The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Three days after it happened I went down to the phone box next to the Spar and tried to call her. She wasn’t there though, she was spending the summer with her mum’s family in Calcutta. Lucy had told me about the trip ages ago but with everything else that was going on I’d completely forgotten about it. A woman answered, someone whose voice I didn’t recognise but who turned out to be Lucy’s mum’s sister. She was looking after the house while they were away. I was so confused I forgot to ask her what date they’d be back, which made the whole thing worse. I had no idea how I could contact Lucy even. I kept writing her letters then ripping them up. I felt so awful it still makes me unhappy to think of it.

  There was no one I could talk to. The thought of Catey finding out? Just no.

  I made myself come downstairs for lunch. I knew Mum would make a scene if I didn’t, and anyway, I was hungry. I don’t remember much about it except that there was an atmosphere brewing. Mum and Dad must have had a row or something. I’m not sure I ever told you how much I hated the way things were at home after Mum’s affair, everyone trying to pretend everything was normal, all of us knowing it wasn’t. There was no way things were ever going to go back to how they were before. I often found myself wishing they’d split up at the time and had done with it. The more I thought about it, the less I could understand why they’d ever got married. They had nothing in common. Mum should have been running a country or a vast business empire or something. Dad – do you remember that photo of him on the motorbike, how ridiculous he looked? I don’t think he ever had one clue about what he wanted to do with his life. That’s how he ended up with Mum, probably.

  Once lunch was over I told Mum I was going to meet Catey but really I was just desperate to get out of the house. I knew Catey was going to a barbecue at Linsey Fanshawe’s house. She’d called me the day before and asked me if I wanted to go with her and I’d said maybe I’d come over later, but I didn’t really feel like it. I knew Richard Lovell would be there, and the thought of having to watch him and Catey pawing each other all evening was more than I could stand. Richard was all right really but the way Catey seemed to deliberately drop twenty IQ points the moment he walked into a room drove me insane. You could see it happen, like a screen coming down. Her voice would change. She’d lose all interest in whatever we’d been talking about and start making flirty jokes about French knickers or who might have got off with whom on the college French trip. I hated that she could do that to herself. It made me feel like ripping things to pieces.

  At least it would be somewhere to go, though. It was either the barbecue or bus into Warrington and hang around the shops. Not that I had any money to buy anything. I supposed I could always walk along by the canal, down to the old Transporter Bridge and back – the iron gallows, some people called it, the cranes rearing their heads against the sky like worshippers, like dinosaurs. I think cranes are really the dinosaurs of the modern age.

  You look out over Manchester or Warrington sometimes and think the apocalypse has already happened. That should feel awful but it doesn’t. In a strange way it’s a relief.

  * * *

  There was a van parked outside the Spar shop. The van was white, with a logo on the side, a dripping tap with BARBERSHOP PLUMBING printed in capital letters in a circle around it. I thought what a weird name, makes it sound as if they only do plumbing for barbershops. Or maybe they go in for close harmony singing while they mend their toilets or put in their boilers or whatever they do. The idea made me giggle, which made me notice the sunshine, which was killing but still amazing, like having hot butter poured over your skin. I felt the urge to take off my sandals, to feel the heat of the paving stones soaking up through the soles of my feet, to walk through the streets like that, free of everything.

  I thought maybe I’d go to Linsey’s barbecue after all. I’d lie in the grass and drink rum and coke. At least no one would get on my case. Who gave a stuff about Richie being there anyway? Certainly not me.

  Or maybe the guy’s surname was Barbershop, I thought. I couldn’t seem to let the subject drop. Jimmy Barbershop, Kevin Barbershop, Sebastian Barbershop. I almost spurted out saliva thinking about that one, the way you do when you need something to be funny, funnier than it really is, just so you can laugh out loud and let the crap go to hell. And perhaps Sebastian really was his actual name. It was at least possible. All things were possible, I decided. The idea made the world feel suddenly larger than I’d imagined.

  Just as I came level with the van, someone came out of the Spar, a tall guy with long, curly grey hair and a black Motörhead T-shirt. He walked around the front of the van and into the road, unlocked the door on the driver’s side.

  Sebastian Barbershop, I presume, I thought, which really did almost make me laugh out loud, even though the guy was less than ten feet away from me and would definitely have heard. I could feel myself going red. I turned my head away, pretended to look through the Spar shop window, but he’d already seen me.

  “What’s so funny?” he said. The kind of question that could have sounded aggressive, but it didn’t. He made it seem as if he wanted to share the joke.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s the name on your van, that’s all.” Even now I couldn’t say what made me tell him the truth. The relief of being out of the house, the sunshine, the fact that I was finally feeling OK about going to the barbecue. I think I just wanted to hear my own voice, communicating, talking to someone – even this guy with the grey hair, a total stranger but who I could tell was a bit of an arsehole, even then. He had a look about him, that sly look. The look of a man who lies out of habit, because he can.

  The sky overhead was so blue that if you stared up at it at a certain angle it looked white.

  “It’s the name of a record label me and some of my mates wanted to set up,” he said. “Barbershop Records, I mean, not Barbershop Plumbing. The band didn’t make it big enough, surprise, surprise. We still play the odd gig on the weekends, though. You know Status Quo?”

  “Are they still going?” I said.

  He looked bemused for a moment, then laughed. “Nice one,” he said. He opened the driver’s door. “What’s your name, then, when it’s at home?”

  “Selena,” I said. God knows what made me say that. I felt queasy in my stomach suddenly, the way you do when you know you’ve forgotten something, something vital, only you can’t remember for the moment what it is. It was like I knew something bad was going to happen, even then, while I still had the chance to stop it. It would be easy to stop it, too – easier than not. All I had to do was go inside the Spar shop and hang around the magazine racks till he drove away. And he would have to drive away. It would look weird if he didn’t, someone would notice. Once he was gone I’d head over to Catey’s and we could go to the barbecue. I could watch Richie frigging around with the firelighters while Catey made encouraging noises. Ooh, my hero.

  Maybe that’s what did it – the thought of Richard Lovell parading around in his shorts, thinking he looked like Tom Cruise or something.

  “You want a ride, Selena?” said Sebastian Barbershop.

  “Where to?”

  “You tell me.” He grinned, looking pleased with himself in a way that made my skin crawl. I pretended not to notice. I remember asking myself, what’s a thing someone like me would never do? The answer came back immediately: get in that van.

  It would be an adventure, I decided, a gas. The kind of escapade you kick yourself for afterwards because anything could have happened but of course nothing did. Not this time, anyway.

  “You can give me a lift into Warrington if you want,” I said. “I was going to catch the bus.”

  “Shift yourself, then.” He got into the van himself, then leaned over to open the passenger door. “It’s a bit mucky in here.” He brushed an empty cigarette carton off the passenger seat and on to the floor. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  I climbed in and slammed the door. The inside of the van stank of cigarette smoke. The rear co
mpartment was divided off from the cab by a piece of dingy orange cloth, ripped in several places, heavily marked with what looked like coffee stains or engine oil. I settled myself in my seat and clipped on the seatbelt. There was still time for me to change my mind, to get out of the van, but all I could think was what an idiot I’d look if I did. Not to him, but to myself.

  “Got any of that Barbershop music, then?” I said as he started the engine.

  “Seriously? You want to hear us?”

  “Why not?”

  He leaned across me to open the glove compartment. He smelled of cigarettes, and sweat, and greasy hair. “What’s your name, anyway?” I asked. I realised he hadn’t said, not even when I told him my own name, or rather yours. I was still thinking of him as Sebastian Barbershop. A large part of me wanted to go on thinking of him that way. To know his real name would be to admit that he existed, that this was actually happening. I shouldn’t know his name, because I shouldn’t have spoken to him in the first place. Or got into his van.

  “Steve.”

  “Steve what?”

  “Steven J. Rockefeller. What’s it to you?”

  He extracted a paint-spattered cassette tape from the jumble of rubbish inside the glove box and inserted it into the van’s stereo system. For a couple of seconds there was nothing but the sound of the engine, then music blared out, a formless mass of guitar feedback with a man’s falsetto warbling along over the top.

  “Is that you?” I said, and he nodded, but I didn’t believe him. There was something familiar about the sound of the voice and I wondered if I’d heard it before, at Catey’s perhaps, or on the radio late at night, which has always been my favourite time for listening to music. They put on such obscure records you never know what you’re going to hear next.

  I wondered why Steven Barbershop had been so touchy over his surname. The only thing I could think was that he didn’t want me to be able to identify him later. To look him up in the phone book, maybe. As if. He could take his paranoia and stuff it right up his rectum.

  Rectum, I thought. Catey’s swear word du jour. Barbershop turned to me and grinned, all straggly hair and pointed nose. Like a wolf, or a coyote on the prowl. How corny is that?

  “This is our own stuff. Not the crap pub gig stuff. Like it?” We were on the main road by then. Other vehicles were passing by in the opposite direction but they didn’t slow down, why would they? We were on the dual carriageway in less than five minutes.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “My sister would be more into it, probably.”

  “What kind of music do you like, then?”

  “I don’t know. Indie stuff. Suzanne Vega. Joni Mitchell.”

  “Johnny Mitchell? Never heard of him.”

  “She’s Canadian.”

  “I can’t stand that hippy shit.”

  How do you know it’s hippy shit if you’ve never heard of her? I thought. I felt something turn over inside me. I think it was then that I began to realise – to actually believe, instead of just kidding myself – that Steven Barbershop was playing a game with me, as I was playing a game with him, when I’d lied about my name, only now the rules had changed. I’ve told myself, over and over, that if he’d stopped the van at that point – at a petrol station, say – I’d have got out, phoned Dad, stood by the pay area until he came to fetch me and who cares what a moron I might have looked.

  But would I have, though? To step out of the van would have meant admitting that I was frightened, that I believed I was in danger. And that couldn’t be true, because stuff like that only happened to stupid people, or characters in the movies.

  I’ve wondered since, how many people have ended up in serious trouble because they’ve refused to trust their instincts, their gut. The gut is rarely mistaken when it comes to sensing danger. The mind, on the other hand? The mind often doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about.

  “I like other music, too,” I said. “I like Marillion.” It was Catey who liked Marillion, but the side effect of that was that I’d been subjected to their albums many millions of times. Catey knew the entire lyrics to Misplaced Childhood by heart. She thought Misplaced Childhood was a work of genius. I thought she was bonkers. Marillion was just a bunch of guys with guitars, after all, guys in too-tight trousers who obviously fancied themselves. I quite liked ‘Kayleigh’ but otherwise I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

  “Prog rock,” said Steven Barbershop, “is for poofs.”

  When he veered off to the left instead of taking the turn for Warrington I pretended not to notice. I knew if I asked him where we were going that would be it. It would be like that moment in Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf stops pretending to be the grandmother and shows its true nature. There would be no way back from that – for the wolf, I mean. Once you’ve decided to go for it there’s no room for mistakes. You can’t go for being a monster, and then pull back.

  I wondered how it would feel, to know you were about to kill someone. Would a monster feel excited by its victim’s terror, or sick to its stomach? Sick at the thought of the things it’s going to have to do before its prey stops screaming.

  I knew my only hope was to keep playing the game.

  I gazed out of the window at the traffic and asked him about his mates, the ones who’d been in the band with him. “What are they doing now?” I said. “For work, I mean?”

  “Matt’s a lorry driver now,” he said. “And Jonno’s a motor mechanic. He’s working at some posh Jaguar garage in Northwich.”

  “Do you enjoy being a plumber?”

  “It pays the bills. Gets me out of the house, anyway.” His eyes stayed fixed on the road. I thought maybe if I kept my nerve, that might give him time to go back on it, to decide not to. It was such a lovely day, after all, exactly the kind of day you’d want to spend driving around in your van with your music on and the windows down. He could tell himself it had been a mistake, a joke even, something he’d wondered about but never considered actually doing. Not seriously anyway, not for real. There was a chance he was as frightened as I was. If he could only find a way of getting himself out of it, we might both be OK.

  We were heading into the real countryside by then. Sunlight filtered downwards through the trees. Narrower roads led off from the main one, carving pathways into the forest like treasure trails, like in Hansel and Gretel. It looks like paradise, I thought. Maybe anywhere would look like paradise when you believe you’re going to die.

  “It’s so green out here, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I thought we’d ride around a bit. You don’t mind?” He turned his head to look at me, just for a second. His eyes looked blank and cunning at the same time. Reptilian, I thought. But then reptiles are born that way, aren’t they, they can’t help being cold-blooded. I shook my head quickly, then went back to staring out the window.

  “This is great. I wasn’t doing anything this afternoon, anyway.”

  We seemed to drive for miles. The cassette of the band music finished. When Steven Barbershop turned it over, Elvis: The Love Songs came flooding out. I recognised the album because Dad had it. It was odd to think of a man like Steven Barbershop having music like that in his van. Perhaps the tape was his dad’s, I thought. Even Steven Barbershop had to have a dad, somewhere.

  After about half an hour’s driving I spotted a brown tourist sign for Delamere Forest and Hatchmere Lake. I remembered our picnics by the water, the stories Dad liked to tell us – about how some of the trees there had been alive in Henry VIII’s time, about the giant catfish that lived in the mud at the bottom of the lake, the huge pike that would eat anything that got in their way. When there was no more food left, the pike would eat each other. I remembered one of our Eng Lit classes right before the end of term, before I had the argument with Lucy and everything was still mostly OK. Miss Willoughby handed round printouts of a poem by Ted Hughes. The boy in the poem – Ted Hughes himself, probably – goes fishing for pike at night beside a ruined monastery. It�
�s pitch black out there, and you know what it’s like at night, you start thinking strange things. The boy begins to wonder what else might be in the lake, besides the pike, and even though he’s terrified he can’t bring himself to leave. It’s as if he has to know what’s down there. He can’t let go.

  The poem was really creepy, actually. Miss Willoughby asked Shauna Wainwright to read it aloud to the rest of the class. When she’d finished Miss Willoughby asked us what we thought it was about. Everyone sat there in silence. Then Sophie Ridout, who was down for the Oxford entrance with Shauna Wainwright, put up her hand and asked if the pike was actually a metaphor for evil, a way of showing how the weak are always exploited by the strong.

  “When he talks about the baby pike, in the aquarium,” Sophie said. “There are three of them at first, but then the two smaller ones get eaten by the larger one. I think Hughes is trying to tell us it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

  “Pike-eat-pike world, more like,” said Ali Blasim, and everyone laughed. Ali fancied Sophie, had done for ages, and everyone knew it. Miss Willoughby waited for the laughter to die down, then said that Sophie’s answer was very interesting, and did anyone else have any other ideas. The discussion became quite lively after that. Derek Morris said he thought the poem was about secrets, about going fishing for stuff you had no business knowing.

  “That’s why he’s scared, Miss. He’s worried about what else might be in the water. That’s what I think.”

  Derek Morris was always top in history, but he never normally said anything in English lessons. A murmur went round the class, then someone said what you mean like Godzilla and everybody started laughing again. At the end of the class, Miss Willoughby said she wanted us to write down our thoughts about ‘Pike’ as part of our summer English project. I folded the photocopied sheet into four and stuck it in the back of my exercise book.