The Mark of Cain

by Lindsey Barraclough

  Sweat needles my skin.

  “Auntie Kath?”

  With a sharp intake of breath, I flick the nail away into the straw and stand up, heart hammering.

  “Mimi?”

  Something rolls across the barn entrance from one side to the other — the bundle of twigs I’d flung away yesterday, still tied with a scrap of red twine.

  I blunder out of the barn towards the creek, slide over the slippery bridge, and stumble my way round the house to the back door.

  I wait ages for the bus home, so cold my breath streams out white and my toes grow numb.

  When it comes at last, I go to the seat in the back corner upstairs, away from everyone else. Looking down, as the frosty evening deepens I catch glimpses of fathers putting the final touches to the bonfires. In one village a fire has been built on a green space surrounded by houses. Several men stand around rubbing their hands, grinning, drinking tea from Thermos flasks, setting out fireworks on a long trestle table.

  Out of Lokswood I can see over a row of fencing into back gardens where excited youngsters, in hats and mittens, their faces glowing, are writing in the air with glittering sparklers, shrieking with delight as fiery rockets streak upwards into the star-spattered sky like whistling spears, then burst into flaming balls of blue, red, and green. I see columns of white-hot gold and emerald sparks rising, soaring, dying, merrily shooting out dazzling, whirling bolts of silver fire before fizzing away on the grass; bangs, crackles, and whizzes; mums coming out of warm kitchens, trays laden with plates of burned sausages and steaming cups of cocoa.

  Then the empty blackness beyond Daneflete, seeing only my own face in the window, unnaturally pale under the harsh bus lighting, the brim of my school hat casting a hard shadow above the dark-ringed eyes that peer out into the cold, bleak night.

  At last I make out the gleam of the single distant street lamp that stands outside the Thin Man. I shift in my seat, loop the strap of my schoolbag over my head and across my chest, press the bell.

  The conductor tips his hat as I step off the platform, his last passenger. I watch the bus for a while, its luminous yellow windows moving away in the darkness towards Hilsea. The popping of distant fireworks from Bryers Guerdon rolls over the damp, curling air that smells of smoke and gunpowder.

  At first I think the road is deserted, but as I walk towards Old Glebe Lane, I glance up and notice two women standing, still and silent, outside the Thin Man. The street lamp is casting their slightly elongated shadows across the main road and down the top end of the lane. The taller woman is wearing a peaked hat that juts out like a beak under her hood.

  I feel a tightness in my chest as I turn into the road and step for a moment onto the shadows.

  Picking out my way in the starlight, I hear footsteps behind me on the uneven surface and quickly press on until I draw level with Glebe House.

  Passing the gloomy mass of the woods on my right, I slacken pace slightly, listening over the thudding of my heart, telling myself the women will go through the wrought-iron gates — that they are simply friends of the Treasures, acquaintances of the Mansells …

  But over the hissing of the trees still they come, here glancing on a stone, there sidestepping away from a patch of mud.

  I move faster, trip as I run blindly down the hill, recover, trip again, arrive at last where the lane divides. I stop for a moment, hearing no sound other than my harsh shuddering breathing.

  But something draws my gaze upwards to the brow of the hill.

  The two women are standing there, black against the night sky, watching me intently. In long, dark-hooded coats, with sleeves resembling ragged wings under hunched shoulders, they’re like a pair of monstrous crows — menacing, and waiting.

  At a run I turn into the Chase and lurch and stumble on to Guerdon Hall, not pausing until, with a shaking hand, I push my key into the back-door lock.

  Panting, I throw my bag down onto the kitchen floor, my breath rasping sore in my throat.

  Auntie Kath glances up from peeling potatoes. “You been running?”

  “Thought I’d be late.”

  “Oh, you needn’t have worried,” she says. “We’ll have the fireworks after dinner. Go and fetch Mimi. She’s watching telly.”

  Mimi is on the settee, bent over her exercise book. She looks up and slaps it shut.

  “Coming for tea?” I ask, then, “What are you drawing?”

  “Nothing.”

  In the kitchen I sit with my back to the window while we eat mash with a bit of cheese on top.

  The Light Programme plays softly in the background.

  Then I hear something — a light tap-tapping — from outside.

  It stops.

  Clink-clink.

  I glance at Auntie Kath. She has her head down, squashes cheese onto her fork.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “Can you hear that funny noise?” I ask.

  Auntie Kath puts down her fork and knife, leaves her chair, and turns up the volume on the radio. “You’re always the one saying I shouldn’t take no notice of funny noises round here,” she says.

  I look across at Mimi. Her eyes are lowered as she swallows her mash.

  Pam’s nose is squashed up against the window of her new little room in the loft as she and Mum cuddle up together with cups of cocoa and a bag of rainbow drops, looking down excitedly into the garden while Dad finishes his preparations. The last rocket-launcher milk bottle is half buried in the grass and the final Catherine wheel pinned to the overhanging roof of the shed. Dad gives it a final test, spinning it round with his finger.

  “Ready for the guy!” he shouts, moving over to the bonfire we’ve been building for a couple of weeks, mainly from old fallen branches, prunings and cuttings from the garden, and wood from the shed, as well as the old kitchen chair Dennis swung on and broke and got a clout for.

  Pete and I pull the guy out of the go-cart by its arms, and Dennis and Terry carry the feet. I shine the torch for Dad while he climbs up the stepladder, takes the guy from us, and pushes it firmly into position at the top of the bonfire, wedging its arms behind two large branches. He twangs the elastic on the mask to bring the ugly face round to look at us and tugs down the old felt hat we bought for a halfpenny at the jumble sale in the Scout Hut.

  “Here are the spuds,” calls Pete, bringing the potatoes to put in the fire.

  “Leave them there by the tree,” Dad directs him, “and we’ll put them in when it dies down a bit later. All right. Move back.”

  We stand well clear while he holds the ends of some twisted sheets of newspaper to his lighter. As they catch, he pushes them into the bottom of the bonfire towards a bundle of rags he’s already soaked in paraffin and shoved in earlier on a long stick.

  At first there’s nothing but a feeble smouldering, then whoosh! — the rags ignite with a mighty burst of flame right up the middle of the wood.

  We cheer. Dennis and Terry whoop and jump about, while Dad, pouring himself a glass of Double Diamond, mutters something about his favourite trousers going up in smoke.

  At first, as the flames creep up the wood behind the guy, his arms and legs hold their shape, but as the crackling fire blazes and spreads and eats into his paper stuffing, he begins to writhe and bend. It’s as if he’s dancing.

  The mask remains for a long time, a dark face with a long nose under a fiery felt hat, the empty eye-holes glowing red. But after a while it curls in on itself and burns away into a few light ashes that rise into the air and float off among the trees.

  Mimi and I stand in our coats on the cobbles between the two wings of Guerdon Hall. Behind us the shaft of light from the open door sends our long shadows swooping down the garden towards the creek, which is all that separates us from the bleak, deserted marshes, now swallowed up by the black night.

  I can’t stop my eyes going to the corner of the building, straining to peer into the darkness, running along the dark margin of the garden where the freezing water laps against the mud, sea
rching the shadows for any movement. Did the women follow me down? Are they watching us?

  Auntie Kath, headscarf tied under her chin, excitedly lights a match and puts the flame to the end of Mimi’s sparkler, which flares into life, shooting out its brilliant little spangles into the chilly night air. I light mine from Mimi’s, then Auntie Kath sets hers going, and we swirl our names in glowing red trails into the dark until the packet is used up.

  Auntie Kath goes out onto the grass, the torch glaring in front of her, the soil sucking at her narrow heels. She stoops down, scoops out a bit of earth with a kitchen knife, then pushes in a two-inch-high cone optimistically called Mount Etna.

  “You got the matches, Cora? Hold the torch for me and I’ll get this lit.”

  I take the box over. Auntie Kath strikes one and it splutters into flame. She bends and touches the flare against the twist of blue paper until it begins to fizzle red.

  “Quick! Quick!” She giggles.

  I run back to Mimi with Auntie Kath hanging on to my arm; we all snuggle together and wait in suspense. For a moment I almost forget the women on the hilltop.

  Little Mount Etna splutters out one feeble, sizzling spurt of sparks, then dies.

  Our laughter echoes off the walls of the cobbled yard.

  The Roman candle is much more impressive, crackling into the air, six inches high, one foot, then two, a fountain of blazing light. Bang! Out bursts a golden star. Bang! Then another. Bang! And another. The grass, the weedy beds, the old tree stumps, glow silver bright.

  The firework collapses into a long hissing tongue of fire and smoke.

  “Come on, girls, let’s go in now. I could do with a fag,” calls Auntie Kath. When I look round, I see that she has been picking up the spent sparklers and is holding them in a fan in her hand. I glance back. Mimi is facing away from the house, her head moving slowly from one side to the other as if she is searching the shadowy garden. Then her gaze seems to settle just beyond the empty cardboard tube sticking up out of the grass, the remnant of the Roman candle.

  “Mimi, it’s finished.” I put my arm round her shoulder and lead her towards Auntie Kath.

  The wind springs up a little, sending drifts of fallen leaves across the cobbles.

  Clink-clink, clink-clink.

  We stop. Look up.

  Clink, clink, clink.

  Hanging above us, from nails in the wall above the lintel, are a few lengths of red twine, and knotted to the end of each one is a small white-painted stone with a hole through its middle. As they sway on their strings, the little stones knock against one another.

  Clink-clink.

  “What the bloody hell’s going on now?” Auntie Kath cries in a burst of anger. “What bloody joker’s stuck them bloody things up there?”

  She stands on her tiptoes and tries to catch hold of one, but she can’t reach and swipes at empty air.

  With a grunt, heels clicking, she storms off down the stone passage.

  Mimi stares up at the little stones, turns back to the dark garden, then up at the stones again.

  Auntie Kath comes back with a kitchen chair, rests it dangerously on the uneven cobbles — “Hold this steady, will you, Cora?” — and begins to climb up, snatching at the red strings and yanking them down.

  “I think we should leave them there,” Mimi says.

  “What! You must be ruddy joking!” Auntie Kath flings the stones away onto the grass, where they land with a dull plop, one by one.

  I feel a gloved hand on my sleeve, glance down. Mimi is looking up at me with an odd expression.

  “Can’t we leave just one?” she asks.

  But Auntie Kath won’t stop until they have all been pulled down and thrown away.

  She marches back down the stone passage with the chair, and I push Mimi inside in front of me.

  Just as I am closing the door, I hear another sound, but I’m not sure if it’s the sighing of the reeds as they move with the wind on the far bank of the creek, or if someone is whispering in the garden.

  With a shiver I follow Mimi down the passage, along the hall, and into the kitchen.

  Auntie Kath is sitting under the harsh strip light, still in her coat and headscarf, rubbing her forehead with an unlit cigarette between her fingers.

  “You all right?” I ask nervously.

  She looks up. “What do you think?” she says. “Course I’m not bloody all right. What sort of ruddy place is this, Cora? Close the curtains, Mimi.”

  Mimi takes a curtain in either hand and begins to pull them slowly towards each other. In the last moment before they come together, she peers out through the gap into the darkness.

  In that drowsy moment just before the alarm rings I think Auntie Kath is knocking at the door again, but it’s the wind whining in the chimney, bobbing at the plasterboard pinned across the fireplace. The radiator sends out its feeble heat into a crisscross of freezing draughts.

  As I get into my uniform, quickly in the bitter cold, the sound of the radio booms up the stairs from the kitchen, waking Mimi, who sits up in bed, dazed, rubbing her eyes then her arms for warmth. Knotting my tie, I clatter down the stairs.

  The music is unbearably loud. The cups are chinking together on their hooks on the shelf, the empty milk bottles rattling on the stainless-steel draining board. I reach over and turn off the radio.

  “Blimey, Auntie Kath, are you going deaf?”

  “I was listening to that,” she says, staring out of the kitchen window, loose threads hanging from the cuffs of her blue candlewick dressing gown, twisting a half-smoked butt into a saucer where there are already enough squashed cigarettes to supply a whole ship of sailors.

  She fumbles in the packet for another and lights it while the sparks still smoulder on the tip of the one before. “I don’t like it quiet,” she mutters.

  “Is it the noise of the wind? Does it bother you?”

  She turns her head towards me. I am shocked. Her skin is pasty and her eyes slightly bloodshot, surrounded by deep dark orbits. She half opens her mouth, then shuts it and looks back at the garden.

  “Didn’t you sleep?” I ask.

  But she doesn’t answer, just continues to gaze out of the window.

  I have no substance. I need flesh and bone, hands, feet, and fingers for my purpose.

  This woman is no use to me. She will not yield. The dying lights are not on her.

  “… led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 … abolition of the rotten boroughs … parliamentary reform … repeal of the Corn Laws …”

  Heads bent, weary, our pens scratching on and on, we write in our exercise books from Mr. Heygate’s endless, mind-numbing dictation.

  “… Lord Russell’s reform bills of 1851 and 1854 rejected …”

  Under the monotonous drone of his voice is a shuffle of sounds — knuckles cracking somewhere near the door, a long sigh to my right, Neil Preston’s catlike sneeze, me yawning.

  Then a moment of unexpected joy.

  “Snow, sir! Look, sir, it’s snowing!”

  A few boys rise excitedly up from their chairs, stretching their necks.

  “Sit down! You’ve all seen snow before! Sit down, Foster! The Second Reform Act of 1867 … householders with twelve months’ residency …”

  I am sitting under the window with my left hand resting, almost unbearably hot, risking third-degree burns, or chilblains at the very least, on the wide metal curves of the ancient iron radiator next to my desk. I look up at the thick grey sky beyond the clear upper windows. The snowflakes fall out of it like small dark dots, then grow fatter, whiter, and lazier as they approach the ground before disappearing behind the frosted glass of the lower sashes, where I can barely see them pass.

  “Third Reform Act 1884 … two million labourers given the vote …”

  I miss a bit. My brain’s gone dead.

  Can’t think why she’s in my head all of a sudden — that girl who came out of Mrs. Aylott’s with her mum when we were doing Penny for the Guy on Saturday. It
was quite dark. The light from the shop was behind her. It was her hair, fair and fluffy, and the way she kept looking back at us over her shoulder. Mimi had hair like that.

  The snow thickens as Mr. Heygate’s dreary voice moans on and on.

  Surely it wasn’t Mimi.

  I feel my palm go moist under my pen. My heart begins to hammer too fast.

  “Jotman!” Mr. Heygate snaps. I jump. “You’ve been staring out of that window for the last five minutes! Detention. After school. Outside the staff room at four o’clock!”

  “Oh, sir.”

  I can hear it from the Chase. By the time I reach the bridge, “Jailhouse Rock” is blaring out from the house, almost as loud as the squalling wind that scatters snowflakes in all directions.

  I rush round the end wall. Even the windows seem to be vibrating.

  I stand at the back door, fumbling in my pocket for my key; then, in the space between songs, hear feet running down the stone passage.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re here,” Mimi cries, flinging open the door. “Auntie Kath won’t blimmin’ well turn it down. I used to like Elvis Presley an’ all, but it’s the third time that LP’s been on since we got back from school.”

  I stride quickly along the passage and into the hall, tossing my hat and bag down on the carpet by the staircase.

  “I think she must’ve had music on all day,” Mimi says. “There’s records everywhere.”

  The sitting room is hazy with smoke. “Heartbreak Hotel” is now blasting its way out of Auntie Kath’s red mock-crocodile-skin Dansette record player, which stands with its lid up on the small table. Auntie Kath herself is sitting on the floor, her wide pink skirt spread out in a circle around her, holding a lighted cigarette in one hand and the Take Courage ashtray in the other. Looking up from their scattered LP covers are Tommy Steele, Russ Conway, and a host of other Auntie Kath favourites.

  I pick my way carefully over the records and turn the volume knob so far down that poor Elvis sounds as if he’s singing outside in the garden.

  “Oh, hello, Cora — you’re home, then,” Auntie Kath says, standing up and smoothing down her skirt, as if everything is perfectly normal.

  “Are you all right?” I say. “Do — do you want me to do tea? Did you go to the shops?”