Dead Branches

by Benjamin Langley

  “’ello,” he said, wiping his hands again on his trouser leg.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just going for a walk. I like going for walks around here.”

  “What are you looking for?” I said. I let a little of Chappie’s lead out, intending for the dog to take a step closer to Shaky Jake to scare him, but Chappie remained still.

  “I heard about that poor boy,” said Jake. His head kept bobbing forward as he said it. It was like he was trying to swallow a boiled sweet hole.

  I shook Chappie’s lead, trying to urge some action from him. He rolled onto his side and exhaled loudly.

  “I wis jus’ lookin’ for clues,” said Shaky. “I wanted to help out.”

  “Do it somewhere else,” I said. “Before people start thinking you had something to do with it.”

  He shook his head wildly, and then almost jumped up and formed a new pose. His feet shoulder-width apart, his body leant forward and crouched down. One hand moved towards his face and the forefinger straightened, vertical, in front of his perfectly circular lips. “Shush,” he said in an overly dramatic manner before putting his hands on his hips. “There ain’t be no need to go tellin’ tales,” he said, and then thrust a hand into his pocket with such force I thought his hand was going to burst through it.

  From the pocket he pulled a small white packet. “Wanna sweet?” he asked.

  Fisherman’s Friend. No way. “Get out of here,” I said – with Chappie offering none of the required aggression whatsoever.

  First, he took a step towards me, and then turned back the other way. He turned again as if he was going to walk past me before finally deciding to stride off in the other direction.

  I watched him all of the way to the end of the drove, where it met the bypass, and watched him ponder over which way to go before he finally decided to clamber up the bank and walk along the new bypass.

  He was definitely going to need to be watched more closely.

  In the evening there was finally a welcome visitor. Granddad looked much older when he came to the door, and actually seemed to need his stick when he walked, rather than carrying it around as a prop.

  Mum made everyone a cup of tea, even though it was boiling hot and no one could possibly have wanted a hot drink, but they all sat round the table drinking it anyway.

  “It were awful sad to hear that you found your friend,” Granddad said, putting his hand on top of mine as I reached for my squash (there was no way I was drinking tea).

  All I could do was nod.

  “I thought he’d be okay,” he said, and took a gulp of his drink.

  I looked Granddad in the eye and could tell he felt bad about it.

  “Don’t get the boy all worked up,” Dad said. “He’ll be crying his eyes out again if you keep that up.”

  Crap. I was going to cry.

  “Well maybe he should cry. He found the body of his best friend a few minutes from his house. If that ain’t worth crying over I don’t know what is.” Granddad pulled me to him, burying my face into his shoulder.

  I cried, but he was hiding it for me. There was no way Dad was going to see this.

  “Well, I’m gonna goo check on them chickens and shut ‘em up for the night,” Dad said, and when he was gone, Granddad let me go and urged me to sit next to him.

  “It’s alright to be upset,” he said.

  By then I’d stopped sobbing, though I could still feel some silent tears creeping slowly down my face. “It’s not fair,” I said.

  “What is?” asked Granddad. “There ain’t no such thing as fair; we jus’ have to deal with whatever hand it is we’ve been dealt and hope we come out of it better.”

  “Dad makes me feel worse though.”

  “Don’t you worry about him. Tell him if he upsets you, he’s not too big to have his ears boxed.”

  I smiled. I could never imagine saying that to Dad, but the thought of Granddad telling him off and clipping his ear amused me. It felt like the right time to dob him in. “Earlier a man from the newspaper came to the door,” I said, “and Dad told me off because he said I was going to tell him all of our secrets.”

  “Well, you’ve got to be careful around folk like that.”

  “But I wasn’t going to tell him anything. I was trying to get rid of him.”

  “I see. But your Dad never saw that. Fly off the handle, did he?”

  “He threw him out of the door by his neck.”

  “Did he? Well, I imagine he deserved it. Plus, your Dad’s a little bit sensitive when it comes to reporters and the like.”

  Dad? Sensitive? I couldn’t see it.

  Granddad could see my doubt. “It goes back to when he were young. Your Uncle Rodney he… he did something amazing. But there was this one reporter wanted to twist it into something it wasn’t. I reckon the experience of going through that stuck with your dad.”

  I nodded, but I struggled to picture Dad as a child. “Have you got any old pictures of Dad?” I asked. “From when he was around my age?”

  “Reckon I probably do. Swing by after school one day and I’ll see what I can dig out.”

  A few seconds later Dad came back in. He had about six eggs in one hand. “They’re some good layers Rodney found for us,” Dad said.

  And I took that as my cue to disappear to my room for the night.

  Monday 25th June 1990

  “You don’t have to go to school today,” Mum said. “Not if you don’t feel like it.” The smell of lard frying was making me feel sick and the sizzling frying pan seemed to be too loud and the sound buzzed around inside my head like an angry wasp. I couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting around at home all day.

  “I want to go,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve got to get a good breakfast inside you,” Mum said. Luckily Dad was already out so I didn’t have him hassling me as well.

  “Can’t I just have some toast?”

  “Nonsense,” Mum said, “I’m doing eggs and bacon, beans and fried bread. That’ll set you up for the day.”

  Because stuffing myself with food was going to get the picture of John’s face out of my mind. I hadn’t been able to remember it on Sunday for some weird reason, but it was all that was in my head this morning. The purple blotches on his neck had spread so they were like fingers spreading up onto his cheeks and he had dark black circles around his eyes which I didn’t remember seeing so I didn’t know if I was just making it worse in my memory or if it was really like that. In one of my dreams he was sitting up by the tree and branches had bent down and twigs had grown and stretched out around his neck and got tighter and tighter until his eyes popped out, but I know that didn’t really happen because I wouldn’t be uncertain about anything if his eyes had exploded out of his face like in my dream.

  Will was rubbing him tummy at the breakfast table and already had hold of his knife and fork, ready to tuck in. As soon as his plate hit the table, he started shovelling it into his mouth. I cut a tiny bit of egg white and put it in my mouth. When I tried to swallow, I imagined purple fingers around my neck and coughed it back up onto the plate.

  Will looked at me and grinned.

  I took a couple of sips of orange juice and after that I was able to eat a few forkfuls of beans and a bit of bacon. I cut the corner off a bit of fried bread, but when fat oozed out of its centre, I put it back down again.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” I said and took my plate over to the sink, “but we’ve got to get going.”

  “You’ve got plenty of time. Your Aunt Anne’s picking you up, so you can finish your breakfast.”

  I took the plate back to the table and spent a few minutes pushing food around. I managed a bit more of the egg (half white, half yolk forkfuls) and most of the bacon. I wondered if I would be better staying at home, but I could hear Mum singing to herself really quietly as she was wiping down the already clean sink and I wanted to be at school where everything might be normal.<
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  In the car, Liam was quiet. He kept leaning forward, looking at me, opening his mouth and then sitting back again.

  Andy had a lot of questions though. “What did he look like?” “Did he smell bad?” “Was his face all gooey?”

  But every time he got one of these questions out Aunt Anne shushed him and we went back to having to think about it himself. I tried to ignore the sounds inside the car as I looked across the fields and at the houses, we passed on the way to school. It all seemed much smaller - probably because we passed it so quickly in the car compared to when we walk by. There were a lot of cars on the roads, parents dropping off their children, and also so many more mums walking kids to school.

  Aunt Anne leant round from the driver’s seat and took hold of my hand after she pulled up outside the car park. She let Will, Andy and Liam get out and then said, “If anyone says anything that upsets you and you want to go home then go to the office and get them to call me.”

  Liam was waiting outside the car for me. “Sorry about the other day.”

  I’d forgotten all about how badly he’d taken it when his alien transition idea fell to pieces, and how he’d elbowed me in the stomach.

  When we went into the school Mrs Palmer was standing at the entrance. She was sending everyone straight to the hall for an assembly. We never had assemblies on a Monday, but I knew what this one would be about.

  The headmaster was at the front of the hall and kept urging everyone to remain silent as we sat down on the floor in our class rows. When we were all sitting down, he noisily cleared his throat. “Many of you will have heard about the disappearance of John Glover, a pupil in Mrs Palmer’s class. It is with deep sorrow that I have to tell you that John is dead.”

  There were gasps in the room and teachers peered down their class rows to quieten their pupils.

  “John’s body was discovered on Friday, and police investigations are continuing. If anyone has any information that they need to share, please come to my office, or if you just feel that you need someone to talk to about it.” I swear the headmaster was staring directly at me when he said this.

  “We will be planning a memorial service for John, and I encourage you to share any ideas you may have with your teacher. Now if you could all put your hands together and join me as we say the Lord’s Prayer.”

  I’d never paid attention to the words of the Lord’s prayer before, (apart from the end bit being about power and glory, which sounded cool); it was like a chant we did without paying any attention, but this time the line ‘Deliver us from evil’, stood out at me. Surely John hadn’t been delivered from evil? Whatever had killed him must have been evil? Or was the fact that his body came back his being delivered from evil?

  Mrs Palmer tapped me on the shoulder. Everyone had already got up and was in a line to go back to class. I stood up quickly and joined the line, looking only at the floor. I went to class, but I don’t remember what we did up until break - it was all a bit of a blur. I kept staring at John’s drawer and thinking that he’d never be back to clear it out. His pencil case would never be opened again. His books wouldn’t be written in ever again. When it came to break time, people headed out onto the pitch as if everything was exactly the same as it always was, as if he’d left school and we were all supposed to get on as if everything was normal.

  As soon as we got onto the playing field Liam asked me if I was okay. “So, what’s next?” he said.

  “Next?”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  I hadn’t thought about next. In the last week I’d always thought that we’d find John, or if we didn’t then he’d just be back at school all of a sudden and everything would be okay. Finding him like he was that seemed like the end of it, I didn’t get the concept of a next.

  “Don’t we have to find out what happened to him?” Liam said.

  At least we’d be doing something. “Yeah,” I said, “We should do that.” I remember Shaky Jake snooping around the drove.

  “We need to check the cards again to see what other possibilities there are.”

  I nodded but got distracted by Will coming towards me. He was with Chris, from his class and he kept trying to stop him walking towards us. When they were really close, I heard Will say, “Chris, leave it.” But Chris shrugged him off and came over to me.

  “You saw his body,” said Chris.

  I nodded.

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like John.”

  “No, but like was there blood or anything?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Were there worms crawling around his face?”

  “Chris, he said he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Will said, coming between Chris and me.

  “How come he was found on your land?” said Chris, going up on tiptoes to get over Will. “Maybe your dad ran him over on his tractor.”

  Chris kept on talking and I put my hands over my ears and then Will swung back his arm thumped him right in the face. Chris was his friend, maybe even his best friend, but he wasn’t going to let him upset me like that. I think Will would have punched him again, but Mr Inglehart callout out and Chris ran away.

  “Violence will not be tolerated in this school,” Mr Inglehart said when he got closer, and told Will to go with him to his office. Liam followed, shouting about what Chris had said, but the headmaster pretended that Liam wasn’t there.

  Laura came skipping over, with Becky trotting behind her. “Did your brother just punch Chris in the face?”

  “Yes,” he did. I felt proud of the way he’d stuck up for me like that.

  “Why?”

  “He was asking horrible questions about John.”

  “That’s mean. He deserved it then. I heard that you found John?”

  I really didn’t want to talk about it with Laura. I didn’t want to cry in front of her.

  “That’s so terrible. Do you feel okay?”

  I managed a nod, and, fortunately, the bell rang to summon us back into school before it went too far.

  After break Mrs Palmer had us all doing work in our literacy exercise books. She came over to me and said, “So have you had any thoughts about John’s memorial?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, “I don’t know.”

  “We were thinking of planting a tree and putting up a plaque by it. How would you feel about that?”

  John wasn’t really into trees other than climbing them, especially if he’d got a football stuck in one. He did that quite a lot. Then I had an idea. “You know they have that trophy they give out at the end of the year to the person who does best at sports day?” I said, “Could you name that after John?”

  Mrs Palmer nodded. “I think that’s a lovely idea. I’ll tell Mr Inglehart. Now, how are you coping?”

  I shrugged again.

  “It can’t have been very nice to have been the one to find him.”

  “So, what’s… next?” I said.

  “Well after lunch we’re going to do some painting, but if you don’t feel up to it you can sit and read on your own if you like?”

  “Sorry, Miss, I meant what’s next, with John?”

  “In what way?”

  “What happens to his body?”

  “There will be a funeral, and I don’t know if John’s parents have decided if they will bury or cremate him…”

  “But before that, won’t they need to look at the body to work out what happened.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Will they have to cut him open?”

  “I don’t know, Tom, why?”

  “I don’t like the idea of him being cut open. He’s been through enough.”

  “I agree.”

  “Who did it to him?”

  “That’s for the police to investigate,” said Mrs Palmer. She got a tissue from her sleeve and handed it to me. I didn’t even realise I’d been crying.

  At home the kitchen was shining. The tiles on the floor and the kitchen workt
ops were bright and the whole place smelt too clean.

  “How was your day, boys?” Mum said after Aunt Anne dropped us off.

  “Good,” we both said, then Will took the letter out of his bag and slid it across the table where Mum was arranging some flowers.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Letter.”

  “Haven’t you got one, Tom?”

  She looked at the letter than at Will. “Fighting? Whatever is your dad going to say when he sees this?”

  “Chris deserved it.” I said.

  “But I thought Chris was your friend,” Mum said, bending down to look Will in the eye.

  “He was upsetting Tom.”

  “He was asking all of these questions about John,” I said, and then went to the sink to pour myself a glass of water.

  “I see,” Mum said. “But still, we didn’t bring you up to go around thumping boys on the playground.”

  “He said Dad ran John over on his tractor,” Will said.

  “That’s ridiculous! Why would he say something like that? What a horrible child. I’ve got a good mind to have words with his mother.”

  “He was just being stupid, Mum. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s not right, people making up stories like that. He’ll get someone into trouble.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Outside, with the police.”

  “Can we go see what they’re doing?”

  “I suppose so, but don’t interfere.”

  I didn’t want to go out there, but Will practically dragged me. “Don’t you want to find out what happened?” I wasn’t sure if I did. I wasn’t sure if what had actually happened even mattered anymore. It was only fun trying to solve a mystery when there was going to be something good to come from it, like John coming back. There wasn’t going to be anything good from finding out what had happened.

  There were loads of them out there. Dad was with a group at the point where the drove led to the field entrance. We walked close enough to see they had tape measures and stuff. At the top of the bypass there were more policemen, and some were climbing up the bank and pacing out how far it was to the markers they’d put in place where the body was.