Eventually they reached the riverbank, where Poppy — the farm’s fierce and playful Jack Russell — had stationed herself. They gathered around her, catching their breath.
‘Here you are, Poppy!’ said Lucy. She bent down for a hug, which the dog dismissed with a growl. ‘What’s the matter?’
Poppy was staring at the line of trees on the opposite bank. It was a thin, shallow stretch of the river, with no bridge to speak of. In the summer, Rupert had shown them how to get across by hopping on the right stones. You avoided the greener ones — those slick with moss that were impossible to touch without slipping and flying into a spectacular spin and landing in the cold, gravel-strewn water, much to Lucy’s delight.
Rupert turned up the lamp. It roared and cast its glow across the frothing curls of water. He peered across.
‘Something in the water?’ he said. Poppy renewed her barking, legs rigid, tail wagging furiously.
‘It’s in the trees,’ said Lucy. ‘There’s something in the trees.’
As if in understanding, Poppy suddenly braced herself and sprang into the water. The current took her for a moment, but she regained her footing and in a second she had darted across and dragged herself up the other bank.
‘Poppy!’ shouted Lucy, somewhere between dismay and delight. With all the forward planning her four years allowed her, she leaped in after her dog and began wading across.
Rupert jumped in and splashed after her.
‘Lucy come back here!’
But she was as quick as the dog, and before James knew it, he and Billy were wading across too.
Under the hypnotic sway of Rupert’s lamp and led by Lucy’s calls, they followed the dog deep into the forest until the sound of the river was far behind. They marched through bracken and over tree roots and boulders. The air around them was dense and muffled with ancient vegetation.
‘What is it?’ said James, whispering, though he did not know why. His feet were wet and numb, and Billy’s teeth chattered behind him.
‘Something dead,’ said Rupert. ‘Fox, probably.’
‘Poooooppppeeeeyyyy!’ sang Lucy, as though she was on a summer walk in bright sunshine, not this freezing hike in the dark.
‘Shouldn’t we go back?’ said James.
‘Father’ll want to know if it’s a fox,’ said Rupert. ‘There’ve been a few chickens taken.’
They marched on, deeper and deeper, until they came to a clump of brambles surrounding a tree. Poppy was at the perimeter, yowling and jumping, scurrying to and fro in an effort to find a way in.
‘Maybe a den,’ said Rupert. He moved forwards to inspect the bush, trying to see through it. ‘Could be some cubs.’
Poppy, nearing the limits of her frustration, suddenly flattened herself to the ground and began to drag herself under the branches. She gave a couple of yelps but was soon through, upon which she barked three times and fell silent.
‘Poppy?’ said Lucy. She turned to her brother and tugged his sleeve. ‘Rupert? What’s wrong with her?’
‘Dunno. Here.’
He handed the lamp to James and turned to a patch of weeds behind them. He pulled out twigs and branches until he found a long, thick stick, which he then used to hack away at the brambles.
‘Give me a hand, will you?’ he said to James.
‘Sorry,’ said James. He handed the lamp to Billy. The weight was nearly too much for Billy, but he managed to hold it in two hands while James searched for another stick. Before long the two older brothers were swiping and tugging at the thick brambles, until they had cleared a path through.
They threw down their sticks, and Billy handed Rupert the lamp.
‘Careful,’ said Rupert. ‘The mother might still be around somewhere. They can bite hard.’
They crept through the bush until they found themselves in a covered clearing around the base of the tree, like a natural cave. Their lamplight filled the small space. Poppy was staring at the tree, against which lay the body of a man covered in a muddy, white sheet. A mess of strings fell from the branches in knots around his limbs, so that he looked like a discarded puppet, with his eyes shut and his face scratched and bruised. Lucy gasped as she appeared from the path, and Billy stood close to his brother. For a long time, they said nothing, but then Billy breathed a quivering sigh — half relief, half despair.
‘I told you,’ he said.
THE SCARF
London, Present Day
I SURFACE FROM OBLIVION and look upwards, as if through shallow water. Three faces swim in low light, peering down at me. The one on the left is pale and framed in white curtains of hair. The one in the middle is dark and freckled. And then on the right a looming terror that makes my chest heave — the wrinkled skin of the ragged man.
‘Are you sure it’s him?’ says the dark, freckled face.
I feel myself falling, and as the faces ripple away, the pale girl replies.
‘Yes. I’m certain of it.’
Needless to say, after Miss Craven’s death, I was not a popular boy. The school was closed for the rest of the week, and the head teacher called me and my parents in for a meeting. Epilepsy was a fashionable condition to talk about back then, so they decided I should be looked at, but the doctor found nothing wrong with me and pronounced my experience an ‘episode’.
Going back to school wasn’t as bad as I had feared. At least, not at first. The next few weeks were all about Miss Craven. There were flowers and prayers and assemblies dedicated to her. The art class made a little shrine in the gym where you could place notes of condolences for her family. It was all anyone talked about. Even Daniel Hough kept himself to himself.
But after a month, the shrine was taken down, and the whispers and looks began. Fear, blame and mockery.
‘Don’t you want me, baby?’
As Miss Craven met her grisly end, I had, apparently, been singing this refrain at the top of my voice. The words crept into the school corridors, first mumbled nervously, then sung, and finally screamed in my face as I walked between classes.
My episode quickly inflated with hyperbole. Apparently I had not just wet myself in the classroom but followed through at the back as well. The smell was atrocious. Then somebody said I had come in my Y-fronts. I had not. I knew this because I had not yet learned to ejaculate properly, despite my age, although I doubted that sharing this piece of information would help my cause.
Then, somebody said that I had, in fact, opened my fly and taken out my penis, waving it at the class like a wand. Daniel Hough, despite having witnessed the event firsthand, took this one on with vigour. His masturbation routine was now a prophecy. And it now had its very own soundtrack.
‘Don’t you want me baby? Uh..uh..uh..oooooooohhhhhh…’
He perfected it daily in front of me, to much applause.
After a while, the abuse died down. But things had changed. I was treated with even more apathy than before, even by the teachers. They had their own staffroom gossip of course, and only the accounts of Mr Mackenzie and those overheard in the playground to go on. Many of them — I’m sure of this, even if it was subconsciously — viewed me as somehow complicit in the death of their beloved colleague. I was picked last, ignored, thrown the oldest and tattiest textbooks and scapegoated for blameless misdemeanours. Even the dinner ladies seemed to reduce my portions of stewed tomatoes and Smash.
A crowd is forever trying to remove its impurities.
I rode it out, put it from my mind, and eventually resigned myself to the fact that I was simply the freak that my classmates insisted I was. I found it harder and harder to piece together what had happened when Miss Craven had died. Had I really imagined her death before it happened? Hadn’t I exposed myself to the class? My memory became as jumbled as the apocryphal rumours themselves. Certainly, the idea that I might possess supernatural powers never entered my mind. Not at first.
Summer held tight, but finally succumbed to autumn’s advances midway through the first term. Cold morning air sm
udged with ember smoke and clouds of breath from red lips hanging over diamond-frosted roads. Dark sunsets and the poetry of leafless trees, the crackle of bracken, the deep, dark perfume of night and creeping death all around. Autumn — a right old fuck fest.
One evening I was taking our dog, Fritz, for a walk. It was already dark and I was on the lane by Kelmere Forest, a curve of large cottages wreathed in woodsmoke and lined by a rambling moss-covered wall. Fritz had jumped into a hedge, and I waited for him with my face buried in my parka while he worried the dead brambles.
A car pulled up to one of the houses and a family spilled out — mum, dad and two girls. I watched them shout and laugh their way to the door of the house. Amidst the clamour of shopping bags, keys, coats, seat belts, one of the girls caught her scarf on the gate. It reeled off her neck without her noticing and fell to the ground in a pile of red tartan. The front door slammed shut.
Lights came on in the house and I saw the girl’s mother at the kitchen window, smiling at the sink. I turned to the bushes.
‘Fritz,’ I called, but he was still busy, so I walked to the scarf, picked it up and took it to the front door. They had a heavy knocker, which I rapped twice.
The father answered wearing an apron and holding a knife.
‘Hello,’ he said, smiling in surprise. He looked down at the scarf, which I held up for him.
‘It was at the gate,’ I said.
He tutted and threw up his non-knife-wielding hand.
‘Susie!’ he shouted.
Susie ran through, a girl of seven or eight.
‘My scarf!’ she said, grabbing it with delight. ‘Thank you!’
She reached out and gave me a hug around my waist.
‘That’s OK,’ I said, a little taken aback by the warmth.
Susie’s sister and mother had joined them so that the whole family now stood gleaming in the yellow light of their doorstep. I basked in their smiles, the warmth of their house, the smell of cooking onions and felt, for the first time in a long time, peaceful and proud. And all for a scarf.
After a few more thank-yous and OKs it was time to go. The father offered me his free hand and I shook it. I got the timing and grip just right too, good and firm and synchronised so that we were properly shaking like men, not stuck in that terrible squeeze where one hand is simply crushing the other’s into a clump of fingers. We enjoyed our perfect handshake and he looked me in the eye, a level look of genuine trust and gratitude.
‘Thank you, son,’ he said once again. I don’t think anything had ever made me quite so happy.
He closed the door and I heard the sounds of the family returning to its teatime bliss. I listened for a while, then returned to my search for Fritz.
My brain did a small swoop as I closed the gate. The trees and the wall seemed to spin out of my vision for a second as if I had stumbled. I stopped and regained my focus, hearing little terrier growls coming from up the lane.
‘Fritz,’ I called, and followed the sound.
I kept to the centre of the road. I could already feel the night trying to pull away from me, losing its meaning like the words had done on the page of my maths book. The brambles and the trees and the stone of the wall began to move around in blocks. Behind them was a bright yellow light.
I stopped again, closed my eyes and held my head. When the light had faded, I looked up. Somehow I had found my way back to the house.
The blocks formed and separated like pieces of a puzzle breaking apart. The same yellow light streamed through the gaps, brighter this time, and before I could close my eyes it had already taken over my vision. I felt myself freezing to the spot.
Now I was inside the family’s house looking down at an onion on a chopping board. I had strong, hairy hands and my wife was at the sink, talking to me about Christmas. I felt as if I was only half-listening to her, but enjoying the sound of her voice and the giggles of my daughters as they chased each other around the kitchen. The knife was well sharpened, I kept it that way, and the onion was strong. My eyes watered. I felt happy and warm and blessed, but there were other feelings too somewhere that I couldn’t quite grasp. I felt that there was something I was keeping hidden away, something to do with money that I didn’t want to think about right now. I felt that if I did think about it, it would ruin this perfect night with my daughters and my wife and my nice, big, warm house.
That boy at the door. Nice of him to return Susie’s scarf. I might have invited him in but he was a bit strange and I didn’t like how he looked when Susie hugged him.
My wife had stopped talking about Christmas and was peering through the window.
‘What on Earth? Good grief, Gerald, look.’
‘What is it?’ I heard myself say. I put down the knife and walked over the sink. Then I looked out onto the dark lane and saw myself.
That’s the boy with the scarf, I thought.
Something clattered behind me.
Why is he standing there with that look on his face.
‘What’s he doing Gerald?’ said my wife. ‘Is he…is he drooling?’
‘I don’t know,’
‘Daddy?’ said my daughter’s voice behind me.
I felt a surge of protection and the conviction that I had been right to be suspicious about this boy, who was now standing outside my house, staring and dribbling like a lunatic.
‘Daddy?’
‘Get back to the living room, girls. Daddy will handle this.’
I removed my apron, ready to go outside and tackle this little pervert, drag him to his house and have it out with his father. But then the boy seemed to jerk awake. He stopped drooling and looked around as if he had no idea where he was. Then he ran off up the lane, shouting something.
‘Well I never,’ said my wife, dropping the blind.
‘Daddy, look,’ said my daughter.
I turned and saw Susie standing, pale-faced and serious in the centre of the kitchen. She was pointing behind her at her younger sister, who was lying on the floor. She had evidently found the knife on the worktop, which was now beside her in a pool of blood spilling from a cut in her arm. My wife screamed.
And then I was back on the lane, facing the window. The man and the woman whose beaming faces and gratitude I had just enjoyed were now glaring at me, frowning and repulsed. I felt saliva on my chin, which I wiped. Fritz barked from where he was sitting in front of me, looking up with his head cocked.
I turned and ran, calling Fritz to follow. As I reached the end of the lane someone screamed. Before I reached home, I heard sirens too.
Her name was Felicity Shaw. I saw the family on bonfire night, when the town flocked to the green by Lasswick Church to eat burnt meat and watch underwhelming explosions. They were standing in the glow of Guy Fawkes’ flaming effigy, their faces gleaming with the same healthy light as when I had seen them in their porch. But their smiles disappeared when they saw me. Her parents eyed me suspiciously and held their daughters close to their hips, then left without a word. Felicity’s arm was in bandages, but she was all right.
Obviously I had not — could not have — hurt the girl. Nevertheless, there were words to my parents, and the whispers of irresponsible parenthood that rustled around Lasswick that November turned quickly to the lunatic who had been dribbling outside the Shaws’ house at the time. I was taken on another trip to the doctor.
The episodes continued, but muted. Those first two ordeals were like floodwater from a bulging dam that gradually settled to an even flow. It didn’t take me long to understand that whatever I was experiencing was triggered by touch — and not just any old brush or knock, not just skin contact, but a touch that meant something, even if it was just to me. I remembered that Miss Craven’s squeeze of my shoulder when I met her in the corridor, fresh from that first daze, filled me with happiness. Mr Shaw’s firm and honest handshake before his daughter’s accident made me glow.
The episodes became more mundane as well — there was no more visceral shock of death or inju
ry. Instead, I saw snapshots of lives. I actually began to enjoy them, to crave the experience of seeing through somebody else’s eyes.
No. Scratch that. What I craved was the experience of otherness, of being anyone but me.
I became addicted to it and took every opportunity I could to cast off of my own life and absorb myself in another. For a few moments I could escape my life completely.
I learned to control the gurgling, and the dizzy spells disappeared. Before long I wasn’t even blacking out, and touch was no longer necessary; all that I required was eye contact.
FEELING THEIR BONES
I WAKE AGAIN. THIS time consciousness snaps back like a taut band, no ripples, no sense of disappearance. I’m horizontal on an old sofa in a small room. The walls are bare and stripped of paper — in some places stripped of plaster too. One corner is just an empty space with slats of wood standing upright. The floor is similarly free of decorative luxuries like carpet, completion or a lack of moisture.
There is a distant rumble and squeak of traffic outside. Then the room fills with sudden streaming light and the roar of a train. Just as quickly, the noise and light are gone. There’s a bad smell around me, like dogs and drains and council house hoover bags. For a second I think it might be me, but I realise it’s coming from the blanket that’s draped over my shoulder. I shake it off and sit up, my head immediately bursting with pain.
‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’ says a voice.
The woman from the van is sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. She’s the same one I saw in the Cherry Tree, looking me over now with those two crystal fists of eyes. Same clothes too; the vaguely military urban uniform that doesn’t quite belong on her frame. She leans her elbows on her knees and lets her hands fall between them. A St Christopher dangles from her neck. There are cheap rings on her long fingers and two leather bracelets on her wrist, worn and frayed. On the skin beneath them are dull welts; track marks leading up to her elbow like a trail of ancient bomb craters.
The Other Lives Page 9