Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

  As he walked along the lanes he breathed in the night air and felt how sharp and cold it was inside him. He’d never actually run away from home before, which was quite remarkable considering what a hot-headed boy Finn could be. He’d certainly contemplated running away on any number of occasions. In some ways this just seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out. One or two aspects of running away made him a little nervous, such as the possibility of being murdered or starving to death. But as he walked along, with his little suitcase full of socks and the moon bright and clear above him, he told himself that any boy who was as stubborn as he was and who was in possession of as many opinions must have a fair chance of making a success of it.

  He reached the edge of the woods in less than half an hour. They weren’t the sort of woods that children were encouraged to enter, not least because they were so impenetrably deep. Grown men had headed into those woods, loaded up with food and all sorts of maps and compasses and never been seen or heard of again. The only time Finn had ever been in them was with his mother and they had gone no more than fifty or a hundred yards. Certainly, no child had ever been known to go anywhere near them after dark.

  It was very strange, but the moment Finn set foot in the woods he felt a powerful change come over him. The smell of the earth and the bark made him feel most welcome. And the sounds were nothing like what he had imagined. The place was alive – ticking and clicking like a vast, natural engine. And as he went deeper into the woods he could feel the trees slowly close behind him, as if they were sealing him in.

  He walked for a while – perhaps just twenty minutes – then sat under a huge, tall tree. He opened his little case. In the moonlight he could make out the balls of socks, all huddled together, which for some reason made him feel inconsolably sad. So he closed the lid, placed the case on the ground and carried on walking. And he kept on walking for the rest of the night.

  When the sun finally rose the sound of the woods slowly shifted, from the clicking and ticking to a mad sort of chatter, as if half the wood’s population was waking whilst the other half was going to bed.

  He decided to rest and sat on the ground. The day went by, but went by so slowly. He heard various rustlings and rummagings in the bushes – some close, some quite far away – but apart from a few birds and a great many insects he didn’t see anything particularly interesting. The only significant event of that first day came late in the afternoon, when he heard a woman’s voice, his mother’s voice, calling out his name. He could hear her getting close, then a little closer. Then he heard her slowly fading away.

  On the second day he woke up feeling mighty hungry. He’d been crying in the night, he seemed to remember. He knew that it was him who’d been doing the crying, but he’d been half-asleep at the time, so it was almost as if it was someone else and that he was just listening, just as he’d listened to his mother’s voice the day before.

  He climbed one or two trees and picked some fruit and berries. Those that tasted good he put to one side and finished later. Those that made him sick he made sure not to pick again. And as the days went by he found that he could eat all sorts of things – such as twigs and grass – without them causing him too much trouble. He ate more or less whatever took his fancy and drank the water from the stream.

  When the sun went down he wrapped himself in leaves and branches. He would scoop a shallow pit in the ground and pull the twigs and soil right over him. He once tried sleeping up a tree, which was incredibly uncomfortable and he spent the whole night quite convinced that he was going to fall out of it and break his neck.

  He got much better at running and climbing and breaking things open. He felt himself slowly change, in all sorts of immeasurable ways. But all the time he kept on moving. Not in any particular direction – just deeper and deeper into the woods.

  It may have been a couple of weeks or a couple of months later when he suddenly realized he’d stopped thinking about his mother. He’d just not thought about her in a long, long while. And if his body was changing then so was the way his mind operated. It had been whittled away into something smooth and simple. The only thing that was important was the very next minute. And there was something deeply reassuring in that.

  He patched his shoes and clothes with whatever happened to be lying about the place. Folded leaves and bits of bark began to sprout out of him and he began to suspect that if he stood still for long enough the world wouldn’t notice and that he would simply disappear. He found a broken branch which, with a little work, looked a bit like the pipes he used to see the old men smoking. And some nights, just before going to bed, he would sit and put his pipe in his mouth, like they used to do. Of course, he had no matches or tobacco. So he just used to chew on it as he looked between the trees which stretched away into the distance, and this seemed to help him relax and prepare for the long, dark night ahead.

  He’d been in the woods for quite some time. Perhaps a year or two. His hair was long and tangled and his skin was thick with dirt. He was sitting on a fallen tree, watching the insects crawl across its rotten carcass when he heard a crackle of leaves not far behind him and turned to find a great brown dog, no more than ten feet away. As soon as the dog noticed him it froze. It bared its teeth and started growling. It kept its eyes locked on the boy. But the boy didn’t move. He just sat on his old dead tree and watched the dog and started talking. Talked about all sorts of things – most of which made hardly any sense – but in a calm and steady voice. And as he talked the dog slowly stopped its growling, until it finally dropped its head and crept away.

  Over the next two or three days he’d occasionally hear the crack of a twig somewhere in the distance or a rustle in the bushes. Then, one night, he scooped himself a bed and pulled some leaves and branches over him and when he woke the following morning he found the dog curled up right next to him. The dog appeared to be fast asleep but the boy felt reasonably sure that it was just pretending. Its eyes were closed but it seemed to be listening to his every move. And from that day forward the dog was a constant companion, with its long brown ears hanging down around its features and its big brown eyes always watching him.

  As they tramped through the woods the dog would sometimes go charging off into the bushes, but would always come cantering back within a minute or two. They seemed to get along very well. Two or three times a day they would stop and rest, but on the whole they preferred to keep on moving, even though they had no particular destination in mind.

  After a while, the boy found that he and the dog could communicate quite well with one another. In the evenings the boy would get out his home-made pipe and the two of them would sit and talk about whatever came to mind. The dog told the boy how it had been beaten by its owner. Half-way through the story, the dog stopped and stared at the ground and seemed full of shame. He’d been beaten two or three times, the dog said, but the next time it happened he decided he’d had enough so he jumped out of a window and just started walking and ended up in the woods.

  The dog asked the boy how he came to be living out in the wild. The boy was surprised to find that he couldn’t remember. He remembered having an argument with somebody and, like the dog, making up his mind to run away. But for a boy who had once taken such pride in his opinions he now found that there were great holes in his memory, and what had once seemed so fixed and solid had been all but washed away.

  The boy and the dog hardly ever argued. The only thing they disagreed about was what to eat. They never questioned where they were heading or why they were walking. They just kept putting one foot in front of the other until the sun started to slip from the tops of the trees, at which point they would stop and try to find somewhere dry to spend the night.

  One evening they were sitting and talking when the boy asked if the dog had ever had a name. The dog sat and thought for a moment. He said he felt sure he used to have one but couldn’t recall it. Anyway, he said, it was a name given him by his cruel owner, so he had no wish to be called by it.<
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  ‘What about you?’ said the dog. ‘You must have had a name.’

  The boy looked suddenly troubled.

  ‘I did,’ he said, ‘but I’ve forgotten it.’

  The fact that he’d forgotten his name bothered the boy a great deal more than it bothered the dog. The boy sat and chewed it over, until the dog told him not to worry about it. Then they lay down, pulled the leaves around them and tried to get some sleep.

  A couple of months later, they were walking along when the boy was suddenly swamped by a peculiar feeling. He stopped and looked all around him. The dog asked what was the matter, but the boy wasn’t sure. The trees in that particular part of the wood seemed oddly familiar. As if he had visited them in a dream. They walked on for a little while longer, then the boy suddenly stopped again. He turned and pointed to a huge tree in the distance.

  ‘I know that tree,’ he said.

  The boy and the dog went over to it. When they got there the boy started rooting around in the bushes beneath it.

  The dog asked him what he was looking for.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the boy.

  He picked up a stick and began to hack away at the bracken and finally found a small suitcase tucked away in a clutch of ferns. The sides of the case were all stained and sodden. Its lid was covered with a thick green coat of moss. He crouched down, pushed back the latches and the locks sprang open. He lifted the lid and found the balls of socks inside.

  The dog stuck his nose in the case and had a sniff around.

  ‘Are they yours?’ said the dog.

  The boy looked quite baffled. ‘I think they must be,’ he said.

  They sat by the tree for a while. The boy felt as if he had too many thoughts for his head to handle. He felt as if all the trees which had been keeping him secret were slowly being stripped away. He looked up and nodded into the distance.

  ‘That’s where I come from,’ he said.

  The dog looked in the same direction. ‘Are you going back there?’ he said.

  The boy kept staring into the distance.

  ‘I haven’t decided,’ he said at last.

  They crept up to the edge of the trees, waited until it was dark, then waited a little while longer. Then they got to their feet and said their goodbyes. The boy knew what the dog wanted to know, without it even asking.

  ‘When you’re tired of waiting, go,’ he said.

  The boy set off down the lane. With every step another memory seemed to come to meet him and another part of his past fell into place. For the first time in years he knew where he was going. He wasn’t sure that he liked it. His feet seemed to be slowly leading him back home. And within half an hour he was standing in the dark, looking up at the cottage where he’d spent so much of his young life.

  He opened the gate, slipped into the garden and tiptoed over to a window where a light was shining. And there, sitting in her old armchair, was the boy’s mother. She was sleeping and looked much older than the boy remembered, but she was his mother just the same.

  He wanted to rush in and throw his arms around her. Wanted to tap at the window and wake her from her dreams. But he found that he couldn’t. He couldn’t tear himself away from the life he’d made for himself in the woods and go back to his old life. So he just stood there, like a ghost at the window, watching his mother silently sleep.

  He ran back down the lanes with all the memories rushing around him. The night seemed a great deal wilder and more frightening than any he’d spent among the trees. When he reached the edge of the wood the dog crept out to meet him. He studied the boy, to try and work out what was going on inside of him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said the dog eventually.

  The boy nodded. And without another word, they turned and disappeared back into the trees.

  Crossing the river

  A‘hearse’ is basically a large black car for ferrying dead people from one place to another, with big windows down both sides so that you can see the coffin, and a handful of men in black suits, sitting bolt upright, to keep it company.

  Hearses tend to go very slowly. Hearses just sort of glide along. And as they make their way down the streets they bring a melancholy air along with them, like a big, black cloud blocking out the sun.

  It is considered bad manners for other cars to honk their horns or flash their lights at hearses to tell them to get a move-on, just as it is considered bad manners to knock over old ladies or laugh out loud in libraries. When you see a hearse with a coffin on board it is customary to remove your hat and stand to attention while it passes. If you’re not wearing a hat then you should bow your head. This is called ‘showing respect for the dead’, but, in truth, what you’re really showing respect for is Death itself.

  The Woodruffs were perfectly suited to undertaking. Old Man Woodruff had a face like a bloodhound and his three sons – Vernon, Earl and Leonard – were about as miserable a bunch of men as you could hope to meet. The Woodruffs hadn’t been the happiest family to begin with. Then Lillian Woodruff, wife and mother, died before her sons had finished growing up, which made a hard life even harder and left a stain of sadness on all four of them.

  Old Man Woodruff liked to sit in the passenger seat. He considered it his right as the family elder and reckoned his dour demeanour helped set the right tone. His sons weren’t particularly bothered where they sat, although Vernon did most of the driving, which meant that Earl and Leonard usually ended up in the back.

  When they were out in the car it was generally felt that they should look straight ahead and be as impassive as possible. Nose-picking, smiling, yawning and face-pulling were all considered inappropriate. If they passed an old friend in the street, they confined themselves to a curt nod of the head or discreet little wink and any conversation in the hearse itself was conducted out of the corner of the mouth, with a minimum of expression.

  But the Woodruffs certainly knew what they were doing. Over the years they must have delivered several hundred, if not thousands, of corpses to their final resting place. When people suddenly found themselves in possession of a dead body their first call was often to the Woodruffs. In certain circumstances a bit of glumness is just the job. But such a reputation was no comfort to Old Man Woodruff on that fateful Friday, when they were out in the country carrying some old-timer to his funeral and Vernon checked his rear-view mirror and found that the car with the old-timer’s family in it, which was meant to be following, was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Vernon.

  ‘What do you mean – hmm?’ said his old dad.

  ‘The mourners,’ said Vernon. ‘They ain’t there.’

  If they hadn’t had so many years’ experience behind them Earl and Leonard might have been sorely tempted to look over their shoulder, but all four Woodruffs kept looking straight ahead, despite the fact that there was no one watching them. Vernon gently brought the hearse to a halt and looked hopefully into his mirror, but the car containing the dead man’s family failed to materialize.

  ‘You great nelly,’ said Leonard from the back seat. ‘How could you lose ’em?’

  Vernon hadn’t the foggiest idea.

  ‘They must’ve taken a wrong turn,’ he said.

  Their father was shaking his head most gravely.

  ‘This is a bad day,’ he said. ‘Very bad. I knew it the minute I stepped out of bed.’

  The Woodruffs sat and waited in that country lane for a good five minutes, without a single other vehicle rolling into view. Their only company was a couple of cows who slowly ambled over and poked their heads through the hedgerow to see what was going on.

  Eventually, Old Man Woodruff exploded.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said, and instructed Vernon to drive on. ‘We’ll just have to catch up with them at the church.’

  And so they pressed on, down narrow roads which grew steadily narrower, on to lanes which were so rough and bumpy they were barely worth the name. Half-way down a steep hill one of the hearse’s wheels
bounced in and out of a pot-hole with such a thump that the coffin leapt up, as if the dead man inside was having seconds thoughts about being buried and had decided to call the whole thing off. Earl and Leonard weren’t remotely troubled by it. They’d been over bigger bumps in the past and, without uttering a word, they both raised a calming hand over their shoulder to stop the coffin hitting them in the back of the head.

  Thick brambles began to scratch and screech down the sides of the hearse. Old Man Woodruff was shaking his head again.

  ‘We should’ve checked the route,’ he said, with great feeling. ‘We should’ve stuck to churches that we actually know.’

  Vernon’s confidence, regarding where they were and where they were going, rose and fell just like the lanes along which they travelled. There were also odd moments in which he admitted (if only to himself) that he had no idea where on earth they were. He would have had more hope of finding his way back on to a road he actually recognized if he’d been at the wheel of a car which could have been more easily turned around. The fact that the hedgerows were ten feet tall and prevented him from getting his bearings did nothing but make matters worse.

  After wandering round that maze of lanes for a further twenty minutes they finally came out into a clearing on a hillside. Vernon stopped the car. Down to their right they could see the great, wide river. On the far side they could see the roofs of a village and, in their midst, a church steeple pointing towards the heavens.

  ‘There it is,’ said Vernon. ‘That’s the church we’re after.’

  The hearse slowly filled up with an ominous silence.

  ‘Where’s the bridge?’ said Len.

  Vernon jabbed a thumb over his left shoulder. ‘About ten miles thataway,’ he said.