After Sally had finished we sat in silence again for a while. We were both contemplating what we had learned and the task we had set ourselves for the next day. I don’t know about Sally but I was scared. It was one thing thumbing through books for disconnected references and conspiracy theories but tomorrow it was going to be very real. Tomorrow we were going to see what we were up against, what the latest incarnation of the beast looked like. Tomorrow we were going to poke the bear, and I was pretty sure we had no fucking idea how to fight a bear.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I woke early the next morning after a fitful night’s sleep. I’d had vivid dreams that involved the girl and French Nazis. At one point, I was tied up on the deck of a slave ship and had to helplessly watch as a group of pirates threw Sally overboard into the raging swells of an angry sea. I didn’t feel at all rested that morning but I had to find some energy for the day ahead. I got dressed, packed my school bag as if I was going, and ate breakfast. I made sure my bag was open in front of my mother at the dining table so she could see it full of school books. Today of all days it was important to appear normal. I took my packed lunch from the kitchen side, pushed it into my bag and left with my sister. At the bottom of our road Steph asked if I was still bunking off, I said I was. She simply nodded and walked off in the other direction. I trudged towards Sea Mills square, my feet and eyes heavy with the lack of proper sleep. I got to the bus stop just as the bus appeared over the horizon of Shirehampton Road. I fumbled for money as it approached, waited patiently for the other passengers to board, bought my ticket and walked to the back of the bottom deck. I didn’t have the energy to be climbing stairs and trying to hold my balance on the top deck of a moving bus so I slumped down in the back corner of the bus, felt the heat from the diesel engine pushing through the seat, and thought about the task ahead.
The bus moved off from Sea Mills square and started down the hill towards Stoke Bishop. I watched the red brick houses pass by and give way to the green of the small woodland beside the river that ran down to Sea Mills harbour. Where the river passed under the road I saw a dog walker crossing through the car park of The Millhouse pub. The dog didn’t seem at all enthusiastic about the walk and was having to be coaxed along with treats and the promise being let off the lead once they reached the woods. I wondered if the man with the reluctant dog would ever know about the Sons of Charlemagne. Would he see it in the newspaper he would buy on his way home from walking the dog one day? Would he hear about the death of a black girl in Coombe Dingle on the local news? My stomach turned as I thought about the very real possibility that the answer to these questions was no. There was no guarantee that any of this would be successful. How could it be? The death of the girl had already been covered up once and now all hope rested on a twelve-year-old bunking off school to meet a librarian. The whole thing just sounded ludicrous. As the bus climbed the hill and snaked its way around the playing fields towards Parrys Lane I thought about how I had ended up here. The girl, the man, the wasted summer, Sally, that chocolate fudge cake. I thought about my fever, The White Ship, Steph and the forged letter, breaking into the house, the business card, Robert Cecil and Portuguese slave traders. The whole thing had become so tangled and so huge, a vast alternative world that I could no longer break free from. I knew I had to see it through but I was scared about what that would mean.
The bus was half way up Parrys Lane when it jerked to a stop and jerked me back into reality. I looked out of the window to get my bearings. The high stone wall of Hiatt Baker halls of residence stood grey across the road. The doors of the bus opened and a steady procession of bleary eyed students trudged aboard. It struck me that Sally had once been one of these mumbling, shuffling creatures though I couldn’t picture it. She seemed so grown up, so together that it seemed incomprehensible that she had once been any younger than she was now.
Once the shuffling had settled the bus crawled away up the hill, seeming in constant danger of not making the brow of the steep hill. It did of course and, as the road levelled out towards White Tree roundabout the bus found its normal speed again. Though the roundabout was a 1950’s construction the junction it sits at dates back much further. The roads that cross Durdham Downs trace their heritage back to track ways for horse and cart. At a cross roads where tracks from the city centre towards Westbury on Trym and from Sea Mills harbour to the merchants in St Pauls meet there stood Silver Birch trees. Thus, the junction was named White Tree and has remained such. Trees have come and gone, some felled during the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak in the 1970’s, another removed to make way for the roundabout in the fifties. Nowadays the name is continued by painting a nearby tree trunk white. None of this information came to mind that morning as I stared across the green expanse of the Downs. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything at all, except that someone nearby had clearly overdone it with the aftershave.
Five or so minutes later the bus pulled up at the bus stop at the top of Blackboy Hill. I pushed past the students towards the door. Trying to get to the door before it shut again and trapped me in a Romero nightmare was like escaping through a horde of zombies from Dawn of the Dead. I made it, just, and practically fell out through the doors onto the pavement.
“Jeez I remember that bus journey well!”
Sally was leaning against the wall at the bus stop, one leg bent to rest a foot against the crumbling brickwork. I hadn’t expected her to be waiting for me, I don’t know why, so I was startled to see her there. She was wearing jeans and white high-top trainers, a loose yellow Bowie t shirt and a battered old leather jacket. A light brown bag, the type bike messengers usually had slung across them, was propped lazily against the wall at her feet. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and she was wearing lipstick of such a dark red hue it was almost black on her lips. And she was smoking. I hadn’t considered that she would be different outside of the library, that maybe the librarian I had met wasn’t truly who she was.
“You look different.” I blurted out pathetically. “I mean…”
“Thanks Hun, I think!” Sally joked. She dropped the cigarette, pushed off from the wall and dropped her foot neatly onto the smouldering cigarette end.
“I have to dress quite conservatively at work,” Sally explained as she gestured up the hill and began walking. I walked beside her and caught the intoxicating blend of smoke and perfume.
“I guess we both spend a lot of time in uniform eh Hun?”
I nodded. I was trying very hard not to fall into another rabbit hole. This one consisted mainly of a world of smoke and perfume and lipstick through which I would occasionally glimpse the bouncing breast beneath a David Bowie t shirt. My father always said that getting dried Weetabix off a bowl was the hardest thing in the world but I reckon getting a twelve-year-old to not stare at a bouncy breast is even harder. I somehow managed to pull my gaze away from Sally’s figure just in time to cross the road. At the top of Blackboy Hill there is an odd little island that the roads have to divert around. On it stands an old Bristol Corporation, fore runner to the council, administrative building which had a small garden at the front with, curiously, a bandstand erected in it. The building was long ago sold to a financial investment company who had laid the garden to cobbles to be used as office parking. The bandstand and its surrounding flowerbeds had remained council property and now stood at the fork in the road as a monument to long dead planning regulations and ideals of community spirit. By the state of the thing when Sally and I got to it that morning it was now mostly used as a handy spot for students to sit and eat chips on the way home from Clifton pubs to the halls across the Downs. Tattered, greasy chip wrappers and cigarette ends skated lazily around the hexagonal space below old rafters clinging to the last remnants of the fading paint from past glory. The seats had been recently replaced but were moulded plastic, not the quality original workmanship that was evident all around it. Those plastic seats seemed to speak more vividly than one could expect a seat to do so on the changing state of mun
icipal custodianship. The world was always changing of course, new ideas, new morals, new technology, new gadgets. The endless march of time, portrayed to us as the glorious path towards the glittering, silver space suited labour free future of Tomorrows World. Old things are always lost when the new wind blows in but sometimes new is not better. The cold winds of change can bring a tear of nostalgia to the eye and that is not necessarily a bad thing. As I stood looking around the grubby, forlorn bandstand that found itself infected with modernity I felt anger at the type of world that could see these gaudy, plastic, lengths of insult as progress towards a brighter tomorrow. The type of world that accepted change blindly, dutifully, quietly. I hated the world that could celebrate Betamax videos and chest freezers as it ignored injustice, the type of world where everyone looked away just long enough for evil to spread a little further. They were only plastic seats in an old bandstand but to me they were the scales from Saul’s eyes. The tiny, utterly forgettable clue hiding in plain sight. The world was not what we were told it was. It was not a righteous, confident cohesion of human ideals. It was not the zenith of utilitarianism, the realisation of centuries of progress towards Nietzsche’s slave morality utopia. No, the world was a dirty, jumbled mess of one fucked up master morality on top of another. There was no common human cause, only individual pride and ambition. We were not the enlightened ones viewing the face of God and gazing upon his wonders. We were ignorant, semi sentient and barely autonomous creatures staring at shadow puppets on the cave wall. The powerful did what they liked and we just let them do it because it was easier than making a fuss. When the people have food and something to follow, religion, football, Coronation Street, they are happy. When the people are happy the powerful can do what they like. That simple truth hit me like the flash of light on the road to Damascus. An old bandstand, an anomaly on a weird piece of land between roads, plastic seats screwed to its old wooden frame, chip wrappers and fag ends. The flower beds still tended by the council, the outside freshly painted every year so from the road the whole thing looked like it was well looked after. It was the perfect symbolism of the skin-deep façade of normality and respect that the powerful portrayed to the people. The greatest story ever told. Told by The Sons.
“You O.K Hun?” Sally put her hand on my shoulder. I looked up at her, she was frowning slightly.
“I’m O.k.” I replied quietly, “I was just thinking.”
“Look, we don’t have to do this you know. We can walk away from this whole thing. I’ve got the pages photocopied in my bag here, we can send them to the police and just get on with our lives. You’re just a kid..”
“I’m not just a kid!” I shouted back at her, “I saw her die! I saw it not you! I saw the man who did it!”
“O.K Hun,” Sally interjected quietly, “I wasn’t suggesting you’re not up to the task, merely that you’ve got a long life ahead of you and maybe you don’t want to get any more mixed up in this than you already are.”
My eyes, which had been wide with anger at being called just a kid, softened and my heart beat and breathing began to return to normal.
“I know I’m just a kid,” I began, “but I need to do this, whatever the fuck this is. I saw her dragged away, I saw the man in his driveway with blood dripping from his secateurs. I let her down when I let it go before, I can’t do that again. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you Sally, I don’t know why you’re helping me but I am grateful. If you want to stop I understand, this isn’t your fight. I won’t go to the police until I have proof that whoever’s business card this is, is involved. I won’t mention you if you don’t want me to.” I sat down on a plastic seat and looked across Blackboy Hill at the shops and the offices above. Sally stood for a while in silence and then sat down next to me. She was staring at the floor and absent mindedly prodding the rubbish with her feet when she started to speak.
“When we were talking in the library, when I told you about growing up in New Orleans and Steven and all that, there’s something I didn’t tell you. I was pregnant when Steven died. That’s why I left New Orleans and came to Bristol with him. Honestly, I couldn’t believe I got pregnant, it must have happened the first or second time we...well you know. Anyway, it happened and I knew daddy wouldn’t be happy and I loved Steven, I was sure I did, so when he asked me to come back with him I said yes. I was working on the courage to tell him he was going to be a daddy but I hadn’t quite done it yet when he asked me. I figured I’d wait until we were here, might be easier for him to take. I don’t know, it was a bit of a mess in my mind but I kept it from him until we were here. The day after we landed I told him, sitting in the window of the Bristol Blue pub just down the road there. Well Hun, he was so happy I couldn’t quite believe it. He started shouting Yes! Yes! And punching the air, it was so embarrassing. That day, that moment in time, me sitting shaking my head in embarrassment but smiling as Steven leapt around the place, that was the happiest I’ve ever been. The comfort of a cosy pub and our whole lives ahead of us.
Two weeks later I was sat alone in a cold church, surrounded by people I didn’t know, saying goodbye to Steven. I didn’t know how to go on, I couldn’t face any of it. So I drank. A lot. I drank until I couldn’t remember my own name, and after I’d slept it off I drank again. I must have been like that for three weeks or so before it happened. One day, drunk as all hell, I fell. I don’t remember but I was told that I crossed a road, tripped coming up the kerb, stumbled forward and fell against a low wall with iron railings.” Sally pulled back the leather jacket and lifted her t shirt a little. I saw the scar running across her stomach. She was still staring at the floor but I knew she was crying, I could see the patch of concrete between her feet darkening with the tears.
“I killed my baby, our baby. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl but he or she would be have been five now. That’s why I can’t leave Bristol, not because of Steven but because of my baby. I know I killed our baby but if Steven hadn’t been killed, if his death hadn’t been disregarded as ordinary, oh fuck I don’t know!” Sally began to sob. Her shoulders began to shake and the tears fell freely, perhaps for the first time in years. It was my turn to put an arm around her. I wasn’t sure quite how to comfort her, I hadn’t ever been called upon to do so, but I did my best. I moved closer to her and put my arm around her shoulder, said some suitably pointless words, I may have even gone with ‘there there’ or something equally idiotic, and selfishly hoped she would stop soon. Empathy has never been a strong suit of mine and even nowadays I find the sight of someone crying to be an annoyance above all else. Of course, my warped mind still demands that my emotional outbursts are treated with the deepest respect and care but I just can’t seem to afford others the same courtesy. Anyway, whatever I did, or despite what I did, or didn’t do, Sally stopped crying eventually. She turned to look at me.
“Thanks Hun, I’ll be O.K.” she reached for a tissue in her jacket pocket and sniffed a bit.
“I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” she continued, “I guess maybe I see something in you that I want to save. Maybe I’m trying to make up for something. I can’t save my baby but I can help you. You looked so lost when you came into the library I just wanted to help you. I didn’t know you were going to involve me in an international conspiracy but still..” Sally was smiling a bit now and raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Oh well, in for a penny…’
I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone who’s lost a child? Worse still a woman who’s lost a baby before it was born, who blames herself for its death? I was useless in that moment. Sally needed someone who understood adult social protocol, a soothing hand and some comforting words. Instead she was sat next to a kid who barely knew how to deal with his own nature, let alone help a woman grieving for her dead baby. So, we sat in silence. We seemed to be doing that a lot. For all the camaraderie and connection we had fostered over the last few days it was clear that we didn’t know each other at all. Somehow events had conspired to
throw two strangers together and they sat there, in a disused and dilapidated bandstand, circling each other emotionally and reaching for the best way forward. Truth was stranger than fiction and certainly that was true of us. Sally reached into her pocket and pulled out her cigarettes and a lighter. Without looking at me she offered the pack in my direction.
“Don’t worry about it Hun, you don’t need to say anything. I shouldn’t have told you, it’s not your problem.”
I looked at Sally and shook my head at the offer of a cigarette. I had never tried smoking and though I wondered if this would be the perfect first time I decided against it.
“No thanks. I’m sorry about….I mean…” My hands were moving about, gesturing at something and nothing. In the end, I just sighed and looked back at the floor.
“I’m sorry.”
More silence. Sally smoked. I sat and looked at the floor. I don’t know what she was thinking but I was thinking that the whole thing was a huge mistake. I was sat here with an American woman I didn’t know, I was bunking off school, I had involved my sister in the deception, and for what? I had started out trying to find out about the girl. I had wanted to get justice for her. I had wanted to find out who she was and why she was there and to make the man on the driveway pay for her death. I was no closer to any of that, I had got caught up in the conspiracies of history, kings and politicians, soldiers and slave traders. None of it connected directly to the girl, it might all just be bullshit anyway. Maybe we had made connections that weren’t there. Was it possible that a grieving American, angry at the world and far from home, and a broken kid with a dark mind had happily turned correlation into causation? Were we just two defective parts, perpetually wondering why we didn’t fit into the machine, who had found each other and a reason to believe that it was the machine that was broken, not us? Were we nothing more than the kid who sits at the back of the class slagging off Shakespeare as a bad playwright because he doesn’t understand the language?
Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One Page 12