Black Wood

by SJI Holliday

  He stared at me as I took the glass. I nodded a thanks before downing the contents and holding it out towards him for a refill.

  ‘How much do you know?’ I said.

  He took a sip from his glass. ‘Nothing.’

  I didn’t believe him. ‘Probably best that way,’ I said, knocking back the second glass of wine. I placed the glass on the floor and stood up. His eyes followed me, expecting more. He wasn’t getting it.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  THE BOY

  The boy wonders how long he has to wait.

  The woman has been crying for too many days. He has been trapped inside the house. The other boy too. But they haven’t spoken about it.

  Not about the man, or the crying woman. Or anything else.

  The woman’s mother comes round every day. Makes them all food. Fish fingers and beans and chips. Sometimes other things too. The woman doesn’t eat.

  Her face is wrinkling up.

  ‘You have to eat something,’ her mother says, ‘for the boys.’

  The boys are fine. They stay in their separate rooms. Sometimes, at night, he hears the woman talking to the other boy. Murmuring things to him. Soothing him. Then she goes back to her own room and cries and sniffs.

  She turns up the sound on the TV. Some late-night American crap she watches. But he can still hear her, underneath.

  The man has been gone for twenty-five days.

  The crying started when it was obvious he wasn’t coming back.

  The boy needs to know when it is safe for him to go to the Place. To see if the bag is there. The guns. The traps.

  The collection of things.

  Every night, he peers out of the window – hoping to see the beam of the torch.

  Somewhere.

  He waits until thirty days have passed. The police have stopped coming round. They last came on day twenty-eight.

  ‘There’s nothing else we can do. He’s an adult. Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t leave us. I know he wouldn’t.’The woman cries and the female police officer hugs her.

  The boy watches through a gap in the stairwell from the upstairs hall. He sees the policewoman’s eyes. She thinks the man has run off. She thinks, I don’t blame him.

  The woman looks ugly now. Her face shrunken and lined like one of those witch doctor’s heads. Her clothes hang off her like rags.

  She is broken.

  Now she only has the boys.

  The one she wanted, and the one she didn’t.

  The Place feels cold without the man. Empty.

  The bag is gone, and the boy feels a moment’s hope. He has run away. He has had enough. But he is not dead. He can’t be dead.

  But then he sees the other bag. The one they always hide deeper in the hole.

  The Collection.

  He would never leave it there for someone to find.

  The boy feels his heart seem to grow bigger in his chest. The thud thud thud threatens to choke him.

  The man would never have left him. The other boy, yes. The woman … maybe.

  But not him. The man loved him.

  The man is dead.

  The boy hears a terrified wail of fear, and realises it is his.

  17

  Sunday morning.

  Traditionally, I’d stay in bed until at least ten. Scott would bring me tea and a bacon sandwich in bed. He’d stick the TV on, but I wouldn’t pay much attention. I’d read. I’d been in the middle of rereading Stephen King’s Carrie. I’d always had an affinity with the main character, Carrie White. She had friends who didn’t really like her and a screaming nutjob for a mother too. It was really no wonder she chose to massacre the lot of them. I realised I’d left it at the side of the bed. Scott’s bed.

  Damn.

  I really didn’t want to go back round there.

  What Bridie had told me about Scott not going to work had left me with an odd heavy feeling in my stomach. Something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know why.

  I headed towards town, taking my usual route. It was early, still before ten, but clearly Maloney was an early riser too. All the curtains were open. A silver Volkswagen Golf was parked in the driveway. His, presumably. It’d been there every other time I’d looked. Yet, something. A feeling. The house had an emptiness to it and, despite the car suggesting otherwise, I sensed that no one was in.

  A flash: that day I’d gone to Polly McAllister’s for tea … her mum taking a key from under an ornamental stone hedgehog near the back door. Could it still be there? I jogged across the road to his house and felt bile rising in my throat. Last night’s wine. I swallowed, and my mouth felt dry and stale.

  I hadn’t ventured over this side since I’d found out he lived in the cottage. Although part of me wanted him to come out, the other part was terrified that he would.

  The downstairs windows reflected the trees from the other side of the road. That empty feeling again. Definitely no one in. I walked up the little lane that led round the back and felt a trickle of fear. Anticipation. Same old gate, slightly ajar because it was out of alignment with the post. He hadn’t bothered to fix it, believing like everyone else that Banktoun was a safe place. No one would creep round the back of his house, would they? I lifted the gate gently to prevent the wood scraping on the path. If by chance he was in the house, he’d definitely hear me.

  I crept round the back.

  The garden looked the same as I remembered it. A thicket of overgrown magnolia. A haphazard rockery. Up near the back wall, a rusty iron bench sat under a saggy-looking tree. On a small patch of lacklustre grass, a wooden bird house, tilted and rotten from years of rain and woodworm. Scattered around the back door were a few chipped ceramic pots of parched lavender.

  And there it was, almost obscured by a clutch of stringy marsh grass.

  The hedgehog.

  Once it’d been smooth grey stone, the spikes somehow moulded to look realistic. Now it looked weathered, the spikes eroded into bumps. If you didn’t know what it was supposed to be, you’d never think it was a hedgehog. I lifted it up and a family of furious beetles skittered away.

  The key.

  Wedged deep into the soil; dark brown from rust so ingrained I expected it to fall apart in my hands.

  I stared at the door. Turned the key over in my hands, leaving a dusty metallic residue.

  I dropped the key into my pocket.

  Carefully, I replaced the hedgehog and crept back round the side of the house, lifting the gate behind me again as I went and letting the latch slot back into place.

  No one would know I’d ever been there.

  The supermarket café was packed. It was the only place open on a Sunday morning and it did a five-item breakfast for three pounds fifty. People queued outside from when it opened at nine and then there was a mad scrabble for seats. People shared tables with strangers. People stood glaring at other people who were taking too long to eat. There was no lingering allowed during the Sunday Special. Every other day of the week was much less frenetic, but that was because there were three other cafés in the town: Landucci’s, the family-run Italian place, which was always good as long as you didn’t mind waiting and weren’t too fussy about your clothes reeking of grease afterwards; Betty Brown’s, which was the favourite of the twinset-and-pearls crowd, with its floral tablecloths and homemade scones; then there was the newest place, Farley’s, with its fancy coffee machine and its selection of French pastries. I’d never been in it, actually. It was hard to get in the door past the oversized buggies. The ‘real’ locals were yet to be convinced that two pounds fifty was a reasonable price to pay for a cup of ‘milky coffee’.

  My tray was still wet from the dishwasher, and as I discreetly tipped the water onto the floor, I scanned the tables. The worst thing about the people who live in small towns is that, on some level, you know them; and there’s usually a reason why you don’t speak. Normally I woul
dn’t dare share a table, but I needed to eat. My stomach felt hollow, and I realised I’d eaten nothing but two packets of crisps in the pub with Claire since the failed pasta disaster at Scott’s. The smell of frying bacon was making me ravenous.

  ‘Tomato or beans?’

  I turned back to the counter. ‘Can I have mushrooms please?’

  That was met with a sigh. My plate held a wrinkled sausage, a rasher of bacon with a crust of thick, gelatinous fat, a shiny fried egg and a triangle of bread that had soaked up so much lard I felt my arteries clogging just looking at it. The woman behind the counter never once caught my gaze as she dolloped a pile of slimy mushrooms on top of the egg. I remembered too late that I detested tinned mushrooms. Should’ve gone for another sausage.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ Another voice, but with the same weary tone.

  ‘Coffee. Can I have hot milk please?’

  Another sigh. ‘There’s cartons of milk next to the cutlery.’ She turned to the next in the queue. ‘Coffee or tea?’

  Then the first voice again: ‘Tomato or beans?’

  Christ, what a life.

  I slid my tray along towards the till, collecting a slice of toast and a pat of butter on the way.

  ‘Toast’s extra,’ the cashier said. ‘Fifty pee.’

  I handed her a fiver and she dropped a pound coin on my tray and gave me a weak smile. I recognised her from school. Mary something. She had a smattering of spots on one cheek that she’d tried to cover up with foundation that was too dark for her pasty complexion. It looked like she’d dipped half of her face in sand.

  I scanned the tables again. Since I’d been in the queue, a couple of extra spaces had opened up. Window seat on a table of four, facing away from the counter. The inhabitants were an elderly couple on their last triangles of toast and a young lad in a hooded top who appeared to be attempting a new world record in speed bean-eating. The other available seat was next to a stressed-looking young dad with two little kids who were gleefully spreading tomato sauce all over the table while he sipped his tea and pretended he couldn’t see them.

  I chose Option 1.

  ‘Is this seat free?’

  ‘Aye, hen. We’re nearly done anyway.’

  The young lad ignored me.

  I put my tray down on the table and tried to press myself as far as possible against the window, leaving the maximum gap between me and the lad. Not that he was doing anything wrong, but the way he was shovelling the beans into his mouth, I was in danger of puking.

  I ate the sausage first. Then the bacon. I balled the mushrooms up inside a napkin and wiped their brown sludge off the egg. I was trying to decide whether to put the egg on top of the fried bread or to dip the toast in the yolk when I realised that the couple had been replaced by a much younger version and the young lad in the hoodie had gone.

  ‘Excuse me, is this seat free?’

  I turned in the direction of the voice, ready to say, ‘Of course, help yourself,’ but the words stuck in my throat and all I managed was a little squeak.

  He was two tables away. Must’ve come in after me.

  He put down his knife and fork and picked up his napkin, wiped his mouth. Took a sip of his tea.

  I stared.

  Felt the bacon fat sticking at the back of my throat.

  The man standing next to me must’ve sensed something was wrong, and he muttered something before turning and heading off to take a seat in the other corner of the room. As far away from me as possible.

  I stared over at Gareth Maloney, and after what seemed like an age, he lifted his head.

  He looked confused, then realisation washed over his face, and he smiled at me.

  I felt myself smile back.

  18

  The summer that my parents died, after one of my infrequent trips home, I’d been packed off to Black Wood Cottage again. I remembered the short journey in the car, my dad driving. Me in the back, surrounded by plastic bags stuffed full of shorts and T-shirts. Sandals. Thin cotton nighties. Piles of books.

  He didn’t say a word the whole way.

  I stared out of the window at the fields, the church spire shrinking away as we drove further from the town. I hadn’t realised then that it was only a few miles away from home, because when I was there it was like being in another world.

  I was another me. After what had happened to Claire, I needed the comfort of being with someone who cared.

  Gran was waiting at the front door as we pulled up the bumpy pot-holed driveway. She gave me a little wave. My face was pressed up against the window, grinning.

  My dad pulled on the handbrake and left the engine running. He turned to face me. ‘You be good for your gran now, you hear? No funny business. I don’t want any bloody phone calls this time. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I’d already pushed open the back door and my legs were dangling out of the car. I was clutching as many bags as I could carry. Gran walked towards us, her plain grey dress flapping around her ankles, her heavy work boots crunching on the gravel. She leant beside me and picked up the rest of my bags, and as she pulled back out, she touched her cheek against mine. Her skin felt like brushed cotton sheets. I slid off the seat, dropping my bags onto the ground. She slammed the door shut and I heard my dad sigh through the partially rolled-down window.

  She folded her arms and took a step closer to the car, bending slightly to meet him at eye level. She craned her neck to peer deeper into the car. ‘Jim,’ she said, sounding disappointed. ‘Miranda not with you?’

  There was a gentle squeaking sound as he wound the window down further. ‘She’s got one of her headaches,’ he said. He handed her a fat brown envelope. ‘Here. This should do you.’ The window squeaked upwards again until only an inch of a gap remained. He’d already turned away and I heard the crunch as he fumbled with the gears.

  He was rubbish in mum’s car. The Citroen 2CV was a clunker, but she loved it. ‘Don’t thrash it,’ she always said, and he always ignored her. He didn’t like to drive his own car, a much newer Saab, up the path to Gran’s in case it got flicked with mud. I hated his car. It reeked of Magic Tree air freshener and stale B&H, and it always made a horrible screech when he stepped on the brakes.

  Gran held the envelope in front of her for a moment as if wondering what to do with it, then slipped it into the pocket of her apron.

  He drove off without another word.

  I felt that little wobble in my legs that I got sometimes. That lump that popped up in my throat like I’d swallowed too big a bite of apple. ‘Bye,’ I said, not loud enough for anyone to hear. I had a feeling then, a prickling, like pins and needles. I knew then. I was never going to see him again.

  19

  The fried breakfast lay like a lump of stone at the bottom of my stomach.

  I’d smiled at him. What the fuck was I thinking?

  ‘Oh, hello. Jo, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  Clever, I thought. Playing it cool. After all, no one knew what he’d done but me. I swallowed, trying to hold back the breakfast that was threatening to make a reappearance. For once I was lost for words.

  ‘Are you all right now? You had a wee turn when I came into the shop …’

  He stopped talking, suddenly self-conscious that he was the only one having a conversation. Everyone else was shoving food into their mouths, gulping tea. All eyes and ears were on him.

  Who’s the newcomer? What’s he doing talking to her?

  ‘I’m fine. Thanks. I hadn’t eaten. Low blood sugar or something. I hope I didn’t spill coffee on your book …’ I was babbling. ‘So, what brings you back to Banktoun?’ I could play it cool too.

  He gave me a broad smile, showing neat white teeth. Not a smoker. Not much of a coffee or red wine drinker either. I wondered if they were all real. Most rugby players would’ve lost at least one, I thought. Scott had lost two. I still had every single one of my own teeth, which was pretty good, considering.

  ‘It wo
uld’ve been my dad’s 60th birthday this weekend … Mum said I was daft, but I wanted to come back here. Mark it somehow. I’ve been renting that cottage up at the top of the town … Do you fancy another coffee?’

  He gestured to the seat opposite him, which had become free since he’d started talking to me. He was still smiling and it hit me then, how good-looking he was. I hadn’t noticed before. All I’d noticed were the eyes, and how the smile didn’t quite reach them. I thought about what he’d said about his dad, that it would’ve been his birthday … A memory flickered like a half-lit cigarette.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Jo! Oh thank God you’re here. I called Craig, but there was no answer. Is your mobile switched off?’

  I spun round at the familiar voice and felt annoyed yet relieved at the interruption. I was about to do something I’d regret. Like sit down and have a civil conversation with Maloney. That wasn’t part of the plan.

  Not yet.

  ‘Scott,’ I said. I spoke quietly and tried to keep my voice level. I didn’t want to have a scene in the middle of the café. Not another one. People had only just begun to get bored of my first exchange and now here was Scott, with his hair sticking up in tufts and his usual smell of Boss aftershave replaced by stale BO. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need to talk to you. Can we go home?’

  ‘You chucked me out, remember?’

  I heard shuffling in seats as the earwiggers picked up on more juicy gossip. I turned back to Maloney, who looked crestfallen. ‘Sorry.’ I shrugged.

  ‘Another time,’ he said. That grin again.

  I grabbed Scott by the elbow and ushered him out of the café and into the car park.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Please, Jo. Come back to the house. There’s something you need to know.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t deal with it. So he’d cheated on me with the girl from work. Kirsty. Whatever. It didn’t matter any more. I had bigger things on my mind.

  ‘Not now, Scott,’ I said. ‘I’ll pop round tomorrow. On my lunch break, maybe.’