by C. J. Tudor
‘And the Fatman still wants his cash.’
‘Do people really call him that, or is it just a name he got from a comic book?’
She chuckles throatily. ‘You see, that’s exactly the type of comment that makes him hire people like me to hurt you.’
‘Nice chap. I must meet him one day.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’
‘I’m working on getting the money. I have a new job.’
‘Joe, forgive me for being blunt, but a few quid here and there is not going to cut it. Thirty grand. That’s what the Fatman wants.’
‘Thirty? But that’s way more –’
‘Next month he’ll want forty. You know how this works.’
I do. I nod. ‘I have a plan.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘There’s a man here. He wants me to leave the village. Badly.’
‘This wouldn’t be the same man who got those thugs to beat you up tonight.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now he’s going to hand you a big wad of cash?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why is he going to have this change of heart?’
Because of what happened. Because of what he did. Because, as he said himself, he has a nice life here, and I could screw it all up, just like that.
‘He owes me,’ I say. ‘And he really doesn’t want me stirring up trouble for him.’
‘Interesting. Who is this man?’
‘A councillor and successful businessman.’
She signals to turn into the village. ‘I like a public figure. There are just so many ways to fuck up their lives, don’t you think?’
‘I’ve never given it that much thought.’
‘Oh, you should. They’re the easiest ones to hurt. The ones with the most to lose.’
‘In that case, I should be unbreakable.’
‘Well, no one is that. But physical pain is the easiest to recover from.’
Right now, just about every part of my body would beg to disagree, but I don’t reply. Talking about pain with Gloria is a bad idea. Like taking a poacher on safari.
We drive along in silence for a while. She sighs. ‘I like you, Joe –’
‘You have a funny way of showing it.’
‘I sense a hint of sarcasm.’
‘You crippled me.’
‘Actually, I saved you from being a cripple.’ She pulls up outside the cottage and yanks on the handbrake. ‘The Fatman wanted me to ruin your good leg.’
She turns and rests a hand gently on my thigh. ‘Luckily for you, being a daft little woman from Manchester, I got a bit confused.’
I stare at her. ‘You want me to thank you?’
She smiles again. It would be a nice smile, if it made it anywhere near her dead blue eyes. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Gloria’s reveal nothing but empty rooms covered in blood-spattered sheets.
She runs her hand down my thigh to my knee. And then she squeezes, hard. For a tiny woman, she has a powerful grip. In other circumstances this might be a good thing. Right now, all my breath is sucked out of my diaphragm. I’m in too much pain to even scream. Just when I think I might pass out, she releases me. I gasp and fall back in my seat.
‘I don’t want you to thank me. I want you to get me that thirty grand, because next time I won’t be so fucking forgiving.’
12
‘Don’t tell me,’ Beth says. ‘I should see the steamroller?’
I try to raise an eyebrow. It hurts. Just about everything hurts this morning. The only consolation is that it makes the pain in my leg bearable by comparison.
‘Very funny.’ I sit down at the canteen table next to her. ‘Excuse me if I don’t laugh, but I don’t want to rupture anything.’
She regards me with a smidge more compassion. Either that or she has something stuck in her throat. ‘What happened?’
‘I fell down the stairs.’
‘Really?’
‘They’re very steep stairs.’
‘Right.’
‘Easy to trip.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It’s almost like you don’t believe me?’
She shrugs. ‘I just wondered if you’d managed to piss someone else off.’
‘You have a very low opinion of me.’
‘No. I just have a very high opinion of your ability to be annoying.’
I chuckle. Predictably, it hurts.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘at least you can laugh about it.’
‘Barely.’
Her face softens. ‘Seriously, are you okay? If there’s anything you want to talk about …’
Before I can respond, I catch a whiff of halitosis mixed with bad aftershave. I cough and push my sandwich to one side. To be fair, I wasn’t very hungry anyway.
‘Joey, man.’
I thought I couldn’t hate him any more, but the addition of an ‘ey’ on the end of my name has just made it possible.
Simon drags out a chair and sits down. Today he wears a Magic Roundabout T-shirt over maroon cords. Maroon.
‘Wow, what happened to your face, man? Or should I see the other guy?’
‘He has really badly bruised knuckles,’ Beth quips.
Simon gives a feeble laugh. I sense he doesn’t really like women who are smart or funny. Makes him feel inferior. Rightly so. And actually, my face got off lightly. Just a bruised eye and a cut lip.
‘I fell down the stairs,’ I say.
‘Really?’ He shakes his head. ‘I thought it might have something to do with Stephen Hurst.’
I stare at him. ‘What?’
‘I saw you two talking in the pub last night.’
‘You were there?’
‘Just having a quiet pint.’
And spying on me. The thought leaps into my head unbidden. Paranoid. Maybe. But why not introduce himself?
‘I didn’t want to interrupt,’ he says. A rehearsed lie if ever I’ve heard one.
‘What does talking to Stephen Hurst have to do with anything?’ I ask innocently. If we’re going to play Pretty Little Liars here, I bet I can win.
Simon smiles. I really wish he wouldn’t.
‘Well, between you, me and the lamp post … Stephen Hurst might give the impression of being a respectable councillor, but rumour has it he isn’t averse to using less professional methods when people upset him.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning,’ Beth says, ‘Jeremy Hurst had a run-in with our last head of PE. Before the guy resigned, he had a run-in with someone’s fists on the way home one night.’
She glances at me and I realize: she knows. She knew from the minute I sat – painfully – down.
‘Well, you shouldn’t listen to rumours,’ I say evenly.
‘Good point,’ Simon says, opening his chicken sandwich noisily and taking a bite, noisily. I bet he even sleeps noisily.
‘Reminds me, though,’ he mumbles, ‘d’you remember Carol Webster?’
‘Sorry?’
‘At Stockford Academy. She was deputy head.’
I try to keep a neutral face, even as my heart picks up pace, like a jogger with the finishing line in sight. Except I’m not quite so happy about where this road is leading.
‘Afraid not.’
Actually, I do. She was a vastly overweight woman with a huge halo of curly dark hair and a face that looked permanently disappointed – with herself, the school or the world in general, I was never sure.
‘Well, she and I keep in touch on Facebook.’
Of course you do, I think. Facebook is the place where people with no friends in real life keep in touch with people they’d never want to be friends with in real life.
‘That’s nice.’
‘She remembers you, or rather, she remembers you leaving.’
‘Yeah?’
‘It was about the same time all that money from the school safe went missing.’
I regard him steadily. ‘I think you’ve got your facts wrong – I heard the money was returned.�
��
He makes a pretence of stroking his chin. ‘Oh yeah. I suppose that’s why the police never got involved. Got kind of hushed up.’
Beth looks at Simon. ‘Are you accusing Mr Thorne of something here, because you’re being about as subtle as a frigging tank?’
He holds up his hands in mock-surrender. ‘Oh no. Not at all. Just saying that’s why she remembered him. Timing. Talking of which’ – he glances at his watch – ‘I have a kid I need to see about a detention.’ He stands, grabbing his sandwich. ‘Catch you later.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Catch you later.’
‘Not if we get immunized against you first,’ Beth mutters, smiling sweetly.
I watch Simon’s departing back and wish for a crater to suddenly open up beneath him or perhaps for the ceiling to cave in, or an instance of spontaneous human combustion.
‘Don’t let him get to you,’ Beth says.
‘He hasn’t.’
‘Bullshit. Simon is a bloody awful teacher, but one thing he excels at is getting under other people’s skin. If you have an Achilles heel, he’ll find it and nip at it like a starving terrier.’
‘Thanks for the mental image.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She pops a piece of pasta into her mouth: ‘Not true, is it?’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t really nick all the money from your last school?’
‘No.’
I intended to. I really had sunk that low. But when it came to it, I couldn’t.
Because someone else had got there before me.
‘Sorry,’ Beth says. ‘Shouldn’t have even asked.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I mean, I know Harry was desperate for a new English teacher, because, let’s face it, the position is a bit of a poisoned chalice –’
‘Like I said, forget it.’
‘But even Harry wouldn’t –’
‘Forget it.’
I’ve snapped. She stares at me. I don’t want to piss off the one ally I have here.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m just in a bit of pain and –’
‘No, it’s fine.’ She shakes her head. Silver earrings glint. ‘Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up.’
‘It’s not that –’
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I’d like to ignore it. But then again, it might be Gloria. Gloria made it pretty clear last night that she isn’t about to be ignored.
‘Sorry,’ I say again. ‘I just need to –’
‘Go ahead.’
I slip the phone out of my pocket and glance at the screen. It’s not Gloria. I stare at the text message. My skin prickles with a million tiny, icy pitchforks.
‘Something wrong?’
Yes.
‘No.’ I slip the phone back into my pocket. ‘But I’ve just remembered, I have to be somewhere.’
‘Now?’
‘Right now.’
‘You’ve got class in thirty minutes.’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘Good to know, Arnie.’
I shrug on my jacket, and wince. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘Watch your step.’
I frown. ‘Why?’
She cocks an eyebrow. ‘You don’t want to fall down any more stairs now, do you?’
13
St Jude’s is a small soot-crusted building that looks more like a run-down scout hut than a village church. There is no spire, just an uneven and pitted roof, tiles missing, holes in places. The windows are grilled, the door boarded up. The only congregations filling its pews and raising the rafters are the nesting crows and pigeons.
I push open the gate and walk up the rutted pathway. The churchyard is similarly neglected. It hasn’t been used for burials for a very long time. My sister and my parents were cremated at the large crematorium in Mansfield.
The headstones here are chipped and cracked, the inscriptions eroded by the weather and the passing of the years, some completely worn away. Tree roots have undermined a few of the oldest graves, toppling them over to be reclaimed by the grass and weeds.
We try so hard, I think, to mark our place on this earth. To leave something of ourselves. But in the end, even those markers are transitory, impermanent. We can’t fight against time. It’s like trying to run uphill on an ever-accelerating descending escalator. Time is always moving, always busy, always cleaning up after itself, removing the detritus of the old and sweeping in the new.
I walk slowly around the church to the rear. The ground rises a little; there are fewer headstones. I stand and look around. For a moment, I can’t see her. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe the text was just some … and then I spot her, lurking at the far end of the graveyard. Half hidden, overgrown with ivy and creepers.
The Angel. Not a memorial or a headstone. Apparently, she was placed here in the Victorian era by the owners of the pit. Some say it was after the family’s twin daughters died as infants, but the grave was once exhumed (something to do with the church being worried about it being unmarked) and no human remains were discovered beneath.
No one really knows where she came from or to what purpose. She doesn’t even look much like an angel these days. Her hands are broken stumps and her head has gone. She tilts a little, unsteady on her square stone feet. The once gracefully flowing robes are chipped and broken, crusted with furry moss, as though nature has wrapped an extra layer around her to keep her stony bones warm.
I bend down – a new and interesting burst of pain reminding me that I need to take some more painkillers soon – and brush away moss and grass from the base. The inscription is a little faded but still legible.
But Jesus said, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’
I look again at the message on my phone:
Suffocate the little children. Fuck them. Rest in Pieces.
A long time ago a gang of teenagers sprayed graffiti all over the Angel. The same ones who brought a shovel and scythed off her head and hands, decapitating and maiming her. There was no real reason for the attack. Just mindless vandalism, spurred on by cheap cider and teenage bravado.
The dismemberment and spray cans had been Hurst’s idea. But the words, I am ashamed to say, were mine. At the time, with a bladder full of booze and the jeering encouragement of the rest of our gang, I had felt pretty pleased with myself.
Later, hanging over the toilet, spewing out bile and shame, I had felt like shit. I wasn’t religious, none of my family was, but I still knew what we had done was wrong.
Even twenty-five years later I feel discomfort at the memory. Funny how the good memories flit by like butterflies: fleeting, fragile, impossible to capture without crushing them. But the bad ones – the guilt, the shame – they hang on in there, like parasites. Quietly eating you away from the inside.
Four of us were here that day. Hurst, me, Fletch and Chris. Marie was absent. She hung around with our gang more and more – much to the irritation of Fletch, who resented a girl in our midst – but not all the time. Hurst probably told her about it, though. And in a school word gets around; rumours spread. Just because we were the only ones here that day doesn’t mean that no one else knew.
Still, it does mean that whoever sent the text must have been at school with us back then. Perhaps the same person who sent the email? I tried to call the number. It went to answerphone. I sent a text. I’m not expecting a reply. I don’t think the sender wanted a conversation. They wanted me to come here. But why?
I straighten and stare at the headless angel. She steadfastly refuses to offer me any divine enlightenment. I wonder what happened to her head and hands. The church probably stored them away, or maybe some weirdo took them for a memento, to keep under their floorboards. Better than a real head, I suppose.
I’m missing something. Something obvious. I regard the Angel’s oddly tilted posture. And then it comes to me. I walk around the back and crouch down again.
Where the roots of the cree
pers have started to push her from the ground there’s a hollow. A recess in the damp earth. Something has been wedged underneath. I stick my hand in, grimacing at the feel of the cold, dank soil. There’s a package of some sort in there, bound up in plastic. It takes a couple of tugs and I pull it out, shaking off dirt and a few slugs and earwigs. I study the package, turning it over in my hands: A4-sized, about half the thickness of an average paperback. It’s been wrapped in a bin bag and secured with electrical tape. I’m going to need scissors to open it. Which means I need to get back to school.
I slip the package inside my satchel (along with my notebooks and some essays I should probably be marking right now). I buckle the satchel up, stand and walk more briskly back around the church. I’m almost at the gate when I realize I’m not alone. A figure is sitting on the church’s only small bench, beneath an aged sycamore. A familiar skinny, hunched figure. My heart sinks. Not now. I need to get back to school. I need to open the package. I don’t need to play the concerned teacher or the good bloody Samaritan.
But then, another part of me, the irritating part – the part that actually gives a shit about kids and got me into teaching in the first place – gets the better of me.
I walk over to the bench. ‘Marcus?’
He starts and looks up, flinching slightly. The reaction of someone who only ever expects an insult or a blow.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask.
He shifts, embarrassed, red-faced. ‘Nothing.’
‘Right.’
I wait. Because that’s what you have to do sometimes. You don’t push to get kids to tell you things. You pull back, let them ease it out on their own.
He sighs. ‘I come here to eat my lunch.’
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask why, but that would be stupid. Why did Ruth Moore eat her lunch in the bus shelter down the road from school every day? Because it was safer. A place to hide from the bullies. Better a urine-stinking shelter or a damp bench in a cold graveyard than the ritual humiliation of the canteen and the playground.
‘Are you going to bollock me for being off school premises?’ Marcus asks.
I sit down beside him, trying not to grimace at the fresh twinge in my back. ‘No. Although I’m curious as to how you found a way past the security gates.’