The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  The houses gave way to a last garden centre, or nursery, according to taste, as the Rivelin woods and the Rivelin valley began their sinuous path. After this point, the river ran behind the backs of houses, unfollowably, and was even directed into narrow pipes. At the edge of the houses, it was full of rubbish, old bicycle wheels, plastic supermarket bags, a trolley from Gateway, which must have been pushed uphill a good two miles before being dumped here. But if you followed the river upstream, the detritus in the water, the flotsam and jetsam, soon thinned and then disappeared; you came across a municipal pond, a little reservoir constructed out of the Rivelin’s stream like a lido. Children often came here with their shrimping nets in search of frogspawn and sticklebacks, taking the sticky trove home in funerary jam-jars. And then you could go further upstream, tracing the river that fed this pond, and all sorts of fish under the rippling green shade. Most kids—Daniel was explaining, as he and Helen walked up the side of the stream together—most kids round here, they came to the pond, and stopped there. But if you went on—

  The pond, with its concrete edges and warning notices, was ruled by the gods of municipal holiday. But further upstream, leading up from the runnel that fed the pond itself through a concrete pipe, in most seasons under water, beyond this pond the events of the river became more surprising and suggestive. There weren’t often many people around. Often you came across the remains of a dam constructed out of rocks and mud by boys, once effective but after a few days scattered and ineffective; the naughtiest boys—

  “You weren’t one of them, were you, by any chance?”

  “I was not,” Daniel said.

  —the very naughtiest boys used to beg or steal a sheet of plastic from building sites and underpin their dams with it. It was the only thing that ever successfully stopped the river, constructed a proper pool; rocks and mud never had the same effect. From such a pool, you could after a couple of hours scoop the gulping tench with your bare hands, more or less. But grown-ups, if they ever came across one of these more ruthlessly efficient dams, would usually step in and pull out the plastic sheet with an impressive roar and cascade as the built-up pool gave up its swelling bulk, its gasping and ungrateful fish.

  The concrete paths stopped above the municipal pond, and the only paths were worn down by people following the river out of curiosity and the occasional gang of naughty boys. Most kids went to Forge Dam, with its ice-cream vans and its shallow reach. You could only drown in that if you set your mind to it, like those government adverts starring man-high talking squirrels about the murderous potential of six inches of water. Some kids, like Daniel, had gone to the stretch of Rivelin that went between the pond and the old post office two miles into woodland, which only survived on the sale of drinks to cyclists and quarters of sweets to the dam-making boys. He loved the summer here; loved the hover of the dragonflies over the soupy surface of the river’s pools in summer; loved those clouds of gnats like a hot fog about your head, clustering under the stickiest trees; loved the underwater hover, like a mirroring of the dragonfly hover above, of the sticklebacks, and the occasional glimpse of a bigger fish, or the thought of a bigger fish as the surface of the water gulped like a hiccup, and it must have been a carp, perhaps, taking an insect. Nobody came to fish here, apart from the naughty boys with their home-made means, which most fish easily evaded. You were supposed to have a licence, according to the notice at the western edge of the Rivelin ponds. But Daniel had never seen anyone fishing seriously here. He liked it—he’d always liked it—because not many people came here. It wasn’t really anything special, but it felt very old, and it was always quiet, so—

  “You mean you could take girls here,” Helen said.

  “I worry about you,” Daniel said. “I worry about what a cynic you’re becoming.”

  “Well, it’s not cynical if it’s true,” Helen said. “And I bet you did bring girls here.”

  Daniel thought. “I don’t think I did much,” he said. “If it was for a kiss and a cuddle—”

  “A kiss and a cuddle?”

  “—if it was for a kiss and a cuddle, I used to take girls more to the crags. It wasn’t so much of a walk from home.”

  “It’s lovely here, though,” Helen said. “We’ve nothing like this in Tinstone. Just the moor tops—if you took a girl up there, you’d not have much luck asking her to take her jersey off.”

  “Look,” Daniel said, “no one else knows about this …”

  And he took Helen’s hand and dived off into the woods to their left. There was no path at all. They could have been going anywhere. They thrashed and plunged through undisturbed plant growth; Helen put her hand on a tree-trunk, and it came away reluctantly, smeared with sap. “This had better be worth it,” she said. The noise of the river behind them, the plunge of the fall over rocks and, above their heads, the song of birds as their huge crashing alarmed them; but when they stopped everything seemed quite still. There was a whoosh ahead, perhaps a couple of hundred yards, the unexpected noise of a car. The woodland was dense and untouched, so close to the Manchester road. “It’s wet, Daniel,” Helen said, but he just held out his hand to help her along. The ferns and grass were moist, and her tights were wet round her ankles as if she’d plunged into the river. But they carried on.

  Suddenly the woodland came to an end, and they were at a clearing. There was a building in the middle of the wood. She couldn’t understand why you didn’t see it until you were absolutely on top of it, but it was quite hidden. It was an old, two-storey building, its windows made blank with wood panels that were themselves old and shabby. Its door—wide enough to have been a double door once—was covered with another panel, but hanging half off, and its roof bald and patchy, the joists displayed like the bones of a dead animal under its fur. It didn’t look like a house; there was a kind of shed to one side, or the remains of one, its roof completely off and open to the elements. The walls of the shed were eroded like the ruins of a medieval castle, as if it had been stripped for masonry or dry-stone walls. The main building, however, was still pretty well whole. There were the remains of two external staircases, leading up to door-sized windows on the upper floor, one at each end, like wrecked fire-escapes.

  “I don’t think many people know about this,” Daniel said. “I found it. I used to come here. Not with girls, I just used to come here. Come on.”

  They went to the building across the grass-strewn clearing. Under the grass, there were some sort of cobblestones, though they’d been grown over for years, perhaps decades. Daniel slipped through the broken door; Helen followed him.

  “It’s some sort of old forge, I found out,” he said. “It went on working till before the war, but no one’s done anything with it since.”

  “What’s a forge doing out here?”

  “It’s perfect for steel-making,” Daniel said. “Or it would have been once. There’s the forest for firewood—if you look round the back, there’s still a pile of timber rotting, it’s been there fifty years. There’s the river—I reckon there used to be a pond came right up from the river, but it’s dried up and overgrown now. I don’t know how that happens. There’s the road, too. They’d have wanted to build something near a road, for the transport.”

  “What—you think they built this because of the Manchester road?”

  “It’s old, the Manchester road. It’d have been there long before this was built. It’s only a hundred yards in that direction. Didn’t you hear the car go past?”

  “That’s amazing,” Helen said. “Someone must own it.”

  “I don’t know who,” Daniel said.

  “People own everything,” Helen said.

  Inside, there was nothing much to be seen. If there had ever been forges or machinery, it had long been stripped out and taken to be melted down or reused. Though, from the outside, it looked as if it had two storeys, and the wrecked staircases showed that it must have done, there were only the broken-down remnants of a ceiling, mostly joists and rafters, hardly any
floorboards, and what might have been a staircase had been efficiently removed, leaving not much more than markings on the wall where the horizontal beams had gone. The sun slashed through the grand ruined space; great diagonal girders of light struck haphazardly, just as they did through the forest. Whether it was from their entrance, or perhaps its normal state, the airborne dust of forest-eaten ruin was as heavy as a thin brown fog.

  Helen walked round the circumference of the building, running her fingers over the lovely texture of the worn brick. “There’s mushrooms growing here,” she said.

  “I bet you could eat them,” Daniel said.

  “I’ll watch you eat them,” Helen said, “and die soon of the adventure.”

  “There’s nothing growing inside, though,” Daniel said. “Have you seen that? The ferns, they’re only growing just inside the door.”

  “Why’s that, then?”

  “There’s a cellar underneath, a big one,” Daniel said. “You get to it through that archway, over there.”

  “I’d be careful,” Helen said. “The floor’s going to collapse if you don’t watch out.”

  “It won’t collapse,” Daniel said. “It’s stone and brick, this floor, it’s made to last for ever. It’s only the first floor that was wood. Do you want to see the cellar?”

  “You must be joking,” Helen said. “It’ll be dark and full of rats, I’ve no doubt.”

  From his pocket, Daniel produced a little torch, smiling. “There’s no rats,” he said. “Or, at least, none I’ve ever seen. There might be a frog or two, they like it down there, but they’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Were you planning this?” Helen said. “I’m not one of your girls, you know, you can ask to lie down on your mackintosh in a wet cellar in a derelict building.”

  “I told you,” Daniel said. “I never brought any girls here.”

  The archway, which looked like a cobwebby niche in the wall, no more, showed itself to be the top of a flight of stone steps. He brushed aside the curtain of wet cobwebs, their makers long gone, and with his torch shining a path down the steps, took her arm.

  “I’m not going down there,” Helen said, but she let herself go down with Daniel, step by step, until with a kind of damp crunch under her shoes they reached the bottom. He turned her gently, as if she were the blindfolded birthday girl being taken into her own party—for a second she almost felt that as he swung his torch round, there would be all her friends, and her family, waving balloons and calling, “Surprise!” But there was a huge space there, pillared with brick, twelve feet high. There must be some other opening; the torch lit up a dense gloom rather than complete blackness.

  “If I were a serial killer,” Helen said, “this is where I’d come to leave the bodies.”

  “That’s a charming thought,” Daniel said. “If I were a serial killer, this is where I’d live, under the staircase, lying in wait for the next pair of my victims.”

  “—!” Helen shrieked, as just then Daniel, with a sharp fingernail, had reached round her back and pinched her bare arm, just where a serial killer might seize her. “That’s not very funny.”

  “Well,” Daniel said, shining his torch around the whole space quickly, “don’t you think it’s fantastic?”

  “I wonder who owns it?” Helen said.

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” Daniel said.

  “What for?” Helen said. “You know, sometimes I get the impression there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “That might be an accurate impression,” Daniel said. “I’m going to tell you now.”

  She looked at him; he brought the torch back to his stomach, and shone it upwards, giving his face heavy shadows, a horror-film expression. She couldn’t help thinking, though, what a charmer he was, even with the special effects.

  “We’re going to buy it,” he said.

  “You must be joking,” Helen said.

  “I’m not joking,” Daniel said. “We’re going to buy it. If we can find someone who can actually sell it, we’re going to buy it. It must belong to someone, and if we can find out who that is, I’m going to make them sell it to us.”

  “And who in the name of Beelzebub do you think ‘us’ is, Daniel?”

  “That’s the thing,” Daniel said. “By ‘us,’ I mean you and me, and your dad Philip and your mum Shirley.”

  “Very funny,” Helen said. “I suppose we’re all going to live down here like the frogs.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “We’re not going to live here.”

  “To be honest, Daniel,” Helen said, “I don’t mind you bringing me down here to see where you used to hide yourself away, but I don’t appreciate you making a joke out of my mum and dad. I thought you might have noticed that about me by now.”

  “I’m not joking,” Daniel said. “I’ve never been more serious.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something,” Helen said, “you might have started going out of your mind, but I can tell you my mum and dad haven’t. There’s no reason on earth could persuade them to get involved with any kind of scheme, being polite for the moment and assuming this isn’t some kind of stupid joke.”

  “You’re too late,” Daniel said. “They’re quite keen on the idea.”

  “You what?” Helen said.

  “I said, they’re quite keen on the idea,” Daniel said. He switched off his torch; the gloom surrounded them. “Do you see?” he said. “There’s a sort of trapdoor over there. I bet it’s where they used to deliver the timber, they must have used this for storage. The raw materials.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Helen said. They stood there in the dark, and in a moment Daniel came towards her, took her folded arms, one in each hand, and tried to kiss her. She wouldn’t kiss back, and in a moment he stopped it.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll walk through as far as the Manchester road—we’re not far from the post office, they’ll do us a cup of tea—and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Book Four

  THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA

  Well, have a look at this,” Damon from the direct marketing said. “We just had the boys in Design—” blood-curdling chuckle “—‘run up’ a little example of the sort of thing we might be talking about. ETA in the press, eight weeks.”

  Nine of them were standing around in the central sort of discussion-space thingy in the office. It was lucky there were four pillars holding the roof up, or nobody would have had anything to lean against, and they’d all, like Jane, stand there formlessly. Would it really be so much, she asked silently and not for the first time, for a table and chairs around it and a door you could shut? But this was called hot-desking, which meant you didn’t have one. Russell’s idea from some American nonsense weekend in Berkshire. Two of the younger lads had dragged over low leather armchairs from the sort of reception-area thing, and were sitting in them with embarrassment, looking upwards. Jane didn’t care, though she would have liked a desk and a room of her own where you could put a vase of flowers and a photograph or two. Instead, there was just a sort of plinth-arrangement thingy with a computer on it every now and again; that was supposed to be for everyone or anyone’s use when inspiration struck. What you were supposed to do when inspiration hadn’t struck? … In practice everyone had their own little computer on a pedestal and their own armchair nearby, where paperwork piled up on the floor alongside. You couldn’t be neat without a desk with drawers, and Jane looked forward to Russell’s experiment soon being modified, then abandoned altogether.

  As the most experienced person there—they didn’t do “senior” in Barney Spacek Boughton—Jane took the piece of A4 laminated card from Damon from the direct marketing. She inspected it. It was an advertisement for a weekend in a holiday camp, the same old chain of holiday camps that the poor kids at Flint used to go to and claim was great fun. Things had moved on. This weekend was reserved for queer-boys. There was a lot of talk about how much money they’d all got, the queer-boys, not having children
and not talking to their elderly parents or anything else that looked like responsibilities. Russell had an expression for it; the “pink pound.” We’ll be doing more and more of that sort of business,” he said to her. “It’s where the money is.” When the question of doing the marketing for this weekend had come up, he’d gone for it with a degree of enthusiasm that had, frankly, surprised the clients, lowering the fee as they were taking their coats off, looking round fruitlessly for somewhere to hang them (and would a cupboard really be too much to ask?).

  As it happened, it turned out that nobody really knew whether the queer-boys, despite having more money than anyone else, thanks to not having any kids and not talking to their elderly parents, were all that likely to part with it in exchange for a weekend in the lowest of low seasons, in dead February in a holiday camp in north Wales facing Liverpool across the Mersey. Jane had always seen these places quite clearly: a swathe of yellow-painted plaster peeling off the surface of grey concrete, and a middle-aged clown trudging round the corner with his soiled yellow-plush props dangling from his hand in the rain. That didn’t seem very gay, in any sense at all.

  She looked at the mock-up, reading from the bottom right upwards. “Is that what the costing came out as?” she said. “It seems quite a lot for the—a lot to ask.”

  “We queried it,” Damon said. “Actually, the boys in Design queried it. They wondered whether the price was right. But the client said they’d run it past their focus group and it seemed to stand up. Fifty-eight per cent of the ITA taking part, I think—where is it?—fifty-eight per cent said that they would be prepared to pay up to, ah—”