Red was a carpenter by trade.
He sold homemade furniture; his craftsmanship was exquisite and widely desired. He had never owned a car, and rumour claimed he felled the trees himself and hauled them back to his house by hand, which went some way to explaining his legendary strength. As a boy Matt remembered Uncle Red as a fiercely warm man with big hands and tender words, but as a teenager he had heard stories about foolhardy men who’d taken Red’s strength on in the bar, and what had happened to them. Uncle Red wasn’t a man to cross.
Red wasn’t actually his name.
Matt didn’t know his real one, but Red was a nickname, taken, Matt assumed, from the copper-coloured hair that grew in thick curls down over his ears and around the base of his neck. Matt still couldn’t believe how he hadn’t recognised the man he had once called Uncle. Red had barely aged in fourteen years; his hair was just a little shorter, his face just a little more grizzled. He looked harder and stronger if anything, unlike Matt’s father who had once been the only man in the village close to Red’s size. Now Ian Cassidy looked faded, a shadowy specter of the man he had once been.
As he climbed to his feet, Matt felt wearier than ever, and just wanted to get through the funeral and get out of Tamerton.
Red scared him, though he hated to admit it. He didn’t like to think what Red might be capable of. The man was an enigma, certainly, but to a young, pre–adolescent Matt, he had always been a harmless one.
Once upon a time, they ha
d got on fine.
Matt closed his eyes, squeezing the pain from his mind.
Physical and . . . more.
(He sees his father’s face, those desperate, pleading eyes, mud–flecked but also speckled with blood, a wide cut beneath his eye, his lip split open and a gash on the left side of his face.
No, please, no more.
And then his own face, as though seen from without – lips pulled back in a snarl, vicious, evil eyes that couldn’t surely be his own –
And the weapon, the length of wood, a tree branch recently fallen, still with some leaves that hung like crash survivors on tiny shoots.
Pulled back over his head.
No more.
(Down
)
(Down)
(Down –)
Moans, the sound of a broken man crying for forgiveness –
No more.
Anger and violence a
nd hatred boiling in his head –
(Again)
And power: wonderful, lustrous power –
(Again)
Strength, oh what strength, power, oh what power
(Again)
No . . . more . . .
(Down –) until the sounds die, until the cries fade to moans, and the branch lies in two ba
ttered pieces at his feet.
With the speed of air escaping th
rough a torn tire, his anger is sucked away. Bloodied with another’s blood, crying the tears of a child, he backs off into his own tragedy, defeated.
Through his father’s bloody gaze he sees himself running away).
#
##
Bethany’s Diary,
February 15th, 1985
Tonight I followed her footprints in the snow. I knew she’d come back sooner or later, come back to visit me, and she did. She loves me, Mummy loves me.
They were big footprints, as though Mummy was wearing shoes.
I didn’t realize Mummy needed shoes where she went, but I guess even angels get cold feet.
They led down through the wood towards the stream, frozen over by the cold, and up the hill on the other side.
I had to cross by some stepping stones and very nearly fell in, they were so icy. I followed the path up to the old chapel, where Daddy tells me never to go. I don’t know why, it looks just like an old ruin to me.
I’ve only ever seen it once before, when I followed Matty up one day last summer.
I found him sitting by a stone rising from the ground, just outside. He looked like he was praying, but when I got closer I realised he was crying. I reached out and touched his shoulder but instead of being comforted like I’d hoped, he went mad. He screamed at me and ran away into the woods. I don’t know why I scare him so much but ever since then he’s never looked at me the same.
I couldn’t find my way back and wandered around there for hours.
I wondered what Matty had been crying about, and looked at the rock sticking out of the ground, to see if there were any words written on it that might explain to me, but it was blank. I think Matty must have been in trouble at school or something, I don’t know. Perhaps he just goes out there to be alone.
Daddy found me later, and took me home.
He looked terribly worried, his eyes red as though he had been crying, and he scooped me into his arms and hugged me and scolded me at the same time, told me never to go there again. He told me he loved me and that he didn’t want anything to happen to me.
We went back to the house, and he made me some tea.
Matty wouldn’t speak to me, even when I went into his bedroom and sat at the end of his bed. He looked like he had been crying again too, and just turned away and stared out of the window. I felt real sad, I think Daddy gave him a hiding.
Anyway, where were we
? Oh yes, I followed Mummy’s footprints up to the chapel, trying to find where Mummy went. They stopped by the piece of stone sticking out of the ground, and someone was sat in front of it. I started to cry out ‘Mummy!’ but then realised it wasn’t her at all. It was Daddy instead. He was sitting up against it, his gun in his hands, staring out into the forest. It was a good job I recognised him in the dark before I shouted out, because he might have shot at me by mistake.
I didn’t know what he was doing there, so I watched him for a while from the trees.
Once or twice, he stood up, cocked his gun, and made as if to shoot something, but stopped at the last moment, and pulled his gun away. I don’t know what he was aiming at, probably foxes or badgers. Don’t know why he would want to shoot them all the way out here. And in the middle of the night, too.
After a while, I started to get cold.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I saw Daddy had a thick coat on, but I only wore my pajamas so got really cold really quick. It didn’t look as though Daddy was going to leave, so I left him there and went back and curled up into bed.
From the look of the new footprints underneath my bedroom window, it seemed that Mummy had been.
I was so sad to have missed her.
16
Red came in through the back door and found Ian in the lounge, sipping a brandy.
Red motioned with his hand and Ian nodded.
‘Here,’ he said, handing Red a glass.
Red took a seat near the window. He glanced over his shoulder at the drizzly Sunday morning outside, and sighed. ‘Ian, I –’
He recounted his meeting with Matthew.
Afterwards, Ian just shook his head and pointed towards Red’s glass.
‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little hypocritical?’
Ian sipped a little of his own drink. He didn’t blame Matt at all; on tough days like these oblivion often seemed the best answer.
‘Ian, the boy had drunk a barrelful.
He could hardly stand. In fact, he didn’t for long.’
‘I can’t believe you hit him.
I know how you feel about him, but he’s still my son.’
Red grimaced and looked away.
‘For Heaven’s sake, Red. I told you, just let it go! It’s been almost fifteen years –’
‘He’s a big boy now, Ian.
He can take it. Shit, I doubt he’ll feel it over the hangover.’
‘He’s my son!’
Red stood up, flushed. ‘After the way he left you he doesn’t deserve your sympathy. And anyway, when he started bad–mouthing Bethany, I . . . I lost my temper a little. I’m sorry.’
‘I know how you felt about her.
But she’s gone, and he’s entitled to his opinion. They were never close. You know that.’
‘You’re far too forgiving, Ian.
He out and out insulted her. That boy deserves everything that comes to him, and whatever you say, I’m glad I hit him.’ He ground his right fist into his other palm. ‘I wanted to do it again.’
Ian sighed, shook his head.
‘He’s not changed in all this time. He still sees everything only as he wants to see it, the same way he did when he left here.’
‘You mean, after he beat you into a bloody ruin and left you to the crows?’
Ian’s eyes closed. His face tensed for a moment. ‘He’s still my son, Red. Whatever he did.’
‘You know how much that cost us, Ian.’
He shook his head. ‘You know just how much damage he caused. He ruined both our lives.’
‘I know, Red.
I’m . . .
sorry
.’
Red downed the last of his drink.
He walked towards Ian, hands apart, like a beggar pleading for change.
‘Just for once can’t you feel something for what he did
? Why can’t you
hate him
?’ He lifted a hand, looked about to throw his glass down, then forced himself to stop and place it calmly down on the top of Ian’s liquor cabinet. ‘And yet you brought him back here. You still brought him back here.’
For a moment Ian said nothing, just stared back, eyes defeated, heart cracking beneath so many accusations.
Matthew was just part of a bigger picture. He had hurt a lot of people, but his hate and the damage he had caused had been as a result of larger revolutions of the wheel of which he was just a part. Ian knew some things were unavoidable, and perhaps what Matthew had done that day with a piece of wood in his hands was one of those things.
He looked at Red, standing in the centre of the room, huge, barrel chest heaving, thick, tree–like arms tensed against his checked shirt.
He met the gaze of his oldest and closest friend and held it.
‘He’s my son,’ he said at last.
17
A large proportion of the village had arrived at the church for the funeral, decked out in black suits and dresses, hats and veils, filing into the pews and taking their seats ready for the service to begin. Some held each other’s hands, some wiped noses and eyes with tissues, and some even cried real tears.
God,
Matt thought bitterly from his place near the back.
They really know how to put on a show. In a town like this, a funeral is one hell of an event
.
He wondered just how many of the assorted elderly, middle–aged couples and groups of bored-looking children present had actually known his sister.
For that matter had actually ever
seen
her. She had hardly paraded about town when he had lived with her, in fact barely coming out of her room.
Only at night, G
od, why only at night?
He shivered, swallowed a cough, felt bile climbing a stepladder into his throat.
After Red had gone, Matt had thrown up several times, the vomit hot and sticky, the remains of the whiskey burning him until he felt like he had swallowed a firebrand.
After five more minutes with his head down the toilet, he had got back into the shower and washed the puke off his face.
Only then, as he stumbled out of the bathroom, did he realize that Red had brought him back to his room at the Bed & Breakfast. Matt had looked at his unmade bed longingly, desperately wanting to crawl under the covers and hide there until the whole sorry affair was done, and his sister was finally buried. Only Red’s threat, echoing in his mind, had compelled him to pull on some dry clothes, slap himself hard across the face, and get over to the church in time for the service.
He looked around him.
People were still filing in. Christ, Bethany had been popular. It was as though the moment he had left she had become the life and soul of the whole fucking town.
His father sat alongside Uncle Red at the front.
He occasionally glanced back, his face unreadable over this distance, but Matt felt sure it was a look of disappointment. He had declined his father’s polite invitation to join them, instead opting for the back row, leaving a couple of empty rows between himself and the rest of the mourners. It didn’t bother him how conspicuous he looked. He had received enough stares already to tell him most of the village knew about his little altercation with Red earlier in the pub. In small towns, gossip traveled faster than most commercial airlines.
As the last mourners took their seats, the vicar began his sermon.
Matt watched with disinterest as first his father, then Uncle Red got up to say a few brief words of mourning from the pulpit, then engaged the rest of the congregation in a couple of hymns. It was the usual fare; he had been to the funeral of Rachel’s grandmother, and although he hated to say it, he had felt more emotional then than he did now, at his own sister’s. Having a crying wife leaning on his shoulder the whole time had helped, but even so.