The Light That Gets Lost (Shakespeare Today)

by Natasha Carthew

  Shouting and screaming spilt out on to the moor and it was comrade and enemy and Trey heard his own voice add to the sound of thumping and kicking. A fireball spiralled in his gut and had him bound to Wilder, two boys mirrored in mud and blood and nothing but the whites of their eyes flashing silver daggers in the dark until finally they fell apart.

  ‘Trey!’ shouted Kay. ‘Leave him. Anders stabbed Lamby.’ Trey was slow to get to his feet, the sudden weight of reality holding him down, the scene another dream or familiar nightmare returned, and he waited until some part of his old self came back. He stood and watched the scene around him unfold; David standing with the harpoon at Anders’ head and Wilder in the background, running and threatening gunfire.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll make a promise of that. Gonna get me a gun and take you down, boom.’

  Kay told David to let Anders go and to give her the harpoon and when the enemy was out of earshot she told them to carry the thin, brittle boy up to higher ground so they could keep lookout.

  ‘He’s bleedin bad,’ said Trey. ‘Harpoon went straight through and out the other side, I don’t know what’s bin got and what int.’

  They sat on a small rise of land to keep watch while Kay bathed Lamby’s wound with a little of the bottled drinking water and she soaked rags and put pressure on his stomach and they all sat dumbfounded, lost in collective trance.

  Trey felt blood running in and out and all about him and he looked at Kay and saw the same.

  ‘This int right,’ he said.

  ‘Brave or stupid?’ she asked. ‘That’s what I’m wonderin.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Standing up to Wilder. Maybe it would have been easier to go along with the crowd.’

  Trey shook his head. ‘But that int you, is it.’

  ‘No, but I wish sometimes it was.’

  ‘That’s a bad cut on your head.’

  ‘Same as all of us.’

  ‘Still runnin blood, let me clean it.’

  Trey dipped a rag into the water and he held it to her forehead and wiped it clean and he soaked it and rinsed and told her to hold it there a minute. For a moment he wished for Kay’s strength, she was sorted in all the ways that he was not. He wanted to be like her, become the hero, have her in his life in the way he knew he never would.

  ‘Spose we can’t go back,’ he said. ‘No point in any case.’

  He turned to David and it was as if he was a newly moulded brother and he smiled and the boy did the same.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  David shook his head. ‘Lamby gone die,’ he said.

  ‘No he int,’ said Trey. ‘Will take more’n a stab wound to keep him down.’ He nodded as if in agreement with his own words and he accepted David’s speech as if today was always going to be the day for it.

  ‘Lamby’ll be OK,’ he said.

  ‘Doctor, is you?’ asked Kay.

  ‘Don’t be daft, it’s just –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’d be dead by now.’

  ‘Int much comfort in thinkin bout death either way,’ she said and she continued to bandage Lamby with what surplus clothing they had.

  Trey sighed. ‘When you think Wilder will make his final move?’

  ‘Soon, once he gets the guns, that’ll be it. Game over. We gotta go.’ Kay looked at him for the longest time with those eyes that said a million things but not to him. ‘While it’s still dark, we gotta go no matter what and keep on goin.’

  ‘I know,’ said Trey and he smiled to make it all right and he said it again. They had to keep going, they had to escape camp. Sitting there in the middle of nowhere he could feel the loose weightless cords unravelling all around him.

  He could smell the damp ash sting of fires gone over and the acrid tang of burning rubber and he imagined the gangs of kids throwing the redundant detritus of a once-was society into the pyre with manic glee. He wasn’t the only pyro-boy on the block any more, they were all fire-starters now, all had aspects of destruction and chaos sparking in their veins, going through them like a dose of volts.

  ‘It’s a slow death now, init, just sittin here? A long time waitin and a slow death waitin to happen.’ Whether through starvation or a knife to the throat, they were kids standing in line to be tipped head first into an early grave.

  He looked at Kay and at her battle scars and rags and aged eyes that told more than a lifetime of horrors and hurts and not just in the last few days.

  Still, there was some hope in those eyes that shared a destiny of some kind and he could have cried for them. He wished he had a way to know the right thing to do, but Trey knew only one option remained and that was escape. To find a way out of the camp was to save his friends and go save Billy and only then would he be able to equal things out with the world and maybe even save himself.

  ‘I’ve got it.’ He stood up and dug his bare feet dead into the ground. ‘I know how we might get out.’

  ‘OK,’ said Kay and she pointed the light towards Lamby and then she said it again.

  Together they lifted him on to David’s back and in single file they went out into that which was as unknown as anything they’d ever known. The smell of fire was everywhere apparent and Trey could see them burn clearly as they reached higher ground.

  Tiny pockets of movement making something out of nothing in the dark. His heart wanted to go to them, always he wanted to return to fire, to have it in his eyes and throat and pull it down into his gut, that rolling power of heat and danger never left him, it never forgot him either.

  They went as fast as circumstance allowed, stepping with quick tiptoe flicks as if the earth was a run of boiling lava, testing it with every step over and over again.

  Trey held his spear in a light grip and he thought about camp and what it meant to those who knew it and what it meant to those who did not. Either way nobody could have imagined this.

  ‘You know which way we’re headin?’ Kay asked.

  ‘Bit. I know where rough in daylight and that’s enough.’

  The dark night called out to the storm and turned it into its accomplice and together they tripped and tricked the gang of four until everything blurred into nothing. The black sky and the black earth was a world tossed up-down as they walked towards something akin to freedom and the wind and rain that was mighty propelled them forward.

  Trey wondered how long it would be before Wilder came with the guns. He wished for a little lost time to help them get ahead; push them through the fence and into a new world. It hadn’t been long since Trey was in it, but it scared him all the same. He didn’t belong in the lock-up, but he didn’t belong in freedom fields either, not yet anyway.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ he said to Kay.

  ‘I’m thinkin.’

  ‘Bout escapin?’

  ‘Bout everythin, int hard to think bout everythin when you’re out walkin blind in the dark, just bout anythin settles in the back of your mind.’

  Trey and David agreed.

  Every now and then Kay splashed the torchlight towards the fence for guidance and the rain became racing stars in the dark.

  ‘We gotta find somethin soon,’ she said. ‘Can’t keep walkin round in circles.’

  ‘We int, I promise.’

  She stopped and ran the light up and down the fence and the razor wire caught it dead in its scissor fingers.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Trey.

  ‘Look.’ She pointed the torch up towards the red light of one of the cameras. ‘If the cameras are back on then the fence is on the same.’ She picked up a rock and threw it at the wire and the three of them watched it buzz into momentary life.

  Trey took a minute to rub the wet from his eyes and he rinsed his hat a hundred ways and slapped it back on his head.

  ‘Listen,’ he said and they all turned their ears in and out of the wind to catch the sound of something other than water hitting mud.

  ‘That’s gunfire,’ said Kay.

&
nbsp; The threat of adult violence made the war with Wilder a real war. No more kids with sticks battling over food rations but a fight for life.

  Trey had friends and family in a mix-pot and something immediate in his life that wasn’t back-pedalling revenge but some kind of forward fight. No loaded gun but a heart packed with purpose. If he survived this he could survive anything, he would survive everything. He wasn’t a bad boy, bad things happened just because. Thought turned to his brother just then; living and growing and dying in a home that he could not call his own with people he would never call his own. This was war, a million times over it was war.

  When the terror got too close he felt like shouting it gone and when it brought fear so uncontrolled he stopped with the shout surging through him and he wanted to scream so he might purge fully all the flame and fire that was in him. To purge was to cleanse, to live again.

  When he thought the demon might return he tried to shake it from his flesh and marrow deep like a rabid dog. It was in that moment he realised the burn flaring up inside was nothing to be feared, it was love. Everything he was doing was for love.

  ‘We got to get underground,’ he said. ‘And quick.’

  They went on into the desperate night and there were times when the landscape took on other shapes and it moved in defiance despite the torrential rain and Trey told the others they were heading to where he had seen the underground trapdoor. Occasionally he recognised something of the landscape despite the floods and he thought to say and he kept his thinking to himself. If they could find the door that led from the quarry below ground then maybe they would have a chance of getting away.

  They went tentatively on in a clutch about the quarry edge and steadied themselves ready for the unexpected. Their passage through the dead-night pits was slow and Trey’s bare feet pounded with stupid side-step walking. Every now and then they stopped to let David snap strength back into his shoulders and they helped load the limp limpet boy once more on to his back.

  Trey watched Kay check Lamby occasionally and he thought about those that were dead and he knew well that hook and twist of gut that turned you silent and void of self.

  He also knew something of love, but pain resided there too and to him hurt was more powerful than love.

  Occasionally gunfire sparked up the night sky and they stopped to watch the light tack splinters through the darkness; shooting stars fizzing and fading in the obscure night.

  ‘You think he’s killed anyone yet?’ he asked Kay. ‘Like shot someone killed someone.’

  ‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Probably just shootin off to show off.’

  They both nodded and looked at the dangling boy hanging from David’s back.

  ‘Them shots are gettin closer,’ he said and he looked at Kay and said he’d noticed it a while back. ‘He’d have found the stables empty by now and knows we’re still out here. Shootin’s comin from that way.’

  ‘Let’s just keep goin,’ said Kay suddenly. ‘Let’s just keep headin till there int no place left to head to.’

  There were times when they thought perhaps they had been spared but then a single shot or shout would spring from nowhere and have them spun and coiled in fear.

  When Trey finally found the trapdoor that led underground he shouted to the others to come over and through the rain he saw white eye glints flash hope through the dark.

  They tried the door and it was locked from within and Kay jumped it to splitting and she kicked the wood until the hinges came clean away. Inside the cavity they were slow to descend the stairs and they entered the room below in a stumble and stood fixed in the thick dark and waited for Kay to switch on the torch.

  ‘What you think this place is?’ asked Trey.

  ‘Storage room, I spose.’

  ‘Storage for what, there int nothin here.’

  ‘Everythin’s been shipped out now, init? Nothin worth nothin left here.’

  ‘You reckon it leads to the immigrants’ quarters? The drugs factory?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kay. ‘We just gotta hope it don’t lead too far back is all. At least it’s someplace to hide out a while. We int got no choice in any case.’ She looked at Trey and then at David. ‘We agreed? We go in?’

  The two boys nodded and the four of them headed deeper underground.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Beneath the underbelly of the moor the four youths took comfort in shelter from the storm.

  To have the sound of rain no longer raging in their ears and the wet wiped from their eyes was to have a little of normality come back to them.

  They descended further into the open gut wound and found another room cleared of whatever it was it had once stored and they sat circled to the tiny light for a few minutes’ rest and they laid Lamby down against the wall.

  What it was to be living was to know how close they were to dying all the same. ‘We int done yet,’ said Trey. ‘While we’re still breathin anyway.’ He looked at Kay suddenly. ‘We’re lost, int we.’

  ‘It’s good to be lost,’ she said. ‘If we’re lost it means we don’t know if there’s a way out and that’s good. Means there might be.’

  ‘Spose that makes sense, way you say it anyway.’

  ‘Course. Everythin I say makes sense.’ They both smiled and so did David and for a minute there was hope in happiness no matter how brief. They were alive, alive and going and thinking straight despite the cloistered creep of incarceration double deep.

  They speculated about the reason for the tunnels and came up with nothing but illegality and Trey guessed those underground passages had been used for such a purpose for a long time, probably from the end of the mining boom when tin’s worth fell and folks had to find other ways to survive. A hundred and more years down the line the country had turned back around to each and every man, woman and delinquent child for themselves.

  ‘You reckon you could have had a better go at it if you’d bin given the chance?’ He looked at Kay so she knew it was a proper question he was asking.

  ‘Go at what?’

  ‘Life,’ he shrugged. ‘Just life.’

  ‘Spose. Too late now though. I was due a long run in this place and if we get out I’ll be due a long run in another just like it.’

  ‘Worse,’ said David. ‘Dead.’ He got up and went to sit by Lamby because he was used to being part of a pair and the others had nothing more to add and they remained silent.

  Trey thought about David’s life up to that point and he thought about Kay and Lamby too and he knew this way of thinking about others was a good thing. Their lives had become his and his had partially stuck to theirs and the glue that was friendship was tar-tight.

  He noticed Kay was watching the two boys and could see the worry in her and he wished that he could tell her he watched over her the same way if only from afar.

  If she were not so thick-skinned he would have told her this, but she would have just laughed and told him to get lost. He knew the toughness that was in her head and heart and the way she went around pushing at the spaces that weren’t hers.

  Trey knew those scars on her shoulders had something to do with it and he thought to ask her about them and then he went ahead and flat-out said what was in his head.

  ‘What bout em?’

  ‘You got em all over?’

  ‘My back, yes.’ She looked at him and shrugged and said they weren’t tribal markings if that was what he was wondering.

  ‘Your mum did it,’ said Trey. ‘You don’t have to say cus course she did.’

  Kay shrugged. ‘There you go then.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When she do it?’

  ‘Would be easier to say when she dint.’

  ‘When she stop?’

  ‘When she overdosed. She dint have so much use for that belt after that so I took it and when they put her in the ground I threw it in for a little memento of her life.’

  ‘Spose heaven or hell she’ll have a good bit of explain
in to do.’

  Kay shook her head. ‘There was only one place that woman was headin and that was down.’ She looked across at Trey and told him that he should rest a while.

  ‘What bout you?’

  ‘I int likely to sleep.’

  ‘Me neither, not with Wilder and them stompin round above.’

  They sat and watched the torchlight turn orange and then thin down to nothing and there was a moment when they kept to the dark and that dark was infinite. Trey closed his eyes to put the outside in and he took solace in just being; a thing and a nothing and an entity a part of everything. Lamby was right, they all had a shared hand in a science of sorts. He could hear the boy moan briefly through the pitch and he wondered what thought he might have in him that he might pass on to his friend to let him know everything was all right.

  When Lamby moaned again Trey asked him what was wrong.

  ‘Water,’ said David.

  ‘You lads OK?’ asked Kay and she replaced the battery and flicked on the torch.

  Trey took the torch from her and went to Lamby. ‘The rain,’ said Trey. ‘It’s comin through the wall.’ He told David to carry Lamby away from the rising puddle and he bent to the crack in the mud wall with the rain water widening and threatening and he told the others it was probably time to head on. When he saw a rat and then another slip silent into the room he said there was no probability about it.

  They advanced slow below the surface of the moor, a straggle-band of kids come together through circumstance a hundred times over and when they reached the next room they stopped.

  ‘Looks like a dead end,’ said Trey. ‘There int nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Wait.’ Kay took back the torch and looped it across the concrete floor. ‘There’s somethin around that corner,’ she said.

  Trey watched Kay fade into the other side of the room and then he followed.

  ‘Over here,’ she shouted. ‘Bloody knew it, it goes deeper underground.’