“I was thinking of Venice,” said Harry. “We’d probably have gone back there one day.”
“Yes,” said Esther doubtfully.
“And we never saw Paris. Paris is lovely. We could have gone up the Eiffel Tower. And that’s just Europe. We could have gone to America too.”
“I didn’t need to go anywhere,” Esther told him. “You know that, don’t you? I’d have been just as happy at home, so long as you were there with me.”
“I know,” he said.
“There’s so much I wanted to share with you,” she said. “My whole life. My whole life. When I was working at the shop, if anything funny happened during the day, I’d store it up to tell you. I’d just think, I can share that now. Share it with my hubby. And we’ve been robbed. We were given one year. Just one year. And I wanted forever.”
“Safari parks,” remembered Harry.
“What?”
“We never did a safari park either.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
Her eyes watered, they were all wide and Disney-dewed. “I want you to remember me the right way,” she said. “Not covered with blood. Not mangled in a car crash. Remember me the way I was. Funny, I hope. Full of life. I don’t want you to spoil the memory.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to move on. Live your life without me. Have the courage to do that.”
“Yes. You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
She didn’t deny it. “All the things we could have done together. All the children we could have had.” And she gestured towards the single cherub now bobbing weakly against the window. “All the children.”
“Our children,” said Harry.
“Heaven is filled with our unborn children,” said Esther. “Yours and mine. Yours and mine. Darling. Didn’t you know that?” And her wings quivered at the thought.
She bent her head towards him again – but not yet, still not yet, another kiss, that’s all, a loving kiss. “It won’t be so bad,” she said. “I promise. It itches at first, it itches like hell. But it stops. And then you’ll be as light as air. As light as feathers.”
She folded her wings with a tight snap. “I’m still getting used to that,” she smiled. And she climbed off him, and sprawled back in her seat. The neck twisted, the limbs every which way – really, so ungainly. And she went to sleep. She’d taken to sleeping with her eyes open. Harry really wished she wouldn’t, it gave him the creeps.
Another set of tappings at the window. Harry looked around in irritation. There was the last cherub. Mewling at him, rubbing his belly. Harry liked to think it was the same cherub that he’d first seen, that it had been loyal to him somehow. But of course, there was really no way to tell. Tapping again, begging. So hungry. “Daddy,” said the Sat Nav.
“My son,” said Harry.
“Daddy.”
“My son.”
Harry wound down the window a little way. And immediately the little boy got excited, started scrabbling through the gap with his fingers. “Just a minute,” said Harry, and he laughed even – and he gave the handle another turn, and the effort made him wince with the pain, but what was that, he was used to that. “Easy does it,” he said to the hungry child. “Easy does it.” And he stuck his hand out of the car.
The first instinct of his baby son was not to bite, it was to nuzzle. It rubbed its face against Harry’s hand, and it even purred, it was something like a purr. It was a good five seconds at least before it sank its fangs into flesh.
And then Harry had his hand around its throat. The cherub gave a little gulp of surprise. “Daddy?” asked the Sat Nav. It blinked with astonishment, just as it had echoed Harry’s own expressions when they’d first met, and Harry thought, I taught him that, I taught my little boy. And he squeezed hard. The fat little cheeks bulged even fatter, it looked as if the whole head was now a balloon about to pop. And then he pulled that little child to him as fast as he could – banging his head against the glass, thump, thump, thump, and the pain in his arm was appalling, but that was good, he liked the pain, he wanted it – thump one more time, and there was a crack, something broke, and the Sat Nav said “Daddy,” so calm, so matter-of-fact – and then never spoke again.
He wound the window down further. He pulled in his broken baby boy.
He discovered that its entire back was covered with the same feathers that made up the wings. So for the next half-hour he had to pluck it.
The first bite was the hardest. Then it all got a lot easier.
“Darling,” he said to Esther, but she wouldn’t wake up. “Darling, I’ve got dinner for you.” He hated the way she slept with her eyes open, just staring out sightless like that. And it wasn’t her face any more, it was the face of a cherub, of their dead son. “Please, you must eat this,” he said, and put a little of the creamy white meat between her lips; it just fell out on to her chin. “Please,” he said again, and this time it worked, it stayed in, she didn’t wake up, but it stayed in, she was eating, that was the main thing.
He kissed her then, on the lips. And he tasted what would have been. And yes, they would have gone to a safari park, and no, they wouldn’t have gone back to Venice, she’d have talked him out of it, but yes, America would have been all right. And yes, they would have had rows, real rows, once in a while, but that would have been okay, the marriage would have survived, it would all have been okay. And yes, children, yes.
When he pulled his lips from hers she’d been given her old face back. He was so relieved he felt like crying. Then he realised he already was.
The meat had revived him. Raw as it was, it was the best he had ever tasted. He could do anything. Nothing could stop him now.
He forced his legs free from under the dashboard, it hurt a lot. And then he undid his seatbelt, and that hurt too. He climbed his way to Esther’s door, he had to climb over Esther, “Sorry, darling,” he said, as he accidentally kicked her head. He opened the door. He fell outside. He took in breaths of air.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said to Esther. “I can see the life we’re going to have together.” And yes, her head was on a bit funny, but he could live with that. And she had wings, but he could pluck them. He could pluck them as he had his son’s.
He probably had some broken bones, he’d have to find out. So he shouldn’t have been able to pick up his wife in his arms. But her wings helped, she was so light.
And it was carrying Esther that he made his way up the embankment, up through the bushes and brambles, up towards the road. And it was easy, it was as if he were floating – he was with the woman he loved, and he always would be, he’d never let her go, and she was so light, she was as light as feathers, she was as light as air.
JOEL LANE
Black Country
JOEL LANE LIVES IN Birmingham, England, and works as a journalist. His contributions to the supernatural horror genre includes three collections of short stories, The Earth Wire, The Lost District and The Terrible Changes; a novella, The Witnesses are Gone, and a chapbook, Black Country. He has also written two mainstream novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask, and three collections of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland and The Autumn Myth. Forthcoming projects include a short booklet of crime stories, Do Not Pass Go.
Lane has also edited an anthology of subterranean horror stories, Beneath the Ground, co-edited (with Steve Bishop) the crime fiction anthology Birmingham Noir, and co-edited (with Allyson Bird) an anthology of anti-fascist and anti-racist stories in the weird and speculative fiction genres, Never Again.
“‘Black Country’ is one of a sequence of weird crime stories set in the West Midlands that I’ve been working on for years,” says the author. “A collection of them is forthcoming with the title Where Furnaces Burn. ‘Black Country’ is also a sequel to my earlier story ‘The Lost District’, which describes another narrator’s experience of Clayheath.
“I’d like to thank The Nighting
ales and Gul Y. Davis, whose words influenced this story. It was originally published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, with an enigmatic cover illustration by Birmingham photographer Trav28.”
And time would prove the weapon
His crime would be to breathe the air
He would stain the sheets of the Black Country
—The Nightingales
CLAYHEATH, THE TOWN I was born in, is no longer on the map. We moved to Walsall when I was nine, and I never felt like going back. I vaguely knew that it had become a district, and that its boundaries had changed. Then it just ceased to exist as a distinct place, so that by the early 1990s it had been absorbed into the Black Country landscape somewhere between Netherton and Lye. The mixture of redevelopment and dereliction had gradually erased it. Even local people I knew seemed to disagree about where it was. Perhaps they weren’t local enough.
In the late 1990s, my superintendent at the Acocks Green station passed on to me some case notes about an outbreak of juvenile crime in a part of Dudley. Perhaps he thought the stranger aspects of the case would interest me; I was already getting a reputation as the Fox Mulder of the West Midlands police force. A mention of the waste ground near the swimming baths struck a chord in my memory, and I found a couple of the streets named in the report in the A–Z map. Another street wasn’t there, however, and it was hard to relate the map to the place I half-remembered. Perhaps it only sounded like Clayheath because I wanted it to.
Something’s got into the children was the best the DS at the Netherton station could manage by way of an explanation, while the only adult witness to any of the crimes had offered the comment “Must be something in the water round here making them yampy.” To which the helpful DS had appended a note: This means insane, unpredictable or violent. I remembered the word from my childhood – in fact, it had probably been applied to me on a few occasions. I couldn’t remember much about those days, which was fine by me.
To start with, the local primary school had reported a series of unexplained injuries to children: facial bruises, a dislocated arm, a broken finger. The children claimed nothing had happened: they’d fallen asleep in bed or on the bus, and woken up having somehow hurt themselves. The school nurse had reported the injuries to the police, who’d made discreet enquiries and learned nothing. The possibility of parental abuse didn’t explain the pattern of similar injuries in children from around the area. One eight-year-old girl had offered the confusing comment: “They all hate me, the others, it was all of them. All of them in one.” Asked to draw her attacker, she’d gone on drawing one face over another until the image was impossible to make out. She’d been referred for psychiatric assessment.
The local toyshop had been broken into via a back window, too small for a normal adult. The cat burglar had escaped before the police could respond to the automatic alarm, taking a random sample of items: toy soldiers, plastic musical instruments, model aircraft, dinosaurs, monsters. A newsagent had been burgled by the unusual process of making a narrow gap in the felt roof, perhaps over several nights. All that had gone was a shelf of comics. Someone had smashed the front window of a hairdresser’s simply in order to spray black paint over a displayed photo of a cute smiling child. The discarded spray-can had the small fingerprints of several individuals, all apparently children.
The name Clayheath didn’t appear in the report, but one of the episodes detailed brought back strong images of place for me. Someone had gone into the swimming baths early on a Sunday morning and dropped a litter of new-born kittens into the water. Around the same time, their mother had been garrotted and hung from a fence at the back of the waste ground nearby. She was the pet of a local family, and had been missing for a week. The murdered cat was seen and reported by a teenage couple on the Sunday evening. During the day, children had been playing football on the same patch of waste ground. They hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the cat. An autopsy found four small metal objects in the cat’s throat: a car, a boot, an iron and a dog, playing pieces from a Monopoly board.
Finally, the same primary school that had seen an epidemic of injuries to pupils was broken into in the early hours of a Monday morning. All the pieces of children’s artwork on the walls had been viciously slashed with a knife. All the mirrors in the school toilets had been smashed. The caretaker, who’d come into the school at seven a.m., claimed to have seen a “scraggy-looking” child of nine or so, moving so fast his face was a blur. “Shaking like he was in a fit, all over, had to keep moving not to collapse. And laughing, or pretending to laugh, like when a kid’s trying to upset another kid. There must have been a few of them because the laughing was everywhere.” The caretaker had since been dismissed for drinking at work, which cast some doubt over the reliability of his account.
I contacted the Netherton station and offered to help out with the investigation, telling them I knew the school and other local places from my own childhood, and might be able to shed some light on what was happening. They agreed to put me up in a local hotel for a couple of days while I looked around. But the more I thought about going back to Clayheath, the less it appealed to me. It felt like going back to nothing – not in a neutral way, but in a way that might suck me back in and draw the life out of me. The night I was packing up, I asked Elaine whether she thought losing memories could actually change the past. She looked into my eyes and said: “You should charge yourself rent.”
Driving to Netherton, I decided to stop off in the area I’d identified as having been part of Clayheath. From the expressway, I could see old factories and terraced streets that reminded me of my childhood. I wondered how much of the past was waiting for me to rediscover it. All I could think of was my own recurring dream of another life in which I was a musician, travelling from one country to another, staying in ancient hotels and meeting beautiful, unattainable women. I found the street where the school was, but it wasn’t my school: it was a small, flattened building not unlike a secure unit. The houses had been replaced by tower blocks and prefabs, while the high street had become a shopping mall. The location of the swimming baths eluded me. I ended up in Netherton an hour late, confused and tired.
DS Richards, a thin man who seemed vaguely ill at ease, took me for lunch at the local pub. “No one seems to know what’s going on,” he said. “It must be a bunch of kids, or maybe a few teenagers who aren’t quite the full shilling. You get the feeling they’re doing it to make a point. To get attention. Maybe they think it’s a joke. We catch them, they’ll find out how funny it is.”
“The place has really changed since I was a kid,” I said. “I’m not even sure it is the right place. What happened to the old school?”
“They shut it down twenty years ago, the building’s gone now. Not enough children. The old town was just dying off. It was called Clayheath in those days. Local people never seemed to be well, probably toxic waste or something. The population fell. It just became . . . well, what you see. A grid reference.”
“It must be difficult living with that sense of a lost community.”
“For the older people, yeah. Not the kids, they take it for granted.”
I swallowed a mouthful of black coffee. It tasted of nothing. “When I offered to help out, I thought I could find where local kids are hiding. Getting up to things. I was that kind of kid too. But I’m not sure those places still exist.”
“Do you want to give us a statement?” Richards asked, then winked. “Only joking, our kid. Don’t look like that. You never know, there might be something we’ve missed. Local team aren’t exactly the FBI, you know.
“It’s a shitty place to live. I don’t blame you for leaving. But don’t start feeling sorry for the little fuckers that are doing these things. What’s important is stopping them before something worse happens.”
The Netherton hotel was quiet and inexpensive, which is what you need for undercover work. A couple of sales reps were talking market access in the bar. Alone in my cell-like room, I pocketed a book of matches (I
didn’t smoke any more, but the memory of 1970s power cuts stayed with me) and switched on the TV to catch the local news. More firms going out of business, more violence on the streets of Dudley; but nothing about juvenile crime. I switched off the set and at once, as if looking through a window into a darkened room, saw my parents sitting on opposite sides of the living-room table, not speaking. And then the narrow bed where I’d curled up with a pillow over my head, night after night, hoping they wouldn’t start. Not knowing what to do when they did. The relief I’d felt when my father got a job that took him away from home most of the week. Then discovering that my parents saved up all their resentments for the weekend. The shouting, the bitter silences, the hours of quiet crying, the times when it became violent. The years of it.
I’d suffered from nightmares and broken sleep, been put on a medication that I’d discovered only quite recently to have been a tricyclic antidepressant known for its side-effects. Yes, I’d got up to stuff. Nothing that would make a play on BBC2, but enough to hide my childhood beyond the view of everyday memory. I’d stolen from shops and other kids, defaced library books and posters, smeared my own shit on the walls of toilet cubicles. In family photos, I used to pull faces and pretend I had a stomach-ache. Throughout junior school and the first year of secondary school, I was a disruptive, friendless, arrogant little sod. My parents knew it, and felt it was their duty to keep telling me. If they ever glimpsed the hopelessness behind it, they didn’t let on. Eventually puberty gripped me and I turned quiet.
Despite being effectively on duty, I went down into the bar and had a pint of real ale. The two reps were swapping accounts of their one-night stands. It still sounded like they were talking about market access. I was grateful for their voices, which covered up the silence in my head. Maybe that’s why heavy metal is so popular in the Black Country. Either that or it evokes some collective memory of the generations of factory work.
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