10
23rd August 1990
Will nearly fell off his bike when he saw the empty wall. Five years of school and he had never beaten Darren to the meeting place at the top of the avenue and yet today oddly he was nowhere to be seen. His scalp felt all prickly and itchy and he felt the hairs stand up on his neck. Forcing himself to breathe deeper he shivered despite the morning sun. He hoped that wasn’t a portent of doom for his GCSE results which he would be receiving in approximately one hour.
He searched his memory to see if he had made a balls-up on the timings. He smiled as he realised he had used Carl’s favourite phrase, in reference to his incident at rugby in their first week. He still had a tiny dint in his head all these years later. Jesus, he thought, five years ago. It felt like he had been at school forever, yet if his results went badly, it would all be over today. Checking his watch he realised he was fifteen minutes early such was his haste to get away from his mother’s doleful expression that morning.
She had kept saying in a misty eyed manner, ‘They will be good, won’t they?’ His father had just shaken his head in the background. He had grown distant from his dad over the last few years. All the things they used to do together like football matches and the cinema he now did with his friends. Meanwhile his brother had been sniggering in the background. He had assessed the situation more pragmatically and come to the conclusion that seeing as Will was hardly ever seen doing any homework then Nathan would be having an enjoyable afternoon at his brother’s expense.
He sat on the wall and let his mind trickle through the previous months. They had all joked that if they failed their exams and couldn’t stay to do their ‘A’ Levels then they would sign up. Will shrugged at this again, in a way he wished he was going to fail and he would be going to join the army.
He had found school life increasingly tedious. He had struggled to drum up much enthusiasm for any of his subjects except history, but that was only because they had been studying World War Two. His interest had waned for that as well when they moved back five hundred years and studied the Tudors. Henry VIII’s villainy being one of the few moments of interest. The lessons had seemingly become longer and longer, in particular Religious Education, where he swore his fingernails grew during some weird time loop. Like in the science fiction films where the astronaut goes away for a year and comes back to find everyone is forty years older.
He shivered again when he thought of Maths. It was the one subject he was nervous around as he knew his general brightness would get him through the rest of the exams. In Maths however he had more or less spent the last five years just copying Carl’s work. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, it was just Carl was a master and it was miles quicker than doing it himself. Well that was what he had told himself anyway. Darren had been the one to copy at the start but him and Aiden had ended up in a different set than Carl for everything except English and it was Will who had taken advantage of Carl’s brilliance.
It was distinctly possible Darren and Aiden could have failed some of their exams and he suspected Aiden in particular had endured a sleepless night.
Will had not picked the cheating baton up lightly and he had felt a bit guilty with the plagiarism at the start but he was way past that now. It had got to the point where he had to change some of Carl’s answers to get them wrong as getting one hundred percent right each week wasn’t feasible. Not for him anyway. Carl wouldn’t be joining the army either, despite their best efforts to drag him down to their level, his brightness was off the scale.
Turns out Will couldn’t do the math, as they say in the States. The advanced exam for his set had been a sweating, clammy, dry throated horror show. Some of it might as well have been written in Latin and his calculator seemed to have the artificial intelligence of a dandelion. It was the one time at school where time had been fleeting and he had walked out at the end cement-footed and wild-eyed.
His general laissez-faire attitude was one of the reasons he kept getting in trouble too, as idle hands made mischief. He actually laughed out loud getting an odd look from a passing granny when he recalled the English class where Aiden had sneaked Carl’s exercise book away and Will had drawn an enormous dripping penis on the next empty page. They had slid it back and watched him as he opened it to write down the homework. Aiden said afterwards he had wet himself a little bit he was laughing so hard and that was before Carl had turned the page. Just the anticipation of it was enough.
The English teacher was ancient and old-school with a zero tolerance attitude to disruption. So they were desperately trying to be quiet but both making snuffling and snorting sounds like two happy pigs. When Carl turned to that page Darren, who had been sitting on the other side of him, saw and laughed loud and hard. On realising his error he tried to stem the sound but that caused him to eject an eight centimetre candle of snot from his nose, which made him laugh more, the offending article swinging like a huge epiglottis hanging from his chin.
A massive bellow came from the teacher at the front of the class.
‘Silence. Silence. Silence’ he had thundered as he came over to their table.
Aiden had buried his face in his book, head bobbing as he sniggered and Will pretended to do his shoe lace up, shoulders heaving as he unsuccessfully tried to think of something serious. Darren said after he was choking back his laughter so much that he was almost suffocating but the shock, then dawning look of realisation, followed quickly by fury on the teachers face when he saw the giant offering was too much and he tipped his head back and roared with glee.
He was frog-marched out of the class to the headmaster’s office, wiping his slimy nasal discharge on Ingram’s shoulder as he left the room. There, he informed them later, he was branded a foul pervert and placed on report for four weeks. He didn’t deny having done it, accepting his punishment with stoicism.
In some respects they should have left him on report for the duration of his last year; it would have cut down on meetings. He once farted so loudly in assembly that Will felt the vibrations through the legs of his chair five metres away. The mass chuckling soon turned to anguish as the stench crept over the waiting ranks like mustard gas on a battlefield. Will was sure he even saw some teachers smile at that one. However, true to his word to Freja, there had been no more fighting.
He hadn’t actually needed to. Nobody wanted to know, certainly not Rudd, who was comical in his avoidance techniques when he came into accidental proximity to Darren. Both he and Kostas returned to the relative safety of bullying new arrivals.
Thoughts of his mates made him check his watch, and it was now a minute past ten. Darren’s time keeping was exemplary so there must be something up. Feeling a weird sense of trepidation that he could not explain he walked his bike down to the bottom of the avenue. Strange how he hadn’t been down here before.
It was a wide, tree-lined road with three bungalows at the bottom. The middle one, which looked all the way down the street, had a slow, curving, shallow ramp leading to the front door and remembering Darren’s comments about his dad’s boots realised it had to be this one.
He lightly knocked on the door, fearing what may open it.
‘Lad,’ someone suddenly shouted. Will visibly jumped in the air, his nerves bow-tight. It was only the elderly neighbour whom Will had not seen as he was bent down gardening. He looked over and raised a quizzical brow.
‘Be careful if you go in there lad.’ He seemed to consider saying something else, then looked at his watch and instead quietly said, ‘You will probably be alright now?’ Then nodded his head and disappeared out of sight.
Will considered this and decided knocking again would not be needed.
As he turned to go the door opened and swung open to reveal a dishevelled man in a wheelchair. He had a dirty, old, blue football shirt on, tired red shorts and a pair of ancient-looking sandals. Will dragged his eyes away from the withered legs and saw a face that looked like it had lived a thousand lives and one of those seemed to have c
ost him an eye and most of the fingers of his left hand. His skin had a yellow tinge and the few remaining teeth looked lonely and unloved.
‘What?’ the man asked, his gaze narrowing. In that moment Will could see Darren, and maybe a glimpse of the man this broken shell used to be.
‘Is Darren here?’ he replied, trying and failing to keep his voice steady.
‘Are you a mate from school?’ To Wills nod of confirmation he said, ‘Come in.’
Will really didn’t want to go in but edged into the doorway. The house had a clean smell but there was an underlying hint of tobacco and something like marsh gas, however the hall and kitchen beyond were spotlessly clean.
‘Darren is out,’ he said slowly and gave him a weak smile. ‘Seems he is out a lot nowadays.’ Will got a sense of crushing loneliness from the tired eyes that looked back at him and felt sorry for the man. He imagined being an active decorated soldier and then being imprisoned in a wheelchair to live a life where your only child won’t even bring his school friends round.
He pondered for a second if there was a Mrs Connor but sensed there wasn’t. The house was tidied in a way a diligent man would. The few personal touches were distinctly male; a few photographs of soldiers, a ship in a bottle and a painting of what looked like a spitfire.
‘But he is a good boy,’ Darren’s dad added, as if he could read his mind. ‘He keeps this place spic and span, does the washing and cleaning now his mother’s gone, all the shopping too, so I don’t need to go out.’ He very slightly flinched at that, as though he would very much like to go out. ‘I can’t complain. He got a call last night though. He put the phone down afterwards very slowly and then simply ran out of the house. He didn’t even say goodbye.’ He muttered under his breath afterwards, ‘He does that a lot lately too.’
He backed up his wheelchair and seemingly forced himself to grin.
‘Come and have a cold drink. I’ve got some biscuits. It would be great to hear what kind of a man Darren has grown into. I taught him everything I know.’
It was Will who involuntarily flinched then, but his dad just laughed.
‘Yes, I bet there are some tales to tell.’
‘I’m sorry Mr Connor but it’s results day today and we are all meeting at Aiden’s house so we can get them together. It’s just he wasn’t where he normally is. Tell him I’ve gone to Aiden’s and I’ll see him there.’
‘Who is Aiden, another friend?’ he asked, looking pleased that he had some because it looked like he hadn’t met any.
Will smiled back and again felt sad that this man knew nothing of his son’s life. He clearly didn’t even know what an important day this was.
‘Will you come back and chat? I need to know my son is ok?’ he almost begged.
He held out his good hand and Will shook it, thinking that there would have to be an extremely unlikely run of events to make him returning here a possibility. He got on his bike and zoomed down the street to Aiden’s without a backward glance.
11
When he got to Aiden’s street it seemed eerily quiet. The sun was beating down now and Will was so thirsty he thought for the first time he would let himself in and get a glass of water. As he pulled up outside, he noticed an empty police car parked on the other side of the road. Thinking nothing of it he went round to the back door. He knew when he woke up this morning his world would be changing today. It would, but not how he expected it to.
He put his hand on the door handle and smiled, but before he entered it was opened from within and a very serious looking policeman came out of the house. Will stepped out of the way and let him by. Aiden’s dad followed him out. Will at least thought it was Aiden’s dad. When he saw his face it was as if all the goodness had been leached out of it like a dried peach. It looked like suddenly he had too much skin on his face. He had unshaven pasty jowls and heavy bags where before there had been none. He reminded him of pinhead in the Hellraiser films. Eyes so dark and distant that Will knew something terrible had happened.
‘Come with me Will, sit down here.’ Aiden’s dad took him over to a bench and sat him down. ‘There is no easy way to say this son, so I’m just going to say it. Freja has been killed in a car accident.’
For one of the few times in Will’s life he was fully aware. All of a sudden he felt the rough edges of the bench under his hand, saw the cat walk along the fence, heard its claws drag on the wood. He could hear a bird singing and the clink of milk bottles. He had to force himself to breathe. His eyes felt too big for their sockets all of a sudden. He didn’t know what to say, or do.
‘How?’ was all he said. Expecting it to come out dry and ragged, appropriate to the situation, but it came out normally, like he was checking a football result.
‘She went out in her car last night to get Darren a good luck card. She was only going down the road, lazy little sod. Her car and another misjudged the lights. Freak accident the police said. Normally there would be no injuries, but Freja’s car was blindsided and she broke her neck. Just like that. Here one minute and then gone.’ He took a deep breath and continued, even though it was a terrible effort.
‘She wasn’t back for some time. I don’t know why but I walked down there. Maybe I heard the sirens. I don’t know, but I seemed to know. I ran the last bit, never ran so fast.’ He stopped talking, screwed up his face. He took another huge breath through his nose and opened his eyes and continued. ‘I ran straight down the middle of the street, through the backed up traffic, like a madman. There wasn’t a mark on her car.’ His speech slowed almost to a standstill. ‘The car I bought her.’
He stopped. Will looked over expecting him to be crying, but he wasn’t. His jaw was clenched and Will could see him swallowing that piece of information. To save it for another time, when he would be able to use it to punish himself.
He quietly continued.
‘They were working on her when I arrived. They didn’t see me arrive. The first thing I heard was one of them say ‘She’s gone’. I don’t remember much after that. We went to the hospital. I saw her. I rang Darren. He saw her. We came home.’
They sat on the bench in silence for a few minutes. Will felt weird, almost wired. Was this shock, or was he missing some basic human feelings. He had to say something, but his mind was like an Antarctic landscape. He blurted out the one thing lurking at the back of his mind.
‘We need to get our exam results.’ Then he instantly felt dreadful for being so insensitive and began to apologise. ‘Sorry, I..’
His dad stopped him by placing his hand on his arm. ‘Life goes on Will, the world keeps spinning. Don’t worry about not knowing what to say or do. No-one does. Go on in, get them out of the house. I’m just going to sit here for a minute. Good luck.’
Will stood up and walked to the door. He looked back into the garden. James Hill was sat amongst the flowers in their busy garden, his head bent down as though in prayer. He could be in a cemetery now, Will thought and again wondered why he himself wasn’t crying.
He walked into the kitchen treading quietly like a burglar. He could hear some quiet music from the dining room and something else in the background, an almost mewling keening sound. He crept in and found Darren and Aiden sitting in chairs next to each other. Both had a similar expression to Aiden’s father on their face. Red, puffy eyes staring into a void.
Will still didn’t know what to say. He sat down opposite them and tried to get his head round it. The radio was playing. ‘Nothing Compares To You’ by Sinead O’Connor echoed around the room. He thought of Freja. He realised what a big part of his life she had become. She had been like a pretty bird that he could admire from a distance. She used to hug him all the time, giggling as he pulled away all embarrassed. She was probably someone he never appreciated. He looked at his two friends and knew their lives had been broken. Will could now hear chants of ‘No, no, no’ and howls of rage coming from upstairs. Darren reached over and turned the radio up a notch, but Will could still hear it. All their liv
es would never be the same again.
They sat there in silence barely moving, like three expressionless, lights-out automatons. Will felt as if the room had been pumped full of air. Too much air. The pressure pushing in on him. Increasing with every second. He thought of Freja and for a moment couldn’t remember her face or her laugh, yet there were pictures of her all over the room. These photos seemed to take on an almost otherworldly glow, almost as if her spirit was lifting itself out of them.
He rose out of his chair and walked to the big picture of Freja and Aiden sitting on the bonnet of the Range Rover taken that summer. Freja laughing at the camera, her arm playfully around his shoulder, Aiden gazing at her. The breeze tussled her hair whilst she displayed the thumbs-up sign at the camera. He felt the urge to touch the photo and consented to it, stroking her face. He could remember her now. Her hair had been so soft, light to the touch. He remembered how she would tap her manicured nails on the table when they played monopoly and she was winning. A happy look on her face, no poker player was she.
He realised he had loved her and that photo was how he would remember her.
The radio slipped onto Maria McKee and ‘Show Me Heaven’. They endured a succession of sad songs on Hereward FM’s ‘Housewife’s Hour’ as they sat there mute and stunned. Songs he would in the future feel the urge to hide from whenever they came on. Wherever he was in the world he would feel the need to change channels, leave shops where they played, talk loudly in bars, or he was instantly back here in a world he didn’t understand.
He couldn’t take anymore. His brain couldn’t cope. He flicked off the radio and went to the door.
‘Come on guys. Freja would want us to go.’ He didn’t know if that was true, he didn’t know why he hadn’t shed any tears, not even a trickle, he just knew he had to get out of here. They finally looked up at him through red rimmed eyes. ‘Carl will be waiting for us,’ he added. They eventually shuffled after him, like liberated prisoners of war, through the croaky screams from above and passed Aiden’s stunned father, still frozen on the bench.
Lazy Blood: a powerful page-turning thriller Page 7