The Hiding Place, page 10
The Angel. Not a memorial or a headstone. Apparently, she was placed here in the Victorian era by the owners of the mine. Some say it was after the family’s twin daughters died as infants, but the grave was once exhumed (something to do with the church being worried about it being unmarked) and no human remains were discovered beneath.
No one really knows where she came from or to what purpose. She doesn’t even look much like an angel these days. Her hands are broken stumps and her head has gone. She tilts a little, unsteady on her square stone feet. The once gracefully flowing robes are chipped and broken, crusted with furry moss, as though nature has wrapped an extra layer around her to keep her stony bones warm.
I bend down—a new and interesting burst of pain reminding me that I need to take some more painkillers soon—and brush away moss and grass from the base. The inscription is a little faded but still legible.
But Jesus said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
I look again at the message on my phone:
Suffocate the little children. Fuck them. Rest in Pieces.
A long time ago a gang of teenagers sprayed graffiti all over the Angel. The same ones who brought a shovel and scythed off her head and hands, decapitating and maiming her. There was no real reason for the attack. Just mindless vandalism, spurred on by cheap cider and teenage bravado.
The dismemberment and spray cans had been Hurst’s idea. But the words, I am ashamed to say, were mine. At the time, with a bladder full of booze and the jeering encouragement of the rest of our gang, I had felt pretty pleased with myself.
Later, hanging over the toilet, spewing out bile and shame, I had felt like shit. I wasn’t religious, none of my family was, but I still knew what we had done was wrong.
Even twenty-five years later I feel discomfort at the memory. Funny how the good memories flit by like butterflies: fleeting, fragile, impossible to capture without crushing them. But the bad ones—the guilt, the shame—they hang on in there, like parasites. Quietly eating you away from the inside.
Four of us were here that day. Hurst, me, Fletch and Chris. Marie was absent. She hung around with our gang more and more—much to the irritation of Fletch, who resented a girl in our midst—but not all the time. Hurst probably told her about it, though. And in a school word gets around; rumors spread. Just because we were the only ones here that day doesn’t mean that no one else knew.
Still, it does mean that whoever sent the text must have been at school with us back then. Perhaps the same person who sent the email? I tried to call the number. It went to voicemail. I sent a text. I’m not expecting a reply. I don’t think the sender wanted a conversation. They wanted me to come here. But why?
I straighten and stare at the headless angel. She steadfastly refuses to offer me any divine enlightenment. I wonder what happened to her head and hands. The church probably stored them away, or maybe some weirdo took them for a memento, to keep under their floorboards. Better than a real head, I suppose.
I’m missing something. Something obvious. I regard the Angel’s oddly tilted posture. And then it comes to me. I walk around the back and crouch down again.
Where the roots of the creepers have started to push her from the ground there’s a hollow. A recess in the damp earth. Something has been wedged underneath. I stick my hand in, grimacing at the feel of the cold, dank soil. There’s a package of some sort in there, bound up in plastic. It takes a couple of tugs and I pull it out, shaking off dirt and a few slugs and earwigs. I study the package, turning it over in my hands: letter-sized, about half the thickness of an average paperback. It’s been wrapped in a trash bag and secured with electrical tape. I’m going to need scissors to open it. Which means I need to get back to school.
I slip the package inside my satchel (along with my notebooks and some essays I should probably be marking right now). I buckle the satchel up, stand and walk more briskly back around the church. I’m almost at the gate when I realize I’m not alone. A figure is sitting on the church’s only small bench, beneath an aged sycamore. A familiar skinny, hunched figure. My heart sinks. Not now. I need to get back to school. I need to open the package. I don’t need to play the concerned teacher or the good bloody Samaritan.
But then, another part of me, the irritating part—the part that actually gives a shit about kids and got me into teaching in the first place—gets the better of me.
I walk over to the bench. “Marcus?”
He starts and looks up, flinching slightly. The reaction of someone who only ever expects an insult or a blow.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
He shifts, embarrassed, red-faced. “Nothing.”
“Right.”
I wait. Because that’s what you have to do sometimes. You don’t push to get kids to tell you things. You pull back, let them ease it out on their own.
He sighs. “I come here to eat my lunch.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask why, but that would be stupid. Why did Ruth Moore eat her lunch in the bus shelter down the road from school every day? Because it was safer. A place to hide from the bullies. Better a urine-stinking shelter or a damp bench in a cold graveyard than the ritual humiliation of the cafeteria and the playground.
“Are you going to scold me for being off school premises?” Marcus asks.
I sit down beside him, trying not to grimace at the fresh twinge in my back. “No. Although I’m curious as to how you found a way past the security gates.”
“Like I’d tell you.”
“Fair point.” I look around. “Isn’t there a better place to hang out?”
“Not in Arnhill.”
Also a fair point.
“Are you here to avoid Hurst?”
“What d’you think?”
“Look—”
“If you’re going to give me some lecture about how I should stand up to Hurst because bullies respect you if you stand up to them, then you can take that crap and stuff it right back in your stupid satchel, along with your copy of the Guardian.”
He glares at me defiantly. And he’s right. Bullies don’t respect you if you fight back. They just beat you harder. Because there are always more of them. A simple equation of numbers.
I try again. “I’m not going to tell you that, Marcus. Because it is crap. The best thing you can do is keep your head down, keep away from Hurst, and get through as best you can. You won’t be at school forever, even though it feels that way now. But you can come to me. I’ll deal with Hurst. You can count on that.”
He stares at me for a moment, trying to decide whether I’m feeding him a line or he really can trust me. It could go either way. Then he gives a very small nod:
“It’s not just me. Hurst picks on loads of kids. Everyone’s shit scared of him…even the other teachers.”
I think about what Beth said in the pub. About Hurst being in Julia Morton’s form group. About Ben going missing.
“What about Mrs. Morton? She was his class adviser last year, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah, but she wasn’t scared of him. She was more…like you.”
Bearing in mind she killed her son and blew her own head off, I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment.
“Did you know Ben Morton?” I ask.
“Not really. He was only a first-year.”
“What about Hurst? Did Hurst bully Ben?”
He shakes his head. “Hurst didn’t pick on Ben. Ben was popular. He had mates—” He hesitates.
“But there was something?”
He throws me a sideways glance. “A lot of the younger kids, they want to impress Hurst. Be on his good side. Be one of his gang.”
“And?”
“Hurst would make them do stuff…to prove themselves.”
“Like an initiation?”
He nods.
“What sort of stuff?”
“Just stupid dares and things. Pathetic, really.”
“On school premises?”
“No. There’s this place Hurst knows about…up on the old colliery site.”
My blood slows and chills.
“On the old colliery site? Or under it? Did he find something up there—tunnels, caves?”
My voice has risen. He stares at me. “I don’t know, okay? I never wanted to be one of Hurst’s fucking gang.”
I’ve pushed too hard. And he does know. He’s just not ready to say yet. I already have a pretty good idea anyway. For now, I let the moment slide. We can come back to it another time. With kids like Marcus there is always another time. Hurst might be indiscriminate in his bullying but, like parents, every bully has a favorite, even if they don’t say so.
I glance around the graveyard again. “You know, when I was a kid we used to hang around here sometimes.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, we’d…” vandalize angels “. . . drink, smoke, other stuff. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“I like to look at the old graves,” he says. “The people’s names. I like to imagine what their lives were like.”
Short, hard and miserable, I think. That’s what most people’s lives were like in the nineteenth century. We romanticize the past, with our period dramas and glossy film adaptations. A bit like we do with nature. Nature isn’t beautiful. Nature is violent, unpredictable and unforgiving. Eat or be eaten. That’s nature. However much Attenborough and Coldplay you wrap it up in.
“Most people had hard lives back then,” I say to Marcus.
He nods, suddenly enthused. “I know. Do you know the average age people lived to in the nineteenth century?”
I hold up my hands. “English, not history.”
“Forty-six, if you were lucky. And Arnhill was an industrial village. Lower-class, manual workers died younger. Lung infections, mine accidents and, of course, all the usual diseases—smallpox, typhoid, et cetera.”
“Not the best time to be born.”
His eyes light up. I sense we have found his chosen subject. “That’s the other thing. In the eighteen hundreds women had an average of eight or ten children. But many would die in infancy or before they reached their teens.” He pauses to let this sink in. “Ever noticed something weird about this place?”
I look around. “You mean, aside from all the dead people?”
His face closes again. He thinks I’m making fun of him.
“Sorry. Flippancy. Bad habit of mine. Tell me?”
“What’s missing from the graveyard?”
I look around. There is something. Something obvious. Something I should have noticed before. I can feel it at the back of my mind, but I can’t quite grasp it.
I shake my head. “Go on—”
“There’s not one baby or young person buried here.” He stares at me triumphantly. “Where are all the children?”
14
When Annie was about three, she asked me: “Where are all the snowmen?”
It wasn’t quite so random. It was November and it had snowed quite heavily a couple of days before. All the kids in the village had run outside, chucking snowballs around and rolling them into huge misshapen lumps that looked nothing like the snowmen you see in films or on Christmas cards. Real snowmen never do. They’re usually far from round and the snow is never white, mixed in with a fair bit of mud, grass and, occasionally, dog shit.
Still, that weekend there were lots of these oddly formed, ugly snowmen leaning lopsidedly around. In every park, garden and yard. From Annie’s window, you could see quite a few outside other people’s houses. We made one of our own, of course, and although it was small, it wasn’t that bad. It had coal for its eyes and mouth, and an old woolen hat of mine perched on its head. The arms I made from two school rulers—there weren’t any trees or twigs around on our street.
Annie loved our snowman and would get up excitedly in the morning to peer out of her window and check he was still there. Then, on day three, the temperature rose, it started to rain and, overnight, the snow and all the snowmen pretty much disappeared.
Annie rushed to look out of her window and her face fell at the sight of the scattered lumps of coal, sodden hats and dismembered makeshift limbs.
“Where are all the snowmen?”
“Well, the snow has gone,” I said.
She looked at me impatiently. “Yes, but where are all the snowmen? Where did they go?”
She couldn’t understand that, when the snow melted, the snowmen went too. To her, they were a separate thing. Real, solid, substantial. Snowmen. Once created, they couldn’t just disappear. They had to go somewhere.
I tried to explain. I told her we could make another snowman when it snowed again. But she just said: “It won’t be the same. It won’t be my snowman.”
She was right. Some things are like that—unique, transient. You can copy, re-create, but you can never bring them back. Not the same.
I just wish Annie hadn’t had to die for me to realize that.
—
I sit on the sofa in my coat, the mysterious package on the coffee table in front of me. I didn’t have a chance to open it at school. When I got back I was already late for my next class. I had to use the break to catch up on grading, and by the time I made it through the last period I just wanted to get out of the building.
I even declined the offer of a Friday-night drink with Beth, Susan and James in the Fox. Something I’m now regretting. Good company and a cold pint in a warm pub, even if it is the Fox, suddenly seems a much better option than a cold cottage with no TV and the only company my skittering, chittering bathroom buddies.
I stare at the package. Then I pick up the scissors I found in a kitchen drawer and carefully slit open the plastic bag. Inside is a folder bulging with papers and held together with two elastic bands.
Scribbled on the front in black ink, just one word: “Arnhill.”
I reach for my drink and take a large gulp.
Every town, village and city has a history. Often more than one. There’s the official history. The bone-dry version collated in textbooks and census reports, repeated verbatim in the classroom.
Then there’s the history that is passed down through generations. The stories exchanged in the pub, over cups of tea while babies squirm in buggies, in the work cafeteria and the playground.
The secret history.
In 1949 a cave-in at Arnhill Colliery buried eighteen miners beneath several tons of rubble and suffocating dust. It became known as the Arnhill Colliery Disaster. Only fifteen bodies were ever recovered.
Locals would recall how the bellowing tremor shook the whole village. At first people thought it was an earthquake. People ran, panicking, out of their houses. The teachers ushered children quickly out of their classes. Only the older villagers didn’t run. They remained, supping their pints and exchanging troubled looks. They knew it was the pit. And when the pit roared like that, you were probably already too late.
After the roar came the dust: black, billowing clouds that filled the sky and eclipsed the sun. The high-pitched wail of the colliery alarm shrieked to the dark heavens, followed by the sirens: ambulance, fire and police.
There were reports and inquiries. But no one was ever held to account for the accident. And the three lost miners remained buried, deep beneath the ground.
Officially.
Unofficially—because who would ever tell such things to an outsider or a newspaper?—many swore, my grandad included (especially after a few pints), that they had seen the missing men, up on the colliery site, at night. One urban legend—retold with fresh embellishments each time—had it that a few of the surviving crew were sitting drinking in the Bull after hours one night when the door burst open and Kenneth Dunn, the youngest of the men lost that day, at just sixteen, walked right up to the bar. Bold as day and black as the night with coal dust.
Allegedly, the barman put down the glass he was drying, looked the dead lad up and down and said: “Get out of here, Kenneth. You’re under age.”
A good ghost story, and every village has plenty of those. Of course, no miner would admit to being in there that night. And when asked about it, the barman (long retired by then) would just tap his red-veined nose and say: “You’d have to buy me a lot of drink to tell you that tale.”
No one ever did buy him enough drink. Although plenty tried.
Just off the high street stood the Miner’s Welfare. Not the original building. That was demolished in the sixties when subsidence caused a wall to collapse, crushing several miners and their families. Two women and one toddler died. People claimed that the little boy still roamed the new building, and sometimes you’d see him in the long, dark corridor between the main bar and the toilets.
As a kid, left to sip soda while Dad downed beer and Mum drank half a lager and lime while rocking Annie in her pram (because Friday was Family Social Night at the Welfare), I would will my bladder to hold until we got home. If I absolutely had to go, I’d run as fast as I could down that dingy corridor to the toilets and back, terrified that one night I might feel a cold hand around my wrist and turn to see a tiny boy, face still smeared with dust, clothes ragged and torn, a bloody red dent in his head where his skull had been crushed.
In 1857 a man by the name of Edgar Horne stabbed his wife to death and was hanged from a lamppost by a lynch mob, his body left in a shallow grave on unconsecrated ground. Legend had it that he was still alive when he was buried. He clawed his way out and could sometimes be seen, dirt crusted on his hair and clothes, sitting by his wife’s headstone. On Bonfire Night, instead of a guy, for years the tradition in Arnhill was to burn an effigy of Edgar Horne. To make sure that, this time, he was really dead.
My dad would always scoff at such things. If he heard Grandad telling the story about Kenneth Dunn, his face would darken and he’d say: “Leave it, Frank. There’s more hot air spouted out your mouth than out the pit stack.”
