The Hilltop estate was a compact sixties development on the very edge of the city. It was set, as its name rather overplayed, on an unremarkable bump in the landscape offering views back towards the city in one direction, and out to ploughed fields in the other. Due to some combination of the whims of its developers and the contours of the land the Hilltop estate had something of an experimental feel. As Frank had looked at the page of the A–Z, he saw the steady Euclidean geometry of the road network descend into a spaghetti of ellipses and ox-bows at Hilltop. It was no clearer off the page. Crescents bloomed from crescents in a tangled Mandelbrot soup.
With the street map in one hand and an umbrella in the other Frank set off to find 12 Lysander Avenue. At first it seemed as if the neat houses and maisonettes were not playing their part in Hilltop’s mission to disorientate. They were not the melting Gaudi confections that Frank thought would better complement the street design. It was only a matter of minutes, however, before their role became clear. Whilst every house had a number, they weren’t as far as Frank could tell in any discernible order. He found number 2 Lysander Avenue, which was followed by number 4 and number 6 creating a momentary illusion of a world in balance, before number 54 loomed up. After further increasingly damp investigation Frank discovered that number 54 belonged to Titania Close, which appeared not simply to intersect Lysander but to dismember it entirely, scattering the remains all over the estate. Frank eventually found number 12 embedded in the heart of Oberon Drive. A woman in a grey trouser suit, with long red hair, answered the door.
‘Mr Allcroft?’
‘Frank, please.’
‘Hello, Frank. I’m Rebecca – you spoke on the phone to my colleague Simi.’
‘Hi, Rebecca, I’m sorry I’m late. I couldn’t find the place.’
Rebecca frowned. ‘Did you not have the address?’
‘Yes, it’s just this place, you know; it’s a labyrinth …’ Frank laughed.
Rebecca looked at him blankly. ‘Well, it’s no problem anyway. I’m here all morning sorting through things. We really appreciate your offer to help – it could lead us to a relative.’
‘I’m glad to help. Hopefully this will jog my memory. I see a lot of faces in my work, but I usually remember them eventually.’
Rebecca nodded. ‘Okay, I’ve collected some stuff on the table in the living room there – have a look through. I need to get on and clear the rooms upstairs, if that’s all right.’
She turned and walked up the stairs, trailing the scent of some hair product Frank recognized from home. He left his dripping umbrella at the door and walked through to the living room. It was not as he had imagined. He realized that he had been expecting a scene of squalor. He had envisaged piles of mildewed newspapers, empty soup tins on the windowsills and mouse droppings in the kitchen. Instead the living room was sparsely furnished and spotless. A single high-backed orange armchair in front of a wall-mounted gas fire, a teak-effect dining table with two chairs, a matching side cabinet with what looked like a seventies-era music centre on top. He looked at the dustless smoked plastic lid of the record player. He thought of Michael Church diligently cleaning a house that would only be visited by strangers after his death. He thought that squalor would have been less sad.
On the table was a pile of paperwork. The woman from the council had said they’d found nothing there to indicate a next of kin. Frank sat carefully on the edge of a chair at the table and wondered what he was doing in this dead man’s house. The chances were that Michael Church had once featured in some news report and Frank would be able to add nothing new to his story. Perhaps Frank had interviewed him back when he was a reporter and all they would learn is that this man once had a lorry crash into his dining room, or had protested about a school closure, or been taken to court for cruelty to dogs.
He pulled the pile towards him and started sorting through the papers and envelopes. He touched the documents gently as if handling ancient relics. It was the usual tangle of paperwork built up over a lifetime. Policy booklets, TV-licence reminders, a letter of thanks for a recent donation. He had a fleeting memory of sitting at another table, many years ago, the afternoon sunlight pooling on the floor as he helped his mother sort through the policies and payment books left behind after his father’s death. He looked for Michael Church’s past addresses; he thought that place would be the key to his memory. Instead, in an A5 Manila envelope he found some photographs. A black and white one of a young woman sitting under a tree, the wind blowing her hair. The woman was laughing at whoever was taking the photo. Another one showed a couple of young men in army uniforms, neither appeared to be Michael. Another was in colour, a toddler, probably a boy, though it was hard to tell, holding a bucket and spade and looking delighted with himself. Another black and white one showed two young boys. The boy on the left was clearly Michael Church. He was wearing a tank top over a short-sleeved shirt and smiling shyly at the camera. The boy on the right was taller with an arm round Michael’s shoulder. His smile was wide and he seemed to have all the confidence that Michael lacked, his eyes looking straight through the lens. Frank had seen that look a hundred times. The boy was Phil Smethway.
Frank leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Now he remembered. It hadn’t been anything to do with a news story. It hadn’t even been that long ago, maybe eighteen months. Phil had been up in Birmingham on one of his visits and they’d arranged to meet for lunch. They were walking past St Philip’s Cathedral, heading down to the Jewellery Quarter when Phil called out to a man walking towards them. The man looked lost for a moment and then slowly broke into a smile as he recognized Phil. As he came towards them, Frank noticed his eyes – bright, big and blue and somehow too young for the rest of his face. Phil and the man shook hands vigorously, both laughing, and Phil introduced Michael to Frank as his ‘most longest, lostest, dearest pal’. Frank remembered how strong Michael’s grip was when he shook his hand. Michael said something about seeing Phil on telly and Phil was demanding to know why he’d never got in touch. Frank felt a bit of a spare part and so told Phil he’d go on ahead to the restaurant to get a table. He’d asked Michael if he’d join them, but he said he couldn’t. He left the two of them trying to work out how long it had been since they’d last met.
Frank looked again at the photo. He wondered if they’d stayed in contact after the chance encounter in the churchyard. He thought of the contrast in the way they had looked that day: Phil with his perma-tan, Rolex and white polo neck; Michael pale and slight in a cagoule. Michael didn’t look like the kind of person Phil had in his life; he didn’t look like he played golf or drove a Mercedes. Frank looked at the room around him and wondered if Phil ever discovered that Michael was living such a solitary existence. Michael must have heard of Phil’s death and yet Frank was sure he wasn’t at the funeral. He felt an itch to know more about Michael. To see if there was anyone alive who knew him and might give some clue as to who he was and how he ended up slipping out of life unnoticed. Frank could tell himself he was doing it as a favour to Phil.
12
Michael
October 2009
It’s a strange place for a bench. He’s walked past it hundreds of times and never seen anyone else on it. He wonders if it’s been waiting for him.
The seat is lower than he’s used to. He bends his knees as far as he can and then allows himself to fall the rest of the way, hitting the bench hard, rocking back with the momentum. Black specks swim in the air around him. He closes his eyes and waits for the buzzing in his head to stop. When he opens his eyes, he assesses the view. Three lanes of cars hurtling towards town, and another three fleeing in the opposite direction. Not something many people are keen to gaze upon.
The carriageway marks the eastern edge of the housing estate. The houses and most of the streets he knew were cleared decades ago, even the old name of the neighbourhood has been lost, but still he likes to look for traces of the places he used to know, places he and Elsie used to meet. He fi
nds them now and then: the birch tree on the corner of Ellesworth Street, the small section of iron railings in the park, the blackened bridge over the canal. He sees himself as an unlikely archaeologist, searching for worthless treasure.
He’s started revisiting the area since Elsie’s death. Most weekends he catches the 86 into town and then walks the rest of the way. He can’t get used to the empty spaces. His memories are of houses built on top of one another, families crowded upon families, but now he finds a landscape dominated by gaps. The flats and maisonettes stare at each other over vast concrete quadrangles and landscaped hillocks. The wind blasts across the open spaces, bending the sapling trees and choking the weeds with litter. He doesn’t know what the spaces are for; no one seems to use them. He doesn’t understand where the children are.
Down the road a little from the bench remains a chunk of the past still intact. Edward Street School, it seems, is no longer a school. The sign outside speaks of opportunities and resources for the unemployed, but the building itself is the same Victorian redbrick lump it always was.
He looks over at its familiar silhouette and he remembers the sounds most of all. He closes his eyes and he can still hear the familiar footsteps behind him. There are three of them. His heartbeat speeds up in time with their approach and as he turns he gets the full weight of a satchel of books square in the side of the head. He smells leather and ink as he fights to keep his balance. He’s dazed but lashes out, flailing wildly, using every part of himself to inflict as much damage as he can in the few seconds he has before they bring him down. He rams his knuckles into somebody’s face and catches someone else in the balls with his boot. For a moment he feels invincible and lets out a victorious roar, but then he tastes the blood in his mouth and the horizon begins to shift.
Once they have him on the ground they begin in earnest. He catches glimpses of their grim faces as they lay the boot in and he almost respects their dedication to something they seem to get so little pleasure from. They breathe noisily through their open mouths, putting all they’ve got into the job at hand.
They see him lying there curled up on the wet surface of the playground taking a beating, but it’s an illusion. Michael is far away. His name is Rusty and he rides through Monument Valley on his Appaloosa horse. He saves the life of his trusty dog Pancho after he’s bitten by a snake and they team up with a Cherokee scout to capture a dangerous outlaw by the name of El Capitan. They free the beautiful girl that El Capitan has locked away and she rides with Michael on the back of his horse, her arms clasped tightly round his waist. Her name is Maria. Her heart beats hard against his back and it feels good. The setting sun casts strange shadows on the valley floor and Pancho barks and wags his tail.
The kicks have stopped. He stays on the ground, clinging to the image of Pancho’s shiny eyes, but it fades fast and instead he sees the chalk smear of a hopscotch grid trickling towards him. He sits up slowly and checks himself. His back hurts and his head throbs, but Rusty would take far worse and never complain. He touches the back of his head and the pain shoots out. He closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them there’s a pair of legs in front of him. Phil pulls him up. He holds Michael’s chin in his hand and turns his face from side to side.
‘Nice work, mate. You’re getting better. They didn’t get a decent kick into the face today.’
Michael rolls up his jumper and shirt and asks Phil to check his back. Phil breathes in sharply.
‘Bloody hell, Mikey. The bruises have already come up and one’s a big bugger.’
‘I don’t think they broke anything.’
‘They had a good go, though, didn’t they?’
‘Did you see it all?’
Phil’s quiet for a moment. ‘Well, most of it.’
Michael looks at him. ‘It’s all right. It’s not your fight.’
‘Three against one, that ain’t a fight. They’re just cowards.’ He stops for a moment. ‘I’m a coward too, just watching it happen.’
Michael shakes his head. ‘You’re not a coward. You stick your neck out – you talk to me.’
‘The rest of them are idiots.’
Michael smiles at that. ‘It doesn’t matter. They don’t bother me.’
‘You know you’re mad, don’t you? You could outrun them.’
‘I was always told that was the worst thing to do with bullies.’
‘Well, I’m saying that’s bollocks. “Stand your ground,” they say. “Fight back!” Well, you do that and look where it gets you. “Run away,” I say – that’s what they want. They don’t even enjoy it any more, mate. They’d take any excuse to stop.’
‘I don’t think my dad would have liked me to run away.’
Phil is exasperated. ‘What you talking about? Your dad ran away. Left your mom before you were even born.’
‘She said he missed Germany. He went back to be a shepherd.’
They look at each other. ‘A shepherd?’ says Phil. He shakes his head. ‘Baaa.’ He and Michael start laughing.
They walk out of the school gates and start heading home. Phil wonders if they’re going to be evacuated again and asks Michael if he remembers all the odd bods in Belbroughton when they were there in 1939. As if Michael could forget. Then Phil starts on about the bulgy-eyed vicar in Evesham when they were sent there. He does the vicar as a crazed, toothy Alastair Sim and he knows it always makes Michael cry with laughter. He begs Phil to stop as it hurts too much.
Phil spots the girls first. ‘Come on, Mikey, let’s go and impress them with your bruises.’
They’re sitting under the tree in the park. Michael looks across and sees her chatting to her friend. She’s smiling and moving her hands and her hair bounces as she laughs and he feels as if he’s been kicked in the stomach again. He stops walking and Phil looks at him.
‘Come on. What you doing? All right, we won’t show them the bruises. We’ll just tell them how you took three of them on and you were the only one left standing.’
Michael thinks he needs to sit down. It’s hard to breathe.
Phil’s smiling. ‘Come on. You know she likes you. God knows why when I’m around, but she does.’
Michael manages to shake his head. ‘She never looks at me.’
‘Exactly.’
Michael doesn’t move. ‘I don’t think I can.’
Phil pulls on his sleeve. ‘Just walk with me. I’ll do all the talking. You can be the strong silent type. The other one’s sweet on me anyway; she has better taste.’
Michael looks in Phil’s eyes. ‘You’ll do all the talking?’
‘Do you think I’d let you blow it?’ He straightens his collar. ‘I told you to protect your face, didn’t I? Those eyes of yours – the girls go for those. They make you look innocent – you can get away with anything.’
Michael buries his hands in his pockets and walks up with Phil.
A lorry pulls up and the school disappears behind it. The traffic is heavier now and the queue for the roundabout reaches right down to the bench where Michael sits. He can’t remember a single word of what Phil said to Elsie and her friend. But he remembers Elsie’s eyes settling on his for the first time and he remembers the shock of the knowledge that passed between them.
13
The motorway was quiet, but he stayed in the slow lane tucked behind a beaten-up van travelling at fifty. Frank secretly held a strong suspicion that he should not be in charge of a vehicle after dark. On city streets all was fine, but on country lanes or unlit stretches of motorway he was alarmed at the sullen lack of communication between his eyes and his brain. Something had gone wrong between them in the last year or two and now the brain would periodically choose to ignore or wilfully misinterpret visual input. The familiar patterns of tail lights, road signs, catseyes and oncoming headlights had broken down into a free-form floating abstract projection through which Frank hurtled wide-eyed on leather upholstery. At times he mistook the retreating tail lights of the car ahead for headlights coming toward
s him, at others he would mistake reflections on his side window for vehicles swerving into his lane. His progress along a deserted stretch of motorway was often punctuated by sudden braking at phantom hazards on the road ahead. He waited for the day the police pulled him over, breathalysed him, and imagined their disbelief slowly turning to unease when they discovered no trace of alcohol in his blood.
He indicated and took his exit from the motorway, making his way along the A-roads and country lanes towards home. His journey tonight was even longer than usual after having to attend a work ‘away day’ in Surrey. His daily commute however was fraught enough and just another reason for him to dislike where he lived. He was always happy to get back to Andrea and Mo, but dearly wished that this nightly reunion could take place somewhere other than their home. He had never felt so little affinity with anywhere he’d lived before, not even the bleak shared houses of his student days with their swirling carpets and pungent sofas. He and Andrea had moved out of the city when Mo was born with some vague idea of the country being a better place in which to raise a family. They bought a five-bedroomed detached new build on a large plot of land thirty miles out of Birmingham. It certainly wasn’t the city, but neither could it be called the country. It was handy for the motorway and that had seemed like a good idea.
That first damp, grey day that they’d moved in Frank had felt a terrible emptiness to the place, but put it out of his mind. In the first few months Andrea settled in easily and Frank had high hopes. He’d always lived in cities, but he held in his head an ideal of country living. He looked forward to doing all the things he thought people who lived in the country must do.
He bought a book of local walks and set out many times in the early days in full Gore-tex regalia, but found the landscape charmless. Try as he might he could find nothing inspiring in trudging over ploughed fields or along narrow lanes with cars screaming past at murderous speeds. He would walk through a field, cross a stile in the hedgerow to emerge into another identical field. Apart from the screaming crows, he saw no other living creature. Sometimes he imagined that he was the last person living after the bomb had dropped, and such thoughts inevitably failed to lift his mood. After persevering through each weekend in October and November, he gave up. There was, he concluded, nothing to see out there.
News Where You Are Page 6