The Hiding Place, page 11
But sometimes, the way he said it made me think he wasn’t angry but afraid. His words not derision but a defense, against stuff he’d rather not think about.
Even my dad couldn’t deny that Arnhill was a village plagued by misfortune. There were never any more fatal accidents down the pit, but several smaller ones claimed time, money and, in one case, a miner’s legs. The pit gained a reputation for being jinxed. Some miners were reluctant to send their sons down there. Despite still being profitable—with tons of coal beneath the surface—in 1988 the decision was made to close Arnhill Colliery for good.
Whatever remained down there would be left, abandoned and undisturbed.
—
I flip through page after page of the folder. It makes for morbidly fascinating reading. Some of it I know, or thought I knew. There are details I wasn’t aware of. Facts obscured in the retelling. I had always imagined Edgar Horne as a boorish monster. In fact, he was a doctor, respected in the community. Until one hot summer night he went to church, ate a supper of potato broth and cut his wife’s throat with a scalpel as she slept.
Remarkably, no villagers were ever held accountable for his lynching. All covering each other’s backs. I wonder how many of their descendants still live in Arnhill today and how many know—or care—about the blood on their forefathers’ hands.
Further back, the history of the village becomes vaguer: the usual tales of poverty, disease and untimely death. A lot of death. Some pages have been highlighted. I lift one of them out:
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE’S SALEM
During the sixteenth century witch hunts were prolific across Europe. The trials in Arnhill began when a young man by the name of Thomas Darling accused his aunt of consorting with devils to bring babies back from the dead. According to Darling, Mary Walkenden took ill babies up to caves in the hills and exchanged their souls for eternal life.
The name Darling doesn’t ring a bell, but I remember a Jamie Walkenden at school. The bus really does never leave, I think. Generation after generation. Born, living, dying here.
I place the page to one side and pick out another.
EZEKERIAH HYRST—MIRACLE MAN (1794–1867)
Hyrst was a renowned spiritual faith healer, alleged to have performed many miracles. Witnesses claim that Hyrst cured a young boy of paralysis of the legs, banished the devil from a woman and gave breath to a stillborn baby. Most of these took place in Nottinghamshire, in a small village called Arnhill.
Hyrst? Hurst? Not a coincidence, surely? And a charlatan healer seems to fit the family tradition. Miracles and tragedies. Tragedies and miracles. You can’t have one without the other.
I turn over the next page. My breath feels like it’s been sucked from my lungs.
search for missing eight-year-old continues
Annie’s face smiles back at me. Wide, gappy smile, hair in a high ponytail. Mum always tried to plait it, but Annie would never sit still for long enough. Always wanting to be off doing something else. Always looking for adventure. Always following me. I don’t need to read this story. I lived it. I push the folder away, reach for my drink and realize the glass is empty. Odd how that happens. I stand. And then I pause. I thought I heard something. A creak from the hallway. A floorboard? Shit. Gloria?
I turn, and my legs almost give out on me. Not Gloria.
“Heyup, Joe.”
15
Life is not kind. Not to any of us, in the end.
It adds weight to our shoulders, a heaviness to our stride. It tears away the things we care about and hardens our souls with regret.
There are no winners in life. Life is ultimately all about losing: your youth, your looks. But most of all, those you love. Sometimes I think it’s not the passing of the years that really ages you but the passing of the people and things you care about. That kind of aging can’t be smoothed away by needles or plumped out with fillers. The pain shows in your eyes. Eyes that have seen too much will always give you away.
Like mine. Like Marie’s.
She sits awkwardly upon the sagging sofa. Knees together, hands clasped tightly on top. She is thinner—much thinner—than the blossoming teenage girl I remember. Back then, her cheeks were round, with deep dimples when she smiled. Her limbs were long and lithe, cushioned with the firm flesh of youth.
Now, the legs in skinny jeans are stick thin. Her cheeks are hollow. Her hair is still thick, dark and shiny. It takes me a moment to realize that it must be a wig, her eyebrows artful pencil lines.
I hover, equally awkwardly. I swept up the papers I had been reading back into the folder, which I clutch beneath one arm. I don’t know how much Marie saw. I don’t know how long she had been standing there, after she let herself in when I didn’t hear her knock. At least, she said she knocked.
“Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, something stronger?”
The sentence makes me wince a little. Cliché, I mentally note, in red pen.
She tilts her head; her hair falls to one side, just like it used to. “How strong?”
“Beer, bourbon? Of course, you haven’t tried my coffee—”
A tiny hint of a smile. “Beer, thanks.”
I nod and walk into the kitchen. My heart is pounding. I feel a little faint. It’s probably just my hollow stomach. I really should eat something. Or have a soft drink. More alcohol is just going to make me feel worse.
I open the fridge and take out two beers.
Before I return to the living room I open the cabinet beneath the sink and chuck the folder inside. Then I walk back and place a can on the coffee table in front of Marie. I pop mine open and take a deep swig. I was wrong. It doesn’t make me feel worse. It doesn’t make me feel better either, but that’s not really the point.
I sit heavily in the armchair. “So, it’s been a long time,” I say, like the cliché-spouting machine I am tonight.
“It has. Are you going to tell me I haven’t changed a bit?”
I shake my head. “We all change.”
She nods, reaches for her drink and pops the tab. “Yeah. But we’re not all dying of cancer.”
The bluntness of her words takes me back. And then, as she tips back the beer, I realize. This is not her first drink.
“I presume you know,” she says. “This is Arnhill, after all.”
I nod. “How’s the treatment going?”
“Not working. Tumor is still spreading. More slowly. But it’s just delaying the inevitable.”
“I’m sorry.”
Cliché after fucking cliché. After the crash, I used to hate it when people told me how sorry they were. Why? Did you cause the crash? No? Then what are you sorry for, exactly?
“What have the doctors said?”
“Not a lot. They’re too scared of Stephen to give me a straight answer. He says they don’t know everything anyway. Reckons he can get me into a clinical trial in America. The Bardon-Hope Clinic. Some new miracle treatment.”
Ezekeriah Hyrst—Miracle Man, I think, and then, hot on its heels: Marie is not going to die. I will not let that happen.
“Did he say what the treatment is?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No, but I’d try anything.” She fixes her sunken eyes on mine. “I want to live. I want to see my boy grow up.”
Of course. And we’d all do the same. Even though there are no miracles. Not without a price.
I look away. We both swig our beer. Funny how the more you share, the less you have to say.
“You’re teaching at the academy?” she says eventually.
“That’s right,” I say.
“Must be a bit weird?”
“A little. Now I’m one of the guards, not one of the inmates.”
“What made you come back?”
An email. A compulsion. Unfinished business. All of those and none of those. Basically, I always knew I would.
“I don’t know, really. The job came up and it seemed a good opportunity.”
“For what?”
“How d’you mean?”
“It was just a surprise, hearing you were back. I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Well, you know me—a bad penny.”
“No,” she says. “You were one of the good ones, Joe.”
I feel my cheeks redden and suddenly I’m fifteen again, basking in the glow of her approval.
“What about you?” I say. “You never left?”
A small, lifeless shrug. “Things always seemed to get in the way, and then Stephen proposed.”
“And you said yes?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I think about a fifteen-year-old girl crying on my shoulder. A bruise around her eye. A promise that she would never let it happen again.
“I thought you had plans?”
“Well, they don’t always work out, do they? I didn’t get the grades I wanted. Mum was made redundant. We needed extra money so I got a job and then I got married. End of.”
Not quite, I think.
“And you have a son?”
“You know I do.”
“Yeah—real chip off the old block. Bet his dad’s proud.”
A glance so sharp I feel it sting.
“We’re both proud of Jeremy.”
“Really?”
“You don’t have kids?”
“No.”
“You don’t get to judge then.” She crumples her can. “Got another?”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it’s hardly going to kill me.”
I stand and fetch two more cans from the kitchen. Then I pause. Marie must have driven here. I saw her slip her car keys into her handbag. She probably shouldn’t drink any more and drive home.
Not my problem, though. I walk back through and hand her a beer. She looks around and shivers.
“This place is cold.”
“Yeah, the heat doesn’t work very well.”
But that’s not it.
“Why here?”
“It just came up.”
“Like the job.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
And there it is. The bitter ball she’s been waiting to cough up since she arrived.
“If you’ve come back to start stirring up the past—” she says.
“What? What are you scared of? What’s Hurst scared of?”
She takes a moment to reply. When she does, her voice is softer. “You went away. The rest of us, we’re still here. I’m asking you, just leave things be. Not for Stephen. For me.”
And I get it.
“He sent you, didn’t he?” I say. “His thugs didn’t work, so he thought you might tug at my heartstrings, persuade me, for old times’ sake?”
She shakes her head. “If Stephen wanted you gone, he wouldn’t send me. He’d send someone to finish the job Fletch’s boys started.”
“Fletch’s boys?”
Of course. Stocky and Unwise Hair. That’s why they seemed familiar. I should have guessed. Fletch was always the brainless muscle when we were kids. Now, his offspring are carrying on the tradition.
“I really should have spotted the family resemblance,” I say. “The way their knuckles dragged on the floor.”
Her face flushes. And I do feel a tug inside. But it’s not my heartstrings. It’s the depressing yank you get on your guts when your worst fears about someone are confirmed.
“You knew about my welcome party?”
Which explains why she didn’t ask about my bruised face when she arrived.
“Not until afterward. I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
She stands. “I should go. This was stupid, a waste of time.”
“Not completely. You can give Hurst a message.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Tell him I have something of his.”
“I doubt there’s anything you have that Stephen wants.”
“Call it a memento. From the pit.”
“For Christ’s sake—it was twenty-five years ago. We were just kids.”
“No, my sister was just a kid.”
It probably says something about me that I feel pleased when her thin, sallow face falls.
“I’m sorry about Annie,” she says.
“And what about Chris?”
“That was his choice.”
“Was it? Why don’t you ask Hurst something else—ask him if Chris really jumped.”
16
1992
Chris found it. That was his knack. Finding stuff.
Like me, he was an unusual addition to Hurst’s gang: tall and lanky with white-blond hair that stuck up like electrified straw and a stutter that got worse when he was nervous (and like most awkward, nerdy kids, Chris spent a lot of his schooldays being nervous).
No one could fathom why Hurst took him under his wing. But I got it. Hurst may have been a bully, but he was also smart. He had a way of knowing who to crush, and who to keep. And Chris had his uses. I guess we all did.
While Hurst’s casual associates were the usual mixture of posers and brawlers, his inner circle was a little different. Fletch was the muscle. The brainless thug who would laugh at Hurst’s jokes, lick his arse and smash heads. Chris was the brains. The misfit, the misunderstood genius. His flair for science helped us create the best homemade stink bombs, ingenious booby traps for unsuspecting victims and, once, a chemical explosion that caused the whole school to be evacuated at the expense, and job, of a stand-in science teacher.
But Chris had another useful quirk. A feverish curiosity. A desire to find out stuff, and to find stuff. A way of seeing things that other people couldn’t. If you wanted to get hold of some exam papers, Chris would find a way to get them. A spot to stand in the fields to see into the girls’ changing rooms, Chris could calculate the best vantage point. A way to break into the store and steal sweets and fireworks, Chris could devise a plan to do it.
If his skull hadn’t smashed open in the schoolyard and his brilliant brains spilled all over the stained gray concrete, Chris would have grown up to be a billionaire entrepreneur…or a criminal mastermind. That’s what I had always thought.
When he blustered into the kids’ playground that Friday evening, late as usual, because Chris was always late—not fashionably, but red-faced, tie askew, food down his shirt and apologetically so—he was even more flushed and frantic than normal. Straight off, I knew something was up.
“All right, Chris?”
“The site. F–f–f–found. G–g–g–ground.”
When nervous, Chris’s stutter worsened; he became almost entirely incomprehensible.
I glanced over at Hurst and Fletch. Marie wasn’t with us that evening, as she had to help her mum with some chores, so there was just the three of us, killing time, talking shit. In a way, it was a good thing. As much as I liked Marie…well, that was the problem. I liked Marie. Too much. And when she was with us, she was with Hurst, his arm slung proprietorially around her shoulders.
Now, he dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, jumped down from the climbing frame and regarded Chris in the hazy evening twilight.
“All right, mate. Calm down. Fuck’s sake, you sound like a fucking Speak & Spell.”
Fletch chortled like someone had just filled his cigarette with laughing gas.
Chris’s face flamed harder, cheeks fire-engine red in his pale face. His hair was tousled and tufted like a particularly windswept haystack and his sweatshirt was creased and crusted with dirt. But the thing I noticed most about him was his eyes. Always a startling blue, that night they blazed. Sometimes, though I didn’t like to admit it, because it made me sound a bit weird and gay, Chris looked like some kind of beautiful crazed angel.
“Leave him,” I said to Hurst.
I was the only one who could get away with speaking to Hurst like that. He listened to me. I guess that was my use. I was his voice of reason. He trusted me. The fact that I often did his English homework for him didn’t hurt either.
I ground out my own cigarette. I never really liked them that much. Just like beer. The taste made me want to spit and wipe my tongue. Of course, I have grown older, wiser and more addicted since then.
“Breathe,” I said to Chris. “Speak slowly. Tell us.”
Chris nodded and attempted to rein in his manic huffing and puffing. He clutched his hands together tightly in front of him, trying to get control over his nerves and his stutter.
“Fucking retard,” Fletch muttered, and spat a huge gob of phlegm onto the ground.
Hurst gave me a look. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a slightly melted Wham bar and held it out to Chris, like offering a treat to a puppy.
“Here.”
Contrary to what is believed nowadays, a sugary snack was about the only thing that could calm Chris down. Perhaps that was why he nearly always had a constant supply of them.
Chris accepted the Wham bar, chewed a bit and then, still half chewing, said:
“Been up…up at the old mine.”
“Okay.”
All of us kids went up there and messed around sometimes. Before they started to demolish the old buildings we would sneak in and steal stuff. Useless stuff. Bits of old metal and machinery. Just to prove we’d been. But Chris went up there a lot. On his own, which was odd. But then everything about Chris was odd, so much so that it just became normal after a while. When I asked him once why he went up there so much, he said:
“I have to look.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Conversations with Chris could be frustrating. I fought my irritation down as he struggled to find his words without them breaking into pieces on his tongue.
Finally, he said: “I found something. In the g–g–ground. C–c–could be a way in.”
