How the Trouble Started (3 page)

I’ve only ever come close to telling one person about what happened in Clifton. Mum always said that it was important to keep the door shut on the past, and over the years she’s watched like a hawk to make sure I’ve done that. She said we were lucky that I was too young to have my name in the paper, and I shouldn’t go ruining our fresh start in Raithswaite by talking about things that can never be changed. And I was careful for years until I nearly told Fiona Jackson. I first met her when we were both nine years old, not long after we’d moved to Raithswaite, and she was just the same then as she is now – dark eyes and darker hair. Stern and lovely. The only difference is that seven years later her beauty comes complete with curves. There’s an old limestone quarry called Crosshills between our two houses. The back wall of the quarry is sixty feet of vertical rock with trees and grass growing out of it; the bowl below is a maze of tracks, sudden big rocks and tiny steep hills. A few years ago the shrubs and trees began to take over and the place is mainly green now with only the odd patch of grey quarry rock showing through.

I’ve never made friends easily; all of it is unclear to me and I’m not sure how it normally happens, but with Fiona it happened because of the quarry. She would often be down there avoiding her dad and her brothers, and I would be there too, hiding from Mum on her dark days. It was easier for us to walk around together than to try and pretend the other person wasn’t there, and over the years we became easy in each other’s company. These days when we meet she’s usually got her music and her cigarettes. We sit down if it’s sunny, or wander about if it’s cold, and she gives me an ear of her headphones, which has got tricky since I grew half a foot in six months, but never offers me a cigarette. I don’t want to be misleading – we aren’t
best
friends. Sometimes we don’t see each other for days, and sometimes we see each other and she might want to be left alone. But most of the time we have a chat and a wander.

It nearly happened because of her brother. He’d just been found guilty of GBH and was starting a two-year sentence. Fiona was angry, but not with the sentence, with her brother. She told me how hard he’d been to live with, how stressed he made her feel and how she was pleased that he was going away. Her hands were shaking and she was pulling on the cigarette too fast and I couldn’t work out the right thing to say. But it got worse when she suddenly burst into tears. We were stood at the side of the quarry nearest my house, and she was sobbing and I’d never been alone with a crying girl before. I was useless. I knew I was supposed to hug her, comfort her, but we’d never touched in all the years I’d known her, and I just couldn’t move forward and put my arms around her. Gradually she calmed down a little. She was telling me that it was a shit thing to say, but she was relieved when her brother got sentenced, that it meant the house might be normal for a while. ‘The thing is, I can’t say that to anyone,’ she said. ‘There’s a few people at the house now and it’s like a wake. And they are all having a go at the judge and the court, and I’m trying to nod along when all I can see is the truth of what he did, and how I can’t stand him and I’m pleased I won’t have to live in the same house as him any more.’ She looked so sad at that moment, so guilty and tired, like she’d said something she should never say, that I was about to speak too. I was going to tell her about the little boy back in Clifton. I could feel myself running towards the words, charging down the runway. I was excited, I felt relief that I was going to be finally saying it out loud, and Fiona would understand, I knew she would. My mouth was open and I was ready to talk when there was a sharp knocking behind us. We turned to see Mum at the bathroom window, eyes glaring down, gesturing for me to come in. Fiona told me to go, she would be fine she said, and I left her stood there, crying in the quarry. Mum was still in the bathroom, cleaning hard. I asked what she was after, but all she said was ‘You’d been out there too long,’ and carried on scrubbing at the bath.

That evening we were sat in the back room reading our library books. ‘You like that Fiona, don’t you?’ Mum said, without looking up. I didn’t get chance to answer before she carried on. ‘It’s important Donald, that you don’t say anything to her that you shouldn’t.’ I nodded and said I knew. ‘We left all that behind when we left Clifton, so don’t go bringing it with you here.’ She looked up from her book then and fixed me with a stare. I looked away first. She was like that my mum – if she saw an open 
drawer
 she always made sure she snapped it shut.

The day after the inset day I headed for the library as usual at dinner, but I could see from the end of the corridor that I wouldn’t be spending my time in my usual library spot. Frizzy-haired Emma was sat against the wall in the corridor knitting away and Tom Clarkson was heading down the corridor towards me, his drawing pad underneath his arm, shaking his head. ‘Nothing doing Donald, they’ve got some meeting or something going on and we’ve been barred.’ It didn’t matter really; I didn’t want to spend a silent hour in the school library. I ended up in the trees on the scruffy grass that looks onto Gillygate Primary School.

The scene was the same as the day before. The football lads tearing around after the ball, the two pretty girls, hand in hand, dancing around, and the youngest ones tumbling about the teacher. The only difference I could see was the lad from the prisoner-of-war camp was stood alone by the tree, muttering away to himself, walking in a circle, rubbing his head, looking lost without his red-haired friend. I watched him for a while, thinking I better not hang around too long, when there were raised voices over the other side of the yard. I could make out two of the football lads rolling around together, taking wide swipes at each other’s heads. The whole yard was suddenly running that way, as certain as a tidal wave, everyone seemingly shouting something. The teacher was the fastest of the lot, her brown hair streaking after her as she dashed to the epicentre of the trouble. One of the few people who wasn’t engaged in the excitement in some way was the short-haired lad who stayed in the corner with his tree. I moved out of the bushes and over to the railings.

‘Hello,’ I called. He looked up and around, searching for the mystery voice. I waved my hand and he saw me and waved back. I gestured for him to come over and he trotted up to the railings. His uniform had that second-hand look I could tell a million miles off – frayed collars and cuffs. Faded colours. He looked up at me, his head tipped back so he could get the full view. He shoved a finger towards his manky-looking nose.

‘Don’t do that.’

He dropped his hand.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jake.’

‘Where’s your mate today?’

‘Harry?’

‘The red-headed lad.’

‘Yeah, he’s not in today.’

‘Why not?’

He shook his bony head and shrugged.

‘He’s probably sick,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘He’s probably hanging over the toilet right now, puking carrots up,’ I said.

Jake laughed. ‘Yeah, or pooing non-stop!’

‘Or both,’ I said. ‘Sat on the toilet and sicking into a bucket.’

He laughed like a drain at the thought of his friend in such a predicament. His laughing turned into a heavy yawn and he slapped his hand to his forehead and rubbed. I looked over to the other side of the yard. The teacher was getting some control over the situation. She had both lads back on their feet, looking at each other and offering her a series of shrugs. She was encouraging them to shake hands.

‘How old are you then Jake?’ I asked.

‘Eight,’ he said.

The lads must have made up then, or at least 
pretended
 to, because the excitement was killed and kids were making their way back over to our side of the yard and resuming their games.

‘Well Jake,’ I said, ‘I’m Donald.’

I put my hand over the railing.

His little hand felt as thin as paper in my big shovel and I made sure I didn’t squeeze too hard. We shook.

‘See you around,’ I said.

‘See you around,’ he said back.

I glanced over my shoulder as I headed back to Raithswaite High and saw Jake by himself again, over by his tree.

We’ve always been heavy library users. Back in Clifton I won a competition for having borrowed the most books by anyone on a junior ticket over the summer holidays. I was surprised to win; I didn’t even know it was a competition they were running. They took a photograph of me with one of the librarians for the local newspaper and gave me a twenty-pound book voucher you could use in any bookshop in the country. It seemed to me a huge amount, but when it came to spending it I couldn’t choose, and after we’d been in the shop for half an hour, with me picking up and putting down book after book, Mum snapped and dragged me home. She went back the next day and came home with a dictionary and an atlas. I was disappointed at the time, I really wanted books about spaceships and aliens, but over the years I’ve used both books many times for homework so I understood her thinking.

Now I go to the library after school. It gives me more time away from Mum and the house and means I can do homework or research for a new vanishing. That was where I saw Jake next. He was over in the corner on the little plastic chairs with his head in a book.

‘All right Jake?’

He looked up at me. His face was grubby and needed a good wipe. He didn’t look like he remembered.

‘Donald,’ I said. ‘From the other week.’

‘Oh yeah. Hiya Donald.’

‘You all right then?’ I asked again.

He nodded that he was, and I lowered myself down onto a chair. My knees nearly touched my chin.

‘Good to be out of school?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘It’s always good to be out of school isn’t it?’

He laughed at that and said, ‘Yeah, always good.’

I asked him if he liked school but he didn’t seem to know what to say to that so I asked him if he liked books. He knew the answer to that one.

‘Horror books, yeah.’

‘Is that what you’ve got there then?’

‘Yeah, I’ve nearly read all of them.’

‘Books about dinosaurs?’ I asked.

He shrugged. Too old for that now I suppose.

‘Books about football?’

He shook his head. Of course not books about football.

‘Horror books,’ I said.

‘Yeah, ghosts and demons and horror and stuff.’

‘I like books too. I read loads of books. It’s good, isn’t it, reading?’

‘Sometimes it is,’ he said.

‘Well, I best get on Jake. See you soon.’

‘See you Donald,’ he said. It touched me that. To hear my name spoken so friendly.

He was quite often there, over in the kids’ corner alone, with his head in a book or sat at one of the computers playing away on a game. Sometimes when his free half-hour ran out I would pay a pound so he could have an extra bit of time. When he was bored he would come and sit with me and we would chat about what he’d been up to. He told me all about his mate, Harry. About how he had all the computer games and how rich his family was and the car his dad drove. He told me about the teachers, the ones he liked and the ones he hated. Sometimes I helped him with homework and other times we both just sat there reading.

It was a Saturday afternoon when I pushed the 
library
 door and it didn’t budge. I noticed the sign then:
Library closed due to burst pipe. Sorry for any inconvenience. Post returns through letter box.
I turned to head home and saw Jake shooting up the road towards me, his rucksack banging up and down against his back. He walked fast for a little lad with skinny legs. He saw me as he sped along and gave me a grin and a big wave.

‘They’re shut Jake,’ I said when he reached me.

‘Oh,’ he said and didn’t ask why.

‘There’s been a burst pipe. They must be flooded,’ I told him.

‘Right,’ he said and nodded.

‘Are you off back home then?’ I asked.

‘I’ll go to the playground,’ he said, and we set off walking down the road.

It was the one Saturday a year where Raithswaite gets both blue sky and warm sun, and the houses and buildings in town looked smaller than usual, shrunk in the heat, shy with the focus of two bright strangers fixed on them. The roads shimmered hot, people were wearing shorts and T-shirts and I thought that perhaps it was no bad thing that the library was closed, that it was good to be outside on a day like this. We walked ten minutes to the playground, which was just at the end of Jake’s street, and wasn’t much of a playground at all. It was a scruffy place, tucked away at the far end of Fox Street, and there was nobody about, not even on a bright Saturday.

We had a go on the swings and the climbing frame and mucked around for a while before Jake got bored.

‘Have you got some of your books in that bag?’ I asked him, and he nodded that he did.

‘Why don’t we have a read of one of your horror stories then?’ I said.

He pulled a book out of his bag, held it up and said, ‘I was taking it back. It’s rubbish. It’s not even scary.’

‘The scarier the better?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Jake, and I hit on a plan.

‘That book might not be scary in the sun in the middle of the day. It might be scary if you read it in a haunted house.’

‘A haunted house?’ he said.

‘Have you ever been to one?’

Jake shook his head. ‘Somebody said the toilets at school are haunted but I don’t believe them.’

‘Do you want to see a haunted house?’

He squinted his eyes up towards me.

‘Do you know where there is one?’

I told him that I did.

We left the playground; he was so excited, walking ahead, that I had to grab his collar to pull him slower.

I hadn’t invented the house; there is a house somewhere in Raithswaite that’s said to be haunted, a house where a tragedy occurred, it’s just that I’ve never been quite sure exactly where it is. But I knew of an abandoned house that looked like it
should
be haunted, a house that if someone told you it
was
haunted, you would think they were telling you the truth. The place I had in mind was the old quarry house, a wreck at the south side of the quarry, about half a mile from my house. It’s next to the old entrance where the trucks used to drive in and out, and it’s been empty ever since we moved to Raithswaite. It sits back from the road, nestled under tall trees. Every year it slips closer to ruin, and on dark nights when the mist comes down from the hills and there’s frost in the air, it can make you shudder to see it so abandoned and ruined. The quarry master used to live there, the man who logged the loads of the trucks and looked after the quarry in the night, making sure people weren’t stealing any rock. When the quarry closed he lost his job and moved out of the house and nobody has lived there since. That was my haunted house for Jake and I hoped that it didn’t look too friendly in the sun.

I told Jake the story of the real haunted house as we walked along. It’s a story that’s passed along from year to year at the high school and all the older kids in Raithswaite know it. I told him that it started when Mr Lorriemore was getting his gear together to go hunting. He was downstairs, it was about half five in the morning, and he’d filled his flask and packed his bag and was checking that everything was in working order with his rifle. Just as he was aiming it skyward his wife was climbing out of bed to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten to pack the sandwiches she’d made for him. She left the bed, stood and reached for her dressing gown, and was about to make her way across the room when Mr Lorriemore took a pretend potshot. He pulled the trigger, but there was a bullet in the chamber that shouldn’t have been there, and the bullet went straight through the floorboards and into his wife. She fell to the floor and was dead in minutes. It’s said that when the ambulance and police turned up Mr Lorriemore was hugging his dead wife’s body, weeping. Mrs Lorriemore was carried out of the house, covered in a blanket, and Mr 
Lorriemore
 was arrested and led away. There was lots of gossip at the time about another man and revenge on Mr Lorriemore’s part, but when the police came and took measurements and did their investigation, everything confirmed the story Mr 
Lorriemore
 had told them. There was a hole in the ceiling and the bullet had entered Margaret 
Lorriemore
 at such an angle that it had to have come from below. The police concluded that a man intent on taking revenge on a cheating wife would not take a potshot through floorboards and be lucky to strike gold with his first and only shot. Mr 
Lorriemore
 eventually left Raithswaite and was never seen again. I told Jake that some said it was guilt that drove him from town, but the more popular story was that he couldn’t bear to stay in the house and hear his wife’s ghost calling out the name of another man.

‘So he shot her dead?’ Jake asked.

‘He did.’

‘And she’s the ghost?’

‘She is.’

‘And that’s where we’re going?’

‘It is.’

He started to speed up again.

It had been years since I’d been to the house. It sits at the furthest point in the quarry away from my house, but I knew that the best way in was still probably through the back door that had been forced open years ago. We stopped at the front gate, both of us hot from the walk in the sun, and rested for a second.

‘Do you still want to go in?’ I asked. Jake nodded, I opened the gate and we walked up the path and around the back.

‘You OK?’ I asked Jake as we stood looking at the house.

‘Is this it then? Is this the haunted house?’ he wanted to know. I told him it was and he looked at it like he believed me. I followed his eyes and could see that the look of the place would convince any eight-year-old it was haunted. It must have been white back in the glory days of the quarry, but now it stood grey and desolate, broken and sad-looking. Even in the sun on a Saturday afternoon I could almost believe that it was haunted myself.

‘Shall we go in then?’ he asked.

‘Are you sure?’ I knew he was sure but I wanted to build the tension.

‘Yeah, let’s go in, but you go first.’

We approached the door and I gave it a hard shove with my shoulder and pushed until it opened. I walked a few steps into the cool dark and waited. I turned to the light of the half-open door and saw that Jake’s confidence had evaporated. He was stood just inside the door, a small black silhouette against the sunny day, one quick step away from daylight and overgrown greenery.

‘You don’t have to come any further, you know.’ I didn’t want to make him do anything he didn’t want to do.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to.’ But he didn’t make a move forward.

‘We could just sit in the garden and read the books and look at the house,’ I told him.

‘I want to come in though,’ he said, but his body betrayed him and he stayed rooted to the spot like a tree stump.

‘Do you want to hold my hand?’ I asked. He nodded. I went back and took his hand and said, ‘If you get scared just tell me, and we’ll leave straight away.’ He nodded again and we slowly stepped forward down the hallway. He giggled with excitement.

‘Have you seen her? The
ghost
?’

He whispered the word, like the mention of it might provoke an appearance.

‘I haven’t, no. I haven’t seen her, but I have heard her,’ I told him.

‘What does she sound like?’

He held my hand tighter in anticipation of the answer. I could feel the blood thrumming quickly around his warm fingers. He stepped closer to hear my answer.

‘She sounds like she’s dying,’ I said. ‘I live over at the far side of the quarry and sometimes at night you can hear her wailing. On still nights it echoes and carries and sounds like wolves. Over the years people who don’t know the story have rung the police but the police have stopped coming because they’ve never found anything.’

‘Maybe they’ve stopped coming because they’re scared,’ said Jake.

He was so close now he was almost under my feet. I sensed he was keener and more scared at the same time. We’d either be going right into the house or running back out into the garden and I couldn’t tell which.

‘Well, they do say that policemen who have caught all kinds of criminals and seen dead bodies smashed up in road accidents won’t come back in here after they’ve been in once.’

‘Really? Let’s go a bit further.’

I had to stifle a laugh at that. We reached a doorway on the left and looked in and saw a shell of a room. It was brighter in there; the sun was strong enough to cut through the thick garden shrubs and the cracked and dirty windows and the light made Jake braver. He let go of my hand and walked in.

‘Was this the room he shot her from?’ he asked. I looked up at the ceiling and saw there were enough cracks and scuffs there for it to seem plausible.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Can you see that mark on the ceiling there? That looks like it could have been done by a bullet.’

Jake grinned as he peered up. He was more excited than scared now and was keen to see the rest of the house. We wandered around downstairs and found most of the rooms to be as bare as the first room. In what must have been the kitchen there were still some cupboards on the wall, and a sink, but other than that, nothing.

‘Do you think there are rats?’ Jake asked. I told him of course there were rats, and he was almost as pleased by this as the thought of the shooting and the ghost. We went upstairs next and he wanted to hold hands again, but I told him I would have to go first to check that the floorboards would take our weight. I creaked my way slowly up the stairs and then shouted for Jake to follow me. There were three bedrooms, all empty, and a wreck of a bathroom. The wallpaper was still clinging on desperately in patches in some rooms, as if the structure of the house depended on it. One strong shoulder charge at any of the walls and I was sure I could bring the whole place down. We sat down in the room where I told Jake Mrs Lorriemore had ended up dead. We rested against a wall and listened to see if we could hear anything ghostlike. When there was nothing that we could even pretend might be a ghost I grabbed his shoulder and said, ‘Jake. What was that?’

‘What?’ he asked, and leant forward to listen.

‘That!’

‘There isn’t anything,’ he said, and I turned quickly and shouted a big ‘BOO!’ at him. He screamed so loudly the noise ran into every room in the house and hung in the air, but he almost immediately started laughing, and he’d enjoyed it, I could tell. We sat there for a while and it didn’t seem like the time to be reading the books, and Jake was more interested in the story of the haunted house than the ghost story in his bag anyway. After half an hour of chatting and making more stuff up I told him we should get him home. As we were walking down the stairs I said, ‘It’s a pity we won’t be here tonight Jake, that’s when she’ll come out and start with her wailing.’