by Adam Thorpe
On our way we pass quite close to the wood’s edge, where the Jennets’ burned field shows through. There’s a lot of rubbish here, it’s horrible, it’s a sort of tip tumbled into the bed of the freshet: black fertiliser sacks and plastic demijohns, mainly. The more I look, the more I see. An empty drum labelled ICI Teat Dip in a tangle of chains and blades and barbed-wire, big tractor batteries – even an old upturned freezer on the slope. Gardner turns round and taps the side of his finger with his nose, which I don’t understand. He looks unhappy.
We follow the policeman to a bright red ribbon that runs from tree to tree. He lifts it up for us, but I still have to stoop. Age, Mother, is unavailing. Here are more policemen, amidst the crackle of walkie-talkies: all of them standing around, desultorily chatting with arms crossed, as if waiting for someone to take them on a nature walk, point out the squirrels, the scars of lichen, the badger toilets, the obscure ferns, the pond beetles. One or two are taking measurements with white tape. They look at us uncertainly as we break from the depths, our clothes wet, covered in streaks of webs, shaking leaves from our hair. Gardner’s mask is looking upwards, as instructed, but his face is looking at me.
‘I think I ought to tell them it’s a Hazardous Area,’ he says, blinking hard.
He sounds as though he’s seeking my advice. But I’ve never been here before, not even in my youth! Never! We’re inside an area cordoned off by the ribbon. The wood’s much thinner here – I can see the brighter edge of it, and the blue and white of police vehicles. I have no idea what is going on, Mother: whenever I see a lot of police activity, I always think of it as an exercise. I feel damp and I stink of bogs and am somewhat out of breath. My shins rankle from nettle stings. A burly type with a more senior air approaches us and shakes our hands.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘I hear you got lost.’
Gardner mumbles something but the senior type tells us to tiptoe. It’s a sort of joke, but it makes me flush. Now we’re near a silver birch, the only one here, very white and peeling. He’s pointing upwards, into its branches. He’s saying something, I’m not sure what he’s saying. A leaf falls on my face. I blink and see a pair of boots. I know those boots. They’re on legs that are growing out of the tree. And then the face a bit below them, spying on us with one wide eye. The Man in the Moon came down too soon and burnt his mouth.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Dull. Wet, windy. It has been nice, though.
My dearest Mater,
‘We’re leaving him up there until the snaps, of course,’ says the senior type. ‘When they come. Traffic. Most inconvenient, whoever did it. Watch this.’
He gives the tree a kick and a piece of it hums off. Greenbottles. They like dead meat and living toads, you see. One bumps my forehead, swooping low. There’s also a shower of tiny winged nuts, fluttering, not nearly as frantic as sycamore seeds. Gardner could be his mask, all aghast and white. The police officer rambles on behind his big red face.
‘If you want a cup of tea, there’s one in the van. The path lab said Jim Reed’s on his way. Everyone’s on their way. The fingerprint people are by the caravan, if you want to have a word. Caravan’s empty, by the way. Has been for a year. But you never know. I’m new at Reading, or I’d know you by name, gentlemen. Detective Sergeant Fagg. Two gs, and I don’t smoke. I’ll fetch the ladder, if you want a peep. Not the most convenient place to take samples from. Not much on the ground, I don’t think – two days, a bit of rain, predators. Talking of predators, there aren’t wolves in this wood, are there?’
He’s looking at Gardner, not at me.
‘Not that I know of,’ says Gardner. He ought to be in bed, really.
‘Can’t be dogs that ripped him up. Foxes don’t climb trees, do they? What about foxes?’ He’s looking at me, now. ‘What about foxes? They don’t climb bloody trees, do they?’
‘Leopards do,’ I say.
‘Who?’
Every movement we make on the dead leaves drowns our voices in ack-ack. What a hopeless idea of Malcolm’s, to spread these over the stage. No one’ll hear a word. A hand up there, too, picking a fresh catkin. Almost picking, but not quite, just hovering. Impaled up there. Oh, I know that hand. I’m good on hands, I know Bulwer’s books of rhetorical gesture backwards and forwards and sideways. Invito, that one is. The Ghost beckoning on the battlements. Come and join me, it’s not so far.
Bits of browned cloth hang like dead vines, or a knotted rope to bring him down.
Have you seen enough, Mother? Blood never bothered you, though. Only bad blood. Or old blood.
The detective sergeant is talking again. Very nasty, it is, but a friend has identified the boots as belonging to the missing chappie in the village, one Frank Petty, retired coalman among other things. Village character. A pity.
Gardner is finally getting through. The detective sergeant stoops to the poor man’s mumble. I’m numb. It’s too real and it’s not real enough. The birch is made of flat painted wood. Sir Toby Belch and the others are behind it and I’m Malvolio in yellow garters. A couple of pink-red sickeners have sprouted from the leaf mould under the birch: I’d like to bend down and run my finger over the gills, hear the tell-tale rustle. If not for the dim pungency of something cadaverous, I’d be all right. Maybe I do start to bend down, but the ground comes towards me too fast. My face is in enemy fire. A hand is thrust under one of my arms and then under the other, pinching the flesh as they tug me up. I’m between two policemen and the wood circles slowly, one way for a little then the other way for a little, as if eyeing me up before pouncing. They’re not forensic, you silly bugger I hear someone – perhaps Fagg – shout, apparently from high in the sky. Someone who’s using my head is insisting that I’m fine, now.
I’m being fine in a police van, but it’s not moving. I have a mug of over-milky tea. The mug says On Probation and has a busty girl stretched naked beneath its lip stains. A police officer with a form tells me to take my time. A colleague in the front seat is checking up on Gardner. Hallo, darling. Morning my love. Good morning sweetheart, could you tell me?
‘Farewell, dear heart.’
‘Whassat, sir? Not your address, is it?’
Now I’m picking my way over the rubbish and burnt bits strewn over the muddy grass. I pass the other police van and spot Gardner smoking inside, hands all a-shake. My mask is on the top of my head too, it’s watching the sky. I step into weeds and a big rusty gridiron springs up, like a man trap. The grease on it brands my trousers, and yet the caravan’s sprouting old man’s beard from its roof. People are dusting it with tiny brushes. I’m on a path now, cutting up behind Herbert Bradman’s place and the Manor. High old walls of soft brick. There’s a marble slab further along, under tentacles of wild clematis and sprayed graffiti. An inscription. Do you know what it says, Mother? Not the graffiti! That is very rude! Look – underneath ForeSKINS ARMY, there’s this:
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
Shelley, probably for someone’s dog.
Well, it does make me cry; Once Nuncle told me to bang my own drum and I thought of that drum I’d had in Victoria, and broke down. I was ill, though. I find myself outside the last bungalow in Gumbledon Acres, studying its low wall. Plop plop, into the faded pinks. Malcolm’s face.
‘You look ghastly,’ he says. ‘Shall I get someone?’
He’s carrying a drum over his shoulder. It’s a big African one. It’s my own, blown right up. It must be full of seeds because it rustles every time he moves.
‘Before I forget, they’ll make a noise.’
‘What?’
‘Dead leaves. Like your drum. Unless they shut. I mean shout.’
‘I’ll get someone.’
But I walk, with his hand under my elbow. We pass the primary school and then I tell him I want a brandy. Really, I want Jessica. S
he’s all woolly jumper and tender heart, her hair is in ringlets and everywhere. Malcolm’s just finished discovering music with the infants, and looks rather flushed and happy. Pink and orange tubes stick out of his knapsack. We steer towards the Old Barn. The bar is empty and a little cold. My clothes are still damp, my feet wet. Roger sets up an electric radiator. Thoughtful chap, if otherwise useless. The two men appear wary of each other: Malcolm’s wife had a fling with Roger Marlow, of course. I can’t hope to remember all these overlaps! Too many pebbles chucked in the pond! Too many circles! Their two ripples do not overlap with Muck’s, though. I knew him better than they did. Roger can’t believe that one person alone could drag somebody up into a tree. ‘A leopard could,’ I point out.
Malcolm freezes.
Perhaps he did it, I find myself thinking. I knock back my brandy in one go. Haaaaaa.
Jessica doesn’t turn up. Outside, whoozy but upright, I am invited to Malcolm’s for lunch tomorrow. Oh, he does seem shifty.
In a nice hot bath, I find myself sorrowing for Muck. Nobody loved him, either. Perhaps John Wall. Muck stamping the floor so the dart fell out, John Wall accepting it. I shave carefully and go upstairs to check myself in the wardrobe’s mirror. Not bad, Mother! Then I do what I have done every so often throughout my life: I pick up my old battered Complete Shakespeare, still with shreds of beechmast in it, and turn to a photograph of Miss Lilian Braithwaite as Anne Page. She stands against painted blossom and a high wall of canvas brick. Merry Wives is froth, of course, Mother, but Miss Lilian Braithwaite uncannily resembles Rachael. Dark eyes, long nose, full mouth, the same curls of midnight hair. On the other side of the canvas wall is Aunt Rachael, but she’s back stage, she’s someone else, she’s safely cut off.
Rachael as Anne Page. The lovely hand in a perfect upside-down Invito, the last gasp of the old ways –
‘Will’t please your worship to come in, sir?’
I wish I was in Merry Wives. I wish I was playing opposite you in a play that went on for ever because it was real (not you, Mother, I’m talking to Rachael, here, please don’t be jealous). But I’m in a lot of different plays, that’s the trouble. The hand is picking a catkin. No it isn’t! Yes, it is! It’s so stiff and cold and utterly utterly dead dead dead! I slam the book shut and hurl it at the door. It falls in a broken heap on the rug. Then the truth flashes so fiercely that I screw up my eyes. The genie came out of the broken book, it stole into my ear and bellowed inside my head. I’m yanking my bedside drawer and it falls right out on to my toes. The pain is nothing as I hold the bundle and thump it.
False letters!
Thump it.
The plays are awash with false letters!
Thump it.
People are made fools of and broken and even killed by false letters, in play after play after play! Thump it thump it thump it.
‘What, frighted with false fire?’ I think I shout this several times. I want to gnaw this bundle like a fleshy leg. You see, Mother? How close I come to madness? I hurl open the wardrobe door and scrabble for the fetish box. The mask rolls out, snarling at my ankles. I have the fetish box – but, oh horrors, where is Nuncle’s scrap of paper? The cinders scatter across the floor behind me with the skull bits, the metal bobs, the nobs of redheart, the big white talons – I’m an animal digging out its hole! The red-tinted forehead lands on my knuckles and I feel disgusted, suddenly – and I flap it off, I’m afraid, Mother. I’m hunting for a scrap of paper, not your touch!
There it is, in among the cinders, oh sweet heavens. To think I might have thrown it away. My lifeline, Mother! All that keeps me who I am! This little scrap with its wonky message, bashed out one day long ago when I was having my hair yanked at school, probably!
The centre
Never gives
Seven answers
I hold it in my teeth, leaving my hands free to tear open the bundle’s oil paper. And there’s a knock at the door.
A tentative trying-out little knock.
I stand there. I admit I feel a sort of dread. My towel has fallen off. I’m naked. I’m gripping the scrap of paper in my teeth and holding the bundle against me to cover my nakedness. The door stays shut. I say it quietly through gritted teeth:
‘Mother?’
Your loving son,
Hugh
Light breeze, scudding clouds. Pleasant. Too many crocuses.
Dearest Mother,
A rat-a-tat-tat, now, like a drum.
‘Mr – Mr Arkwright? You in there?’
A man’s voice. Fagg’s voice! I ask him to wait until I’m decent. I have to blow my nose. I stuff everything back where it should be and dress as fast as I can, falling over my trousers. The scrap of paper is sodden, because I forgot it was between my teeth, but the typing is still legible. I slip it back into the fetish box. The wardrobe door shuts as the other one opens.
‘Not in your fancy tights, Mr Arkwright? We reckoned you were changing for a show. Plumes and all.’
My pullover’s on back to front. The label scratches my Adam’s apple.
Fagg’s with a spotty minor in a suit who turns out to be his senior. Fagg does the interrogation while Detective Inspector Shaw, or Shore, or whatever his name is, leans against the wall, smirking. He keeps sliding his eyes to the side without moving his head, as if studying a fly on his cheek or keeping tabs on someone I can’t see. This puts me off. At one point he leans down and picks up the broken Shakespeare, putting it on the table without glancing at it. A couple of pages fall out, and he tucks them back in – any old how. They’ve made a Darby and Joan between the killing and the fact that I haven’t paid for some fruit. What fruit? I was spotted nicking fruit by some lads from outside the shop, Friday. Good grief, I never paid for it! Two measly apples and a banana! Shoplifting! I say that if I did, it was sheer carelessness, old age, call it what you will, I know Marjorie, Marjorie knows me. She certainly does, they say. (What’s that supposed to mean? What have I done to upset her? Moved away, probably.)
They ask me outright if I was anywhere near ‘Pry’s Wood’ on Saturday night. I haven’t heard it called Pry’s Wood in years but what a fitting name. (I know, Mother – pry is another name for the small-leaved lime. But all the same.)
I deny it. Why shouldn’t I? I’m still feeling exhilarated. Nuncle almost had me, back there, but now I’m bounding off again. Be terse, they’ll be gone soon. ‘So,’ says Fagg, ‘you went straight from the public-house here to the gate of, er, your house, er, Eyelie –’
‘Ilythia, yes –’
‘Yes, and subsequently returned, having not entered by said gate, am I right?’
‘Spot on.’
‘I see.’
The other chap’s eyes are not sliding any more. Fagg looks as if he’s solving an algebraic problem in his notebook. He has the heavy breathing of a drinker – and from the smell of it, he’s made enquiries down below. What’s Ted told him about me? With a rush of blood I realise that they’ve trapped me, they know I’m lying. They’d have talked to Dominick Pratt! Fagg’s telling me about his daughter’s acting, now. Star appearance in the school’s Annie Get Your Gun. I nod as if fascinated. Shore has gone into the bedroom. He emerges with a talon. I must have missed it.
‘Been paring your nails have you, sir?’
‘Of course not. Let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion’s claws.’
‘Eh?’
‘And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath –’
‘The Bard,’ Fagg explains to Shore, without looking round. ‘All right, all right,’ mutters Shore. He’s glaring at Fagg’s back.
I explain that it’s an African fetish.
‘Fetish, eh?’
Shore passes the talon to Fagg. ‘Looks clean enough, sergeant. Cinders all over the floor, in there.’ Then he looks at me. ‘Been having a barbecue in the bedroom, have you? A bit mucky.’
‘Just been sorting through. Old thing
s.’
The talon rolls around in Fagg’s palm. ‘African, is it? Africa. What a mess. We should never have left ’em to it.’ He does something clever with his fingers and the talon pops up between his knuckles. He makes a clawing movement and hisses. Then the talon jumps back into his palm again. He offers it to me like a cigarette. I meet his eyes briefly. I take the talon and hide it in my hand. I must not speak first. I must keep my head still and my eye must not swivel about. I have a very delicate crown balanced on my frontal lobe. I am a prince.
Fagg breaks the silence.
‘We may be required to do a search of both your room here and the house in Crab-Apple Lane,’ he says. ‘Don’t have blood on any of your clothes, do you?’
My mouth drops open, I’m afraid. He waves his biro at my forehead. ‘How did you come by that scratch, sir?’
‘The struggle. He put up a savage resistance. Strong chap, even when drunk.’
A little pause. They might be waxworks.
‘Gardening,’ I sigh, eventually. ‘There’s a lot of clearing to do in the grounds.’
Fagg comes back to life with a sniff. ‘These are routine questions, sir. Our job’s to ask what’s pertinent. And the thumb?’
I look at the filthy plaster. I can’t remember for a moment. The fretsaw, cutting through the string on the bundle of letters. So long ago!
‘The same,’ I manage to say. ‘Sawing old branches.’
They look as if they don’t believe me. Sliding Eyes jerks upright and goes over to the door.
‘Thank you, Mr Arkwright,’ he says. ‘If we have to search your room and the property, we might be in need of your assistance. We’d be grateful, therefore, if you have any travel arrangements in the immediate future, to let us know. It may be that we require your presence at very short notice.’
‘In other words, I can’t go to London this evening.’
‘Was that what you were planning, sir?’