by Jonathan Coe
‘Disgraceful!’ Grandad kept saying, but before I could agree with him he made it clear that he was talking about something else entirely. ‘Week in, week out, the BBC gives us this left-wing propaganda. If these Latvians and Lithuanians don’t like doing British jobs, they should go home and get better ones. Did you know there’s a shop in Selby that only sells Polish food now?’
I think this question was directed at Gran, but she had left the room some time ago. As Grandad didn’t seem to need an audience I quietly slipped away too, and went upstairs to bed. Alison was not back yet, and normally this would have worried me, but I was still too angry with her to care.
I must have fallen asleep straight away. The sky around the edges of the curtains was still only dark blue when I felt myself being shaken awake by a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes drowsily. It was Alison, of course.
‘What? What are you doing? I was asleep.’
‘I know, but this is important.’
With some reluctance I raised myself into a sitting position. My eyes opened further and the first thing I noticed about Alison was that she was shaking.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I saw one, Rache,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘I saw one just now, in the woods.’
‘Saw what?’
‘I saw a body. A dead body.’
Our eyes met. I said nothing.
‘Just now,’ she added: as if that somehow made it any more believable.
I lay down again and turned away from her, facing the wall.
‘Alison, you’re pathetic.’
‘I did, Rachel – really.’
I turned back over and glared at her.
‘A dead body, yeah? In the woods. Just like that man in the paper. Was he sitting up against a tree?’
‘Yes,’ said Alison, and now there was such a note of distress and insistence in her voice that for the first time it crossed my mind she might be telling the truth.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, all the same. ‘No way.’
‘It was bloody terrifying. His head sort of … flopped over when I came up to him, so it was like he was looking at me. His eyes were open. He had all this grey hair, long and tangled. His skin was yellow – and all stretched and wrinkled. He was so thin …’
I sat up again, and looked at her carefully. I had an unfortunate history of being gullible when people played practical jokes like this on me.
‘What’s that in your hand?’ I asked, glancing down.
Alison was clutching a single playing card.
‘I picked this up in the wood,’ she said. ‘There were loads of them, scattered all around him.’
I took the card from her hand. On the back was a pattern of yellow and black diamonds. Turning the card over, I found a drawing of a spider. It was a grotesque and horrific thing, standing upright on two of its legs, and raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight. Against the glossy black background of the card, the pale green of its underbelly shone out with queasy clarity. The artist had dotted dozens of coarse hairs all over its distended belly, at the bottom of which, in a detail which made me feel particularly sick, there hung some sort of fleshy sac filled with God knows what. Although the drawing was crude and cartoonish, it somehow managed, at the same time, to be far too realistic.
As I handed the card back to Alison with a shudder, she threw her arms around me, buried her head against my neck and held me tight. She was still trembling all over and I had no choice, from that moment on, but to believe everything she had told me.
6
‘This is the tree,’ she said. ‘Just here.’
‘You’re sure?’
It was the next morning, a gloriously warm and sunny one. As we explored the little patch of sunken woodland at the eastern end of the Westwood, sunlight streamed through the leafy canopy above us, and by the time it reached us the light was a delicious, cool lime-green. The air was fresh and the only sounds were the occasional chirrup of birdsong and the distant hum of traffic. It was the kind of spot you would come to for a picnic, or to lie beneath a tree reading a book. Instead, we were looking for a corpse.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I pointed out, after we had stood for a few seconds looking at the bare patch of grass. It does no harm to state the obvious every now and again.
‘It’s gone,’ Alison agreed.
What were we supposed to do now? I had read enough kids’ adventure stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries to know that there was a procedure to be followed in these circumstances. I knelt down and began to stare intently at the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ Alison asked.
‘Looking for clues.’
Alison crouched down beside me. ‘What sort of clues?’
‘I don’t know.’ I thought about mentioning footprints or fingerprints but that seemed rather old-fashioned. Then I remembered something I’d seen on a TV show recently. ‘DNA,’ I said, with an air of confidence. ‘You always find DNA at a crime scene.’
‘OK.’
We both started to examine the area minutely, parting the very blades of grass with our fingertips.
‘What does DNA look like?’ Alison asked.
‘Kind of … slimy, I think.’ I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. ‘Slimy and see-through.’
‘Well, I can’t see anything like that.’
Alison was not as patient as me. Before long she was standing up again, looking around vaguely, without any clear intention. I tutted and continued with my search. Perhaps I would find something else significant – a lost button, or a fragment of torn clothing. Or perhaps this was, after all, a complete waste of time: just part of some malicious joke on Alison’s part, her revenge for the slap I’d given her last night, which she hadn’t mentioned since and for which I was yet to apologize.
Soon she had wandered off altogether. I didn’t know where she’d gone; I only knew that the wood had started to feel quieter than ever. Even the birds seemed to have stopped singing, and I couldn’t hear a single car even though the road was only a couple of hundred yards away. So when I heard the sound of a branch or twig snapping nearby, it was almost as if a gunshot had rung out. I jerked upright and looked around sharply in every direction. But there was no one there.
‘Alison?’ I said.
No answer.
I stayed like that for another minute or two, still kneeling. The silence was absolute once again. Of course it had only been some bird hopping from one spot to another; or perhaps a rabbit (we had seen one or two of those over the last few days); or Alison playing some tiresome game of hide and seek. There was no need to be jumpy about it. I would continue looking for clues.
The second noise was louder than the first, and seemed to come from a point about ten yards away, to my left. Louder than just the snapping of a twig this time, it sounded unmistakably like a footstep in the undergrowth. At the same time I saw – or thought I saw – the shadowy movement of some object or figure in the bushes. A whisper of motion, nothing more. Then everything was silent and still once again.
Alison. It had to be. What was she playing at?
‘Alison?’ I called. ‘Alison, where are you?’
This was getting really annoying now. Or rather, I was doing my best simply to find it annoying, while trying to ignore the way my heart had started to thump and a sheen of sweat was breaking out on my brow. I rose to my feet, slowly and cautiously, feeling it important to make as little sound of my own as possible. I looked again towards the bushes where I thought I had heard a sound, a
nd seen a fleeting movement. The temptation just to bolt, to make a run for it, was getting very powerful. But I decided not to do anything sudden. In a careful and studied movement I turned through 180 degrees, heading directly away from the bush and whatever danger my fevered mind had decided lurked inside it. Another dozen of these steps would take me away from this dense cluster of trees and bushes and out into more open woodland. Then, and only then, I would start running.
But after only a few more steps, something caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks. Caught between the branches of a bush, above my eye level, was another playing card: just like the one Alison had found, only this time the illustration showed a fish, not a spider. A blue-and-yellow-striped fish against a shiny black background. As with the spider, there was something disturbing, even repulsive, in the cartoonish simplicity of the drawing: the way the fish’s eyes bulged and its mouth drooped open stupidly. Was this the clue that I had been, subconsciously, looking for? I had no idea what these playing cards might have to do with Alison’s macabre encounter in the woods last night, but it seemed of overwhelming importance, now, that I should retrieve this piece of possible evidence. I stretched out my hand but the card, maddeningly, was just out of reach. I stepped forward and stood on tiptoe. If I stretched any further I would surely fall over. But now I could almost touch it. Another half an inch and I would just about be able to hold it between two fingers.
And then, another hand – a grown-up hand – appeared out of nowhere, was thrust towards the card and snatched it.
I gasped and wheeled around: and there she was, right behind me. Her face was red with anger. Her cropped hair, piercings and tattooed neck and throat were just as before. Her grey eyes bored into me.
The Mad Bird Woman.
‘This is mine, thank you very much,’ she said.
I don’t know where she came from, but now – somehow or other – Alison was standing beside me. Terrified, we faced the apparition together. We stared at her, and she stared back, none of us uttering a word. It was like a staring competition. The silence of the wood pressed down upon us.
‘Are there any more of these around here?’ she said at last.
‘I … don’t think so, miss,’ Alison faltered.
‘They must be returned to me. All of them. And you’re not to tell anyone about this.’
‘Yes, miss,’ we said in rough unison.
‘Good. Now clear off.’
We didn’t move. We were too stunned.
‘NOW!’ she shouted.
And then we were gone, out of the woods as fast as we could run, back across Westwood in pursuit of safety, our tiny bodies a whirl of spinning legs and pumping arms, our fugitive figures shrunk to nothing by the ageless, impervious bulk of the Black Tower behind us.
7
My grandparents’ house did not provide quite the sanctuary we were expecting. We returned to find that the living room was full of people. Full of old people, to be precise: nothing but silver hair and cups of tea wherever you looked. After one glance at this lot (Grandad and his next-door neighbour being the only ones I recognized) we beat a rapid retreat to the kitchen, where Gran was standing at the table laying chocolate biscuits and custard creams out on serving plates.
‘What’s going on in there?’ I asked.
‘The local Conservative Club,’ she said. ‘It’s our turn to be the hosts.’
‘They look like a right bunch of old relics,’ said Alison.
‘Never mind that,’ said Gran. ‘Take these in, will you? I’m going to have a bit of a sit down.’
She gave us a plate of biscuits each and we set off nervously to make a tour of the room. When we made our entrance Grandad’s neighbour (whose name, I discovered later, was Mr Sparks) was holding forth on the subject of vagrancy, another word I’d never heard before.
‘Vagrancy,’ he declaimed, ‘is becoming a serious problem in Beverley and its environs. The council should be dealing with it but frankly they seem to lack both the will and the means.’ He noticed, at this point, that I was holding a plate of custard creams under his nose. ‘Ah! Is one of these for me? How very kind.’
‘As usual,’ said a lady with alarmingly pointy horn-rimmed glasses, who was sitting in Gran’s armchair, ‘Norman has hit the nail on the head. My evidence is only anecdotal, but at Saturday market I have personally noticed a marked increase in the presence of … undesirables.’ She practically sang the word out, in a deep, throbbing alto, stretching the third syllable to a semibreve at least. ‘Many of them, needless to say, belong to the ethnic minorities.’ Precisely as she whispered these last two words she became aware of Alison, standing right in front of her and offering her a chocolate biscuit with the sweetest of smiles. ‘Why, thank you, dear,’ she said, thoroughly flustered. ‘Of course, I didn’t mean … I wasn’t trying to say that all …’
We returned to the kitchen with the plates still half full of biscuits and set about working our way through them.
‘What are they blathering on about in there now?’ Gran asked. She didn’t seem to think much of Grandad’s friends.
‘I wasn’t really listening,’ I admitted. ‘Something about vacancies at the Saturday market.’
‘They called me an ethnic minority,’ said Alison, in a tone of bemusement but also pride.
‘How rude.’
‘I don’t think she was being nasty,’ I said. ‘She just noticed that you were from a different … culture, I suppose.’
‘What nonsense. Alison’s from just the same culture as all of us. Aren’t you, lovey?’
‘Well, not really,’ said Alison. ‘I’m from Leeds.’ She took the last custard cream and popped it in her mouth in one go. ‘Anyway, it’s my dad who’s black and I hardly ever see him. My mum’s as white as they are so I don’t really see what they’re on about.’
‘Quite,’ said Gran, and we all fell silent.
‘What is a Conservative, anyway?’ it now occurred to me to ask.
‘Well, I suppose a Conservative,’ said Gran, ‘is someone who likes things the way they already are. They think that the world is essentially how it should be and we shouldn’t mess about with it too much.’
After reflecting on this I said: ‘That sounds OK. I like things the way they are, too. Doesn’t Tony Blair?’
‘Mr Blair is the leader of the Labour Party,’ said Gran, ‘which in days gone by used to believe in a thing called socialism. Socialists think that the world could be made much more fair for everybody but in order to do that, you have to change things and sometimes scrap things which are traditional and perhaps a bit out of date.’
‘But he doesn’t believe that any more?’
‘Well … nobody is quite sure what he believes.’
‘And what about you, Gran? Which one are you?’
She let out a heavy sigh. ‘Frankly, Rachel, right now I think I’m one of those people who’s starting to believe that none of it matters in the slightest.’
She turned away from us: perhaps, even, because she was trying not to cry, although neither Alison nor I was likely to notice. From our point of view, this conversation was getting a bit boring, and we had far more exciting news to tell her.
‘Ooh, Gran, guess who we saw up in the wood?’ I said. ‘The Mad Bird Woman. She gave us a terrible fright.’
Alison glanced at me: a silent reminder that we were not supposed to have told anyone about this. But since the secret was out now, she added:
‘We were just walking around, minding our own business, when she sort of popped out from behind a tree. It was almost like she wa
nted to scare us. Nearly gave us both a heart attack.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Gran. ‘How horrible for you both. She really is the nastiest, most difficult person …’ She pursed her lips. ‘If she deliberately scared you then I suppose I should really – one of us should really go and speak to her about it …’ She tailed off, clearly not relishing the prospect of such a confrontation. I felt sorry for her, and said:
‘Don’t worry, Gran. There’s no need to do that. Is there, Ali?’
I looked to my friend for confirmation but all she said was: ‘Where does she live?’
‘There’s a tiny little road,’ said Gran, starting to rinse the biscuit plates under the hot tap, ‘which runs off Newbegin. It’s called Needless Alley, because it doesn’t go anywhere. That’s where Mrs Bates used to live. And when she died, she left the house to Miss Barton.’
‘Why did she do that, I wonder?’
‘Yes, a lot of people wondered that,’ said Gran. ‘In fact, they did more than wonder about it. They got very angry about it, which was a bit stupid of them.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Because it was none of their business really, was it?’
‘Exactly. But people can be very … judgemental.’
‘What’s the number of the house?’ Alison asked. She was trying to sound casual but I could tell there was some secret purpose behind these questions.
‘I can’t remember, offhand,’ said Gran. ‘But you can’t miss it. It’s the one that’s covered in ivy and laurel bushes and goodness knows what, and the whole thing is covered in netting and behind that she keeps birds.’
‘Birds?’
‘Oh yes. A regular aviary, it is. Budgerigars and canaries and all sorts.’
‘No kestrels?’ I asked hopefully.
‘No, she doesn’t have a kestrel any more. I don’t know what became of it.’
It seemed that we had exhausted Gran’s knowledge of this topic now, but in the process she had stretched our curiosity to breaking point. When we went upstairs to discuss our plans for the rest of the day, I knew exactly what Alison was going to suggest.
