Dreams of Leaving (2 page)

‘Is he really dead, do you mean?'

Dinwoodie nodded. His eyes lit like hot ashes.

‘Well, if he's not,' the greengrocer said, ‘where is he?' A logical man, the greengrocer.

‘That's what I'm getting at,' Dinwoodie said. Sweat oiled the working parts of his face. It was sweltering outside, but it was not the heat that he felt.

The greengrocer waited for his friend to elaborate. They passed a marble cross that had been carved to look like wood. A heap of stone fruit and vegetables adorned the base. The greengrocer's grandfather.

‘What I'm getting at is, could he have escaped?' Dinwoodie said.

The greengrocer raised an eyebrow. ‘A thirteen-month-old baby?'

‘All right. Could his escape have been – ' and here Dinwoodie paused, searching for the appropriate word – ‘have been,' he continued, ‘
engineered?
'

‘Ah,' the greengrocer said. A logical man, but not an excitable one.

‘Well?'

‘Well what?'

‘Well what do you think?'

‘It's never been done before,' the greengrocer said.

‘So far as we know,' came Dinwoodie's fierce whisper.

‘So far as we know,' the greengrocer agreed.

One of the police officers walking in front of the two men twisted his head and glared in their direction. Dinwoodie lowered his eyes. He examined the flagstone path as it passed beneath his feet. The stones were uneven. Weeds pushed through the cracks like mysteries demanding solutions.

‘There seems to be some tension,' the greengrocer observed, ‘among certain members of our local police force.'

Dinwoodie's pale eyes glowed. His hand, trembling, clutched at the air. ‘Is it any wonder?' he said. ‘They never found the baby's body, did they? The mystery hasn't been solved. It's just being buried, that's all.' He drew a large yellow handkerchief out of his pocket and began to mop his forehead and his upper lip. ‘We're burying an empty coffin here.
An empty coffin.
Don't you see, Joel? They're admitting they've failed. The police have failed – maybe for the first time. Do you know what that means? It means there's hope for us, Joel. There really is.'

Joel sighed. As if the sun had slid behind a cloud, gloom moved over his face. ‘You'll never know.'

‘How can you be so sure?'

‘I'm telling you,' the greengrocer said. ‘You'll never know. Who are you going to ask? The police?' He snorted. ‘There's no way you'll ever find out.'

‘Ah, this fucking village,' Dinwoodie snapped. ‘You too.'

Chief Inspector Peach (known behind his back as ‘The Fuzz') swung round, his lower lip jutting, his face pink with indignation. ‘Gentlemen, please. This is a funeral.'

The two men covered the remaining distance to the open grave in silence.

*

George Highness stood, gaunt and bearded, beside his son's grave. How he loathed New Egypt, he was thinking. How he loathed and detested the place. Hate massed in his fists, drew the blood out of his knuckles, tightened the stringy muscles in the back of his neck. He looked older than his twenty-nine years.

He was facing north. The cemetery fell away in front of him, sank to its knees, offering a view. Tombstones rough as dead skin. Yew trees almost black against a flawless sky of blue. Then, at the bottom of the hill, a wall which contained, if you looked closely enough (and as a child he had), every colour in existence. Beyond the wall, a row of brick cottages. Above
their rooftops, the elm that told him where he lived; it stood in his front garden. Away to the left and anchored in a dip in the land, the church. Unusual stonework: green on grey days, grey on bright days like today. Timeless, ancient, solid. He didn't believe in it. Further left, a lane dodged the pub and ran downhill past the village green. Behind him all the time, the police station. As it should be, he thought. A brief smile twisted one side of his mouth.

He turned back to the grave. He watched the empty coffin being lowered into the ground. What a farce this was. He glanced across at Alice, his wife. Tension bunched in her shoulderblades so that, in profile, she looked almost hunchbacked. Strands of green-blonde hair lay lank against the nape of her neck. Behind her veil her eyes were blank as stones. Her face like bread, spongy and pale. An echo of the girl he had married.

*

The first time he noticed her she was eight, a white floating girl, a twist of smoke against the grey trees on the western edge of the village. He began to run across the field. Twice he turned his ankle on a furrow. It didn't matter. He ran on. He had to close the distance between them. Catch her before she vanishes, he had told himself. A curious thing to say. But so right, so instinctively right, he would realise later.

He must have been eleven. Even then he had felt the pull of her strangeness and how magnetic somehow her frailty was. Close up, among tree-trunks veined with ivy and bindweed, her feet lost in leaves the colour of rust, she had the awkward grace of a bird. A stork, perhaps, or a heron. She had the same elongated neck, the same brittle stumbling legs.

He stood in front of her getting his breath back. She wasn't looking at him. He asked her name.

‘Alice,' she said. Without moving her feet, she turned away so he could no longer see her face. Rooted to the ground she seemed. A bird that would never fly. He could have seen it then. In that first meeting.

‘What are you doing out here?' he asked her.

‘I was alone.'

Her hands moved among the folds of her white dress. Three years younger than he was, she seemed wiser, more adult. Like blotting-paper she soaked up the messy ink of his questions.

Still something possessed him to say, ‘Not any more,' and she turned towards him and looked at him as if he had just spoken for the first time.

They had met by chance and their friendship continued as a kind of planned coincidence. This understanding arose: he looked for her, she
waited for him. He always knew where to find her – by the river, in the woods beyond the allotments, up on the hill behind the police station (from there, you could see the village as it really was, a group of houses huddled in a hollow in the land, bound on one side by the river's thin grey cord and on the other two by trees which, from that distance, all too closely resembled fences) – and soon they were spending so much time together on the village boundaries that people began to think they were up to no good. The truth was simpler, though still ominous, perhaps. They wanted privacy, secrecy. They needed territory they could call their own. So they went to the edge of the village. Had to go to the edge. There were no halfway houses. They both understood this early on and recognised it in each other. Peach recognised it too. He wrote a short memo regarding the two children. The police were alerted. Gently.

An endless source of fascination for George, those boundaries. Marked on the map, but invisible in real life. Invisible but concrete because people had believed in them for so long. He was overawed by the power beliefs could generate. He could even hear it. Like electric fences, the boundaries seemed to hum when he approached. He knew them off by heart, as he knew the names of the twenty-nine policemen who took turns to patrol them. The twenty-nine real policemen, that is. How many dummy policemen there were he had never been able to work out. They were always moving them around.

One of Peach's inspirations, the dummy policemen. They were built out of straw, as scarecrows were, but instead of being dressed in rags they wore proper uniforms – helmets, truncheons, the lot. They stood in realistic positions throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Their eyes always seemed to be staring at you. In poor light they looked as real as real policemen. It was an immensely cunning, uncanny and economical device.

They terrified Alice. She said they looked like dead bodies propped up. Whenever she saw one she had to poke or tickle it just to make sure it wasn't alive. She was convinced that, sooner or later, one of them would begin to wriggle and giggle on the end of her finger. She dreaded the moment. She had another theory. She thought their faces resembled the faces of policemen in the village. ‘Look,' she would cry, ‘here's Peach.' And George would tilt his head on one side, try to see the likeness. He wanted to believe her. She invented nicknames for them too. Peach she called ‘Melon' because he was ‘much bigger than a peach' or ‘Gooseberry' on account of his short prickly hair. Marlpit was ‘The Waterfall' because he dribbled so. Hazard she described as ‘the one with a face like a shovel' so he became ‘Shovelhead'. But when she heard their heavy boots come
crashing through the undergrowth she would flatten herself against the ground until it seemed the earth would open up and swallow her. Her eyes staring, her blonde head pressed sideways into the leaves, she would always whisper the same words:

The world is a dream

It will always be so
–

It was the beginning of a nursery rhyme that every child in the village knew off by heart. It was what the boots meant.

*

By the time she was fifteen Alice was already moving out of reach, her mind a wild garden where only weeds grew. Their age-difference was beginning to count now. George tried with his own sharpening intelligence to cut through to her, to clear some ground, but no matter how hard he tried the jungle always grew back. Rain would fall overnight and in the morning he could no longer tell where he had been.

He remembered finding her once that year sitting in the tall grass on the hill behind the police station. He sat down beside her. She acknowledged his presence with a slow hydraulic turning of her head, so smooth and slow that, horrified, he thought of a machine.

‘Who are you?' she asked him.

It wasn't a joke, and he didn't try to laugh it off.

The jungle always grew back.

It was during the same year that Tommy Dane made his famous escape attempt. Everybody knew about Tommy Dane. He was a phenomenon. So much so that a new word had been invented to describe him.
Juvenile delinquent.
George remembered thinking how complex, how grand, that sounded. Like a title or something. Tommy obviously thought so too. He certainly did his best to live up to it.

When he was seven years old he cut a rat's throat during needlework class. A live rat. He used a pair of nail-scissors. The rat died theatrically on the scarred lid of his desk. When he was twelve he got a 22-year-old girl pregnant. The girl claimed that he had tied her to a tree with coat-hanger wire and then raped her. Tommy denied it, but people believed the girl. At sixteen he set fire to his parents' house while they were asleep inside. They survived. The house burnt to the ground. Tommy decided it was time to leave home.

Rumour had it that he had staged a fake accident on the main road outside the village, using a stolen hayrick, his father's bicycle and a gallon
of fresh pigs' blood. He arranged the hayrick and the bicycle so it looked as if the two had collided, then lay down on the tarmac with his head in a puddle of blood. He hijacked the first car that stopped for him. He climbed into the back seat and, brandishing a fiendish homemade bomb, shouted, ‘Get going, you bastards, or I'll blow us all sky-high.' Accounts of exactly what followed vary, but, somehow or other, the bomb exploded in Tommy's face. The driver of the car (a spirited chap from the south coast, retired brigadier apparently) pulled into the side of the road, sprinted to a public phone-box, and called the nearest police station. Which just happened to be New Egypt.

George would never forget that afternoon. He was standing outside the post office with Alice when they brought Tommy in. It didn't look like Tommy. Glossy yellow blisters, smooth as mushrooms, swelled on the left side of his face and the palms of his hands. One eye was a bloated purple slit. His hair must have caught fire at some point because it had shrivelled, coiled into a few black springs. He had no eyebrows any more. Invisible slings held both his arms stiff and crossed in front of his chest.

‘Where am I?' he whimpered. Poor Tommy really didn't seem to know.

Peach glanced round as if he too wasn't quite sure, the sarcastic bastard. He took a deep breath and let the air out again in several tense instalments. By the time his answer came, it had acquired immense dramatic power. ‘New Egypt,' he said.

Tommy Dane began to cry.

Peach put an arm round the boy's shoulders, then looked up as if he expected cameras to be rolling. It was a historic moment, certainly. The rebel tamed, the system triumphant. The record intact. Nobody had ever succeeded in escaping from the village. And nobody ever would, Peach's smile seemed to say. Later that day he threw a small drinks party at his house in Magnolia Close.

And Tommy? He went back to live with his parents in temporary accommodation, a pre-fab hut behind the vicarage. He died at the age of twenty-four. Some said he had committed suicide. According to the doctor (a more reliable source, perhaps), he simply lost the will to live. The events of that day closed a whole avenue of fantasy for George. If Tommy couldn't leave the village, he reasoned, then nobody could. He was stuck there for life and he had better get used to the idea. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

Two years later he asked Alice to marry him.

They were sitting by the river. Side by side, as usual. Nine years of rehearsal for this moment. The month was September, the sunset that evening almost Victorian in its coyness, layer on layer of respectable black
and grey. Then, unexpectedly, just as he spoke, the sky lifted its huge gathering skirts to reveal an inch of pink flesh, the hint of a calf. His scandalous proposal. Embarrassed, he glanced across at her. But she was staring at the river, her eyes flicking left to right, left to right, trying, it seemed, to follow separate pieces of water as they floated downstream. He knew she had heard him. He gave her time, as he had always done. He waited. The sky's lights dimmed, the darkness of a cinema then. Side by side, their elbows almost touching, their dim profiles silver-lined. And then, when he could no longer see her face, she whispered, simply, ‘Yes.'