He cut himself a slice, buttered it, and chewed, frowning as if in deep concentration.
‘Well?’ He hadn’t seen her this nervous in a long time.
He chewed. ‘It’s…’ he started, choosing his words carefully. ‘Substantial.’
‘Look,’ she said, pointing the bread knife at him. ‘That’s ten thousand years of human civilisation you’re munching on there, mate. Bit of respect.’
‘As in healthy! Substantial as in good, healthy, homemade food!’
‘It’s possible that the dough needs to rise a bit more.’
‘I think it’s great!’ said Toby. ‘Have we got any chocolate spread?’
‘Bloody heathens, the pair of you,’ she muttered.
After Peter had finished the washing-up he kept turning to the selfie that Lance had messaged him later that afternoon. It showed the pair of them bleached fish-white by the phone’s flash, Lance grinning, Peter managing a reluctant smile. It wasn’t their faces which demanded his attention, like a broken fingernail snagging cloth – it was their shadows cast on the bare brick wall behind them. Hard to tell because of the angle, and it could have been nothing more than the peculiar lumps and bumps of the wall, but it definitely looked like there were three.
Then, in the morning, he deleted the picture, because of course he didn’t believe in ghosts.
11
GOADING THE GHOST
THE GIRL CAME BACK THE NEXT NIGHT, AND THE NIGHT after that, and the night after that. She didn’t do anything more than stand by the parish stone – the Beating Stone, as he thought of it now – stare up at Toby’s window, and beckon to him whenever he appeared. Oddly, and despite his initial alarm, he wasn’t frightened by this. She was freaky-looking to be sure, but She made no aggressive moves and the rats didn’t reappear. Not that this made him any more inclined to tell his parents; part of him was terrified that he was going mental, and that this would be confirmed if it turned out that they couldn’t see Her. Preferable to believe that She was real, however impossible. But how real? There was a limit to how much he could know by hiding in his room, and since She either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything more, that really only left him with one option.
On the fourth night he went out to talk to Her.
It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d sneaked out of his room, but it was the first when he’d had to deal with stairs. He found that if he hung on to the banister and put his weight only at the very edge of each step he could get down with the minimum of creaking. The back door alarm and the security light weren’t a problem; once he’d made up his mind to do this he’d carefully watched his dad locking up so he could deactivate them.
When it was open he hovered by the back door, watching Her carefully for any sudden movements. If She was a junkie She might have a knife. The thick foliage surrounding the house muted both the street lights from the front and the sky’s ambient city glow, leaving Her in rustling, restless shadow. It was late April, and despite Easter having come and gone, spring wasn’t yet far enough advanced to put a balm on the night air. It was chilly as if with the ghost of winter, and his breath plumed.
Hers didn’t.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’
She remained unmoving. A thin breeze trickled past, though it didn’t seem to touch Her. Was She even really there? Was he still asleep and dreaming Her? He moved closer, halfway to the Beating Stone. She stood on the other side of it, as if sheltering in the shrubbery, and though the details still eluded him he could see now that there was something wrong with Her face and neck. Some kind of damage to Her skin.
‘Are you okay? You asked me to come down, so here I am. What do you want?’
Still no response. He was starting to get annoyed now. There was an arrogance in this silent treatment which reminded him of the man in the green skull mask – it was the same sense of entitlement, but in this case demonstrated as an unspoken scorn, as if by capitulating to Her and coming down here he wasn’t worth Her attention anymore.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Fine. Blank me, whatever. Whoever you are, I’m not afraid of you.’
She stepped closer to the stone, into a shifting blur of light, and he saw Her properly for the first time: the sores, the patches of black necrotic flesh, the open wounds that nobody could suffer and live, let alone stand. She stank of the grave.
Toby fell back a step. ‘Jesus…’
She smirked. It might as well have been a taunt: You were saying?
It was just a mask, he told himself. Just movie make-up, that was it. He’d seen enough zombie movies to know how real it could look, and he knew that people costumed up and chased each other around in the real world. This was some local nutjob trying to put a scare on the new neighbours, that was all. Probably someone pissed off that his mother had inherited Stone Cottage instead of them. All the same, that smell…
‘Yeah, very clever,’ he rallied, hoping that he sounded a lot more confident than he felt. ‘Why don’t you fuck off before I call the police? You can’t do anything to us, you know.’
The smirk broadened as She tilted Her head and raised Her eyebrows at him. Really?
Later, as he lay in bed, he told himself that She must have slipped away into the bushes too quickly for him to see, but at the time it did look an awful lot like She simply dissolved into the formless play of shadows.
* * *
In the broad light of day it was much easier to relegate such events to the realm of an overactive imagination, especially when his attention was consumed by the vastly more terrifying prospect of having to start a new school.
First, it was getting to grips with the physical layout of the place. His old school in Brownhills had been a simple series of red-brick blocks and corridors which hadn’t changed much since the eighties, with all the aesthetic appeal and educational joie de vivre of a Victorian iron foundry. Haleswell Specialist Academy School, on the other hand, was part of a multi-academy trust which had been given a ridiculous amount of money by the government to ‘renovate and reinvigorate’ local education provision, and so had been redesigned by someone who had presumably been inspired by pictures on the Internet of cutting-edge work environments created for hip, maverick Californian tech companies and decided to replicate this for eleven- to eighteen-year-olds in the West Midlands.
It was all open plan, with sofas and weird coloured panels hanging from the ceiling and ‘learning hubs’ – small clusters of computers which the other kids didn’t use because they had access to all the games and video streams they needed on their phones, as opposed to the school network which, he quickly discovered, was so tightly buttoned down that he couldn’t even look up the subject of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ without getting a firewall alert warning him of SEXUALLY EXPLICIT AND/OR OFFENSIVE CONTENT. It had hydration stations and big LCD screens on the walls scrolling through pithy motivational quotes which didn’t actually mean anything, like ‘You Never Fail Until You Stop Trying’ and ‘Work Hard in Silence; Let Success Be Your Noise’.
What it didn’t have was books. At the end of his first day he took home a list of all the stationery he was going to have to buy for himself, which at first his mum thought was a joke. ‘All this?’ she asked, incredulous. ‘For just one term?’
‘And this is the bog-standard comprehensive school,’ his dad observed. ‘God knows what he’d have ended up needing to buy at the grammar. His own bloody polo pony, probably.’
Toby’s new registration tutor was a young history teacher called Mr Willis who looked a bit like one of the sports reporters on the local news. Mr Willis assigned Toby a ‘buddy’ in the form of Krish Mittal, who inhabited a strange no man’s land in the school pecking order because despite being a lanky sports-phobe he already had enough facial hair that he needed to actually shave. Krish had a twin sister called Nandini and was quite at ease hanging out after school at the corner shop with her and her crowd of galdem, which was how Toby met Maya Gori c.
&nbs
p; His interaction with any of the girls outside the classroom in those first few days had been limited to hurrying by, mortified, as they stood in groups looking at the fresh meat sidelong and laughing, but Maya introduced herself by walking straight up to him with a broad grin, saying, ‘Pocketa-pocketa-queep!-pocketa-queep!’ and prodding him in the ribs with a finger on each queep!
‘Shut up,’ he groaned. It had been only his second English lesson and the teacher, Mrs Chamberlain, had got them reading aloud from ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, in which the hero took passage aboard a steamer whose faltering engine made that noise, and whereas everybody else in class had read their bits in the standard expressionless monotone, Toby had decided to get a bit of a laugh by reading it the way it should have sounded. No laughter had been forthcoming – only an awkward, embarrassed silence.
‘I liked it!’ she said. ‘I mean what’s the point of using onomatopoeia if you’re not going to use it, right?’
Looking at her properly, he found that she wasn’t particularly pretty, hadn’t hoisted her skirt up short or unbuttoned the top of her blouse like the other girls, was slightly taller than him and didn’t have much by way of tits, but the open frankness with which she was grinning at him arrested his attention utterly. There was no mockery in what she’d said, only the simple desire to share in something funny, and maybe even something like respect. See also: onomatopoeia. She was clever and not afraid to show it, which was a rare thing in his – albeit limited – experience of girls.
‘Right,’ he replied. ‘Hi. I’m Toby.’
‘I know.’ She was still grinning. ‘I’m Maya.’
‘Good name. As in ancient civilisation, pyramids and human sacrifice?’
Her grin, if anything, widened. ‘That’s the one. So watch yourself, new blood, or I’ll tear your heart out and hold it up beating before your dying eyes.’
Funny, he thought, it feels like that’s happening right now.
After she’d gone, Krish elbowed him and waggled his eyebrows.
‘What?’ Dear God, now he was actually blushing.
Krish didn’t reply, just elbowed him again and waggled his brows even more salaciously.
‘Shut up.’
Whereas Toby’s home was within walking distance, Maya’s family lived in a flat on the Pestle Road estate, right on the edge of Haleswell. Most afternoons she had to pick up her ten-year-old brother Antony, whom she referred to simply as ‘the Ant’, from his junior school and walk home with him, but every so often they would both get picked up by her older brother Rajko, who was studying something mechanical at the sixth-form college half a mile away. Raj drove a white Vauxhall Corsa hatchback which could be heard long before it was seen thanks to the bass thumping out of a ridiculously over-powered stereo system. It was pimped out with a spoiler which was about as necessary as a shark’s fin on a goldfish and alloy wheels worth probably more than the whole lot put together.
The first time Toby saw Maya’s big brother, Rajko barely glanced at him, curtly ordering Maya into his boy-racermobile in a language which Toby later discovered was Serbian, before screaming off in a stench of burning clutch fluid.
The second time did not go even half so well.
Raj had texted to tell her that he was having to stay late after lectures so she’d be on foot with the Ant. ‘Do you want to come with me?’ she asked Toby. ‘I can help you with your science.’ As if he was ever going to say no; it was the closest he figured he was ever going to get to an actual date, but on a very practical note the end-of-year exams were coming up at half-term and there were some topics which his old school hadn’t covered. So he said yes. They picked up the Ant from his after-school club. Maya’s usual route home took them along the High Street, where they bought bubble tea and kept the Ant distracted by letting him chase pigeons with a stick, and then through the Rec.
The Rec was short for Recreation Ground, something of a misnomer given that there was little to do by way of recreation except one small playground for little kids next to the Asda supermarket at the far end. The Rec was a shortcut between the village and the Stratford Road, used by teenagers getting to and from school and on weekends to sit in circles under trees smoking and just hanging out. It wasn’t as nice as the village green for family picnics but some people walked their dogs and raced remote-control cars.
The journey wasn’t long, but it took them out from where the leafy streets and closes of central Haleswell – what locals called simply ‘the Village’ – sloped downhill towards a neighbourhood of flats and blocky houses known as the Pestle Road estate. He saw the shabby Victorian townhouse that was subdivided into the flats where her home was, and squirmed with guilt when he realised exactly how grandiose his own new home was in comparison. If he went inside, he would have to return the invitation, and then she would see Stone Cottage and think he was rubbing her nose in it and she’d never talk to him again. When she invited him in to meet her mother he balked. See also: meeting her mother.
‘Listen, I’m really sorry, but I, uh—’
‘You uh what exactly?’
‘I’ve just remembered I have some jobs I need to do or my mum will go skitz at me.’ It was a lame excuse, and he could see that she knew it.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said, and went in. He tried explaining as she was closing the entry hall door but she ignored him and he was left apologising to a panel of frosted reinforced glass.
Catch u 4 bubble tea before school 2moro? he texted her, but there was no reply.
Kicking himself for his own gutlessness and how he’d managed to offend her, he turned and headed for the bus stop, when the familiar doompf-doompf-doompf of a pair of 300-watt speakers came rolling up the road to meet him.
‘Oh shit.’
Toby tried to ignore the white Corsa as it slowed alongside him, matching his pace, its tinny exhaust snarling like a wasp in a bottle. Maya’s brother was only a short distance from his own front door, and Toby prayed that it was close enough that Raj would carry on home, park up, and leave him alone – or come back for him on foot, which would at least give Toby a chance to outrun him. The tinted driver’s window scrolled down, replaced by Rajko’s unsmiling face. His eyes were the colour of sump oil. His head was shaved down the sides, leaving a thatch of close-cropped curly hair, and he had a fag on. Gold chains were at his throat and wrist, and the sinews in his forearm shifted like cables. ‘What are you doing here, šupak?’
Toby walked faster, not quite allowing himself to run.
‘Hey! Don’t you ignore me!’ The car snarled and leapt forward, the passenger’s side wheel coming up onto the pavement in front of him, blocking him, the door opening, Rajko surging out and around the front of the car, coming right up and into his face, so close that Toby had to back up against the wall. Rajko’s cigarette hovered an inch before his eyes, the sting of its smoke mixed with the sweet reek of the bigger boy’s aftershave making him cough.
‘People tell me you been sniffing around my sister. Is that true, you posh piece of shit? Hey?’
‘Sorry, I’m sorry, look, I—’
Rajko planted a palm on the side of his face and shoved it against the wall, grinding his cheek into the brick. He moved even closer, if that were possible, dragging on the cigarette so that its tip glowed red and Toby could feel its heat. ‘Posh kopile like you got no reason being interested in my family, you understand?’
Toby nodded as best he could. He couldn’t breathe; it felt like someone was taking a cheese grater to his cheekbone and jaw. All he could see was a green skull and a crowbar. You think you’re a badass?
‘You say yes, or I burn it into you in Morse fucking code.’
‘Y-yes.’
‘Dobro. Now piss off home where you belong.’
Rajko let him go, flicking the cigarette at him, and he ducked as it hit the wall in a shower of sparks. Then the gut-punishing bass resumed as Maya’s brother got back in his car and drove off. The vacuum which seemed to have surrounded Toby po
pped and the world rushed back in, bringing daylight and the sounds of the world as he propped himself against the wall, trembling and breathing in great shuddering gasps, praying not to have an asthma attack and trying not to cry. There was blood on his face. People passed him without comment, let alone stopping to see if he needed help. Why would they? As far as anybody else was concerned he was just as bad as the rest of them.
When he had got himself more or less together he walked the rest of the way home, giving himself the time to calm down and think of a plausible story to tell his mum. But when he got there he found that he needn’t have bothered, because his mother – who had been vocally anti-Church for as long as he could remember – was preoccupied with hanging a large and ornate crucifix in the hall by the front door.
12
The Food Bank
‘KNOCK KNOCK?’
Joyce Dobson appeared around the side of the house while Trish was pegging out the laundry. It was the first time Trish had seen her wearing anything other than a dog collar and suit; she was in jeans and a hoody with a printed slogan which read JESUS IS COMING – LOOK BUSY.
‘Is this a bad time?’
‘No,’ Trish replied emphatically, dropping the sheet she’d been wrestling with back in the basket. ‘This is most definitely a very good time. Cup of tea?’
‘Hmm, not right now, thanks. I was actually off to help out at the food bank and wondered if you felt like lending a hand. You know, if you’re at a bit of a loose end.’
Much to her own surprise Trish found herself glad to take up the offer. It wasn’t as if she was bored in the house with Peter at work and Toby at school. There was plenty to keep her busy, what with having to wrangle the financial arrangements of their new life and the upkeep of a home three times the size of their old. Her previous job at the distribution centre, as she had pointed out frequently and loudly, had been badly paid for long hours working under a management which was petty and draconian to the point of paranoia – but at least it had felt like actual work. ‘You know what? Yes. I think I would like that, actually.’ She chucked the peg bag into the basket as well and took it all back into the utility room.
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