Harvest (2 page)

“
That’s right,” Craig
acknowledged. He remembered his frustration in the fifth form at
the contradiction of being expected to act as an adult while being
treated as a child. The hypocrisy burned him now as it had back
then because Benchman was the embodiment of it. Except, he told
himself, he was twenty-four had achieved good school college and
university grades and was unquestionably an adult, and more
satisfying than that Benchman had no power over him.

“
Colin Digby. Thought I
recognised the name – you haven’t changed much.”

Craig suspected Benchman
deliberately mistook his name and he heard an underlying accusation
in the last part of his sentence.
Craig hadn’t changed
much in appearance, no more spots that had kept him from being
attractive, but he was still of average height with messy unkempt
blond hair and blue eyes, his shoulders broader but still lacking
the muscle behind his build.
He stood unflinching as
he had done at school, unfazed by authority, a picture of rebellion
with his shirt untucked, but without the blazer that had been
mandatory, and his tie was now neater than it used to be. His
redemption was that his untidiness was now
trendy.
Craig didn’t want redemption though; he wanted
Benchman to see he was still a rebel and hadn’t conformed to what
his headmaster had wanted for him.

Craig
corrected him as casually as possible, wanting desperately to
end his sentence with “you wanker.”

“
That’s right… Craig. How
could I forget? Had you at my desk a few times to push your studies
in your final year if I remember.” He winked.

Craig simply smiled. Benchman
had been his form tutor in his final year – no one wanted Benchman
as their form tutor in the exam year because he wanted their passes
to reflect his influence on the pupils, to be an example to the
other teachers. The head had realised Craig’s commitment to his
Art, Media and Graphic Design lessons was largely at the expense of
his work within Maths English and Science, subjects Benchman had
been head of in his rise to the top. He had pushed for Craig to
work harder in those areas, forced him by restricting his time in
the art and design rooms. Craig had wished he could have been rebel
enough to flunk those exams just to infuriate Benchman. Craig might
be stubborn but he wasn’t stupid.

“
So this is your line of
work now, is it? You were always more artistic than you were
academic.” There was no malice in his tone but the word “artistic”
was emphasised as if it was taboo.

“
Actually, I’m a
freelance photographer for the local paper.”

“
Freelance, eh? So you do
this to make up the money?” He nodded over his shoulder to the
children who were now arranged and seated in an order of height and
symmetry.

Craig prepared his return and
decided not to bite on the assumption of how much he was paid. “Not
really, I do a variety of photographic work. I get some displays in
galleries from time to time.” The last bit was an exaggeration. It
had been a while since he had had the time to put together a
portfolio and a display.

Benchman looked down at him
through his glasses. He still towered over Craig, even as an adult
Benchman made him feel small. He fixed Craig in his sights and
drifted into that deliberating look he gave his pupils for late
homework excuses or if he disagreed with a pupil’s opinion. Craig
remembered the look, which was essentially an unanswerable
last-judgement. He hated it even more because under the glare of
those eyes he found himself agreeing with what Benchman saw and
thought.

“
You had a brother here
too didn’t you? Darren?”

“
Yeah.”
Benchman got
his
name right
first time. Typical.

“
What’s he doing with
himself now?”

“
He’s running the family
business with my dad.”

“
Yes, did well in
business studies and maths. I remember. He had his head screwed on.
I thought you had moved away after your final year.”

Craig’s family had moved to
London from Bath at the start of his secondary education. Losing
all his junior school pals in the process. “Yes. We moved back to
Bath as Mum wasn’t happy.” Losing him all his mates from secondary
school.

“
And
you returned to the big city to make your fortune.”
Was he scoffing?

“
I returned for
University actually. For a degree. Got a first.” Craig corrected
and boasted, scoring himself a point.

“
Better let you get on
with it, then.” Benchman flashed a grin and strode away. He took
his seat and folded his arms sternly and produced a prepared smile,
the same smile that had stared back from Craig’s own school
year-photos. He didn’t know how Benchman could be so fucking smug,
from what Craig had read the only notable Alumni the school had
produced were two serial killers.

Craig settled behind the
camera, prepared the shot, saw Benchman’s gaping trouser zip and
the off-white triangle of underwear it exposed and grinned
wickedly.

“
Smile!” Craig called to
the assembly.

Flash.

“
Prick!”

Kelly Mason walked around the
east block of The Heights to get to the main entrance. She smiled
and nodded to people she passed. She knew most of the faces she
saw, and they knew her. She often wondered whether they feared her,
with her uniform and what she represented, or whether they hated
her or resented her because of it. Perhaps they respected it or got
some security in seeing it, but more important than other people’s
perceptions was that it gave her something to hide behind and
devote herself to. She was sure they wouldn’t know it was her
crutch. They didn’t know her past and how much it now meant for her
to have something that she belonged to.

That’s why she wore her police
uniform on her journey home while others changed back into their
civvies at the Kentish Town station where she was based. She would
hang it on the back of her bedroom door in her flat so she could
see it from her bed. When she couldn’t sleep for the solitude of
the night, she would look to it and what it represented, to know
that at thirty-four she was finally strong and in control of her
life. She was a lifetime away from what she used to be like, which
is where she wanted to be; as far from that time and that self as
possible.

She was startled from her
thoughts by a muffled crash. She was sure the sound came from the
rubbish storage area, but it wasn’t due to be collected until
tomorrow, and she had just passed Alec the caretaker.
Kids?
She didn’t not understand
w
hy anyone would want to be in there.
She
looked at the double doors that clearly instructed ‘NO ENTRY’. Her
movements became cautious and quiet as she approached
them.

She eased one open and peered
in. Warm air assaulted her with the pungent smell of rotting food
and waste baked by the heat wave. She put the back of her hand to
her mouth and wrinkled up her nose against the smell as she stepped
in to the darkness. She plucked the large torch from her belt and
snapped it on. The torch light plucked a grizzled face from the
dark to startle her. Grime and dirt masked the pale and aged flesh,
his hair dishevelled and matted with thick grease.

“
Harry!” she chastised. “Harry Crabb, come on out of
there. You know you aren’t meant to be in here.” She walked over to
him and took the old man gently by the arm. Harry was a resident of
the tower, known for his eccentric dementia. She looked down at a
black plastic sack that was ripped open with its contents strewn
about and picked through. Slivers of greasy meat hung from his
hand. “Oh, Harry!” She clumsily brushed the slimy waste from his
fingers as if cleaning a messy child. “
You have a home
you know? It’s not like when you were on the street.
You get meals on wheels.
Y
ou don’t
have to keep doing this. Come on. I’ll take you.” She hooked her
hand under his arm and ignored the feeling of grime, trying not to
think about his unsanitary state. She looked about the large room,
which was full of bags from the chute opening in the lobby; the
damp-blackened concrete gave the ceiling a cavernous depth that
conspired with the dark. “How did you manage to see a thing in
here?” she mumbled incredulously.

Kelly got him to the doors and
he turned awkwardly in her grip.

“
Goodbye...” he called
over his shoulder into the room.

Kelly frowned and scanned her
torch through the darkness of the room and then back into his face,
his lower jaw was masked in thick stubble that was stained and
crusted in places. She was able to ignore the morsels of food
nestled at the sides of his mouth because his strange expression of
warm nostalgia was so distracting. She gave one last hesitant and
puzzled look into the void. “Harry, there’s nothing there but bags
of rubbish,” – and a terrible stench, although she decided that
Harry would be contributing to the ripe air himself. “Come on,
Harry.”

She closed the door on the rank
smell. The dark rushed in on the shrinking rectangle of light
falling through the doorway except for a dull green glow on the far
wall. Odd, she didn’t remember seeing a green light bulb or
anything that would have cast that light. Harry squirmed in her
grip. “Alright, Harry let’s get you home.”

Craig reached the door to
his flat in the east block of The Heights, but before he could
enter it
his neighbour called out to him. Virtue Kafar
sauntered along the corridor from the lift behind a pram.
Craig faced the slender young woman and said a quiet hello to
her, his face flushing. Her boyfriend had died six months
previously. Craig had seen her soon after, in passing as they were
now, and he had blurted out his condolences to which she gave him a
flicker of a smile in thanks before scurrying away with tears in
her eyes. Since then he had only given her sheepish smiles of
acknowledgement and had retreated hastily. “How
are
you?”

“
Okay…” She wrinkled her
petite nose and tilted her head from side to side as if considered
the question. “…ish. You?”

“
The
same.” He inwardly cringed and thought he could kick himself – it
wasn’t the same at
all
. Her
boyfriend had
died
. She was
only a few years older than him and had lost so much. He searched
her face for a reaction to his comment. Although her long black
hair looked tired and was roughly tied back from her face, the
sallow appearance from her grief had gone and the rich dark colour
of her skin had returned, the weight from her maternity had been
lost and she was her slender shapely self again. However, her dead
boyfriend got in the way of him finding her
attractive.

She looked distracted,
fortunately because he would have hated for her to catch his
appraisal of her. It felt wrong. She went through the actions of
retrieving her keys from a pocket in her sweatshirt and pushing a
stray band of hair behind her ear, but she was clearly hesitating
around saying something. He made the same play of retrieving his
keys.

“
Craig, when you ask how I
am, you mean, how am I coping with Will not being around, don’t
you?”

Craig was caught by her
candidness. “I guess so…”

She smiled around perfect teeth.
“That’s nice of you, that’s nice of everyone, but can I ask you a
favour?”

He would be more than happy to
do anything for her. When Craig had first moved in he couldn’t work
out how to use the heating and had decided to call on his
neighbours for advice. Harry Crabb, Craig’s other neighbour, had
given him an absent stare then closed the door on him – that was
the first and last time Craig had called on Harry. Calling on his
other neighbour had been completely different. He had received a
warm hello from both Virtue and Will. Will had even come in and
showed him how to use it. He had told Craig that he was welcome to
join him and a few of his mates for a kick around on the common
ground on Sundays, Virtue had picked up that he lived alone and
offered him round for dinner. Craig had never taken their offers
up, but it was a kindness he had needed being so far from home. Now
Will was gone. He felt a twinge in his chest like an old wound.
“Sure.” He nodded eagerly, hoping to move the conversation back to
casual and shallow pleasantries.

“
When you ask me if I am
okay,” she winced. “Can it be about me, about my day, or how Billy
is, or bypass that and just pass on the gossip of the block? I
don’t get as much of that as I used to since Will died and Billy
was born. Just get sympathy. Spend most of my day in the parks or
at home with Billy.”

“
Er, yeah…” He was
relieved to be let off from having to figure out how to approach
the elephant-in-the-room-boyfriend.

“
I’m glad you didn’t take
offence. I am not blocking out what happened, just trying to move
on from it and I don’t think I am going to do that if everyone’s
point of reference for me is Will.”

“
I understand.”

“
That was a bit heavy for
a casual hello, wasn’t it?” Her eyes flitted between his face and
various locations in the corridor.

“
A bit, but if it helped…”
His face reddened and he shrugged, mirroring her fleeting eye
contact.