Read Online The Smile of a Ghost by Phil Rickman - Free Book Online Page A

anger in that song, though, isn’t there? Which is unusual for you – it’s usually more sort of resigned. It’s as if this guy did something really bad to you.’
    ‘Not to me personally.’
    ‘So, what—?’
    ‘Can we leave this one, Jack?’
    ‘Seems to me this whole album is about your journey, through the system… back into the light, kind of thing,’ Jack said. ‘Like an exorcism.’
    ‘Not exactly the word I’d use.’
    Jack grinned, like maybe he knew about Merrily. He couldn’t know.
    ‘So how did you wind up out here in the sticks?’
    ‘Well, I… came here originally with a woman. She eventually went off with someone else. And then, um…’ Lol leaned back on his sofa and paused for a few seconds while he worked out what it was best to leave out – like him leaving the village and then coming back, because of Merrily. ‘… Then I met Prof Levin, just as he was setting up his studio on the other side of the county. And I’ve been working there, helping Prof out, doing a bit of session stuff. And then Prof kind of persuaded me to do the album. So I owe it all to him, really.’
    Lol got out a copy of the CD and put it on the boombox, and they sat there, amid the paint cans and the dust sheets, discussing the songs and people who’d played on the tracks.
    ‘Including Simon St John on bass and cello,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a real name from the past. And he’s a vicar now, right?’
    ‘He’s been a vicar for years.’
    ‘Cool.’
    ‘Yeah, he’s cool.’
    ‘But you’re nothing to do with the Church…’
    ‘Oh no.’
    ‘’Cause, like, your parents…’
    ‘It can put you off, when your parents are… extremists.’
    A lorry full of gravel went clanging down Church Street, and Jack was silent for a moment, seemed to be thinking what else he could ask.
    ‘How long have you been in music-writing?’ Lol asked.
    ‘Oh, not long. My old man – he publishes specialist magazines now, but he used to be a newspaper reporter when he was young. But my grandad thought this was a really disreputable thing to be and he tried to persuade him to pack it in and get into the management side. My old man’s really encouraged me to go into cutting-edge journalism. Go for it, you know? Don’t look back.’
    ‘Music’s, er, cutting edge?’
    ‘I do other stuff. Anything that comes up, really. Anyway, Lol… I mean, you were really fucked up for a long time, weren’t you? It was like with Nick Drake – how long’s he been dead now, thirty years? I mean, like him you couldn’t cut it on stage, face an audience.’
    ‘I identified a lot with Nick Drake, from the beginning. Hence the name of the band, Hazey Jane.’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘The Nick Drake song, “Hazey Jane”?’
    ‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, I thought you meant… So like, how did you get over that? ’Cause you did this amazing comeback gig… at the Courtyard in Hereford?’
    Lol told Jack about all the help he’d had from Moira Cairns, folk-rock goddess, who happened to have been recording at Prof’s. How Moira had literally pushed him out in front of that audience. Scary? Oh yeah, cold-sweat situation. All those lights, all those faces.
    ‘And you’re still doing a few gigs as support for Moira, right? But you and her…?’
    Jack moved his hands around.
    ‘Oh no,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing like that.’
    ‘But you’re with somebody?’
    ‘No, I live alone. A rural idyll.’
    ‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Right.’
    Still waiting for Eirion, Jane saw Lol and the guy from Q come out of the front door of Lucy’s house and walk up the street to the village centre. They seemed to be getting on OK. She didn’t know why she felt so responsible for Lol. He was just that kind of guy – vulnerable.
    The journalist was a surprise. He didn’t look any older than Eirion, for God’s sake. He had a camera with him – a Nikon, digital-looking. Doing his own pictures, too. Jane slid behind one of the thick oak supports of the old market hall as