“Move over, move over,” the old man mutters in the near dark. The three are backlit now, the candlelight and shadow a long distant dream; everything looks darker from the slab.
“Give it here,” the old woman says. “You’re not doing it right!” The woman takes the widow’s hand, sinks her sharp teeth into the soft white flesh of her arm and the widow cries out, the worst pain she’s ever learned. No, not the worst: even this blinding curtain of agony pales next to that phone call, a month gone. It’s still not enough. So that’s what she thinks of, the phone call that ended her old life. That and the back of her husband’s freckled and sunburnt neck, his wavy red hair as he runs laughing from her and down to the sea on some past and distant shore. Sand whips all around them as she hurries and fails to keep pace, his sunhatted daughter trailing behind them both, a bright yellow bucket dragged in her wake.
The old woman grunts as she chaws her way up the bloodied and spasming arm, and the widow’s own mouth goes agape. She forces herself back to the greater pain, her loss a worried scab that’s been prized open anew. They take of her, and they think of lost loves, and it should be enough for them all. She will survive this.
Think of him.
“Help me! Help!” she screams, and the old man hurries to mount her, bends leering over her and lowers his skull in an open-mouthed kiss. He finds her tongue and fastens his brittle teeth to it, blood spattering his glasses and rushing down both their throats as he silences her. Her tongue severed now, the old man turns his head to spit it slippery and wet against the curved wall of the crypt. The old woman scrambles after it, a starved dog after a scrap of meat, the widow gurgling in protestation as she continues to drink of her own blood. Now she knows why the young woman never speaks.
Help me!
She screams in silence, as they continue to devour her.
Think of him.
A distant shore, a laugh. It should be enough.
His face!
She sees him, again.
His face!
At last, she smiles.
SLIMIKINS
Charles Wilkinson
GILES SHOOTER STIFLED A GASP OF astonishment when he saw Noel Hillup’s hands, which were utterly out of proportion with the rest of the boy’s body. The elongated thumbs and forefingers tapered towards the end, as if they belonged to a much taller person; the pale colour and sheen of the skin was at odds with the yellowish flesh of the forearms exposed beneath the cuffs. The nails had a dull white gleam. A nickname he’d given another child, so many years before, came back to him.
The minute hand on the wall clock reached a quarter past the hour.
“You may begin now.”
Noel picked up the pencil in his right hand and turned his attention to the Wechsler Intelligence Test. The fingers of his left hand, so still as to seem nerveless, were spread out, seemingly stuck to the paper. Shooter tried to suppress the thought it might be necessary to peel them off, digit by digit, sucker by sucker. His consulting room was at the top of the building; all he could see were tiny flecks of snow falling from the padded grey sky.
It had been a tiresome morning. Nothing of importance had occurred; merely a series of maddening incidents: an appointment cancelled; his secretary unexpectedly off sick; then, minutes before the late arrival of the Hillups, his wife persuading the switchboard to put her call through.
“When are you coming home?”
“I told you. I’m working all day.”
“So four o’clock. You’ll be home by then.”
“Not necessarily. It depends if I’m running late.”
“So I’m to deal with him by myself. Without any support whatsoever?”
“Just ignore him. He’ll soon go away. You know that.”
She was about to dictate a shopping list when he cut her off: “Sorry. A patient’s just arrived. I’ll speak to you later.”
Why had he said “patient”? To lend his calling gravitas, a way of implying he was about to deal with a serious professional matter? The succession of children with dyslexia, attention deficit disorders and handwriting difficulties often had pressing problems, but none amounting to a medical emergency. He’d opened the door to reveal a dumpy woman with discontented features gripping the hand of an undersized, sallow-skinned child.
“Mrs Hillup and Noel?”
As the mother unburdened herself on the shortcomings of the boy’s school, Shooter somehow succeeded in persuading her to complete the necessary paperwork. The boy remained standing at a safe distance from the adults. His long oval face, with a receding chin and a small mouth, was set above sloping shoulders; light blue eyes protruded expressionlessly. He held both hands behind his back: the posture of an old man. It was winter, but he wore no jacket; merely a white shirt a size too small for him and a striped tie; in contrast, his grey shorts were baggy and shapeless. Shooter had shuddered, as if he’d uncovered something unpleasant in a black bin-liner.
He now glanced down at the note he had made of the start time and then leant back in his swivel chair. Outside, it was still snowing. The boy had not yet seen fit to start writing. As he observed him, Shooter felt a shiver of professional disquiet. He was running late and had not spent sufficient time putting the boy at ease, asking him about his hobbies and favourite subjects. Was it that he wanted to get him out of the office as soon as possible? The snowflakes were larger. He knew that under a microscope they would reveal patterns, each one startlingly delicate and beautiful in its individual complexity. But he could only think how they would soon settle in a great white mass, deforming the streets and the park in which he had planned to walk during his lunch hour.
When he awoke at three o’clock in the morning, Giles Shooter remembered he had been dreaming about winter. The image of a snowdrift, somehow connected to the empty space on the double bed where his wife used to sleep, started to recede. He switched on the side lamp: his blankets on the floor; the wind rippling the curtains. Then as he swung his legs out of bed and moved towards the window, a scene from thirty years ago presented itself from the back of his memory, where it had been perfectly preserved: the last day of his inglorious teaching career:
He’s by himself on the muddy playing fields at the back of the school: a bedraggled figure in a track suit; Mr Shooter to the twelve- year-olds whose game of football he’s just supervised; a master too unpopular for the accolade of a nickname. After a week of snow and ice, a slight thaw has supposedly rendered the pitches playable. Giles’s game consists of the least glamorous of the senior sides—the 3rd and 4th XIs. They play on a sloping tract of land, the part of the fields most exposed to the lacerating east winds. It’s the Michaelmas Term. The upper goal still blackened by November’s bonfire; the bottom of the pitch, where the drainage is at it poorest, is sodden and slimy with worm casts. A small pit filled with water has replaced the centre spot, but the white lines marked in January are no longer discernible.
The game was the worst he has refereed all season: so one-sided that the goalkeeper at the bonfire end was making mud pies streaked with charcoal; the backs refused to move up with play and stood, hunched with cold, in the area. But the battle by the bottom goalmouth had been fought with fearful intensity: sliding tackles gashed the mud and ripped out the few blades of grass on the wings; players surrounding the ball lashed out without regard to the laws of the game. A centre back hopped away, clutching his knee. Pushing and shoving. Vile imprecations. Something was wrong with Giles’s whistle, which emitted only a barely audible dry rattle. He glanced at his watch: ten more minutes. With a furious scream, he brought the game to a halt.
Now he’s waiting on the touchline. It is almost quiet. The cries from the other matches are weirdly remote, carried away on the wind. On the other side of the fence, the furrows in the farmer’s field are striped with snow. In the nearby copse, a solitary rook caws and flaps away over the dark churned pitch. Giles has sent his game on a run: along the gravel path, then through the woods that mark the limits of the sc
hool grounds, across the front lawn, then back past the swimming pool to the playing fields. It is three minutes since they have galloped off and at this moment a monstrous thought occurs to him: he hasn’t sent Andrew Ollaby with them, surely?
Shooter rented the consulting room when working at home became impossible. After seeing an advertisement in the local paper, he drove out to a part of the town he’d never visited before: an estate with light industrial buildings, a red-brick factory converted into arts and crafts studios, storage units and office space. The block in which he worked was the highest on the estate. If the architect hadn’t placed the windows so far up the wall, Shooter would have had a fine view; instead, he had a simple prospect of snowflakes, the white dots falling slower than on the previous day. As he watched, he tried to work out which ones were furthest from him. He couldn’t tell whether his sense of perspective was faulty: one moment it was as if the flakes were drifting on a level plane; the next, there was a sense of distance, the spaces between them.
His computer screen was black. He tapped a key and the unfinished report on Noel Hillup reappeared. The unnatural length of the boy’s fingers suggested he had Beale’s disease and yet this had not been mentioned by the mother or the school. Would it be best to shelve the report until contact had been made with the boy’s medical practitioner? He sighed. Why do you call him Slimikins, sir? He doesn’t like it. One thing was certain: Noel’s hands had brought back the memories.
A knock on the door followed by the worried white face of his secretary.
“Your wife’s on the line, Mr Shooter. Shall I put her through?”
He put his hands together to form a contemplative spire. He had appointments later in the day and wasn’t making much progress with the report. Could Beale’s disease affect a child’s cognitive development? He wasn’t sure.
“I’ll take the call.”
The snow in the frames of the left-hand window appeared to be falling slightly faster than in the right. Was this to do with his perception of events or some subtlety in the wind?
“Yes, dear.”
“He’s back. And do you know what he’s doing?”
“Well … no. Obviously not.”
“He’s sitting in the chair in the living-room. The best one. I’m calling the police.”
“Please, dear. You simply mustn’t do that. Do you understand?”
“Why ever not! I’ve told him to go away, but he doesn’t pay the slightest bit of attention.”
“This is not a police matter. You can take it from me.”
“I’m sorry, Giles. But it’s simply not right…”
“Listen!” he hissed. “He will go away. He always does in the end.”
Silence, black and miserable at the end of the line.
“All right,” he said, relenting a little. “I tell you what: if he’s still there at lunch time, give me another ring. How’s that?”
“Well, I suppose…”
“Fine! And whatever you do, don’t contact the police.”
He put the phone down. The right-hand window was slightly longer and narrower than the left. Until now he had always thought of them as identical. Was that true? There were burning white points of memory and then the glazed black gaps between them. A month ago at a conference, he’d been introduced to a colleague who had the same slightly unusual surname as a boy he’d taught during the one year and unfinished term he’d spent as a schoolmaster. He realised he’d not thought of the boy for thirty years. When he tried to visualise him, he could only bring to mind a slight figure with brown hair: the features refused to coalesce, the shape of the nose shifted, the colour of the eyes changed; even the sense of an expression, a scowl or smile, had vanished. Yet some of what occurred at that time returned to him with appalling exactitude. The only way to bury the memory was to consider it first from his point of view and then reconstruct the evening, its every incident and angle. By returning to it, again and again, asking every question, he would finally drain the tragedy of significance, deprive it of that buoyancy that made it rise, white and terrible to the surface, time after time. Only then could he commit it to recollection’s deepest waters.
Unable to find proper football boots, Shooter had put on old pair of trainers. Now he’s stopped refereeing, he’s aware of his soaked woollen socks and damp striped shirt clammy on his cooling chest. The first red-faced runners are coming up the hill towards him. As soon as he shouts and signals to go straight to the changing-rooms, he remembers he should have asked about Ollaby. He searches for his whistle, but it has fallen through a hole in his tracksuit. Was the boy playing? He’s unable to summon up a recent image of him on the pitch: a delicate spindleshanks of a child with pale red hair and cream white skin, usually to be seen loitering on the wing or giggling with the goalkeeper. There was no one on the off-games list and Ollaby had not given him a note from Matron. He tried to picture them running off. Surely the boy would have been visible somewhere near the back, his head bobbing above his thin shoulders as he lolloped along, his spindly arms flailing. “Andrew Ollaby is on no account to undertake strenuous exercise.” The note in Matron’s black copperplate has been pinned to the Staff Room notice board for as long as Shooter has been at the school. Of course, it is perfectly possible the boy has been shirking somewhere: in the stationery cupboard, if it’s been left unlocked again, or one of the darker recesses of the changing rooms. Now the runners are jogging back to the pitch in groups.
—Have any of you seen Ollaby?
—Ollaby, sir? He wasn’t with us.
—He’s not supposed to do cross-country, sir … is Ollaby.
—I know that. But was he playing football earlier?
—Football, sir? Was that what it was? I thought it was …
—That’s quite enough. This is a serious matter.
They glance at each other: small eyes concocting the correct answer. Or perhaps they are genuinely uncertain.
“I think he was, sir.”
“That’s not good enough. Either he was or he wasn’t.”
“I saw him. Definite,” says someone rubbing blue hands together, desperate to be dismissed.
He waves them away. Most the games are heading for the changing rooms and his runners are joining them, rather than report back to the pitch: only an overweight straggler lumbers towards him.
—Are you the last one in?
—Yes, sir.
—What about Ollaby?
—Oh, I think he dropped out. He was with me in the woods … then I lost sight of him.
Shooter runs back to the changing rooms. Through the grey fug from the showers, he can see the master on duty pointing accusingly at items of discarded games kit.
—Has Ollaby been through yet?
—No, his clothes are still on his peg. If he’s one of yours tell him to get a shift on, will you? I want to get out of here.
Shooter turns and heads back to the games fields. It’s darkening now: the cloud blemished blue-grey; the red-pink seepage of sunlight on the horizon; the woods in the distance thickening with the approach of dusk. The 3rd XI pitch is a glistening black wound. Yellow lights are on in the classrooms. In ten minutes, the bell will go for the first of the last two lessons of the day.
It is beginning to snow. Yet there is a slim figure coming from the direction of the dark mass of the woods towards him: the arms move, as if repeatedly clutching at hand-holds; the legs are so stick-thin that at moments they disappear in the murk, leaving the frail body and blur of a head to float in the air. Shooter runs toward him, through fiercely shining snow-specks.
Andrew!
No reply but there is something about the swaying head: the boy is unmistakeably Ollaby. He’s wearing his white gym vest rather than his football shirt, which he must have discarded in the woods. The wind has picked up; the snow’s heavier: driving across the fields in cold flakes, burning for a second on Shooter’s hot face. The boy is moving faster now, as if there’s something stronger than a mere gale on h
is back. Then he’s standing in front of Shooter, his breath ragged and terrible, worse than the tide’s grate on shingle.
The five-minute warning bell for lessons. The pattering quick feet and shrill cries of boys running along paths to the classrooms. Shooter is going to be late unless he appears in his tracksuit, which is not allowed. Ollaby too will not be on time.
—I’m sorry, Andrew. I didn’t intend to send you on a run; you should have had the common sense to see me before joining the others. The bell’s gone. Just try to get to your lesson as soon as you can.
As Shooter runs towards the school building, he hears the strenuous breathing of Ollaby running just behind his shoulder: a rasp, counterpointed by coughing, the windpipe wheezing, the rattle of phlegm on the thin chest. For a second, he wonders how the boy can keep up, but then the sounds recede. He does not turn round—and soon he is inside, striding alone down the corridor.
Defying the forecasts, an unaccountably warmer winter’s day: the vanquished snow turned to slush, a pale brown-pink where salt and grit mixed; the cloud cover wrapped up and put away, revealing a depth of blue not glimpsed for weeks; stark branches somehow softer in the sunshine, as if they might bud at any moment. Shooter walked across the estate and cut through the park to the café-bistro where he lunched if his appointments diary was light. A modern place, minimally furnished with teak chairs and tables that were all straight lines; a floor of varnished hardwood; the blank white walls that did nothing to absorb the echoing footsteps. By one o’clock it would usually be filled with young professionals pitching business proposals or taking calls while club sandwiches sat ignored next to carafes of iced water. On Fridays, the mood was sometimes more festive if big deals had been done: senior management with swept-back wings of grey hair and plush pink faces above dark suits and crested ties.
But today it was unexpectedly quiet: a few regulars grouped around the high tables by the windows; a woman with her back to him at the rear of the restaurant. Shooter took his normal alcove table and watched the passersby, lightly clad for late November; the same time of year as the fateful football match—the first in a chain of events culminating in his dismissal and a change of career.
Shadows & Tall Trees 7 Page 19
