‘He’s always struck me as one, Flip,’ shouted Katie.
‘Fuck you. What are you calling me?’
‘Doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘It’s Luke Michael Lewis you bitch, and you know it,’ he said through gritted teeth, it was always really easy to wind him up. ‘Perhaps I should drag you off down to the lake right now – just the two of us. Let’s see how clever you are then.’
‘Always cleverer than you, Dumbo, always cleverer.’
‘Oh you little cow –’ he reached across to grab my shoulder, but I weaved away again, ducking at the last moment, causing him to overstretch, with the inevitable loss of balance. I’d leaned my bike over too much and was heading straight for the almost vertical grassy bank at terminal velocity, my tyres biting hard and complaining. I threw myself over in the opposite direction, leaning downhill, trying to take the bike round before it hit the bank, but there was no way of stopping it. My front wheel hit the steep compacted soil, for a second catching in the earth, threatening to flip the bike up into the air, but then digging in and shredding soil and stones from the unstable slope beneath the tufts of grass as the tyre climbed up, plumes of dust spewing out from behind me like smoke. By the time my back wheel joined it I was horizontal, riding along the bank like I was in a ‘wall of death’ act in the circus. I turned to look over my shoulder and saw the result of Lewis’ over-stretching. He and the bike were starting to move in opposite directions, the bike dropping away from him, halfway down before those behind realised what was happening and took evasive action. Lewis was falling to the side, but the handlebars were twisting the front wheel under him, and suddenly the wheel locked, flipping the bike. He was catapulted violently into the air, summersaulting over like a rag doll before managing to break his fall onto the road with his face. My pace had slowed and I rode down off the bank and onto the tarmac of the lane once more, continuing to look over my shoulder. My enduring memory of that day is of seeing him recede into the distance, propped up on one hand with blood pouring from his chin, a huge flap of skin underneath opening out like a second mouth. He was like a gore-drenched two-mouthed monster from a sci-fi film, screaming. ‘You’re fucking dead, you bitch! You hear me? I’m gonna fucking kill you!’
∞ ∞ ∞
We lay low for a few days – speaking on the phone or visiting each other’s houses by bike, but never riding round as a group. I heard that Lewis had to go to hospital to have stitches in his chin.
These memories were returning to me in sudden bursts. Things I hadn’t thought about in decades, about home and friends and school. The cliques and groups the social pecking order, the stuff I was always telling my own kids they should ignore and not get involved with. No wonder they never talked to me about this stuff. I’d forgotten what it was like, how it felt, about the odd groupings, the way you could get your head kicked in for what, as an adult, looked like nothing.
I don’t really remember how we fell foul of his stupid little gang. He’d become used to people being deferent around him, getting out of his way and paying him ‘due’ respect. He’d been a dickhead at junior school, but had just thrown his weight around, bumping into people, and shoving them out of his way. Lewis had obviously met some other like-minded folks when we went to Comp in Dayden, lads he could influence and rule over like a gang leader, like Mark Drudge and Lee Jenkins. He also grew a harem of females that would worship at his feet – or anywhere else he told them to, presumably – and we weren’t like that. We tended to ignore him and people like him, like they didn’t matter, like they had no relevance to us and didn’t exist. I guess that’s what was infuriating to someone like him – someone who wanted to exert control and create fear in others.
Or something.
He’d become a bully, lording it at school with his mates, threatening little kids – not stealing dinner money or anything like that, just being a presence and deciding to pick on someone for the sake of it. He and his gang would often wander across the playground, right across a game of football or keepy-uppy, bringing the game to a standstill. They’d strut around in front of the younger children in their Mod jackets, maybe shoving a couple of them, sometimes terrifying one by grabbing them and using their favourite phrase, ‘I want you, don’t I?’ as if their protection racket had the child on a bullying hit-list. After they’d suitably ruined the game, they’d wander off to bother the next group. Sometimes they’d encounter one of the other small groups of bullies who did the same, and a fight would inevitably ensue, which were always entertaining. Maybe once a week someone would lash out at someone else and the call of ‘Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!’ would go up. If you were ‘lucky’, it would happen in front of you and the ring of kids would form with you in the front row seats. More usually, it would happen somewhere else and we’d just watch from a distance as a small stadium of children formed, with those at the back jumping up to get onto the backs of those in front to see the action. ‘The action’ was usually pretty poor – all handbags and holding each other – like watching two has-been heavyweight fighters come out of retirement for one last payday. The spectacle would also quickly bring some teachers to break it up, before the protagonists were led away for a talking-to from the Head.
The real disagreements were settled elsewhere, without the crowds and the hype. We were walking down a corridor near the gym one day after lunch, just hanging around with nothing to do. Around the corner in front of us came two boys running at speed. The one behind grabbed the other one, pulling him to a halt and swinging three or four vicious punches at his face, while the other could only raise his hands in self-defence. Just like that it was over, and the victor quickly walked off to re-join his friends who had just arrived on the scene, presumably after being part of the ambush for this particular prey. Nose pouring blood onto his shirt, the beaten boy got to his feet, angrily pushing us out of the way before storming off, etiquette demanding that we not make eye contact to avoid a ‘What are you looking at?’ moment.
Now, during the summer holidays, there was no reason why we should bump into him, the village was big enough for us to be able to keep our distance, but I knew he’d be out there looking for us. For me. Wanting his revenge. He was crazy, and he was a bully, so how badly would he want to mess me up?
Chapter 10 – Then – Royal Game Soup
WHAT A RIDICULOUS name I’m saddled with. Eveline and Ronald Dover aren’t too bad, really. There are worse surnames to have, they just needed to take a little care with the Christian names they gave their kids. Except they didn’t. But Philippa Dover? Oh, what fun the kids in school had with that. Flip’ Dover was a stalwart along with a dozen more besides. And my brother Raymond… it might’ve needed more work but they usually just called him Ben.
Ray was off to university in Manchester that autumn. Beforehand, he and his friends had decided to go camping, choosing the Yorkshire Dales as a picturesque and relatively close destination should anything go awry. Mum and Dad had bought him a tent for his birthday and he’d been working through the summer holidays so he could buy the rest of the gear he’d need. I remember when he packed it all up into his blue Mark II Escort one sunny Saturday morning, and drove off for a planned week of heavy drinking, leching at local girls and poor personal hygiene.
By lunchtime on Monday he was back.
∞ ∞ ∞
Regardless of the outside temperature, a hearty soup was not unusual for the summer lunch menu chez Dover, despite all the windows and doors being thrown open due to the heat. We obviously couldn’t sit down to anything like a salad because, to mum, a salad entailed nothing but slices of tomato and cucumber. That didn’t constitute a meal. So lunch was either soup or sandwiches as far as she was concerned, and we’d ‘enjoyed’ tinned salmon sandwiches the Friday before.
We sat down to eat in the dining room, the silence only broken by the sound of spoons scraping bowls and Dad and I trying not to look at each other when we were slurping our soup.
‘There’s some rum stuff going on that’s for sure,’ Dad said into his bowl, as if he was talking to himself.
‘Oh?’ I wasn’t sure what he might be getting at but hoped it wasn’t anything we’d done.
‘Two people burning to death within half a mile of each other doesn’t strike you as odd, Flip?’
‘I spose it does, when you say it like that.’
‘And that professor fella on the telly saying it’s spontaneous combustion. To me, that’s just a load o’ rubbish.’
‘What do you think’s going on?’
‘Well I don’t know. But this sort of thing just can’t be a coincidence, can it? You just be careful when you’re out and about with your little gang.’
‘Is this where you tell me not to talk to strangers, Dad?’
‘Aye it is, and there’s nowt wrong with that. Good advice that. You stick together you girls. You’ll be safe then.’ Dad returned to his soup in a ‘here endeth the lesson’ moment.
We all heard the sound of a car screeching to a halt on the driveway, the engine revving one last time before it was cut off. Then the door slammed. Ray stormed into the dining room.
‘Did you have a nice time, Ray, love? You’re back sooner than I thought. How was the weather? Did you manage to keep warm? How was the tent?’ Mum always fired questions at you so you felt like someone being machine-gunned in a war film.
‘Fucking pissed it down the whole fucking time!’ Ray angrily ran up the stairs to his bedroom. I was glad I hadn’t sat opposite Dad, because he would've pebble-dashed my white ‘Relax’ t-shirt with Baxter’s Royal Game Soup after Ray’s outburst. It was the first and last time I heard Ray swear in front of Dad, and I instantly worried for him when my father slowly and calmly rose from his chair to leave the table, fury in his eyes. I didn’t hear all the ensuing argument, but I did hear raised voices and Dad using terms never to be repeated.
Ray repeated his earlier weather report to me after lunch and explained that it had rained so hard that water had poured into the tent, soaking him and his friends to the skin. All their gear had been soaked-through too, their sleeping bags and spare clothes, and whilst they’d tried to tough it out, a night shivering in a sopping-wet sleeping bag was the last straw. Hence their return and Ray’s foul mood. As if to reinforce this, he smelled like a wet dog that had been marinating in pond water for a couple of days.
Ray and Dad pitched the tent in the garage to let it dry out, and hung all the other gear on strip-lights, stepladders, and pieces of wood that Dad always kept in there for some imaginary job that he would never do. I didn’t even ask if I could take the new camping stove down to the lake – Ray was never going to use it again, and I was sure he didn’t have an inventory for half of this stuff. So equipment disappeared, a bit at a time; torches, tent pegs to stop our stuff getting blown around on the banking, dry bags that we used to store our non-perishable gear in the trees behind the lake to save carrying back and forth. You couldn’t say we weren’t resourceful, when it came to ‘stealing’ stuff.
Chapter 11 – Then – Trespassers
WE OFTEN BROUGHT alcohol with us to the lake. A helpful brother might buy us some beer from the shop, or Janey might ‘borrow’ some vodka from her mum. Today we’d passed the bottle around, sipping it in the heat on an empty stomach and soon feeling tipsy. Then Janey fired up the cooking stove.
‘Tea everyone,’ Janey called after a few minutes as the water began to boil. I’d been lounging in the sun while the others had been splashing around in the lagoon. Janey was usually in charge of tea or coffee. We sat around her in a circle and watched as she arranged some plastic cups that I’d also liberated from Ray’s belongings, and half-filled each with the steaming water from the pan.
‘What’s this?’ Katie asked.
‘Mushroom tea,’ Janey replied.
‘Oh fuck off, I hate mushrooms,’ exclaimed Clara, about to pour the brew away.
‘You’ll like these. They’re magic mushrooms.’
‘What?’
‘You know, magic mushrooms – gets you off your face.’
‘Fucking hell. How do you know about this stuff?’
‘They have this thing now called reading, in the library, you know?’
‘Is it safe?’ I asked, warily sniffing the musty smelling drink.
‘Yes definitely – picked some last time and tried them in tea at home – it’s very weird, but amazing. Like being drunk without the need to piss all the time.’
‘Where the hell did you find them?’ Clara was not going to be convinced anytime soon.
‘Over there,’ she pointed in the direction of the nettle patch and the barn skeleton. ‘On the grassy bank as it slopes away – it’s muddy and shaded by the trees. There were loads.’
‘Okay-y,’ Katie said then immediately took a sip. ‘Fuck,’ she spat, ‘What is this, it’s like dog shit tea?’
‘It’s not the nicest, I’ll give you that.’
‘Bottoms up,’ I raised my cup in a mock toast, took a sip of the earthy-tasting water then drained the rest, including some of the residue in the bottom. ‘Are you s’posed to eat the mushrooms in the bottom?’ I asked Janey, but she shrugged and continued to sip her drink.
It took a while for everyone to empty their cups and flop back on the grass to stare at the sky. I studied the vapour trails left behind by aircraft flying who-knew-where. The warmth of the sun melted my naked body. The tension, the hassle, the everyday annoyances were massaged away by the heat washing over me from the caress of the wind. I gave myself up to it and became part of the yellow glow all around me. I felt like a speck of dust, blowing around a vast desert, so inconsequential was I in the universal scheme of things. I had the same feelings when laying on my back on the lawn staring up at the stars in the dead of night – a time when you can really see the universe laid out in front of you – all that was stopping you going exploring was mankind's physical limitations. One day someone will be laying down on her lawn looking up at the stars, then she’ll jump into a ship and fly right up there amongst them.
One day.
I dozed dreamily, barely aware of the others around me, the sound of wildfowl quietly going about their business with the odd flapping of wings or a call to a fellow lake dweller. The wind itself was a friend, touching my hair, stroking over me, always checking I was okay and keeping the temperature just right. My metaphysical oneness with both the breeze and the cosmos relaxed me as much as I could ever remember. Time stood still and the world around us drifted away. I drifted away, falling backwards through the bank, through the lake and the earth, spiralling down and away into the void, my awareness fading in and out for a while, almost breaking the surface before dropping away again.
I’m not sure how long I slept.
My consciousness returned. The warmth remained on my skin, and I was so hot that I thought I should maybe take a dip to cool off. But that wasn’t why I’d awakened. There was bird movement on the lake – the busy sounds of landing and taking off – like an avian Heathrow airport. But that wouldn’t have disturbed me either.
Then I recognised the sound in the background.
Voices.
Boys talking loudly – not yet so close that I could understand what they were saying, but definitely getting closer. I sat bolt upright and looked around at my friends, realising our vulnerability and more importantly, the likelihood of embarrassment.
‘Girls,’ I said in a stage whisper, but received no response. ‘Hey, you lot!’ I hissed with increased volume and urgency. ‘Someone’s coming.’
‘Not anywhere near me, he isn’t,’ said Katie sitting upright, not attempting to hide her nakedness. ‘Who?’
‘Dunno. Boys, though.’
‘Shit, we better get dressed – get the others up.’
We quickly roused the other three and pulled on our clothes, all the while listening to what sounded like three or four voices getting ever closer. We ran to retrieve our bikes, peering round the corner
of the barn skeleton to see if we could see anyone. Just beyond the barn and a big oak, I could see the approaching figures shimmering through the heat haze, turning animatedly to talk to one other, shoving each other and picking up handfuls of grass to push down each other’s shirts. They were walking along the path having presumably left their bikes at the start of the track, and were so pre-occupied they didn’t see me.
‘Quick, they’re nearly here – let’s get going,’ I whispered. We grabbed our bikes and ran back with them to our camp, picking up bags, towels and water bottles before disappearing into the brush. ‘Shit,’ I said, realising that we’d flattened the grass on the bank. It might’ve given away that someone had been there. I burst back out from our cover position.
‘Flip, what the fuck are you doing, come back,’ Katie hissed.
I did the lake equivalent of plumping the cushions up at the end of a party to tell everyone to go home. I bent and roughed the grass up, disguising that we’d been there. I started at the far end and slowly walked backwards, ending at the treeline and looking at my work before disappearing again. The grass looked terrible but it might fool those idiots.
The others had gone on ahead, pushing their bikes down into a dip which was a soak-away from the lake above, the slope lined by fallen tree trunks rotting away, covered in lichens and algae. I collected my bike, which I’d thrown to one side before running back to pimp the grass, and slowly started pushing it along. With every revolution of the back wheel, the hub clicked and ticked, making what must’ve been the loudest noises known to man. It seemed like the unnatural metallic sounds echoed around the trees and were surely being broadcast out to the approaching boys, giving us away. I lifted the bike by the seat, raising the rear wheel from the ground and ran as quietly as I could down the slope, the handlebars steering precariously until the front wheel caught in a tree root and the bike flipped us both to the ground. The others looked back at me with alarm as we heard the voices of the boys, close now, on the other side of the leafy screen. Holding my finger to my lips was the most stupidly obvious thing to do, but it made us all stare at each other and we silently squatted down as one to make us less visible should they burst through the trees. My plumping of the grass must’ve worked because they didn’t take any notice of where we’d camped. A couple of them paddled in the shallow water, stepping around reed beds and clumps of bulrushes. One of them did this without realising the water suddenly got deep at the start of the lagoon and went in up to his waist.
The Shadow Man Page 8