We lived so near the school, I wasn’t even particularly late for practice. Hill said something routinely sarcastic. ‘Nice of you to turn up.’ Soon enough I was brought in to bowl.
At that time I was about the fastest bowler the school had, which isn’t saying much, but at least we kept a steady length. I found myself facing a boy called Martin. Nothing I came up with fazed him. I threw him a leg cutter and instead of blocking it as he was supposed to, he leant his bat a foot wide of his wicket and clipped the ball as it passed for an easy four. And I was done.
‘Next up.’
I glanced at my watch as I took up position on the field. It was only twenty past four. Time was crawling by. The next bowler, Merriman, managed to knock Martin out of his complacency; he scooped the ball like a beginner and suddenly everyone was yelling at me. I flubbed the catch: the ball slipped through my fingers and, falling almost vertically, hammered the toes of my left foot. I staggered around like a wounded deer while everyone groaned at me.
‘Thank you all. If you can, get some catching in before Saturday.’
Puzzled, I looked at my watch again – it was ten to six. First, time had practically stopped. Now. it was racing out of my grip. Nothing added up. Nothing made sense.
In the shower room, people left me alone. The shame of my missed catch steered them away from me. This far into the tournament they feared a jinx.
Dad was waiting for me out the front of the school. He was standing, leaning against the car. When he saw me, he said, ‘Where’s your kit?’
I had left it behind. I couldn’t bear the idea of opening the boot again. I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’s in my locker. There’s another practice at lunchtime tomorrow.’
Dad shrugged and went round to the driver’s side and started the engine.
I climbed in beside him.
‘Come on,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s go for a drink.’
And so it went on, and on, and on – it was never going to stop – there was never going to be an end to it, never. Now we were off to the Margrave, with its lead-roofed veranda smothered in lilac. Beer straight out of the barrel, because the barrels were kept directly behind the bar. I was old enough to drink if Dad bought. This had become our summer treat – a half, maybe a pint, in the pub around the corner, away from the smell of Mum’s patchouli, clary sage, dyes, inks and paints.
The Margrave had no car park as such – just this verge, badly churned, along the lane that turned from tarmac outside the pub, to gravel and dirt where it became no more than the driveway to the mill house at the bottom of the hill.
Dad, an old hand at this, reversed us down the lane about as far as you could park without blocking the drive. From here the lane descended, unlit, through a tunnel of trees to the mill house, the millrace, the river. It was part of our cross-country course.
He ran the nearside tyres up on the bank a little, so that we both had to climb out the passenger’s side. I stood by the car, fearing to breathe. The odd thing was, I couldn’t smell a thing. Nothing bad, anyway. The earth churned by our tyres, and a cut-grass smell, and something dusty and ticklish from the field behind the hedge.
‘Come on, then,’ Dad said, pocketing his car keys.
There was a slatted bench in front of the house, under the soft leaden roof. It wasn’t a whole lot more comfortable than the window seat in my room at home, but Dad wanted us to sit outside. He took off his jacket – in summer he wore this ice-cream linen jacket – and dumped it on the bench beside me. ‘Mild?’
The local mild was frothy and liquorice-sweet. ‘A meal in itself.’
We drank. We talked cricket. At least, I set Dad talking about cricket, knowing how reliably he would spin off if I gave him his cue. The daylight was going. A lamp blinked on above our heads and within a minute the air was a blizzard of moths.
‘I might walk home,’ I said at last.
‘Okay.’ The hotel was only round the corner – closer, if you cut the corner and followed the river. ‘Can you manage in the dark?’ If he’d known how treacherous the ground was along the river bank, how precarious the brick edging of the millrace, he would have tried to stop me. Instead, he accepted what I told him: my shortcut home was simply a stretch of our cross-country run – not difficult at all. ‘I’ll be back after this,’ he said, lifting the remains of his pint. I was fairly sure he would stay for another. There were men here he knew, and he would stay to talk with them tonight, making the most of his little moment of freedom.
‘Sure, Dad. Thanks.’
I headed down the lane, down the hill, into the dark.
Half-way down I stopped and turned. I watched the top of Dad’s head as he entered the pub. Even if he came out again he wouldn’t see me. The glare from the porch lights would blind him to movement this far down the lane. The stars were out. No street lamps. No house glow.
I took out the keys I had filched from the pocket of his jacket and unlocked the car. The rubber button gave against my thumb. The boot was on a spring, it pulled away from me and swung all the way up before I could catch it. I stared into the boot. There was nothing to see. It was too dark to see anything. Was she even there? Imagine her awake, her head wrapped in that plastic bag. Jesus. I put my hand out, imagining her there, willing on the original, familiar horror of her presence to bat away the terror that she might have climbed undead from here, be standing at my back . . .
The touch of her hand, so dry, so cold, so stiff, was an electric shock, knocking me back and away. I paused, trying to gather my breath again, trying to force it down, trying to cram it into my lungs. My eyes began to accommodate the deeper darkness of the boot. There were cryptic shapes there, hard to separate and decipher.
I had no choice. I had to reach inside. I had to touch her. I leant in and found her arms and got my hands under her armpits. The cold there was a shock. It dizzied me. I pulled at her, shifting her about in the boot. Lifting her into my arms was impossible. Though thin, she was too heavy for me.
Low laughter came from drinkers on the veranda.
I reached for her feet. They felt small and familiar. I gripped them roughly, as you would clasp a nettle. I figured the harder I squeezed, the less I would feel. I had them now in my hands. I pulled.
Her knee joints bent stiffly, smoothly, as though steeped in cold oil. Was this the onset of rigor mortis, or the end of it? I pulled her round so her legs dangled over the lip of the boot. I had to reach in further now to lift her hips up and out. I bent down and wrapped my arms under her legs. My head pulsed as I pulled at her. It was no use. I had somehow to get my weight behind her. I would have to prise her out of the boot. If I climbed in there with her, maybe I could push her out.
I was practically on top of her now, fumbling for the right hold, and suddenly I could not bear it any more. I rolled out of the boot and sat down in the road, clenching my teeth against the sound rising in my throat.
Her feet dangled in front of me.
I had an idea.
I shuffled around and leant my back against the boot, my head between her legs. I clamped her legs to my shoulders and clambered onto my knees. The tarmac bit into my knees as I hefted her up. With the backs of her knees round my shoulders, I tried to stand, slowly, straining. I paused half-way, getting my balance, poised like a weightlifter, one leg locked behind me, the other bent forward. At least this way I was facing away from the boot. I took a deep breath, held it, and stood up straight, trembling against her weight. I tottered forward and she came with me, out of the boot. Fresh from its baking confines, she came out cool, inert as earth. There was a double jolt as first her shoulders and then her head bumped against the sill and slid away. Her weight was too much for me. I dropped her and her head smacked the tarmac.
I staggered forward into the dark and froze, listening. I couldn’t hear a thing. No murmurs, no laughter.
Mum lay sprawled on the tarmac – an indeterminate shape. I could not be sure what I was actually seeing. She lay every which way. She made no sense. I reached for her in the dark. I found her feet again.
But I couldn’t just drag her. Not over the tarmac, Christ. (My knees stung where I had broken the skin trying to lift her from the boot. They were wet, bleeding.)
There was a blanket in the boot, laid there to stop luggage sliding around. I found it bunched up in a corner. I pulled it out and tucked it under her feet. I tried to tie it around her ankles but the blanket was too small, the material too thick. I tucked the corners around each other so the blanket protected her feet as I dragged her down the road.
I reached under her arms and her head flopped against my belly. There was a little starlight now. The plastic bag around her head had stuck against her face. That eye was still open, a black pebble pressed against the plastic.
I started to drag her along the lane and the blanket gave way immediately. I laid her down again, took up the blanket, shook it out and spread it beside her. I rolled her onto it. Sitting down in the road, I took hold of the edges of the blanket and pulled. The weight of her pinned the blanket against the road. It didn’t move.
Now I straddled her and gathered the corners of the blanket together, bunching them in my hands. I tried to lift her. Her arms trailed on the ground. Her head dangled and swung as though her neck was broken. My back sang. I couldn’t possibly manage her weight, lifting her at such an unnatural angle. I couldn’t lift her. I couldn’t drag her. It was impossible. Panic strummed my bladder.
Then it came to me. I sat down in the road and I took off my trainers and slipped them onto her feet. With my shoes protecting her heels, I could safely drag her along the tarmac. The only problem was the amount of noise we would make. I took off my socks. I tugged the socks over my trainers to dampen the sound they’d make against the surface of the lane. I knew what I was doing now. I was no longer afraid. A thumping numbness had overcome me. I reached under her arms and I lifted her against my waist; her head lolled against my stomach. The tarmac felt smooth and cool against my feet as I pulled her further into the dark of the lane. Even with socks over them to dampen the sound, the heels of my trainers rattled and chocked, but at the top of the lane, around the pub, nothing moved: the drinkers on the veranda had all gone inside.
The trees parted above me and the tarmac gave out. The ground was warmer here and gritty, smothered with dirt and twigs. I was nearing the mill-race. The sound of rushing water overlaid every other sound. Where crumbling brick embankments canalised the river, turning it past what was now the front door, a wooden railing guarded the drop. I laid my mother’s body down in the dark and pulled the socks and shoes from her feet. The flagstones were slippery under me as I tugged the body alongside the balustrade, to where water spilt over the weir.
A light beside the porch snapped on. I wheeled round, dazzled, and stared at the glossy black door of the mill house. The lion’s head knocker. The little glass eye of its spy-hole. Had my movements triggered the light – or had someone turned it on from inside the house?
I pulled my mother by the arm. The arm gave slowly, turning and articulating like machinery. I let go and it stayed in the air, pointing back at me at an unnatural angle. I crawled around her and sat down and got my feet against her and pushed her underneath the balustrade. The uprights of the balustrade were close together and she was too tall to simply slip between them. I pressed my foot into her stomach. The air remaining in her lungs escaped and the bag around her head inflated like a balloon. The plastic sticking to her eyeball peeled away. The black pebble disappeared. The bag misted, saving me from the sight of her face as she fell through the balustrade. The rushing waters masked all other sounds. I barely heard her hit the water.
The porch-light went off. After all, it was only a security light. I stood up and the light came on again. I put my shoes and socks back on, gritting my teeth in concentration.
A new plan was forming in my head. Up till now I had only been concerned with getting the body out of the boot. Mum’s eventual discovery was something I had been prepared to leave to chance. Now I realised that this too could be managed. There was a way I could tie everything up tonight, and I would not even have to tell a lie, or not much of a lie. What could be more natural than for me to run back now to the pub, breathless, staring, haunted, close to tears? I would tell my dad I had seen Mum – spotted her on my shortcut home. That Mum was floating in the river. Dad would follow me down the track, over the bridge, along the bank of the river – and there she would be. Together we would find her, and terrible as this would be, it would be better, unimaginably better, than what would have happened if I had not intervened.
I leaned over the parapet. I could just about make her out – a pale shape, rotating slowly in the middle dark.
I’d forgotten to take the plastic bag off her head.
I closed my eyes, trying to work this out. I wanted her body found, of course. The sooner the better.
But with the bag over her head?
Who puts a bag over their head before jumping in a river?
I was going to have to find her and take off the bag.
The bridge was fenced off to stop sheep wandering off the common. I was half-way over the stile when I heard:
Click-clack.
I froze.
Click-clack.
I knew this sound.
The porch-light went out. (
Click-clack.
) I waited, my eyes adjusting little by little to the dark. I heard nothing more beyond the race of the water. I saw nothing at all. Even my mother had disappeared. No white shape blurred the millpond’s soot-black surface. She had been carried downstream.
I climbed off the stile.
Click-clack.
I was being watched.
I waved my arms. I was out of the range of the porch-light, but even in the dark:
Click-clack.
There was a soldier out there, watching me. My movement was enough to trigger his visual vest! I tried to find my voice, but no sound came. I hunted the darkness for a halo of white hair, but all I saw were the ghost limbs of distant trees.