Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  A waiter, whom he’d never seen before, came out to take his order. It was odd how often they changed. Somehow it added to the impersonality of the place, the lack of warmth Shooter found so congenial. In a way his dismissal, although inconvenient at the time, had not been unwelcome. An agreement had been reached: a term’s wages on condition he vacated his job and accommodation immediately. Generous—in the circumstances. Of course, he’d begun to realise he wasn’t suited to teaching: his temper was quick; he found too many of his pupils repellent, even though he was to some extent intrigued by the condition of childhood. Returning to university to re-qualify had been expensive but worth it: in his new profession however odious a child and its parents might prove, he never had to put up with them for long.

  His drink arrived at the same time as a commotion on the other side of the restaurant: a plate dropped on the floor; a woman’s sharp voice reprimanding; childish protestations of innocence and explanation. The waiter scurried off. As the woman stood up, he saw her face in profile—Mrs Hillup. Noel was now under the table, his abnormally long white fingers salvaging cutlery from what looked like the curried fish casserole with rice. For a moment, Shooter was unable to imagine what could have brought them to the restaurant to invade one of his rare moments of relaxation. Then he remembered: they were due to see him second appointment after lunch. Fortunately the waiter returning distracted them. Shooter was just about to move to the innermost seat in the alcove, when his secretary rushed through the entrance and run-walked straight to his table. He was scarcely able to credit the sudden convergence of his personal and professional lives.

  “What is it?” he snapped, sotto voce so as not to attract the attention of the Hillups.

  “It’s your wife, Mr Shooter…”

  “I’ve told you I am on no account to be disturbed.” How often had he explained to the secretary that the strange men his wife saw at home were symptoms of her condition and no cause for alarm? “I don’t care if she says there is an army of…”

  “She didn’t phone; it was the police.”

  “Good lord! What’s happened?”

  “She’s perfectly safe… but under arrest. The call was from the Station.”

  As he hurried coatless out of the restaurant and into the cold day, his bill unpaid, he caught a glimpse of the Hillups, open-mouthed, and the waiter turning towards him, one arm raised.

  As Shooter sits in his single room in the teachers’ accommodation block correcting exercise books he will never return in person, he does not know it is the last evening of his teaching life. The lessons have finished; the day boys are being signed off by the duty master before going home. Ollaby is missing.

  Shooter has corrected the first six essays on the top of the pile. They are all very bad. It would appear he has taught them nothing. He gets up from his armchair and pours himself a small whiskey, to which he adds a splash of water. Outside, the snow continues to fall, although only the largest flakes are discernible through the black squares of the windows. He sits down again, takes a sip of the whiskey and picks up his red biro. As he underlines a grammatical error, the boy, whose footsteps Shooter has just heard crunching along the path below his window, has reached the deputy headmaster’s house with a message: Ollaby is nowhere to be found; his mother is waiting in the front hall.

  The pile of marked exercise books on the striped counterpane of Shooter’s bed grows. He glances at his watch: another three quarters of an hour to go before staff supper. He may as well try to finish the set before then. Without warning, his biro dries up, leaving nothing more than inkless indentations on the page. He searches his jacket and trouser pockets without result, before remembering there is a perfectly functioning felt-tipped pen in his desk. As he levers himself up, he hears voices: a boy and the deputy head, their tones agitated and querulous. Shooter strains to listen but catches only the occasional word: “mother” and “everywhere”—meaningless without a context? He quickly overcomes a moment of icy dread; it is nothing to do with him. He returns and opens another exercise book.

  It is established that Ollaby attended neither of his last two lessons. Boys and staff have assumed he is with his woodwind tutor or Matron. Now registers and timetables are consulted; peripatetic teachers and the boy’s father are phoned. Ollaby is often absent, away for reasons musical or medical. But this time there is no record. The headmaster’s wife arrives to reassure Mrs Ollaby, who is taken to the drawing room and offered a cup of tea.

  A sharp knock on Shooter’s door, which opens as he responds. The cold air from the corridor and the headmaster come in.

  —Andrew Ollaby’s vanished. I’m told he was on your game. That correct, Shooter?

  —Yes, headmaster.

  —Did he turn up?”

  —Yes.”

  —The duty master says he didn’t come into the changing rooms.

  —Andrew was the last one in.

  —Did you see him through?”

  —No, I was running late. The first bell had gone.

  —So you don’t really know where he went, do you?

  —He was running behind me—and towards the changing rooms. I remember that quite clearly.

  —Well, since you’re the last person to see him, Shooter, you’d better help us now. We’re searching the grounds.

  As the headmaster leaves, slamming the door behind him, Shooter picks up another exercise book. He is not to be ordered around so peremptorily; only when he has finished the task in hand will he join the others. He glances at the name on the cover: Andrew Ollaby.

  As Shooter reads, pausing to underline spelling mistakes and add comments in the margin, the deputy headmaster, most of the boarding staff and several senior boys are scouring the playing fields, the copse, the front gardens, as well as the rough ground behind the science laboratories and the tennis courts. As Shooter finishes writing his comment, which is longer and more encouraging than usual, at the foot of the essay, the deputy headmaster and two monitors, armed with torches, reach the spot in the woods, where Andrew Ollaby lies face down and breathless at last, his long delicate legs awry, the back of his head already covered by a layer of snow.

  Once they were outside, Shooter told his secretary to go back into the restaurant and inform the Hillups their appointment had been cancelled. He glanced both ways and then ran across the road. There was still no snow falling, but the limpid blue sky reminded him of Arctic waters; a few ice floes of cloud dissolved in thermals far above. He soon reached the park, where he pulled out his mobile phone. In summer, every bench would be occupied, but it was cold enough now to deter the hardiest picnickers and office workers with packed lunches. He sat down and dialled the number his secretary had given him. Mrs Shooter, he discovered, has been detained for wasting police time. On four occasions she’s contacted the station to complain of mysterious intruders, who had always unaccountably vanished by the time assistance arrived. Shooter explained: his wife’s memory was disordered; the medication no longer effective; a measurable degree of cognitive loss. Then more recently new symptoms: ethereal visitors or sometimes a sense that her house was not her own. His apologies. A difficult month; two of her carers on holiday at the same time; a need for further support. And yes, he would be grateful if an officer could drive her home.

  A duty of care, that’s what we have. Shooter had left his car in a side street not far from his office. One of the early symptoms of his wife’s condition was being unable to recall which level of the multi-storey car park she’d parked the Honda only to discover she’d left it outside the hotel where they were staying. In the circumstances, it would be best if you leave at once. The headmaster’s voice. Of course, you have a right of appeal to the Governors.

  Fortuitously the car keys were at the office. With the roads clear, he experienced a frisson of unfamiliarity on reaching the by-pass in half the usual time. Personally I can’t think of a better example of professional negligence than sending a child with a hole in his heart on a cross-country ru
n. A dual carriageway for five miles: he must concentrate. No slush on the roads, but the hard shoulders corrugated with dirty snow. He wondered whether a WPC would be with his wife when he got home. Making her a cup of tea. What really surprises me, Shooter, are the string of lies you told me last night; all which you still maintain, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, are true. He slowed down, signalled and turned off the motorway. So what am I to say to Ollaby’s parents? That he reported to you on the playing fields and then ran back into the woods to die?

  Already Shooter has arrived: the detached house with bay windows where he’d lived with his wife for twenty years. No police car parked on the gravel drive and so presumably no WPC to reproach him for leaving his wife alone. He unlocked the door and at once she emerged from the sitting-room, which in recent months she’d shared with assorted phantoms of her imagination.

  “Thank heavens you’re back. I’ve had another intruder.”

  In spite of her condition, she remained superlatively well-attired: a blue dress bought from Liberty’s of London; an antique brooch pinned to her breast; her makeup carefully applied; the grey waves of her plentiful hair tinted and permed. Only a year older than Shooter, she’d not lost the air of authority that had made her a commanding figure in the bridge club. It was easy to understand why her mental competence was not always immediately questioned.

  “I think you’ll find, dear,” said Shooter, resting a hand gently on her arm, “that if we both go back to the sitting-room your gentleman visitor will have left.”

  “But it’s not a man. That’s what I told them; much good that it did me. It’s a boy?

  “What sort of a boy?”

  “Well, not a very small boy, but even so far too young to be wandering around by himself in other people’s houses. He’s in your study, right now. Up to heavens knows what!”

  Shooter walked quickly down the corridor and into his study. Inside, it was snowing—and dark. He reached for the switch but couldn’t find it. For a moment, there was nothing but the flakes, so clear he could see their asymmetrical crystal patterns as one by one they were blown across the fields of darkness, sparkling individually for an instant in front of his microscope eye. Then his sight began to adjust: the filing cabinets with their soft moon-metal gleam; the shape of the bookshelf; his desk and the hump of a swivel chair.

  Was it snowing in here because his wife had left a window open? Certainly some strange luminosity was flowing in the curtains. The must from old books and boxfiles has been replaced by the tang of ice and the scent of wet black leaves. Perhaps an intruder had forced an entry. He’d never believed in his wife’s visitors. Yet now there was a shape in the corner, something growing there or discarded? Clothes to be taken to the charity shop? A head on the top of the pile; then slowly the rest of the body snaked upwards, turning taller, thinner, paler. Marfan’s disease. Then Ollaby’s face, level with his, ice-flakes spinning in dark sockets; once again, the terrible breath issuing from the cracked mouth. But now he was loftier than he’d ever been in life: an up rush of wild white clothes and spiralling limbs, soaring to the ceiling. Oh Slimikins! Then Shooter remembered the question he’d forgotten to ask, which had been worried at since the retreat of the glaciers: what is it like to die, alone in the woods, in the snow and the dark?

  THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

  Alison Moore

  ON THE DAY OF THE PROTEST, GLENDA decided to drive out to the retail park to buy weedkiller. She was just setting out, getting into third gear, when a pigeon dawdling in the road caused her to brake hard. The pigeon seemed oblivious, even when Glenda’s two-tonne car was virtually on top of it. Perhaps the car actually was on top of it, because having stopped dead, Glenda could not see the pigeon anywhere. She was just about to get out to look beneath her wheels when she saw the pigeon wandering to the side of the road. She watched its strangely sluggish progress, and then drove on, towards the edge of the village.

  The garden was really Dougie’s responsibility, but work was taking it out of him these days. On his day off, he just lay on the sofa, with the cat asleep on top of him, or sometimes the cat fell asleep on the carpet or in the lengthening grass, wherever it happened to be. Dougie himself did not really sleep, he just lay there, with no energy for Glenda, or for his projects: at the far end of the overgrown garden, a half-dug pond had been abandoned; and the second-hand furniture that he had bought to spruce up was gathering dust in the spare room. The last piece he had done was the little table on which their telephone stood: he had spent weeks sanding and then staining and varnishing it, although Glenda hated it, the darkness of its wood, and its rickety, skeletal legs.

  She had just got onto a faster stretch of road leading out of the village when another pigeon staggered out in front of her car, not even flinching away from the vehicle as she skimmed past. She wondered what was wrong with these pigeons; they were like zombies.

  It was not just Dougie; it seemed to be everyone who worked at that factory. They had all lost their pep. No one in the village liked the factory, although the men needed the jobs; it employed hundreds of them. It was an ugly, stony-faced building, ruining what had been a nice stretch of river-side, at a spot where the locals used to swim—some still did, but not many. The women had been worrying about the factory’s emissions, about what exactly was going into the air. Sometimes the smoke that went into the clouds looked yellow. And was anything going into the river, anything that should not be? Dougie used to fish there, but he did not do that anymore. And there was that terrible smell, which had to be coming from the factory.

  At the bend, where the road turned away from the river, there was a pigeon, flattened against the tarmac. Its grey wings were splayed around its crushed body. Its underbelly was turned up to face the sky, to face the wheels of the oncoming traffic. These pigeons reminded Glenda of the summer outbreak of flying ants, which did not fly off at the flap of a hand as houseflies did; or they reminded her of the houseflies themselves, the listlessness that came over them at the end of the summer, leaving them too slow to avoid the swatter. But she had never before noticed the phenomenon in birds or other creatures.

  Glenda had written the council a letter, which the other women had signed. The letter asked questions about those emissions; it suggested that the factory might be affecting the health of the workers; it requested a thorough investigation and the suspension of operations pending the results. The men had not signed the letter. The letter had been forwarded to a secretary who would liaise with the relevant committee; it was then, after somebody’s holiday, to be discussed at a forthcoming meeting. Not having heard anything for a while, Glenda had left messages on a council answerphone. In the meantime, the women were going to go on a protest march. “We never used to take things lying down,” Glenda had said to the women. “When we were students, we used to march.” They used to go down to London, on coaches; they had marched through the capital in their thousands, to force things to change. “We should,” the women had said in response. “We should do that.” Since then, they had been meeting every Wednesday morning at Fiona’s house. Fiona had provided refreshments while they made placards, nailing boards to wooden sticks and painting slogans on them—WE WANT ANSWERS!—slogans that they would shout as they marched. They had photocopied flyers to put through people’s letterboxes. They had notified the local paper.

  Glenda glanced at the dashboard clock. It was almost noon; they were due to meet to start the protest at one o’clock. They would march down Union Street to the river, right down to the factory. They would stand outside that grim building and stamp their feet and shout, make some noise. Someone would have to respond; something would have to be done.

  She pulled into the car park of the Do-It-Yourself store, disturbing a couple of birds, which flapped up into the air and flew away. She parked near the entrance and went inside the store. As she entered the gardening section, she recognised a neighbour who was standing looking at the lawnmowers. Glenda said hello. She could not thi
nk of her neighbour’s name. The woman continued to stare at a lawnmower, and Glenda thought that she had not heard her, but then the woman said, “I’ve been here for hours. I just can’t decide.”

  “Are you coming on the protest?” asked Glenda.

  “I just can’t decide,” said the woman.

  Glenda turned away and picked up a spray-gun bottle of ready-to-use weedkiller. She took it over to the till, where the cashier was sharing a joke with a man who had bought paint in a shade called “Nursery”. The colour looked putrid to Glenda. The man turned away and the cashier looked at Glenda and said, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Glenda, lifting her free hand and touching her face. “It’s just a rash.” She handed over the weedkiller.

  “Two pounds,” said the cashier.

  Glenda looked at the silver and copper in her purse. She could not be bothered to count out the coins. She handed over a note and waited for her change, and then stood struggling with the zip of her purse. She took her weedkiller and moved towards the exit, aware of the cashier watching her as she walked away.

  She strapped the weedkiller into the passenger seat, as if it were a child. She did not want it sliding around, busting open, weedkiller going everywhere. She drove home slowly, carefully.

  It was after one o’clock when she returned to the outskirts of the village, where she found Fiona sitting on the kerb, with a placard on the pavement beside her. Glenda came to a stop and wound down her window. She said to Fiona, “Have they gone already?”

  Fiona raised her eyes. “Who?”

  “The other women,” said Glenda. “Have they started the march?”