Black Wood

by Derek Flynn

  And then, Charlie was on top of him, pummelling Dale’s face with his fists. I’d never seen anyone give out that kind of punishment before, or anyone take that much of a beating. At this stage a crowd had gathered around, but unlike the usual crowd – which is normally split between those that try to stop the fight and those that cheer it on – this crowd was neither. Everyone was just rooted to the spot, watching in appalled silence, as Charlie’s arm moved with machine-like precision. Each time his fist made contact, there was a dull, slapping sound; not the crack you hear in the movies, more like a piece of meat being thrown down on a wooden board.

  I don’t know how many times he hit him. It seemed like a hundred; it might have been ten. Suddenly, with one of the punches, there was a cracking sound, so loud it echoed down the hallway. Everyone let out involuntary gasps. If they didn’t know it was his jaw that had snapped, they certainly knew that something wasn’t right.

  And that’s when it happened.

  Samantha pushed forward through the crowd. I don’t know if she’d been there long or if she’d just arrived, but suddenly she was pushing her way through, alternating between screaming out Dale’s name and screaming out Charlie’s.

  I didn’t even know she knew his name.

  Charlie had stopped punching him; now his hands were in a stranglehold around Dale’s throat. Samantha threw herself at Charlie, screaming at him to stop. Charlie must have been so focused on Dale that he never even heard her, because when she collided with him, the force of it caught him off-guard and he tumbled sideways off of Dale.

  Samantha was on her knees, Charlie on his back, and for a moment they were completely still, just staring at each other. Then, Charlie leaned over and punched her in the face. The gasps that went through the onlookers this time were even more pronounced than when Dale’s jaw gave out.

  The Freak had just punched Ms. Popular.

  Why? Because she’d tried to stop him bludgeoning her boyfriend to death? Or was it just that he was simply crazy? For a second, I wondered if he was going to do the same thing to Samantha as he’d done to Dale. Or what about the crowd who had gathered? Was he going to turn on them? Did he have a gun? Was this going to be a school massacre?

  Charlie stood up and everyone took a step back. But there was no gun. He simply got up and walked away. Samantha was still on her knees, her hand touching the spot on her face where he’d punched her. She watched Charlie walk away for a moment and then turned back to Dale, who was whimpering quietly on the ground behind her. When she turned him to face her, the crowd let out another gasp. His face looked like mashed pulp. There was blood everywhere and lumps and cuts all over. He looked at Samantha, and through bruised and swollen lips, mumbled, “My face ...” I have to say, as much as I disliked him, I felt sorry for the poor guy.

  “It’s okay,” Samantha said quietly. “It’s going to be okay.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I’ve always been fascinated by memory. How we remember things and why we remember things the way we do. Particularly sense memory – the association of memory with the everyday objects we have around us. We move through our lives, and we discard certain things and keep other things. We discard clothes and furniture when we move from one place to another, but we keep things like books or photographs. And rereading a book or looking at a photograph can give you a sense of a certain time, but what gives even more of a sense sometimes is the everyday items. Sometimes you can touch something or look at something and it can give you a sense of a time – so vivid and real – that it’s almost like you’re living it again.

  Something very similar happens with Samantha on our second meeting. We’re having lunch in “Nude”, the new hot spot in Manhattan. It took me three days on the phone to get us a reservation. I don’t tell Samantha that, of course. I make sure to

  get there before her, in case there’s any problem with the reservation. When she arrives, I see her look around the room. She looks suitably impressed. I act painfully normal.

  As ever, she looks stunning. There’s a certain air that beautiful women have. I don’t claim to be a lothario, but I’ve known my fair amount of women. Those with a natural beauty have this nonchalance about them. Now, that’s not to say that they’re necessarily all confident. Some of them are wracked with doubts and uncertainties. And some of that may stem from their looks as well. But nine times out of ten that doesn’t radiate outwards. What does is the confidence.

  After we’re seated, I say, “I can recommend the swordfish,” even though I’ve never been there before. I think I read something about it in the New Yorker.

  “I’m allergic to fish.”

  “Really? I never knew that.”

  She gives me a look, as if to say, Why would you?

  “Speaking of fish, do you remember that day we were down at the river and you fell in?”

  “No. I don’t.” She sounds like she doesn’t care or want to remember. “I think my mind managed to block out a lot of that time. Thank God. Most of my teenage years.”

  “What are you talking about? You had the perfect teenage years.”

  “Being perfect doesn’t necessarily make for a perfect life.” She says it without a hint of irony.

  She reaches over for the water and her hand rubs against mine. I feel the warmth of her skin and I’m suddenly struck by the most vivid memory of her. I’m in her bedroom, sitting on her

  bed. I can smell the perfume from the bottles on her dressing-table.

  And it’s amazing because there’s probably a million tiny memories I’ve forgotten about Concord, and a million other things that only photographs can remind me of, but the touch of her hand against mine can bring back – not just an image – but such a sense of being there.

  “But ... you really don’t remember?” I say. I know it sounds a bit needy, but I can’t believe she’s forgotten all these things.

  “No.”

  She feigns disinterest. She was always good at that. It was her defence mechanism, so she didn’t have to interact with others. But I know her better than that now. I knew some of that was certainly true with Samantha. Yes, she radiated this nonchalant beauty more than anyone I’d ever seen. And I knew she was confident, there was no denying that. But I’d seen something else in there too. That summer in the Black Wood. A yearning for something.

  “So, tell me more about yourself,” I say.

  She looks at me. “Why?”

  “I ... ah ... I think it might be helpful for what we’re trying to do here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to build up a picture of who you are now. Why someone would want to do this to you.”

  “It’s not just me. It’s us.”

  I love it when she says “us”.

  “I know that,” I say, “but he didn’t contact me. He contacted you. So why didn’t he contact me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. We must presume he’s got something against you. Not both of us. That’s why my initial thought was Charlie.”

  “Because he’s got something against me?”

  “Well, you didn’t leave it on great terms.”

  “That was twenty years ago.”

  “He was notoriously distrustful. He could hold a grudge.”

  She brushes something from the table, as if dismissing the conversation. “For the last time,” she says, “it’s not Charlie. You think I wouldn’t know his voice? Even twenty years later?”

  Something strikes me when she says that. Her mask slips for a second and I remember just how close they were. As bizarre as it seems, there was a connection. I can hear it in her voice.

  “Look, I’m a writer,” I say. “I’m just trying to build up the backstory. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. After you left Concord, what did you do?”

  “I was an actress for a while.”

  “Yes, I think I saw you in a movie once. On TV.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly set Hollyw
ood alight.”

  “I’m sure you were great.”

  “There’s no shortage of good-looking girls to play damsels in distress. It’s funny. In Concord, you’re the big fish in a little pond. But then, you go somewhere like Hollywood and you realise just how little the pond is. Anyway, that’s where I met my first husband.”

  First?

  “He was an actor. I don’t know what I was thinking marrying him. He was so fucking earnest. He didn’t believe in compromising his principles. He believed he had to give everything to his art. Which meant I had to earn enough for both of us, while he sat around on the couch all day watching Behind the Actor’s Studio. It didn’t last long. After that, I left LA. Met my second husband. He’s in real estate. A much more reliable profession. So, I could afford to stay at home and tend to my garden.”

  “You garden?”

  She almost smiles. “No. I was being sarcastic.”

  “Oh. So, how’s your husband doing?”

  “We’re divorced.”

  My stomach curls a little when she says it.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  “Don’t worry ... I’m not. But, yes, he was in real estate. And there was a settlement, and that’s why I can afford to be between things at the moment.” She leans in closer to me, and my heart skips a little. “Now, this catching up is all very fascinating, but we have more important things to discuss. Like, what the fuck are we going to do?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I think we need to find out what he wants.”

  She screws her face up slightly in a look of disdain. “What does any blackmailer want?”

  “Well, normally blackmailers look for money, right? They ring you up and say, ‘I know what you did and unless you give me money, I’m gonna tell everyone.’ But this person hasn’t done that. We need to figure out if it’s a blackmailer and if so, what they want.”

  “I’m not paying money.”

  “We’re not going to pay money. But we need to flush him out, find out who he is. At the moment, we know nothing about him. He’s got the upper hand. We need to level the playing field a bit.”

  “You sound like you’ve done this before.”

  “I have. In my head.”

  “Have you ever written a book about a blackmailer?”

  “No.”

  “So, you really don’t know what you’re talking about then, do you?” Her voice is dripping with sarcasm.

  “Samantha, you came to me.”

  “I know. So, what do we do?”

  “We wait.”

  “I’m tired of waiting.”

  “Look, either he’s going to get back to you and look for money or you’ll never hear from him again. But it’s going to have to happen soon. You won’t have long to wait.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After I saw Samantha and Dale that day in the Black Wood, I had what could be called my ‘Eureka’ moment. I realised how easy it would be to watch – or to observe – people more. Up to that point, I had always been on the outside. I was born an only child, and I grew up an only adolescent. Don’t get me wrong; in one way, I don’t regret it. It made me who I am. That’s what a writer needs. A writer must be solitary, he must be alone with his own thoughts. But, of course, as a teenager, you think differently. The only people I knew growing up were other guys like me, and – because of this – I was never privy to what went on in other people’s lives. I never got to see other people’s houses or bedrooms or got to see what went on behind the school, or at the mall. The friends I had were all the same as me; their houses and bedrooms were the same as mine. I didn’t know any of the popular people, and that was what I wanted. When I say I wanted to know them, I mean more than be an acquaintance of theirs, I mean really know them. I wanted to know what went on in their heads, in their lives. What went on at the family dinner table? What did the likes of Dale talk to his father about?

  Or, what about Samantha? Did she have secrets? What kind? What did she do at night in her room? What did she talk to her friends about on the phone, sitting on her bed in her pyjamas? What colour were they? What kind of posters did she have on her wall? These were things I’d always wanted to know and now, I realised, perhaps I could. All I had to do was observe, just like that day in the Black Wood. It wasn’t spying; it was observing. Observe close enough and you could see things that people didn’t want you to see and hear things that people didn’t want you to know.

  I’d been reading a book on sociology – tribes, customs, that kind of thing – and I was fascinated by it. I absolutely believed you could apply those same principles to the High School environment. What’s more, I believed that I was the one who could do it. I would be like an anthropologist, observing and recording the characteristics of this sub-species of humanity: the High School student. It seemed so obvious to me, I couldn’t understand why no one had done it before. All the rituals were the same as those in primitive cultures: the mating rituals, the defence of territory, the fighting over the female, the survival of the fittest. All of these things existed in High School, and I would be the one to observe and document it.

  And that was where Charlie came in.

  The one thing that Charlie had – that I envied more than anything else about him – was secrets. Nobody knew where he came from, who his family were. After the fight with Dale, people started to look differently at Charlie. He was now more than just a weirdo, he was a curiosity. Attention shifted from what his parents might have done, to what he might have done. What kind of dark secrets were there in his past? What he’d done to Dale – had he done that to someone else before? What else had he done? Where did he go every day when he left school? Did he go home to some kind of dungeon where all kinds of debauchery took place? What kind of dark deeds had been committed there?

  The minds of the John Shade High seniors started to work overtime. Rumours sprang up. They said that his father had murdered, chopped up and buried his mother, and that Charlie had watched. He was eventually found out and got the death penalty. Or that his mother had shot her abusive husband and then turned the gun on herself. Or that the father had left, and the mother had gone insane and was in an asylum somewhere.

  All my life growing up, I wanted secrets. I believed – and I think not erroneously – that all good writers should have secrets. There must be something there for the biographer to uncover. An illicit love affair, a bastard offspring, a secret drug habit. These are the things that make us love writers and make us want to read their books. Secrets. But I never had any. My life was the proverbial open book. Everyone knew who I was, everyone knew all the girls I hadn’t dated, all the debauched parties I’d never been invited to, all the humiliating bullying I’d received. I always thought it would be a cool thing to have secrets, like Charlie. I didn’t realise what mind-eating bastards they are, until I got some of my own. They burrow their way right to the centre of you, and then, eat their way from the inside-out. But they never do quite get out. “All men have secrets and here is mine.” So said Morrissey, that strangely coiffed Englishman from the Eighties. It’s what I wanted to say so many times. Get them out. But, of course, I never have.

  So, I started to observe Charlie. It wasn’t pre-planned or anything like that. I’d still been mulling over my idea about observing people – and figuring out the logistics of it – when I saw Charlie in town one day. I decided that this was my opportunity. It was too good to pass up – he’d essentially landed in my lap. I would have to observe him.

  He made his way out of town across the river. I wondered why he was walking; he normally rode an old beat-up motorcycle. Maybe it was in the shop getting fixed. I followed him at a safe distance. I figured, even if he saw me, he would hardly think that I was following him. I had no idea where Charlie lived. As far as I could tell, nobody did. I mean, I’m sure the principal or those involved in administration probably had an address on file, or a number to contact in case of emergency, but the students wouldn’t be privy to that kind of inf
ormation. So I had no idea where I was going to end up as we headed further and further out of town.

  But it didn’t take me long to figure out where he was headed: Gastown. They called it a town – it was little more than a few houses, two rundown apartment blocks, and a couple of dive bars. It was where a town went to die. Every town has one. Back in the early 1900s, Concord had been one town. But then, little by little, the undesirables started to head across the river. They called it Gastown because for a number of years after Concord had gotten electricity, they were still lighting lamps. In the 50s, the local town council tried to do something. They knocked the ramshackle old huts and built two state-of-the-art apartment blocks. Within ten years, they were known as the Gastown Projects. Now, nobody bothered trying to do anything in Gastown anymore. How appropriate that that was where Charlie lived.

  As we approached it, I felt my heart race and my palms sweating. I’d only ever seen Gastown through the safety of a windscreen before. But I could see Charlie up ahead striding purposefully though the streets as though it were any other neighbourhood.

  It was like a ghost town, or a city after somebody dropped the bomb. It was strangely quiet, and the buildings were rundown and decrepit-looking. I saw Charlie walk up the steps of a shabby-looking apartment block, and in through the front door. After a few minutes, I went up to the front door, but there were no names on any of the buzzers. I had no idea what apartment he’d gone into. After coming all this way, I figured I should at least find out his apartment number, just in case. I couldn’t think of what to do. I walked to the end of the block, and when I got to the corner, I looked down the alleyway at the fire escape. For a second, I thought it was too crazy. Maybe I was taking the whole thing too far. Cultural anthropology was one thing, but I wasn’t some kind of detective. But then, I thought, how else was I going to observe? Obviously, it wasn’t going to be as simple as just following people and watching them from a distance. I would probably have to get into some awkward places to be able to observe them in their own habitats, as it were.