“I’m sorry for what happened,” I heard Mum say, and her voice sounded close, the other side of the door, so I assumed it was her leaning against it, “But you have to go, now.”
“Tom,” said the voice again. It was a woman’s voice, that’s all I knew.
“Hello?” I said.
“Tom, it’s me,” said the voice. It didn’t help.
“Mum, let me in,” I said. “Who is it?”
“It’s Barbara. Mrs Glover… John’s mum.”
I felt Mum’s weight shift away from the door, so I opened it and went into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Mum then at me, “but I had to come.”
She looked so different. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and her hair was scruffy and limp. She was wearing an old t-shirt which was so long it almost came down to her knees and there were a few stains on it, like she’d spilt something and mopped most of it off.
“Can you show me where you found him?” she said.
Mum came between us. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I understood why John’s mum would want to see where he was, and it felt right to take her back there.
“I didn’t get to see him until he was at the mortuary. We had to identify the body, even though we all knew it would be him,” said John’s mum as we walked across the yard and up onto the drove.
Dad glared at us from the yard. I watched him march inside as we followed the track along the drove to the point in the ditch where I’d found John.
Mrs Glover had heels on, and she put her hand out for support as she struggled across the mud, so I helped guide her between the rows of potato plants.
As we got a close a gust of wind came from nowhere, and John’s mum gasped.
I turned to face the wind and found myself glaring at the tree. I swear the shape of its mouth, the big scorch mark on it that looked like a mouth, had changed, like it had turned up at the corners into a laugh.
We couldn’t get close, as the police had put tape all around the area, but we moved to the edge of it. “He was there,” I said, and pointed into the ditch.
John’s mum put a hand over her mouth. I tried not to look at her as she did that silent crying thing where the shoulders bob up and down. I didn’t know what to say.
“Did he look… peaceful?” she said.
“He did,” I said, and it was true. Yes, he looked as though something terrible had happened to him, but there was no terror on his face, the only thing that was remarkable about it was the lack of emotion, and I guess that’s what peace is all about.
“Why?” she said and buried her face in her hands. “What kind of monster could have done that?”
I hadn’t heard him approach, but then Dad was there. He put a hand on my shoulder, and then nodded towards the house, so I slowly walked away. I turned back and Dad was hugging John’s mum. I hurried back to the house.
I had an urgent need to beat Super Mario Bros. Luckily Will wasn’t already playing. He was sitting on his bed cheating at his Fighting Fantasy book again. So as the Nintendo Entertainment System was free, I could play it all I liked. Will didn’t even look up as I ejected Punch Out and put in Mario. He didn’t notice me speed through the first few worlds or using the shortcut. He knew all about the first one, where you could skip all of the way from world 1-2 to world 4-1 by running all of the way across the top of the screen to get to the Warp Zone, but he didn’t know about skipping from World 4-2 all the way to 8-1. John had showed me this when he came over to play one day when Will was late back because he had a school trip with his class to a museum in Cambridge. To skip from 4-2 to 8-1 you had to find a hidden beanstalk which carried you back up to the top of the screen where you can run to another Warp Zone. World 8-1 is tough because there are so many bad guys and really tough jumps. For the first time ever, I did it without losing a life. I lost a life on world 8-2, due to that stupid cloud that throws out the red spiky things. I hate them! I’m sure I heard Will snort when he heard Mario’s death tune, but when I looked round his nose was still buried in the book, with his fingers saving at least two other pages. Even though one of the red things got me I was lucky not to get taken out by the big bullets that get fired across the screen. They normally had me beat and I’d only ever finished the level once before.
When I did get to world 8-3 before it was the Hammer Bros that got me, but this time I ran right under them. That was one of John’s tips, telling me that I didn’t have to beat every bad guy, just get to the end of each level. There were loads of hammer guys on the level though, some you couldn’t run under unless you timed the jumps right, but I did that and was soon through them and onto the last level. Right from the start I mis-pressed the D-pad and fell in the first pool of lava. I was down to my last life and never thought I’d do it. Somehow the flying fish kept launching directly underneath me and dying as they hit my feet, when normally they’d fly at my head and kill me. Even the jellyfish seemed to be swimming away from me instead of towards me.
Then there was Bowser. He was throwing out so many hammers I didn’t think it was possible. And when he jumped in the air, there surely wasn’t time to run underneath him. The music changed, warning me I was running out of time, so I went for it. As he came forward there was a gap in the hammer stream and I closed my eyes, pushed forward and jumped. I don’t know how he missed me. I was expecting to hear the death noise, but instead it was the sound of the bridge falling away. Even as Mario went into the next room, I kept expecting a little mushroom guy to tell me that my princess was in another castle, but she wasn’t, she was right there in front of me. THANK YOU, MARIO! YOUR QUEST IS OVER. It said. I’d done it. I turned to get Will’s attention, but he was watching anyway.
“Well done, bro,” he said.
Will put the football on a little later, but neither of us were watching. It was Cameroon versus Colombia. When the score flashed on the screen at the thirty-minute mark I realised I’d not taken a single bit of it in.
“Remember when John got us all to play as Cameroon?” Will said.
I did. It was on the first Monday we were at school after the World Cup started, the day before he went missing. It was the last normal day we’d had. “He’d be cheering on Cameroon now, wouldn’t he?”
We started cheering on Cameroon. A goal soon came in extra time. Me and Will high-fived when Roger Milla put Cameroon in front. Then the funniest thing happened. The Colombian goalkeeper made a massive mistake. He was playing the sweeper-keeper and hanging around half-way between the goal and the halfway line. When a player passed it back to him, he mis-controlled it and Roger Milla took the ball off him. As he was all the way out of goal Milla could just dribble up to the 18-yard line then score from there with no one in the way to stop him.
John would have loved that. A tear trickled down my cheek as they showed another replay.
Even though Colombia scored a goal to make it 2-1, Cameroon held on till the end to make it through to the quarterfinals. Will got up and put their name on his wall chart.
“If England beat Belgium on Tuesday,” Will said, “they’ll have to play Cameroon.”
NOW
“Hullo!” comes a shout from the shed as Charlie and I walk towards the back door of my old house. I turned to see a portly man dressed in the kind of clothes that my dad used to wear, the kind of clothes that you seemingly don’t see outside of Fenland farms or Sunday evening dramas on ITV. A checked shirt is tucked into shapeless beige trousers that are held up with suspenders. As he approaches, he rubs his hands on his thighs, adding another layer of grime to them. A grin spreads across his familiar face, and his cheeks begin to redden. Following behind him is a young boy, dressed in near-identical clothes.
“Liam!” I shout, “where’s Dad?”
“Where he’s been the last month. In bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, Tom.”
“Have the police been here?”
“No. You’re here now. You can relax. What’s got you so wound up?”
I tell him about the police car and the missing girl, and the boy beside him looks up at us.
“That’s Jessica Matthews,” says the boy.
“Who’s this?” I say, smiling at the child.
“This is my boy, Billy,” says Liam. He ruffles Billy’s hair.
“I didn’t know you had a son.”
“Yeah, was married for a bit, but that didn’t work out. Now Billy comes to stay with me every other weekend, ain’t that right, boy?” he strokes Billy’s hair.
“What were you saying about the girl, Billy?” I ask.
Billy pulls a phone out of his pocket. It’s significantly newer and more expensive than mine. “Saw something on Facebook. Her mum was asking if anyone had seen her.”
“No need to worry yourself about that son,” says Liam.
“That’s the kind of thing they said to us, remember?”
Liam looks at me, puzzled.
“When John was missing, that’s what our parents said, ‘there’s nothing to worry about’, only there was, wasn’t there?”
Liam pulled Billy close to him. “You’ll scare him,” he says.
“Maybe he should be scared.”
“Billy,” says Liam, bending down to talk to the boy, “why don’t you take…” he turns to look at my son, “Charlie, isn’t it?” Charlie nods and Liam continues, “Why don’t you talk Charlie to see the tractor we’ve been working on?”
Billy practically jumps with excitement and grabs a less-enthusiastic Charlie by the hand. “If our Dads are cousins,” says Billy, “does that make us cousins too?”
Once they’re out of earshot I lean in close to Liam. “Can’t you see? It’s happening again, and we’re making the same mistakes that they did!”
Liam shakes his head. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and mops some of the sweat from his brow.
“What are you talking about?”
“Our parents used to send us away when they wanted to talk. Don’t you remember all of the whispering? Drove us near crazy?”
“We got caught up in the excitement of it all, that’s all. That’s what kids are supposed to do.”
“You can’t keep lying to them.”
“What would you do then, Tom, warn them of every possible danger out there, have them worried stiff all the bloody time?”
“Yes. It’s what I do. Charlie knows the risks, and he knows the probabilities of them happening too.”
“Some childhood that is.”
“At least he’ll have one,” I say.
Liam shakes his head. “How come you never took any of my calls?” he asks.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t deal with anything that was going on here.”
“We could have got your Dad’s conviction squashed if you’d have come forward.”
Somehow, I resist the urge to correct him. Nothing I could have said would have made my Dad look better, not after what I saw.
Sunday 24th June 1990
After breakfast, Will was dragged out with dad to help stacking the hay bales. While I was relieved that I’d gotten out of it, I also had this horrible feeling because I’d not been asked to help, and it was like I was not good enough.
“Your dad and me think it’ll be best if you rest today, and get ready to go back to school tomorrow,” Mum had said, and she’d then urged me to go back to my room.
I took advantage of the time and picked up The Secret of the Scythe for another play through. With reasonable dice rolls I felt confident that I’d be able to make my way through the game a little better than before. I avoided the witches house, tackled all of the monsters on the way to the Underworld, and then found myself in front of a grotesque living tree. I had to roll a die to test my luck, and unfortunately, I was not lucky, which meant that the tree had tied my legs together with its roots. This meant that I was taking double damage every time it attacked me. I was strong enough to get through it though. I rolled the dice for a strong attack, but one of them hit the corner of the book and bounced off awkwardly under the end of the bed.
As I was crouching down to recover it there was a knock on the door. I thought Mum was in the utility room, because she’d had a basket full of washing with her earlier, but I couldn’t hear her go to answer the door, so after a second impatient knock on the door, I went downstairs.
On the stairs, I could hear the washing machine rumbling, and Mum whistling happily to herself. She was deaf to all else outside of that room when the washing machine was clanking away.
I started to think about who could be at the door, and I hoped it was Granddad, but when I opened it, I was disappointed to find this really cheesy looking man standing there with his hair all swooshed over to one side. He had a camera in his hands, and he was holding a little tape recorded.
“Are you Thomas Tilbrook?” he said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m looking for Thomas Tilbrook. It really is rather important that I talk to him.”
“What about?”
“Are you Thomas Tilbrook?”
“Might be.” There was something about the way he asked questions that made me not want to answer him.
“Listen, if you are Thomas Tilbrook, would you mind answering some questions for me?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Joseph Price.”
“And what do you want?”
“I need to speak to Thomas Tilbrook, who I’m assuming is you. Am I right?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m a journalist. I work for the Daily Report. Have you heard of us?”
I’d seen the paper in the post office but had never read it. Most of the headlines on the front page were stupid, and they normally had a woman in a bra and knickers on the front too. Liam liked to point and laugh at it when we went in for penny sweets. “Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Will you answer a few questions for me about John Glover?”
“No.”
“I can pay you.”
“No.”
“Surely a young man like yourself could think of something to do with one-hundred pounds.”
I was tempted, I’d be able to buy enough stickers to complete the World Cup album and a new game too. Maybe enough left over for the next Fighting Fantasy book, but I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Go away,” I said and tried to push the door closed, but he’d put his foot in the way.
“Mum,” I called out, but I could hear the washing machine clunking away, and thought she hadn’t heard me.
“Who’s this?” I looked up and Dad was standing behind the reporter.
“He won’t go away,” I said.
“We’ll see about that.” Dad put his hand around the back of his neck. Dad had huge hands. I could see his sausage fingers clearly on either side of Joseph’s neck.
“I wanted to speak to your son about what happened here, Mr Tilbrook.”
Dad spun him around with his hand then let him go, only to grab him again by the neck from the front.
“There could be a significant sum of money in it for you, Sir.”
“If I ever see you around here again, I will throttle you, understand?” Dad lifted him off the ground and threw him back.
He landed on his bum. He sat up and blew some dust off of his camera. “I could sue you for that,” he said in a croaky voice. He brought his hand up to his neck and gave it a rub.
“You better get off my land quick sharp or you’ll have a bloody lot more to sue me for.”
Joseph was slow getting to his feet until Dad jerked his body towards him then he scrambled up and set off into a run.
“What did you let him in for?” Dad said.
“I didn’t. He came to the door. I didn’t know who he was.”
“Where’s your mum?”
She must have heard the commotion because, all of a sudden,
she was there with an empty wash basket by her side.
“Where were you?” Dad said.
“What’s the matter?”
“This daft boy of ours was about to go tell all of our bloody secrets to some soppy reporter. Bloody ghoul.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said. What did he mean by ghoul? I wanted to ask, but with him it was impossible.
“I saw you standing in the door talking to him.”
“I was trying to close the door. He had his foot in it.”
“You shouldn’t have opened it to him in the first place.”
There was no way to win an argument with him. I turned away and headed upstairs.
“Go on, then, run off,” I could hear him say, “Go and cry up in your room.” And as soon as he said that I couldn’t help but do anything else.
Looking out of the window, I saw Dad go trundling off in the tractor, with Will sat beside him. I watched them go along the drove until they were out of site behind the elderberry bushes. As I was about to move away from the window, I spotted something else. Walking along the drove that ran closest to the house, near to the place where I’d found John there was a man. I leaned in closer to the window. It was Shaky Jake, and he seemed to be peering into the ditches, looking for something right next to the police tape.
I ran downstairs and grabbed Chappie’s lead. Reluctantly the dog clambered out of his basket. “I’m taking Chappie for a walk,” I yelled, but I don’t know if Mum was close enough to hear us.
I moved as quickly as Chappie would allow. We followed the path from the farm onto the drove – the same way that Dad had just taken the tractor, but when we hit the drove, we went the other way, towards the spot where I’d found John.
Shaky Jake was still there. He was wearing some horrible faded green trousers, and he kept rubbing his hands on the side of them, as if they were covered in some disgusting sticky substance that he couldn’t get off. Even though it was hot he had a blue jumper on. When he turned to look at me, I realised that he was wearing nothing under the jumper, as a load of curly black hairs sprouted out of the gap in the v-shaped neck.
Dead Branches Page 16
