The Taking of Annie Thorne

by C. J. Tudor

  ‘Like I’d tell you.’

  ‘Fair point.’ I look around. ‘Isn’t there a better place to hang out?’

  ‘Not in Arnhill.’

  Also a fair point.

  ‘Are you here to avoid Hurst?’

  ‘What d’you think?’

  ‘Look –’

  ‘If you’re going to give me some lecture about how I should stand up to Hurst because bullies respect you if you stand up to them, then you can take that crap and stuff it right back in your stupid satchel, along with your copy of the Guardian.’

  He glares at me defiantly. And he’s right. Bullies don’t respect you if you fight back. They just beat you harder. Because there are always more of them. A simple equation of numbers.

  I try again. ‘I’m not going to tell you that, Marcus. Because it is crap. The best thing you can do is keep your head down, keep away from Hurst, and get through as best you can. You won’t be at school for ever, even though it feels that way now. But you can come to me. I’ll deal with Hurst. You can count on that.’

  He stares at me for a moment, trying to decide whether I’m feeding him a line or he really can trust me. It could go either way. Then he gives a very small nod:

  ‘It’s not just me. Hurst picks on loads of kids. Everyone’s shit scared of him … even the other teachers.’

  I think about what Beth said in the pub. About Hurst being in Julia Morton’s form group. About Ben going missing.

  ‘What about Mrs Morton? She was his form tutor last year, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah, but she wasn’t scared of him. She was more … like you.’

  Bearing in mind she killed her son and blew her own head off, I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment.

  ‘Did you know Ben Morton?’ I ask.

  ‘Not really. He was only a first-year.’

  ‘What about Hurst? Did Hurst bully Ben?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Hurst didn’t pick on Ben. Ben was popular. He had mates –’ He hesitates.

  ‘But there was something?’

  He throws me a sideways glance. ‘A lot of the younger kids, they want to impress Hurst. Be on his good side. Be one of his gang.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Hurst would make them do stuff … to prove themselves.’

  ‘Like an initiation?’

  He nods.

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘Just stupid dares and things. Pathetic, really.’

  ‘On school premises?’

  ‘No. There’s this place Hurst knows about … up on the old colliery site.’

  My blood slows and chills.

  ‘On the old colliery site? Or under it? Did he find something up there – tunnels, caves?’

  My voice has risen. He stares at me. ‘I don’t know, okay? I never wanted to be one of Hurst’s fucking gang.’

  I’ve pushed too hard. And he does know. He’s just not ready to say yet. I already have a pretty good idea anyway. For now, I let the moment slide. We can come back to it another time. With kids like Marcus there is always another time. Hurst might be indiscriminate in his bullying but, like parents, every bully has a favourite, even if they don’t say so.

  I glance around the graveyard again. ‘You know, when I was a kid we used to hang around here sometimes.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah, we’d …’ vandalize angels ‘… drink, smoke, other stuff. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  ‘I like to look at the old graves,’ he says. ‘The people’s names. I like to imagine what their lives were like.’

  Short, hard and miserable, I think. That’s what most people’s lives were like in the nineteenth century. We romanticize the past, with our period dramas and glossy film adaptations. A bit like we do with nature. Nature isn’t beautiful. Nature is violent, unpredictable and unforgiving. Eat or be eaten. That’s nature. However much Attenborough and Coldplay you wrap it up in.

  ‘Most people had hard lives back then,’ I say to Marcus.

  He nods, suddenly enthused. ‘I know. Do you know the average age people lived to in the nineteenth century?’

  I hold up my hands. ‘English, not history.’

  ‘Forty-six, if you were lucky. And Arnhill was an industrial village. Lower-class, manual workers died younger. Lung infections, mine accidents and, of course, all the usual diseases – smallpox, typhoid, etcetera.’

  ‘Not the best time to be born.’

  His eyes light up. I sense we have found his chosen subject. ‘That’s the other thing. In the 1800s women had an average of eight or ten children. But many would die in infancy or before they reached their teens.’ He pauses to let this sink in. ‘Ever noticed something weird about this place?’

  I look around. ‘You mean, aside from all the dead people?’

  His face closes again. He thinks I’m making fun of him.

  ‘Sorry. Flippancy. Bad habit of mine. Tell me?’

  ‘What’s missing from the graveyard?’

  I look around. There is something. Something obvious. Something I should have noticed before. I can feel it at the back of my mind, but I can’t quite grasp it.

  I shake my head. ‘Go on –’

  ‘There’s not one baby or young person buried here.’ He stares at me triumphantly. ‘Where are all the children?’

  14

  When Annie was about three, she asked me: ‘Where are all the snowmen?’

  It wasn’t quite so random. It was November and it had snowed quite heavily a couple of days before. All the kids in the village had run outside, chucking snowballs around and rolling them into huge misshapen lumps that looked nothing like the snowmen you see in films or on Christmas cards. Real snowmen never do. They’re usually far from round and the snow is never white, mixed in with a fair bit of mud, grass and, occasionally, dog shit.

  Still, that weekend there were lots of these oddly formed, ugly snowmen leaning lopsidedly around. In every park, garden and yard. From Annie’s window, you could see quite a few outside other people’s houses. We made one of our own, of course, and although it was small, it wasn’t that bad. It had coal for its eyes and mouth, and an old woollen hat of mine perched on its head. The arms I made from two school rulers – there weren’t any trees or twigs around on our street.

  Annie loved our snowman and would get up excitedly in the morning to peer out of her window and check he was still there. Then, on day three, the temperature rose, it started to rain and, overnight, the snow and all the snowmen pretty much disappeared.

  Annie rushed to look out of her window and her face fell at the sight of the scattered lumps of coal, sodden hats and dismembered makeshift limbs.

  ‘Where are all the snowmen?’

  ‘Well, the snow has gone,’ I said.

  She looked at me impatiently. ‘Yes, but where are all the snowmen? Where did they go?’

  She couldn’t understand that, when the snow melted, the snowmen went too. To her, they were a separate thing. Real, solid, substantial. Snowmen. Once created, they couldn’t just disappear. They had to go somewhere.

  I tried to explain. I told her we could make another snowman when it snowed again. But she just said: ‘It won’t be the same. It won’t be my snowman.’

  She was right. Some things are like that – unique, transient. You can copy, recreate, but you can never bring them back. Not the same.

  I just wish Annie hadn’t had to die for me to realize that.

  I sit on the sofa in my coat, the mysterious package on the coffee table in front of me. I didn’t have a chance to open it at school. When I got back I was already late for my next lesson. I had to use the break to catch up on marking, and by the time I made it through the last period I just wanted to get out of the building.

  I even declined the offer of a Friday-night drink with Beth, Susan and James in the Fox. Something I’m now regretting. Good company and a cold pint in a warm pub, even if it is the Fox, suddenly seems a much better option than a cold c
ottage with no TV and the only company my skittering, chittering bathroom buddies.

  I stare at the package. Then I pick up the scissors I found in the kitchen cupboard and carefully slit open the plastic bag. Inside is a folder bulging with papers and held together with two elastic bands.

  Scribbled on the front in black biro, just one word: ‘Arnhill’.

  I reach for my drink and take a large gulp.

  Every town, village and city has a history. Often more than one. There’s the official history. The bone-dry version collated in textbooks and census reports, repeated verbatim in the classroom.

  Then there’s the history that is passed down through generations. The stories exchanged in the pub, over cups of tea while babies squirm in buggies, in the work canteen and the playground.

  The secret history.

  In 1949 a cave-in at Arnhill Colliery buried eighteen miners beneath several tons of rubble and suffocating dust. It became known as the Arnhill Colliery Disaster. Only fifteen bodies were ever recovered.

  Locals would recall how the bellowing tremor shook the whole village. At first people thought it was an earthquake. People ran, panicking, out of their houses. The teachers ushered children quickly out of their classes. Only the older villagers didn’t run. They remained, supping their pints and exchanging troubled looks. They knew it was the pit. And when the pit roared like that, you were probably already too late.

  After the roar came the dust: black, billowing clouds that filled the sky and eclipsed the sun. The high-pitched wail of the colliery alarm shrieked to the dark heavens, followed by the sirens: ambulance, fire and police.

  There were reports and inquiries. But no one was ever held to account for the accident. And the three lost miners remained buried, deep beneath the ground.

  Officially.

  Unofficially – because who would ever tell such things to an outsider or a newspaper? – many swore, my grandad included (especially after a few pints), that they had seen the missing men, up on the colliery site, at night. One urban legend – retold with fresh embellishments each time – had it that a few of the surviving crew were sitting drinking in the Bull after hours one night when the door burst open and Kenneth Dunn, the youngest of the men lost that day, at just sixteen, walked right up to the bar. Bold as day and black as the night with coal dust.

  Allegedly, the barman put down the glass he was drying, looked the dead lad up and down and said: ‘Get out of here, Kenneth. You’re under age.’

  A good ghost story, and every village has plenty of those. Of course, no miner would admit to being in there that night. And when asked about it, the barman (long retired by then) would just tap his red-veined nose and say: ‘You’d have to buy me a lot of drink to tell you that tale.’

  No one ever did buy him enough drink. Although plenty tried.

  Just off the high street stood the Miner’s Welfare. Not the original building. That was demolished in the sixties when subsidence caused a wall to collapse, crushing several miners and their families. Two women and one toddler died. People claimed that the little boy still roamed the new building, and sometimes you’d see him in the long, dark corridor between the main bar and the toilets.

  As a kid, left to sip pop while Dad downed beer and Mum drank half a lager and lime while rocking Annie in her pram (because Friday was Family Social Night at the Welfare), I would will my bladder to hold until we got home. If I absolutely had to go, I’d run as fast as I could down that dingy corridor to the toilets and back, terrified that one night I might feel a cold hand around my wrist and turn to see a tiny boy, face still smeared with dust, clothes ragged and torn, a bloody red dent in his head where his skull had been crushed.

  In 1857 a man by the name of Edgar Horne stabbed his wife to death and was hanged from a lamp post by a lynch mob, his body left in a shallow grave on unconsecrated ground. Legend had it that he was still alive when he was buried. He clawed his way out and could sometimes be seen, dirt crusted on his hair and clothes, sitting by his wife’s headstone. On Bonfire Night, instead of a guy, for years the tradition in Arnhill was to burn an effigy of Edgar Horne. To make sure that, this time, he was really dead.

  My dad would always scoff at such things. If he heard Grandad telling the story about Kenneth Dunn, his face would darken and he’d say: ‘Leave it, Frank. There’s more hot air spouted out your mouth than out the pit stack.’

  But sometimes, the way he said it made me think he wasn’t angry but afraid. His words not derision but a defence, against stuff he’d rather not think about.

  Even my dad couldn’t deny that Arnhill was a village plagued by misfortune. There were never any more fatal accidents down the pit, but several smaller ones claimed time, money and, in one case, a miner’s legs. The pit gained a reputation for being jinxed. Some miners were reluctant to send their sons down there. Despite still being profitable – with tons of coal beneath the surface – in 1988 the decision was made to close Arnhill Colliery for good.

  Whatever remained down there would be left, abandoned and undisturbed.

  I flip through page after page of the folder. It makes for morbidly fascinating reading. Some of it I know, or thought I knew. There are details I wasn’t aware of. Facts obscured in the retelling. I had always imagined Edgar Horne as a boorish monster. In fact, he was a doctor, respected in the community. Until one hot summer night he went to church, ate a supper of potato broth and cut his wife’s throat with a scalpel as she slept.

  Remarkably, no villagers were ever held accountable for his lynching. All covering each other’s backs. I wonder how many of their descendants still live in Arnhill today and how many know – or care – about the blood on their forefathers’ hands.

  Further back, the history of the village becomes vaguer: the usual tales of poverty, disease and untimely death. A lot of death. Some pages have been highlighted. I lift one of them out:

  NOTTINGHAMSHIRE’S SALEM

  During the sixteenth century witch hunts were prolific across Europe. The trials in Arnhill began when a young man by the name of Thomas Darling accused his aunt of consorting with devils to bring babies back from the dead. According to Darling, Mary Walkenden took ill babies up to caves in the hills and exchanged their souls for eternal life.

  The name Darling doesn’t ring a bell, but I remember a Jamie Walkenden at school. The bus really does never leave, I think. Generation after generation. Born, living, dying here.

  I place the page to one side and pick out another.

  EZEKERIAH HYRST – MIRACLE MAN (1794–1867)

  Hyrst was a renowned spiritual faith healer, alleged to have performed many miracles. Witnesses claim that Hyrst cured a young boy of paralysis of the legs, banished the devil from a woman and gave breath to a stillborn baby. Most of these took place in Nottinghamshire, in a small village called Arnhill.

  Hyrst? Hurst? Not a coincidence, surely? And a charlatan healer seems to fit the family tradition. Miracles and tragedies. Tragedies and miracles. You can’t have one without the other.

  I turn over the next page. My breath feels like it’s been sucked from my lungs.

  SEARCH FOR MISSING EIGHT-YEAR-OLD CONTINUES

  Annie’s face smiles back at me. Wide, gappy smile, hair in a high ponytail. Mum always tried to plait it, but Annie would never sit still for long enough. Always wanting to be off doing something else. Always looking for adventure. Always following me. I don’t need to read this story. I lived it. I push the folder away, reach for my drink and realize the glass is empty. Odd how that happens. I stand. And then I pause. I thought I heard something. A creak from the hallway. A floorboard? Shit. Gloria?

  I turn, and my legs almost give out on me. Not Gloria.

  ‘Heyup, Joe.’

  15

  Life is not kind. Not to any of us, in the end.

  It adds weight to our shoulders, a heaviness to our stride. It tears away the things we care about and hardens our souls with regret.

  There are no winners in life.
Life is ultimately all about losing: your youth, your looks. But most of all, those you love. Sometimes I think it’s not the passing of the years that really ages you but the passing of the people and things you care about. That kind of ageing can’t be smoothed away by needles or plumped out with fillers. The pain shows in your eyes. Eyes that have seen too much will always give you away.

  Like mine. Like Marie’s.

  She sits awkwardly upon the sagging sofa. Knees together, hands clasped tightly on top. She is thinner – much thinner – than the blossoming teenage girl I remember. Back then, her cheeks were round, with deep dimples when she smiled. Her limbs were long and lithe, cushioned with the firm flesh of youth.

  Now, the legs in skinny jeans are stick thin. Her cheeks are hollow. Her hair is still thick, dark and shiny. It takes me a moment to realize that it must be a wig, her eyebrows artful pencil lines.

  I hover, equally awkwardly. I swept up the papers I had been reading back into the folder, which I clutch beneath one arm. I don’t know how much Marie saw. I don’t know how long she had been standing there, after she let herself in when I didn’t hear her knock. At least, she said she knocked.

  ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, something stronger?’

  The sentence makes me wince a little. Cliché, I mentally note, in red pen.

  She tilts her head; her hair falls to one side, just like it used to. ‘How strong?’

  ‘Beer, bourbon? Of course, you haven’t tried my coffee –’

  A tiny hint of a smile. ‘Beer, thanks.’

  I nod and walk into the kitchen. My heart is pounding. I feel a little faint. It’s probably just my hollow stomach. I really should eat something. Or have a soft drink. More alcohol is just going to make me feel worse.

  I open the fridge and take out two beers.

  Before I return to the living room I open the cupboard beneath the sink and chuck the folder inside. Then I walk back and place a can on the coffee table in front of Marie. I pop mine open and take a deep swig. I was wrong. It doesn’t make me feel worse. It doesn’t make me feel better either, but that’s not really the point.