At first I find only mulch. Then my hands close on something smoother and more substantial. Hoping it isn’t the ear of some subterranean animal, I pull it through the opening.
It is a wallet, wrinkled and filthy. I open it, knowing it once belonged to Mr. Strachan even before seeing his name on the cards. Steve had been supposed to return this. Only he hadn’t. A present to me, he’d said. I’d told him to get rid of it, and this is what he’d done. Like he knew one day he might need this to convince me of his character, and would bring me here to show me this time capsule. A true relic from our childhood. That is stupid, I know that really, yet here I came and here it is. Either it is romantic or it is really fucking sinister.
I close the wallet. I want to believe him, and that in itself is odd. I rarely want to believe anything. I like beliefs to happen to me, their truth undeniable.
But there is some plausibility to the notion that I might have been allowing myself to believe this Steve-is-the-murderer story a bit too readily, too. That can’t be dismissed. Allowing it because us having no sexual chemistry isn’t a dramatic enough ending to the romantic dream I’ve been harbouring these last few weeks: Nostalgia Crush Host Hooks Up with Childhood Sweetheart After Years of Bad Romance.
Knowing my own doubts can’t be resolved until I see him, I put the wallet back. It will stay there until either the bridge falls down or the world ends. Some future human, or an alien, might find it, and like Will’s pot all those years ago it will obtain significance and value. Even though the only difference between the wallet now and the wallet then will be that it is old. Old is all it is.
Will, 1998
He’s not stupid, he knows what Steve wants him to do. Steve reckoned he was quite cool, able to hide things from other people, but he was about as subtle as the Blackpool illuminations.
The thing was, Will knew which of the pieces were valuable, and which weren’t. Knew which ones he could take without doing the collection too much damage, might even be able to take a few without him noticing, sneaky does it.
What Steve would do then he didn’t know. If he could convince him not to smash them up, then maybe he could keep them. That would be all right. Then at least all this would come to an end and they could just get on with the rest of the time they had together. The main thing was giving Steve something so he didn’t go too far.
At the end of Dead Man’s Alley he turned left, then in the woods leaped up over the back fence into the dank space behind Bill’s shed. Bill was in, the van on the drive. Midnight was a few minutes away, and he knew he’d be in bed, up early for work the next day.
“Hey,” Steve said. He couldn’t see him yet. “You ready to make this right?”
“Uh huh,” he said. “You going to pick the lock or something?”
“No.” This startled Will, because he thought Steve was to his right. He was behind him. Will turned around and he was so close Steve’s soapy scent briefly overpowered the other, much more powerful stink that reasserted itself once Steve took a step back. Petrol. Yeah, it smelled like petrol.
“Did I scare you?” he said. There was a scritch sound, then the dark was pierced by a flame that floated towards him.
“Take this,” he said.
Will reached forward and took it obediently, only on doing so feeling any kind of concern about petrol and flames being near each other.
Another scritch.
“I’m making this simple,” Steve said. “I’ve already chucked a load of petrol on the roof. I want you to throw your match up there, and if you don’t, I’m throwing mine.”
“What?” Will said. “You can’t.”
“This is what we agreed. So don’t think about it. Just do it.”
“The dog’s in there, Steve,” he said.
“So? Don’t think about it.”
And now Will understood that Steve was wrong. Wrong all the way through in a way that he’d probably known the day he’d asked him to help bury his dog.
“He killed Obi,” Steve said, even though Will knew for sure now that Steve had killed Obi. “What do you care? Anyway, I know what you do. I know about all those animals you kill. I’ve seen you burying them around the place. Adeline’s seen you. Throw the match, Will.”
This was unfair, totally unfair. How did he even know about that?
“That’s not what I do,” he said. And it was true. He only buried the dead animals he found. The rat down by the bridge, the bird in the maize field. Jen’s cat out on the main road, which had been hit so hard and so many times it was barely recognisable as an animal any more, something he’d wanted to keep from her, because it would have been so awful. Better to have her think it wandered off. He’d read a book, a lovely book about a man that thought all living things deserved a funeral. And he agreed with that. Everyone deserved a funeral, every living thing.
“Your match,” Steve said. It was one of those paper matches, and they burned faster than the wooden ones. It was nearly out.
“He’ll know it was you,” Will said.
“Not if you, his best friend, say you were with me,” Steve said. He’d thought it all through.
Will waited. His hand was actually shaking. “Let’s get the dog out first.”
“It’ll bark.”
“I’m not killing it.”
“Why does no one listen to me?” Oh, the rage in his voice. Burning harder than both matches, than all matches that had ever burned. “Throw it.”
“No,” Will said. “Fuck off.”
The match in his hand went out. Now only Steve’s match burned, illuminating his face. A ghoul. A demon. A killer. The danger was real, and he’d been under their noses the whole time.
“Fine,” Steve said. And then the apparition before Will was gone. Steve had thrown his match.
The shed roof ignited, orange light spilling into their hiding place.
“You were with me,” Steve said. “That’s all you have to say.” He leaped up onto the top of the fence, and Will saw he was carrying the petrol can from the farmhouse. “You coming? No? Fine. See you.”
Now alone, he knew the best thing to do was to follow Steve. But the fire wasn’t quite out of control yet. It was too far gone to stop, but there was time to get into the shed. To get Elvis out. He ran around the side, the heat intense enough to make him pull his head away. Once around the front he could see that Steve hadn’t just petrolled the roof, he’d petrolled the front window panels too. Tongues of flame reached up and around the glass for sustenance.
Will took out a Swiss Army knife from his pocket, and approached the door. He tried the screwdriver, the knife, the corkscrew, none of them would go into the lock. And now his shoulders were getting hot, and the fire was reaching to taste him. From inside he could hear the dog’s claws on the bare floorboards like hail on a glass roof, and the low sound of its whining from inside the muzzle Bill tied tight around its mouth to stop it barking. He kicked the door, but it was sturdy. No flimsy shed this, top of the range. Will kicked again, harder. Kicked again.
It was too hot now. He stood back. His hands ran through his hair; his legs carried him from the shed porch to the magnolia tree in the centre of the garden again and again. He could wake Bill up, say he’d seen it from the road. No, that won’t work. Not one bit. And Elvis, it would be too late for him. He could hear him scratching at the door, imagined he could. Over in the flowerbed was a spade. He pulled it from the ground and hurled it through the window of the shed, wanting to let the air in to help the dog. But this only invited the fire inside, and the flames were reaching in now, reaching in—
“Fucking hell!”
The sight of Bill behind him was as much of a relief to him as breathing in the smoke-free air away from the shed. He charged at Will, changed direction, then charged at the shed.
“Fuck. Gah. Fuck. What have you done?” He was up at the door, trying to put a key into the lock, but it was too hot and he was having to let go. He tried again, and again, then gave up and started to k
ick the door. One, two, and in, clumsily though a large hole where the wood split. Ghosts of smoke poured from inside the shed.
Will wanted to say it wasn’t him. He stopped himself, though. Couldn’t betray Steve. Not after Steve had asked him not to. It would be fine now, Bill was here. He would—
Out he came, in his arms the dog, lying with its head much too far back for everything to be okay. He placed the dog down on the grass away from the shed, metres from where Will stood paralysed. The dog wasn’t moving. The dog wasn’t moving. The dog wasn’t—
“Did he do this?” Bill said, stare fixed on Will now. Will wanted to hide from that look. Knew bad things had happened to those that caused that look in the past. “He did this, didn’t he?” His mouth didn’t open very far when he spoke. He was nodding the way Steve nodded, to get him to agree.
“No,” Will said, his voice coming out of some other person standing on a distant planet in some other galaxy.
“Will, tell me it was him.”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t do this,” he said, and put a palm on the dog’s still chest.
Oh, the time that flowed while they stared at one another was like syrup and he was drowning in it. Then wood cracked, and part of the roof fell onto the shed porch.
Will turned, and he ran. He ran and ran. And by the time he got home he could hear the sirens approaching down Blythe Lane.
Even at that point, as always seemed to happen to him, the strongest emotions from that night were beginning to fade. Pretty soon he was hungry, and though he’d dream of fire and smoke that night, he would sleep.
Steve left Blythe and the farmhouse stood empty.
Jen and Rupesh both swanned off on holiday again after GCSE results, their parents allowing them to miss the opening of sixth form to take advantage of the cheaper flights. Typical. Before Rupesh left he asked Will why he didn’t show up for Steve’s Dedication, and Will told him the truth, about how Steve wanted to rig it so Rupesh lost. Wasn’t much point in lying about that bit. He didn’t tell him about the other stuff, though. About the fire. When Rupesh asked for details about what had happened when Steve wanted him back in the group, he told him he’d punched Steve and told him to let him back in. Not a bad lie, although one based on something he’d occasionally wished he’d actually done more than once since.
Adeline spent a lot of time in Marlstone now, hanging out with some people she knew from her old school that she met on an open day at Marlstone College. Nice for her, he supposed.
So Will walked the fields on his own as August became September. Sometimes missing them, sometimes not, but always making sure his destination was some previous haunt of theirs. At the railway tracks that sleepy afternoon with Jen drifted through his head, along with it a sense of shame he didn’t understand. Whatever: when he started college soon there would be other girls, and Jen would become a thing of the past. He started finding pictures of fit girls in Mum’s catalogues and Dad’s magazines, cutting them out and sticking them up on his wall, reminding himself that other girls existed. Jen wasn’t everything. Since he’d started doing that, though, Monks had begun sneaking into his room and drawing things on the women to make him laugh, moustaches and beards—poking holes in their eyes, too, and worse, holes in places that weren’t even that funny when you—
He’d expected Steve to mention the fire again, but he never did. Not the day of the photo shoot, nor the night up at the pylon, nor any of the few times they’d met up at his before he went away. The time at the pylon had been one of his better nights. He’d joked about becoming a serial killer, stupid really, but he’d made the others laugh. Monks had shown him a documentary on serial killers recently—he was really into them—and Will hadn’t know before that the magic number of victims was three. Mainly, though, killers were on his mind because Jen had been over to pick his mum’s brains about acting that morning, and all that obsessing over making it, which really meant getting famous, had made him think about how if they really wanted fame, a much quicker way to it would be to kill enough people to become a—
He’d even made himself laugh that night, something he hadn’t done much of recently. But not Steve, no… he didn’t laugh. And with Steve’s eyes boring into him, it hadn’t seemed that funny any more. Then they’d all got spooked anyway, thinking someone was out there in the bushes, watching them.
He’d been expecting Bill to come for him, or to send over the police. Sometimes he glimpsed a shape out in the fields he thought might be him, but it was always so easy to imagine things out there. No one did come, even though Adeline said that Elvis was dead and the entire shed and all the back fence was ash. Bill was telling people it was his fault. That a bonfire caught the roof. He had a burn barrel back there so it was a good lie. Poor Elvis, though. Poor Elvis. He’d been an all right dog, despite what Steve thought. Some nights he dreamed of them both. In them he managed to save Elvis, pick him up from the burning shed floor, the dog licking his face, only to get outside and find Steve there. He would demand the dog from him. And while he would fight him, he would always end up giving him the dog. And then Steve would do something terrible. A different fate each time but one that would mean Will woke up crying, even if it was only for a minute or so. Had he overheated, or just breathed in too much smoke? How would that feel, to breathe that in, and would it hurt?
Will was out in the fields one September afternoon, just when it was starting to get dark. He only got as far as the footbridge when he realised it was time to turn back. When he did he saw a shadow moving down the path towards him. Drifting to begin with, then he could see a sort of wonkiness to the movement, and at the same time the general shape of this person’s upper body was familiar to him.
“I thought I’d seen you,” Bill said. His words were a bit wonky too, his mouth not closing down around the words properly. “Come back to mine.” Will nods. “To talk.”
He didn’t really like it, the way Bill sounded, it was the way Dad and Mum sounded when they were on the plonk. He followed Bill, though. When they got to the end of Dead Man’s, Bill walked Will out to the middle of the road. In the orange streetlights, he could see giant sacks under Bill’s eyes. And the dim glint of kindness that sometimes looked back out at him wasn’t there any more. Nothing was there any more.
The two of them stood facing one another, and Bill said, “I was out there listening to you that night. I heard what you said. About killing people.” He shook his head. “You’re a nasty lot, aren’t you?”
Will shrugged because what could you say?
“Still can’t believe it was you, though. The shed. You can tell me. It were him, weren’t it?”
Will stayed silent. He knew about gangsters and grassing. Knew Bill would think less of him even if he told the truth.
“You know I lost the lot. You know I lost him.” Still Will said nothing. “You telling me you did that?”
“Sorry.”
Nope, he won’t fall for it. And Bill got it, because his shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes.
“Wait here,” Bill said. “In that spot.”
So Will did, and Bill went into the house for a good five minutes before coming back out. Bill’s breath stank of whisky when he spoke, and mmmm, wouldn’t a whisky be nice now?
“I’ve called the police. You understand, I’ll tell them I did it. But you understand my life was in there. You know that, don’t you?” He reached out and touched Will’s shoulder. Something black is wrapped around the knuckles on that hand.
“But you can’t take the blame for it,” Will said. “It wasn’t you.”
“It was.”
The pain in Will’s head didn’t register until he opened his eyes to see the concrete surface of the road just centimetres in front of his eyes. By that point it was almighty, all down his neck and on the insides of the actual bones in his head. And God, some tearing agony pushed behind his right eye, and the road was wonky now and—
Another blow struck the top of hi
s head.
And another straight away.
Then Will could just make out the edge of Bill’s shoe coming towards his face, then he had to shut his eyes.
This was what he’d been waiting for.
This was his punishment.
This was his—
New Year, 2016
“You know I love this film,” I say, “it’s hilarious, the writing’s great. Other than when he’s bothering Sigourney, Bill Murray is hilarious. Even more so on a big screen where you can see him improvising with his face when he doesn’t have a line.”
“You’re still going to put it in the crusher?” Jon says. He’s watching me from across the table in the studio with the usual mix of disdain and amusement.
“She won’t,” Xan says. “You won’t.”
“But. Buuuut… You can’t avoid the fact that Ghostbusters has a really, really bad attitude towards government regulation and environmental protection,” I say. “Walter Peck is more evil than Gozer the Destroyer. He sneers and bullies and cajoles, and can’t even be bothered to say the whole of the word ghost sometimes, so beneath him is what the Ghos-sbusters are doing.
“But the bloke is just doing his job. And these pricks were kicked out of university for having sloppy methods, they’re shooting things with unlicensed nuclear weapons that are at best unwieldy. Walter Peck works for the Environmental Protection Agency. How can they be the bad guys? You know, this is the standard, Randian individualist stuff—”
“Oh Christ—” Xan says.
“—that lurks in the dark heart of eighties American comedies. We’ve talked about it before. Sinister government regulation in the way of the beautiful, progressive force of the free market. Well, I call bullshit. The Ghostbusters are an out-of-control vigilante group that are more of a danger to New York than the ghosts. They need controlling, they need some rules, they need mandatory fucking training on health and safety.”
“Still, in the crusher?” Xan says through laughter. “The original Ghostbusters?”
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