Clem and Lucas were both looking at me, waiting.
“Okay, let’s do it.” I said. “That whole story about the tramp is crap, Lucas. Don’t you think we’d have heard about it on the news, or had police crawling all over the estate if there really was a psycho in the underpass eating kids? This isn’t fucking ‘It.’”
Lucas thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
I poured us all a glass of juice, and we chugged our drinks back in unison.
“I didn’t actually believe it,” Lucas said, as we headed out the door. “The place just gives me the creeps, that’s all.”
Clem laughed. “You did believe it.”
“Shut up,” he muttered.
It took us about half an hour to get to the underpass. It was on the furthest outskirts of the estate, beyond the parchment dry park and the pathetic ‘nature’ pond. The rise of a long, landscaped hill obscured both it, and the dual carriageway, from view, but as we neared it we could hear the low drone of the cars rise to an insectile whine.
“Are you sure you’re alright with this?” Clem asked, and I couldn’t tell if she was addressing me or Lucas. The snideness had gone from her voice, and I began to suspect that maybe she’d like to be talked out of what we were about to do.
“Course,” I answered, for both of us. “Like I said, it’s just a shitty story.”
We trundled up the small hill. Reaching the top Clem plopped her backpack down on the ground and pulled out a bottle of orange liquid. She took a swig and passed it to me. I took a deep draught…and immediately sprayed it back out.
“Clem, is this spiked?”
The grin re-appeared. “Only a little bit. Can you handle it, Jamie?”
“What the Hell is wrong with you?” I asked her, for the second time in an hour. Yet I took another sip, more carefully this time. I drank again, then tried to pass the plastic bottle to Lucas.
“I don’t want any,” he said.
“Yes you do,” Clem insisted.
“No, I really don’t.”
Clem grabbed the bottle from me and thrust it towards Lucas’s face. He snatched the bottle from Clem. “Anything to make you shut up.” He took the tiniest sip. “Happy now?”
We stood quietly for a moment, looking at the view. Behind us the estate undulated as far as the eye could see, uniform rows of clone houses dipping and rising in martially ordered blocks, the thin smoke from a couple of barbeques drifting above the roofs like a pair of long, grey balloon strings. We barely gave it a glance; what we wanted was ahead of us.
At the bottom of the hill alongside the dual carriageway ran a stunted, narrow path, largely overgrown with tall grass. It led nowhere, and terminated at the mouth of the underpass.
“Come on, losers,” Clem said, and began striding down the slope, towards the path and the rush of cars.
“Honestly, it’s fine,” I said quietly to my friend as we followed after.
“Yeah, I know,” he sighed.
Clem turned then, smiling back at us. It was a wide, beautiful smile that bloomed as bright and free as one of the meadow flowers that grew, unnoticed, by the side of the road. As quickly as the turn of the breeze it was gone, and she was just ordinary old Clem again, shouting back at us to get a move on.
There has not been a day that’s gone by, since that afternoon, that I haven’t thought of that smile.
At the bottom of the slope we walked in silence, single file, for a hundred yards or so, following the ratty little path. The cars passed by, separated from us only by a low barrier and a handful of inches.
We moved to stand side-by-side as we came to the open maw of the underpass. Concrete steps descended down into gloom, burrowing beneath road and earth. I realised that, despite their proximity, the noise of the cars had become a distant thing.
The one sodium light still working down there flickered, just out of sight. I knew that it was just the chancy play of light that made it look as though someone was down there, crawling along the floor.
“Are you sure about this?” Lucas said to me, and when I looked at him his blue eyes were wide, and the clouds above rolled, reflected across his gaze.
We were all quiet for a moment.
“I don’t want to go back yet, Lucas.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I feel like I’m suffocating in there. Do you understand that?”
A few beats of silence pulsed between us, a thick heartbeat in the heavy air.
“Fuck them,” Lucas said quietly. “Ever since we came here, my folks have been acting like the Kardashians. Literally, the second we arrived. Automatic contamination.”
“Fuck them,” agreed Clem. “I wish we’d never moved to this shit hole. No offense.”
“Alright then,” I said, taking the first step down, “let’s get out of here. For a couple of hours, at least.”
And, together, we put our backs to the droid houses and pretend parkland and crossed over to…somewhere else.
*
Like I said, we knew there was something wrong with that place from the very beginning.
There was no bird noise, for a start. When we came out the other side of that underpass (limbs whole and bodies un-nibbled), that was the first thing that struck me. It wasn’t that I’d been particularly listening to it before – the hard ratchet of the crows, the spiralling trill of the summer robins –but I became aware of it by its absence.
At the top of that step, on the other side of the underpass, a few hundred yards and a few hundred million miles away from the clean-slate sweep of the estate, there was no bird song. The skies, the swollen bellies of the trees, were empty of noise. There was nothing but the diesel hum of the cars behind us, and the noise of our breathing, wet and slow.
“Which way, Jamie?” Clem asked.
I
