The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  "The town talks and remembers everything. It never forgives. You know that." Davies smiled at Callaghan who shuddered; Callaghan thought of Mr. Punch.

  "They all talk, don't they Eric?"

  "Yes," he had whispered affirmation hardly recognizing his own voice. He thought of the silence in the staffroom each time he had entered in the weeks leading to his dismissal. The sudden bursts of laughter following him down the corridor. The Benetton girls sniggering as he passed their clutch at lunchtime, working insults aimed at him into their conversation ("yes and he was such a pervert!") and then feigning wide-eyed innocence.

  Black's wife extinguished her bedroom light. It was almost time to move out of the bushes. He had spent the previous two evenings watching the Blacks' movements; they were predictable even to the outsider. Callaghan knew something about the Blacks' seemingly idyllic life that few others shared. Davies had known though. He had told him that there was something of which Callaghan needed to be aware. He had reached out and placed his hands on Callaghan's temples.

  Callaghan felt the world dim and a film of greyness descended over his perception. He viewed Davies with a visceral certainty that the answer to his problems was about to follow.

  Davies' began to speak and Callaghan closed his eyes. Davies voice was nothing more than a whisper. Callaghan felt more disorientated with his eyes closed. His senses were intoxicated. It sounded like many voices whispering.

  When Callaghan had opened his eyes, Davies was gone. Only the resonance of an echo of the whisper remained; it was a slow bounce that would soon gain impetus until it became a ricochet. At that moment however, Callaghan felt nothing but vindication. It was not his fault. It wasn’t the drinking either. He was the victim in all of this not his wife. He had seen the light.

  He had seen what he had always known had been missing from the chain of reason leading him to his current state.

  He saw Black and his own wife, Susan. A series of images that was painful and exciting at the same time. There was a time when he would have found the idea of his wife with another man stimulating but this was different.

  Now Black was standing. Callaghan watched him stretch and look at his watch. Black put his palms together and rubbed them like a man about to receive a treat, a gesture he had seen in the corridors and assemblies of Measton High countless times. He went to the corner of the conservatory and opened a desk draw took something out, held it under his nose and began to unlock the conservatory door.

  Callaghan stepped out of the bushes.

  2

  9.05pm Cornhill

  There wasn't much doing on a Tuesday evening; those that had a penchant for exploring Measton's limited nightlife were either out of money, spent by the weekend's frivolity or, perhaps lacking companionship, at home in front of the television. A light drizzle coated the pavements of High Street and created miniature puddles in the cobbled lanes of The Shambles. In the neon-lit video rental shop on

  Bridge Street a few customers picked through the new releases with a desultory lack of inspiration. Two middle-aged women hurried across the old bridge towards the Open Farms factory for the nightshift. In their wake lay the town's second largest street, Ash Road, so-called because, when the town was younger, it had been lined with ash trees now long gone. The shop fronts were grimy from the passage of years of heavy traffic. Several were closed indefinitely, yellowing posters stuck to the inside of the windows with peeling tape advertised closing down sales. Everything must go, it predicted in unconscious existential parody. On a number of the lampposts signs were plastered and peeling, vainly appealing for any information regarding the whereabouts of Snowy, Tabby, Socks, Princess and Precious. Some had childish hand writing, some were typed, nearly all had descriptions; some had photographs. There were several pubs along the way frequented by the older generation and avoided by the pre-nightclub crowd. Tonight, two of the landlords were thinking very seriously about closing up early, while a third was open only so he could watch his nineteen year old barmaid out of the corner of his eye as his wife watched television in their flat above.

  The upper floors of most of the shop buildings provided cheap residence for the unemployed and the growing number of immigrants that had found their way to the Midlands from the south coast. Above Secondhand Bargains, Sean Hodgkinson sat back in his stained armchair and pressed the syringe plunger sending heroin into his veins while in the neighbouring street his mother, Jean, poured herself another whisky and told her new drinking partner/lover, Bernie Hampton, that her son was a drug addict. Bernie nodded, wisdom personified, vaguely worried that they seemed to be getting low on supplies and he was skint, and proffered another cigarette.

  The streets beyond Ash Road marked the beginning of the Cornhill.

  Many of the houses that had been proudly built in the wake of the second war- homes fit for heroes- were inhabited by the town's unemployed and unemployable; re-housed travelers neighboured the old who were either too tired, too proud or too poor to move to the better part of town. In the lamplit (Has anyone seen Shadow? He's completely black with a red collar) streets, shadowed hulks of discarded domestic appliances brooded in postage stamp gardens; the regular sight of a police car slowly idling by could be viewed through torn and stained net curtains. Loud rap music thudded through the walls, mingling with wailing children and screaming arguments. This was Cornhill.

  To the south of Cornhill, lay the river.

  The wasteland leading to the river's edge had become a dumping ground; refridgerators, engine blocks, boxes of mouldy newspapers and green bottles, sodden mattresses with rusted springs jutting out at odd angles; cartons of old paper, photographs, documentation of lives forgotten homed nests of rats; black bags of clothes had split revealing the garments of the dead or departed, now strewn through the detritus and trodden into the marsh-like mud that thickened as it progressed to the towards the water.

  The figure of a man moved through the trash with assured knowledge of his footing from long experience of this place.

  Craig Phillips needed to have a clear out.

  He carried his waste in a large bin bag; it bulged oddly as though containing a variety of cushions or children's soft toys.

  At first he had needed to clear his garage once a month; as his hobby had accelerated so had the necessity to visit the wasteland, causing his visits to become fortnightly. This was his second visit in a week.

  He had been very busy.

  3

  9.10

  Tom Saunders bent hunched over his father's workbench. He examined the nut he had recently lathed for burr, saw some, frowned and rubbed at it with some worn emery cloth. He was trying to get his father's old jeep back on the road but the drive shaft kept slipping out. As the Second World War jeep was as rare as rocking horse shit, he had to manufacture his own parts; he loved it and hated it by degree. Tonight he was glad simply to have some time to himself.

  His father's workshop stood alone forty metres from the old man's back door. The house was on the outskirts of town. His father had bought it along with its four acres of land in a bargain purchase way back in the 70's. It was worth almost half a million now but his father was wealthy in the extreme so he wouldn't sell it. It was a haven from the provincial attitudes of Measton, had no neighbours and, with the construction of the town bypass, was seldom passed by anything but the occasional vehicle. There was a large pond to the south of the property in which his father had put Coy Carp when Tom had been a boy. They were still there; Tom had seen the phantom face of the largest of the fish rise out of the murk only last Autumn while sitting having a smoke with Greg at the waterline. Every year the same pair of mating geese returned, nested and then left again.

  Tom and his mates loved the workshop. It was a small barn really. The previous occupants had been able to park their VW camper in there and still use it as a workshop. As a teenager, Tom had set up a rock band that had rehearsed there. He’d played bass guitar. It was perfect: no neighbours; away from the road
; far enough from the old man in his study not to cause a problem. However, there had been one unassailable problem: they were shit.

  Since those days his friends had dropped by when they were in need of somewhere to go and just be. The history of the conversations they had shared told the story of boys into young men. Shared stories about girls had become shared attitudes to wives and girlfriends. Dreams of rock stardom had become dreams of packing in the job and starting up on my own. The litany of dissatisfaction with school and parents had become the drone of marital drudgery. None of the drop-in crowd ever brought their spouses or girlfriends along to Tom's place, it was an unspoken rule. Besides they'd be bored.

  Tom was happy to be alone tonight. His father had gone out for the evening so the place was in darkness except for the strip light running the length of the beam that ran through the eave of the workshop roof. John-o had threatened to swing by on his way back from Cambridge but the hour suggested that he had decided to spend another night at his girlfriend's place. That was fine by him. He liked John-o well enough but wasn't in the mood for John-o's brand of dope-wisdom.

  Greg wouldn't be around. He’d been off-limits since his brother's disappearance. The last time Tom had seen him was on the news, holding his mother for support as she had tried to avert the attention of the tabloid scum waiting at her garden gate. Until Davies had gone barmy at the school. People were now of the opinion that Davies had done Patsy and Martin both. Tom had supposed he should ring Greg but what could he say?

  The truth was he wasn't great company either.

  He was pissed off with his job for one thing; he could predict each day with depressing accuracy. He knew who would talk about what in the canteen (tele, tits and football) and who would react; he was aware of the details of grudges going back to when Jesus had been a boy to such a degree that he could foresee arguments and fights (grown men rolling around in the dust of the car park). That wasn't the worst. The thing that bothered him most was the fact that, although he had put in eleven years at Johnstone Industries, he still had to defer to the old timers. He was sick of all that when I was in Baghdad, you were still in your dad's bag stuff.

  Then there was Jackie who seemed to be taking a little more of his independence by the day. In the first six months it had been come round when you like. There had been a casual air to their relationship that had suited them both it seemed. Now she sulked if he didn't go to see her every night. Last night he had spent the whole evening trying to convince her that he wasn't seeing anyone else. She had even told him that she thought he preferred his friends to her. Tom had left the house after telling her that he didn't realize that she and his friends were up for comparison. Today he had ignored her calls.

  There was more to his depression though.

  He was twenty-eight and had absolutely no idea who he was or where he wanted to go in his life but none of that usually mattered while he was messing around with hunks of machinery.

  Tom let out a long sigh and looked into the corner of the workshop. There was a fresh saucer of milk and a plastic bowl filled to the brim with cat biscuits in front of a bald tire. Within the tire a faded red cushion matching- but never missed from- the old man's couch. He thought about going out and calling again but it was no use. It had been over a week now with no sign. Tom knew that Tyson was gone. Probably to the same place as the rest of the cats that had gone missing. Tyson- so called because he was sans half an ear- had first wandered in to the workshop when Tom had been fourteen. Incredibly, despite his many scraps and skirmishes over the years, he was still going strong turning up with all manner of wildlife from around the old man's land.

  Some sick fuck was taking cats.

  The town was plastered with cat missing posters and the Pets and Livestock section in Measton's local rag had never been longer but instead of advertisements to find homes for kittens, dogs, smaller animals and accessory services there was a litany of appeals varying in tone but all with the same hopeless undercurrent.

  How could he give comfort to someone like Greg- whose brother was quite possibly dead- when he was brokenhearted about a cat? It seemed wrong somehow but he couldn't help himself.

  Tom blew the swarth dust from the piece in his hand and examined it carefully with one eye squeezed closed. He began to hum an old Deep Purple track. He smiled to himself thinking of his old band's earnest belief that they would "make it".

  He heard footsteps crunching on the gravel outside the workshop. The old man or John-o after all, he thought. The shed door slid open. Tom wiped at one edge of the nut he had worked and looked at the door.

  Martin Clear smiled at him.

  4

  9.15

  Somewhere in the Cotswold countryside

  Driving stoned was like a game.

  John-o squinted into the dark rain that slapped the Mini's windshield, his adrenalin pumping through his testacles and wrists. The wind pushed at the sides of the small car with little resistance or protection. The Cotswold roads were exposed to the elements in places and devoid of illumination. He had to use all of his affected concentration to follow the unpredictably winding way; he had turned his music off because Frank Zappa- as excellent as he was – often made him paranoid, especially at times like these. Zappa the sorcerer, the harsh weather, the darkness and the fact that he was stoned were enough of a recipe for fear as it was but this road freaked him out too.

  He had read a little about the ancient rites that had taken place in these hills, about the worship of nature and he thought of the power of the earth as his car edged along the slick road. The mini's tyres were bald, increasing his fear that he would end up in a dark ditch in the middle of nowhere with only nature for company.

  There were very few cars on the road tonight which, on the one hand, was a good thing; every time a vehicle approached from the opposite direction the glare of its headlamps shone up from the shining surface causing him to blink rapidly, colourful clouds floating across his vision for the next ten seconds or so. On the other hand, he was fucking freaked by the idea that he was totally alone. The occasional light in the distance indicated life but beyond that it was only him and Frank. Frank could be good company but he was a bit of a headfuck sometimes.

  Then there was the rear view mirror paranoia.

  John-o was convinced beyond any rationalization that he would look into his mirror to check the road behind and see the outline of a figure sat directly behind him. The more he tried to tell himself it was stupid, the more he was convinced that it was going to happen. The utter darkness of the route did not help either. He shook his head trying to dismiss the feeling; he had experienced this imagining countless times before and had even shared it in a well-embellished story with Greg Clear and Tom Saunders over a smoke in Tom's dad's workshop where they often hung out, tinkering with engines and talking shit. That was where he was heading now. But John-o had a problem.

  It was a good forty minutes to the outskirts of Measton where Tom's dad lived and John-o needed to piss badly.

  There was no way he was going to stop here. Fuck that.

  He consoled himself in the knowledge that there were several villages on the way and he thought he could hold off. That had been ten minutes before. The dull ache in John-o's bladder had increased since then.

  It was the fucking beer. He'd spent the afternoon at a student pub in Cambridge trying with everything he had to shag his girlfriend's best friend while said girlfriend was attending an afternoon lecture. He'd failed on that score but had ended up back at her shared house smoking weed with some of her college chums. At first he had cursed the presence of her housemates with their matching goatee beards and witty Take me to your dealer posters on their dorm room doors. There was no chance of a shag now, he'd thought but soon he was so wasted on goatee beard number one's superior homegrown skunk weed, he'd lost interest. He'd left there to meet his girlfriend for a drink before heading back to Measton, had a row, drank more beer and, before he knew it, was driving in a diagonal
across the countryside as night descended on the verge of pissing his pants. John-o grabbed his crotch and squeezed it.

  There was a sign shining in the distance. Cool. A nearby village. He squinted at it through his windscreen wipers.

  Odd.

  At a distance, in the poor visibility, John-o assumed it was a triangular sign but there was more to it. He couldn't make it out. As he passed the sign he turned his head to the left to get a better look.

  What the fuck-

  A panic that was absolute overwhelmed him. The steering wheel jerked in his hands causing the car to skid momentarily. He looked back at the road and corrected his course, his heart sprinting in the confines of his chest cavity. He looked in the rear view mirror and the sign- whatever- looked innocuous again. Nothing, he thought. Imagination. But for a second there.

  The sign had been the head of a large puppet, a Jack-in-the-Box face with the triangular court jester hat. It had bobbed slowly in leering recognition as he had passed.