We sat there for a bit eating, not looking at the van.
The van didn’t move.
NO LOOK.
FLORA IN VAN?
DON’T KNOW.
We finished, got up, threw the wrappings away, went back to the car. He was talking stuff about Don and burgers and ready meals and dementia and rats’ arses and phone radiation and sperm rates. Whatever came out of his mouth didn’t matter. What mattered now was pinching and eyes.
He could be working with the van.
He unlocked the door and we got into the car and he started up the engine and we drove out of the car park and on to where the petrol was. And he got out and got coins out of his sticks, the whole rigmarole, and the dirty white van sidled up and parked near us to one side, not by the pumps, as I seemed to remember a white van had done the last time we filled up, near Reading, when the old woman scratched me. And he went and paid and the van sat there and I tried not to look at it, and he came back out and started us back up and the van started up too and drove out onto the motorway behind us and kept itself alongside us and drove close by us with dark tinted windows as we drove on north in fretting silence to Jenny 2 up the crack.
18
At Preston we turned off the motorway and took small roads following signs to Coniston and then Ickthwaite into the hills, slate, walls of the Lake District, the white van in the rear-view mirror all the while. He took my hand: IS OK.
My time before, my useless post-New York Alan guilt-tour, I’d taken the train to Ulverston and then a couple of buses and some walking among sheep in the sunshine. Now he drove me up the road I’d walked on a different day. Grey skies, fields, drizzle, drenched earth, stone, lakes beyond reeds, steep hills, small crooked trees crippled by wind and weather, purplish slate on the ground and roofs. The built things here were made of the land, no plastic, only washed-out colours and birds and sheep. Stone walls locked together without cement: ‘mini-Stonehenges’ he said, ‘last traces of the megalith builders’. The lake to our left, the hills to our right.
‘Volcanoes?’ I said, to swab the fear.
He nodded. ‘Undersea volcanoes, the ash got forced down under big pressure here to make slate. That’s why the Japanese love it round here so much,’ nodding at Asian tourists milling round a parked bus, ‘even if they don’t realise it: Japan’s the Lake District in a few million years’ time, all those earthquakes, built on the live crack that surrounds the Pacific. Here’s a taste of things to come, for the Japanese, once their hot dragons die.’
‘Look,’ I said, feeling worse, because the tourists were taking pictures of something on our left: a huge metal sculpture of a horse in the field next to me, facing the lake. Which hadn’t been there when I’d visited before, I was totally certain, unless I’d walked a different way. And this was a horse from Scritch: Enbarr, the biggest horse in the world, protector of the Ickthwaite Barns, who crushed intruders under his hoof.
Again the cold rising feeling, tanged with old Scritch flashes and the aftermath of burgers.
‘Is this real?’
‘It’s bronze,’ he said, stopping the car in a lay-by to look, letting the white van drive past and off into the village ahead of us, telling me the horse was a piece of art, a modern sculpture.
I looked at him.
‘Enbarr,’ he said. ‘I know.’ It wasn’t warm but he was sweating.
‘Give him the sign,’ I said. You made a circle with your finger and thumb to show Enbarr you were friends, so you wouldn’t get crushed.
‘Don’t test me,’ he said and reached for my hand and pinched MAKE FUSS so I did: asked him for Ickthwaite details from Scritch, made him do the sign and tell me about Enbarr and Bugg the giant troll who owned the barn in Alan’s stories, the huge milk churns you could hide in, the red post box that marked the Lurkers’ secret entrance from their underground world. What was he saying, I said: ‘The Lurkers are real, midget messengers really do live in mazes of ancient tunnels under Britain?’
Britain was honeycombed with secret tunnels, he said: ‘better believe it’.
And while this was going on with our mouths I could see his right hand bunched up in his jeans pocket writing me another note.
He took my hand. GET OUT he pinched so I did: opened the car door, said I’d had enough of him and needed a wee, marched into the field to look at the horse and crouch in reeds in my billowing burka and unfurl, discreetly, the note he’d palmed me. And from out there I could see the white van, parked in the next lay-by, waiting for us.
Nim, his scrawl said,
We’re looking for Flora but if we find something else they’ll B watching and I can’t B let near it or they’ll see it too. I’m tainted, 100% sure. So U do this alone.
I’ll distract them. Don’t worry about me, been waiting 4 this a long time. End of my road & I’m fine w/ it. U + Alan & F is all that matters now. Finding A or what he left, making U all safe.
When U come back to car, this is what U do. Tell me U don’t trust me, U don’t want me anywhere near U. That whatever’s here, U R going 2 do it alone, find Flora, some message, whatever. I want U to say U’ve had enuf of me, U don’t trust me, that’s it, your only interest is finding Flora, U R doing this alone or not at all.
I’ll play along, try persuade U, make U take me w/U. Fight me, don’t let me, it won’t B hard 4U! Let me come with but don’t let me see anything, stand me well back. & don’t write anything down. If U find smthing memorise it then tell me U want a coffee. Then we work out what 2 do next. We R only of value 2 them if we know things they don’t. That’s how it works 4 them. I’ll write & pinch & talk ancient stuff. Distract them. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine w/ whatever happens 2 me. I deserve it. U + F + her fam + A are all that matters.
Tear this into tiny pieces & bury in ground.
Which I did, crouched among tall reeds in the field.
I went back to the lay-by, him leaning by the car, munching his nasty mushrooms, looking grim, sweating though it was cold.
‘OK?’
‘I don’t care about any of your crap,’ I told him. ‘It’s only about Flora for me.’
He gave me the tiniest nod.
I did what he said: told him I didn’t trust him, that whatever was coming up I wanted to do alone. I’d carry on but only to find her, I didn’t want him near me. It came pretty easy. He did his bit, tried to ‘persuade’ me. He lied and acted well, I noted. We got back in the car, drove on a bit, came to signs for Ickthwaite. No signs of Flora or the yellow campervan. We passed the red post box, the Lurkers’ entrance in Scritch and then on the other side of the road, where I’d been before: a metal plaque fixed to a dry stone wall: The Barns.
A farm once, these would have been the outhouses, now done up. Where I’d been seven years before, where we were supposed to come twelve years before, me and Tal and Flora and a Chris who was maybe him.
We parked, I got out, shooed him away, as per his script. I told him to wait for me, that I was going looking for Flora and didn’t believe his Alan-alive crap, that whatever else he was interested in was of zero concern.
I crossed the road and stood shivering in front of the big iron gate in my burka. Last time this was as far as I’d come: pushing the locked gate, failing to open it, the old lady in the house next door. This time I pushed the gate and it opened. I stepped onto shingle made of purple slate.
I was in a courtyard of several converted barns with a set of small workers’ cottages to my right. No sign of Flora or anyone else. I knew this place. Not because I’d made it through here before but because it matched the Jenny 2 shed layout Alan had built at the bottom of the Fall.
I looked back. Him leaning against the car on the other side of the road, hoodie low over his face, his arms folded, looking at me, looking skanky.
I closed the gate and turned back to the barns.
The two biggest were straight in front of me, joined together, painted black, fully-renovated: someone’s house, corresponding to the bigges
t pile of logs in Alan’s Fall version. In Scritch: the home of Bugg the giant child-eating troll who slept all day and roamed at night.
All the layers of this.
Trying to remember.
It was about 3pm I guessed, the light already low on the horizon. Coming up to the shortest days now and we were quite far north. Probably about an hour left before Bugg woke and went roaming, according to Scritch, who or whatever Bugg was in real life, if Bugg existed in real life.
I didn’t want to find out.
Old fears of being shit at puzzles, of not being able to solve things, standing cold outside, the fading day.
Flora.
To my far left was a run-down barn with a huge rotting door chained with a padlock, Bugg’s storeroom in Scritch. Between it and the troll’s house was an open roofed area of chopped logs and jumble, the milking shed in Scritch, corresponding to where Alan’s actual real shed had been when we’d played, the only real shed, the one he’d lock himself into, that you could only get him to open if you knocked that five and six. Alan’s shed had four walls and a door but this one was open, no knocking necessary. In Scritch: the place where Kraton the centaur was born and where Bugg milked female centaurs and laced their milk with potions he got drunk on at night and slept off during the day. This was also where the Lurkers hid their messages in a three-chambered casket buried deep in the straw, using Bugg’s presence as deep cover for their activities. If there was a message here—from Alan, from Flora—this was where it would be hidden.
Are you talking to me, old man? You or someone else?
In Scritch we used Alan’s strongbox as the casket, stuffed under his messy desk. A metal strongbox with the three compartments.
I went over and had a rummage. Old furniture, bad art made from Coca-Cola cans and rams’ skulls, a huge gilded mirror reflecting black-robed me ferreting around. Rotting armchairs, a rusty pram filled with pine cones, bundles of twigs and brooms, a plastic clothes line and pegs, an old fridge, various chairs, an old white dressing table with three drawers. No sign of Flora or Alan or anyone. No strongbox or casket.
But an old white dressing table with three drawers.
I stood before the junk, a priestess at the altar of a religion I didn’t know.
Letting who act through me?
The slate crunched behind me: him come through the gate from the car, leaving the gate open which was silly surely.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t answer any of his questions. I told him to get lost. I meant it. He fiddled round with things in the shed, opened the empty fridge, poked around in it, for traces of them, must be. Watching me but leaving me alone.
I went over to the white dressing table. I opened the drawers.
In Scritch all three compartments would contain messages but two of the messages would be bogus: decoys to fuddle the enemy. You’d know which of the three messages was the real one by a sign that would leap out at you when you saw it, if you’d been following Alan / Kraton’s previous game clues correctly.
Each dressing table drawer was crammed with junk but each contained an identical postcard of Manhattan, stamped and addressed but not sent, from someone called Judy, telling three different people about the fun she was having in the Big Apple despite the rain. Three different people, three different addresses, waiting there for who knew how long, for twelve years perhaps or recently planted, by who? For who? For me?
Barry Clyde
120 St Sepulchre Street
Scarborough
Marsha Devens
217 John Kennedy Street
King’s Lynn
Betty Fields
226 Vengeance Street
Barrow-in-Furness
I ran my fingers over their surfaces. No pricked out Braille, which Scritch clues were sometimes written in. The New York skyline of these postcards was recent, no Twin Towers. Instead: the new replacement building. Which was finished when? Five years ago, perhaps.
‘Want a coffee?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
In each of the drawers were other things: coins, trinkets, pins. And then I saw what stopped me.
In the Vengeance Street drawer was a child’s pink bead Hello Kitty purse, identical to the one given to me by Tal perhaps two years earlier, which Tal had found in his hospital, he said, with a note inside telling him to come and visit me and give it to me.
And where was Tal now?
I picked up the purse. I opened the zip. Inside, heavily tarnished, was Alan’s half of the broken mini horseshoe pendant, what looked like Alan’s half.
Hello.
The question was: if Chris saw that broken horseshoe would he know what it was too? Probably, but just a little bit delayed, was the pattern. Because they’d fucked with his mind, cut his head open. He said.
But if he wasn’t Chris, if he was something else, a twin or clone who’d never played Scritch or grown up with me in the Covert, someone relying—somehow—on second-hand info leeched from Tal or humming in from Antarctic servers, then wasn’t his whole ‘they’re-following-us/I’m-tainted/You-do-it-alone’ a brilliant ruse to get me to do what he needed, snuffle out his info for him without me testing how well he could read these clues himself?
But the van. Parked where now, turned back, heading for us?
But he could be working with it.
Whichever which way: so much planning, so many people involved, had to be.
Unless he’d run up here before coming for me in London, seeded the country with nonsense for me, for no clear reason.
Disappeared homes all alone?
Fed me drugs.
Cooked me up in some underground lab.
I held the half-horseshoe in my hand.
He was looking at me and the purse, the purse he wouldn’t know because it had been Tal’s, or one just like it.
Where was Flora?
The eye.
226 Vengeance Street. I lodged it mechanically in my mind bus. Twos were the white china swans on Alan’s cardboard mantelpiece, sixes were the battered golf clubs he kept with umbrellas in a carved wooden elephant’s foot by the side of his front door. The club smashed the swan, it lay on the blue patterned floor wanting vengeance: simple.
‘I can’t find anything,’ I said, holding the purse. ‘Just junk. I’m tired, Chris. I need a coffee. Where’s Flora?’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, a flash of private double meaning in his eyes. ‘You’ve found something, haven’t you?’ ever so slightly wooden, coming for me, taking my hand, gripping my wrist with his stump hand so I couldn’t move, pinching my palm so lightly, snatching the purse, finding the broken horseshoe, looking sharp up at me, putting his stump on my pulse, looking into my eyes, looking into the drawers, his fingers still clutched tight. ‘Yes you have. What is this, what does it mean?’
A woman’s voice behind us: ‘Hello?’
I turned. An old woman, crunching down the slate towards us, from out of Bugg’s house—the door was open. An old woman with a cane, poshly dressed.
‘Are you the police? Is it about the accident?’ she said in sharp London tones, staring at me, her cane decorated with painted flowers and topped by a brass knob.
Central casting.
‘What accident?’ I said. The Chris was pulling at me.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ the woman said, but it wasn’t threatening.
‘What accident?’ I said, feeling that’s what I was supposed to say. The scene had changed into something heavy, I could feel it from both of them, ‘Chris’ and the woman, playing off each other. Not good enough actors.
‘The family in the van,’ the woman said, coming closer. The Chris was pulling hard at me, trying to get me to move with him towards the gate, pulling his hood down. I pulled back.
‘Come on,’ he was hissing. ‘Don’t,’ his white face and dark eyes trying to say something. ‘It’ll be their trick.’
‘What family?’ I said, playing my part. Let him run for the gates
.
‘There’s been a tragic incident, I’m sorry to say. A man… gassed himself and his family in a campervan overnight just down the road from here. A woman and a little girl and a baby, truly dreadful. Estranged husband, they’re saying. What makes them do it, I don’t know,’ shaking her head.
Oh really? Where was I, what was happening? Too much info. It felt completely wrong.
Sirens, two police cars screeching up from opposite directions to stop at the gate.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Chris said, ‘but we have to go now,’ pulling me while the woman watched.
The police, in their black, getting out of their cars, coming through the gate, walking in unison, coming for us, talking to the woman: ‘We’ll take it from here.’ The Chris ran off, left me there. The ‘police’ grabbed me, dragged me out through the open gate towards their waiting cars. ‘No,’ I said, because from out there in the road I could see what hadn’t been there before: barricades closing off the road ahead, police lines and cordons around a yellow camper van parked a hundred metres down from the Fiesta by the field side, their rainbow stickers in the back window, four sheeted shapes laid out on the road in front of me, two big, one small and one tiny, Poppy’s blue bunny at the window closest to me.
Was it what it was supposed to be? The ‘police’ pulled me towards a car.
A shriek and then Chris sprang at them from low in the bushes next to us, whacked them in the knees with a coin stick wielded from above his head, whacked one of them on the head. I saw blood, a crumpled face. That was real. They buckled, let me out of their grip a fraction. Chris seized me, pulled me, tore me back through his bush into the field beyond twisting us up, clutching his head. He pulled me on through bushes and mud while I screamed, pulling me on and through and past bog and reeds beyond the sirens towards the lake and the setting sun.
19
At the water’s edge was a green boathouse with a wooden boat and dark water for a floor. Inside he slapped me till I stopped shouting or doing anything. Nothing seemed real but something terrible was happening. Noise and glint of police with torches and dogs.
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