Charisma by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online Page B

and he told me, and now I’m telling you. No. We leave the man alone.’
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    The van was leaving as Liz got home. The front door was open and there were packing cases in the hall and also at the top of the stairs. So far as she could tell from a quick glance through the windows the furniture had been decanted into more or less the right rooms.
    She found Brian in the living-room, sprawled on the couch with his head tipped back and his eyes shut. She thought for a moment he was asleep. He looked exhausted, his shirt darkly patched with sweat.
    But he wasn’t asleep. He stirred at her entry and cranked his eyes open. ‘Good day at the office, dear?’
    She bent to kiss his forehead, which was about as high as foreheads go before people start talking openly about baldness. ‘Not great. But probably better than yours.’
    â€˜The cooker’s working. Do you want to eat now or later?’

    â€˜Stay where you are,’ she said, ‘I’ll put something together. I’ll just turn Polly into the paddock first.’
    â€˜Polly—!’ From the tone of Brian Graham’s voice he thought there were more important things to do.
    â€˜Be fair: today’s shambles wasn’t her fault, there’s no reason to punish her for it.’
    â€˜Oh, see to the bloody horse,’ he growled, closing his eyes again.

6
    â€˜Sin,’ rumbled the Reverend Michael Davey. ‘Sin and corruption.’ His eyes, sharp as a diamond drill guaranteed accurate to a thousandth of an inch, scoured his congregation as if expecting to catch some of them out in pride, avarice or lust at that very moment.
    â€˜Sins of the heart. Sins of the soul. Sins of the flesh. Wherever I go, wherever I travel, always the same. People without values. Without faith. Without love: the love of God, of their fellow man, of their families, of themselves even. Because people who liked and respected themselves couldn’t do half the things that happen in our society. Old men tortured for their pension money. Old women raped at knife-point. Children snatched from the streets, young girls violated by those who should be looking after them.’
    Reverend Michael Davey wore a white suit, as anyone who had seen the posters would have expected, and sat in the centre of a dais raised some three feet above ground level – sat because he had no option, he was a man in a wheelchair. On his feet he would have been a hugely commanding figure, tall and broad, with a strong fleshy face crowned with a shock of springy hair somewhere between blond and white. That was the age he was, somewhere between young and old, and that was all you could know without reading his well-publicized autobiography. In fact he was fifty-two.
    But the impression he gave, in spite of the wheelchair, was of a man in the prime of life and vigour. The eyes were only part of a vast natural arsenal of command. The voice was another weapon: deep, rough, with power burgeoning up through it as if it came from a fathomless reservoir of passion and it was as much as he could do to keep it from running amok and tearing the tent down.
    The white suit, the commanding figure, even the electric hair and diamond eyes, were taken straight from the chapter on American evangelists in the Book of Stereotypes. But the voice, resonant with its full vowels and rolling consonants, came from the mining
valleys of Wales. It was a fierce, angry, Trade Union type of Welshness in which the words rushed from him like a violent little torrent coming off Snowdon.
    â€˜So what’s gone wrong, that suddenly we have such monsters among us?’ he asked. ‘There are people, you know, who blame God. It wouldn’t happen if He really cared for us. What, rape and torture God’s will? If I believed that I’d throw stones at the Archbishop of Canterbury and spit in the communion wine. I would not serve a God who treated His people that way. These things are