Why I Went Back

by James Clammer

‘Sometimes she puts earphones in when she’s working,’ Daniel whispered.

  Fast and soft we slipped outside, Daniel telling me how he’d made sure the internal door to the basement was locked tight, with his mum believing the key to be lost. Down the iron-railinged steps, then through a windowless unfriendly door which Daniel secured behind him immediately, following procedure, security-conscious above all else.

  It was dark in there and hot and it didn’t smell too good, sort of like an animal’s lair. A moment of fumbling and then a small pink table lamp went on and we saw Haxforth. He was down on the floor. His face looked white like flour but that didn’t mean anything because I’d only ever seen it that colour, it wasn’t like he’d once had apple-red cheeks and now this. I guessed the bright smears around his mouth were from all the jam sandwiches Daniel’d been leaving him.

  ‘Haxforth! You’re awake!’

  He stared at us. The sports gear needed burning but apart from that he didn’t look too bad. The blood from the cut on his head had dried out and there were some black scab-fragments matting the thin yellow hair. His eyes were pale again, the pure and non-diluted colour of winter, if winter has a colour. He was trying to pick up the heavy upright heater, one of those things like radiators only you move them around on little wheels. It’d fallen over hitting the piano, and that was what made the crashing ringing noise.

  ‘You’re the one who came with the cutters,’ he said slowly, ‘who thinks like a peasant.’

  ‘We rescued you. Me and Daniel here. This is Daniel’s house we’re in now. And I’m not a peasant.’

  ‘No. Aidan – that’s your name, isn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, Aidan. And Daniel. This is wonderful. I don’t believe it’s meant to fall over though.’

  I knelt down to help. ‘It’s just a heater,’ I told him.

  ‘Feel it.’

  I touched it – had to while I hauled it upright. It was red hot.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Haxforth said. ‘The trouble is, it burns the skin after a while.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You have to watch out for that.’

  ‘I’ve been so cold, so right-down-deep-in-the-earth cold.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘My head hurts.’ Gingerly Haxforth rubbed at his scalp.

  ‘I’m not surprised. It was quite a way you fell. You remember that – falling off the ladder?’

  ‘It’s all a blur … I hardly know how I came to be here …’

  We lifted him onto the sofa with its pattern of grey geometric shards. He’d made a nest there similar to the one back in the Brace Brothers factory.

  ‘But you remember the other place, being chained up?’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember that. The bruises remind me, should I ever forget.’

  I thought, We can’t send him away like this. Not with Christy and his sick little gang still out there, even more vicious now knowing somebody must’ve helped him escape, wanting revenge and retribution.

  ‘There was a bird,’ Haxforth said. ‘Have you seen a bird?’

  ‘We saw something, but it flew away. A summer swallow?’

  ‘That’s it. He came to me, through the broken windows. Only there was the chain around my ankle, stopping me from going with him …’

  ‘Going with him?’ Daniel said. ‘Where?’

  Haxforth stared up at the ceiling. One of those glazed-over looks where you know the person isn’t in the present any more, they’re in the past, or thinking deeply about it anyway.

  ‘You can tell us,’ I said softly. ‘You’re safe here.’

  I meant it, too. Somehow the solid upright slab of piano, and the heat and the pink glow from the table lamp, which was exactly the same colour you see in photos of womb-growing babies, made this place, the basement at 79 Annandale Avenue, seem like the safest place on earth. I don’t know why that should be, it was more feeling than fact because after all Mrs Cushway could come prowling any moment. But somehow the room felt sealed-off and separate so I understood why Daniel’d felt he could take the risk, bringing him here in the first place.

  Haxforth smiled. Ghostly yes but not completely broken down. ‘I’m someone who had to go away. The time’s come to return home. I couldn’t before – only now.’

  ‘But where are you actually trying to get to?’

  ‘A place called Shuttle Hill. It’s near here, very near. That’s where I was going when I ran into Christy and his friends.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was on a path I was using. A wide path, with tyre tracks in the mud. That should’ve warned me. They were sorting through the back of their van. The way the path turned – the trees that were there – I ran right into them.’

  ‘And that’s when they found the bracelet?’ I said.

  Haxforth nodded. ‘One of them must have caught a glimpse as I tried to go past. They had it off me in seconds – demanded to know where I’d got it from. Someone shoved me … I remember stumbling, falling. Babbling something or other. I must have passed out. The trouble was, I hadn’t eaten in a long while, not properly. It was easy for them. The next thing I knew the doors of the van were slamming shut and everything was going dark …’

  ‘But they didn’t get the clasp?’

  ‘No. I had that well hidden. There were some places even they didn’t want to search.’

  ‘Where did you get them from?’

  ‘The houses of the rich.’

  We sat in silence for a minute, me and Daniel. Haxforth had closed his eyes and I thought maybe he was drifting off again, back to sleep. I looked at him, wondered who he really was and where he’d come from. The strange thing was, I got the feeling that even if he told us it would still explain nothing. He could talk for an hour and still be full of mysteries I’d never fathom. People are like that in general, you never know what they’re thinking, not deep in their own invincible hearts. Well, Haxforth, he was like that too, only a hundred or a thousand times more.

  ‘And when you get to this place,’ I said quietly, trying to press him, ‘Shuttle Hill or whatever it’s called, that’s where there’ll be somewhere for you to stay? And someone who’ll look after you? Because, you know, you can’t really stop here any more.’

  Haxforth nodded. Eyes still closed. ‘That’s where he is. My brother. All ready to take me in.’

  ‘Your brother who heard voices in his head?’ I heard my own voice tighten, saying it. I hadn’t forgotten any of that stuff he’d told me back in the Brace Brothers factory. ‘Who you said you helped once?’

  ‘That’s right. Once.’

  Daniel glanced at me. ‘Maybe we can find it on a map,’ he suggested. ‘There’re loads upstairs. Dad used to have a thing about them, especially old ones.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to find it on any map.’

  ‘Has he got a car? We could call him, get him to come and pick you up. If it’s not too far.’

  ‘No.’ Haxforth’s eyelids looked like two white chocolate buttons in their stillness and waxiness. ‘No car. He’s not too mobile these days.’

  ‘He’ll be able to look after you OK though?’ I said. ‘When you’re there?’

  ‘Oh yes. When I’m there. But not without the bird. Not without Old Beautiful.’

  ‘Old Beautiful?’

  Daniel tapped me on the arm, pointed at the ceiling. His antennae alert and switched on high. Mrs Cushway was walking about upstairs, short clipped steps, still wearing those high heels.

  ‘You’ve got to promise to be quiet. You’re not supposed to be here at all, see. If Daniel’s mum finds you …’ I drew a finger across my throat, indicating Sudden Death.

  ‘Quiet as a summer cloud, that’s me,’ Haxforth whispered.

  Jesus Christ he looked old. All the things he must have seen and all the things he must have done. Was he asleep now? Old men are like little babies in some ways. They sleep and sleep and then sleep some more. With babies, they’re sleeping becaus
e they need to get ready for life. Maybe with old men they’re sleeping to get ready for the other thing, the thing that happens to all of us in the end.

  Up above I heard the front door open. The short clipped steps were outside, moving with intent. Daniel looked at me panicked. We both knew they were going to turn at the iron railings that led down to the basement room.

  He killed the light and in a flurry we were closing the door behind us and trying to get out.

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Cushway said, seeing me from the top of the basement steps. ‘You’re still here.’

  ‘Aidan’s just leaving,’ Daniel said loudly.

  ‘I didn’t hear you practising. Why not? Mr Gillessen says that to have any chance of …’

  ‘I was practising the adagio,’ Daniel said. ‘Soft pedal. Pianissimo. So it wouldn’t make much noise, would it?’

  Mrs Cushway looked confused.

  ‘It was very beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Well – anyway. I wanted to check, that’s all.’

  Daniel shot me a look. You better go now, it said.

  I edged down the driveway and pulled the racing bike out of the hedge. It was obvious Mrs Cushway wasn’t going to let me stay there another moment longer. If anything happened here tonight with Haxforth, Daniel was just going to have to deal with it on his own. Walking away down Annandale Avenue, wheeling the bike, I heard her say, ‘Ridiculous, having to come outside in the cold like this! We need to find that key.’

  I don’t suppose I could’ve stayed too much longer anyway. It was time to get home, time to haul and heave the mail in my secret practised way. Time to get sorting again. The moon would be out tonight, almost full – not that the alliance would mean much if the cloud stayed so thick in the sky. Only, moving through the dark streets, I felt this idea growing inside. An idea that made my stomach tip and roll the more I thought about it.

  Perhaps, before he disappeared, there was something Haxforth could do to help me.

  It was so stupid. Just because he had a brother who’d heard voices, once, in the past, and now he didn’t hear them any more. There could be any number of reasons for that. I mean, what exactly did I expect to happen? It was stupid, pointless, a fantasy. But deep down, deep down and in secret, I really was thinking, If once why not again?

  I did the right thing though. I squashed that idea out of existence, before it grew big enough to hurt me later on.

  Chapter 29

  4.10, the red lights of the digital clock said. The dream was hovering right inside my forehead, the dream where I tried to run from the collapsing houses of mail while the queen stared at me with enraged eyes. This time there’d been a new twist. That woman with the Oncology letter, Annie Fraser-Howe, she’d been floating somewhere alongside. She was a pale rotting mushroom with postage stamps for eyes and nose and mouth. She wanted to tell me something but the stamps were thick and solid and they acted like corks in a bottle, stopping anything from coming out.

  I lay in the warm bed, forced the images away. They weren’t relevant. Be like a machine, I told myself, a perfect machine.

  The trouble is, machines don’t dream, do they? When they’re off, they’re off. Whereas when I’m off, there’s still something going on.

  Then I remembered about Dad and that did the job all right, killing off the nightmare. Last night he hadn’t been in the house at all. Or at least not when I’d laid down to go to sleep. I’d carried and sorted another load of mail, got it all ready and ordered with the Big Bag empty but waiting at the foot of the bed, and nowhere in that time had Dad been around.

  Where was he?

  I pulled on jeans, jumpers, trainers, armour-plating against the cold, went from room to room, flashing the torch that always seemed to be with me now. Nothing. Nobody had been there in all the hours I’d been asleep. Every room silent, every corner cold and void-like. A house carved from a giant ice cube.

  I thought again of Hawkie, shouting through our front door about Dad being monitored at work. I thought of Mrs Cushway and her undelivered post. If she’d been angry enough to complain, how many others were there feeling the same way? Loads probably. And even though I’d tried so hard to be secret and silent, perhaps some of them had seen me out with the Big Bag and put two and two together. I imagined all these people asking questions, making demands. Busybodies. There’re busybodies everywhere, making wheels spin faster. Just because I couldn’t see them, those wheels, it didn’t mean they weren’t turning. I might not see them at all until the moment they rolled right down on top of me.

  Yes. That was it. Dad had seen them too and he’d done a runner. Just upped and gone. Left me on my own and Mum in Tredegar House.

  He wouldn’t do that, would he?

  Yes.

  No.

  Don’t know.

  For a few minutes it was about all I could do to stand there in the dark and remind myself over and over that a person can’t be killed by cold crushing panic.

  Back to the bedroom window, to check the weather. I needed to stay focused, keep doing all the things I’d been doing up till then. My sleeve rubbed at the windowpane. Outside I saw a crystalline frost thickening the surface of the world.

  And something else.

  There, huddled under the streetlamp, in the exact same spot as the scumbag pair who’d stolen my bike, stood Daniel Cushway.

  I ran out and beckoned him inside. He had a bike of his own, propped against a nearby wall, which he wheeled into the passageway while I dulled the squeaking gate. I don’t know how he knew where I lived. Maybe he found it on the internet. You can find out pretty much anything on that these days, if you have a connection.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he whispered. ‘Worrying about stuff. So I thought I’d come and help you. 4.30, that’s what you said.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘I should be OK if I’m back by seven.’

  I saw how he’d brought a rucksack too, for carrying the mail.

  ‘Come inside. Get warm for a minute, before we start.’

  It felt stupid, walking around my own house in the dark now someone else was there. Up in my bedroom I flicked on the light switch and scooped the mail out from under the bed.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ Daniel said nervously.

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really.’

  Daniel watched me arranging the bundles, saying nothing, all stony and serious like a churchyard statue.

  ‘How much more of it is there?’ he said at last. ‘You told me your dad puts it in his shed.’

  ‘There’s tonnes. This is just a little part of it.’

  Daniel whistled softly. ‘Come on then, give me some. Not just Annandale Avenue. More than that.’

  ‘Thanks, Daniel.’

  I passed him one bundle, another, another, told him the street names, the directions he should take and the order he should do everything in. All that stuff came easy now, easy as dreaming.

  We stowed everything in the bags, got them shouldered.

  ‘There’s something I’ve sort of been thinking about,’ Daniel said, a bit cautious and delaying.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The clasp. Do you reckon I should ask him about it?’ Daniel hadn’t mentioned Haxforth till then so I’d assumed he was still safe in the basement at 79 Annandale Avenue.

  ‘Don’t know. Where is it now?’

  Daniel patted at a square shape in his pocket. ‘I’ve put it in a matchbox, wrapped it in toilet roll to protect it.’

  ‘Do what you like. It belongs to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What if he wants it back? I mean, he seems to have forgotten, but if I say something it might remind him.’

  ‘Then don’t ask. Keep quiet.’

  ‘But if I keep it and deliberately don’t say anything – well, it’s not right, is it? It’s stealing, basically.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Every thief for himself,’ I sai
d.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Every thief for himself.” Something he said to me when I first found him.’

  ‘But I’m not a thief.’

  We went down the stairs and Daniel waited in the kitchen while I fetched the key to unlock the racing bike. The clock on the microwave said 04.39.

  ‘Something that old – it must’ve been through hundreds of hands,’ I told him.

  Daniel looked unhappy at that but what did he expect? It wasn’t like I was a schoolteacher, telling people what to do and how to behave.

  We left the house, cycling past silent cars white-windscreened from the frost. Past the faded tubes of the play park at the end of the Crescent where I’d jumped and tumbled as a little kid. No moon tonight. It was up there, a sliver off being fully round, only shut behind armies of cloud.

  ‘You know that big place on Willowfield Road, all covered in scaffolding?’ I said – whispered, since in the dead of night even quiet voices sound like loudspeakers at midday.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Let’s meet there, in ninety minutes. See how we’re getting on.’

  ‘OK.’

  I watched his back disappear into the dark. He was wobbling slightly from the weight of the mail but I had to assume he’d be all right. I’d asked for the help, after all – in a roundabout sort of way.

  I knew deep down that it couldn’t go on forever. Of course I knew. Whether it was Hawkie’s investigators, or some random casual complaint, or some other thing I couldn’t foresee or imagine, this never-ending task was going to end some day soon.

  That day wasn’t today though.

  I gathered myself in, knowing time goes faster that way. I had to move like clockwork, be the perfect machine, not let myself get distracted. There’d been too much of that recently.

  I checked the first bundle, then I started pedalling.

  The very top letter was addressed to Annie Fraser-Howe.

  Chapter 30

  Ninety minutes later, plus some, loitering outside the big gutted house on Willowfield Road.

  Where was he?

  I’d given him too much. I knew that now. What’d I been thinking? He didn’t know the route like I did, didn’t know the individual houses or the awkward unnumbered flats, didn’t know how to go invisible through the night like me. And now night was almost over, grey in the sky, signs of an approaching sun.