The Unravelling: Children can be very very cruel (A gripping domestic noir thriller)

by Thorne Moore

  ‘In Marsh Green Junior School. Way back. In Lyford, I mean, before we moved up north. This girl. I worshipped her. Honestly. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I really did. And then we moved away and I never thought about her again. Isn’t that odd? You don’t do that, do you? Completely forget someone who meant everything to you?’

  ‘Well, children, you know. They live in the moment and moments change and they just move on. It’s us oldies who carry the past around with us, and sometimes it can surprise us. We remember things we didn’t know we’d forgotten. Is that what you’re doing, Karen? Beginning to remember something?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just remember her.’

  ‘But that’s good. Tell me all about her. What do you remember?’

  ‘She was lovely. It’s like thirty-five years have vanished and I can remember her so vividly, she’s all I can think about. I know I have to find her, but I can’t. I don’t know how. I feel so…’ I started shredding the bread.

  ‘Well. You’ve found her in your memory, Karen. That’s a start.’ Charlie thoughtfully rescued the chicken and tomato, manoeuvring them to the side of my plate. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘She was an angel.’

  ‘I see. An angel. Meaning what? Do you think she’s in heaven?’

  ‘No, no!’ My turn to laugh. Charlie was being ridiculous. ‘Just lovely.’

  ‘Tell me all about her, Karen.’

  ‘She was just, I don’t know. She was Serena.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Serena Whinn. That’s her name.’

  ‘Hm.’ Charlie sat back, her face puckered up into a frown of deep thought. ‘Serena Whinn.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘No, sorry. Are you sure? Serena Whinn. It does sound a bit like a character in one of your fantasies. Is that what you’re doing? Thinking of someone in a book?’

  ‘She’s not someone from a fantasy novel. Or a historical romance, or a wartime thriller or science fiction. She was a girl at school. Though she was so beautiful, she should have been a heroine in a novel. She was in my class. She had long dark hair and dark eyes and the most beautiful smile.’

  Charlie smiled fondly. ‘You had a crush on her. That’s all right. We all did it. I remember a girl, when I’d just started High School…’

  ‘It wasn’t a crush. It was ‒ it was…’ Whatever it was, it was far more significant than a crush. The memory of a crush would make me laugh. It wouldn’t produce this weird reawakening of joy and fear. ‘Why did I forget her? Why did I suddenly remember her now? I can remember, so vividly. All about her. I can even remember where she lived. Just off the estate, on Rowlands Avenue. I checked in the phone book and there’s no one called Whinn living in Rowlands Avenue now.’

  ‘No, well, that’s hardly surprising, is it?’ Charlie shrugged. ‘It was thirty-five years ago, didn’t you say? Her parents will have retired to Eastbourne, or died, and anyway, she’s probably married, so she won’t be called Whinn any more.’

  ‘Oh. Hell. Of course. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘She’s not going to be there, where you left her, Karen. Not geographically. But she is still there where you left her in your head, and that’s very important. It’s so interesting that you’ve started to think about her now. Because of an apple, you say. I wonder why. Did she ever give you an apple?’

  Mirror, mirror on the wall… I could see Snow White’s Wicked Queen holding out a lovely apple. A hand reaching out, holding… I jerked my head to shake the image away. Serena would have been Snow White, not the Queen.

  ‘It wasn’t the apple. It was the drain.’ My fingers clenched as I realised. It was the drain.

  ‘All right.’ Charlie patted my hand. ‘Don’t get fraught. Do you feel it’s time to dig a bit deeper into all this? It’s up to you, Karen. I don’t want to push you.’

  ‘But I want to push. Of course I do. It’s like I’ll never be able to sleep or breathe or do anything again until I find her. I don’t know why, but now she’s there in my head, she won’t go away. So how am I supposed to sit there in the office all day, typing accounts and all that crap, when all I can think about is Serena?’

  ‘All right.’ Charlie smiled broadly. Too broadly. The very broad smile of a woman telling other people to stop looking at us. Was I getting a bit loud? ‘Why don’t we go and see Miles? You know he’s always there to help.’

  ‘Miles? Why? He’s not a private detective. That’s what I need. Someone who can track people down. Except I can’t afford one.’

  ‘No, but you know, Miles is a sort of detective. I think he could help you with this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re in pieces, Karen. You’re not turning up for work, and when you do, you don’t do anything. And you’re not eating again.’

  ‘I am!’ To prove it, I picked up lumps of chicken and tomato and swallowed them whole.

  ‘Don’t choke yourself to death.’ Charlie firmly placed the milkshake in front of me. ‘Drink this. It’s nourishing.’

  I sucked up a disgusting mouthful.

  ‘I really do think we should go and see Miles,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while.’

  She phoned me later, at work. The White Witch put the call through to my desk with a sharp bark. ‘Karen Rothwell. Charlotte Freeman for you. Pick it up. Quickly please.’

  I couldn’t quite drag my eyes from the paper on which I’d been scribbling a picture of the gates of Marsh Green Junior School. Wire mesh fencing. Greening bronze plaques of busy bees set into the gate posts. Mr Jefferson, rising on his toes, hands behind his back, moustache bristling…

  ‘Karen! Now!’

  I picked up my phone.

  ‘Karen?’ Charlie sounded breathless. ‘All right, good news, Miles is going to be here, end of next week. I’ll pick you up at lunchtime on Friday. I told him all about what you’d remembered and he’s very keen to see you. So we’ll go, shall we, and see him and tell him all about Serena? I’m sure he’ll be able to help.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ve arranged for you to have the afternoon off, so don’t forget. All right? And keep eating!’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I had to do as Charlie said. Because she was more than just my friend. She was the one who’d been given the job of sorting me out.

  — 3 —

  Friday. I woke in one of those moods. A mood of resistance. Which sounds great. I’d have liked to see myself as one of the French Maquis, rifle over my shoulder, diving behind rocks as I took on the Nazis. Or a flame-lit revolutionary, one of Les Misérables shouting defiance as I manned the barricades. But my version of resistance wasn’t quite so picturesque. It was usually termed ‘being difficult,’ by Charlie and other well-meaning souls. Or ‘bloody-minded pig-headed stupidity’ by the less generous. Call it what you will, there were times when immovable stubbornness set in, and this was one of them.

  It had set in even before I’d grasped what it was I was determined to resist. I woke with my fists clenched, my toes curled and ‘No!’ screaming in my head. Then I remembered. I didn’t want to go and see Miles.

  Nothing wrong with Miles Pearce, in his way. I pictured him these days as Beorn. Quite helpful if you need to find your way through a dark forest but with a tendency to turn into a real bear if you didn’t obey orders. A thoroughly growly bear with big teeth. When he was being nice, offering me bread and honey, I liked him well enough, but I knew that on this occasion I wouldn’t be able to behave. No way could I sit there and rabbit on and on for his entertainment because I knew that, for all his detective skills, his being a professional listener, he wasn’t really going to be able to help me find Serena Whinn. And that was all I cared about, so what was the point of wasting an afternoon talking about it?

  He wouldn’t know anything about Lyford unless I told him.

  I did. Sort of. I was born there. I went to school there.

  *

  It’s my own world, Marsh Green Estate. Like
a country all on its own, like the way countries are shown in different colours on the map on Mr Gregory’s wall. Marsh Green Estate is purple. I don’t know why I think that. It’s not really, only it makes me think purple, so that’s how I’m doing it. Maybe it’s because there’s all that tarmac and concrete and when shadows fall across the empty streets, they look purple.

  Marsh Green is a purple square, very neat. I’m drawing it for Geography. There’s Pirton High Street on the west side, with an old pub and a thatched cottage in among all the new houses because Pirton used to be a village before it became part of Lyford. There’s Merecroft Road on the south side, with smelly little factories and yards where lorries are parked up. There’s Foxton Road on the east side, very busy, with traffic roaring along, and beyond it the allotments and the railway. There’s fields and Thornton Farm on the north side, beyond a line of elm trees, and in the middle of the square is Marsh Green estate, with lots of rows of brick council houses.

  There are lots of empty roads too, that haven’t got anyone living on them at all, because they’ve knocked down all the prefabs. They’re going to build more houses, but there’s nothing there for now except concrete foundations and wire fences and tall weeds.

  Where the prefabs used to be, I draw a mouse.

  There’s the Parade in the middle, with shops and a place for buses to turn, and there’s the school and there’s the Rough, where we play and scream and roll, and boys chase us with creepy crawlies, and we swing across the brook on ropes…

  *

  I could remember it. Not just Serena and her friends, but the whole estate, just as I’d drawn it in class. I never told Mr Gregory why I drew a mouse, and now I no longer knew why. One of my resistance spells, probably, doing something I wasn’t supposed to do.

  Could I draw the map again? Maybe but it was still a broken and deceptive image, in my mind. Like a cracked mirror, but it was coming together, the little world I inhabited until I was ten. A month ago I probably wouldn’t even have remembered the name of the estate, but I’d had three weeks to conjure it up and reconstruct it in my mind like a Lego model, piece by piece. Some bits still missing, but you could see what it was going to be.

  I’d figured out, by now, why I had wiped it out for more than three decades. The answer was obvious. I should have sussed it at once, but when Serena suddenly materialised, I’d been taken by such huge surprise that my prolonged lapse of memory had seemed utterly mystifying. The truth, as I realised now, was that my early years had faded into invisibility because they’d been blotted out by The Thing.

  That thing. My accident.

  When I was eleven we’d moved up north, away from Lyford, and I’d had an accident. A major accident. It had refocused my entire life. Hospital, operations, rehabilitation, relapse, more hospital… The world takes on new and frightening shapes when you see it through an oxygen mask or a medicated haze. Old memories are tidied away into a sealed trunk, where your troubled soul can’t trip over them. You wipe them out because the present is so overwhelming, it takes all your resources to cope with it.

  But thirty-five years had passed since the accident and even though its consequences still dragged around with me, like a ball and chain, I could open that trunk again without trauma, and look on a world that used to be. An apple had rolled and Serena had shot back into my thoughts, as if she’d been waiting to push the lid wide. It was wide. My early years were marching through and I could swear I was more confident of my childhood address than of my current one.

  12 Linden Crescent. No postcode. We didn’t have postcodes then.

  Marsh Green was a council estate on the edge of Lyford. All my memories were contained within its borders. I still had no joined-up recollections of Lyford itself, but then Lyford was just ‘Town’. It was somewhere with a library full of polished wood and people who said ‘Sh!’ It was a town hall, with long chilly corridors, for paying rent, and it was a Sainsbury shop, with cold white tiles and women in hairnets cutting huge chunks of Cheddar and Red Leicester with wires. It was somewhere I went occasionally with Mummy and Hilary on the bus, to eat doughnuts at a Lyons Corner House, but I had no idea what route the bus took.

  I wasn’t even entirely sure that I could place Lyford accurately on a map of Britain. It was south, near London but not London.

  How could I possibly go to work, or think about a meeting with Miles, if I couldn’t even be sure where exactly Lyford was? I stopped any pretence of getting ready and pulled out a decent-sized atlas of Britain.

  What I mean is, I set to work pulling out an atlas of Britain. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. My flat had a lot of books. And when I say a lot… My trouble – not that I saw it as a trouble – was that I’d buy anything and everything if I passed a secondhand stall, regardless of content. It was why I was living in Hobson Road, in what the agents called a garden flat. Garden, meaning a square of tarmac and a tub of dandelions. I’d been more than happy with my old place, despite the leaking dormer windows and the arctic winter temperatures, but Charlie said the floor of the garret apartment wouldn’t take the weight for much longer. I think she’d hoped I’d weed out my collection when I moved, but I couldn’t. She regularly warned me my home was a fire hazard.

  ‘There’ll be a disaster one day and you’ll be trapped in here, unable to escape.’

  Which was ironic, because my books were my escape.

  There was a rhyme and reason to their distribution, which other people didn’t always realise. The easy-access books, piled on the floor, on the table and chests, like fortress walls around me, were the ones that constituted my reading of choice. Fantasy, science fiction, romances, historical novels, anything that would whisk me away from the real world. I could cope with dragons, aliens, evil villains armed with swords or Regency sneers. Just not with the grey, blood-sucking monsters outside my door.

  Contemporary realism was out. But I still bought it. It was piled up on the window sills and along the passage. Reference books, which were all coldly and relentlessly about the real world, were shunted to the high shelves of the corner bookcase, above and behind everything else, where they could be ignored. They included atlases.

  I had to move a mountain of stacks and boxes to get near the bookcase, and it took time. Time that was easily diverted towards other goals. With my arms full, a copy of The Silmarillion slid loose, tumbling to the floor, and as I struggled to retrieve it, it occurred to me that I might not be too sure of the whereabouts of Lyford or the general layout of the United Kingdom, but I could confidently draw a map of Middle Earth. And Earthsea and Narnia and the Drenai lands and the world of the Belgariad.

  Could I? Before I knew it, I’d put the books down and was rummaging for paper. There was always some around. It floated like confetti through my library, mostly already scribbled on.

  I was at work, positioning the mouth of the Greyflood on the coast of Minhiriath, when Serena Whinn turned in her seat and smiled at me.

  She kept doing that.

  Instantly, I remembered what it was I was supposed to be doing. After more tectonic shifts, I managed to clamber up to the corner shelf and found my road atlas.

  Slightly damaged. Not by me. It had come to me with the hard cover already buckled, which is why I had it. It was a discard from Gem’s Books. Dear Mr Tumnus – Malcolm Garnet – had let me take it, rather than adding it to the recycling pile. It’s always good to have a pet bookshop owner.

  I found Lyford. Oh. How uninteresting. I was able to place it precisely among the amorphous satellites of London, but that didn’t really give it an identity. It was a grey blob. An amoeba threaded with a spider’s web of roads, merging with neighbouring Stapledon and surrounded by its own satellite villages. Some of them triggered faint memories of bus rides and ponds and clambering on chalk downs. Others meant nothing. Foxton, Thorpeshall, Cambingley, Tillsworth and Pye Green. The villages didn’t matter. I’d lived in Lyford. But where? North, south, east, west? No idea. The map wasn’t detailed enough to n
ame the different suburbs. What I needed…of course, what I needed was an Ordnance Survey map.

  I had quite a few. Years before, the library I’d belonged to had thrown out its old ones, the ones with red covers, when the pink ones had come in, and I’d fought with another deranged collector, to grab what I could. I’d managed to squeeze about three dozen into a shopping bag and pockets. My rival was intent on searching for specific areas. I wasn’t so choosy. Any would do. My compulsion to rescue and rehome any orphaned books extended even to maps.

  My Ordnance Surveys hadn’t been banished onto far shelves like the road atlas, because they didn’t count as reference. They were much closer to fantasy. You can disappear into an OS map, construct everything, craggy hills, waterfalls, woods and railway cuttings and church steeples, all in places you will never really visit.

  It was just possible that in among my three dozen fantasy worlds, there was one that overlapped with the reality I was seeking. They were in a box, under my bed. Not that one. That held Beatrix Potter, the Flower Fairies and Little Grey Rabbit. This one. I emptied them out on the only vacant bit of bedroom floor.

  I shuffled through them. Taunton and Lyme Regis. Buckingham. Market Weighton, Selkirk. Montgomery and Llandrindod Wells. And Lyford! Or at least part of it. The countryside that constituted Lyvale, a couple of small market towns and down in the bottom right corner, most of Stapledon and the northern part of Lyford itself.

  If it turned out I’d lived in the southern part, I was stuck. I didn’t have the adjoining map.

  I opened it out, pushing the others aside, and poured over it. Now… There was a main road leading northeast, out through Cambingley and off the map. Another leading northwest, through Foxton – and Foxton Road had bordered the eastern side of our estate, so… The road coming down from Foxton village disappeared into the built-up mass of Lyford.

  Marsh Green wasn’t named, but I found it. I found the railway line and Thornton Farm and what must be Pirton High Street. I found the Parade, and the school.