The path was straight and dark, but the lights of distant houses shone like stars on the ground, and the moon gave us enough light to see. Once we were scared, when something snuffled and snorted in front of us. We pressed close, saw it was a badger, laughed and hugged and kept on walking.
We talked quiet nonsense about what we dreamed and wanted and thought.
And all the time I wanted to kiss her and feel her breasts, and maybe put my hand between her legs.
Finally I saw my chance. There was an old brick bridge over the path, and we stopped beneath it. I pressed up against her. Her mouth opened against mine.
Then she went cold and stiff, and stopped moving.
“Hello,” said the troll.
I let go of Louise. It was dark beneath the bridge, but the shape of the troll filled the darkness.
“I froze her,” said the troll, “so we can talk. Now: I’m going to eat your life.”
My heart pounded, and I could feel myself trembling.
“No.”
“You said you’d come back to me. And you have. Did you learn to whistle?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I never could whistle.” It sniffed, and nodded. “I am pleased. You have grown in life and experience. More to eat. More for me.”
I grabbed Louise, a taut zombie, and pushed her forward. “Don’t take me. I don’t want to die. Take her. I bet she’s much tastier than me. And she’s two months older than I am. Why don’t you take her?”
The troll was silent.
It sniffed Louise from toe to head, snuffling at her feet and crotch and breasts and hair.
Then it looked at me.
“She’s an innocent,” it said. “You’re not. I don’t want her. I want you.”
I walked to the opening of the bridge and stared up at the stars in the night.
“But there’s so much I’ve never done,” I said, partly to myself. “I mean, I’ve never. Well, I’ve never had sex. And I’ve never been to America. I haven’t…” I paused. “I haven’t done anything. Not yet.”
The troll said nothing.
“I could come back to you. When I’m older.”
The troll said nothing.
“I will come back. Honest I will.”
“Come back to me?” said Louise. “Why? Where are you going?”
I turned around. The troll had gone, and the girl I had thought I loved was standing in the shadows beneath the bridge.
“We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”
We walked back and never said anything.
She went out with the drummer in the punk band I started, and, much later, married someone else. We met once, on a train, after she was married, and she asked me if I remembered that night.
I said I did.
“I really liked you, that night, Jack,” she told me. “I thought you were going to kiss me. I thought you were going to ask me out. I would have said yes. If you had.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.” Her hair was cut very short. It didn’t suit her.
I never saw her again. The trim woman with the taut smile was not the girl I had loved, and talking to her made me feel uncomfortable.
* * *
I moved to London, and then, some years later, I moved back again, but the town I returned to was not the town I remembered: there were no fields, no farms, no little flint lanes; and I moved away as soon as I could, to a tiny village ten miles down the road.
I moved with my family – I was married by now, with a toddler – into an old house that had once, many years before, been a railway station. The tracks had been dug up, and the old couple who lived opposite us used it to grow vegetables.
I was getting older. One day I found a gray hair; on another, I heard a recording of myself talking, and I realized I sounded just like my father.
I was working in London, doing A&R for one of the major record companies. I was commuting into London by train most days, coming back some evenings.
I had to keep a small flat in London; it’s hard to commute when the bands you’re checking out don’t even stagger onto the stage until midnight. It also meant that it was fairly easy to get laid, if I wanted to, which I did.
I thought that Eleanora – that was my wife’s name; I should have mentioned that before, I suppose – didn’t know about the other women; but I got back from a two-week jaunt to New York one winter’s day, and when I arrived at the house it was empty and cold.
She had left a letter, not a note. Fifteen pages, neatly typed, and every word of it was true. Including the PS, which read: You really don’t love me. And you never did.
I put on a heavy coat, and I left the house and just walked, stunned and slightly numb.
There was no snow on the ground, but there was a hard frost, and the leaves crunched under my feet as I walked. The trees were skeletal black against the harsh gray winter sky.
I walked down the side of the road. Cars passed me, traveling to and from London. Once I tripped on a branch, half-hidden in a heap of brown leaves, ripping my trousers, cutting my leg.
I reached the next village. There was a river at right angles to the road, and a path I’d never seen before beside it, and I walked down the path, and stared at the partly frozen river. It gurgled and plashed and sang.
The path led off through fields; it was straight and grassy.
I found a rock, half-buried, on one side of the path. I picked it up, brushed off the mud. It was a melted lump of purplish stuff, with a strange rainbow sheen to it. I put it into the pocket of my coat and held it in my hand as I walked, its presence warm and reassuring.
The river meandered away across the fields, and I walked on in silence.
I had walked for an hour before I saw houses – new and small and square – on the embankment above me.
And then I saw the bridge, and I knew where I was: I was on the old railway path, and I’d been coming down it from the other direction.
There were graffiti painted on the side of the bridge: FUCK and BARRY LOVES SUSAN and the omnipresent NF of the National Front.
I stood beneath the bridge in the red brick arch, stood among the ice cream wrappers, and the crisp packets and the single, sad, used condom, and watched my breath steam in the cold afternoon air.
The blood had dried into my trousers.
Cars passed over the bridge above me; I could hear a radio playing loudly in one of them.
“Hello?” I said, quietly, feeling embarrassed, feeling foolish.
“Hello?”
There was no answer. The wind rustled the crisp packets and the leaves.
“I came back. I said I would. And I did. Hello?”
Silence.
I began to cry then, stupidly, silently, sobbing under the bridge.
A hand touched my face, and I looked up.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” said the troll.
He was my height now, but otherwise unchanged. His long gonk hair was unkempt and had leaves in it, and his eyes were wide and lonely.
I shrugged, then wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat. “I came back.”
Three kids passed above us on the bridge, shouting and running.
“I’m a troll,” whispered the troll, in a small, scared voice. “Fol rol de ol rol.”
He was trembling.
I held out my hand and took his huge clawed paw in mine. I smiled at him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Honestly. It’s okay.”
The troll nodded.
He pushed me to the ground, onto the leaves and the wrappers and the condom, and lowered himself on top of me. Then he raised his head, and opened his mouth, and ate my life with his strong sharp teeth.
* * *
When he was finished, the troll stood up and brushed himself down. He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a bubbly, burnt lump of clinker rock.
He held it out to me.
“This is yours,” said
the troll.
I looked at him: wearing my life comfortably, easily, as if he’d been wearing it for years. I took the clinker from his hand, and sniffed it. I could smell the train from which it had fallen, so long ago. I gripped it tightly in my hairy hand.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Good luck,” said the troll.
“Yeah. Well. You too.”
The troll grinned with my face.
It turned its back on me and began to walk back the way I had come, toward the village, back to the empty house I had left that morning; and it whistled as it walked.
I’ve been here ever since. Hiding. Waiting. Part of the bridge.
I watch from the shadows as the people pass: walking their dogs, or talking, or doing the things that people do. Sometimes people pause beneath my bridge, to stand, or piss, or make love. And I watch them, but say nothing; and they never see me.
Fol rol de ol rol.
I’m just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge.
Oh yes, I can hear you.
But I’m not coming out.
AT THAT AGE
CATRIONA WARD
When they come into the classroom, John thinks he’s seeing double. They are exactly alike: gold and blue, hair and eyes. The boy is slightly taller, maybe. John looks the longest at the girl. Everyone is looking at them. They don’t seem to mind. They are used to it. The teacher says their names and they smile politely. Daisy and Drew. John thinks, how stupid to give twins names that begin with the same letter, like characters from those old stories about boarding schools. Alice liked those kinds of books. John doesn’t.
There is an empty seat next to him and he hopes and hopes. But obviously the teacher puts the girl at the very back of the class, and the boy sits next to John. A strange, delicate scent hangs about him, like the fruit bowl at home when those little flies start hanging over it.
John starts, because suddenly chair legs are scraping and there is a tumult of voices. The lesson is over. The boy is looking at him in a friendly way.
“You were sleeping with your eyes open.”
“It was boring,” John says. He doesn’t sleep at night anymore but he doesn’t want to talk about that.
John is thirteen. Sometimes he tells people he’s sixteen. And sometimes they believe him because he is tall – though he has developed a hunch in recent months. He doesn’t like to take up too much space, or be looked at. Just in case what’s inside him might be visible on the outside.
He blinks. He is in the playground in the sunshine and the Drew boy is standing beside him with a friendly air. His skin and eyes are so clear that he seems almost pearlescent, lit from within. The upper school girls file past. It is the end of their break time. They look at Drew, little flashes of heat passing through the chain-link fence. Jealousy spears John deep in his stomach. They don’t look at him like that, with his dull brown hair and normal eyes.
Drew says, “So, what is there to do around here?”
“Not much,” says John. He doesn’t bother to sound matey.
“Do you want to come to our house after school? There’ll be no grown-ups home.”
John says, “Nah.”
“Oh, do,” says Drew and John shrugs and says OK, to make him go away. He supposes it beats going home to his mother, her slow sorrow. He is tired, these days. Maybe that’s why people believe him, when he says he’s older.
* * *
Daisy is waiting outside the school gates. She walks alongside them in silence. Her hair falls over one eye in a white-gold sheaf. Drew says, “Where’s the nearest place to buy beer?”
“There’s the off-licence on the corner,” John says. “But they ask for ID.”
“Don’t worry,” Drew says.
John supposes Drew has a fake ID. The twins have money, that’s obvious. He can pay for the good kind.
“I’ll pay,” Drew says, as if tracking John’s thoughts. “Daisy and I will. We don’t mind.”
John stops in the little cobbled alley by the off-licence. “OK,” he says. “Here you go.”
“I’m not going in,” Drew says. “You are.”
John feels a spurt of irritation. “I can’t,” he says. “They know me and my mum. I thought you had an ID or something.”
“No.”
“Waste of time,” John says and walks away.
“Wait.” A soft, pale hand on his arm. Daisy smells like her brother but sweeter, like apple juice. “Please,” she says. “We have an idea.”
John stops. Her hand feels like it’s sinking into his flesh, but not in a gross way.
“I know a trick you can use,” Drew says. “It’s like… hypnotism or something. It’s that same guy who hypnotised the entire football stadium. Did you see that on TV?”
John is interested, in spite of himself. He did see the man hypnotising the football stadium full of people. It was cool. He likes magic and all that stuff.
“All you have to do is lean in close, and say a word, and the other person will do whatever you want them to do.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I know it sounds mad,” Drew says. “But it works, I swear.”
“What’s the word?”
Drew whispers in his ear. Afterwards John can’t call the word to mind. It sounds something like anuśru, or anushru, but not really. It sounds like stone grating on stone, bones calcifying deep beneath the earth.
* * *
The door gives with a cheerful tinkle. Inside, the shop smells mineral and cool, like glass bottles or maybe coins. John’s palms start sweating. His skin crawls with shock as he sees that it isn’t the old man behind the counter; it’s his wife. She is knitting and the sound of her needles seems to echo his speeding heart. Click, click, click. Mrs Berry has this way of looking at you, just like she is doing now, over the rim of her glasses.
He goes to the fridge anyway. The cans are blue and gold, so cold that they stick to his palm. The colours make him think of Daisy. He takes out a six-pack of something. It could be beer, cider. His eyes won’t make sense of the label. His fingers aren’t steady and he drops the cans onto the counter with a sharp sound. Mrs Berry looks at him.
“Proof of age, please,” she says gently. She’s not angry, it’s worse than that. John sees that she pities him, she is thinking of Alice and how sad it all is. His heart feels like a balloon that’s been blown up too much and has reached breaking point.
He leans in close to her. The word drops from his mouth like a stone. Mrs Berry blinks and says, “Are you all right, John?”
He says the word again, panicking, and she takes the beer away from him. “I’ll put this back in the fridge,” she says. “You get home.” She puts her hand on his, briefly. “I know you’re having a rough time. It will pass, I promise. You’ve got to try and be a help to your mum, now.”
Outside, John finds that he is trembling with rage. He runs to the alley where he left the twins. He seizes Drew and shoves him against the brick wall.
“You were making fun of me,” he says, breathing hard. “The word didn’t work.”
Drew gives a shout of mingled surprise and laughter. “Of course it didn’t work,” he says. “What did you think? Honestly.”
John stares at him for a moment. A feeling bubbles up inside him. It bursts out and he realises he is laughing too. How could he have believed that there was a magic word that made people do what you wanted? Honestly, it is pretty funny.
“Let’s go to your house,” he says.
The smile spreads slowly over Daisy’s face like sunrise.
* * *
Daisy and Drew’s house is in the new development on the other side of town. They walk there slowly, talking.
“You have a sister, John?” asks Daisy.
“A twin,” John says. He doesn’t feel like getting into the Alice thing right now. “She goes to a different school.”
Where Drew and Daisy live, a
ll the houses look the same. They are big and clean and anonymous. They don’t have the pressing weight of sadness on them, because nothing has happened there yet. John wishes he and his mum lived here, and not in the small grey terrace filled with memories of loss. He worries about his mum. At least John gets to go to school during the day. She just sits.
They stop outside a white house, which looks just like the adjacent white houses, and all the other houses in the close. Drew opens the gate and they go up the garden path, which is so new that the crystals in the paving still sparkle in the afternoon sun.
Inside the front door is a large table, piled a foot deep in letters and bills.
“Woah,” John says.
“The previous owners,” says Daisy, drawing him on. “They didn’t leave a forwarding address. I suppose we should just throw it all away.”
The living room is like a large, cool cave, what his mum would call open plan. Everything is either white or shining. Daisy puts on music, which comes out of hidden speakers in the walls. Drew hands John a drink in a real martini glass, just like James Bond. The first swallow burns his throat, but after that everything starts to feel wonderful.
“Let’s have a party,” Drew says.
“Oh, do let’s!” says Daisy.
John laughs, because sure, why not? A party, out of nowhere.
“Won’t your mum and dad mind?”
“Hester is out,” Daisy says. “But she won’t mind, anyway.”
Drew takes out his phone and starts calling. In what seems like minutes, the doorbell rings and there are kids outside. John doesn’t know any of them. They must be from other schools. It happens again, and again, and soon the white living room is filled with teenagers. Everyone’s teeth seem really white, and the girls’ clothes are amazing: dresses that seem ready to float off like clouds, flower crowns and bare feet.
John finds himself talking to an earnest boy wearing black, named Edmond. He has glasses and his dark hair is long, combed over one side of his face. Even so, John glimpses the scar beneath. It is long and vicious.
“How did you get that?” he asks. He knows that personal questions are rude but he feels so close to Edmond with his nervous eyes and sweet face.
Cursed Page 4
