He holds a piece of dry cotton wool to the wound, waiting for it to staunch. ‘Just tell us what happened, Stephen.’
Silence.
‘Was it one of the children? What did they say? Were they calling you names again? What names did they call you?’
Silence.
‘Or was it a grown-up?’
Again I remain silent, and it occurs to me that I need never speak again.
‘Where did it happen? In the street? Or at someone’s house?’
‘Please, darling,’ says my mother. ‘You might have been really badly hurt.’
‘You could have been a goner, kid,’ says Geoff, coming back with the first-aid box. ‘Someone’s swiped all the emergency rations, by the way.’
‘Why can’t you tell us what happened?’ my father asks me, in his gentle, reasonable way. ‘Did they tell you not to say anything? Did they threaten you?’
Silence.
‘Stephen, what else happened? Did anything else happen?’
‘Maybe it was that sexual deviant,’ says Geoff. ‘The one who’s been hanging round at night.’
‘Stephen,’ says my father very slowly and carefully, ‘there are some people in this world who get a kind of pleasure out of hurting others. Sometimes they like to hurt children. They do things to them that the children find frightening. If something like that has happened to you, then you must tell us.’
‘He swiped the rations,’ says Geoff. ‘Then he slit Stevie’s throat to keep him quiet.’
My father paints iodine on the wound. It stings far worse than it did when the bayonet went in. I wince and cry out. He takes a bandage out of the box and begins to wind it round my neck.
‘Or was it you who took the rations, Stephen?’ he asks very softly.
I weep silently with the pain.
‘To play with in your camp?’ pursues my father. ‘Or perhaps to give to someone? Someone hanging around the street? Someone who asked you for food?’
‘That old tramp, probably,’ says Geoff.
‘I’m not going to be angry, Stephen. It would have been a kind thing to do. I just have to know.’
‘It’s that old tramp who hides out in the Barns,’ says Geoff.
‘I thought they took him away?’ says my mother. ‘I thought they put him in prison after that little boy was interfered with?’
‘Maybe he’s back. Maybe he’s the deviant.’
‘Was it the tramp, Stephen?’ asks my father.
I shake my head. I try to say, ‘Not the tramp. Not the Barns.’ But no words come out, only howling as infantile as Milly’s in her pushchair. I’m behaving just like that poor ghost in the grave – brave once, brave twice, but not brave for ever.
My father puts his arms round me. My mother strokes my hair.
‘Poor kid,’ says Geoff.
‘You’ll have to report it,’ murmurs my mother over my head to my father when I quieten a little.
‘Have we got the telephone number of the police station?’ murmurs my father, and at once I begin to howl again more hopelessly than ever.
Someone’s knocking at the front door. Terror silences my howling – the police are here already.
Geoff goes downstairs to answer it.
‘It’s Barbara Berrill,’ he says when he comes back. ‘Can Stephen come out to play?’
I resume my howling.
I’m woken from the depths of a deep and dreamless sleep by the uneasy feeling that something’s wrong.
I lie in the darkness, listening to the sound of Geoff’s breathing, trying to work out what it is.
The pain in my throat – yes. And when I put my fingers to my throat to investigate, I find the bandage round my neck. Now I remember – everything’s wrong: Milly’s weeping, Dee’s pressing her hands to her ears, Keith’s intent face in front of mine …
The policeman who’ll be coming in the morning to talk to me … The scarf that the policeman will find when he comes …
Yes, where is it? I sit up in bed in a panic. I can’t remember what I’ve done with it! I’ve left it lying around somewhere for anyone to find!
I scrabble under the pillow, my heart cold … No, there it is, just where I shoved it, smeared with dried blood, when my mother put me to bed and I at last opened my clenched hand. At once I see the policeman searching the bedroom, opening the toy cupboard, turning back the bedding … I’ll have to find somewhere better to hide it.
Is this what woke me? Possibly. Or is there something else wrong? Something I still can’t quite locate?
Something in the room? Or something outside?
I get up and put my head under the blackout blind. It’s as dark outside as it is in, and it takes me a long time to distinguish even the roofline of the houses opposite against the sky. What I’m peering into is what Keith and I were waiting for: the dark of the moon.
And in that blackness there’s some kind of lurking presence. A sound of some kind. A very small sound, but one that shouldn’t be there. I listen hard. It’s steady and unchanging, a faint, sustained sibilance, as if some creature were quietly and inexhaustibly exhaling.
I begin to shiver, because I know that I have to go out there into the breathing darkness to find somewhere to hide the scarf. I quietly put on my sandals and pull a jumper over my pyjamas, as I did before. I remember, almost wistfully, that earlier night when the moon was full, and my childish feeling that I’d need a knotted rope to climb out of the window. The difficulty in getting out this time, though, is not one that ropes could solve. The difficulty is the darkness itself and the sound in the darkness that shouldn’t be there. The difficulty is the shivering that won’t stop.
Once again I ease back the bolt on the kitchen door, then edge my way step by step through the confusions of the front garden, and stand at the gate in the perfumed and empty stillness of the street, wondering which way to go, as insubstantial as the darkness enclosing me. The sound’s more insistent out here. It seems to come from far off, and yet to be in the air all around me. For a moment I think I hear muffled, distant voices calling, but when I hold my breath and still my shivering so as to be certain, there’s nothing but the same long sigh as before.
Where am I going to find a hiding place? I can’t lock the scarf away inside the trunk, because Keith will find it there even if the policeman doesn’t. I think of each dark house along the street in turn. The Sheldons, the Stotts … Lamorna, Trewinnick … Each one’s a world closed against me.
The voices again … Again I hold my breath and try not to shiver … Nothing. Only that long, unnatural animal breath.
There’s only one possibility I can think of, and I stand there for a long time in the darkness before I can persuade myself to accept it. But if there’s nowhere else … I walk to the end of the street and turn towards the tunnel.
As I get closer my dread increases. The pitch darkness of the tunnel mouth is bad enough, but there’s something else about it as well – something that’s changed. The mass of the embankment towering against the darkness of the sky above me as I approach seems somehow wrong. I have the impression that there’s even more of it than usual pressing down upon the mouth of the brickwork. Something about its outline seems different, too. The horizon between the blackness of the embankment and the blackness of the sky above it is no longer even and level – it’s jagged and confused.
The whole sound and shape of the world has become in some way dislocated.
Now I’m enclosed by the hollow darkness beneath this strange mass … feeling my way along the slime through the huge echoes of my own breathing … and emerging into that same level, quiet breathing of the night. It reminds me, as I bend back the rusty links of the fence, of the level breathing of the unseen man behind me when I was here before, and once again I feel the cold prickling in the nape of my neck.
I climb through the gap, and fumble my way forward on my hands and knees through the stalks of cow parsley until I find the hollow behind the brickwork where the croquet box
was hidden. I take the scarf out of the sleeve of my jumper, and bury it as best I can in the dark under the loose, dank earth and the rank vegetation.
A new sound makes me raise my head. Distant barking. There’s someone in the Lanes.
That poor sick ghost has risen from his grave. He’s coming to punish my betrayal of him – coming to catch me in the very act of burying the precious object he trusted me to deliver. I scramble out of the undergrowth, and through the gap in the fence. I run back towards the tunnel, then stop, because something’s entering it at the other end. Two dim grids of hooded light and their two reflections in the puddles come towards me, bucking slowly in counterpoint over the unevennesses of the track. The howl of an engine in low gear echoes around the wet brickwork.
A vehicle of some sort – and in the middle of the night, in a place where no vehicle has ever been seen before.
There’s nowhere it can be going except to the Barns.
I crawl back through the fence and wait behind the brickwork for it to pass. They’re coming for him. They’re coming for him because I let myself be bullied once again, even if this time I didn’t give in, and because I’ve been too weak and inept to conceal the fact from my parents. And there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can do is hide yet again.
I wait, sick at myself, for the murmur of the engine to die away.
It continues, though, as quiet and steady as that mysterious breathing.
I raise my head an inch or two above the brickwork. There’s the vehicle, stationary in front of me, a vague, murmuring bulk outlined against the faintly illuminated patch of ground in front of the blacked-out headlights at one end and the small red glow from the hooded tail light at the other. A pair of doors stand open at the back, and two small splashes of light are dancing about over the retaining wall opposite and the embankment above it.
One of the splashes swings abruptly across to my side of the lane, and I drop below the top of the brickwork just as the dazzle of the beam reaches me.
I’m wrong. It’s not him they’ve come for. It’s me.
The torch finds the gap in the fence. I press myself face down in the hollow where I’ve hidden the scarf, as I did once before, and I hear the catch of the wire on cloth as someone squeezes through. A man’s breath. Then the snagging of the wire again, and the sound of a second man.
The rough hands are just about to seize me and drag me out into the blinding light of their torches …
The breathing and the breaking of undergrowth come closer … then move past me and grow quieter. I hear the scrape of boots on brickwork. The men have scrambled up on to the parapet, as Keith and I did the first time we came here, and they’re following it up towards the top of the tunnel mouth.
It’s not me they’re looking for, then. Or will they come back down if I move, and find me as Keith and I came back down and found the box?
I wait … wait …
The barking of the dogs has long ceased. Whoever it is coming along the Lanes is now well away from the Cottages. I can almost feel his approach … Or has he seen the lights of the van already, and stopped?
Still I wait. Still there’s nothing to be heard but the murmur of the waiting vehicle and the quiet, unnatural breathing of the night. I slowly lift my head above the brickwork …
And now I hear voices in the Lanes, and at the same time see torches approaching along the top of the embankment. Not two now but half a dozen of them, coming slowly along the ganger’s path beside the rails. Every now and then one of the beams swings sideways and lights up the wheels and undersides of the long train of stationary trucks waiting on the up line, all the way across the top of the tunnel and on towards the cutting. One of the beams swings upwards for a moment and catches part of the cargo projecting from them – the duck-egg blue underside of a shattered aircraft wing with its red, white and blue roundel, sticking up from a jagged tangle of scrap metal, a camouflage-painted tailplane with its red, white and blue flash.
I hide my head again as the men come scrambling and slithering slowly down the sloping parapet of the retaining wall above me. They’re breathing hard now, and uttering little grunts of warning and acknowledgement as they struggle with the weight and awkwardness of the load they’re carrying. They all wait, three feet away from me, breathing and shifting, as the wire fence is ripped off the concrete posts, and goes rustling back to allow the bearers and their burden to pass.
The voices approaching from the Lanes call out. ‘Got him?’ says one of them.
‘Most of him,’ gasps one of the bearers. ‘Want to look?’
A silence, and then, on the other side of the brickwork, the helpless groan and gagging of someone who’s turned aside to vomit.
The one thing I know for sure is that I did this. I wept and was weak and said nothing, and they went to fetch him. He fled before them on to the railway embankment, and ran down the line, home towards the houses in the Close, or up it and out to the great wide world. And there in the darkness, I suppose, he missed his footing. At once the terrible secret force hidden in the live rail leapt out at him, and the passing trains cut him in pieces.
The doors of the vehicle slam to. The murmur of the engine rises to a howl, then slowly, joltingly recedes, and echoes through the tunnel. The voices go echoing after it, some of them now raised in a cacophony of ghostly calls and answering laughter.
The noises die away, until once again there’s no sound left in the darkness but that same unsettling, long drawn-out sigh. I know what it is now: the hiss of steam escaping from the locomotive halted way up ahead in the depths of the cutting. The sigh gathers itself together into a single sharp exhalation. Another exhalation – a flurry of exhalations – a measured sequence of them – and the clanking of tightened couplings comes spreading back down the line of trucks. Slowly the train resumes its interrupted progress up the gradient.
By the time I’m back in my bed it’s dissolved into the remotenesses of the night, and the blackness is silent again.
The game’s finally over.
11
Everything in the Close is as it was; and everything has changed. The houses sit where they sat, but everything they once said they say no longer.
Not to me, at any rate. I walk up the road and back once more, stupidly, a stranger who’s beginning to make himself more than a little conspicuous, a confused old man wandering the streets. I turn the corner and walk under the railway bridge again, even more stupidly, since there’s nothing left of the Lanes at all. Where in this labyrinth of Crescents, Walks, and Meads was the sycamore with the rotted rope? Where was the dried-up pond, where were the Cottages? Was this dull service station next to the roundabout once by any chance the Barns?
I retrace my steps to the railway bridge. It’s still flanked on either side by brick retaining walls, as the old tunnel was. I walk along the smooth grey pavement, peering at the brickwork on the side where the croquet box was hidden. The walls must have been rebuilt when they replaced the tunnel and widened the road. Or is it possible that the old wall might have been kept on one side of the road for economy’s sake? The bricks here look well weathered … the gradient of the capping course seems familiar … At the low end of the wall now, where the rusty wire fence was, is an electricity substation, with a clean new galvanised wire fence boxing it off from the embankment beyond. There’s no way of crawling through it, and it’s too high for me to climb. I peer through the serviceable grey links. The bottom of the embankment behind the wall has been used as a tip, and it’s impossible to see, under the layers of ancient rubbish, whether there’s any gap behind the brickwork where something might be hidden.
I feel a small, unreasonable disappointment. I’m embarrassed to confess it, even to myself, but I think this may be why I’ve stopped to look at the bridge. It may even be why I’ve come on this whole expedition. Just to make sure. Just to check – and this is too silly to think, as soon as I put it into words – just to check that it’s not still here somewhere. The scar
f. The one piece of material evidence there might still be that the whole strange dream actually happened.
I know perfectly well, of course, that it can’t possibly have survived. It would have rotted half a century ago. If it wasn’t found by somebody first. Other children, perhaps, pursuing some fantasy of their own. I wonder what they’d have made of it. Chemnitz … Leipzig … Zwickau … By the time it was found all three would have been in either the Soviet zone of occupation or the German Democratic Republic, and it might have suggested Communist spying rather than Nazi. I imagine them carrying it importantly off to the police, or taking it with proper scholastic curiosity for identification in the local museum. I might just possibly find it still preserved in some forgotten dusty box, or displayed in a glass case along with a dutiful assemblage of shrapnel and old ration books.
Why didn’t I go back later and recover it myself? Because from that night on I was in a different corridor of my life. A door had closed behind me, and I never opened it again. I never went back to the Lanes. I never walked through the tunnel. I put all those things out of my head. Until today. Squeezed in here between the substation and the galvanised wire fence, and thinking these ancient thoughts, I’m standing on this particular spot of ground for the first time in over fifty years.
So what did happen after that night? Nothing. Life went on. I got up next morning as usual, so far as I remember. I went to school, and struggled to keep my attention fixed upon the algebra and history exams. I refused to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about the bandage round my throat, and endured as philosophically as I could the hypothesis eventually offered by my friends Hanning and Neale – that I had attempted to hang myself, but had failed because I was too weeny, too weedy, and too Wheatley. To my parents I said nothing about the events of the night. They said nothing further to me about the injury to my throat, and no policeman came to question me. It seemed to be understood that somehow the problem had been solved, and that I needn’t be tormented further. I suppose there must have been an inquest on the body that had been found on the line, and there must have been evidence of identification, but I can’t remember hearing about it. Well, it was wartime. Not everything was reported or spoken about.
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