Free Crybbe (AKA Curfew) by Unknown

and so they're on the look-out for a new contributor. I've had a
chat with the editor there and he sounded quite enthusiastic'
        'I bet he did.'
        'And maybe I could do the odd
programme for you, if freelancing for a local independent as well doesn't break
some ancient BBC law.'
        'I'm sure that's not an
insurmountable problem, but . . .'
    'I know, I know. I'm far too young to
be retiring to the country.'
        'And far too good, actually.'
        'You've never said before.'
        'You might have asked for more
money.'
        Typical bloody BBC.
        Fay spun back the Henry Kettle
tape - why couldn't you rewind your life like that? - and let herself out,
throwing the studio into darkness with the master switch by the door. But the
spools were still spinning in her head.
     
     
    She locked up and set off with a forced briskness up the alley, an
ancient passageway, smoked brick walls with a skeleton of years-blackened
beams. Sometimes cobwebs hung down and got in your hair. She wasn't overfond of
this alley. There were always used condoms underfoot; sometimes the concrete
flags were slippery with them. In winter they were frozen, like milk ice-pops.
        She emerged into the centre of
Crybbe as the clock in the church tower was chiming eleven. Getting to eleven
sounded like a big effort for the mechanism; you could hear the
strain.
        There were lots of deep
shadows, even though the sun was high, because the crooked brick and timbered
building, slouched together, like down-and-outs sharing a cigarette. Picturesque
and moody in the evening, sometimes. In the daytime, run-down, shabby.
        People were shopping in the
square, mainly for essentials, the shops in Crybbe specialized in the items
families ran out in between weekly trips to the supermarkets in Hereford or Leominster.
In Crybbe, prices were high and stocks low. These were long-established shops,
run by local people: the grocer, the chemist, the hardware and farming
suppliers.
        Other long-established businesses
had, like Henry Kettle, gone to the wall. And been replaced by a new type of
store.
        Like The Gallery, run by
Hereward and Jocasta Newsome, from Surrey, specializing in the works of border
landscape artists. In the window, Fay saw three linked watercolours of the Tump
at different times of day, the ancient mound appearing to hover in the dawn
mist, then solid in the sunlight and then dark and black against an orange sky.
A buff card underneath lid, in careful copperplate
     
    THE TUMP - a triptych, by
Darwyn Hall.
Price: £975.
     
        Wow. A snip. Fay wondered how
they kept the place open, then walked on, past a little, scruffy pub, the Lamb,
past Middle Marches Crafts, which seemed to be a greetings-card shop this week.
And then the Crybbe Pottery, which specialized in chunky earthenware Gothic
houses that lit up when you plugged them in but didn't give out enough light by
which to do anything except look at them and despair.
        'Morning, Mr. Preece,' she said
to the Town Mayor, a small man with a face like a battered wallet, full of
pouches and creases.
        'Ow're you,' Mr. Preece intoned
and walked on without a second glance.
        It had been a couple of months
before Fay had realized that 'How are you' was not, in these parts, a question
and therefore did not require a reply on the lines of, 'I'm fine, Mr. Preece,
Ow're you ?' or, 'Quite honestly, Mr.
Preece, since you ask, I'm becoming moderately pissed off with trying to communicate
with the dead.'
        Brain-dead, anyway, most of
them in this town. Nobody ever seemed to get excited. Or to question anything.
Nobody ever organized petitions to the council demanding children's playgrounds
or leisure centres. Women never giggled together on street corners.
        Fay stopped in the street,
then, and had what amounted to a panic attack.
        She saw the spools on the great
tape-deck of life, and the one on the right was fat with