by Graham Marks
We lived in two or three Midlands towns, moving according to which bank branch Mum was assigned to, but the upgrade to Priory Mews took us eighty miles closer to London. Closer to Dad’s cronies and the music biz, because it was his ‘career’ that called the shots now.
Hadlington is a picture postcard of English suburbia. I’d never even heard of it before I was told we were going to live there. In the early afternoon of Wednesday September 18th, I watched it roll past me from the back seat of the (brand-new) car. Clipped lawns, detached properties, lines of shops all still in business instead of boarded up. Mothers wheeling pushchairs with a smile, old folk chatting at bus stops as the bus pulled in on time, corner cafés filled with suited customers tapping at their iPads.
“Shall we drive around a bit before we go to the house?” said Mum, slowing the car at traffic lights. “Go for a wander about town?”
“Let’s do that, babe,” said Dad, his voice thick with excitement. “Take a look at the manor.”
They took my silence for agreement. We drove past an industrial park plastered with freshly printed hoardings: engineering works, small caterers, e-tail warehouses, an art studio. I remember lounging on the back seat, the car’s smoothly efficient shock absorbers still feeling like a novelty, and looking in vain for anything that reminded me of our Old Life.
Everything here was tidy, and clean, and nice-looking. Even the factory units were smartly designed. Nothing was dumped on front drives in Hadlington. Here they had civic pride. Here they had money, and responsible attitudes, and a spring in their step. It shone out of the streets, the buildings, the pavements. This is Hadlington, said the town, and it’s better than where you come from.
We drove around the southern half of the town, skirting the grounds of the large Elizabethan mansion that was the local tourist attraction, with New Car smell filling my lungs and the engine purring like a tamed big cat. Here were leafy avenues and clusters of homes surrounding oval-shaped greens with little children playing while parents watched from wooden benches. We crossed the humped, stone bridge that spans the river close to that Elizabethan mansion.
The River Arvan slices through Hadlington like a knife through flesh, its sinuous waters slow and dark. It cuts through a picturesque park, where trees and the occasional fishing platform dot its banks. Then it leads out of town, getting deeper and more treacherous as it goes, with swirling undercurrents and tangled weeds. People drown in it regularly, I later discovered.
As the river leads out of town, it borders the Elton Gardens estate, Hadlington’s own enclave of the underclass. Most towns and cities have their run-down areas, but Elton Gardens stands in such contrast to the rest of the town that it almost seems like a broad blade of the outside world trying to stab its way in.
The rest of Hadlington looks down on the residents of Elton Gardens in a way I’ll always find repellent. Snobbish, dismissive, wilfully ill-informed. The residents of Elton Gardens either work in the town’s least desirable jobs, or scratch an existence on the edges of the law. Kids from Elton Gardens go to the schools along the A-road that heads towards London, the sort of schools you see in Channel 4 documentaries designed to shock the middle classes.
The estate was apparently quite smart when it was built in the late 1960s but it rapidly declined. The final nail in its coffin were the floods of 2007 and 2012, when the Arvan burst its banks and gurgled up from the drains, gushing across the ground floors of all two hundred and twenty-seven homes. There was sodden rubbish in the streets for months.
On hot days in the summer, so I learned, teenagers jump off the clattering green metal footbridge that crosses the river beside the estate. They don’t listen to the warnings, of course. Two or three times a year, there’s a huge headline in the local paper, above a picture of the grieving family. Sometimes, people get pulled down and the bodies are never found.
At least, so it’s believed.
We didn’t drive around the estate. We’d just left that kind of place.
The park and the estate border one side of the river while, up a steep and landscaped hill, Maybrick Road runs parallel with it on the other. Maybrick Road is the poshest part of Hadlington. That’s where you find Maybrick High School and five-bed detached houses that cost six times the national average. People put themselves into serious debt just to send their kids to Maybrick High and have a Maybrick Road address.
Priory Mews joins Maybrick Road a few hundred metres from the school. Gently swaying trees, pleasant views down the hill towards the park and river. Bins and recycling boxes out of sight. When we drove into the short cul-de-sac on that Wednesday afternoon, the removals van was already parked outside our new home. The car glided to a halt and we got out, my door clunking behind me with a deliciously expensive wh-ump.
Mum bustled over to the three removals men, who were propped up against the side of the van smoking. She fumbled in her bag for the house keys.
Dad leaned against the front of the car and gazed around, a grin lighting up his chubby features. “You made it, sunshine,” he said to himself quietly.
To be honest, I could see his point. I was grinning, too. There were three detached houses nestled in a semicircle: big, solid homes with curving bay windows and smoothly tarmacked drives. Ours was the one on the left, No. 3.
This was the first time I’d ever seen it, except for in the estate agent’s photos. Mum and Dad had only visited it once before paying the full asking price.
Dad had made a million. Or near enough. Out of the blue, two songs he’d written in the 90s got picked up by a trendy girl band and became global hits. ‘Sweet Angel’ and ‘Boppin’ Hoppin’’, by the Blaster Rays – you must have heard them. Dad wrote them as solid guitar rock, and they got turned into cheesy pop. Utterly hideous; I actually felt sorry for my father. But worldwide sales, downloads, radio airplay, stadium performances – they all added up to a lot of money. Suddenly, we were quite rich. Mum grabbed her chance and we got a Maybrick Road address. No. 3, Priory Mews, Maybrick Road, Hadlington.
While the removals men were unloading our stuff, ninety per cent of which was Dad’s assorted ‘treasures’, Mum and Dad skipped about the empty house like a couple of kids. You could hear Dad’s whooping echo off the walls.
The house was great. Two enormous living rooms downstairs, a couple of little rooms at the back, a kitchen with a long annexe leading out into the garden. Upstairs, five bedrooms, the ugliest bathroom I’ve ever seen, and a narrow door opening on to creaky wooden stairs up to a vast and dusty attic space.
My room was at the front corner of the house. Or rather, rooms. There was an en-suite shower room at one end, and at the other was what I presume was meant as a walk-in wardrobe, lined with shelving painted in off-white gloss and with three chrome hanging rails. It alone was larger than most of the rooms I’d ever called my own.
We lived here now. Not in some just-for-now, until-we-can-afford-something-else, stop-gap place, but here. Everything I owned filled two big cardboard boxes beside the door.
It was only when I stood beside my wide window, overlooking the removals van and the front of the house, that I noticed the fourth building in Priory Mews. How I’d missed it outside, I’ll never know. Too busy gaping at our place, I suppose.
From the moment I saw it, it unsettled me.
It was set well back from the others, surrounded by tall, narrow shrubs like leafy security guards. A broad gravel pathway led up to an imposing entrance. The house was three storeys high, its two lower levels topped with a series of windows jutting out from very high, angular sections of roof. One of these sections rose up even taller than the others, punctuated by chimney breasts. At the corners, the walls had the kind of inlaid stone you see on old manor houses and castles, like zigzag reinforcements.
The house was more than double the size of the others in Priory Mews. A long, glassy ground-floor extension had been added at the side. Above loomed the tortured, twisted grey branches of ancient wych elms and silver birches
in the back garden. A separate, modern two-door garage had been built closer to the road.
This, I later found out, was Bierce Priory, built in 1812. That extension was constructed in the 1920s, at the same time as our house. Even at first sight, even with the excitement of the moment sending my mood soaring, the Priory looked cold and austere. As if it was watching me back.
Despite my impressions of the place, I paid no more attention to the Priory that day. Now, merely writing the name sends a rush of horror through my guts. We had Chinese takeaway for tea, and Mum and I spent hours dragging cardboard boxes from one room to another. Dad spotted our new neighbours at No. 2 getting into their car, an elderly couple, and called them over with a whistle and a wave. I didn’t catch their names but they seemed taken in by that studied chumminess of his. He talked at them for nearly twenty minutes, while they smiled blandly.
I hooked up the TV in the biggest living room. The sound bounced off the bare floorboards as I sat on our threadbare sofa. I patted its stained arm a couple of times. You’ll be chucked out soon, old friend, I thought to myself, without a doubt. I watched gangsters shoot each other while Mum scrubbed the bathroom and Dad clattered about. “Ellen! Where did you pack my… S’OK, babe, I found them!”
By eleven I was snuggled down on my mattress on the floor of my room. The pieces of my wooden bed frame were stacked in a corner, waiting for when I could be bothered to put them together. My anglepoise lamp threw a yellowy glow over the thick paperback anthology of ’70s Doctor Strange comics I’d got on eBay just before we moved.
I was starting at Maybrick High the following day, Thursday. I’d tried to squeeze a couple of days off, to start at the beginning of a week, but with the school only a two-minute walk away and me already being late for the start of the Maybrick term, I had no excuses. I yawned, clicked off the light and went to sleep.
When I got up, Mum had already left for work. Some things never change. She didn’t need to do that job any more, but she did it anyway. I had suggested to her that she could free up her job for someone who really needed the money, but she’d just looked at me as if I’d asked her to boil her head. The only difference now was that she’d chosen which bank branch to work in, rather than letting the bank send her anywhere it liked. I imagined that the Hadlington branch was a little more prestigious than the last one.
I was up, washed and dressed nearly an hour before I needed to leave. I got through two slices of toast and a mug of orange juice, with first-day nerves jangling at my stomach. I made my sandwiches with a care I never normally took. Displacement activity, to mask the jitters. Cake in my lunchbox? Did I want cake today?
I still had forty minutes before I needed to leave. I took a slow tour of the house. The silence was only broken by the clump of my shoes on the floorboards and the sound of Dad snoring.
I told myself not to be such a wuss. No need to be nervous. Best school in the district.
I checked myself in the unhung mirror in the hall. My new uniform was embarrassingly fresh and unworn. My stomach knotted all over again.
Outside, the air was sharp and damp, a fresh autumnal morning. I looked across to our two neighbouring houses, but nothing was stirring there. Opposite them, the Priory seemed a touch less sinister in the cold early light, glowering behind its spiky shrubs.
As soon as I walked out on to Maybrick Road, I could tell something was up. There was a steady flow of uniformed kids along the pavements. From the end of Priory Mews, you could just see the main entrance to the school, but kids were going straight past it. They were hurriedly crossing the road and taking a wide path that led down the hill, ending at the green metal footbridge over the river, which led to the park and the corner of Elton Gardens.
As a handful of younger pupils passed me, I stopped one of them.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Dead body!” said the kid excitedly. “A Year Nine’s put a picture on Facebook.” He and his friends scurried on.
A what? Surely he meant an animal or something? A larger group of pupils, who looked my age, also crossed the road and headed for the path. I wondered if some of them were my new classmates. I allowed curiosity to drag me into the flow.
The path sloped in long, graceful curves down to the river. To either side were broad stretches of grass, and beyond that sprouted bushy swathes of tall reeds and sedges.
As the flow of kids approached the river, I could see a gathering arranged in a ragged semicircle. I’d almost caught up with the group who looked my age, but hung back. I wasn’t sure if the best way to meet classmates was rubbernecking at the scene of an … accident?
A girl suddenly detached herself from the semicircle, staggered a few metres and vomited noisily on to the grass. A couple of her friends rushed to her side.
By now I was at the spot where the gathering of pupils had trampled flat a haphazard patch of the reeds. I could see something stretched out on the ground. Someone was saying that a woman walking her dog had found it a few minutes ago, that she’d already called the police. For a second, the scene flashed through my head: the dog sniffing around, not coming when called, taking a few licks.
I drew closer. I saw it in detail now.
My first day nerves vanished, replaced by icy horror.
It was a man, flat on his back on the damp ground, legs pointing away from me. He was dressed in dirty trainers, fleece tracksuit bottoms and a jumper. His limbs were straight, as if he’d calmly lain down on the spot. His face was upturned; dull staring eyes pointed at the grey sky.
His face was spotted with blood. Much more blood, long sprays of it, fanned out around his head like some hideous spiked wig. The top of his head was gone. He simply ended, just above the face, sliced open like a pepper.
Copyright
STRIPES PUBLISHING
An imprint of Little Tiger Press
1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2014.
Text copyright © Graham Marks, 2014
Extract from Flesh and Blood © Simon Cheshire, 2014
Cover copyright © Stripes Publishing Ltd, 2014
Photographic images courtesy of www.shutterstock.com
eISBN: 978-1-84715-505-4
The right of Graham Marks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
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