Cryers Hill (22 page)

Nothing remained of the cement cat. There was nothing to see. Probably it was not even true. Sean left the others. He preferred to be by himself on the days when Ann did not fly up over the fence on her swing. He would go to the modern church. Maybe a modern miracle might happen.

How come they killed Jesus? That was his thinking thought. It didn't make any sense. You can't kill Danger Man. And why did he let them? Why didn't he just zap them or beam himself up or turn himself into an eagle? Sean wondered if the wooden cross they made Jesus carry was as heavy as it looked. He looked for something to put on his back. He spied an empty box of Daz with a dark stain on it. He remembered the voice on the television said Daz had blue energy that could drive out stains, although there was another washing powder that could actually eat dirt. Even he couldn't manage that.

He filled the box with stones and swung it on to his shoulders. It felt good to walk with the heavy box, it made you stoop like a persecuted man. He wished someone could see him right now, stooping and staggering.

CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, the sign informed anyone who could read. This was once sheep country, it was true. Once this hill would have been grazed by Southdowns all year round. Sean stared at the other words on the sign. JESUS LOVES YOU. Soon, he thought, when he was
changed,
he would read out those sign words. Sean set down his heavy box of Daz on one of the turf squares that was piled up waiting to be holy lawn.

In spite of its name, the Church of the Good Shepherd was self-consciously modern. The concrete bell tower consisted of two geometric interlocking slabs that left the church bell open to the elements on all sides. An average wind could ring the bell without difficulty and a storm would have it tolling all night like the end of the world had come. There were six tall church windows, thin as slits and hung inside with modish vertical blinds. The church had been completed before the water supply, some said. Local committees and town planners congratulated themselves. Gabbett Housing had a cheese and wine evening. It was considered proper that these new commuter families with their young children should arrive in their overloaded Hillman Sedans with their city ways and kidney-shaped dressing tables, to the summoning chime of a Christian bell. They could rest secure in the knowledge that whatever troubles, large or small, befell them, their village church (a church on a hill no less, meticulously designed to blend in style and tone with the estate) was there with new Cyril Lord carpet, coordinating cushions, and two Sunday-morning services. Sean tried the door, it was locked. He peered through the windows at the rows of blue chairs and the appliquéd wall hangings of aghast-looking shepherds surrounded by their hand-stitched, satin-horned flocks. It was a light, airy room, barely like a church at all, with a noticeboard, leaflet stand, and even a sideboard at the back housing a kettle, tea and coffee, for when the occasion demanded. It looked cosy and inviting compared to the annihilated shells of the unfinished houses.

Rev Davis is in charge at the Church of the Good Shepherd. That is what people call him. Encased in sandals are his long white toes, stroked with hair. This is the first thing you notice if you are a child. The theme continues up, even when he is off duty, through his bell-sleeved smock shirt and the tormented smile that is full of chestnut beard and the tumbles of John the Baptist hair. The Rev is a huge fan of the Messiah, you can tell. He looks up skywards to the Divine Father for inspiration, and down at the ground for effect. A right
poofter,
is how Gor described him. A
right fruit and nut cake,
he always added, laughing out loud at himself.

As a matter of fact there were those who had already begun attending the Sunday-morning services, though most of the newly arrived families, Sean noticed, preferred to unfold wire chairs in their garden and read the newspaper. The tolling bell did not call them from their rest, not even for a free cup of coffee and a biscuit. The Good Shepherd was offering nothing they really wanted, truth be told. They had forgiven themselves their sins and renewed their flagging spirits at the White Lion the night before. Now they wanted some peace and quiet on a lawn chair, even while the grass turf remained undelivered (though none of them seemed to mind), even as they sank lower and lower, along with their uncleansed souls, into the chalk and clay-bound earth.

It is cool in the woods and quiet as a crypt. This is where Ann likes to hide, to play tricks. She wanders off and hopes to scare him. You must be careful with your noise, the snap of a twig rings out like a rifle crack. Sean bows his head and creeps along, while above him birds call out their warnings. Spears of sunlight come down through the gaps in the forest canopy, like Lothian's arrows, hot and gold and sending up dust, like smoke.

Sean thinks he will see if he can start a flame. He kneels down to make a bushman's fire. There was a programme he saw on television. The bushmen were long and slender and moved deftly as hunting cats. Their hair was curled close to their heads and they had small, smiling, crinkled faces, like old ladies. They knew how to make fire with two sticks:
far,
the television voice said.
They have no need of matches when it comes to making a far.
Sean gives up on his. His two sticks won't cooperate and have never seen a bushman, much less a far.

This is where she hid last time. His dad was right. The female species are a strange law unto themselves,
bottomless pits.

'Ann?' he calls.

Above him a warbler adjusts his song and a general shushing flows through the trees. Sean sees a line of words. They are growing on the bark of a tree with the lichen and moss. He stares.
I looked to Him. He looked on me. And we were one for eternity.
Tree words. Tree talk. What does a tree know? Not the liar alphabet. Sean hopes the tree cannot read and write. Holy cow. Where would that leave him? What if he were stupider than a tree?

Sean thinks about the story-children who fell asleep in the woods. He struggles to remember their names. They are in an illustrated book of fairy tales he had been given once. He remembers looking at the wispy watercolour pictures, at the pale pinks of their fingers and toes, the blue spill of sky, and the watery greens and reds of their clothes. The book is not phonetic, so he is still peering at the pictures now, trying to figure it out while the words lie uselessly about. Somebody fell asleep, anyway, and paid the price. What was the price? He didn't know. Something bad, it always was. He will wait one more minute for Ann – however long that is.

Sean is asleep beside a bramble thicket. Click. The trees stop their shushing. Through the fug of sleep Sean can feel the eye on him, the all-observing lens of the forest. Click. Every forest has an eye. He wonders if it watched him trying to make fire, being a spaz.

He thinks he will go now. She always says she will count to twenty. Then she does not bother to come and find him. Liar. Liar. As he gets to his feet, something in the forest moves with him, shadows drift. He hears another click, and then again, like a person tutting. Where are the birds? The wood holds itself still. Is he awake? Is he dreaming? Dreamers eat pie in the sky. They live on cloud nine. They throw their lives away. They don't listen. They get knocked down on zebra crossings, tumble into manholes. They float off the earth.

There is a rustling in the treetops. One tree and then the next and then the one beside it, as though something were moving quickly from one to the other. A creature? Sean thinks it would most probably be a creature. A dreadful one offers itself to his mind's eye. A thing with liquid bones and teeth like pins, who knows his name, who speaks it with a creature's hiss. He has heard his name spoken this way before, this way but with a curl at the end, same as when someone asks you a question, so that the hiss gave way to a cry,
Sean?
And the cry was all in the N at the end, so the call was,
Seaner?

Sean is running. It might not be a dreadful creature, he tells himself, it might just be a squirrel or a pigeon. But he runs anyway, and as he runs he thinks he is sick of running. He hopes he is sleeping. He hopes he is sleep-running. This would explain the colours that move and bleed against one another as if they can't decide, and the ground that rolls like water. Stop the dream. He must stop the dream.

He is running without clothes. The dream will not stop. He is naked as Pan, with a straight back and startled face. Something else is running, he doesn't know what, nor whether behind or in front. Something burns and he feels the heat of it on his skin. He runs hard, straining the hoops of his ribs. Sensation is gone from his feet, as if he dashes on hooves now. The eye watches him, he knows it. It halts him between strides, frame by frame, looking, checking. It can speed you up, slow you down, and erase you completely. The figures are here. Some are in groups, some are alone. He tries to avoid them, to swerve, he tries not to look. They are hushed as Sean bursts past. Though he is moving at speed he feels sluggish. Is he being chased? Is he the chaser? No clue comes. He sees someone, just a flash. A girl, he thinks he knows her. She is curled up with her back to him, and he frightens her then, rushing up. He should have crept quietly. He does know her. He ought not to have frightened her. She turns and screams and that is when he sees that her flesh is almost gone and her body is liquid, like something spilled, and her bones are small and springy. She is frightened and so she screams and her teeth are long and sharp as knives, though her tears come down like any other girl's.

Sean runs away, but her voice follows.
Sean! Seaner!
she cries. He does not want to stop.
Seaner!
He runs for the edge of the wood, towards the fields and paths and home. And as he runs he sees that the thing that is on fire, is burning, is him.

S
EAN WATCHES HIS
mum as she wipes something from her fingers with a kitchen cloth. She stares out of the window as she does this, at the dirt and diggers and garage roofs. It could have been anything on her fingers, grease, salt or some other bitter thing. It could have been blood; no one would pay any attention. She is not speaking today. Today she will be starring in her own silent film. The other members of the cast are left to wander haplessly in and out of her scenes. Their job is to ruin her performance, deliver poor lines from some other script, spoil everything; at this they prove impeccable.

Sean senses her silences are a punishment of some sort, for what he can't be sure. There are things that upset her, things you couldn't imagine would ever upset anybody; things like eating and laughing at the same time, jumping on or off furniture (unless the house was on fire), shouting (unless the house was on fire); running is another, but then so is dragging your feet. Sean had once tried to match her silence with one of his own. He too made his own dramatic film without words. He too stared and slumped and swiped at things with a limp cloth. At her approach he would fall aside like a wretch and let his mouth hang and his arm swing like an empty sleeve. Rather than capture her attention, it swiftly caught on as a competitive sport in the family. Gor, having noted with a narrow eye that elaborately executed mute battles were taking place around him, felt himself excluded and was quick to respond. To everyone's surprise, he suddenly struck himself dumb one night during
The Avengers
and didn't speak again for almost a week. A record. An unbeatable achievement in their household. One Cathleen couldn't hope to challenge in spite of her experience. Together they went about their silent business in the house, sitting like three speak-no-evil monkeys around the Sunday-lunch table while Ty pulled out his eyelashes and groaned tunelessly through advertisement jingles. His Tarzan calls (more awful than ever when released into the silence) made Sean think of a jungle gone badly wrong, where the animals behaved freakishly, where roaring machines dug holes for the trees to fall into.

If Ty noticed the silent tournament taking place he didn't bother participating. Gor was therefore, unarguably, the winner, and did not need to button up ever again.

Sean and Ann are walking backwards up George's Hill Road for something to do. It is not as easy as it looks. Sean has developed a rhythm. He uses his arms as oars, he bends his knees; he goes off at tangents nevertheless. It is surprisingly difficult. Ann does well for a while. She creeps backwards with her hands in her pockets, she hums, she scolds. 'Spaz! Spaz! Crine out loud!' She has stopped now. Going backwards has made her sick and she is lying on the new tarmac pavement with grit in her hair. Sean bends over her to tell her about the grit and the ants and the tar that is on her dress. Ann lies there. It starts to become strange that she is lying there.
Women don't behave like you or I, they are influenced by the moon.
Sean pulls on her arm, but she won't get up. He sits on the kerbstone. The tar stinks, it makes you dizzy. There was a story, Sean thinks, a true one, about a horse who wouldn't get up and they had to shoot it. He tells it to Ann. She won't get up, she says, because she is bored, bored of him, bored of life, bored. She is going to get a different boyfriend this afternoon and anyway he is not her boyfriend, never was, never will be. Then they are quiet. Sean thinks about the streaker. There is more to streaking, he suspects, than meets the eye. If the streaker and the murderer turn out to be the same person it is possible he will be the first of his kind. Sean wonders if this could mean more will follow, or perhaps he would remain unique, a local legend, like the water serpent. P'raps they will have to change the name of the wood. P'raps one day Four Ashes will become Three Streakers.

Ann has closed her eyes. She is very white against the black tar pavement. It is possible she has died of boredom. It's not so silly, somebody somewhere must have once, else why would people say it? Sean pulls at her dress.

'Oi.' He watches the ants around her head; one of them hauling itself on to a strand of hair.

'Oi.'

She opens one eye, but it does not look at him.

'P'sof, Spaz.'

Sean wishes he could tell her something shocking and fantastic. He wishes he could say something that would electrocute her body, make her bounce up and look at him with two big unblinking eyeballs. Her mouth is closed. It is small and warm and full of commands. He wishes she would gasp and cry and flop against him, and kiss him with that mouth.

Ann has a long red scratch on her calf, he notices, curling at the end like the letter L. Sean follows it down to the dirty ruff of her sock. By the time he gets there he has made up his mind. He bends over her to speak into her ear.

'I'm going away for a long time.' Sean rubs his nose. 'I'm going now. Must be off. Don't tell anyone.' She closes her eye. She doesn't reply. 'See y'later,' Sean says. He stands on some ants beside her ear and then he is gone. When he is at the bottom of the hill he turns and calls back, 'Alligator!' But the wind pushes the word over his head so she does not hear.

20th February 1943, M.E.F.

Darling Mary,

I am thrilled with the photograph of you. What a good one it is. I keep looking at it over and over again. I have shown it around, I hope you don't mind, but I thought it was such a good one of you. I was pleased to see the lane behind you and the old beeches. I also enjoyed hearing about your film-star moment on Clem's bicycle. I'm not surprised old Styles still has his cine camera on the go, in particular when a pretty girl rides by. I should like to see that cine film one day, so I would. I have a picture of it in my mind and that will have to do for now.

We passed some white anemones, like a wondrous fall of snow, and I thought of home and of you. And then we came across a spread of wild flowers: miniaturised snapdragons, primroses, delphiniums and daisies. I gathered a few to press inside this letter.

The Italians and Jerries have left their dugouts filthy and soiled. They leave notes: 'Hope we find this clean when we come back.' It makes you sick.

The big news is that Churchill has visited and stayed near to us. He received a great welcome. A pithy remark of his was: if you are asked what you did in the war, all you need to say is you belonged to the desert army.'

Soon Rommel's Panzer army will be extinct. I remember a while back meeting a pilot and he said, 'What mob are you?' I told him and his reply was, 'Steak meat, eh? Damn that for a game.' And we always thank our lucky stars we are on the ground!

We have anchored our bivvies with tons of boulders. There is no water available. My uniform is dirty and full of holes and I have a beard and worn-out boots.

Later.

We're out of smokes and have pinched some food and cooked a cosmopolitan meal: Jerry stew, Italian tomatoes and English chips – very appetising.

Later:

Jerry attacks again and again. I was almost blown up trying to shave with spit in my bivvy this morning. Brigadier Lucas paid us a visit. We hope to be in Tripoli by the 17
^th
. There are lorries burning everywhere along our route and we're knocking out tanks galore as we go. When we are stopped by Jerry tanks in a sand pocket, we disperse. Every man for himself then! A Spitfire came down nearby. The pilot only had a broken shoulder. We are filthy and hot. I am not allowed to say too much.

Later:

We have found a well in a lovely village, but there are many booby traps left by Jerry. We found a wine vat today with millions of gallons in. We had a sing-song and every single man in our brigade got drunk. A welcome break after travelling over 1,600 miles of desert. We see dogfights every day. Jerry is losing lots. The knocked-out Jerry and Italian vehicles have pin-ups of cinema actresses. You forget that they are human. We all have to be vaccinated again. Well, I'd better close. I look at your picture every day.

Two days later:

We went to a draughty place for a picture show yesterday. First there was a VD picture – the frankest I have ever seen. Then a Judy Garland musical. I have seen the brothels, Mary, but it is not for me. The women have two rooms usually; one to dance and talk, and one for their work. It costs 22 piastres, which is handed to an old woman at the door, and five or ten minutes later the woman is out again beseeching new customers. Most of the lads have tried it. I find I am not interested.

Later:

We captured the aerodrome before the Italians had time to move – about 200 planes. I am going on leave to Tripoli on Saturday with Arthur. I ate pomegranate and monkey nuts for tea today. I had better get this off to you, Mary. I look at your picture all the time. You are getting lovelier by the day. Are you my girl? Please say yes! Have you written? Well, cheerio for now.

Yours, Walter xx

It is a small shed. It stands in the playing field that is utilised by the school on one day of the year only, for their chaotic summer-term running races. Sean stands on a plastic bucket to see through the web-laced window. There is equipment, machinery, tools. He casts his eye over the blades and oily black chains. The door is locked, fastened by a padlock that is heavy as a stone. As he selects a brick, Sean has to steady himself. He is a thief today, a criminal. This is quite good. It is a masterful plan. His breathing comes in rushes and his skin prickles with cold in spite of the sunlight. He must keep his eye on the ball. He must remain calm so as not to unduly affect his aim. You do not go all the way to the moon only to turn spaz when you get there. If Neil had turned spaz over the Sea of Tranquillity things might have been very different.

Sean pulls himself tall, takes a few paces back, rushes the same paces forward again and releases the brick. He keeps his eye on the window and the brick sails from his hand that is guided by his eye into the glass, which parts perfectly. There is a crash, a thud, then a slow tinkle of pieces as they drop into the lawnmower on the other side. The tinkling sounds festive. The world is silent for a moment. The trees, grass, sky, all wait. Nothing bad happens. Two-four-six-eight who do we appreciate? Sean is looking at a black hole. It is magnificent. It deserves a name. Holey. He has made it be there, it was not there before. Holey holey holey. It is one of the greatest holes in the world. Sean thinks he would like to make some more holes, honest to God. Sean picks up a piece of the broken glass and looks through it at the world. Everything is slightly different. He holds it up to the sky for a cloud to pass through. Ann will be amazed, perhaps she will blink. Sean Matthews, you're my hero. Sean imagines it, the words pressed between her lips. Girls like broken glass. Sean doesn't know why. He remembers how all the girls crowded around Nigel Drake the time he broke the bay window of an almost-house on Harebell Walk; hung round him like horseflies, swaying up and down the hill with him for days, giggling and whispering and laughing at nothing. It was mysterious. Sean was nonplussed and waited for an answer. The only clue was the glass.

Now he has broken glass of his own. He begins to gather the pieces to show Ann and the others. It would be useful to have a pot to put them in, or an envelope, but he only has pockets, so he fills both pockets with jags of window. He can feel their sharpness against his legs. He knocks against the heavy padlock as he straightens up. No padlock in the world can keep him out, ha. No match for his aim, for his Holey. He kicks the door – it whines scornfully as it falls open. Sean hesitates while he thinks everything through. The shed. It was open all the time.

Inside dust is rising and floating towards the door like smoke. The door was open, he could have stolen something without smashing the window. But now he has broken glass, which is better. Sean steps into the falling dust. It is hard to choose; there are cutters, scythes, saws, twine, pegs, paint, bicycle tyres. There are tins of nails too, a line-marker, a box of hammers and chisels, drills. It is difficult to want one thing more than another. He tries the rhyme. Eeny meeny miney mo. He doesn't want the broom. He tries the rhyme again.