The River Dark
A Novel by N. M. Bennett
For Emma
Part One
The Bridge
It’s the undercurrent, y’ see
Prologue
1
August, 1976. Measton.
It was the hottest day ever. Everyone knew that, Davey told himself as he trotted along in the thin strips of shade alongside the wall. It was much too hot to run but he was struggling to keep up with that bad boy, Grant Moran.
Davey knew he was doing wrong. Very wrong.
He had gone well beyond the invisible boundary set at the top of the road. A boundary that should never, ever be crossed, no matter who said it was alright. Not only that but he had followed in the footsteps of that baddest of bad boys.
Grant Moran.
It wasn't fair though. Just because Grant's daddy was a bad man, everyone said that Grant was bad too. Like father, like son his mummy had told Carol, their next-door neighbour. Grant's daddy was a criminal. He stole from people's houses like a cat burglar on The Six Million Dollar Man and was in prison so Grant never got to see him. Not even on his birthday or at Christmas. His own daddy was away too but he would never see him at Christmas and on his birthday or at any other time. His daddy was not a criminal; his daddy was in Heaven. Grant said that he didn't care about whether he saw his daddy or not. Then he got angry and wanted to throw stones at the greenhouses in old Mr. Andrew's garden. Grant always did things like that. That was the problem and why Davey struggled along in the heat, his short legs twinkling in the harsh early afternoon sunshine. But Grant always had the best ideas.
"Come on. It'll be funny!" Grant had that look that meant that someone's windows were going to be broken. His grin was wide- scary and funny-naughty at the same time.
"I'm not allowed," said Davey. "My mummy said-"
Grant became an exaggeration of scorn.
"Yah! Mummy said, mummy said! I'll wet my nappy if I go out of the street!"
Davey pushed Grant in the shoulder. He didn’t even wear a nappy. He was five.
Grant danced around him gleefully. "Mummy said, mummy said, mummy said, mummy said!"
Ten minutes later, Davey was trotting along in the narrowest of narrow strips of shade vainly trying to keep Grant in sight, sickly panic welling up inside. He wanted to cry. He had never been this far from home without his mother holding his hand and that was only to go to school.
"We're goin' on a'venture," he reassured himself and shook away the tears. He broke into a full sprint, despite his mummy's warning about running in this heat. He didn't want to get lost and Grant was racing off ahead without pausing to even look back. Not once. The houses were unfamiliar; he had never been this way before. They were dirty he thought and knew that his mummy would not like the broken bicycles in the weedy front gardens or the gates that swung open because of broken latches. He ran on, avoiding dog poo and hopping over faded hopscotch chalking on the boiling, baking pavement.
Grant ducked down an alley way at the end of the street. By the time Davey turned into the alleyway, Grant was a tiny figure in the distance. Davey ran faster. He flew passed paint peeling paneled fences, his feet dexterously negotiating half-buried red house bricks. He was Steve Austin- the world's first bionic man. The theme music started up in head along with the voice of Lee Majors. I can't hold her chief! She's breaking up! Grant seemed closer now.
-wait for me!
We have the technology to build the world's first bionic man…
Grant waited in the shade of an elm tree. He grinned his bad boy grin at Davey and rocked his head at the expanse of field below. There was a weather-scabbed painted sign by the side of the dirt track that ran along the wasteland.
"Ross's," read Davey getting his breath back. "Why we goin' to Ross's, Grant?"
Grant showed all of his teeth again and said, "You'll see."
They headed into the long grassed plain that swept down to the banks of the River Meas, the weedy grass up to Davey's shoulders. It was easy to negotiate a path through thanks to generations of children heading to fish or play at making dens and teenagers going to find a secret place to enter the grown-up world of smoking and sex who had etched living pathways through the wildness. Davey spied the entrance to a hideout where the grass and weeds were thickest, rain-faded sweet wrappers gave away the age of the previous occupants. This was a kids' place. They ran on towards the river. At one point Davey slipped and turned his ankle painfully. He sat on sun-cracked ground rubbing at it frantically, trying not to cry. Grant's shadow fell over him.
"Maybe you should go home, baby Davey. You're too young for this. And you’re a dick."
Davey squinted up at Grant. Dick? Grant was eight years old. He knew some really good swears.
"I'm alright," Davey sniffed.
The air began to smell different to Davey. Like poo. The river wasn't far now, he knew that and felt the lurch in his tummy that he always got when he knew that he was being naughty. His mummy's voice again. Never go by the river on your own! But he felt the river’s current pulling him towards it. He could no more turn back now than flies could stay away from the dog muck he'd avoided on the street. The river was big. It was exciting. The river was a brown lid covering a whole host of wild imaginings. There were giant fish down there, he was sure. There were sunken wrecks. There were dead bodies. He knew this for sure. Duncan Harris had told him so. Four boys drownded in the river, he'd said in hushed tones so Mrs. Newton wouldn't hear him. "Their bodies was never found." Davey pushed on through the long grass.
The river opened out before them, its banks littered with rubbish and things that people had dumped there over the years, everything from refrigerators to armchairs, bags of empty lemonade bottles (Grant examined these and announced that he was going to drag them to Dix's Corner shop to claim the deposit money) and sodden cardboard boxes filled with magazines with pictures of naked ladies on the covers (Grant examined these too but didn't say anything this time). They picked their way through the detritus of Measton in a way that only boys can, finding treasures and interest in the defunct and dead thrown-away remains of people's lives.
Their movement towards the bridge was punctuated by shouts to look at this and a game of skimmers that lasted twenty minutes. Grant won, of course. Davey would never beat Grant's miraculous record of eight skims. Davey sulked for a while until Grant assured him that he had never known a five year old skim anywhere near as well as he could. He had one more go and sent one across the water making it bounce off the surface one, two, three, four, five times. The best he'd ever done.
Right then, Davey was the happiest he had ever been. Except maybe for Christmas.
2
The sewage plant loomed to their right. Grant explained patiently what it was to Davey.
"So all of our poo and wee goes there?" Davey couldn't be sure if Grant was making fun of him or not. Grant liked making fun of him.
"Yes, it does," Grant laughed. "Why do you think it smells so much?"
Davey frowned. "But what do they do with it?"
"They stir all the shit up and pour it into the river," Grant replied with quiet authority.
"Wha-? Why do they stir it all up first?" Davey was fascinated. Mrs. Newton would never have recognized this as the indifferent student she struggled to drag away from the daydream temptations of the classroom window.
"Dunno," Grant conceded, thinking about it for a while. "Prob'ly so it breaks up better and doesn't float so well."
"Oh."
Grant was on a roll now.
"They add special ingredients to the piss so we can drink it again."
Nothing Grant could say would convince Davey that this was the truth. They peered over the fence looking down at
the circular pools of excrement with childish wonder. Grant eventually began throwing large rocks over the wall "to see how much shit he could splash" until a man with long grey hair came running out of the buildings next to the sewage shaking his fist and telling them to fuck off.
"You fuck off, you shitworker!" Grant shouted back and lobbed over a house brick so that it looped down into the reservoir of waste with a splosh.. They stayed just long to see the tidal wave of shit head for the man and hear him scream Oh SHEE-YIT!
They ran laughing for five minutes before collapsing against the grassy manmade hillock that formed the railway siding. When he had recovered his breath, Grant walked toward the river and stood gazing up at the railway bridge. Some of the chalky railway chippings had fallen the sixty feet down to the river bank. He picked one up, weighed it in his hand lobbed it in a large arc towards the underside of the bridge. The parabola of the stone's journey was just short of the catwalk and fell back towards the river where it slammed into the dirty water with a stinging slap.
"Wa-hey!" Davey cried impressed.
"Shithouse," Grant muttered and picked up another. Davey came and stood next to him absently sucking a forefinger. Grant tried again and fell even shorter this time.
"Too heavy," he told himself searching the weedy riverbank for another worthy missile. Davey stood below the bridge looking up at the network of girders and struts that seemed suspended in mid-air. "Hello," he shouted and listened to the short, barked echo return. It was like when you threw a tennis ball against a wall when you were standing too close and it came back at you too quickly.
"Here we go," said Grant. He executed a hammer thrower's pirouette and released the stone. They watched it bounce off the catwalk with hoots of appreciation. It clanged and clinked in an echoic fashion that reminded Davey of the sound of a buoy out at sea on a foggy night in a scary film. His mummy sometimes let him stay up to watch scary films with her if he was good. He didn't suppose he'd be doing that again for a while. The sploosh of the falling rock was accompanied by smaller splashes as metallic fragments rained down. A few stray missiles landed on the riverbank near them. They dived for cover with exaggerated urgency in the style of every TV adventure they had ever seen.
"Fucking thing's falling apart," Grant said in awed tones. "One of these days a train's gonna come down into this river and I hope I'm here to see it."
Davey knew that Grant meant every word of this; Grant never joked when it came to breaking things. He had said that he wanted to break Old Mr. Andrew's greenhouse windows and he had; Mrs. Dix shop door window suffered a similar fate when she caught him stealing sweets (penny chews for two pee? You're the thief, not me!); bloodying Peter Carson’s nose for calling Grant's dad a "diddy-coy". Even at the tender age of five, Davey seemed to be able to see something that his mother and the other neighbours couldn't when it came to that bad boy Moran.
He only seemed to do bad things to bad people.
Mr. Andrews was a nasty old man who would hit you, if he caught you near his precious garden, even if you weren't doing anything. He'd once given Clifford Johns a black eye and Cliff was only twelve. Mrs. Dix was a thief, even his mummy said so. Those prices are daylight robbery, she'd told Carol. Peter Carson was a horrible boy; he picked on little kids and made them cry. Grant had told him that it was true, his father was a gypsy; he just hated Peter Carson saying anything about his father no matter what it was. To Davey, Grant was like Batman or Robin Hood. If he had known the word, he would have described Grant as noble.
But he was also dangerous. Mummy was right about that.
"Let's get on the bridge," said Grant and grinned that bad boy grin again.
They scrambled up the incline, grabbing weeds for purchase and using clumps of dried mud as footholds. Davey looked over his left shoulder and felt dizziness overwhelm him as he saw the swirling waters below him. It seemed impossibly high and he was only halfway up. Grant grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and pulled him up towards the railway sidings. They both collapsed, panting under the hairdryer intensity of the hottest summer ever. Later, the news would announce heat-related deaths.
Davey thought he could see the whole town from up here. There was the cruddy town football ground, Carson's scrap yard and the school fields to his right, on the other side of the river; to his left, the beginnings of the housing estate that he called home with the town centre buildings peeking over the rooftops along with the spire of St. Matthew's where he'd been baptized and mummy and daddy had been married. Behind him lay farmland and the distant Measton Hills. Grant pointed at the row upon row of apple and plum trees.
"Great for scrumpin'," he said. "Farmer's got a gun, though."
They walked onto the bridge, picking up the refrain: "The farmer's got a gun, the farmer's got a gun- ee-aye-adio- the farmer's got a gun." Davey thought that you'd never know they were on a bridge except for the steel railings on either side. He looked down the track for as far as he could see. In one direction he could see the line for miles and miles shining silver in the sun. The other disappeared around a hillside soon after it ran away from the bridge. They stood on the tracks (Davey after much persuasion and demonstration that he would not be 'lectrocuted) and acted out what they would do in the event of a train. This was followed by spitting over the side into the river below (a long way below) and target practice with railway stones. They passed time trying to hit floating debris. Davey fluked a half-submersed Guinness bottle which actually smashed. Then Grant announced the plan.
3
They waited for the vibrations to increase, watching the twelve chalky stones begin to tremor on the hot railway line. The boys had laid them there with careful reverence without uttering a single word and then retired to the edge of the siding where the grass was long enough to hide them. Both had seen enough war films to adopt the commando belly-crawl.
The train was on time.
Neither boy had any concept of train timetables but the 12.20 from Paddington was on time for them. They had only to wait for five minutes before they saw the dust begin to vibrate and jump across the tracks and the heavier pebbles tremble as though aware of the fate that befell them.
"Look!" Davey could hear the bad boy enjoyment in Grant's voice and felt his own sun burnt cheeks stretch in a grin of his own. They could see the train in the distance. Davey was still young enough to get excited by seeing a train at any distance. He'd only been on a train once when his mummy had taken him to Birmingham to see her old school friend, Auntie June. That had been great; this was much better. The roar of the approaching train was accompanied by its deafening wah-woooh!
The distance between the train and the boys was eaten up in no time. Grant screamed something that Davey could barely hear. He tried to tell Grant that he couldn't hear but could barely hear himself. Grant got up onto one knee like a sprinter before a race. Davey was confused. They'll see you, he wanted to shout. Get down. Grant's eyes were fixed on the track. Davey followed his gaze and saw that the largest of the chippings had fallen off the line. Grant had chosen that rock for size and weight. The train was close enough to the bridge to cause it to jump and rattle. The railings along the precipice thrummed with electricity and dimly Davey could hear the plink and splish of stones hitting the River Meas below. Davey noticed this in the split second before Grant darted out of their hiding place towards the railway line.
Davey could not hear himself scream.
The train was approaching the bridge. It filled the world with its noise, its weight, its speed and stink. Grant was going to die, right there in front of his eyes. That was the moment that Davey became acutely aware of the reality of death; this was not cowboys shooting Indians in a John Wayne film, this was his friend Grant about to be smashed to pieces by a train. Grant crouched at the edge of the track, his hands moving with liquid precision as he replaced the fallen stones. One-two-three-four. They were all back on the rail.
Davey could see the face of the driver now, the man's hands waving wildly
at the boy on the line. The train's horn filled the world; a deafening WAH-WAAAHH! Grant dived backward to the edge of the siding without looking to see where he was leaping. Grant landed on top of Davey with a ooff! The train went hurtling by- a blur of doors, carriages and windows; they could even make out the white blobs of faces in the window seats. The sound of the passing carriages and the air between them SHUCUH-SHUCUH-SHUCUH lasted for an impossibly long time until Davey put his hands over ears and squeezed his eyes closed against tears.
Then it was passed. The noise did not fade, it dropped immediately the train had passed them; deafening became tolerable in an instant. Davey still had eyes closed. Grant elbowed him in the ribs painfully.
"Ow-er! What did you do that for?" he complained. Grant was pointing at the receding train, the same old bad-boy grin on his elfish face. Davey watched as the guard shook his fist from the rear door of the train and mouthed words that they couldn't hear but could well imagine.
The River Dark Page 1