by Paul Roscoe
He started to take slow, deep breaths, and shifted his attention to Sycamore Drive and its neighbourhood. Even though he could hear murmurs of traffic, the main road was unusually quiet. Everything was moving in slow motion, somehow. A family with suitcases stood in a driveway, lost in their own discussion; a postman appeared at the corner, struggling to draw a package from his over-stuffed satchel; a thin, late middle-aged woman pulled and tugged at her curtains, casting furtive glances through her window, and then fussing with the curtains again. Beyond thin walls, life carried on. Mr Ermey lifted his chin to a cloudless sky and took in his surroundings: the clean, fragrant, summer-tinged air; the leafy trees with their abundant blossom; these lifeless roads that led nowhere; and standing in the distance, standing for eternity, the steep rise of Bracton Hill.
Having calmed down a little, he withdrew his keys and twisted one into the car door, but instead of yielding with a satisfying clunk, the metal felt spongy in his grip. Automatically, he twisted the key in the opposite direction, searching for the anticipated result and accidentally locking the door instead. He then realised that he had left the car open the whole time he had been at the wake.
Of course I have. And the windows are down, anyway. All this checking is pointless if I miss simple basic stuff like this.
Pointless? Of course it’s pointless.
The realisation was one he had experienced many times, but that didn’t stop it from being both calming and elating.
Mr Ermey exhaled hard and unlocked the door, instinctively glancing at the entrance to the cul-de-sac where his favourite pupil lived no longer. It’s good to be out of that place, he thought. His fingers tugged at the handle, and he eased himself behind the wheel.
Best get a move on, old man, he thought. Today might be the day they actually make it.
Yes, today might be the day. Thursday the Twenty-Fourth of May, Nineteen-Ninety.
With that thought, tiredness overwhelmed him, and the sound of someone crying splintered the peaceful morning. The sound was very close, and Mr Ermey closed his eyes to clear the bright, watery jewels that had suddenly filled the world.
Chapter Two
1
Henry Townsend had once explained that the previous owner of 12 Sycamore Drive – a fellow who had lived and died here alone – had built the garage himself. Henry’s daughter, Mary, found this easy to believe because she had never seen another like it. The garage looked like a leftover prop from an old western, a wooden construction held together by bent nails and huge hinges that resembled leather belts. And even though it was just a sagging, creaking shack full of gardening tools and painting supplies, she liked to imagine that if she looked long enough, and if she was still enough, she could hear the gentle sweep of tumbleweeds drifting across the open plain. On a day like this one, barely begun yet already warm, the illusion was almost complete without having to try.
Mary Townsend carefully twisted the key in the padlock, undid the catch, and hung the lock in its loop; with long, delicate fingers, she stopped it swaying. Letting the big wooden door swing wide into an adjacent hedgerow, she stood in the morning sun, her shadow stretching into the dusty gloom beyond.
This is my place, she thought.
2
Her ownership of the garage had started five years ago.
Although finding space had not really been an issue back then, her mother had suggested that the garage should become Mary’s studio as soon as Mary started at St Vincent’s. The teachers would expect homework for every subject, her mother had argued, and that would no doubt include their daughter’s well-established favourite, Art.
“Besides,” Maureen Townsend told her husband, “I’ve already had enough of vacuuming chalk and paint out of Mary’s carpet. If you don’t want to give up your precious garage, then I suggest you do the housework from now on.”
Later that week, Henry Townsend had quietly disappeared into his wooden haven, home to a mishmash of old junk and DIY stuff, to make a begrudged little space for his daughter’s things. Over time, however, he had allowed her to take over. After getting rid of the old furniture, which had granted access to Mary’s desk and chair, Henry had removed many other things, including an old pair of shears, a disused roof rack, his wheel ramps, and two rusty rakes. The spare refrigerator followed, and two black and white TVs. A long, wooden trunk was emptied of its long neglected contents and burned in the back garden; the contents – mouldy tents, sheeting, broken plastic sleds, blankets and toys – were unceremoniously dumped at the local tip. The last of her father’s items to go was a neat pile of unused bricks, leftovers from the wall he had built at the front of the house, and whilst Mary had a good idea why he was reluctant to dispose of these, she never said.
Once, role-playing alone in the privacy of her father’s garage – back when it had still been his garage – she had decided to make a fairy castle using the bricks. They had been heavy, she remembered, but not impossible to move, even for a little girl, and after a while she had become quite adept at lifting and repositioning them to suit the needs of her imaginary magical kingdom. So much so that she was a little disappointed to discover the stack had a hollow base, and that there were in fact fewer bricks than had first appeared. However, when she realised what had been hidden in that secret space, her disappointment – and her role-playing game, for that matter – was soon forgotten. Her heart beating in her ears, and the world having gone strangely quiet, she had sat with her father’s porn stash, slowly turning the pages, marvelling at the copious female flesh on display.
3
Mary’s eyes adjusted to the murky light that spread from the three squares of glass held by strips of cracked putty. These panes endured their precarious existence in the far wall, overlooking a conifer-lined back garden. The garage smelled of linseed oil, white spirits, and rotting wood. A lawnmower stood to her left, towering over a stack of decorating equipment: paint tins, plastic buckets, brushes, sandpaper, powdered filler, and giant tubes of adhesive. Nearby, a pile of rusting toolboxes slowly fused together. There was a set of extension ladders, gardening things hanging on the wall, and, cowering in the corner, a hose.
Mary stepped onto a floor littered with discarded sketches and mugs crusted with the orange residue of milky tea. Her desk was strewn with further drawings and further mugs. On a little table to the right rested a kettle, a tea tin, and a jar of powdered milk. An empty easel stood near the windows, and at its feet rested a small, cloth rucksack, which she picked up and dropped on the desk. She rummaged through it, checking her stuff: canvas boards, sketchbooks, charcoals and chalks, a pencil case, a camera, and her personal stereo. Satisfied, she slumped into the chair and reached for a drawing board sandwiched between the desk and the wall. Her fingers found a thick folder and – taking a moment to listen for anyone coming – extracted it. She yanked her rucksack onto the floor and laid the folder out. In pencil, it was inscribed:
MARY TOWNSEND, SELF PORTRAITS
She turned to her latest nude, one of her finest, and a warm sensation of pride welled up from her toes to her nose. To get the framing just so, she’d placed the mirror to one side, positioning the easel so that her feet and head were cut off. It was a good angle, it made her breasts look bigger, and her hips look like sand dunes – her pubic hair the rolling sea.
She took another moment to admire her work, then gently replaced the painting, grabbed her bag, and headed out.
4
Mary walked to school. As she walked, things slipped away unnoticed on either side: the sprinkling of pastel colours in people’s gardens; the cherry blossom trees lining the church drive; the freshly mown grass in the graveyard; the sound of someone kicking a ball in their yard. They were typical Saturday sights and sounds: things that simply were and had always been. She imagined that someday they would spring up in her paintings, perhaps not as inspiration, exactly, but as a cache of sensory information to dip into when required. For now, however, they seemed to recede, and she existed in her
own private slipstream, a space only she moved through, outside of time and memory. Her body moved without needing to be told: automatically slowing down for traffic as she navigated road crossing, and speeding up as she walked along the pavement. As she walked, she tried to think about the object she was going to paint, but the specific shapes and details seemed to recede from her mind’s grasp. Even so, she knew where she was going, and somewhere just below the reach of articulated thought, she understood what it was that she was going to do when she got there. The idea had come from nowhere, of course; it had literally popped into her head as soon as she had woken up.
Maybe I dreamt about it, she thought, and it sounded like the truth. And with that decided, she forgot about where she was going and continued walking, each soft footfall accentuating the fading world around her. As it fell away, it occurred to her that she must not be the only person to do this, that really the only way anyone could live in the same place their whole life, and walk the same old paths over and over, was for them to blot out each previous journey. Otherwise they went crazy. Repetition wasn’t the problem – she imagined most people found repetition reassuring, even necessary – it was the history involved. The sheer volume of memories. In order to survive being crushed, you put your history on hold.
Or at least you think you do.
Mary nodded at the thought. If she had considered the idea of blotting out all previous memories a thousand times before, then she had considered a similar but more fantastic idea a million times before:
When walking along like this, the world passing by on every side, her thoughts weaving together, Mary Townsend imagined that her historical selves existed out there somehow, waiting to either be noticed or ignored. She thought it possible that through meditation, and an incredible amount of chance, she could slip into any younger version of herself and summon up the specific tastes and sounds of that time. As far as she was concerned, there had been enough moments, however half-glimpsed and fleeting, to provide solid evidence of this. She wondered if this was also true for everyone, if so, no one ever talked about it.
Inevitably, however, her private slipstream ended, and she found herself before a sign:
ST VINCENT’S ROMAN CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL
A thick chain padlocked the main gates, but the pedestrian entrance to the right was open.
She shrugged off the rucksack and produced the personal stereo, which she untangled with a quick shake. Entering the school grounds, Mary re-shouldered the bag, clipped the unit to her jeans, and adjusted the earphones. As she walked along the narrow driveway that rose towards the car park and bike shelter, a rasping vocal filled the tree-lined universe: Bob Dylan, singing ‘Talking World War III Blues’. She’d bought the tape last Saturday, during her regular weekend visit to T.M. Music, Bracton’s finest independent record store. She had been listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan for a week now, and it had grown on her; but there was good reason for that, aside from the music itself. Craig, who worked at T.M. Music on Saturdays, had picked it out for her. They’d never spoken to each other at school, but ever since last week they’d caught each other’s eye once or twice, and each turned red accordingly.
Craig Anderson. All she knew was that he had good taste in music and lovely green eyes. He was skinny, too, like her, and about the same height, maybe even a little taller. And he was nervous, no doubt about that, which was cute; the last boy to act so awkwardly around her had been Alex Turner, back when she was just a little kid. Which made things strange, for her at least: Craig was one of Alex’s new friends. By new, she meant someone he’d met at high school, which was hardly new at all. It just felt new, somehow. Craig was part of the giant wind that had blown the old gang apart when high school had started, and although she knew those things no longer mattered, and that the others probably didn’t think about the old gang anymore, she couldn’t help but worry about the fact that she still did. She had made many acquaintances at St Vincent’s in the last five years, but no real friends.
The school stood before her, a hollow collection of cells where they were forced to listen and watch and answer and do and stay and go at the whims of some strange, invisible machine. A place to escape from, always, but also a place to wonder at, for this was her fifth year and, although it seemed impossible and even a little absurd, she would be leaving forever in less than two months. Two months and her presence here would be nothing more than a ghost’s.
Despite obvious attempts to revitalise the building – the new and no doubt expensive glass atrium that had been stapled onto the main entrance, and the recent brown and beige paint job – St Vincent’s still looked angular and worn, a red brick hulk that exuded no real personality. On the inside it got worse: the walls were painted an underwater green, a colour that managed to soak up the already dim fluorescents, and the still air was heavy with boiled vegetables and toilet cleaner. Connecting the various classrooms within, two rectangular corridors looked into a central courtyard: a barren place of concrete, peeling paint, complete with a spiral staircase that led nowhere. In that strange, desolate space at the centre of the school, Mary had never seen a living soul venture.
From above, the school was the shape of a T, with a thick, square vertical that surrounded the courtyard, and a horizontal composed of a gymnasium, kitchen, and hall. This widest part of the building faced the main approach at an angle, creating a rather overbearing façade for which the new-fangled glass dome on the entrance did nothing to compensate. Mary stopped to appraise it for the thousandth time. Here, away from the playground, the ROSLA block, and the sprawling fields beyond, was a shady part of the school – its backside, a place of unmarked and unassuming doors: one that led to a storeroom and cleaning closet, one that opened into the gymnasium, and a set of double doors that opened into the kitchen. A disused fire escape loomed above a vast set of bins, some housed within a wooden enclosure, some not.
Mary followed the narrow pathway to the corner of the building and turned right along a wall of gleaming glass panels that hid racks of wooden gym equipment and countless plastic chairs. The glass displayed a shimmering, animated mural that might have been titled Teenager In Black Walks Along Grass Verge. To her left stood the thin end of Tithborough woods: a wedge of trees that thickened into a series of deep, shaded places where the old gang used to spend most of their weekends.
Mary started up the concrete stairs leading to the playground, and began the usually delicate task of finding a good vantage point for her initial sketch.
5
The drawing was fine. As soon as it was done, she knew it was what she had been looking for: something simple, something familiar, and yet something different.
The canvas board on her lap cast a hazy white glow against her skin. The charcoal stick felt greasy between her fingers. Shifting slightly, Mary became aware that all feeling in her buttocks was gone. She set the drawing aside and knelt up, waiting for the inevitable pins and needles. As she did, she reached for her rucksack and pulled out her camera, a shiny, red Polaroid.
Polaroids were expensive to run, but for good reference shots Mary thought there was nothing finer. Not just because they coughed up the goods on the spot, but because they also had their own opinion. She liked the way those small, shiny squares seemed to pick a dominant colour and tint everything with it, and the way they flattened things out, making the perspective wonky and two-dimensional. (She had been tempted to take reference shots for her more private portraits, but had resisted, accepting the simple truth that it was one thing to hide nude portraits she might exhibit one day, but quite another to hide nude photos.)
Pins and needles paralysing her lower region, Mary snapped back the top of the camera, adjusted the exposure, lined up a shot…and froze.
Someone was watching her.
She scanned her surroundings: the grass verge to her left, the woods ahead, the fields to her right, then she turned and stared at the school itself. Her eyes traced the line of windows, but the sun reflected o
ff them, making them twinkle and sparkle. No one was there. She turned back to her subject and placed her eye to the eyepiece.
In the viewfinder, the old shelter looked very far away, lost in the playground. Moving tentatively, testing the prickling sensation in her legs, she stuffed her work into her rucksack, shouldered it, and then stumbled to her feet. Holding the camera to her eye, she approached the old shelter, tracking in until it filled the frame. She held the button firmly, exhaled, and squeezed. As she took the photograph, litter drifted into the foot of the shot. Something white. A newspaper.
“Damn.”
Mary removed the undeveloped photograph from the camera’s mouth and slipped it in a back pocket; then, fearing what she suspected to be the case, she peered into the Polaroid’s magnified peephole that displayed how many photographs were left. The display showed a zero.
“Aw, for the love of God, would you just look at that?”
She put away the camera, shaking her head. With the rucksack once more on her back, she yawned and stretched. The day was beautiful and the idea of a brief stroll into the woods started to turn in her mind.
Wiping tired tears from her eyes, Mary took one step forward and then caught herself. Her eyes darted from left to right. She turned in a circle, even going so far as to check beneath her feet.
The newspaper was gone.
She hurried over to the old shelter and stood beneath it, her feet resting on the edge of the pavement, the dry, brown soil of Tithborough woods just inches from her toes. Fully expecting to see the newspaper lying somewhere – snagged in a tree, caught in some nettles, or folded beneath a felled trunk – she traced the woodland floor from the edge of the shelter out towards the mossy fence at the other side of the trees. She couldn’t see it. Her eyes sought out the thicker aspects of the woods over to the right, identifying the old pathways, acknowledging the familiar clearings. How long had it been since she had stood in this particular spot, looking out into this thin stretch of woodland, contemplating going deeper?