The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Which is to say, the elfin young woman in multilayered clothes who let herself in easily through the back door didn’t live there, but she didn’t have to break any windows this time and wasn’t there to steal anything.

  In a very real sense she wasn’t actually there at all. The couple arguing in the kitchen certainly didn’t notice her as she squeezed between them, except possibly as a sudden draught of cold air or a flicker of shadow on the wall.

  The teenaged boy in the living room – slumped on the sofa in his hoodie watching Deal or No Deal with sullen detachment (new DVD player, she noted. That was quick) didn’t notice as she passed between him and the screen and rummaged in the untidy heap of DVD cases lying on the floor.

  That done, she turned and spent a long moment considering him, listening to the argument coming from the kitchen. Something about where did he think the money was going to come from and why didn’t she just trust him for once. The boy appeared as insensible to the shouting as he was to her presence. He was pale, his eyes dark with shadows and red-rimmed.

  She went upstairs to find his room. No surprises here. The detritus of neglect: unwashed laundry, empty bottles, fag-ends, porn. The smell of a long-untended zoo cage. She left on his pillow the other thing which she’d brought with her, but as she opened the door to leave she found a tiny, solemn-faced girl on the landing, staring straight at her.

  Bex smiled. She brought herself fully forward so that the girl could see her properly, crouched down, winked, and placed a finger to her lips: shh.

  The girl copied her, shh, and gave a wan smile of her own.

  Bex left the house.

  There were two reasons why six-year old Millie Chadwick never got around to telling her mummy and daddy about the strange woman in the hall. First, the very next day her big brother Glenn disappeared and wasn’t seen for a week, which caused all sorts of shouting and crying and policemen coming in and out, and in all of this nobody took much notice of little Millie (at least, less notice than was normally the case) – especially when Glenn came home again with a carrier bag of sweets and a battered A-to-Z, saying that he’d only just taken a shortcut down the high street and what was the fuss about?

  The other reason was that she just plain forgot, in her own private excitement that Father Christmas had brought back her favourite Spongebob Squarepants DVD.

  ***

  The meeting place was a narrow country lane hidden between high banks and overarched with a bare latticework of hazel and hawthorn. In the summer, this would be a green tunnel, strewn with white sprays of cow parsley. It was still too early in the new year for any sign of spring, but those with the senses for such things could feel the slow slackening of winter’s torpor, like the pause of an in-drawn breath. Meanwhile, ash trees raised their black-budded antlers protectively over the sleeping hedgerows as the grey January sky sieved itself through them in a fine, clean rain.

  The throaty growl of an old diesel engine built rapidly in the silence, and in the lane appeared a campervan exactly the same shade of orange as an old penguin paperback, except where it was mudspattered up the wheel arches. Its headlights were owlish in the half-light.

  Behind it followed a motley retinue of similarly dishevelled vehicles: caravans, minibuses, ordinary cars with roof-racks piled high.

  Rabbit John braked the camper to a halt and peered out through the windscreen. ‘Well,’ he said to the man sitting next to him, ‘this is the place if you say it is, but I’m blowed if I can see anything.’ He might have added something about useless Jerry headlights, but there was a tense expectancy in the van which hushed him without words.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Andy replied. ‘It’s here.’ He turned to look over his shoulder. ‘How’s our patient doing?’

  Edris lay full length on one of the camper’s bunk beds, bandaged in a dozen places. He propped himself up on one elbow. ‘I mend,’ was all he replied.

  ‘Eating us out of house and home, is how he’s doing,’ complained Kerrie the Kook, sitting beside him. ‘The sooner we’re shot of him, the better.’

  Andy grinned. It wasn’t surprising. The Dobunni warrior must be finding it hard to regain his strength in their comparatively lacklustre world. Kerrie, on the other hand, was as fit and cantankerous as ever, with little if any outward sign of the battles she had fought. He wished he could say the same for the rest of them.

  He let himself out of the Shed and walked back to where the other members of their small convoy were stretching their legs. Bex ran up, clamped herself to him, and gazed up in mock adoration. ‘When am I getting my van back?’ she demanded.

  ‘Soon,’ he laughed and kissed her. ‘One piece of unfinished business first.’

  ‘We’ve got more than enough of those, alright.’

  Looking at the collection of individuals milling around the vehicles, he couldn’t help but agree. In the weeks of wandering since Barber’s defeat, they’d collected a few refugees of the chaos – but precious few. Most of the Holly End villagers had been picked up by the police and subsumed into the existing welfare system – Ted included, once they’d found his parents and Sam living in a shabby, council-funded bed-and-breakfast. It had seemed a poor reward for everything they’d been through, but Andy supposed that at least they were together. Some, like Rabbit John, had taken one look at the modern world and decided to chance the open road instead. Many of the Narrowfolk from Moon Grove had dispersed amongst the other squats and shelters in the city, but again, there were a handful for whom the return to normality was impossible.

  And here they were, following him, hoping that he could somehow make it right. Strangely, he found that the burden of responsibility didn’t terrify him half as much as he’d thought it would.

  Slow hoofbeats distantly in the road ahead, approaching.

  What looked for all the world like an old-fashioned gypsy caravan with a thatched roof rounded the corner, driven by a tall woman in a hooded robe, and drawn by a pair of white horses whose tack flashed with horse-brasses. Its sloping sides and steep eaves were elaborately carved and coloured, and the thatching was fashioned into the shapes of wheels, stars, and prancing horses. It gleamed, untouched by the dirt of travel, and seemed more real than its surroundings.

  Lady Holda drew her team to a halt and smiled down at the travellers. ‘You have been busy, by all accounts,’ she said.

  ‘Just a bit,’ agreed Andy. ‘Sorry it took us so long to get to you. Time moves more slowly for us here.’

  ‘It has been almost a year for my people; soon we will be preparing to move on from our summer pastures. But time is a burden only to the idle, as they say, so have no fear. The hour was well kept.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady.’

  ‘I do have a pressing need for the member of my warband whom you keep, however.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Edris was helped out of the campervan but stood unaided before his mistress.

  ‘Warrior,’ she said to him, ‘there will be a time and a place to praise your bravery fittingly. For now, the best gift I can give you is simply home.’ She turned to Andy and Bex ‘And what of you? Where is your home? It seems to me that this world offers little enough cheer to the needy – will you not come to live in mine? You would be accorded the respect which your actions have earned, and it would honour me greatly.’

  Andy declined as graciously as he could. ‘A lot of our friends are still missing,’ he explained. ‘I couldn’t rest comfortably knowing that they were still stuck here somewhere, living hand to mouth.’

  ‘I understand.’

  They parted warmly, each returning in the direction that they had come.

  But later that year, at the height of summer, a much larger – but still just as motley – collection of vehicles wound its slow way along that road and stopped in the same place. Because the circles of the
world may be very wide, but they are still just circles, and on an island eventually even the most long-journeyed of travellers ends up retracing their footsteps.

  There was an old wooden gate in the hedgerow which nobody had noticed before, for the simple reason that it hadn’t been there until just now, and a bright field of yellow grass beyond, beneath a sky wider and bluer than even England on a June morning can boast. A young man got out and opened it, watching as the last of his people passed through, and then carefully closed it behind him.

  Then the gate faded back into forgetfulness, and their tracks disappeared into the long summer grass.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Nigel Pennick and Paul Devereux for ‘Lines on the Landscape’, Tom Graves for ‘Needles of Stone’, and of course Alfred Watkins for his immortal ‘The Old Straight Track’. Thanks too must go to everybody who has ever been a member of Thethem, for teaching me that no plot survives an encounter with its characters, and Anna from Snowbooks for her patience while I fumbled through the process of getting this story out of the Narrows in my own head.

  About the Author

  James Brogden was born in Manchester in 1969 and teaches English and Media Studies at Bromsgrove School, in Worcestershire. He is also a regular contributor to the British Film Institute’s annual Film and Media conferences, delivering workshops in online education, and is a qualified mountain expedition leader who enjoys exploring Britain’s ancient and mythical landscapes. He lives in Bromsgrove with his wife, two daughters, and far too much Lego. The Narrows is his first novel.