Cryers Hill Read online

Sean felt his stare growing blank and stupid; he tried to close his mouth and found he couldn't; he tried to move and found that his arm was nailed to the tree; he tried to think and found his brain would only tick over the same word: prick, prick, prick.

  'Come on,' she said. She was already stamping over tree roots, dusting off her skirt as she went, confident he would be hurrying up behind her. But he was stuck to a tree, his mouth full of fear and words he didn't understand.

  The problem with Typhoid is he's a genius. That's what they say. Sean has waited patiently, without irony, for evidence of this. It was true that Ty had mystical gifts when it came to Spot the Ball competitions in the newspaper. He was almost never wrong. For a while the prize money bought their dinner in the White Lion beer garden two nights a week. They won it so many times they finally had to be investigated by the competition organisers. Then Ty made it into the local paper. His big mule head took up all the photo. Sean carried it around with him. He had to ask people to read out the words 'Local,' 'Every' and 'Time' for him, but he knew 'Boy Spots Balls'. 'Local Boy Spots Balls Every Time,' it said. Then the picture of Ty, his ball-spotting little eyes squinted into slits, his mouth hanging askew, as though something more complicated than a ball had foxed him. Then it said Ty liked Cadbury's Aztec bars and James Bond, as if anyone cared. It didn't say he had a brother. That's when their parents decided he was a genius.

  When finally the family was prohibited from entering Spot the Ball competitions, their dad took his eldest son to the racecourse at Newbury. The theory was if he could spot a ball, why not a horse? They set off like two men, in clean shirts, with sandwiches and a flask and a roll of pound notes warming in the glove compartment. Sean was left behind with his mother and the dirty dishes, like a girl.

  When Ty was concentrating, when he was getting the feeling, you weren't allowed to enter the room, speak, move or cough. If you interrupted or distracted him in any way – for instance one time Sean walked past on the front path and glanced in – you were banned from the area until further notice. Ty explained that Sean ruined his concentration just by being in the vicinity, so Sean was banished to the further reaches of the estate, to the Wilderness, while Ty worked his genius eye. They won electric hair curlers, a whisk, a petrol voucher, a bear in a sombrero and twelve pounds in cash.

  'One wheel on my wagon, but I'm still rolling along.' Their dad had stood by the car with his hands on his hips and an enormous pair of binoculars slung around his neck, as if now it were lions and elephants they were spotting. Somewhere at the end of those dark twin tunnels lay their fortune. Ty, the predictor, the cosmic foreteller, the spotter of invisible balls, slouched towards him. He glared momentarily at the estate and threw himself into the front seat, sweating with self-importance, sunglasses perched improbably on his nose, like now he's Chan Canasta or something, like he's going to saw the car in half.

  It turned out Ty had no feeling for horses or, at Ladbrokes in High Wycombe, any feeling for greyhounds either. There were no Tarzan cries that week. They were back to the kitchen table, ticking boxes on the football pools, sticking Green Shield Stamps and entering competitions to win holidays, cars, caravans, kitchens and cash. Ty's big time was over, but he didn't know it yet. He discovered he could hold his breath longer than anyone else in the school. Their dad timed him with a stopwatch while submerging his son's head in the sink, and subsequently wrote to the Guinness Book of Records, but they already had a record-holding diver from the Philippines. Sean watched Ty turning red, purple and blue in an effort to improve on his time, and reckoned one day, with any luck, he would just explode, like a freeze-dried dinner on gas mark 10, and the local paper would come round again.

  *

  It occurs to Sean with a pang of likelihood that it was him who killed the girl in Gomms Wood. The thought pulls open his mouth and leaves his eyes staring at nothing. He wonders it for ages and the more he wonders, the more he thinks he can remember doing it.

  He waits at the place where he has waited many long hours for Ann to fly up over the fence on her swing. He crouches beside one of the blocks of garages. Ordinarily, she flies up around about this time of day, and he watches her face against the sky, where it belongs. But not today. She does not come out today. The garage doors are made of tin, some are already painted. A blue door squeals open and two partially dressed girls run out screaming like rabbits.

  Sean thinks that if it was him who killed her, would he run away or give himself up to the police? He wonders if they would believe him. He wonders if they know it was him already. If it is true that it was him, he thinks, then this makes him a criminal. That is quite good. He wonders if maybe he should tell just one person and leave it at that. Then that wouldn't be lying. That would be more or less telling the truth and he might not get into trouble. He tries to remember. He asks himself questions, cross-examines himself. He will have to search his own room for clues, he decides. He thinks about Ann.

  He likes the narrow space between the blocks of garages where you can crawl and imagine the walls closing in until you were squished, like on Danger Man. The wall on the left is Ann's garage wall. He kisses the bricks. He glances about but he is completely hidden here. He licks the bricks. They taste all right, like exploding sand. If he loves Ann then he will probably marry her.

  Sean carves the words with a piece of broken brick, and then he is fed up with it. He edges out sideways. Everywhere is hot and smoky with brick dust. He can see the air wobbling as if it is turning to water. There is no one about. The machines are deadly quiet, so it must be lunchtime. The men always go to their hut for their sandwiches and cigarettes and then they lie around and rub themselves like sea lions while the sun burns them the colour of the houses. Sean feels hungry. His mouth is full of brick. He decides he will walk home for some Sugar Smacks. He decides he will tell Ann he is a murderer.

  Thirteen

  YOUNG MARY HATT says she has kissed one of the lads at the farriers working up Springfields way. More than this she says she kissed one of the pigman's boys while he was sleeping in a ditch. It is hard to know whether she is telling the truth. She says she will show Walter how kissing is done and if he hurries she will show him now in Gomms Wood before she is required to help with the laundering.

  Walter runs so hard he expects his teeth to fall out of his head. Everything is in his way, trees, brambles, gates, a barking dog, Mrs Prior with her cousin's friend, Eileen, from Ilfracombe. Hello, young man. What a nice lad. Don't they grow. What's the hurry then? Where's the fire?

  Walter had escaped from the house quick as a cat burglar, his mother's voice ringing in his ears. 'Don't you walk on my clean floor! Don't you walk on my clean floor!' And now every item in the landscape is conspiring to keep him from Gomms Wood where the rest of his life is waiting. Mary Hatt, queen of women, wait for me.

  Truth is, even as the fields and hedges are blurring past, Walter remains astounded by Mary Hatt and her behaviour. Did she care nothing for her reputation? Did she care nothing about a whipping? If caught, she would be thrashed along with those boys, if they got hold of them, and any boys working for John Hatt would be instantly dismissed without pay. Something similar had happened a year or two back to the Bennion family: a few stolen kisses, and the lad in question and his family were turfed out of their tied cottage, the father jobless, the mother pregnant. They moved up Missenden way and cleared fields of stones for work.

  In the wood it is as cool as a barn and the stillness makes him stop and listen. The loudest thing is the sound of his panting and the roaring of his blood in his ears. His eyes adjust to the gloom. There is a tangle of hazel clustered with nuts and he pulls one off to chew. Where is she then? There is a click from somewhere and a warbler trembles out a note. 'Mary?' His voice sounds unnaturally loud. The wood holds itself in case he calls again. Through the trees he can see the bright juicy meadow belonging to Mr Creasy. He usually puts his bull in there, a great black beast of a thing. Walter crouches to catch a glimpse of it but
sees only the waving white faces of the meadowsweet. Usually when you are looking for a bull it is standing directly behind you.

  'Wally Wally Wallflower,

  Growing up so high.

  We're all ladies,

  And we shall have to die.'

  Walter spins around and around but she is nowhere to be seen.

  'Except Ena Kirton,

  She's no relation.

  She can go and turn her back,

  To all the congregation.'

  He will spank her, he decides, when he finds her. Teach her a lesson.

  'Marry in September's shine,

  Your living will be rich and fine.'

  Mary arrives suddenly. She falls from the tree as if she has unexpectedly lost her footing. There is a crash of foliage and a surprisingly loud thud, and there she is, fallen to earth, stunned, winded, staring up at an indifferent God. Walter rushes to her and kicks her in the calf.

  'That'll teach you.'

  She has no breath, only panic and surprise. Her mouth is open though no air or words can come. Her hands jerk at her sides. Walter stares. He has seen a rabbit look like this; shot in the head, not cleanly, it danced about for a time. Walter wonders whether she is dying; he decides not. He kneels down beside her. Her hat has fallen some feet away and her blue dress is twisted up around her waist, revealing her woollen knickers and pale thighs scored with scratches all the way down to her gumboots. Her body stiffens and her teeth clench. Her face pulls to the side, as if she is travelling at high speed. Walter detects something curious; she trembles as if she were powered by the Electric Company. Her eyes slide. Walter waits. He knows to wait while she is fitting. Her face is hot when he touches it, sticky. He imagines she may die one day in more or less this way, with a crash and thud.

  He bends down to kiss her. He knows he oughtn't. She tastes sour and salty and she smells of sweat, tree lichen, laundry soap. She is his own angel fallen from the sky. 'Mary Mary, quite contrary,' he tells her. She is handsome, he thinks, in spite of it all. She moves her arm quickly behind his neck. She pulls him down and astonishes him as she pushes her warm tongue all the way inside his mouth.

  Walter got himself caught with his mouth open once before; head flung back, his .410 between his knees. Bird scaring was not bad employment, Walter did not mind it when he was younger. It was boring, that was all. You had to fire to keep yourself awake more than frighten the birds, but eventually, especially in good weather, you would fall asleep. The man who found him was the same man who hired him, and he let him have it hard on both ears with his fists. Walter went home deaf in one ear, reeling as if he'd just got off a boat. On Valley Road he decided he would not go directly home. He found Mary by the cow byre with a butterfly net and a tobacco pouch and showed her his reddened ears and she squeezed them to see exactly how painful they were and she laughed.

  'Tell me how much you love me and all that,' she instructed.

  'I'm bloody deaf. I'm telling nothing.'

  Mary wrapped his head in her scarf made cold from a dip in the water trough. 'Tell me or be sorry.'

  Walter closed his eyes and made up something fancy out of nowhere. Daft words. She would not ever tell him, not on your nellie, no. She would not tell him how soothing were his idiot words.

  Walter and Mary walk the lane home, between the stubble fields. Most are already gleaned, with just a few women and children now left in the big field gathering the loose corn. They would keep going with their sacks until it got dark. Walter can still feel her rough kiss between his teeth. Mary is dragging her boots, singing some kind of song. Walter likes to sing too – you do when you're walking, working, worshipping – but not the way Mary sings, like a bird shot in the breast.

  Sugar-beeting would start soon, a hard job, nobody liked it, but there were always plenty of lads willing for the shilling. Hilda Brown objected to her son spending all his time in the fields, but she allowed Walter to help at harvest, and he regularly earned a few coins here and there. A shilling an acre he would get for pulling up docks and half a crown for singling mangolds, which was another back-breaking task. Hilda, however, had kept a careful eye out for signs of passion in her son. His employment was waiting for him at the Water Company. His father and grandfather worked their way up. He must be ready to begin his ascent, the same. She bought him his first suit and shoes before he left school to make certain his future was set, to see off any ideas that came in the night to ruin everything. This way her boy would be steady and secure. Not for him farming, skilled labour, craftsmanship; unreliable trades, dependent on the weather or the times or a glut of customers. The Water Company needed no such encouragements.

  Walter and Mary walk the dusty lane between the uncut hedges. As the rabbits scattered at the neck of the woods, Walter shot them all with his imaginary twelve-bore and Mary makes the noise of their cries. A smell of stocks and yarrow thickens the air now and there is a scent too of cut corn with a spice of horse dung. Just here a hare was killed last night, a doe. Her leverets will starve until they are finished off by the fox. The dry dust hangs high, gauzing the sun, softening the distant line of ragged elms that marks the field's boundary.

  'D'you want to marry me then?'

  'No,' Walter replies, not unkindly.

  Mary looks behind and sees their bootprints in the dust. She stamps harder to make a better impression.

  'Well, I don't care,' she says.

  To take her mind off Walter's response she remembers that to find the North Star you have to first find the Plough. You follow the two stars at the end of the tip of the Plough upwards until you get to the brightest star, and that star is the North Star. A ploughman had told her that. His name was Swift. You only knew their last names. Ploughmen knew about the sky as well as the ground. Tonight she would take a look for that bright star and make a wish and then Walter had better look out. It would be a secret else it would not come true.

  'Bugga you, then, Wally Wallflower. Clear off then.'

  Walter looks at her, smeared with dust, stamping her feet like a baby, and he thinks, after you kiss a girl they go queer. He will remember that.

  Charles Sankey had none of the old traditional skills of the local craftsmen: the bodgers, caners, polishers and cabinetmakers. He worked in one of the new automated chair factories in Wycombe – the chair shop they called it. He worked maskless in a spray booth, using methylated spirit as a solvent. When the fumes overwhelmed him he opened the door for ventilation and if that didn't work he tried a sacred song and that always did the trick. The work was not bad, he thought, a bit cold in winter, even after you got the wood burners going; when it was cold you needed to keep the doors closed and the chemical vapours would hang in the air and burn everyone's eyes and throats. You got used to the sickly smell; Sankey found smoking a cigarette helped. Of course contrariwise the chair shop was hot in summertime and then everyone boiled over chronic. Often Sankey and the others would be put on short time due to the lack of customer demand and, depending on the time of year, this would get them into the fruit orchards or fields for harvesting and clear their heads of fumes and dust.

  Sankey took to cherry-picking. Fruit it was in actual fact that made this place famous. They had orchards hereabouts of apple, pear, plum; but it was cherries that made the local reputation. Little black cherries sweet enough to make your cheeks ache, known as corones, pronounced croons. Black juice like ink that stained your clothes something rotten. Tall as any elm those cherry trees, inter-bred with wild varieties until they were colossal. In a mature orchard they blotted out the sky.

  The orchards improved Sankey's health every summer during the picking season. Air, sunshine, fresh fruit and, moreover, close proximity to God. The ladders took you up and up. Longer than any ladder he'd seen before in his life, they appeared tall enough to reach inside the clouds, with rungs enough to take you all the way to Heaven. They flared out wide at the bottom, funnel-like, for stability, making them look peculiar but inviting. A feller by the name of Bil
l Newton made them locally in Primrose Hill (he was known as Isaac by the fruit pickers, as homage to the very gravity that brought the uninitiated down off a ladder quicker than a flash).

  It was two cherry pickers per ladder usually, picking different parts of the tree, smart in their waistcoats and moustaches, chattering like women in spite of there being no ground under them for several seconds.

  Sankey took to it straight away. The heights didn't bother him. After two seasons he was as good as any of them. At the top of a ladder on a clear day he felt a kind of elation at the thought that he was right under God's nose, so to speak. He sang hymns and sacred songs and the other pickers joined him for the popular ones, 'Praise my Soul, the King of Heaven' and 'All People that on Earth do Dwell', and he filled his bushel basket faster for the joy the singing made inside him.

  Cherry orchards had enemies same as all crops and the weather mattered to fruit like it mattered to corn, barley, hay and wheat. Heavy rain would split the cherries and they would all go bad. Everyone had an eye to the sky and a proverb made from experience. In good weather, however, Charles Sankey was for two or three weeks in June the happiest fruit picker in the south of England. Life, however, as anyone knew, was not a bowl of cherries. The picking season would end quicker than it started. There was the cereal harvest then, but the money was better at the chair shop, so Sankey would return with his friends to the rooms that were only ever freezing or boiling, and to the invisible poison fumes.

  It was said Sankey had a hymn or four for every occasion. It was said he sang in the womb and even during his own birth, whereupon his mother, terrified out of her wits, died. Indeed, she had died young and he had hardly known her, except for a small grey-brown photograph he kept in his pocket. He imagined her a kind woman, her face suggested as much in the picture. The light was all on one side of her, brightening her skin and eyes and hair so that they glowed with goodness and humility. The other side was cast in shadow. Only the small brooch on her collar had caught the camera's attention, though insufficiently to suggest what exactly it might be. Sankey had examined the photograph every day of his life. He had long ago decided the brooch was the Saviour on the Cross, and that every person had two distinct sides, light and dark.