Turning Blue

by Benjamin Myers

  It cannot be. The unborn thing. Can it? No. Surely not.

  No. Dead girls don’t breed.

  No. Do they?

  So how did –

  A family.

  Could she –

  No.

  Could she –

  He sits amongst the soaked young shoots of the emerging heather. He takes deep breaths. Darkness surrounds him and darkness swallows him and darkness consumes him. Darkness destroys just like he destroyed the girl.

  Is that thing my doing? he wonders. Maybe it is.

  No.

  Stupid bloody stupid. Don’t be so –

  Of course it isn’t.

  Well if it’s not mine then whose?

  RUTTER. IT HAS to be Rutter. The tyre has been neatly stabbed with one-inch wounds through the rubber. The car is leaning at the front left corner.

  Who else in the hamlet would –

  It has to be Rutter.

  Brindle opens the boot and pulls up the carpet and Brindle lifts the spare from the wheel well. He rolls up his sleeves and unfolds the jack and sets about changing the tyre. Dirt and grease and gravel. The new tyre looks odd. Its rims seem too thin. Brindle has nothing to wipe his hands on. Other people would have dusters or newspapers or carrier bags or anything but his car is immaculate. There is only bottled water and mints. Air-freshener. The satnav. A roll of pound coins for parking meters.

  The grease is in the creases of his skin and under his nails. The sight of the dirt quickens his breath. Shortens it to a tight ball in his throat. He starts quietly counting out sequences of numbers and is surprised to hear them adopt a childlike sing-song melody.

  Sometimes he wishes he could pay someone else to live his life for him.

  Brindle gets back in the car and looks at his hands and Brindle takes some long slow deep breaths and then puts a mint in his mouth and his hands on the wheel to stop them shaking.

  He wishes the world was different and he was different and everything was different; he wishes there was a place in the world into which he could fit. He wishes he was ignorant because he has heard that it is blissful.

  And that is when he hears the noise of another car. Looks in the rear-view mirror. Sees a truck speeding by. Up the hill. Out of the hamlet. Away.

  It’s him.

  Rutter.

  RODDY MACE IS in the off-licence buying four cans of Stella and four bottles of lager when he hears the news over the radio.

  Both he and the female shop assistant stop to listen.

  TV presenter Larry Lister has been found dead in his home in West Yorkshire. The entertainer was recently released on bail and was facing charges relating to the sexual abuse of minors. Police had been taking statements from several dozen men and women who claimed to have been a victim of the popular light entertainer over the past four decades and were building a case which has been described as disturbing and extensive. Seventy-nine-year-old Lister first appeared on television over fifty years ago and was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1999. The cause of his death is currently unknown.

  Bloody hell says Mace. That fucker.

  The assistant shakes her head.

  I always said he was a bit odd. But he raised a lot of money for charity.

  You better give me a half-bottle of vodka says Mace.

  She hands over the bottle and he pays.

  I met him once you know she says.

  Mace is distracted.

  Did you? he says. Where was that then?

  Here. It was right here. He was buying his cigarettes. I distinctly remember he paid with a tenner but let me keep his change.

  Did you see a lot of him?

  Yes. He was often about. We had what’s-his-name from Emmerdale once but you don’t get many celebrities round here.

  Why says Mace. Why was he often about?

  He knew some of the boys I think. He was friendly with them like. Roy Pinder was with him.

  Pinder?

  Oh yes. Good friends those two. Thick as thieves.

  Really?

  Yes. He spent a lot of time up at Lovely Larry’s house did Roy.

  Which house?

  The one here.

  In the valley.

  Yes. In the valley.

  Where’s that then?

  Well that’s the thing isn’t it. Folk reckoned he had a bolt-hole in the area but no one knew where exactly. It was a secret like. A place to get away from the media and that London lot.

  And no one at all knew where this house was.

  The woman shrugs.

  Roy used to visit him. Take him his messages and that. His bits and pieces. Some said they’d been in business together years back. I expect that’ll all come out now.

  What type of business?

  She shrugs.

  I don’t know. You’d have to ask Roy that. But I wouldn’t advise that.

  Why not?

  She shrugs again then sniffs.

  I’ve never had a problem with Roy she says. He’s helped me out.

  You lot talk about him like he’s untouchable says Mace. But I’m telling you now – he’s not. Defending him is the same as defending Lister as far as I’m concerned.

  Mace turns to leave the shop. His cans and bottles clanking.

  Wait says the woman.

  Mace stops and turns. She lowers her voice.

  Roy wasn’t the only one who knew where the house was.

  HE EMPTIED HALF a tank driving off his indecision and uncertainty before he found himself on the edge of the city that night.

  He drove through hamlets and villages. The street lights getting closer. Then he cruised down slip roads and around roundabouts. Passed people. Then he saw it. The Odeon X. It had been a long time since. He needed to go there to be documented. Recorded.

  What’s on he asked the girl who took his money and handed him his laminated card. She was reading a glossy magazine with an orange woman on the cover. Bored she jerked a thumb at a print-out tacked to the wall.

  Films for January:

  Slut Puppies Get the Bone

  Extreme Homeless Hussies

  Four Hours of Fuck-Hungry MILFs

  Who’s Your Mama

  Den of Depravity

  The titles sounded different. Harsher than the vintage flasher-mac romps and schoolgirl farces that he liked and remembered in the early nineties. Films that fitted the times. But now the internet had happened and porn had exploded in all directions. The Odeon X was just trying to keep up with a new millennium.

  What’s showing now? he asked. Again she didn’t look at him. She ignored him.

  I said what’s on now he said again and this time she looked up at him and held his gaze for a moment then said does it even matter? and went back to her book. And he thought: she’s right. Does it even matter.

  He walked down the hallway. Screen One on the left. The smaller Screen Two and the tiny Couples Room on the right. Just as it always was. He went into Screen One and let his eyes adjust to the light. There were a half-dozen heads scattered around the room. Their faces illuminated. Each exiled in their own internal fantasies.

  The film was more modern-looking. It had been made using different techniques too. Different technologies. No longer was the image on the screen grainy and full of awkwardly edited jump-cuts. Now cameras were handheld and the scenes crisp and ultra-sharp around the edges to create their own strange digital unreality.

  And the women. All the women were lithe and all the women were tanned and all the women were shaved. Bald snatches and the hair on their heads straight. No. There were no big hairy bushes or perms this time. Times had moved on. They wore thongs and neon heels now. Their full breasts barely moved on their chests. There were no moustaches or hairy chests on the thrusting grunting men either. The men were hairless and gym-hardened. Tattooed. As determined in their work as ploughmen.

  The scenes took place in empty night clubs and sports cars and alleyways and gymnasiums. Places repurposed.

  The woman
on the screen was older and taking two men at once. She had blonde hair. She had them both in her mouth at the same time. There was a lot of saliva.

  He watched the scene until its completion. The next one featured an older black woman with a white man wearing a baseball cap and a faded Celtic band inked around one arm. They had sex on the sofa in an empty flat. He could not tell what their nationality was as no word was uttered between them. They had mechanical sex in different positions for ten fifteen twenty long minutes.

  He drifted off. He slept for a while.

  When he came round he was cold and shivering a little and on the screen a woman with small breasts and black hair was forcing a dildo up a woman who was on all fours in a park on a nice sunny day. Only when the women receiving it turned around did he realise it was not a woman but a man with a ponytail and a penis.

  He yawned. Felt a craving for a cigarette.

  He tried to focus his thoughts on these singular acts of humiliation and not let his mind wander back to the farm. He was OK here. He was a part of this. The X was a part of him. He was a cog in its machinery; that had been proven. He had proven himself amongst feared men. He was OK. Everything would be different now that she had fallen to the ice and the frost. His mother. He told himself that this was not an end but a beginning.

  IT CANNOT BE seen from any road.

  He has the taxi drop him half a mile away and at first he thinks perhaps he has been given misinformation or written down the wrong directions but he follows a pitted track on foot into a large plantation of pines. It is dark and still in there; a green cathedral. There is a density to the silence. A deadness. Off the track the ground is a carpet of brown needles and rotted stumps and tangled roots and fallen trunks and patches of moss.

  The media is already going to town on Lovely Larry. Many journalists and editors have been waiting for a long time for this moment; entire careers have passed while carrying around dirt on Lister. They certainly have plenty to draw on: the allegations and his illustrious half-century career; his awards and charity work and outlandish appearance. And the rumours of much much darker secrets that were only ever shared over hushed pints in the back snugs of off-Fleet Street pubs for years. Rumours of friendships with the high and mighty and untouchable in the media and politics and the church. People you do not accuse in print unless you’ve had a small army of lawyers go through it all first.

  They still have to be careful what they print now – especially a regional rag as small as the Mercury. Not for nothing is Lister also known around Chancery Lane as Litigation Larry.

  But what the national inkies do not know about – and therefore the one thing that Roddy Mace has over them all – is the existence of Lovely Larry’s Dales getaway. The place he has managed to keep quiet from everyone except a few town locals who for reasons unknown were complicit in the secrecy of its existence.

  The house is tucked away in one corner in a clearing. It was here long before the trees which have been uniformly planted around it as if to deliberately enclose and imprison the building. To pull it away from the outside world. Mace thinks of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Of Hansel and Gretel. Gingerbread houses and TV presenters.

  It sits three long miles out of town down the valley road and then up narrowing back tracks; a dead-end location with half of the house cast in permanent semi-darkness.

  He has explored further leads and got nowhere. His local sources have seized up. He tried ringing Roy Pinder on the way up with an official press enquiry – do you have a comment about Larry Lister owning property in the valley – but was told: on the record? You fuck off you little faggot.

  His exact words.

  Mace said what about off the record then Roy? and Pinder hung up.

  THE CURTAINS ARE drawn but there is a car out front on the gravel driveway. A nippy sports car. A newish-looking blue MG. Mace looks through the tinted windows and sees CD cases spread across the passenger seat: Tiny Tim and Noel Coward. Slade and Bucks Fizz. The good stuff. Noddy and Jay and Cheryl and the gang. Otherwise there is nothing of note in the car.

  He takes a photograph of the registration plate and then knocks on the front door. The knocker is a brass fox whose tail he lifts. He knocks and counts to ten and then he knocks again. No one answers. Mace walks to the front windows and then past them around the side of the house where there is a garage – locked – and then around the back. There is a small side window. Mace cups his hands to his eyes and looks inside. He sees a hallway of sorts. He sees a wooden banister. A framed photo of the Queen at her coronation. A coat stand with one coat and a baseball cap hanging from it. He cranes his neck the other way. He sees an open door into what looks like an empty kitchen. He sees a shabby brown rug.

  He cranes his neck further and sees a photo of Larry Lister sitting on the fake jewel-encrusted throne he used to have on Larry’s Party. In it he is surrounded by smiling children. He is wearing a green shirt and a purple tie and a hat that holds a can of coke on top of it and from which protrudes a long curly coloured drinking straw. Larry is sucking on it. He has his thumbs up.

  His eyes are crossed.

  HE KEEPS HIS distance. All the way down into town Brindle lets the distance between them increase. The twists and turns of the road help keep him hidden from view and two three four times Rutter disappears from sight but there is nowhere for him to turn except into fields between here and the city.

  Brindle can almost smell him.

  As he takes the Hareton Lane route into town he sees a figure ahead of him. An ambling man with a can in one hand and a carrier bag in the other. Without turning around the man steps out into the road.

  Brindle brakes. The tyres squeak. He winds down the window.

  Get in.

  Mace turns and sees the car and looks confused for a moment.

  Why?

  I’m following Rutter.

  So?

  So get in.

  Why?

  Look says Brindle. I’m sorry. For what I said. But get in.

  Mace shrugs and then climbs in the passenger side.

  Have you heard then?

  About what?

  Lister says Mace.

  That he’s been bailed?

  That’s he’s brown bread.

  Dead?

  Yes.

  When did you hear this? asks Brindle.

  On the radio in the shop.

  What happened?

  They don’t know.

  Suicide?

  They don’t know.

  They sit in silence for a moment and then Mace says alright fuck it I might as well tell you the best bit seeing as you’ve already stolen everything from me anyway: he had a place round here.

  Mace lets the words sink in and then he continues.

  Lister he says. A house. And Roy Pinder was a regular visitor. Apparently the two were in business together. Or had been.

  What business?

  You tell me. Nothing good I’d bet.

  They skirt town and take the main road further down the dale.

  I’ve seen it says Mace. I’ve been there.

  Where?

  Lister’s bolt-hole.

  They round a bend and a hundred metres ahead they see Rutter’s truck trundling at a steady forty.

  Neither the detective nor the reporter say anything. Mace swigs from his can of beer.

  Brindle calls Cold Storage. Mace swigs from his can again.

  Is it true about Larry Lister? says Brindle into his phone. What do you know? Yeah – that’s what they said on the radio. But what do we know? Well find out then. No – don’t talk to him. Why? Because he can’t be trusted. Find out directly and then call me. Don’t speak to anyone in between. And I need you to look into his finances too. I need you to find out what properties he owned. Well how should I know? Just find out will you? And be bloody discreet about it.

  He hangs up: for fuck’s sake.

  He’ll have killed himself so he doesn’t have to face up to what he’s done says Mace.
All those girls. Those kids. That’s what will have happened. He’ll have taken the chickenshit route so that his secrets go to the grave with him.

  We don’t know that. We don’t know that for certain.

  They drive through tiny Dales villages whose names are unfamiliar. Today they look hostile and unwelcoming; closed off to the world.

  The road crosses the river once twice three times and Brindle steals glances down at gravel banks and shallow stretches where the water runs and bubbles white with foam and where young trout bolt through shallow runs like electrical surges. Mace plays the ring pull on his can.

  Who do you think the father is? he asks.

  Which father?

  The father of the girl’s kid.

  We don’t know that says Brindle. All I found was a pregnancy-testing kit in her drawer. It doesn’t mean anything.

  The road runs alongside the river and they see the slow flow of the deepening waters and the occasional lone angler fishing corner pools where the water circles beneath the overhang of willows that drape tenderly across the silent flow. Minutes pass as Mace drinks more beer and Brindle clears his throat and counts trees and then white lines and then cat’s eyes until his eyes feel strained and ache in their sockets and he feels sick.

  All we ever see of Rutter is around the hamlet or in town or up on the moors says Brindle.

  Yeah.

  So this might be significant.

  What might? asks Mace.

  This. Him leaving the valley.

  Mace looks at him with scepticism.

  I have a hunch says Brindle.

  I thought you didn’t believe in hunches?

  I’m varying my methods these days.

  They pass pine-lined caravan parks and woodlands planted high up on the hillsides two or three or four decades ago and after fifteen or twenty minutes the dale flattens and widens and the roadside gets busier with houses. The river disappears from view but Rutter’s truck is still in sight.

  Brindle hangs back. He lets other cars get between them.

  You fixed your tyre then?

  Brindle looks at Mace. Back to the road. Then at Mace again.