The Camel Trail

by Merrigan, Peter J

  ‘You haven’t told him?’

  ‘How can I? He’s already caught me crying for no apparent reason. I don’t want him knowing there’s something wrong.’

  ‘Maybe he can help you through it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be helped through. And besides, it would terrify him to know Frankie was out.’

  Sarah and Tessa watched through the kitchen window as the boys threw a ball to each other. Alan was with them, fixing the chain on Kevin’s bicycle.

  ‘He’s great with his hands, isn’t he?’ Tessa said of Alan.

  ‘There you go, changing the subject again.’

  Tessa smiled. ‘Yeah, but this is a subject I don’t think you’d mind talking about.’

  Sarah glanced at her from the corners of her eyes and Tessa threw her hands up in defence. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t like him like that,’ Sarah said, turning from the window and folding her arms. ‘And now’s not the best time for things like that, anyway.’

  ‘Any time is the best time. Just because Frankie has been released doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. Again.’ Tessa paused, turned, assumed the same folded-arm stance as Sarah, and pressed her shoulder against her. ‘So are you going to go through with a divorce this time?’

  ‘And let him find out where we live?’

  Tessa shrugged, changed the subject again. ‘You do fancy him, though, don’t you?’

  Sarah shook her head in dismay. ‘He’s like ten years younger than me.’

  ‘Six. And all that gives you is more time to mould him into the man you want him to be.’

  When their laughter died, they stood in a comfortable silence for a few minutes. At length, Tessa said, ‘He’s going to find out, you know.’

  ‘Kevin?’

  ‘Sooner or later, if you keep him under lock and key, never let him out of your sight, he’s bound to put two and two together.’

  ‘I won’t let him find out,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

  ‘Nothing ever is.’

  Kevin flew through the kitchen and into the hall in a flurry. ‘We’re going to the Trail.’

  ‘Going where?’ Sarah shouted after him.

  ‘The Camel Trail.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Just for half an hour.’

  ‘Come back here,’ Sarah said.

  Kevin shuffled back into the kitchen, by which time Alan and Martin had come in from the garden. Alan was stamping his feet from the cold and rubbing his hands together.

  ‘It’s nearly dinnertime,’ Sarah told Kevin.

  ‘Not for another hour,’ he retorted.

  ‘You’re not going.’

  Kevin whined.

  ‘Let them go,’ Tessa said. ‘Alan’ll be with them, won’t you Alan?’

  ‘If Sarah says—’

  ‘Never mind Sarah.’ Tessa went to Sarah’s side, said softly, ‘Let them go.’

  ‘Just for half an hour,’ Kevin added.

  Sarah glared at her friend, then sighed. ‘Thirty minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ll be counting.’ When Alan and the boys had gone, she said, ‘If anything happens…’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen, Sarah. Graeme should be back from work any minute. In half an hour, I’ll send him out in the car for them. He won’t mind. In fact, we can all go, get some fresh air. It’ll do you good. Nothing’s going to happen.’

  Nothing happened. When Graeme drove Tessa and Sarah out to the Camel Trail a little while later, Sarah sat in the back seat, eyes forward, with a knot in her stomach, dreading the worst. But when they got to the Trail, parked the car and headed up to the bicycle hire shop, she was finally able to breathe right—Kevin, Martin and Alan were making their way slowly back down the Trail towards them.

  She pictured Kevin with a broken arm hanging at an awkward angle from his body, blood on his face and on his clothes, just like she’d seen when he was six years old, one of his laces undone and trailing limply behind him.

  ‘He’s still on his feet,’ Graeme said, and it took Sarah a moment to realise he had meant Martin.

  ‘We went for miles,’ Martin said as they approached.

  ‘Half a mile,’ Alan corrected.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Martin said, holding his arms up to Graeme who picked him up and carried him back to the car.

  Sarah ruffled Kevin’s hair. ‘Are you in a better mood now?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Let’s go out for dinner,’ she announced. ‘All of us. You, too, Alan.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Tessa said. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to cook, anyway.’

  ‘And I’m not in the mood to wash up, either,’ Kevin said, raising a chuckle.

  Graeme stood by his car, opened the passenger door and said, ‘Squeeze in, then. Pub grub or restaurant?’

  Sarah smoothed the lapels of her coat. ‘I’m not dressed for a restaurant.’

  ‘My dear,’ Graeme said, bowing low and gesturing her into the car, ‘those who are beautiful are always dressed for a restaurant.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a charmer, that one,’ Sarah laughed.

  ‘You can have him,’ Tessa said. ‘Alan, squeeze in beside Sarah.’

  Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe nothing was ever going to happen. Maybe she’d live to be a hundred and Frankie would never find them. She tried not to think about it at the restaurant, tried to concentrate on what Alan—told to sit beside Sarah by Tessa, who could hardly suppress a mischievous smirk—was saying. He’d been doing physical therapy since he left school. He’d flitted from one PT job to the next, thought about setting up his own surgery once, and then settled on one case soon after taking it on: Martin. ‘He takes up so much of my time,’ he told Sarah, ‘that I don’t have any left for anyone else. Not therapy, anyway,’ he added, as though the implication lay elsewhere. ‘I wouldn’t have the mental exuberance to take on any more clients. Not that I’m complaining. Martin’s a great kid, and Graeme and Tessa are wonderful.’

  He used big words, but wasn’t out to impress her. He was educated, and just listening to him made her feel like he was educating her.

  He kept a keen eye on Martin throughout dinner, cutting up his steak into manageable pieces and making sure everything was within easy reach for him, holding two conversations, one with Martin, one with Sarah, never getting confused between the two.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t think I’d have the stamina.’

  Alan laughed. ‘You’re like the frog in the well.’

  Martin groaned. ‘Don’t tell that story again.’

  Pointedly ignoring Martin, Alan said, ‘See, there’s this frog in a well and a bird comes to take a drink from it. And they start arguing about the sky, about how it looks. The bird, he sees the sky as this huge, never-ending, beautiful thing. But the frog only has this one little view of the sky from inside the well. He doesn’t know how big and beautiful it is because he won’t come out and see it in all its glory. It’s his narrow view on life that stops him from living fully.’

  ‘And I’m like the frog because…?’

  ‘Because you’re not realising your full potential.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Freud.’

  ‘You’re very welcome. Anyway, that’s kind of how the story goes. It’s an old Chinese tale.’ When Sarah raised an eyebrow, he said, ‘I spent a month in Nanjing once. You learn all sorts.’

  After dinner, when Martin could barely keep his eyes open, his head resting against his mother’s shoulder, Graeme and Alan were sitting in stools at the bar having a manly chat about football or women or both, and Kevin had gone to the boys’ room, Tessa whispered, ‘So?’

  ‘So nothing,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re going to have to stop matchmaking.’

  ‘But you’d make such a lovely couple.’

  ‘It’d never work. You know the state my life is in. And besides, he’s far too…’

  ‘Handsome?’ Tessa said. ‘Intelligent? Kind-hearted?’

  ‘All of t
he above,’ Sarah admitted.

  ‘And Kevin seems to like him, too.’

  They moved onto more mundane subjects when Kevin returned to the table complaining of having eaten too much but still picking at his double-cream cheesecake. Twenty minutes later, they had packed themselves into Graeme’s people-carrier, dropped Alan off at the Camel Trail to pick up his own car, and were heading home.

  Sleepily, Kevin said, ‘Alan promised to take me out on his bike some time.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Sarah said.

  ‘See?’ Tessa said, smirking in the front seat.

  ‘See what?’ Graeme asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Chapter Seven

  Kevin yawned, stretched, rolled over and crawled out of bed onto the floor where he lay for a further ten minutes. When he finally got up and dressed, the sun was playing charades with shadows on the bedroom wall. It was almost seven o’clock.

  He punched his feet into trainers that he hadn’t unlaced the night before, squirming to force his heels in. He swung the bedroom door open wide but noiselessly—if you do it slowly it creaks. The landing was dark and silent. His mother’s door was slightly ajar and he could just make out her deep, regular breathing. She often slept late at the weekends and could be in bed for another two or three hours at least.

  He crept across the landing and tiptoed down the stairs, jotted down a note on the pad by the telephone—At the Trail with Martin. Back before you’re awake—then tore it off, scrunched it up and threw it in the bin. If he was going to be back before she was awake, she wouldn’t need to see the note anyway.

  He ate a chocolate bar for breakfast, pulled on his heavy winter coat, thick woollen gloves, navy-blue Quiksilver beanie hat that he’d had for two years, and left the house. A strong wind pushed him next door where he knocked quietly on Martin’s ground-floor bedroom window. A minute later, Martin opened the window and Kevin climbed inside.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

  ‘What if you fall?’

  ‘Stop being a baby.’

  ‘I’m not being a baby.’

  Martin struggled through the window. ‘Are you coming or what?’

  The Camel Trail was deserted. At this time of the morning, not even the bicycle hire shop was open. Kevin could tell Martin was already getting tired. They had walked the whole way to the Trail, a lot of it uphill, and had only stopped for a rest once. He might be able to walk now, but in another year or so, Martin will be stuck in a wheelchair and someone else will be doing the walking for him.

  Martin pulled a bottle of water from his backpack and drank, casually leaning against a fence as though he didn’t need to lean on it for support. ‘Let’s stop here a minute and make a plan,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of plan?’

  ‘About what to do.’

  ‘We’re only walking along the Trail and back.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Martin said, ‘but how far do you want to go? That’s what we need to think about.’

  Kevin knew he was stalling, getting his strength back up.

  ‘Maybe just a mile or so. My Mum’ll be wondering where I am.’

  ‘Chicken,’ Martin said. ‘I want to go to the end.’

  ‘The whole way?’

  Martin screwed the cap back on the bottle and adjusted the strap on his backpack. ‘Let’s go, then. We haven’t got all day.’

  As they started out along the first stretch of the Trail, Kevin kept his pace the same as Martin’s. Most of the trees were bare, large spindly limbs like crooked witch’s fingers sticking up in the air. It seemed like the summer was so long ago.

  Further along the Trail, as it veered down alongside the Estuary, the trees fell away and they would be able to see for ever. There was the slightest hint of a mist up ahead, God’s breath in the cold air. Kevin zipped his coat all the way to the neck and hunched his shoulders.

  ‘Imagine if we saw a dead body,’ Martin said.

  ‘Why would there be a dead body in the middle of the Camel Trail?’

  ‘There could be. Murderers don’t care where they do their murdering. And it’ll be someone famous. Off the TV.’

  ‘There are no famous people living here,’ Kevin said. ‘Except that chef and who wants to kill a chef?’

  ‘Yeah, but they’ll be down on holiday, won’t they? Visiting their granny. She lives here. They’ll be bringing down some Christmas presents because they couldn’t make it down in December when they should have come.’

  ‘What presents?’

  ‘Woolly hats. And jigsaw puzzles and books about how to plant trees and boring stuff like that.’

  ‘If I was the granny I’d throw them in the bin.’

  ‘She does. And that’s why this famous person is out on the Camel Trail all alone in the middle of the night. ‘Cause she’s taking a walk and just thinking about things. And then this axe murderer comes along, asks her if she has the time—’

  ‘Doesn’t she see the axe?’

  ‘He’s hiding it under his big coat. And as soon as she looks down at her watch, whack! He chops her head off. Then he leaves her body sprawled across the Trail.’

  ‘What about her head?’

  ‘He takes it with him. So no one can identify her.’

  ‘Then how will we know she’s famous when we find her body?’

  ‘Because she has her driver’s licence in her pocket.’

  ‘You shouldn’t touch a crime scene.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Martin said. He paused, took another drink from his bottle and started walking again, slightly slower this time. ‘We don’t touch her. We don’t know she’s famous yet ’cause she’s got no head. But we call the police. And they come and check her pockets and then it’s someone famous. And all the news people from the TV want to speak to us and make us famous.’

  ‘I don’t want to be famous,’ Kevin said.

  ‘But we’d probably get a reward or something. For being the ones that found her. We’ll take the reward and then say we don’t want to do any interviews and that we’re going to be reclusive.’

  ‘How much is the reward?’

  ‘Depends how famous she is,’ Martin said.

  ‘Let’s hope she’s really famous. Are you tired yet?’

  ‘Not me. You?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Robert’s car smelled like petrol. Frankie even pulled over off the motorway to check the engine at one point, but he couldn’t find a leak. He urinated in the grass verge, stretched his legs, smoked a cigarette, and got back in the car when it started raining.

  He was heading west across the M4, and was probably only another twenty or thirty minutes outside Bradley Stoke, according to his road map, where he had decided he’d stop for breakfast. He had left London in the middle of the night, after lying awake, a piece of paper in his hand with an address in Cornwall written on it. He couldn’t sleep. Henry Turner, his solicitor, had called him the evening before to pass on the address. ‘Write to her,’ he had said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  Frankie assured him he’d be the model citizen.

  It hadn’t taken Turner long to track her down. ‘You just need to know where to look,’ he had said. The electoral register was a free for all when it came to finding someone. All you needed was a name and the search results would spit back the addresses of everyone listed under that name. Luckily for Frankie, there weren’t many Sarah Catchpoles in the world. Dumb bitch. Even if she’d registered in her maiden name, they’d still have been able to find her. You gotta love the Data Protection Act.

  They were heading back along the Camel Trail, Martin clinging almost desperately to Kevin’s coat sleeve. They hadn’t found any dead bodies. The only things they did find were runny noses, sore feet and an ugly purple bruise on Martin’s knee from where he fell once.

  He seemed to be up on his tiptoes even more than before. They were going slow, taking their time, every step a p
ain for Martin.

  ‘Let’s stop a minute.’

  Kevin turned, helped Martin sit on a low fence and sat beside him, rubbing his hands together for warmth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Martin said, the joviality gone from his voice, a sombre expression on his face.

  ‘What for?’

  Martin sighed. ‘If I didn’t have stupid legs, we could have walked all the way to the end and back.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Kevin said. ‘You’d have to carry me home if we walked the whole way. And anyway, it’s not your fault you’ve got weak legs. It’s no one’s fault.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone we didn’t go the full way, okay?’

  ‘If my mum’s still in bed when we get home,’ Kevin said, ‘I won’t even tell her I left the house.’

  ‘But you have to tell Alan we walked all of it, okay? When we see him today, you have to say we went the whole way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t want him knowing I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘We’ll do it next weekend,’ Kevin assured him. ‘We’ll get up even earlier and walk the whole way. And we can stop as many times as you want. It doesn’t matter. We’ll just keep going. And when we get to the end, we can call your dad so he comes and picks us up. We don’t have to walk both ways. One way’ll do.’

  Martin nodded agreement. He leaned a hand on Kevin’s shoulder and eased himself back up onto his feet. ‘Next weekend,’ he said.

  ‘Definitely,’ Kevin said.

  The walk home was painful. They were going at a snail’s pace, Martin’s legs moving awkwardly beneath him, both of them knowing that next weekend won’t make a difference, he still won’t be able to walk the full length of the Camel Trail, but neither of them willing to say so out loud.

  Kevin knew instinctively that, if not next week, or next month, Martin will be in a wheelchair before too long. He used one even now, but only when he was really tired. It was only a matter of time before he’d be sitting in one for the rest of his life.

  Martin was almost crying with pain when they finally rounded the corner at the bottom of their street. ‘Nearly there,’ Kevin said.