by Will Maclean
In our case, however, this drifting away from each other would never be allowed to run its natural course.
Autumn came and went; the seasons passed. A year and a half went by.
9
Winter 1972 was an exciting time in the world that Abi and I had built between us, woven from my mind to hers and back again in a trillion complex strands. That Christmas, it seemed as if the world had finally caught up with our obsessions, and the TV schedules seemed crammed with supernatural dramas and general oddness that Abi and I dutifully circled with a red biro in the Christmas Radio Times, and looked forward to every bit as much as presents, or Christmas dinner.
Firstly, there was Dead of Night, a half-hour spooky anthology series, the first episode of which told the story of a middle-class dinner party going terribly wrong after the guests discovered their converted farmhouse was, centuries ago, the site of an awful tragedy. This series concluded just before Christmas, and whetted our appetites.
Secondly, the BBC’s annual Ghost Story for Christmas was an adaptation of M.R. James’s ‘A Warning to The Curious’, which was, of course, one of our favourites. The tale of an unfortunate who seeks one of the lost Anglo-Saxon crowns of East Anglia and is visited by its terrible guardian, the adaptation exceeded our expectations, containing lots of terrifying images and one ambiguous moment of pure nightmare that Abi and I discussed and dissected endlessly afterwards.
Better even than this, however, was Nigel Kneale’s play The Stone Tape, starring Jane Asher, broadcast on BBC 2 on Christmas Day. This managed to be not only absolutely terrifying but also bring to vivid life an idea we had only previously encountered in books. In The Stone Tape, a group of audio researchers stay in a haunted house, and begin working on the hypothesis that ghosts are recordings of traumatic events, somehow impressed into the fabric of the building. I don’t think either Abi or I spoke during the entire ninety minutes it was on. It fell exactly into line with our thinking on the subject of ghosts – that science might, one day very soon, explain them, understand them, and in so doing open up a whole new way of thinking about the world. This was a perfectly reasonable expectation, back then. We were not alone in believing it.
December rolled into a cold, hard January. The Stone Tape had proved to be a shot in the arm to mine and Abi’s obsessions, and had temporarily slowed our inevitable drift away from each other. We were making an earnest attempt to persuade our parents to buy us a tape recorder, which they were resisting – not on the grounds that we would use it to make Raudive recordings, the tape recordings of spirit voices first captured in the 1960s by the Latvian scientist Konstantin Raudive (although that was, admittedly, exactly what we planned to do) – but on the grounds that it was expensive. Meanwhile, we talked endlessly about The Stone Tape, and tried to devise ways in which the central theory could be proved or disproved, that we could reasonably organise within our means. The programme appeared to justify what we had always believed; that an answer was just around the corner. Ghosts would be explained, just like everything else in the universe. Maybe we might even be the people to do it.
I was thinking about this, and many other things, one afternoon in January, as I took the long route home from the bus stop along Everson Road.
I was taking this circuitous route to avoid Tony Finch and his gang, who, over the last two weeks, had taken to picking on me on the way home from school. Tony Finch was both nasty and clever, a terrible combination in a bully, and I was properly and unashamedly scared of him. Rumour had it he once threw a kid off the flyover onto the motorway and broke his hip, after hunting him through the woods for an hour beforehand, and I could quite believe this was true. His gang consisted of Cliff Lang, a sneering, sandy-haired creep who agreed with everything Tony said, and Gary Fisher, a gigantic boy whose nickname was ‘Frankenstein’. Gary Fisher had all the propensity for cruelty that Tony Finch possessed, with none of the imagination, and so his principle role was as enforcer. They were delinquent and dangerous, and seemed to attend school only when they felt like it, preferring to horse around on railway lines and by the canal. I was by no means their principal target, but I knew I could easily become so if I didn’t handle the situation well. I had decided that the best way to prevent this from happening was to avoid them as much as possible, until they either lost interest or fried themselves on the railway line that seemed to exert such a fascination for them.
That afternoon, however, I was so absorbed in thinking about The Stone Tape, and the possible implications of it, that I didn’t notice Cliff Lang lurking around the trunk of one of the leafless trees on Everson Road, smiling his trademark unpleasant smile. And now it was too late, and he was standing in front of me, blocking my way. Behind him, I could see Tony Finch himself, all glossy black hair and a brown leather jacket with an elasticated waistband and an enormous, chunky zipper. Behind Tony, I spied the colossal bulk of Gary Fisher, bringing up the rear like a bear on a chain.
Having no better plan, I tried to walk past this grinning obstacle as if he weren’t there. Cliff, still smiling, stepped sideways to block my path. I tried to go round him the other way, and he once again sidestepped to block my path. He was the same height as me, and our eyes locked. His were large and blue, with nothing but low cunning in them.
‘Tim Smith?’
I nodded cautiously. He grinned.
‘Tim Shit more like! Eh? Eh?’
Gary Fisher hooted with laughter, but Tony Finch remained impassive, observing, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. I could extrapolate nothing useful from his expression. My heart thumped unevenly, as if it were pumping porridge rather than blood.
‘Wow,’ I heard myself say. ‘Were you working on that one all morning?’
I was as surprised as anyone to hear myself say these words. Having said them, I began to observe myself objectively, as if I were someone else; close by, but out of harm’s way. Wow, I thought. What else am I capable of? I was genuinely fascinated to see what I would do next.
Cliff Lang looked furious, and confused, and – after he saw that Tony Finch was quietly laughing – laughing at him – murderous. ‘Ooh!’ said Gary Fisher, in a way that said Well, you’ve just signed your own death warrant.
You spend your life at school, if you’re a quiet, bookish child, avoiding physical violence at all costs. I think now – as I thought then – that this stems more from a fear of unpredictability and chaos than a fear of pain itself. A fight amongst two teenagers is a zone without rules, and anything can happen. It was that savage space, I think – that space of no rules and no help, where you are utterly on your own – that I feared the most. I think most of us do, deep down, and quite rightly.
I was almost relieved when Cliff Lang just punched me in the side of the head, as hard as he could.
I spun around but just about managed to keep my balance. Lang shoved past me, and as he did so, he spat onto the lapel of my blazer. I was just coming to terms with this when Gary Fisher shoved past. As Gary Fisher was essentially a Clydesdale forced into an ill-fitting school uniform, this time I did lose my balance, and went flying onto the pavement.
When I looked up, Tony Finch was looking down at me. I expected a punch or a kick, but he just smiled. Something about his smile made me realise he wasn’t laughing at me: he was still laughing at the joke I’d made, at Cliff Lang’s expense. Unexpectedly, Tony Finch was amused by me.
‘Better luck next time,’ he said. ‘Say hello to that sister of yours for me.’
After they had gone, I picked myself up, gathered my belongings together and walked soberly down a long tarmac alleyway that was always a minefield of dog mess. Halfway along its length, when I knew that I would be able to see anyone approaching with a two-minute head start from either direction, I broke into a series of short, violent, angry sobs. I was not physically injured, of course, but my opinion of myself had been unacceptably defaced. After five minutes, however, my tears had subsided, and after ten, were gone altogether.
&n
bsp; Even before I got home, I had resolved not to tell Abi about the bullying.
It was odd to even think that that’s what it had been – bullying. I had been bullied. I had, somehow, turned into the kind of person that that happened to, largely by not paying attention. If I told Abi about it, she would insist on interceding somehow, and that might well make things worse. Besides, I thought, I might be able to keep such incidents as rare as possible, or avoid them altogether, if I was vigilant. As far as masculine pride went, I would just have to lick my wounds in private.
Instead, I decided, I would share my thoughts on the tape recorder project with Abi. My plan was to make recordings in the attic, and then to try and make recordings in places where the atmosphere was more likely to be saturated with echoes of the past. I was already wondering whether the vicar would let us record in the local church.
That, I recall clearly, was my general plan for the evening. Instead, something else happened. It becomes difficult to remember the sequence of it with any real clarity; linear time appears to break down entirely, becoming instead a series of bright, painful memories that, even now, refuse to fit together into anything as streamlined as a neat narrative, or a smooth progression. They are bright, sharp shards, orbiting an inescapable darkness.
10
It started slowly.
Abi wasn’t due home from school at the usual time that day, as she had chess club. She had kept up playing chess at her new school, and I think she found the higher ability level of her new opponents invigorating. Despite the competition, Abigail was, naturally, ranked Board One, the best player on her team. That night, they were playing the nearby Catholic girls’ school, St Peter-in-Chains, and Abigail was itching to play their Board One, who had won the regional chess congress the previous year (I learned later that Abi had indeed played their Board One that evening and had won). Afterwards, Abi elected to walk home rather than get a lift in the school minibus with Mr Benson, her teacher, and the rest of the team. It was not out of the ordinary for the supervising teacher to let this happen, even on a cold January evening when it got dark at about five to four.
I think it was sometime around 6.30 p.m. that my mum first remarked that Abi was late, and should be home soon. By 7 p.m. Dad was mentioning this too. I kept quiet; my sister was beginning to have secrets of her own that I was not privy to, and I did not wish to get her into trouble. Besides, 7 p.m. was not impossibly late, although it was unlike Abi not to phone. Maybe she didn’t have change, I thought.
By 8 p.m., we were all worried. My heart was beating very fast indeed, and it seemed as if an awful possibility was gathering strength and sickening speed around us, willing itself into reality, into concrete being. I was shaking with fear by 9 p.m., when my mum phoned Mr Benson, and by the time she called the police half an hour later, I was practically hyperventilating. They promised to send someone over as soon as they could.
At 9.45, the doorbell rang, and Mum, Dad and I scrambled to answer it. I hoped, hoped, hoped it would be Abi. She would be covered in mud, having got lost on the way home. Her face would be tear-streaked. She’d have lost her keys, which would be why she’d rung the doorbell. We’d all hug her gratefully and cry and laugh and tell her off in an affectionate way for worrying us half to death. My dad threw the front door open.
Two police officers stood there, a man and a woman. Their faces were devoid of expression. They looked like the Autons, the evil race of shop-window dummies from Doctor Who, only much more real than anything I had ever seen on television. That was their principal terror, I decided, their very solidity and undeniable reality. I watched them, hypnotised by the actuality of them, unable to speak.
‘Mrs Smith?’ said the WPC.
‘That’s me, officer,’ said my mum.
‘You called to say your daughter Abigail hadn’t returned from school.’
‘That’s right, officer. Has she been found?’
‘Well,’ said the male officer, ‘why don’t we come inside and you can tell us all about it?’
‘Just tell me where she is,’ said Mum.
‘Alice!’ said Dad. ‘I’m sorry, she’s a bit hysterical. She’s very worried. Please come in. Alice, be so good as to make our guests some tea.’
The two police officers shuffled into the living room, with a wordless awkwardness. Again, they seemed more real than the house around them, more real than anything I had ever seen. Whilst Mum made tea, Dad and I told them about Abi.
‘Has she ever done anything like this before?’ asked the WPC, not looking up from her notebook.
‘Never,’ said Dad.
‘And it’s not like her to go wandering off?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She has very little interest in what she calls “the tedium of suburbia”.’
Dad shot me a look. The male officer looked at me curiously, but decided to let whatever was bothering him about this statement go. ‘And you say she had … chess club?’
‘That’s right,’ said Dad. ‘Every Tuesday. Even if it’s an away match, it’s never more than two or three miles away. So she’s normally home by six-thirty at the absolute latest.’
The WPC wrote something in her notebook.
‘How would you describe her emotional state?’
My dad looked baffled by the question. He shrugged. ‘Normal?’
‘What I mean by that is, do you have any reason to suspect she might have run away from home?’
‘She wouldn’t do that,’ I said.
‘Timothy, please.’ My Dad shot me another look. ‘As far as we know, Abigail had no reason to run away.’
‘As far as you know.’
‘As far as we know.’
‘She wouldn’t have run away,’ said Mum, coming back in with a tray laden with mugs of tea and a plate of Bourbon biscuits. I felt pleased that she echoed my opinion on the matter so exactly.
‘Not to see friends? Or a boyfriend?’
My mum shook her head. ‘She keeps herself to herself, really.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’ll be home before you know it,’ said the male policeman, winking at me as if we were drinking companions. ‘Do you have a photo of her we might have?’
There were several recent school photos of Abi on top of the television, but they were all in glass frames, and too large to take. However, stuck into the frame of one of them were several other photos of Abi, including the photo I had taken two years ago, to use up the last exposure on the end of our roll of ghost film. She had been almost fourteen when the picture was taken; now she was almost sixteen, but the photo had always made her look older, and it was a good likeness. Plus, she was smiling in it, which was rare. Dad tugged it loose from the frame and handed it, and two others, over.
‘We’d like those back, if that’s possible,’ said my mum.
‘Right you are.’ The male policeman placed the photographs in his notebook, took a gulp of tea, and my dad walked both him and the WPC to the front door.
After they’d left the room, my mum turned to me.
‘Where do you think she is?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. I honestly don’t know.’
‘Right.’
My dad returned, and the three of us sat in silence for a very long time, until I could stand it no longer and went up to my room.
I awoke the next morning, still in my school uniform. There was a tantalising split-second of normality before I remembered the situation, and ran downstairs.
Mum was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the window. I felt a huge and terrible kick of desolation.
‘She hasn’t come back?’ It seemed impossible.
Mum shook her head. I pulled up a chair next to her and took her hand, and we both stared out of the window. Neither of us said anything for what must have been half an hour.
Eventually, it was Mum who broke the silence. Standing up, she walked over to the sink and gripped the edge of the metal draining board, with movements that were economical and precise, like those of an aut
omaton.
‘Would you like some breakfast?’ she said.
‘I’m fine, Mum.’
‘You need to eat.’
‘Really. I’m fine.’
Before the horrible silence could fall again, I decided to speak. Say something, I thought. Anything.
‘What are we going to do, Mum?’
‘We’re going to wait,’ said Mum simply. ‘I can put some toast on for you.’
‘Mum?’
‘I heard what you said, Tim. You need to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘If I make it, you’ll eat it.’
‘Mum …’
‘If I make it, you’ll eat it. You will, won’t you?’
I sighed. ‘Yes, Mum.’
Later that day, the police returned, the same two officers who had called round previously (which, I recalled with a shock, was less than twenty-four hours ago). They intended, they said, to circulate the pictures so that they could begin an appeal for more information. And with that, I felt the awful narrative gather strength around us, forcing itself into the world.
After the police left, I tried to fight this new narrative in the only way I could, by acts of small magic and superstition. If I could count ten birds from the attic window in under five minutes, Abi would be home safe. If I wrote all the names of our enemies on a piece of paper and burned it in a glass ashtray, Abi would be safe. If I could throw a screwed-up ball of paper into the bin on the first go, Abi would be home safe. Best of three. Best of five. Best of seven.
Incredibly, the situation continued into the next day. How? How was this possible? I awoke, went downstairs, had a more or less identical conversation with my mother to the one we had had the previous day, and waited. Dad was out at the police station, and returned after breakfast, with no news whatsoever, which, upon pressing him, turned into the news that police were searching fields and woods, waste ground and rubbish dumps. There was talk of dragging the canal. My mother and I listened to this in cold silence, a tear slowly wandering down my mother’s clenched cheek. I felt terrible for her. For myself, I felt very little. A vast and silent blackness seemed to have opened up beneath me – within me – and I was being drawn into it, moment by moment, now, like a black hole, and I was powerless to resist.
