He looked at her again, sidelong, hoping she would turn her head and look at him. With one slender hand she toyed with her gold chain. Her cloak fell open slightly as she walked, and he caught a glimpse of the creature she carried beneath it, close to her body, attached by a slender golden chain.
He stopped walking and let her get away from him. He had to rest for a little while before he felt able to climb the stairs to the street.
By then he was wondering if he had really seen what he thought he had seen. The glimpse had been so brief. But he had been deeply shaken by what he saw or imagined, and he turned the wrong way outside the station. When he finally realized, he was at the corner of Jenny’s road, which had once also been his. Rather than retrace his steps, he decided to take the turning and walk past her house.
Lights were on in the front room, the curtains drawn against the early winter dark. His footsteps slowed as he drew nearer. He felt such a longing to be inside, back home, belonging. He wondered if she would be pleased at all to see him. He wondered if she ever felt lonely, as he did.
Then he saw the tiny, dark figure between the curtains and the window. It was spread-eagled against the glass, scrabbling uselessly; inside, longing to be out.
As he stared, feeling its pain as his own, the curtains swayed and opened slightly as a human figure moved between them. He saw the woman reach out and pull the creature away from the glass, back into the warm, lighted room with her, and the curtains fell again, shutting him out.
GRAHAM JOYCE
Under the Pylon
GRAHAM JOYCE was born in 1954. After attending teacher training college in Derby, he won the George Fraser Poetry Award while taking an MA at Leicester University. He had a variety of jobs—fitter’s Mate, kitchen porter, bingo-caller, holiday camp attendant, fruit picker, supply teacher—before becoming a development officer for the National Association of Youth Clubs.
He quit in 1988 and went to live on the Greek island of Lesbos to concentrate on his writing. His first novel, Dreamside, was published to critical acclaim by Pan Books in 1991. Since then, two more books have appeared from Headline, Dark Sister and House of Lost Dreams.
Although his stories have been published in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror, In Dreams, Darklands 2 and Interzone, he has hardly been prolific in this area. It’s quality not quantity that we may expect from him, as “Under the Pylon” shows.
AFTER SCHOOL OR DURING THE LONG summer holidays we used to meet down by the electricity pylon. Though we never went there when the weather was wet because obviously there was no cover. Apart from that the wet power lines would vibrate and hum and throb and it would be . . . well, I’m not saying I was scared but it would give you a bad feeling.
Wet or dry, we’d all been told not to play under the pylon. Our folks had lectured us time and again to keep away; and an Electricity Board disc fixed about nine feet up on the thing spelled out DANGER in red and white lettering. Two lightning shocks either side of the word set it in zigzag speech marks.
“Danger!”
I imagined the voice of the pylon would sound like a robot’s speech-box from a science-fiction film, because that’s what the pylon looked like, a colossal robot. Four skeletal steel legs straddled the ground, tapering up to a pointed head nudging the clouds. The struts bearing the massive power cables reached over like arms, adding a note of severity and anthropomorphism to the thing. Like someone standing with their hands on their hips. The power cables themselves drooped slightly until picked up by the next giant robot in the field beyond, and then to the next. Marching into the infinite distance, an army of obstinate robots.
But the pylon was situated on a large patch of waste ground between the houses, and when it came down to it, there was nowhere else for us kids to go. It was a green and overgrown little escape-hatch from suburbia. It smelled of wild grass and giant stalks of cow parsley, and of nettles and foxgloves and dumped housebricks. You could bash down a section to make a lair hidden from everything but the butterflies. Anyway, it wasn’t the danger of electricity giving rise to any nervousness under the pylon. It was something else. Old Mrs Nantwich called it a shadow.
Joy Astley was eleven, and already wearing lipstick and make-up you could have peeled off like a mask. Her parents had big mouths and were always bawling. “The Nantwiches,” she said airily, “could only afford to buy this house because it’s under the pylon. No one wants a house under the pylon.”
“Why not?” said Clive Mann. It was all he ever said. Clive had a metal brace across his teeth, and even though he was odd and stared at things a lot, people mostly bothered to answer him. “Why?”
“Because you don’t,” said Joy, “that’s why.”
Tania Brown was in my class at school (she used to pronounce her name Tarnia because of the sunshine jokes) and agreed with Joy. Kev Duffy burped and said, “Crap!” It was Kev’s word for the month. He would use it repeatedly up until the end of August. Joy just looked at Kev and wiggled her head from side to side, as if that somehow answered his remark.
The Nantwiches Joy was being so snobbish about were retired barge people. Why anyone would want to rub two pennies together I’ve never understood, but they were always described as looking as though they couldn’t accomplish this dubious feat; and then in the same breath people would always add “yet they’re the people who have got it”. I doubted it somehow. They’d lived a hard life transporting coal on the barges, and it showed. Their faces had more channels and ruts and canals than the waterways of the Grand Union.
“They’re illiterate,” Joy always pointed out whenever they were mentioned. And then she’d add, “Can’t read or write.”
The Nantwiches’ house did indeed stand under the shadow of the giant pylon. Mr Nantwich was one of those old guys with a red face and white hair, forever forking over the earth in his backyard. Their garden backed up to the pylon. A creosoted wooden fence closed off one side of the square defined by the structure’s four legs. One day when I was there alone old Mrs Nantwich had scared me by popping her head over the fence and saying, “You don’t wanna play there.”
Her face looked as old as a church gate. Fine white bristles sprouted from her chin. Her hair was always drawn back under a headscarf, and she wore spectacles with plastic frames and lenses like magnifying glasses. They made her eyes huge.
“Why?” I’d croaked.
She threw her head back slowly and pointed her chin towards the top of the pylon. Then she looked at me and did it again. “There’s a shadow orf of it.”
I felt embarrassed as she stared, waiting for me to say something. “What do you mean?”
Before she answered, another head popped alongside her own. It was her daughter Olive. Olive looked as old as her mother. She had wild, iron-grey hair. Her teeth were terribly blackened and crooked. The thing about Olive was she never uttered a word. She hadn’t spoken, according to my mother, since a man had “jumped out at her from behind a bush”. I didn’t see how that could make someone dumb for the rest of their life, but then I didn’t understand what my mother meant by that deceptively careful phrase either.
“Wasn’t me,” said Mrs Nantwich a little fiercely, “as decided to come ’ere.” And then her head disappeared back behind the fence, leaving Olive to stare beadily at me as if I’d done something wrong. Then her head too popped out of sight.
I looked up at the wires and they seemed to hum with spiteful merriment.
Another day I came across Clive Mann, crouched under the pylon, and listening. At that time, the three sides of the pylon had been closed off. We’d found some rusty corrugated sheeting to lean against one end, and a few lengths of torn curtain to screen off another. The third side, running up to the Nantwiches’ creosoted fence, was shielded by an impenetrable jungle of five-foot-high stinging nettles.
It had been raining, and the curtains sagged badly. I ducked through the gap between them to find Clive crouched and staring directly up into the tower of the pylon. He said not
hing.
“What are you doing?”
“You can hear,” he said. “You can hear what they’re saying.”
I looked up and listened. The lines always made an eerie hissing after rain, but there was no other sound.
“Hear what?”
“No! The people. On the telephones. Mrs Astley is talking to the landlord of the Dog and Trumpet. He’s knocking her off.”
I looked up again and listened. I knew he wasn’t joking because Clive had no sense of humour. He just stared at things. I was about to protest that the cables were power lines, not telephone wires, when the curtains parted and Joy Astley came in.
“What are you two doing?”
We didn’t answer.
“My Dad says these curtains and things have got to come down,” said Joy.
“Why?”
“He says he doesn’t like the idea.”
“What’s it got to do with him?”
“He thinks,” Joy said, closing her eyes, “things go on here.”
“You mean he’s worried about what his angelic daughter gets up to,” I said.
Joy turned around, flicked up her skirt and wiggled her bottom at us. It was a gesture too familiar to be of any interest. At least that day she was wearing panties.
I had to pass by the Dog and Trumpet as I walked home later that afternoon. I noticed Mrs Astley going in by the back door, which was odd because the pub was closed in the afternoon. But I thought little of it at the time.
Just as we were accustomed to Joy flashing her bottom at us, so were we well inured to the vague parental unease about us playing under the pylon. None of our parents ever defined the exact nature of their anxieties. They would mention things about electricity and generators, but these didn’t add up to much more than old Mrs Nantwich’s dark mutterings about a shadow. I got my physics and my science all mixed up as usual, and managed to infect the rest of the group with my store of misapprehensions.
“Radiation,” I announced. “The reason they’re scared is because if there was an accidental power surge feedback . . .” (I was improvising like mad) “. . . then we’d all get radiated.”
Radiated. It was a great word. Radiated. It got everyone going.
“There was a woman in the newspaper,” said Joy. “Her microwave oven went wrong and she was radiated. Her bones all turned to jelly.”
Tania could cap that. “There was one on television. A woman. She gave birth to a cow with two heads. After being radiated.” The girls were always better at horror stories.
Kev Duffy said, “Crap!” Then he looked up into the pyramid of the tower and said, “What’s the chances of it happening?”
“Eighteen hundred to one,” I said. With that talent for tossing out utterly bogus statistics I should have gone on to become a politician.
Then they were all looking up, and in the silence you could hear the abacus beads whizzing and clacking in their brains.
Joy’s parents needn’t have worried. Not much went on behind the pylon screens of which they could disapprove. Well, that’s not entirely true, since one or two efforts were made seriously to misbehave, but they never amounted to much. Communal cigarettes were sucked down to their filters, bottles of cider were shared round. Clive and I once tried sniffing Airfix but it made us sick as dogs and we were never attracted to the idea again. We once persuaded Joy to take off her clothes for a dare, which she did; but then she immediately put them back on again, so it all seemed a bit pointless and no more erotic than the episode of solvent abuse.
It was the last summer holiday before we were due to be dispatched to what we all called the Big Schools. It all depended on which side of the waste ground you lived. Joy and Kev were to go to President Kennedy, where you didn’t have to wear a school uniform; Clive and I were off to Cardinal Wiseman, where you did. It all seemed so unfair. Tania was being sent to some snooty private school where they wore straw hats in the summer. She hated the idea, but her father was what my old man called one of the nobs.
Once, Tania and I were on our own under the pylon. Tania had long blond hair, and was pretty in a willowy sort of way. Her green eyes always seemed wide open with amazement at the things we’d talk about or at what we’d get up to. She spoke quietly in her rather posh accent, and for some reason she always seemed desperately grateful that we didn’t exclude her from our activities.
Out of the blue she asked me if I’d ever kissed a girl.
“Loads,” I lied. “Why?”
“I’ve never kissed anyone. And now I’m going to a girls’ school I’ll probably never get the chance.”
We sat on an old door elevated from the grass by a few housebricks. I looked away. The seconds thrummed by. I imagined I heard the wires overhead going chock chock chock.
“Would you like to?” she said softly.
“Like to what?”
“To kiss me?”
I shrugged. “If you want.” My muscles went as stiff as the board on which we perched.
She moved closer, put her head at an angle and closed her eyes. I looked at her thin lips, leaned over and rested my mouth against hers. We stayed like that for some time, stock-still. The power lines overhead vibrated with noisy impatience. Eventually she opened her eyes and pulled back, blinking at me and licking her lips. I realised my hands were clenched to the side of the board as if it had been a magic carpet hurtling across the sky.
So Tania and I were “going out”. Our kissing improved slightly, and we got a lot of ribbing from the others, but beyond that, nothing had changed. Because I was going out with Tania, Kev Duffy was considered to be “going out” with Joy, at least nominally; though to be fair to him, he was elected to this position only because Clive was beyond the pale. Kev resented this status as something of an imposition, though he did go along with the occasional bout of simulated kissing. But when Joy appeared one day sporting livid, gash-crimson lipstick and calling him “darling” at every turn, he got mad and smudged the stuff all round her face with the ball of his hand. The others pretended not to notice, but I could see she was hurt by it.
Another time I’d been reading something about hypnotism, and Joy decided she wanted to be hypnotised. I’d decided I had a talent for this, so I sat her on the grass inside the pylon while the other three watched. I did all that “you’re feeling very relaxed” stuff and she went under easily; too easily. Then I didn’t know what to ask her to do. There was no point asking her to take her clothes off, since she hardly needed prompting to do that.
“Get ’er to run around like a ’eadless chicken,” was Kev’s inspirational idea.
“Tell ’er to describe life on Jupiter,” Clive said obscurely.
“Ask her to go back to a past life,” said Tania.
That seemed the most intelligent suggestion, so I offered a few cliched phrases and took her back, back into the mists of time. I was about to ask her what she could see when I felt a thrum of energy. It distracted me for a moment, and I looked up into the apex of the pylon. There was nothing to see, but I remembered I’d felt it before. Once, when I’d first kissed Tania.
When I looked back, there were tears streaming down Joy’s face. She was trembling and sobbing in silence.
“Bring her out of it,” said Tania.
“Why?” Clive protested.
“Yer,” said Kev. “Better stop it now.”
I couldn’t. I did all that finger clicking rubbish and barked various commands. But she just sat there shaking and sobbing. I was terrified. Tania took hold of her hands and, thankfully, after a while Joy just seemed to come out of it on her own. She was none the worse for the experience, and laughed it off; but she wouldn’t tell us what she saw.
They all had a go. Kev wouldn’t take it seriously, however, and insisted on staggering around like a stage drunk. Clive claimed to have gone under but we all agreed we couldn’t tell the difference.
Finally it was Tania’s turn. She was afraid, but Joy dared her. Tania made me promise not to make he
r experience a past life. I’d read enough about hypnotism to know you can’t make people do anything they don’t already want to do, but convincing folk of that is another thing. Tania had been frightened by what happened to Joy, so I had to swear on my grandmother’s soul and hope to be struck by lightning and so on before she’d let me do it.
Tania went under with equal ease, a feat I’ve never been able to accomplish since.
“What are you going to get her to do?” Joy wanted to know.
“Pretend to ride a bike?” I suggested lamely.
“Crap,” said Kev. “Tell her she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she wants to make mad passionate love to you.”
Naturally Joy thought this was a good idea, so I put it to Tania. She opened her eyes in a way that made me think she’d just been stringing us along. She smiled at me serenely and shook her head. Then there was a thrum of electrical activity from the wires overhead. I looked up and before I knew what was happening, Tania had jumped on me and locked her legs behind my back. I staggered and fell backwards on to the grass. Tania had her tongue halfway down my throat. I’d heard of French kissing, but it had never appealed. Joy and Kev were laughing and cheering her on.
Tania came up for air, and she was making a weird growling from the back of her throat. Then she power-kissed me again.
“This is great!” whooped Kev.
“Hey!” went Clive. “Hey!”
“Tiger tiger!” shouted Joy.
I was still pinned under Tania’s knees when she sat up and stripped off her white T-shirt in one deft move.
“Bloody hell!” Kev couldn’t believe it any more than I could. “This is brilliant!”
“Gerrem off!” screamed Joy.
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