Killing Woods

by Lucy Christopher

  I feel something tense inside me. How can Joe keep talking like this after I’ve shown him this sketch, after I’ve admitted everything I’ve been thinking – how can he not even look?

  ‘So what if Damon was in the woods?’ I say. ‘And if he looked upset? He is upset! His girlfriend died.’

  I’m thinking about how I, also, went into the woods a couple of days ago – how I went back to Dad’s bunker. I’m thinking how, if anyone saw me do that, they might think that was suspicious too.

  ‘Maybe Damon needs to go back,’ I add. ‘You thought of that? Maybe being in Darkwood helps him somehow? Maybe it’s where he can think about her, by himself.’

  I feel strange defending Damon. Shouldn’t I be clutching at anything right now – anything that doesn’t point towards Dad? Even this? But something has changed inside me after seeing this sketch, after doing that detention with Damon – after seeing the desperation in his eyes. Some tiny candle I had has sizzled out.

  I bring the sketch to Joe’s face. ‘You need to look at this.’ I feel the heaviness inside me as he does look this time. ‘What do you see in it? Who?’

  He shakes his head, annoyed. ‘It’s a deer, one of your dad’s animal pictures.’

  His eyes don’t stay on it; they go back towards his computer screen. Suddenly I’m blinking back tears and I don’t even know why. I thought Joe would listen. It took all the nerve I had to show Joe this and he’s acting like it’s nothing. But isn’t that what I wanted him to do? Shouldn’t I be relieved?

  ‘Can’t you just look properly?’

  But he’s not bothered, not about anything apart from his stupid theories about Damon. Suddenly I’m more annoyed at Joe than I think I’ve ever been. I’m annoyed at how Joe is always trying to be helpful and always getting it wrong. I’m annoyed at how he doesn’t see my life careering off kilter and how he always seems to think things will be alright again soon. I’m even annoyed at how nothing bad has ever happened to him and his family and probably never will. Joe will never know how it feels to be scared every day that his dad is a killer, will never know the fear of having killer’s blood inside him.

  ‘Just look at it!’ I shout.

  When he still doesn’t look I rip the sketch from his hands, stand up fast.

  ‘It’s because Damon dropped you from that stupid sports team, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘That’s why you hate him?’ And these words are harsh; I can see by the way Joe flinches that they hurt. But I don’t care. ‘It’s not fair, Joe! None of this is fair!’

  And it’s not. It’s not fair to anyone.

  This time when Joe comes towards me I stumble back over a pile of books, scatter them. Downstairs, Joe’s mum is shouting something. I hear her coming up the stairs. I can hear Finn crying too.

  ‘It’s not because I hate Damon that I think he’s being suspicious,’ Joe says fast. ‘Of course it’s not! And you’re an idiot if you think it’s because of some stupid sports team. An idiot!’

  My mouth drops. Joe’s never called me that before. He’s never called me it and meant it.

  ‘It’s because Damon Hilary’s not right in the head, Emily!’ he continues. ‘It’s because he’s got a screw loose!’

  I’m blinking back tears – I feel them there, hot and waiting. I feel the anger just beneath the surface of my skin. ‘You’re just making stuff up!’

  ‘I’m not! I’m just saying this because I …’

  I glare at him. How can he even think I’d believe this junk? How can he even think it would make anything better to say it to me?

  Mrs Wilder is banging on his door now. ‘What’s going on, you two? You’re upsetting Finn!’

  Joe flinches. ‘Look, I’m saying these things because I care about you, all right? I don’t want you to get hurt!’

  I see the colour in his cheeks, his eyes blinking fast. For one strange second I want to hug him, but I can’t. Not now.

  ‘You don’t get it,’ I say instead. ‘None of this.’

  He looks away from me quickly.

  ‘Emily, sometimes you just have to go with what you feel,’ Joe says quietly.

  ‘And sometimes you can’t keep living in fantasy land!’

  He bites his lip, quiet. And I hate myself, because I sound like Mum.

  And because I don’t want to upset Joe. I don’t want to get this angry. It’s like that horrible thing inside me is taking over again, making me someone else – someone who rages. It’s like I can’t stop it.

  When Mrs Wilder comes through the door, I push past her fast. I’ve got to get out. I can’t stay here and risk saying something else nasty, I can’t let this anger out properly. As I take the stairs fast, I know I’ve just got to find somewhere to think. I need to look at Dad’s sketch and decide what to do with it myself.

  30

  Damon

  There’s this sound – dragging. Something moving through leaves. Through mud. There’s rain too. A weight on my shoulders. A heaviness. I’m trying to move forward, trying to see. I smell something like pine, feel something like cold. A stinging frozen cheek. Eyelids that don’t want to open.

  I’ve been sleeping. Dreaming?

  I focus on my little finger, try to make that move. But I can’t open my eyes, not yet. And there’s another image, a memory.

  Detectives. The two that faced me in that interview room. A hard-faced man across a shiny table. A woman with her arms crossed. They’re asking about us all drinking in the car park. There’s sweat on my back. The man leans across and asks if Ashlee and I had been fighting, and I want to say yes. Because, right in this moment, I’ve done it – whatever it is they’re trying to get me to confess to. These detectives know about the Game, they can see how I’m panicking. I wait for those words you hear on a hundred TV shows: We’re arresting you on suspicion of … Because whatever has happened to Ashlee, it’s my fault.

  The detectives don’t arrest me, though, just open the interview door for me to go. And in a room I pass on the way out is a man with his head in his hands. Just by the way he looks I know he’s the guilty one. Jon Shepherd. I breathe out, relieved. And I sink back again into blackness … and cold …

  I’m in a car.

  It’s freezing.

  I still can’t open my eyes.

  But there’s a tapping sound – loud. Beside my right ear. I turn my head, painfully sneak one eye open. Through the window is a face. Frowning. Behind her I see that it’s morning. Grey-pink. I shut my eye and open it again. She’s still there. Still angry. And now she’s yanking open the door I’m leaning against. I’m starting to fall towards the road. I grab the doorframe, stop myself. My body is numb. Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all, perhaps I passed out with hypothermia instead. When I look up she’s shouting something, pushing my shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing in my dad’s car?’

  It looks like she’s been crying; looks like she could do it again. I pull myself up straight as I can, try to ignore the shooting pain that’s running through my arms, the dull throb of my cheek, the hunger in my belly, the way my head’s so fuzzy. I try to fix my eyes on Emily Shepherd.

  ‘It was unlocked.’ My voice sounds heavy. ‘It was freezing outside.’

  ‘Why are you even here?’

  She’s shaking my right shoulder, making more pain shoot through it. She’s looking so mad perhaps she’s about to call the cops. And why shouldn’t she? I’m a freak: I’ve been sleeping in Jon Shepherd’s car. No wonder she’s mad.

  And there are images, still, in my head, even as I look at her. I don’t think I’m properly awake. There’s still that sound, that dragging. There’s an image of shoes being caught on tree roots. A flash of seeing my hands on a neck. There’s laughing. My chest is thudding hard.

  I follow Emily’s gaze, see the can of de-icer still in my hand. She’s frowning at it, looking around at the car then back.

  ‘It’s not a spray can,’ I say, turning it so she can see. ‘It was here.’

  She frowns even m
ore. I watch her grey-blue eyes focus on my left cheek, the place where Ed hit me. I hold the de-icer can up to it, wince from how freezing it feels. Her face goes softer then – least, I think it does – and maybe that makes me bold or something because I open my mouth.

  ‘I need to speak to you,’ I say.

  And this – I realise – is true. I breathe out. I think I’m even glad she’s here, that she’s found me like this, that I found this car without even meaning to. Maybe it’s a sign. But what the fuck of, I don’t know!

  She bends down, crouches so her eyes are level with mine. ‘And I need to speak to you.’

  31

  Emily

  I make Damon shove across. This is too weird, he shouldn’t be here. What Joe was just saying is buzzing in my brain too: He’s not right in the head … he’s got a screw loose.

  Is this why Damon was waiting in my dad’s car? He really is nuts?

  He certainly doesn’t look right. His eyes are big and dark and red rimmed. There’s dirt on his skin, and something else that looks like a bruise. He’s shivering, freezing.

  ‘What happened?’ I’m looking at the mark on his cheek.

  ‘Walked into something.’ I must look sceptical because he adds, ‘I was in Darkwood last night; there are a lot of trees there.’

  He glances across. For a second I think he almost smiles at the stupid thing he’s just said.

  ‘I know where you were,’ I say.

  ‘Course you do. Joe Wilder told you, didn’t he?’

  I’m surprised he’s not denying it. Surely if he was feeling guilty about being back in Darkwood – if he was hiding evidence like Joe says he was – he’d be trying to keep quiet, trying to throw me off the trail. I look around the car to see if he’s got a bag with him, anything he might have used to carry evidence away. I look at his face and check for guilt. There’s nothing. Damon is staring through the windscreen as if he’s only just realised it’s daytime. He looks exhausted.

  ‘Have you been in here all night?’ I say. ‘In my dad’s car?’

  He blinks. ‘Maybe.’

  I see how his hands shake. Perhaps Joe was right when he said Damon was on something last night. Maybe Damon went back into the woods to get out of his head. To forget the things that have happened to him. To escape.

  ‘You look kind of desperate,’ I say.

  He shrugs. ‘Kind of feel it.’

  I keep looking at him and he doesn’t seem to mind. He looks like I feel – he’s the human embodiment of the mess that’s inside me.

  He turns to me slowly. ‘Last night I was looking for something …’

  I freeze, remembering Joe’s words about the evidence.

  ‘I didn’t find it.’

  Now he’s looking at me like I’m some sort of answer, like I’m a rope to pull him out. If I wasn’t so confused by this boy, if I wasn’t still thinking about what Joe just said, I might want to keep hold of that look, store it to remember later.

  ‘Joe thinks I should stay away from you,’ I say.

  Another shrug. ‘Maybe you should.’

  It’s not the answer I’m expecting, but he doesn’t give me any more. The combat shirt he’s wearing is muddy and torn, I see Hilary on the name badge. His dad’s?

  ‘Joe thinks you know something,’ I try again. ‘Something about that night. Something you haven’t said.’

  I don’t know why I’m saying this. Am I testing him? Testing myself? I wait for him to get angry – to get confrontational like how he was on the Leap. But he just stares at me with tired eyes. The fight’s been taken out of this boy and I don’t know why. I don’t think he hates me any more, at least.

  ‘Wilder would think that,’ he says eventually. ‘Wilder doesn’t like me too much.’

  He rests his head back on the seat. I wonder then whether Damon doesn’t really like Joe too much either, whether there’s more going on between these two boys than just the cross-country team.

  ‘But what do you think, Emily?’ he says with his eyes closed. ‘Do you think I could hide something? Am I like that?’

  He opens his eyes and turns to me, the chair creaking as he shifts. The last time I was this close to Damon – holding his gaze like this – I was pinning him to the forest floor after he’d told me he could make my life hell. What’s happened to him? Why isn’t he demanding answers about my dad any more? Why is he acting so strange?

  ‘Anyone can hide things,’ I say.

  He looks back through the windscreen. And I get it suddenly, why Damon might have been in the woods last night, what he might have been looking for.

  ‘You’d never find that alone,’ I try. ‘Not if you didn’t know where it was.’

  He frowns, there’s a wisp of a smile straight after. I know I’m right about what I thought.

  ‘Show me, then,’ he says. ‘Please?’

  It’s the please that gets me. I nod, not because I want to take him there but because he’s so desperate-looking. Because I see how much he needs this. Because I still feel this odd kind of guilt every time I look at him, this odd kind of something. Since I’ve found Dad’s sketch, this feeling is worse. I nod, because the anger I’d felt at Joe’s house is starting to drain away just by being here. But, most of all, I think I nod because, despite everything, I don’t want him to get out of this car. Maybe that makes me kind of desperate too. But Damon said it, didn’t he? That he wanted to talk? Maybe that’s what I want as well.

  I stare at Damon’s copper-brown eyes. I know Joe is wrong with the things he said about Damon. Damon isn’t suspicious, he’s just someone who’s not coping at all. He wants to understand what happened that night like I do. And there’s something else I know – Damon would see Ashlee in that sketch. If she’s in it, it’s Damon who’d know. A shiver skims down my spine as I think about going back to that bunker, going back with him, showing him the sketch.

  ‘I need to see that place,’ he says.

  There doesn’t seem to be much else to say, so I get out of the car and just walk. If Damon wants to, he’ll follow. I lead him around the side of our house and to the lane out back. I go through the gate. As I walk into the woods he’s close behind. I remember the touch of Damon’s fingers against my wrist in my dream – how he’d walked forward with me to meet Dad. I also remember that other time I’d seen Damon in these woods. Not the time on the Leap the other day – that time months before, almost a year ago, when he’d been running hard. The time I’d shown him the starlings. That day he’d looked tired and desperate too. I hear him brush his hand against a trunk behind me, tap his fingers against bark. Maybe it does make sense why he was running so fast that day – why he’d looked upset. That day had been just after the bomb that killed his dad.

  There’s a slight whirring sound as wind moves through branches somewhere above us. It reminds me of how wind rattles the razor wire on the army barracks’ fence in town. I look back to Damon and wonder if he thinks that too.

  ‘Do you think our dads knew each other?’ I say. ‘They must have been in the desert the same time.’

  Damon frowns and I don’t think he’s going to answer me, but he shrugs eventually. ‘Maybe.’

  I think about my dad and Damon’s dad in an army base together – whether they ever talked. Maybe Damon’s dad unearthed an IED that my dad could have stepped on. Damon’s dad could have saved my dad’s life without anyone ever knowing.

  ‘Do you wish it’d been my dad who died?’ I say, the words out before I even mean them to be.

  Damon doesn’t answer this. But there are answers going around in my head. Because, maybe, if my dad had been the one to die on duty, nothing bad would have happened later. Maybe Ashlee would still be alive. Maybe this thought is enough to make Damon hate me for the rest of my life.

  I focus on the rustle my shoes make in the leaves, and I get this strange feeling it’s not Damon I’m walking here with, but Dad. I’m almost listening to hear him talk about the hard fern and wood blewit and devil’s bit –
all these things I can see in the ground as we walk. I’m waiting for him to tell me how when the trees breathe, they give us life – how, without them, there’d be no oxygen on Earth at all. But it’s quiet behind me. No Dad mumbling about nature. And anyway, if it really were Dad there, I wouldn’t go to the bunker. I’d go deeper into the forest, somewhere with sunlight, and I wouldn’t leave him by himself. Not again.

  The whirring wind around us gets louder, spins leaves down. I walk faster. It’s such a grey day, one of those days that never really gets light: rain coming. I think about Dad that night, walking through here just by moonlight. I think about him with Ashlee in his arms. I shiver, then flinch away as Damon grabs my shoulders.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says quickly, his hands darting back. ‘I was just trying to … you must be …’ He starts taking his duffle coat off. ‘Here, do you want this?’

  I shake my head. ‘You’re OK.’

  He hesitates like he’s going to say something else, his eyes are flicking all over the place. I feel Dad’s sketch in my pocket. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him. All of it. To see what he says. To see if it’s something different to what Joe said. Do I dare?

  ‘We won’t stay long,’ I say.

  I turn on to the track I used to run down, and the wind kicks up in a cold angry gust. I’m breaking one of Dad’s rules to bring Damon here but it doesn’t feel so terrible to disobey him, not now. Several times I look back to check Damon is still behind me – he moves like a cat. Each time his eyes are roving around, as if he’s looking for something, or searching for a part of Darkwood he knows. He looks lost. And like he’s thinking about every tragic thing in the world. It makes me wonder whether people other than soldiers can get post-traumatic stress disorder. Could Damon have it because two people he loved died? Could I get it over what’s happened? Could Mum? Maybe this whole town has it, everyone touched by violence somehow and suffering? I hear a rumble of thunder.

  ‘Do you want to keep going?’ I say. ‘We’re almost there.’

  Damon nods, determined. A few more steps, though, and the rain starts. I feel the drops on my cheeks, soft and light and irregular at first. I’m surprised at myself. In this past year I thought I’d got good at watching for storms, for being prepared for when they’d arrive, always being hyper-aware because of Dad.