Why I Went Back

by James Clammer

  ‘What do you think?’ I whispered.

  ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘The thing is, he won’t go running to the cops, will he? So if we can get it away from here, there’s zero comeback.’

  Daniel pushed his scarf higher, almost covering his eyes. ‘It doesn’t look like anybody’s in …’

  ‘Haxforth, what do you think?’

  I saw a nod, a wisp of breath on the night air.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

  We worked it like this. The three of us shadow-creeping up the driveway even though the moon was glaring down supercharged. Everything dark inside the box-like house. Ears straining to hear beyond curtained windows, difficult to pick up sound however what with the blood-drums beating time again.

  Christy, who’d attacked Haxforth. Christy who’d bought the chains and padlocks, who’d picked out the place to keep him prisoner. Was he inside, right now? Or out somewhere, twisting elbows, fixing on the next opportunity?

  I watched Haxforth slip a hand under the black plastic handle, heard a soft metallic clunk as the door opened and he climbed in behind the steering wheel. He’d told us he could steal a vehicle fine and this was fast work sure enough. Daniel and I, we got around to the front. As soon as Haxforth took the handbrake off we’d push the van backwards down the little inclined hardstanding and out into the road and then try to get it turned, try for some momentum and distance till it felt safe to switch on the engine. It’d be insane doing it too close to the house, especially if Haxforth needed a few attempts to get the thing started. He was so old, so dried-up and such a bad fit with the twenty-first century that part of me couldn’t help wondering if he really could drive at all.

  Behind the dark glass of the windscreen I saw a hand rise and swipe down. That was the signal.

  I didn’t look at Daniel but I could feel him pushing alongside me. Pushing and heaving with legs and arms braced, using the whole of the earth underfoot to take the strain, knowing the trick was just to get that first turn, half-turn, quarter-turn even, out of the wheels and then we’d be fine or on our way at least.

  ‘Come on!’ I heard Daniel whisper through closed teeth.

  A slight silent lurch and the white mass started to roll. Inch by inch it moved, metre by metre. Picking up speed. We kept with the speed, tried to increase it. Already Haxforth was turning the wheel so the van’d get out into the road right.

  Suddenly it was rolling too fast. Then it was really rolling too fast. Perhaps Haxforth was stepping on the clutch instead of the brake. Not exactly a good omen for our motorised getaway if he was. Daniel and I ran down alongside trying to slow and steady the van but it was like stopping a new-christened ship on the slipway. Use the brake, use the brake, we tried to tell him by waving our arms.

  The van hit the dip between driveway and road and as it did so the exhaust pipe crunched lightly on the tarmac. In the cold still night the sound seemed to reverberate around the world.

  The van came to a stop.

  Inside the house, upstairs, a light flicked on.

  ‘Get it moving again!’ I hissed at Daniel. ‘Get it straightened up, so he can start the engine!’

  Already I was thinking, Jesus Christ and bloody hell we’ve had it and we can’t even run, not really, because then we’d be leaving Haxforth there in the cab where Christy’d be pleased enough to see him again, no worries about that, and what the hell did we think we were playing at?

  ‘Just bloody push!’

  ‘I am pushing!’ Daniel said.

  Under my hands I felt the bonnet rattle as the engine flooded with loud mechanical power. We hadn’t agreed on this, not starting the engine so near. I had no idea how Haxforth was doing it, whether he was hotwiring or whatever, but it didn’t catch, just turned over and died. Again he tried and I tried to get his attention through the windscreen, telling him to stop, but he was a dark hunched figure not noticing. Instinctively me and Daniel stepped away from the van, not knowing whether to climb in or stay on the street. For a third time Haxforth tried the engine and this time the mechanics sounded louder and even more painful and the van jumped forward so you knew he didn’t even have it in neutral and everything was going wrong and it was all the most terrible mistake.

  Then I saw a dark rectangle where the front door of Christy’s house had been.

  A shout came through the night. You couldn’t hear what the shout said but you knew what it meant all right and you could hear the salt and scabs in the throat. A snarling leaping face came in close and already Christy had Daniel down on the ground and he was kicking him and I knew right then it was that moment you always wonder about, how you’ll handle it, pure animal survival.

  I got my hands up, the stone-hard fist-blocks high and full of top velocity and I charged. Daniel was curled into a tight protective ball. No-one else had come out of the house, it was just me and Christy and after all he was only human, a human like me who could be damaged, and he saw me and put his own hands up but it was too late, I smashed through and I have never hit anyone as hard as that and for a second he looked astonished then I heard the slubb as he fell and his head hit the cold concrete kerb.

  Behind me I heard the engine catch and establish. The passenger door flew open and I saw the tip of a hand waving at us to get inside. I yanked Daniel to his feet and he was hyperventilating but there wasn’t any time to stop because Christy was moving around, trying to get up, a wounded animal which everyone knows are the most dangerous and now he was on his feet and staggering after us but we were up to the van that was moving past and I was shoving Daniel in head first, into the front passenger seat next to Haxforth who wasn’t anything more than a dark outline and then me in beside him, my hands reaching and searching for the inside door handle, desperate to get it shut, get it locked, get safe.

  A kick went into the back of the van. Vicious intent but no proper connection, because by then we were lurching away and the Cloisters was behind us.

  Chapter 42

  Through the streets. Left, right, left, left, wishing Maresfield Crescent was zones away. Daniel looked pale and waxy when he took his scarf off but at least it hadn’t come loose at all. There was no danger of Christy ever picking him out from a crowd. And his eyes were fine, sharp and paying attention and not glazed over, so I knew there was nothing fundamental to worry about.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said after a painful minute or two.

  ‘No problem.’ I didn’t really feel like talking about it. There was a big part of me that still felt bad about the things I’d done to him at school, back when I’d needed his dinner money. Maybe rescuing him like that would make up for some of it. Not that I did it because of that. Both of us knew what Christy would’ve done to him if I hadn’t got in there. All that was unspoken but understood.

  I watched him rub his back, massage his thigh, check the matchbox in his jeans pocket where he kept the arrowhead clasp.

  ‘The last time I was in this vehicle, I was locked in the back,’ Haxforth said. ‘Satisfying, stealing it tonight.’

  ‘You hotwired it?’ Daniel sounded impressed.

  ‘It’s no great skill. The problem was the pedals – so sensitive. Kept popping out from under my feet. But it’s all coming naturally now.’

  Right, left. Right, right. Into Maresfield Crescent. Haxforth pulled in, killed the lights and engine and we sat for a moment looking up and down the road. Most of the houses still had their lights on, walls and gardens pearled by the moon.

  It was now. Or it was never.

  The winter freeze made a snatch for the air in my lungs as I stepped out of the van. Haxforth and Daniel were with me. Up the path to the house we went, through the passageway gate with the clicking closing hinge. Into the kitchen where we’d left Old Beautiful, unmoved in its locked-down plastic nest.

  From under the sink I took out the roll of black sacks. It was a good thick roll and there was a second one behind it, a reminder of bulk-buying in the supermarket back when we did normal fam
ily things like that together. It was good, having that second roll, since we were going to need them all. One after another I tore them off, walloped them through the air to get them open. In the lounge Daniel was already shovelling handfuls of mail.

  ‘Big bags and darkness,’ Haxforth said. ‘The two things every thief needs.’

  Five, six, seven bags we filled, Haxforth holding open the mouths of the sacks while Daniel and I rammed and compacted the mail. Me tying the bags and stacking them out in the passageway. I saw Haxforth take an envelope and turn it over in his hands, feel it, begin to open the flap. The cracks in his skin were getting more noticeable. They seemed to be all over his body now, all the bits of it I could see anyway.

  ‘There’s no point,’ I told him. ‘There’s nothing in it, all of this is rubbish.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yeah. And we don’t have time to mess around.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Force of habit. It’s utterly pointless anyway.’

  Then one of the bags split because we’d overfilled it and after that we didn’t talk any more but double-bagged instead because wherever it was we were taking all this mail, whatever it was that Haxforth’s brother was going to do with it (if we ever found him), the last thing we wanted was a telltale trail of white and brown envelopes left behind like breadcrumbs in the fairy tale. After about the twentieth sackload I stopped counting, just kept shovelling and compacting and tying the bags and stacking them outside.

  ‘Last one,’ Daniel whispered finally. ‘How many is that, altogether?’

  ‘God knows.’ I glanced into the kitchen. The clock on the microwave said 21.41. How had it got to be so late? I checked my torch, maybe I wouldn’t need it with the moon so full and the sky so clear but you never knew. Carrying it was automatic by then anyway. There are always places where moonlight never falls, murky places where shadows lie solid like black concrete. Perhaps it was one of those places we were headed for now.

  One last look around the house, one last look in the shed too, making certain we’d got every single item, picturing in my mind all the while tomorrow morning’s scene, the Royal Mail investigators and their police cronies stepping from warm cars. But they’d all be too late. The house was just a house and the shed an ordinary garden shed, with tins of old paint and rusted tools and offcuts of wood and nothing else.

  Haxforth came up behind me while I was shining the torch inside there. I watched a hand reach past my shoulder, take down a spade hanging from a rusted nail. A minute or so later I saw him sitting in the driver’s seat of the van, ready to go.

  I stared at the piles of black sacks in the passageway.

  ‘Let’s get them in,’ I said to Daniel.

  Silent as behind-the-lines commandos we started hauling. The back doors of the van were unlocked so we just slung them in there, faster and faster and faster. Suddenly it felt like we couldn’t afford to waste another single second. The windows of the houses all around were closed and curtained, but all it would take was one to blink open because it looked dodgy as hell what we were doing. Quickly the dank space in the back of the van filled up until we were having to kick and cram and shove and ram just to get it all in. The final three bags we stuffed onto the front passenger seat out of desperation.

  Haxforth didn’t say anything and he didn’t offer to help. I knew Old Beautiful would be in there with him somewhere, the creature that seemed to have been like a hideous companion to him all those long years of his life.

  ‘You sit in the front,’ I told Daniel when we’d run around and got everything like we wanted it.

  ‘What about you? There isn’t room for all three of us …’

  ‘I’ll burrow in the back. Just make sure you close the door properly after me.’

  I tunnelled in among the sacks, heard the doors slam. Already the engine was starting up.

  ‘Comfortable?’ I heard Daniel ask from the front.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Are there any seatbelts back there?’

  ‘Having a laugh, aren’t you? It’s difficult enough just breathing.’

  I felt the van slide along empty roads. Ten minutes later we were leaving town.

  Time to meet Haxforth’s mysterious brother.

  Chapter 43

  We drove. Through tiny gaps in the body-pressing bags I glimpsed road lights, familiar green signs. With a bit of struggle-and-twist I got myself squatted behind the headrests up in the front of the van. The bags still crowded in tight but at least here I could see where we were going. The sodium lamps dangling above the tarmac made the three of us look tired and shadowy. Somewhere Haxforth pulled off, bumped over a mini-roundabout and we left the lights behind. Quietly, without saying a word, Daniel took out his phone and I watched him turn it off, watched the screen go dead. Dark lanes now, no pavements, the road twisting this way and that. Plunging on and on, the headlights switched to high beam, two white funnels speeding ahead of us. The moon glided and kept pace above, one of those nights where you can’t believe it only reflects and doesn’t generate light. Was this the way Haxforth had been coming when he’d run into Christy and his pals?

  ‘Where are we?’ I said. ‘I’ve never been out this way before. I don’t recognise any of it.’

  No answer. On we flew, turning, twisting, eating up tarmac. The road signs were flashing by too fast now for us to read them. They were the old-fashioned sort, black letters on white pointers, all words and numbers blurred.

  ‘I recognise that signpost,’ Daniel said after a time. ‘The way it’s half fallen over. We went by here ten minutes ago. We’re lost, aren’t we?’

  ‘Not lost,’ Haxforth told him. ‘Circling.’

  He shot me a look in the rear-view mirror. Shadows cast by a line of roadside trees slid across his ghostly face. ‘I know this stretch,’ I heard him say quietly.

  Know it? I thought. How? From these endless grass verges and hedges and country lanes, all looking the same and not a single distinctive thing to tell them apart?

  Suddenly he said, ‘There,’ and slammed down on the brakes so the bags surged up around me and he was reversing along the patched and peeling tarmac, swinging the van through an angle and in the headlights now there stood a rusted gate and beyond it a track, farmland it looked like but rising, at least as far as we could see.

  Haxforth whispered something to Daniel, and Daniel got out and opened the gate, holding it wide so we could drive through and then he closed the gate behind us and climbed back in.

  The track was white. Everything that night was white, luminous, ivory-coloured. It was like all the real colours in the world had got sucked away so you didn’t know if they’d ever come back and would red, green or blue ever mean anything again. The van crunched along the track, over lumps that looked in the headlights like badly buried bones. I was getting a ride in the back all right, the smoothness of the road gone and everything thumping up and down, grabbing onto anything I could find for support.

  Up we went and up. At a place where the ground levelled out, Haxforth stopped and wound down the window and looked out. In the moonlight I saw how the cracks in his skin were worse than ever. Some lights twinkled down below, distant lights from the regular world.

  ‘I’m going to release Old Beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘Is it going to show us the way to Shuttle Hill?’

  I said that because sometimes it seems to me that even ordinary birds know things we don’t, the way they move so easy and not being held down by guilty churning brains like us. And then this bird, this ancient swallow returned in midwinter with Haxforth, well, there was nothing too ordinary or everyday about that at all.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  I watched Haxforth lift the big plastic lunchbox from the place where he’d stored it in the front of the van. He laid it on his lap and unclipped and removed the lid.

  ‘If it goes for your head, make sure to beat it away.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  Old Bea
utiful unfolded its wings and moved its scaly lumpen feet. In the moonlight and shadow it looked congealed and matted like those birds you see on TV when they get caught in an oil slick. It even seemed to move like oil somehow, sort of fluid and flowing, as it lifted clear of the plastic nest and made the short hop to the open window ledge of the van.

  ‘Poor swallow.’ Haxforth stroked its feathers. ‘He’s had his own burden to carry all these years.’

  In the frozen silence I could hear its tiny bird heart beat-beating madly fast. Could it even fly at all any more? But even as I had the thought it was a dark flicker escaping over a nearby hedge.

  Abruptly Haxforth put the van into gear and crashed through after it.

  Bushes flared and crumpled in the headlights. We were in a field of some sort, regular patterns streaming by in the earth below. Now I was really hanging on. A glance told me Daniel was braced up too, legs wedged against the dashboard and arms up around his head like a protective doughnut. His face looked grim, a crash-test dummy for real. At least he had a seatbelt which was more than I could say.

  ‘Poor swallow. Poor Haxforth.’

  That ride couldn’t last forever. We were going faster and faster, downhill now unexpectedly and picking up even more speed and either the van was going to break or we were. But still the shock when it came, the scream from Daniel, the sensation of flying, the twisting metal as we crashed, was deep-gut sickening, pure flashback material. For a freeze-frame moment I even thought we were going to roll and then the petrol tank’d blow like you see in the films.

  Instead the engine died and the van rocked to a halt.

  Outside, silence.

  We sat and listened to it. Nobody wanted to escape the wreckage just yet. Deep deep quiet, the only sounds coming from within our bodies, the inside noises that tell you you’re still alive.

  ‘What happened?’ I said, hardly even knowing my own voice above the blood slamming in ears and throat.

  ‘God. Oh god.’ For a moment I saw Daniel with his face pressed hard against the windscreen. He turned mechanical and doll-like, his face like a stiff white mask. ‘I think we drove into a ditch.’