The Challenge

by Tom Hoyle

  The Twins were immediately behind me on the back seat, surrounded by other people from our Year.

  The Royal Northern Hotel has now been converted into flats, but in 2011 it was on its last legs: brown patterned wallpaper, dirty beige curtains, a slightly sticky dance floor in a large stark room dominated by a huge disco ball – it didn’t really matter if it was trashed.

  Just before half past seven the buses pulled up across the road from the ‘hotel’ and everyone piled out, occupying the main road and running around on a bit of green next to the railway lines. The sea was an expanse of black beyond, lit only by the glow of the distant lights of Morecambe. An old couple were walking down the road, and three or four boys danced round them making stupid noises.

  The Twins guided me towards some bushes at the far end of the green.

  ‘How’re you feeling?’ asked Jack.

  ‘A bit better.’

  ‘Here’s something to help you get through the evening,’ said Sam. He made to shake my hand and I realized that something was being placed in my palm. It looked like a paracetamol packet.

  ‘Guys, I’m not taking anything,’ I said.

  Jack whispered in my ear and kept one eye on the others as they started to make their way towards the hotel entrance. ‘Hey, dude, all they do is help you chill.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m messing with my brain,’ I insisted.

  ‘Everyone’s doin’ it – they make you fly. It’s what you need,’ said Jack. He gave me his innocent-looking smile. ‘Come on, it’s cold out here. Let’s go in and party!’

  I watched them run inside, then threw the packet of pills into the long grass next to the railway line. The metal tracks started to click and hum, then there was a fizzing and whirring sound: a train approaching from the left, its headlights glinting off the track. I stared at the driver.

  Caroline was with the others inside. I was annoyed – I’d had this silly dream about walking in with her. ‘I’m sorry, I was just – they . . .’ I gestured helplessly. ‘Never mind.’

  There are so many stories that intertwine that evening, and mine is only one of them. The evening started with us all sitting around and laughing loudly at jokes that weren’t really funny, then dancing self-consciously on a half-empty dance floor.

  Given that I’d been offered those pills, I’m now sure that my drinks were spiked or drugged, and possibly Caroline’s were too. I suppose it was part of The Twins’ plan to get us together.

  Just before the large 1930s-style clock showed nine, I’d been sitting at a table just inside the door with Caroline, not talking about anything in particular. The Twins had brought over more drinks and Sam said he knew we were getting on because we drank at exactly the same time, which apparently was a sure way to tell if two people fancy one another. Everything seemed simple, frivolous, funny. My worries turned to dust. The Twins seemed amazing – after all, they had never done anything to actually hurt me, and though some of what they did was radical, they seemed to have my best interests at heart.

  The world slowly spun; everything was light. Caroline and I put our drinks down together and I remember moving my head towards hers. Suddenly we were kissing, a proper kiss, mouths open, eyes closed. I only pulled away when someone shouted ‘Yeah!’ in my ear.

  ‘Come on, let’s dance again,’ said Caroline, slightly glassy-eyed, and pulled me on to the dance floor.

  Everyone was standing up for one of the most popular tracks. Our group started off dancing in a large circle – about ten of us, with Caroline next to me. Blake was the focus because he was completely hopeless and funny.

  My arms and legs whirled round like a cartoon character’s, and garbled nonsense spilt out of my mouth. I suppose I tried to compete to keep Caroline’s interest, like a prancing animal trying to attract a mate. There was a clip of it on someone’s phone: I look wild-eyed, limbs pumping in time to the music, circles of damp under my arms. At one point I pull Caroline close and kiss her on the neck. I didn’t understand that something was wrong; I thought I was just hyper because of what had happened immediately before the song started – if I thought anything at all.

  The circle broke down and Caroline started dancing with Blake; she held his hands and looked into his eyes. Everyone saw it as a bit of a joke – just Caroline being nice – and attention drifted away. A well-known song started and people sang loudly. There was so much going on; hundreds of sweaty people.

  But I was consumed by the bubbling acid of jealousy. Because of Blake. Blake! Crazy. Caroline was just having fun. And Blake, for once in his life, was living the moment.

  My mind was messed up and I would have done anything to make them stop. Why wasn’t Caroline looking at me? Why wasn’t she dancing with me? I felt she had toyed with me. Given the chance, I would have smashed the speakers and made the lights explode.

  I stormed back to our table and glowered. Sam arrived with another fresh drink and I downed it in five gulps, never taking my eyes of the dance floor. All the normal pathways in my brain had been twisted.

  The last thing I remember is Caroline and Blake dancing beneath a clock that showed the time as 9.25 p.m.

  [Reconstructed from what Ethan told me weeks later]

  I bumped into one or two dancers as I made straight for Caroline. One shoved me pretty hard, but undeterred I placed myself between Caroline and Blake and slurred things like, ‘You need to dance with me now,’ and, ‘Here I am, what’s going on?’

  Blake was defensive and pleading. ‘Come on, Ben, we’re not hurting you, man.’

  ‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ I growled. I insulted his physical appearance and ridiculed his dancing.

  People found this more interesting than the music.

  ‘Just leave her alone,’ Blake protested.

  ‘Stay out of my way, or I’ll kill you!’ There were a hundred witnesses. I shoved Blake so hard that he stumbled back into a boy from the year above.

  [Reconstructed from a phone recording]

  After Blake was forced back towards me, things escalated: I held him in a headlock and shouted aggressive nonsense in his ear. As quickly as I grabbed him, I released him.

  Blake, red-faced and dripping with sweat, ran towards the exit in his usual clumsy fashion.

  I didn’t bother to watch him go. ‘Come on, just a little kiss,’ I slurred to Caroline.

  One or two people laughed; others shouted things at me. I ignored Anna, who thundered at me: ‘Just piss off, you freak!’

  The Twins ambled forward, smiling, feet tapping in time with the music.

  I spun round to face them. ‘This is all your fault. You made me do it.’ Everything I said was at half-speed. ‘You’ve taken things too far. I shouldn’t have listened to you. No one would have got hurt.’ I held my head in frustration. Everyone assumed I was talking about what had happened with Caroline.

  But The Twins knew otherwise. ‘Get him outside,’ Sam snarled.

  Ethan’s tone, almost overlapping with Sam, was pleading: ‘You need to go outside and calm down, man.’

  Just before Sam and Jack reached me to throw me out (or knock me out), Caroline ran to the exit and I followed.

  On the mobile recording, there follows a couple of seconds of Sam talking in Jack’s ear. In that moment, I think they brought forward their plans against me.

  [Reconstructed from the security tape, Royal Northern Hotel]

  We appear as slightly blurred, black-and white, silent-film figures, but there’s no doubt it’s Caroline and me, and no doubt what’s going on.

  She confronted me as soon as I arrived at the desk. Pointing and shouting, she obviously wanted me to come to my senses.

  But the cogs in my brain just weren’t connecting. I took half a step back, banging my palms against my head in sadness or desperation.

  Given what later happened, Caroline made her best decision of the evening: she threw her hands up in frustration, brushed past me, and marched back into the party.

  Almos
t immediately, Blake entered from outside. We had spent hundreds of hours together as friends and he surely expected me to have sobered up – but even the grainy tape shows that I was in a terrible state, twitching and twisting erratically.

  Blake said something (I still don’t know what).

  I shouted and pointed with the spittle-flecked rage of someone who has lost their mind, then stepped towards Blake and jabbed my fist at him.

  He took two steps back, hesitated for a second, then ran.

  And I dashed after him.

  Four or five seconds later, Ethan, Sam and Jack appear and go outside to look for me. Ethan told me later that they searched up and down the road, but saw neither Blake nor me.

  (There’s four hours on the security tape after that. People come and go, and then, eventually, about 1.00 a.m., larger groups of people leave – but there is no sign of Blake or me.)

  I have no memory of what happened after that, until just before 4.00 a.m., when I woke up next to the railway tracks.

  I was some way round the corner from the hotel, back from the road, in bushes and gorse. My body ached and was as rigid as cold metal. The skin over my skull seemed to be drawn too tightly.

  There was a cut about three inches long on my left arm, running down towards my wrist, and another on my left hand, roughly half the length of it. The cuts were sore, and red, and deeper than scratches, but they weren’t bleeding.

  I looked at my phone and saw ten unread messages, all except one connected to what had happened with Caroline and Blake. The final one, timed at 1.43 a.m., was from Sam:

  We’re back home. Hope you’ve made it up

  with Caro and sorted things with Blakey

  That was by far the most positive. Anna’s just said:

  bastard

  Ethan’s:

  that wasn’t good man – where are you?

  I sent one back to Sam:

  stuck in grange and don’t know

  how the hell to get home

  I moved my head from side to side and felt dizzy and sick. From somewhere nearby came a strange cacophony of cartoon noises: pings and tapping feet. Blake’s ringtone. His phone was nearby.

  ‘Blake?’ I said towards the tracks. ‘Are you OK, man?’

  Nothing.

  Using the torch on my phone, I fought through undergrowth towards the noise, which was coming from somewhere next to the barbed wire that protected the railway track. It was a neglected place: rusty lager cans and faded crisp packets caught by the thin fingers of the brambles.

  After a pause, the ringtone started again and I saw the pale glimmer of Blake’s phone three or four paces away, just within reach from my side of the barbed wire.

  The caller ID flashed as Mum&Dad.

  I held the phone up and away from me, as if it were a dangerous specimen, and called into the night air: ‘Blake?’ The phone kept pleading to be answered, vibrating desperately, but something kept me from swiping the bar to the right. When the noise stopped I saw that he had nine missed calls from the same number. I could see the start of a text:

  Please call us, we’re VERY . . .

  There was no sign of Blake anywhere nearby. I searched for dropped clothing or flattened grass, but all I succeeded in doing was trampling the site, making it look as if something had actually happened there. ‘Blake?’ There was no sound except a car growling past.

  I retraced my steps to where I’d woken up, then lumbered to the road and round the corner towards the metallic cry of police radios. Blue lights swirled in front of the the Royal Northern Hotel.

  Of course, there was no reason for me to hand in Blake’s phone – I intended to return it to him along with apologies for being so stupid: not that I knew how stupid I’d been. As I wandered past the front of the hotel, hoping to find a bus stop, a policeman called over: ‘If you’re one of the Wordsworth lot, you need to get home right now. Please.’ He waved his arm as if to scoop me along towards the main part of the town. ‘The buses finally left two hours ago,’ he huffed.

  I stepped around someone’s vomit. ‘OK. Thanks.’

  The front window of the hotel had been smashed and the manager was standing in front of it talking to another policeman. They shook their heads and gave me a tight-lipped look.

  I trudged to the town centre to find that the first bus for Kendal was at 6.29 a.m., and that was only the first leg of the journey. I rested my head against the back of the bus shelter, unsure of how embarrassed and wretched I should be: at that time, I didn’t know about anything that had occurred after 9.25 p.m.

  The stars had been covered by clouds. As I sat at the bus stop, drifting off into an uneasy, cold sleep at about 5.30 a.m., my phone pinged: Ethan.

  R u with Blake? He’s not

  home & not on phone.

  His parents are doing their nut

  I wrote back immediately:

  haven’t seen him since last night

  No sooner had I pressed SEND than Blake’s phone rang again. Mum&Dad for the tenth time.

  I knew I was going to return Blake’s phone, so it would have been weird if I hadn’t answered.

  I didn’t have time to speak before his mum did. ‘Oh, thank God you’re well, we’ve been worried sick. We said that going to that party was a bad idea.’ The words came out in a relieved tumble.

  I wasn’t sure what to say and made a sort of stupid dull clicking noise.

  ‘Blake, dear? Darling? Blake?’ Her switch to panic was immediate.

  ‘It’s not Blake,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s Ben, his friend. I picked up his phone.’

  ‘Where’s Blake? He’s never been out this late before, you know. Never.’

  ‘I don’t know. I just found his phone and was going to give it back to him.’ It made me sound like a passer-by.

  ‘Where did you get his phone from?’

  I pictured the place next to the railway tracks. ‘I found it, um, in some grass.’

  ‘Oh my God, oh my God! This is terrible. Where is Blake? We need to speak to the police. Who did you say you were?’

  ‘I’m Ben.’

  Breathless and desperate words: ‘Oh my God. I thought you were his friend. You’re the boy he was fighting with. What have you done to him? Where did you last see him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And then I turned the phone off. I wanted it all to go away.

  Attachment

  NOVEMBER 2011

  PUPPET ON A STRING

  It was about half an hour later that a police car pulled up in front of the bus stop and a policeman spoke from the passenger window. ‘Can we help you, son? What’s your name?’

  When I murmured the truth, he was out of the car immediately.

  ‘We’re looking for a boy called Blake Coldwell,’ he said. I knew it was more of a question than a statement.

  ‘Caudwell,’ I said (stupidly). ‘Yes, I know he’s not home yet.’ I pulled his mobile phone from my pocket. ‘I’ve spoken to his parents on this. I found it.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ he asked. ‘His parents have said that he’s missing, and that’s seriously out of character.’

  ‘No – I must have, er, fallen asleep somehow . . .’ I must have looked guilty; I certainly felt guilty, though I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘How’d you get his phone, Ben?’ It was strange to hear the policeman use my name. Perhaps it’s a technique they’re taught; perhaps it was meant to be friendly. To me, it was a sledgehammer blow.

  ‘I found it in some grass near to the hotel. I heard it ringing.’

  ‘Just passing by, were you?’

  ‘No.’ I looked down at the ground. ‘I just woke up there and heard it.’

  The other policeman had also left the car. ‘Bit of a cold night to sleep out, eh?’

  ‘Could you show us where you found the phone? Then I think we’d like to talk with you properly, down at the station. OK? Who should you tell?’

  They listened as I called my gran and asked her to get a taxi as soon as she could to
the small police station in Grange-over-Sands. Her high-pitched voice wavered at the end.

  Four more police officers surrounded me at the station, energized by the frantic worry of Blake’s parents. His mum and dad were insistent that Blake would never, ever, not in a million years, stay out all night – and in any case, everyone knew that Blake had not returned on the official buses.

  I had his phone.

  Worst of all, hanging over me like the darkest and most hideous of clouds, was the thought that I had done something to Blake that I couldn’t remember. I vaguely remembered being irrationally angry with him. If his body was found a little way down the railway tracks . . .

  The police certainly saw the same logic. It’s normally a while before a missing-person inquiry reaches the stage this one did, but the Cumbrian Constabulary had people searching along the Grange-over-Sands seafront on Saturday morning. This was even before the mention of ‘Blake Caudwell’s disappearance’ had hit the news.

  The police were methodical. They searched half a mile in either direction of the Royal Northern Hotel, between road and sea, and every garden on the other side of the road for the same distance.

  Later on the Saturday, when it was obvious to others, as well as his parents, that Blake had actually gone missing, a forensic team examined the area where I’d found his mobile phone. I had trampled the area so much that it looked like several people had been there – but they found nothing: no fibres on the barbed wire, nothing on the brambles, no sign of a struggle. And yet his mobile phone had been there. It was as if he had walked to the edge of the barbed wire next to the railway tracks and disappeared into thin air.

  Except that wasn’t the obvious explanation. They were circling me, hungry for my guilt – the obsessed magician who’d kissed his dream girl and then seen red when she danced with another boy.

  They took my fingerprints and a DNA swab from my cheek, exactly as they had when I was taken in after Mike’s death. I didn’t mention that.