Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Not that the place was haunted. I had discovered this with the aid of a ritual I always employed when forced to stay in a strange house or bed. I would find the quietest spot in the building, first making sure it was midnight and that no one else was awake, and then (with all the drama available to a ten-year-old) lay myself open utterly to any spirit whom I imagined was creating the strong presence. I would dare the apparition to make itself known. At number fourteen, this spot was at the end of the passageway—the blue back door. At the climax of the ritual I would ask out loud for anyone—or thing—to come forward. This was always a raw, bare moment, and luckily I only received a reply once, causing me to flee from my silent vigil at the garden-facing glass in white-haired panic. Well, not so much a reply as a demonstration of one of the laws of physics. The ghost had been my own breathing, condensing against the cold panes.

  Ghosts. Unheard music. Supernatural clocks. But it didn’t feel that threatening at the time. That’s just a trick played by the memory. And I don’t feel I am any closer to an explanation of what made it home. What is a home? A door that’s always open—a place that offers unconditional safety just by being what it is, where it is. At number fourteen Dovecote Lane I cannot recall a time when I wasn’t there—it was the house I was born into. It contained my first life memories. Something sacred and non-transferable—they will die with me, like everyone’s. Home as a central point, like the spike of Donne’s geometrical compass—no matter how far one travels or how long one resides somewhere in later life, the impulse is always to return. To crawl back to the comfort of known rooms, known voices.

  The second floor at Dovecote Lane floor contained the runnered shelves that held my father’s books. I can see them now, a precious emblem of learning; an uncharted rainforest for a child. The light from the sunflower-print blinds used to cast a saffron glow in the room—it often resembled a library under a Los Angeles smog. On the rare occasions when my father was around (in the tranquil days before the degradation and turbulence brought by Delph) I would ask him about the exotic titles: ‘Eugene Won-jin. What’s that Dad? Is that about a real person or a made-up one? You and Your Neurosis. Dad, what’s ner-o-sis?’ I remember his replies as scanty, evasive. He had that strange way of looking at me—a neutral evaluation from under hooded eyes. He was often preoccupied, not surprisingly considering the ructions that were going on behind my back at the time. He often smelt indistinctly of chemicals, of the lab. A short man, with powerful shoulders, bald-headed, handsome, opinionated, I nevertheless remember him as a gentle presence. Like Granny Chloe. His displays of temper would largely be confined to hand-wringing and expressive hisses or sighs, like a lorry letting off its airbrakes. His movements were quick and decisive, especially in the cellar where I watched him at his carpentry bench, planing a door or fixing a broken drawer with wood-glue and heavy G-clamps. I stood spellbound as a chisel made its effortless way through a plank of pine. A manly puff sent the shavings scattering. Same when digging in the patch of allotment opposite the house. The blade of the shovel would go in each time with a decisive whoompf as his rubber-booted foot struck it with great force. Yes, he could handle a spade, my father. This is all the more surprising when I think that he had no father himself to watch. No masculine role model. But then the world is full of orphans—orphans of the heart. I often ponder these facts: I am roughly the same age as him when he fathered me. Where are my tools? My workbench? My books and shovel?

  Sinead, on the other hand, would always be there, omnipotent. If that omnipotence describes a good mother then that’s what she was. To be everywhere at once; capable, all-seeing. In the top part of the house, the bathroom was her domain, with its cluttered shelves of potions and perfumes, the steam that took forever to clear. The airing cupboard contained folded towels of unimaginable warmth and luxury. This was in the days when she would always apply scent to her wrists and neck before leaving for the school—lavender, or occasionally sandalwood. Her morning ritual was often accompanied by vexed expressions as one minute her mauve headscarf kept slipping off, the next her magic wooden letters couldn’t be located; then the toast was ‘black as cinders’. A lapsed Catholic, she would use expressions such as ‘Mary mother of Jesus!’ during moments of high exasperation. The rough, bike-stealing boys in the lane who she had threatened to ‘sort out with a big stick’ had lately become my friends. But then there are always bigger, rougher boys waiting out there when we leave the soft harbour of childhood. We had formed a gang. This caused Sinead a great deal of pleasure as she was always exhorting me to go out and play. She didn’t know we were a gang, however, until it was too late.

  On a Saturday, I would call on the members one by one. Often there were only three of us. Not much of a gang, you might say. My first visit would be to the house of Trevor Thomas on Annesley Rise, who we all knew as the Little Kid. This appellation was due to his stunted, weaselly frame, his wiry knuckles and his choirboy voice. His earnest eyes were as wet and mobile as a dog’s. Then, further up, towards the bad estates that bordered the town (always named after things they didn’t resemble: the Sunnyside Estate; the Haywain Estate), we would knock for Nigel, a boy with learning difficulties, four years older than us, who was forced to play with younger kids due to the outright rejection of his peers. He was big-framed, with slow eyes black as the seeds of apples, overhung by a monobrow the length of a large slug. A bit of a pitiful gang, but at least it got me out of the White House, away from the boiling resentments and strained scenes. Initially our activities centred on building things—camps, treehouses, bivouacs, or, when it was raining, robots and contraptions that would never work, with circuit-boards and soldering iron. Then construction turned to destruction. By the end of our reign over the badlands of the neighbourhood, our escapades would involve either throwing, burning or exploding any object we could lay our hands on.

  The wall to the overgrown sanctuary of the allotments always required a running jump and a leg-up. It was topped by a mons pubis of slippery moss. Although Nigel was tall enough to scale it by himself, he was too backward to act on this knowledge. Many a rimey morning the Little Kid and I would struggle, one clod-hopping foot in each hand, to push him over the top. He was as heavy as a sack of gravel. The wall was a good indication of how tall I had grown. Once the running jump became a brash joy, not a shoulder charge that resulted in flayed kneecaps and a twisted neck, I knew I was growing up.

  One November day marked Game Over for us three bizarre musketeers. It was always cold in my memory of those months—the air a brace of metal against the forehead; earlobes crimson under parka hoods. But this short afternoon was especially bitter, the autumn mist and fog mustard brown and supernaturally abundant. We sloshed our way down the lane then hiked ourselves up the wall. Once among the birches and sycamores at the back of the allotments we began destroying one of our old tree-camps. Out of boredom, out of malice—we all fancied ourselves Jack from Lord of the Flies. The wooden observation tower was first to hit the leaf-mulch. Next, the swinging rope, which also doubled as an escape route in case the location was marauded by insurrectionists from one of the euphemistic estates. Finally, the machine-gun nest (complete with stash of toy guns and soggy ammunition) crashed into a mesh of blackberry bushes. The Little Kid appeared ecstatic at this carnage, though I was a little sad. I didn’t want to destroy everything—if we did there would be nowhere to play and nothing to play with. Nigel, seeing that his stunted friend was enjoying himself, started to laugh along, producing a noise that resembled a mule under a load. A sort of strangulated sawing sound. It vanished quickly into the dense air. Like being suspended at thirty thousand feet, the sere November day disappeared into nothingness on all sides. The only other sound was the low cawing of the wood pigeons, with their extended second note: woo-wooh-woo.

  Then it began to go wrong. We had devised a game whereby Nigel had to attack us, the last soldiers left defending the valuable strategic town that was the compost heap. This Nigel embarked on with abandon,
all plodding limbs and rebellious black hair, the imaginary general of his own army; hurling sticks in a frenzied counter-assault. During this occurred the mishap that would reveal to my mother that I wasn’t out collecting fossils or playing marbles. Nigel, like the ghost of Cain, seeing an empty emulsion can, picked it up and flung it full force at the Little Kid’s head. A whoop of pleasure from the overgrown boy; a blood-curdling yell from the runt. Still echoing in my mind today is this scream of immeasurable decibels, emitted as he fell to his knees, holding the big red gouge in his skull together. I had never seen blood come so fast and copiously. Rushing to help the Little Kid, I discovered Nigel was still laughing, antic, unstoppable. He took matches from his pocket and began to torch the remains of the camp. The lighter fuel and ammunition we kept stashed in a waterproof box soon went up. At this point I remember Delph—newly installed at number fourteen, and eager to assert his authority—appearing on the allotments like a big-bearded Adam. My mother wasn’t far behind. He ran through the fog, tall and sinewy, with one motivation: to put Nigel in the ground. As I cradled the Little Kid’s bloody head in my lap, Big Nigel stood next to his pyre, a frown of confusion on his face. His laughter had transformed itself into strange, low mooing sounds. Burned into my memory is his pitiful look: crestfallen, confused; uncomprehending that the game must finish, his close-set eyes anguished under their low black brow. However, before Delph could reach him some survival instinct must have kicked in—he was off in a flash across the cabbage patches, still making the mooing noises, the athletic northerner in pursuit, shouting, ‘Come here you little bastard, you fire bug! I’ll kick your arse! Kick your arse!’ Looking back, I still believe Delph indulged in this gallantry only to impress my mum, who by now was kneeling next to the Little Kid, trembling with butcher’s hands.

  In the end, poor Nigel was carted off to the Land of Nod known as council care. The Little Kid survived, though he had to spend four months with all his hair shaved off looking like an electrocuted gerbil as the twenty-five stitches did their reformatory work. For some reason he never seemed to grow any bigger, unlike the rest of us. And when we did grow bigger, the Lane grew smaller. The gangs and camps had become an official menace. Although our so-called posse had disbanded, I started running with the rough boys from the top estates. Soon you couldn’t sprint, kicking up explosions of slate and mud, down to the breaker’s yard at the bottom without encountering Mr Tombs and his two mangy sheepdogs. This self-appointed Cerberus was a rake-thin peggy old buzzard with a voice like a hacksaw who acted as guardian of the grounds after a series of burglaries. Mr Tombs was Dovecote Lane’s oldest resident, and he would glower from behind the permanently chained gates to the breaker’s yard with a look of harsh propriety. His voice would saw through a perfectly good afternoon with a sour threat: ‘Scarper you little buggers, or I’ll call the police.’ We jeered at him until he rattled the wire meshing, eyes bulging: ‘I’ll give you some! If your mums and dads weren’t just up the road, you’d have some from me, you buggers!’ No one knew quite how far he would go. Behind his lizard-slit eyes and gummy scowl he was an unknown and terrifying quantity. I had nightmares in which he broke the skulls of little children to dust between his thumb and forefinger.

  Once the kids got out of hand, it soon became clear that the lane was populated by wheezing, gossiping geriatrics—like some kind of terraced old-folks’ home. Des and Sinead were the youngest couple on the block. This can have only contributed to my mother’s boredom. The most magnanimous of these valetudinarians was Mrs Hewson, who lived in the last house in the bumpy lane, just before it dipped to the ivy-devoured wall of the breaker’s yard. She had a breadloaf hair-do left over from the mid-sixties and boiled-sweet specs, behind which glimmered seemingly sane eyes. She didn’t appear to mind the rolling gangs of boys pelting each other with half-bricks just outside her net-curtained home. But then she had Colin to worry about. Even at that young age I, along with everyone else, harboured suspicions about Mrs Hewson’s son, so obviously unmarried yet in his early thirties. So obviously shy, yet simultaneously threatening. He was often seen at erratic hours with a plastic bag under one arm and a big snorkel parka done up in all weathers. The plastic bag undoubtedly contained pornography. Some of it ended up in our camps—left there purposefully? It wouldn’t surprise me. He was always sneaking around, friendless, trembling. Still fresh are the odd, vertigo-like sensations on first seeing the crumpled glossy pages with their gleaming stilettos, anguished expressions and detailed seething clefts. It took years before I, and probably the other astonished little boys, realised these women were largely chimerical. For Colin Hewson, with his pursued expression glimpsed in a greasy halo of fur, this was probably the closest he ever got to a real woman. People claimed he had a voice like a Dalek, but I cannot remember him uttering a single word to anyone in ten years.

  So it came as no surprise when, arriving back after a desultory camping holiday in Torquay, we were greeted by police officers and their streamlined shiny vans in the lane investigating the sexual murder of an old lady on the allotments. Colin Hewson was the prime suspect. It was a sultry August afternoon. There was a flurry of nervous excitement when a journalist knocked on our front door and asked if he could use our phone. At that moment, the van with the mysterious, tarpaulin-wrapped cadaver in the back rolled past. As our door opened we were met with a pack of pressmen hovering on the step to gain some height for the photograph. Everyone was afforded a brief, terrible glimpse. The corpse was encased in a raw ebony body-bag guarded by a policewoman. No part of the anatomy was visible, but this only invested the mobile sarcophagus with potent questions about the human organism and its final destination. So this was death, then. A tremendous stillness at the centre of things while the living take photos, wring their hands, cry hysterically. In death, it seems, the focus for a short while is on you only. How pleasurable, if only one were conscious to reap the benefits of that sudden celebrity! And then, somewhere unseen, the dutiful worms take their turn. The human body begins its eternity of neglect. One becomes obscure. Literally non-existent. Only after this process is completed does activity subside and one is granted some peace.

  Many years later I discovered what had happened to this woman, my mother having hidden the local papers for weeks after the grisly event. She had been raped and strangled, with a broken broomstick pushed so far inside her that it was discovered only during the postmortem. I remember feeling damaged and sick at this revelation; startled that human beings had such unreal, bestial violence inside them. It was like the occasion when I discovered what the word ‘Holocaust’ actually referred to. The word itself was phonetically scary. Was it really true? Or were the revisionists deeply afraid that this mechanised, industrial-scale slaughter could be part of a so-called civilised world? How could it have happened? And so recently in world-historical terms too. A paradigm shift we are only just beginning to comprehend. It all seemed very remote from my secure embryo-world of trees and camps. The world that was always quiet on Sundays, tempered by the lovely soporific pipings of wood pigeons. So remote that it might have happened on another planet. After Colin’s arrest, and predictable release, the crime went unsolved for eighteen months. Then new evidence convicted a young welder who lived on nearby Annesley Rise. A skinhead and member of the National Front, he had been under the impression that his victim had been Asian. In fact, she was Portuguese, of Romany blood—Gemma Fernandez, a woman who had lived and worked in the country since the Second World War. She had escaped the Nazis in 1945 and had lived in the same gloomy bungalow until 1976. Thirty years of quiet living after the fevered diaspora had deposited her in a dreary commuter town in Hertfordshire. That’s a long time to believe you’ve finally evaded man’s inhumanity to man, his butcherings, his holocaust. A long time to carry the illusion that you were one of the lucky ones … Her killer got life. He was, as I recall, one of the roustabouts who used to wolf-whistle my miniskirted mother as we dragged a shopping wheelie down to the market.


  Neither the murder nor Mr Tombs stopped us from investigating the land beyond the breaker’s yard. There we discovered the remains of an old school playground, the ramshackle schoolhouse gutted and overgrown. Populated by pheasants, foxes and blackbirds, broken glass crunched underfoot as we ran our heedless ways. It was overhung by tall silver birches and sycamores. Once I climbed one to retrieve an old man’s flat cap, only to tumble from the branches, the hat teeming with a devil’s cauldron of earwigs. I thought of Gemma Fernandez in the cold ground with only these for company. Here we would dig for fossils, play army, smash old TV sets, before it was time to return to the ticking house. Later, I would learn to cycle a stabilised bike on the gouged macadam, the tyres forever puncturing on scattered glass.

  It was in the surrounding wooded wilderness, strewn with whacked-out radials and circles of bonfire ash, that Gemma had been strolling when she was attacked. Only cissies, however, let that worry them. By the time we were all approaching middle-school we knew every climbable oak and jungle shortcut in the area. Though sometimes, on darkening afternoons, venturing to the very edge of the wood, it seemed one would enter almost Narnia-like into another world. It was here we found the derelict remains of what once must have been a very grand house. There were submerged cellars with racks of blackened wine bottles, draped in a white mist of cobwebs. There was a drained swimming pool jammed with busted cookers and car bonnets, all dumped into a tarry inch of rainwater—water that seemed alive with belching, gangrenous frogs. Best of all was a piece of land which might once have been the tennis court. It was now a miniature meadow, overgrown and bordered on all sides by overhanging horse chestnut trees. For a brief time this became a very magical place for me, as no one in our loose agglomeration of tearaways seemed to know its existence, or were too busy hurling bottles and masonry into the drained pool to explore further. It is good to have an exclusive spot in the universe, somewhere that is yours and yours only—a virtual impossibility in adult life. It was a place I sought out, always alone, on summer days, to stand in the glossy waist-high grass and enjoy a resolute, uplifting solitude. The celestial light of July invested everything with the vivid stillness of a dream. The grown-up world seemed many years in the future then. A feeling of unparalleled peace, of timelessness, was achievable in that rectangle of hushing grasses. I can see now the blazing snow of elder flower; the quick-diving magpies hurrying to their partners in the dense chestnut canopies. It was as if the place were entirely and magically removed from the rest of the town, the world even. There I allowed the warm, giving silence of the field to fill me to the brim, like a slowly poured glass of wine; a towering summer paradise, the sun falling in retina-splitting arcs through the tree tops.