“Jay. Horton.”
He nods to the wall and the other wall beyond it. The wall formed from green.
“You were here yesterday, weren’t you?”
He sees my surprise and raises a calming hand.
“I live on Dalry Road. I was walking my dog yesterday and saw you here.”
Pretending to think about a reply, I give him a quick once over. Stocky with a clear layer of muscle under his light jacket, he could probably pass for late forties. It’s only the lines stretching from his eyes and the broken veins in his nose that make him appear his true age.
All at once, the temperature—warmer than might be expected—seems too high. I want to sit in the shade and think of nothing, but the sun is at my back, making me sweat while I stand still.
“I’m new to the area,” I say eventually. “Moved here with my family a few weeks ago. Harewood Road.”
It’s his turn to nod. “Exploring?”
“Yes.” I gesture towards the field on the other side of the road where no kids play on the swings or slide. “Looks like a nice park. I—”
He interrupts me. “This caught your eye, didn’t it?”
His gaze flicks over my shoulder to the squat wall and the thick trees. Lying seems pretty pointless.
“Yeah. It did. It’s kind of odd, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t really get places like this anymore. Overgrown. Messy.”
I trail my fingers over the top of the wall. The stone is hot, almost uncomfortably so.
“I thought the council would have kept this tidy.” To illustrate my point, I gesture further down the road to where the hanging vines and branches block half the pavement. They trail on the ground, putting most of it in shadow. “It’s had time to get like this, hasn’t it?”
“It has,” Colin agrees. “Forty years. Longer.”
We stand in silence and a little part of me wishes being English meant being less awkward around strangers. We both have things to say and neither of wants to go first. When the breeze kicks up for a few seconds and the leaves whisper, Colin says speaks again.
“It gets under your skin, this place. Unless you’ve lived here for a while.”
“What?”
He purses his lips and glances behind. I’m not sure if it’s anything more than simple intuition, but all the same, I see Colin in the pub around the corner. I see him sitting his bulk in a seat at the bar and sipping a pint of bitter while the early afternoon light drips through a wall of windows and a TV on a corner wall shows either the racing or a match. He wants to be there, not talking to me. Jesus, I want him there instead of with me, but here we are, cut away from the main section of Dalry by a mass of rotting greenery and its ceiling of branches.
“Follow me, would you?”
He walks away before I can reply, moving with an old gent’s steady care. I take a last look over the wall into the shadows cast by all the trees and the breeze plays through them again. Only this time, it sounds exactly like a murmur of whispering voices.
Even with the heat of the sun, I’m a frozen piece of meat.
Something in the green rustles.
I run after the old man.
We sit on a bench set back from the road. The pub—The Green Man— I guess is Colin’s local is another minute or so away.
“There were three of them.” Colin looks straight ahead and I don’t miss how he won’t make eye contact. “Three girls.”
Again, I’m ice-cold even though there’s no shade on the bench.
“Three girls, all murdered.”
Oh shit. I don’t want to hear this.
“1976. Over that summer. All sixteen years old. Not one connection between them other than their age. They didn’t even live close together or go to the same school.”
He shifts to look at me; the red veins in his nose glow because his cheeks are so pale.
“All raped and stabbed to death. All dumped in there.”
He jerks a thumb towards the triangle.
“The police got nowhere with the investigation. No suspects. Nobody held for questioning. No clues on who did it or why those girls.” He sighs, looking abruptly ten years older. “Me and my friends, we were only kids, so we couldn’t find everything out. There was an old chap who lived on Atherstone Lane back when there were a couple of cottages on it. He told us the story and we stayed away from the green. We wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the road. Of course, in those days, it wasn’t as overgrown so there was some pavement left. Now... well, it’s a jungle and nobody goes anywhere near it. Apart from people like you.”
He tries to offer a reassuring smile and it’s just a twitch of his lips and a glimpse of dentures. Inside, I cry out my horror. The man Colin has described what was inside my head yesterday. I saw through his eyes and I knew his fear of the area on the other side of Atherstone Lane.
Let it go. You’ll go mad if you don’t.
In the sun with the suburban houses on the other side of the road, it’s easy for me to take my own advice and say: “You’re telling me three kids were killed in the same town and that’s not huge? That’s not something we all know. I mean, Jesus. Even if that was forty years ago, it should be like the Yorkshire Ripper. It should be the Moors Murders. Everyone should know about it.”
Colin shakes his head. “People don’t want to know about it. Back then or now. They don’t want to know. It’s easier to say something was horrible and won’t happen again and then let it go than it is keep it alive.” He pulls a face. “Plus, think about it. We were different, then. If it happened now, it’d be non-stop news. Then, we thought differently. People got away with things because nobody considered the idea they were doing those things.”
I’m about to argue against that and I think of names like Savile and Harris; I think of sitcoms I watched with my parents when I was a kid and how they’d get nowhere being made these days; I think of being eleven or twelve and that song by the black kids and the jokes that went round school—jokes I repeated happily—about those kids.
“Yeah, fair point,” I say, “but even so, you’d think it’d be public knowledge.”
“Name me three murdered children before ten years ago.”
He’s had this conversation before, I realise. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I’m not the first guy to wonder about that relic behind us: land not touched by anyone or used for anything.
To answer him, the only name I’ve got is Bulger and maybe that proves his ugly point.
Colin stands and I’m left staring at my hands.
“For what it’s worth, it’s private land which is why the council leaves it. Plus, I think they’ve forgotten it’s there. Even people who live around here have forgotten it. It’s just there. Most of the people on this road have lived here for twenty years or more; we leave it alone and when we see the odd new person who’s curious about it, we tell them the same. Leave it alone. It’s a sad, dead place. It should be left alone. That’s why I thought I should talk to you when I saw you coming this way, again.”
He gives a slight tug on the dog’s lead; the Alsatian stands and his pink tongue lolls as he gazes at me. There’s a good summer coming—it’s in the air. A summer of walking my dog and not coming to this gloomy piece of land because there’s nothing for me here.
“It’s private land?” I ask.
“Yes. God knows who owns it these days. In any case, they haven’t touched it in decades, and that’s how it’ll stay, I imagine.” He pauses and his next words make my head jerk up to stare at him. “There’s a house somewhere in all that mess. It’ll be as much of a wreck as the land is.”
A house in the green. A house with holes for windows and crumbling bricks and rotten wood for floorboards. A house straight out of a fairy tale.
“It’s a sad place,” Colin says again. “Leave it alone, okay?”
“Yeah. I will.”
He smiles, a friendly gesture I welcome. Dalry might not be our village but it isn’t far off. “Fancy a pint?”
I decline with honest regret. He tells me to come to the pub at some point and walks his dog away. The Alsatian glances back and his eyes, brown and mournful, mark me.
I rest on the bench in the quiet of the late morning and I think about the years of winter cold and summer sun between me and three bodies being tossed into the cool undergrowth to be found only when the smell reaches the people living nearby.
A few hours pass in a strange no time. I cook dinner and laugh with my family when we have one of our infrequent meals around the table. I clear up and sort out a load of the dirty clothes to wash in the morning and I listen to Char tell me about another day of being the Head just as I hear myself tell Beth to be back from Tim’s by eleven since it’s a school night and I listen to the low growl of her scooter as it fades around the corner. I know all this. It’s what makes sense and what makes a home. Even so, it happens to someone else because my head’s full of what happened during my talk with Beth and the conversation with Colin. It all finally comes out in the low light and murmur of the TV at about ten o’clock when Char says puts down her laptop.
“Go on, then. What’s up?”
She rests her long legs on my knees so I can rub her ankles and calves (doing so without registering the warm feel of her skin). Char’s question makes me jump and it’s only then that I realise I haven’t been in the house or with my family all night. Not really.
“What? Nothing?”
“Lies.” She sips her wine. “I can tell. Come on. Bad day? Your laptop wasn’t out when I got home.”
Shit.
I never remember to put the computer away after a day’s editing. It’s kept at the side of the little table below the window where I work, and it should be back there when I finish. Since I did nothing today, it hasn’t moved after Char put it away yesterday evening.
“Nothing. I just…I didn’t sleep very well. I’m knackered.”
“I know you didn’t. You were all over the bed. Surprised I got any sleep.”
“Sorry.”
I catch Char’s eye and something inside clicks. She’s a good woman; the best. We’ve been happy for a long time and I love the life we’ve made with Beth even if we’ve had to change things over the last six months for Char’s job. With that in mind, I skim over how weird I was with Beth as well as most of what I saw in my head last night (it’s enough to tell Char I had a strong déjà vu at the wall around the triangle and it’s played on my mind all day especially after finding out what happened there).
When I finish, I’m lighter. Cleaner and back to me. I’m also aware of how stupid the whole thing sounds. That doesn’t alter my reaction when Char gives me hers.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. We’ve had a load to deal with recently. Stress. Changes. It’s not just been on Beth, has it? You and I have had to change with the move and my job and... I don’t know. Maybe the editing isn’t enough for you. Maybe you’re bored.”
On the TV, the ads finish. We’re re-watching Breaking Bad, and Jesse and Walt resume their argument. I watch them for a moment, attempting to get my thoughts straight.
“You think I’m bored? You think I’m what? Looking for something? A problem?”
Char raises a finger and I almost smile. She’s in charge at work and in charge at home. “Don’t get arsey, Mr Horton. I’m just saying you might be needing something more…. substantial in your life. Something with a bit of interest. Your dreams and how much they bothered you, getting spooked by, let’s face it, a town we don’t really know…” She shrugs. “Maybe you’re just not as comfortable with leaving Repton as you thought.”
The next few moments play out inside as clearly as real life. I see our conversation turning into an argument; me telling Char I’m not a drama queen and I’m not looking for a problem; Char telling me there’s no way I’m fulfilled with being stuck in the house all day and being a freelance editor so only working when the jobs come my way, and then going to bed to sleep without our bodies touching.
It’s there in front of me like a film and my reaction is a solid no.
I tell Char she might be right. After all, it’s stupid to be this bothered by nightmares and hallucinations, and yes, getting used to Dalry is taking some doing, but I’ll work on it and look to expand my work as soon as the summer holidays arrive in six weeks and yes, she can get me a top up for my glass.
I drink more than I should and pretend I haven’t. Beth can tell when she gets home and I don’t care any more than I care about Beth getting stroppy after I say that, no, Tim can’t stay overnight when she brings it up for the fourth or fifth time since we moved here.
The drink does what I want it to.
Stops the dream from coming back. For tonight, that is.
After a weekend of being unable to focus on anything for more than a few minutes without the image of the overgrown greenery filling my head, I’m here again—almost in the same spot where Colin approached me.
If the old boy was here and he asked me exactly why I’ve come back after our conversation, all I could tell him is that this place has got to me. It’s a leftover from years ago. Even though lush vegetation fills it from end to end, it’s still a wasteland that doesn’t fit in the twenty-first century. It pokes and prods me to the point of I’m thinking of nothing else. And frankly, I’ve had enough of this.
I tie Bob’s lead to one of the lampposts. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t just leave my dog on the street as people did when I was a kid, but there’s nobody in sight and no good reason someone will come wandering down here at gone ten on a weeknight.
“You stay here,” I tell Bob. “Okay? I’ll be two minutes.”
He licks my fingers.
Standing, I splay my hands on the top of the wall, take a breath, and clamber up. Trying to keep quiet is harder than I’d like. Grunting and puffing, I’m on the wall, Bob looking at me. Thankfully, he hasn’t barked. Yet.
“Stay there.”
The night presses in to the trees and bushes as tightly as I imagined. Anything beyond a couple of feet might as well be invisible. There’s a light in my head; it goes on like a hundred watt bulb in a blackened room.
What are you doing? You’re forty-six years old. This is kids’ stuff. Get Bob, walk home, and have a drink. Have a lot. Just get off this wall and go home. Right now.
I drop to the soft earth and grass.
Bob barks and I hiss at him to be quiet. Grunting, he subsides.
I’m on uneven land, knees bent, hands up as if to grasp the spindly branches.
You’re here now. Either move or go back.
Listening for the slightest sound, I creep forward, reaching and pulling my phone free to use its little light as a guide. The leaves and bushes part with more ease than I might have expected. They’re also dry. Same with the grass low down—for the most part. How I’m going to explain my damp ankles to Char, I don’t know. Branches bend not quite to snapping point and move aside. Feeling my way, I step forward, mouth and nose full of the rich aroma of all the foliage, all the mossy smell of grass and weeds left to grow out of control. It’s hot in here, a dry heat which maybe isn’t surprising as this June is shaping up to be a hot one. The faintest outline of the thicker branches stretch above; they’ve got to be ten feet or more above my head, probably double that in a few places and I wonder about the birds nesting above or the squirrels who clamber up those branches.
There’s not a single sound of any wildlife in the undergrowth which almost makes me stop, but I move further in as the vines and twigs shift out of my way and the smell of the moss and meaty green fades. It’s as if it’s sliding down a long tunnel, my limited vision and sense of smell narrowing to a point at the same time because a new smell is coming; something sweet, sticky.
The sweet smell and taste of thick chunks of bubblegum, each pink piece delicious on my underdeveloped taste buds, each one just two pence from the machine on the wall outside Ansar’s Shop on the corner right before Nigel and I get to the field.
And there
’s more. A song on a radio, a tune that always made me want to dance with my mum around our small kitchen. Pushing my way through the green, I hum the opening bars of Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel and laugh again. The song fades in and out; whatever station is playing it, the reception’s not great, but that’s okay. I know the tune inside out. It’s everywhere. On Top of the Pops, on our stereo, coming out of the windows of our neighbours and it’s the sound made of those windows wide open to let in the warm air. Doors are open, too, so people can chat on the street and the cat I know lives at number seventy-three perches happily in the doorway of number seventy-five, while I gaze at the cracks in the pavement and make a show of stepping on each one.
Something’s coming, blowing away sight and sound. It’s a blast of savage heat covering dry earth. In that heat, memory isn’t old; it’s right now.
I’m Jason and I’m six and I’ve got my football and I’m walking with Nigel and we’re going to call for Mohammed and go to the park at the end of my road we’ll play and it’ll be good and later, I’ll watch Top of the Pops and see if I can guess who’s number one. I hope it’s the song about dancing; I hope mum and dad don’t talk while it’s on the telly and I hope I hear it on the radio in that woman’s window tomorrow when I walk with Nigel and Mohammed again. I hope it’s as hot tomorrow as it is right now while Nigel gives me a piece of bubblegum and it’s sticky on my fingers. I’m Jason and my dad will go to the pub this Saturday lunch and maybe when me and mum go to the shops, we’ll go and see him first. We’ll sit in that room away from all the men where the piano is and I’ll see my dad sitting with the other big men and they’re all drinking the brown beer out of the glasses with the big handles on the sides. The room smells of the men and their cigarettes and I like that smell because it’s my dad.
I’m Jason and I’m six and it’s hot today. I hope it’s hot every day. And I can smell I can smell I can smell—
—something wrong here.
There’s a shadow on everything; the shadow of a dead tree, its bark rotting, hot sunlight baking its side and turning the flakes of wood into tiny slivers of fire. It’s the stink not quite faint enough to hide in the baking air.
9 Tales Told in the Dark 20 Page 5