Crooked Daylight

by Helen Slavin

  Anna wasn’t sure what to say. It sounded like a very good excuse and now she was certain she could hear gunfire. Her mother’s voice was muffled as if she was turned away.

  “Which idiot armed that baboon?” Vanessa turned back to the phone, her voice too loud. “SO, YOU’LL HAVE TO TAKE HER.”

  “Is that gunfire?” Anna asked.

  “I have to go. Love you. Bye.” And she was gone.

  * * *

  Charlie was working and so they walked her to the Castle Inn on their way to the Woodcastle Community Academy. Charlie and Anna had attended the sprawling sixties box, then known as the Alderman Hadley School, and it felt odd to Anna to return. It looked brighter somehow. She recognised a couple of teachers and the School Band were playing a medley of music in the assembly hall. It was all very festive.

  In the central car park come quadrangle the History department were putting on a big show. The floor was covered with plastic sheeting and sand and strewn with what looked like 3D puzzle pieces made of cardboard and papier mâché.

  The History teacher was dressed in chain mail and armour and was waving a flag.

  “Come on! The castle needs building… where do we start? We start with me, the baron of Woodcastle, John de Brabazon, and we start with you… my willing serfs…”

  Most people were looking away, embarrassed, others were starting to join in with the few sixth form students roped in to help. Emz stood still. Watching. Anna did not hurry her away to the Mathematics building.

  John de Brabazon approached.

  “Are you starting with the motte and bailey?” Emz asked. “Is that what the sand is for?”

  What could be seen of John de Brabazon’s face through the authentic helmet looked pleased.

  “That is indeed what the sand is for… care to start piling it up? Or would you rather help Sir Richard over there with the Keep Tower?”

  Emz began to move between castle pieces, locking and interlocking them. John de Brabazon looked on, nodding.

  “I’m impressed…” He turned as well as he could in the armour and looked at Anna.

  “My sister loves Woodcastle Castle. She’d live there if she could.” Anna explained. John de Brabazon nodded once again, and his helmet visor fell down. He seemed to have some difficulty opening it.

  “Sorry… it’s the gauntlets…”

  Anna helped him.

  “Thank you, fair lady…” he said. There was just a moment then, a locking of eyes, because really, that was all Anna could see.

  “I’m Mr Atwood.” He tugged off a gauntlet, offered his hand “…I teach History here at Woodcastle Community Academy, in case you hadn’t guessed.”

  “Your willing serf is Emz, Emily, and I’m Anna.” He was still shaking her hand, they were still looking at each other. The wind blew suddenly and the pennant that he had been waving, a black lion on a white and gold ground, flapped and furled around them.

  That was the moment, the second, the very instant, that Anna Way fell in love with Calum Atwood.

  12

  Boots and Stones

  Seren Lake wanted to do nothing except look out at the lake. The sight of the water distracted and drew her and by the late afternoon she had wandered out onto the porch. The breeze was chill, but she didn’t care, she enjoyed the cold. It made her feel clean. It made her feel sharp.

  She had a struggle fastening up the boots. The laces were like snakes in her fingers, unwilling to be threaded and hooked across the tongue which twisted and folded across her instep. Finally, she opted to pull the laces in tight, knotted them and shoved the dangling ends in under the tongue out of her way. The fight with the boots had fired her up and rather than be tentative she found she was bounding down the porch steps. She strode across the sward of grass and crunched onto the pebbled shore. That was where the battle began.

  Every step she took was wrong and twisted her ankles in new and gymnastic ways. Her knees jarred against the effort and her arms were outstretched in balance like a tightrope walker. What the hell was wrong with her? It had seemed an easy thing when she was sitting on the porch. Panic burned at her. The water will cool it. The thought lilted into her head, like the edge of the water itself.

  The edge of the water. She reminded herself of Anna Way’s warning that the water was not for swimming. Black-deep. Blue-cold. But the edge of the water could not hold any dangers, could it? It was just the edge, just dipping a toe, wetting a sole.

  It was easier to take the boots off and fling them aside. The moment she did so the panic subsided. As she stepped onto the uncertain surface of the pebbles she was suddenly effortless, the skin of her arches tightening against the cool clamminess of the stones. Her feet flexed and stretched, stepping with surety over the bigger stones and before she had thought about it she was in the water, up to her ankles, stepping and stepping onwards, the stones offering themselves up as if she was following footprints.

  The water cooled her panic, was salve for her hot feet, washing away the sweatiness of her woolly socks. The red lines that the edges and seams of the boots had pressed into her skin vanished.

  In this way, her coat flapping around her like wings, she moved around the edge of Pike Lake.

  He had called her Birdy. His Birdy. It had begun as a nickname and she’d never had a nickname before and liked it. Except. No. It became her label. She was a birdy. She was weak and fluttering and captive; all the things she hated about herself. Birdy. With bells at her ankles telling him where she was. There was a name for those ties, she’d been at the falconry place with him and he’d volunteered to step into the arena with the hawk. Jesses. So that the hawk could soar but always be summoned back to be hooded and tied. It had been too much that afternoon, the sight of the bag full of dead day-old chicks, the savagery of beaks and talons.

  But as she walked in the water she saw things more clearly. The breeze had strengthened and tugged at her coat. At first, she pulled away, and then something inside her flew up and she leaned into the wind, let it carry her, her footsteps light and cool. She felt the energy of wind and water. She felt free.

  13

  Cry Wolf

  Anna and Emz parked the car down the lane out of sight and walked through the woods. They knew their way so well they almost didn’t need the torches.

  “We should leave them.” Emz put her torch back into the boot, pulled her grandmother’s raincoat closed around her. They could both sense the coming rain, the slight cooling of the air and the thermal already brushing its way through the trees of Havoc Wood. “We need to be covert. They’d see torches through the trees. Don’t want to give ourselves away. Remember what Grandma used to say about poachers.”

  For a second, they both looked at the coat and then up at each other.

  “I do.” Anna nodded. “But we have to be able to see.” Anna switched her torch on and kept the beam low.

  The moment they moved through the trees Anna felt the unease rise. It was unexpected, she had hoped after her Craft Club experience that Havoc Wood would rescue her. She looked down to where Emz was striding ahead of her and she could see in the way that her sister moved, looked about them, that she too felt the unease.

  “Remember what Grandma said about your gut instincts?” Anna whispered to her sister.

  “Your neck prickling too?” Emz whispered back. They stood for a moment, their breathing slowed, and they did what Grandma had taught them to do. Settle. Reach. Listen.

  The wind brought them his scent, a crisp and undoubtedly expensive aftershave that Charlie would have been able to name. It was a thin mist which meant he must still be a way off. The Way sisters listened hard. The thermal passing through meant that the trees creaked and rustled, but somewhere inside that breath the sisters heard something metallic click and grind. Emz looked at Anna, pointed higher up the ridge.

  He was poised, as he had been at Leap Woods, his back against a tree, sipping from a flask. Now bitter coffee mingled with the acidic citrus of his expensive after
shave. He rustled open a packet and the crack of chocolate breaking bit into the air. He munched at the squares and lifted his binoculars once more to his face. He made a sweep and then back again, alert. Anna peered into the darkness to try and make out what he had seen. Deer? They were often in Havoc Wood. If he took down a deer that was a lot of chops and steaks to sell in the pub. She couldn’t see what it was he saw, and she cursed that she had picked up the torch but not the binoculars. She turned to Emz.

  Emz was peering through the binoculars, her finger rolling the focus, adjusting. She looked very intent and then handed the binoculars to Anna, placing them at her face with one word whispered.

  “There.”

  Through the trees Anna could see Seren Lake, naked, wading waist deep into the water. She was bathing, the water draping over her skin. It was an odd sight, beguiling, the water seemed to hold the thin light offered by the windows of Cob Cottage and glide over her in sheets like silk, droplets sparkled diamond white. As Anna watched, the unease she had felt before fell away, and another feeling rose up. The unease in Havoc Wood was being caused by the presence of this man.

  She handed the binoculars back to Emz and was not surprised when her sister turned their optic gaze upon the man.

  They watched him as he watched their guest. She came out of the water and sat for a while on the shore before going back into the house for a blanket and a drink. She sat on the porch looking out over the lake and still he observed her, the binoculars pressing into his face. At last Seren Lake headed inside and the lights in the cottage went out.

  The man waited for a few moments, still observing through his binoculars before he packed them away. The Way sisters waited. He was not leaving. Instead, he stashed his kit in a hollow by a tree and began to trek his way down through the trees towards the cottage.

  The Way sisters behaved according to their gut instinct, Emz moving stealthily across so that there was a sister on each side of him. Then they began.

  It was a game they had played with Grandma many times and it was called Cry Wolf.

  * * *

  The noise came from his left and at first it didn’t register. It was only when it was repeated and was closer that he stopped. He listened. What was that? He didn’t think he was afraid but just at the corner of his mind a little of his twenty-first century confidence peeled back and something primal peeked through. Nope. Just the trees. Traffic maybe. He took a few more steps, his feet making a lot of noise in the undergrowth but not enough noise to cover the definite animal sound. Again.

  He slid to a halt. What the hell? What did a fox sound like? There was another growl, deeper this time and a movement, the noise of steps in the undergrowth, something moving towards him. The growl came in once again, long and low and sustained. What the fuck? He found his heart was drumming, which was not good because that was all he could hear. Keep moving. Keep moving. Moving target. Sitting duck. He pushed the thoughts out of his head. What did a fox sound like? He had a sudden stupid image of a Walt Disney Robin Hood singing jazzily in a cartoon forest and the laugh caught in his throat and half choked him. He was moving too fast now to keep his balance, his feet were unsteady in the heavy boots and the undergrowth, the humus and detritus of a four-hundred-year-old wood was out to get him. What did a fox sound like?

  Not like that. The sound was big and gravelly and pursuing him. His feet were now not his own, carrying him forward and downward and as he did so the sound split in two and whatever it was that was after him had brought a friend. Growling, snarling, barking. The car. Get back to the car.

  He moved sideways, struggling now against the lie of the land, one foot higher than the other as he ran along the contour, trying to remember where the hell he had left the car. Here. No. Further. Yes. He could glimpse it through the trees now, now that his breath was like knives slicing carpaccio out of his lungs.

  He slammed the door shut, clicking the central locking. The interior light came on automatically and he fumbled at it, switching into darkness so that he might have a chance of seeing whatever had pursued him before it saw a spot-lit version of him. Nothing. There was nothing out there.

  In the distance though, the howl was liquid steel in the air. Laughing at him.

  * * *

  The Way sisters watched him drive off swigging at a hip flask and, when they had watched him turn off towards Castlebury and were sure he was clear of Havoc Wood, they headed back to their own vehicle.

  “Not a poacher,” Anna mused as they pulled into the drive at home.

  “A pervert,” Emz decreed and Anna gave a “maybe” face and a shrug to match. “Did he have a camera?”

  They resolved to go back to the woods in daylight and take a look through the kit he had stashed in the tree.

  “Is it wrong that that was fun?” Emz asked with an edgy grin. “It’s so long since we played Cry Wolf.”

  Anna smiled. She thought she couldn’t remember the last time and then a memory rushed at her through the forested darkness.

  She had been with Calum, only then he wasn’t quite her husband, he was almost her fiancé by then. They had spent the day in Havoc Wood and she had spooked him with the game. And the memory gave up the picture of him, angry, storming back towards their car in the darkness and Anna let the darkness swallow him up.

  * * *

  Charlie wanted the darkness to swallow her up so she could get some sleep. Aron was snoring beside her in the icy whiteness of his bedroom. There were no curtains or even a blind at the window and so the bare white light from the marina seeped up into the room. It was a pretty view, the boats and the buildings all clad in wood and looking Scandinavian. It was just too new.

  Charlie slid out of bed and took her clothes into the living room. She closed the door softly behind her and moved to put the kettle on. Its blue light made her think of electric fly traps. She was thinking about the pizza, about the day she had spent at the WoodFired pizzeria with Michael Chance.

  * * *

  “You look hot and sweaty, let me take you away from all this…” Charlie had not seen Michael enter. She was clearing out the mash, her face steamed in the heat of it. She had been daydreaming, the scents from the hot mash, the beginnings of a new brew, always sent her away somewhere else in her mind. She had always visualised it as a sea of beer and she was steering across it in a wooden longship. She was inhaling the scents and trusting her nose as to what she needed to add or adjust for the brew.

  “What?” She turned, her face screwed up, before she realised. Michael laughed.

  “I thought I’d take you with me to this pizza place. You talk about the beer better than I do.”

  “I’m supposed to be brewing it. The copper’s on. I thought you’d already gone…” She was a little bit miffed, Michael was supposed to be half way there by now, wheeling and dealing with the new restaurant. What had he been doing all this time? She hoped he’d been chugging through some of the paperwork.

  “I got distracted with that stack of invoices…” he confessed and chankled his car keys. Inside Charlie gave a quiet hurrah. When she was at Drawbridge she wanted to be here on the brewery floor, she wanted to be listening to the sound of the grist as it was funnelled into the hopper or like now, up to her elbows in hot mash, she did not want to be in the office on the wobbly chair tapping at the computer keyboard. “…You can leave the lads to do that… we won’t be so long.”

  She only half trusted Jack and Owen to pay the proper attention to today’s wort. With both her and Michael away the two young men had a tendency to slack off. Still, she would have time to tinker with it all when she got back.

  “I’m your boss. You have to come along.” Michael smiled.

  WoodFired was a new enterprise, a couple brave enough to open up in the face of the new leisure development at Castlebury. Their place was a long low stone building on the opposite side of the castle from the Castle Inn. It had once been a sweet shop where Anna had taken Charlie and Emz to buy them sherbet limes and jel
ly babies to keep them out of her hair. Then Charlie seemed to remember it had been a hairdresser. The second that Charlie walked in she liked the place and as the owners showed them the wood-fired ovens that had been specially built in the yard behind, Charlie liked it even more. The fire and the embers, the scents and the sound of the wooden peel sliding the pizzas into the heat, all reached into Charlie and made her feel good.

  The restaurant owners, Rob and Nicki, were keen to build a network of ‘local produce’ and Drawbridge Ales fitted into that.

  “If we’re all connected up… all the local producers, brewers, cheesemakers, bakers, then we’re stronger. We’re a network and can support each other.”

  “Promote each other.” Michael agreed. “We source our barley from Old Castle Hill Farm for instance and they carry our beer in their farm shop.”

  “Their award-winning farm shop,” Charlie put in and received a wry smile from Michael.

  Somehow, they spent a few hours at the pizzeria and drew up a deal for the restaurant to carry Drawbridge Ales. And then somehow, they had not headed back to the brewery immediately because Michael wanted to check out the bottling plant that might be up for sale on the other side of Castlebury.

  Charlie, standing now in Aron’s flat looking out over the marina, thought of rolling along in Michael’s car. It was nothing flashy that car, he had had it for as long as she’d known him, a slightly knackered VW Golf, but it smelt of malt and hops, bitter and delicious to her.

  * * *

  Aron had not appreciated the WoodFired pizza. They had sat in the kitchen at her mother’s house, each perched on the perilous kitchen stools. He’d discarded his second slice, slumping it back into the box, sneering slightly at the “recycled” credentials of the cardboard.