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Shiftling

Page 6

by Savile, Steven


  He was talking again, but that wasn’t thanks to me. At least not directly.

  I left him alone with his fears.

  I had no idea how long they’d keep him in that place, but given what had just passed between us, there was no denying it was the best place for him—for the time being, at least. He needed looking after. There wasn’t anyone else around to do it, and these people were qualified to treat him, which is more than I was.

  “Will you come and see him again?” Mrs. Topliss asked as I walked past the reception desk on my way out.

  “I’ll try,” I said noncommittally. It was almost the truth. Well, it was more truthful than simply saying “of course” would have been.

  “I’m sure he’d like that.”

  I smiled and nodded as I pushed through the big plate-glass doors and headed toward my car.

  I made the mistake of looking back.

  Looking back is never a good thing.

  Ever.

  Scotty stood at the French doors. He was looking in my direction. I didn’t wave back, but instead slipped into the car so I didn’t have to look at him or the hospital.

  I needed to think about what he had said to me in there.

  I needed to decide if I believed him, or if he was telling me because he was crazy.

  Or if what he had seen had made him that way, in which case I had to believe him, didn’t I?

  I knew what we had been through down in the tunnels had pushed us both to the edge, but I had pulled back from the precipice. Had he? Maybe the difference between us was purely that I’d moved away and left this place—and the Batters—behind? Maybe that had helped me sever the connection. And if it had, then maybe that was why Scotty had been drawn closer to it? I couldn’t imagine having to look at that place every day of the year. Every day of my life. Even if he was right and really had seen it, then, shit, that only served to create another mystery, not solve one.

  I wasn’t ready to see Mum again yet.

  She’d be full of questions.

  She’d want to know what we had talked about.

  I wasn’t ready to share that with her yet.

  I needed time to think and maybe to face up to my demons.

  I hadn’t been back to the common since the day Spider had fallen from the Big Wheel. I hadn’t walked across the Batters either. It had always been there, lurking on the other side of the hill from our house, but I had managed to avoid going there for years. None of us had been left with much appetite for the funfair for the rest of its visit. And by the time it came back the next year things had changed. Ferret had gone back the year after that. He’d taken a girl with him. I remember seeing him walking along the road in his turned-up stonewashed jeans with ridiculous fluorescent pink socks on, his arm wrapped around a girl with Bananarama hair. I heard him bragging that he’d been on the Big Wheel on the night Spider had jumped into the air never to be seen again. He took a perverse kind of pride in it. I just felt the most unimaginable sorrow. There was a Spider-shaped hole in the last couple of years of my life and nothing could fill it.

  The carnies never erected the Big Wheel on the common again.

  I drove closer. I felt the sweat between the steering wheel and my hands. I reached down and put the radio on. It greeted me with the last few bars of Born to Run—the Frankie version, not the Springsteen one—and was followed by Holly Johnson promising to protect me from the Hooded Claw and keep the vampires from my door. How little he knew, and how easy it was to make promises he could never keep. It could have been 1985 all over again, with Frankie telling me to Relax.

  I drove on, even though I really didn’t want to.

  Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes was next up.

  It was like the ’80s were haunting me. I half expected Aztec Camera and Blancmange to follow. Just as long as it wasn’t bloody Starship.

  And it didn’t matter that I didn’t want to do it, it was something I had to do. It was as simple as that.

  I’m not sure why—maybe because the music hadn’t changed—but I had expected things to be the same. In my mind it was obvious that time marched on, that things changed, and that open land was being gobbled up by developers to produce housing estates, but for some reason I’d never imagined they’d have built on the wasteland around our old house. The common was basically untouched, but out on the Batters there were dozens of houses in various stages of construction.

  Nothing was happening at the moment, though there was a cement mixer on one of the driveways churning round and around so someone had to be working somewhere.

  I drove into the would-be estate.

  As I reached the spot where the common and the Batters were closest together—where once upon a time Old Man Harrison had lived—I saw the house. It seemed the old place was doomed to neglect no matter who owned it.

  I could see strands of blue and white police tape cordoning off a quadrant of ground.

  The building work was set back quite a way from the police tape.

  I guessed the intention had been for an access road to run from this side of the common through the heart of the old Batters ground and the building process had turned up some relic of the old mine works.

  The whole area was riddled with tunnels and shafts and air vents and every other kind of mine works. There’d always been a rumor that back during the Second World War part of the tunnels had been used as air-raid shelters and the MoD had even gone so far as to convert some of the tunnels into a subterranean hospital just in case Jerry got the better of us.

  I’m sure all of the old tunnels were carefully mapped out on the building plans along with anything else the builders needed to know courtesy of the old Coal Authority surveys. They wouldn’t have broken ground without satisfying themselves that the land was suitable for building on.

  It still didn’t seem right that they should be building houses on a place like this. Not when I knew what had been living down there. It was like building on an ancient Indian burial ground: a bad idea.

  I slowed as I drove past, but no more than that.

  I wasn’t about to stop the car and get out.

  I kept on driving until I reached the first pub on the other side of the common and I swung straight into the car park without indicating. I’d almost forgotten The Rising Sun was there, and yet I knew if you’d have asked me, I’d have immediately been able to say it was where my granddad had used to go; retired miners still looking for the camaraderie they had lost when they had left the colliery gathered inside. It was a man’s pub. It was also where I’d snuck in with Scotty and Ferret and Gazza and had my first-ever beer. I needed a drink. I knew it was somewhere I’d be left in peace and quiet to think. And even though I’d had a history with the place there was next to no chance anyone in there would recognize me now.

  I went on in, knowing I was guaranteed the first, if not the second.

  The barmaid seemed vaguely familiar. She smiled as she pulled the pint of Spitfire and put it on the well-worn counter between us. I couldn’t put a name to the face. On a different day I might have asked.

  Even if I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, it seemed like she was.

  She looked at me, having a light bulb moment. Her face lit up like maybe I was the ghost of Christmas past…

  “My God, it’s Drew, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, trying desperately to remember her name. Her voice was the clue. She might have changed, but her voice hadn’t. I only managed to bring her name back from the depths of the past a moment before she said it herself.

  “It’s Rachel,” she beamed, seeming to grow about two feet taller and fill with so much life as she spoke. “Rachel Corcoran. Well, Rachel Needham, now. You were a couple of years younger than me at school, I think.”

  “Of course,” I replied, wondering how the hell I could have forgotten the girl of my dreams? She’d been part of every teenage fantasy I’d ever had, and I’d completely forgotten her actual face. I shook my head. I couldn’t help but smile
. Back then she never would have looked twice at someone like me.

  “Needham? As in Dean?” I asked, vaguely bringing a shape to mind. Dean had been one of those guys in school who was great at everything. It didn’t matter what sport he turned his hand to, he mastered it effortlessly. I could remember him stopping for a cigarette halfway through the cross-country run and still winning. He was that kind of kid. He was also the kind of kid the girls queued up for. He could do no wrong. Obviously I hated him. Not that he even knew who I was.

  I didn’t want to pry, but it looked like she was ready to talk and given the fact that the bar was pretty much empty, I was a captive audience. Funny to think my arrival might have brightened her day.

  “Hah! You remember him then?” There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice, but I didn’t think she meant anything by it.

  “Sorry?”

  “Don’t worry, love,” she said, briefly pressing a hand on my arm as it rested on the bar. “Let’s just say he’s not what he used to be.”

  “Who is?” I said, with what I hoped was a self-deprecating smile.

  “Then let’s just say I’ve opened my eyes.” I realized what she was saying, again about half a second before she said it. “I’m better off without him.”

  Of course, I’d stopped listening. She called me “love.” God, I’m pathetic sometimes. Rachel Corcoran, the girl of my dreams had called me love about twenty years after I’d stopped dreaming about her. I felt a flush of embarrassment thinking about how I might have reacted if she’d said that in 1985. I think I might have died and gone to heaven, even if it was just a common affectionate ending, like “mate” or “fella” or “honey.” I’d almost forgotten the way some things were back home.

  She waved my money away when I tried to pay. “On the house,” she said in a low voice, glancing around to make sure no one was listening, not that there was anyone to listen. The only other customers were an old guy reading a newspaper and the dog curled up at his feet.

  “Worried about the boss?”

  “Hah!” she laughed. “I am the boss, just don’t want anyone else getting ideas. Anyway, let’s talk about you. What brings you back to this neck of the woods? We all thought you’d escaped.”

  We chatted for a while about nothing in particular, and to be honest, it felt good. We talked about people we both knew and I had completely forgotten about, just like the conversation I’d pretended to have with Scotty. We talked about things that had gone on at school all those years ago. About discos and sports days and teachers. She talked about Dean and I talked about there not being anyone in my life. She broke off every now and again as customers came and went, but I didn’t feel for a moment she was keeping me company just because I was there on my own. And I admit it, it was a hell of a lot better than sitting around brooding.

  And it was Rachel Corcoran.

  If my fifteen-year-old self could have known that one day I’d be sitting in the snug of The Rising Sun flirting with the object of his obsession…well, such are the things wildest dreams are made of.

  She went over to the jukebox and slipped a pound coin in, selecting three songs. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I wanted to think there’d be a subliminal message in them, though I’m not entirely sure what message Rolling in the Deep, Sympathy for the Devil and Up the Junction could possibly imply?

  “It’s not always this quiet,” she said, coming back to join me on this side of the bar. “When the building work was in full flow, we were usually flat out at lunchtime.”

  “I heard they’d found a body,” I said.

  She pursed her lips and nodded. I probably should have stuck with small talk. She went back around to the other side of the bar and started to polish the glasses as she took them out of the dishwasher beneath the counter. It wasn’t hard to tell I’d stamped my size eights down on a raw nerve. I figured I should change the subject, but I had the nagging feeling she was connected to the stuff that had happened back in 1985 and somehow I’d forgotten about it or deliberately put it out of my mind.

  The man with the dog folded his newspaper and drained the last of his pint, then got to his feet. The dog roused itself. As he left, I realized I was the last person in the bar.

  It was only when I glanced at the clock and saw it was mid-afternoon that I realized I’d drunk too much to get back behind the wheel for a while.

  She must have seen me looking at the clock and pulling a face as I tried to work out the units of alcohol and how quickly they’d leave my blood, because she smiled and asked, “Have you eaten?” saving me having to think about what to say next.

  I shook my head and reached for the simple laminated menu, but she stopped me before I could flip it open. “I’ve got something in the oven upstairs, and there’ll be far too much for one. Want to join me?”

  “What about the bar?” I asked, ever the one to look a gift-fantasy in the mouth.

  “Kenny can cover both,” she said. “It’s not like he’s going to be rushed off his feet.”

  I craned my neck to see where she was looking, not having realized there was a better-appointed lounge only a few steps around the far corner of the bar. Had I known I would probably have chosen to go in there, so sometimes not knowing something is best.

  12

  1985

  Mum and Dad didn’t seem to believe me any more than the police did, but it’s a lot more disturbing when it’s your own flesh and blood, believe me. I don’t blame the police for being skeptical—I would be in their place.

  But Mum and Dad?

  They’ve known me all my life.

  They ought to know me…

  Dynasty was just finishing. Bergerac was on next. Mum had made ham sandwiches and had a pack of prawn KP Skips on the plate beside them. She loved Saturday night television. Dad was in his den reading the latest Craig Thomas. He didn’t appreciate being dragged away from The Bear’s Tears. He loved his Craig Thomas but not half as much as Mum loved her Krystle and Alexis.

  They sat me down in the front room with that “we’re very disappointed in you” look on their faces.

  They were absolutely convinced this whole thing was some kind of prank, and given it had to be a prank, then I must have been in on it. I don’t know what bothered them more though; the fact that Spider had fallen from the Big Wheel because he’d been clowning about like an idiot, or the fact that I’d been brought home in a police car for all the neighbors to see.

  The television played silent images from the Miners’ Strike that had finished a few months ago. I could imagine the commentary about how villages like ours would never recover.

  To be honest, if the policewoman’s first words as they opened the door hadn’t been, “He’s not in any trouble,” who knows how they might have reacted. In Dad’s eyes, having the police call at the house was the only thing worse than me getting a girl pregnant. Not, I hasten to add, that that was likely to happen anytime this century. Girls were not interested in geeks like me. Mentioning you had worn out your keyboard playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon or that you were really excited about Lords of Midnight wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear—and not just because it sounded like a rather sad euphemism either.

  “So, what was that all about then, sunshine?” Dad asked as the policewoman left. She’d warned us they might need me to make a statement, but at the moment it looked like it was just some kind of stunt. She made me promise if I heard from Spider before they managed to find him, I’d call the station and let them know.

  “Like she said.” I shrugged, “We were on the Big Wheel and Spider climbed out of his chair. Then he fell.” I left out the bit about him kissing the girl; it would only complicate things.

  “Christ, then he’s one lucky sod. That’s a long way down. It’s amazing he managed to walk away from it,” Dad said.

  “I didn’t see him walk away, Dad. I saw him fall. Lots of people did. But no one saw him hit the ground.”

  “Well, he didn’t just disappear into thin air
, did he? They do stuff like that on the telly all the time,” Dad said, like he’d just worked it out. “That American magician…Oliver Twist,” he said.

  “David Copperfield,” I corrected him. He was in full flow though.

  “Misdirection, they call it,” he explained. “It’s all about getting people to look where you want them to look, so in this case, making them look where they think he is going to land, not where he really lands. That’s how he does it. Mirrors and stuff.”

  “There were no mirrors, Dad. The police would have seen them, wouldn’t they? There was nothing like that.”

  But he wouldn’t be dissuaded. “They probably weren’t looking for them, were they? That’s all part of the trick.”

  I worried about Dad sometimes; he had a different grip on reality compared to the rest of us. Even if he had seen the thing in the tunnel, he would have denied the evidence of his own eyes. No doubt he would have concocted a reasonable explanation that was much more rational but nowhere near the truth. He’d probably have blamed it on Doctor Who. Maybe they’d have been filming an episode down beneath the Batters and it’d been a guy dressed as a Silurian? It wouldn’t have mattered that there was no sign of a BBC film crew or Colin Baker. You could always trust Dad to deny, deny, deny.

  That night I lay in bed replaying everything that had happened over and over in my head; going into the tunnels, killing the thing that lived down there, Spider falling from the Big Wheel.

  When I finally drifted off to sleep, I was the one who was falling and there was something waiting for me at the bottom.

  13

  Present Day

  Rachel led me upstairs to a small sitting room and left me to my own devices for a moment while she checked on the oven.

  It was a nice homely place, though I suspected it still reflected the previous owner’s taste rather than her own. I didn’t quite see her as an anaglypta and nest-of-tables kind of girl in my mind.

  I settled myself into one of the two armchairs and waited for her to come back a few minutes later with two cups of good hot coffee.

 

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