The Memory Game (8 page)

She lifts her
hand and starts to trail her finger down his neck.  When she gets to the
place I tell her. ‘That’s it.  Now push!’ 

She shoves her
finger in hard and the shock makes him back off, grabbing for his throat. 
He goes to smack her face but she has enough room now to bring her knee up
between his legs. It’s only a puny kick but it’s enough to make him fall away
with a howl and she starts to run like a newborn gazelle up the alleyway. We
break out into the open together and I look round to see that Gary’s
mates have now joined him.

‘That little
bitch kneed me in the
nads
,’ Gary
shouts and they all start tearing after us.

‘Beth, run!’ I
scream.  She glances behind her and then turns her face back to me for a
second.  In the white security light I can see she’s terrified and her
legs are shaking as she runs.  But she finds more speed and bolts for the
gap in the fence, ripping through it without a thought for the wire
that razors
her cheek bringing a jagged line of blood. 
Then we’re out on the field, making distance between us and the boys chasing
after, the darkness swallowing us a little more with every desperate
stride. 

‘I know
somewhere we can hide,’ I call and I veer to the left.  Bethany
looks across at me and follows. 

There’s an old
drainage tunnel buried on the edge of the fields and hidden by shrubs and
weeds.  Matt and
me
have hidden from Mr Allen
there enough times for me to know its location well.  As we’re almost on
it Bethany realises my intention. She
stops and stares at me, her chest rising and falling like she could never get
enough air again.

‘Get in,’ I tell
her.

For a minute I
think she’s going to say no but then she climbs inside the metal tubing and
scrunches herself up as small as she can.  I sit on the ground outside and
listen to her harsh breathing, which seems to echo across the frozen fields,
but Gary and his two mates don’t hear and they run right past.

After a few
minutes Bethany whispers, ‘Do you
think they’ve gone?’

I break through
the cover of the shrubs. The moon has come out from a bank of cloud and the
frosted grass glints in its silver glow. The fields look empty.  I walk
back to Bethany. 

‘I think you can
come out.’ 

She clambers
from the tube. Her jeans are filthy and her face is tear-stained.  I
can see she’s still trembling.  She looks up at me and I know the question
without her asking.

‘They must have
been trying to break into the school,’ I say.

‘What for?’ she
whispers.

I shrug.
‘For a laugh.’

She drops to the
grassy bank below the pipe and sits holding her head in her hands. The
blood on her cheek is congealing already so I suppose the cut wasn’t too deep.
She puts a hand up to it and runs her finger gingerly along the length of the
wound. Then she lifts her head and glances down at her dirty jeans. 

‘
Dad’ll
go nuts when he sees me like this.’

‘What are you
going to tell him?’ I sit down next to her, keeping a close eye on the
landscape, though the kids that I think were chasing us will probably look for
their kicks elsewhere now.

‘I’ll have to
tell him I fell over or something.’ She throws a small smile at me. I’m not
sure if she’s feeling better now or she’s just trying to make me believe that
she is. ‘Thanks,’ she says.

‘For what?’

‘For being there.’

I look away. 
Neither of us says anything about the fact that she wouldn’t have been in
trouble at all if it wasn’t for me. 

‘Do you know
them?’ she asks.

I nod. ‘I don’t
know them, exactly, but I know who they are. Gary James left school two
years ago. Don’t you remember him?’ She shakes her head. ‘He used to hang
around with Tom Delaney and
Callum
Peters,’ I remind
her. 

‘I think I might
remember them vaguely,’ she says. ‘They don’t live in our village do they?’

I shake my head.
‘No. It was definitely Gary, though,
so it’s probably those three that chased us. They wouldn’t have done
anything
serious,
they always liked to pretend they
were harder than they actually were.’ That’s not true, but I tell her that
anyway and hope that it makes her feel safer.

‘It didn’t feel
that way when he got me against the wall,’ Bethany
says staring out over the fields.  She shivers and pulls her coat tighter
around her. ‘I daren’t go home now, in case they’re waiting for me.’

‘I don’t think
they will be.’

‘Are you sure?’
she asks doubtfully.

‘I’ll go down
and check they’ve gone if you want to wait here.’

She shakes her
head fiercely.
‘No, stay with me.’

I wonder what
good staying with her would do and she probably does too but I don’t argue. ‘If
we sit for half an hour, they’ll probably be long gone,
then
you can go home.’

She nods and her
hand goes up to the cut on her cheek again.

‘Does it hurt?’
I ask.

‘A bit.’
 She pauses. Then she asks in a timid voice, ‘
What
did it feel like… when you died?  Did that hurt?’

I think about
this before I answer. ‘I suppose it did when the car hit me. After that I
can’t remember. It must have done.’

‘Kids at school
said you were really smashed up.’

‘How did they
know?’

She shrugs. ‘I
suppose someone told them. Word gets round pretty fast in this village.’

‘I suppose so,’
I say. ‘It looked bad.’

‘You saw?’

‘Yeah.
 I stayed with my body for a while. I didn’t
really know what was happening at the time so I felt like I didn’t dare leave
in case I wasn’t dead and I could climb back in,
y’know
,
like they do on films when they realise it isn’t their time to go.’

She looks
thoughtful. ‘Maybe that’s what did happen. Perhaps you’re still here
because your body wasn’t actually ready to die but you didn’t get back in? And
now it’s too late because your body is buried and you’re trapped.’

I shake my
head. ‘If you’d seen the mess I was in, you’d have known there was no way
I was going to survive that. I was definitely dead.’

‘What happened
to the car?’ she says.

‘It drove off
straightaway.’

‘Did you get a
look at it?’

‘Not
really.  It was black, pimped job, that’s about all I can tell you.’

‘So it was a
hit-and-run?’

‘I suppose it
was.’

‘Perhaps you’re
here to solve the mystery of who hit you then?’

I consider this.
‘I don’t think so.  It’s not like it changes anything for me whether I
know who did it or not.  Besides, what would I do about it if I found
out?’

‘We could go to
the police,’ she says.

‘And tell them
to arrest someone on the strength of what a dead boy is saying to you?’

She pushes her
hair back from her forehead.
‘Maybe not.’

As she says this
I can see what looks like a bruise on her temple. She catches me looking and
drags her fringe back down over it. It’s dark where we are and I can’t see all
that well, but it looks too black to be from tonight. The way she covers it up,
though, it doesn’t seem like she wants me to mention it.

‘You’re ok now?’
I ask instead.

‘Not really,’
she says with a shaky half-laugh. I can see that she’s shivering. I’m not sure
whether she’s still scared.

‘I saw you at
the funeral, you know,’ she says.

‘The funeral?’

‘Yours.’

‘I know which
one you mean. Why didn’t you mention it before?’

‘I didn’t know
what to say about it. Does it matter?’

‘I don’t suppose
so. What did you think? It must have been weird.’

‘I was scared.’

‘Of me?’

‘Of seeing you dead.’

‘But you see
dead people, you said so.’

‘No,’ she
corrects me, ‘I said I get a sense of where they are. I’ve never seen them
lurking at the doors of the church where their funeral is before.’

‘Maybe you’re
getting better at seeing us?’

‘I don’t think
so. It’s something about you that’s special.’

I laugh. ‘That’s
the first time anyone has ever said that without adding
needs
to the end
of the sentence.’

She laughs too.

‘I didn’t see
you
at the funeral,’ I say.  As soon as it comes out, I wish it hadn’t.

She’s quiet for
a moment. ‘You wouldn’t, though, would you?’

She’s right.
 Bethany was probably more
invisible than me at that funeral.  At least one person noticed I was
there.

We sit quietly
for a while.  In the distance a dog barks and the church clock strikes a
half hour, though I’m not sure which half hour it is.  Somehow, time gets
all muddled up lately.  Then I’m aware that Bethany
is shivering even more than before.

‘You must be
freezing.’

‘A bit,’ she
says pulling herself into a hug.

I wish I could
remember what being cold feels like. ‘Would it help to walk around?’

‘It might, but I
don’t think my legs are working properly yet,’ she says. ‘Give me a minute.’

‘Ok.’

‘What’s it like
not worrying about anyone hurting you?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’
I get up and scan the fields.  ‘I never really thought about it.’

When I turn
around she’s staring at me and she looks like she might start crying again.

‘You don’t need to
be scared now,’ I say. ‘I think they’ve gone.’

‘I’m ok,’ she
says. ‘I should go home.’

‘I’ll walk with
you.’

She tries to
smile but it only makes her frown. ‘Thanks,’ she says as she stands up. 
Her legs do look wobbly still, but she shoves her hands deep in her pockets and
starts to make her way down the grassy slopes towards the outer fence.

We stop outside her yellow
door.  She’s hardly said anything as we walked back, the night air crisp
and shiny around us.  I think the things that happened tonight freaked her
out more than she lets on.

‘I suppose you
want me to stay away now,’ I say as we look up at her house from across the
road.  The horse comes up to the wall and nuzzles her back. I click at it
encouragingly and it doesn’t back off. I think it’s getting used to me, though
it seems to prefer her living scent and nudges her again.  She turns and
gives it an absent pat on the nose.

‘I don’t know,’
she says.

‘Shall I call
for you tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know
what to think, David.
Maybe.’

 I watch
her cross the road and climb the steps to her front door.  She looks back
once and then goes inside. 

I turn to the
horse. ‘What do you think I should do?’

The horse snorts
a plume of warm breath and whinnies softly, its huge brown eyes reflecting the
moonlight back at me. ‘Fat lot of good you are,’ I say.  It lowers its
head and pushes its nose towards me, then seems to take a startled step back as
it goes through my hand. ‘Yeah, I don’t blame you,’ I say as I take my hand
away. ‘I’d be grossed out too.’

I take one last
look at Bethany’s house. The light
in one of the upstairs rooms goes on.  The curtains are already drawn –
pale green with tiny flowers on them – so I guess it must be her room.

‘Goodnight,
Beth,’ I say, and turn to follow the lane towards home.

Mum’s talking to me. 
Not exactly
to
me, but
at
me.
She’s talking
out loud to my empty bed, but I sit in front of her and pretend that she’s
really talking to me like she can see me. I promised myself I wouldn’t come
back, but here I am.  Being here hurts but staying away hurts just as
much.

‘I’m sorry,’ she
says, ‘for all the things I said to you that last night.’ She’s not crying now,
but her eyes are dull and blank, like there’s nobody in there. ‘I should have
come looking for you, like a good mother would.’

‘It’s not your
fault, Mum,’ I say. ‘I was a total
git
.’

‘I should have
checked where you were. When I think how much you must have suffered… I’d give
my own life to spare you that.’

‘Don’t say that,
Mum. Don’t ever say that.’

She pushes a
sleeve up and runs a hand along her forearm.  It’s scored with angry red
ridges. I look closer.

‘What’s that?’ I
ask.

She scratches at
one of the scars, making it bleed.  Then she works her way along the
length of her arm, poking and dragging her nails into every one until her arm
is a network of mutilated skin. She winces and whimpers with each rip but she
never stops.  Even though it’s tearing me up, I can’t stop watching. 
And I can’t shout at her to stop, though I want to, it sticks in my throat. 

I run
downstairs.  Roger is in the kitchen getting a pizza out from the
oven.  He rushes it over to the work surface where he drops it and starts
to cut it into slices.  Two plates of salad are already waiting.

‘Get up there
and stop her, you useless
ballbag
!’ I shout at
him.  He licks some sauce from his finger and goes to the bottom of the
stairs.

‘Lisa… come and
eat
something,’ he calls. 

He waits but she
doesn’t reply. ‘Lisa!’ he calls again.

He trudges upstairs
and I hop behind him, willing him to walk faster, ready to scream in
frustration. First he goes to their bedroom and checks.

‘She’s not going
to be in there you dick!’ I shout. ‘Look in my room!’

He walks along
the landing. Slowly, he pushes my door open. When he sees Mum, her curly head
bent over her arm, pulling furiously at the skin, he runs in. He grabs her and
holds her close and tight and she starts to cry and I have to get out before I
start to cry too.