The Chalice by Phil Rickman Page A

distinctly uncomfortable. A real journalist would have protested,
been absolutely determined to go up the Tor with them.
           'Who's that twat think he is?' Headlice struggled to his feet.
'We got a fuckin' hierarchy now?'
           'It's, you know, it's all right. Really. I didn't want to cause
any ... I mean, it's not the same at night, anyway. You can't see the view, and
it gets very cold.'
       'What you sayin' here, Mol?'
           Diane rubbed her goose-pimpled arms. 'I don't know.'
           'Don't you?' She saw that Headlice was confused almost to the
point of tears. 'I'm fed up wi' this. Everybody treating me like a fuckin'
dickhead. And you ...' Staring at her resentfully. 'Wi' your fancy accent slippin'
through. You're a bit deep, Mol. You come on like fat and harmless. I reckon you're
weirder than all of us. I reckon you're the weirdest person here.'
           Diane was silent, biting her lip.
     

 
    SEVEN
    Sliver of Light
     
    Increasingly, the dusk
obsessed Jim Battle. He supposed it was due to his time of life: slipping away,
as everyone must, into the mauve and the sepia.
       But still it was endlessly
challenging. Midges, for instance. How were you supposed to paint midges? In
clouds, perhaps? A thickening of the air? Or just a dry stipple.
           'Dry stipple,' Jim said aloud. One of those phrases that
sounded like what it meant. There was a word for that; buggered if he could
remember what it was.
           With a thumb he smudged the sun. In the finished painting, it
would be merely a hazy memory, a ghost on the canvas. Same with the Tor; you
should be able to feel it in the
picture, but not necessarily see it.
           Jim stepped away from the canvas. The tangled garden, by now,
was all blues and greys and dark browns. As there were no lights on in the
cottage, Jim could barely see the canvas. Time to stop. Time to wind up the
Great Quest for another day.
           Still, for once, time was playing on his side, staying the dead
hand of winter, letting him go on painting outdoors into the early evening,
using the very last of the light. For this was when things happened. Often,
when he looked at the picture next morning, he'd find that the absence of direct
light had wrought some marvellous effects, textures he'd never have found if
he'd been able to see properly. All a matter of surrendering to the dusk.
           And beyond the dusk ... lay the Grail.
           Of course, everyone came to Avalon in search of the Grail. And
it was different for all of them. There was always the possibility of an actual holy relic somewhere. But for most people
the Grail was simply the golden core of whatever you dreamed you might achieve.
The vanishing point on life's horizon. Glastonbury being one of those spots on
the Earth's surface where the phantasmal became almost tangible, where you
might actually reach the vanishing point before you, er, vanished.
           Jim's personal Grail - the mystical formula which would (he
hoped) come to define a Battle painting - was to be round at the very end of
dusk, the cusp of the day, the moment between evening and night when the world stopped.
           It should happen at dawn too, but it didn't for Jim. He'd walked
out in the drizzle and the dew, to wait. In vain. The moment never came, or he
could not feel it. Time of life again: at his age perhaps you were just not
meant to feel the stopping of the world at dawn.
           Not that he greatly wished for youth - only to have come to
Avalon as a younger man. Wasn't as if he hadn't known, then, what he wanted to
do. Plenty of time for painting, bloody
Pat had bleated, when you've got your pension.
           God. Why do we listen to
them? If he'd left his wife and met Juanita twenty years ago, when she was
a very young woman and he didn't seem so much of an older man ...
           Well, he hadn't. It was enough of a privilege that she was