The snow fell more heavily now. I could feel through the steering wheel that the old Peugeot sedan didn't want to cleave to the road as well as it had before. Just a slight pause in response. A slipperiness. I slowed down, although it chafed at me. I should have been home hours ago. The girls would be wondering where I was. And there was midnight service at St Martin's to attend to. Ordinarily poor driving conditions on the road that cut through the North Yorkshire Moor causing me to be late, or even to miss a church service, would not be the end of the world. But tonight was Christmas Eve.
Of course I was the one responsible for this. Not the snow, but certainly the inaccessibility of the destination. After June - my wife - died a year ago last September, I had decided a clean break would be best. Like the stern patrician father-figure in any pulp novel, I had gone slightly over board. I like to think I’m always honest with myself; on this occasion, the honesty had come a little late. I should have asked my daughters what they wanted. Not shipped them off to Arncliffe with no thought but to get as far away from the scene of the tragedy as possible. Ripping them away from everything familiar was cruel, even if it was done with good intentions at the time. There were mistakes there that could not be undone. What was it Churchill said? When you're going through hell, the only thing to do is keep going? I snorted.
A shot of adrenaline hit my veins like iced espresso. The car skidded and fishtailed. Without even thinking, I steered into the skid, then away, then back and away again. A series of micro-corrections until the car was once again travelling evenly along the winter road, slick with black ice.
Almost came off there. The thought was idle, although the sudden cold sweat drying on my temples announced that I had experienced some level of fear. It was hard to tell what I felt these days. Had been for several years before June's death - that had only lacquered the hard casing around my emotional responses. Since I left the SAS. Since I joined the clergy. Wasn't sure which one had heralded the end of normal, easy human interaction. Maybe both. Maybe it was nothing to do with either. I slowed down even further. Sod midnight service, if it came to it. I was not leaving my children parentless on Christmas Eve.
The snow was heavy enough that I was sure it would start sticking to the road soon. The hedgerows all wore pale wigs as if in judgement of my past misdemeanours. The head lights on the sedan only shone so far in the whirling white blindness. I clenched my jaw in concentration. There. Movement.
I drove forward at a crawl, foot hovering over the brake pedal, expecting a fox or deer to break for the other side of the road any moment. It was a man. Youngish, bent into the wind, snow collecting on his fatigues and beret. There was a kit bag slung over his back. I didn't have to look for the ‘Excalibur wreathed in flames’ on the sand-coloured beret. I just knew. And there was no way I was leaving a brother officer out walking in this - unless it was some kind of drill. I pulled the car up beside him and wound the passenger side window down.
"Can I offer you a lift somewhere?" I leaned over the passenger seat, so he could hear me over the gale.
He looked at me uncertainly, taking in the dark clothing. His eyes swept over the dog-collar. Some people have a funny reaction to the clergy. "You sure? I'm all over muck from this weather."
"Get in, you daft bugger." It was so easy to slip back into the camaraderie, the looser language of a bygone time. A time of brotherhood and desert nights.
"Alright." A blast of frigid air as the passenger door opened and closed behind him. "Thanks, friend."
I cranked the heat up. "D squad?" His fatigues weren't immediately recognisable. Which should be impossible. There wasn't a belt buckle I wouldn't recognise as regulation or otherwise.
"A scrambler," he confirmed with a grin.
Mountaineering. Made sense. He sounded like a Yorkshire born man. Although his accent was hard to place. A Yorkshire man who'd spent time with Etonians, perhaps.
"You're a fellow Lad, then." He nodded. "I can tell now I'm outta that blizzard. You're…" He eyed me narrowly. "You're special projects."
I surprised myself by chuckling. "Good eye. But that information is classified."
He laughed. "You have the look but I'll keep me gob shut. Retired, is it?"
"For some years now." Scrutiny normally made me uncomfortable, causing me to bark at whoever was doing the eyeballing. But there was nothing about this young man that felt threatening. Seemed a nice lad. Little raw and cheeky for the Blades but he was still a nipper. He'd learn. Must've learnt something already or he'd have washed out. One way or the other. "Where are you headed?" I asked.
"Moreton. On the ridge." Twenty-five miles from Arncliffe and on the way.
"I'll see you there. What's your name?"
He straightened up in his seat and I realised I'd used my commanding officer voice. Bad habit. Did that with the girls sometimes. Made them think I was angry with them when I wasn't. Soft skills were something I was still working on.
"Ackroyd, sir. Most call me Spud, though."
"At ease - I'm retired, remember? Reverend James Matthews. Jimmy."
"Oh aye." He levelled that cheeky grin at me again and I rolled my eyes. Somehow driving through the snow didn't seem so bad now. The car was clinging to the road better, despite the fact that the snow was settling on the tarmac. Not to mention the gusts that rocked us from side to side. Still, it felt easier.
"What were you doing out in this, Spud?"
"No one to pick me up from the station. Me folks don't have a car. I'm on leave." He said this last as if anxious that he should not be misunderstood.
"You walked all the way from Keighley in this?"
"Nah, Filey. What we do isn't it?" Spud rubbed his hands together and blew on them. I turned the heat up another notch. The driving was easier but it had definitely got colder.
Filey? Had he just got off a boat? The boy was mad!
“Mind if I ask you about... that?” Spud chipped in before I could question him further. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wave a hand vaguely at his own throat. “Why the priesthood?”
I found myself chuckling again at his frank and chipper tone. “Man’s got to make a living somehow. I’ve got three teenaged daughters. Well, two. Grace is twenty now. At University. She’s come back for Christmas.”
“You don’t look old enough somehow,” Spud commented.
“For the priesthood?” I laughed.
“Nah! To have three grown up daughters. Half grown up anyway.”
“They are not grown-up-” I started to say with a frown and checked myself. Because they were almost, weren’t they? Who did most of the cleaning and all of the cooking? Who really looked after them? I might bring in an income but they took care of themselves. Too much so, sometimes, although I was trying to change that.
“So what are they like? Your kids?”
Anyone else and I’d have frozen them out with a clipped word and silence, but Spud was different somehow.
“Grace would have made a good Desmond, actually. Takes lip from no one. Doesn’t let anyone push her around.”
Spud laughed. “My kind of lass. And she’s at university? Bright girl, then.”
“They all are. Amy’s the youngest but if you heard her talk you wouldn’t think so. Getting hard to keep up with her when she gets going. All quantum mechanics and particle physics.” I shook my head, shivering a little in the cold car.
“And the third lass?” Spud probed gently.
I felt a flicker of suspicion but a glance at Spud’s open, honest face made me lower my hackles down. “Emily Lynette,” I sighed. “Emily’s the middle child. She’s... not like her sisters.”
“How so?”
I shook my head again but more in puzzlement at how to explain Emily Lynette to a stranger. “She’s the spitting image of her mother, the other two take after me. Plays piano and violin like June too. Same way of slicing into you with melody, you can’t not listen to her play.” I paused. Why was I telling this boy anything? A cold
, electric prickle started at the base of my neck. I swallowed and pulled my coat collar up. Slicing a look sideways at Spud, I said, “how old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one, Sarge,” he barked back. Must’ve used the commanding officer voice again.
“That’s young. Very young. I’m sorry.” The tiny seed of suspicion at the back of my mind sent up a frail shoot. Spud merely looked back at me. Pleasant. Friendly. There was a gauntness about his face I hadn’t noticed before. A hollowness about his eyes. “Do they keep you fed?”
A flicker of confusion passed over Spud’s face and then his expression cleared. “Much as they can,” he chuckled.
“I’ll tell you a story,” I said. “You’ll likely see why I joined the clergy. Then you can tell me one. We’ve a fair clip to go before we hit Moreton.”
“Deal,” Spud said, grinning again. “Since it’s Christmas will it be one of ghosts and goblins?”
“Ha! Someone’s been reading his Shakespeare. The Winter’s Tale?” I smiled. It felt odd on my face. I needed to practise more.
“S’good thing about the Bard. You never seem to run out of it,” Spud agreed. He stretched his skeletally thin hands out over his kitbag, which rested in the footwell between his feet. I nodded, willing to bet there was a battered Jane Austen paperback or two and several spare pairs of socks in the bag too. I felt inexplicably sad. This boy would never be going home.
“Ghosts, perhaps. Maybe. Never made up my mind about them.” I paused, turned up the heater to full blast. It barely touched the glacial air. “I know that sounds strange, me being a vicar and believing in an all-powerful, all-knowing God. But the spirits of the dead coming back? That just stretched credulity.”
This smile did not feel odd. Which meant it was the bitter curve I’d worn so long. I’d thought I’d lost that. The bitterness. “When Emily was a little girl, five maybe six years old, she frightened another little girl so badly that the girl started not sleeping. Bed wetting too as I recall. The little girl – damned if I can remember her name, June would know – had lost her older brother to Leukaemia.”
“Jesus! I’m sorry,” Spud said, genuinely upset.
“Terrible thing that. Awful, bloody stuff cancer. Doesn’t pick and choose.” I swallowed. Maybe this was a mistake. Too close to the unhealed wound. “Emily told this little girl that there was a boy following her, who looked just like her. Same hair. Same eyes. But taller, older. She said he wanted to know his sister was okay. The little girl was terrified. Not that we got this from Emily. Not then. Not since. I wonder if she even remembers.”
“Christ alive, Sarge. You’ve brought me out in goose-bumps! Did you talk to your daughter about this?” Spud sounded fascinated. Why did the young love tales of death and ghosts s much? I could remember feeling that way, but I couldn’t remember why.
“No,” I said shortly. “But my mother did. Emily’s grandmother. She’s dead now but when she was alive, she had a strange way of knowing things herself. June was close to my mother and asked to speak to Emily about it. To this day I don’t know what was said. It did the trick though because there were no more complaints that Emily had been frightening the other children. No more parent-teacher nights where staff would covertly hint that they were frankly spooked by our middle girl. No. Things ticked on as normal for years. At least that’s what I thought.
“Then my squad were in Iraq.” I glanced sideways at Spud, ignoring the swirling white flurry ahead. We wouldn’t crash. The certainty sat still and right inside me, even as the cold in the cabin intensified. “You’re a Lad. You know there’s things I can’t say.”
Spud nodded, his pale, drawn face shadowed. With hunger and with regret it seemed. There should not have been enough light to see his expression but there was. As if he luminesced. His thin cheeks seemed to cling to his teeth. His eyes, so blue and lively before, were for a moment so dull and sad that it hurt to look at them. I wanted to tell him I was sorry all over again.
“It was near the end. Our troop happened to include the squad chaplain. Funny old sod. Skinny Scouse bugger we used to call Dabs – he was a ‘dab-hand’ at anything. Explosives, negotiation, linguistics. Mechanical engineering was his on-paper speciality. He was always having a laugh – when it wasn’t all business that is. He and I were close friends. Never had another like him. Never will. One of a kind. Anyway as chaplain all of spoke to him at one time or another. I heard the others say that Dabs had a way of making you feel better about life. Hopeful. Didn’t matter if you believed in God or not. For all his practical joking and his cheeky attitude, he was kind. Kinder than that life tends to leave you in you know what I mean?”
“Aye, I do,” Spud agreed. “So how did it happen? How did he die?”
Perceptive lad. “We were driving near the Kuwait border. They said afterwards that it was an accident. Part of me can even see how that happens. You put troops through rigorous training, put heavy duty guns in their hands...”
“And you tell them to wait,” Spud said, his voice grim. “’Course it’s the waiting that does you in. The waiting is a killer.”
I nodded. “Friendly Fire. One moment my best mate was laughing at some filthy joke, for all the world as if he weren’t an ordained minister of the Church. The next his brains had been sprayed across the cab.”
“Yanks?”
“Does it matter?” I stared at the road. Or rather at the darkness where the road should be. “I have to tell myself it doesn’t. That it was an accident. Or I go back to a time and place where I was someone else. Someone I don’t like to remember.” I swallowed again. “I was there for a long time. Lost, for a long time. Oddly enough it was getting a letter from one of Dabs’ mates from clerical college that set me on this path.” My turn to wave a vague hand at my throat. “Fellow vicar. Helped me sort myself out. Enough to decide on a life at least. Better for me. Better for the girls.”
Spud was silent for a moment. His pinched features troubled. A dark stain spread across his coat, bubbling from some place on his body that I couldn’t see. I knew what it was.
“So what does this have to do with your Emily?” Spud said, traces of his old humour back in his voice.
“My wife would tell me, once I returned home from that campaign, that Emily had awoken her by screaming in the night. Horrible, blood-curdling screams, June said. Apparently Emily had had a dream –a really bad dream. Was raving about the blood... all the blood and the poor man with no face. About fire.” I cut my eyes sideways to look at Spud again. His skin was greyish-blue in places. His shrunken lips bloodless. The hollows under his sunken eyes more pronounced. “June told me that Emily scared her half to death by screaming ‘Daddy? What happened to Daddy? Where’s Daddy?!’ Freezes my blood just remembering it. Didn’t take much synchronizing of watches to work out that while Emily was screaming herself awake from a nightmare no little girl should have, I was being shot at by our allies. And Dabs was dead.”
“Aw Sarge! And you don’t believe in ghosts?” Spud’s voice echoed slightly, as if it came from a long way away. The beam from the headlights swept through a parting in the falling snow, hitting a sign that read ‘Welcome to Moreton – please drive carefully through the village.’
“Looks like you’re home, lad,” I said. “Drop you off at the War Memorial?”
“I ... er... I was meant to tell you a story...” Spud began.
“I don’t think there’s any need for that, son, do you?” I smiled at him, not letting the horror of what I saw register in my expression. God, how long had they left him out for crow’s to peck at? “In fact, how about I give you a summary, and you can tell me where I go wrong?” I knew the uniform now. Recognised those fatigues – century old fatigues at that. No beret on his head but a cap. How I’d ever thought he was SAS...
Spud nodded, his eyes dim and haunted.
“There’s a few Ackroyds carved on that pillar,” I said conversationally, parking beside the War Memorial. “I remember now. So anyway, the summary
. There’s a bright young lad from Yorkshire who somehow bucks the odds and gets into university. Oxford...?”
“Cambridge,” Spud said hoarsely.
I nodded. “Then the Great War came. The war to end all wars, ‘cept it didn’t. You know that now. And this lad joins up. Right thing to do. Serving his country and all the rest of the propaganda they spun young men’s heads with. Our hero discovers that there really is a hell, and he’s in it. But he waits. He tries to hold on. Nearly Christmas after all. He’s got leave coming. He’s a brave lad.” I watch Spud’s face. It’s fuller, rosier than it was a moment ago. Silent tears glisten on his smooth cheeks and drop off his chin to join the spreading dark stain on his chest. “And then the leave is cancelled. Our poor lad is half-starved, squatting in a trench, ankle deep in mud and filth in December. Maybe the order comes. Over the top! Or maybe it doesn’t. As you said, lad, it’s the waiting that kills you.”
Spud is watching me with the avidity of a hawk now. Breathless. His skin no longer so shrunken on his frame. His features, less wasted than a moment before.
“And so,” I concluded, “Our lad loses his head, just for a moment. Does he mean to do it? Probably not. But however it comes about, he runs the wrong bloody way and is shot dead as a deserter. How am I doing so far?”
Spud gave a strangled sob. “I can’t go home to ma and pa... the shame...”
“Easy, son. There’s no shame. You did nothing wrong.” He looked at me with desperate hope and I said, “Really. Things get pretty damn flaky in wartime, and that one was a doozy.”
“So... so I can...?” I realised that I’d never seen his lips move. Not once. He had not been speaking out loud during the entire journey.
“Spud, how long have you been walking home? How many years? Consider this your honourable discharge, son. Go home and get some rest.” I smiled as the black blood stain faded from his chest. As Spud sat up straighter, becoming briefly the man he’d been before he went to purgatory. Before he punished himself with this yearly walk. “Your duty’s over now, lad. You did your country proud.”
His smile was full and genuine. If he’d lived he might have broken many a young girl’s heart. “Thank you, Sarge. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Spud.”
He got out of the car and instantly the heater seemed to warm the air again. The cold prickle on my neck faded. “Sarge?” Spud peered through the still open car door. “Have you told her? Your Emily?”
“Told her what, son?”
“That she gets it from you. Her gift.”
I shook my head.
“You should tell her, Sarge. You should let her know. Thanks for the lift.” He shut the door. I watched as an expression somewhere between bliss and relief suffused Spud’s face. And then he drifted apart in sparkling motes of light in the whirling white night.
“Maybe I will, Spud. Maybe I’ll tell her. One day.” I started the car and set off home to spend Christmas with my girls.
I Belong to the Earth (Unveiled Book 1) Page 65
