Half-Sick of Shadows (22 page)

‘Mother …’

‘I’m cold.’ She tugged at her blanket.

‘What have you just told me?’

‘I’m cold. Help me get back …’ She groped and hauled at the chair arms. I helped her get into bed, propped her on a cushion and pulled the bedclothes up to keep her warm. What do I say? I thought. How do I approach this? I had to hurry; she would close her eyes as soon as her head touched the pillow.

‘Who is our father?’

‘I’m ever so tired.’

‘Is Father not our father?’

Her eyes closed.

‘Were you raped?’

Nothing.

I left her room and gently closed the door.

What would become of us if Mother died?

I stared at Granny Hazel’s weed-covered grave mound. That was dead: put in the ground like a plant, covered but not expected to grow, still, silent, stopped. I didn’t know what to make of dead, but thought I should make something of it. I should have had something to say about dead. Dead was like God: mysterious. Why did God give His creatures life only to make them dead? It seemed cruel to me.

17

The Body in the Bog

I kissed Sophia at the broken gate and set off across Hollow Heath to catch the newly scheduled evening train back to school. Without my trusty torch, I would have seen neither my feet nor the track they proceeded along. I helped to make the track with my very own feet. Gregory’s and, to a small extent, Sophia’s feet helped make it too, and the feet of our parents before we were born. Edgar too, until they took him away. Hard to believe it, but Edgar had become a man: a Superman last I heard, occasionally a Batman, sometimes a Spiderman, and once an Incredible Hulk.

The beam, like a big moon, revealed a lie of the land that looked alien at night. I sometimes sang, but only when alone, and alone I sang now – probably to allay my fear of the dark. Everyone is afraid of the dark, even if just a little. I was a little afraid. ‘Moon River, wider than a mile, Father is senile, today.’ The rain had stayed away, allowing the mud to freeze. Without Torchy, I would have been wiser to have either left several hours ago or waited until morning.

To keep out the chill I needed to walk quickly. To get off the heath alive I needed to avoid stumbling and knocking myself unconscious. Even if I woke before freezing to death no one would hear my cries for help. The orange-strip boundary partitioned our world from the world outside. Behind me, a solitary small light shone:
Sophia
in the kitchen, far away now, boiling milk on a gas ring for her bedtime mug of hot chocolate, and a kettle for her hot water bottle.

Sophia closed the front door after Edward’s departure on to Hollow Heath. She stared into the age- and abuse-scarred wood and saw nothing. Her head lowered, like modesty before a superior, like slumbering on her feet, like giving up the struggle. The parents made not a sound. The Manse made not a sound. She sang quietly, slowly, and briefly, to fill some space. ‘I fell in to a burning ring of fi-re.’

Sophia raised her head again, but the door had no window for her to see through. She twitched. The dull bronze latch waited there for opening. The wood rested there to thump or kick, or for Sophia to crash her head against. Edward never knew about her thumping her head against the door. If the graze hadn’t healed when he returned from school, her hair covered it. Sophia twitched. Why open the door and torture herself with nothing out there, nothing for her. She could run after her twin, catch him and hang on. What kind of madness would he call that? Not one the same as Edgar’s. They were sending Edgar home. She’d have three of them to look after then. Edward hadn’t a clue. He had a life to get on with … beyond the boundary. ‘I went down, down, down, and the flames got high-er.’

At last, when she had twitched long enough, twitched and sniffed and hated herself for long enough, Sophia turned round and looked up the stairs. If only Father would hurry up and die! His death would make no difference; living would just, somehow, like a gentle day, be easier. Sophia went up the stairs. She could glide up now, the way Mother used to do.

‘And it burned, burned, burned …’

Turned the handle softly.

And tiptoed into his room.

From the corner of an eye I saw someone else on the heath, off the track, the only track I knew of, and distant to my right, as far from Hollow Wood, perhaps, as from me. I saw a silhouette, which quickly disappeared, leaving me unsure if I had seen a silhouette at all, rather than the movement of long grasses disturbed by a hare, or something caught by a gust of wind, or some trick of shadows. But the wind whispered softly; there had been no gust. And there was nothing to cast a shadow. So why had I seen one?

The silhouette was too far away for Torchy to illuminate. If it had been a person, he or she would have seen my light.

I shone it the other way, to my left, where the heath ended far off at an invisible minor road beyond which were kilometres of fields where cattle grazed in the daytime, weather permitting. That way, the motorway curved away to a point of orange light at the end of the world. Or possibly at the start of it. As a child, I never knew whether the world lay east, west, north or south of the Manse; I only knew that the Manse never seemed to me like part of it.

I returned my attention to where the movement had been. Nothing looked amiss now. Might Edgar have returned sooner than expected? Had he lost his way? Surely he would be escorted home. I cursed Gregory for telling them that Edgar could be safely released into his guardianship.

‘Edgar!’ I shouted. ‘Edgar!’

He might have been playing hide-and-seek.

I noted the approximate location of the movement: close to the right-hand side, as I now turned to approach it, of a crumbling wall – made from the same crumbling stone as the crumbling Manse – that used to be part of a footbridge over a stream that stopped flowing for ever when they built the motorway. The crumbling wall stood two metres high, and radiance from the orange motorway strip made it clearly visible.

I left the track and went to investigate what might have caused whatever I had glimpsed.

Keeping one eye on the wall, and one eye on the ground, and one eye behind me for unwanted surprises, I advanced slowly. I soon realized that I had no idea of how far away from myself and the track the original movement had been. Had it been closer to me than the wall, or further away than the wall? How far should I go? In this direction, I had about a kilometre before the heath ended at the unused access road of a long demolished farmhouse.

I wasn’t afraid out there, in the middle of the dark heath with nothing for reassurance but a torch. Granny Hazel and the others meant me no harm. However, after several minutes walking off the track, I began to think myself a victim of the orange light, which had probably played a trick on my senses.

Turning back wasn’t an option. Turning back would have left a foolish adventure half complete. If you start something, even if you think it’s foolish, you should finish it.

When I had ventured some distance to lumpier ground with wilder undergrowth beyond the wall, I decided that if I had indeed seen something extraordinary, then whatever it was could not have been further from the track than this. Since I’d found nothing extraordinary, I might as well call it a fool’s errand and trace my steps back to the track, or take a tangential line to the spot where I customarily exited the heath. Having wasted so much time already – I could have been across the heath by now – I thought I might as well look around my present location.

Feeling like a failed Sherlock Holmes, I trawled the torch’s beam across the earth as I moved a dozen or so paces in a direction generally away from the motorway and towards the Manse. As I turned away, something again caught an edge of my vision and I swung the beam back. It had lit a corner of something, and now it illuminated the whole carpet, or large rug, rolled fat, bent in the middle, and dumped here in the heath.

I knew before I touched it. Thrill excited my heart and made it beat dangerously fast. On closer investigation of the roll there could
be
no doubt to anyone with an imagination, no matter how subdued its vividness, that the floor covering contained, wrapped and trapped within, a body. A human body. One shorn of life. I shone my beam up one end and saw feet in a woman’s stiletto shoes. I shone my beam up the other end and saw hair.

Oh, Gregory! What have you done?

Why did I instantly think Gregory was the guilty party? I’d always thought him capable of murder – in a semi-serious-but-not-really kind of way. No one else I’d met in my life was capable of murder … with the possible exception of Peter McCrew, and I’d no reason to suspect him. On reflection, I’d no reason to suspect Gregory either. But I did anyway.

Someone had roughly cut the carpet’s edges with a knife or scissors. The same knife or scissors that cut the throat or stabbed the heart? Curiosity is a frightful temptress. The carpet had been tied at four places along its length with thick industrial tape. I would need a knife to undo that. Since I didn’t have one, and the roll would be easier to manage tied, I left it that way.

Manhandling the bundle seemed like the only option. Digging deep into my shallow reservoir, I did indeed manage it. I got to my knees, wrestled the roll of uncooperative carpet on to a shoulder, struggled to my feet and staggered with it, the torch in my left hand, back towards the track. What am I doing? That was what I asked myself. Why am I getting involved? Moreover, what had I in mind to do with it?

Returning to the Manse in a straight line from where I’d made my discovery, rather than returning to the track, would have been half the distance, but the ground was much more uneven that way and harder to navigate. Having tripped and stumbled my way back to the track, and unable to go further without resting first, I dropped my burden gently – so as not to damage the corpse – and I dropped too, to my knees, gasping great chunks of frozen air into my lungs, my body sticky with sweat, my mind a kaleidoscope. There I recovered for a
few
minutes before rising to my feet and undoing the recovery.

I discovered that the carpet would not be pushed, which I knew had something to do with Isaac Newton and friction. I had more luck pulling it, but not much more. In the end, I heaved it on to my shoulder again. The track presented no obstacles, and had a slight downward incline towards the Manse. At last, almost in the same physical condition as the corpse in the carpet, I reached my destination. As I had known since finding the carpet and turning back, all the lights were out. Sophia had gone to bed.

I left the carpet on the ground. A little frightened of being caught, a little excited, I felt as a burglar must feel about his crime as I unlocked the back door with my own key. Moving around in the dark, I took a bread knife from a kitchen drawer and returned outside, leaving the back door open because I would have to replace the knife.

Returning to the carpet, I sensed someone watching me from the Manse, an outhouse, or the cemetery. It might be Sophia, or my imagination. Either way, there was nothing to worry about. My watcher might be the White Lady with the fuzzy face, in which case there was still nothing to worry about – but I hoped she didn’t show herself anyway. Sophia hadn’t mentioned seeing the portentous White Lady with the fuzzy face. She mustn’t have seen her. If the White Lady hadn’t appeared, it meant that the corpse died somewhere far from the Manse, and was someone unknown to us.

Knife cutting through tape sounded like a car engine revving. The outdoor light on the wall of the Manse cast my own shadow over my work, but I was sawing too feverishly to think about changing my position. The tape parted. I unrolled the carpet. The corpse tumbled out.

There she lay, a woman aged around twenty, well dressed – maybe dressed to go shopping. She had ruffled and knotty blond hair, and looked ghastly by torchlight. There were no violent marks on her that I could see.

The wheelie bin, I thought. No. Put her in an outhouse. Hide her in the coal bunker. The outside toilet – no one ever goes there. No one had been to the outside toilet for years. Taking the corpse by her underarms, I dragged her into the toilet and propped her on the toilet seat.

I returned to Whitehead House and found Alf in my room, cross-legged on my bed, scratching in his notebook. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, surprised to see him because I hadn’t seen him for ages, but even more surprised that I was pleased, if not delighted, to see him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, getting quickly off my bed.

‘No. No,’ I said, to reassure him that he was welcome. ‘Stay where you are. It’s just that I didn’t expect to see you.’

He stayed in the room, but remained on his feet.

For large chunks of time – whole terms – I didn’t see Alf. Did he go home during these spells? Did I simply not notice him? One day, last term or the one before, I went to the dormitory I thought he slept in to find a lost book, which I wondered if he’d borrowed from my room. Alf wasn’t there, but neither was a bed assigned to him. When I asked John Morrow, the only boy there at the time, nervously sucking the tail end of a cigarette, if he’d seen Alf, he said, ‘Alf who?’ and I assumed I’d got the wrong dormitory. I didn’t bother searching for him in the others; the book wasn’t that important.

I poured Alf a glass of water, and gestured that he take the only chair in the room. We all had a water jug and a tumbler on our bedside table. Somehow, my room had grown an extra tumbler.

‘Where are you from, Alf?’ I asked. ‘I’ve always wondered.’ Actually, I’d never wondered until that moment.

He tipped his head back, as though consulting the ceiling for an answer, and in that position, with that particular, rainy light coming from the window, seeing that unique angle of fine chin and pale neck, I thought, My God! He looks like me. And Sophia!
He
looks like us. Might that be why, so often, I didn’t see him?

He was about to speak when the door knocked and a breathless boy opened it before I’d invited him to do so. ‘You’re in trouble, Pike. Blinky wants you in his office. Now!’