The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (31 page)

“No thanks. We’re alright here aren’t we Jesse?”

Megan walked through to the kitchen and started banging around before I could answer, and when I looked back at Angel she gave me a naughty smile then started fishing about in her little bag, hunting for another good-sized rock.
 

I can’t remember how many we ended up smoking but I was way too fucked up to have sex with Angel after that. Megan came in for a bit and ate her pasta from a bowl on her knees, she didn’t seem to notice I was basically comatose. When I woke up it was the morning and I was still on the sofa. Alone.

My head hurt and my mouth felt like someone had laid carpet on my tongue and nailed it down. But worst of all I assumed I’d blown it with Angel. I forced myself up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. I thought I’d sneak out quietly. I’d ditch the course and go back to working at the campsite. I couldn’t come to town again. But then Angel came in. She was barefoot, wearing a big t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front and nothing else but a pair of orange pants. I saw them when she bent over to get something from the fridge. I don’t know if she meant it to be sexy but it sure as hell was. When she straightened back up and I’d dragged my eyes back to her face she was holding half a joint, and her eyes twinkled with success. She lit it up and then holding it in her mouth she took my hand and she led me out of the kitchen. We edged past her bike in the hallway and went up the narrow stairs and into her room. It was like a weird purple cavern, filled with stuff, feathers dangling from the ceiling, candles, trippy psychedelic posters and purple cushions and teddy bears everywhere. Everything smelt of joss sticks. I stood for a moment feeling lost then she kissed me and blew smoke deep inside me. When the joint was finished she undid my belt and pushed my trousers to the floor. Then she pulled her t-shirt up over her head and she had nothing on underneath but those orange pants and she grabbed my hands and put them on her tits.
 

 
The meth hadn’t totally worn off and she was right. I did last for ages. We fucked on her single bed against the wall, at first we were surrounded by all these teddies, but one by one, thrust by thrust if you like, they fell off and onto the floor, till it was just me and her, with her legs spread so wide they nearly touched both walls of the room at once.
 

Angel confused Darren. She and me were together a lot after that, and he didn’t understand why I suddenly wasn’t in the caravan when he turned up every evening, plastic bag of beers in hand. Darren confused Angel too. He was too slow to follow her caustic comments when she came down to visit. She liked to get stoned in the sea air, she just didn’t see why we had to wait until Darren had finished his six pack before we could pull the little bed down and get the old van creaking. I thought at first there might be some future in Darren and Megan, it turned out she wasn’t a hallucination, and she was ugly and Welsh enough to be just Darren’s type, if he really had a type. But when I mentioned it to Angel she just lifted her eyebrows and said “
Megan? Darren?
” and I knew I’d got that wrong. And slowly Darren got the message and didn’t turn up every night, and I could sense the balance of my life had shifted. I’d started on a new path.

 
And who knows? If things had just stayed as they were for a little while longer my whole life might have got established on this new path. A path that had nothing to do with Darren and John and all the shit that had happened at Hanging Rock. Maybe if I’d stayed on it long enough I’d have got to a point where there was no way back. But fate wasn’t having that. It played its ace card. It made something happen that forced me right back onto the path that led ultimately to John. Maybe I’m kidding myself now if I thought there was ever any other way.
 

It seemed to me to come out of the blue, but when I thought about it Mum had told me lots about the pains she was having in her armpit. When she finally went to the doctor he had her drive right to the hospital in the city that same day. They told her the lump in her breast was the biggest they’d ever seen. I think they were quite impressed in a way. The scan showed the cancer had already spread to her lungs, her heart and her kidneys. They asked if she wanted a prognosis and when she said ‘yes’ they told her she had a thirty percent chance of being alive in six weeks.
 

She’d always said the women in her family were tough but didn’t last long. Her mother was dead by sixty, her mother before her too, so I suppose Mum had lived her life expecting it. It still came as a shock though. Two months later she would be dead.
 

And the funny thing was, while Mum was dying, it was Darren who understood, not Angel. She thought me and her smoking a big bowl of crystal meth would sort things out. But Darren came and talked to Mum. He sat with her and talked about times when we were kids. The times she’d shouted at us for ripping up the grass skidding our bikes. The times we’d brought flatties back from the pier and she’d cooked them. And when he talked like that she smiled through the pain. And even I, fucked up on the dope like I was a bit then, I could see that was a good thing.
 

It was Darren’s idea to tell John. He convinced himself that John would want to know, because of the way they’d always got on through the years. At first I said no. I was still pissed off with him for what happened in the Range Rover, but in the end I agreed. Mum did always like John, it might be nice for her to see him one more time. But then I didn’t have any contact details for him, so I had to go to his dad’s house to get them. Then for a few weeks I just sat there with John’s address written on a scrap of paper in my room. By the time I got to sending him a letter, it was a bit late to ask him to come and see Mum before she died. Because she was already dead.

thirty-nine

 
ANGEL STAYED OVER with me at the campsite the night before the funeral. It was the first time she slept in the house instead of the caravan. That bit was alright, but Darren turned up before breakfast, and right from the off they were getting on each other’s nerves. We spent the day killing time, the two of them bickering and dipping into Angel’s big bag of grass.
 

The church was depressing. It wasn’t quite just the three of us, but we didn’t even fill half of one side and the vicar didn’t know who we were. There were a few ladies from the village that Mum had got to know. Gywnn, the old surfer with the longboard came as well, but that was it. John didn’t come of course. I kept looking towards the back of the crematorium in case he was going to come in late, but he never did.

It didn’t matter. Even in his absence, it was John we ended up talking about back at the house. I had the fire lit and Angel was curled up on the sofa, her long skirt stretched tight over her legs, and just her orange socks visible. Darren was in the armchair, his face both angry and sad, watching the logs as they burnt. It was Darren that brought the subject up.

 
“I really thought he’d come,” he said, not taking his eyes off the fire. “Or send flowers or a note or something? You’re meant to do that at least. Why didn’t he do that?”

I shrugged and joined Angel on the sofa, letting her rest her legs on my lap. Normally I’d have liked this, but her legs felt heavy, I thought about dumping them on the floor. “We’ve not seen him in years. What did you expect?”

“After what you did for him Jesse? I expect a bit more than this.”

“He was probably busy.” I was tired and stoned and I glanced at Angel, but she didn’t seem to be interested.
 

“Yeah. Probably busy with his film star girlfriend.”
 

Darren grabbed the poker from the fire tools set and started stabbing at the logs.
 

I ignored him and looked again at Angel, but she was watching now with more interest. She swung her legs off me and pulled herself more upright on the sofa.
 

“So is it really true then?” She asked. “You two properly knew John Buckingham when he lived here?”

We’d never properly talked about John by then, but most people in the village knew about him by now. People who didn’t really know him I mean. They saw him in newspapers with his film star girlfriend. People were proud that he came from around here.
 

 
“We still do know him,” Darren said.

“Obviously,” she said. She rolled her eyes.

“What’s that mean?”

“Obviously you know him really well. That’s why he’s here with his whole entourage.”

I just watched the fire eating through its meal of logs.

“We do know him,” Darren said. “We know him better than anyone.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“We know things about him that no one else knows.” Darren said.

Angel laughed. “What like the time you all wanked onto a digestive playing soggy biscuit?”
 

“No, like…” Darren started to say, but I cut into him.

“Hey, Darren, put another log on the fire will you?” I stared at him, a warning to shut up.

“Go on then,” Angel said, after he’d thrown the log on and a million sparks had spiralled their way up the chimney. “What do you know about John Buckingham? If there really is something, you could sell it to the papers. It’s pretty clear he’s not really your mate after all. You might as well make some money out of him.”

Darren glanced at me and kept quiet.

“Come on Darren. Either you know something or you’re full of shit. Which is it? What’s the big secret?”

Darren didn’t look at her when he replied. He dropped his head and mumbled, something. He spoke so quietly I barely caught what he said.
 

“We went surfing together.”

Angel heard it though. She raised her hands to her face like she’d seen a ghost.

“Oooo. Big fucking story Darren. Hold the front pages.” She looked at me for encouragement and I could see Darren opening his mouth to say something else. It worried me what he might say, so I jumped in.
 

“Fuck’s sake Angel, will you just leave it? It’s not really the night for this.” This pissed her right off, and she snatched her legs away from my lap, then grabbed her dope from the table and announced she was going to bed. From the way she said it, I wasn’t welcome to come with her, so I let her go.
 

“I don’t get you sometimes Jesse,” Darren said when Angel’s banging upstairs had stopped. “Don’t you ever feel betrayed?”

“What?”

“Betrayed. We help him out like that, and then he just disappears. The next thing we hear he’s some big shot with no time left for us. Doesn’t that piss you off a little bit?”

I sighed. “A little bit.”

“Sometimes that pisses me off.” Darren said.

“Yeah well there’s nothing we can do about it.” I wanted to change the subject. Or just sit there staring at the fire.
 

“Especially since it wasn’t even an accident.”

“What?”

“At Hanging Rock. He made us help him out like that and it wasn’t even an accident.”

“Course it was.”

“No it wasn’t.” He shook his head.
 

“You didn’t even see it happen,” I said.

“I didn’t need to. I thought about it. You don’t stab someone like that by accident. It’s obvious.”

“John said the guy lunged at him. It was slippery. John said it was an accident.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said. But I don’t think what he said added up. At least not to me.”

“He was in shock about what he’d done. He’d broken his fucking arm Darren. He wasn’t saying much at all.”

“Well what about when you went to see him? Before he went to London. That we all just had to be apart for a little bit. That was bullshit too. He didn’t even bother coming to see me.” He shut up for a bit and I thought he might drop it, but he didn’t.

“It’s not fair Jesse. It’s not fair what he’s doing with his life and what we’re doing with ours. Not with what we know about him.”

I could get a sense with Darren sometimes. This wasn’t something he’d just thought of. He’d been working up to this for some time. A long time. I was glad that Angel had gone to bed.
 

“Yeah well like I said. I didn’t really see it either. I was looking at you when it happened, so I don’t know.”

“But you do now, because I’ve told you.”

I said nothing and for a time I thought he’d dropped it. We had a few drinks and watched the fire. But all the time I could feel Darren watching me. Then he started again.
 

“It wasn’t no accident Jesse.”

“What does it matter anyway now? It’s not like we can do anything,” I snapped.

He leaned forward, swirling his drink around in his glass.

“He stitched us up. Making us help him like that. Making us drag the guy’s body over the rocks, driving his fucking car down to Cornwall and blowing up the Hanging Rock. We couldn’t go to the cops after that. We didn’t do anything and he made us as guilty as he was.”

“Well… There’s nothing we can do now.”

“And then he couldn’t even be bothered to come for your mum’s funeral. We help him out and he couldn’t even come for that. Didn’t even send a letter to say he was sorry. No flowers, no…”

“Maybe he was busy.” I cut in.

Darren considered this for a good while, nodding his head gently the whole time.

“Yeah, busy. Probably.”
 

“I don’t get why you don’t see it Jesse. He owes us. He owes us big time.”

 
He looked at me, his little eyes all hard.
 

“He owes us Jesse. And I reckon we should do something about it.”
 

 
He told me his plan that same night. It wasn’t sophisticated. It didn’t even make much sense. We were supposed to write him a letter, telling him we’re going to the cops unless he paid us. Darren didn’t know how much. Just enough money so we could go and do whatever we wanted.