by James Long
Passing a perfect hump where tree roots heaved up earth, they had skidded round, rear wheels locked. Zach jumped it first and landed shouting his exaggeration. ‘I got air. Wow! Did you see that? Three feet.’
Ryan went next but barely hopped, fiddling intently with his gears all the way back as if thwarted by mechanics.
Their leader Luke attacked it last, taking the longest run-up to fulfil their expectations. Luke was a brave, inventive boy and they liked to see him set the standard. He rushed the ramp, jerked head and shoulders back to make the jump, then froze, still staring upwards instead of at his landing point.
They saw the bike rear backwards, hurling him abruptly to the solid earth, and went fearfully to pick him up.
‘You really stacked it,’ Ryan said, avoiding looking at the blood flowing from Luke’s chin, but his friend was oblivious to the injury, searching up through the trees.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see where he went?’
‘Who?’
‘The man on the parachute. He’s come down. He must have done.’ Luke was standing up and staring into the woods. ‘We have to go and find him.’
He climbed the bank, questing through the trees, searching left and right. They followed, frightened by his sudden mania.
‘There’s nothing,’ Ryan said in the end. ‘There’s no one here. You banged your head.’
‘It was a yellow parachute. You saw the plane.’
‘There wasn’t any plane.’
‘Come on, you must have heard it.’
‘No.’
‘You couldn’t not have heard it. It was roaring and banging.’
The vivid image was still in Luke’s head. Straight wings, two propellers, one of them stopped, smoke pouring out behind, a greasy burning line across the sky, its belly pale green with stark black crosses from a war that was no more than history.
They all looked up at a clear and silent sky, and that was when Luke’s friends began to think him odd.
Now he felt odder still, staring up the lane where the teacher had gone, pulled in two directions. Neither of them was the road that led to Cucklington. Montacute was tugging him gently back – not the place, but the brief and shocking power that had travelled up his arm. The faces of three girls swam in his mind’s eye – vaguer, blurrier now, too far away. He felt a sad and fading need to see them properly but the lane ahead called him too and that was stronger. It was the right and only way to go, more like the way home than the Cucklington road with its cheerless, pointless bungalow at the other end. He pushed his bike in the wheel-tracks of the teacher’s car and every step he took felt a step nearer to something.
A sign pointed left to Pen Selwood and he stared at the name, pulled by it, but the other road had a stronger pull so he ignored it, went straight on, curving around a bend until he came to a gap in the trees and a gate on the right and a cottage beyond it and knew this was what was calling him. He pushed the gate open, wheeled his bicycle through as if dreaming, stood staring at the front door and the low windows, and was amazed when that door opened and the teacher came out to stare at him in matching amazement.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded the boy.
‘Me? I live here. What are you doing here? You followed me? Why did you do that?’
‘No. How could I? You drove off.’
‘Luke, why are you here?’
‘When did you buy this house?’
‘What an odd question.’
‘When?’
The teacher frowned in thought. ‘It was nineteen ninety,’ he said, and looked hard at the boy who took a few steps back from the porch and scanned the front of the house from side to side, frowning as if it was lying to him.
‘What was it like then?’
‘It was a complete ruin. Why?’
‘I remember it like that.’
‘No, you couldn’t possibly. You weren’t born.’
‘I know you from before.’
‘Before what? Before today? Of course you do.’
‘From back then, from when you first saw it.’
The teacher was shaking his head. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.
The boy saw a hint of fright in the teacher’s face. He repeated it urgently as if he had to get through to the older man. ‘I tell you I knew you then.’
‘Stop it, Luke. You fell. Are you feeling ill?’ But the boy found the familiar name was no longer so familiar. It glanced off him.
‘I’m taking you home,’ said the teacher. ‘Get in the car.’
As they drove away, three images spun, swirling and colliding in Luke’s head – the girls, the cottage, the teacher’s face. He could get no purchase on them. They wouldn’t stick but when they were approaching Cucklington they drove past the remains of an ivy-clad barn and the sight of it altered the teacher’s cottage in Luke’s mind’s eye. The ivy spread up the gable end beside the road. The roof sank, the glass splintered away, and a man was standing outside it. Then that man changed too and merged into the teacher in the seat next to him, but younger – no grey in his face nor in his hair.
‘Where do I go?’ the teacher asked him at the village sign but the boy just gazed at him. The teacher looked back in blank bewilderment.
‘Luke, where’s your house?’
‘I don’t think I’m Luke. I’m not, am I?’
‘Of course you are.’
‘No.’
‘I’m taking you home. Will there be someone there?’
‘Don’t.’ The boy was rubbing his head as if he could massage Luke away. ‘I can’t remember my name.’ He stared at the teacher again. ‘You have to tell me.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘I think you do. What was I called when I met you?’
‘Today?’
‘No. You do know what I mean. I’m sure you do. Way before that. At your house. When you first came.’
All the teacher could do was shake his head in mute distress but the boy went on, pitiless, unstoppable now as other fragments surfaced. ‘You were poking around. Your car was parked in the lane.’ His voice sounded far away and his face was screwed up, concentrating fiercely, ‘It was a dark blue car. You’d gone inside where you had no right to be. No right at all. It wasn’t yours. Not then. I caught you looking in the cellar.’
‘Someone’s told you,’ said the teacher faintly.
‘I caught you there. You know I did.’
‘You didn’t. That wasn’t you. That was an old man. Who told you?’
‘What was the old man called?’
The teacher found he didn’t want to say. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘It’s the whole point,’ said the boy. ‘You have to tell me his name.’
‘Why?’
The boy stared at him and all Michael Martin could do was flinch away as if a snake was coiled in the seat beside him, and the only explanation came to him and it was worse than having no explanation at all. Across years of sadness he was back there again, back at the cottage she had found by chance, poking around in the ruins. All those years ago, before this boy was born.
‘Because it’s my name, don’t you see?’ The boy was shaking. ‘Tell me my name.’ He was shouting now, roaring his distress. ‘You must help me. I can’t remember. Please tell me. Please.’
And of course Mike knew the name which filled his head – the name of the old man who had caught them in the cottage, the old man who destroyed his life, the old man who was dead before this boy was born. He could not say it.
‘Stop it,’ he said and reached out his arm, not sure if he was trying to keep Luke at bay or to comfort him.
The boy glared at him, jerked the car door open, shouted, ‘Get away from me.’
A man and a woman were walking down the lane. The woman ran to him. ‘Lukey,’ she said, staring through the windscreen at the white-faced teacher, ‘is something wrong?’ and the man said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
CHAPTER 8
In
the kitchen Luke’s mother pinned him in a corner and roasted him with angry concern. ‘You trying to tell me nothing happened? You screaming at him in the car and him sitting there like he’d seen a ghost?’
‘I went to a dig, that’s all. He gave me a lift back.’
Barry, lurking in the doorway, stepped forward into their business. ‘What do you mean, a dig?’
‘You know – archaeology.’
‘So you’re suddenly an archaeologist, are you?’ Luke saw fat triumph in Barry’s face as he made himself the man of the house. The boy resented that deeply.
‘What did he do?’ his mother asked.
‘Nothing. He gave me a lift home.’
‘Where from?’
‘The dig. I told you. I went to this place where they were digging.’
‘Why did you yell at him?’ demanded Barry.
‘I was tired.’
‘Oh, come on. Was I born yesterday?’
‘Barry’s right to ask,’ put in his mother more gently. ‘You don’t yell at people, Lukey – not without a reason. You’re sitting in some strange man’s car, shouting at him – something’s happened, hasn’t it? If he was trying something on, you need to tell us. It wouldn’t be right, and anyway you should have asked us before you went. These teachers might not always be very nice people. You and him, alone and all that. Barry reckons he’s a poofter. Said so after he saw him at parents’ evening.’
Barry’s not my parent was what Luke wanted to say, but all he did say was, ‘That wasn’t him. That was Mr Jellicoe.’
‘Was it? Maybe it was, but if they’ve let one poofter into the school, who’s to say there aren’t more? Shouldn’t be any,’ said Barry.
‘It wasn’t anything like that,’ said the boy, but then Barry got going all over again and it went on and on, and of course he couldn’t begin to explain.
When they finally ran out of words, he took refuge in his bedroom while they watched television with the sound turned up next door, then as evening came, he opened his window and slipped out through the back garden. He walked to the place he went to whenever it got bad – to the steep hillside with a sheer view westward over the drained marshland.
The evening sun was half an hour from the horizon and he settled down, his face towards it, to think in the peace that place offered. The high ground he was on ran away north, curving back, hiding the teacher’s village. Until today the name had meant nothing to him but now Pen Selwood filled his head and with it another name that he could not quite find. He searched that way in his mind, seeking the name that hung out there along the ridge.
As he waited for the sunset, his gaze wandered across the lower ground below, casting around for something to take him out of the here and now. He looked down at the farms scattered over the lowlands, Baskets Farm and Frith Farm and the one they used to call the Redhouse Farm, and was thrilled to find he knew that. He saw the late sun paint the crown of the little hill above Stoke Trister and he also knew that the tufts of woodland left on its summit were all that remained of a great swathe of trees.
Now the sun was down on the horizon and the sky put on a fine evening ocean swell of clouds in line after line, purple above, orange below, growing brighter as the sun dipped. He watched, cooling to a state nearer peace in that vast proof that only the earth’s thin crust was within the spoiling reach of man. He knew that he had missed something enormous at Montacute, something he would have found if he had been allowed to stay just another hour. He knew he had to go there again, west where the sunset was calling him.
He got up at eight the next morning, heard his mother and Barry snoring in Sunday unison, and cycled away. As he left Cucklington, it seemed absurd to him that his name might not be Luke, but as he grew steadily nearer to the rise of the ridge he passed through a no-man’s-land to a point where it seemed absurd that he ever thought it was. He slowed down as he approached Bagstone Farm and he knew that was the name of the house Michael Martin lived in even though there was no sign on it. Now that he could feel its vast gravitational pull, he was astonished that it had been hidden from him.
He pushed open the gate, relieved to see no sign of the teacher’s car, needing time alone. The house stood end-on to the road. He walked slowly through the yard in front of it, noticing the encroaching brambles, minding the decay, then came to the far end where the roofline sank lower and fought his way through the dense undergrowth round to the back of the house. The ground fell away into a stream valley but he knew exactly how the path had run, though little trace of it was left and the trunk of a fallen tree lay across it. Returning to the yard, he leaned to look in at all the windows, shading the glass with his hand, then stood back, staring at the front of the house.
At first there was nothing, but instinct prompted him to wait and to slow his breathing, deep and long, to a point where the world slowed down with him. The even line of the roof peak twitched and shifted before his eyes and he discovered he could pull it down a little further in his head. In his mind’s eye he tugged tiles out of place, let the guttering droop at one end. As he peeled paint from the window frames the door shuffled sideways to where it had once been, the porch sagging. The house slowly loosened as ruin crept between the stones and he blessed this new trick that seemed very, very old.
A man came out of the ether like a print developing in a chemical bath and for just one clear moment he was standing there alone in front of the door facing Luke. He knew the man – Mike Martin, the teacher, as his younger self. Then she came bursting out of the same lost past, a miracle, to stand there beside the teacher where she should never have been. The girl with a hundred faces now had only one. It was wide and smiling, framed by a flood of shining brown hair.
For just a moment she was clear to him, this glorious girl who filled his void, but she scorched his mind’s eye and he could not make her stay. The house snapped and wriggled back to the implacable bleakness of the present and left him bereft. Her name mattered as much as his because he knew in his bones that all those hundred faces he had seen shared that single name.
He felt an awareness of an imminent revelation, not here but back at the place he should never have left, back at the old hill fortress of Montacute, and though this house held a million more possibilities for his imagination or his memory or both, he knew he had to go straight back there to chase it down. In a single shock he knew she was there, that she had certainly been there yesterday, close within his reach if only he had looked with the right eyes. Three girls, his age, and she was one – standing right there, and he had let her go. His mind raced back to the fragmentary memory of each girl – the blonde, the dark girl, the short girl – and found to his despair that he had no idea which one she was.
It was simple. Montacute called him and he had to go, so he got back on his bike to ride all that way again, but this time he did not trust in instinct to find the way. Stopping at a petrol station, he leafed through a road atlas and borrowed a pen from the irritated man behind the counter to write down his route. It took him longer, struggling into a strong south-west wind, on main roads this time, passing trucks buffeting him with fists of air, and then eventually he saw the hill rise once again and turned to where he knew the diggers’ tents were pitched.
There was a police sign in the way, square in the middle of the track. It said ROAD CLOSED and it filled him with foreboding. He ignored it and rode on. A great deal had changed since the day before. Most of the tents had gone from the field. An army truck and two police vans were parked alongside the few remaining cars. A policeman stood there, barring the way.
‘Sorry, you can’t come through,’ he said.
‘I know what happened. I was here on the dig yesterday. I just wanted to see the others.’
‘They’ve gone,’ said the man. ‘There’s only a few of your lot left. The army’s up there. You’ll have to wait down here.’
A door slammed in the field and a rough diesel burst into life. Luke saw a red pick-up truck start to move. The po
liceman stepped to one side to make way and to Luke’s huge relief, he saw Dozer at the wheel. The truck stopped.
‘Hello, matey,’ said Dozer through the open window. ‘You back again?’
‘Yes, but he says I can’t go up there.’
‘Too right. There might be a big bang at any moment. It’s just Rupert and his students and me plus the army amateurs.’ He grinned at the PC, who sniffed.
‘Where have the others gone?’
‘Home,’ said Dozer. ‘Why?’
The boy sagged. ‘No reason. I’d better go then.’
‘Yup, ’fraid so. Where was it? Wincanton? You biked all that way again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Blimey.’ Dozer considered. ‘Well, you’re in luck. I’m going to Bridgwater to pick up some gear. I could go that way. Pop your wheels in the back.’
With only a hazy knowledge of Somerset geography, Luke had no idea how kind that offer was. ‘Are the girls still here?’ he said. ‘Are they Rupert’s students?’
‘Some of them were, but no, they’ve all gone. They hadn’t done the training, you see – the explosives stuff.’
‘All the girls have gone?’
‘That’s right. It’s just the lads here now.’
With a heavy heart, Luke did what the man said and settled into the ripped plastic passenger seat.
‘So what brought you cycling all the way back again, young fellow?’ Dozer asked as they reached the main road. ‘You been bitten by the digging bug?’
‘No. I mean, I liked it. Thank you for showing me how.’
‘I wasn’t looking for thanks. I was looking for the reason a boy shags himself out on a bicycle.’
He got no answer to that.
‘Got nothing better to do?’
‘No.’
‘So what else do you like doing, Luke?’
The boy frowned. ‘Nothing much.’
