Dead Branches

by Benjamin Langley

  I continue to drive through, with the old parts of the village starting to show through more and move. I pass Downham Close and slow down as I pass the place where Shaky Jake lived. The whole house is gone now, the foundations grassed over into what should be a pleasant green, but there’s no one enjoying it. Beyond it, on the road where John used to live, I can see a number of For Sale signs. People have given up on this area.

  A little further down the road, I come to a stop outside the old school building. The gates are closed, long since chained together, but behind it the building is still standing.

  “My old school,” I say to Charlie, and nod towards it.

  “What was it like?”

  “Up until year five it was a fun place to be. I liked the teachers. I worked hard. I had good friends.”

  “Then what?”

  “Everything changed. I didn’t go back, but I guess that there were too many ghosts wandering the corridors.”

  Charlie leans closer to the window, staring at the school.

  “Not real ghosts. You know I don’t mean real ghosts, right?”

  “Yes Dad,” says Charlie with a sigh.

  “What is it, Pal?”

  “You always do that.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll talk about a ghost or a monster or a skeleton in the closet and then insist on explaining that it’s not a real ghost, or monster, or skeleton.”

  “I don’t want you getting mixed up, that’s all.”

  “They do teach us about metaphors and similes at school, you know, Dad,” says Charlie with a smile.

  “They taught me too,” I say. “Didn’t stop me getting confused.”

  I pull away from the school, and less than a minute later I’m turning down the drove towards my old house. From the outside it hasn’t changed at all. The house had stood for a couple of hundred years without change, so why would my twenty-year absence make any difference.

  As I pulled up around the back of the house and looked into the field, I saw that there had been one enormous change. Our fields were covered in solar panels.

  The old witch had been right.

  Friday 22nd June 1990

  Iopened the kitchen door and Mum and Dad stopped talking. It was becoming a bad habit.

  “What’s up?” I said, and they looked at each other.

  “You want some breakfast? I can do you some bacon,” Mum said.

  “No thanks. I’ll have some cereal.”

  “Your dog’s missing,” Dad said, and Mum stared at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I let him out for a pee last night, after we got home, but he didn’t come back in.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” He rose up out of his char.

  “Did you look for him?”

  “I gave him a shout this morning.”

  I grabbed my trainers from by the back door and sat at a chair at the kitchen table and pulled them on.

  “We’ll take a look for him later,” Dad said as he sat down again.

  Mum was cutting bread for the bacon sandwich she was making Dad. “You’ve got school. Have some breakfast now and look for him later.”

  “No,” I said and left them at the dinner table. How could they be so calm? Didn’t they care about anything?

  Even though it was early it was already warm, but it wasn’t just the warmth I felt right away, as soon as I was in the open, I could feel my eyes start to itch and the back of my throat felt scratchy. Even the inside of my ears needed a good itch. I tried to get the itchiness out of my head by thinking of the places Chappie would normally lead me to when I took him for a walk. We had a couple of usual routes, but it had been a couple of years since he’d bounded off looking for an adventure or going to sniff at a hole in the ground. I walked out towards Main Street as the worst thing I thought might have happened was that he’s been hit by a car. There was a little bit of traffic going through the village, but it wasn’t too heavy. I looked down the road both ways but couldn’t see any new roadkill. The fox that had been hit a few weeks back was practically flat now, but that was down by the end of the village after the last of the houses where people start to speed up again.

  I crossed over the road and looked down into the ditch. I seemed to be spending a lot of my time staring into ditches recently, even though they all pretty much looked the same, filling up with nettles and no clear sight of the bottom. But if anything had fallen down there, I would have seen it. We never came down onto Main Street on our walks though, so I figured he probably hadn’t come out this way. I walked back past the house just as Dad was coming out.

  “Any sign?” he said.

  I shook my head, “Not yet.”

  “I’ll check the sheds, you take a walk around the back fields, and don’t leave my line of sight.”

  And I thought, what if the tree got him? I looked across to it. The branches were shaking even though there was next to no wind. I looked away quickly, but knew I had to take another look at it. I stared at the ground for a bit, counted to ten then looked up. There was definitely something at the base of the tree. I hurried up the drove, but before I got to the entrance to the field, I realised there was someone standing nearby.

  “Hey, young man.”

  It was Mrs Johnstone. She was in her dressing gown.

  “Hello,” I said, confused by her presence. “What are you doing here?”

  “One day, you’ll be farmers of the sun,” she said.

  I saw someone running down the drove towards us.

  “Have you seen my dog?” I asked.

  “You’ll find him dead,” she said.

  “Mum!” came a shout from the drove. The man running towards us must have been her son.

  “Won’t be the only one to die!” she said, leaning close to me.

  The man arrived. Out of breath, he grabbed his mum’s hand. “Come on, Mum. You’re not supposed to wander off alone.”

  He started to lead her off, then turned back to mouth ‘thank you’ to me.

  I didn’t have time to worry about whether Chappie was dead, as I heard a whimper. I listened. It seemed to be coming from the ditch on the left, it sounded like the noises Chappie made when he was asleep, and I always figured he was probably having a dream or something. I looked down and could see him curled up at the bottom of the ditch with flattened nettles all around him.

  “Chappie!” I called, and he looked up. He tried to struggle onto his feet, and after a few seconds he managed to get into a more upright position. I slid down into the ditch beside him, flattening more nettles so they didn’t sneak up my trouser legs and cover me in stings. He was breathing heavily but seemed to be comforted when I stroked the top of his head. He licked at my wrist, and when he seemed more comfortable, I put my arms underneath him and lifted him up. He felt so light and it was easy to plonk him down just out of the ditch. I didn’t even notice that my hands had been in stinging nettles until I glanced down and saw how blotchy they were.

  Chappie was okay walking back to the house, even though he was slower than usual.

  “Found him then?” Dad said from the shed. He had his overalls on and already started work on one of the farm vehicles. So much for helping me look for Chappie. I didn’t expect him to, but he followed us back to the house.

  “There he is!” Mum said as we walked it, and it annoyed me, as she acted if he’d wandered back himself and she was the first to notice. He went straight to his bed and curled up into a ball.

  “Is he all right?” I said, looking at Mum, then Dad, not knowing if either would give me an answer.

  “He’s getting old, that’s all,” Dad said.

  “Let him have a rest and we’ll see how he is later,” Mum said. Then she must have caught sight of my hands, “Oh look at you! You must have got stung. Let me put some lotion on it.”

  She got this slightly purplish bottle of liquid out of the pantry and a bag of cotton wool balls and insisted
in covering my hands in the goop.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “it must be a bad sting. The skin’s peeling.”

  Dad had already gone back out again by this point, but I didn’t feel like telling her that the only reason the skin on my hand was peeling was because Dad had burnt them the other day as I got the feeling that she’d tell me not to be daft even though she was right there and saw him do it.

  When I arrived at school Liam was excitedly hopping from foot to foot.

  “What’s up with you?” I said.

  “You know you said we should keep our ears open?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guess what I heard Mr Inglehart talking about in his office.”

  “What were you doing in his office?”

  “Nothing, I was crouched down outside the window. Guess what I heard him talking about?”

  “Who was he talking to?”

  “I don’t know. Now guess what I heard them talking about!”

  “Why were you crouched under his window?”

  “Tom! Guess!”

  “I don’t know. A school trip?”

  “No.”

  “I give up.”

  “No, guess.”

  “Mrs Palmer’s stick insects.”

  “Now you’re being silly. Guess properly.”

  “I don’t know, Liam. Tell me.”

  Liam stopped hopping from side to side, leaned in close, and whispered, “Transition.”

  Will, who had been listening patiently so far, rolled his eyes and walked away, calling, “See you losers later.”

  “I’m not a loser. You’re a loser!” cried Liam, triumphantly, and then turned his attention back to me. “So, what are we going to do about it?”

  “What exactly did you hear?”

  “Well I don’t remember what they said exactly.”

  “What did they say, roughly?”

  “Something about having to move on with the next stage of transition before it was too late, and how they couldn’t let the current situation stop them from moving forward with year six.”

  “Will’s in year six.”

  “We’ve got to warn him.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before he left?”

  “He called me a loser! I got confused!”

  “Come on; let’s go.”

  Mr Inglehart appeared at the door and started calling pupils in for the start of the school day.

  “What are we gonna do now?” asked Liam.

  “If we run to his classroom, we might be able to get to him in time.”

  Liam sped off first, and I followed behind. Mr Inglehart was talking to a couple of girls in our class, so he didn’t seem bothered by us going in in such a hurry. We were in the corridor and heading for Will’s classroom when the door to the caretaker’s cupboard swung open. Liam had to swerve out of the way, and his legs collided with mine. We both fell in a heap.

  “That’s why we tell you not to run in the corridors. We say it again, and again, but nobody listens until someone gets hurt.”

  I looked up to see Mr Jenkins standing over us, holding his mop as a Neanderthal might have held a spear. His eyebrows now seemed to meet in the middle, and his beard was thicker and more menacing.

  I untangled my limbs from Liam’s and scooted away from Mr Jenkins on my bottom.

  “Go on,” said Mr Jenkins. “Get up. Don’t tell me you’ve broken something. That’s the last thing we want to be dealing with right now.”

  Liam and I awkwardly stood and started to move away.

  “Hold on just a minute. Someone needs to give you two a serious talking to. What if one of the infants had been in the corridor? You could have knocked them down, and they might have cracked their skull. We can’t be having that, can we?”

  “No, Mr Jenkins,” Liam and I said in unison, and started to walk away.

  Again, Mr Jenkins stopped us, lifting the mop slightly as a barrier. “What else?”

  “Sorry, Mr Jenkins.”

  “That’s better. Now off you go.” He still held up the mop as a barrier. “And remember, your classroom’s that way.” He nodded with his head, pointing towards the corridor which led to Mrs Palmer’s classroom.

  We had no choice but to take that path.

  Mrs Palmer urged us in from the doorway to her classroom and gave us a bit of a telling off for running late. She told us to sit down, and then she did the register, and told us to get our P.E. kits on.

  “What are we gonna do?” asked Liam in one of his noisy whispers.

  “Right,” said Mrs Palmer. “Tom, you change in that corner.” She pointed to the area by the sink, near to where the stick insects were kept. “And Liam, you go to that corner.” She was pointing at the book corner where the comfy beanbags were.

  The class changed in silent, and soon were we out on the field laying out cones to make lanes for a relay race. I had managed to sneak back over to Liam, and we were dropping cones out together when I looked up and saw Will, and the rest of his class, heading across the playground and towards the school gates.

  “Look,” I said to Liam, and nodded towards them, with one eye on Mrs Palmer.

  Liam was less discreet. “Will!” he shouted.

  “I’ve had enough of you two already today,” cried Mrs Palmer. A vein was bulging in her neck. She never got angry. “You’re going to sit out this activity, and you’ll be spending break-time with me too.” She split us again quickly, pointing to spots on either side of the field where we were to sit in silence, facing away from each other.

  As I sat alone, looking at the horses in the neighbouring field I wondered why Mrs Palmer was so edgy today. Maybe she was nervous about whatever plan the school had for the year six class and Will. I tried not to think about what might be happening to them. Were they being beamed onto the spaceship, one at a time, ready to be strapped into the alien machines to have their brains wiped? Maybe Will would be too smart for them and would have fled before they were able to start the transition process. And if Will had escaped, maybe he would be able to sneak aboard the alien ship, and free the rest of the class. He could come face to face with the alien master and use his strength and wits to defeat him and save the entire planet. He had, after all, been sneaking his penknife to school since John went missing. I kept looking to the sky, waiting for the inevitable explosion, but perhaps defeating the aliens was taking rather a long time, as Mrs Palmer called us back in before there was any activity.

  Until break time Mrs Palmer had us working on maths problems using long division. She had brought both Liam and me to the front, but on opposite ends of the row, so we couldn’t talk to each other. While we were working silently, she kept looking at different documents on her desk, and she was scratching a spot over her right ear frequently.

  Eventually break-time came, and Mrs Palmer released the rest of the class. Once their noise had disappeared from the corridor, she looked at each of us, and then sighed. “What has gotten into you boys today?”

  Liam looked nervous. He was tugging at a bit of loose skin by one of his fingers. I could tell that he was desperate to put it into his mouth and tear it free.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Palmer,” I said, looking down at the desk.

  “Sorry only works if you mean it. You can’t start chatting again mid-lesson just because it takes your fancy.”

  “We were worried about Will, Miss,” Liam said.

  I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want Liam to expose what we already knew, which would put ourselves at risk.

  “Tom’s brother?”

  “Yes, Mrs Palmer,” I said.

  “What do you have to be worried about? Is he not well?”

  I looked up. “We saw his class go off somewhere, that’s all.” I looked over at Liam, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring intently at Mrs Palmer.

  “Where are you taking them?” he said in a voice which I think was supposed to be menacing, but it made him sound dumb.

  “They�
�re at Methwold High School for an induction day. Didn’t your brother tell you, Tom?”

  “He must have forgot,” I said.

  “In a month’s time he’ll be finished here, and then in September he’ll be at Methwold High School, and you two will be year sixes, where we don’t expect any chatter whatsoever.”

  I had one more question to ask. If she was ever going to tear off her human flesh disguise and devour us both, this was the question that was going to prompt it. “What’s transition?” I said and shuddered.

  “Transition? As in transition from primary school to secondary? It’s days like today when Will gets to have a look around the secondary school he’s going to.”

  I nodded. I looked over at Liam whose face was screwed up and reddening.

  “I’m not going to have you two sitting around when you’re on detention,” said Mrs Palmer as she stood up. “Go sharpen all of my pencils.”

  “How do we know she’s telling the truth?” Liam said at lunch time while shoving the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth.

  We were sitting under the shade of one of the trees on the edge of the field updating Andy on what had happened that morning. He’d been particularly worried because he hadn’t seen us at break and thought we may have been eaten by a teacher. He even went as far as peering into the window of our classroom, risking a telling off from Mr Inglehart and being dubbed a ‘Nosey-Parker’, to find out where we were.

  “I used my Turtle Power to stay hidden though,” Andy said, with a smug grin. “So, do you think Mrs Palmer was telling the truth?”

  “We’ll know when Will comes back.”

  “If he comes back.”

  “Don’t say that, Liam; he’s coming back.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Liam stood up. “We’ve been talking about what happened to John, and before you all agreed that aliens might have taken them away, and we found all that proof of it, so why do you believe Mrs Palmer and not me?”