Cryers Hill (32 page)

A
CLARKS SANDAL
floats in the pond. It bobs to the side and waits there as though it would like to step out and walk away. The sun is high in the sky, but the big tree shadows the water, keeping it cool. A woodpecker taps into a tree, a sound like urgent knocking. As if to answer it, Sean comes up in the pond. He is slick like a seal. He gasps and coughs. The tree waits.

Sean walks home. He thinks he is always walking home this way, squelching. His progress is slower in only one sandal. The bare foot finds every stone, shard and thorn in Hughenden. 'Ow,' Sean says, and then again, like a peculiar wading bird. The sun follows him, burning the backs of his legs, pressing him on.

Once he is on tarmac he speeds up. She will not believe him of course, but he will tell her nonetheless. The truth will out. That's what people say. He hopes that is correct because the truth this time is more fantastic than any lie.

He sees her. She is at the top of a dirt mound with her hands on her hips. Yap yap yap, she is talking like that. When Sean's dad wants to indicate that, in his opinion, Sean's mother is talking too much, he makes little yap-yap motions with his hand, and says, 'Yap, yap, yap,' behind her back. Sean is always amazed as he has never noticed his mother talking more than the odd word or two.

Sean climbs the dirt mound. By the time he reaches the top he is bursting to tell it.

'P'sof, Spaz.'

'Guess what?'

'P'sof.'

'Mr Walter went in the pond bludyell I tried to stop him doing it God.'

'Yur a spaz and you don't know it.'

'Like some Martian I tell you what.'

On the hill the great orange crane stretches its neck left and right and raises its dinosaur head to the sky.

'Mr Walter went in the pond.' Perhaps, Sean considers, the smoky policemen will come again. Perhaps they will photograph the pond water. Maybe wade in up to their waists in their short raincoats. There was never a dull moment around here lately. Sean mentions this to Ann.

Gor stands at the sink, flicking his ash into the plughole, watching his youngest through the window. Sean appears to have been tarred and feathered or ducked or rolled in wet mud or something. Always the filthiest kid on the estate, Sean. How did he come to have such a funny kid? Who the bloody hell's he talking to? Other kids don't talk to themselves. Talking to himself all ruddy summer since she died, that girl. Not his fault. Nothing to be done about it. Police knew that. Ann Hooper. Nothing to be done now. Too late now. Poor kid's been buried almost three months. He'll have to snap out of it. Find another pal. Come on, son, come on. Chewing a ruddy brick. He's doing it again. Who in the bloody hell's he talking to? There's nobody there.

Ann Hooper's funeral had taken place on a warm spring day. She sailed past the estate in a gleaming black hearse. Wotcha, Spaz! She glided up the hill like an empress and the other cars followed. She sailed past the last tattered poster of her face:
Did you see anything? Did you hear anything? Were you in the vicinity on 4 May?
And the number to ring if you did. At the crossroads they waited for traffic but there were no other cars in Buckinghamshire. Sean heard the world go quiet. Just the scraping sound of insects and a burning sky. Ann had the roads to herself, like royalty. There was nothing else save for her big black wagon, the procession behind and a blank-eyed cuckoo in the wood.

The children from Cryers Hill Primary School were required to sit on the left-hand side of St Mary's Church on Cryers Hill Lane. Perhaps the Church of the Good Shepherd on the estate was considered too informal, with its concrete bell tower and smoky coffee mornings and come-as-you-are vicar. St Mary's on the other hand had a stained-glass window of St George and family tombs and was over four hundred years old. Here the local community could take comfort in a place that had witnessed the christenings, weddings and burials of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Here Ann Hooper could lie in peace and grow leaves in her hair. Here a village could bid a dignified farewell to its own lost child, its own unwitting angel snatched in the woods from under their noses.

A small group of girls shared a hanky to cry in, but mostly the children just swung their legs and stared.

The vicar read out things from the Bible. Sean didn't remember hearing anyone read from the Bible before. It was, Sean felt, not bad. Pleasant, Mrs Roys would have said. They sang hymns, 'Abide With Me', and 'Lead, Kindly Light'. Some of the adults knew the words and Sean watched their mouths making the rhymes. Ann would have been scornful, he thought, but he enjoyed it. When the service was over he wished they could do it again. Afterwards he heard the adults remarking on how small the coffin was, but Sean reckoned it was huge – enough room in it to roll over, to knit, to point out spazzery. He stared at it without blinking for old times' sake. But no one could stare without blinking longer than Ann.

Beside the altar lay a word made out of flowers.
Ann,
it said. Sean was glad he could read it. He read it again.

After the funeral he went to his room and closed the door. He sat on his bed and tried very many times to remember. He tried but he could not remember, not for the policeman, not for God, not for nothing. He remembered being in Gomms Wood and the sound of the leaves, as though they were moving by themselves. He remembered her saying, 'Don't be a twit, Sean Matthews. Why would I want a little spaz like you for a husband?' He hated her for that. For lots of things. He wandered off. He heard her calling him. He saw no one, nothing. No man, no murderer. But the leaves were moving, he remembered that. He kept wandering on. He heard her. 'Sean?
Seaner?'
He heard her scream.
'Seaner?'
She often screamed. He went home.

After that he forgot. He did a good job of forgetting. People arrived and asked what he remembered. But he could not remember and remember is what everyone wanted him to do. Try to remember, they said, try. But he could not. He forgot instead.

He saw her a few days later. She was sitting on a mound of dirt, arms folded. You see what you want to see.

'Spaz! Where'f you been?'

'To your funeral.'

'Ha bloody ha.'

Sean touched her hand. It was warm and as real as his own.

'Are you dead?'

'No, you spaz. Are you?'

He went indoors. His mum was in the kitchen listening to the plughole gurgle. Sean spoke to the back of her head.

'I've seen Ann. She's outside.' And his mum turned and stared at him.

'Don't be silly'

'It's true. She's there. I swear.'

And then she looked towards the window. 'Where?' And he pointed her out on the dirt mound.

'There. She spoke to me.' And his mum turned and walked away. 'Mum?'

And his mum's words. 'There's nobody there, Sean.'

But there was. Now who was the spaz? She was as plain as the nose on your face. Anyone could see. Except no one could.

You're a pie-faced spaz. What are you?

That summer Sean and Ann went to the woods, to the tip, to the pond. Sean went all the way to the bottom with his breathing tube. Together they had looked at Ann's picture in the newspaper.
Local Tragedy.
They cut it out so that Sean could keep it in his pocket. Then they watched her photograph as it bloomed on the trunks of trees and lamp posts. Now she was everywhere and still no one could see her. I love you do you love me? Beneath her picture was the telephone number to call if you had information for the police. Sean and Ann called the number. 'Spaz,' murmured Ann. 'Spaz,' confirmed Sean. And replaced the receiver.

Ann Hooper was discovered by a local man walking his dog on 5 May 1969. No one could recall anything so dreadful happening in Cryers Hill before. They found her folded in bracken, sparkling with maggots, with leaves in her hair. Her skin was mauve. The policemen came to the woods with their measuring tapes and flash photography. They arrived sombre and determined in short dark coats. They crunched through the undergrowth and put their hands in the earth. They squatted and knelt, while above them the trees whispered shhh, shhh, and the shadows drew back.

Let bygones be bygones. Sean walks away, leaving her talking to herself on the dirt mound. Her hands are on her hips, her mouth is going yap yap yap. You see what you want to see.

He climbs upstairs to the bathroom. He has always liked this bathroom. It has waterproof flower-patterned wallpaper. No amount of splashing will wash those flowers off. If you stare, the flowers curl into faces. The modern world is remarkable. Nothing is what it seems. Except Ty. In the mirror Sean sees he could perhaps do with a quick wash. He looks again and this time he sees an astronaut. Tall, trained, fearless, ready for space. He is so tall in fact he can hardly fit his reflection inside the mirror. He has to bend to include his face. He smiles. Is this the smile of a man who turns steps into leaps? The smile of a space hero, a moonwalker? His suit is white and running with tubes and valves. On his left shoulder is his country's flag, and below that his name. Beneath his arm is his helmet with its dark visor, reflecting a smaller version of himself. You see what you want to see.

Sean and Ann are walking backwards up the hill for something to do. It looks simple, but it is not. The wind arrives from nowhere and lifts the red dust. The machines clatter and roar and the diggers raise their long yellow necks. There is a smell of dog-dirt and tar. Today they will go, same as every day, to the pond, the tip, the woods. Today Sean Matthews will learn to breathe without air, and jump without gravity. He will watch the lone ploughman without realising the horses are all gone, and listen to the birds he cannot name.

He calls this place home though it does not know him. It knows none of the flop-haired tykes on the estate, as smeared and dirty as their jungle ancestors, waiting for the day when, as adults, they will sit in commuter carriages nursing a bout of mild depression, as the empty farmland rushes by. The tykes who do not yet know their mortgages, their miserable marriages, their inability to recognise popular hymns. You could ask Sean to write the name of this place. You could ask.

When the nearly-houses are all complete Sean Matthews will look up at the night sky and wish he was there looking down. From space the earth is blue and white. Here among the diggers it is red and brown. And green. If you know where to walk it is still green. You will find it down narrow paths, over stiles and bursting up suddenly beside the tarmac roads: woodland and parkland and grazing acres, still shaded by the same beech and oak, now giant with age.

It is true that God moves in mysterious ways. The vicar says so. Everybody says so. Sean accepts it must be true. He thinks there is a song which points it out, perhaps by the Beatles. He cannot remember. There is an assortment of things he cannot remember. Assortment is a word by Mrs Roys. He remembers that. Mrs Roys says she ties a knot in her handkerchief if she wants to remember something. A bit loon that, like Debbie Sinclair lying naked in her garden all summer in the hope she will turn a darker colour, and Mr Dewitt walking about with a ticking box inserted in his heart because his heart forgets to beat. Forgets! The box electrocutes him and his heart remembers. He could have just tied a knot.

If Neil Armstrong had thought to write his name in the moon dust it would still be there today, beside his bootprints. He must have kicked himself. He could have done it easily, Sean thinks, with the flag stick. Anyone else would have, surely. There are names all over the estate, in the builders' sand, drying in cement:
Big Dave
'69.
Jef Burn luvs janet. Sod off brian.
Sean saw a man write his name on Blackpool beach. If it had been him, not Neil, then Sean knows he would have, yes he would most certainly have written his name on the moon.
With smiley faces in the U.

April/May 1944, C.M.F.

My darling,

Your letter was sweet and has made me so happy. Winter is passing here. The women gather water in pitchers from a hillside spate and balance them on their heads. All the ploughs here are drawn by oxen and most people have an ass. The good earth of Italy is really good, soft and crumbly, and gives good and plentiful crops. Have I mentioned that before?

Did you know the Yanks have Spam and fruit and all sorts for their grub. Clearly we have been swindled. They are generous to a fault, however, and always share. Some of the lads hear from their wives that the wives have found someone else. Bill Palmer received one such letter. He cannot take it in.

2nd May '44

I am at this moment sitting on my camp bed at a rest camp writing this letter to you. It has been a change to be out of the line, and I feel much better for the break. We get up in the morning when we like! You would imagine us all in our rooms 'til noon, and yet never in this billet has a man been in bed after 0800 hrs.

We saw a picture called My
Sister Eileen,
which was quite good, a laugh anyhow. I preferred another show called
Melody and Rhythm,
which had plenty of kick in it and some girls who were not afraid to show a little leg!