Cryers Hill

by Kitty Aldridge

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  The ITA Experiment

  Acknowledgements

  CRYERS HILL

  Kitty Aldridge was born in Bahrain but grew up in England. She trained as an actress in London and has since worked in film, theatre and television as an actress and writer. Her acclaimed first novel, Pop, was published in 2001.

  ALSO BY KITTY ALDRIDGE

  Pop

  'In this lyrical, tender but troubling portrait of Deep England, Stanley Spencer shakes hands with Mike Leigh.'

  Boyd Tonkin, Independent

  'Aldridge has huge talent.'

  Guardian

  'This is impassioned, ingenious novel-writing at its magnificent best, bursting with beautiful sentences and revealing a mind possessed of an infectious wonder at the nature of things. From the call of the plover to the roar of the engine, everything is made glorious in Aldridge's elegant hand.'

  Melissa Katsoulis

  'Kitty Aldridge articulates well the depths of feeling that charge the hopes and anxieties of her characters with a poetic intensity. Their carefully observed, spirited portraits form much of the considerable charm of this powerful, slow-burning second novel.'

  James Urquhart, Sunday Telegraph

  'Cryers Hill is a beautiful novel, nostalgic without being cloying and suspenseful without being melodramatic . . . both a thumping good read and a cautionary tale about the dangers of educational experiments.'

  Big Issue

  KITTY ALDRIDGE

  Cryers Hill

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409079446

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Kitty Aldridge 2007

  Kitty Aldridge has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2007

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781409079446

  Version 1.0

  To Isabella, Joe, Ben and Katya

  The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet.

  Mark Twain

  One

  THE DOGS ARE beginning to bark. Every day it is this; same hour each dawn, precise as any farmyard rooster. Each has a distinct voice. Sean leans out of his bedroom window. Above him a dirty sky sparks gold in the far corner, where the green hill waits. Below him he can see the diggers, their yellow cooled to amber in the half-light. Forklifts and cement mixers, resting with yesterday's last brick or crumble of mortar gone cold in their teeth.

  The fastened-up houses are dark; the sleepers inside still strewn in their sheets. The air is turning pink; Sean breathes it in and feels his scalp creep and his legs chill. Everywhere you look are the orange-brick houses and the promise of more and more and more. Here are the houses-in-progress, the houses-in-waiting, the partial houses with their innards hanging out. Here are all the things you're not meant to see: the metal prongs and foam and breeze block, arterial pipes, asbestos fillings, and waterfalls of wiring. The serrated, sharp, jagged and gelled are all on display here: ducts, tubes, cavity walls, sheathing, joists, waste pipes. The bits, pieces, livers and lungs, dissected, cross-sectioned, unfinished. The families may watch, as they move in, their neighbours' houses in the next cul-de-sac growing from a set of spikes in the ground.

  Sean looks at the sky. Somewhere beyond the smeary grey, God is watching, deciding. Sean scans the estate. You must keep your eye on the ball; it is a known fact. Even when there appears to be no ball at all. There is always a ball. This much he knows.

  Sean Matthews stands at the bottom of George's Hill, more or less the very centre of the housing estate, with his hands on his hips. School is finished for the summer and last night, 20 July 1969, two men landed on the moon. This morning somebody mentioned that the earth was spinning at hundreds of miles per hour. Sean narrows his eyes against the grit and dust from the diggers, mixers and trucks, and tries to take all this in. His shaggy head is yellow and as round as the sun that hangs directly above him. His legs are sturdy; they carry him each day, in reasonably straight lines, after the girl he believes he cannot live without. He is her attending page, his chin low under his gold helmet of hair. Sean, flat-nosed, slope-eyed Sean, with his scooping walk and his hiccuping laugh. A boy whose waking thoughts drift high above the clouds, even while he traipses on his stout legs, limping, dragging, perhaps the wail of a radio song drifting over his shoulder.

  Sunlight falls across the estate-in-progress, sending the dust rising like steam at a sulphur springs. Sean glances down at his feet encased in their C
larks sandals and he wonders, what if they can't get back to earth, Neil and Buzz? Whatif?

  Nothing will grow well here. No one knows why. There are stones in the soil; it is full of rocks and lumps of chalk that crumble into powdery pieces, flecking the earth with white, and dry, dry, dry. But it doesn't stop people gardening. On the contrary, they appear encouraged. In the coppery evenings made soft with brick dust you can see them leaning on rakes and hoes, pale and fleshy in their flip-flops, strolling about their few square feet, oblivious to the neighbour, identically occupied, the other side of the chicken wire. The air is filled with the ting-ting of rakes combing over broken stones and the sweetly ripe pong of fertiliser as it folds into the sorry soil in big hopeful spadefuls. Everybody sprays and digs and hoes and starts again, sleeves rolled up and mouths set firm like the Pilgrim Fathers. Some things grow, weeds do well, especially nettle and dock and dandelion, and the piles of bricks grow too and the dust and the fat rubbery babies whose banshee yells can be heard over the roar of machinery. Above the earth two men are prancing about on the moon. They cannot be seen with the naked eye. The naked eye, Sean thinks. Whatif they never come back?

  'Want to see something magic?'

  Sean is confident. He has combed his hair to the side and leans with his hands in his pockets. Ann narrows her eyes, stops chewing.

  'No. I'm having my tea p'sof. What?'

  'You'll have to come.'

  'No. Where?'

  Sean raises his eyebrows, hinting, he hopes, at unfathomable mystery. 'Not far. See something. Want to?'

  Ann is annoyed by this acquisition by him of some mysterious fact she knows nothing about. She is mildly revolted also by his display of showy confidence. She waits until her silence unnerves him and he blinks first.

  'Wait then.' And she slams the door in his face.

  They go the short way, as fast as they can, past the school where they are learning to read a modern alphabet – not the traditional true one, a new one, a kind of liar alphabet. It is an official experiment, like space travel. Along the dirt paths they go and then across the fields. You have to watch what the farmer puts in here. There are bulls sometimes; a man from Hazlemere was very nearly speared through the spleen. Now whenever he goes to the pub everyone shouts, 'Olé!'

  Sean tells Ann. She stares at him, but does not comment. Ann does not blink if she can help it. Anyway, she has other things on her mind. There are no dangerous beasts in the field today. Only grass, dock and dandelion, and a tall blue sky, flaring in the corner where the sun lies idle.

  Sean tries to chase but Ann will not run, so he is forced to trot circles around her and burp, which she ignores. She walks elegantly, with wading-bird aloofness. Sean tries fart noises.

  At the farm they turn left and head for the woods. The dairy herd are in for milking; some of them waiting by the fence turn to watch them pass. Something about their fixed, white-lashed stare, unblinking, and only the briefest pause in their chewing, reminds Sean of Ann. Then their big heads swing away again as one.

  Cockshoot Wood is dark and still. Sean and Ann skirt around it, scooping through grass that clicks and sizzles with insects. From the wood comes the voice of a pigeon, oo-look, oo-look, he coos. A woodpecker laughs.

  To the left is the first of several dewponds, fringed with brown and purple grasses and busy in summer with frogs and snails and numerous insects busily rowing themselves to and fro on copper-wire legs. The tiny muntjac deer tiptoe from the wood to drink here at the start and end of the day; foxes come too and tumbling balls of hedgehogs.

  The pull of the wood is strong enough to prevent you looking where you are going; the shadows are tempting. Sean and Ann look back at it over their shoulders as they run, as though they are expecting something to rush out, or fearful they may themselves be drawn helplessly in. The noises, exotic and inexplicable, come one at a time, magnified by the pauses. Fluty notes, then nothing. A sudden ptchoo, as though something unseen were unable to contain a sneeze.

  Sean and Ann run. Sean wants to be fastest, to beat her. He pumps his elbows and rushes till there is a wind in his teeth. He cannot help admiring his running. He notices that Ann appears not to rush at all, but merely glides sideways while the grass flows under her feet. This is the kind of girl she is. Nature itself is careful around her. You will never stare down Ann Hooper; she can outstare anyone, she is undisputed champion. She does not blink unless it is absolutely necessary, nor giggle, nor cry, nor chatterbox with girls.

  Sean has realised over time that Ann's loveliness comes from the things in her face that are not quite right. Her eyes are wide apart, the same shade of brown as her hair, and would be pretty if not for the look they carried, which is stupefied and mildly criminal. She has a broad meaty nose that is softened by a downpour of freckles, and a small sullen mouth filled with sharp teeth. In the point of her foxy chin is a dent, hollowed as if it were done hastily with the end of a spoon. Ann doesn't laugh often, but when she does it is like your life being spared.

  Sean can't help it: the world stops where she stands. She is older than him by a year and a bit. He likes to place himself before her, a soldier to his Queen, and stare up at her face, while she gazes, unblinking, over his head. She has awoken in him a courage he hadn't known he possessed. She has made him want to run and fight; she has made him think of blood and rockets and battles and nudity. He wants to tap her on the shoulder and say, 'Come on. You're with me.' But he doesn't. Instead, Sean presents himself daily at Ann's house, arriving either around the back, by the garages, where he waits for her to fly up over the fence on her swing, 'Wotcha', or, at the front, where he sits on the mounds of dirt and builders' sand gawping up at her bedroom window. He can easily be viewed from the house, kicking something off his shoe, rolling bricks around with a stick, staring into space. Sometimes Ann opens her mouth to shout something down at him, then changes her mind. Sean sits like a weary traveller, elbows on his knees, mop of yellow hair blinding him to the obvious. He does not know enough to be vain about his hair, though it hangs glossily in his eyes like the kind of yellow hair you find on the heads of righteous characters in fairy tales.

  He decided the first time he saw her. 'Hello. Your name's Ann.' His first words to her, telling her like that, asserting what he knew. It had been his only moment of power, those first few seconds between them. After that she was in charge.

  'P'sof, spastik.'

  He clung on, obstinately, for a while.

  'Make me, then.'

  But she was already lost to him.

  'Pissof, oppit.'

  'Says who?'

  'P'sof, don't talk to spastix, do I?'

  'P'sof yself, then.'

  Then she walked away and he followed. And this was the beginning, they had got the formalities out the way. Her leading, him following, flaxen page in royal footsteps. Sean Matthews fell in love with an older girl before he was nine. Nobody thought it would last.

  Sean cycled as fast as he could past the newest nearly-houses; past the diggers and mixers and waiting towers of bricks that touched the sky. Clouds of red dust obscured the road and billowed up in drifts like battle smoke. He rode blindly on, directionless, while a Dixieland of jackhammers and electric saws shrieked and thumped behind him.

  He went around the front and rang the bell. He wasn't going to wait all afternoon for her at the back fence, life was too short, his life at any rate, lately. The house seemed dark and cool inside. He thought he heard a sound like singing, or perhaps a person speaking in a swirly way, a kind of complaining. He put his finger to the bell to ring again and the door opened, as though someone had been there all the time.

  If he had checked his reflection in a car wing mirror beforehand, Sean would have seen a small ghoul, recently dug from the ground, with hot red eyes, dusted from head to toe with brick and cement dust. Ann stared gravely at him for a long time. 'I'm dying,' he said. Very good – he was pleased with that.

  She didn't move at first. Her eyes travelled up and do
wn him, and then a thing from the gods for which he would for ever rejoice: she blinked.

  *

  They run the usual way, along the dirt paths, across the fields and alongside Cockshoot Wood. Everything is strangely still today. There is no birdsong or vixen bark. There is no clue as to why. They go past the dewponds and then away from the ancient castle that is no longer there, to the woodland pond.

  When they arrive they are breathless and hot and have to collapse noisily for a while in the long reeds. Sean looks up and sees Ann's face blotting out the sun. And though he has imagined it a thousand times, it surprises him. It is where it ought to be, above him, falling to earth. He hopes it might kiss him, please God try. She does open her mouth, but she talks.

  You could drown yourself it doesn't hurt.'

  He waits while the words fall down on his face. He waits for them to make sense, to realise she didn't say that at all, but something else like, Can't you see I love you, darling, I've always loved you, the way they talk in the black-and-white films on Sundays. After a moment he realises she said what she said. He wasn't sure if he should reply or not.

  'Drowning is quick and you don't feel none of it.' She smiles softly. He wants the smile to go on and on. He wants to stop his life right here. He wants to pull the bus cord – ding – like you do when you want to get off. He will lie back under her smile for a hundred years. Maybe drowning wouldn't be so bad.

  'Nah,' he says. 'No ta.'

  She moves away. 'Spaz.' And the sun lands in his face. He feels her body falling next to his. The air feels cooler in spite of the glare. He has her smile though, he has held it in his mind, trapped it under glass so he can look at it any time.

  Two

  THERE IS A naked man at large. Three sightings so far. Four if you include this morning, when he appeared to Ann and Sean. They walked to school the long way, by Widmer Farm to pinch the ripe plums that fell when you shook the trees along the fence, then ran to the allotments, and sat on the gate opposite the lower fields to eat them. They had each eaten two when a tall man without a stitch on, nothing except for shoes, came bursting out of the covert by the ancient oaks and started to sprint across the grass in front of them.