by SJ Bradley
‘That’s enough.’ Gareth was at the door. ‘I’ve given you too much of my time already. Now look – I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, but don’t try and drag my family into it.’
‘Our family, you mean.’
Samhain saw a moment’s flicker, a second’s hesitation before Gareth opened the door.
Then he turned, quickly. Faster than a man of his size ought to have been able to. It brought Samhain up short, his nose close, breath, the smell of coffee in his face.
‘Now you look here,’ he said. ‘Don’t you bring my family into it. If I find out you’ve been anywhere near my mum – especially my mum – I’ll be down on you so hard for harassment, you’ll wish you’d never been born. Right?’
A quick pinch, hard as a hypodermic needle, somewhere in Samhain’s ribs. It winded him; he tried to pull away, tears spiking at his eyes.
‘We can get away with a lot in here,’ Gareth said. ‘How much would surprise you.’
Samhain didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The pain caused blotches, like splashes of engine oil on tarmac, blurring his vision.
‘You understand, son?’
Ears hurt. Pinching inside, roaring, like the agony of cold air. Samhain nodded.
‘Good.’
Release. The skin loosened, and Samhain felt a bruise forming; he gasped for air.
‘Just so long as we’re clear.’
Gareth was friendly again now, a professional with a busy diary. He opened the door, and ushered Samhain out. A woman rushed by in the same uniform, hatless and haring.
‘Good to see you,’ Gareth chirped. ‘All the best.’
The woman ran around the corner. Gareth muttered: ‘Don’t contact me again, you understand? When I come back down here this afternoon, you’d better be gone.’
It was the first time Samhain had ever gone out of a police station without a bail sheet or notice of caution in hand.
He came out into a day so weakly fine it seemed to have been diluted. Standing out there on the busy Manchester street, hearing the distant ding of the trams, trying to figure out the quickest way back to the train station.
There was a buzz and whistle from his pocket. Sam took it out of his pocket, and looked at the name flashing on screen: Flores.
6.
This time it was animals. A stable and all its tack, and a few boxes of things from inside the house. The one thing they didn’t have to move was the horse itself.
‘Little girls,’ Kebby remarked, ‘all want a pony.’
It was early, the morning dewy. Simon was still on holiday, and the pony stood out in the paddock, sunlight on its dappled haunches. These people were friends of Peter’s, and he’d promised them a bonus if they did the job well.
‘That so?’ Samhain said. ‘I hope my little girl doesn’t. I don’t know where we’d keep it.’ A saddle, which looked much too large for the animal in the field, hung over a wooden beam in the centre of the room. It looked heavy as machinery.
‘Morning, chaps.’ A ruddy faced man appeared, clapping his hands together. ‘Peter said you’d be early, but I didn’t know he meant this early. Very impressive, I must say. At this rate, you’ll be all done by lunchtime.’
Samhain noticed Kebby turn a smirk into a smile, flashing those great strong teeth. He wanted the bonus just as much as he did. ‘We’ll do our best, Mr Midden,’ he said.
The place they were going to was not in the same village.
Their journey to it took them over hilltops; through pretty villages with stone walls and low cottages, around a small red-bricked industrial town sitting deeply in a valley, past highly polished car dealerships, by a car wash (closed), twin concrete tower blocks, then back out into open, rough moorland. Pheasants hopped, their heads just showing, while sheep tore at the grass. They were woolly, shaggy things, black-horned and sprayed with a blue insignia of ownership.
‘When Ayesha was about five or six,’ Kebby said, ‘she was obsessed with this series of books called The Pony Club, and she had My Little Pony. You know My Little Pony?’
‘Horses?’
‘Plastic horses, with love hearts and clover and rainbows and so on, all on their rear ends. She had about twenty of these and all she ever read were these pony books. I couldn’t wait for her to grow out of that phase. At least twice a day, she used to say, Daddy, I want a real pony. I don’t know where she thought we were going to keep it, living in a terraced house.’
Mr Midden was following them with the horse box: Kebby drove carefully, keeping him in sight.
‘I’ve got all this to come,’ Samhain said.
‘You’ll be fine.’ Kebby took a gentle pace, slowly avoiding pot holes. He was making a smooth journey for Mr Midden, and his horse, to keep Mr Midden happy. ‘It will surprise you what you can deal with, when you need to.’
Samhain already knew what he was going to do with his bonus, if they got one. He would put it in an envelope, every bit of it, and give it to Marta to give to Charley. ‘Do you think he’ll give us a bit extra today?’
Kebby nodded. ‘Yes – if we do well. Peter is very reliable, on the subject of bonuses. He’s not one of these ones who will say he’ll give us a bit extra, then change his mind later. Lots of bosses would say it and then move the goalposts, and say, Oh, but you forgot to fill in the mileage on the van, some tiny, petty excuse, about something you were “supposed” to do, and you didn’t, that means you now can’t have the bonus you were promised. Believe me, I’ve had bosses like that. But Peter isn’t one of them.’
‘Good.’
Flores had brought Samhain up not to mind about material things: Boy-Samhain had never been in clothes that hadn’t been worn by somebody else first. And he had been fairly happy, never having known anything different. Only now, thinking about Graeme Stokes’ other family, his half-brothers the same age, who had lived in a huge, insulated house with central heating and all new carpets, did he feel anger. As a boy, he’d spent hours riding his bike aimlessly around that tiny, suffocating estate, watching the sun set, trying to make fun from nothing, while Gareth and James Stokes, wherever they’d lived, had played on their Gameboys, or Megadrives, or whatever else they’d had, in a large warm house full of snacks.
He didn’t want Astrid to go without, not the way he had.
‘Peter going to give you a reference – to get a place?’
‘Said he would.’
‘Then he will.’ Kebby brought the van around a low stone wall, beyond which was a deep green valley, in which they saw the brick-built, high-chimneyed town from another angle. ‘You see, he’s a good man, Peter. Did I ever tell you about my old boss – from the cruise ship?’ He drew them into a car port in front of a stone-coloured, new build house, and stopped the engine. ‘He was a bad man, a real bad man. A control freak. You wouldn’t have liked to work under him – nobody did. We weren’t allowed to bring our own ideas into the set. If we had just changed the order of the numbers around, it would have given the set more shape, more variety, you know? Instead of playing Get On Up at the very end, after all of the ballads, when the customers were already worn out from dancing, we could have built back up to it, or put it in the middle, to spice things up a bit. But my old boss had a certain way he wanted things doing, I don’t know why. Everything had to be played at the exact speed he’d set, which he’d memorised from this electronic metronome he carried around in his pocket – and those things were very expensive at the time, it must have cost him a fortune, and he carried it around with him everywhere, even though he didn’t need it. We had to play it all exactly at that speed, the songs in exactly the same order, his order, night after night after night after night.
‘He never read the crowd, this one, never, no sir. Another band leader would have seen the customers really going for it in the groovy songs and said, They like this, let’s throw in everything we’ve got that’s got a bit of groove to it. Not Charles. Everything at the same pace and in the same order, every single night. And if you p
ut a beat out of line...’ he blew his cheeks out, and whistled, shaking his head: ‘He’d dock you an hour’s pay.’
‘Is that even legal?’
‘Maritime law.’ Kebby pointed at the cottage. Wide blonde stone, broad windows. ‘The captain makes his own rules, once you’re a certain distance from land. It wasn’t like this. I tell you, it was a relief when I came to work for Peter. I couldn’t get used to it at first. I kept on turning up for work fifteen minutes early, and asking for permission to do every single tiny thing. I couldn’t even move a box without asking the customer, Are you sure you want this one in the van? And then at the other end, I had to ask them again exactly where to put it, and I wouldn’t put it down until I was sure I had precisely the right spot. Here? I would say. Here? Are you sure you want it here? Just here?
‘Peter used to work on the van sometimes too, in those days. He said to me, Kebby, you’ve got to loosen up a bit, you look like a frightened rabbit. He said, You’re making the customers nervous. Try to get a bit of banter going. So I did.’
Mr Midden hopped down from his van, and waved over at them in the cab. They waved back.
‘Nowadays, as you may have noticed, I don’t really bother,’ Kebby said, through his faked grin. ‘Not unless there’s £50 in it for me.’ He unclipped his seatbelt. ‘Well? Shall we make nice and move all these bits of horse paraphernalia?’
A woman in riding jodhpurs opened the door. She looked like Mr Midden, only thirty years younger, and gave them both a look as though she were deciding whether or not to let them in.
‘These are the removals men, Tibby,’ Mr Midden said.
‘Well then, hurry up,’ she said. She stood aside, hair swishing like a horse’s tail. ‘They can put the boxes anywhere.’
‘You heard the lady,’ Kebby said. When her back was turned, he turned to Sam, and tugged an imaginary forelock. ‘Boxes anywhere, and quickly.’
It wasn’t a big place, not the way Samhain had expected. He had thought of large rooms, and plenty of them. But this place had only two bedrooms, and a terrible draught: there was a wind blowing through it like the North Sea on a clifftop. You could have flown a kite in the upstairs bathroom.
He heard Mr Midden’s voice all over the house. Odd words came up the stairs. Combi-boiler, electric cooker. Convenient, manageable. He seemed like a nice chap, the way he was taking her all around the house, showing her everything.
Tremendous views. Samhain put a box down in the second bedroom and looked out to the East. From here, you could see the village down in the dip. A single car ran along one of the rural roads. All this took up less than the bottom half of the sash, and everything above it was sky.
He heard a light, frightened scurrying, and looked down to see a brown mouse running along the skirting. Thinning itself finger-width, it vanished into a hole the size of a pencil.
Kebby came to the top of the stairs with another box. ‘When you are quite ready,’ he said.
7.
He was in his home, but not his home. The same colour walls as his boyhood bedroom. Pale green and yet the floor reaching between them was larger, much larger. There was no bed. He walked a vast expanse of pine on barefoot.
This was warm wood. It felt real to him – something like a floor of forest – he could feel the earth anchoring him down. But nothing stuck between his toes, no moss and no leaves and no slivers of insect – nothing living making its millilegged way around his ankles. This was real and it was soft and polished, clean. And it was his.
A woman in the kitchen was not his mother, although she was a mother, or something like it. He saw a curve of back, a hip, a flickering curve of bright, auburn hair. Standing in the place as if she belonged there, as if it were hers.
In a moment she would call him. In a minute. In a moment. Any minute.
‘Samhain!’
The call, softly, through a fog of sleep.
‘Samhain – you up?’
He came to, taking in the things close to him. Overturned waste bin, working as a bedside cabinet. Dead digital alarm clock, blank screen, no back. A pile of his mother’s clothes in a wardrobe with no door.
So here he was. Mouth fuzzy with the taste of experimental, heathery homebrew. ‘Yeah,’ he called.
‘I found these.’ Flores pushed the door open, holding a set of faded floral curtains. ‘Remember these? From the living room? I thought you might want them for your new place.’
Things returned to him from the previous night. Bottles of beer with lilac labels, which she said had been made by a friend. The taste of it had made him think of a coarse, sludgy brown, a colour that tasted of gorse, the ground beneath your feet. She had been glassy-eyed early; he thought she must have been drinking before he’d got there.
‘You’re still my little bug,’ she’d kept on saying, despite everything they’d talked about. ‘You’re still my little bug.’
Flores didn’t have a television, but she did have a battered CD player, upon which she’d kept on repeating a short CD of protest songs by a girl with a guitar and a sincere, annoying voice. She had started smoking in the house, he noticed. Everything smelled of it. The sofa, the wall hangings. The few cushions she had.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said.
‘You know, I was thinking.’ She, swaying slightly, grabbed the doorway, her fingers gripping white as though it were helping her stand. ‘We did ok, didn’t we? Me and my little bug. You know – you could have turned out much worse.’ She let go of the door and stumbled into the room, the bed, where she sat down. ‘Fields might technically have been your dad, but he was nowhere near being your actual dad. Panzo was much more of a father to you than he ever was.’
‘I know, Mum.’ He had so many questions. He wanted to know: what was he like when you met him? Was he like me? Do I look like him? Sound like him?
‘Maybe I didn’t get everything right.’ Flores’ eyes slipped, half-closing; she rocked slightly on the coverlet. She smelled strongly of last night. ‘I should have told you much sooner. Maybe when you were younger. But...’ she waved an arm around: ‘When would it have been a good time?’
He wasn’t sure whether she was asking him, or herself.
‘When we came to live here? When you were a bit older? A teenager?’
‘You said all this last night.’
‘Did I?’ Flores had put the curtains down. She reached into a sagging pocket for a roll-up which, when she found it, had already been half-smoked. ‘Well, I still don’t know what I should have done. When do you think I should have told you?’ Hot strings of tobacco flared in red filaments, falling dangerously onto the carpet.
This was doubt; he remembered times, as a child, when she had fallen into it. Pits of doubt that had seemed larger than them both, and which had kept her in bed for weeks, while Panzo came around and cared for him.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘If you find him,’ she said, ‘don’t bring him here. I never want to see him or hear from him again.’
‘You couldn’t anyway. He died last year.’
‘Good. I hope whatever killed him was painful.’
‘Flores...’
‘Sorry.’
‘No. Listen. He also had... I’ve got a brother. Well, two half-brothers. One a year older than me, the other a couple of years younger.’
She half-laughed, holding the dead cigarette between thumb and finger. It was a bitter thing, pinching her lips closed. ‘I don’t know what to say to that,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, Flores,’ he said.
‘Like you say.’ Looking around at the floor, her clothes, brushing bits of dry tobacco from her leggings onto the carpet. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She made to get up.
This, he recognised. Her saying things didn’t matter, when to her clearly they did: things that could gain strength in numbers, like union members in a movement, and clip themselves together in her mind, weighty, immovable, until there was little room for an
ything else. ‘It was years ago,’ she said.
At the doorway, her back was a question. Asking: was he going to leave her for this new family he’d discovered, a family he’d never known he had?
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘They’re not my family. Not the way you are.’
‘Huh.’ She stopped, pulling at something on her tongue with curious, tapping fingers. ‘That tobacco’s very dry.’
‘You’ve probably been carrying that roll-up around for months.’
‘I doubt it.’ Now she turned to face him fully, and he saw a cautious happiness. ‘No roll-up lasts any longer than five minutes in one of my pockets.’
‘One of them’s in the police.’
A dry laugh. ‘Figures.’
‘I went to see him.’
‘Why?’
Samhain started to get up. Kicking legs free, reaching for yesterday’s trousers. ‘I don’t know. Curiosity, I guess. Wouldn’t you have done the same?’
‘No. I wouldn’t, and I don’t know why you’d want to, either.’
‘I...’ he was standing now, his full height. Everything in this house looked so much smaller than it had. The bed, the wardrobe, the window – everything half-sized, as though he’d remembered it wrongly. ‘It’s difficult to explain.’
‘Then don’t bother.’ She was already half-way down the stairs.
‘He was a dickhead,’ he called. ‘I didn’t like him, and I won’t be seeing him again.’
‘Really?’
She paused, on a stair half-widthed by books. There was something on every surface in this house. The steps were part shoe-rack, part-shelf. You had to mind your step whichever way you were going. He didn’t know why she kept on doing it: gathering things, magpie style, when there was nobody left in the house but her.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Get this. Graeme Stokes had fed him this bullshit story about us being cousins, and he believed it.’
‘Christ.’ Flores was laughing, really laughing, the way she did when Badger came round. Full peals, belly laugh, a sound that echoed around the walls. ‘That’s really funny.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘Awful, though. He’s lied to them, same way he lied to us.’