Ill at Ease

by Mark West

  Dale had died at 11 o’clock, right around the time I was checking out the Landsmoor’s place. His body had finally given up, the internal organs throwing in the towel all at once. She and Mr Campbell had been there with him at the end. We talked for about half an hour. Mrs Campbell’s grief seemed supported by a residue of relief that I sensed beneath her tears. We talked about him as a boy, even chuckling at the silly stories she remembered. Most of her words washed over me as I tried to reconcile my childhood friend with the sallow frame of a man I’d seen in the hospital.

  Before she left she gripped my hand and I heard myself committing to attending the funeral - which was to be arranged for later in the week - and a strange finality entered her demeanour. She turned on the threshold and glanced round the room as if seeing it for the first time.

  ”You know, there’s a lot still here for you.” She leaned in close and said quietly, “I bet your Mum’d love to have you back.”

  I smiled wanly. “I work in London.”

  Her eyes brimmed again. “Don’t turn your back on those who love you.”

  With that she was gone. Her words echoed around my head like a mantra for days.

  Life in Scarborough, I discovered, had not altered much over the past 20 years. Certain modern elements had infiltrated my home town; mobile phones and the internet, fax machines and Starbucks - but mostly the old places were intact. After a couple of days I began to settle back into the idyllic relaxation of small-town life, a stark contrast to the maelstrom that was my career as a journalist.

  The day before Dale’s funeral arrived. After drifting down to breakfast, I spotted a brown journal on the table. The pages were crumpled and yellowed, filled with seemingly unreadable sentences. I flicked through it.

  “What’s this?”

  Mum popped her head out of the kitchen. “Oh - Mrs Campbell dropped by first thing. She said it belonged to Dale, but he’d wanted you to have it.”

  I was transfixed, my eyes compelled to read, but the words were meaningless in their present form – though I suspected they were in the secret code we used to communicate with when we were kids.

  The breakfast burned my mouth - such was the speed with which I gulped it down. Afterwards, I spread some papers onto the table and began to decipher the code.

  It took me two hours before I uncovered the thrust of the words. The code was this – we wrote A to Z on a piece of paper and exactly below it wrote Z to A, reversed so that B meant Y, D became W and so forth. Nothing too complex but to a 13 year old kid it was unbreakable. I think we’d copied it from some book.

  As I read Dale’s words I began to get a feeling for the enormity of what he’d written. The journal was a diary of events, sometimes crossed with his thoughts and emotions. The dates covered the last year or so - a catalogue of depression, an outpouring of remorse. The most recent entry was from April - a couple of months previously - and it contained a final strange passage – my torture will soon be over and I will face the music. Perhaps my old friend will exorcise the ghosts. The truth needs to come out.

  In the front of the journal was his address. I left the house and jumped in the car.

  Frellington was a run-down town, many miles inland, and enjoyed neither the benefit of tourism nor the wealth of industrial farming. The main street was a row of pubs, tattoo parlours and pool halls, hunched together like shivering tramps. Gaudy neon tried to soften the harshness of the buildings.

  I tracked down Dale’s address. His flat was a derelict, three-room hovel behind a laundrette. I rubbed some filth from the window and peered through the glass. All I could make out was a disarrayed bed, strewn clothing, and two or three bottles on the floor. I tried to picture my old friend inhabiting such a fleapit but my mind drew a blank.

  There was a pub on the corner and I remembered the name from the journal. Like the rest of the town, it was a dump. The bartender scowled through the smoky air at the three or four patrons that were sitting on stools. I ordered a drink and squirmed in the awkward silence while he pulled it. Over the next couple of hours I managed to engage his conversation, chipping away at him bit by bit, building an image of one of his regulars.

  It appeared that Dale went in there most nights. He always sat on the same stool, barely spoke to anyone. The pub had its share of regulars but nobody knew his name or anything else about him. He came to be known as The Heartbreak Kid. Often he’d play the same song on the jukebox - a song from the 1980s by an Australian band, hence his nickname. On a couple of occasions he had intervened in fights when the odds were stacked unevenly.

  I left, feeling both proud of my friend and disappointed with the manner in which he’d spent his adult life.

  In films, funerals are sombre affairs - black-coated mourners, heads bowed beneath dark skies while rain pours incessantly. Dale’s funeral was surreally different – friends and family gathered around the graveside, the sun baking down on shirt-sleeved mourners fanning themselves against the heat. The service was unremarkable, though heavy with the weight of wasted life. Partway through one of the readings I was struck suddenly by the meaning of Dale’s words – the truth needs to come out.

  As soon as I could, I paid my respects to the Campbells - promising I’d see them before my return to London - and jumped in the car. My destination was yet again four or five miles out on the coast road, cutting a line across the rocky seafront where the gravel led down to the beach. As kids, Dale and I would play pirates, creating elaborate treasure maps, sketching cryptic clues and hiding possessions in sealed boxes. It was the clue in the journal that had alerted me to the secret of his words.

  My heart was pounding as I carefully stepped across the treacherous rocks to the spot in the seawall, curious to see whether our hiding place was still there. It took me about 20 minutes to find the loose rock, and when my trembling fingers finally pulled it out and I glimpsed a scruffy wooden box inside the hole, I glanced skyward in triumph.

  The box was almost disintegrated. There was a book inside, wrapped tightly in plastic bags, and I hastily removed them and began to read the handwritten words.

  This journal was written in plain English, in a jerky, barely-legible hand. It was unmistakeably Dale’s, but the style of the writing indicated it had been written in the final months of his life when the legacy of his drinking was fast approaching. I realised as I read that it was a confession - a purging of guilt, and a plea to his childhood friend to exorcise past sins.

  I think you can probably guess what it said, and I felt myself shivering, the sweat on the back of my neck suddenly cold. It described how Dale had absorbed for years the relentless bullying that Josh had inflicted. I was ashamed that I’d been unaware of it. The climax of the journal explained how Dale had finally cracked and decided to take control; luring Josh to a convenient place and quite suddenly putting an end to the bullying. It mentioned Dale’s guilt at his feigned ignorance of Ernie Landsmoor’s vigil. He even described how time had diminished his fear of the corpse being discovered.

  I sat for a minute after finishing the words, tears blurring my vision. Then I replaced the rock and returned to the car, grabbed a torch from the glove box and drove back to the Landsmoor’s.

  It took almost four hours to find the body. I had to comb the whole area of the overgrown farm – which was now a tangle of neglect – and eventually discovered the trapdoor purely by chance. I’d been expecting to see a pit or some kind of well, but as I probed the thick grass my foot stumbled on the wooden trapdoor and I pitched forward, dragging splinters into my fingers. After I had cleared the tangled undergrowth from the trapdoor, I lifted it with trembling hands and let it fall back, flattening the grass behind. The sound resembled a gasp.

  My flashlight instantly picked out a jumble of grey bones, twisted and unclean. The jawbone lay apart from the rest of the skull in an amazed expression of repulsion, spider-like strands of hair still attached. And on the stained material that bundled the bones was the unmistakeable face of Bruce Lee; th
e very same one that I’d seen Josh wearing in his disappearance photo.

  From where I stood I could make out the farmhouse about 300 yards away, directly in the line of Mr Landsmoor’s sight. The irony of that fact made me shiver suddenly.

  I called the police from my mobile phone at the side of the hole. It was messy – they arrived and sealed off the whole area while I was taken to the station and questioned for hours. My statement merely said I’d been visiting my old haunts and had stumbled across the body by accident. Apparently the cellar had been used originally for storing fruit, but in the 70s had been abandoned to Josh for use as a play-den back. The autopsy on Josh Landsmoor eventually revealed that he’d died as a result of a fall, probably breaking his neck as he landed in the hole. I didn’t see any need to challenge that decision. I thought about Dale’s confession – how he’d dumped the body in the pit months after Josh’s death, long after the police had searched the area. I’ve spent many nights since wondering where his body must have laid in the intervening period.

  So the journal was a tragic tale of lost lives – of three lives ruined in very different ways. The ending of Josh Landsmoor’s in an outburst of violence; the suspended limbo that trapped Ernie Landsmoor’s life, like a butterfly in a sealed jar; and finally the haunted existence that Dale had endured – guilt and remorse ravaging his body until it eventually gave up, relief claiming him.

  Soon after, I quit the Evening Standard and took a job at our local paper. I’d come to realise that my humble beginnings were nothing to feel embarrassed about. In London I’d always been dismissive of my roots, feeling like I’d managed to escape a dead-end town. Returning to visit Dale had made me see I was wrong. Nowadays I’m the editor of The Scarborough Chronicle, and it seems I’ve spent my life waiting to do this job. I feel like I’ve returned home, both literally and metaphorically. Mum loves having me back.

  Some nights I like to drive out to the beach and watch the restless tide lit by the moon, wondering what was in Ernie Landsmoor’s mind as he kept watch for 33 years, thinking about the lengths we go to in an effort to keep the past alive. And then I remember that the past can hold darkness and conflict, and that memories are events that shape the future, and that sometimes the past is better left buried.

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  Come See My House In The Pretty Town

  by Mark West

  The fair, loud and noisy, was set up in the last field before the sign that said “Leaving Hoelzli” and David Willis was being dragged towards it by Billy, a seven-year-old doing his best to make his parents friend move faster.

  “Is he always like this?” David asked, glancing back at his friends Simon and Kim. They were a couple of paces behind, holding hands and leaning into each other as if completely comfortable in their lives.

  “Only when he’s on an adventure,” said Kim.

  “And this is some adventure,” said Simon.

  What had started this weekend off was a message on Facebook. David and Simon had been at college together, giving them a friendship that spanned over two decades, but they hadn’t seen one another for the past eight years, their only contact being Christmas cards.

  But when the Roberts’ decided to leave the hustle and bustle of London and move out to the sticks, Simon sent David a message titled “come see my house in the pretty town”. At the time, David thought it a bit strange - eight years, after all, is eight years - but he’d been pleased to hear from his old friend, was pleased that he was still married to Kim and was thrilled that they’d had a son. David, on the other hand, worked in Imports, spent at least six months of the year out of the country and had discovered, to his cost, that it left no room for lasting relationships. He had plenty of contacts - not quite the ‘girl in every port’ fantasy, but close - but there was no-one special and he regretted that. Almost as much as he regretted the fact that he had once had someone special but had chosen, at the last moment, to step back and let her go.

  So when Simon had asked him down for the weekend, both as a break from the rat-race and also as a chance to catch up on lost time, David jumped at it.

  “Don’t you get fairs down here very often then?” asked David, looking around.

  Hoelzli was beautiful, a delightful hamlet that was little more than a smudge on a map, but it perfectly embodied his idea of pastoral English quaintness. Built along a main road which had now been bypassed, it had an old pub, a duckpond and a memorial, which was surrounded by pristine park benches and beautifully kept flower beds. Behind this stood a very old church, its stone dull and pitted with age, but a lot of care and attention had gone into making sure that it was still standing and, presumably, still in operation. He could see three red telephone boxes and two post boxes, each bearing a GR crest, affixed to poles. He half expected to turn around and see Miss Marple come busybodying out of one of the cottages.

  “Apparently not, because it’s so difficult to get permission. Most of the village’ll turn out for this, by all accounts.”

  David could see that wasn’t an over-statement. There must have been close to fifty people sharing the pavement with them and half as many on the opposite pavement. The main road was closed at either end with saw-horses and police cars, officers posted to presumably keep out any interlopers. David imagined that not many people found their way here by accident.

  “Certainly a good turnout.”

  “It’s apparently a great fair,” said Kim and David noticed something in her tone, that reminded him of things in the past, things that it might not be best to bring up.

  “Something to remember,” agreed Simon and he squeezed Kim’s hand and smiled at her. She returned his smile, at a much lower wattage and then looked at her son.

  “Billy, we’ll cross by the gate.”

  “Yes Mum,” said the boy, as if he’d already made the decision himself.

  Although David had Sat-Nav, he spent so much of his working life being guided by gadgets of one form or another, that he preferred to be a Luddite in his downtime. He’d plotted the route on a cheap map he bought, writing it longhand on a sheet of paper that he put on the passenger seat, just as his dad had done years before.

  The journey down, especially the M4 at Swindon and trying to get through Exeter, was a nightmare and by the time he got to Hoelzli, it was late afternoon and he was tired. He turned off the A38 and followed a progressively narrower B road, that wound up and down through moorland. He was starting to think he’d read the map wrong when he spotted the church spire through a thick treeline. Hoelzli was virtually invisible until you were actually upon it, nestled into the base of a small valley, making it feel more isolated to the casual traveller than it perhaps was.

  He quickly found the side-lane that ran parallel to the main road, where the Roberts’ had their semi-detached cottage. It was two storey, painted brilliant white that was offset by a dark wood stable door and the neatly kept thatched roof was covered by chicken wire. There was no pavement, just a dead-straight yellow line and it took David a moment to see a space, three houses down, marked “Helby Cottage Visitor”. He parked, stretched, grabbed his rucksack and walked back to the cottage.

  He paused at the stable-door, suddenly unsure of what he was doing. How would Kim be? How would Simon be? Was this really about sharing in their joy of a realised ambition to a move to the country, or had she talked to his once-best-friend?

  Without realising he was doing it, David took out his phone and checked the signal. It was stronger than he got at home and he frowned. How was that possible?

  Quick footsteps came from inside the house, sounding almost like pistol reports and then the upper door opened. David looked down, to see a small round face staring at him. The boy had fair hair, big eyes and was smiling broadly, as if proudly showing off the gap in his milk teeth.

  “Who’re you?”

  “I’m David. Are you William?”

  The boy frowned, rubbing his eye. “Yeah, if I’m at school or do
ne something naughty. I’m Billy.”

  “I’m sorry, Billy, I didn’t realise. I’m here to stay for a few days, I’m a friend of your Dad and Mum.”

  More footsteps on the stairs, measured this time and David looked up. He could only see half the risers, the rest hidden by the floor of the bedrooms. Barefoot, wearing a loose skirt that grazed her knees and a white t-shirt that clung to her frame nicely, Kim came into view. The passage of time had hardly marked her at all - she looked as luminous and gorgeous as ever, with only a few tell-tale lines around her eyes and mouth to give away her age. Her hair was still dark and glossy, her eyes an intense green, her skin almost glowing.

  “Hello David,” she said, cool and calm.

  “Hello, Kim, how’re you?”

  They were in the small garden, drinking tea and watching Billy race around shooting at invisible aliens, when Simon came in.

  “Hey stranger,” he said.

  David got up quickly, the chair legs scraping on the flagstone. Time had been less fair to Simon, who now just looked older and worn. He was still dark - an olive complexion that David had envied in college - but his hair was more grey than black these days and his eyes looked lined.

  “Simon, it’s good to see you.”

  The friends looked at each other, as if unsure whether to shake or hug, so David held his hand out and Simon grasped it and pulled him against him. Strong large hands pounded David’s back and he returned the gesture, pleased beyond belief that the sands of time did, indeed, appear to heal all.

  “You too, Davey. My God, you haven’t changed.”

  The man nobody else in the world called Davey smiled, enjoying the warm feeling he got hearing his oldest friend use a decades-old nickname.