Shiftling

by Savile, Steven

  “Unless you’d rather have another beer?” she asked, putting the mug down on the table beside me. I shook my head. I felt cold inside and needed something to warm me up.

  “Coffee’s good, thanks,” I replied.

  “So do have any plans for the rest of the day? Catching up with more old friends? Visiting the folks?”

  “No. I’ve spent enough time with Mum to make it into her good books. If we are together much longer, we’ll start arguing about me not coming home often enough. It’s a delicate balance,” I chuckled, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  “No old friends?”

  “I went to see Scotty Nichols this morning. That’s why I came back.” I wasn’t laughing this time. Neither was she. The mention of his name seemed to have a strange effect on Rachel. She put her mug down on the table and sank into the chair beside me. She’d aged ten years in as many seconds.

  She closed her eyes. I wondered what she was remembering. “He’s not been the same since the day that kid fell from the Big Wheel. None of us have.” She opened her eyes, but it was so obvious she was lost in her own thoughts. Finally I realized what had been bugging me.

  “You were there.” It wasn’t a question, but she thought it was.

  Rachel nodded. I saw a tear start to form in the corner of her eye. “I tried to catch hold of him,” she said. “But he slipped. I keep trying to tell myself I should have done something…That I should have tried to hold on to him…at least until we were closer to the ground, but I couldn’t.”

  She chewed on her lower lip, then raised her head and looked at me.

  And I remembered it as clearly as if it had just happened.

  I saw Spider climb from his seat and monkey-swing his way over to the two girls in the next chair. I saw it rocking beneath him, and I saw him reach over and kiss one of the girls with that big idiot grin plastered on his face. It hadn’t registered at the time—and every time afterward that I’d thought about it—I’d never imagined it could have been her. But it was. The girl had been Rachel. And she might remember having tried to hold him, but me, I remembered her recoiling from his kiss and pushing him away.

  14

  1985

  Spider didn’t appear the next day or the next.

  I didn’t expect him to, no matter what everyone else said.

  There was an appeal in the local paper and then on the regional news a few days later, but the police were still convinced this was some kind of stunt to hide the fact that he had run away from home. Though why he’d run away, well that was anyone’s guess. He had been living alone with his father for as long as I had known him. I’d never thought to ask him where his mum was. A few kids’ parents were divorced. It wasn’t the kind of thing you just asked. And besides, we just accepted each other for who we were, meaning we didn’t care about each other’s circumstances.

  It was only after Spider went missing that any of us gave his home life any real thought. Before long there was talk in the village about how his father had knocked him about. The word “abuse” was never mentioned but we all knew what the gossips meant when they got together and said maybe it was understandable he’d gone. Hell, maybe it was even a good thing.

  As the days went by, the police came and went and finally Spider’s father was taken in for questioning. It was all anyone apart from Scotty and me could think of.

  We had other things on our minds.

  “We need to go back down there,” he said. It was almost a week after that day.

  “Go back? Are you mad?”

  “I’m serious. We have to go back down into the tunnels.”

  I shook my head. “No way. Besides, we don’t have the key. We threw it away. It’ll take forever to find it again.”

  “I need to get that gun,” he said. “One day someone is going to find it and they are going to know we were down there.”

  “Even if someone went down there, even if they happened to find the gun, how would they know it was ours?”

  “Because my idiot brother carved his name on the stock. If they find it, it won’t be long before the police come knocking on the door and start asking questions. Do you want to tell people what you did down there?”

  You. Not We.

  There was no way I was going back down there again. Not in this lifetime. I was happy to help Scotty look for the key, but once it came to opening the grille, I was out of there.

  I suggested we should get Ferret, Gazza, even Nate, after all it was his air rifle, I was sure he’d want to get it back. We could divide the area up into a grid and search properly, but Scotty wouldn’t even let us so much as mention it to the others. This was our secret and as far as he was concerned it was going to stay that way.

  We looked for days before I finally gave up.

  It wasn’t there.

  No matter how much I tried to get him to leave it, he could not stop looking. It was becoming an obsession for Scotty. In the end I left him to it.

  I didn’t see him very much after that.

  15

  Present Day

  “Okay, now we’re beginning to get somewhere. When did you next see Scott after visiting him in the hospital?”

  “What is this? Guantanamo?”

  The questioning was never ending.

  “Do I need a solicitor?”

  “Do you?” The detective asked, mirroring the question back at me. They would keep going with their asinine questions until I gave them the answers they wanted to hear. That wasn’t the truth. It was a version of events that would fit their framework. It was like assembling the pieces of a puzzle with the most important ones missing. They were putting square pegs into round theories, to torture a metaphor.

  Of course, if they’d just had the decency to tell me what they wanted to hear, maybe I could help them out. But no, that would have been too easy. Instead they just kept asking me variants of the same questions over and over again. It didn’t help that they were questions that didn’t make sense to me.

  “I haven’t seen him since.” The detective’s disbelief wasn’t exactly disguised. I would have loved to play poker with the guy. “It was a one-shot deal. I went to the hospital, we talked about old times for a while, and then I left. That’s it.”

  “Well whatever you talked about had a dramatic change on him.”

  “I have that effect on people,” I said. It wasn’t the best time to be making jokes. “Maybe he just needed to see a friendly face. It can’t be easy. You know.”

  “A friendly face? You said you hadn’t seen him for what, the best part of thirty years? That hardly makes you a friendly face. Frankly, I’m surprised he even recognized you.”

  “Surely this is the kind of thing you’d be better off asking him?”

  “Oh, believe me, Drew, we would if we could. But an hour after your visit your friend Scott got up and walked out. No one has seen him since.”

  “What do you mean he walked out?”

  “It’s a hospital not a prison. Mr. Nichols hadn’t been Sectioned under the Mental Health Act, he was there under his own free will. He had been quite happy to go in and be looked after. He might well have withdrawn from contact with others, preferring not to engage, but according to the nursing staff he was well aware what was going on around him. You changed all that.”

  “So he just got dressed and walked out?”

  “He didn’t even get dressed. He was wearing pajamas, a dressing gown and a pair of slippers. The nursing staff thought he’d just gone out onto the patio to get a little fresh air. A lot of the residents do that, apparently. They never go very far because they want to be there. But it seems that Mr. Nichols had other ideas. That’s why you’re here, Drew. I want to know what those ideas were. You were the last person to talk to him, and right after you do, he walks out. I’m not a big believer in coincidences. So how about we cut the crap and you tell me exactly what you talked about?”

  “I’ve already told you, we talked about nothing in particular. B
ut surely it can’t be that hard to find someone walking the streets in a dressing gown? It’s not a big place. Someone must have seen him.”

  “So, let me just be clear on this, you’re saying you’ve not seen him since the moment you drove away from the hospital?”

  “That’s right.”

  There was a pause. The detective looked at me. His expression didn’t change in the slightest. I could have counted the pores one by one, or played join-the-dots, his complexion was that bad. He was waiting for me to say something else. To change my statement, convinced he had caught me in a lie.

  “Last chance to be straight with me, Drew.”

  “He was standing at the window when I left. That’s it. I haven’t seen him since. I’m telling you the truth.”

  The detective inclined his head ever so slightly. “And you’ve not been in touch with the hospital to see how he was? Not been back to see him again?”

  “Jesus Christ, seriously? Why would I? We’re not friends now. And you’ve already he said he wasn’t there, so even if I had been back, I wouldn’t have seen him, would I?”

  Now he smiled. Slow. Cunning. I didn’t like that smile. “But you didn’t know that, did you? You’ve already told me you didn’t know he’d left, so you must have assumed he was still there?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened. If I have it right, you came back for a rare visit to see someone you haven’t seen for thirty years, spent twenty minutes with him and that’s it? I’m just saying that in your place I would have wanted to see him again before I left. Twenty minutes doesn’t seem like enough.”

  “I came back because Mum asked me to. She said he had been asking for me. She thought it would be good for me to come back to see him.”

  “Good for who? Him? You? Both?”

  “For Scotty.”

  “So it wasn’t your idea then?”

  “No.”

  “If she hadn’t asked you to come, you wouldn’t have bothered?”

  “We’re going in bloody circles. If she hadn’t told me he was in there asking for me, how would I even have known he wanted to see me?”

  “An old-fashioned invention called the telephone, maybe?”

  “Then check my phone records if you don’t believe me.”

  “A letter.”

  “Ask my postman.”

  “Email.”

  “Check with my ISP. I’m not hiding anything from you. You asked me, and I’ve told you.”

  It was driving me nuts. I was telling them the truth, but they still didn’t believe me.

  Right at the outset I had said I hadn’t wanted a solicitor. I mean, why should I need one? I’d done nothing wrong. I wasn’t even “helping them with their inquiries.” This was all voluntary. The only thing I had done was visit an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time. It wasn’t my fault we had lost touch. It wasn’t my fault we had said everything that had needed to be said in those twenty minutes when I’d met him in the hospital. That was just it. But it was like that damned “methinks the lady doth protest too much” the more I tried to make them believe nothing had happened, the more suspicious they became.

  “Look, like it or not there’s no law that says I owed him any more than those twenty minutes. There’s no ordinance that says I had to spend more time with him just because he was ill. I’d done duty. I’d paid him a visit for old time’s sake. That’s it. I’ve told you everything there is to tell. It’s not very exciting, I know, but sometimes the truth is boring. Now, I think we’re done here. I would like to leave now.”

  “Really? But I thought you wanted to help us, Drew?”

  “And I have. I’ve told you everything I know. There’s nothing else I can do to help.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Okay, one last question, and then we’re done: where did you go after you left the hospital?”

  I looked at him. I hadn’t expected that. What did Rachel have to do with anything? He noticed my hesitation.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a simple enough question: where did you go after you left the hospital? It would be useful for us to know where you went. It helps us build a picture of both yours and Mr. Nichols’s movements. You might have seen something. And if you didn’t, then it might well help direct our search in a different direction. Humor me.”

  “Scotty was still at the hospital when I drove away,” I said. “You said he left an hour after me. I could have been nearly seventy miles away by then without breaking any laws. There’s no way he would have been able to catch me up if he was just wearing his slippers.”

  That smile again. “It sounds like you have something to hide. Do you have something to hide, Drew?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then, like I said, humor me.”

  “I don’t know…I just drove around for a while. It was all a bit of a shock seeing Scotty like that.”

  “Talk us through it. Where did you go?”

  I took a deep breath and leaned back in my chair. There was no point in keeping anything from them—for a start there were enough speed cameras to track my progress around the town—even if they wanted to know what I had been doing for every minute of that day.

  I had nothing to hide.

  16

  Present Day

  It’s funny how life is sometimes.

  I woke in a strange bed, my head full of dreams that seemed to make sense of everything in the way that only dreams can. There were things I’d forgotten that had found their way back to the front of my mind. There were memories of events I’d thought were unconnected that started to fall into place, and they were anything but.

  The things Scotty had told me had given me what I needed to find the answer and I knew without a doubt where to find it: in the house on the edge of the common. Old Man Harrison’s place. The house Scotty had been living in for the last few years.

  My head throbbed with the deep groan of a hangover somewhere in the background. My tongue felt too large for my mouth. I needed a glass of water and something to dull the pain. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been drunk.

  I stared at the ceiling, expecting to see the old-fashioned shade of my old room, but realized I wasn’t at Mum’s.

  The mattress shifted slightly.

  I remembered where I was.

  An afternoon of chatting while we ate and an evening with a bottle of wine in the sitting room above the pub while Rachel slipped in and out to make sure everything was okay downstairs had led almost inevitably to her bed. But even then, she’d insisted on me calling Mum to let her know I had drunk too much and was staying with a friend, before leading me through by the hand to her bedroom.

  I’m not the most experienced guy. I tend to fall in love and stay in love. A serial monogamist. I’d read something about the past being a dangerous place because it was so seductive, so perfect in our memories, that the danger was you’d want to get lost in it. I watched Rachel slip the shoulder of her dress down, and still didn’t understand just how seductive it really was. This was the woman I’d been so tongued-tied in the presence of when we were fifteen the best I could do was imagine her body beneath her school uniform and how it would feel to hold her—not that I’d ever held a girl, not like that, not back then. Aunts and mums and cousins don’t count.

  The second shoulder strap came off, and then she stood before me in her bra and skirt, and she was just a woman wanting to be told she was worth waiting for. I took my time. I looked at her. I wanted to remember this. There were four people in that room. The Rachel and me of today and the Rachel and me of twenty-five years ago, their ghosts so young, so frightened, so full of hope where we were older and bruised by life, divorced, carrying physical baggage and mental baggage. But for a moment standing there looking at her I didn’t see the cellulite and extra pounds, I saw the girl she must have been, and it was b
reathtaking.

  “We should listen to something,” she said, nervous.

  I nodded.

  She’d got a little speaker arrangement on the bedside table with an iPod plugged in. Still half-undressed she fumbled with the playlists, turning her back to me, and a moment later a song came on I hadn’t heard in forever. Jim Kerr implored me not to forget about him. How could I? The song was a staple of every school disco and slow dance of my youth.

  Rachel turned back to face me, and she looked beautiful and frightened, like she expected me to push her away.

  I held out my hand to her, then brought her close. I could feel her body up against mine, every curve. I could hardly think straight. I so desperately wanted everything to be perfect. Her breath hitched in her throat as I tangled my fingers in her hair.

  “There’s so much I wanted to say to you back then that I never could,” I told her. “I didn’t know how to.”

  “So tell me now,” Rachel told me.

  “You were always so perfect, so beautiful, so together.”

  She laughed at that. “Oh, how little you know. I always felt so alone back then, like I didn’t quite fit in my own skin. Like I didn’t belong here. I guess we all do, but we’re all too busy worrying about ourselves to realize everyone’s going through it.”

  “You carved your name on my heart, Rache. It’s hard to explain. There’s no way to legislate how much of an impact someone has on our souls, but I don’t think I could have become the man I am without you, even if there was no you and me…if that makes sense? I used to write you letters,” I admitted. “I’d never send them, I’d just pour my heart out into them.” I hadn’t thought about those letters in twenty-five years. To be honest, I’d put them out of my mind because they were a bit obsessive-stalkerish. “I’d copy out song lyrics from Aztec Camera or Love & Money or Lloyd Cole or Martin Stephenson and the Daintees and pretend they were my words, because these guys seemed to know so much about life and love and women and were so much wiser than I ever could be. I’d write these great long missives about nothing that would have scared you off if I’d ever posted them.”