Frozen

by Richard Burke

  Then it turned out she had a flair for three-dimensional thinking because she found an anchor spot that let us use the swing in countless ways. She spotted a cleft in a branch about ten feet up and out from the platform's far end. To my eyes, it didn't look promising, but she insisted. To attach the rope she had to stand on my shoulders and pull herself up on to a branch way above head height, then crawl out along it until she was hanging perilously perhaps twenty-five feet above the ground with nothing to break her fall, wrestling with a thick and uncooperative mass of hemp.

  “You should let me do it,” I called anxiously. She had just lost her grip for the fifth or sixth time, and was swinging beneath the branch by her knees. She stopped trying to get back up and hung upside-down, staring at me intently. Her dress had fallen away. Its hem brushed her chin, and she swung gently, coils of rope looping around her. I tried hard not to look at her legs and knickers.

  “Harry,” she said, after a pause. Her face was reddening and bulging, clotting her voice.

  “Yes, Verity?”

  “Shut up.” So I did. I watched.

  Eventually, the swing was hung, and a small spar knotted into it for a seat. I stood on the platform holding it, feeling stupid. “Go on,” she urged. She looked enchanted, her eyes dreamy and unblinking, her stillness the only sign of her excitement. I leaped upwards and plunged from the treehouse. “Yeeee-hah!” A sudden perilous drop—the breath rushed out of me—and I arced upwards, and then out towards the shimmering curtain of leaves. I had to stretch almost to my limit to grab the platform's edge as I swung back. I pulled myself on board.

  “That was brilliant! You can almost touch the leaves! I bet you could if you jumped high enough first.”

  Verity's eyes glittered darkly. “If you hold it lower down and run along the edge before you swing, you'll reach that branch.” She pointed to one of the large horizontal limbs, which jutted outwards further round the tree, beyond the end of the treehouse. She made no move to take the rope.

  The angles looked all wrong to me, but I tried it. I swung out and round, and my fingertips brushed bark before my momentum carried me past and smashed me into the main trunk. I rebounded outwards, spinning and a little dazed. On my second return, she caught my arm, and hoisted me back to safety.

  “Got—got to—run a little faster,” I gasped, my chest in agony.

  “Second time lucky!” She giggled and clapped her hands. “Gimme!” She flew outwards, screaming happily, not caring about the knocks.

  For Verity, the swing was only the start. She announced that a treehouse was not a treehouse without a roof, so we built one over part of the platform. It was flat, and doubled as a second level; by using it as another starting point, the swing had even more permutations. Next we knocked up a ramshackle shelf. We kept biscuits and pilfered apples, and bottles of Coke, which were always warm and flat by the time we were finishing them.

  I secretly relished the implied intimacy of my lips touching the bottle where hers had been. It sealed our companionship, acknowledged our oneness—I had a lot of romantic notions when I was thirteen. We shared everything: food, drinks, games, trivial flirtatious secrets. Some days she would be distant and uneasy, though, and even the most spectacular stunts on the rope would not bring her back. I learned to give her time.

  We improvised a rope ladder, which we hid on the platform and pulled down with a stick when we needed it. We kept the stick hidden in long grass against the fence just where we slipped through into the woods. From the ground, despite all our modifications, the treehouse was still all but undetectable. Of course, it probably stood out like a sore thumb in winter with no leaves to shield it, but I never gave that a thought. The gamekeeper never found us—or if he did, he left us alone.

  Someone found us, though.

  And it changed everything.

  *

  We didn't go to Wytham Woods every day. Occasionally we'd get out the sling and play target practice instead, or cycle to Port Meadow and swim in the Isis, or rummage out our roller-skates and sweep down the hill into Wolvercote at lethal speed in the middle of the road. We broke into the grounds of the local private school, St. Edward's, and swam in its huge outdoor pool. We spent lazy days on the swing-bridges across the canal, and exploring the old cement works. It was summer; there were endless days, endless ways to spend them.

  But one morning when we arrived at the treehouse, the rope ladder was hanging down. Someone had been there in the two days since we'd been. They'd even taken our biscuits. I thought Verity was going to cry. Her hands waved about, apparently uncontrolled. She began to stammer. She looked around constantly, her gaze flitting fearfully from place to place.

  “They can't,” she whispered sadly. (I'm leaving out the stammer. It seems unfair to her.) “Not here. No one can come here.” She sat on the platform hugging her knees, rocking, her eyes large and soft and seeing nothing, the way she waited for me some mornings. “Ours. This is ours.” She stiffened, and turned to look at me. “We have to catch him.” From the first moment, she was always sure it was a boy—but then, I suppose I was too. It never occurred to me that it might be a girl.

  We spent a few days staking out the treehouse, waiting to see if the interloper would make another appearance. But he was cleverer than that; if he came, he spotted us first and slipped away. We spent four uncomfortable days in prickly undergrowth, and saw no one.

  Verity suggested traps. It quickly became a game, and the strangeness of that first moment of discovery vanished, replaced by exaggerated fantasies—concealed pits filled with spikes, specially weakened boards that only we would know about. We even considered deploying the sling in anger: it would fire a projectile—rotting fruit or ink or, my favourite, spiked steel balls—when the intruder triggered a trip-wire. Ink was the best idea, because then we could track down the intruder later, hold an identification parade, have him incarcerated for trespassing (as, of course, were we). The experiments with the sling were promising, but ink and steel balls were out; whatever method we used had to be private and non-lethal. We settled for milk cartons filled with water. They worked perfectly. It was not enough for Verity, though. She announced that whether or not the sling worked as a deterrent, we still had to find out who the invader was.

  “What we need are cameras,” she said, and she gave me a certain look: that questions were not allowed. She frowned intently for about a minute, and then her teeth flashed as she giggled. She ran down my garden and through the hedge. For a few paces, I swear I saw her skipping.

  I knew what that meant. She had a plan.

  *

  Verity had a little sixteen-millimetre Instamatic. Mum didn't have a camera, but I knew that Dad had left one behind when he went, an old Olympus he'd always said he should throw away.

  I climbed up into the loft. It was intolerably hot, airless, with no wind to ruffle the layers of dust. The camera was in a packing case full of things Dad hadn't bothered to take, underneath a few shabby items of clothing he'd used for working round the house. It was in its own box, frayed brown leather with two clasps, set in sparkling grey foam along with a flash, a trigger-wire and a couple of spare lenses.

  I set it on one side and continued to delve. I don't know what I was searching for—clues, perhaps, to the muffled yells and shouts that had kept me awake night after night for months before Dad left. I felt guilty that I was peering into his private, unhappy world. I stopped at the slightest sound, fearful that Mum would discover me, because Dad's Old Things were a no-go area. I found nothing. I heard Mum coming upstairs, and hurriedly tidied everything away. I hunted for a tripod, but there wasn't one, so I swung myself out, pulled down the camera case, and closed up. Mum was in her bedroom, so I slipped downstairs and dodged quickly out of the kitchen before she could ask what I'd been up to, and then hurried down the garden with my trophies. There was still time to get to the woods and set up.

  As well as her own camera, Verity also had a professional-looking machine, which she held
as though it was infinitely precious—I know now it was an SLR, a single-lens reflex. Very posh. She wouldn't tell me where it came from; she just said that it had been hard to get, and looked distantly at the nearest wall. So that made three cameras—and she insisted we take the sling, plus a supply of empty milk cartons to fill from the stream. I couldn't see the need for three cameras—but, as usual, she was ahead of me.

  “Insurance,” she said brightly.

  She began to construct a simple hide of twigs and leaves around the first camera. She squatted with her knees high. She moved quickly and easily.

  “When we get him,” she grunted, as she yanked a branch towards her, “we need three photos of him. If we only use one camera, he might be facing the wrong way.” She hid all three, with logs balanced precariously above their shutter buttons, hooked up to strings that trailed away from them to where the trip-wire was to be set. The idea was that when the intruder triggered the wire, the logs would fall and set off the cameras.

  Verity sat with her legs half-curled under her. Her big serious eyes seemed almost emerald in the shade. There was a green-brown scuff mark on one cheek. “And another thing,” she said firmly, “he might realise we've taken his photo. If we're lucky, the milk cartons will distract him—but even if he does spot a camera, he won't spot three, will he?”

  “Devious,” I growled.

  “Mean,” I added.

  “Underhanded,” I suggested.

  “I like it,” I grinned.

  Verity smiled, as if all was suddenly well with the world. She twitched her eyebrows up and down to show how cunning she was. When she set back to work, she hummed absentmindedly. If I had recognised the tune, I would have joined her. Instead, I smiled at her—and her eyes shone back.

  *

  Unbelievably, it worked—all of it.

  We set the trap, left it there for a day—and when we came back, the wires had been tripped and the sling had fired. Most amazingly, though, all three cameras had gone off. The falling logs had knocked them over, they looked a little beaten, but they'd taken the shots. We fired off the remaining exposures, and took the films to the nearest chemist in north Oxford. A few days later, the prints were ready.

  There was the intruder, frozen from three angles, his arms up to ward off the flying milk cartons, water already looping from them. One carton was clearly going to hit him.

  We crowed. We hugged each other excitedly. Triumph was sweet. Her fine hair tickled my nose as she pressed against me, and I bent over her to get my first glimpse of our villain. The first shot showed his back, his arm half raised, the cartons motionless in mid-air, flying straight towards the camera. In the second shot, he was smaller—the Instamatic had been further away from the action and (I now realise) had a wider-angle lens. His face was indistinct and too small to recognise. The third shot was from my Olympus (and why shouldn't it be mine if Dad didn't want it and Mum had left it in the loft for so long?) and it was the clincher: a three-quarters profile with the spray from the cartons hanging out of focus in the foreground, the face recognisable. Not bad for my first-ever photo. Verity spread out two shots and handed the third to me. Our hands touched as we arranged them in a neat row.

  Adam Yates. A boy at school. He was a year above me, but I knew who he was. A big boy, but often picked on. He was always the one whose gym shoes got peed in; smaller children threw things at him because he never fought back. I had teased him myself, from the safety of a sniggering group. I knew him without knowing him. I opened my mouth to tell Verity, but she was already thinking about something else.

  She was frowning at the photographs. She set her two prints at an angle to each other so that all three together made up three sides of an open square. Then she took back the one I'd been holding and squatted on the pavement. As I crouched next to her I could hear she was humming again, faint familiar snatches. Carefully, she propped the photos upright, as though she were building a house of cards; the prints all touched at their top corners, each becoming one side of a triangular box. She shuffled round them in a circle, nudging me out of the way. As she passed, I smelt a hint of woodscent.

  “We need more cameras,” she said finally.

  “What are you talking about? It's Adam Yates. From school.” I was getting a little exasperated.

  “Yes, yes.” She waved her hands about impatiently. “But we need more cameras.”

  “Wha—”

  “Look,” she said firmly, and grabbed my wrist. She dragged me round the tiny construction of photos. “Here. The same moment—here—here—here. One, two, three. You've got the milk cartons, Whatshisface Yates, the tree, all from different angles, all at the same moment! We need more cameras!” She clapped excitedly, and bounced to her feet. She shuffled the photos into a pile, and gave them to me.

  I was perplexed, unable to keep up with her quicksilver thoughts. She stopped hopping around and frowned at me, then spoke slowly in case she lost me again. “Take a bunch of cameras, loads of them, twenty or something... put them in a big circle, all pointing in towards the middle... then set them all off at exactly the same time! Wham!” She threw her hands dramatically into the air. I still didn't get it.

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, stay completely still...” She mimed taking a picture of me and said, “Click.” Then she jumped round so she was sideways on to me—“Click.” Another jump, nearly behind me now—“click”—and so on, until she was in front of me again.

  “3D photos,” she said simply. “Each picture's the same thing, at the same time, but from a different angle. Then if you hold them in your hand and flick through them like a book, it'll feel like you're flying around whatever's in the picture.” She rushed off towards her bike. “But we need more cameras,” she shouted over her shoulder.

  I had to pedal hard to catch her. We rode home in silence, with houses and then fields flickering by. Some time after we reached open countryside, I plucked up courage. “What about Adam Yates?”

  “Cameras,” she said, ignoring my question. “We need more cameras, Harry.”

  She grinned and leaned her bike towards me until our shoulders bumped, and we both swung away, wildly trying to regain our balance. She giggled.

  We cycled on in silence, and her eyes were alight, and the wind whispered for our ears alone.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE PHONE WOKE ME. It took me about five rings to reach it. By then the answering machine had kicked in. I had to fight my own recorded voice while I fumbled for the off-switch.

  “Hello?”

  “—ry Waddell. Sorry I can't get to—”

  “Hello, hold on. Wait a second, I'll switch it off.”

  I heard Adam's voice at the other end. Couldn't understand what he said, though.

  “—‘bout a job you can call me on”'

  As I groped for the switch, I knocked the machine off the table. “Fuck! Oh. Sorry.” The machine gave one protesting beep when it hit the floor, and stopped. I looked at it, confused, trying to gather my thoughts. It was half on the floor, half suspended in a snarl of cables. Amazingly, the message light was still flashing. I stared at the machine. Probably broken. Great.

  “Hi. Adam?”

  “You all right, Harry?”

  “Yeah. Half-asleep. Woke me up. What time is it?”

  “I didn't mean to, I thought you'd be up. Ten to eight. I wanted to check how you were, what you were up to.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  In my dream, there had been clouds, a huge cool storm that filled the sky but never arrived. Hungry faces, big wise eyes staring.

  “Harry?”

  I rubbed my face fiercely.

  “I'm here, just trying to wake up.”

  “You up to listening?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Ads.”

  “Don't go there, just listen. I'm taking today off. That's why I rang early. Fridays are almost as bad as Thursdays anyway. Court's closed because judge fancied a long weekend and I'm not going anywhere near the town hall—Appropriat
ion Committee, Policy Steering Group, all garbage. So I'm devoting today to the newly created, officially sanctioned Harry Waddell Outreach Programme. HWOP for short. Catchy, don't you think?'

  “I don't deserve you, Adam.”

  “Shut up and tell me what we're doing.”

  “Seriously,” I smiled into the phone. Grinned, actually.

  “And when we're doing it.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I'd been planning to go to Eastbourne. I wanted Verity to have a few of her own things, even if she was in a coma and couldn't appreciate them. You never knew. Then I was going to follow her footsteps and find the place in her diary, Birling Gap. She'd had an appointment there at three-thirty on the day she fell. “I'd like it if you could come,” I said. “I mean, if you're serious.”

  “Deadly serious,” he said. “We'll take the BMW.”

  “Pick me up at Verity's, then. Give me an hour to get there, maybe half an hour to sort out some things for her.” I glanced at a clock. Just past eight. “An hour and a half,” I said. “Make it half nine.”

  “See you there, then—and don't say thank you again, Harry, or I might have to shoot you.”

  He hung up before I could think of a reply.

  I set the answering machine straight, and wandered into the bathroom to prepare for the day. When I looked in the mirror, the face I saw smiled back broadly.

  *

  I was dreading going to Verity's flat, and at the same time I was desperate to be there. Of course, if I wanted to collect things to take down to Eastbourne for her—a decent nightie, ornaments for her bedside cabinet—then I had no choice. I was far from sure that such things were allowed in ITU, but I wanted to try—and behind that, of course, was the real motive: I wanted to see her again. I couldn't admit it to myself, because I already knew the horror I was letting myself in for—the stark white light, the damaged body, the blank face, the silence. Even so, the truth was that I wanted to see her.