Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi by John Grant Page B

sympathies. There were few enough in Ashburton who would sincerely grieve for the Blue Horse's landlord that she should allow herself to be absent.
    Her jeans. They were filthy. You couldn't go to a funeral in jeans like these. But what else was there? She'd got mud all over the black jumper suit some time in the past few days – she couldn't remember when – and one night, drunkenly, she'd taken a pair of kitchen scissors to all her skirts. It was the jeans or nothing.
    Upstairs in the loo she spent a few explosive minutes. The smell made her want to be sick, but she wouldn't allow herself to go to Jas's interment with vomit on her breath, so she fought down the nausea, forcing herself to take long, deep, controlled breaths through her nose. Standing, she wiped her bottom on the front page of a fortnight-old Guardian – toilet paper was something she kept forgetting to buy during her furtive trips to the International Stores – and tried to flush the foul-smelling mixture of newsprint and pale yellow shit down the pan.
    She lurched to her room, fastening her jeans. They sagged to her hips, and without thinking she scrabbled along the rail inside her wardrobe door to get a belt. It was crimson, with a gaudy buckle done in fake gold and glass diamonds, but at least it would hold her goddam trousers up. In front of the mirror she dragged a brush through her hair and slashed a thick line of lipstick across her mouth; the waxy colour caught the ends of her front teeth, but there was no time to salvage that now – she'd just have to make sure she kept her mouth shut throughout the proceedings.
    That was everything, that was everything, surely that must be everything. She stood in the middle of her bedroom's devastation and stared around her in a series of jerky, hopeless glances, as if anything that she'd forgotten might suddenly volunteer itself from the midst of the shambles. Her knickers were climbing into the crack of her bottom, which felt moist and sticky, and she tugged vexedly at the sides of her jeans.
    Downstairs again, she took a slug of whisky from the drawing-room bottle, just to steady her nerves, then grabbed up her handbag (No, it wasn't her handbag: it was Aunt Jill's handbag. Joanna had lost her own handbag somewhere on Dartmoor while the wolves had been filling the skies with their song. But in a way it was her handbag, because when Aunt Jill had died the kind old bird had left her everything, and it wasn't unreasonable to assume that "everything" included this handbag. So Joanna didn't feel like a thief or anything using it.) (Besides, Aunt Jill would have wanted her handbag to be at Jas's funeral, wouldn't she?) and made for the door.
    The bells had stopped. She could hear voices joined in a hymn – "Be Thou My Vision" – as she scurried up the path that wound from the churchyard gate to the church itself. She'd been wrong to think that there'd be a small turn-out to say a last farewell to Jas: from the sound of it there must be forty or fifty, quite an assembly for a small place like Ashburton. She wondered if she should turn back, since her absence would hardly be noticed, but then the thought of Aunt Jill and those two pints of Royal Oak drove her on. She pushed her fingers through her hair, yelping as she tugged on a knot, and wished that she'd thought to bring a hip-flask or something in case the Reverend James Daker guffed on for ages at the grave-side.
    The church doors seemed to be locked, like those of a theatre once the play's started and the auditorium's full. She knew that St Leonard's had another entrance round the back somewhere, because she'd seen it from the vicarage garden once when Mrs Daker, during a weekend when her husband was away at a conference, had invited Aunt Jill and her visiting niece across for tea. But her recollections of it were vague, and she wasn't about to start stumbling through the rose-bushes looking for it.
    Thwarted, she stood back from the doors and looked