The Light That Gets Lost (Shakespeare Today)

by Natasha Carthew

  The Preacher was a tall man, cloaked and towering with big-boot feet that somehow gave the game away. He had elegance for a man his size, but Trey knew this was a learnt and practised thing, knew this man was all for the show.

  ‘Take down your hood,’ Trey said. ‘He has to take down his hood.’

  Through the cloche of fog and rain Trey tried to spy a feature of the man who killed his parents. He was certain it was him but to see the whole of him was to know for sure. Trey pushed into the crowd despite the flood water that filled the mud tracks and he stood below the stacking crates with the Preacher above and he realised everyone was praying.

  The holy man stood with one hand hooked high above their heads and with the other he gripped on to the megaphone and maybe Trey caught his eye and maybe they held whatever it was between them in that middle ground that was both life and death. It was a place of limbo where they awaited their fate; the Preacher for what he had done and Trey for what he was soon to do.

  He pulled the oilskin to his chin and gripped the hood into hiding and he stamped his ground as other kids crushed close and they stood like wet-whistle army recruits and listened in awe to the Preacher. Whatever the man believed it was almost believable, to the gullible and the soft-heads and the ones with nobody to show them the way, but not Trey. Perhaps to some the Preacher was a father figure. Trey hated that. He closed his eyes to get the focus thing set on the man’s voice and he tried to make sense of what it was he said but it was brimful with God and Devil and Trey’s demon took offence on both accounts.

  ‘What he say?’ he found himself asking.

  ‘We gotta know right from wrong,’ shouted the boy standing to his left. ‘We gotta do what’s right by the camp.’

  Trey sieved through the words like grit on a shovel and it was as if he were gold possessed.

  One nugget of truth was all that was needed to forge the metal that would finally seal the coffin. One nail bang bang. The coffin with the dead and the bad and the memories obsessed all in and bundled and buried underground.

  ‘Give me somethin,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Why don’t he give me somethin?’

  ‘He’s givin us a chance to fess up.’

  ‘Bout what?’ Trey moved closer because it was hard to hear through the drumming rain and the blurt of amplified voice.

  ‘The kid who’s bin spreadin rumours bout this place.’

  Trey pulled open his hood a little. ‘What kid?’

  ‘Someone bin tellin shite bout camp. We’re gonna be investigated.’

  Trey jammed his hands into his pockets and he thought about Lamby and held his lighter tight.

  ‘Do the right thing,’ the man shouted and Trey nodded and he said to himself and anyone that was listening that he would. He would do the right thing.

  When the Preacher was helped from the stage Trey was quick to follow him, keeping his distance as the man made his way through camp and towards the slaughterhouse. He stood against a wall and out of sight behind a curtain of water falling from the roof and he watched him enter and waited and he knew he would be waiting a long time.

  Two armed guards flanked the door and they stood with guns settled to trigger but Trey could see they weren’t bothered about much except standing out of the wet. Trey knew inside any last evidence would soon be brushed gone and with it maybe his one and only and last chance to face the Preacher.

  He looked down at his hands and noticed the demon had taken the lighter from out of his pocket and had struck the flint and Trey watched the fire and rainwater surround.

  ‘We’re goin in,’ said the demon and he returned the fire to its hiding place and stepped forward and together they went to the men.

  ‘I’ve left somethin inside,’ said Trey. ‘If I don’t get it I’ll die.’

  ‘What?’ asked one of them.

  ‘Inhaler,’ Trey lied.

  The men looked him over and for once Trey was glad of his size. He looked harmless enough.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ the second man said and in unison they moved apart to let him pass.

  Inside the slaughterhouse Trey didn’t know which way to turn. He walked slow to keep the wet slap of his trainers silent with the flavours of fight and flight coursing through him. Everything he had thought out in the way of murder had gone from him now. He tried to concentrate on the act of doing, but the memory of Mum and Dad tipped empty of life was too great, both of them nothing more than floored rag dolls, bloodless.

  He slipped into the room meant for herding and gunning, where the last of the beasts hung bolt-blasted from the rafters on a hook. He slid the lock on the door and hid and waited behind the animal.

  He heard talk approaching and then the Preacher came into the room and Trey was glad to see the phone in his hand because it meant he was alone.

  Trey watched the man cross the room and when the demon told him to unclip the hook meant for meat from above his head he obliged and he coiled the metre chain around his fist and put the crook to his lips for the devil’s kiss.

  Everything in him and everything in that room slowed and Trey swallowed his breathing down to an irregular tick. He waited. The world paused in time and when the Preacher put his phone into his cloak pocket the universe stopped and waited for Trey to step forward.

  ‘Preacher,’ he whispered. ‘Preacher, init?’

  The man turned and smiled and Trey hadn’t reckoned on that.

  ‘You int sposed to be here, boy.’

  Trey nodded and said that he knew this.

  ‘So best you get on.’

  Trey stepped from the shadows and he went towards the man in the cloak and in his mind they were equals.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ Trey said.

  ‘Why would I?’

  Trey shook his head and he tested the weight of the hook in his fist. He could hear the Preacher telling him to get gone and the demon telling him to stay but all he could think about was that rusty crescent dusting up his hands. He looked up to see the Preacher’s mouth chewing over and perhaps he was saying settling things and perhaps he was threatening and Trey gripped hold of the heavy chain and let the hook drop from his grip and he sent it once round for the crack.

  He watched the Preacher slip to the ground like a melting thing and his ridiculous cloak spread left-right like broken wings. Trey stepped on to the cloth and the Preacher who was just a man became a moth beneath his feet, an injured insignificant being.

  ‘What you want?’ The man shouted and when he tried to move Trey kicked against his back.

  ‘What do I want?’ he asked. He walked around the black and blood ink spill so he could see the Preacher without the hood and he said that he remembered him. ‘I was just a kid so doubt you remember me,’ he shrugged. ‘Long time since but not so long as I don’t remember you.’

  ‘What?’ shouted the Preacher. ‘What you want, you little runt?’ His hand went to the cut on his head.

  ‘My dad,’ said Trey. ‘My mum and my dad and my brother is what I want.’ He told him to sit up and he kept the hook swinging. ‘You remember them murders eight years ago down by the coast? Sure you do.’

  ‘The Pearce murders?’ The Preacher pressed his cuff to the wound to stem the flow of blood.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What bout em?’

  ‘Them was my folks is what bout em.’

  The Preacher looked at the hook in Trey’s hand. ‘You wanna floor that hook so we can talk man to man?’

  ‘No,’ said Trey.

  ‘I thought you’d bin adopted or somethin. Better’n what me and Dad could’ve provided.’ He went to grab the hook and Trey pushed him back and the abruptness had him raise the weapon in anger.

  ‘What the hell you talkin bout?’ he shouted.

  ‘Your dad, he weren’t the man you think he was.’

  ‘What you sayin? Why you dissin the dead?’ Trey was becoming agitated and the demon screamed out for bl
ood. ‘Why you kill him?’ Trey shouted and his voice broke with the rip of terror. ‘Why you kill Mum and Dad, why you try kill Billy?’

  ‘Lad, you’ve got it all wrong. I dint kill em.’

  ‘I seen you, seen you stand over Mum and then run.’

  The Preacher put his hands to his face and Trey thought it a strange thing to do and he could hear him whisper and he crouched to listen.

  ‘I was too late,’ he said over. ‘Too late to tell em and too late to save em.’ He looked at Trey and asked him what he was supposed to do.

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘I went to warn em.’

  ‘Bout what?’

  ‘Your dad had been treadin on others’ tracks a good while, movin into areas that were run by other gangs. Turf wars, it was.’

  Trey stood up quick. ‘What the hell you talkin bout?’

  ‘Drugs.’

  ‘My dad weren’t into drugs.’

  ‘No he weren’t, but he trafficked em. Don’t you remember his trawler? Headin out into the Channel to meet up with other boats and then headin back.’

  ‘He was a fisherman,’ shouted Trey.

  ‘Barely, enough to cover his dealins just bout.’ He sat up straight. ‘You were too young to know the difference, Trey.’

  The sound of his name from out the Preacher’s mouth had Trey rub weak at the knees and he asked the man how he knew his name.

  ‘Cus I’m your uncle.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Well whatever you want.’

  ‘I don’t remember you.’

  ‘That was probably best for everyone. Me and your dad never quite met eye to eye, bein in the same line of work and all that.’

  ‘You’re still in the same work,’ said Trey. ‘How you get to be a Preacher and deal in drugs the same?’

  ‘Money,’ he shrugged. ‘Easy money pays for my church, the good work I’m doin and whatever else.’

  ‘You int doin no good.’

  The Preacher shrugged and Trey could see he was happy enough with himself either way.

  ‘I int lettin you go,’ he said.

  ‘Course not. Why would you? I’m your uncle who tried to save your folks but I can see you got a need to blame someone so again I ask, why would you?’

  Trey gripped the hook. He didn’t like that kind of talk; it confused him and he knew it confused the demon because he had fallen silent.

  ‘Spose you just want me to let you go,’ he said.

  The Preacher shrugged. ‘That would be somethin.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t go after me or nothin?’

  ‘You think I got time to run after kids? I gotta close down this place and go into hidin cus of you snoopin bastards.’

  ‘That int no way to talk bout us.’

  ‘Well sorry, kid, that’s all I got.’

  ‘Don’t you care that I’m kin, if you’re right and all?’ Trey wanted to smash him dead, but what if he was telling the truth? Then it would be murder and murder straight, not revenge.

  ‘I got kin closer’n you,’ the Preacher nodded. ‘Got a kid if you care to know, a little in-camp cousin for Trey.’

  ‘Go on then, what’s his name?’

  ‘Joe,’ he grinned. ‘Joe Wilder.’

  ‘Wilder?’

  ‘Spose you know him. Nasty little shit, he is.’

  Trey’s heart skipped a beat and he felt tiny-sorry for the boy. Suddenly there were a million reasons for his behaviour and one motive why he wanted to connect to Trey.

  ‘He know this?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Why you keep him a secret?’

  ‘Cus I’m a Preacher, don’t need no mistake gettin in the way, only let him stay in camp cus I had nowhere else to put him.’

  ‘So why he called Wilder and not Pearce?’

  ‘His mother’s name, tis easier.’

  Trey didn’t know what to believe from anything the Preacher said, but if he was lying he could have made a better story of it.

  He told him to stand up. He wanted to see something of Dad in the man’s eyes and maybe there was something.

  ‘You know what happened to them that killed Mum and Dad?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t need to worry bout him. He’s already dead, overdose it was.’

  Trey nodded. If this was truth it was good to hear. ‘So why people say the killer was in camp?’ he asked.

  ‘What people?’

  ‘I heard some police say backalong.’

  The Preacher shook his head. ‘Local cop, I spose, them always got a way of stirrin. Like they int got nothin better to do. You gotta let me go now kid, I’ve bin honest with you and you gotta let me go and you gotta let all this go the same.’ The Preacher took the bloody hook from out of his hands and swung it across the slaughterhouse floor and when the guards hammered at the doors he told Trey to leave at the side entrance.

  ‘Trey?’ he shouted after him. ‘Don’t forget to save yourself in all this.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Save yourself, cus I got it on good authority that God int gonna do it.’

  Trey turned and ran to the door and everything that he had known now wasn’t but still a weight had been taken from off his shoulders.

  Outside the building he stood in the rain and he felt it soothe the fire inside enough for standing’s sake and when he thought he might keel over he slipped to the ground and sat in the soak with his arms hugging. The heat that was in him was cooling and it steamed from his gut and his blood and placed the vaporised demon before him. Hot air rising, disappearing, gone.

  When the water became too high he got to his feet and all he knew and all he wanted to know was the anchor that was friendship. He went through the camp with the chaos that was struggling order in his head and made his way towards the stables. He knocked on the door and shouted for Lamby to unlock it.

  The boy opened the door an inch.

  ‘Just let me in, will you.’ He pushed past and stood with a world of water and lies falling from him and he saw fire and four familiar faces circled to that fire and that was something and that was everything to a boy who had nothing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Trey slept on into the first cut of morning and everything he had dreamt was of survival and it was all pitched somewhere between reality and blur. He thought about Dad and how he had talked to him in a sit-across dreamscape conversation sometime during the night. He had told him to do the right thing in regard to Billy and had called him a man and Trey liked that more than he could contemplate. It made him proud and it made him sad in equal measure. Billy was the one who did the looking out; it was never meant to be Trey.

  He had been thinking about his family as usual and not with avengement in mind but with peace, just peace. He turned from the sweet-smelling hay bale and its heady heaven scent and watched as spaghetti strings of sunlight lassoed across the dust-bowl floor and he could hear the sniff and shuffle of horses in the stalls all around him. There were things he could remember and things he could not and he knew something of falling to the floor and something of the fall was in him still.

  He eyed a solitary wolf spider spinning a web the size of a wheel hub above his head and a pinprick fly fizzle within and he wished he knew the secret to catching something without trying.

  ‘What time you think it is?’ whispered Lamby from somewhere close.

  ‘Dunno, late I reckon.’ Trey leant up on one elbow to look around.

  ‘How you feelin?’

  ‘Like crap. How long was I out of it?’

  ‘Since yesto mornin.’ Lamby came and sat cross-legged beside him.

  ‘Where the others?’ He lay back down.

  ‘Dorms. You just bin sleepin, I thought it best to keep you here.’

  ‘Did I miss much?’

  ‘Masters have all gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Left the camp.’

  ‘And the Preacher?’

  ‘Gone too, far as we know. You hungry? I’m crazy h
ungry, we should go for a recce and get some food.’

  ‘Sounds quiet out,’ he said to himself.

  ‘No sirens no more,’ said Lamby. ‘I can live with that.’

  Trey sat up and put on his trainers and he went to look out of the top half of the stable door and he watched the rain ease a little to make room for breathing space. ‘So them all gone?’ he asked.

  Lamby came and stood next to him. ‘Chaplain’s someplace apparently.’

  They stood with their arms resting on the top of the door and curiosity got a pinch on both of them.

  ‘Let’s go look,’ said Lamby. ‘Get us some food, I’ll bring a sack.’

  Trey shrugged. Truth was he didn’t care what they did; purpose had deserted him completely. He felt numb to the thought of future and numb to the past. Both truth and lies merged and tangled in him like thorns and all he once knew of Dad was leaving him now, a slow bleed purge to remove all memory.

  He wished Lamby would go away so he could look at his photo for the pretend, salvage something from his childhood to make it part-way good. But instead he followed Lamby out into the wet and tried to direct his hopeless heart towards someplace other than numb.

  ‘I’m starved,’ said Lamby. ‘Hope we can go ahead and grab what we want, you reckon we will?’

  ‘Dunno, we’ll have to be careful, mind nobody catches us fillin the sack.’ He looked at his friend and told him again to pull up his hood.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Keep a low profile.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I know it. Don’t want nobody guessin it was you that split on camp.’

  They saw signs of life in the form of Anders standing cocksure outside the food tent and Trey pushed his friend forward and asked where everyone was.

  ‘Inside, you’re late.’

  ‘Late for what?’

  ‘You’ll see, where’s the rest of you weirdos?’

  Trey ignored him and ducked into the tent. The place was a scatter mix of hungry kids and the two boys kept to the perimeter to get a feel for things and Trey asked the girl from butchering what was going on and was told Wilder would not give out food.