by Neil Cross
In one of them was a pile of timber – bits of cast-off wood which Kenny had collected over the years. He carried an armful of damp 2x8s round to the last bedroom window. It took two trips.
When the wood was collected, he peeked through the window.
Soon, it would be sunrise. Right now, it was still dark – especially here, in the shadow of the house. Kenny could just make out Jonathan, his back straight, staring into the middle distance.
Kenny returned to the outbuildings to get a hammer and some nails, checking out the sky.
He jiggled the nails in the palm of his hand. He knew that loud hammering echoing through the Levels was unlikely to wake his neighbours, most of whom were farmers. If they thought about it at all, they’d probably assume someone was doing some necessary repair – mending a gate perhaps, or a collapsed section of fencing.
Probably.
He lay the nails and the hammer in the muddy scurf next to the stack of timber and went inside.
Kenny locked the door with a big, black key. His legs were shaking and weak.
He sank to the floor.
Something inside his head was growing. It grew until it had occluded his vision.
He seemed to be speeding through a tunnel.
He saw a sword.
He saw a sunrise. A skeletal king on the green swell of an English barrow, the dawn breeze whipping at the remains of his clothing.
He saw a flaming bone glow red, like iron in a forge.
He saw the black silhouette of an ash tree.
He saw the burning eye of God.
He woke twisted on the kitchen floor, soaked in tears and sweat, knowing that time was very short.
22
Ollie had phoned Jonathan about half a dozen times, but Jonathan wasn’t answering - not his landline or his mobile. So Ollie popped round to wake him up: Jonathan’s place was only five minutes away.
He found the front door open and a half-eaten microwave curry on the coffee table in the lounge. He called out Jonathan’s name and explored the weirdly echoing house. He found a broken window in the living room.
Not knowing what else to do, he went outside and called Becks. But Becks didn’t seem able to grasp what he was talking about.
He kept trying to explain it: ‘I thought he must’ve overslept,’ he said, ‘or had one too many last night. So I popped round. The door was open.’
‘What door?’
‘The front door.’
‘Then where the hell is he?’
‘I assumed he must be with you.’
‘Well, he’s not with me. Does it sound like he’s with me?’
It was like he was trying to explain quantum mechanics.
Eventually, Becks screeched to the kerb in her red Suzuki Swift and came clattering up the front steps. Ollie sat there waiting for her.
He waited while Becks ran her hands through her hair, looked at the sky, chewed on her lower lip – either because she was going to cry, or because she was angry. Or both, whatever.
‘Fuck,’ she said, ‘Fuck.’
Becks scrabbled round inside her handbag and brought out her phone. She called Jonathan’s brother Tim, in Sheffield, but he had no idea where Jonathan might be. He offered to come down. Becks told him not to worry. Then she hung up and called Jonathan’s parents.
Jonathan’s dad came to the phone. By now, Becks was beginning to snivel. She wiped away the snot with the heel of her hand and put on her smiling voice and said, ‘Dennis! It’s Becks.’
‘Hello, love. How are you?’
She stood there, Ollie watching her; both of them scared to go into the house. ‘I’m all right, thanks, not too bad. Have you heard from Jonathan at all?’
‘What, our Jonathan? Last Sunday, was it?’ His voice grew fainter on the line. Becks imagined him turning from the handset as he called to his wife: ‘Was it Sunday our Jonathan came round?’ A moment later he came back, saying: ‘It was last Sunday. Why, love? Is everything all right?’
‘I don’t know, to be honest. We don’t know where he is.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know where he is?’
‘He didn’t go to work today.’
‘Why not? Is he all right?’
‘We don’t know. His front door’s wide open. There’s food on the table, half eaten. There’s a broken window. But he’s not home.’
‘Where is he?’
‘We don’t know.’
Ollie muttered something about quantum mechanics, but Becks scowled and turned away to complete her phone call, patiently explaining the same things to Dennis over and over and over again.
Ollie and Becks waited in the kitchen. Dennis and Elaine, Jonathan’s parents, were there within the hour.
They walked straight in – it had seemed wrong, bad luck to shut the door that Jonathan had left open, as if shutting it might hamper his return.
Ollie and Becks were drinking coffee. Becks, who’d given up smoking eight years ago, had been puffing on Ollie’s roll-ups. The cigarettes and the coffee and the worry had given her a shitty headache. Then she’d taken too many Nurofen. They hadn’t made the headache go away, just made her feel like puking.
Dennis shook Ollie’s hand, gave Becks a little hug and a kiss on the cheek. Elaine stood in the corner, clutching her handbag.
Ollie and Becks showed Dennis the broken glass in the living room, the half-brick.
Dennis said, ‘Did anyone call the police?’
Ollie and Becks, both in their mid-thirties, were relieved that a responsible adult had arrived to ask such questions. In unison, they said, ‘Not yet.’
Dennis took out his mobile, dialled 999 and said: ‘Police, please.’
Elaine began to cry.
Becks sat on the sofa, drained.
Ollie went out to the garden. He made himself a single-skinner, sucking it half to death on the patio, watching the wind play in the poplars at the foot of the garden, thinking how badly they needed a trim.
23
Kenny was woken by the phone. He stood, awkward and bewildered, wondering for a bleary moment where he was and why his arms and legs ached so much.
Then he remembered, and answered, ‘Hello?’
Pat said, ‘You’re back then?’
‘Mmmm. What time is it?’
‘Gone nine. You up?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So put the kettle on, then.’
‘Why?’
‘Thought I’d pop over.’
‘Why?’
‘See how you are. How are you?’
‘Good. Bit sleepy.’ He thought of Jonathan Reese in the last bedroom and said: ‘Look, there’s no need to come all this way. I’ll come to you.’
‘I don’t mind. It gets me out of the caravan.’
He couldn’t think of a lie, so he told part of the truth. ‘I’ve got nothing in – tea, coffee, milk, whatever. Let’s meet in Weston. Have a stroll along the front.’
They arranged a time and place and Kenny hung up.
He stood, looking out of the kitchen window – at the ragged outbuildings, the barley fields beyond, the cattle, the fields of rape, the distant motorway. The vivid green hills, the bright blast of morning.
It was a clear day, but for a strange, hazy patch of cloud to the south-west. He walked round to the back of the house. He nailed the timber he’d collected earlier to the frame of the last bedroom window. He tested it for strength. It was good.
Jonathan Reese sat in the false twilight, cross-hatched by streaks of light which bored through cracks and fissures in the timber barricading the window to this lonely room.
Inside, Kenny told him: ‘I’ve got to go out. When I come back, you’re going to tell me what happened to her.’
Jonathan raised his eyebrows and made a noise, a single syllable. It was a question. Who?
‘Callie Barton,’ said Kenny. ‘I want you to tell me what you did and why you did it. Because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.’
Then
he left, locking the last bedroom door. He took a shower, got changed, and went to see Pat.
He was halfway to Weston when she called to say: ‘Meet me on the front.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
He saw it long before they met. The strange haze he’d noticed was a black river of smoke surging up to the sky.
The Grand Pier was burning.
The pier was a sinister place, but it was an innocent one, too – it was two things at once, like a beast from a fairy-tale. Kenny stood on the sea front, part of the crowd that had gathered to watch it burn.
Pat found him. She edged up to him and said nothing, just took his hand and squeezed it once.
Weston pier stood on the second highest tidal reach in the world, and the tide was out – so here, on the beach, there was no water to douse the flames. A police hovercraft, helpless, drifted over the brown sand like a ghost.
There was a low death groan, a crash and a discharge of red embers – vivid and capering, fairies against the smoke-black sky. The boardwalk collapsed. Superstructure rained on the beach.
All these people were here, at the edge of the land. Kenny thought they were like refugees waiting to be saved: the burning pier, the glowing metal; it was all a signal to the pale blue land across the water.
Pat said, ‘I used to come here before the Beatles.’
And Kenny had come here with his dad, often enough; before the Sex Pistols.
He’d loved its optimism and its vulgarity. A pier, by its nature, was touched: a place of jangling and jangled nerves, shrieking and not sane. Kenny had felt at home there; riding the little train, losing his precarious balance on the seesawing floor of the Crazy House.
And now, as he stood witness to its ending, he knew that something inside him had changed.
They stayed without speaking for a long time. Later, when the fire had been contained, they wandered to a sea-front amusement arcade. It was weirdly deserted. They got change and stood next to each other, pumping coins into one-armed bandits.
Pat had to shout over the chinking and honking and flashing of the abandoned machines. ‘Finished with your travels, are you?’
He shouted back: ‘I think so, yeah.’
‘No intention of running off again?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Because we were worried. Me and Mary.’
‘You don’t even like Mary.’
‘I like her fine. It’s Mary that’s not too keen on me, but that’s a different story. She’s very protective of you.’
‘I just had to go away and think.’
‘About what?’
He shrugged. ‘Y’know.’
‘Are you going to tell her?’
‘I’m going to try.’
‘Because she’s more important than the rest of it – lost loves, kidnapped boys. All of it.’
He nodded and said nothing because Pat wouldn’t understand.
Outside, the summer sky was hazy with smoke, and the tide was coming in – brown, opaque, gritty water, not even really the sea.
After saying goodbye to Pat, Kenny stopped off at a DIY shop before driving home, where he dumped his carrier bags in the kitchen.
He took the claw hammer from beside the kettle and shoved it through the loop of his belt then went to unlock the last bedroom, stepping from bright sunshine into fetid twilight.
The cord was still round Jonathan’s throat. He’d fretted and fussed and stretched his duct-tape manacles, but they’d held.
Kenny scrutinized Jonathan with some satisfaction, like a nurse with a difficult patient. Then, using a sponge, he applied rubbing alcohol to the duct tape on Jonathan’s face, massaging it into the bristly skin.
He picked at the corner of the tape. Soon, he’d made the corner edge large enough to get a good grip. He peeled the tape away in one long movement.
Embedded in the sticky side were flecks of Jonathan’s skin and dots of stubble. His face was red as if sunburned.
He looked at Kenny and said nothing.
Then he exploded into something like a seizure. He bucked and thrashed in his bonds; he foamed at the mouth until the cord choked him and made him placid again.
Kenny had to fight not to giggle at the absurdity of it, standing in his spare room with a knot of cancer in his skull and a kidnapped man in the last bedroom, tied with nylon cord to a ten-fin, cast-iron radiator.
When Jonathan had stopped, Kenny said: ‘Are you thirsty?’
‘Yes.’
Kenny went to the kitchen and filled a mug with water. He carried the mug back to the last bedroom and knelt. He tilted the mug to Jonathan’s lips.
‘Where is she, Jonathan? What did you do?’
Jonathan gulped, water spilling down his chest. When the cup was empty, he said: ‘I don’t know where she is. And I don’t know what happened to her. Hand to God.’
Kenny tested the weight of the claw hammer in his fist.
‘I’m not lying,’ said Jonathan. ‘Please God. Please Jesus.’
They locked eyes. Kenny screamed at him. He screamed until his throat was sore and lifted the claw hammer, its buck-toothed metal end.
Jonathan said, ‘Don’t.’
Kenny lowered the hammer and squatted so he was eye to eye with Jonathan. ‘If you tell me where she is, you can leave.’
The desire to believe this played on Jonathan’s face like sunlight on a pond. Kenny watched it.
‘On my mother’s life. I don’t know.’
‘Then you’ll die here.’
‘No. They’ll find me.’
‘Who will?’
‘The police.’
‘They won’t begin to look for at least a week. You haven’t got a week. Because neither have I.’
Then Kenny saw an expression on Jonathan’s face that he’d never witnessed before, not in person. He supposed it was terror.
He watched for several seconds, fascinated. Then he hurried to his studio to get a sketchpad and some charcoal, wanting to capture it.
24
In the morning, Kenny raised a bottle of water to Jonathan’s lips and let him drink, warning him not to gulp – his stomach would cramp and he’d vomit. But Jonathan didn’t listen and Kenny was forced to snatch the bottle away, as from a toddler.
Water ran down Jonathan’s jaw and on to his chest. He sat gasping.
Kenny left him there, to grow hungrier still.
It was like having guests to visit. The routines of the day were disrupted and the atmosphere was different, but you had to get on and do things. So Kenny did the housework - dealing with the mud and the bloody footprints, all the rest of it. He pottered about, tidying.
Then he returned to the studio to add the finishing touches to his last portrait. Her name was Michelle. She was twenty-two and very pretty – a PA in a firm that made organic beers and cider.
Her married lover was chairman of the company. He’d commissioned Kenny to paint Michelle after Goya’s The Nude Maja.
Kenny had aged the painting – not well enough to satisfy the eye of an expert, because that would constitute deliberate fraud. The painting was aged just well enough that the client could hang it in his home study without arousing his wife’s misgivings.
When the painting was finished, he’d build a pine crate in which to ship it. This was his favourite part of the job; wrapping the painting in newspaper and cardboard and bubble wrap, then wedging it tight into its flat pine crate and screwing the crate shut with a small Black & Decker.
He’d prop the crate against the wall, hand-addressed, to send by courier when all this was over.
Then he’d prepare some new canvases. He didn’t know what for: they’d stay blank. But he liked preparing canvases almost as much as he liked dispatch; it required the expert repetition of long-learned techniques. It emptied his mind.
In the evening, Kenny visited Jonathan. He was carrying the blue bucket and the crowbar.
Leaving Jonathan tied by the throat to the r
adiator, he snipped his hands free of the duct tape. Then he turned away, crowbar in hand, as Jonathan squatted to urinate and empty his bowels.
The air in the room grew rank and intimate. Kenny was reminded of a chimpanzee sanctuary he and his father had visited in Devon, back in the mid-1990s. Their concrete enclosures had smelled something like this. The desolation of that place – the sad-eyed chimps grooming each other - had sent Aled into a moonless depression from which he didn’t emerge for many weeks.
When Jonathan was done, he stayed squatting there.
‘Paper?’
Kenny threw him a roll of toilet paper which unspooled prettily as it flew, like a celebratory streamer.
Jonathan cleaned himself and pulled up the striped pyjama trousers Kenny had given him. Then he waited to be bound once again with duct tape.
When he was remanacled, Kenny put the bucket just outside the door and returned to Jonathan. He knelt before him and spoke the same words, chanting them in what had become a tender liturgy.
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Just tell me what you did. Help me. Then go home. Back to the world.’
‘Oh, Christ. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to her.’
‘Just one question. Then you’re free.’
‘I don’t know the answer!’
‘Yes you do!’ screamed Kenny. ‘Yes you do!’
There was a moment of stillness, paralysed and remorseful; then Kenny left Jonathan to another night of hunger and thirst.
He carried the bucket to the bathroom, emptied it down the lavatory, flushed, rinsed it with hot water, emptied it down the lavatory once again.
Then he washed his hands and left the bucket in the bathroom until tomorrow.
The phone rang. Kenny stopped to listen. It was Mary.
‘You didn’t come round. You haven’t called. We’re worried about you. Please call us back. Just pick up the phone and call us back.’
But he didn’t. He couldn’t, not until this was over.
He was sure it wouldn’t take long – he’d already overheard Jonathan murmuring to himself, weeping, tormented by hunger and fear.