The Hunger Trace (9 page)

‘It’s pretty distracting, I must say, when a woman is, erm, erm, gyrating her pelvis in your face.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Although perhaps I’m not the person to talk to about such things.’

‘Oh, right,’ he said, lapsing into a silent reverie – probably flashing back to some private dance – of which Louisa was powerless to disapprove.

Then he sat back slowly, raised both arms in the air and pointed both index fingers down at his crotch. He stared at Louisa through his blue lenses. She shook her head slowly and grasped the neck of the guitar, ready to swing it if he made a move. She knew the dog was outside. ‘
What are you doing?’
she said.

He leaned forward, still pointing downwards. ‘Toilet,’ he whispered.

It took Louisa a moment to understand. ‘Jesus,’ she said, closing her eyes with relief. ‘Yes, yes, go. It’s upstairs.’

Louisa put her hands over her face as he left the room. She had thought briefly of the irony of being sexually attacked by David’s son. She laughed to herself.

He flushed twice before coming downstairs, still buckling up. ‘Erm, erm, I’ve had a whale of a time,’ he said as Louisa showed him to the door. ‘This could be the start of quite a friendship.’ Louisa smiled, and he carried on. ‘A friendship based on Mutual Assured Destruction.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, I’ve told you sensitive information. About Eden and the gold-digger,’ he said, touching his nose. ‘I hope you won’t betray me to Maggie Green.’

‘I will not.’

Louisa let him go, thinking he had misunderstood the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, until he turned and said, ‘And I won’t tell Maggie that you hang around the garden at night.’

They’d been vying for control of the woods for years. Louisa remembered a time on Bryant’s land, back in the nineties, when, leaning against the fibreglass stegosaurus, she’d been shocked by a crashing sound behind her. She turned to see that David’s little boy had fallen from an ash tree. His leg was bleeding, and he was in shock from the fall. He was whimpering, and still held the branch that had broken in his hands. ‘You might want to, erm, help me instead of just standing there,’ he said.

‘Are you okay?’

‘No. Get my, erm, daddy.’

As something of an uninvited guest on his land, Louisa saw that as a last resort. ‘Who else is working on the park today?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps someone—’

‘Not someone. Daddy!’ he screamed. Some of the animals called back.

‘Okay, okay,’ Louisa said.

As it happened, she came upon David first anyway, in his Stetson and long coat. They ran back to Christopher and carried him to Louisa’s cottage because it was nearer and she had a better medical kit. Louisa’s attempts to treat the boy met with kicking and screaming and the word ‘fiend’, so David took over, kneeling before the sofa on which Christopher lay.

‘Now Christopher,’ said David. ‘Look at me and tell me honestly: what were you doing up that tree?’ He applied the rag gently to the edge of the wound as he spoke. Christopher hissed, but answered the question.

‘Because Robin Hood has a tree house. You said, in your story. I was looking to see if there might be any, erm, ruins.’

‘Robin Hood?’ said David. ‘He didn’t live in a treehouse, you ninny, he lived in a cave. I mean . . . Not a cave. Cave’s too dangerous.’

‘A den,’ Louisa said.

‘Perfect! Yes, a den. He lived in a den,’ David said.

Christopher narrowed his eyes and looked at them both in turn. ‘What are dens made of?’ he asked.

‘We’ll make you one, down by the brook, won’t we Louisa?’

‘I suppose. I just pulled down the old mews, so there’s a lot of wood and iron hanging around. We could use that. It’ll be like a treehouse, only on the ground,’ she said. David beamed. ‘A treehouse on the ground,’ he said, and then stopped smiling and addressed Christopher. ‘As long as you promise, no more trees,’ he said.

‘Erm, erm, as long as you promise a den,’ Christopher said, excited by the prospect of an infinite conversation.

When his knees were wrapped in the gauze Louisa used to treat her hawks, they left Christopher to rest and went through to the kitchen. Louisa made tea. They stood by the sink. ‘You look well,’ Louisa said, with a hint of sadness.

‘I feel good,’ David said. ‘Better than I have for a long time. Since I was a kid, I suppose.’

Louisa nodded slowly and sighed. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’

‘It’s taken a long time. It was a terrible thing that happened to us. You saved me, you know. I wouldn’t have coped.’

Louisa sniffed and looked away.

‘Anyway, what about you, Smedley?’ David said, lightening the tone. ‘I see precious little of you these days.’

‘Well, it’s not like I
go
anywhere. You know where I am.’

‘You’re in my garden,’ he said. Louisa reddened, but David became serious. ‘If there’s ever anything I can do for you,’ he said.

They looked at each other for a moment. The kitchen lights were off, but the twilight made the place orange, threw patches of furtive heat across them both. Steam slinked up from the coiled clay mugs. Louisa’s knuckles stung.

Christopher hobbled into the room. ‘Daddy, I want to go home, now. This house smells funny.’

‘Christopher, for God’s sake.’

The moment was gone. Louisa turned away, towards the sink, the pan handles thrusting forth from water gone tepid. No plates.

‘Louisa, he doesn’t mean that. He’s just tired.’

‘So am I,’ Louisa said.

The next day, Louisa dropped the materials for the den at their house, but left them to it. So David, with help from Christopher, built the den into the bottom of the slope, not far from the brook. They could often be seen fishing for beer cans and old shoes. Later, when Christopher was older and hoarding God knows what secrets, Louisa would see him crawling into the tin shack alone, hiding from the world.

Christopher’s policy of speaking the brutal truth had not abated. Had he not said something similar, about the state of the house, on his most recent visit? Louisa thought of his bright gums, of her own swollen mouth, and of the unquantifiable disfigurements of the animals her birds had killed. Faces peeled off, eyes speared, every kind of cave-in. Diamond had once slashed a partridge after a fulsome stoop, and when it hit the ground it split in two, from head to tail. She thought of David in that field, all those years ago. The horror of it. Louisa could not sleep, and when she heard Maggie calling her dog on the first round of the morning, she stood from a bed on which she had only sat.

*    *    *

The day after visiting Louisa, Christopher sat at the computer, wrapped in a blanket, and checked his profile on the dating website. His photograph was just a picture of his bright blue eye.

Shivering, he laughed at his pun about Sherwood Forest. They could see that he had a GSOH, he thought, even if he didn’t have GCH. There was a message in his inbox from a girl named Carol-Ann.

So it could have been a good day, but his nemesis on campus that afternoon was Mr Stephen Cullis, tutor and supervisor, who was intent on convincing Christopher that there were no decent grounds for the existence of a real, historical Robin Hood. Christopher believed that William Fitzooth, a twelfth century landowner, had been dispossessed by King John while accompanying Richard the Lionheart during the crusades. Such a catastrophe, it seemed to Christopher, would be enough to create the violent outlaw who inhabited the early Robin Hood ballads.

Christopher had trapped Cullis in the corridor after class. He didn’t like the way Cullis nodded to the other students who passed slowly by, watching the scene. ‘This is an important, erm, historical issue,’ Christopher said.

‘Listen, Christopher. Can’t we talk about this some other time?’

‘It’s not very nice to be usurped,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve had a similar experience myself. I know how Robin Hood must have felt.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ said Cullis. It was not their first argument on the subject. ‘Robin Hood is always a product of his times. He tends to be most popular in eras of tyrannical leaders, unjust wars and revolution. People turn to a moral hero who pulls down the pants of the men in charge.’

‘Pulls down their pants?’

‘Figuratively,’ said Cullis, looking over his shoulder towards the staff-room.

‘Oh, right.’

‘Each Robin Hood is created in line with the society he comes from. You yourself have created a Hood with your own sense of . . . well, a man with your issues at heart. Injustice, and such like. An angry man.’

‘But what about the corpses?’ said Christopher. ‘What about the evidence?’

Christopher reminded Cullis of the crossbow bolt, the skull, the rank of bodies. Cullis pushed his fingers under his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He wore an overlarge denim shirt tucked into what Christopher would have called ‘school trousers’. The skin at his neck hung loose and smooth. ‘Nottingham’s got the worst per capita gun crime in the country, and every time a body turns up they blame it on Robin Hood,’ Cullis said.

Christopher considered this. ‘Whose side are you on, exactly?’

‘Look. Your essay is shaping up well. You can analyse the
texts
. How does the psychotic vigilante of the ballads compare to the all-American code of Kevin Costner? It’s good stuff.’

‘He wasn’t psychotic. It’s understandable that he’d be, erm, erm, aggrieved. How would you like it if someone usurped you?’

‘Christopher, you’ve got to let go of him being real. He was a tree-sprite.’

Christopher walked away at that point. He considered the ‘tree-sprite’ comment to be sacrilege. Figurative pants. But he knew, on some level, that it might be true.

In the canteen he had lentil soup, nostalgic for his years of vegetarianism. His refusal to eat meat had come from his fear of the animals on the park, the fear of retribution. His father had talked him out of it. ‘Protein is the building bollocks of life,’ David had said. His father had a way of swearing which was different to other people. He made it sound kind and funny, like a hiccup. There was nobody to tell Christopher what was right and wrong now. Nobody to tell him what was true or mythical about Robin Hood, or anything else.

When he listened to the stories of Maggie Green and the villagers, it was hard to hold on to the real memories of his father. Maggie Green sometimes tried to tell him that old story of how they met, in the deer enclosure in London. Christopher used to like that story, but now it just sounded like the tale of how she wangled her way onto the park. Anyway, why should he believe such a story? Where was her evidence? Everything was uncertain.

His building bollocks of life, it seemed, had tumbled to the floor.

As she drove to collect Christopher from college, Maggie remembered his fifteenth birthday, when they had set up a treasure hunt in the woods. Maggie and David had spent the day writing clues for Christopher, riddles about Madge and Harold from
Neighbours
, and Ayrton Senna. David found a tree with two protrusions at chest height and he tied a bikini on them, pasted a picture of Dannii Minogue’s face above. That night, in the beam of the lanterns, she had watched Christopher dry hump the tree while David told him to stop through his laughter. She could not remember ever having had so much fun.

It was dark when she arrived at the campus, the only illumination coming from her headlights and a bulbous lamp placed in the path-side bushes. Christopher stood on the edge of the glow, shifting his weight awkwardly in the doorway and chewing the lip of his cardboard coffee cup. Three students taunted him. He tried to retaliate, but it only made them laugh.

Maggie got out of the truck, felt the rain coming down the inside of her jacket, felt her endorphins firing up.

‘Erm. Why do you have to use such vulgar language?’ Christopher said. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got anything stuck in my, erm, brace.’

‘Your
embrace
? What are you talking about?’

Maggie noted the pun, the voice with all regional traces squeezed out of it. She knew this sort of student from her days working in colleges. They were the worst kind – the children of the governors, who would bully a kid half to death, then breeze into the disciplinary meeting with a haircut and a suit.

‘Hi, Christopher,’ she said.

He crumpled out of the light when he saw her. ‘Erm. What are you doing here?’

‘Come to pick you up,’ she said, with an apologetic smile.

‘This your woman?’ one of the students asked.

‘No!’ shouted Christopher.

‘Go home, before I call your daddies to come and get you,’ Maggie said to the students.

‘Hey, steady on,’ one of them said. ‘You don’t know what happened here.’ The boy pointed to Christopher. ‘He said Mark had herpes.’

‘Christopher, that’s ridiculous,’ said Maggie. ‘Who’d shag
him
?’