PLEASE NOTE This is an Advance Reading Copy for review purposes and is not for onward distribution, sale or circulation without the permission of the author. R.N.F. (RICHARD) SKINNER has published several poetry collections; composed lyrics for a range of songs, including a musical; and written a clutch of published short stories. He has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, where, as well as being a member of the famous Footlights club, he co-founded and performed with the cabaret-revue team Headlights. He continues to write and perform sketch-based comedy. A south-east Londoner by upbringing, he moved to Devon in 1975 to pursue his writing while working in a variety of jobs, mainly in the mental health sector. In 2012 he was awarded a doctorate from Exeter University for his thesis on religion and evolutionary theory. He lives in Exeter with his wife, four hens and, until recently, two cats. Still Crazy… is his first published novel. To find out more please visit www.richardskinner.org Poetry published as Richard Skinner Leaping & Staggering (Dilettante 1988/1996) In the Stillness: based on Julian of Norwich (Dilettante 1990/2013) The Melting Woman (Blue Button 1993) Still Staggering (Dilettante 1995) Echoes of Eckhart (Cairns/Arthur James 1998) The Logic of Whistling (Cairns 2002) Invocations (Wild Goose 2005) Colliding With God (Wild Goose 2016) A brief poetry of time (Oversteps 2017) Published in 2020 by SilverWood Books SilverWood Books Ltd 14 Small Street, Bristol, BS1 1DE, United Kingdom www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk Copyright © R.N.F. Skinner 2020 ‘I deem not profitless…’ (p.144) from The Prelude by William Wordsworth ‘come not single spies…’ (p.179) from Hamlet by William Shakespeare ‘wears man’s smudge’ (p.194) from ‘God’s Grandeur’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins The right of R.N.F. Skinner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Sections 77 and 78. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright holder. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. ISBN 978-1-78132-991-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-80042-037-3 (ebook) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Page design and typesetting by SilverWood Books Acknowledgements Several friends read the first draft and made many helpful comments, and Sam Jordison gave a lengthy critique under the aegis of The Literary Consultancy. I am very grateful to them all. Extra thanks to David Thompson who not only read the second, penultimate draft as well as the first draft, but also enthusiastically discussed my characters and their affairs over many glasses of wine and cups of coffee, his suggestions resulting in considerable improvements. Double extra thanks to my wife, Betsy Allen, for reading both drafts, listening to my ramblings, giving unfailing sympathetic encouragement, and living with the characters almost as much as I have for the past few years. The team at SilverWood have displayed excellent midwifery skills in bringing to birth Melanie, Phil, their friends, their acquaintances and their antagonists. I look forward to further collaborations with them. Prologue Loch Lomond, Scotland: July 1958 Melanie looked through the picnic basket in the hope of finding something else to eat, but could only find fragments of cheese that had fallen out of the sandwiches. They were too small to pick up; she licked a finger and dabbed at them to transfer them to her mouth. Not very satisfactory. She stood up and looked round, wondering what to do next. Her parents were still on their little collapsible chairs, Mummy reading a book and Daddy dozing over a newspaper. Her brother Mikey had gone off on his own, probably looking for more things to add to the broken skull of some animal he’d already found and balanced on a piece of jutting rock near where they were picnicking. Melanie thought it looked horrible. She wandered down to the loch’s edge a few feet away and gazed across the great expanse of water, wondering if a monster like Nessie were lurking in its depths. She’d been looking hard while they had had their picnic, but there had been no sign of anything remotely monster-like. Now she stood as close to the water’s edge as she dared without getting her sandals wet, gazing over the loch, seeing the surface ruffled by the wind, trying to remember her father’s explanation about why there were proper waves on the sea but not on a loch. The moon came into it, but surely the moon shone on a loch at night as much as it did on the sea? The water surface was glittering, and she stared and stared, hoping a monster would rear its head and scatter the glittering. With her mind’s eye she could see a great grey head rearing up, water cascading from it, flashing from it like countless sparklers on Bonfire Night being whirled around, and a gaping mouth with rows of sharp teeth, and huge staring eyes. Behind the head a series of grey arches also flashed with scattered water, and at the end of them a wildly thrashing tail… But no, with her real eyes she could see no monster. Yet as she stared and stared, a curious sensation developed that she was somehow part of the loch itself – not simply as though she were on the water 7 or in the water, but the sensation of actually being the water, and not just the water but also the mountains and pebbles and trees and the little islands in the loch. She could see, or she seemed to see, a vast network of lines of dancing golden fire. Mikey had recently told her the difference between millions, billions and trillions, and she felt sure there were trillions of these lines connecting everything to everything, like the huge spiders’ webs she sometimes saw in the garden at home in the early morning sun when there was rain or dew on them, only stupendously bigger. These trillions of lines ran between the tiniest pebbles and the hugest mountains, between every leaf on every tree to every leaf on every other tree, between the distant birds in the sky and a little boat moving along near the opposite shore. She looked at her hands. Golden fire glowed from them. When she turned to look at her family she could see each one radiating the same goldenness. Mummy still reading, Daddy dozing, and Mikey further off holding up some trophy; the car-rug spread on the ground and the open picnic basket; the toppled-over thermos flasks and the old tennis rackets: all were shimmering. Even the skull on the rock shimmered. Threads of golden fire connected it with trees and leaves and pebbles and water and people and everything. Never before in her eight years had she had this feeling, this reassurance, that all is well. It felt wonderful, a trillion times wonderful. She stretched out her arms to embrace it as her ability or desire to think about it and puzzle over it and try to describe it to herself faded away, like seawater when the waves can go no further up a beach sinking into invisibility in the sand. How long did it last? she wondered later. Although time had seemed to vanish, the trillions of threads of golden fire had begun to fade, slowly fade. Like the dying of the sparklers on Bonfire Night, when no matter how hard you keep whirling them they become just crispy grey ash on lengths of thin wire. The golden fiery threads died away as her everyday way of seeing the world and feeling her feelings reasserted itself. 8 Chapter 1 Melanie Exeter: January 1997 How extraordinary. I saw Phil yesterday. Met him. Talked with him. Spent the evening with him. Or rather, I spent the evening in his company with others. It’s over twenty-four years since I last saw him. I can’t say ‘he hasn’t changed a bit’, because his hair is definitely shorter and tidier (and in places a bit grey). He was dressed slightly smarter than he used to be (albeit not much), but his voice and speech are unchanged with that odd mixture of fluency and hesitancy, and his laugh and that grin are pure Phil as I remember him. His eyes too, which every so often widen, and he gives a burst of rapid blinking, almost fluttering his eyelashes like a beauty queen. This was at Charlotte and Jimmy’s. They’d originally invited us to come and see in the New Year with them and others, but I’d told Simon I wasn’t up to that – my energy levels are still not good enough for me to risk a very long evening and into a late night, in the company of mainly strangers. Far too exhausting. They’d then been kind enough to ask us to what Charlotte promised would be a much quieter, smaller dinner party a couple of weeks later. Actually, I didn’t want to go even to that and told Simon when we got the invitation that I felt I wouldn’t be up to it.