by Ross Welford
They both had thick notepads, and sheaves of forms. We may be here a while, I thought.
‘All right, Alfie. We have to ask you a few questions, do you understand?’
I nodded, and it started. Gently at first. Name, age and then:
‘Can we ask you about your mum, pet?’
I nodded and told them her name and age, all according to the plan.
They wrote in their pads.
‘Where do you go to school, Alfie?’
‘I do not go to school. I am home educated. Home-ed.’
Home-ed. That is the slang, is it not?
‘I see,’ said Sangeeta. ‘Only you don’t appear on the home-education register.’
I shrugged, as if to say, ‘That is your problem, not mine.’ Sangeeta and Vericka exchanged a glance.
‘And who is your family doctor, Alfie?’
Shrug.
‘Do you ever see a doctor?’
I shook my head.
‘Don’t you ever get poorly?’ asked Vericka, a bit crossly, I thought.
I shook my head again, only this time my answer was more or less true. Coughs, colds, occasional tummy aches, but nothing you would bother a doctor about. Mam had remedies for most things.
‘Do you have any family, Alfie? Anybody you can stay with?’
I shook my head. That was the truth. There was just Mam and me.
Sangeeta pressed on. ‘No one at all? An aunty, an uncle? Maybe living somewhere else? Family friends?’ She was getting desperate. ‘Anyone at all?’
Shrug. Another look between Sangeeta and Vericka.
And so it continued for another hour, and I still stuck to the plan.
I was left alone for a little while after that, and then Sangeeta came in with yet another woman, and I was beginning to forget all their names now. Began with an L. Anyway she was a ‘Child Bereavement Counsellor’ who asked me if I wanted to talk about Mam, and, when I said no, proceeded to ask me all about her, anyway, forcing me to remember and that made me cry, which I hated.
She said she would meet me another time, and told me I could always call her up, or ask to see her any time (which was unlikely) and that she would inform me about Mam’s funeral.
After she left, in came a man. Almost the first man I had spoken to all day. I do not know, really, why I was pleased about that but I was.
He was called Robbie. He was a Fire Investigations Officer. He wanted to know about the fire. I told him everything I knew.
Well, almost everything.
Mam had been on edge the evening it happened, and all because of Roxy Minto’s appearance in our backyard that afternoon.
The evening had turned chilly, as I had predicted, and we were indoors with a wood fire going.
‘Do you remember the first time you met a black man, Alve?’ Mam said. I suppose because of Roxy. We had recounted this story to each other a few times over the years, but we still brought it out now and then because it was funny.
It was not long after this story began. It was in the sixth or seventh year of the first King Henry’s reign, or 1107 as you would say now. By then, Mam and I were living in Jarrow, where there had been a great monastery, but by that time it was almost in ruins.
There was one old prior remaining – a senior monk – and a handful of older boys and young men, including me, who were learning and reading and training to become monks ourselves.
It was a sleepy, empty place: no one asked too many questions about me or Mam. Mam would visit the old prior, Paul, to keep him company.
Monks were not allowed, of course, to have wives or girlfriends although many did, secretly. Everyone knew about Mam and Paul but nobody really minded. Or if they minded they said nothing. I asked her once if she was in love with Paul. She smiled and said, ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Paul knew our secret too. The legend of the Neverdeads was still alive in those days.
He kept our secret; we kept his.
Back then, we had seen many people from different countries. There were the Danes, obviously, the ones who stayed. There were also lots of Scots, who were not so popular in our part of the world, although it depended on which dialect they spoke. For some years, we had heard more people speaking the Frankish tongue – they had come from what is now France with the conquering king, William, who had later been so cruel to so many people in the north of England, but who had not come as far north as us.
But in quiet Jarrow? Not for several years had anyone passed through from another country, until the arrival of Johannes at our priory.
He was young, with skin the colour and sheen of the coal dust that lined our seashores, and none of us had ever seen anything like him.
He had come to learn with us, to pray with us, to join our community. He arrived on foot from Monkwearmouth, down by the coast, and, when he entered the village, people stared. People literally stopped and gaped. An older lady gave a little shriek of surprise. He was not wearing a monk’s robe, just a normal tunic and breeches, with a woollen wrap secured by a leather belt.
I think that is what astonished people: he was dressed just like us.
Old Paul had been expecting him, of course, and came out to greet him, and he grinned, and they clasped hands, and came into the monastery where I had heard nothing of the young man who was to join us.
I knew about black people, of course. The faraway place that we now call Africa was well known to be populated with men and women and children who had shiny black skin, but whose blood was as red as mine. Then again, I had heard all sorts of things from travellers.
How could I be sure about Johannes, then? Like the story of St Thomas, who doubted the reappearance of Jesus after his death on the cross, I required proof. I reached out and tried to rub the colour from Johannes’s face. I looked at my fingers for smudges, but there were none. I rubbed his arm, and he laughed: a good-natured laugh, not mean at all. This had happened to him many times before, he told me later.
‘Scholasticus bonus es, o amice!’ he said to me in Latin. ‘You are a good student, my friend!’ He told me, ‘Scholars must ask questions and discover answers!’
All men of learning (and back then it was nearly always men) spoke Latin. It was the way that educated people from different countries could communicate.
We all spoke our own languages too, of course. At home with Mam, she and I still spoke a form of Old Norse; with many of the monks in Jarrow we spoke a dialect of Anglo-Saxon that is now known as Old Northumbrian.
We could understand other types of Anglo-Saxon as well. I was learning how to speak Frankish and had already mastered Greek, because it was the original language of so much of the Holy Bible that I copied many times as a young scribe.
Mam and I laughed at the memory of Johannes. He had been a good friend to us. He stayed a few years in Jarrow and then – as was the way with monks – he moved on, taking his learning and the Word of God with him.
About three decades later, Johannes passed through Jarrow again on his way to the cathedral in Durham.
He was a middle-aged man now, no longer slim, and with greying hair, but his smile was as warm as ever and he sat at our hearth, looked at us both and hesitated a little before saying: ‘Neverdeads?’
He knew. We trusted him, we nodded and he smiled, shaking his head slowly. ‘Of all the Lord’s holy miracles!’
We smiled too, although we knew it was not a holy miracle but science. Or al-kimiya, as we called it then. Alchemy.
Back at our fireside in Oak Cottage, I did my Johannes voice for Mam, because she thought it was funny and she liked to remember him.
‘Of all the Lord’s holy miracles!’ I said, and Mam chuckled for maybe the two hundredth time at that.
I put another log on the fire. They were poor logs. I had been lazy that day and picked an armful from the pile nearest the house. They were not yet seasoned properly.
Wood that has fallen naturally because the tree or branch is dead is often good already. This wood, though,
was from a tree that had blown over in a storm in the early spring. Mam tutted gently. ‘Alve! You brought in the new wood, didn’t you?’
Robbie would know all about fire, so I did not tell him that bit, nor the stuff about Johannes. But I told him the rest.
Mam had gone up to her bed, I told Robbie the Fire Investigator. I had gone out, as I often do, to shoot rabbits.
It is all right. I do not shoot them for fun. I shoot rabbits in order to eat them. I know some people in the twenty-first century are squeamish about things like that, especially those who live in towns: that is why I point it out.
(I have a sling to shoot with. You do not use them nowadays, but slings are a very effective weapon. Mine has a small pouch in the middle of a long leather cord. I made it many years ago and I am quite accurate. I also have Da’s knife, the steel blade darkened with age, and worn thin through centuries of sharpening.)
I told none of this to Robbie, however. I just said that I was going for a walk.
‘At night?’ he asked but he tried not to sound surprised.
There is a huge field to the north of our woods, which on cool spring nights is full of rabbits. Until quite recently I had never seen anybody there at night. Not until the new estate was built, and then some people walked dogs there. I had stopped going so often. I would not want to hit someone’s dog by accident, or even a person.
I had the big light, on a head strap, that I take with me, but the moon was so high – almost full – that I did not need it to see the way. Instead I turned it on when I got to the field, and swept the beam at ground level. That way, the eyes of the rabbits shine back and you have your target.
I spotted one immediately, and slowly withdrew my sling and put a ball bearing, about half an inch across, in the pouch. I kept the rabbit’s eyes in my sights, not moving my head while I began the ‘wind-up’ – spinning the pouch round on the long strings. That is when I noticed something different. A different kind of light to the south: very faint, a different colour. Orangey, greyish.
The colour of fire.
Forgive me, but I do not suppose you have been greatly exposed to seeing things on fire: buildings, towns, boats?
I have.
I knew immediately what it was. Terror mounting, I sprinted back to the woods, batting away branches, skidding on moss, my breathing rapid and shallow. I nearly tripped over Biffa who came pelting out of the woods. I knew then that something was badly wrong.
‘Biffa! Biffa! Kum-a, kum-a!’ I cried but she did not even look back. Terrified, she ran across the field as if pursued by a dog.
Even then, I heard in my head the voice of my old combat teacher, Rafel: ‘Calm, Alve. Your heart, she needs the air!’ and I tried to make my breathing slower and deeper, but it was not easy.
In the dense woods, I could not see the orange glow, nor smell the smoke, until I got much nearer, but soon it was unmistakable. A few yards further and I could hear it: a sort of high-pitched whoosh, and crackling.
And there it was below me as I stood, wheezing, on the wooded slope: my house, our house, a roaring, terrifying inferno, yellow-orange flames licking the trees that seemed to be shrinking back from the heat.
I had one thought only, and I screamed it again and again at the top of my smoke-filled lungs:
‘MAAAAAAAAM! MAM! MAAAM!’
I could not even get near to the house. Some of the chickens had got out, and one flapped by my feet. Others were still trapped in the coop. Amy the goat’s stall door was banging open.
I watched in powerless horror as a glass window cracked and shattered with the heat. Could I get closer? What about Mam? I jumped down into the yard where only that day Roxy Minto had fallen and hurt her head. I knew it was dangerous to try to save Mam, but I was not thinking straight, and I ran to the corner of the burning house, grabbing a bucket of water on the way.
I threw the bucket at the back stairway, thinking maybe I could get upstairs, which was already ablaze. It sizzled, and for a brief moment I thought there may be a chance, but then, seconds later, the water had evaporated and the flames were advancing again.
Then it fell: the wooden lintel above a collapsed door came away without warning and thudded into my arm, singeing my flesh and causing me to scream out.
I retreated, shouting again, ‘MAM! WHERE ARE YOU?’ I collapsed in a coughing fit as thick smoke enveloped me.
In the back of my mind, a hideous, ugly thought was forming. Looking back, it seems rather strange to me that at that moment of terror at least part of my mind was considering matters in a calm and detached way.
I think it may be a little like those people who say that at a time of great drama, ‘everything seemed to slow down’. For me, things did not slow down, but instead some things became clearer, like a camera lens focusing on one part of a blurry picture.
So this is what I thought:
‘Is it time to enact the plan?’
Through the smoke and the astonishing heat and the noise of destruction all around me, that thought, that thought alone, was as sharp and clear as a monastery bell on a winter’s night.
The heat and the flames forced me back, further and further. My arm was hurting, my eyes were stinging so much that water was streaming from them. I cried out again for Mam. Had she escaped? She would find me, surely?
Then I heard the sirens, and I ran uphill, up the slope. I ran in terror and in panic. I ran until I came to the shed that had been there for months, and I let myself in with the key that I had seen the little girl put under the stone before.
That was it. That was how it happened, the night my mother died.
I looked up at Robbie. He had stopped writing, and his eyes were full of tears, which alarmed me a little.
He sniffed loudly and looked at his shoes, shaking his head. ‘I am so, so sorry, Alfie. Truly, son, I am.’
He seemed very shaken. The silence was uncomfortable, so I said, ‘My mam?’
He looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘Did … did she …’ I could not form the question to which I so wanted an answer. Robbie helped me.
‘Did she suffer, you mean?’ I nodded.
He seemed to weigh his words. ‘No,’ he said, eventually. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
I swallowed hard. ‘Thank you.’ Then I added, ‘Have you seen a cat? A black-and-white cat?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, son.’
I had forgotten that Sangeeta was sitting in the corner until she got up and said, ‘Thanks, Robbie. I think Alfie has had enough now,’ and for once I was not annoyed by her presuming to know what was good for me.
I had had enough.
Sangeeta drove me to a house on the terraced seafront in Culvercot – a big white villa with a name: Earl Grey House. There were square pillars either side of the front door. Inside it had high ceilings and smelt of food and cheap air freshener.
A children’s home. My home.
I am a thousand years old and I live in a children’s home.
I miss my mam. I miss Biffa. Somehow nothing seems quite so bad when you are stroking a cat.
Yet, for several hours now, I have been thinking only about the man with the beard and the scars, just like mine. Surely I imagined it.
Surely?
I was certain now that I recognised him. From somewhere. Then, once again, the memory wriggled from my grasp.
Well, that was odd.
I mean – Jasper running out of the house and all that, and Mum going after him, and practically dragging him away from the car before he got arrested or something.
Dad had been watching from the house. ‘He’s nuts. Honestly, Marie. I knew there was something not right about him.’
‘Shush, Ben,’ said Mum because Aunty Alice – who had seen nothing of this – was approaching with Libby behind her.
‘Poor lad!’ said Jasper, as he came back into the house. He grinned his long-toothed grin, and then raised a hand to wave at the police officers who were still milling around outside. ‘T
hanks, fellas!’ he said, as if they’d done him a favour. Which I suppose, by not arresting him, they had.
Jasper seemed relaxed and confident, but he was faking it, I was sure. Perhaps it takes a bad liar to spot a bad lie.
‘Ah, that poor wee lad. I just wanted to wish him all the best, you know?’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Dad. It came out a bit aggressively, but Jasper either didn’t notice, or had to keep up the pretence.
‘Yes. What an inconceivably rotten thing to have happened to him! I wanted to tell him that the situation would get better.’
Aunty Alice had missed all of this. She’d been talking in the kitchen with a policewoman she’d been at school with. ‘What’s up?’ she said innocently.
Jasper got in first. ‘Ah, not much. I was just trying to reassure that young fellow. He looked so lost, you know? Police said it wasn’t the time or place, and you know – they were probably right in hindsight.’ He turned and headed upstairs. ‘Anyway – look at the time! We’d better be on our way, Alice, me old fruit pie.’
I kid you not – he talks like that. They were out of the house and back to their boat in Culvercot within half an hour. Jasper refused Dad’s offer of a lift and phoned for a taxi.
It was the strangest atmosphere. Everybody was behaving normally, but nobody was feeling normal. Libby had gone upstairs and did not come down to wave them off.
As soon as the taxi had rounded the end of the close, Dad murmured, ‘Blimey! Don’t want to see him in a month of Sundays.’
Mum slapped his arm playfully. ‘Ben! That’s my brother-in-law.’
Dad tutted. ‘Brother outlaw, more like.’
Night after night, I slept badly. When you are as old as I am, there are a lot of memories that can turn into bad dreams.
The man’s face kept coming into my mind, when he leant down at the car window, and each time I would reach for the memory, but it would elude me and I would wake, sweating, in the hot nights. My bed was covered with a ‘duvet’. I was used to sheets and blankets.
I ate little. Mam and I used to have simple food. I do not know why, but at Earl Grey House we are served foreign things like curry, and spaghetti, and peri-peri chicken, which burns my lips.