The Revenants

by Alec Dunn

  The hunt was on.

  Tristan ran. His legs pumped into the hard, unforgiving floor, his solid school shoes were slapping the ground. Behind him they followed, baying, in close pursuit. He didn’t think he could escape them this time.

  The school day was over, but he had waited. He had stayed late, until he thought they had all gone, waited until they would have given up and gone home to enjoy their Christmas holidays.

  Their triumphant whoops trumpeted into his ears.

  They hadn’t all gone.

  He crashed into a set of doors, using the impact of his whole body to fling them open, staggered, fell. His bag careered crazily over his shoulder, seemed to hover next to his head as he swept at the floor with his hands, bent double, not stopping even when on all fours and he was up, away again, running desperately.

  He heard the deafening bang of doors crashing into wall again. They were not far away. The screaming noise again. So loud. So close.

  Tristan didn’t know this part of the school. He had meant to sneak out, take a route that they wouldn’t expect, lose them. Now he was lost and couldn’t find any doors out. He was trying to outrun a fight he couldn’t win, and he was being run to ground.

  Hurtling round a corner, ragged breaths tearing at the air, lungs bursting, he stared in horror at what he was charging towards. In front of him were another set of doors. A set of large, heavy, wooden doors. A set of closed looking doors. A set of doors with no windows in them and a large sign that Tristan couldn’t read.

  There was no stopping. All he could do was carry on and hope.

  He stretched out his arms, flattened his hands, slightly bending the elbows to take the sudden, jarring attack. He closed his eyes and leapt – full speed – into the solid, heavy, wooden doors.

  The doors smashed open and he was through. But the impact also bounced him off them and he rolled across the floor, landing on his back, splayed over his bag. He lay there in an undignified pose, prostrate, with arched back. He scanned around him in confusion.

  There were shelves and books, lots of books, and tables and chairs and three people looking at him in surprise, but there were no exits.

  He groaned.

  He was trapped.

  He was about to get beaten up - just the perfect start to his Christmas holiday. But, what made it worse, he was going to get beaten up in a library. His two greatest enemies, books and Ryan Sankey, had joined together to make his embarrassment complete.

  How had it come to this?

  The first day in December: So, This is Christmas was pouring out of the tinny speakers of the radio in the kitchen, drowning the house in festive goodwill.

  Tristan sat alone in the tobacco stained living room, frowning in his attempt at concentration. The music was flooding his thoughts, sweeping across his precariously balanced mental building blocks like a tsunami. He was reading, slowly. Or he was trying to. Forming words in his brain from little bites of sound that he had been told different letters created. Letters and sounds that he had tried and tried to remember and was straining to remember now.

  Tristan was learning his A, B, Cs.

  He was learning something called phonics and it was not going well.

  His aunt was abrasively humming along to the Christmas music, nasal and discordant, further destroying his concentration, bringing his tottering tower of letters and sounds crashing down. She hummed with an almost angry determination, willing herself to be happy, willing seasonal greetings and cheer into the house and completely ruining any one else’s chances of enjoying the tune.

  Not that it mattered.

  Tristan sighed. He was trying to work. At the age of fifteen, he was learning how to read. And he hated it. There was no chance that he would be suffering from joy, festive or otherwise, any time soon.

  His uncle, who seemed to be, as far as Tristan could make out, a typical miserable old man, was asleep upstairs.

  His ‘invisible uncle’ Tristan thought of him as. His name was Trevor and he worked the night shift at the canning factory. He had worked the night shift for the past twenty years. This much Tristan had been told.

  Tristan had seen him once, but only once. Trevor, his face lined and ruddy, looking markedly older than his aunt, had grunted at him and then left for work.

  It was like his aunt and his uncle lived completely separate lives. His aunt was pleasant, kind even. She always had a smile, slightly nervous, on her face. She asked about his day, cooked him tea, took him to McDonald’s every now and then. She lived in the world of daylight.

  Trevor was awake at night. He went out a lot. He smoked Marlborough, snored heavily and drank even more heavily. This Tristan had worked out from the ashtrays his aunt constantly emptied, the empty packets of cigarettes she kept binning and the beer bottles and whisky bottles that she quietly cleared away. She always tried to put cardboard over the clinking bottles when she put out the recycling.

  His uncle was like some sort of entity that affected the house without ever showing itself. There were strange sounds, smells and things that mysteriously appeared or vanished. He was a dirty poltergeist: refilling the stinking ashtrays, leaving the toilet seat up and staining the sofa.

  Unsurprisingly, they slept in separate rooms.

  His aunt said so they could both get a good night’s sleep, so they didn’t disturb each other. Although he couldn’t read letters, Tristan understood this. He had seen enough of life from travelling with his mother to know that the marriage was not officially over – don’t say anything – but the marriage was over.

  His aunt was nice; she smiled a lot, but she was not a happy woman. His uncle was plain miserable and was steadily drinking and smoking himself to an early grave.

  The song bleated on accompanied by his aunt’s persistent piercing nasal hum.

  Another year over… and what have we done?

  Tristan sighed again. Very true, he thought glumly, looking at the page of large simple print. Colourful drawings of clean, smiling children and a dog took up half of each page. It was clearly aimed at five year olds and he was embarrassed.

  He was embarrassed a lot. At school he had been placed in ‘The Base’ where the students with special needs went, also referred to by teachers as the Learning Support Unit, called loudly by Ryan Sankey the ‘spaco room’. He sat there, away from the rest of the school, struggling to form words that even the weakest student in normal classes could read easily.

  If anyone asked, his mother used to say she was ‘home-schooling’ Tristan. And sometimes they did ask, sometimes the authorities, social services tried to check up on him. Tristan sometimes thought of it as ‘home-ignoring’, although ‘home’ was a fluid concept – they moved around a lot, which made it hard for social services to catch up with them – besides, it was all he knew. His mother’s life was one long adventure. She suffered great, rocky mountain, highs and abyssal, depth of the seas, lows, one after another, constantly. She was genuine and caring, selfish and cruel, rarely between boyfriends, always between jobs, the life of any party and a lie in bed, mascara streaked mess. She schooled him in many ways, taught him lessons they don’t teach at school. He had learnt to drive at twelve, could roll a cigarette at eight and could identify field mushrooms from about a hundred yards away. He had planted potatoes, picked fruit and had seen the effects of heroin addiction first hand. Reading was one thing she hadn’t taught.

  The Base was at least safe though. Nobody paid attention to someone struggling to read. There were no pointing fingers and no mocking laughter. The main teacher was Miss Fritchley, a stout, square lady, who was patient and calm. She was different to the other teachers. Everyone was different at The Base. She was much more motherly than the other teachers and a number of times Tristan had seen one student or another who had been going there for years fling themselves at her and cling to her sobbing out whatever torment or fear or hurt they had suffered.

  The other students who went were all different too. They were from different years
and they had different reasons for going. They had different physical appearances and issues, different emotional difficulties, different ways of seeing the world, or mental problems. And among all those differences, Tristan felt different again. He wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t different like them. He had just never been taught to read. So he was nice to them. But he didn’t find friends.

  He was embarrassed walking past groups hanging around together, acutely aware that he did not have friends.

  No, although The Base was fine for now – and he had even started to go there for breaks and dinner – as Miss Fritchley told him, he wasn’t going to make any friends by spending all his time in there.

  He also wasn’t going to run into Ryan ‘Arsewipe’ Sankey.

  He was embarrassed by Ryan. This was his first year of school. He had never been bullied before and he was not quite sure what to do about it. Ryan had taken against him immediately, he knew that.

  Why though? For what reason? Tristan didn’t understand that.

  He had avoided Ryan as much as possible, but it was difficult as they were in the same Form. Not that Ryan could get away with much under the sharp nose of Mrs Parks. No more than snide muttered comments, glares and finger or hand gestures. Tristan made sure he hung back so that Ryan couldn’t barge into him when everyone was leaving. But outside of Form the tension was building.

  Ryan was bigger than him, taller and wider. He got into a lot of trouble and had a reputation as a fighter. There was a year eleven student that Tristan noticed in the corridor with fading black eyes and missing both his top front teeth, Ryan’s previous victim Stephanie told him, but done outside of school so the teachers couldn’t touch him. There were rumours that he went joy riding with his older brother. Sometimes, Ryan would be excluded for a couple of days, but he always came back.

  In the first few weeks at Hillcrest Community School, if they passed in the corridors Ryan was like a Tristan seeking missile, lurching across to walk into him, clipping him with a broad shoulder jammed forward. Now, it was getting worse. He was squaring up to Tristan in the corridor, or not letting him get past at all, and pushing him backwards, all the while taunting, “Spaco. Arsewipe. You can’t even read. C’mon then. Do something.”

  So far, each time Ryan squared up to him, Tristan had got away, once he had been rescued by a passing teacher and another time a random student from a lower year kicked a football down the corridor, hitting the back of Ryan’s head, leading to swearing, shouting and a chase for Ryan and the smaller child while Tristan disappeared quickly in the other direction.

  Still, he couldn’t rely on luck. Things were building to a head. Tristan had seen Ryan outside The Base. This was not just idle entertainment, Ryan was actively stalking him now and, sooner or later, Ryan would not wait for Tristan to “Do something” but was just going to start hitting him for no reason.

  There was no reason.

  It was just embarrassing.

  Despite the presence of Ryan Sankey, Form times were still the highlight of his days. He saw her then. Stephanie still smiled at him and was the only person he really spoke to. She sometimes moved over just to talk to him. At first he had only managed to murmur hello with his head down. He had wanted to say more; her hair was golden. But then she had asked about where he had come from and why he had decided to come ‘to this shit-hole?’ and that was it. The conversation flowed easily. One thing Tristan’s mother had made sure of was that they had lived an interesting life. And the more he told her of his unusual life, the more interested she became. She gazed entranced into his moody grey eyes, hidden behind his cloak of hair. She thought his eyes looked like a winter sky after a storm. Her laugh was beautiful, clear and loud. He wasn’t sure if he told her about his mother’s death to gain her sympathy or because he really needed to talk about it, but they spent more and more time talking. He even told her a little about his dreams, dark dreams of finding her body, nightmares of how she died.

  These were Tristan’s favourite moments. The hard stares from Sankey as Stephanie’s laugh rang out were just an added bonus.

  Did he know Ryan was jealous?

  Perhaps.

  Did he try to make her laugh more to wind him up?

  Definitely.

  He was embarrassed in his aunt’s house by her kindness, by what lay behind it, by her sympathy. They both knew what had happened, what he had seen, and that polluted the very air between them, as much a part of the atmosphere of the house as the stale cigarette fumes from his uncle. But there was more to it than that. The sympathy was more general. She felt bad about how he had been treated. She would never say it, but she felt sorry for how he had had to live, for his whole life – his whole life! – it was like saying that nothing he had ever done, nothing he had experienced was worthwhile, and that just wasn’t true. It also meant that she blamed someone, because if she felt sorry for him, she thought it was wrong, and if she thought it was wrong she must blame someone.

  She had tried to talk about his mother soon after he had arrived and he had brushed it off, looked away, changed the subject. She had left it, not wanted to force the conversation. He wasn’t ready, that was all. But she was waiting, the conversation was waiting, the embarrassing conversation, the apportioning of blame. She had left it, but not before saying, “She was my sister, you know. I loved her too.”

  But she blamed her as well.

  And why not? Didn’t he blame her? Didn’t he hate her for letting that happen? If she wasn’t dead, if she wasn’t…

  A silent scream etched into a frozen face.

  Embarrassing.

  That was the early times when they were finding out what they could and could not say to each other and talk about, before his aunt had adopted her policy of forced cheerfulness and relaxation. She had tried to joke with him and make him feel ‘at home’. She had asked lots of questions and been asking about friends at school, was he making some? Who did he spend his time with? What was your day like, dear? She had tried to ‘take an interest’.

  And she had started singing. There was some old song called Getting to Know You that went on ‘getting to know all about you’. And she sang it to him, or at him, gently teasing him, making it deliberately embarrassing but embracing the fact. He appreciated the effort. She was showing him, in her way, that she did care. She would sometimes even raise a smile, mostly when he had been thinking about Stephanie.

  That was before he had been relegated to The Base.

  Before he had realised how bad he was at reading.

  Before he was being bullied.

  Before his fresh start had gone stale.

  Before Ryan Sankey.

  The heavy wooden doors flew open and Sankey swaggered in. The other boy was not as large as Ryan and walked slightly behind him, a hanger on, a side-act to Sankey’s show of cruelty.

  Just here to watch the fun.

  Here to see the kill.

  Ryan’s eyes focused solely on Tristan who was still lying prone on the floor. Ryan advanced slowly now, confident in his abilities and enjoying the moment. “Arsewipe,” he drawled the word out slowly, his breathing heavy from the chase, “what you runnin’ for?”

  Tristan rolled onto his side, getting up to face the bully. What was that phrase? ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.’ Or was it the other way around? ‘Better to live on your knees that die on your feet.’

  Well, you had to make a choice and if he was going to get beaten up by the likes of Sankey he wanted to land at least one good punch and hurt the prick. Perhaps a swift knee in the happy sack would surprise him. Sankey certainly wasn’t overloaded in the brains department.

  Tristan decided to let him come close, let him gloat, let him think it was all going his way.

  But then, as he finished rolling onto his hands and knees to get to his feet, he noticed a pair of shiny, black, knee high boots with the leather pulled tightly around the shapely calves of a girl’s long legs. They certainly did not belong to Ryan
Sankey. He looked up, dragging himself to his feet as his eyes traced the attractive curves of legs, hips, waist and body.

  The creamy pale skin of her legs contrasted with the tight black boots and black pleated skirt which revealed a startling amount of leg. An un-tucked white shirt was complemented by a loosely worn tie used to emphasise the plunging neckline of her unbuttoned shirt. There seemed to be graffiti written across each striped line of the tie. A neatly fitted blazer with sleeves rolled up revealed more creamy pale skin and thick leather wristbands. Even about to be beaten up, Tristan took a moment to stare at the girl, at the young woman. She was gorgeous.

  Then he looked up at her face. It was beautiful. Perfect. Her pale skin was seamless and unblemished, framed by curling, bouncing swathes of hair, long black ringlets cascading to just above her shoulders. The effect was completed by large oval eyes, deep and black, stylised and emphasised by thick black eyeliner. Her eyes looked almost like some sort of Egyptian pharaoh’s. He took her for an older student, year eleven maybe. He had never seen her before.

  She looked coolly at Tristan and gave him a slow, luxuriously controlled, wink.

  Approaching from behind her was a boy, slightly smaller, and an elderly, very elderly, man.

  The boy seemed to have tried to destroy his uniform while still wearing it. It was ragged and torn. There were rips in his trousers, stains down his shirt and pen marks were visible on his arms and face. Pen marks mixed with bruises and scratches. His hair was dark and wild, shooting in all directions, but not in a gelled – I’m trying to look like I don’t care how I look – way, but in an – I haven’t looked in a mirror for a week – way. His eyes were narrow furrows, glinting angrily at the interlopers to the library.

  As the three figures came closer, Tristan noticed the man, the very elderly man, and Tristan did look a second time to check, was not only ancient, leaning on a walking stick, but he was wearing slippers and a long red reading jacket.

  Despite the growing audience, Ryan was not going to let his fun be interrupted, “I said, what you runnin’ for, Arsewipe?”