Scar Hill

by Alan Temperley

  Lying in bed Peter tried to imagine it – and failed. How could his mum betray his dad like that, chasing after other men, getting herself talked about? He had heard the stories, a spiteful girl at school had taunted him with them, making things up as she went along. When she wouldn’t stop he had hit her and got into trouble. What she said about Billy Josh wasn’t true, he knew that. Billy was a friend of his dad. He was married now with a big house and children of his own. Last summer holiday Jim had let Peter go off with Billy on his trawler, fishing round Iceland.

  Peter had heard his mum’s name linked with another man too, a bearded forestry manager who had long since moved to another part of the country. But there was no mystery why in the end she had chosen Morris Sinclair for her getaway, lanky Morris with his thinning hair and big Adam’s apple, living off the Social, propping up the bar in his old jeans and sweater. For Morris had had a big win on the pools. All at once, no-account Morris had become a man with a new Volvo Estate and expensive leather jacket, buying drinks all round.

  How could she have gone off with such a person, Peter wondered, deserting them even before they’d spent their first Christmas at Scar Hill? Did he, Valerie and their dad mean nothing to her? The affair hadn’t lasted long, by all accounts. Within a few weeks Morris was back in the village, scuttling away like a frightened rabbit whenever his dad appeared.

  And his mother, did she ever think of them? Did she have any regrets? She had never written or phoned, not even once. The last Peter had seen of her was that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon when she had rushed about the house packing her satin-lined suitcase, taking things from drawers, lifting them off shelves and throwing them hastily into the boot of the Volvo. ‘Be good now,’ she had said, giving first Peter then his sister one of her special big hugs. ‘Look after your dad. Remember I love you.’ Then she had stepped into the car and driven off down the track with Morris, leaving eleven-year-old Valerie to look after her broken-hearted and tearstained brother until their dad came back from the hill.

  Like names pencilled lightly on paper, she had erased her husband, daughter and four-year-old son from her life. Despite this, sometimes Valerie had news, though only of the broadest kind. How she obtained it Peter never completely understood because he was only eight when Valerie herself left home, but a year or so after his mother’s departure he learned that she was living in Leicester with a good friend, and later that she was living in Liverpool with another friend and calling herself Cynthia Talbot. She had found herself a part-time job in a cinema. The last he heard, in a letter from Valerie, was that their mother, though still legally married to their dad, had married again and emigrated to America where she was starting a new family.

  One morning around the same time, Jim told him he was thinking about getting a divorce. ‘Your mum and me, Pete, I don’t think there’s much chance of us getting together again. I’m sorry. Do you mind very much?’

  Peter was ten. He knew what divorce was. The parents of Jo-Ann, a girl in his class, were newly divorced. But what did it mean to him? His parents lived apart already. He resented his missing mum. She had hurt his dad and Peter loved his dad.

  All the same … He let the picture fall and looked up at the beams on his bedroom ceiling. His half-brothers or sisters, how old were they now? What were they like? And his stepfather? And his mother? Supposing she wanted to see him again sometime, did he want to see her? Peter thought about it.

  No, he didn’t.

  Not really.

  Not ever.

  9

  Stuff School

  SUDDEN MUSIC CAME from downstairs. The Rolling Stones, his dad’s favourite group. Peter listened: ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. He’d heard it so often he knew the words by heart.

  There was a chorus of barking from the dogs in the shed. It went on for some time. The front door opened beneath him and a slit of light appeared at a gap in the curtains. Peter threw back his duvet and crossed to the window.

  His dad was in the yard. He called something to the dogs and opened the shed door. They came bounding out, Meg carrying something and Ben trying to get it. Meg shook whatever it was hard and turned away from him. As the light hit her, Peter saw something trailing from her jaws. It was a rat’s tail. The unwary rodent had ventured into the dogs’ sleeping quarters. His dad called her but Meg was too proud of her trophy to come at once. Tail high, she trotted round the yard, repeatedly shaking the rat hard, though it must be very dead by this time. Eventually she went to him, too excited to be patted and reluctant to part with her treasure. At length she let him have it and he straightened, holding the rat by the tail. ‘Good girl,’ he said, but both dogs were more interested in what he held in his hand. ‘Go on then.’ He threw it across the yard and they bounded in pursuit. This time Ben got there first and pranced away from Meg, holding the rat high above her head.

  Jim saw the light at Peter’s window and looked up.

  Peter raised a hand and let the curtain fall back. The bedroom was cold. He pulled on his thick brown dressing gown and slippers and went downstairs. The dogs were still playing with the rat.

  His dad looked round. ‘Hello there, Pete. What you doing out here?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘No? Not worrying about me, I hope. What happened this morning.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Just a little turn, I’ll be all right.’

  They watched the dogs. ‘I think that’s enough, don’t you,’ Jim said. ‘Much longer and they’ll start to eat it. Ben!’ he called. ‘Come on now. Bring it here.’

  Ben took no notice.

  ‘Ben!’ he said more sharply. ‘Come here!’

  Reluctantly Ben did as he was told and allowed Jim to take the rat from him. ‘That’s a good boy.’

  ‘I’ll get them a couple of biscuits.’ Peter went into the kitchen and returned with two digestives and a handful of meaty chunks. He let the dogs sniff them and led the way into the shed. They knew the routine and flopped down happily on their beds. ‘Good boy! Good girl!’ he said and divided them equally. ‘Night-night.’ He gave each head a brief pat and switched off the light.

  Jim had wrapped the soggy rat in newspaper and thrust it into the bin. Peter followed him into the house.

  The Stones’ CD was playing another track: ‘19Th Nervous Breakdown’. His dad sang along as he straightened the living room.

  ‘Right,’ he said, turning to Peter. ‘Can’t get to sleep. How about if you go on up and I’ll bring you a mug of hot chocolate with condensed milk?’

  ‘Yeah, great!’ The fire had burned low. Peter pulled the neck of his dressing gown close. ‘And a couple of biscuits, those sultana ones.’

  ‘No sooner said.’ Jim nodded towards the stairs. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

  They were delicious. Peter propped himself against the pillows and pulled the duvet to his throat. His thoughts returned to the rat. There weren’t many but they were attracted by the sacks of grain and sheep nuts his dad kept for winter feed. He’d often thought of catching one and trying to tame it. Rats were intelligent, they made good pets.

  Valerie hadn’t agreed. He smiled, how his sister had hated them. Even the sight of a mouse, a harmless little field mouse at the end of the byre, was enough to make her scream. The thought of a rat made her go cold all over. When Peter wanted to torment her, he’d describe how a rat would come climbing up the bedclothes when she was asleep and creep around her neck, its skinny tail slithering over the pillow and its sharp little claws … But by this time Valerie was shouting and hitting him to make him stop.

  He missed her, even after all these years. When his mum went off, Valerie had taken her place. She was his big sister, lively, funny, who had hugged him, and smelled of sweat and scent, and told him secrets and had a total disregard for authority.

  Her photo stood on his chest of drawers, indistinct in the night-time shadows.

  What fights there had been with his father. One occasion he would never forget.
It was a Saturday evening and Valerie was going off with Maureen Bates, a school friend, to a dance in the neighbouring village.

  ‘Mind, I want you back by half past ten, not one o’clock like the last time,’ his dad said. ‘And not smelling like a cider barrel either.’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ Valerie answered automatically.

  ‘I mean it, Valerie.’

  ‘I said OK, didn’t I?’

  ‘What a sight!’ Her dad looked her over – the heavy make-up, streaked hair, skirt halfway up her thighs, blouse clinging to her ample young bosom. ‘Is that what all the girls will be wearing?’

  She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

  ‘Where did you get those shoes from anyway? I haven’t seen them before.’

  Valerie looked down at her chunky-heeled shoes in shiny red leather. ‘I borrowed them from Maureen.’

  ‘Is that right, Maureen?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Irwin,’ Maureen answered without missing a beat. ‘We’re the same size. I got them for my birthday.’

  Which even at the age of seven Peter knew was a lie, because Valerie had stolen them from a shoe shop in Fortness one day when she and Maureen played truant. Ever since, they had stayed hidden beneath her wardrobe, right at the back where Jim would never find them.

  In the event, Valerie and Maureen didn’t go to the dance that night, had never intended to. Instead they went to a party at the house of Maureen’s boyfriend, thirty miles away, where Valerie, on the vodka now, drank more than was good for her and fell asleep on the settee a bit after midnight. At two o’clock, as the party was breaking up, the boyfriend’s father phoned Jim, explaining that his son, who had picked up the girls at Scar Hill, couldn’t drive Valerie home because he’d had a couple of drinks – a gross understatement. Valerie was quite safe though, she was sharing a room with his daughter and they’d bring her back the next day. Jim wasn’t happy about it and wanted to drive over and collect her right then, but Peter was too young to be left on his own.

  It was early the next afternoon when Valerie, hung over and defiant, arrived home. The boy’s father, seeing the expression on Jim’s face, drove off quickly.

  ‘By God, girl,’ Jim said when they got indoors. She wore a silk scarf she had not been wearing the night before. He hooked it down with his finger and saw the love-bites on her neck. ‘That’s the last time you’ll be going out for a while. You are not, repeat not, while you’re living under this roof,’ he drew a shaky breath, ‘going the same way as your mother.’

  His face was white. Peter and Valerie stared at him.

  ‘Now away upstairs,’ he said, ‘and wash that muck off your face. Have a bath. And then tidy your bedroom, it looks like a tart’s boudoir. When you’ve done that you can help me put these sheep to the hill. I’ve lost the best part of a day with your shenanigans.’

  Valerie was so sick and angry she couldn’t speak and stormed away through the hall to her bedroom which was downstairs.

  ‘I see you’re still wearing Maureen’s shoes,’ he called after.

  ‘What d’you expect?’ she shouted back. ‘Want me to come home barefoot? Yeah, you’d prob’ly like that, wouldn’t you, mis’rable old sod! Tip some ashes over my head, shall I? Chuck out my clothes and wear an old sack?’

  ‘I’d like it better than that you’re wearing now, anyway.’

  Peter, sitting on the settee, left off picking a scab from his elbow and stared from his dad to the door Valerie had slammed shut behind her.

  After a while, when Jim had gone out to the sheds, Valerie crept down from the bathroom. She had changed into jeans and an anorak. Conspiratorially she looked at her young brother and put a finger to her lips then slipped away through the kitchen and out the back door. Peter watched from the kitchen window as she dropped into a nearby hollow of the moors.

  When Jim came to look for her she had gone. ‘That bloody girl! That bloody girl!’ he stormed, hunting round the outbuildings, scanning the moors with binoculars. ‘Which way’d she go, Pete?’

  Peter was torn by conflicting loyalties. Wide-eyed he looked at his father and said nothing.

  Later, when a cold wet dusk was falling and Valerie still hadn’t returned, he was frightened and pointed across the heather.

  Jim ran out, calling and searching every hiding place and dangerous spot for a mile around: peaty hollows, sheltered corners of dry-stone dykes, rocky overhangs. There was no trace of his fourteen-year-old daughter, not even a footprint. When it grew too dark to continue, he sat in the hall and phoned everyone he could think of: teachers, schoolfriends, people in the village, anyone with outbuildings. No one had seen her. Eventually, as midnight approached, he contacted the police, who came to the house.

  He told them about the quarrel. They wanted to talk to Peter. Jim brought him down, dazed with sleep, but he could tell the police no more than he had told his dad. Searchers were summoned and went out into the moors with lights and loudhailers. Valerie did not respond. She was not to be found.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they reassured her distressed father. ‘Teenagers do this sort of thing sometimes.’

  ‘Not from this house they don’t,’ Jim said, his hair sleeked by rain that by this time was teeming from a black sky, slanting through the beams of the high-powered torches.

  ‘Maybe she’s found herself a warm bolt-hole,’ they said. ‘Anyway, there’s no more anyone can do tonight. Leave it to us. We’ll be out again first thing in the morning.’

  And where was Valerie all this while? Keeping out of sight, she had made her way to the house of a girl in her class who lived just beyond the village. She was, Valerie knew, away with her parents for a few days. Valerie also knew, for she had seen the girl collect it, that a spare key was hidden beneath a watering can in the shed. And so, an hour after leaving Scar Hill, Valerie let herself into the house and locked the door behind her.

  Looking through drawers in the kitchen, she came upon a scatter of money hidden beneath tablecloths. She counted it – just over forty-two pounds. How much could she safely take, Valerie wondered, and slipped a ten-pound note and a few coins into her pocket. Then, since the afternoon was cold, she made a cup of coffee, took some biscuits from the cupboard and settled down to watch a video.

  Afterwards she carried a radio upstairs and sank into a jasmine-scented foam bath, which was not exactly the hardship her father was imagining.

  It was a modern house built facing a panorama of sea and headlands. The only habitation to be seen in that direction was a deserted holiday cottage. When darkness came, therefore, Valerie was able to close the blinds, draw the curtains and switch on the light with little chance of being spotted by inquisitive neighbours. A liquor cabinet contained vodka and there was orange in the fridge, so by the time bedtime arrived and Valerie climbed into her classmate’s bed, her head was spinning for the second night in a row. She giggled to think of Jim searching for her. ‘Serve him right,’ she said aloud, ‘miserable old git,’ and pulled the frilly duvet to her chin. Tomorrow? Well, stuff school for a start. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

  At eleven o’clock the next morning, having removed every trace of her presence as far as possible, Valerie let herself out of the house, replaced the key and walked the half mile into the village. On the way she shoved the wet bath towel, hidden in a poly bag, into the bottom of a rubbish bin. Then she bought a bar of chocolate in the shop and phoned her father.

  That was the worst of her misdemeanours but there were others, many of them. She was her mother’s daughter, just as Peter was his father’s son, and relations with her dad were stormy. It was a battle which neither could win and in which neither would give way, not enough to bring a lasting peace.

  In the end, a few months before her sixteenth birthday, Valerie ran away from home and never contacted her father again. Peter was devastated: first his mother and now his sister. Valerie wrote him a letter or card occasionally, and always, for the first two or three years, sent a birthday and Christmas present. So th
ey knew Valerie was all right but not where she was, because the presents and cards came from different towns. This was puzzling, though it made perfect sense if you knew that Valerie was travelling with a third-rate boy band called Tinker’s Cuss, whose single hit, a frenzy called ‘Liquidise the Leaders’, climbed to thirty-seven in the charts.

  After eighteen months the band broke up and Valerie moved to Bristol with one of the other groupies. Little by little the cards and presents grew fewer, and for the past two years there had been no communication at all. The last Peter had heard, she was working in a hotel. The card was postmarked ‘Bristol’ but it was a pretty tourist scene so she might have been on holiday. In any case, by that time Valerie was seventeen and old enough to live as she chose. If she had wanted to hear from him she would have included her address.

  The hot chocolate was finished. Peter slipped down the bed. His eyes were closing. The music had stopped and he heard Jim in the kitchen, clattering a few dishes and filling the kettle. His poor dad, Peter thought, one thing after another: he didn’t choose to leave the army; he didn’t want to lose his wife and daughter; he couldn’t help being sick. It wasn’t fair, he always tried so hard. Peter knew he should turn off the bedside light but his limbs were too heavy. And before he could do anything about it, he was asleep.

  A while later Jim raked the fire, set their boots beside the hearth and came upstairs to bed. As he reached the landing he felt a bit light-headed. His heart was beating irregularly again. He gripped the banister rail to steady himself and swore under his breath.

  Peter’s light was still on. He crossed the landing and pushed the door wide. His son was dead to the world, breathing easily. A photo lay on the rug, face down. Jim picked it up. It was the picture of Sharon. He examined it. She was pretty, no doubt about it. He remembered the night he had taken it; remembered Sharon in their bedroom pinning the rose in her hair. With a sigh he slipped it back into the drawer beneath Peter’s socks and T-shirts. Then he tucked his son’s arm under the bedcover. Softly he kissed him on the brow, switched off the light and went from the room.