by C. J. Tudor
I sit heavily in the armchair. ‘So, it’s been a long time,’ I say, like the cliché-spouting machine I am tonight.
‘It has. Are you going to tell me I haven’t changed a bit?’
I shake my head. ‘We all change.’
She nods, reaches for her drink and pops the tab. ‘Yeah. But we’re not all dying of cancer.’
The bluntness of her words takes me back. And then, as she tips back the beer, I realize. This is not her first drink.
‘I presume you know,’ she says. ‘This is Arnhill, after all.’
I nod. ‘How’s the treatment going?’
‘Not working. Tumour is still spreading. More slowly. But it’s just delaying the inevitable.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Cliché after fucking cliché. After the crash, I used to hate it when people told me how sorry they were. Why? Did you cause the crash? No? Then what are you sorry for, exactly?
‘What have the doctors said?’
‘Not a lot. They’re too scared of Stephen to give me a straight answer. He says they don’t know everything anyway. Reckons he can get me into a clinical trial in America. The Bardon-Hope Clinic. Some new miracle treatment.’
Ezekeriah Hyrst – Miracle Man, I think, and then, hot on its heels: Marie is not going to die. I will not let that happen.
‘Did he say what the treatment is?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘No, but I’d try anything.’ She fixes her sunken eyes on mine. ‘I want to live. I want to see my boy grow up.’
Of course. And we’d all do the same. Even though there are no miracles. Not without a price.
I look away. We both swig our beer. Funny how the more you share, the less you have to say.
‘You’re teaching at the academy?’ she says eventually.
‘That’s right,’ I say.
‘Must be a bit weird?’
‘A little. Now I’m one of the guards, not one of the inmates.’
‘What made you come back?’
An email. A compulsion. Unfinished business. All of those and none of those. Basically, I always knew I would.
‘I don’t know, really. The job came up and it seemed a good opportunity.’
‘For what?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘It was just a surprise, hearing you were back. I never thought I’d see you again.’
‘Well, you know me – a bad penny.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘You were one of the good ones, Joe.’
I feel my cheeks redden and suddenly I’m fifteen again, basking in the glow of her approval.
‘What about you?’ I say. ‘You never left?’
A small, lifeless shrug. ‘Things always seemed to get in the way, and then Stephen proposed.’
‘And you said yes?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
I think about a fifteen-year-old girl crying on my shoulder. A bruise around her eye. A promise that she would never let it happen again.
‘I thought you had plans?’
‘Well, they don’t always work out, do they? I didn’t get the grades I wanted. Mum was made redundant. We needed extra money so I got a job and then I got married. End of.’
Not quite, I think.
‘And you have a son?’
‘You know I do.’
‘Yeah – real chip off the old block. Bet his dad’s proud.’
A glance so sharp I feel it sting.
‘We’re both proud of Jeremy.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t have kids?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t get to judge then.’ She crumples her can. ‘Got another?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, it’s hardly going to kill me.’
I stand and fetch two more cans from the kitchen. Then I pause. Marie must have driven here. I saw her slip her car keys into her handbag. She probably shouldn’t drink any more and drive home.
Not my problem, though. I walk back through and hand her a beer. She looks around and shivers.
‘This place is cold.’
‘Yeah, the heating doesn’t work very well.’
But that’s not it.
‘Why here?’
‘It just came up.’
‘Like the job.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re so full of shit.’
And there it is. The bitter ball she’s been waiting to cough up since she arrived.
‘If you’ve come back to start stirring up the past –’ she says.
‘What? What are you scared of? What’s Hurst scared of?’
She takes a moment to reply. When she does, her voice is softer. ‘You went away. The rest of us, we’re still here. I’m asking you, just leave things be. Not for Stephen. For me.’
And I get it.
‘He sent you, didn’t he?’ I say. ‘His thugs didn’t work, so he thought you might tug at my heartstrings, persuade me, for old times’ sake?’
She shakes her head. ‘If Stephen wanted you gone, he wouldn’t send me. He’d send someone to finish the job Fletch’s boys started.’
‘Fletch’s boys?’
Of course. Stocky and Unwise Hair. That’s why they seemed familiar. I should have guessed. Fletch was always the brainless muscle when we were kids. Now, his offspring are carrying on the tradition.
‘I really should have spotted the family resemblance,’ I say. ‘The way their knuckles dragged on the floor.’
Her face flushes. And I do feel a tug inside. But it’s not my heartstrings. It’s the depressing yank you get on your guts when your worst fears about someone are confirmed.
‘You knew about my welcome party?’
Which explains why she didn’t ask about my bruised face when she arrived.
‘Not until afterwards. I’m sorry.’
‘Me too.’
She stands. ‘I should go. This was stupid, a waste of time.’
‘Not completely. You can give Hurst a message.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Tell him I have something of his.’
‘I doubt there’s anything you have that Stephen wants.’
‘Call it a memento. From the pit.’
‘For Christ’s sake – it was twenty-five years ago. We were just kids.’
‘No, my sister was just a kid.’
It probably says something about me that I feel pleased when her thin, sallow face falls.
‘I’m sorry about Annie,’ she says.
‘And what about Chris?’
‘That was his choice.’
‘Was it? Why don’t you ask Hurst something else – ask him if Chris really jumped.’
16
1992
Chris found it. That was his knack. Finding stuff.
Like me, he was an unusual addition to Hurst’s gang: tall and lanky with white-blond hair that stuck up like electrified straw and a stutter that got worse when he was nervous (and like most awkward, nerdy kids, Chris spent a lot of his schooldays being nervous).
No one could fathom why Hurst took him under his wing. But I got it. Hurst may have been a bully, but he was also smart. He had a way of knowing who to crush, and who to keep. And Chris had his uses. I guess we all did.
While Hurst’s casual associates were the usual mixture of posers and brawlers, his inner circle was a little different. Fletch was the muscle. The brainless thug who would laugh at Hurst’s jokes, lick his arse and smash heads. Chris was the brains. The misfit, the misunderstood genius. His flair for science helped us create the best home-made stink bombs, ingenious booby traps for unsuspecting victims and, once, a chemical explosion that caused the whole school to be evacuated at the expense, and job, of a stand-in science teacher.
But Chris had another useful quirk. A feverish curiosity. A desire to find out stuff, and to find stuff. A way of seeing things that other people couldn’t. If you wanted to get hold of some exam papers, Chris would find a way to get them. A spot to stan
d in the fields to see into the girls’ changing rooms, Chris could calculate the best vantage point. A way to break into the newsagent’s and steal sweets and fireworks, Chris could devise a plan to do it.
If his skull hadn’t smashed open in the schoolyard and his brilliant brains spilt all over the stained grey concrete, Chris would have grown up to be a billionaire entrepreneur … or a criminal mastermind. That’s what I had always thought.
When he blustered into the kids’ playground that Friday evening, late as usual, because Chris was always late – not fashionably, but red-faced, tie askew, food down his shirt and apologetically so – he was even more flushed and frantic than normal. Straight off, I knew something was up.
‘All right, Chris?’
‘The site. F–f–f–found. G–g–g–ground.’
When nervous, Chris’s stutter worsened; he became almost entirely incomprehensible.
I glanced over at Hurst and Fletch. Marie wasn’t with us that evening, as she had to help her mum with some chores, so there was just the three of us, killing time, talking shit. In a way, it was a good thing. As much as I liked Marie … well, that was the problem. I liked Marie. Too much. And when she was with us, she was with Hurst, his arm slung proprietorially around her shoulders.
Now, he dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, jumped down from the climbing frame and regarded Chris in the hazy evening twilight.
‘All right, mate. Calm down. Fuck’s sake, you sound like a fucking Speak & Spell.’
Fletch chortled like someone had just filled his cigarette with laughing gas.
Chris’s face flamed harder, cheeks fire-engine red in his pale face. His hair was tussled and tufted like a particularly windswept haystack and his sweatshirt was creased and crusted with dirt. But the thing I noticed most about him was his eyes. Always a startling blue, that night they blazed. Sometimes, though I didn’t like to admit it, because it made me sound a bit weird and gay, Chris looked like some kind of beautiful crazed angel.
‘Leave him,’ I said to Hurst.
I was the only one who could get away with speaking to Hurst like that. He listened to me. I guess that was my use. I was his voice of reason. He trusted me. The fact that I often did his English homework for him didn’t hurt either.
I ground out my own cigarette. I never really liked them that much. Just like beer. The taste made me want to spit and wipe my tongue. Of course, I have grown older, wiser and more addicted since then.
‘Breathe,’ I said to Chris. ‘Speak slowly. Tell us.’
Chris nodded and attempted to rein in his manic huffing and puffing. He clutched his hands together tightly in front of him, trying to get control over his nerves and his stutter.
‘Fucking retard,’ Fletch muttered, and spat a huge gob of phlegm on to the ground.
Hurst gave me a look. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a slightly melted Wham bar and held it out to Chris, like offering a treat to a puppy.
‘Here.’
Contrary to what is believed nowadays, a sugary snack was about the only thing that could calm Chris down. Perhaps that was why he nearly always had a constant supply of them.
Chris accepted the Wham bar, chewed a bit and then, still half chewing, said:
‘Been up … up at the old mine.’
‘Okay.’
All of us kids went up there and messed around sometimes. Before they started to demolish the old buildings we would sneak in and nick stuff. Useless stuff. Bits of old metal and machinery. Just to prove we’d been. But Chris went up there a lot. On his own, which was odd. But then everything about Chris was odd, so much so that it just became normal after a while. When I asked him once why he went up there so much, he said:
‘I have to look.’
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
Conversations with Chris could be frustrating. I fought my irritation down as he struggled to find his words without them breaking into pieces on his tongue.
Finally, he said: ‘I found something. In the g–g–ground. C–c–could be a way in.’
‘A way into what?’
‘The pit.’
I stared at him, and it was weird. I felt like I had heard the words before. Or had been expecting them. A strange shiver ran around my body, like when you touch a trolley and your hand tingles with static. The pit.
Hurst loped over. ‘You found a way into the old mineshafts?’
‘Fucking ace,’ Fletch added.
I shook my head. ‘No way. They were all blocked off and, anyway, those shafts are, like, hundreds of feet down.’
Hurst looked at me then nodded. ‘Thorney’s right. Are y’sure, Doughboy?’
Doughboy was Hurst’s nickname for Chris because he was ‘soft as dough’.
Chris looked between us, helpless as a giant rabbit caught in our headlights. He swallowed and said, ‘I d–d–don’t know for sure. I’ll show you.’
It was only later, when I really thought about it – and I had plenty of opportunity to think about it – that I realized he never answered Hurst’s question.
‘A way into the old mineshafts?’
We presumed that’s what he meant. But I don’t think he did, even then. He meant The Pit. Like he already knew what it was. And The Pit was something very different indeed.
The light was losing its grip on the day by the time we got up there. It was late August, the tail end of the summer holidays, and ‘the nights were drawing in’, as my mum would say (which always made me think of someone taking a great big piece of charcoal and scribbling out the day).
I think we all had that feeling of stuff ending, like you always do when you’re a kid and six weeks of holidays is almost over. I guess we also knew that this was our last summer of really being ‘kids’. Next year we had exams, and plenty of our classmates, even in the nineties, would leave school straight for work, although not straight down the mine, like they used to.
By this point the old colliery site was just a great muddy scar on the landscape. Grass and scrubby bushes were starting to take a grip. But the place was mostly still black with coal dust and littered with rocks, rusted machinery, sharp fragments of metal and lumps of concrete.
We hauled ourselves through a gap in the ineffectual security fencing around the outside where signs like DANGER, FORBIDDEN and NO TRESPASSING might as well have read: WELCOME, COME IN and DARE YOU.
Chris led the way. Well, sort of. He scrambled and slid and tripped then stopped, looked around and scrambled and slid and tripped some more.
‘Fuck, Doughboy – you sure you’re going the right way?’ Hurst panted. ‘The old shafts are back that way.’
Chris shook his head. ‘This way.’
Hurst looked at me. I shrugged. Fletch made a whirling motion at the side of his head.
‘Give him a chance,’ I said.
We continued our awkward progress. At the peak of one steep, muddy summit Chris paused and looked around for a long while, like a large dog sniffing the air. Then he plunged down the almost sheer incline, scrabbling and skidding through the gravel and rubble.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Fletch muttered. ‘I’m not going down there.’
I admit I was tempted to turn back, but I also felt a strange, bubbling excitement. Like when you see a fairground ride and you don’t want to get on it because it looks scary as fuck but another part of you does want to, really badly.
I glanced at Fletch and couldn’t resist: ‘Scared?’
He glared at me. ‘Fuck you!’
Hurst grinned, never happier than when there was discord within the troops.
‘Pussies!’ he cried, and then, with a wild whoop, he plunged down the slope. I followed, more cautiously. Fletch swore again then did the same.
At the bottom I almost slipped on my arse but just managed to keep my footing. I felt gravel lodge in my trainers and dig into the soles of my feet. Overhead, the sky seemed to hang lower, heavy with impending darkness.
‘
We’re not going to be able to see fuck all now,’ Fletch moaned.
‘How much further?’ Hurst asked.
‘We’re there!’ Chris called back, and disappeared.
I blinked, looked around then spotted a flash of grey. He was crouched down in a hollow formed by a small overhang. If you looked quickly you wouldn’t even see him in the dip. We scrambled down after him. Patchy grass and bushes had started to make a tentative hold on the ground nearby, offering further camouflage. There were several large rocks scattered around. Chris moved a couple and I realized he had placed them there on purpose, as markers.
He shoved away dirt and smaller stones with his hands. Then he sat back on his heels and stared at us triumphantly.
‘What?’ Fletch spat in disgust. ‘I can’t see nothing.’
We all squinted at the uncovered patch of earth. Maybe a bit more uneven and a slightly different colour to the surrounding earth, but that was it.
‘Are you taking the piss, Doughboy?’ Hurst snarled. He grabbed him by the neck of his sweatshirt. ‘Because if this is some kind of wind-up –’
Chris’s eyes widened. ‘No wind-up.’
I would think later that, even then, half choked by Hurst, he still didn’t stutter. Not here.
‘Wait,’ I said. I bent closer to the ground, brushed away a bit more dirt and felt my fingers touch something colder. Metal. I sat back. And suddenly, I saw it.
A circular shape in the earth, rusted almost the same colour, but not quite. It looked a bit like an old hubcap, but if you looked closer you could see it was too large for a hubcap and too thick. There were small round lumps around the edge, like rivets. In the middle was another circle, slightly raised, with grooves in it.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Can you see it now?’
I pointed at the ground and looked back at the others.
Hurst dropped Chris. ‘What the fuck is it?’
‘It’s just an old hubcap,’ Fletch said, echoing my first thought.
‘Too big,’ Hurst said immediately, echoing my second thought. He looked back at Chris. ‘Well?’
Chris just stared at him, as if the answer was obvious. ‘It’s a hatch.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s like an opening,’ I said. ‘To underground.’
Hurst’s face broke into a wide grin. ‘Fucking ace.’ He looked back at the circular shape in the ground. ‘So, what? Some sort of escape shaft for the mines or something. I think I’ve heard of those.’