by David Mathew
She felt her stomach, punched by panic. No baby breathed inside her skin. Then she relaxed. Of course not: her baby was now four years old, and was urging her to go somewhere else. Her baby was guiding her. Her baby –
‘Claire?’
The girl’s head stopped in one place for a few seconds; her eyes were Phyllie’s own, the mother realised – years before the embarrassments at school that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of myopia, to spectacles, and later to contact lenses.
Phyllie and Roger had settled on Claire if it was a girl; Vincent if it was a boy. The second option had been rendered redundant.
‘Where are we going, sweetheart?’
‘Mummy, please…’ The girl was at the classroom door, which was warped on its hinges (it looked like a cow’s tongue).
Firmer now: ‘Where, darling?’
‘To the Overlap,’ the child whined, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. And perhaps it was… in this world at least.
Wondering where Vig had been taken, Phyllie followed Claire out into the corridor… How long had the school been abandoned? she wondered. Beneath the pale blue sky, the damage to the building was well enough lit. The corridor was slippery in a porridge of dirty and filthy paperwork; textbooks spread-eagled, ruined and trampled, posters and staff announcements, pleas for club enrolments, Sports Day achievements… Phyllie saw a picture of Ben Nevis that she’d painted in Art at the age of eleven, it lay in some crumbled plaster and the remains of a bird’s nest. She remembered the gold star that she’d earned with that painting, how her teacher, Mr Madden, had urged on a talent that Phyllie had not only jettisoned but until now had forgotten ever existed.
Phyllie took charge and gripped Claire’s hand. Together they negotiated the corridors, Phyllie quickly learning to reduce the length of her stride in order to accommodate her child’s less certain movements. As they approached, step by step, the building’s rear entrance (leading on to the playground, as Phyllie well recalled), Phyllie saw artefacts from her childhood and from later on. This abandoned school was where her memories had been deposited, it seemed. A photo of her first boyfriend, Dean, hung by one corner from a waterlogged notice board, the image’s smile reminding Phyllie of why she’d slept with him at the age of fourteen. As the memory returned that Dean had died in a car crash at the age of twenty-two, the image in the photo grew a blonde beard in seconds, grew gentle laugh-lines around the eyes, stopped smiling and lowered its eyelids. He was gone. She had mourned him. Along with other former school friends she had taken a train south from her university town to attend his funeral.
In this new existence, Phyllie wondered, was Dean still alive?
She tried to recall what Benny had told her and Vig. Only while so attempting did she acknowledge the fuzziness in her skull. The long-left-behind was as clear as day; the more-recent needed extra time to sleep… or so it seemed.
It occurred to Phyllie that Vig might be somewhere in the building, perhaps hurt; that by exiting, she and Claire would not be permitted to re-enter. Although the little girl was adamant that they must be on their way to the Overlap (whatever that might be), it bit Phyllie’s heart to imagine she might be leaving Vig here, and in pain. Perhaps if she could understand the child’s urgency she would be better positioned to make a reasoned decision.
They stepped out onto a path that led to a playground. Taking in the unexpectedly diminished dimensions, Phyllie stopped in her tracks. The girl walked on, like a dog at the end of its leash, she felt a restraining tug (they were still joined hand to hand), and she turned to her mother with a quizzical expression on her face.
Phyllie didn’t notice it. True as it might be that there was nothing to see in the playground, the littleness of where they’d played – where they’d shouted, where they’d sulked – had grasped hold of her breath. In a trance she saw a parade of boys from the lower years, walking in file around the perimeter, ghostly, dead soldiers now, perhaps, chanting Who wants to play… war-ore! Always the word war in two syllables: the rhythm of their mantra. Playtime after playtime, the line of willing conscripts growing, but never enough time to actually play. The collection was everything… Skipping ropes flicked the summer-hot asphalt. Johnny Hodgins fell from the climbing frame one lunchtime – not even from its summit – and broke his left arm. Phyllie had witnessed the accident; terrified and heavy-bladdered, she’d been summoned to Mrs Barter’s office to provide an eye-witness account, and now Phyllie saw Johnny fall again and again, in a loop, from the frame that she had always been too scared to scale herself.
‘Mummy?’
‘Just a second, Claire.’
More and more children filled the playground as Phyllie kept watch; children whose names were now buried under strata of other memories, but whose faces were familiar. The Gillis Twins, who had frightened everyone; that poor girl Jeanette, an old face on a young girl, born with a hole in her heart, not long to live while Phyllie had known her.
‘Mummy, we have to…’
‘Claire, be quiet,’ Phyllie snapped, squeezing her daughter’s hand too hard (a bone clicked, hers or Claire’s?). When the child started crying, Phyllie stared still at the playground for a second, seeing girls bobbing on a hopscotch grid, little boys with twigs for rifles, shooting bullets of air.
Phyllie decided that this was a place of fears; this was where she had once been frightened. And remembering (a little) what Benny had taught, she knew that it could not harm her now. If it had lacked the power and the will to harm her then, it most certainly had no evil charms to freeze her blood if she was an adult.
But Claire could be damaged, she understood.
The notion made her drop down into a crouch. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll kiss it better…’ It was what her own mother would have done to her in a similar situation.
The ghosts in the playground stopped playing; whispers passed on a breeze; and such was the suddenness of the games’ cessation that the absence of energy caused a pulling sensation on Phyllie’s skin. Tension rippled in the air, the atmosphere was off balance, shaky.
If nothing moved in the playground, why had butterflies appeared in Phyllie’s stomach? Partly she was nervous on Claire’s behalf, for the girl had tensed from temple to toe, the squeezed hand forgotten. The girl was watching for someone… or something.
‘Claire. What’s the Overlap?’ Phyllie wanted to know.
The girl did not respond. Any signs of positivity had been snatched from her; she jumped when a screeching sound reached their ears – something metallic.
Calm. For the sake of the girl, calm.
‘Claire-darling… Claire, look at me.’ Phyllie smiled. The girl looked at her. ‘Thank you. Do you know what’s happening?’
Was the question more useful or less so, worded in such a vague fashion?
The little girl nodded her head.
The metallic screech again, laden and more insistent. Although Claire said nothing, she raised her right arm and pointed a finger… at the climbing frame from which Johnny Hodgins had once fallen and broken his arm.
It was domelike in shape, constructed of curved metal bars: radically upscaled, it was something like a large vessel to strain vegetables, set on its base. The objective for the braver kids was to climb to the top of this spindly crown – and then to climb down again, mission accomplished. And Phyllie had always felt anxious beside it, back then. The climbing frame (years before the term Jungle Gym existed in the UK) had often put her in mind of a giant spider. No - a giant cranefly – a daddy-long-legs. When the wind had puffed up and lashed one of those rare winter rainstorms across the yard, the child that Phyllie had once been had fancied that she’d seen the metal monstrosity twitch.
A trick of the light, at the time; a weirdness reasoned away from childish shadows by retrospective logic, by adult luminescence. No?
No.
No.
Again, no.
Not a pet tethered - a daddy-long-legs trapped under an inverted pint glass. One or more limbs tightly secured.
Pulling.
2.
Unlike Phyllie, Vig did not wake up in a new place, pining for a return to the old. Indeed, it took a morning of his going through his ordinary business, while plagued by flashes that he couldn’t decipher – images, sounds and smells that seemed no more than dreamlike – before Vig even remembered that there was an old from which he’d been snatched, and by then he was German again.
You know you’ve mastered a language, someone had once told him (a philosopher? a professor?) when you start to dream in that language. Which was all well and good… but where did it leave Hartvig Klossen, whose lessons in English were only a term old? Hartvig, who was now in a forest.
There were children all around him, boys and girls, all determined to find something among the trees. What was the treasure? For a moment he could not remember; snatches of the English language would sneak into his skull, transmitted from he didn’t know where. His cranium had become an aerial.
Was he ill?
A boy ran past him, beaming, and calling, ‘Ich habe der ____ gefunden!’ Face all smiles, triumphant; a winner. But Hartvig had not caught the missing word. ‘I have the [SOMETHING] found,’ his brain translated into English… but why was he translating anything into English. I have found the [SOMETHING]. What were he and his friends searching for? No. Not friends. Classmates; schoolkids. What were he and his classmates searching for in the forest? On this field trip. This Geography field trip.
You’re searching for me, Vig remembered, his adult consciousness casting a tarp of awareness over the scene. The boy who had just run past, he had run to collect help. It hadn’t been smiles on his face: that was horror. He was the one who found me. He had not seen Vig on the forest path; he had seen a little boy, little Hartvig, and unconsciously he had assumed the worst scenario, for the missing word was Körper.
Ich habe der Körper gefunden.
I have found the body.
Not: I have found the missing boy. Not: I have found him.
‘I have found the body.’
Comprehending which, Vig sensed his adult world take on solidity and greater amassed form. He thought of Benny. And not only that, he was grateful to think of Benny, for if the scene with Benny had occurred, the little boy Hartvig could not have perished in the forest on that field trip. He had slipped down a long and treacherous slope, true enough, but he hadn’t died; he had knocked himself unconscious and lost two pints of blood. But that kid from one of the other schools had found him…
‘Carlos.’
Although Vig said the word with no great volume, more with the snap of something dug up from a deep mental place, the boy who had passed him stopped running away. As he skidded to a halt he kicked up twigs and dirt on the path.
The young Carlos and the adult Vig, they walked towards one another, both more than a little cautious. At a distance apart deemed respectable by both parties they stopped.
‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ Vig began.
‘Bitte?’
Vig repeated what he’d said, this time in German. The boy replied that he could hear him fine. Was Vig one of the search party? he asked.
‘I don’t know if you can hear me as an adult,’ Vig went on.
The boy cocked his head to one side, confused.
‘But I never said thank you. For finding me… For saving me. I might have bled to death but you found me and they lifted me to the mountain clinic. I didn’t say thank you. From the bottom of my heart… Carlos. Thank you.’
3.
Five metres high, a skeletal dome-shaped nightmare, the cranefly yanked the first of its eight legs from the playground’s asphalt, the bolt-and-screw combination that had held it springing free with a noise like a bullpeen hammer on an anvil.
Little more than ten metres from this act of emancipation, Phyllie crouched on the pathway, attempting a motherly grip. Phyllie’s lower jaw dangled somewhat, the lips were parted. The child had turned her face towards her mother’s neck (Phyllie could feel the girl’s snot on her skin)…
And the cranefly released a second leg. Once again, a bolt and a screw were catapulted out, this time as high as a clay pigeon.
Phyllie expected a gun shot to knock the screw into smithereens – a constellation of carbon – but nothing followed for a few more seconds.
Then the metal screech again, and another leg extracted itself from the ground in which it had been implanted… and Phyllie was not sure that she could bear to see the daddy-long-legs walking free.
Phyllie lifted Claire to chest height… not that the movement was a cinch. On the contrary, it was an agony - the lower spine, the kneecaps (her muscles were not used to this particular exercise).
Meanwhile, the cranefly had released the fourth of its eight legs.
Ping.
Clang.
The options were to sneak back into the building or to run forwards, into the playground. Phyllie chose the latter with little hesitation. The school had adopted, in her mind, a creepy quality, although she mightn’t have been able to articulate exactly why, or why not, she did not intend to return to her past. Not unless there was no alternative.
Absolutely none.
Enduring the girl’s sudden squeals in her ear, Phyllie carried them both towards the playing fields beyond the playground. She stepped close to the cranefly as it worried free its fifth leg. She paid it no attention. The only goal was to run beyond the school’s boundaries. Or rather… the only goal was to stop Claire’s tears, and this might be achieved – it might not – by stepping over the school’s boundaries.
No one was taking her daughter.
4.
Vig followed paths into areas that reminded him of the woods on the grounds of his home – the woods in which he’d found Don Bridges dangling. The trees looked identical… But they would, wouldn’t they? Trees are trees. In Europe at least… No? Yes? No? Maybe this was the point, he considered; these trees were of his own creation. By tramping along these beaten tracks he was doing nothing more than walking into his own memories. Not only the memories of when he’d slipped down the slope on the school trip; there was also the discovery of Don’s suicide to process, with this stroll through the trees acting as therapy. Not the talking cure, the walking cure.
This meant that he had to find Don again, in order to confront what had already gone stale in his soul – and would one day begin to rot. However… if Vig could find Don (and assuming that all logical bets, all wagers of logic, were squarely off), then what was to stop him locating the old guy before he killed himself? Before he’d even set the birds free…
Or why stop there?
What if Vig could find Don while Eastlight was still alive? If he could stop Don Bridges starving Eastlight to death, then Don might not kill himself either. Everything would be different. Vig would not have driven to Benny’s, for one thing.
Benny.
How could Vig have forgotten that wanker in all of this? And whereabouts in this forest did the wanker reside? He had to be somewhere… Didn’t he? Benny had said that each traveller made for himself or herself something new, something original… something different from other people’s retreats. But surely it could not be only Vig and Phyllie who knew of Benny’s existence in the real world, and therefore they must also have created a version of the wanker herein in this world.
To Vig this reasoning made about as much sense as anything else did, so why not? Why not seek him out?
‘These are the woods on my grounds,’ Vig said aloud. ‘We are not in German
y, we are in Buckinghamshire.’ He tipped his head back and shouted: ‘Does everyone hear me?’
The forest creaked with wildlife and with a crackle that sounded like fire, albeit a baby blaze.
‘No!’ Vig shouted. ‘You will not burn down my woods! Do you understand me? You will not! I own these trees and if they’re to be burnt, it’s me who’ll strike the fucking match!’
Silence. No response.
‘Don’t make me angry!’ Vig bellowed into the trees. ‘Either I employ you or you’re on private property, and I will prosecute.’
Silence. No response.
How did I find Don? I scrambled away from the beaten track... I followed the sounds of the foxes…
Not this time, Vig decided. I own what I see – and I’ll own Benny too before I’m done.
‘Come here now, Don!’ Vig shouted. ‘As your employer, I order you to appear now.’
Suddenly Vig noted birds on the branches of the trees – birds that had no place in an English woodland setting.
Don’s birds?
And summoned by Vig’s order, Don himself appeared on the path in front of Vig, looking sheepish and afraid. Chin dug into the top of his chest, flat-capped and wearing his poacher’s waterproof coat and his mud-streaked wellington boots, Don entered with neither fanfare nor avian applause from the creatures that he’d looked after so diligently.
He wore his noose like a necklace. The rope from which he’d hung dragged behind him – a tail of shame.
‘Good day to you, sir,’ said Don.
‘You owe me an explanation.’
And Don looked up, something steely in his eyes. He took his time rolling a cigarette, using a pouch of tobacco that he plucked from his coat pocket.
‘No, sir. I believe I was clear as day, sir. If I might be so bold ... You owe me an explanation.’
5.
Claire wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and shoulders. The faster Phyllie walked (and she was definitely lengthening her stride), the tighter the little girl clasped. It got to the point, about a quarter of the voyage across the cricket field, when Phyllie worried about passing out due to a lack of oxygen.