Cryers Hill Read online

  'Are you with us, Sean?' Determined, give her that.

  Sean felt his dazed self pushing through a froth of blur and underwater sound. A girl's giggle rushed up on his left as he surfaced and managed to focus, at last, on Miss Day and her urgent question.

  Young Miss Day: there she was, there was her soft worried face with just a hint of approaching indignance, her sheaf of hair twisted over one shoulder, her arms folded patiently or impatiently (Sean couldn't tell) across her chest, across the pinafore of a summer dress that revealed her long, freckled knees and bow-shaped calves. Miss Day wore dresses that tricked you into supposing she was a child too. It was confusing. The dresses were short, with puffed sleeves or smocking or bows, and she allowed her conker-coloured hair to spill down over her shoulders the way mermaids do when luring men to their deaths. She can't have been that much older than Sean's brother, Ty. She liked to yawn and rub her eyes and smooth her dress as if she'd awoken all of a sudden in Wonderland. It swayed you. First you thought she was on your side, a child still in her own heart, then she'd surprise you with her exasperation, some scornful remark, and you'd realise she was just a grown-up after all.

  Miss Day liked to dash about with the kids in the playground, that was her thing; football, rounders or tag, she reckoned herself a bit of an athlete, a bit of a huntress, blowing on her little whistle, slicing up and down on her long knees. She'd throw her lustrous hair behind her for the wind to unravel, and all the boys would stare and run into each other. Mr Stone, vice-head, found the trilling of that little whistle irresistible. It brought him like the call of a conch shell from whatever smoky corner he had wrapped himself in. Mr Stone wasn't the only one. You would catch Miss Day leaning in the staffroom doorway with Mr Turner or Mr Price or the teacher with long hair who only came on a Wednesday. She was no longer your friend on these occasions, you would find that out. You might say something as you slunk glumly by, Hello, Miss, for instance, and she'd pull an eyebrow up at Mr Whoever and look at you without replying, and you'd see that her eyes were cold and speckled as a lizard's.

  'Hello? Are you with us?'

  'Yes, Miss, sorry, Miss,' Sean replied.

  'Nice to have you back on earth, Sean.' Miss Day spoke cheerily like she meant it.

  Sean brightened. It was a good thing to say, clever. It was what you said to returning astronauts. Wur.

  There were words on the blackboard. Miss Day suspected Sean might like to read them out. The air was smoky with chalk dust, as if writing them had started a fire. Sean looked at them warily.

  Sean stared. He narrowed his genius eye.

  'You look exactly like,' he said boldly, before pausing momentarily to check Miss Day's face for indignation. 'Three dirty old mangold wurzels. Go along at once and wash your faces.'

  Miss Day nodded. 'And why were their faces dirty, Sean? Did they tumble into the river?' A rumble of laughter. 'Did they fall head-first into a cow-pat?' More laughter, louder. Jason Smith forcing it out, still going after the others had stopped. Sean too was rocking happily in his chair. Miss Day was funny for a woman, very.

  'OK, Sean. This one please.'

  'The ice angel gave the boy a snowball.' Sean turned triumphantly towards the girl giggler on his left. 'Why don't you put a plank of wood across it and make it into shoes.'

  'And the next?' Miss Day chirruped. Sean filled his lungs again, for under water, for deep space.

  'To make a snowman you always need snow, coal for eyes, a carrot nose and two branches.' Easy. Peasy. Pudding. Pie.

  'Good boy, Sean.'

  Sean grinned at his hands. Sean glanced about proudly.

  'Who would like to read the next part? Jason? Wendy?' Miss Day pointed at the words with her long finger.

  'Off you go, Jonathan. Good boy.'

  Five

  THE DEAD GIRL had marks on her legs. Sean heard his mother say it to his father while she was submerging something in the kitchen sink. Sean was lurking in the hall, prodding the air bubbles that were gathering beneath the wallpaper around the doorway. Upstairs meanwhile, concoctions gurgled in the airing cupboard, all of them carefully organised and linked by rubber tubing – nameless liquids that lay still until they frothed and furred over with bitter-smelling scurf. Home-made beer. You could hear the hiss and bubble as it fermented in the buckets.

  The dead girl had marks on her legs. Sean felt his skin cool. He waited, hunched out of sight, for more. His father said, 'What kind of marks?' Exactly the right question to ask. When his mum didn't reply, Sean pressed his face into the wall, flattening an air bubble between his eyes, waiting for the words to float out; hoping they would not be horrible: hoping they would be.

  'Dunno,' she said. 'Sort of shapes, symbols, Chinese maybe.'

  Nothing Chinese had ever happened in Cryers Hill, maybe not even in the whole of Buckinghamshire. Sean's frown mirrored his father's on the other side of the wall.

  'Chinese?' His dad spoke it low, as though it intrigued him, unlikely as it sounded.

  'Or Japanese, you know, Oriental.'

  'Oriental?'

  'Or Arabic maybe, Egyptian, I don't know.'

  'Well, make your mind up.'

  Sean's dad hated surprises, secrets, uncertainties, things on tenterhooks. He preferred Jim Reeves singing 'I Love You Because', and whisky and soda and Embassy No. 3 He had a good head of hair, Gordon Matthews did. He had quick blue eyes and a nose that had been broken twice.

  Sean thought of the James Bond film he'd seen in High Wycombe. The baddies were narrow-eyed villains from exotic countries with horrible scars and cruel ambitions. They wore collarless tunics or a fez or an eyepatch and their weaponry was underhand and nasty, boomerang blades, sharks, that sort of thing. Sean couldn't fathom what such a person would be doing in Cryers Hill.

  His mother, Cathleen, had a selection of wigs upstairs in contrasting styles. They were kept in a box labelled 'Cathleen Matthews'. Unknown to her, Sean had tried them all on over the years. Now her voice had grown shrill.

  'Janet Davis said it was scribble and Colleen from the semis said it was symbols. Although someone, I can't remember who, said the police said it was something foreign.'

  'A foreigner?'

  They fell quiet. A foreigner. They waited, perhaps for a sound, as though, even now, the perpetrator of this exotic tattoo, this mysterious character of inexact provenance – this foreigner – was at large, spying or stealing or whatever it was foreigners did. They listened. Maybe listening hard would reveal fancy foreign footsteps picking their way around the Hillman Avengers and communal bins. Sean had heard that a great many foreigners were unable to read, write or speak English at all. They came from countries that were far away and generally strange in their outlook. Never mind that there were two men up there on the moon, the moon didn't count as foreign. You could see it every night for a start and sometimes during the day. It hung over the estate like an old friend, like leaving the landing light on, reassuring, not like the Congo or Ceylon or even Halifax. The men on the moon were Neil and Buzz and everyone knew their faces; if they were to turn up at the post office, or pop in for a quick half at the White Lion, no one would bat an eyelid. They were everyone's heroes, they were locals in everyone's local, and they had seen off the Russians good and proper. They had described their small steps and giant leaps with poetic polish, and the whole world heard it spoken in the English language and so now it was official. The moon was an English-speaking planet, which made it practically British.

  True, the people opposite went to the Costa Brava every year and Sean's dad had visited Rotterdam, and yes, they were saving up to go to Gibraltar since Sean's brother hadn't managed to win a single family holiday competition with his foolproof genius eye, not even the one in Bournemouth, but still. Foreign was far away and strange, foreign was not to be trusted, foreign was foreign.

  Finally his father said, 'Enoch was right.'

  Sean was inclined to suppose this had to be someone from work, or the Bible.

&nb
sp; 'I worry about him.' His mother this time.

  This was the thing about grown-up conversation: it was like a game, you had to fill in the gaps. This was why they talked so much; they gave away clues, nothing more, you had to do the rest yourself, it wasn't easy. Often the real meaning was the thing that was not said at all. Sometimes the thing that was said was simply not true. Even the adults themselves struggled to understand one another. You could hear them any day of the week, bewildered as the next man: What's that supposed to mean? I never said that. You're putting words into my mouth. What the hell are you on about? Am I making myself clear? No one knew what anybody meant. The whole thing was a minefield of tripwires and unexploded word bombs, of meanings, half-meanings and non-meanings. You had to get in between the words, a bit like the liar alphabet.

  'He's not managing.'

  Tough one. Sean waited. It was an utterly mysterious remark. Who was Enoch? Why wasn't he managing? Did he know the foreigner? The one who had killed the girl?

  'Don't start. He'll be all right.' His dad. You had to pick out all the liar words.

  'See if his teacher agrees with you then.' His mother's voice spiralling upwards again, his dad winding her tighter with his big key.

  'Young girl like that? Just out of school herself, what does she know?'

  'She knows her skirts are too short.'

  His dad threw back his head and laughed. A joke. Someone wore a skirt. Enoch?

  'Oh, I know you don't mind.'

  'Any beer in that fridge?'

  The key in her back twists a final inch. Now she was fully wound.

  'I know what you're after, Gordon Anthony Matthews.'

  Now she was clockwork. The words came whirring, while her feet rushed her to every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen.

  'Cath, Cath. You don't even know the capital of Poland. Don't kid yourself.'

  'Oh, that's right, I forgot. Your name's Albert Einstein.'

  'Don't get your knickers in a twist, bloody hell. Can't a man make a joke?'

  'Ho. Ho. Ho.'

  'Little Raquel Welch number moved in at twenty-nine, I see.'

  The fridge door slammed. A pause while Gordon cocked his head.

  'What did she want then, the lady teacher?'

  'What do you think she wanted?'

  'I haven't got a crystal ball, Cath. Have I got a crystal ball?'

  'A child could see it, Gor.'

  'Are you trying to make me look stupid?'

  Sean closed his eyes. What the bludyell were they saying? Now something else happened. Now his dad was angry.

  'I saw that! Thank you kindly. I saw that! Cheeky cow.'

  Whatever it was his mother had done, she was doing it again.

  'It's called innuendo, Cath. It begins with an i.'

  Women did things with their faces, complicated things. His dad reckoned he had it all figured out. Have you ever watched a pair of pigeons on a roof, Sean? Gor enjoyed natural history. Have you? It'll tell you everything you need to know about the mating game. His dad had learned to read the signals. A woman closing her eyes could mean you were a fool, a bore, a liar; or it could mean she loved you but couldn't say it; or it could mean she was having a bit on the side. This particular phrase cropped up regularly in Gor's conversation. Whatever his mother had done with her face it would have likely been fleeting, but his dad had learned to read the smallest messages in faces, especially his wife's.

  'What do you know about Einstein, Cath?'

  It was frustrating, the silence. Sean too wanted to know about Einstein. He needed to know whether he was connected to Enoch, whether the clues to this whole exchange lay in these two names. Still nothing.

  'I'm waiting, Cath.'

  Sean waited too. This was women all over. His dad had explained it more than once. They carried on their backs an invisible shell, he said. From time to time, usually without warning, a woman retreats inside her shell and will not come out. Sean had been amazed by this, though even in his stunned consideration of it, he realised he could recall examples and saw with clarity that it was true. Why would they want to do that? His dad seemed none the wiser on this. Because they can, was all he came up with. He said it sadly, without conviction, and Sean thought of witches and princes.

  'You don't know a bloody thing about Einstein!'

  Sean thought he couldn't blame his father for being upset. She had introduced this other person, called him by a funny name, and now refused to reveal who this other person was.

  'I asked a simple question, Cath, a simple question.'

  Silence. His mother had entered her shell. Neither he nor his father could winkle her out now. Bobbing in the silence were Chinese symbols, a dead girl, Bond villains, Miss Day, a foreigner and someone called Enoch. Sean flattened another wallpaper bubble with his teeth. His father burped. It had impact where the words had none. It was a sound that said, That's the end of it, like a bell.

  Sean thought, what if the sun burns out? What if I become possessed by an evil spirit? What if an alien ship lands? And, what if I accidentally eat poison? Sean thought whatifs a lot. There were a lot of whatifs to think about. If you tried for the rest of your life you wouldn't get through all the whatifs that could be. These questions pressed down on Sean whether he liked it or not. He thought maybe this was why mad people were mad. This could mean that madness was just around the corner. What if people turned mad and didn't know it? What if half the world were, in fact, mad? What if these questions and all the others spun you about until you were rotating inside a vortex of whatifs? What then?

  Six

  SINCE BOYHOOD WALTER Brown had tried to imagine the girl who would one day be his own. He tried to conjure her from the hawthorn hedge and stile. He daydreamed and night-dreamed her. Eventually he gave her gold hair and called her Cissie. At night he felt the whisper of her breath and the arch of her back. He decided she would be happy as Larry and love him all the time. He upset himself over how she would suffer at his funeral. He pictured her clinging and crying by his grave, while the mourners shook their heads at the pity of it all.

  He thought about her when the rain was coming down and when the wind pushed him home, through the fields, from school. He thought about her when the heat of the coals in the teatime fire made his eyes smart and when the sun stroked down his back in the morning. Sometimes he wondered if thinking about her this much might bring her, just from the force of wanting and the pull of his imaginings.

  So he waited for her but she didn't come. While he waited for the Cissie he'd made up in his head, he practised talking to live girls. He tried Mary Hatt.

  'I saw a man get his head stove in once.'

  These were the first words Mary Hatt spoke to Walter Brown in the yard at Cryers Hill village school. Walter nodded politely and tried not to look at her face for fear this would release a whole chain of events. In contrast to her elder sister, the graceful Isabel, Mary Hatt carried herself carelessly and released her thoughts directly from her mouth, without censorship or consideration. In 1930 this was not regarded as a desirable attribute in a girl.

  'Yes,' she continued good-humouredly, 'kicked him when he was turned. His brains went in a bucket.'

  Walter struggled to come up with a suitable reply. Mary did so for him.

  'Never mind,' she said.

  Walter could not think of a single thing to say. He stared at the slates and waited for time to move on.

  'Mind you, I seen worse than that,' she continued pleasantly.

  He listened to her shoe scraping the stone, her breath go in and out of her open mouth, loud as Doug Shaw's breeding bull.

  'I'm sure you have.'

  'I have.'

  He was done for, he suspected. He didn't know why he thought that.

  'Which d'you want to hear about?'

  'None. Thank you.'

  'Well. So, one had his arm off from a scythe and another one got his whole head taked off by a Marshall engine at threshing time. Dogs drunk all the blood off the groun
d. His legs went on all right, like a chicken's, trying to run.'

  And she laughed a startled, good-natured laugh as if this were not so terrible as it sounded. Walter was grateful for the laugh that wiped from his mind the poor man's scrabbling legs. Now at least they wouldn't have to stand there in silent contemplation of the wretched fellow, headless as a Christmas bird, running everywhere and nowhere at all.

  He looked at her and felt the shock of her bold blunt stare. When he looked away her face remained like an imprint on his eye, her wind-tangled hair and jumble of teeth, so that he saw it over everything, the Victorian brickwork, the drain gulleys, the sky.

  'Something in there?' she asked, as he pressed his finger against his eyelid.

  'Gone now,' he replied, not daring to glance again.

  'Give it a rub then.'

  He obeyed for something to do.

  'My grandad had a glass eye he could take out. He swallowed it once, playing the fool.'

  'Oh.'

  'He got it back. Came out his rear, covered in plop.'

  'Oh.'

  'Yes. So, cheerio then.'

  Walter stood there a while after she'd gone. 'Cheerio.' He didn't trust himself to think or move; almost as though his head too had come clean off his shoulders and his legs wanted to dash nowhere at all. Here then was Mary Hatt. True enough it was to say she was no Cissie.

  Sankey and Walter stand together at the old gate on the Four Ashes road. They lean their backs to the valley view. Behind them are the forested hills, sharply angled farmland and flowing sky. They smoke. Walter is forbidden to light up at home until he is twenty-one. Sankey too is unable to smoke his pipe at his lodgings. The old gate on the Four Ashes road lay between their respective addresses. If it was raining or inclement they would shelter in Town Wood or retire to the White Lion. They will speak with each and everyone who happens along. Just now it is the road sweeper, Saul, trimming the banks and verges, carrying his mole traps – a shilling he would get for a good pelt, rats too. He was surprisingly effective with his catapult and lead balls. A menace rats were, in the feed rooms, corn ricks; Saul earned his fresh milk and cheese.