Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  If he turned and walked away now, came back in a few hours, Jack knew the woman would be gone; probably some of the toys would be gone too, clutched in her hand even as she went to her death. The bag would most likely still be exactly where she’d left it.

  He almost did walk away.

  Instead he sighed, flexed his fingers to unstiffen them, picked up the bag and approached her. The smell got worse as he drew near, and his resolution faltered. But she was young, to his old eyes, and so trying not to grimace he gently touched her shoulder.

  She looked nervous now, in that way kids had when the excitement of a new place wore off and they wondered where they were and how they’d get back. Jack made soothing nonsense sounds like he’d used to when Kevin woke from another nightmare. His arm drew her into a comforting hug—decades’ old muscle memory. (“Huggles,” Kevin had called them.) He tried not to grimace, tried not to cry, when the woman relaxed herself into it. Her body was hot, feverish as the planet’s terrible summers, and after a few seconds he pulled away slightly, tried to free himself from her infant grip that didn’t want to let go. To distract her he gave her the handbag; she made cooing, appreciative noises like she’d never seen it before.

  He coaxed her up, led her with his arm round her shoulders towards the door—not the one to the outside area, but the one to the dim and silenced hall, then back towards the main school exit. She was talking to him trustingly. “When I grow up…,” she said at one point, and giggled. He wondered if parents still said that to their kids—“when you grow up”—still encouraged it, let them think they definitely would.

  It’s not my fault, he thought again.

  Outside, the sunlight was harsh and unforgiving, any clouds in the sky burnt away. The woman shrank from it; Jack turned and blinked away after-images and tears. His body ached with the effort of getting her this far, contorted as it was to guide a grown woman as if she were a child. She looked at him now, with her arid, trusting eyes and waxy smeared grin.

  You could hear the sea from the front of the school, although you’d never been able to before.

  Instead, he directed her towards what he still called the moors, although the last of the heather and bracken burnt away seasons ago. The landscape around the village was one of sun-baked rocks and dead soil, a few stubby, stubborn plants, skeletal trees, and a cloudless, birdless sky. The road—the only road out the village—could be seen snaking its way through the moors; while navigable, it was in a state of some disrepair.

  “That way,” he said gently. “You go that way.”

  “What that way?” she said in her little girl voice and remembering he told her it was the beach.

  “And Josie and Kay-Kay?” she asked quickly, her red-rimmed eyes so dry and caught between excitement and panic. He told her yes.

  He watched her set off along the road through the moors; the next village was seven miles inland. Seven miles safer. She was still toddling in her high heels like they were too big for her, although they’d presumably fit fine that morning. Or the morning before—he never knew how long it took them to reach him. He watched her figure become smaller and smaller, both with distance and the distorting heat haze rising from the road, so that he could almost believe her the child she thought herself to be. Looking for someone’s hand to hold. He was crying although he didn’t know if he should be. Had he done the right thing, or should he have let her go where she wanted? Maybe they came back when he wasn’t around anyway, drawn by whatever lemming-like instinct drew them here.

  Were they even real? Jack thought, as he turned and walked back inside (not wanting to see the moment when she crested the hill and dropped out of sight). Oh he knew they were physical; the shit and the sweat and piss and blood on them proved that. Still, were they real real? Who were they? No one ever came looking for them, no reports ever came from the villages inland of their arrival. Nor did Jack know how they journeyed to the school or got inside. There were never any cars parked out front. He’d tried calling the police the first few times, but no patrols came out to Haffield anymore; officially it was uninhabited, a non-place. By the time someone phoned him back, the kids had already headed out back anyway.

  They’re not bloody kids, he thought to himself. Why should they get out of it?

  His moods, in his old age, were sometimes unpredictable, flipping with a suddenness like in his youth, and he now found himself irrationally angry. Or maybe it was his lack of anger before that was irrational. Look at what happened to his life, to this place. Just look. His fists clenched, but he ignored the pain.

  It was then, in the dim silence of the old school he heard a sound, and realised there were more of them inside.

  He made a low, stressed sound in his throat, only half-aware he was doing it. What did they want, these messed up people? Why come to him? There’d been a time he wanted kids, wanted responsibility, but that was—how long ago? He could only work it out by remembering the year Kevin came to them from the agency, and counting forward from there. Holding the nervous young boy’s hand and leading him wide-eyed into the “seaside house”—he’d felt like a superhero. As if the fact he’d do anything to protect Kevin and his future gave him the powers to actually do so. That moment was the fixed point in Jack’s thoughts, about which all else revolved. They’d hoped for other such moments, but it had remained unique.

  When Mary died she was still bitter, her love for Jack still eroded and crumbling from his insistence they live in his childhood home close enough to hear the sea, and what followed was her reluctant agreement. He’d vowed he wouldn’t die like that, trussed up and powerless in a hospital bed, given too much chance to think of the past. The past was too painful with missed chances, lost time, and the future was too awful and blighted a thing to contemplate. He wanted to live only in the present moment, even at the moment of his death. At least now he knew how it would happen.

  It was only after Mary died that the kids started appearing in the school.

  Now he heard, from the other classroom, the sound of someone clumsily moving around, as if unused to their size. He thought, as he always did when given warning (when they stumbled out of the hot dusty light towards him, lips gummy, eyes wide and arid, arms out wanting a hug, wanting comfort, wanting an adult to tell them the bad things were gone), of just walking away, not letting himself see them. Of walking out the school and locking it behind, confronting the blackened space of the moors; of closing his eyes, and hearing the loud calling of the sea, tasting the salt in the air… . But he never did. Responsibility was responsibility, whether you’d asked for it or not. And so he walked, fingers flexing, joints raging, towards the sound of the kids.

  There were two of them, this time. Two men, all dressed up for the fairway: slacks, pastel polo shirts, spiked golf shoes. One of them had what looked like chocolate sauce smeared over his clothes, his hands, his mouth. He wore a pink permed wig from the dressing up box; his companion wore a feathered Robin Hood hat. They were sitting on the floor, pretending to pour tea from a plastic teapot into plastic teacups, with that seriousness of purpose some kids had when playing. They were so absorbed in it Jack watched them unnoticed. He saw they were actually pouring something from the teapot; as he stepped further into the dim classroom he realised the carpet was wet, and what he took to be the sound of the sea was in fact a tap running. He walked quickly to the low enamel sink and saw it was blocked with wads of green and brown tissue paper. The water was unpleasantly warm when he reached down to remove the blockage.

  “Someone else always cleans it up eh?” he said loudly to the two men, and they started with the nervous, sudden guilt of children surprised to find themselves in the wrong. The teacup and teapot fell from their oversized hands, splashed to the ground. These people, they never broke character once. It was ridiculous, Jack thought: these guys were, what, early sixties? Why did they get to play dress-up and pretend to be someone else, somewhere else? God, but his hands hurt as they squeezed at nothing; his head ached and hi
s vision blurred, and he still heard the sound of water.

  “C’mon, stand up!” he yelled, as if he held some authority, moral or otherwise, over the two men. Quickly they scrambled up, their tanned skin, their beer guts becoming more obvious as they did so. They were similar to Jack’s age but their bodies betrayed none of the stiffness and wear his did; these men had obviously lived easy, glutinous lives, Jack thought. As if that were the decider, when in truth he’d already decided before he’d even entered the room…

  “Sorry,” one said in a small falsetto voice.

  “ ‘orry,” the other echoed, shuffling his feet.

  Jack stood clenching and unclenching his fists. He wondered how far the woman had got, crossing the bleak and soot-scarred moors, tripping over her feet.

  The sound of the sea could be heard, as if it were lapping at the perimeter of the building. The two kids looked towards the sound, then back at him. Two men used to getting what they wanted, Jack thought, used to just taking without consequence to themselves.

  “Want to play outside?” he said, nodding towards the back of the classroom.

  “Yay!” one of them shouted, his feet squelching on the water-logged carpet as he jigged excitedly. The other joined in, the curls of his wig slipping to reveal white hair beneath; he stopped and solemnly straightened it.

  “Go on then,” Jack said. (You spoil him, Mary said, you just give in when he wants… but she had been smiling when she said it.) The kids looked at him cautiously, as if they might still be denied. Jack gestured towards the door at the back of the classroom, although there was really no need; the same instinct which drew the kids to the school drew them out back, if left long enough. He’d disconnected the electricity, so that the door no longer set off the alarm when opened. Not that there was anyone to hear it ringing, anymore.

  It was already scorching outside, the sky clear, and Jack shuddered. One of the things, nowadays, was that you could no longer simply enjoy nice weather. Yet the two men seemed to, running onto the straw-dry yellowed grass, arms outstretched like planes, glancing at Jack from the corners of their red-rimmed eyes to see if he was still angry with them.

  He gestured them forwards.

  Not only did the heat feel wrong, but the outside looked wrong too. Jack had been at this spot thousands of times, both as an adult and child. The grass had once been green and spotted with dandelions and daisies; a large chestnut had provided shade in the summer, conkers in the autumn. Jack still saw a plastic slide, swings, a seesaw; remembered all his classmates charging to play on them at break-time. And beyond them—quite a way beyond—tall, sturdy metal railings, protecting the children from the cliff drop the other side.

  Now, it was like something had eaten away half of what he remembered as true, for the edge of the cliffs was much closer, and the only inadequate protection was some fluorescent tape staked in the ground, snapped strands of it fluttering in the air, like it was marking an old crime scene.

  What happened to Haffield had happened in slow-motion; they’d read reports and seen artist impressions of the inevitable for years. People had stopped being able to get mortgages or home insurance; estate agents stopped listing the properties in the village because no one could buy them. The rising sea levels meant the dwellings in the lower part of the village, down by the small harbour, were already standing in inches of water at high tide. The upper part of the village was still theoretically habitable, but families left every week. And the higher tides didn’t just flood the low areas but increased the erosion at the base of the cliffs; gradually they fell away, so that the available land receded year after year…

  The agency said they’d taken Kevin away for his own good. That night, Jack and Mary argued about whether they should pack up and leave, for all they couldn’t sell the house. To just go. They’d both wept, hot and seething in their bed even though they’d rolled away from each other to avoid touch, their weeping as rhythmic and slowly destructive as the sounds of the sea.

  The two kids were playing something different now, some chasing game too complicated for him to understand, the shapes they made running from each other too quick for his eyes to follow. In the haze from the heat, he could fancy they looked smaller, their slacks and polo shirts baggier on their bodies. He was dizzy watching them. It was too hot. The sea was too loud. His hands burned as they squeezed and slowly let go something invisible in his grip. Jack closed his eyes.

  “Hide and seek!” he shouted in the darkness. “You run and hide and I’ll close my eyes and count to ten.”

  “We shouldn’t have children,” he’d said to Mary, years ago when things seemed salvageable. “Not our own. Another mouth on a hungry planet? What’s the point in living like we do…”—the cut-backs, the going-without, the growing-your-own—“…if we have kids? There’s plenty of children need looking after already; there will be more soon the way things are headed. We could foster, maybe adopt.” And reminded of a childhood secure and carefree, he’d told her he knew just the place to move to in order to do so. When Kevin came into their life it was like he’d been right.

  The sound of the waves was so hungry.

  When Jack opened his eyes, one of the men was gone.

  The other one, the one in the pink wig, was cautiously tiptoeing towards the edge of the cliffs. He looked at Jack with those wide arid innocent eyes, and Jack surged with hatred. Why did they get to play innocent? They weren’t fucking innocent; no one grown up was.

  “Flying,” the man said in a squeaky voice, making his airplane arms, looking down the drop to the rocks and sea, then back at Jack.

  “I haven’t flown in thirty years,” Jack said gruffly, deliberately misunderstanding. Had this man stopped flying, made sacrifices? He hoped not.

  Hands clenched, let go.

  “Wanna keep playing with him,” the man said, pointing downwards. “Ona beach.” Jack noticed the man’s hands were clenched around something too. He walked towards the man and everything seemed to intensify: the heat, the salt-taste, the pain in his joints and chest and the noise of the waves. He took the man’s hand, which was bigger than his, and gently curled open the fingers.

  “Found ladybird!”

  “Look a ladybird!” Kevin had said that first week, the first sign of excitement, of engagement with his new home. As if he’d never seen one before; maybe he hadn’t, even though they’d not been endangered then. Held out his small sheltering hand with the small life inside for Jack and Mary to see. Where was he now, Jack thought, he’d be a grown up himself and…

  The air was too scorched with light to follow the flight of the ladybird from the man’s open palm; Jack’s eyes watered to blindness and he closed them again. He heard a child-like cry of mingled excitement and disappointment, and the hand pulled away from his. He tried to hold on, then remembering, let go. There was smoke in the air, salt on his lips, the crash of the sea on the rocks and hard-packed sand below. There was the sound of someone counting to ten, and he wasn’t sure if it was him.

  When Jack opened his eyes there was no one to be seen at all.

  He shuffled right to the edge of the drop, as he did every time. The tips of his shoes poked over the edge, and he heard the crumbling sound as small pebbles and loose earth fell away. One day it would go, he knew, and so would he. It was only fitting. Deserved.

  He peered down. Was what he saw all fallen from the school, or was some of it from places equally crumbling and in the process of being eaten away? He could see plastic cars and starships, doll arms, a bike wheel, dead sea birds noosed in plastic, a deflated beach ball, parts of an old see-saw, torn jackets and coats swirling in the water like they still housed things alive. A bright pink princess palace, a kite, suntan lotion bottles, a feathered hat, a severed hand, a smashed face, a pink wig…

  He would count to ten as if he were still playing hide and seek, and then walk away, he decided. It was Kevin’s favourite game, for those few months they’d had him, and in all those years after he’d been ta
ken from them, Jack had never been able to find any trace of him. He closed his eyes; and something gave way beneath his feet, then more. Would today be the day?

  “Coming ready or not,” he said.

  All he could hear, now the children were gone, was the sound of the sea too close.

  Hungry Ghosts

  Alison Littlewood

  • • ∞ • •

  The old quarter of Hanoi was a chaos of noise and light and heat and dust, new sights and sounds striking me every moment. It was a puzzle I couldn’t solve or begin to understand; I’d done as Mai had said, taken a left out of my hotel, followed the road to the top and turned right by the ATM, or thought I had. It had sounded simple, but the eatery she’d named wasn’t here and neither was my friend.

  Now I couldn’t see any signs and the narrow ways all looked the same, though completely different to how they’d been during the day. Low plastic stools and coloured lights and the smell of pho noodles spilled from numerous bars, along with cries of ‘You come.’ Tiny shop fronts filled every remaining inch, their owners eyeing me as I passed. Mopeds ruled the city, parking across the pavements, edging their way down the narrow road between the evening revellers.

  I checked my mobile. Mai still hadn’t replied to my texts, hadn’t called. Someone wheeled past me, their bicycle turned into a shop laden with conical Vietnamese hats. A farm worker followed, circular panniers yoked over her shoulders, heavy with guava. I stepped over the suds being swilled from a street food vendor, around raw chickens waiting in a bucket of water, a man stropping a carving knife against a lamp-post.

  A new sound impinged on the cacophony of moped engines and music and human voices. This was wavering, discordant, strange; but somehow it was more real than anything else, more welcoming than the tinny pop blaring from the t-shirt concession behind me. All around, everyone was intent on their work or their food or their journey, on the contents of tourists’ wallets, and I decided that any direction was better than none. I headed towards the sound, telling myself it might even be coming from the Green Farm, the restaurant Mai had chosen. We had worked together on a volunteer project in the south for a while, establishing an organic community garden in Ho Chi Minh City, and she knew that I’d like to sample some of the traditional culture; somewhere with music like this would be an obvious choice.