The policeman looked up from the papers he had been studying. “Didn’t I?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye.
“Unusual death, you said. You didn’t say anything about murder. Is that why I’m here? Am I a suspect?”
“You have to admit it’s all a little strange, isn’t it? You come home and visit your old friend for the first time in who knows how many years, and on that very same day he turns up dead.”
I had not even thought of Scotty’s death in those terms. Murder. I hadn’t even tried to give a name to what had happened to him…Was I responsible? Not had I murdered him, was I responsible for his death? That was a different question and one that could take some contemplation. The only thing I knew for sure was if I hadn’t made the trip home this weekend, none of this would have happened.
3
Present Day
Mum had called me a couple days ago. We spoke regularly, though often it was little more than a “How are you? I’m fine, how are you?” exchange before she told me about how someone I didn’t even know had died. She was at that age. Everyone she knew was dropping like flies. This call was different though; it came on the wrong evening. We only spoke on weekends and she insisted on us taking it in turns over who called whom. It was my turn to call her, and it was Thursday.
“Everything okay, Mum?”
“I’m fine,” she said, and I sensed the usual exchange starting up. My first thought was the dementia was getting worse and she didn’t realize what day it was. It wasn’t a happy thought.
“So why the call?” I asked, instantly regretting it and half-expecting a retort along the lines of “Are you too busy to talk to your mother today?” or a sarcastic “Is it too much trouble?” Neither came. She paused for a moment as if unsure what to say or how to say it. I heard her take two deep breaths in the silence.
“Mum?” I tried to hide the concern in my voice, but if she had been listening for it, it would have been unmistakable.
“It’s one of your friends. I think he’s in some kind of trouble.”
Friends? My friends were all here in Manchester. One or two of my old mates from uni had moved around the country, but most of them had made their homes in and around the city. Had she heard from someone who only had my old number?
“It’s Scott,” she said, and I felt a sudden rush of ice-cold fear run the length of my spine. Scotty. I no longer thought of him as a friend—hell, I didn’t even seek him out when I went home to visit Mum. But once she mentioned his name, a whole host of memories came flooding back—most of them bad.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Mrs. Johnson said she saw him last week, walking across the common in his bare feet, shouting at the top of his voice.”
“We all do silly things when we’ve had a drink, Mum. That’s no cause for getting worried.”
She didn’t seem to be listening to me. There were things she wanted to tell me and I knew there was no point in trying to stem her flow. She had to say what she wanted to say before I would really get the chance to add my own two pennies worth. “But then a couple of nights ago he was in the building site and got attacked by one of the guard dogs.”
“Building site? What building site?”
“The new one, you know? On that old waste ground opposite the common. You used to call it a funny name? The Pancakes?”
I knew exactly where she meant. “The Batters?”
“That’s it,” she said, almost with a smile in her voice. “The Batters. Told you it was a funny name. Pancake, batter.”
“Is he all right though? You know after the dog?”
“They took him to the hospital. They’ve kept him in for observation, but I don’t think it’s anything to do with the dog bites. Jenny Topliss called in to see me on the way home from work today. You know, Lisa’s mother?”
She waited for my assurance that I knew whom she was talking about before she went on. She always did this; told me stories about relations of the parents of people I had been at school with. It wasn’t always easy to stop her, more often than not the best thing to do was just nod and let her get on with it.
“Anyway, Jenny’s a nurse at the General. She’s on the psychiatric ward. She said she shouldn’t really tell me, but he’s on her ward, you see, and she knew you were close. He was asking for you.”
“Me? Why would he ask for me? I haven’t talked to him in ten years.” Mum barely paused for a breath. She was already in the middle of a sentence I wasn’t listening to. She stopped talking, realizing I’d said something.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But Jenny said he sounded desperate.”
Desperate. That was never a word I thought I would hear being applied to Scotty. There were all sorts of ways he might have been described, but that was never one I would have chosen for the coolest kid in school. But desperate was exactly the right word to describe him; desperate.
“Will you come and see him?”
I hadn’t expected the question, and yet I replied without thinking. Of course I would. I tried to convince myself I would be going home to see Mum—after all, I hadn’t been home for a while, but in truth I would be doing it to see Scotty. “I’ll be there tomorrow night.”
“And you’ll stay for the weekend?” She didn’t seem surprised I would be coming; in fact, she almost seemed prepared for it.
4
1985
The sun had almost set by the time we started to gather together. My mother hadn’t wanted me to go out again, saying there were too many things she needed me to do around the house, but when I asked her to tell me what they were, she only came up with a couple of small jobs, including an errand to the corner shop, which I was only too happy to take care of straight away.
She’d quizzed me on how I had got money to afford a night at the fair. She had known I had no money the day before as she had been with me when I spent the last few coins of my pocket money on a bottle of Coke. She spared me the lecture on how it was so much cheaper to buy a bottle of cordial and get a lot of drinks from it. I had heard it so many times I could have given the lecture for her and saved her from sounding like a broken record. Luckily I had learned to tune out her voice. It’s a skill all children need to learn if they’re going to make it through to adulthood. Even when people were stopping in the street to watch her as she gave me a hard time, I just let her words wash over me and figured the important stuff would seep into my brain while the rest of it sluiced off.
I could have lied, I suppose, but why bother?
We hadn’t begged for the money; she was against us doing ‘Penny for the Guy’ mainly because she was worried someone she knew might have seen us. That was Mum all over. Keeping up appearances. It was all about keeping up the good face for the neighbors and the thought of me—her flesh and blood—doing something one of her friends might turn their nose up at was a fate worse than death. I told her about the odd jobs my friends and I had been doing and she experienced a moment of pride when she learned we had been earning the money from the fruits of our own labor. I liked that. Sure, she had some doubts, she wouldn’t have been Mum without them, but she let them pass. And I was relieved she didn’t ask whom we had been doing the jobs for. She just left the unspoken message between us: if I had taken money without doing a job properly, then she would get to hear about it and there’d be hell to pay. There was always hell to pay.
One by one we began to gather.
Scotty was almost always one of the first to arrive. He was never big on grand entrances, but he made an exception today. He was late and the sky was bright orange where the sun had started to fall below the horizon. He appeared a little odd when we’d examined the grille on the Batters, but that was nothing next to how he was behaving now. We were supposed to be heading to the fair to have fun, but there was absolutely no joy in him. Worse, ever since the moment he walked into the camp he’d been leaching the excitement out of the rest of us like some sort of emotional parasite. There was a hollownes
s in his eyes and a paleness to his skin, like he was sick.
“You okay?” I asked as the group stretched out in our walk to the fairground.
He stopped and looked at me for a moment without speaking, though his lips moved. It was as though he was trying to form the words he wanted to speak but couldn’t. It was like he was trapped inside his own head and couldn’t break free long enough to tell me he was a prisoner in there. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “I really don’t know.”
“Is it the…” I didn’t know what to call it, but he knew exactly what I meant. Worse, he nodded. He had a better idea of what lay down there than I did; I knew that. He’d gone back alone. And he was afraid of what he’d seen.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We have to go down there tomorrow. Do it properly. You’ll come down with me, won’t you?”
“Of course.” I nodded, not sure what I was getting myself into, but knowing I couldn’t back out now. Not when Scotty needed me.
“The others can’t know,” he said. “Just the two of us.” And then the five words I’d known he was going to say, and really, really, hoped he wouldn’t. “We have to kill it.”
I still had no idea what he really meant, but I knew without any shadow of a doubt I’d stand side-by-side with him. Whatever it was we had to kill, why we had to kill, it didn’t matter. He needed me. We were friends. Friends didn’t leave each other when things got tough. I’d find out what we were up against tomorrow. That was soon enough.
* * *
The evening passed with little incident, but for me the excitement I had felt earlier in the day had long since disappeared. We went on a couple of rides, lost a few coins on the slot machines and won no more than a bag of sweets on the rifle range between us. But it was fun. We were all together. The ping of metal bullets hitting the six-inch-high targets in the shape of men standing to attention was almost drowned out by the music blasting out from the waltzer and the dodgems, and the laughter growing around us.
Spider spent most of his time trying to chat up a couple of girls by the carousel, but it was obvious they weren’t interested in him, even when he paid for their rides. Duran Duran and Mr. Mister filled the air. Scotty and I wandered from one stall to the next, watching people lose their money with a smile while we stood around with almost empty pockets.
Boys in white baggies and fluorescent socks and fluorescent fingerless gloves tried to be Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw with spiky haircuts, while floppy-haired boys went for the George Michael look in their CHOOSE LIFE T-shirts and the girls all wanted to be Ally Sheedy or Madonna with their bangles and hair.
We hadn’t said anything for a couple of minutes before we realized the others had drifted away. Spider had followed the two girls to the dodgems, but they were now deep in conversation with an older boy I recognized from the fifth form, and doing their best to ignore him. He didn’t stand a chance. Through the crowd I saw Ferret walking back toward us with a sheepish grin on his face and holding a coconut in one hand and a plastic bag with a goldfish in it in the other.
“I got fed up of trying to win a coconut for Mum,” he said. “I ended up buying one from the guy on the stall.”
“Ha!
“He said I wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.”
“And the fish?” I asked.
“For my sister. I win one for her every year, but they always seem to die after a few days—normally the same time the fair moves on.”
“Maybe this one will last a little longer?” I offered helpfully. I looked at the poor creature trapped inside the plastic. I doubted it’d see the night out, never mind the week. “Or maybe you should just tell your mum to get the chips on and save your sis a world of pain?” I said, trying to raise the mood a little. I wasn’t a natural comedian. Absolute zero comic timing. I caught Scotty looking in the direction of Old Man Harrison’s house and began to wonder if he’d seen something in there.
“Look, I’m heading home,” Scotty said. He turned to me. “You coming?”
“I’ll hang around a little longer,” Ferret said, even though he hadn’t been the one asked. “I said I’d walk back with Spider.”
“Looks like pretty boy’s otherwise engaged,” I said, but as I looked toward him he was making his way back down the steps from a ride, crestfallen. His bubble had been well and truly popped, and not in the good way. The two girls were getting into one of the waltzers’ cabins with Fifth Former settled in the middle with an arm around each of them, claiming his prize. He might as well have peed all over Spider’s legs to mark his territory. Poor sod.
“Never mind,” Ferret said. “Plenty more fish in the sea.”
“Or in the plastic bag,” I joked. I thought it was funny. No one else seemed to.
Scotty had already turned and taken a few steps away before I had realized. Spider mumbled something about Scotty being in a shitty mood, but I ignored him.
“See you tomorrow,” I said and started after Scotty. The others nodded and said their good-byes. A few moments later they’d already disappeared back into the crowd in pursuit of fun.
Scotty waited for me at the edge of the common.
To the left stood Old Man Harrison’s house, the start of the Batters lay directly opposite us, and our way home was off to the right. For a moment I thought he was going to cross over to the Batters again, but with the only light coming from the streetlights and the glare of spotlights that illuminated the fair people’s caravans that would have been a really dumb idea. I’m all for dumb ideas at the right time, don’t get me wrong. But this wasn’t the time for doing something dumb.
“Nothin’ we can do now,” I said. “If you want, we can meet in the morning and we can do whatever you think we need to do.”
“I don’t think anything, mate. We have to kill it,” he said. “Before it comes for the rest of us.”
5
Present Day
I saw Scotty before he saw me.
I didn’t realize I actually had though, because I didn’t recognize him.
He looked a lot older than I had expected. A lot. We were only a couple of years apart, but he could have been twenty years older than me. He sat in an armchair in the corner of the room, well away from the sunlight that was doing its best to melt the French windows.
“Thank you ever so much for coming, Drew,” Mrs. Topliss said, placing a hand in the middle of my back as she did, as though I needed pushing the last few feet. Maybe she was determined I wouldn’t get away now that I was here? “I don’t think he has anyone else.”
“What about his mum and dad?” I asked, and then I remembered Nate. “His brother?”
She pressed her lips together, making a moue, and shook her head. She didn’t have to say anything. I understood. And I knew why he had turned to me.
She shrugged. It was an incredibly eloquent gesture given the circumstances. “The only thing he’s said since he got here has been your name, so to be honest we’re all rather hoping you might be able to get through to him. He’s still in there somewhere, we just have to find him.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
I looked around the room properly. He wasn’t the only one sitting alone in the lounge. Some of the residents were reading old magazines they’d probably read a dozen times in the last month already. Most of them were staring out of the window into some unseen space in the middle distance. They were lost like Scotty, off away in in their own little world. I hoped it was a better one than this.
“Scott?” she said, leaning down beside him. “You’ve got a visitor, love.” She stood again and moved a chair to position for me to sit opposite him. Scotty showed no sign of having heard her, never mind her words having gotten through, but she crouched down beside him again and placed a reassuring hand on his arm. His eyes flicked in her direction at the contact, but no more than that.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “How about a nice cup of coffee?”
I didn’t know if she was talking
to me or Scotty, and I really wasn’t in the mood for anything, but by accepting I would have to stay until I had finished it, even if Scotty showed no sign of recognizing me. She was good, this nurse.
“Hey, Scotty. Long time, matey. How’re you doing?” I sat in the chair and leaned forward, speaking softly. I didn’t want my voice to carry. I was uncomfortable with the idea of keeping up a one-way conversation, but more important than overcoming embarrassment, I wanted to be the only one to hear if he had something to say. Especially if it was about what had happened to him—or what had happened to us all those years ago.
I was searching for words to say. Blather to fill the silence. I was never very good at small talk. My ex could do that just fine. She could extemporize for England, if you know what I mean? Me? Tall, dark and broody…well, more like average height, mousey-blond going bald, and sulky, but you get the idea.
His eyes moved slowly toward me.
I could not tell if he was actually seeing me.
Maybe he was following the sound of my voice rather than trying to see who was speaking?
After a moment something changed in them and instead of being flat and dead they became alive.
“Drew?” he said. It sounded as though it had been a month since he’d said a word. His voice was brittle.
“Yeah, Scotty, it’s me.”
Without warning his hand shot out like a cobra. He grabbed my arm, fingernails digging in as he gripped it far too tightly for comfort. I could feel the bones of his fingers through my jacket. It was like being in a vise. An ever-tightening vise.
“I’ve seen him again, Drew,” he said. “After all this time, I’ve seen him again.” He looked around, his eyes suddenly wild as he checked to see if there was anyone else watching us. I couldn’t help myself, I glanced over my shoulder too. No one was taking the least bit of notice of what we had to say.
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