There’s the playground where Johnny Dobson fought back against Mr Addison. There’s the school field where I got ambushed on my birthday and I was egged to within an inch of my life. Now it was all just memories. Then and now. No context. His life was a flatline without detail. Bedtime stories, and not very good ones at that.
He walked along the edge of the school grounds until he reached the gym. Everything the same. Everything changed. His youth was so close sometimes, he felt he could feel it beneath his fingers. He saw himself every day in any number of mirrors, and it was Don, it was him. But a photograph from even as recent as five years ago displayed to him a massive change in how he looked. His skin greyer now, his eyebrows lighter, his eyes more sunken. But he had not seen it happen. He had been tricked.
He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn’t like not having a map for it.
Movement. He turned and gazed out over the school fields
and saw a couple gesticulating wildly at each other as they raced across the grass towards the main road. She was having to run to keep up with him, her red scarf flapping at her throat like a terrible wound. She spotted Don and pointed at him. The man’s head snapped up. Little hair. It was like a pink oval, a beige egg sitting on an elaborate eggcup. They arrowed towards him. The man was rolling his sleeves back as if setting himself for a scrap.
“Martin,” she was calling. Don shook his head, but then realised she wasn’t attempting to address him.
“Have you seen Martin?” Her voice was brittle. She was at the edge of tears.
“My boy,” the man explained, and he was full of accusation. “Our boy. He was playing in our garden on Kent Lane, just down there at the foot of the fields. Keepy-uppy. In our garden.”
“I was washing dishes,” said the woman. “I could see him. And then I went to empty the washing machine and when I came back he was gone and the back gate was swinging open.”
“Maybe he kicked his ball over the wall,” Don said.
“Martin is six,” the man said, as if that was explanation enough.
“He can’t reach the latch,” the woman said.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Don said. “I just got here.”
The man looked him over as if Don might somehow be concealing Martin on his person. “The police,” he said at last. “We have to bring the police into this.”
“Oh, God,” the woman said. And then she screamed Martin’s name.
Don drove back to the hotel and forced himself to face up to what was going on. His coming here was nothing to do with a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a personal tribute. It was running away. All of those responsibilities back home; they’d still be there when he returned. Debts and deadlines and demands. Julie was the soft barrier that prevented him injuring himself against all that bureaucracy. She organised, she delegated, she controlled. It might have lapped around their ankles occasionally, but the water never rose around their throats, as it seemed to be doing these days.
Now Julie was gone, every day was like crashing his car. There were impacts everywhere. He missed her so desperately it was as if he could still feel the mass of her in his hands. Her smell was in every room she’d inhabited. There were shadows and shades of her in everything he owned. When the sun shone she was splintered within it; when it rained, each drop carried a fragment of her reflection.
He had tried to find that snow globe of hers, after the crash. She took it everywhere with her. It had been a gift from her childhood. A lucky token. He had wandered around in the ruins for an age until the ambulances arrived, his face dripping into the snow around the wreckage, poking with his toe amidst the mangled aluminium, the torn fabric seat covers, the shreds of her. It was gone.
The stress of the afternoon was in him like hot pins. The way that poor woman had screamed for her son. It was animalistic. He could understand her need. He had wanted to howl like that, for Julie. It built up inside you. You forgot who you were.
He tried to make the room comfortable enough so that Julie might come to him in some way. He needed to be warm and clean and relaxed. He bathed and drank a glass of whisky. He put her favourite music station on the radio. He sat by the window and closed his eyes. He determined what each sound was and relegated it to the back of his mind. There was space here for her.
He felt himself slide towards sleep. But she was not there to greet him. She had not been a part of this intimate darkness since before her death. It was as if, in dying, she had ceased to exist for him during the moments when he ought to be most receptive to her. Gazing at photographs of her was like assessing a stranger. She mugged for the camera. She was never her natural self. He felt panic at the thought that, day by day, this memory of the truth was gradually leaving him. It scared him more than the nightmares that were so ready to enter that vacuum he’d created just for her.
That evening, after another challenging meal in the hotel restaurant, Don sat in the bar nursing a glass of Scotch. He’d decided on an early night and a quick escape back to London in the morning. He’d look into therapy. He’d consider a holiday away from the UK. He needed to map out his career. Find a new hobby, some new friends. Do the unthinkable. Find someone else.
“Hello again!”
“You bastard.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. Grant, isn’t it? I’m very sorry. I was talking to myself. I was thinking about someone.”
Kerner was observing him with a mixture of scepticism and distaste.
“Really,” Don pressed. “I’m sorry. That was aimed at me, actually.”
The doubt in Kerner dissolved. Maybe he could see something in Don’s own features, his posture. Defeat, quite possibly.
“Then I apologise for interrupting you.”
“I’m glad you did. There’s only so much abuse I can put up with.”
Kerner laughed; the tension lessened. He assessed Don as if for the first time. There was a sense of him weighing up what to do next. Don could feel an invitation growing within; he was all too ready to refuse it. But he surprised himself by accepting, when Kerner asked if he would like to accompany him on a visit to Kayte’s Cavern.
They walked. It was not far. There was a place to buy tickets and tat. A cafe. All of it closed now. A little display, showing the history of the cave and what had been found there. Roman coins and bones and bronze brooches. Over time it had been a burial ground, a shelter, and the hideaway for a robber, the eponymous Nathaniel Kayte, who used the darkness and the depth and the churning noise of the water sluicing through it to his advantage when hiding from his pursuers.
Later it was a tourist trap. People travelled great distances to see the flowstone curtains, the stalactites and stalagmites, the great chambers of pale crystal, glowing in the dark as if lit from within. After that it became a big draw for the Victorians, who were led by candlelight deep into the cavern and then, the flames blown out by their canny guides, asked for more money if they wished to be taken back to safety.
“Isn’t it a bit late for this?” Don asked again. “I thought you meant we’d go in the morning.”
“Caves are dark whether the sun’s shining or the moon’s up, no?” Kerner said. “My mate’s on duty tonight. We can get in without paying. And anyway, the cavern’s closed while they do some exploratory digging. I think they’re going to go deep. Open up some new chamber that has never before been seen by human eyes.” Kerner deepened his voice at this last sentence, turning to Don and peering at him with theatrical menace.
“What’s your interest in this place?” Don asked Kerner as a black-clad figure in a peaked cap swung open the gates and directed them to the cavern’s mouth. “I thought you photographed broken things.”
