The Magus of Hay(109)

Robin said, ‘You never told me any of this.’

‘Maybe you weren’t listening. Anyway, it wasn’t one of my favourite nights, and I’ve not thought about it much since. We kept away from them, wondering how to play it. They got stoned and came looking for us, and we’d realized by then that we were supposed to camp out with them for the night. So we just took off for the nearest farm and asked if we could use their phone. Spent just about every last penny we’d got on a taxi. But not before we’d listened to all this shit, in the van and then round the fire on the site.’

‘Like what?’

‘How their generation – our generation – was going to see the birth of a new aeon of Aryan supremacy of which Hitler was only the prequel. How the spirit of Hitler was still out there to initiate the… I don’t know, the warrior replacing the wimp-culture. Make war, not love. How the weak should be culled. And the work-shy scroungers.’

‘Was everybody there that way inclined?’

‘Probably no more than a dozen. It was an acoustic festival run by local beardies, and I think they were a bit pissed off by these guys who were kind of jeering at the music. But nobody wanted to cause any trouble.’

‘I’d’ve caused some trouble,’ Robin said. ‘Back then.’

‘I ran into a few later, on the pagan scene. Always hanging around the fringes of Wicca and Druidry. Lowest kind of goth – heavy metal, death metal, grandiose, sexist. It’s mainly a man-thing.’

Robin thought of his paintings for Lord Madoc, the intergalactic Celt. A lot of violence there. Not that he’d written the stuff.

‘You never told me,’ he said sadly. ‘Not all this.’

‘Robin, I was never very interested. I’ve always followed the Celtic tradition. I knew they were into some of the same things as us – earth energies, green politics. Just in a different way. They reject the matriarchal element in Celtic paganism, the Mother Goddess. And they say we got the back-to-the-land thing wrong. You can’t just get by with apple orchards and growing your own veg, you need to kill. Kill the wildlife, cull the population. Get rid of the weak.’

‘That’s religion?’

‘Oh, and democracy can never work. And the name of the God-like Hitler was blackened by us inventing the Holocaust. And all non-whites are a result of our ancestors having sex with monkeys, but you knew that.’



Robin’s hand closed on the ram’s head knob on his stick, aware of something rising within Betty that didn’t occur too often. She’d been the one to suggest they show the picture of the swastika around town, which translated as Gwenda’s. Betty had gone in meaning business, Gwenda backing her up, two strong women, both outsiders.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whadda we do?’

‘If he’s left anything here, we need to get rid of it. Starting, I suppose, with the purely practical stuff.’

‘The easy bits, huh?’ Robin knelt down, ran his fingers over the contours of the crooked cross in the chimney. ‘You wouldn’t have a stone chisel, Kapoor? I got one back at the bungalow, but we should do this now. Now it’s exposed to the air.’

‘Well, yeah,’ Kapoor said. ‘Suppose I can find summink. But if you bring the whole wall down, it ain’t my fault.’

‘Accepted.’

‘Fair enough. Don’t go away.’

When he’d gone, Robin was aware of the cold, metallic weight of the air in the room. Maybe imagination, but the ambient calm around Betty wasn’t. He knew that calm, like a vulcanologist knew volcanos.

‘You’re quiet.’

‘For too long.’

She went over to the window, looking down into Back Fold, the town slowing down for the evening like some old crustacean settling into its shell.

‘They should’ve told us.’

‘Maybe it was just we didn’t ask.’

‘Crap.’

‘Bets, we’re—’

‘You’re right. Nobody’s had much luck here, have they? From a back-street antiques dump with a phone number in the window to a failed literary bookshop. And Jeeter’s right, people cover up things they don’t like. It’s like this guy Tom Armitage – “Oh, life’s too short for what you can’t explain.” Wrong!’ Betty banged the flat of a fist on the window sill, turned round, glaring at him. ‘You explain it, then you fix it. Meanwhile… yes, get rid of the obvious. Knock the bloody wall down, if you have to.’

He nodded. Stood up, and the pain went up and down his back like a file. He felt his face go grey. He didn’t care.