by Thorne Moore
‘Forgive you? Forgive you! I am the one I can’t forgive. I should be dead. I should have died years ago. You’re right. You understood perfectly and you’re right, I did try to kill myself. My sister is forever claiming that that’s what I was doing when I fell out of the window. She was there, in the room with me.’
*
‘Karrie?’ I can hear Hilary’s voice, but it’s not real. I can see her, the expression on her face, crumpled with fear, but she’s not real. It’s like I’m looking at her through water. Or as if she’s a picture, not a person. She’s not real, nothing is real, except this thing inside me. This pain and fear, this big black thing that’s trying to eat me up and I can’t escape.
I turn away, look out through the open window instead, over a grey city that I don’t know, under a grey sky that is coming down to smother me, suck the air out of me, and I can feel the invisible ropes winding round me, tightening, strangling me with grief and a turmoil of guilt.
‘Karen! Mummy, Mummy, come here, please. Karen’s being silly!’
There’s such urgency in my sister’s sobs, but it’s all a part of the bad dream. I just want to be out of it. Not to have to do any of it any more – eating, breathing, waking, remembering. No more remembering.
I’m kneeling on the windowsill, the catch biting into my knee, but the pain isn’t real either. It’s left behind, as I topple forward, and there’s nothing but the whistling wind and, far behind me, my sister’s hysterical screams.
*
‘She watched me do it. Jump. And no one would believe her. No wonder she hates me.’
‘Poor Hilary.’ Serena’s voice was almost a whisper. ‘She must have been so confused.’
‘Yes. And angry, not being believed. By her own parents. Because they did believe her, really. They just couldn’t bring themselves to admit it. They spent the rest of their lives watching me.’
‘But you didn’t die.’
‘No. Humpty Dumpty was put together again. It took, I can’t remember, fifteen operations, I think. To put the body together again. Not the head. The mind. They’ve never managed to put that right. That’s still in a million pieces.’
‘And you jumped from a window. Oh God. That would scare me. Heights. I don’t think I could ever do that.’ She was staring into nothing again. ‘Awful how we think these things through, isn’t it? How to end it all. Knowing that we shouldn’t even be thinking about it.’
‘You don’t!’
‘Oh I do. Or I have. Even since I’ve been here in Thorpeshall. When Jack died, I felt such guilt that I hadn’t seen it coming. He was such a decisive person. I did think, maybe, one day, if the cancer proved truly unbearable, he’d go through with it, just as he’d said he would and I’d dissuade him for as long as I could, but I’d be with him. I’d nurse him, care for him, do whatever he needed. But he didn’t wait. I knew him and I should have known he wouldn’t wait. My poor Jack. Sitting here, alone, afterwards, trying to figure out how I could shoulder that guilt and yet carry on, starting a new life – there were nights when I thought, why should I carry on? Why not follow him? There’s a canal at the bottom of the downs. A lock, deep water. Fill my pockets with stones and just sink into darkness.’
Her gaze, which had been distant, came back to me and she looked at me with horror. ‘What am I doing? I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. I shouldn’t even be thinking it, let alone talking about it. I’m sorry, Karen. Forgive me. Please.’
She was desperate. A part of me wanted to reach out and comfort her, or offer some sort of reassurance, however lame, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move or speak or think, except to visualise, so vividly now, that dark, dirty culvert, deep in the woods by Sawyer’s Lane, where I had hidden my friend.
The friend I had murdered. There was the truth I’d been hiding from for thirty-five years. No hiding now. It stared me in the face, the finger of accusation boring into me. Murderer.
I stood up. Did Serena flinch? All the time that she had been offering me sympathy and consolation, she must have been afraid too. Surely. She knew what I was capable of and she was alone with me. I could rescue her from that fear, at least.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. My tongue felt as if it had swollen up to fill my whole mouth. I stumbled towards the door.
‘No, Karen, no you can’t go like this. Forget everything I said, about suicide, about the lock. Please, let me help you. You’re in shock. Wait. I should never have said anything. You’d wiped it out. That’s how I should have let it stay.’
All I could say was, ‘I’ve got to go.’
I made it out of the front door, God knows how. I trudged, like swimming through treacle, across a vast desert of gravel to the van, willing my limbs to move.
‘All right?’ Gary, the painter, moving his ladder, paused to look after me. I must have been floundering like a drunkard.
‘All right,’ I managed, and fell into the driver’s seat. He didn’t want to know me. I was a murderer. Go back to your painting, boy, or you don’t know what I might do.
— 19 —
Somehow I turned the van and drove out of Serena’s gate, back through Thorpeshall, back the way I’d come. I didn’t have a destination in mind, but the instinct to go back was overwhelming. Back and back and back.
Clearer and clearer, I could see Janice’s bloody face staring up at me, pleading.
I drove down the steep scarp slope of the downs, beeches arching over me like judges gathering to condemn me, their leaves ashiver with disgust and rejection. Banks of chalk, bone white, hemmed me in, channelling me down and down and down. I swerved. Did I do it deliberately? The van caught the bank and bucked, slewing across the road. But I didn’t crash. I pulled the wheel round, and went on.
Down. How much deeper could I go?
The road levelled at last, running out across rolling fields, to the faint blue of tamer hills, the dark green of woods, the distant smoggy haze of Lyford. I passed through another village without noticing, until speed bumps round a school entrance woke me to the fact that I was among people. People who didn’t know I was a murderer.
I drove on, weaving along the snaking road, unaware of any other traffic till I reached the bridge. A cramped humpback bridge that would only allow one vehicle at a time. I’d come this way – I remembered the lurch of the van as it had tipped over the brow of the bridge. There was more traffic around now. A small convoy of three cars were coming the other way and I had to hover, waiting for them to pass, before I could cross.
But having stopped, the adrenalin of flight that had been driving me drained out. I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t cross that canal bridge. I couldn’t do anything anymore, except sit there and stare at the bridge. A car behind me hooted and, when I did nothing, it edged past, the driver mouthing angrily at me.
I was in the way. I didn’t mean to be. I shouldn’t be in anyone’s way. I put the car in reverse and edged back onto a wide section of verge. People could pass now and give me no heed. I could be invisible.
The canal bridge rose up before me like a cobra.
Canal, Serena had said. That was where she would go, to end it all.
I got out of the car. A towpath followed the canal, tangled with brambles and nettles. Was there a lock, as she had said?
I walked up to the brow of the bridge. No traffic for the moment, queuing up to edge its way across. Just me. From the brow, I could look up the canal, past rushes and a moorhen swimming, to lock gates, creaking and blackened. They oozed water, and ferns spouted from their rotting joints. The heavy iron gears and shafts were rusting. I could sense, beyond those gates, the weight of black, slimy water. The deep, dark water of my drowning dreams. That was where I belonged. Smothered in slime.
Fill my pockets with stones and just jump in, sinking into darkness.
I pictured myself on the brink of the sheer, narrow chasm, ready to step in and disappear forever. I leaned forward, over the parapet of the bridge, as if practising the move, and
looked down.
The green water below barely moved. Its surface was smooth as glass, mirroring the bridge. A perfect mirror image of reality, I saw myself staring up at me, black against a white sky, leaning forward, straining to touch my other self. Then the reeds along the bank began to rustle and bend. A gust of breeze swept along the canal and the green glass broke into a thousand ripples, a jumbled confusion of light and dark. I was leaning over a parapet, looking down into crazed water, and nothing was clear any more.
Just a moment earlier, I’d known everything. I’d known what I’d done, and what I was going to do. Soon, it would all be finished. But now, in a flash, I knew nothing. It was all wrong.
What it was that was wrong, I didn’t know, but it had something to do with Sawyer’s Lane. There’d been a bridge in Sawyer’s Lane. Not an arch of stone like this bridge. This bridge was…where?
For a second, I couldn’t think where I was or how I’d come to be there. I thought I was in Sawyer’s Lane, and it wasn’t right. There was something missing from the picture. It wasn’t as Serena had said – except that it must have been, because she’d watched it, hadn’t she?
No. I surfaced enough to remember that Serena hadn’t been there. She hadn’t told me what she’d seen, only what she was guessing had happened. A wise and intelligent guess, based on my hysterical guilt, my garbled lies, the blood on my hands, but she hadn’t got it quite right. Something in the story wasn’t right. I just couldn’t… I couldn’t quite grasp—
A lorry came over the bridge, miraculously fitting itself between the parapets, tooting me to squeeze clear. I did, as the great beast rolled past, millimetres away, drawing air deep into my lungs. Oxygen and exhaust fumes rushed to my head. How long had I been holding my breath before the lorry came? It passed, leaving me dizzy.
My head spun. Like a roulette wheel, spinning slower and slower, till it stopped and at last the ball stopped careering round and dropped into its slot. The ball said Janice, and the slot said Sawyer’s Lane. That’s where I needed to go. To see it once more, and figure out for myself what was missing.
I didn’t need the atlas to work out the direction of Lyford. I’d seen it in the distance. I just followed my nose. The first road signs I passed merely directed me to the next village or two, but when I came to a main road, signs in large letters pointed to Lyford. I came to a roaring ring road, which saved me tackling the town centre and whirled me quickly round to the north side of the town.
I recognised the roundabout I had circled when I’d left the motorway on my first visit. I took the turn that led me to Foxton Road. No confusion now. The twists and turns, the old and new estates, were all familiar from my visit in early spring, although the area had transmuted from hard grey to technicolour, with the trees in full weary leaf and gardens in belligerent bloom. I turned into Linden Crescent, as I had before, and parked up, out of the way.
It was only now, back at my old address, that I remembered how confused I’d been in the spring, by the overwhelming changes, the plethora of new houses, new roads, the greedy expansion of the estate. If entire farms and fields had been swallowed up, what chance was there that Sawyer’s Lane would still be there? It had been a relic of an older world even in 1966.
Only one way to find out. I got out and walked up to Foxton Road. I turned right. There was a bend in the road, and just around it should have been the timber yard, with the wood and the lane just beyond it.
No timber yard. No whine of saws behind high wooden fences. A block of flats stood there instead, in a pool of neatly clipped shrubs. And beyond, where the corner of ancient woodland should have been, stretched new houses. The old world had been rubbed out.
Not quite. Over the roofs of the houses I could see trees. Substantial old trees that must butt on to their back gardens, meaning that a stub of the woods remained. And there, between the flats and the first house, was Sawyer’s Lane. Not as I remembered it, a dark, muddy track, overhung with branches, but a neatly paved lane, with a decorative street lamp, straight out of Narnia. It was wide enough for two mothers with pushchairs to walk abreast – they emerged, chatting, as I watched.
I turned up the lane, determined to try and track down my past, but feeling hope dribble away. How was this place going to jog that final clinching memory? This ruthlessly gentrified pathway was nothing like the lane I’d known. I passed the houses, and gazed into the remnant of the wood that stood behind them. A dozen trees perhaps, carefully lopped of weakened branches and tidied of unseemly undergrowth, where there had once been a tangled and impenetrable forest. It made me think of a poodle, clipped and beribboned, when I’d been expecting a wolf. Not even a chihuahua on the right side of the path, when the old trees that had once sheltered swathes of bluebells had been cleared away entirely, to make way for open, neatly mown grass – a miniscule park for pensioners, with a couple of benches, fronting a stretch of the brook that had been cleansed of junk and planted with irises to give an illusion of rural tranquillity in the midst of urban sprawl.
All this remodelling and neatening had been done a long time ago. Probably so long ago that no one else could remember the way it used to be – the old, truly rural Sawyer’s Lane and the deep, dark wood. A pale, bare track had been worn across the level grass, where locals must have been cutting the corner for years. The benches were weathered and greying. An old man was seated on one of them, reading a newspaper. I sat on the other one, wondering what to do next. I was still nursing a surging sense of expectation, but I had no idea how to fulfil it. Go on? Go back? There was nothing here that I could relate to.
It was only when I stood up that I noticed the plaque on the bench. The ground shifted under me.
This bench, donated by Cpl Kenneth Dexter, is dedicated to the memory of his beloved sister Janice, 1955 – 1966.
‘You touch my sister, I’ll punch you in the face, I’m warning you.’
I stepped back, stung.
How could I have thought there was nothing here? There was everything here. I returned to the paved path, which crossed the brook on a quaint footbridge.
There had been a bridge on Sawyer’s Lane. Nothing like this new pseudo-Japanese one, which had steps and decorative railings. The old had iron poles as rails and rotting planks, gaps between them big enough to catch high heels – not that our mothers ever came this way much. They kept to the neat hard pavements of the estate streets. Only children opted for the muddy gloom and fantastic possibilities of Sawyer’s Lane.
I stepped up onto the bridge, no danger of my heels catching, and I paused to look down.
At a pipe.
I did a double take.
Everything else had changed, everything had been neatened and paved and trimmed and smoothed, but there it was still, the old pipe that I had forgotten until this moment. I suppose it was simply too solid or too important to be tidied away.
It was a huge thing of cast iron, with massive riveted joints, crossing the brook in the shadow of the footbridge. What was it? I have no idea. A sewer, maybe. Wafting all the shit of Marsh Green through this pleasant little park. It had been painted a pale gloss green, but the paint was worn off in places and the pitted iron showed through.
It had been rusty brown, back then.
I looked down at the brook flowing beneath it. In among the trees, the banks rose, gathering the stream into a dark channel that poured, at last, into the maw of a low, black culvert.
Which hadn’t changed at all. Except that the water was cleaner. It hadn’t been clean on January 12th 1966. It had been dark and muddy, foam and filth piling up at the lip of the culvert, and threads of crimson in the water.
Threads of crimson blood.
— 20 —
Cross my heart and hope to die, I don’t want to kill Janice. And I’m sure she doesn’t want to kill me. Almost sure. I think.
Even so, I hesitate at the school gates. I always wait for her, or she waits for me, and we walk home together, but today I’m there first, and I think ‘
Shall I just go on? Maybe she’s gone without me. There’s no point waiting, if she has. I could say I thought she’d already gone.’
But it’s too late to claim that because there she is, coming through the gates. We look at each other, both of us hesitating, uncertain. Then she smiles. Or maybe I smile and she smiles in return. We walk on together, because we always do.
Every so often there are tiny snowflakes, drifting out of the grey sky and it’s whistling cold, the sort that eats through your head. I have a knitted bonnet that buttons under my chin and mittens attached to the sleeves of my duffle coat on elastic, so I can’t lose them, but Janice just has a coat that used to be a lady’s jacket and it’s got no buttons and the lining’s torn out. I can see her ears turning blue. We run a bit to keep warm, then we stop at the Parade, and peer in the window of the general store, to see who’s buying marbles or sherbet flying saucers or threepenny chocolate bars. We don’t go in. I haven’t any pocket money left, and Janice never has any, except when Kenneth gives her some he’s taken off someone else. But he’s not around today.
So we walk on, dawdling, and by the time we’re passing down Aspen Drive, among the empty prefab stands, we’ve almost forgotten that one of us is going to kill the other.
‘Shall we go to the ’lotments?’
‘Yeah!’ Where better on such a cold, gloomy day? Mr Colley, one of the whiskery old men on the allotments, has a fire in a brazier to keep himself warm and sometimes he roasts chestnuts on it. If you get him in the right mood, and don’t run wild among his leeks and Brussels, he’ll give you some, throwing them and laughing as you catch them and squeal because they’re so hot. Then you sit on the bank by his compost heap and squeal some more as you pull the scorched shells off.
So we’ll go to the allotments.
Then I see her.