Moonlight filtered down through burning rafters. Publican Jim Reed struggled to lift the erstwhile roof-beam from his midsection, but it had fallen over not only his abdomen but also his left arm. Both were crushed. Ivory splinters toured arteries, scratching corridor walls. He heard the celebratory laughter of Father Clemence and his retinue of townspeople petering out as they discarded their torches on the other side of the hillock. Reed grappled at the beam with his remaining arm, but only managed to shift it so that it crashed down on the lower section of his left lung. He felt something bubble, and then give way, and his torso housed a breaking dam. Reed began to wheeze, the blood he spat singeing in the crackling flames.
His eyes moved from the encumbering wood up to the moon, and he whispered something under his breath, something much like the words that, in being much too holy, had provoked Father Clemence’s parochial crusade. He looked to his right side then, along the floorboards, and towards the iron trap door that steamed like a griddle beneath conflagrating kegs. Reed smiled at the sight. Death came and froze the irony his face .
By morning, the flesh under Jim Reed’s nose had charred to the bone, making that smile even wider.
…………………….
The eleven thirty-four Virgin Pendolino to London Paddington moved more quickly on the outside. Inside they sipped lattes, occasionally looking out at fields that they would never roam. Megan McColl and Leo Campbell were due to alight at Chippenham before getting the bus to Castle Combe, where they had decided to share a quiet and romantic weekend in fourteenth century pubs and in castles and in other assorted quaint and pretty things. The mini-break would remind them that there was a history outside of themselves, and one that hadn’t all been composed of blood and guts and forced hierarchies, at that: from the looks of the brochure, it was a place that would reassure them that some of the nation’s past had actually been rather lovely. Both Meg and Leo had forgotten whose idea it was to go there.
Meg was reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. Leo had forgotten to bring a book, and his iPod had run out of battery. Initially she was glad about this, because he had always been too cheap to buy headphones of quality and so a tinny reverberation of whatever Bruce Springsteen song he happened to be listening to – and it would definitely be a Springsteen song, as he never listened to anything else - would always infringe upon her relaxation like an adolescent bluebottle. She discovered, however, that the alternative was much more frustrating.
“Which bit are you at?”
He had been asking her that every five minutes, as if he was acutely familiar, on an incident-by-incident level, with every event and emotion in Elizabeth Bennett’s life, and wished to be reminded of each and every one. This literary equivalent of punching someone in the arm whenever you see a yellow car punctured her personal experience of the narrative so unceasingly – the word “the” seemingly qualified as a yellow car - that after an hour she wanted to throttle his neck and throw his pathetic gropings at connection onto the oncoming rails.
“She’s just met Wickham,” she relented.
“Isn’t he the one who dates her older sister? ‘Courts’, I mean.”
Evidently, he wasn’t as familiar with it as she’d thought, and was just bored. This was not something to be welcomed: she had head the adage that ‘only boring people get bored’, but the person who had come up with that one had never met Leo, who had a tendency, whenever ennui struck, to become – in his own eyes, at least - cloyingly, overwhelmingly interesting . She leant over and brought her bag into her lap, and proceeded to fumble within, scrambling for mp3s, praying to the relationship gods that there would be battery power.
“No,” she said, trying hard not to make it sound like the “fuck you” that permanently-holidaying courage would have provided. “That’s Bingley. And she marries him.”
“Bingley, that’s it.” He beamed suddenly. “I remember. I liked him. He was cool.”
She found herself at very risk of starting to hate her favourite book, which was now soiled by his banal textual commentary. Thankfully, at that moment, her fingers clasped around the cold surface of her iPhone and she was free. She told him she was tired, and was going to sleep the rest of the way. She told him she could read the Austen, if he wanted.
Leo didn’t want to read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. He didn't particularly enjoy reading books, let alone rereading them: the only reason he was familiar with that one is that, at a time when he still thought it germane to do his homework, she had said it was her favourite. She had read that book five times since they had started seeing each other two years ago, and he got the distinct impression that each time she read it he receded further in her eyes from the ideal that its landed gentry promoted. She seemed unhappy with him again and he could not understand why. A few months ago, this would have angered him, or caused him to worry about how to rectify the situation, but now he did not want to understand why. Situations like this now only left within him a dull tension that was bearable and would only deteriorate were you to fiddle with it further, like an old television with which one has made a compromise: accept the mild interference on the image, because if you start to play with the aerial any more you’ll lose the picture entirely. He would let her sleep now, and make sure to do something charming later to resolve the situation and save the weekend. He started to think about what this adorable act could be (should the situation call for it, he was, if he didn’t mind thinking so himself, always rather good at being adorable), but, petulant that it was again left to him ameliorate matters, he resolved that he would leave thinking it up on the bus from Chippenham. If she was still visibly irritated when she woke up then he wouldn’t bother, anyway. Right now, all that Leo wanted was to look out of the train’s window and to not think about it. He sighed, wondered if that was possible, and wished his iPod hadn’t run out of battery. He could really do with listening to ‘Born to Run’ right now.
The village was quiet in a manner that justified the tour guides’ decision to label it serene. They ambled through the old square as a quaint sun shone past spires overhead. They had to amble; there wasn’t enough square to facilitate walking. There was a lot of thatch, though, and a few of pubs and tea shops. That was something they could see themselves doing: a blog had told them that they were supposed to like tea shops. Still, the overwhelming quietude of the village exposed other, less welcome silences, and they grew uneasy with one another. Leo lamented the lack of a Nando’s, in an attempt at compensatory charm for earlier. That only made things worse: unbeknownst to him, his river of charm had run dry a long time ago, and unveiled to Meg a bedrock of overwhelming conceit. Seeing as it was still eleven in the morning - the taverns were out of the question - they decided to sit down at the tables outside a tea room facing the Market Cross. They hoped the blog was right.
Each ordered an earl grey, both (mistakenly) thinking that it was the others favourite. When it arrived, they chinked their cups, and smiled at one another, dappled attractively by the beams refracted off mottled stonemasonry. There was a moment or two where nothing much was said. It was a rather prolonged moment. Meg was loathe to say ‘this is nice’ - that would be as much of a death-knell as bringing out the iPhone - so she delved forthwith into her bag, rifled about, and pulled out the stapled-together printouts she had pertaining to ‘The Prettiest Village in England.’
“I was thinking we could look at the church after this. Apparently it has some rather lovely stained-glass windows.” She was hoping he’d fail to observe that she had never cared about stained glass windows before in her life.
He looked away from the indeterminate point in space that had been occupying his attention: “Where’s that?”
She regarded the printout, looked right past him, and pointed. “It’s right there.”
It really was right there. Where else would it have been?, they both asked themselves. There wasn’t a lot of town in which it could be.
“Sure, I guess,” he said, before resuming his previous ocular engagement.
She scoured to find something that would interest him further, resenting the fact that she once again had to do so. After a couple of minutes she felt she had reason to interrupt his activity once again.
“Apparently this place we’re staying tonight is haunted!”
“Yeah?” His eyes lit up.
They both loved ghosts. Things that had died and found within or without themselves the supracosmic wherewithal to actually come back fascinated them. They had discovered this shared enthusiasm a few months ago, and it had facilitated the most passionate, lengthy, and cod-philosophical conversation they had shared since the early days when they were still wrapped in each other’s illusions and their eyes were filled with smiles. During this talk, a rekindling felt immanent. Eventually, however, and before that connection could be consummated, something in the conversation had caused them to stop, and they had been left agitated, awkward and unable to sleep. The accusatory silence had confused them both at the time, but its hidden meaning was beginning to dawn on them: that night they had exposed their shared desire for their relationship to come back, and in doing so they had betrayed the reality of its current state.
