by Neil Cross
I said, ‘How’s the car?’
He was chewing. He chewed five or six times, then he swallowed. He took a sip of water. He said, ‘The car’s fine. Why?’
‘Because I saw you.’
‘Saw me where?’
‘Broken down, on the corner.’
‘What corner?’
‘The corner by Mum’s work.’
He smiled. ‘I’m afraid you didn’t.’
‘Yes, I did.’
He said, ‘What nonsense is this?’
It’s what he said when he saw me reading a new comic book or a science fiction novel. He’d pick it up and examine it and say it. It was a kind of joke between us.
‘I saw you,’ I said. ‘You were broken down. You were walking round the car. I thought you were going to kick it. I went and got Mum, but by the time we got there you’d gone.’
‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken.’
‘No I’m not.’
He looked at me. I wasn’t looking at him. I was watching TV. But I could feel his eyes.
He said, ‘Don’t contradict me.’
‘I’m not contradicting you.’
‘Good.’
He went back to eating.
‘But I saw you.’
He lay down the knife. He said, ‘I’m warning you. Don’t defy me.’
‘I’m not defying you. But you were there.’
I watched TV. My heart was beating.
Mum said, ‘You must’ve seen someone else, love.’
‘I didn’t see someone else.’
‘Well,’ said Derek. ‘You certainly didn’t see me.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I saw you.’
He stood.
I stayed sitting. My eyes were on the screen.
He stood there. He was a shape in the corner of my eye.
He said, ‘Go to your room.’
I wanted to leap to my feet, because I was angry. But I made myself stand slowly.
He said, ‘When you’re ready to apologize, you can come back in.’
‘I can’t apologize. I saw you.’
‘Then get out of my sight.’
I entered the other cottage through the hole in the cupboard. I closed the door behind me and lay on the bed, my hands laced behind my head. I listened to them talking about me. Derek’s voice was soft and full of compassion.
I heard him say, ‘You can see why they’re not allowed to testify in court, can’t you?’
In the morning everything was normal. My hallucination was not mentioned again. It was just one of those things.
Mum had many reasons to believe Derek. At least one of them was simple: he couldn’t be lying, because recently he’d been made Bishop of the Livingstone branch, and Mormon bishops didn’t lie.
Now he was Bishop, Derek oversaw the running of the branch. It took up a lot of his time. He conducted the meetings. He made assignments. He presided over all pastoral and financial matters. Most of being a bishop involved being away from his family. Even on Sunday we rarely got to see him, except from a distance. He listened to everyone’s problems with concern and authority.
We watched him.
It was now his responsibility to raise a tithe from his congregation. It was equal to ten per cent of their gross earnings. A tithe was used, in part, to pay for a building’s upkeep, or in this case rental of the school. It was also used to fund young missionary programmes, to print free copies of The Book of Mormon and, at the bishop’s unofficial discretion, to make welfare payments to Mormon families in need.
It was Derek’s stated ambition to move the Livingstone branch out of the school assembly hall and into a building of its own. For that, he needed more members. The church required a minimum number of worshippers before it would commit expenditure to land acquisition and church building. Derek was sure he could do it: raise enough cash to build a church of his own. And under his steerage, attendance–and the tithe received–continued slowly to grow.
During my Easter visit to Bristol that year, I scarcely saw Dad. He was at work. I was alone in the house with Gary, Wayne and Margaret.
I seemed to gather silence and trail it behind me. When I entered a room, it hushed. Margaret exchanged looks with Gary. When I left–I’d go to my bedroom and lie on the bed, reading–exhalations and sibilance of distaste tracked me up the stairs. The walls of the house grew tense around me, like flexed muscles.
Dad remained doggedly oblivious. He came home from work, said, ‘Hello, Nipper,’ and hello to his family. He watched the early evening news, the sports results, the weather, and then we had tea.
I sat at the table, grinding my teeth. Pretending to be exhausted, I went to bed at eight. The release of leaving them was like a cool breeze. I lay on the bed. I couldn’t make sense of the page until some of the tautness had left my legs and neck. In the morning, I woke with a headache and a sore jaw; I’d been grinding my teeth as I slept.
It was at its worst just before tea-time. We sat in the living room, waiting for Dad to come home. It looked odd if I wasn’t there. So I slunk down, taking my book with me.
On Thursday, as I sat there, Margaret, who’d been quiet since that morning, suddenly stood up and strode from the room. She stomped right past me. Gary followed her to the kitchen. Wayne was watching Grange Hill.
For a while, I couldn’t hear anything. Then I became aware of low voices, growing steadily louder. Margaret was confiding something. Gary muttered something back. Margaret began to shout.
She said, ‘I can’t stand it.’
Her voice came through the wall.
She said, ‘Alan’s so different when he’s here. It’s not like it’s my home. I don’t want him here any more, Gary. I don’t want him in our home.’
She was crying. Gary tried to comfort her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
I wanted to go and hide. But I couldn’t leave the room because it would mean passing the kitchen door. So I pretended to read. My teeth hurt. Wayne didn’t look up from Grange Hill.
Margaret cried for a long time, but eventually she went upstairs. Gary came into the living room and sat before the TV. When I looked, I saw that he was crying, too. I didn’t want to be in the living room any more. I didn’t want to be in the house. I sat without moving. So did Wayne. My jaw hurt for the clenching.
When Margaret came downstairs, she was smiling and normal. She got on with making the tea. Then Dad got home from work, in his suit and tie and we ate together, round the table.
For the rest of the week Margaret was smiling and friendly, a knife behind it.
In Edinburgh, I worried about telling Mum and Derek the things Margaret had said. But in the end I had to; they knew something was wrong. So I told them and that night I listened to Derek and Mum, conspiring quietly over the sound of the TV.
We went to meet their solicitor. I sat in the office, between Mum and Derek, looking at a wooden desk. The solicitor wore a dark suit. I looked at his tight face and he looked at me while Derek recounted all the things that Margaret had said.
When the meeting was nearly over, the solicitor read the letter out loud, to make sure I agreed with it. Neil feels that his stepmother, Margaret, resents him…
Mum listened. She looked pinched. Her handbag was on her lap. Derek wore a face of businesslike triumph. It was his shopkeeper’s face.
Within a day or two of it being posted, I knew Dad would read the solicitor’s letter, which was called an affidavit. It would make him cry. His face would collapse, slowly at first, like a demolished tower-block, because that’s how he looked when he cried. But it was either make him cry or keep going back. So I agreed without hesitation that the letter should be sent.
23
Derek’s prediction about the dog had been correct. She was happy in Tarbrax.
We lived close to the Post Office, which was run by Mrs Lamb. She was elderly and slight, in green Wellingtons and a sleeveless anorak. But she was Presbyterian, courteous, in brisk health. Within a week of our
arrival, Mum had entrusted her with a set of house keys.
Mrs Lamb kept a venerable, radically untrimmed husky dog, a globe of white fluff called Sindie. Every morning and every afternoon Mrs Lamb and Sindie came to collect our dog and, together, they went for a long walk around the village. Mrs Lamb liked our dog. I suspected that she kept her all day.
Now, when we got home in the evening, there was no neurotic, joyful barking, nor any terrified cringing. There were just welcoming barks and paws on the shoulder and a beating tail.
The dog ignored Derek, and Derek ignored her. He no longer had any excuse to beat her. Sometimes, if she was in his way, he threatened her with a rolled-up newspaper. She looked at him with nobility and sadness and slinked away, not quickly, not slow.
If the evening was fine and I was in the mood, I took the dog for a walk over the bing. We passed through the still overgrown (and still chickenless) quarter-acre, then crossed the main road into the village. It was surfaced with rose-coloured tarmac. Then we walked down a wide, muddy path and passed an old No Entry sign, pocked and warped by decades of air-gun pellets.
We went through the collapsed gates and into perfect, post-apocalyptic isolation. The little bing was like a city destroyed by a nuclear firestorm. There were boulevards of shale and ash, mounds as tall as broken houses and hollowed churches. All of them were easy to climb and easy to explore.
At first, the dog trotted at my heels, sniffing the blighted ground. Then she pressed her ears flat and sprinted off, hunting for rabbits. There were thousands of them. The dog’s heedless charge startled them from the long grass on the bing’s perimeter. Rabbits scattered in all directions, like fat on a skillet.
The dog’s acceleration and persistence were astonishing. She never caught a rabbit, but she never grew tired of trying. Eventually, I decided to test the limits of her endurance.
She and I walked to the big bing; that colossal wedge, a pinkish doorstop the size of a mountain. A kind of path ran up the centre of it. The dog followed me to the top. It was a long, lonely walk.
I sat down on the upper lip of the wedge and looked down at the surrounding farmland. It was cut into patches. The dog sat with me, panting.
I picked up a piece of shale. It fit my palm. It was the shape of a hip-bone and the weight of pumice. I showed it to the dog. She stood. Her hind legs trembled. She made little yelps under her breath. I pulled back my hand and threw.
The dog launched herself in pursuit. She raced down the yielding, near-vertical incline. Her feet caused little avalanches.
At the foot of the bing, she sniffed round for a while. Then she woofed and looked up at me. She scooped something in her mouth and laboured up the shifting slope. It was hard going, even for her.
At the top, she approached me at a pleased saunter. She dropped the shale into my lap. It was the same bone-shape, now dark-spotted with dog slobber.
She barked, asking me to do it again.
She had not tired of the game even when the sun began to set and I grew anxious to be gone. Darkness could come quickly, and it was a good walk back to the village.
On the way home, the dog trotted at my heel, content but not exhausted. At the base of the big bing, she set off after a rabbit. I sensed it as a sudden alertness, then a frantic rustle in the long grass.
I walked the rest of the way alone, the shadows growing longer and deeper in that shattered, imaginary city. When I reached the gate, several minutes later, the dog was waiting.
I thought of all that energy, confounded in a tiny flat on Duff Street. I hugged her. She was a good dog. She sat erect and allowed herself to be hugged. When I disengaged, she lay a muddy paw in my lap. I took it and shook it, and we walked home together.
The bing had a supernatural quality. I loved the isolation and desolation of it. I liked to frighten myself, timing myself home against the fall of night.
Sometimes, as the sun faded to orange and I grew pleasantly anxious to be gone, I became aware of a low, persistent hum. It seemed to emanate from whichever direction I turned. Its was pitched like plainchant, like cloistered monks singing a single, unwavering note.
I made some effort to identify its source and found nothing. There were no power lines until you reached the village, half a mile away. And power lines couldn’t explain why the hum rose from the landscape only when the sun set, or why it grew louder as the darkness quickened.
The first time, I made myself walk home at a deliberate pace. I was not pursued by the hum, but enveloped within it. It seemed to rise in pitch with the beat of my heart. When I stepped onto the road, I realized it had gone.
The next time, fear got the best of me and I ran through the violent sunset, the dog romping at my heels.
When Tam came to stay for the weekend, we stood on the lip of the big bing, waiting for the sun to go down. As the light faltered, the hum rose like mist from the ground. Tam heard it too.
At first, we stood there, discussing it with self-conscious seriousness. Then, as our shadows grew long, we began to scare each other.
A couple of years before, there had been a peculiar incident on the A17 just outside Livingstone. That was our route home. On 9 November 1979, Bob Taylor–a forestry worker for the Livingstone Development Corporation–was making a check in those eerie, endless pine forests. In a clearing, he noticed a metallic object shaped like the planet Saturn. It was fading in and out. As he watched, it launched two metallic balls, each emitting spikes of light. They rolled over the ground. They smelled bad, and they made the inside of Bob Taylor’s head burn.
He passed out. When he awoke, the object had gone. His clothes were ripped and his skin was scratched. He was shocked and drained and disorientated. He had to crawl to his truck. But he was too dazed to drive. He went into a ditch.
Eventually, he called the police. Where Bob Taylor had seen the UFO, they photographed a 4.5-metre ring of ‘spiked holes’, 10 centimetres deep and 9 centimetres wide. Nobody knew what they were, and nobody ever found out. Eventually, the council erected a plaque to mark the location of the encounter, which became known as the Livingstone Incident.
On the bing in that deepening evening, Tam was quick to identify the hum with the malevolent UFOs that had nearly taken Bob Taylor. Perhaps they used the bing as a base. It was a good place to hide: desolate, miles from anywhere. Right then, malevolent UFOs frightened me more than anything else.
At first we giggled, because we were scared and we didn’t want to show it. Then we broke and ran like hell. We ran all the way to the village, on through the quarter-acre, the small fenced garden and through the door of Crosswood Terrace.
Later, we slept top and tail, our feet jammed in each other’s faces.
Derek was working late, supervising the cashing-up, when four armed robbers entered the cash and carry. They wore ski-masks and carried sawn-off shotguns. They forced Derek and some other staff into a locked room. They put a gun to Derek’s head and ordered him to open the safe. They stole all the money.
When they’d gone, Derek broke free of the room in which they’d all been locked and called the police.
He got home very late that night, unspeakably weary. He didn’t want to talk about it. A lot of money had gone. It was just his luck, that he was in charge when it happened.
In the morning, his picture was on the front page of the newspaper. The story described the events of the previous evening as an ordeal. In the photograph, Derek looked desperately drawn.
He drove me to West Calder and idled at the kerb while I went into the newsagent and bought half a dozen copies. In the shop, tucking them under my arm like a swagger-stick, I pointed to the photograph.
I said, ‘This is my Dad.’
The shopkeeper didn’t seem interested. Perhaps he didn’t believe me.
Even at home, the robbery was not much spoken of. Mum didn’t like to think about it–it had been a bad night for us all. And talk of it made Derek shifting and uncomfortable.
To recreate the events of t
hat evening, my only resources were the newspaper reports and my imagination. And so I imagined that Derek was involved with the robbery. His escape to alert the police seemed too easy. If I’d been one of the raiders, I’d have tied him up a great deal more competently than they had. Yet otherwise, the hold-up was perfectly executed. They arrived when the maximum amount of cash was on site, along with the fewest members of staff. It was almost as if Derek was supposed to escape, in order to call the police–that way, nobody would suspect it of being an inside job.
The thieves were never caught. Nobody was ever charged with anything, least of all Derek, and the money was never found.
Several weeks after the robbery, Derek came home in a temper. He took off his driving gloves but forgot about his dripping coat.
Yvonne slipped to her room. She paused in the cupboard to look at me. She jerked her eyes sideways. But I didn’t want to go with her. I pretended to watch TV while Derek and Mum talked. I caught fragments. Derek was recounting an argument with his boss. He and his boss hadn’t been getting on for some time.
He muttered, ‘So I told him where to stick it.’
He sat there, calming down, still in his wet coat.
I thought of him, livid, driving along the A70, that lonely road, through the pine forests, the starry skies above him. Past the turn-offs for West Calder, the signposts for Edinburgh and Glasgow. The slowing of tyres on gravel outside Crosswood Terrace. On the way, he had been rehearsing the conversation he’d just repeated for Mum’s benefit. It consisted of things he wished he’d said, but hadn’t.
I thought of another morning, not long before. As we were entering Edinburgh, a car cut us up. A young man was at the wheel, his mate in the seat next to him.
Derek gave them the finger and mouthed the words, ‘You prick.’
The car braked with a shriek. It paused in the road, then described a smooth U-turn.
Mum said, ‘Oh God, Derek.’
Derek fumbled with the wheel. Then he forced the Skoda into a blind right turn. The other car followed.
Derek turned right again, into an amber light. He turned again. He was breathing oddly. His feet were jerky on the pedals.
