Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  As she took off she didn’t see the figure that emerged from behind one of the two gruesome statues that sat half-way down the Main Drive until it was too late. She crashed into the boy and they went down in a clatter. Heather found herself on top of the unfortunate boy and by the pain in her forehead and his startled look of surprise she surmised that she had also managed to head-butt him on the way down. She scrambled to her feet in a torrent of apologies and tried to help the boy up before realising, to her horror, that he was searching about with frantic hands for his walking stick and was not able to stand.

  “Oh my god, I’m so, so, sorry. Let me help you,” she muttered as she leapt after the stick and heaved him off the ground.

  “Don’t worry! Don’t worry! It’s my fault you see. These statues - fascinating aren’t they? I completely forgot that I was on a road. Lucky it was a pretty girl and not a delivery truck, really.” The boy seemed to realise what he had said and went bright red. She looked at his friendly, almost handsome, face, bright blue eyes and earnest smile, and decided to rescue him.

  “I’m sorry; I should have been paying attention. I hope you’re not hurt?” she asked with a tentative gesture towards his leg.

  A gave her a dismissive little wave. “Let’s not think of it,” he said and then extended his hand, “I’m Henry by the way. You’re… hang on, you are the costume maker! What luck!”

  “You know of me?” Heather asked, stunned.

  “Oh yes, people talk of you! They are quite astounded, I can tell you. The drama lot are overjoyed. I heard them talking about doing Tempest while you are here,” Henry said smiling.

  Heather, despite herself, was very flattered. A tightness that was coiled in her chest seemed to ease at the compliment. That people knew her and valued her for her skill was a novel and, she found, pleasant sensation.

  She took Henry’s still outstretched hand and shook it. “My name is Heather, Heather Evynstone. Very nice to meet you, Lord Grenville,” she replied with a wide smile, enjoying his look of surprise. “Oh yes, people talk you of you too,” she said with a wink. They laughed together companionably for a moment which petered out into an awkward silence.

  Heather coughed then realised that she was no longer clutching her bus pass and must have dropped it in the collision. She started to hunt after it on the gravelly ground until Henry tapped her arm. “Have you lost something?” he asked, eyes sparkling, mouth quirked upwards.

  “I’ve dropped my bloody pass. I can’t get on the bus without it.”

  “Oh, well. Let me try something. I’ve quite a talent at finding things.” He pushed out his arms and pulled back his sleeves.

  Heather grinned at him but kept looking. “Thanks but I’m in a bit of a rush.”

  “Humour me. Just stand still,” he asked and Heather straightened. She watched as he muttered to himself theatrically and reached his hand behind her head. He smelled nice, she realised, he smelled expensive.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Almost done. Just say ‘bus pass’.”

  “Fifty quid.”

  “Voila!” Henry said producing the orange plastic wallet, from thin air.

  “How did you…”

  “You dropped it on Player’s Walk, that’s what took so long, please, call me Henry,” he said grinning as he handed it over. She laughed and shook her head, charmed by his boyish enthusiasm and a trick well done.

  “Well, lovely to meet you Henry buy I am late for my…”

  “Is it true that you read Tarot cards?” Henry blurted. “That you have Romani blood?” Heather’s smile dropped away and her brows gathered together in fury. Henry’s eyes widened and he backtracked frantically. “No! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean,” he started, but to no avail.

  Heather pushed past him and strode off. Henry hobbled after her as quick as he was able. “Please stop! I apologise. It’s my stupid mouth! I’m very interested in gypsy magic is all I meant! I’m sorry!” Heather kept walking until his voice was lost on the wind. Darkwells. Even the nice ones were wrong.

  #

  Heather was saved from a long and dispiriting walk by the inefficiencies of the West Somerset bus service. Despite her desperate flight she ended up waiting for a good five minutes at the shelter before the bus arrived. She tried to put Darkwells out of her mind as she sat clasping the yellow bar and staring out at the flat rolling landscape. At least they liked the costume, she consoled herself. It was stupid, getting upset by things that didn’t matter. She wasn’t going there to make friends or admirers; it was to learn a trade, to improve her skill. To use what talent she had to pull herself out of the knife edge life she lived. Those Darkwells kids would never understand what real pressure was, what real achievement felt like. Once this placement was done her portfolio should be good enough and then with luck she would be off to London to do her Fashion Design. After that? Who knew? But it would be better than here. She might be able to afford a real house for her and her mother and they could rent out the Black Swan or even sell it. Things would be better, she decided, away from this place.

  She disembarked from the bus in the heart of town and set off towards home. She passed the tourist trap shops selling crystals, Ouija boards and books on astrology and made her way into the Tesco Local. She stocked up on milk and bread and other essentials. Her mother was likely to have forgotten again. She suffered the daily terror as the attendant swiped her debit card – did she still have enough in there? To her relief the transaction cleared and she was on her way.

  Her journey took her past the prettier parts of town and also down through the dingier, narrow alleys and rough terraced housing to the outskirts and the canal. She greeted people she knew as she walked down the tow-path to the mooring. She caught sight of The Black Swan and her spirits picked up. The narrowboat had seen better days. The paint was flaking off and the windows were grimy, but it was still home, still her refuge. The Darkwells snobs could sneer all they liked but Heather wouldn’t have traded her cosy little floating palace for any of their grand stone castles. Well, maybe she would like some heating.

  Her mother was not aboard and so Heather pottered about making dinner with the meagre scraps they had in their bare cupboards. The sight of the empty spaces made Heather purse her lips and resolve to confront her mother about what it was she had spent her Jobseeker’s Allowance on this time.

  #

  Her mother was still not back when dinner was ready. Heather saved a portion and ate hers curled up on the tatty sofa, wrapped in blankets. After she was done she sat with her sketch book and worked through a few ideas that had struck her during the procession. The soft rocking of the Black Swan took effect and she found her concentration wavering and her pencil drawing doodles rather than serious designs. She leaned further back and started to drift off into sleep when her mother reappeared, clambering aboard in a clatter. Heather bolted upright at the noise and noticed that she had been drawing a figure with a cane and laughing eyes.

  “You there, love?” her mother called out in a too loud voice.

  “Yes mum, I’m here. I saved you some dinner if you want. Where have you been?”

  “At the Bingo!” her mother shouted back, her voice slurring, “I won thirty quid!”

  “And spent it at the Bear and Bishop,” Heather muttered to herself as she watched her mother stagger into the kitchen.

  “How’d your thing go, love?” she asked as she ate her dinner at the table.

  “Well, I think. The colours came out well against…” Heather stopped as she realised her mother was not that interested. She was still in her gypsy costume from working in her stall earlier and must have gone straight to the Bingo from there. She dreaded to think how much she had spent of her week’s earnings in order to ‘win’ the thirty pounds she had now drunk away.

  “That’s brilliant, Heather, brilliant. I’m going to go have a quick lie down now. Thanks for cooking for me, you are an angel.”

  “Goodnight mum, sleep well,
” Heather called as she picked up her note-pad again. She looked at the sketched out boy with a cane. I bet you don’t have these sorts of problems, Lord Grenville she thought to herself as she tore out the page and started some real work on a fresh one.

  Chapter Nine: Crystallomancy

  Heather was back at college the following week. Her commute on the bus through the shingle walled and grey roofed council estates and the industrial parks to the boxy concrete complex of her college provided a pleasant contrast to Darkwells. It rained ceaselessly and the students that crowded by the front doors in their hoodies taking languid draws on a final smoke before class seemed more relaxed and at ease than the artificially upright versions, so confined in their waistcoats and blazers, that she had gotten used to seeing at Darkwells. The corridors were cluttered with boxes. The notice boards were overflowing with layers upon layers of ignored messages and miniature posters selling second hand drum-kits or advertising the charms of MONG-FEST! or the like.

  On her second day, as she sat at one of the wide drawing desks, which was, like everything in the building, covered with graffiti of varying quality and jaundiced irony, she received a pleasant surprise from her supervisor who tossed her ‘Elizabeth Costume’ scrapbook across her desk with a large red ‘Outstanding’ scrawled across the top. Heather looked up with wide eyes. Her supervisor smiled from behind her heavy nose-bar and eyebrow piercings and motioned for her to flip the scrapbook over. On the back were the notes from the Darkwells’ Drama department printed in neat calligraphy. The praise was universal and quite dizzying.

  “Oh yes, Heather. They loved it. I’ve an email from them asking if you’d be interested in doing some new pieces for their next production.”

  Heather’s first thought was of Lord Grenville, who had been so pleased to break this news to her already; so he wasn’t lying. Before she could feel elated another thought struck her and she sighed and shook her head. “Sorry Jade, I’ll have to decline,” Heather packed away the glowing report into her backpack. Her supervisor’s metal eyebrows shot-up and almost escaped into her finger length cropped hair.

  “Really? But why? Your portfolio… I can tell you that you’ll never get a better offer than doing multiple pieces for Darkwells’ Drama…”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to,” Heater cut in, “because I do. It’s just that, well, I can’t afford it. The fabric alone on that last piece…”

  “Oh! But I should have said - they’ll buy all the material. They even said they would buy the finished pieces off you at the end. They want you to work in the Performing Arts centre with a couple of girls from…” she reached into her pocket and peered at a scrunched up piece of paper: “Elizabeth the First House.”

  “Ugh, Jets. And there’s the catch.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Oh alright, I’ll do it,” Heather replied with a martyred voice and a light, happy heart.

  #

  It was Friday and Sean and Kim were waiting for her when she finished to celebrate her return after her long exile to Darkwells. To prepare for the parade she had been forced to stay on that side of the town for a couple of weeks and as a consequence was woefully out of touch with the intricate web of gossip and flash trends that constituted the social life of people her age.

  The three of them jumped on a bus for the centre of town and caught up in rapid, animated fashion. Sean had a new tattoo on the inside of his forearm which he showed off; it was of a fist crushing a handful of grapes with the words ‘In vino veritas’ inked in as a tattoo within the tattoo.

  “Oh my god, Sean, you are like, so clever. Tell her what it means,” Kim urged as she touched up her mascara in her ever handy pocket mirror.

  “Grapes of wrath, right?” Heather responded before Sean could. He nodded, scowling at his stolen thunder. “And ‘In vino veritas’. That’s ‘truth in wine’. So. Truth in wrath?” she hazarded.

  “Close,” Sean responded, pleased. “It’s about the righteousness of anarchy and oblivion, the drunkenness of destruction.”

  “You’re so clever, Sean. You should, like, be a scientist or something,” Kim observed as she applied foundation. Heather snorted and, for once, kept her mouth shut. She didn’t feel like crossing blades with Sean again today.

  They made their way straight to the King Arthur and Sean got a round of drinks. Sean was eighteen and the pub was never that strict about the drinking age to start with. Kim perked up as soon as Sean was away. “He’s been a total dick for the last couple of weeks, I tell ya,” she said as she made a vain effort to tug down her minuscule skirt, “I don’t know what to do with him.”

  Heather grimaced, she knew what had happened. “Did he get a rejection from Manchester?” she asked. Kim nodded, her hooped earrings swaying mournfully at her sides. “And Leeds?” Kim nodded again. Poor, poor Sean. He was by a distance the smartest student at the local comprehensive. Heather knew how it went. She had sat in enough classrooms to see how the keen kids eventually just coast because the teachers were too beaten down to do anything more than the bare minimum. She had seen how the lads who thought they were funny dragged down anyone who thought they might achieve anything. It was an all too familiar: there would be a sudden realisation that they might want to be something when it was already too late. The teachers that took an interest and worked hard were still nowhere near the quality required. Sean was always moaning about the standard of teaching. It was well known that all the better teachers joined Darkwells or moved across the country when they closed the much missed Grammar School.

  “Don’t ask him about it,” Kim hissed at her, grabbing her hand. “It makes him terrible.”

  Sean returned with two pints and a white wine, which he placed in front of Kim. The three of them settled back into their chairs and chatted about little things, enjoying each others’ company in the safe, familiar environment. Round followed round and the pub filled up.

  “Bet you’re glad you’re back from that place though,” Sean commented.

  “What place?” Heather asked sipping on her pint.

  “Darkwells, The Tory breeding pit. Where else?”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad.”

  “Ha! I knew it! They have you curtsying and doffing your cap already. You must never forget Heather, these people are the enemy. They are the foot in the jackboot of oppression.”

  “The what?” Heather laughed. “Does that even make sense?”

  “I’m serious,” Sean continued undeterred. “Places like that - they disgust me. I’d tear them all down. All they do is foster this sense of superiority, of entitlement. The Empire was built in places like that, where it was seen as acceptable to shit all over their lessers and take whatever they want. I tell you, we’d be better off burning it down and shooting the lot of them.”

  “That’s a bit melodramatic,” Heather replied. She was used to Sean’s rants. “And listen to yourself. You’re much more of a militant-in-the-wrong-decade-class-warrior than any of them.”

  “It’s easy to be indifferent to others in the lap of luxury.” Sean was testy now. “I don’t know why you’re defending them, Heather, when they all go to the stall just to…”

  “Sean!” Kim barked, too late.

  “…laugh at your mother,” Sean finished.

  Heather didn’t say anything. She felt tired and a little light headed. Sean was angry and feeling spiteful. She understood but was too drained to swallow it down just then. She stood and said goodbye to Kim and set off down towards Wick Hollow and her mother’s stall.

  #

  She didn’t need to look at her watch to know that it was just past closing time. The tension in the air, the catcalls and the angry challenges that drunk pub-goers hurled at each other were more than she required to set herself on guard. She stepped past a pair of girls in tight dresses who were slumped in the cobbled street, one holding up the hair of another as she was violently sick. She quickened her pace past a kebab shop where a scuffle had broken out and was
now spilling out the door. Drunken packs of men propositioned her as she hurried along, face turned aside. Forget Halloween, she thought; it was quarter past eleven in England and the abyss gaped open.

  She stuck to the well lit streets until she spotted the familiar yellow curtain and wooden frame of her mother’s stall at the far end of Wick Hollow. She often worked late on Fridays to try and maximise on tipsy tourists. While it was less safe, Heather preferred it as it at least kept her mother out of the Bear and Bishop. The curtain swung open and a client, a chubby specimen with a ‘Don’t mess with Texas!’ tee-shirt, waddled out into the night with a wistful smile. You will find a tall, dark stranger Heather imagined to herself, in her mother’s best gypsy voice.

  The stall was painted in black with the splayed palm and marked lines signifying Palmistry on one side and an image of a glittering crystal advertising Scrying on the other. The front of the stall had a crescent moon and a woman with a scarf on her head with the pattern of an eye, signifying… well, Heather wasn’t that sure. Something to do with being a psychic she assumed. She made her way towards the stall but stopped as she noticed another customer approaching.

  It was a young man who had ostensibly appeared from nowhere. It was a student still wearing his Darkwells’ blazer despite the high probability of it causing him physical harm. He was a handsome boy who was hobbling along on a cane in the dark night wearing the widest smile as if he were on a ramble across his favourite estate. Heather shrunk back into the shadows and watched him approach, Sean’s words still echoing in her ears. Her eye twitched.

  Henry ambled up to the stall with avid interest and obvious delight. He stopped to take in the designs on the stall and then pulled the curtain back and bellowed, “Hullo!” as if he were entering an empty cathedral. As he entered Heather stole up to the stall and pulled back the old spy portal that her mother had forced her to use when she was smaller. Heather would never admit that she had used her little hands to snake into bags and had taken sneaky looks at people’s driving licences (or other things) while they were distracted to help her mother’s credibility, but it was clear that it was something that might have happened. Now she stared at the earnest, all-too-smug face of Henry, who was listening to her mother’s famous entry prattle with bemused interest.