‘The tower,’ Martin said. ‘It was cool inside, wonderfully cool, and restful.’
‘Wasn’t it locked up?’
‘No, I told you. There was a doorway but no door.
I went straight in. And inside the place was smelly, really stank, like empty places often do, don’t they, as if people have used them for lavatories. But it was quite clean, no rubbish or anything. A round-shaped room with a bare earth floor. And one of the little pointed windows with no glass in it. And a stone stairway that started just inside the door and curled up round the wall to a floor above. No banister, just the stone stairs in the wall.’
‘No sign of life ?’
‘Nothing. Deserted. And very cool. Really nice after the heat. Well, anyway, I thought it must have a terrific view from the top, so I climbed the stairs. Thirty-two. Counted them. Eighteen to the second floor, and fourteen to the top. The first floor was just old wooden boards. A few bird droppings but nothing else.’
‘And safe. Not rotten or anything?’
‘No. I wouldn’t have gone on if it hadn’t been safe, would I? I’m not that stupid, whatever Dad thinks.’
‘It’s just his manner. So was there a good view?’
‘Not really. After the field there’s trees in the way in most directions. But it was nice. There’s a parapet so you can’t fall off. And it was just as cool up there as inside. I’d have stayed longer, but I knew if I didn’t get home in reasonable time, Dad would start getting at me for taking so long to do a simple route. So I came down, paced the distance back to the lane, marked the position on the map, and came back.’
Mrs. Phelps took a deep breath. ‘What a story!’
Martin glared at her. ‘It is not a story. It’s what happened.’
His mother leaned to him and hugged his face to hers. ‘Yes, my love, I know,’ she said. ‘I mean, what a strange thing to find a tower like that and it not be on the map.’
Martin pulled free. ‘Don’t you start!’
Mrs. Phelps leaned back on her hands. ‘Did you tell your father all this ?’
Martin grimaced in disdain.
‘No,’ his mother said. ‘Best not to, I suppose.’
‘He wouldn’t believe me about the tower being there. So you know what he’d say about the rest. Rubbish, he’d say, pure imagination.’
Mrs. Phelps thought for a while then stood up and adjusted her bikini. ‘Look, why don’t I slip into something respectable and you can show me your tower? That’ll settle matters.’
Martin shook his head.
‘Why not? If I’ve seen it he can’t go on saying it isn’t there.’
‘But that’ll only make it worse. He’ll get angry and say we ganged up against him, that I got you to take my side, that I can’t stand on my own feet.’
Impasse.
After thinking for a moment Mrs. Phelps said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You go on your own, and double-check the position of the tower. After all, you just might have made a mistake. Then come back and tell me. After supper this evening, I’ll suggest we take a walk, and I’ll make sure we go along Tinkley Lane past the tower. That way, we’ll all see it together and your father won’t be able to say you’re wrong. How about that?’
Martin considered.
‘OK,’ he said, cheering up. ‘But I know it’s where I said it was.’
‘’Cause it is, my love. But make sure. And while you’re gone I’ll fix supper so that everything’s ready when your father gets back.’
Martin pulled on his shirt, collected his map from the camper, folded it so he could hold it easily and see the area round the tower, gave his mother a tentative hug, and set off across the field.
Mrs. Phelps watched her son out of sight before going inside, pulling on a pair of jeans and an old shirt of her husband’s, and slipping her feet into her sandals.
Martin sauntered down the lane, stifled by the heat cocooned between the high, dense hedgerows. Wasps and flies whirred past his head. A yellowhammer pink-pinked behind him. Straight above, crawling across the dazzling blue, a speck of airplane spun its white spider thread.
His shirt clung uncomfortably to his oiled body. He glanced up the lane and down, and, seeing no one, tugged the shirt off and used it as a fly-whisk as he walked along. Usually he kept covered, too embarrassed by his scrawny build to show himself in public. Boys at school called him Needle.
Even without his shirt he was sweating by the time he reached the gateless opening in the hedge that led to the tower. And sure enough, there it was, looking just as it had in the morning. This time he noticed at once how coldly it stood and clearly outlined while all around grass and flowers and trees and rocks and even the pond at the foot of the tower shimmered in the haze. And while he looked, just as that morning, he felt a nerve-tingling strangeness. He tried to work out what the strangeness was and decided it was like knowing something was going to happen to you but not quite knowing what.
There must, Martin thought, be some ordinary explanation. His father would probably know what it was, and would tell him, if only he would stop insisting that the tower wasn’t there, and come and see for himself while the heat haze was still rising. By this evening, when his mother tricked his father into seeing the tower, the haze would have vanished.
As he checked its position on his map, Martin remembered the coolness and how much he had wanted to stay in the tower. Now there was nothing to hurry back to the camper for. He could stay and enjoy himself. He might even make a den, a secret place where he could come and be by himself during the rest of the week. He could properly explore the building. There was bound to be something interesting if he looked carefully enough. There was also the pond. There might be fish to be caught. And if he wanted to sunbathe, the tower roof was a good place. No one could see him lying behind the parapet, but he would be able to spy anyone approaching across the field. He might even go home after the holiday with a useful tan.
He was about to enter the field when he heard a shout. A cry, in fact, rather than a yell. A girl’s voice, high-pitched and desperate. Coming from the direction of the tower.
Shading his eyes with a hand, he searched the tower but could see no one.
The cry came again.
And suddenly he knew what caused the strangeness he felt.
It was as if he had been waiting for this cry, that it had reached him as a sensation long before he heard it as a sound in his ears.
As he stared with unblinking eyes, he saw a girl’s head, then her body appear above the parapet till she was revealed to her waist. She was about fifteen or sixteen and wearing a sleeveless white summer-loose dress. But from this distance it was difficult to see her features clearly, which anyway were partly hidden by long dark hair that fell around her face and shoulders.
She grasped the wall of the parapet with one hand. The other she raised above her head and waved urgently at Martin.
At first he thought she was only excited, perhaps pretending to be frightened by the height. But then she cried out again in that high-pitched urgent voice.
She seemed to be shouting, ‘Come back, come back!’ and waving him towards her.
But that could not be. He had never seen her before.
Puzzled, Martin did not move, except to raise his own hand and wave back in a polite reflex action.
Still the girl waved and cried, ‘Come back, come back!’
She’s mistaken me for someone else, Martin thought. But even as he thought this, smoke began to drift up from the tower behind the girl, first only a thin blue smudge in the air, which quickly became a thicker feathering, and then, after a belching puff, a dense, curling ribbon that streamed straight up into the sky, grey-white against the deep blue.
As the smoke thickened, the girl’s cries became more panic-stricken, her hand-waving more frantic.
Which at last brought Martin to life again.
Dropping his shirt and map, he sprinted towards the tower.
Mrs. Phelps gave her son a few
minutes’ start before setting off after him. But she got no farther than the gate when she met her husband striding down the lane towards her. She knew at once that he was excited from the jaunty way he was windmilling his stick.
‘You’ll never guess,’ he said as he approached.
‘What?’ Mrs. Phelps grinned, expecting some story about her husband finding an almost extinct flower or spotting a rare bird.
‘Just been talking to an old farmer. Asked him if he knew of a stone tower anywhere in the district.’ He paused, enjoying the drama.
‘And?’
‘At first he said no. Nothing of that sort round here, sir!’ Mr. Phelps, who prided himself on his talent for mimicry, imitated the farmer’s accent. ‘Then he remembered. Ah, wait a minute, sir, he says, yes there were one. But that were years back, sir, when I were a boy, like.’
Mrs. Phelps caught at her breath.
Her husband went on, unaware. ‘I quizzed him—without letting on about Martin, of course. Apparently, there used to be an old teasel tower where the pond is just down the lane from here. You know the sort. You always say they look as if they’re straight out of a fairy tale. Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and all that rubbish. And I came across a teasel growing wild this morning when I was checking on Martin’s nonexistent tower. Rather like a tall thistle, with a large very prickly head. Well, it was the heads they dried in those towers and then used them for raising the nap on cloth. Fascinating process.’
‘Yes, darling, but—?’
‘They cut the dried heads in two and attached them to a cylinder which revolved against the cloth so that the prickles snagged against the fabric just sufficiently to scuff the surface.’ Mr. Phelps chuckled. ‘Teasing it, you might say.’
‘Don—’
‘And do you know, Mary, they still haven’t been able to invent a machine that can do the job better. Isn’t that extraordinary!’
‘Don, the tower—what did the old man tell you?’
‘I’m just coming to that. According to the old chap, one day during a long hot summer like this, the tower burned to the ground.’
‘Burned—?’Mrs. Phelps flinched.
‘Hang on, that isn’t all. A young girl is supposed to have died in the blaze. The old chap told a marvellous tale about how she was meeting her boyfriend there in secret and somehow the fire started, no one ever found out how, and the girl got trapped.’
‘Don, listen—’
‘The boyfriend ran off, scared he’d be caught with the girl, I expect. You know how strict they were in those days about that sort of thing, and quite right too. The wretched boy deserted her, poor lass, and she died in the flames. Young love betrayed by cowardice.’
‘He’s gone there,’ Mrs. Phelps said bleakly.
‘A nice yarn but all nonsense, of course. However, it does look as if there might have been a tower somewhere near where Martin thought he saw one. Isn’t that odd!’
Mrs. Phelps turned away and set off at a jog down the lane.
‘Hang on, Mary,’ Mr. Phelps called after her. ‘Haven’t finished yet.’
‘Got to find him,’ his wife called back.
‘But wait!’ Mr. Phelps waved his stick. ‘I want Martin to take us to where he thought he saw the tower.’
Without turning, Mrs. Phelps shouted back, her voice carrying her panic, ‘He’s gone there already!’
Hearing at last what his wife was saying, Mr. Phelps sprinted after her, ungainly in his walking boots.
‘Gone there?’ he called as he ran.
‘To check. We must catch him.’
‘Steady! Wait!’
By the time Mr. Phelps reached his wife he was almost speechless from lack of breath. He seized her arm and pulled her to a stop.
‘Mary, you’re being hysterical. What is all this?’
‘Can’t you see?’ Mrs. Phelps panted. ‘Martin wasn’t wrong.
‘Having us on!’
‘No! There! To him, it was there!’
‘Rubbish!’ Mr. Phelps leaned forward, both hands on his stick, recovering his breath. ‘He’d found out. Only pretending he’d seen it. Some kind of joke.’
’No, no, no!’ Mrs. Phelps was near to tears with desperation.
Her husband glared at her. ‘Pull yourself together, Mary, for heaven’s sake!’
As if she had been slapped, his wife’s tears suddenly gave way to anger. She glared fiercely back at her husband.
‘Don’t you speak to me like that, Don! Don’t you dare condescend to me! You think you know everything. To you the world is just one big museum of plain straightforward facts. Well, let me tell you, you don’t know everything. There’s more to this world than your boring facts! And for once I don’t care what you think. I believe Martin saw that tower. He’s gone back there. And I’m going after him. I’m afraid what might happen if he sees it again. Call that a mother’s intuition. Call it what you like. But I feel it. That’s all I know. Now, are you coming or aren’t you?’
Mr. Phelps stood open-mouthed and rigid with astonishment at his wife’s outburst.
By the time Martin reached the tower, smoke was billowing from every window and crevice.
Instinctively bending almost double, he ran inside.
The force of the air being sucked in through the doorway pressed against his bare back like a firm hand pushing him on.
At once he found himself engulfed in blinding, choking fumes, could hear the roar of flames from across the room, could feel their blistering heat on his skin.
But still from above came the girl’s panic-stricken cries.
Without thought or care, he threw himself to the left and onto the stairs. He pounded up them, stumbling, coughing. Hardly able to see for smoke, he kept his left hand pressed against the wall for fear of veering to the edge of the stairs and falling into the furnace on the floor below, from where flames were already leaping high enough to lick the exposed floorboards of the room above. He held his right arm against his face, trying to protect it from the scorching blaze.
On the second floor flames were already eating at the boards. The dry wood was crackling; small explosions were sending showers of sparks cascading across the room. And, mingled with the suffocating fumes, the stench of burning flesh was so strong that Martin retched as he staggered on hands and feet now up the second flight of stairs. By the time he reached the trapdoor to the roof he was choking for breath, his smoke-filled eyes were streaming with tears and all down his right side he felt as if his skin were being peeled from him like paint being stripped by a blowtorch.
The tower had become one giant, roaring chimney.
Martin hauled himself up into the air, gulping for breath. Once on the roof he clung for a moment to the parapet, unable to move till he recovered his strength. But he knew there was no time to spare.
Through tear-blurred eyes and the fog of smoke swirling about him, he looked round for the girl and saw her only an arm’s length away still waving and crying desperately in the direction of the road.
‘Here!’ he tried to shout. ‘I’m here!’
But the words clogged in his parched throat.
So he reached out to take her by the shoulders and turn her to him.
‘Surely we’re nearly there!’ Mrs. Phelps panted.
Clumping along beside her, Mr. Phelps, breathless too and sweating, said, ‘That beech tree. Just there.’
Seconds later Mrs. Phelps spotted her son’s shirt and map lying in the road.
‘Don!’ she cried, rushing to pick them up. ‘They’re Martin’s!’
She turned and saw the gap in the hedge, and dashed towards it. But her husband, arriving at the same instant, pushed her aside and ran ahead into the field, causing Mrs. Phelps to fall to her knees.
‘Oh, God!’ she pleaded, and, finding her feet again, stumbled after him.
‘Martin!’ Mr. Phelps was calling when both he and his wife were brought to a sudden stop.
Across the field, high above the pond, they saw their s
on floating upright in the air, his arms outstretched as if reaching for something.
‘Dear Lord!’ Mr. Phelps muttered.
But neither he nor his wife could move. Spellbound, they could do no more than watch as their son took hold of that invisible something for which he was reaching and clutched it eagerly to him in a passionate embrace. For a long moment he remained like that, his body utterly still, until, suddenly, he opened his arms wide, peered down and, in a strangely slow, dreamlike movement, as if from a high diving board, launched himself earthwards.
The instant Martin’s body hit the water, Mrs. Phelps came violently alive.
‘Martin!’ she screamed, and hurtled across the field.
Her scream seemed to bring her husband back to his senses. He sprinted after her, yelling, ‘Mary . . . Mary . . . Careful!’
But Mrs. Phelps paid him no heed. By the time she reached the pond her son’s body had surfaced and was floating facedown in the middle. She plunged in headlong, her arms flailing, but found herself at once entangled in clinging weeds that grew around the edge.
Galloping up behind her, Mr. Phelps made no attempt to swim, but ploughed in till he was wading waist-high towards his son, his frantic strides churning the water to froth and his boots so disturbing the stagnant mud on the pond’s bottom that it belched up great bubbles of putrid gas in his trail.
As soon as they had lifted Martin onto the bank Mr. Phelps said, ‘Leave him to me!’ And with a sureness and skill that surprised his wife, began reviving their son with the kiss of life.
It was only when Martin was breathing properly again that Mrs. Phelps noticed the ugly blisters covering the right side of his body. She was sitting with Martin’s head cradled in her lap and had been going to cover him with his shirt. Instead she looked at her husband who was kneeling at her side and saw that he too had seen the burns.
‘We must get him to hospital,’ she said, working hard to keep the shock from sounding in her voice.
Mr. Phelps nodded.
Martin opened his eyes. ‘Mum,’ he said.
‘Hush, sweetheart. It’s all right. You’re safe now.’
The Kissing Game: Stories of Defiance and Flash Fictions Page 7