There was nothing to be done about it, so Ann and Sean carried on chewing, and watched. He ran well, long arching strides, arms pumping. Ann noted that his hair, though balding, was rather wavy and grew out of his shoulders too. They watched until the man reached the perimeter of the field, where he paused under a giant sycamore. He did not appear to be out of breath. On the contrary, he began a series of slow, inexplicable movements, before fastening himself against the tree, where he remained for several seconds. Ann and Sean looked at one another, their mouths purple-raw from plum juice, and Sean became aware that he might quite like to press the plum stone in his hand against Ann's teeth until she struggled and then he would have to use his body to pin her down, p'raps kneel on her. But instead he said, That's not right.'
Ann didn't reply. She chose silence for a response, in the hope it might convey superior knowledge. Sean remembered the bus-stop snoggers, interlocked at impossible angles, all joined up at the mouth, two by two, like they were waiting for Noah's Ark to pull up, instead of the 11 and 14 to High Wycombe. A naked man. A streaker. Streakers were modern; they were all the rage; they were on the news, chased by crowds of police officers. What was a streaker doing in Cryers Hill? Where were the policemen who were supposed to be chasing him? Sean wished Lothian were with them. Lothian Dickey, a boy with a hero's name. Only the coils of sable hair hinted at his Celtiberian inheritance, a clue to the bronze and iron heart. 'Black as a tinker's pot,' was how the mothers agreed to describe the raven black of those curls. Lothian would have known what to do about a streaker. Lothian was from Dumfries. When he spoke, a strange beautiful sound came out, like words blown through some sort of gas; a Scottish riddle with a daring rise and fall that pulled the words taller and shorter at the same time. 'Aye,' he would say, as though referring only ever to himself, as if no one else mattered. But mostly Lothian said very little at all.
Lothian's dad worked at Harwell, with the graphite reactors. He had blown-up hair and wild eyes, like he'd swallowed the uranium. Once upon a time he had made his son a bow and a set of arrows with cardboard flights and Lothian had become quite the little archer on the streets of Glencaple. Subsequently the cello-throb of his bowstring could be heard each evening as he stalked the Cryers Hill estate, releasing his arrows over the diggers and brick piles, firing them through the nearly-windows like one of King Malcolm's own archers at Carham. The Dickey family stayed a few months, before moving to Southampton. Sean had kept Lothian's address in his pocket until the pencil words faded completely away.
'Bang bang pop pop, you're dead, I'm not.' This is what Kevin Atkinson says. Kevin has worn the same limp blue shorts and red pullover for months, even now that it's summer. Nobody takes him seriously. He runs sideways, with his mouth open. Bang bang pop pop.
'Waaaah!' replies Charlie Burns.
Adam Duke wheels around with his hands on his hips, eyes bulging. 'We need gunpowder!' He kicks the ground and walks showily up and down.
The girls are standing in a straggly group. There are no straight lines; hair, ankles, arms, heads, all angled, crooked, curled. In their faces a mixture of indifference and incomprehension. What are girls for? Sean used to think. Apart from pushing prams around. What are they actually for? He concluded there was no obvious point to them. He knows better now. Now that he is eight and a half. The boys run in straight lines between one pointless task and another, bawling out live reports. 'I am running! Aaagghh! I are here! A big hole! Charlie! It's got water! Quick! Get off! Run! Waaahhh!'
The girls, in contrast, sidle, idle, circle. They communicate in whispers, murmurs and coded giggles. They sway in groups, like exotic fish, swirls of hair and skirt, watching the boys with a practised air of disapproval, already softening into a sort of resigned affection. The boys regard the girl groups with fear and disgust. Girls produce an invisible magic that turns each boy into the other's vilest enemy, enchanting them so that they fall on one another with fists, feet and threats, while the girls giggle approvingly.
Jason Smith has a secret he is telling everyone. He says he can understand bird talk. He says what they say is mostly rubbish not worth listening to. He says it with his hands behind his head and his foot tapping as if it's an actual truth. Sean reckons if this is lying then it's very good. Jason doesn't know any breeds of bird. He only knows that the fat brown ones make jangling calls all summer and like to sit on high perches. However, he insists birds are very intelligent, in spite of all their chatter. Calling someone birdbrain is not an insult, it's a compliment. Jason says this twice. He is pleased with the way it sounds: official. Sean realises he has never thought about the word birdbrain before, that it is a compliment in disguise. He hopes he is one.
*
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Astride their bikes the Dewell gang lean against fences at increasingly unlikely angles. They fold their arms and sway in the saddle, cocky and sure as a circus troupe. Rod is their leader. In truth, Sean prefers the idea of sticks and stones; it is the names he can't tolerate. The way they are broadcast for a start. If only they could be written down on slips of paper, folded, for only him to see, edged through his letter box, or handed to him quietly. Why does everyone else have to know? This way they become official, like a replacement name. The worst part is their killing accuracy. Spaz, dwarf, germ. It is uncanny. Pygmy, squirt, runt, leg, Nelly, midge, spaz. Spaz had stuck. He is Spaz now more than he is Sean. He is rarely Sean; only in the classroom, at Christmas, and during the police interviews that were taking place every day in the school dining hall.
'Want to see a streaker?' Sean asks Rod, hoping this might buy him some time. Whole summers in the saddle meant the Dewell gang ride as well as any highwaymen; backwards, sideways, in the air and after dark; as though boy and bike were a whole animal, fused together. They fly up and down the hill day and night, unearthly as centaurs. They ride inside the almost-houses on their rubber-tyre horses, up and down the splintery staircases, through the wind-blown bedrooms, down the precariously balanced plank ramps that lean out of naked window holes. They fill the houses with screams and disagreement before any family has even had the chance. You can't know where they'll appear next. Their faces pop out of window holes and doorways, rear up over fences and burst from behind brick mountains. They flit between puffs of diesel smoke like fiends. Their presence signals that things are poised to go awry. They appear not to be interested in his streaker.
'Sorry, but can I get past please?' Sean says it as pleasantly as he can. He waits while his brain plays the pictures of them flinging young adders across the stream by Widmer Farm.
'Sorry but can I get past please!' they chorus, a satanic choir at the creosote gates. There is nothing Sean is actually sorry for, except maybe being in this moment, in this place, at this time, with boys whose legs are wheels, and whose hearts have cemented over, along with the farmland. Afterwards, as he hunches down and walks briskly away, he realises that, in spite of everything, he believes one day he will foil them. This is what happens in stories, even liar-alphabet ones. The baddies always get what is coming to them.
The camp is empty. Just Steven Bone, sitting with his back to them, cross-legged in a recently purloined steel sink. He flashes around, stubby fringe in his eyes. 'Can I help you?' he cries archly. He is ignored. The camp is in the wilderness. The wilderness is the remaining shred of green on the estate. A surviving tangle of vegetation and trees. Dazzling green where the sun flares and darkening in the shadows. At the height of summer it is jungle-lush with things that climb and twine. You can listen to the creaks and whispers of the vegetation, you can feel the sensation of its animal eye, the hush while it remembers its secrets. From here you can still hear the rumble of diggers and thump of piledrivers. The diesel throws a brown haze over the sun, making the sky hot and oily, making the clouds slide and curdle. One of these days the forgotten bit of wilderness will also be dug out and thrown away to make room for more houses and dirt gardens where nothing new will grow.
For now it belongs to the estate kids, their own patch, to do with as they please. They have built a house. What else? An improvised copycat among all the orange-brick examples. Three estate dogs lie in the shade, belonging to who knows who. Estate dogs roam free.
There is a noise like the cry of metal birds. Everyone stops to listen, all the kids and dogs with heads tilted high. It's louder now, a terrible scraping, a scream. Keith Dodd's stubby legs appear first, through the leaves, beneath the branches, short, determined strides. Then his fishbone body, shirtless, and his sharp face, bright with anticipation. He stops and the screaming is silenced. He waits, watching everyone watching him, savouring his Trojan moment, a leaf in his hair. Behind him a giant loop of metal shivers; a great silver coiling wave, glinting in the sun, like a curl of ocean. Keith, the grubby merman, has captured it from the builders' heap and dragged it, shrieking, all the way up George's Hill Road. It will live on top of the sawn timbers that make the roof, like a roll of surf about to break.
Three
A GIRL HAS been murdered in Gomms Wood. A local tragedy, that is what they are calling it, that is what it is. Local Tragedy it said in the paper. Only weeks ago she had been in Sean's school making woollen horses with her friend Cindy. She could stand on a swing and fold her tongue in half.
'Why you so short, Sean?' she used to say, and Sean would reply, 'Why you so ugly?' He felt bad about that now. She wasn't ugly at all, he just couldn't think what else to say. It was what you said to girls, they didn't like it.
The girl was discovered by a local man walking his dog. She was folded in bracken, sparkling with maggots, with leaves in her hair. Her skin was turning mauve. The policemen came to the woods with their measuring tapes and flash photography. They arrived sombre and determined in short dark coats. They crunched through the undergrowth and put their hands in the earth. They squatted and knelt, while above them the trees whispered shhh, shhh, and the shadows drew back. The policemen left the woods and walked around the housing estates and farms. They knocked on doors and they asked people questions. Black-and-white pictures of the girl fluttered on trees; she looked surprised. Did you see her on Friday 4 May? the words asked those who knew their traditional ABC, and people tried to remember. But even if he had known how to read, Sean couldn't recall dates or what happened on them. She was wearing red trousers and a pink top, she had a blue purse for her dinner money, coaxed the words.
There was a number to ring if you had something to say. Some people rang it. Sean wondered what they said. He had things to say, but he wasn't going to ring the number and say them, just like that. There was something he could have said, should have said, but it was too late now. Now he wanted to say things that were not about her.
He looked at the number on the trees, below the girl's amazed smile. He tried to see if her tongue was folded or unfolded, and he thought about the other things he wanted to say.
No one was arrested. Some men were questioned. Nobody knew who these men were, but there were suspicions. The locals reckoned it had to be a man who was responsible, not a woman, and the police didn't contradict them. Sean marvelled at their guessing powers. Then it was decided he was a tall man with an evil soul and a nasty past, who lived in the vicinity but not locally and worked casually or not at all. They all agreed it was not anybody they knew; they all agreed they'd know him if they saw him. Sean supposed he was as good as caught. The mothers huddled in groups. They said hanging was too good for him.
The men from the housing estates and the farms set out after dark. United for the first time, they decided to spread out over six square miles. They covered woodland, lanes, fields and streams. Their torch beams slid into ditches, troughs and coppices, dazzling hedgehogs and foxes. They shone their light wherever it would reach, crossing beams in their urgency, blinding one another. They walked four, five abreast, murmuring while they lit their cigarettes. What did they expect to find? Their beast under a blackberry bush, lurking on a bridle path, up a tree? P'raps a message, or maybe a clue? No one commented. It didn't matter. When they got home they felt like better men.
No answers came. They began to talk of other things on the high street, at the pub and at the school. The weather-streaked pictures of the girl came down and the police stopped knocking on doors and jogging people's memories. People no longer telephoned the number with something to say. Now it was time to forget.
She was buried in St Mary's Churchyard at the top of Cryers Hill Lane. Two wispy angels floated at the corners of her gravestone, watching over her, tooting their trumpets; too late, some might argue. There were no angels, musically inclined or otherwise, in Gomms Wood on 4 May 1969. There was only panic and struggle and darkness.
Later, as the men walked together in ranks, burning up the spinneys and hedgerows with their bright white lights, they would discover they could not chase the darkness away. The darkness was here to stay.
Four
IN THE AUTUMN of 1934, Walter Brown and his friend Charles Sankey went rabbiting. The moon floated up, released by the tall trees at the edge of Gomms Wood. She went up like a helium ship; wobbled, steadied, and silvered the fields over. Sankey was an inveterate hunter before he turned Methodist. His sensitive hearing and long fingers suited him to poaching and religion both. He seemed a tall man, though he was well below six foot. His high forehead pinned his hat down low over his eyes. The pale light of his teeth revealed him in the dark.
As soon as its neck was broken Sankey loosened the rabbit's body between his fingers. Once they were limp he stroked them tenderly down their long backs, like he was easing out their souls. Death is always a surprise, even when you see it coming.
Walter and Sankey hung two nets. The moon was bright as blindness. Sankey preferred nets to snares; he didn't use gin traps, he had seen enough of those. Sometimes, when an animal had been struggling for a long time, it would get a look in its eye that told you it understood things had turned bad. In order to die you had to stop struggling. Charles Sankey had seen it so.
Walter Brown had seen things somewhat differently. He had inherited an allotment from his father. He was not a particularly keen gardener, but his father had died there, on his knees, at gooseberry level. They found him that way, knelt, slumped, a bower of berries over his head. He was buried in St Mary's Churchyard at the top of Cryers Hill Lane.
Walter's mother had found it comforting, the fact that he had expired on his knees. Walter found it unnerving. You almost never heard of people dead on their knees. Mostly people tended to die on their backs or stomachs, or sides, and feet of course, occasionally. Anyway, it took them a long time to straighten him out. After that, whenever engaged in the task of unfolding something, Walter found himself thinking queasily of his father. He avoided at all cost any situation that might require him to kneel. In church he blamed it on sciatica, though he was just eighteen years of age.
Walter had also inherited his father's lantern jaw and drooping brown eyes, and his tall slim neck with its sharp Adam's apple. Perhaps his shyness too was passed on and his habit of rubbing his cheek. Where he got his fondness for fancy words, no one could tell. While he was not passionate about fruit or vegetables, unlike his father before him, Walter did not neglect the allotment. On the contrary, he punished his ambivalence by spending long hours bending, squatting – rather than kneeling – over rhubarb, spinach and chard. The trouble with vegetables in particular was they didn't lead to anything; they were merely their awkward, mucky selves; a few vitamins for a lot of hard work. He found fruit more uplifting. But it was poetry that Walter reserved himself for. He was keen on the Romantics: Byron, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth. But also John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, George Crabbe and James Clarence Mangan. He didn't own many volumes, so he borrowed extensively from the library. He reckoned the pleasure of a good poem could put a curve into a flat day.
*
At Sean's school they learn a brand-new type of reading and writing. Phonetic. It is an experiment. Newfangled. It's no
t bad. It is not the usual alphabet, it is a new one; a liar alphabet. It's modern. They had been reading a trap for lieonz at the time of the Local Tragedy. After reading they did cutting and sticking.
The light in the classroom was a pale blue reflection of the painted walls turned greenish by electric light. It made Sean feel sick. He found himself watching the others as they glued, folded, trimmed and decorated with the absorption of master engravers, but he could not persuade himself to try a sticky creation of his own. He stared through the window at the gulf of blue sky beyond the Esso garage and the Grange Farm fields until it became a sea on which his bobbing thoughts set sail one by one, little rudderless boats, drifting and then falling over the edge of the horizon. The windows, burned by the sun, shone like shields. The smell of glue and felt-tip pens turned his head hazy, his tongue floated in his mouth. He watched the scraggy elm outside waving its bony branches backwards and forwards until he was stunned. The fur-lined drone of a faraway voice hummed through the heat, filtering into his blood, buzzing up and down his bones. This was school. Like being put to death: a lethal experimental dose.
The movement of Ann suddenly rising from her seat roused him. He watched her walk across the room, head hanging as if one of her strings were broken, languid, indifferent. Ann was fifteen months older than Sean; she was in the year above, but the two classes always did cutting and sticking together on a Tuesday. The room made him think of a boat: the blue and green, the sticky collage of wool and yarn strung in waves across the wall, the cries of the gulls from the river.
'Sean Matthews, are you with us?' It was true, he was anaesthetised; indeed he was dead, they would have to summon him with Ouija.
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