We looked at Silbury Hill, walked around its base, made a detour to avoid a herd of cows – my mother’s fears turned out to be genetic – and arrived at a long straight road. Haze rose from fields of dry grass. All of the farmers seemed to be growing straw or stubble. Across the road, a thin track led across a bleached field. Weary travellers in loose trousers trudged along it in both directions. The sun made its way to the centre of the sky and stayed there for three hours.
There was a barrow up there. Not the garden sort, the sort they used to erect around dead people back in the days when gods had bad tempers. We went to look at it. The path was of loose, sandy soil and large round stones. It led directly away from the road and then took a right-angle to the left. After half a mile it took a right-angle to the right. Then it went upwards, as though it wasn’t hard enough going already. It went up onto a grassy rise.
I felt a tingle of anticipation. The stones had been stones, the hill had been closed. But this would be something else. The haze rose from the fields and surrounded us. It did cruel things to vision; Jack flickered in and out of existence. The fields rose and fell like the sides of a sleeping dog. A small hill in front of us rose sharply, pale green and stubbled. Thistles stretched from it. I shook the haze from my head. Jack became constant again, the fields settled down. The path led between the thistles, which had been real after all. Sweat crawled down my scalp. Something was afoot. We crested the ridge and there it was, the long barrow, and on it a horde of people babbling about the earth goddess and the right to roam and there it was, as expected, the sound of the first two bars of Wish You Were Here being played with exacting incompetence.
There was no magic in Avebury. It had been hammered flat by the sandals of too many shambling summer-holidaying students.
The visions in the fields had other causes. I had sunstroke.
I spent the next two days in my tent.
On the third day – the copyright on this one must have gone by now – I rose. I could hear the sounds of many fingers tapping on the canvas. It grew dark, and a chill fell upon me.
Looking outside, I found that it was raining. Jack was sitting glumly in the entrance of his tent, watching puddles join forces. The last time I’d seen the sky it had been blue, and the sun had been jammed in the centre of it, balanced right at the top. The sky had been huge and the air had been on its way to solidity. Swinging your arms, you could feel it sliding through your fingers.
Now the sky had dropped two hundred feet, and it looked like a dishcloth. A constant rain fell. The ground was flat, so the rainwater gathered. It made inroads into my tent.
‘It’s in mine,’ said Jack. ‘My books are fucked.’
‘They were fucked before. Have we got anything to eat?’
‘Beans.’
‘Have we got any matches yet?’
‘Of course we fucking have,’ he said, looking at me strangely. ‘What’s up with you? You’ve made no sense all day.’
‘I’ve had sunstroke.’
‘You’ve had no fucking sense, is what you’ve had. You were with me when we bought the matches. Remember? Remember buying the cider?’
I remembered that.
‘I remember you vomiting,’ I said.
‘Right, but I threw it up and got it over with. I swear you’ve been drunk for two days. It’s your metabolism or something. It’s only this rain that’s snapped you out of it.’
‘That’s because I’ve been suffering from sunstroke. Rain cures it.’
‘Does it bollocks.’
‘No, it doesn’t cure bollocks. If you want those removing we’ll need the penknife. If I haven’t had sunstroke, why am I hungry?’
‘Because you’ve been too pissed to eat for two fucking days, that’s why. And you’ve done some right fucking wittering while you’ve been at it. We’ve had the field to ourselves. The rest of them were frightened they’d catch something off you.’
I hadn’t noticed that the field was empty.
‘It was probably the rain,’ I said.
‘They went yesterday, while it was sunny. While you were wittering. Like a little old woman, wittering away.’
‘Well they heard a weather report and had to get back to Surrey or wherever they come from.’
‘Whatever. So, beans?’
‘Beans. And we can have them hot?’
‘No.’
‘What about our matches?’
‘They’re in there,’ he said, pointing into his tent. I leaned far enough out of mine to peep in. The floor had been invaded by water. The rain had made inroads into my tent. It had made motorways through his.
‘This is a fucking disaster,’ he said. ‘Why did I agree to go on holiday with you?’
‘My good looks and charm?’
‘You paid for the coach. That was about it. What the fuck are we going to do out here in the middle of nowhere in the fucking monsoon season?’
‘Go to the cinema?’ I suggested, and that’s what we did.
V
A grim usherette with a lit cigarette and a face like the one Mother Theresa used to save the wear on her best one walked up and down the aisle with a tray of melted ice creams and warm Coca-Cola. The rude teenagers fell silent as she approached. The children of the family in the second row began to pester their parents for warm sweets. The offspring that would not shut up asked its parent for something.
There was the cheering sound of a slap.
There was no intermission. During the film, halfway through a scene, the lights came on and the image became unclear. This upset no one except Jack. Jack was distressed. He had been enjoying the movies, for his own strange reasons. I had theories about that:
One. Jack wanted to have a different identity. He wanted the one he had, and he also wanted another one that could be hidden under his everyday clothes. In Jack’s case, that’s an accurate description. He wore the same clothes every day. Under those he wanted to be someone more colourful.
Two. Jack wanted to be something out of the ordinary. He wanted to fly.
Three. Jack wanted to get the girl.
None of those seemed impossible. I knew Jack was interested in tattoos. Well, he had magazines about tattoos. It was more likely he bought them for the pictures of naked women, like everyone else, but there was a slim chance that he was interested in the tattoos.
Body piercing was something else he’d mentioned. Some sects believe that body piercing aids magic. It depends on the magic. I want to impose my body on the world, not the other way around.
Getting the bodywork touched up was easy. Learning to fly would be more difficult. Thunderboy did it by hanging from wires in front of a rear-projection screen, and even then he looked uncomfortable.
Getting the girl was something Jack would have to work out by himself.
The usherette dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and trod on it. It smouldered. She leaned over us.
‘Ices,’ she said, using the tone of voice you’d use when you were telling someone you’d accidentally reversed over their dog. ‘Drinks.’
‘No thanks,’ I said.
‘I’ll have a coke,’ said Jack. She handed him a battered can.
‘Fifty,’ she said.
‘How much?’ asked Jack.
‘Fifty pence. Is he foreign?’ she asked me. ‘Help him with his money.’
‘Here,’ said Jack, handing over money. ‘Thanks.’
She inspected the change at length.
‘That should do,’ she said. ‘Right you are, then.’
She shuffled away. Jack sipped warm cola and the lights went down, or rather off. There was no dimming, the lights went out and the movie had never stopped. Jack settled down and fell back into it. I went to the toilet for a break.
To get there, I had to walk back out into the lobby. In a tiny refreshment booth a fat youth eyed his charges. The toilets were through a swinging door with loud hinges. Behind that, a corridor led to GENTS and LADIES.
A chart on the wall
said that these toilets had been cleaned and inspected. There was a place for the cleaner to sign their name, and a place to put the date. The most recent date was five years old. The most recent signature, on closer inspection, turned out to be that of Mickey Mouse. I paddled across the cracked tiles and did my best to see what I looked like. There was a mirror but it had interference. It was cloudy and stained. I looked like a ghost. I splashed back to the auditorium and waited while my eyes got used to the darkness. I spotted Jack and sat next to him.
He was still wrapped in the movie. It was the second one, and there wasn’t a lot of it left. Thunderboy had been back in time and given his younger self the secret identity that would turn his younger self into him. He’d fought off the ranks of large but dim henchmen, and now he was on his way to save the girl at the last minute. I hoped it was at the last minute. Sitting in a wet tent no longer seemed such a bad thing.
Jack watched avidly as Thunderboy took to the air. I looked at the cables that were holding him up. Perhaps magic is all like that, after all. Perhaps it’s all misdirection. You don’t look at the cables, you look at the flying man and make the effort to believe.
It was too much of an effort.
That was where it began, if you ask me. That was where Jack’s body-modification thing was sparked off. He was watching those terrible movies and he was thinking about colouring himself in, about having a hidden identity. He’d end up, years later, run through with ironmongery and tattooed from head to foot.
Perhaps that was what the piercings were about. Perhaps he was future-proofing himself, turning the nerves off, getting set up for pain. Perhaps he saw more than I saw, all the time.
(That could be true. I never did find magic. I don’t know how long I’ll live. All mirrors look like that cinema mirror now, all of them faded and faint. These days I always look like a ghost. I don’t know whether or not I’m getting older. I think Uncle Mickey knows something I don’t. I’ll try to ask him, one of these days.)
I sat in the cinema, knowing that I could manipulate Jack into carrying out the ritual, knowing that he would take my word for all of it. I thought I was in control. You don’t see how wrong you are, sometimes. I was looking for magic and Jack had found it, in a pair of cheap movies. He sat there and watched Thunderboy fly to the rescue while I just sat there, seeing the wires.
PART SEVEN
Sam, aged thirty
Chapter Fourteen
I
When I got home I found some old clothes to wear. Detective work could be a dirty business, and I didn’t want to get any new clothes dirty. I’d only have to wash them. I could throw old clothes away.
I knew this because Judy mentioned it on a regular basis.
‘You can throw those old things away,’ she’d say. ‘You can buy new clothes.’
I could buy new clothes, but it wasn’t my idea of fun. That was a point the two of us differed on. I thought shopping for clothes was something you did to get clothes. She thought it was fun in itself. She could do it for days.
I looked at the article in the Pensnett Herald. Jack had gone into a lot of detail about our imaginary crimes.
They are imaginary. Honestly they are. We didn’t do anything. I’d know. I’d tell you.
Jack claimed we buried parts of the bodies. He mentioned the old railway tracks outside the town. He was very specific. There was an illustration accompanying the article, and it showed the alleged burial site.
I knew how to prove he was wrong. I could go to where the bodies were supposed to be buried and dig. There wouldn’t be any body parts there, and that would be that. Proof. I put a trowel in a plastic bag and took it with me. I thought a shovel might be difficult to sneak through town. I could be there and back in an hour, although the digging would take longer.
It was a mild day. The drizzle was in mist form, hanging rather than falling. I joined the old railway tracks at the edge of town and followed them to Jack’s imaginary burial site.
The route led along a deep entrenchment and through a tunnel. I’m not afraid of the dark, but in the tunnel I was worried. I felt someone watching me, though I couldn’t see anyone. I couldn’t even see myself. It was dark in there. That’s the way of tunnels. After that short dark walk, the old line ended at a wide flat patch of sandy soil. I got the trowel from my bag and realized that it would take a long time to dig up the whole area. It was easily twenty feet across, and twice as long. The trowel seemed very small. I looked over my shoulder. I still had the feeling that someone else was around. The railway line was in a deep trench. There were trees and bushes along the tops of both sides. Someone could have been hanging around in them. I decided I was being paranoid. No one would be hanging around looking at abandoned railway lines. The news was a day old, and there was nothing to see.
The feeling wouldn’t go away. It had settled in for the evening.
I looked around. Not far from the railway line, a stick had been pushed some way into the ground. It looked like a marker.
I decided to dig there. The stick was rotten and fell to pieces when I tried to pull it free. I squatted and began to prod at the earth with my trowel. The soil was wet and heavy. It clung to the trowel in unhelpful clumps. When I tried to shake the clods loose, they showered me with mud. I shook the trowel more vigorously and lost my balance in a strange, slow way. I fell into the mud in slow motion.
As a rule I only fall over in public. It’s something to do with people. The more of them able to see me, the more likely I am to trip over things that aren’t there or pratfall on black ice. The more of them that are in earshot, the higher the chances of me making an involuntary noise on my way down.
I made an involuntary noise. The ground was wet. Dudley ground always is. I stood up after a ridiculous struggle. The mud was fond of me, and didn’t want to let me go. I hauled myself free of it.
I thought of my involuntary noise. It had been high-pitched. I was glad no one was there to hear it.
But I had the feeling that someone was, of course. I looked at the trees. Nothing moved there. I looked at the ground. I’d give it another shot, I decided. I swore at Jack, who wasn’t there to hear me. If I didn’t find anything, that’d do. I wasn’t going to dig the whole area up to prove what I already knew. I knelt in the mud where I’d been digging before and carried on digging. I pulled out the few short sections of the damp stick that had been marking the place. They were clearly very old and rotten. I put them to one side and dug a little further.
There was nothing there. The stick hadn’t been marking anything. I looked at the remains of it. The three little sections that had been under the ground looked different. The other part had crumbled, rotted right through. Those sections looked more solid, rotten in a different way.
I picked them up and cleared the mud from them. Two of them had joints at each end. The third, smaller, piece only had a joint at one end.
It had a fingernail at the other one.
I wondered who would have put a fingernail on a stick. I knew some people had strange hobbies, but that was the first time I’d heard about that one.
Then it clicked. The fingernail was on the end of a finger that had been buried under the stick. The three little sticks were finger bones, what you’d get if you severed a finger at the knuckle and then buried it until the soft tissues decomposed.
What you’d get, for instance, if you needed to take something of the body with you after the murder. If you needed something to fuel the ritual.
I dropped my trowel and held onto the finger. I walked away from the burial ground. I didn’t want to go through that dark tunnel again. I could climb up the revetment and make my way to the main road that way. I’d have to cross a hundred metres of wasteland, but at least it would be light. I reached the top of the trench and blundered through the wet bushes. The trees had low branches that caught me low down. I emerged from the shrubbery and saw the wasteland. Something rose from a chunk of concrete and approached me. It was a man, I noticed.
/>
‘Mr Haines,’ a voice said. ‘Here’s a turn up. Here’s a thing. I hope you don’t mind if we don’t shake hands. I think you’ve met some of my little friends. I’m more.’
More? More than what? What did he mean, and who were his little friends?
‘Inspector Moore,’ he explained. ‘I think we’ll be arresting you now, if you don’t mind.’
II
He held out a transparent plastic bag. I looked at it.
‘If you could put the finger in there,’ he said. ‘Good of you to dig it up for us. We could have been down there for weeks. I asked for a methane probe but they wouldn’t authorize one. That leaves manpower alone for the job, and manpower means me. Excuse me complaining. You aren’t going to try running for it? Now would be the time.’
He had a crumpled, sorry face. He was middle-aged but his face was ten years older. It drooped from his skull. His eyes were bright. In that face they looked like stars. He wore a battered felt hat and the traditional long mackintosh. His shoes were bright. The mud was steering clear of them. I dropped the finger bones into his bag.
‘Not going to try running? Oh well,’ he said, disappointedly. ‘I came here to see whether there were any signs. Digging, that sort of thing. There weren’t any, and then you turned up and made some. I should read you your rights, ideally. I can never get it right. I always think that your rights stop when you murder someone. So I don’t tend to read people their rights. I tend to treat them quite badly.’
It was like being threatened by a teddy bear.
‘I don’t know anything about this,’ I told him.
‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so. I seldom meet people who know anything about anything. They were somewhere else, with someone else. They never met the people concerned. Sometimes that’s down to lapses of memory. I can usually help to fill in the gaps. The car is over there.’
Seeing the Wires Page 19