How the Trouble Started (12 page)

‘Jake, just look at the wall in front of you. Just stare at the wall in front of you and hold on.’

‘I’m dizzy!’ he shouted. ‘I’m dizzy. I’m slipping. I’m going to fall! I am!’

He screamed again. I was moving as fast as I could, scrambling, climbing, pulling myself up to him. I could see the soles of his feet up above me to my left. Three more moves and I would be next to him. Then came another scream. He fell. He dropped past me in a moment. He hit the quarry wall further down and bounced back out and landed on his side in the quarry. He didn’t sound like an egg cracking. He landed with a thump.

I stayed until the ambulance men came. I had to leave him to phone but I ran back and I was with him. We held hands. He tried to sit up, but cried out with pain, and was sick and there was some blood in the sick. He looked ten times worse than Oliver Thomas had ever looked. I made him lie still. I kept standing up to see if any help was coming, but every time I stood up he started to cry and I had to get back down quickly to be with him. Finally I heard them shout, voices calling out for us, and I shouted as loud as I could, ‘We’re here! We’re here! We’re here!’ but the last time I shouted it I was already not there and running away, trying not to hear Jake crying. The last thing I remember seeing is Jake lifting his head to see where I was, and the blood in the dirt on the ground and knowing that I’d been right all along: there has to be evidence left behind when something terrible has happened.

I bought a ticket and boarded a bus. I don’t remember the journey. I came to when we pulled into a dark shady place and the driver turned the engine off and the bus rattled into silence. I got off with everyone else and followed them out of the bus station and into daylight. I recognised where I was from photographs and TV clips, but I’d never been there before; I’d never been in a city before. I walked past shops and glass buildings and tall old buildings, people everywhere. Not like Clifton, not like Raithswaite. It was too much of everything and I went back to the bus station. There was stand after stand and signs with letters and numbers on them and I couldn’t make out how any of it worked. I asked a man in a fluorescent vest which bus went to Clifton and he said, ‘Read the board lad, read the board,’ and pointed to a huge perspex timetable cemented into the tarmac. I stood in front of it and all the numbers, times and destinations swarmed together like an army of flies that wouldn’t stop moving and I thought for a second that I might pass out.

‘Stand D, love. Twenty past the hour.’

I looked down at a middle-aged lady. I didn’t know what she was saying to me. ‘Clifton love.’ She pointed behind me and said, ‘Stand D. Twenty past the hour.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ And I don’t know what my face was doing because she reached out and put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Twenty past the hour love,’ and tugged my sleeve before walking back to wait for her own bus.

An hour into the bus ride I saw an ivy-covered bridge over a train line, a broken barn in a field, a bicycle shop at the end of a row of houses. These places belonged to a time that didn’t quite exist any more, half-memories stirred. Slowly buildings and streets began to look more familiar, I understood where I was, and then, finally, the bus stopped in the centre of Clifton. I stepped off and headed in the direction of Kemple Street. I wanted to approach the house from the same direction I had done the morning it happened. At the top of Kemple Street I found the track that cuts through to Hawthorne Road. It looked just as it always did, weeds and grass, potholes and grey gravel. I walked out of the end of the track and back into my childhood, all of it in front of me, like it had been waiting. I started down the hill. I passed Mr and Mrs Dawson’s, Mr and Mrs Jackson’s, old Mrs Armer’s, some houses different, some just the same. Things are supposed to shrink when you get older. Nothing was shrunk here. Everything as it was. Then I was there: number seventy-five. They’d built a room over the garage. Probably an extra bedroom or a study, maybe a games room. People had those. The doors and windows were new, but you could still tell, it was still our house. I turned away and carried on. Mrs Franklin’s, Mr and Mrs Seedall’s, Mr Mole’s, Mr Taylor’s. Further down to houses where I didn’t know who had lived there, not even by sight sometimes. The numbers were getting smaller now, my steps slowing. Then, finally, nine, seven, and five. I started looking from number nine. Just in case. My eyes to the floor, staring.
Come on
, I was thinking,
come on then, show me, show me.
I walked up and down, up and down, but the eight-year-old me was right. There wasn’t a spot of blood anywhere.

Over the years two distinct memories have emerged, formed and sharpened. Both are as real and separate to me as my own two hands. In both memories I am riding my bike, that is the constant, it was me on my bike. I’d had it for nearly a year by then, still couldn’t believe it was mine. In the first recollection it was early Saturday morning and I’d been riding around on the waste ground behind our house, but every time I passed the garage where the trouble with the kitten happened I felt guilty, so I rode to the front, onto Hawthorne Road. It wasn’t as much fun there, there were less bumps, less space, but no bad memories. I was only allowed down to number sixty-five because Mum could see that far from the front window, and she knew Mr Taylor who lived there. But after Mr Taylor’s the hill really starts to fall steeply and that was where you could get your speed up. By the time I’d raced down the steep slope, leaving number sixty-five behind a couple of times, it didn’t feel like I was really breaking the rules any more. I was getting faster too. Braver each time. When the handlebars started to wobble, instead of holding tighter and reaching for the brakes, I’d learnt to relax my grip and ride the bumps out, to let the jolts and shocks dissolve into my arms and fizz away into nothing in my elbows. I looked at my watch, I had ten minutes before I had to be back inside. There was enough time for one more really good ride and I decided I would make the most of it and get to the bottom of Hawthorne Road for the first time by myself. I thought I could just about do that and get back in ten minutes, get back before I was in any trouble.

I started from outside my house and pedalled hard until I hit number sixty-five, after that I coasted for a while because it was impossible to keep up with the speed of the wheels anyway. I slowed myself for number thirty-seven because the pavement kinks to the left and you can’t be going full tilt there or you’ll end up in the road. After thirty-seven the pavement straightens out again, and if you put some serious pedalling in, you can get back up to speed in no time. I wasn’t going the fastest when I hit him. Probably about eighty per cent. The main road at the bottom was approaching, so I would have started to slow a little, not much, but a little. I was still going fast. I saw a shock of blond hair appear from a gateway on the left, he was almost already under the wheels, and then I was no longer holding my handlebars, I was tumbling through the air. The pavement was the sky. The sky was the pavement. I landed hard, folded over like a piece of paper. I was sore and confused. I moved different body parts but nothing was screaming in pain; nothing was broken. I stood up. I was facing the opposite side of the road – the big grand houses with the steps leading up to their wide front doors wobbled in front of me. I turned to see what had happened but I was dazed and turned the wrong way and was looking at the bottom of the road. I managed to get myself the right way round and saw him lying there. Blond hair. A dark blue all-in-one outfit. Pink feet. No shoes. My bike was next to him. I ran back and knelt down in front of him and brushed the hair away from his eyes. His eyes were open. He looked curious. He looked deep in thought. I picked him up. I stood him on his feet, he fell forward into my legs and wrapped his arms around my knee. He wasn’t crying. I crouched down in front of him and he tried to hug my face and I gave him a big hug back. ‘Are you OK? Are you all right? Are you OK?’ I kept saying into his face, looking for any damage. I pulled back to get a proper look at him. He pushed his hand at my nose like it was a button he wanted to press. I gave him another hug and then I took his hand in my hand and walked him to the open gate. He held onto my hand tightly. He stumbled once as we walked up to the house and he was wheezing, like he had asthma, but everything seemed to be in working order. There were no cuts or bruises, none that I could see. His hand was very warm. I jabbered as I walked with him, ‘Are you hurt? God I walloped you then didn’t I? Did you see me fly through the air?’ The front door was ajar. It was a red door with a silver letter box. I was about to knock when I heard the shouting. Two of them at it, upstairs. Angry as Mum on a terrible day. There were words I’d never heard used before tumbling into my ears, words I instinctively knew must be the worst in the world. They were raging. I held my hand ready to knock, waiting for a pause, but when one of them finished the other started and then they were both going together. When there was finally a silence I got one knock in before the woman screamed like something was being torn away from inside her and I couldn’t knock again after that. He’d gone floppier now and was leaning into my legs so I turned him round and sat him against the wall next to the front door. I knelt down in front of him and held both his hands and he smiled at me. ‘Sorry,’ I said. He smiled again and his head fell to one side and his eyes closed but he carried on smiling. I heard someone banging down the stairs then. I was terrified. I turned and ran. I reached my bike and clambered on. The steering was knocked out but I could still work it. I pushed down hard and pedalled back up the hill, trying to get back home before Mum spotted that I’d gone further than number sixty-five.

The other memory is just as clear. I woke up determined to paint. After breakfast I gathered all my stuff together and set myself up on the kitchen table. I spread out the old newspaper underneath, just like I was supposed to, and began to work. I leant forward to wash my brush in the water, but it was a long stretch and I was clumsy. I knocked the jar over. I rushed to clean it up but Mum heard the clatter and came charging in from the front room. I hadn’t even noticed at that point, but it was the first thing she saw – the murky water had reached and covered her purse. She picked it up, water dripping from it. She threw it down on the table, took three fast steps and slapped me across my face. She screamed at me to get out and started to cry. Why is
she
crying? I thought. My cheek was throbbing, I could feel the skin pushing itself out in shock and pain, hanging heavy. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ she screamed, when I didn’t move as fast as I should. I left the mess on the kitchen table and tumbled out through the back door. I took my bike from the yard and set off shakily. The air met my cheek and cooled the skin a little. I was shocked and rode slowly and wobbly with no destination in mind. She’d never hit me like that before and it took a while before I could think straight. As the shock lessened the anger started to come through and I rode past sixty-five, pleased to break her rules. All I’d done was knock some water over, her purse wasn’t
ruined
, it would clean up. Why did she whack me so hard? Why was
she
crying? I was heading down Hawthorne Road, still not pedalling fast, but the slope was carrying me away and I was speeding up regardless. The anger reached my legs at the bottom of the slope and I started to pedal then. My cheek began to burn again, my legs ached and I was flying. Leaving that fucking woman behind. As I sped along I saw him step out from the front gate into the middle of the pavement. Just when I should have braked and pulled up I pushed down on the pedals – push, push, push and I hit him hard. I didn’t hang around. I looked him over, saw there was no blood anywhere and jumped on my bike. I was away in seconds.

The truth is in those two accounts somewhere, but I can’t get to it. I was eight years old when it happened and I’ve thought about it so many times, reimagined it over and over, and now I can’t get to the truth of what happened. I know what happened afterwards, I got the details of that. His mum found him. She noticed the front door was open, thought of Oliver, ran out and found him sat against the house. He tried to get up when he saw his mum and that was when he collapsed. The ambulance must have arrived with its siren off. I didn’t hear it and neither did Mum, but it made sense that it arrived silently; there wouldn’t have been much traffic to clear from Clifton roads that early on a Saturday morning. I wasn’t told when he died. I don’t know if it was in the ambulance, in the hospital, or if he was already dead when I was halfway up Hawthorne Road on my way home. They did tell me that it was internal bleeding. I’d hit him so hard that the damage on the inside was too much for him to survive. That shocked me. In both memories when I hit him it was like riding into a tiny mountain, a little lump of hard rock, and it was me that was sent flying, my steering that was knocked out. Something as solid as that on the outside shouldn’t crumble so easily on the inside. It was a catastrophic design fault. And if there was so much damage on the inside, how come none of it spilled out? How come it all stayed put inside? How can a chunky little two-year-old boy die so easily? So cleanly?

Eight years later I was no nearer an answer. I looked to the ground again but there was still no blood; still no evidence that any of it had ever happened. I noticed somebody watching me through a window from the house next door to Oliver’s and I came to. I realised I didn’t know how long I’d been stood there. I started to walk back up Hawthorne Road, past the kink in the road, up the steep stretch, the house numbers slowly crawling back up through the fifties and sixties. I wasn’t thinking what to do next. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was getting closer to our old house and when I looked up I saw him leaning on his green wooden gate, watching me as I approached, his thick, heavy hands dangling over the side. As I got closer I realised it was Mr Mole. I couldn’t believe that he was still alive; he’d seemed so old to me all those years ago, but there he was, looking no older by a day than he had back then. I stopped when I reached him. We looked at each other and he said, ‘It’s little Donald Bailey isn’t it? From number seventy-five.’

I looked down at him and he smiled up at me and said,

‘Little!’

The house was the same. Maybe the carpet was different but I couldn’t be sure. I remembered that he decorated a room a year, but he never changed the colours, so nothing ever looked too old, but nothing ever really looked new either.

We were sat in his front room with a cup of tea each.

I looked around. ‘No Scruffy?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘He went not long after you left,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking about getting another one, but I can’t quite take the plunge.’

He blew on his drink.

‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

‘She’s all right.’

‘Tell her I send her my regards.’

The clock out in the hall chimed, a cloud covered the sun and the room fell dark.

‘Does she know you’re here?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t think so.’

He shook his head back at me.

‘I always thought it was a shame,’ he said, ‘that she whisked you away like that. I understood, but it didn’t seem right.’

I looked at the floor. After eight years I was finally with someone who knew all about it, someone who would probably be happy to talk about it, and I couldn’t say a word, wanted to keep it eight years away.

‘Anyway Donald, how old are you now?’ He put his head on one side and closed one eye and did some calculating.

‘Fifteen is it?’

‘Sixteen,’ I said.

‘Sixteen! And how are you? How are things? What brings you back here?’

I didn’t know how to answer. All I could think of was Jake in the quarry and the patch of blood and the scream he let out when he fell. We sat in silence for a minute before he sprang into action.

‘Wait there Donald,’ he said.

He disappeared upstairs and I could hear him rummaging away up there, opening wardrobe doors, shuffling through drawers. A few minutes later he came back into the room holding an old plastic spaceship across the palms of his hands like he was presenting me with a medal, a big grin plastered across his old face. ‘Do you remember this Donald? Do you remember how much you loved it?’

He held it out to me and I took it from him and turned it over in my hands. It was a model of the space shuttle
Columbia
. Other than my bike it had been my favourite present, I’d taken it everywhere with me, never let it out of my sight.

‘How come it’s here?’ I asked him.

‘The last time your mum dropped you off, not long before you moved away, you brought it with you as usual, but you weren’t in the mood for playing with it and I put it on the sideboard to keep it safe. Your mum turned up suddenly and took you back home and you forgot to take it with you. I kept meaning to drop it off round at your house but the next thing I knew you’d gone and nobody really knew where you’d gone to. I’ve had it here all these years.’

‘Why didn’t you throw it away?’

He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem right. You loved it so much, I didn’t have the heart. I’d forgotten all about it until a few minutes ago.’

I turned the space shuttle over in my hands. It was the one thing that had shrunk. I remembered it being long and thick and heavy, like it contained the miniature workings of a real spaceship inside. Now it sat in my hands lightly, a cheap-looking toy, dated and faded.

‘Whenever you came round, for about a year, you always used to have that with you. And books about space, do you remember?’

I did remember. I remembered my first vanishings to Neptune. My escape to space. I remembered staring out of my bedroom window at the night sky, knowing that the stars I could see might be dead already, but not quite grasping how that could be, not believing that it was possible. A thought stirred at the back of my mind.

‘I always thought you were going to be an astronaut,’ Mr Mole said and looked at me and smiled. I managed a smile back.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’ll stay for some tea?’ Before I had time to answer he was already up and walking off, and a minute later I could hear him chopping away. I sat back in the chair, closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of the room. The house was the happiest place I’d ever known and to be here like this felt like I was ruining it.

As I tried to eat something he said, ‘Do you want to ring your mum Donald? Let her know where you are?’ I shook my head, and he smiled and said, ‘That bad is it?’ I tried to smile back but it was impossible. After he’d washed up I was ready to leave, I had an idea where I was going next, but Mr Mole said, ‘The spare room can be ready in minutes Donald.’ As soon as he said it my legs nearly gave way with tiredness and I had to sit down. I went to bed early and slept until lunchtime. Mr Mole insisted I had some food when I finally came downstairs. He left me to it and went out to work in the back garden. When I’d finished eating I went out and helped him for the rest of the afternoon, just like I had done years before. When it got to four I told him I’d better be on my way, I had somewhere I wanted to go. ‘Let your mum know you’re OK Donald. She’ll be worried sick.’ I nodded that I would and Mr Mole walked me to the front gate where we shook hands like men in a film. He closed the gate behind me and resumed his position with his hands dangling over into the street, watching as I walked down Hawthorne Road, back towards the centre of Clifton.

I asked at the library. A bus from Clifton would take me to a village called Hethersby, from there it was a three-mile walk. Most people drive, I was told. The bus took for ever, winding its way through villages, waiting at stops for ten minutes without anybody getting on. The driver turned to me and said, ‘This is it, this is Hethersby’ at one of the stops in one of the villages. As soon as I stepped off the bus I could see it. There was nothing else to look at; it was massive, the only thing on the horizon. A huge white satellite dish supported by crisscrossed scaffolding. An antenna in the middle of it all, pointing to the sky. The Pilchard Telescope, finally. It didn’t look anything like a telescope. I set off walking.

I found my way to the entrance, walked through the car park and followed the signs to the visitor centre. I tried the door but it was locked. A man in a blazer with a walkie-talkie appeared and told me it closed at five, but I could walk to the base of the telescope, he said, walk the path around it. He said that they locked the gates at eight, so I had forty minutes. He pointed out which path to follow and I set off walking again. No one else was around that late so I stood alone, staring up at the telescope. Faded boards with facts about Thomas Pilchard and the telescope were spread out along the route. I stopped at each one, but couldn’t take any of the information in, the words refused to add up to anything that made any sense. I stared at the telescope again but could only see Jake lying in the quarry. My legs felt weak and I sat down on a bench. Eventually an announcement crackled out of a speaker somewhere. The site would close in ten minutes, would visitors please make their way to the exit. I looked around and saw a wooden shelter over by a small clutch of trees. I walked into the trees. After a few minutes the man with the walkie-talkie appeared and walked the path around the telescope, whistling. He walked over to the shelter and peered inside. On his way out he picked up a little teddy that had been dropped in the grass. He looked it over and put it in his blazer pocket. He locked the gates behind him. I heard a car start up and drive off.

I moved into the shelter and sat down on the floor and looked over at the telescope. Massive and silent. Miles above the sky ended and space began and planets and stars existed. Somewhere up there Neptune was spinning, like it always had done. Nothing down here making any difference to anything up there. Dusk fell, the sky darkening, slowly at first, and then suddenly, the huge telescope fading impossibly away. I fell asleep easier than I thought I would but slept badly. I dreamt of falling boys, and broken boys. I woke at dawn when the birds started singing. It was worse than the morning I’d found out Oliver Thomas was dead. It was a long time before anyone arrived but eventually the man in the blazer turned up, walked around the path again, and ten minutes later opened the front gate. After half an hour visitors began to arrive. First through the gate was a man holding a little girl’s hand. They approached the blazer man, the man explained something, the girl stood shyly at his side. He ruffled the little girl’s head as he spoke. The blazer man crouched down and pulled the teddy out of his pocket and presented it to the girl. A smile raced over her lips, she took the teddy quickly, pulled it into her chest and wiggled. The men laughed and shook hands, the little girl was made to say thank you and they turned and walked back to the car park, the girl still clutching the teddy closely to her chest. I waited until a few more visitors turned up and left the shelter and walked to the exit. Nobody noticed me leave. I walked out through the gates, across the car park and onto the country road. I was in the middle of nowhere.