For some reason this was a sinister impression. Suddenly I longed to be safely home again – home where lights and shapes were dependable, where a car was a car shut up firmly in a garage and not one of a herd of swollen, hump-backed creatures undulating through the night. And none of the cars I could see looked silver, sleek or shining. There was no sign of Brook at all.
‘He must have lost himself. He’ll be here in a minute,’ said Ivan. I didn’t know if he was comforting me or reassuring himself.
Anyhow we stood there waiting, while Woodlands shadows flowed and danced, sometimes curtseying to the lights that brought them into being, sometimes standing rigidly to attention. Brook did not appear.
I thought about him. It was easy to imagine – to suddenly imagine – that he was gambling on me . . . thrusting me into a dangerous world, hoping it would swallow me up. Perhaps seeing me with Ivan had reminded him that some day I might marry . . . that Granny’s investments might move completely beyond his reach. Perhaps he was casting me down on a board where the wild forces of the world might sweep me away. I seemed to hear his voice saying, ‘I told them not to go there. I told them it would be dangerous.’ Who would contradict him, except Granny and my mother? And somehow I imagined that, though they might weep for me, they would both paper over any secret suspicions and remain silent, Mum because she was so much under the spell of Brook, and Granny because she was no longer the sharp granny she once had been.
The night was emptying out. A darker mood began to settle on us. Somewhere someone howled like a wolf, and then, from down the road, more or less outside a pub, a whole pack howled back. Woodlands was becoming a black fairytale.
‘Where is he?’ Ivan hissed beside me.
‘He can’t have lost himself,’ I said uneasily. ‘This street, Forest Road, is just two corners from the car park at the back of the mall, and it’s not as if there are any one-way streets or anything to confuse him. Besides, he knows this part of Woodlands pretty well.’
‘I don’t get into this part of town very often,’ said Ivan, looking around cautiously. ‘I feel a bit lost myself right now. Perhaps he’s parked further down the road.’
‘I don’t know it very well either,’ I said. ‘We sometimes use that supermarket back there because it’s the nearest. But we do try to keep clear of it at night, because this part of town can get pretty rough.’ I paused. ‘I wish I’d brought my phone but it’s in my other coat. I didn’t think we’d be gone for long.’
‘Mine needs recharging,’ said Ivan gloomily.
By now, the twilight above the Woodlands roofs had deepened . . . had become true darkness. Forest Road, the road we were now standing on, was a luminous, writhing worm, familiar in some ways but not at all reassuring. Doorways and side streets had become black caves, but Forest Road itself held darkness at bay, armed as it was with streetlights, along with the glow of passing cars. And, after all, some shops still had bright windows. The people walking past us looked rather more like ordinary shoppers than the drifters in the mall had done. Some of them were even talking to one another in a perfectly normal fashion. It wasn’t as if Forest Road was deserted or that people were frightened and anxious. Far from it! The sound of voices – many voices – flowed across the street. ‘Harry’s Drop’ said a glowing sign curving over the pub door. There was quite a gang of men standing around that door staring up and down Forest Road. Bottles and glasses clinked, and the pulsing, red tips of cigarettes winked and glowed. In a way all this was ordinary enough . . . just what you might expect. There are lots of pub doorways in a city, and lots of people gathering to smoke and talk and drink. Yet once again that mad feeling pushed in on me – the feeling that we had space or time had twisted and we were in a strange dimension. We had strolled through the tunnel of the mall and out into a place trying to disguise itself as part of the city so that it could trick wandering, uncertain people like us, only to consume them when its appetite grew keen.
And now I began imagining that the old trees and ferns which had once flourished here, but which were clamped down these days under the sealed surfaces of footpaths and streets, were breaking free, disguised perhaps, but still making their presence felt to vulnerable people. You are lost on the woods, in the bush, in the secret, primordial forest of the world. Only now can those ancient woods begin to reveal themselves, as they grow out of the savage darkness that lurks in the crevices of all towns and cities. Cities, those frail frontiers people build to hold the true wild of the world at bay . . . the wild and the wolves. The wolves and the wild. I believed (just for a moment) that the busy men and women walking past us were really savage animals, able to conceal their true nature by taking on human shapes. Woodlands had become something far older and far fiercer than it had ever seemed before – a forest, seeded in prehistoric times, obliged to hide during the day, but able, as the night advanced, to reveal its true self.
‘It’s really odd,’ Ivan said. ‘Hey, night!’ he breathed, looking into the air above him as if night were really listening to him. ‘Where’s our transport? Have you swallowed it up?’ So I was not the only one feeling that Woodlands was a thin veneer over something ancient and implacable, and that the traffic lights were something different from what they seemed to be . . . night witches, clicking their fingers, maybe. Once again Ivan and I were of one mind. ‘Let’s see if he’s parked further on,’ said Ivan.
So we set off strolling down Forest Road, peering at parked cars, squinting at those other cars that lined up impatiently, waiting for wood witches to click their fingers and turn the traffic lights green.
‘Something’s happened,’ said Ivan at last. ‘Perhaps he got a flat tyre, or broke down. There’s room to park along here, and I reckon it should only take about three minutes to drive from the parking lot at the back of the mall around to the front. We must have been waiting for close on fifteen minutes by now. And, come to think of it, why didn’t he wait in the parking lot? Why bother to drive round to the front? Okay, shall we go back and look in the parking lot just in case he decided to stay there?’
‘Or we could phone him, if I knew his number, which I don’t, and we could find a public phone, which we can’t seem to do. I could even ring home and get Mum to come and collect us.’
‘Or will we live a bit extravagantly and get a taxi? I can probably afford one now, though it would use up most of my money,’ Ivan suggested.
‘I suppose there’s a taxi stop somewhere near here. Let’s keep an eye open,’ I said, and off we went again, walking slowly though we had no real place to go. I couldn’t be sure how Ivan felt, but I know I felt lost, even though Forest Road was a road I recognised. Well, I knew it in the daylight. Night was transforming it. Once I looked back over my shoulder, up out of Forest Road, high up above Woodlands, and saw little spots of light on the hills behind us. One of those stars was quite possibly the front window of my own home, staring down at the city below.
Ahead of us, a particularly bright streetlight beamed down at a corner, marking a crossroads. But, bright though it was, it seemed somehow fragile, set in a fierce forest of shadows. From above, the night flowed obstinately down the corrugations of old roofs, poured over into their spoutings and then overflowed, filtering down onto balconies, all of which seemed to be trying to cage darkness – but this was a darkness that would not be contained. Those shadows overflowed yet again, drifting around us, while the windows directly behind the balconies stared blankly out like strange, lashless eyes monitoring the thinning flow of life in the streets of ‘ Woodlands.
We reached a stretch of stone wall with no doors or windows that shouted commands at us.
‘die!’ it commanded, in savage sprawling blue paint. ‘the wolves are running!’ it added in urgent scarlet. ‘blood!’ said a small, almost shy message that looked as if it were written in mere crayon. A pink arrow pointed up towards the word ‘die!’
‘It’s funny to think this place was ever trees,’ I said, ‘once upon a time, that is.’ I wanted
to remind myself that the city was what I knew it must be, and not some mythical forest.
‘Funny that it’s still called “Woodlands”,’ Ivan said, ‘when it’s the dead opposite these days. Mind you, in a funny way it almost feels like . . .’ He fell silent.
‘I was just thinking that.’ I stopped and looked around. ‘Right now, it’s all got the feeling of a sort of fierce forest . . . a wild wood . . . hasn’t it? Not a tamed forest, all noble trees, but a savage one. And in old fairytales people are scared of forests, they’re scared of getting lost. I almost feel we could get lost here. I mean, those people walking past us sometimes seem lost themselves, or sometimes they seem a bit like animals on the prowl.’ I tried a casual laugh. ‘We’d better watch out, Babe!’
I was half-joking in the way I said this, turning secret, spooky thoughts into a joke, and yet once I had said it I immediately felt it was true. One woman going past me had a hairstyle that made it seem, for a moment, as if she had horns sprouting out of her forehead. A guy walked along after her, and I thought at first he had four legs, but it was just the swinging sleeves of a jersey round his waist, casting shadows that mixed with the shadows of his legs and gave him the look of a quadruped.
‘Books!’ exclaimed Ivan suddenly. ‘Look! It’s that bookshop I told you about. Who’d try running bookshops in this neck of the woods?’ And he spun off from Forest Road into one of the many side streets to study a lighted window. I looked up at the sign on the corner – ‘Robbins Lane’, it said – then followed Ivan, and began peering into the window of that small shop. Sure enough, a second-hand bookshop, though it did seem strange to find any sort of a bookshop in Woodlands. Though the window was still lit, there was a notice on the door that said ‘Closed’.
‘Look,’ Ivan was saying. ‘I love old bookshops. You never know what you’re going to come across. They’re like lucky dips.’
But I was looking at the name on the window.
‘Robbins Books,’ I read aloud. ‘Same as the name of the street. I wonder if it’s any relation to that Mr Robbins who used to teach us in primary school. He loved reading to us, remember? He loved books.’
‘All teachers love books,’ Ivan declared. ‘Or they ought to. Look! There’s an ancient copy of The Coral Island. Bit tatty. Still I wouldn’t mind reading it again.’
‘All the books in this window look tatty,’ I said. ‘Hey, come on, Ivan, let’s get back to the mall. Brook might be there by now. He’ll be mad if we’ve kept him waiting.’
‘It’s him who’s kept us waiting, Babe,’ Ivan said. ‘It’s his fault we’re still wandering around in the wilds of the city.’ Exactly, I thought as we moved back to the brighter lights of Forest Road. ‘I hope he’s there. It’s so dark – as if all the lights are just there to make other places seem darker.’
We were passing a corner. Another narrow alley opened off the main street . . . dark, dark, dark . . . though off in the distance there were stepping stones of light, and a sort of rhythmic movement as if the shadows were dancing to music only they could hear.
‘Weird!’ I agreed. ‘Weird, Babe!’ and, as I spoke, that darkness in front of us writhed and seemed to shrink back a bit. Someone took shape and stepped towards us.
‘Hey! Vannie!’ the shadow exclaimed – almost shouted. ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’
He was tall, this newcomer, with a long, sharp nose and hair straggling around a face I felt increasingly sure I knew. And the name ‘Vannie’ spoken in that particular voice brought something back to me. I began to remember the school playground and a boy called Dexter Loop . . . Dex. Dangerous Dex. Dex the Devil! But that was ages ago.
‘Dex,’ Ivan said, speaking the name just as I was remembering it, and sounding like me, dismayed perhaps, but only slightly. ‘How’s it all going, man?’
I now remembered Dexter Loop as the leader of a gang of boys, all of them fierce, and revelling in their ferocity, ferocity that had become like a sort of freedom for them. Taken singly they were just ordinary kids, probably a lot of them from the Woodlands part of town, but when they got together they became a single thing, a different thing, a wild pack, a fierce, churning complex organism, many voices blending to become one voice, looking eagerly for trouble, wanting to create trouble just for the thrill of it, and inventing some trouble-chorus all its own if it couldn’t find any to join.
Dexter was dressed in black, which was why he had been so hard to see at first, there in the shadows of that ill-lit alley, but there was a yellow symbol on his chest. I knew I had never seen it before and yet, for all that, I felt I recognised it. He had a supremely confident air about him, as if Woodlands was entirely his territory and he was in charge of everything that happened there.
‘We run this playground,’ the school gang would have declared back then. ‘We’re the boss! We’re the wolves.’ And back then, in the beginning, they had concentrated their force on lonely or isolated children, of whom Ivan (I suddenly remembered this) was one, calling him ‘Van’ and ‘Vannie’ and making tooting sounds as he walked by. Of course the voice of the older Dexter had deepened into a man’s voice, but for me it was still filled with that unpleasant power of the past. He stood looking from Ivan to me and back again, smiling, perhaps trying to trick us into thinking he was friendly. Yet at the same time he was snarling his old wolf’s snarl. Hard to tell which was which looking up into a face like his. And suddenly I found I was able to make out that shape on his T-shirt. It was a human shape standing, legs spread . . . without a head. And I knew at once that Dexter must have become a Headlopper.
‘What are you doing in this part of town?’ he was asking. ‘Not your sort of place, is it, now you’re a uni-ver-sity student?’ he mocked.
‘Last time I checked, anyone could come here,’ Ivan replied.
‘Could be risky,’ said Dexter. ‘There’s a lot of savage animals in this neck of the woods . . . all looking for prey . . .’
As he said this he grabbed my arm and wrenched me back into the darkness of the alley and howled . . . howled like a mad wolf, pouring out a sound both violent and vicious and lonely, from somewhere deep within him. He jerked me back again, and from somewhere out in Woodlands, from somewhere close to the pub, I thought, other howlings, fainter but just as menacing, sounded in the night air.
‘Hey!’ I heard Ivan’s voice as I struggled furiously. ‘Let her go!’ Turning my head towards those fingers gripping my shoulder, I took a chance, a lucky one as it turned out. I sank my teeth into Dexter’s hand and bit hard. At the same time Ivan found me there in the darkness of that alley and grabbed my free arm, giving an enormous tug. He almost pulled me free. The three of us, Ivan and I pushing frantically against Dexter, struggled there in that dark Woodlands side street. Howling came from Forest Road, but for now it was still two against one. We broke free and began a stumbling run, not back into Forest Road but down that side street towards those distant stepping stones of light.
‘Brook!’ I gasped. ‘We must find Brook!’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ Ivan grunted. ‘I reckon he knew what he was doing.’
He had voiced my own fears. Brook wouldn’t have had a definite plan to do away with me, I thought, just a momentary impulse. Just a gamble with the savage possibilities of a Woodlands night. Worth a try.
Tall buildings seemed to lean over us as if they were responding to Dexter’s howling. We reached the place where some of the lower windows flooded the footpath with patches of light, but the upper windows remained tightly closed and dark.
I stumbled as I ran, then stumbled again, kicking against a curb that was almost invisible. I felt sure Ivan was right. I found myself living in a fairytale where anything might be possible. Ivan and me – babes in the wood, deserted, lost. And at that moment a chorus of howling voices – the wolf pack, no less – bayed behind us.
‘Go right! There!’ Ivan hissed, panting a little.
Dexter must have waited for his wolf pack – his Headloppers – to
join him. We had a bit of a start on them. All the same, when they howled again in a ragged chorus, they sounded confident . . . and not too far behind. We spun off to the right into a very dark side street, blank windows, locked doors, big rubbish tins. Behind us the howling rose again. The pack were not exactly at our heels but were certainly hunting us, sure of themselves, sure of this part of the city, which was so peculiarly their own. We had no right to be in Woodlands by night. Well, we’d been aliens from the beginning, but now we had been given another part to play. Now we were to be prey to a savage pack. Now, as we ran, we were inviting pursuit.
But when it came to running we did rather better than the wolves behind us, possibly because they had been drinking like Dexter, and we were stone cold sober and driven by fear, and fear can give you urgent wings. Still they followed us, shouting and howling. It wasn’t that we had done anything challenging, but those wolves wanted fun, and their idea of a good time was fun at our expense. I didn’t know if they wanted to beat us up, or rob us, or tear us to bits and leave our bleeding remains scattered around Woodlands, or perhaps all three. I only know that Ivan and I were both immediately sure we must not let the pack catch us. It didn’t matter that we were blameless. We were babes in the wood all right, natural prey, and night had fallen in the forest. None of the ordinary city rules applied in Woodlands at night time. Night was a time of ferocity, and surrender to ferocity. Behind us that voice howled once more, and then the whole pack howled too, with slathering excitement.
‘Right!’ Ivan cried, and we turned right into a street that I knew must lead us back onto Forest Road. There was enough light for me to see the street sign . . . Robbins Lane.
The Wilful Eye Page 20