We started to walk too. ‘What did you do that for?’ I demanded angrily. ‘That little kid didn’t say anything. He was just going along with the others.’
‘The ones who just go along are worse. They don’t even have the guts to decide. I’m teaching him about gorillas,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s my mission.’
The anger in me faded. What was he talking about?
‘That was pretty slick talking back there. You’re okay, Nathanial,’ he said, and in spite of everything, I felt a burst of pride at his approval. It was as cold and dark as it had been before, but there was something comforting about not being alone. Especially in Cheshunt.
‘How did you know that about the Kraken not wanting trouble in Cheshunt?’ he asked curiously.
I shrugged. ‘It was a guess. What that old guy on the bus said made me think of it. And the fact that none of us have been beaten up outright. I think it must be some kind of rule he’s set that no one is to cause trouble here.’
‘What happened at the home?’ Danny said after a bit. ‘Did you get to talk to the old lady?’
I nodded and shivered, remembering the conversation with Anna Galway. ‘She was… a bit mad. But she told me the guy who went to prison didn’t kill the old caretaker.’
‘He was framed?’ Danny said savagely. ‘The cops lied.’
I frowned, wondering what his beef with the police was. ‘It was nothing to do with them. The kid gave himself up so the others wouldn’t be blamed as well.’
‘If the guy didn’t do it, who did?’
‘Anna said he killed himself. Doused himself in kero and lit a match. She said no one would have believed the truth so this guy agreed to say he did it.
‘There was a whole bunch of them then?’ Danny said. ‘They should have stuck together. The police would have had to believe them.’
We passed the park. It was silent and dark, and the wind made the swing creak eerily.
‘A lot of weird things happen here,’ Danny said in a subdued voice. Suddenly he reached out and pushed me hard into a shadowy driveway.
‘What the…?’
‘Shut up!’ he hissed. ‘It’s a police car.’
I froze, thinking of Seth’s father. Then I realised it was still early. ‘They can’t do anything to us. It’s not after curfew.’
‘I don’t trust them,’ Danny whispered fiercely. ‘They make the rules, then they break them. Police can do anything they want. Who’d take the word of a couple of punk kids over a cop?’
We watched silently as the police car cruised slowly by.
Danny gave me a strange look as we came out. ‘You still see them as good guys, don’t you?’
The moon went behind a cloud and the world grew darker, but he didn’t seem to notice. He leaned closer and his pale eyes were almost luminous.
‘One night, a couple of years ago, I was coming home from a party on a farm outside town. I didn’t know the guy driving. He had borrowed the car from this other guy called Benno, who had lost his licence. Benno had been in a lot of trouble as a kid, but he had a kid of his own and a wife and he was trying to make a go of it and stay straight. Anyway, this guy was driving me along the beach road in Benno’s car when a cop car spotted us.’
Danny’s voice dropped lower, but his eyes were distant. ‘We weren’t doing anything wrong, so I figure they had checked on the rego and recognised Benno’s name. They started after us. The guy driving the car freaked and took off. He said the cops had beat him up once before on a dark road.’ Danny smiled bleakly. ‘I figured he was probably lying because cops don’t do things like that for no reason, but I just sat tight. When they were gaining, he swerved off the main road, bashed through a gate and bogged the car in a field. Then he took off.’
It started to rain lightly, but Danny seemed oblivious to it. ‘The cops had a dog in the car and they let him go. That was when I ran, but the dog got me straight away.’
He stopped, as if picturing what he was telling me, fixing the details in his mind. Rain soaked steadily into us, but I was transfixed by the vividness of Danny’s storytelling.
‘The cops were hopping mad at having to run around in the paddock and then getting no one but a kid,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t know it then, but it’s cop tradition here to beat up anyone who resists arrest or runs. I tried to tell them what had happened but all they wanted was the name of the guy who had driven the car. They thought it was Benno. I told them it wasn’t him. That he was still at the party, but they didn’t believe me. They told me if I didn’t name Benno as the driver, they’d stick the dog on me.’
He laughed. ‘I thought they were bluffing and I guess they thought I’d cave in and say anything they wanted. I started to realise they didn’t care who was driving the car about the time it must have taken for them to understand that I wasn’t going to lie. So they sicced the dog on me. I punched it away, so they held me down, belted me with their sticks and then they held me while the dog attacked me.’
Danny brushed his hand unconsciously over his forehead and the streetlight shone fleetingly on a wide twisted scar hidden by his blond fringe.
‘Jesus!’ I whispered, staring at his forehead in horror. I felt breathless and scared, and it seemed to me I could hear it all: the threats, the dog growling, and Danny screaming.
‘I was a mess by the time they got the dog off me. I was all torn up on the head and he had got my leg and shoulder pretty bad. But I still didn’t say Benno did it.’ There was a faint tremor in his voice, and I wondered how close he had come to doing what they wanted. How near he had come to breaking.
‘That was torture,’ I said incredulously.
Danny seemed not to hear me. ‘They dropped me outside the hospital and later on, another cop came to my mum’s house to say I was being charged with breaking into that farmer’s yard and destroying property.’
He looked at my face, read the outrage and shock. ‘The solicitor my mum hired said it would be my word against theirs, and no one was going to believe a kid over a copper. He said if I didn’t plead guilty to the police charges, I’d go to a remand centre. He said to plead guilty and then I could charge the cops later for beating up on me.’ He stopped.
‘What did you do? Did you charge the police with bashing you?’
Danny smiled with unexpected gentleness. ‘Nathanial, that’s what I meant about you. Haven’t you figured out by now that in the sleezy adult world, there aren’t any good guys? The solicitor told my mother to accept, so she did.’ His smile faded. ‘I pleaded guilty and then we found out that the police investigate complaints against themselves.’
‘What?’
Danny nodded. ‘See?’ He started to walk again, and I followed, but my legs felt unsteady.
‘For a while I was scared every time I saw a cop because I figured if a cop could do that, then they could do anything, even kill me, and no one would do anything. I went a bit mad for a while and I had to go to this place.’ He gave me a quick look. ‘A sanatorium. That’s what those kids were on about on the bus. The only reason they let me come home was because I told them I made up the whole thing about the cops attacking me. They didn’t believe me until I lied.’
He gave a hard bark of laughter.
My mind groped towards something like a hand in the dark. A conclusion maybe; a light. But Danny’s voice intruded, subtle as a shadow in the night. ‘I was pretty messed up. I felt like it wasn’t over. It seemed like there was something missing. So I waited.
‘Then one day a copper came to Three North. It turned out to be one of the cops who’d bashed me. There he is smiling and telling everyone how the police are there to protect them. I thought maybe he didn’t recognise me. But at the end of the talk he winked at me like we knew a good joke nobody else did.’
We had reached my house and I stopped, so Danny did too. I don’t think he was seeing anything though.
‘When he winked, it all came clear to me. I realised everything that happened was a joke. I had been thinking tha
t what happened with the police was wrong, waiting for something to happen to make it right. But when he winked, I realised nothing was going to make it right. That’s life. Nothing made any sense but to stay alive – survive. Justice. Right and wrong: it was all bullshit people made up.’
He took a deep breath and stretched his arms out. ‘It’s like that woman who went to live with gorillas in the jungle,’ Danny explained. ‘She had to turn herself into a gorilla to live with them. That’s what you have to do if you want to survive. It’s no good telling a gorilla who wants to tear your head off that he shouldn’t do that because it’s not fair. That’s what the police are like. The power makes them into gorillas and you have to remember that’s what they are. You don’t talk to them or expect them to be fair. You run, or you climb up a tree or you shoot them before they can get you.’
Danny was telling me that what had happened in that dark field turned him into the wolf boy. He had become an animal so that he could survive.
As if he read my thoughts, Danny said, ‘I got a mission, see. That kid back there, I’m teaching kids like him what those coppers taught me. I’m helping them survive because next time instead of trying to reason with the gorilla that wants to eat them, they’ll run. I help them see how it really is – you live, and then one day the wild animals realise you’re not one of them and they kill you and eat you. End of story. There’s no such thing as bad gorillas or good gorillas.’
You could tell he really believed that, but there was something wrong about what he was saying. Something that didn’t jell. And I thought of Lallie’s warning to Danny. She had told him not to let the dark flame of the past consume the future. ‘What about Lallie and the Chain? That’s about right winning out over wrong.’
Danny grinned at me, an engaging urchin’s grin and in spite of being horrified over what he had told me, I found myself smiling back. ‘Yeah. Well, I’m an idealist.’
‘You are crazy,’ I laughed, shaking my head. I was surprised to find I no longer thought of him as a sort of trainee maniac. He seemed suddenly kind of heroic to me. I thought he was probably right about power making people savage, but not about it turning them into animals. Animals are better than people. Humans are the real savages. That’s what people don’t understand. Those police who bashed Danny weren’t acting like animals. They were acting like humans.
We were leaning on the fence now, and without us noticing, the rain had stopped.
‘I was, until I met Lallie,’ Danny said quietly and seriously. ‘The first day I saw her I had just been in a brawl. My mouth was all bloody, and everyone had scattered because a copper was coming across the oval. Lallie wiped the blood off my mouth. I can remember exactly the words she said too. She said, “You have to believe in justice to make it happen. You have to believe in the light, or you live in darkness. Believing is the magic.”’
He shook his head. ‘It was as if she saw inside my mind and knew what was eating me up. Then, you’re not going to believe this. Lallie said the cop couldn’t see the truth because he didn’t believe in it. That cop came right up to us and looked around. He couldn’t see us! Spooky eh?’ He shrugged and seemed suddenly embarrassed.
‘I still don’t get why you belted that kid.’
He shrugged. ‘It was because of what Lallie said about believing in justice. That little kid had stopped believing. He was just going along with those big guys because it was easy and safe. Only it’s not safe. It’s never safe to go along with what’s wrong. You have to fight against it. I showed him that it wasn’t safe to go along.’
I stared at him, for the first time noticing that he was a lot shorter than me. His pale hair was darkened by rain and plastered to this head, his jeans and japara dripping wet.
‘I never told anyone that whole story before, not even Indian,’ he said suddenly. He looked up and his eyes were clear and bright. ‘I told you because you have to understand a guy isn’t good just because he is a policeman. It’s what people do that makes them good or bad.’ Danny sneezed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Better go.’
He frowned, staring over my shoulder. ‘There’s a note on your door.’
I turned to see an envelope stuck to the front door. My heart jumped and I hurried over, ripped it open and read it with a feeling of trepidation.
Danny came up the path after me. ‘What is it?’
‘It says we’ve all got to meet at Shelly Beach tomorrow at eleven. It’s signed The Chain.’
Danny squinted at it. ‘Indian must have dropped it over. It says urgent.’
‘Maybe it’s to do with Lallie. I guess there’ll be one waiting for you, too.’
Danny nodded, frowning down at the note. Then he shrugged, pulled his jacket tight around him and headed down the path. ‘See you tomorrow then.’
I nodded. ‘Danny?’
He looked back, and the rain began at the same time, more heavily, streaming down his face in rivulets. ‘Yeah?’
I opened my mouth, not sure what I wanted to say. That I was glad he had told me what had happened to him. That it had made me sick and angry. That he had more guts than anyone I had ever known.
‘You’re all right too, Danny-O,’ I said at last.
He grinned again, sketched a wave and trotted away into the rainy night.
17
I let The Tod out of my room and into the back yard for a walk. He gave me a reproachful look for the weather, which he regarded as my area of responsibility.
Standing at the back step to wait for him, I watched the rain hammer down on the dark lawn. Behind me, the house felt vast and empty and I wished I had asked Danny to stay.
It was hard to remember how much I had disliked him less than a week ago. His oddball sense of humour, even his wild streak were neither good nor bad traits now. The longer I knew Danny, the more complex he seemed, the more sane his craziness became.
It occurred to me that this was why Danny had been called to the Chain. Maybe that was what Lallie had meant about being chosen by our choices. In choosing to fight against evil, Danny chose to fight for what was right. But if that was so, why had I answered the Call? I had never fought against evil.
The Tod came back inside, shook himself vigorously, and went into the kitchen with an expectant look. Obediently, I opened a can of dog food, then sneezed violently. I was still wearing the rain-soaked clothes. No wonder I couldn’t think properly. I put the fire on, changed in front of it and made a hot drink.
But even then, my mind would not settle. Random thoughts flew at me like leaves blown before a storm: Buddha standing on my foot, and Mr Karle smiling while the blond boy threw the medicine ball. Mrs Vellan questioning me, hinting things about my father and mother. The redhead kid on the bus telling the old man he would come and fix him. Lallie telling us Cheshunt had been bruised by an ancient evil.
And behind all of these, I had a nightmarish image of Danny, who was scared of nothing, screaming while policemen held him in a dark field and a dog savaged him.
Lallie had said Cheshunt was bruised by evil: torture, sacrifice and betrayal, and the more I thought of that, the more I could see the ancient theme repeating itself like echoes all around me.
Somewhere, a dog barked and The Tod lifted his head and gave a long, eerie howl in response. Then he looked at me with such a knowing, distant expression in his eyes that the hair on my arms prickled.
I pulled out the soggy note and smoothed it out on the carpet. It meant I would have to wag school. I had never done that in my whole life. My mother didn’t even like me to be late.
The easiest thing would be to convince her I needed a day in bed after the bash on the skull. The bruise would be spectacular technicolour by morning and it would not cross her mind that I might be faking. I was surprised to find the thought of wagging didn’t bother me. I was probably a lot safer than at school where anyone could brain me with a cricket bat and call it an accident.
I would stay in bed until my mother left, and then ride
my bike out of Cheshunt along the beach road to Shelly Beach. I had never been there but I knew it was just inside the boundary of Cheshunt.
I shivered despite the heat radiating from the fire, and a picture came into my mind of Anna Galway telling me about the caretaker killing himself. That had happened in Cheshunt. In fact, it had happened at Three North. Even back then, before Mr Karle, the darkness had been here. Danny thought we had to fight the Kraken, but what was wrong with Cheshunt had gone on long before he came. That was what we were fighting. Mr Karle was just its mouthpiece; its vessel. Maybe even one of many vessels.
The security guard had called the school a place where bad things happened. Whatever was going on with Cheshunt, the school was at the centre of it, and I had the sudden conviction that whatever we were supposed to do would happen there too.
Later, I found myself thinking of the guy that had taken the blame for the caretaker’s death. How must he have felt all those years, knowing his life was slipping away while he rotted in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed? I went to my jeans and pulled out the list of phone numbers with new resolve.
If I could find just one other person who had witnessed what happened, maybe I could write to the papers and get them curious enough to reopen that old case. It would be something to clear the guy’s name after so long. In a funny sort of way, I felt it would be a blow against the Kraken.
I could have kicked myself when I sat down at the phone and realised I hadn’t asked Anna the name of the guy charged for the murder. I tried the Sikorsky number that had been engaged all along with a strong feeling that this was it. This time it barely rang once before a man picked it up.
‘Yeah?’
I started to explain my search, but he cut me off, asking who I wanted. ‘I’m looking for Zebediah Sikorsky,’ I began.
‘My name’s Gertze and I never heard of any, what was it, Sokinski. He must have lived here before.’
‘Do you have a forwarding …’
‘Nope.’ He hung up.
So much for hunches. I sighed, wondering how someone that terse had been engaged for so long.
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