by Emlyn Rees
‘Nearly there,’ said Tony, hardly pausing and heading off through the trees, to where a long hedgerow separated the land from the road.
‘Where are we going?’ she panted, as he pulled her onwards, beating a gap with a stick through the thicket.
‘I told you. It’s a surprise,’ he said, as she squeezed through past him and down into the dry ditch on the side of the road. She helped pull Tony up the other side and they lay exhausted on the far slope of the ditch, staring up at the fluffy clouds against the blue sky.
Rachel looked over her shoulder down the open road, surprised to see that they were a few yards away from the bus stop. It was risky catching a bus, but she figured, as Tony already had, that it was better waiting for it here, than down in the town.
She watched Tony as he took a small pair of binoculars from his knapsack. He gave her a knowing look, then, before she could question him, he was back off across the ditch and scrambling nimbly up to the fork in the trunk of an oak tree.
‘What are you doing?’ Rachel called up after him, shading her eyes against the sun.
‘I borrowed them off Arthur. If I wait up here, I can see when the bus comes round the bend. I’ll be able to see who’s on it. Whether it’s safe.’
‘You’ve thought of everything,’ she said, laughing.
‘I just want to get us out of here.’
Towards the top of the hill, the bus, in a noisy first gear, was slower than walking speed. The tradition with the town’s children was to make an expectantly rising collective whoop, as the bus neared the brow of the hill. It always felt as if, any second, it might roll back downhill but, miraculously, it never did.
Rachel thought about all the stories she’d heard about women in the Resistance in France during the war. She liked the dangerous feeling she had when she was with Tony. As if the world was their enemy and they were freedom fighters all on their own. In a way, she supposed, they were.
‘Get down!’ Tony shouted, and she ducked back down into the ditch, as she heard the bottle-green bus shuddering up the last part of the steep hill. Rachel peeked through the long grass.
She crossed her fingers, hoping that none of the regulars from the shop were on board, or anyone from school who would be bound to make a fuss if they saw Rachel and Tony together.
‘All clear,’ Tony called, and in a moment he was by her side, as she flagged down the bus. He winked at her, as they walked aboard.
Tony bought two tickets to Wolcombe.
‘You do want to go, don’t you?’ he checked.
‘Of course I do!’
‘It’s just that you look all worried.’
‘Then let me pay half the fare,’ Rachel insisted, digging in her pocket for her purse. She’d seen Tony’s shed and how sparsely equipped it was and she knew that he didn’t have much money. Two return fares seemed too much for him to pay.
Tony stopped her. ‘No. It’s my treat.’
The bus driver looked between them.
‘But –’
‘No buts, we’re going to enjoy ourselves and you’re not going to worry about a thing.’
Tony seemed so calm about it, but Rachel buzzed all over with excitement as he led her up the aisle of the lumbering bus to the long seat at the back. It felt like the most daring thing she’d ever done. The thought of being alone together, away from Stepmouth and all its hazards for a whole day, made her shake with anticipation.
‘I thought we’d take a picnic,’ Tony said, patting his knapsack, as he swung in to sit next to her.
Rachel grinned at him and was about to speak, when a huge man in his late twenties slapped the metal bar above the seat back in front of them, and leered over the top at them both. He had an ugly tattoo stretching down his forearm and a ginger crew cut which made his ruddy, freckled face look huge.
‘Well, if it isn’t Anthony Glover,’ the man said in a sneering, slow drawl. A foamy reservoir of saliva bobbed in the crease of his lips. His breath stank of stale beer.
‘You seen your brother Keith? Only if you do, tell him I want a word.’
Tony looked perfectly calm as he faced the man. ‘I’m minding my own business, Douglas, why don’t you mind yours.’
It wasn’t a question. Rachel could sense from the menacing threat in Tony’s voice that one move from Douglas and there’d be a fight.
She put her hand on Tony’s arm, feeling his tense muscles beneath her fingertips. Fear crept around her like a cold draught. Douglas looked at Tony and then glanced down his nose at Rachel, as if she were nothing. For a second she thought he was working on an insult, or threat, but his brain cells didn’t seem up to it and he decided against it. Instead, he hawked loudly and spat out of the open top part of the window, before retreating back up to the front of the bus.
‘Just tell him you saw me,’ he snarled as he went. ‘He owes me.’
‘Who was he?’ Rachel asked, when Douglas had gone. Tony looked tense, as if his good mood had been crushed out of him. He sat rigidly in the seat.
‘No one. He used to hang out with my brother. That’s all.’
‘Oh.’
Rachel was silent, following Tony’s gaze to where he was focused intently on the roll of flesh on the back of Douglas’s head. Even though she now had a flash of what it was like to be Tony and to have his life blighted by Keith everywhere he went, she still wasn’t sure she was the person to comfort him.
She crept her fingers along the pitted red leather seat of the bus and put her hand over Tony’s, but he didn’t move. She longed to say something to make it better, to bring Tony’s guard down again, so that he was her Tony once more, not the hard, anxious Tony that everyone else saw, ready to defend himself at any moment.
She stared out of the window, feeling her hand over his, forcing herself to leave it there, even though she felt as if she were burning him. She could see a faint reflection of her own worried expression in the glass. Even though they were touching, Rachel could feel all her closeness with Tony draining away. And it was all Douglas’s fault. He’d ruined everything.
But then, perhaps there would always be Douglases, always somebody who would mention Keith to them. What if it was always like this when they did? she panicked. What if they never overcame the past? What if it was always going to slap them back down into the people they were before they got together?
Rachel turned to face Tony. She wasn’t going to let that happen. She’d taken too many risks to let everything fall apart now. Besides, as she saw it, the whole point of being together was that there were no barriers between them.
‘Tony? I was wondering. I know we haven’t spoken about it before, but now that it’s come up, I was wondering . . .’ She lost her nerve. What was she doing? Of course they hadn’t spoken about it before, because she’d deliberately chosen not to. Because they both had. Because they’d both known, as she did now, that it was a subject that, once broached, might tear them apart.
But Rachel knew she couldn’t ignore it any longer. Even if Douglas hadn’t ruined everything, they’d still have had to face talking about Keith, sooner or later. The subject couldn’t be swept away. It was the scariest thing she’d ever had to ask anyone, but the longer she didn’t ask Tony, the bigger the question became.
She took a deep breath. ‘I was wondering . . . well, how you do feel about your brother?’
‘Keith? You want to talk about Keith? Right now? Here?’
Tony sounded so gruff and annoyed that she recoiled away from him. He looked down at where her hand had left his, seeming only to notice it now that it had gone. He stared at the space between their fingers.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, more gently.
‘I don’t know. Anything. Anything you want to tell me.’
For a long time, his face was sombre, almost as if he were too scared to talk. She waited for ages and was about to give in and change the subject, when Tony spoke.
‘He used to write to Mum, after . . . you know. Anyway, Mu
m always threw the letters in the bin, but he never stopped writing. Month after month. For nearly a year. They never stopped coming. One day, I read one of them.’
Rachel held her breath. She’d never imagined anything other than that Keith had been locked away, written off and forgotten. The fact that he had the power to communicate with the outside world, or at least with his family filled her with a morbid fascination.
‘What did it say?’
‘The words themselves . . . the sentences on their own . . . didn’t matter. They were just daily stuff about the prison routine, food and stuff. It was more his attitude that struck me. He sounded so unlike the Keith I knew.’
‘In what way?’
Tony glanced past her, out of the window. ‘I don’t know. Just changed. Wiser. Older. Not denying who he was or what he did.’
Tony’s eyes switched anxiously back towards Rachel, but she forced herself to continue listening. She’d asked for this after all.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, after I read that first letter, I wrote back to him.’
‘You did what?’ She’d almost shouted the words.
‘We’ve been corresponding ever since.’
She’d been expecting Tony to tell her that he hated his brother. After all, that was what she’d assumed. How else could he have asked her out? Now this unthinkable revelation completely threw her and she was unable to understand what it meant. How could Tony communicate with his brother and see her at the same time? It didn’t make sense.
Now it was as if she were seeing herself from the top corner of the bus. She’d been pretending that she was safe with Tony, but now she thought of all the reasons why she shouldn’t be here, speeding away from everything that she knew. She could hear the bus changing up a gear as they hit the straight stretch of coast road, and behind Tony’s head, the high hedgerows seemed to whizz past the window at a dizzying speed.
She wanted to fight. She wanted to shout at Tony. To scream. How could he? How could he want to have anything to do with that murderer, that animal who’d killed her dad and crippled her mum? But she couldn’t, not here on the bus. And not before she’d heard everything Tony had to say. She owed him that much.
‘So . . . have you seen him?’ She sounded formal and pinched, as if it were her mother speaking.
‘No, the first thing he wrote to me was that he never wanted me to visit him. He’s got this thing that he never wants me to set foot inside the prison.’
Tony’s eyes seemed to be imploring her to understand, but Rachel felt as if she no longer knew anything about him. As if she’d assumed far too much.
‘Please don’t look at me like that. Like you hate me.’
‘It’s him I hate.’
‘I know. And you should. I hate him too for what he did. For what he was, but not who he is now. You see, that’s just it: he’s changed.’
‘He can’t have. People don’t change.’
‘But Keith has. It might be too late for him, but you see, he’s got this notion that I’m good. That I’m the one who’ll make it. He thinks there’s certain images and things I mustn’t have in my head. Like the war, like the pills he used to take, like the inside of a prison. He’s always telling me to keep on the straight and narrow.’
The memory of Tony fighting came to Rachel like a film clip. And as Tony peered over the seat and glanced anxiously towards Douglas, who had risen from his seat to get off the bus at the farm stop, she knew she should stand up and get off as well. She should walk away from Tony and never turn back. She should go back home, to her mother, to Bill, to the people she loved.
But already another part of her was jumping to Tony’s – her Tony’s – defence. Keith Glover had no right to be concerned about his brother, because of course Tony was good, of course he was on the straight and narrow. He didn’t need lecturing. And he was going to make it. Wherever it was. He didn’t need a killer to tell him that.
‘I don’t understand how you can bear to communicate with him,’ she said, as the bus sped up once more. Tony didn’t look at Douglas who peered into the bus from the side of the road.
‘He’s my brother.’
‘So you’re saying that you forgive him? Is that it? Just because he’s family?’ She felt a tightness in the top of her chest. For a second, she was tempted to stop the bus and get off at the stop they’d just passed and run all the way home. Even braving Douglas might be better than the fear she now felt.
‘Him being family has nothing to do with it. What he did was terrible, evil and he deserves all the punishment that’s been given to him. He’d be the first to admit that.’
‘You mean . . . you mean . . . he’s sorry?’
‘Of course he’s sorry,’ Tony said. ‘Can you imagine living with what he did?’
‘Yes,’ she said, bitterly.
Tony wiped his hands over his face. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’
Rachel picked at a loose thread in the hem of her skirt. She felt so confused. ‘Are you suggesting that somehow I should feel sorry for him?’
‘All I’ve learnt is that my life has been a lot easier to live since I forgave him. If you forgive the person you most hate, you set yourself free.’
There was a long pause.
‘Will you see him again, when he’s out?’ she asked, eventually.
‘That won’t be for years.’
She glanced over at Tony, wanting to cry. He looked so sad, so ashamed, as he sat looking at his hands in his lap. Rachel yearned for the closeness that they’d had before this conversation, wishing that it had never happened. It felt as if everything was different.
Then, as her eyes met his, she saw in them the tenderness that only she knew existed. He was Tony, her Tony. No one else’s. She simply couldn’t walk away from him. If she did, that would mean that Keith had won again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rachel said, reaching out to touch him. ‘I’m not angry with you. It’s not your fault.’
‘You don’t hate me?’
‘No. This is us, remember?’
He leant over and kissed her then, his lips lingering softly on hers. Rachel squeezed her eyes tightly shut, sealing some kind of unspoken pact with Tony, as much as with herself. It felt as if she were freefalling, as if they’d stepped off a cliff together. Whatever she’d believed before had just been wiped away. In its place was only Tony. She had no idea where her faith in him would lead, but she knew now that it was all she had.
Wolcombe was hardly as crowded as Stepmouth, but it boasted a pier with a small funfair that had been open since the end of the war. As she and Tony whizzed around the helter-skelter on old rope mats, and bobbed high above the sea on the merry-go-round, leaning back on the gold twirling poles, their laughter obliterated the seriousness of their conversation on the bus. A few hours later, it was as if it had never happened.
They’d walked right to the end of the pier, before Tony was satisfied that they’d found the right spot to eat their lunch. He rolled his trouser legs up and set out a blanket from the knapsack on the rough planks. Rachel sat down in the sunshine, dangling her legs over the edge of the pier. They were so high up, it felt as if they were sitting on the edge of a cloud.
Far below them the seagulls shrieked as they dipped into the waves and skirted through the criss-crossed iron structure underneath the pier. Behind, the plinkity-plonk music from the fair drifted towards them on the salty breeze, while below came the crescendo and diminuendo of the sea gently breaking along the long stretch of sandy beach either side of the pier, the water spurting in dramatic white plumes as it hit each wooden breakwater.
Rachel shuffled forward and leant on the iron bar, resting her head on her arms, so that she felt the wind on her face. Her skirt rippled up her thighs. She closed one eye against the glare of the sun and stared along to the far end of the beach to where the faded red-and-white-striped bathing huts stretched into the distance like an abandoned production line of Punch and Judy tents.
‘What’s the matter?’ Tony asked, touching her shoulder.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘No, go on. Tell me what you were thinking about?’
She remembered telling Tony on the bus that he could tell her anything. Now, she turned to face him.
‘Daddy,’ she said. Saying it that way made her feel vulnerable.
‘What was he like?’ Tony asked.
‘That’s just it,’ Rachel admitted. ‘I can’t remember. But looking at the beach made me think of him when I was little. He was always clowning around to make me laugh. He used to carry me up on his shoulders. I remember holding on to his ears and twisting them. And every time I did, he stuck his tongue out.’ She laughed and then they were silent.
‘I wish I could have met him.’
‘So do I,’ Rachel said, meaning it. ‘I think he would have liked you.’
They stared at each other and she felt her eyes blurring with tears, but they didn’t fall.
‘You must be hungry,’ Tony said, wiping away their bittersweet moment. He turned to unload his knapsack. ‘Only I bought a few things to eat.’
Rachel later laughed at Tony for his modesty. The few things to eat turned out to be a feast fit for a queen. And best of all, Tony had prepared it all for her himself. She felt truly exotic as he assaulted her taste buds with new sensations: home-made pasta salad and ham quiche. And the dishes kept on coming. By the time he revealed his home-made coffee cake from the bag, she was laughing. She’d never eaten so much delicious food in her life.
‘You really made all this?’ He must have been up all night preparing it all.
‘Emily showed me how. She’s a good teacher. She says I should be a chef.’
