Why I Went Back

by James Clammer

  I reached for the rusting racer, propped there against the scaffolding. Then I put it back. I didn’t know whether to stay or go. It wasn’t good, all this hanging around. My stress levels were swamping up a bit. I should be finishing now, thinking about it at least, heading home, getting off the streets.

  The minute you trust someone you’re asking to be let down, that’s my experience.

  Then I saw him away in the distance. It was light enough to see that. From the way his rucksack was flapping I knew most of the mail had gone. He was riding pretty fast, knowing he was late probably, needing to get home before that dragon-thing that called itself his mother woke up.

  His bike skidded to a halt in front of the scaffolding. ‘EX05 JYP!’ he said. ‘EX05 JYP!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Christy’s van! I saw it! Parked outside a house on the Cloisters.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I had to go back that way and I saw it twice. The same one we saw from the roof of that old factory, definitely.’

  I shivered inside. The Cloisters was right on the boundary of Dad’s route, not too far from home. I didn’t like the thought of Christy being so near. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising though, it being a small town and always bumping into people whether you wanted to or not.

  ‘Well, that’s one bastard who won’t be getting any more mail.’

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ Daniel said excitedly.

  It was funny, the way he was looking and talking at me, like I was the one in charge, a general ready with strategies and schemes. But I didn’t feel general-like at all. I was tired, exhausted – felt more like a bankside fish smacked on the head, waiting for the angler’s knife.

  ‘Do? Nothing.’

  ‘But you were the one who—’

  ‘What do you want to do? Go and slash his tyres just when his neighbours are getting up for work?’

  ‘No, of course not, but—’

  ‘How did you get on with the mail?’

  Daniel looked disappointed. He was all revved up, proud of his discovery, wanting to jump feet first into action. He opened the bag, showed it to me. Empty – completely empty. Not one single item left.

  Something happened then I wasn’t expecting. Something inside, I mean. I don’t know where it came from. There I was, acting all tough, like a general after all maybe, and the minute I saw the inside of that empty bag I practically burst into tears. It was totally pathetic. I was just so grateful he’d done it, that was the thing.

  ‘That’s really helped,’ I mumbled.

  ‘I’ll do it again tomorrow, if you want.’

  ‘Great.’

  We stood there and I didn’t say anything and he didn’t either so it was turning into one awkward moment when suddenly Daniel’s coat started ringing. We both jumped about a foot in the air. It sounded like a siren in the morning quiet, like the loudest thing you’d ever hear. He fumbled, took it out, the same top-of-the-range handset I’d threatened to hurl from the Brace Brothers rooftop. I saw him check the number, go pale.

  ‘Hello?’ he said timidly.

  I could hear the voice at the other end. The drone of an angry insect – a queen bee.

  ‘But –’ pleaded Daniel. ‘But I – yes. No, no, I’m fine … Is there? No, I didn’t – Well, just out. Aidan’s here …’

  That went on for a few seconds. Then he hung up. His face was all white and his lips were shaking.

  ‘Who was it?’ I said, like I didn’t know.

  ‘Mum. She says there’s a disgusting old man in the house. He’s frying bacon in the kitchen, and unless I get home in two minutes flat to explain to her where I am and what’s going on, she’s dialling 999.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said.

  Chapter 31

  Never have I seen anyone ride a bike like Daniel did then. The sprint sections of the Tour de France had nothing on it. He reached Annandale Avenue first though I wasn’t far behind because I can do speed too if I need to, it’s not all stopping and starting and lugging the Big Bag.

  I don’t really know what I was expecting to see but there he was, Haxforth, sitting on the bottom-most of the five steps leading up to the front door. We threw our bikes against the basement railings. Mrs Cushway was standing beside the big silver car wearing a blue business suit. Her hair was done and her teeth were white and she looked ready to go out and earn lots and lots of money. Looked, when I thought about it, like the sort of person who’d put my Dad behind bars and call it a Great Victory.

  ‘I want you –’ she pointed at Daniel – ‘to tell me what has been going on in my own house and who the hell he is.’

  ‘That’s Haxforth.’ Daniel’s voice trembling as he said it.

  ‘Oh well, that explains everything, doesn’t it?’

  Haxforth opened his hands wide and smiled apologetically. He looked like a collection of bones held together by dirt and rags. ‘I suddenly felt ravenous,’ he said. ‘I thought the house was empty.’

  ‘He’s been sleeping down there, hasn’t he? I’ve seen the mess. It’s foul. Like some – some place where junkies go. No wonder I haven’t heard you practising. What on earth were you thinking? And what will your father say, when I tell him?’

  ‘He won’t care,’ Daniel said quietly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I have no idea, Daniel, what could have possessed you to let somebody like – like that – into our house, but believe me I will be getting to the bottom of this when I get back. Just consider yourself lucky that I’m in such a hurry. In fact I’m late already, thanks to you. Do you know, really, how big this case is? Do you know how far I have to drive this morning? Do you know anything about what I have to deal with now that your father’s gone?’

  Daniel seemed to be curling under the onslaught. Something about the angle of his head reminded me of those films you see where they strap a dummy into a car and then drive it into a wall to see how a real human body will deal with the impact. Then she turned on me. That was OK though, better in some ways since I’m no crash-test dummy but someone who can hold their neck straight and butt right back at anything coming their way.

  ‘This is all your fault,’ she said. ‘You—’

  ‘Aidan,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Aidan.’ (She said it like something she’d seen writhing wet and pale through the soil at the bottom of her garden.) ‘It’s people like you, sending him off the rails like this. He was perfectly all right until you came along – you and that – that tramp.’

  I thought, No, he wasn’t perfectly all right at all, not that you’d ever think to listen and understand about it.

  ‘And that wretched school. Nothing but trouble from beginning to end. The music department is a joke. Lessons in rapping! Well, thank heavens it’s your final week, Daniel.’

  I glanced over at Daniel but he wasn’t making eye contact with anything except the little pieces of gravel on the driveway. He seemed to be examining those individually and in great detail.

  ‘Final week?’ I said to him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Cushway said. ‘After Christmas – new term, new school, new start. Linden College. Frankly I would have got you in there earlier, much earlier, if it wasn’t for your father and his peculiar ideas about education.’

  I didn’t know too much about that place, Linden College. Just that it was out of town, with cricket grounds the size of aircraft runways and a sort of church thing of its own, and that parents paid for their kids to go there.

  ‘It’s all arranged. Piano lessons with Mr Gillessen. You’re incredibly lucky to get someone of his—’

  ‘What about him?’ Daniel mumbled. He pointed at Haxforth, still sitting on the bottom step but gazing now at a dead stump of tree hemmed into the far concrete corner. He didn’t seem to have the first idea about the trouble he’d caused.

  Mrs Cushway flashed her iron-sentinel eyes from Haxforth to Daniel and back again. She reached into the jacket pocket of
her business suit and took from a tiny leather purse a ten-pound note. ‘Oh god,’ she said to Haxforth. ‘Just take this. Use it to go to a cafe or something. And you, Daniel, I want you to come inside and clean up the basement. Blitz the place. I’ve put cream cleaner and bleach on the kitchen top. Make sure you use rubber gloves when you use the bleach, you know you have to be careful with your hands …’

  Daniel puffed out his cheeks. He moved towards the house, all lowdown and obedient.

  Haxforth was still staring at the scrawny tree. Lost in his own world, drifting off. Precious lot of use that was.

  ‘Now I have to go. Frankly I’m in shock. I’m starting to wonder, Daniel, if there isn’t a need for you to see someone. Someone who can help you get back on track, stop all this strange behaviour. I certainly don’t understand it anyway.’ Mrs Cushway unlocked the car, climbed in. ‘Heaven knows I wouldn’t be going unless I absolutely had to.’

  She backed out and drove away.

  After that nobody spoke for a couple of minutes. I looked up at the sky. Daylight was here, not that you could call it that, a murky glow more like. Boiler-steam spouted up and down Annandale Avenue, houses warming themselves from the long winter night.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were leaving St Stephen’s,’ I said.

  Daniel shrugged. He still didn’t want to look at me, and who could blame him?

  I nodded at Haxforth and the banknote he was holding in his hand.

  ‘We could all go together … have a fry-up …’

  ‘Better not.’ Daniel went up the steps to the front door.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For – you know. Helping with the mail. Coming with me to that place in the middle of the night.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘It was great, how we ran out of the museum like that.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He went inside, pulled the door behind him till all I could see was a narrow strip of face and body.

  ‘See you around, then.’

  ‘Yeah. See you around.’

  The door closed with a quiet metallic click.

  ‘Well done,’ I said, turning to Haxforth. The ten-pound note had blown out of his hand, was drifting into the road on a little breeze that’d blown up. I ran and caught it. Nobody lets something like that sail away.

  ‘The tree,’ he whispered. ‘Look.’

  I looked. He meant the black stunted thing in the corner, the one with the trunk all covered in sickly fungus and the branches like smashed TV aerials.

  Slowly, slowly, the fungus was peeling away. It spiked up like a lawn in summer and dried and separated from the bark and then it fell to the concrete. The bark itself seemed to be changing colour. The black was gone, the slick unhealthy black, replaced by a powdery grey that stretched up and down the trunk, reaching into the branches. One or two gnarled limbs lifted a little. Twigs untangled.

  At the ends of the twigs, tiny green points appeared. They were jammed tight into woody cups with raw red at the base. The green points grew, swelled, opened into sticky spikes.

  I looked at Haxforth. He’d stood up now, was moving closer to the tree.

  I looked at the sky. The same wintry sheet of cloud we’d had for days.

  I raced up the steps of 79 Annandale Avenue and banged on the front door.

  Daniel opened it a crack. ‘Aidan, you need to go …’

  ‘I think you better look at this.’

  ‘What? … Oh!’

  Daniel stepped down onto the gravelled parking space and stared at the stump and its crown of upraised branches. The green spikes were lengthening, broadening, spreading into dry fleecy-type leaves. Now something else was coming, coming faster, as if inside the tree was picking up speed somehow. Cottonwool white, curling and spinning into life. Blossom. Showers, clouds of white blossom, with rose-coloured hearts and yellow standing heart-hairs.

  ‘But it’s been dead forever …’

  I ducked out and glanced up and down the road. There were trees in both directions, neighbours’ trees, council trees planted along the kerb, trees in the distance that were part of some allotments. All were bare and dark, motionless in the winter air.

  I ran back. A black-and-gold bee hovered among the flowery branches. Already the blossom was shrivelling and coming loose and dropping to the ground. It lay on top of the white fungus, first in scatterings and then in a soft heap like a snowdrift. I wanted to take off my shoes and plunge my feet in but I knew they’d freeze because this was December.

  ‘Dad could never bring himself to cut it down,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Sensible man.’ Haxforth glanced at us. There was a smile on his face but it was that crooked kind that doesn’t really mean happiness.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.

  But Haxforth didn’t answer, only turned back to the tree. It wasn’t like you really wanted to talk then anyway, you wanted to watch and nothing else.

  With the blossom gone we could see the fruit. Standing up, little orbs on sticks. Quickly they expanded and sagged down in bunches. Green, the colour of emeralds, then reddening as they grew. Apples. And somehow the little tree was bright and its leaves made shadows even though there was no sun in the sky. It was a shady tree, a bursting tree, a tree like you see at midsummer.

  A swallow came down, skimming the ground. Round and round it went. On the tree the apples ripened, dropped to the ground. The leaves fell too, turning green-black, then brown, crinkling like chips left too long in the oven. Autumn. Not so long ago. Once more the swallow circled, then we saw its forked tail settle in the branches, saw its body become still and hunch-shouldered.

  Two ancient unblinking bird eyes stared at us through the winter-morning gloom.

  Haxforth shuddered out a long low breath. With steady hands he approached, with steady hands he plucked the swallow from the tree. He held it like you’d hold a valuable antique. Gently, gently, he folded the wings then tucked the bird inside the front pocket of the foul Admiral hoodie. The apples lay at his feet. There were five or six of them, their surfaces yellowing, softening, the skin rucking up. For a moment or two they looked so yellow they might have been made of gold. But then they were browning too. A wind was stripping the branches. The powdery grey of the bark congealed to black, the death-poison surfacing again. The wind gusted and blew away the fungus and the blossom and the carpet of brown leaves and the shrivelled apples. Soon all of it was gone.

  The tree was gnarled and dead. It had been dead for many, many years.

  Daniel held the front door open for us. In the metal kitchen we boiled the kettle, made three hot sugary teas.

  Chapter 32

  We went downstairs to talk. It felt safer. Somehow among the silver machines Mrs Cushway still seemed predatory. Only this time, instead of the outside stairwell with its iron railings, we used the internal connecting door. It was in a corner of the hallway, half hidden by a loaded-up coat stand – the door Daniel’d been so careful to keep locked. Now it was swinging on its hinges.

  ‘The mechanisms can be so complicated these days,’ Haxforth said. ‘This one was quite straightforward though.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have opened it at all,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you know how much trouble you’ve caused?’

  ‘It practically came apart in my hands.’

  ‘You couldn’t open those padlocks in the factory,’ Daniel said. ‘That one around your ankle, you couldn’t get that off.’

  ‘Hard to pick a lock when you’ve got icicles for fingers.’

  Down we went and it was all the same as before – the big blocky piano, the Great Composers on the wall, the narrow basement window thick with condensation. Haxforth sat on the sofa with its grey geometric shards. There was nothing like the mess Mrs Cushway had said, just a couple of blankets fallen on the floor and some sandwich crusts scattered and a not-so-great smell in the air.

  Daniel and I stood in front of him, arms folded.

  �
��What just happened out there? Who are you? We want the truth this time.’

  ‘I’m nothing and no-one,’ he said, pulling the radiator-style heater in close, switching it on. ‘No-one for you to worry about, anyway.’

  ‘Well, how old are you? What does it say on your birth certificate?’

  ‘Birth certificate?’ Haxforth looked thoughtful. ‘I know what those are. I made a good living for a while, stealing them. Ration cards too. I never had one of my own though. No, not a birth certificate, never one of those.’

  ‘So Aidan’s right – you’re just a thief?’

  ‘There’s more to it than just. But yes. It’s something I used to be rather good at.’

  I grabbed the piano stool, sat down. Haxforth shifted on the ancient-patterned sofa and I stared hard at him, tried to match his mysteriousness with a force and a flex all my own.

  ‘I’ve watched them all,’ he said. ‘From the inside of my secret white eye. Peasants, Crusaders, millworkers in their slums. I’ve met them all and I’ve stolen from them all. Now, no more.’

  He wasn’t speaking too loud. We had to hunch in close, to hear his words.

  ‘Crusaders?’

  ‘And their masters. The kings and monsters – Napoleon, Hitler …’

  ‘You met Hitler?’ Daniel said.

  ‘Well, not met, not exactly …’

  ‘You can’t be such a great thief,’ I told him. ‘Not if the condition I found you in’s anything to go by. If you were really good at it, you’d be driving around in a Rolls-Royce or something.’

  ‘I’m tired. Worn out. I’m so old you can’t begin to imagine.’

  ‘OK then, how old are you? I mean roughly. You still haven’t told us.’

  ‘Roughly? Roughly a thousand years old.’

  I laughed out loud. That was insane. But what could you say? Sometimes it’s better to let people believe the crazy stuff. He looked that old for sure. And then there had been the apple tree coming back to life and the swallow returning, so that put the doubt in your mind, made it so you couldn’t be completely certain.