The Hunger Trace (35 page)

‘Right.’

‘One a them things, I’m afraid.’

Adam hung up. He checked his phone for details, but there were no clues as to where Christopher had called from. He thought of speaking to Maggie, but what good would that do, if she was away? It struck him, also, that she would not answer the phone if his name came up on her caller ID. Most people, he realised, probably did not assign a real name to his number in their phone memories. He had forgotten, temporarily, what he was to people. It hadn’t really mattered before.

He caught sight of himself in the window. The thought of being in love – he had shot it out of the sky, before now. But he pictured Louisa in that field, mud all over her clothes, the smell of cinders and rain. The feelings were like nothing he had ever imagined, and he knew he could not change them.

Christopher had been unable to sleep, for one thing. The room that Cynthia put him in had clearly been Georgia’s when she was a little girl. Rather than redecorate, they had simply started her teenage room somewhere else, and left the childhood one behind. A globular sky-blue lantern with rainbows on it surrounded the lightbulb. The remnants of half-peeled stickers glittered on the walls, and Christopher noted the assortment of wooden boxes with keyholes. By the bed, one of these small boxes was open, and four dried-out seahorses – two big, two small – lay on tissue paper inside. The bed itself was a narrow single, and Christopher’s feet hung off the end. This did not trouble him so much, but he was accustomed to the huge room at Drum Hill, and here it felt like the walls were caving in on him.

On his way to bed that night he had heard Georgia in her room, crying on the phone. Perhaps she had called her father, Mike. Perhaps she had called a friend. Perhaps she had just been talking out loud, as
he
sometimes did, though Christopher doubted that. He looked at the wooden boxes around the room, and tried to imagine Georgia hiding things in them, as a little girl. It was difficult. What was more bewildering was the thought that, as Georgia had played in this room, Christopher himself, at the very same time, had played only twenty or so miles away. When she was four, he would have been nine, still at primary school with his special tutor. When he was fourteen, wishing for wet dreams, and dangling his feet in the brook, she would have been eight. A whole life going on parallel to his own. It was difficult to imagine.

He didn’t know her, but then again she didn’t know him. For a few sad moments he experienced the situation from her point of view: the teenage years were a time of great upheaval, and the last thing you needed was some massive psycho turning up claiming to be your half-brother.

He thought of the woods back home. They were lush and junglish in the rain. With all the things Robin Hood stole, he could have redistributed the wealth and still had enough left over to settle in a decent castle. But he didn’t. Sometimes it felt good just to knock the walls down and get to somewhere that’s been there forever.

Christopher rose from the bed. He had not removed his clothes, just rolled his sleeves up to let his itchy forearms get some air. He tried to lift his suitcase, but it was too much of a burden, so he walked downstairs without it. In his coat pocket, he still had Louisa’s US Air Force T-shirt, which he had stolen after vomiting in her bathroom, back when they were friends.

He walked through the heavy smoothness of the house, retrieved his boots from the utility room, carried them to the front door, and quietly put them on. On the driveway he turned and raised his hand in a stiff goodbye salute. As he walked away, he felt a twitch of light fall on the pavement, just for a second.

The night had not been so bad. He had a student bus pass, and once he got to Nottingham he had just sailed up and down the A52 on the Red Arrow, watching the rowdy young drunks swap cities every half-hour. The Red Arrow smelled of sticky sweet perfume and sticky sweet alcohol, mint sauce and red onion, and hair gel – the kind with bubbles in it. Christopher recoiled from the distorted appearance of a boy with a stretched condom pulled over his head, the seriousness of his face as he waved to the cars on the road long after his friends had stopped laughing. At one point, a lad wearing dog tags and a gladiatorial belt approached Christopher, and asked that most dangerous of questions between Nottingham and Derby:

‘Eh up. Mate. Who do you support?’

‘Erm. I don’t support anyone at the moment,’ Christopher said. ‘But no one supports me, either. One day I hope to be the man of a house, and support a whole raft of children.’

The lad squinted in the glare of the reading light, considered the answer for a moment, and then went back to his seat. ‘Nah. Not worth it,’ he said to his friends.

The buses began to empty at around 3 a.m., and Christopher saw the slow blinks of the driver in the rear-view mirror. He had a wrinkly bald head and low eyes which made his face look upside down. Christopher cleared his throat conspicuously every ten seconds, to keep the driver awake, until, eventually, he fell asleep himself.

His rest was disturbed by a voice, and when he woke there was an old-style bus conductor standing over him. This would have been fine – he had a valid ticket – but for the fact that the conductor had antlers. ‘Who the, erm, eff are you?’ said Christopher.

‘
Tickets to Cromm Cruac
,’ the conductor said. Christopher handed him his Peak Saver ticket, in which the conductor made a little tear before returning it, and disappearing.

At 8 a.m., Christopher left the Red Arrow and spotted a bus in Nottingham station with the word ‘Sherwood’ on the display. He had been feeling a little anxious, and wondered if it might be a hallucination, but he got on the bus anyway. He told the bus driver that he was going on a pilgrimage. ‘Just ring the bell when you want to get off,’ she said.

Sherwood, when he got there, was just a normal urban area, with an average high street on a persistent incline. It had a betting shop, an Indian take-away, a few pubs, and a Co-op. It was cold and wet. The local youngsters must have been thankful for their woolly hats and hoods.

Christopher bought a tin of tuna and a bread roll from the Spar. ‘Erm. I’m not very impressed with Sherwood, I must say,’ he told the man behind the till.

‘It’s an up and coming area, mate.’

‘Not many open spaces.’

‘There’s a pitch and putt up there, past the pub.’

‘Oh right. Erm. Do you know where the forest is, at all?’

‘Forest? You mean the football?’

‘No. Sherwood Forest.’

‘Oh. Where the Holiday Park is, you mean? Few miles from here. Follow the signs for Center Parcs.’

‘Oh right.’

Christopher turned away.

‘
Nothing is forgotten
,’ the man said.

‘What?’ said Christopher.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ the man said, shaking his head at Christopher.

Christopher had not bothered following the signs to Center Parcs. He had eaten his lunch on the first tee of the pitch and putt, caught the bus back to Derby, and then a train out to Detton. He had called Adam from the station.

As he approached Drum Hill now, he kept to the high side of the brook and off the main paths, tracking instead through the trees at the base of the hill. It was a good decision, for the brook had burst, and the wooden footbridge which crossed the water from the field was almost completely submerged. Only the handrails were visible, like the humped backbone of an animal. The fast-moving water was the colour and opacity of old women’s tights.

Christopher edged along the gap between the brook and the steep rise of the hill until he reached the silver birch, which he used to swing himself towards the entrance to the den. Inside the den was a blanket, a sleeping bag, a torch, and a couple of copies of
Asian Bride
Magazine, which he had ordered thinking they were something else. Christopher removed his drenched coat, trousers, socks and pants, and dried himself off with the blanket. Then he wrapped it around his waist like a towel, and shuffled to the back of the den with the sleeping bag, where he watched the rain fall in the brook. It made him want to urinate. Shivering, he thought about taking a nap but his father had once told him that if you were stranded in the cold, you should not go to sleep, because your body temperature drops.

It’s cold out
, his father used to say.
Especially if you leave it out.
(It had taken Christopher a while to get that one.)

He had a whole host of sayings about the weather.

It’s so cold, that when I took Monty
(their old dog)
out for a wee, I had to chop him off a tree trunk.
(Christopher found that outrageously funny.)

Listening at a locked door, Christopher had once overheard his father say, ‘We’ll make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’ He had asked what it meant a few hours later, but his father had been shocked, and gave a muddled explanation about how brilliant Christopher was, and how nobody should ever tell him different.

Every path has a puddle.
This was apt, right now. Christopher looked at his boot prints leading up to the den. Soon the treads would be washed away, the troughs filled.

Christopher decided to go when he saw the water coming in. Leaving his socks and pants at the back of the den with the blanket, he replaced his jeans and boots. His jumper was damp. He struggled into his coat, put his hand in the pocket, and was momentarily amazed to pull out a dry T-shirt. But then he remembered that it belonged to the Turncoat Louisa Smedley. After dipping it carefully in the brook, he balled the T-shirt up and hurled it across the water. It landed in the pooling water in the field. He looked down at his forearms, which had pink and white crosshatches from where he had scratched at the irritation.

He took an elevated route through the pines. Clumps of grass and earth came away in his hands like scalps as he climbed. The light reflected in the puddles and the sheen of bark played tricks on him. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he thought he saw movement in one of the boggy areas a hundred yards away. It was as though the mud was taking a human form, and standing up. Christopher looked at his boots, willing the vision away.

The funny thing about the woods, Christopher thought, as he arrived at the top of the hill amongst the swollen, naked trees, was that they were in you, as much as you were in them. Like that old saying about taking the boy out of the country, but not being able to whatever. And what was in you, was
your
woods, and once they took hold, it was pointless trying to find anywhere else.

That didn’t mean the woods were always
nice
. Right now, the bare branches reminded him of the little vein things you see in biology diagrams of the lungs. Micro-villi. They were frightening when you thought of them like that: something turned inside out. A large drop of water ran off the end of a branch and went down his collar. Even from deep in the woods he could see the charred shape of the aviary out there in the fields.

Up ahead, between the trees, he saw the back of a man covered in mud. It was hanging off him like rags. Christopher was too far away to see with any great accuracy, but he could certainly make out that the man had a quite glorious branch-like set of antlers. It definitely wasn’t the bus conductor. Christopher was not afraid; he wanted to know who the man was, and he tried to follow him, but the man was fast, and passed quickly out of sight.

Christopher trudged on, thinking back to the episode of
Robin of Sherwood
he had watched with Maggie, featuring Cromm Cruac, that village of the dead. Little John had dreamed over and over and over of his wife’s murder. The outlaws had changed in his mind since then. They weren’t very merry at all. They were disturbed and sorry and sad, full of regret and loss. Christopher had read of the crusades recently, too. Times, he thought, had not been pleasant.

He imagined the woods, crowded with the dead and gone: the last man to be hanged in Derby, who had sexual relations with a calf; the girl from his school who overdosed by her mother’s grave; the ewe he had found trapped in the brook; all of Louisa’s birds. That bloke who invented the Spinning Jenny.

Christopher heard the angry, shuddering blades of a helicopter moving overhead. It was one of those yellow rescue choppers, probably carrying some old dear who’d fallen off her roof. Christopher pulled out his Peak Saver ticket, and looked at the little tear.

If he imagined the dead inhabitants of the woods, and each of those individuals had imaginations of their own, then the place would be absolutely teeming with the loved and lost. Teeming. He said it out loud, and the word seemed to summon the antlered man, who appeared, closer this time. Christopher could see the frayed fabric where the antlers had burst through the man’s hat.

The antlered man started to run away again. ‘Wait,’ Christopher said, marching on. He hoped that the man (and all of the other dead folk) had not heard him singing ‘Hey Mona’ earlier that week. It was very much a work in progress.

The diving platform looked like the champagne centrepiece of an ambassador’s reception, the steps so worn that the water flowed down them, one to the other. It was quite stunning. Christopher climbed the steps slowly, their rusted grids like grinning mouths.

When he got to the top, Christopher saw the antlered man one last time, standing at the edge of the platform. He had his back to Christopher, and appeared to be looking out over Detton. ‘Erm, who do you think you are?’ Christopher said.