The Standing Water

by David Castleton

  But if I remember that bit of springtime, it was one of rain lashing and hammering outside, of Weirton’s arm lashing the air and hammering buttocks within, of the lads hammering fists and lashing kicks at each other on the field and on the way home. And relations between Jonathon and Craig had not improved since the day Craig had blundered into gifting his brother two hidings. The situation had been worsened by the decision Jonathon’s parents had reached after that fateful episode. They’d declared set-outs were banned – forever. Jonathon had to clear up his toys at each day’s end – or he’d face the thrashings of his mother’s tongue, his father’s hand. Jonathon’s life was now dullness in school, dullness without – his bare floor a reflection of his bare days. He amused himself with the cartoons he disdained, and the villages and small towns he managed to construct – to be honest, not much more exciting than Emberfield – before the falling of night would bring down forever its dark curtain on those creations. Of course, Jonathon blamed Craig. There’d be arguments – Jonathon whipping him with barbed words. I’d see Craig sit there trying to take it – maybe mindful of our conversation that day in his kitchen. But, eventually, Craig’s fists would grip; his breath would come heavier, faster; his face would flush. Jonathon would find himself copping a Chinese burn if he was lucky, a flurry of punches if he wasn’t.

  As we lurched into May, the skies cleared somewhat, there was more light and less rain, and Weirton also switched from days of heavy thunder to a sunnier mood. The beatings on the school field, on the way home tapered off among the lads, though things between Jonathon and Craig were still not peaceful. The trees’ shy buds had now extended, by some mysterious power, into the furled banners of leaves. The sun – having survived the deep winter and tumultuous early spring – seemed to have new life too, as if it was a yolk broken triumphant from one of those painted eggs we’d devoured at Easter. (In fact, I wondered if maybe we ate them to speed the sun on his upward curve, to encourage that orb to arc higher and shine stronger in his rotations of our world by showing him so many millions of those bright yolks.) We kids also had a spec of spring promise, something to look forward to. Weirton had announced we’d walk to Salton and both junior classes would go.

  The name ‘Salton’ had a magic for us. Our little town was hemmed by fields, those fields had fences – fences and hedgerows often spiked with barbed wire, sometimes lined with evil cables humming with that strange enchantment called electricity. Those fields had farmers – those farmers had shotguns, those farmers had dogs, those dogs had loud barks, fast legs, eager teeth. Those farmers had farms – those farms had heavy tractors with crushing wheels, those farms had sucking slurry pits, slicing combine blades. Those farms were not places for children to play, as our parents and teachers warned us. Cities – I’d heard – at least had parks in which young legs could run; we had only the scrap of garden attached to the Community Hall – perhaps ten adult strides long, five of those paces wide.

  Yet Salton – Salton was the only place around Emberfield you could really walk. I’d been down there twice with my family – my recollections were obscured by the shifting fogs of childhood time, but through those mists of memory I saw a stony track dotted with pond-like puddles, with vast fields and forests spreading on each side. I saw mythical buildings – a sky-scratching tower, a great castle, and an aged church ringed by ancient graves dominating the marshlands. If Emberfield was locked by conquered fields – the earth beaten, reined in, divided, its only resistance a sullen waterlogging – then this track to Salton at least offered a path into a wilder, less tamed world. The upper juniors had been down there the last autumn – as the brother took care to boast. They hadn’t gone all the way to the church and castle – as we would! – but had had a fair old tramp, sketched leaves and collected owl pellets. Some leaves had been snapped from branches – to be preserved in weighty books, mummified by the press of pages – while the pellets had been scooped into plastic bags to be cut up later. Our class felt a mad jealousy as the bigger kids sliced up those droppings next door, as we overheard Weirton exclaiming as the bones, fur and feathers of the owls’ prey were revealed. The class stuck these remains on pieces of paper then mounted them on the corridor’s walls – every time we passed we felt twinges of envy at the tiny shrew skulls and the reconstructed mouse legs with their thighbones, joints, miniscule toes.

  But this time we’d be going too! I counted down the days – waiting to be led to the mysteries and wonders of Salton, all thanks to the kindness of our headmaster, who perhaps didn’t deserve to die after all, and who – now I thought about it – might even have been innocent with regards to Marcus and Lucy.

  The longed-for day came, and after assembly we all gathered outside the school – Weirton sporting a rather ridiculous get-up of haversack, granddad cap and woolly socks pulled up to the knees. Smiling – as most of us were smiling – he led us off at quite a pace, Perkins stumbling behind on the slightly lower heels she’d put on for the day, some of the shorter children straining their dwarf legs to keep up. Soon a crocodile of kids trailed after the headmaster, with Jonathon, Stubbs and I plodding close to its rear. Weirton led us through our patch of town: striding under a low sky, which – though full of dark swirls, black cloud – did not disgorge its rain. The familiar flat fields stretched off on either side as kids pointed to their houses, waved at their garden gnomes, bickered about whose gnome was best. Then Weirton led us into less well-known territory – Emberfield’s high street. Even at that age, even for eyes peering from such a little body, it seemed small and dismal: the charity shops with their battered books and threadbare clothes, the pallid fruit in the greengrocer’s, the newsagents displaying the same papers as Davis. There were pubs – dark and forbidden at that hour, even to adults, yet still breathing their stale beery wafts. We passed a farmers’ shop, all green wellies, waxed jackets, a boring bakery, and the high street was over. On the town’s other side were rows and rows of semis – pretty much like our own, with the same bleak gardens, even the same gnomes and wishing wells. We passed one strange building – ancient-looking, rising up in stern red brick, ringed by a tall wire fence.

  ‘What’s that place?’ Jonathon asked.

  ‘Maybe it’s the prison,’ I said. ‘My parents say if I go on being bad, it’s where I’ll end up.’

  ‘Idiots!’ said Stubbs. ‘It’s not the prison! The fence there’s at least half a mile high with huge circles of the sharpest barbed wire on top! It’s guarded by machine guns, wolves and snakes! That place is only the Big School.’

  ‘The Big School!’ Jonathon and I exclaimed.

  ‘Aye,’ said Stubbs, ‘it’s not quite the prison, but there’re plenty of legends about it.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said, sticking my face and chest out in challenge to his cockiness.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ said Stubbs. ‘Compared to it, our school’s just the size of the cane cupboard. Kids get lost in there and they don’t find them till days later – half-mad and half-starved. Then there are the cream cakes in the canteen, which give you the shits for a week!’

  ‘A week!?’

  ‘At least – maybe two.’

  ‘You boys!’ Weirton’s yell jerked us from our earnest debates. “Stop gossiping and dawdling and keep up! What are you – a bunch of grandmothers? You should wear your skirts to school tomorrow!’

  Laughter gusted up.

  ‘Silence!’ Weirton shouted from the front.

  The giggles quietened, but as we walked on, the brother got in behind Jonathon, Stubbs and me. His hand clipped Stubbs’s ear; his fist jabbed just below my ribcage.

  ‘Wearing your skirts tomorrow then, little grandmas?’ he said.

  ‘He was just joking – idiot!’ Jonathon said.

  ‘He meant it – you’d better all come in your skirts or you’ll get a walloping!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Darren Hill said, ‘we’ll look forward to seeing all three of you in your lovely dresses!’

  Hill managed to land a
kick on my behind then his fingers grabbed Stubbs’s wrist, gave him a Chinese burn. But the brother had something special for his sibling. He gambolled forward, stuck out his leg in front of Jonathon, gave him a push. Jonathon flew through the air, hurtled into a stone wall – his hands took most of the impact, but he still cracked the side of his head. He plummeted, landing on a grass verge, face narrowly missing a few nuggets of dog shit. Kids battled their laughter as Jonathon lay sprawled and blinking on the wet grass. His bewildered face began raising itself – its dopey expression triggered another swell of chuckles.

  ‘What is going on here!?’

  Weirton was striding back through the parade of kids, hands and arms swiping children from his path. Jonathon had no time to stumble to his feet as Weirton shoved his way through the last of the pupils.

  ‘Jonathon Browning again!’ Weirton bellowed, his pink face pricked with sweat, his mouth breathing puffs of angry mist. ‘Whatever it is, however you got into that ridiculous position, I don’t want to know! But I’ll tell you something – one more hint of trouble from you and I’ll make the worst walloping of your life seem like a walk in the park! Understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ Jonathon said, from his bed in the grass.

  Weirton strode back to the front of the line of smirking kids. Jonathon – limbs shaking, face woozy – hauled himself up.

  ‘Only a yellow card,’ the brother said, ‘lucky – very lucky.’

  ‘Can’t believe he didn’t get whacked!’ said Darren. ‘Old Weirton must be going soft!’

  We trudged on past the last of Emberfield’s drab houses, damp gardens, and soon stood before the gates of Salton.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Two columns of grey stone thrust up – topped by two weather-beaten sculptures of lions, waving their front paws. Between those columns hung gates formed from spiked iron poles. The gates were grand – at least four times my height, but the stone was pitted, lichen-dappled, moss-patched; the iron rusting genteelly. The gates were open, permanently swung back. The lower part of their grid rested on the verge – stems of grass weaved between the iron uprights, around which weeds spiralled.

  ‘OK, everybody,’ Weirton boomed, flinging his arm towards the gates, ‘when Salton used to be a wealthy, aristocratic estate, these gates marked the start of its territory. That house there’ – his finger thrust at a nearby dwelling – ‘was the lodge house. The Salton family were so rich they could pay a man just to guard the gate. It’s a private home now.’

  I liked it when Mr Weirton told us stuff; it was interesting; I wished he’d do it more. But now he led us across that dilapidated threshold. Walking through there always seemed like passing into another realm – we were passing out of Emberfield, yes, but somehow the whole feel of the air changed: an atmosphere converged on us that was more ancient, spookier, more magical, as if the thinnest of barriers separated that place from the otherworld. Yet just after those gates was a copse of trees and I felt my first twinge of disappointment. What I’d remembered from perhaps a year ago as a substantial wood was little more than a thicket. Jonathon had tagged along with us that day; we’d explored that jungle of hazardous creepers, vast moss-bearded trunks: a whole dark world into which the already meek light had to find its way down through a matted roof of plump leaves and thick branches. We’d imagined ourselves soldiers, tying bits of string between saplings – tripwires to booby-trap our enemies. Now that daunting wood, where you could have got lost for a day, seemed as if it could be stridden through in one minute.

  We walked on – on one side was a cropped bumpy field dotted with patiently munching sheep where Weirton said you could see the lines of medieval furrows. There they were – dips and ridges now covered with their pelt of damp grass. Mr Weirton made it sound like they’d been made so long ago – definitely in the Olden Days, perhaps even before his granddad was born. On our other side was a wood – a real one this time; one it’d take at least three minutes to run through. It was less tangled than the first – a track meandered through somewhat sickly-looking trees, lichen-speckled, raising their pallid leaves to Emberfield’s weak sun. I’d have loved to have gambled through that grove, but Weirton insisted we stick to our stony path. After squeezing to the side of it to make way for a tractor – the plough behind it dripping with sludgy black earth – we passed by the wood and came to a small river. We stood on a little bridge – no railings, the stumpy remains of its sides suggesting the rest of its walls had crumbled long ago. We gazed down. Dirty water ran between steep densely-nettled banks. My eyes soon picked out objects in the flow. A child’s ball – painted in bright slashes of purple, yellow, red – rotated on the water. Maybe due to some strange magic, it didn’t move downstream but just spun its colours enticingly. I was tempted to brave the nettles, clamber down those banks and pluck it from the river, but I knew how Weirton would reward such rashness. Near the ball bobbed a dead fish: a trout, Weirton said. Even in our dull light, its silver side shone; a rainbow of colours flashed along its flank. I watched those shades flicker and change as the water buoyed and dropped that body, without moving it downriver. I couldn’t pull my gaze from that play of colour until another discovery jolted it away. I gasped; my eyes swelled. A knight’s breastplate of the type worn by King Arthur lay a little downstream. Maybe some ancient warrior had dropped it a hundred or more years before. I could see how it would mould itself around some brave soldier’s chest. My heart beat as I saw that, beneath its thick coat of rust and dirt, it was encrusted with jewels – with a large ruby studding its centre. If only I could have hauled that piece of armour from the stream, sold it to make my fortune – I wouldn’t have to go to school, or even work when I was older like Dad did. Maybe I could have bought a mansion far, far from Emberfield. But I knew how Weirton’s hand would react to such a venture.

  ‘Please, Sir –’ Stubbs was pointing ‘– what’s that metal thing in the river?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, Dennis,’ Weirton said. ‘Maybe it’s a part of an old car or tractor or motorbike.’

  I knew Weirton was trying to put us off the dangerous clamber down the banks, discourage us from wading into those treacherous currents. I promised myself that later I’d pull that breastplate from those waters. As we stood on the bridge, Weirton gave a little lecture. The stream’s name was the Bunt; it was vital for the farmers for bringing water to their crops in the summer, draining away the wetness the rest of the year. As I looked at the Bunt’s sullen ripples weaving between the bricks and stones that stuck up from its bed, navigating the metal island of the breastplate, I wondered about that stream. I glanced around me, trying to work out where that valuable river came from. The fields that stretched off in each direction gave no clue. Perhaps the Bunt simply tipped into the world at some magical point: God’s mysterious bounty given to quench and water Emberfield.

  I’d had strange recurring dreams of following that river, of trudging along its course. I’d begin by scrabbling along its nettle-stinging sides as it led me away from Emberfield. The stream would slowly swell as it wound through farmland until it was a decent-sized river. It led me underground, through dusky caverns both natural and manmade. Its force was sometimes tamed in reservoirs then allowed to gush down dams with ferocity. On I followed, my patient tramp lasting days then weeks as the Bunt grew to a huge girth: that little stream now like the massive rivers of Egypt and India I’d heard of in legends. On the Bunt led me through the landscapes of the night; on it led me with each step away from my hometown. In my dreams, I never stopped, never turned, never glanced back.

  We crossed the bridge and carried on. Now our path led between two barbed-wire fences beyond which spread ploughed fields. The odd crow flapped over that black melancholy earth. The land began to yield its legends. After a few moments of his striding, Weirton stopped; we gathered round him, bunching in the little space the track granted us between those spiked fences, those forbidden fields.

  ‘If you look over there –’ Weirton flung
his pointing finger ‘– you can see some farm buildings. The farmhouse is very old – one of the oldest structures round here. Legend has it that King Henry VIII would stay there on his journeys north …’

  Henry VIII – he was the one who’d had six wives: who was fond of lopping the heads of those wives off!

  ‘According to some local stories,’ Weirton went on, ‘you can see his ghost, roaming around the house, still thanking people for their hospitality …’

  ‘His ghost has an axe – if it sees you, it’ll cut off your head!’ Stubbs whispered in my ear.

  ‘Course it won’t – idiot!’ I hissed. ‘Mr Weirton said the ghost only says thank you!’

  Despite my words, a shiver shook my torso. I tried to look away from the farm so I wouldn’t see the ghost. But my eyes were drawn back to that dwelling. It all looked normal enough – the barns and outbuildings, the stacks of bales. The curtains of the farmhouse were open; despite my struggles, curiosity sucked my eyes into the rooms. I just saw tables, chairs, a clock on one wall. But my heart gave deep thuds; my chest tightened as I expected to see the broad body of that king, transparent in its jewelled tunic, wide-brimmed hat. Would he step from behind a door wielding his see-through yet deadly axe? Thankfully, Weirton changed the topic, thrust his finger and our eyes to the other side of the path.