The Man Who Built the World (14 page)

‘I will.’

They went out the front. Rachel paused as she opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you soon, Mum. Say bye to the kids for me. I can’t wait for them, I just can’t. If I see them I might not be able to go. I –’

‘They’ll be fine.
You know kids, they’re like elastic, always bouncing back. Be careful honey. We’ll be right here waiting for you.’

Rachel lifted a hand to wave goodbye, and then climbed into the car.
As she ignited the engine and turned out on to the road, she didn’t look back. She had a long journey ahead of her. Longer than she could ever imagine.

###

Bethany’s Diary,
March 7th, 1985

I heard gun shots in the woods last night. I think Uncle Red and Daddy were out shooting stuff. I don’t know why because there’s plenty of food downstairs.

Mummy’s not been back for ages, even though now the snow’s gone no one can follow her tracks.

Where are you Mummy? I miss you.

21

Matt
opened his eyes. His head was pounding. Had he fainted? He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples, wishing he could clearly remember what had happened. Something about a woman; had she attacked him, or him her? Had he even seen her at all?

He looked down at the smashed brandy bottle, and couldn’t be sure.
A lot of things didn’t seem to make much sense. Who had that woman been? Not Bethany, surely? Bethany was dead.

Wasn’t she?

He scrambled to his feet as someone called his name. Uncle Red’s gruff voice.

He slipped out through the door, unsteady on his feet, unable to do anything about the brandy, but no matter, he
would clean it up later. He doubted anyone ever came up here.

Except, of course, the woman.

Hadn’t this been one of his mother’s rooms?

Questions burned in his head as he made his way back down the stairs, into the living room, managing to avoid Uncle Red whose calls echoed from the end of the first floor corridor.
His father stood waiting for him beside the drinks cabinet. A few other guests still lingered, some tearful, most inebriated. An older couple were making their way down into the kitchen and towards the front door.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Sorry, Dad,’ Matt said, only too aware of the slur of his words. ‘Got lost in memories, I suppose.’ Well, it was half true.

‘We need to get up to the chapel.
Get this all over with.’

Matt nodded his assent, but his mind whirled.
Twice, he had seen her. Twice, he had seen a woman with a baby. And then there was the woman he had seen watching him at the church. Were they all the same woman?

He thought it was the Meredith sisters, but now he wasn’t so sure.
He didn’t know what his sister looked like now, after all. Could Bethany actually be alive and living with the Meredith sisters?

Was a game being played here
? Who were the players? Who knew what was going on, and who didn’t?

And who was the child?

‘Red!’ His father shouted up the stairs. ‘He’s down here.’

Perhaps Bethany was alive.
So who were they about to bury?

His mind reeled.
His father, standing next to him, seemed to be oblivious to Matt, his neck arched to peer up the stairs as he waited for Red to reappear.

‘Dad?’
Matt didn’t give himself a chance to think about what he said, just let the words out as they came into his mouth. ‘Dad? Did Bethany have a
kid
?’

His father’s face snapped towards him.
‘
What?
’

‘A kid.
A baby.’

Ian’s mouth dropped open to speak, but at that moment Matt heard the sound of Red’s heavy footfalls on the first floor landing.
Matt tried to read his father’s eyes as Ian looked away, but failed, his own vision lacking clarity.

As he heard Red descending the stairs, Matt said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to get outside for a bit.
I need some air. Call me when you’re ready to go.’

‘You’re drunk again, aren’t you?’
His father sighed without looking back. ‘Red told me about this morning.’

‘Dad, I –’

‘Just control yourself a little while longer and then you can drink yourself to oblivion for all I care.’

Something about the disappointment in his father’s voice struck a chord with Matt.
He started to say something, thinking again about Bethany, but changed his mind. Instead he simply shrugged and turned away.

He stumbled down into the kitchen and out on to the courtyard.
He leaned against the side of his father’s truck, breathing in the leafy, sweet–tasting country air, feeling it fill his lungs with its chilled freshness. The cold numbed the skin of his face and he began to feel almost sober. He looked out across the courtyard to see the old couple just starting down the lane towards the village. His gaze drifted across the canopy of trees on the far side of the courtyard. He found himself frowning. It only took a second to realise why.

The black car had gone.

Owned by a couple of mourners? Perhaps. Yet it had been parked at the bottom of his father’s lane the night before. Matt had felt sure no one had been in the house with them, but in a house so big you could never tell.

The blinking light in the upstairs window.

It belonged to a cleaner. Must do, although the house didn’t look like a cleaner had been within a mile of these halls and corridors for some time. It couldn’t belong to a cleaner.

Uncle Red then.
But Uncle Red was indoors with his father.

Matt had no choice but to believe what his mind told him not to.

Who are you?

H
e had not been alone in that room, either tonight or last night. Whomever he had seen, be it Bethany or one of the Meredith sisters, had been there for sure. In some form or other he had seen them.

Because they ha
d just driven away.

It couldn’t be Bethany.
Bethany was dead, drugged herself to death with sleeping pills, according to his father. And the Meredith sisters would surely be old by now, not young and lustrous as the woman he had seen had been.

So, what the
fuck
?

Matt’s head spun.
Reality and imagery merged again, forming a blur of memories in his mind like a drenched chalk drawing on flagstones, even as from the doorway, he heard his father calling his name.

Matt stumbled back towards the house.
His father leaned on the doorframe, and shook his head in apparent resignation as Matt approached.

‘We should go,’
Ian said.

Matt, dazed, let his father and Red lead him out across the back lawn.
They headed for the thin, partially overgrown path at the back of the garden, a footpath leading down through the woods to a shallow stream where as a child he had fished and built dams. His father had laid the stepping stones you used to cross it, big rocks he had found further upstream and carried down to make the path. In truth, you could cross it easily enough if you were willing to get your feet wet.

From the river
the path rose again, winding steeply up through the shady, less densely foliaged woods on the opposite side of the valley until it ended in a flat clearing near the crest of the hill, in which the ruined chapel stood. And where, fifteen years before, his mother had been buried.

‘Come on, keep up,’ Red called over his shoulder, as Matt stumbled along behind them, wet grass and brambles whipping at his jeans and making his footing unstable.
Red and his father both wore strong hiking boots, but Matt had not changed out of his funeral wear.

The lush woodland dripped water on to his clothes even after the rain had stopped, and Matt cursed often as he slipped, in some areas the path little more than mud.
The undergrowth hadn’t been cut back in a long time – obviously his father rarely came here anymore, and the occasional branch whipped back across his face after his father and Red had passed. Matt scowled, wishing he had bothered to bring a coat like his father or Red. Red wore a thick trench coat and Ian an old battered jacket with a satchel slung over his back. Something jostled around inside it, a prayer book perhaps, from which he might mutter a few last rites.

They waited long enough to help him over the stream, swollen from the autumn rains.
His father’s stepping stones were slick with algae and spray, but somehow Matt managed to avoid falling in to the churning waters.

The path rose up through steep woodland, towering stacks of sycamore and oak, thin boughs of ash and elm, all surrounded by an undergrowth of bramble, ivy and fern.
Beautiful to look at, an untouched area of forest, but as they approached the top of the hill Matt could barely think about anything around him, only what lay ahead.

They emerged into the clearing and it rose before them,
a tiny chapel, just a single stone room with the last of an often-replaced roof of wooden boards now collapsed inwards, and a small outhouse where as a child Matt had always believed the priest would keep his horse, or his donkey.

And there, in the centre of the clearing, some fifteen feet from the chapel’s
boarded up doorway, his mother’s grave.

Matt froze, a terrible boiling sadness frothing up in his throat.
He felt tears choking him, and he looked up at his father, horrifying memories flooding back as clear as the night they had happened. Unable to meet his father’s despairing gaze, he stared past at the empty clearing at the grave of his mother, the blank headstone, the grass and weeds now starting to grow up around it.

And wondered suddenly why the clearing stood so empty.

No gravediggers, no coffin, no grave.

Matthew’s throat seemed to constrict
. He reached up a hand, thinking he would die of strangulation if he couldn’t force out a few small breaths.

‘Dad,’ he coughed.
‘Oh my god, where –’

Matt slumped to his knees, hands squelching into the soft earth.
Mud spray flecked the front of his coat.

He felt himself
pushed down from above, felt the ground reaching up for him. His eyes raced across the empty clearing, filling with tears. The earth bubbled and he thought it might swallow him.

The rain began again.

###

Bethany’s Diary,
March 10th, 1985

We had a blizzard last night. Mummy never came, so the snow must have been too heavy for her. Today Daddy and Matty went out in the snow. Neither has come back yet, and now it’s getting dark. I haven’t seen Uncle Red today either.

I’m scared.
I had the window open earlier. I heard shouting, far away. It sounded like Matty’s voice. Matty shouting. He didn’t sound too happy.

Interlude One

10th March 1985

‘Can’t stand this no more. Can’t stand this. Gotta get away. From here. Anywhere.’

Slumped in the corner of the bedroom, fingers raking against a torn poster of The Clash which now hung askew, the words of the seventeen–year–old Matt Cassidy float up through the air, striking the ceiling and shattering, breaking down into nothing before they can find their way up through the floorboards of the room above.
Slumped, shoulder against the edge of Mick Jones’s guitar, fingers raking absently against Joe Strummer’s face, his words are heard by no one except himself and the bitter disagreeing silence of his bedroom.

‘I need . . . to . . . leave . . .’

Trickles of words, like the last flow of a stream before drought sets in, meaningless except to those desperate, despairing beasts yet to die, words as pointless as a killer’s gentle apology, as fresh air on the moon. A tap, dripping, fading to silence as the last drips slip off into the basin to vanish against the bleached white of the porcelain, to become meaningless, nothing.

He waits for an answer; none comes.

‘You killed my mother.’

The silence remains.

‘You killed her. You took her.’

Cry, cry sweet baby, it won’t hurt you for long –

His fingers rake, and the poster rips from the last BlueTac, slipping to the floor.