A Strange Incident By Paul Boyd aged 13
When I was nine years old I went to the Byram Street swimming baths with some freinds. It was a warm day and the pool was very refreshing. There was a girl there, who was a big girl, and who was probably about 14 or 15 years old. She was with her younger brother, who was about my age, and he had blue goggels, which were just like mine. They were fighting, quite violently it seemed to me, about what I do not know. At one point during the proceedings, I was in the shallow end of the pool, as I am not a very good swimmer (I am ashamed to admit it but it’s true!), and suddenly the girl whom I mentioned previously jumped right on top of me. She pushed me under the water and I was gasping for breath. The girl held me under the water for a long time. She must think I’m her brother with whom she was fighting. She was pushing me down until I was on the bottom of the pool and she was standing on top of me. I struggled and I struggled but there was nothing to be done. I was very terrified. Words fail me. I couldn’t breath and I tried to rise to the surface of the pool but I was unable to. I spluttered and I tried to shout “Help!” but of course you can not speak under water and so I got a mouthful of water and I was chokeing. I think I was going to drown but the next thing I know is my freind Sarah jumped into the pool and she was hitting the big girl and screaming at her to let me go. Sarah was 7 years old at the time of the strange incident and much less bigger than the big girl. The next thing I know is I am lieing on the side of the pool and someone is banging on my chest and I am spitting water. The big girl and her brother were expelled from the pool and my freind Sarah and I were treated to cups of hot chocolate and bisciuts. It was a very strange incident and I will never forget it. Beyond the shadow of a doubt Sarah saved my life.
I’m woken by my own shivering… violent spasms that at first I take to be a heart attack or a seizure but it’s just my body telling me I’m not dead yet. I struggle to my feet and take a step forward and then another. It feels like I’m walking on fire, on hot coals, my feet are burning and I look back and see red footprints behind me. Or so I imagine... because there are no colours anywhere... just grey and white and black and more grey... I walk on, seeing the mast ahead, the top half of it disappearing into the snow and the cloud. I start counting my breaths again and force myself to think of things that have nothing to do with cold and pain and walking in the snow and I manage to get to 100 breaths and then I almost fall over again but I keep on… a few more steps… but the snow’s deeper now and there’s no way I can run, I can barely lift a leg and plant it down in the snow and then lift the other leg and balance for a moment before setting it down and doing that again and again and moving forward towards the mast where maybe it will end.
The next time I look up, the mast is there, huge and grey and lights are flashing faintly in the clouds above and I reckon I’m a couple of hundred yards away and I keep going. Then I see there’s a wire fence round the mast and as I get nearer I can see it’s about ten feet high. There’s a gate to one side and I limp that way… my left leg’s gone dead… and there’s a metal door at the bottom of the mast and a squat concrete block with another metal door but no lights, no sign of life, no nothing and the gate’s locked anyway and there’s no way I can get over the fence even if I wanted to. I try to hold onto the fence but my fingers are numb and I can’t feel anything and I slump against it and fall to the ground. I’m fucked… and then a wave of something rises up inside me and I want to scream… and I manage to make a feeble roar, like a pathetic lion and I blink my eyes and stand up and I know I can go on just a little further… Perhaps down this road a bit… because there’s a track leading from the gate down a hill… so I move down the slope, sliding and slipping, and I feel sharp pieces of gravel under the snow digging and scraping into my feet and then I see something about fifty yards ahead, a grey shadow among a mosaic of grey shadows in the snow… and I hobble towards it and I can’t believe it, it’s a phone box! A fucking phone box! I make it to the door and heave it open and get inside and it’s bliss because there’s no wind. But it’s still cold… it’s like a fridge… and I look at the phone and I can just make out that there’s a hand-set and a wire connecting it, and I run my hands over it and it’s not ripped out or broken and I pick up the receiver and I have no fucking idea what to do. I can’t see anything…
Then I have an idea… Even with my cold numb hands I can feel there’s a dial but it’s an old-fashioned job with holes that you turn and I have to try and get a finger to work and I manage to squeeze one into the 9 hole and try to turn the dial but it won’t budge and my finger keeps slipping out because I can’t feel anything and I’m too weak. And so I try again and again and again until I somehow manage to dial 999 and someone comes on the line and I try to speak… ”Hello?” a voice says and then “Hello?” again and I say “Hello?” too but they can’t hear me and I say “Hello” again and the line goes dead. I lean against the cold metal and glass of the phone box and I don’t know if I’m shivering or convulsing and weeping. I try to see if there’s any information posted in the phone box but it’s too dark… I’m a blind man in here… a blind man in a fridge… I try 999 again and the same thing happens. I try to dial 100, thinking that’s the number for the operator, and it rings and rings for a long time and then I hear an engaged tone and then nothing, just a buzzing and a final click and I do it again and this time a voice comes on and they can’t hear me either and the person goes away without saying goodbye, not knowing that their voice might be the last voice I’ll ever hear. I want to smash the phone up but don’t have the strength even to consider it… I barely have the strength to stand up so I sit down and try to think. Thinking isn’t easy, it hurts… I haul myself back on my feet and run my fingers over the phone unit… there are some slots for coins… I feel in the coin return box, but there’s nothing… but maybe someone dropped a coin the last time the phone was used? So I get down on my hands and knees and feel around the floor and there’s nothing there either except for some used chewing-gum, which I put in my mouth and chew just to see if I can move my jaw. I can feel a loose tooth and it hurts and I split blood out with the chewing-gum and then I remember! … I reach round my neck and feel my chain… Sarah’s chain, with the shilling on it, the 10p piece… The bastards didn’t take it… I try to undo the clasp but there’s no way that’ll work so I yank it off and slip the chain through the hole and I have a 10 piece in my hand… but what the fuck do I do with it?
I try to remember something, but it keeps slipping away… I can feel myself slipping away too, as if all my blood’s draining from my body and flowing down through my limbs into a hole in the phone box floor… I can hear a sing-song voice, answering the phone, announcing the number… but that number will have a couple of digits added to it now, won’t it? I try to work it out and I think I have it and I know it’s my only hope, I have to get it right… I repeat the number in my head over and over and then I reach up and grab the phone unit and pull myself to my feet and feel the dial… I’m going to rehearse the dialling so I get it right, I can’t make a mistake, I’ll only have one chance… So I start dialling the number, counting the holes out loud, trying not to shiver, turning the dial carefully, not too fast, not too slow, and then I’ve finished and I’ve dialled all the digits and there are some strange mechanical and electrical things happening somewhere that might make a number ring… and after a long, long silence I hear a faint ringing sound! And it rings and rings and goes on ringing and then there’s a buzz… and I hear the pips… I feel for the smallest slot and try to fit the 10p piece into it… I push it and it slips and tumbles to the floor so I have to bend down and find it and pick it up and my hands are trembling and it seems like hours before I can grasp the edges of the coin and flip it up and pick it up and then I stand up and feel for the slot again and I push it in… and then there’s silence and I think the whole world has frozen solid and I might already be dead.
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Who�
��s this? Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s Paul…”
“Paul?”
“Paul Boyd.”
“Fuck me… I thought you were dead!”
“I am, mate, I am…”
And then I manage to say “the TV mast” just before my time runs out.
Chapter 4
The boy is lying on a bed, his right eye swollen shut, bruised blue and purple and his lips are puffy and bleeding. The girl bends over him, holding a bowl of warm water and a face-cloth, and she dabs at his wounds and talks to him softly. She asks him what happened but the boy says nothing. He doesn’t want to talk about it. But the girl knows anyway, she’s heard about it already, and she doesn’t blame the boy for his reticence to tell her the truth, or to lie.
There was a fire in the boy’s house, she knows. A chip-pan caught fire and the kitchen-window curtains went up in flames and when the boy’s father rushed into the house the boy was soaking towels under the tap and he was trying to put out the fire.
“What the hell happened?”, shouted the father as he grabbed a fire-extinguisher from a cupboard, and the boy looked across the room to where his mother was sitting in an armchair, asleep, snoring, a whisky glass on the carpet at her feet and an empty bottle on the low table in front of her and the boy looked up at his father and said: “I was making some chips. I was hungry”.
The boy’s father pulled back his hand and slapped the boy’s face with the back of it, hard.
“You daft bugger!”, he said.
And now the girl takes the boy’s hand in hers and she leans over him and smiles and she kisses him on his forehead and the boy looks at her out of his good eye and a single tear rolls down his cheek.
The girl knows what happened and she knows that telling a lie is not always a bad thing, despite what everyone says.
And then the boy is me and I’m lying on a bed and my right eye is swollen shut, bruised blue and purple and through my good eye all I can see is white light and I close it and I go back to sleep.
The next time I wake up I think I’m in a swimming-pool, drowning, but I can breathe and I’m only bathed in sweat and I can see a blurry human shape against a white background and my eye begins to focus and I see a man in a police uniform and for a moment I think it’s my friend Dave Middleton but that’s not right and then my eye blinks shut and I’m cold again and everything’s black.
I can hear my Dad’s voice… the thick Yorkshire tones and intonations, like Greville Hartley’s… but it’s not Dad, it can’t be, he’s dead… it’s Uncle Frank…
“… I would if I could… maybe I will… some day…”
And I open my eyes, or an eye and a half, and Uncle Frank’s there, and I’m lying in bed covered with blankets and what looks like tin-foil and I’m attached to an IV drip. Frank looks surprised.
“What did you say?” I say.
“Fuck me… you’re awake!”
I swivel my eyes round and see walls and a door and a window and a picture of a mountain and a lake and I know I’m in a hospital.
“Six two double five six three”, I say, as if this makes sense.
“You what?”
“Thanks for the necklace, Sarah. I love you”.
Frank doesn’t say anything, but looks around and a woman appears and she has something pointed in her hand. I close my eyes again and I feel warm and I can see Sarah bending down to kiss me on the forehead and for some reason I feel very sad.
I wake up and I’m hungry. I try to sit up but I can’t. I look around me and see walls and a door and a window and a picture of a mountain and a lake and I know I’m in a hospital.
There’s a man sitting on a chair to my right and he’s wearing a uniform and I recognise him.
“So you joined the family business?”, I say.
Dave Middleton stands up and suddenly I remember a lot of things all at once.
“What day is it?” I ask him.
“Wednesday”, he says. “You’ve been out for 4 days, more or less.”
“Jesus…”, I say, assailed by a kaleidoscope of horrible images.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m starving.”
Dave steps out of the room and then he’s back.
“Long time no see”, he says.
“Four years?”
“Give or take.”
“Where am I?”
“Halifax General .”
“What happened?”
“You tell me.”
“Terry Booth.”
“Figures.”
“Bastard.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“He had a police car.”
“Stolen off the Feltham estate. Someone’s getting a bollocking.”
“How are you doing?”
“All right.”
“So it was you I talked to, on the phone?”
“Three o’clock in the fucking morning and I get a call from someone I thought was dead.”
“How did I end up here?”
He sits on the edge of the bed and I look at him. My best mate, Dave Middleton, now aged 21, not seen since 1997 and a memorable night – if that’s the right term - that changed my life. He looks even more like Terry Wogan than he used to, and he’s put on a few pounds and has a scar on his cheek that looks fairly recent.
“Traced the call, more or less, sent cars out to the most likely masts, ambulance got you in the nick of time, they said. Apparently you’d been tarred and feathered.”
“No, that was me, an old survival trick I learned in cubs.”
He manages a bleak smile.
“Who the fuck is Paul Riley?”
It takes me a minute to work out what he’s talking about.
“That would be me.”
“You what?”
“I changed my name, my ID, after… you know…”
He says nothing, just looks disappointed. Maybe even a bit guilty.
“Your hotel contacted us: guest checked out without paying his bill, leaving his stuff behind, including credit cards and a passport and a driving licence in the name of one Paul Riley, with your photo on ‘em .”
I remember I’m supposed to be in Amsterdam for work.
“Fuck!”
“What?”
“Never mind…”
A nurse walks in with a tray and sets it down and cranks my bed up and stuffs pillows behind my back and I’m eating a bowl of cereal and bread and jam.
“Sorry about your Mum and Dad”, Dave says.
“Yeah…”
He gets up and walks over to the window.
“Would have been nice to get a call… or a postcard .”
“Probably… sorry.”
I can see him shake his head and shrug. He turns round and there’s a question in his eyes.
“Charges?”
“Is there any point?”
He pouts.
“Fuck it”, I say.
He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
“So where are you living these days?” he says.
“Brighton, on and off, I travel a lot.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m a tour guide, and I write a bit of travel stuff. How about you?”
“Engaged. Cath’s a nurse. Right here, actually. Still at Mum and Dad’s, getting our own place in a couple of months.”
“Congrats.”
“Ta.”
“No news of Sarah Hartley, by any chance?”
He looks at me for a long moment and then looks away.
“No.”
PART 2 – 2013
Chapter 5
MAIL ON SUNDAY April 21st 2013
HONEYMOON HEIRESS MISSING
The heiress to the Hartley textile-mill and property fortune has gone missing in Italy. Sarah Morgan, née Hartley, aged 31, was travelling by train to Venice on Friday April 19th with her husband of 2 days, Mr Neil Morgan, 37, an international businessman, when she disappeared. The couple were ma
rried last Wednesday at a private ceremony at Calderwood Hall, the family home in Yorkshire. Mr Morgan told Italian police that his new bride – who recently inherited an estimated 45 million pounds from her father, the textile and property tycoon Greville Hartley, who died last year – had left their first-class suite on the Orient Express shortly before arriving in Innsbruck, apparently to get a bottle of water from the restaurant car. She never returned. Italian police say it is most likely that the young woman got off the train during the stop in Innsbruck, for reasons at present unknown, but they have been unable to pick up her trace. She was wearing a green trouser suit with white trimming and had a brown handbag with her. Her mobile phone and credit cards have apparently not been used since last Thursday. Foul play is not, at the moment, suspected, but the police are considering every eventuality. Neil Morgan is currently in Venice, helping the police with their enquiries, but is expected to return to the UK on Tuesday. Mrs Morgan’s mother, Mrs Rebecca Hartley, 69, is receiving medical care at an undisclosed private facility, and is unavailable for comment concerning her daughter’s disappearance. A spokesman for the family asked for their privacy to be respected at this trying time. The West Yorkshire police are working hand in glove with their European colleagues, and have released a statement saying they are very optimistic about locating Mrs Morgan in the very near future. A press conference will be held at Calderdale Police HQ on Tuesday morning if there are no further developments before then.
The King's Shilling Page 3
