Spawn (11 page)

The ground sloped away before him slightly, leading down towards a deep cleft in the field which looked like an open black mouth in the darkness of the night. Harold steadied himself and made his way towards the depression. Above him tall electricity pylons rose high into the sky, their metal legs straddling the field, the high voltage cables they carried invisible in the gloom. There was a smell of ozone in the air, rather like the aftermath of a thunderstorm and Harold could hear a distant crackling sound from overhead.

He reached the foot of the small hill and stood close by the foot of a pylon. He was exhausted, both mentally and physically drained. His eye felt gritty and his throat was dry but he walked on, finally finding what he thought looked like a suitable spot. There was enough natural light for him to see what he was doing. He paused and laid the bundle of dirty sheet on the frosty grass, then he knelt and began scraping at the earth with his bare hands. He found that it was soft enough for him to achieve the necessary depth. Like a dog who’s found a good spot to hide a bone, Harold pawed the earth away until it began to form a sizeable mound behind him. By the time he’d finished he estimated that the hole must be about two feet deep and twice that in length. He was panting loudly, his hands caked in mud, his clothes already reeking from the foul smell of the soiled linen. With the hole prepared, he unrolled the sheet, exposing the foetus inside. He lifted it gently from the cover and laid it in the hole.

For long seconds he stared down at it, tears brimming in his eye. He lowered his head, his body shaking.

“Gordon,” he whispered. “Forgive me.”

He felt a strange contradiction inside himself, a great sadness but also something akin to relief. Had he at last found a means of atonement? He began pushing the wet earth back into place, covering the tiny body.

“Mother,” he said, as he continued to pile earth back into the grave. “It’s different this time. This time I won’t let it happen again. There’ll be no more burnings.”

He looked up, as if expecting to see someone standing over him. Expecting to hear voices. There was only the far-off whistle of the wind in the pylons.

Harold finished piling in the earth and stood up, flattening it down with his shoe. He wiped his hands on the piece of soiled sheet then balled it up and hid it beneath a nearby bush. That done, he returned to the small grave. At first, when he tried to speak, no sound would come and his lips fluttered noiselessly but he swallowed hard and clasped his dirty hands before him.

He didn’t know anything religious. No prayers. No hymns. He lowered his head, his eyes closed.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” he began, falteringly. “I pray the Lord. . .” He struggled to remember. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” A long silence. “If . . . If I would. . . should,” he corrected himself. “If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Tears were coursing freely down his cheek by now.

“Amen.”

He turned and headed back to his hut.

It was not to be the last time he performed the cathartic ritual.

Lynn Tyler prodded the bacon with a fork, turning it over in the hot fat. She hated fried food and the small kitchen already smelt strongly of it, the odour making her feel queasy. How the hell anyone could ever eat a cooked breakfast she didn’t know but, in about five minutes, Chris would come downstairs and devour his usual four rashes of bacon, two eggs and a couple of slices of fried bread. He was sleeping upstairs at the moment, undisturbed by the sounds coming from the room below him. The radio competed with the frying bacon for supremacy in the cramped area.

Lynn jumped back as the fat spat at her, some of it catching the arm of the sweatshirt which she wore. At least three sizes too big for her and with “Judas Priest” printed across it, the garment came to just below her bottom. She wore nothing else and the lino in the kitchen felt cold beneath her bare feet. She ran a hand through her uncombed black hair and exhaled deeply, looking down at the pan but also at herself. She was almost shapeless beneath the thick folds of the sweat-shirt but even that wasn’t enough to disguise some painfully obvious facts about her body. Her breasts, for so long unfettered by a bra, were beginning to droop – legacy of all those years she had spent enticing men. Ever since she’d reached her fourteenth birthday, just over five years ago, she had flaunted herself in every flimsy blouse and T-shirt she could find. There had been dozens of men in the intervening years, too many for her to count, attracted not just by her sizeable bust but by her easy manner – and easy was the operative word. She knew that some called her a tart, a slag, someone had even called her a whore once, but to Lynn Tyler the moral double-standard which governed the sex lives of men and women was ludicrous. And unfair. If a man slept around he was patted on the back and admired, earning the name of stud with each new conquest. If a woman chose to take different men to bed for her own private pleasure, she was sneered at, insulted and, in Lynn’s case, thrown out of the house. Her parents had kicked her out when she was seventeen after coming home to find her locked in a torrid embrace on the floor of their sitting room with her boyfriend of the time. Since then she had shared a three-bedroomed house near the centre of Exham with her best friend, Jill Wallace. Jill worked in nearby Camford and her job often took her away from the house for days at a time. It was during these respites that Lynn invited Chris to stay. She herself was unemployed and had been for over a year. Chris worked in Exham’s largest engineering firm. They had been together for over nine months. It was something of a record for Lynn and, during that span of time, something had happened to her which she had always consciously avoided before. She had fallen in love. All the countless other men, they had been for
her
private gratification although more often than not it had not turned out that way. But it was different with Chris. She had never had any intention of falling in love, in fact the emotion had proved so alien to her that at first she hadn’t been sure what she was feeling, but she knew it was ten times stronger than anything she’d felt in her life before. And she knew she wanted Chris on a more permanent basis than meetings three times a week and the odd weekend together. She wanted to marry him.

That was why she had stopped taking her pill. For the last three months she had left it untouched in its green packet. And, finally, she was sure. She was pregnant. She’d missed two periods, and a trip to the doctor last week had confirmed her suspicions. Surely with a baby on the way Chris would marry her? But she had yet to tell him her news.

She finished cooking his breakfast and while the kettle boiled for coffee she lit a cigarette, went to the bottom of the stairs and called him. She waited until she heard the creak of the bedsprings, signalling that he was up then she padded back into the kitchen and sat down to her own breakfast – a cup of Nescafé and a Marlboro.

He was down in a matter of moments, chest bare to expose his hard lean body with its tangled growth of light hair on the chest and stomach. He wore a faded pair of jeans, held up by a studded leather belt. Around one wrist was a leather band, similarly dotted with studs. He rubbed his stomach and sat down in front of the plateful of food.

“Don’t you ever wash in the mornings?” she asked him, smiling. She watched as he started hacking away at the bacon.

“Well, I didn’t have time this morning,” he told her, chewing furiously. “I felt hungry.”

She shuddered.

“I don’t know how the hell you can eat
that
first thing in the morning.” She took a drag on her cigarette, blowing out a long stream of smoke. She crossed her legs beneath the table, tapping her feet together agitatedly. Should she tell him now? Excuse me Chris but you’re going to be a father? She took a sip of her coffee instead.

The DJ on the radio was babbling some hip bullshit which neither of them seemed to hear. Chris because he was too engrossed in his breakfast and Lynn because she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts. She watched him as he set about the first egg, slicing it in two, dipping his fried bread in the runny yolk. He looked up at her and smiled that warm, welcoming smile she had come to know so well these past nine months. She wondered if there was room for love in that smile.

“What’s on your mind?” he said.

She looked surprised.

“Not a lot,” she lied. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re not usually this quiet,” he told her.

Lynn smiled weakly, taking mock offence.

“Thanks a lot.”

He smiled again, pushing half the egg into his mouth. She sucked hard on her cigarette, held the smoke in her mouth for long seconds then blew it out in a long blue stream.

“Chris, I’m pregnant.”

The words came out as easily as that but, once she’d said them, it felt as if a hole had opened up inside her. Well, there it was. She’d told him, flat out. She sipped at her coffee and eyed him warily over the rim of the mug.

He slowed the pace of his chewing, looking down at his plate, not, as she’d expected, at her. He didn’t speak.

“I said. . .”

He cut her short.

“Yeah, I heard you.” There was an edge to his voice, almost imperceptible but nevertheless present. Like a knife blade in the darkness, invisible but razor sharp.

She ground out the fag in a nearby saucer, the plume of smoke rising mournfully, disappearing above her like a forgotten dream.

“Haven’t you got anything to say?” she wanted to know.

“Are you sure?” he asked, still looking at his plate.

She told him about the visit to the doctors, the missed periods. He nodded.

They sat in silence for an eternity then he dropped his knife and fork onto the plate where they clattered noisily. Finally, he looked her in the eye.

“I thought you were on the bloody pill,” he said, exasperatedly.

“I was,” she told him. “I just didn’t take it for a few weeks.”

With the deception now revealed, it was she who dropped her gaze, unable to meet the unrelenting stare from his green eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured, then his voice gradually grew in volume. “You bloody tricked me didn’t you?”

“I didn’t,” she countered although the accusation bore weight and she was crumbling beneath that weight.

“You had me thinking it was safe and all the time you weren’t taking your pill. You made a fucking mug out of me for all that time?” He was struggling to keep his anger in check and he wasn’t making much of a job of it.

“It was just two months, Chris,” she said.

“Two months. Two
years
. What’s the difference? It’s still me who ends up looking the twat, isn’t it?”

She could feel the tears building but she fought them back, angry with herself now. They sat in silence for a long time. A silence finally broken by Chris.

“So what are you going to do?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“About the kid.”

“I’m going to have it.”

He shook his head.

“Well, it’s your business I suppose but I think you’re stupid,” he told her.

Her brow furrowed.

“It’s not just
my
business,” she said, defiantly. “It’s yours too. You are the father after all.”

“Are you sure?”

The remark was barbed and it cut deeply.

“You bastard,” she growled. “Yes, I’m sure it’s yours. If anyone else had been fucking me in the last nine months I think you might have found out about it.”

“So, what are you going to do about it?” he asked again.

“I’ve told you once. I’m going to have it. I wanted the child. It’s
our
child.”

The realization gradually swept over him and a bitter smile creased his face.

“You know, Lynn, you’ve got more brains than I gave you credit for,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

“The baby. Not taking the pill. You planned it all didn’t you?”

She reached for his hand, almost surprised when he didn’t pull away. When she spoke again her tone was low, almost pleading.

“Chris, it was the only way I knew of keeping you,” she said. “I love you. I’ve never loved anyone else in my life before. I didn’t want to lose you.”

“So you thought you’d trick me into becoming a daddy?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

She pulled her hand away.

“I hoped you’d marry me when you heard about the kid,” she confessed. “You are its father after all.”

“Only because you didn’t take your fucking pill,” he said. She watched as he got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Lynn but I’m not ready for this.” He swallowed hard, not sure whether to pity her or punch her in the teeth. She too got to her feet.

“I love you, I want your baby. I want
you
,” she said, the first salty tear sliding down her cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, I think a lot of you, you’re a good kid, fun to be with. . .”

She cut him short, her own anger now overriding his.

“And an easy fuck,” she growled.

“I just don’t love you,” he told her, almost reluctantly.

She stood quivering for a moment, trying to hold back the flood of tears which she knew would come any minute. Her voice was cracking.

“So what’s
your
answer then?” she demanded.

He stepped away from the table.

“I think it’d be simpler if we just didn’t see each other again,” he said.

“As easy as that? Forget the relationship. Nine months down the drain. Is that all it meant to you? Is it?” She was shouting now, the tears flooding down her cheeks. “A good screw when you wanted it? What was I, just a convenient piece of equipment when you got fed up with wanking?”

“I think I’d better go,” he said, quietly.

“Yes, go on. Go. Fuck off.” She started to tug the sweatshirt off, despite his pleas for her to stop. Eventually she pulled it free and threw it at him, standing there naked in that smoke filled kitchen, the odour of fried food heavy in the air.

“I’m sorry, Lynn,” he said.