by Paul Roscoe
Mr Ermey eyed her wearily through a haze of smoke. “Since I found little David’s magazine, of course.”
4
Gliding silently at first, and then scraping on the drive’s rough concrete, the garage door fell open and the fresh, midday air took on a musty flavour. Mary immediately recognised the sweet linseed oil, and the bitter tang of white spirits that lay beneath. Between these two distinctive notes came the abundant fragrance of old wood and dusty spider webs. She inhaled deeply. As the homely smells coursed through her, further similarities to her father’s garage – correction, her studio – struck her. For a start, both seemed transplanted from an old western: ramshackle constructions built out of need, but rendered with love. More specifically, they shared sagging, felt lined roofs, matching oval lamps set beneath the front eaves, and those same thick hinges that looked like rusting leather belts. Mary eyed these details with a balance of surprise and uncanny acceptance. Thankfully, however, they were not identical. With regards to maintenance and electrical safety, the specimen before her fared much worse. Whereas a sturdy wooden fence, featuring a length of heavy-gauge electrical wire, ran from her studio to the house, Mr Ermey’s garage got its juice through a thin domestic cable stretched between two makeshift telegraph poles, both constructed from wooden off-cuts formed into Ts. There was no fence, just the scrawny wires sagging overhead. Mary marvelled that the garage had not been burnt to a cinder before now, and she was about to say as much when it struck her that perhaps her studio was Mr Ermey’s. The more she thought about what Mr Ermey had said at the dining table, the more she realised that it was almost certainly the case.
Why not? she thought. This is his world we’re in. It was never ours in the first place. My real world is unknown.
Mary felt a tantalising sense of anticipation as the idea that she would eventually catch up with her real self somehow, in the same way she had always been able to catch up with her many historical selves, began to form in her mind.
Mr Ermey stood with his back to the doorway. He rubbed his eyes until they were bloodshot. “I’m afraid this is where everything leads to. All the rehearsal I’ve put you through. I’m so sorry for-”
“Rehearsal?” Buddy asked. “What rehearsal?”
“All the…unpleasantness. The car accident, the razor blade, the pills,” he raised his eyes to Mary, “and the rope. I’m sorry for troubling all of you with my burdens. I guess it was my way of thinking things over; still, I’m sorry for putting you all through that. But it won’t be for much longer now, I promise.”
The group stood, waiting. Their mild and mute behaviour reminded Mary of Tom’s first morning on Bracton Hill, the way he had quickly accepted his fate and waited to be beamed up to the great white beyond. At the time, she had thought it was funny, that it was so Tom, but in the end she was no different. Not really – none of them were. They had searched for clues, compared theories, done everything they thought they could, but none of them had known how deeply they would have to look at themselves to see what was really going on.
But how could anyone think that the life they were living was a lie; how could anyone ever live that way?
Mr Ermey disappeared into the garage and flipped a switch; the light within flickered before settling into tinting the daylight orange.
“Come in.”
And in they went.
The first thing Mary saw was her father’s pile of decorating equipment, the one that had nestled between the lawnmower and rusty toolboxes at home. Without having to inspect them, she knew the colours on the pots would match those on the walls in their house on Sycamore Drive perfectly; uncanny acceptance had given way to resignation of the inevitable. That Mr Ermey had somehow been a part of her life for an untold length of time – perhaps since David disappeared, but probably well before that – now seemed self-evident. She wondered if the others saw this – and then wondered how they could possibly miss it.
“Just a moment,” Mr Ermey said, deliberately crossing their path and stopping them from going any further. Their host approached the wall on their right and dropped to his haunches, using the small pile of pristine, red bricks for balance.
When she saw what he did next, Mary started to blush, the forgotten memory of finding her father’s dirty magazines with her once more.
Mr Ermey leant against the neat stack of bricks, letting them support his weight. His left hand disappeared. His lips drawn in a thin grimace, he hugged the cobwebbed stack. Then all of a sudden there came a hollow, grating sound, and movement at the bottom of the bricks. Mr Ermey drew himself away and regained his balance; he teased a slightly protruding brick from its snug confines. It came without fuss. Setting it to one side, he inserted a hand into the new hole palm-up and, using his index and middle fingers, extracted something wrapped in clear polythene. Bones popping and cracking, Mr Ermey stood up, dusted himself off, and passed the package to Mary. Even without unwrapping them, the charred remains of David’s ornithological magazine were easily recognisable.
“You kept this?” she asked. It was an idiot’s question, but she couldn’t help it.
“I told you, I got into bird watching after reading this.”
“You said after finding it.”
Mr Ermey shrugged. “Finders keepers.”
Mary squeezed the package in her hands, feeling the polythene sheet slide over the perished goods inside. Resisting the temptation to remove it from its protective covering, she passed it to Tom, who reached past Alex and Buddy to set it down gently on top of the brick pile. He performed this action without a moment’s hesitation, as if not wanting to touch it. Alex and Buddy just stared at the floor, and Mary followed their gaze. The usual mess of old teacups and bits of food was gone, as was all the related refreshment apparatus, the kettle and her tins. This visual subtraction made the space seem bigger – and much tidier – but it also served to temper her now overwhelming sense of having returned home. Don’t think any of this is to do with you. This is a spectator sport, don’t forget that. You don’t even know what home is. She watched the others find their own spaces in the garage: Alex and Buddy headed for the easel, stood in its usual place over by the window; Tom sat at her desk, ruffling the edges of her painting folder, which had been removed from its secret stashing place against the wall and left on the desk for all to see. This blatant disregard for her privacy still managed to send a wave of panic through her, and she was about to tell Tom to leave her stuff alone, when she noticed the lettering where she had written her own name many years before:
MR ERMEY, SELF PORTRAITS
“Well, wouldn’t you know?”
It was Alex, standing next to Buddy, his arms folded. Buddy was staring goggle-eyed at the painting in the easel, nodding distractedly at what his old friend was saying.
“What is it?” Tom asked, already getting up.
Mr Ermey sighed. Mary looked to him, but he only shrugged and gestured for her to go and see for herself. Soon the old gang stood before the painting, their faces filled with some amusement, but mostly awe.
The landscape mounted on the easel consisted of greens and browns rolling beneath an indigo fog, a depiction of a cold and austere twilight. Orange and white fairy lights glittered on the horizon. Mary leaned in for a closer look at the pregnant-lady-on-her-back. Four tiny shapes, mere dabs of paint, stood near Bracton Hill’s navel; the brushstrokes so small that they were completely unnoticeable unless looked for.
“Nice work,” Mary said, her eyes now following Mr Ermey’s sweeping brushstrokes, his bold hand. Automatically she synthesized the overall effect, stripped it of its final details, rendered the colour sections in her mind’s eye, and dissected the painting into its basic components. She found the style and technique at once pleasing and intuitive. Too intuitive, perhaps, for comfort.
“Thank you, Mary,” Mr Ermey said quietly. Then, watching his female guest, and pausing for maximum effect, he added, “I learned from the best, didn’t I?”
A frown cast a brief shadow
across Mary’s face, quickly banished by the glow of recognition. Mr Ermey tapped the folder. “There’s more here if you want.” He levelled his gaze at Mary, humour dancing in his eyes. “But don’t worry, there’re no nude self portraits, not all of your style rubbed off.” Buddy grinned despite himself, despite everything, and elbowed Mary, who rolled her eyes, trying her best to go along with the joke. Mr Ermey dragged the chair away to make space for the viewing, setting it beside the collection of paint pots and toolboxes while the four teenagers gathered around the desk. As his guests contemplated his work, Mr Ermey collapsed in the chair. He tapped out a cigarette and smoked it in long and slow breaths.
Tom turned the folder’s leaves in measured movements, allowing each member to fully digest what they were seeing. With every sketch, the sense of the inevitable rested more heavily upon them, and they were numbed by their discovery. The first four sketches were portraits, one of each of them: Mary, then Tom, then Buddy, and then Alex. The fifth and last sketch was of the old shelter, rendered with a close similarity to Mary’s painting. There was something about the drawing, however – all four of them felt it.
Something missing.
“Where’s my bike?” Alex said.
Buddy favoured him with a quizzical look. Alex pointed to one of the shelter’s more upright supports. “Right there, see? In Mary’s painting there’s a wheel – my bike’s front wheel. It pokes out from behind that post. Remember? I used to stand on the pedals and balance myself against things using just the front wheel.”
“Alex, you were one crazy kid,” Buddy said.
Undeterred, Alex traced his hand across the sheet. “And look there,” he said. “Where’s your cigarette?” He poked at the drawing for emphasis.
“Or my ball,” Tom said.
Alex nodded, his eyes filled with feverish intensity.
“Or my sodding cagoule,” Mary said, peering down at the sheet. “Sir, why didn’t you draw in-”
Mary turned to Mr Ermey and fell silent. The rope around his neck was short, and fastened to the main beam. Supported by the wooden chair, Mr Ermey had to stoop slightly beneath the cobwebbed ceiling. Mary stared, her mouth open, the question completely gone. “Sir?” she managed, her voice a dry croak. From far away, Buddy said, “Ah…no.”
“Why didn’t I draw the details you left in?” he asked, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
Mary felt her head move, signalling her acknowledgement.
“There’s no need. You’re all my enigmatic little details, and today I’ve finally gathered you all up.”
Mr Ermey gripped the beam with both hands, gripped it tight. “If I hadn’t been such a coward, David Hartman would still be alive. That’s a fact, and you all know it. You saw what I did from the very first moment I opened the door. You know what I did as much as if you’d done it yourselves. I’ve tried telling myself there was nothing I could have done, and that I did everything I could, but in the end that’s just so much rubbish. I should have gone out there as soon as I saw trouble; I should have broken it up. But I didn’t, did I? I watched. And when I finally did pluck up the courage to help, I should have stayed with him. That would have meant carrying him inside, and I know that’s a risk when someone’s injured, but I never stopped to consider the risk of the gang coming back to finish the job.”
“But we didn’t kill David, he just disappeared,” Tom said.
“That’s right, Tom, no one knows what actually happened to David, but if I’d considered the likelihood of further reprisals, I would have saved him from the unlikely fate that actually befell him. But I didn’t, did I?”
“I don’t think you’re to blame there,” Alex remarked. “For all you knew, the gang had gone. By leaving David where he was, you were just trying to not make things worse.”
“Maybe so, Alex, but you have to admit I should have reported what happened to the police.”
“You didn’t?” The astonishment in his own voice took Alex by surprise.
Mr Ermey shook his head, but didn’t lower his gaze.
Alex’s eyes narrowed; he clenched his teeth, working to control himself.
Mr Ermey removed his hands from the beam and folded them behind his back, as if he was about to embark on a leisurely stroll. He shifted his weight towards the edge of his chair, making the back legs wobble and tap. Having found the sweet spot, the place where the least amount of movement would achieve the maximum amount of momentum, he took one last look at his young guests. “Have any of you any final words to say?”
He played with the balance of the chair, feeling it roll beneath his feet; a small push in the right direction was all it would take.
“I have,” said Alex. “You’re standing up there with a noose around your neck, ready to kill yourself over something you feel guilty about, but how do you know that any of this is true?”
Mr Ermey smiled. “My dear Alex, you and your old gang might be having trouble getting to grips with the precarious nature of your existences, but you’ll be right back where you belong before you know it. For me, however, this is it.”
Alex folded his arms. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Think about it: you said it yourself: ‘The day is full of cracks through which we might slip.’ If you have so much trouble remembering the things you’ve done, how can you be so sure that you didn’t look after David Hartman properly? What’s to say that this isn’t one of those cracks you’ve fallen through?
“What’s to say that David Hartman isn’t out there, running around and having a fine old time of it, and you’re just a confused old man with a rope around his neck? For someone like you, with your O.C.D. or whatever the hell it is, I’m betting there are layers within doubt. Maybe you should think about that.”
Mr Ermey put his hand behind his neck and counted to three, then ran his fingers along the rope and over the knot tied around the beam, counting again. Reluctantly, he looked down at Alex, and Alex was satisfied to see confusion and, yes, doubt there.
“No,” he whispered, “please don’t say that.”
“Why not? Why should we accept that our lives are not everything they seem, but that you can understand everything about yours? ‘Memory is the worst testament,’ you said. Well, that cuts both ways.”
Mr Ermey closed his eyes.
Alex fell silent.
Outside the garage, birds chirped merrily, and he listened to them for a long, long time, trying to ease his mind with their soothing chatter. He didn’t want to do what had to be done in a fit of confusion; he wanted everything to be calm and rational. As those tiny chirrups and whistles drifted in through the thin garage walls, his mind slowly turned things over. The voice he heard was David’s, always saying the same thing:
The day is full of cracks through which we might slip.
To see the darkness of another world through the cracks in this one.
My mind is often lost in darkness: those lost, small moments of forgetfulness.
But maybe Alex is right. What’s to say that this isn’t one of those cracks? That I’m just a confused old man with a rope around his neck?
Don’t say that.
Don’t say that.
Don’t say that.
The image of Mary’s painting tumbling to the fake-bronze gas fire in an imaginary living room came to him. He watched it once more fall in slow motion, shattering into nineteen pieces. Then he saw the painting itself, miraculously caught by unknown reflexes. He had never been that quick in real life – but what of that? The whole funeral had just been another one of his…episodes; he had never even been in the Townsends’ house.
Alex had a point: there were layers within doubt.
And which to trust?
Mr Ermey opened his eyes. He was alone, as he always had been: he knew that much at least. His sketchbook was on the desk where he had placed it, unopened (one); his last painting was drying in the easel (two); and the rope was tight around his neck (three).
All the preparations had been made.
<
br /> Good: checking made him feel more himself, somehow.
Now, what had he been thinking about? Ah yes: doubt. That was the key to it all, wasn’t it? That was why it was good to have a system, something to rely on.
Mr Ermey touched the rope around his neck and smiled: he’d gone with his first choice after all. After what happened with Buddy, razors seemed too messy; and pills and cars seemed far too uncertain – Tom and Alex had died, yes, but still, those deaths seemed a bit, well, chancy. Rope was the thing; it was the right decision.
But could it bear his weight? There was only one way to check:
One.
Two.
Three…
In the instant where his weight teetered, the faces of four teenagers came to him. Just four kids out of the hundreds he’d seen around school as he pushed his mop back and forth, but as the chair slid away beneath him, and his body fell with a jolt, those faces melded together, and his mind was filled with a clear and intense feeling of a debt being finally paid. Of gratitude.
The old gang, he thought. That’s what we call ourselves.
Chapter Nineteen
1
Mary Townsend opened her eyes.
The light in the room was bright and intrusive. Yawning, she rubbed her face and snagged her thumb on something, creating a dull ache in her right ear. Lightly tracing her fingers along a fine cord, her personal stereo came unplugged. Mary plucked the cassette player from the small of her back, where it was uncomfortably lodged, and held it a few inches from her face. The spool was back in its original position, which meant the Bob Dylan tape Craig had talked her into buying had finished both sides.
Craig, she thought. Was I dreaming about him?
It was more than likely; she’d woken up in a good mood.
Thinking of Craig, she checked her watch: twenty past four – time to get a move on. She was meeting him after he finished work as usual, and then they were buying chips and eating them in the park. Craig’s idea of a date, but it suited her fine. Most of her friends liked to spend Saturday nights bouncing between the handful of pubs they could get served in, or else hanging out smoking dope. Give me chips and the park any day, especially with Mr Craig Anderson.