Killing Woods

by Lucy Christopher

  ‘Go on, clear off!’ Damon yells again. ‘Otherwise I’ll give you all detention. I mean it!’

  I watch Ed Wilkes walk close to Joe. ‘Always watching, watching, watching …’ I hear him say. ‘We should charge you money one day …’

  Charlie Jones shoves Joe’s shoulder, and Joe glares at that. Then he’s turning to look back at me, shaking his head in a way I know means Don’t do anything stupid, Emily! Kirsty shifts too as Damon starts threatening detention again. I feel every single stare from every person as they leave. Then I hear the whispers: What’s he going to do to her? I can’t believe Damon Hilary stopped it … she’ll get suspended … expelled …

  I wait, ready for whatever punishment Damon’s going to give me, but he’s still watching his mates lope after the crowd. Ed turns and walks backwards, staring at Damon and me, maybe checking I’m playing nice. He grins, all teeth, until Mack grabs the collar of his jumper and pulls him away. Only then does Damon turn back to me – he looks at me in a slow and curious way, almost as if I’m a specimen he’s studying. If it were anyone else looking at me like this I’d probably arc up, but I’m still thinking of how he’d sat in the row in front of me yesterday in the public gallery; how his chair screeched back when Dad said the words not guilty to murder; how he’d scowled. I get this strange urge to apologise, I can’t hold his gaze. Does this mean I’m starting to believe it – everything? Damon’s hand feels heavy on my shoulder, pressing me.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you were fighting about?’ he says eventually. ‘If you don’t talk to me I can make up anything, I could take you to the Head who’d suspend you straight up.’

  ‘Do it.’ I say the words before I mean to.

  If I got suspended I wouldn’t have to be near Damon at all, and this would be better for both of us. I wouldn’t feel this weird guilt just from being near him; he wouldn’t be so angry. His jaw tightens, doesn’t want to give me anything.

  ‘I want answers from you,’ he says.

  There’s a quick flash of something in his eyes – Panic? Curiosity? – it’s there for a second then masked over just as fast. I wait for him to start firing his questions. The schoolyard is empty now, everyone gone to class, and the silence goes jagged and awkward. Is he enjoying making me wait, this power over me? He’s not gloating like Kirsty was. Why didn’t he just hand out a detention slip and walk away?

  ‘You can fight,’ he says eventually. ‘Did your dad teach you?’

  This isn’t the question I’m expecting, and it’s hard to answer. ‘I guess,’ I murmur. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Why?’

  Again there’s no easy answer, no answer he would want to hear. I can hear Dad’s words in my head, though, when he’d been showing me how to crouch into a fighting stance in Darkwood ages ago: All young women should know how to get away, if they need to.

  I can’t say this to Damon. Not when Ashlee didn’t get away.

  ‘He was a soldier,’ I say eventually. ‘It’s what he did.’

  Damon seems satisfied with this. ‘I know about soldiers.’

  I twist my face away, remembering that Ashlee Parker isn’t the only person that Damon has ever lost. Maybe this is something else we share: army dads, dads who used to be heroes … dads who, in different ways, have been blown apart.

  Damon grabs my chin, turns me back. ‘Just because your dad was a soldier, it doesn’t mean he gets off with pleading manslaughter. He’s a murderer!’

  ‘He’s not.’

  Damon watches me. ‘I’m not sending you to the Head.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Detention. With me.’ He says the words quickly, almost as if he’s daring himself to. ‘Sports detention after school.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘I can.’

  I don’t understand it; he could punish me, seriously, for what I’ve done. Why settle on the lowest level of punishment when he could get me suspended? Sports detention is what’s given for dropping rubbish, or not wearing a uniform properly, not for fighting. It won’t even go on my records.

  ‘People deserve a second chance, don’t they?’ he says, but his eyes are hard. ‘Anyway, we should talk.’ He gets up. ‘After school today, OK?’

  I nod; it feels like I don’t really have much choice. And I want to know what he has to say to me, his questions. ‘Where do I meet you?’

  He thinks. I’m expecting him to say the playing fields or the gym.

  ‘Meet me in Darkwood,’ he says instead. ‘I’ll be waiting at the Leap. You know it?’

  ‘Darkwood?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nods. ‘The Leap.’

  I get a flash of memory of bumping into him in Darkwood once before – by accident, when he’d almost tripped over me. I remember how the expression on his face had changed when I’d started to talk to him then. But why would he want to meet me there now? After everything?

  Again, he nods. ‘As soon as bell goes, go there. We’ll run. Sports detention.’

  Then he’s gone, and he doesn’t turn back. Not once.

  6

  Damon

  Stupid. STUPID. This is what I’m thinking as I’m jogging away from her. I didn’t need to do that. Why didn’t I just come down on her hard, march her to the Head? Why did I need to speak to her at all?

  I know why.

  Because I’m an idiot!

  And she doesn’t believe it. Any of it! Not even after yesterday when the bastard admitted to what he’d done. Just thinking about all that shit – how Shepherd said he was guilty but didn’t admit the whole story – well, it makes me want to hit something. Someone! Yesterday I’d wanted to push aside chairs and people and whatever-the-fuck-else just to get at him.

  The boys would approve of me punishing Emily Shepherd. We’d all said it, hadn’t we? That we’d kill Jon Shepherd given the opportunity, chuck him over the Leap to the sharp rocks below. Strangle him slowly. Punish him.

  But she isn’t him.

  The most I can do is rough her up a bit, give her the toughest sports detention I’ve ever given. It’s not enough, though: I want her to feel like I do, to understand. I want her to know what it’s like to lose people who don’t have a chance of coming back.

  I tip into a run. I should go to Mr Smith and clear this sports detention like I’m meant to, but I won’t. Course not – I decided that as soon as I gave it. Smith would never clear a detention for me and Emily Shepherd in Darkwood – no one would, it’s mad.

  As I turn on to the playing fields, I touch my hand to the base of my spine, feel the space where my tatt begins. My old man wouldn’t like how I am right now. Ashlee wouldn’t have minded, though – she always liked me playing tough. I remember what it was like to run after her, fast in the dark, to take her dog collar. I want to do it again so bad that I almost have to bend over and breathe deep to stop this feeling from rising up into coughing, or sick, or something worse like crying. I feel choked, like Shepherd is trying to strangle me too. I need to run this feeling out. I need to run Shepherd’s daughter so hard that she’s the one who’s sick. Run her ’til she tells me who her dad really is and why he picked Ashlee. I almost pull out my phone and call Mack, even if he is in class. Because right now I need Darkwood. The Game.

  No.

  I can’t need that again.

  I close my hand into a fist and try to think of what my old man would’ve done: he’d have said that the Shepherd girl is scared, probably just as screwed up as I am. The fact that she doesn’t even believe her dad did it at all suggests she’s mental, don’t it?

  But even so … why Darkwood? Why even say that to her? It’s because it was the one word that was going round in my brain as I was looking at her. And I need to go back. Because I need those woods. Need what they do to me.

  And I need to understand.

  7

  Emily

  ‘Why Darkwood?’ Mina says when I tell her. ‘Why would he want to go back in there? With you?’

  ‘What’s
wrong with the gym or the playing fields?’ Joe murmurs from the other side of me. ‘Why give you sports detention at all?’ He’s staring straight ahead, his eyes blinking quickly like he’s trying to read the board and can’t see it properly.

  ‘It’s weird,’ Mina adds.

  ‘That’s for sure.’ Joe’s eyes dart across to me then.

  ‘But the cross-country team train there, don’t they?’ I ask. ‘So it’s not that strange.’

  Joe shrugs this away, starts drawing cartoon figures on the side of his exercise book.

  I know what I’m doing: I’m trying to make this whole crazy detention sound less weird, trying to stop the nerves that started as soon as Damon left me in the schoolyard.

  ‘No one has detentions in Darkwood.’ Joe says, making me anxious all over.

  I feel Mina’s nails dig into my arm. ‘Maybe he wants revenge? You thought of that?’

  I remember Damon in the courtroom, the way he’d glared.

  Joe sighs. ‘What about all the stuff we’ve been talking about, Em? The list we made? The theories we came up with?’

  I think about the conversations I’ve had with Joe over the last few weeks, the theories we’d had about who else could have been in Darkwood the night Ashlee died: tramps, druggies, kids from out of town, ex-army … We’d made a list – possible suspects – I’d wanted the police to keep looking.

  ‘Someone could still be hiding in those trees,’ I’d said. ‘They could be waiting undiscovered.’

  But the police hadn’t listened.

  Damon was on that list, though.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Joe says. ‘Seriously.’

  I’m thinking about how Damon stayed next to me in the schoolyard when he could have left so easily. ‘He’s got something to say. He won’t do anything.’

  Joe snorts. ‘There’s another side to Mr Nice Guy.’

  We all shut up then as Mr Westbury shoots us a glare. Mina looks down at the desk and adjusts her hijab, tucking her hair neatly behind it.

  ‘You know they took him in for questioning?’ she says, jabbing me in the arm again. ‘Damon Hilary was one of the first people in the station the day after Ashlee died, along with …’

  She stops, doesn’t say the words that come next: along with your dad.

  ‘I know.’

  I remember that spark of hope when I’d heard: when I’d thought, for a short while anyway, that maybe it was Damon that killed Ashlee, that even this was more likely than it being Dad.

  ‘They always say it’s the boyfriend,’ Joe had said that day. ‘On the cop shows they do.’

  I’d wanted to believe him.

  But the police didn’t keep Damon long, and they didn’t press any charges. And why would he do it anyway? Everyone knew Damon followed Ashlee about everywhere, adored her. When the two of them were together they were golden – they shimmered in this school. My stomach knots as I remember the sports honour board with Ashlee Parker’s name on, her locker left open after her parents cleared her stuff out for the last time, the space on stage where she’d sat in assemblies … the way Damon’s eyes used to linger over her in break times. This school is riddled with holes Ashlee has left: shot through with shrapnel.

  Damon couldn’t have done that.

  Suddenly I’m blinking and forcing my eyes to focus on the board. But I can’t concentrate on this lesson, not even if I want to. So I nudge Mina. ‘Do you think he’s had counselling?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘His girlfriend died …’ And your dad killed her.

  But she leaves off this last part. It’s something I’m glad of with Mina, why I don’t mind her hanging about: she never says outright that Dad’s a killer, never corrects me when I say otherwise. Just like Joe never does.

  I allow myself a moment of Dad, of how he was before he got discharged from the army. That Dad could never have hurt Ashlee Parker. Whenever I say this to Mum she says people change; she says that awful things can make brains buckle. She reminds me that only one person has ever admitted to killing Ashlee Parker and that person is Dad. How can the police ignore something like that? How can anyone?

  ‘Sometimes people can’t be who they once were,’ Mum says. ‘When people see a lot of horrible things they become different.’

  Has Damon changed too because of the things that have happened to him? Have I?

  Mina is still looking at me, concern threaded through her skin.

  ‘Damon won’t do anything,’ I say, though I don’t know why I’m so certain of this. ‘Anyway, if I don’t go, he’ll refer me to the Head and Mum will know I’ve been fighting. I’d get suspended.’

  Mina nods at that, always the good girl. But when I look across at Joe he’s got his head down, ignoring me, sketching a tree blown sideways. He’s angry. And maybe I am being foolish, doing this alone.

  ‘It’s time I went back,’ I murmur.

  And it is. I haven’t been into Darkwood since before everything happened, not properly. And right now the leaves will be red-gold, the branches gripping on to them desperately. It’s the first autumn since Dad got posted here that I haven’t seen the leaves turn in that forest and, after seven years, that feels wrong somehow. This, at least, is something Mina doesn’t understand: my pull, still, to these woods.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I say again. ‘I want to go back.’

  I look to Joe – to see if he understands it – but his fingers just tighten around his pen. Maybe he’d rather draw me the woods, though Darkwood will be too achingly beautiful right now to be caught in an image. It will be starting to get slow for winter, and that kind of stillness needs to be felt. I want to hear the trees groan as they steady themselves. And I have things to say to Damon Hilary too, things to ask.

  When the bell goes for end of class, I get up fast and move towards the door. I need to do this before I change my mind.

  ‘Emily, wait!’ Joe says as I’m turning into the corridor.

  But I’ve decided. ‘Don’t follow me, Joe.’

  I go faster when I think I hear Joe’s footsteps behind me. Once, Joe might have come with me into Darkwood after school and we would have mucked around and played stupid kids’ games. Not today.

  I change beside my locker, pulling on sports kit and a hoodie, then dump my school bag inside. It’ll be hard to do detention with it banging against me and, anyway, I’m not interested in homework right now. Damon isn’t in any of the bus queues, so I don’t join them either. It’s not far to the main entrance of Darkwood anyway, only a couple of stops, and I move into a jog: warming up. For the first time in weeks I make my shoulders drop, relax into the movement.

  Going into Darkwood always used to make me feel better. It might be crazy to think that it’s going to do this again now, though – when my dad has just pleaded guilty to manslaughter; when I just pushed over my supposed best friend; when I’m going to a detention with a boy who probably hates me. Still, even now, something inside me gets lighter the closer I come to the woods. Weaving between shoppers, I see a few older boys slouching on corners and waiting at the chippie, none of them Damon. He could be joking about meeting me in Darkwood; maybe I’ll get there and he won’t show at all. Like Mina, he probably thinks it’s the last place I’d want to be right now. Maybe my detention is simply going back there, facing it.

  As I move down the high street I get that familiar feeling that everyone’s staring at me. Since Dad was arrested, I’ve got pretty good at ignoring people but it’s hard not to notice the way the boys in the chippie are nudging each other as I pass, or how an old lady has stopped in the middle of the street just to gawp. I look into a shop window, stare at plastic ghosts and blow-up pumpkins. I’m part of it all this year, I live in the real house of horrors that everyone is so fascinated by. It’s four days until Halloween now; that means it’s less than two weeks until Dad is either convicted of manslaughter or sent to trial for murder. Both of these days will be filled with ghosts and nightmares. I keep going. The feeling that everyone is watching m
e still clings, worse than usual. It’s as if everyone knows where I’m going and who I’m meeting. Nobody likes it.

  I zip up my hoodie like it’s some sort of protection, and I don’t avoid the cracks in the pavement like I used to. What’s the point? All the bad things have happened to me already. I keep going past the charity shops. Then past the supermarket I don’t go into any more, ever since some woman shielded her kids from me and muttered scum. I keep my head down as the first school bus passes. Joe might be on that. I tense as the bus slows in traffic, listening for banging on the windows to get my attention. But it moves on. When the bus stops at the shelter further up the street and I see a tallish boy getting off, I don’t hang about. I cross the road, dart between cars. I take the passageway between the doctors’ surgery and the launderette, skirt around the town playing fields. I don’t look towards the edge of the army barracks like I always used to, just turn left on to the footpath. With my hoodie up I feel invisible, like a ghost. Maybe it’s like this for Ashlee – always watching, waiting.

  Then I’m in Darkwood car park: the main entrance into this vast, ancient woodland. The place Damon and Ashlee and Damon’s mates were drinking that night. There are soggy colourful bundles of flowers and toys that must be for Ashlee, to pay respects, like how there are sometimes tributes laid at the sides of roads after car accidents. I search for something to add, but there’s nothing here but dying leaves and rubbish. Eventually I find a pale cloverleaf and place that near a laminated photograph of her. I don’t read any of the cards or messages, though I do wonder what Damon left.

  I walk past the few rotting picnic tables, the over-flowing rubbish bins, the empty muddy car spaces. There are squashed drink cans and bundles of scrunched newspaper blowing about. But there are no people, and there always used to be at this time of day. Perhaps it’s Ashlee’s death, scaring everyone away. Perhaps it’s because it hasn’t stopped raining since the summer ended – since that night – and now this place is clogged with mud.

  The last time I was here it was mid-summer, about a month before that night, before the rain started. It’s odd to think that I’d been here with Dad then. But he’d been calmer that day, that’s why I’d suggested the walk through the woods in the first place – just like we always used to do on Saturdays. Maybe I still thought I could coax the old version of Dad back; I could pull Dad out of his sadness.