The Challenge

by Tom Hoyle

‘Drop it on the mat,’ he said slowly, as if he had to think about the words. Then he went back to dragging the pot.

  ‘It’s in here,’ I said, prising open the letter box and trapping the newsletter so that it flapped in the breeze. I didn’t want to drop it on the mat just because Mike had told me to. In any case, the wind would have blown it away. The door slowly creaked open. Copies of a tabloid newspaper were piled up next to a small table with a disconnected cream-coloured telephone; above that, there was an old painting of what looked like Lake Hintersea. With the door open fully, I saw his blue bag of tools. I remembered the same bag being taken out by the police when they were looking for a murder weapon. Bullseye jumped up, his paws leaving mud on my jeans. Bark-bark-bark.

  Mike rubbed his lower back. ‘Bullseye, down, down. Now!’ He moved slowly.

  My gran was probably the only person who thought he had nothing to do with Will’s disappearance. ‘I feel sorry for him,’ she had said at the time. ‘He can’t even organize his garden. He doesn’t mean any harm. He doesn’t mean anything. He’s a bit soft in the head.’

  Now, delivering the newsletter, I tried to do what she said: ‘Just be nice to him and keep your distance.’

  ‘Benny,’ he rasped in acknowledgement. ‘I hope you’re OK.’

  ‘Yes. Fine,’ I said blandly, and left as quickly as I came. Bullseye followed but never went further than the gate.

  I don’t need to tell you about all the houses I visited, but one is of significance – Lakeside House. Like all the houses on the far side of the road, including Will’s and Mike Haconby’s, Lakeside House had direct access to the water. It was easily the grandest house in the area and had a large garden that stretched down to a wooden jetty.

  I dreaded visiting Mike Haconby, but Lakeside House spooked me. Its driveway, overcast with trees, always seemed damp and cold, even at the height of summer. The house looked vaguely like a castle and had a stone tower, which we had always called the Lantern Room, at the top. It could be seen from miles away and at night was like a large, pale candle, poking up above the trees.

  The house was significant because my mum worked there for fifteen years before I was born. I couldn’t imagine the smiling woman in the photo on my gran’s sideboard walking up and down the dreary lane.

  At the bottom of its long garden was a rowing boat that Will and I went out in when we were little. Mrs Winter was happy that we used it, and Will’s parents and my gran didn’t ask what we were up to. One day when I was ten, I fell overboard, gulped in water rather than air, and in my confusion rose underneath the boat. I still shudder at the fizzing, swirling water and my panic and disorientation. My blood runs cold at the thought that Will experienced the same thing before he died. But Will dived in and rescued me. Without him, I would have died.

  Since then, I’d not been on Lake Hintersea once. The rowing boat bobbed about on the jetty, unused.

  In my whole life, even though he lived a few hundred yards away, I’d only seen Mr Winter once – as I lay on his lawn waiting for the ambulance to come on the day I almost drowned. He only said one thing: ‘I’ve watched you; you’re a good boy.’

  Mrs Winter (I always called her that, never Daphne) usually worked in a conservatory studio on the Lake Hintersea side of the house, and was friendly, loud and eccentric, the exact opposite to her husband. Every other word was ‘darling’ or ‘daaahling’.

  She appeared down the side of the house as I was about to get back on my bike. ‘Thank you, my darling,’ she started. ‘Thank you so very much.’

  ‘No problem,’ I replied.

  ‘And, darling, how are you now? Are you feeling better?’

  The second question was easier to answer. ‘Yes, thank you.’ I hoped that short responses would speed my escape.

  ‘You know, darling, that the Lake is out there waiting for you. Your mother would have liked you to be out there.’ She smiled, her thin lips overlaid with heavy red make-up. Green eyes. ‘It’s a shame that the boats are unused.’

  Will had used a Topper, a small craft designed for one, which was still at the bottom of his back garden. He would often be on the Lake without me, sometimes with his dad, usually on his own.

  ‘No, thank you. Sailing isn’t my thing,’ I said, my head filled with a vision of Will cutting through the water on his boat, then reminded of the nightmare of bubbles and confusion that had haunted me since my own accident, and doubly since Will’s death.

  ‘Well, the offer stands for as long as those hills,’ she continued, smiling, apparently oblivious to my discomfort. ‘It’s so good to see you around, darling, so very good.’

  A shadow moved behind a net curtain in the window high above her.

  The rowing boat bobbed on the jetty.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Winter,’ I said.

  She had been kind to us, supplying ice lollies when we returned from the Lake, even, once, letting us dab at one of her paintings. It was a very modern creation, barely resembling the Lake at all, and I remembered Will joking afterwards that a three-year-old could have done it and it wouldn’t have mattered where he left his splodge.

  Happy days. Lucky days.

  But as I rode back down the driveway to Lakeside House, another memory returned.

  There was only one time I had a serious argument with Will: Good Friday, 2011, about two weeks before he drowned.

  In the school holidays, we would spend every afternoon together, often whole days. We usually met at 2.30. ‘It’s half past two, Will will be waiting,’ my gran would say, and sometimes just ‘Will-will’, as if it was some sort of animal call.

  In those Easter holidays, Will missed some of our meetings. ‘It’s not a date in my diary,’ he said. ‘We’ve never actually arranged it.’

  But for me, 2.30 p.m. meant ‘Time to see Will’.

  Many times I’d wait at the bottom of his garden while Will raced back in his small boat, waving and shouting, as I looked warily at the water. But that final Easter – the warmest Easter on record and with hardly any rain – Will often went out without telling me, and sometimes he didn’t return all afternoon.

  About two weeks before he died, I went over the road to see Will as usual and his mum said that he was sailing on Hintersea.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t known you two have a falling out before.’ She smiled sympathetically.

  It was the thought that I had done something to upset Will that kept me at the bottom of his garden all afternoon. It was a hot day, much more like July than April – exactly the sort of day that should produce happy memories. I just stared out at the Lake, getting more and more upset, my neck turning pink, then red.

  Later than he’d promised his mum he’d return, Will gradually became more defined as he edged out of the haze.

  ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours!’ I shouted as soon as he was within earshot. I was all emotion – common sense completely burned away. ‘I’ve been waiting here for bloody hours!’

  Will landed the boat on the small shoreline, splashed out, and tied it to the usual post without looking at me.

  Selfish, sad tears were welling up in my eyes. ‘I can’t believe that you’re not even talking to me now, when I’ve been waiting for you for hours.’

  Will spat out his words. ‘I was only out on the Lake; you know I like to go out on the Lake; I didn’t ask you to wait; we’re not married.’ He tutted and swore. ‘Well, if I’m your slave, what would you like me to do now?’

  He stood with his hands in the pockets of his blue shorts – the shorts he was wearing when he died. I was no longer sure whether I was in the right or the wrong, and that kept me going, shouting about how unfair he was.

  We had never come close to blows before, but he hit me – a slap, right hand against my left cheek, hard enough to leave a light red smudge.

  ‘That’s to bring you to your stupid senses,’ Will shouted, eyes aflame. ‘There are some things that we have to do on our own. I’m not jealous of your magic
tricks.’

  The mention of jealousy touched a nerve. I stormed off, shoulders heaving up and down as I cried. I lowered my head as I saw Mike Haconby silently watching from his garden, then put my hands over my face as I passed Will’s mum.

  About mid-evening, Will rang our front door bell instead of shouting at my window. He started by saying that his mum had told him to apologize.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, too,’ I said. I had cried out my frustration, and my apology and red eyes probably encouraged Will to make genuine amends.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said with sincerity. ‘I’ll try not to do it again.’

  ‘Is it something I’ve done? I just wanted us to go out on our bikes as we used to.’

  ‘I suppose things change as you get older,’ Will said.

  I returned home from delivering the newsletters at exactly the same time that a Royal Mail van stopped in the lane.

  The postman handed me four letters from his pile and said I could save his legs. I flicked through the delivery. Under an advert for a stairlift and something from a charity, above what I supposed was a bill, there was a smaller letter for me. Above my address it said: Benny (Private). No surname.

  I never received letters – no one from school would use such an old-fashioned way of communicating unless they were forced to.

  ‘Junk mail on the table,’ I shouted, then turned back out the door, opening the envelope as I went. Inside was a small white piece of card.

  It started: Hi Benny

  At the end I could see: Will (Capling) – just like that, with the surname in brackets.

  I stood still and read the name over and over: Will (Capling), Will (Capling), Will (Capling) . . . My insides churned.

  I immediately thought it was a sick joke, and probably would have torn it up or run inside and moaned about it to my gran, had it not been for the handwriting, which looked like Will’s – and one line towards the end:

  Think of me whenever you eat a curliewurly.

  This wasn’t the chance line of a random ‘joker’; it was an embarrassing joke that I’m certain only Will and I shared – for us, ‘a curliewurly’ didn’t mean the chocolate bar. There was surely no way that such a thing would be known by someone casually impersonating Will.

  There was no doubt that Will was dead. Absolutely no doubt: there had been forensic experts, an autopsy, funeral people, and a burial. People had seen his dead body.

  Hi Benny. I’M NOT DEAD.

  Everyone wants to know what happened to Me – I know that.

  Look, I know I can trust you. Its importent you dont tell anyone at all. Definately not the police.

  PLEASE just play along. Perhaps you’ll want to tell Sylvie or my parents, but don’t.

  (Think of me whenever you eat a curliewurly. I’ll be back.)

  Will

  The postmark said Manchester.

  I went back inside and up to my room, knelt on the floor and put the letter on the bed. Who would want to play such an awful joke? Darren Foss had bullied me badly, verbally and physically, but I didn’t think this was his style. But maybe it was.

  ‘Sylvie’ was what Will called my gran, but anyone could have known that.

  I leaped across the room and pulled down a box from the top shelf of my wardrobe. This was ‘Will’s Box’, a collection of memories we assembled after Will died – it was meant to help me get over the shock and remember Will in a calm, positive way. There were all sorts of odds and ends, everything from a poster of our favourite film to a little plastic Smurf. It included Will’s Rough Book from school – I think I got it because everyone knew only I would understand most of the scribbles inside. After I put it on the bed, I flicked through the bottom right-hand corner and a little stick-man waved his arms and legs in the air. The last few stick-men pictures also had something else rudely waving around. Typical.

  On the first page inside he had drawn two cartoon characters: him (strong, girls in the background, a six-pack); and me (weedy, massive Y-fronts, red spots). The title: this is Me and you.

  Everyone wants to know what happened to Me . . . this is Me and you: ‘Me’, not ‘me’, in the middle of a sentence. Will was creative, but not good at anything that involved accuracy, like spelling and grammar.

  At the bottom of the same page, next to a rude and amusing illustration, I also saw ‘curliewurly’.

  Not Curlywurly: ‘curliewurly’, with only one y.

  I closed the book and threw it back in the box. Even the cover, splattered with little drawings and comments, made me sad.

  The note was either a chillingly good hoax, or somehow, God only knew how, Will had written it.

  Written it? Posted it? No way. It was much, much easier to think it was a cruel joke.

  I stood in the window to see if a sicko (Darren?) was watching and laughing. Nothing. Nothing apart from Mike Haconby walking up his garden path. Bullseye barked loudly.

  It was only then that I turned the card over and saw someone had drawn the most basic unhappy face – dots for eyes and nose, an upturned half-circle for a mouth, all inside a circle. It was exactly the sort of thing that Will would have done.

  I didn’t want to believe it was genuine, but put it away with Will’s things in the box.

  There was an irritated shout from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t leave your bike in the middle of the path all of the time.’

  ‘I’m just leaving to see The Twins,’ I called back, trying to sound normal, but feeling tearful.

  ‘Daphne Winter will be round this afternoon for an hour,’ my gran said, again mentioning a major event for her. ‘Tea at six. I’m doing eggs and chips.’

  ‘OK.’ I buried my head in my duvet and cried.

  I should have gone downstairs and talked about the card. My gran was in her mid-seventies but she was still sharp when it came to anything involving common sense. I could have taken it to the police, but that would have dredged up the horror of what happened before. It would put me back in the shadow just as I was beginning to escape from it. Once the moment passed, the note seemed crazy and unreal, a little shard from a nightmare that had pierced into real life.

  I think crying helped push emotion out of me. Whoever has sent this – I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of getting to me.

  I rode off, jittery and unsettled, oversensitive to a world that, for a time, had brighter colours and louder sounds. How could anyone be such a bastard to have sent me a card like that?

  A few hundred yards down the lane, everything seemed calmer again, and I tried to force thought of the letter into a corner of my brain. But every part of that journey made me think of Will.

  At the head of the Lake, between the trees, at a point where sunlight burst through the shadows, I saw Cormorant Holm, the island in the middle of Lake Hintersea. Beyond it, the Winters’ rowing boat bobbed about on their jetty.

  Attachment

  SEPTEMBER 2011

  STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

  On the opposite side of the Lake to Compton Village there was another hill, not quite as high as Ward’s Fell. The bottom third of the slope was thick with trees, and among them there was Timberline, where The Twins lived.

  It took me about twenty minutes, that Saturday after Jack’s injury, and still reeling from Will’s letter, to cycle to the bottom of the twins’ drive, and then nearly another ten to climb up the track that zigzagged through the trees. It was steep enough for me to get off my bike and push. The road curled round, and on a ledge, above a sixty-foot sheer drop, was Timberline. The house wasn’t huge in the way that Lakeside House was, but it was impressively built in dark yellow stone and covered in ivy and other greenery. People who went to Wordsworth Academy didn’t usually have fancy houses. A Land Rover was on a gravel drive between the house and the drop.

  I glanced into a room with bookshelves and then one with a large dining-room table. Gravel crunched.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered, impressed. Then I looked to
my right, across Lake Hintersea towards Compton Village and Ward’s Fell. I could see the turret at the top of Lakeside House.

  My mind went back to the letter yet again. I wondered about mentioning it at school and getting the writer expelled – I imagined that being Darren Foss.

  The front door had a fish-shaped brass knocker, but before I had a chance to use it, Sam opened it.

  ‘Your parents must be loaded!’ I said, a little too loud.

  ‘We don’t feel rich,’ Sam shrugged. ‘We’re just ordinary kids.’ He smiled. Typical of The Twins – not really telling me anything. ‘The invalid is upstairs . . .’

  The house looked the way that cool rich people’s houses do. There was modern art on most of the walls and no carpet on the floor, just smooth wooden boards. On the right, just before the stairs, I caught a glimpse of a large harp in the sitting room.

  ‘Can you play?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a little bit,’ Sam said as he wandered in and ran his fingers up the strings. He then played about ten seconds of a Led Zeppelin song.

  ‘I think that’s the biggest painting I’ve ever seen,’ I said, pointing at what was hanging behind him – it must have been twelve feet by six, a swirly sky above a mountain, crooked houses at the bottom. It was vaguely Van Gogh in style, I suppose.

  Jack’s bedroom had posters and photos behind perspex frames (not a bit of Blu-tack in sight) – one was a signed photo of a famous football manager with the message: To Jack – when the time comes, wear red for me. There was also a banner poster running at the top of the wall behind his bed: THE CHALLENGE.

  Jack was sitting in bed with a computer keyboard on his lap and two screens on a desk in front of him.

  ‘Hey, Ben, my man,’ he shouted and raised a hand for me to slap. ‘They said that if it had gone through the bone I would have been in plaster for three months.’ His leg was heavily bound and raised on a cushion. ‘Give it a couple of days and I’ll be back in action.’

  ‘Imagine if it had been a bit higher and to the left: the pole would have disappeared up his arse!’ Sam laughed. ‘He’s being a lazy git. I wanted to abseil down the cliff earlier and he just sat there like a blob.’