The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER THIRTEEN





THEIR TRIP WAS delayed, but they were determined to continue with their plans. The ambulance crew took away the injured and sedated man, strapping him to a gurney, and they were told to wait until the police arrived. There was not much to say when the officers questioned them, just a précised version of the facts, and they were asked to call in at the local station as soon as it was convenient to give a formal statement.

Nobody seemed to care that much about Banjo; the emergency personnel went about their business in a calm, detached manner. He was just another junkie who’d lost his mind, overdosing on cheap smack, and turned his emotions inward to cut himself.

The area was full of people just like him, and the police seemed unimpressed even by the manner in which Banjo had done himself harm. They’d seen it all before. It was part of the job, another aspect of their day-to-day existence: self-harming junkies, street drugs, and common-or-garden madness. Just one aspect in a grim parade of extremity, the same as every other event they were trained to deal with.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Tom glanced into the rear-view mirror as he drove out of the estate. He knew what he wanted to hear, but didn’t want to prompt a reply she was reluctant to give.

Lana sat with her arms around Hailey’s shoulders, but the girl remained oddly unmoved by the experience. “What do you think, honey? Shall we still go, or would you prefer to go home?”

Hailey shook her head. “We’ll go. What have we got to go back for? There’ll be blood on the road and questions and gossip from the neighbours. I’d rather stick to our plans.”

“Only if you’re sure, baby.” Lana stroked her daughter’s hair. Her eyes remained locked on Tom’s in the mirror. Her lips formed a tight line across the bottom of her face, as if underlining the event.

“He was just a drugged-up loser, Mum. Who cares?”

Lana’s hand stopped moving on Hailey’s scalp. “Okay, honey.” She stared at Tom.

Tom nodded. “So we continue, then: to Hadrian’s Wall. It might do us all a bit of good, actually, just to get away from all that madness back there.”

“Can we have music on? Please?” Hailey was sitting up straight. She’d folded her arms across her chest and moved away from her mother, pressing her body against the inside of the door. She seemed to have forgotten about the horror they had witnessed.

“Yeah. Sure we can.” Tom reached out and turned on the radio. He noted that his hands were shaking, even as he turned the dial. The radio was tuned to a local station; they were playing a pop tune he vaguely recognised from a television commercial. He wasn’t sure what kind of product the ad was selling, but he knew most of the words to the song’s hideously catchy chorus.

“That’s good. Thanks.” Hailey smiled as she looked out of the side window. Her eyes looked empty, bereft of anything but the reflection of daylight.

He drove west, towards Hexham, taking the A69 – a road which followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. Green fields were pocked with strange pools of light and shadow. Small tumbledown stone walls barricaded dirty sheep and kept them from the roadside. The occasional fell walker waved as they drove by, raising red-cagouled arms to indicate some kind of bond they did not share. Tom drove in silence until they reached the signs for a place called Greenhead, where he turned off the main road and followed the signs for the Hadrian’s Wall Path.

Tom parked the car on a patch of gravel. The sky was turning dark, clouds were bloated and shuffling. A few other people – pensioners, on a day out – were milling around, putting on or taking off their walking boots, sorting out rucksacks and packed lunches.

“I brought a picnic,” said Lana. She was buttoning her coat against the chill.

Tom nodded. “That’s nice. I’m sorry, the weather’s turning bad, and that thing back at the estate... It seems like something doesn’t want us to have a good time today.”

Hailey was walking away, towards a low fence. She sat down on the top bar and stared back along the road.

Lana moved towards Tom, placing her hand on his arm. “I want us to have a good time,” she said. “What happened earlier doesn’t matter. It’s what we did yesterday that really counts.”

Tom placed his hand over hers. She was warm, and her long, thin fingers moved against his, rubbing his thumb. “I want us to enjoy this, too,” he said. “All of it.” The sky churned above them. A large bird – black, and with a huge wing span – flew over their heads, cawing loudly. It was like an omen, but Tom refused to let its message inside his head.

“Come on, let’s go for that walk.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt brittle, like calcified bone. If he stopped for even a moment to think about all of this, he might snap into a million pieces, his skeleton shattering and the broken bones spilling across the hills and dales.

They walked together to the spot where Hailey was sitting, her legs tucked up under her bottom and her hands pressed flat against the wooden fence. “Come on, we’re going to work up an appetite.” Lana brushed her fingers across Hailey’s cheek, and the girl flinched away before getting to her feet and following them across the flat, wet grass.

They crossed the fence using a wooden stile, and headed up a long, gradual rise. The gravel path soon became a hard-packed dirt trail, and the bushes and trees thinned out the higher they climbed. Scrawny lone trees stood like sentinels, surrounded only by flat stretches of grass. Old rock falls had created shallow caves, and the roots of old trees clasped the stone walls of these strange natural constructions.

Soon they reached the tip of the hill, and went through a gate to follow part of a bridle path. As they turned to follow the tip of the rise, the partial remnants of the great Roman wall came into view.

The uneven stone spine of the wall stretched away from them, dipping into small valleys and then rising to rocky peaks. The route was no longer steep, but it did undulate dramatically, so that the wall itself resembled the sculpture of some great stone serpent. Tom recalled with passing fondness the legend of the Lambton Worm, and the old folk song they used to sing at school when he was a small boy:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

An’ grewed an aaful size;

He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

An greet big goggly eyes

This particular worm, the one whose back they were following across the ancient landscape, hoping that it might lead them to a glimpse of something better than they already had, was made of stone. But no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the wall that would lead them to better things, it was their own ambition, and the strength of any plans they made.

“We learned about this at school, in Mr. Benson’s class.” Hailey had drawn level with them. Her eyes were still blank, dreamy, but she seemed a little more focused than before.

“What did you learn?” Tom thought that a mellow discussion about the history of the place might divert her mind from darker thoughts, and even help him to stop thinking about his increasingly uncertain future.

“Well, Emperor Hadrian built the wall. I think it was in AD 122, at least that’s when he started. It took – I think it was six years to build.”

“Well remembered,” said Tom. Lana gripped his hand. “Anything else?”

“It was built as a fortification to keep out trouble from Scotland.” She chewed on her lower lip between sentences, as if lost in thought. “But it was also meant as a symbol of Roman power, according to Mr. Benson. He reckons it was like the Romans flexing their muscles. Telling everyone else not under Roman rule to keep back, or they’d get a good kicking.”

Tom laughed. “Well, yes, that’s a fair point. The Romans certainly knew how to give folk a good kicking.”

“Something else, as well: we read this article from a science magazine, and apparently back in the Sixties someone dug up a portion of the wall and found human bones. Baby bones. Newborn children were buried alive under the foundations as a sacrifice, to protect the wall.”

“Jesus, Hailey… do we really need to talk about that?” Lana shook her head. “What the hell gets into your head, girl? Sometimes, I just don’t think I know you at all.”

Hailey’s voice turned petulant, the tone low and uneven. “It was in the magazine. I didn’t make it up.”

“Okay, that’s actually very interesting.” Tom turned to face them, walking backwards across the stony ground and trying to avert the threatened row. “The Romans were a pretty nasty bunch, and they had very demanding gods.” Something caught his eye. A small, almost dainty movement far behind them, somewhere back along the route they had taken. It looked like a scrap of white sheet, or perhaps a piece of paper, flapping in the wind. Tom stared back along the trail, but nothing else moved. Even the hikers they’d seen in the car park were absent.

“What is it?” Lana looked in the same direction, and then at Tom. “Are you okay?”

Tom nodded. “Yes, fine. I just thought… I dunno. Something just spooked me.”

“Yeah,” said Lana. “Probably all this talk of dead babies. So I think that’s enough of that.” She glared at Hailey, who continued walking at a slow pace, watching the ground at her feet.

They followed the relatively straight line of the wall, clambering over small rocky outcroppings and plodding up and down the sudden dips and rises. In places the grass was so worn that it looked bald, as if transparent ice were forming and hardening the ground. The air was chilly – but not cold enough to support the idea of snow – and the slight breeze was stirring, becoming stronger.

Tom kept glancing over his shoulder, trying to catch sight of whatever he had spotted moments before. Each time he turned his head, something twitched at the edge of his vision. But by the time he had focused on the location, there was no longer anything to be seen. It was as if something were teasing him, drawing his attention before ducking back out of sight. The thought unnerved him, and he remembered the weird visions he’d been having lately: the dog with a boy’s face, a figure that may or may not be a visual echo of his dead father’s abuse.

“How about we stop for a bite to eat?” Lana pressed her body against him. It was warm, firm, and reminded him of reality rather than stupid dreams and visions.

“That would be good. Hailey – what do you think?”

“Whatever.” The girl stopped and sat down on a large, damp rock that was sticking out of the ground like a giant’s tooth. She picked up a twig and started stripping the bark, rolling it off between her fingers like the rind of some strange fruit.

Lana put the cooler bag on the ground and sat on a nearby cluster of stones. Slowly she began to take items out of the bag: a small checked blanket, bags of sandwiches, a thermos flask filled with what Tom assumed must be coffee. She lined up these things neatly, as if it were important that everything was just right.

“Can I help?” Tom made a move to sit down beside her, but she glanced up and shook her head.

“It’s fine,” said Lana. “Be done in a minute. The grass is still a bit wet, but it’ll be okay if we stay on these rocks.”

The sky was now grey as slate, and the dense clouds resembled a layer of dull, dirty plaster across the ceiling of the world. Tom stared upwards, trying to make out the sun behind the billowing mayhem. He saw glints, tiny fragments of brightness, but they were swallowed instantly. “Hope it doesn’t piss it down,” he said. And when nobody answered, he trudged over the grass towards a low section of the wall.

The stone was old, chipped, and light grey in colour. It poked up above the grass like a giant fossilised spine. He approached the ruin, glancing along it in the direction they’d been heading. Then, as his hand pressed against the cold stone, he looked the other way, trying to pick out the route they had come along.

Something shifted in the grey air, partly obscured by the dimness and the distance. It was a mere flicker, like the sudden twitch of a fish’s tail twisting and vanishing into deep, debris-filled waters. The motion filled him with a heavy sense of dread, and he wished that he had not seen it.

Tom kept looking at the same spot, but the movement failed to reoccur, and nothing solid appeared out of the dull, heavy air.

He felt a weight pressing down on him, as if the air above him were turning to stone, like the wall, like the attitudes of the people on that damned estate. His shoulders began to ache from the imaginary burden, and if felt as if he were being pushed down into another world – one that existed either directly beneath or alongside this one. He ran the palm of his hand across his forehead and it came away damp. The sweat was cold, like the perspiration from someone suffering a fever. His vision burred; the churning air far ahead of him shimmered with the promise of more movement.

“Who’s there?” he whispered the words, afraid to speak them louder.

Then, fading into existence like a slow-dissolve image on a cinema screen, something took shape a few hundred yards down the track. It hovered in the air, twisting and bucking, filled with an energy that was both frightening and invigorating. It seemed to Tom that he was watching many hands, chopping, punching, and picking at the substance of the air, as if trying to use those small, condensed acts of violence to break through the barriers of reality.

“Who?” Again, it was a whisper. He didn’t want Lana to hear.

The hands darted like birds; they opened like wings and then folded shut again, forming solid fists that pummelled the air. Tom heard their impact in his mind, but he knew that the sound was not audible in the real world. Only in that place he had felt shifting beneath and around him, that one that was still trying to open up and pull him in.

He was trapped here, mute and helpless before those rampaging fists – the fists that were now moving closer to him, seeking him out, drawn to his anxiety.

It was like a pocket or envelope of air had closed around those barely visible fists, and they were trying to fight their way out. They were large, bony and monstrous: bigger than life, yet so much less than living. He saw now that there were scores of them, packed in tight like creatures caught up in gossamer netting.

Tom stood his ground. He was too terrified to move, to run. His feet had been swallowed by the earth, becoming part of the footing of the ancient wall at his side. The fists raged; they bristled with energy. If they touched him even once, Tom knew that he would be destroyed. His body would explode on impact.

Then they were gone. The pocket of air seemed to pop like a balloon, and nothing threatening was inside. The sky rose back to its natural position, and his legs were released from the ground’s hungry grip.

“Mum said the food’s ready.” Hailey stood at his side, one hand resting on his forearm. Her face was so pale that he thought he could see through it to the skull beneath. Something twitched inside the confines of her cranium, causing the bone to bulge outward: nothing but a vision that was leftover from his brush with that imaginary realm. He blinked and it was gone.

Tom was under no illusion that her presence had sent the chaotic hallucination on its way, and he could have fallen to his knees in thanks. Instead he followed her back to the cluster of rocks, where Lana sat smiling on the red and black blanket, an array of food set out before her on an improvised table of stone. The sheer banality of the sight helped him to put some distance between this moment and what he had seen – or what he thought he had seen.

“This stuff isn’t going to eat itself,” she said. Then a look of concern crossed her face. “Are you okay? You look... well, you look shocked. Or scared.”

Tom knelt down on the blanket, reached for a sandwich. “Sorry. I was just thinking – thinking about my late father.”

And then he was frightened all over again, because it was true: he had been thinking about his dead father, but without even realising he was doing so. Those fists – those images of violence – had been all that was left of the man, a representation of his will. His ghost, his phantom, was nothing more than a snatch of unfocused aggression, a flock of fists fighting against something unseen.

After they’d eaten – sandwiches with cheap fillings, freezer-shop-bought vol-au-vonts, mini sausage rolls, flattened cheese spheres wrapped in red plastic jackets – Hailey walked across the grass and then started to stroll along the side of the rampart. She bent over to pick up a stone, threw it, and then ran her hand along the weather-worn surface of the wall.

“She was a twin, you know.” Lana smiled, but her eyes were flat. “Her brother was stillborn. Thirty-seven seconds after I had Hailey, I delivered a little corpse.”

Tom didn’t know what to say, so he remained silent. He stared at Lana’s face, at the way her hair fell across her cheek and she kept pushing it out of the way; an unconscious gesture, but somehow sad and beautiful.

“I haven’t told anyone that,” she said, glancing at him, and then down at the ground. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you.” She shook her head. “Hailey doesn’t even know she almost had a brother.” She smiled again, and this time it was better, stronger, almost real.

“What’s wrong?” Tom waited for her to answer; there was no rush, they had all day. “What’s really bothering you?”

“I’m worried about her,” said Lana, turning to stare at her daughter’s back.

Tom moved round on the blanket so that he was sitting right next to her on the rock. He could feel the heat of her body, even through their fleecy jackets. A flash of sunlight lit the sky above them, and then dimmed but did not vanish. “Why? Is she still having those fainting spells?”

Lana shook her head. She lifted a hand and pushed the hair from out of her eyes. “No, she seems to have stopped those. But there’s something else, something wrong.”

Tom placed his hand on her knee.

She glanced at him and smiled, but the expression didn’t last. “I think she might be pregnant.”

“Ah… okay. Has she said anything?” He squeezed her knee, but this time she failed to respond.

“No, it’s nothing she’s actually said. But sometimes when I look at her, when she’s wearing thin clothing, her belly seems swollen. Then, the next time I look, it’s flat. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it isn’t right. It could be a tumour, or something. It might not be natural at all. I think I should take her to see a doctor, but if I tried I know she’d fight me.”

The landscape was silent; not even the birds sang. Not a living soul was visible. The sky trembled.

“This all sounds a bit strange,” said Tom, unsure of what she wanted him to say. “Her belly – you say it looks like she’s pregnant one day, and then the next it looks normal?”

“No,” said Lana. “Not normal. On those other days she looks too thin. Skinny. Like she’s starving to death. Her skin’s all dry, her breath smells, and she’s passing blood when she goes to the toilet. She says she’s never even been with a boy. I don’t know what to do. I couldn’t handle it if she was seriously ill.”

Tom remained silent. He wanted to help, to offer support, but this was something in which he had little experience. He’d never been a father; his marriage had not produced a child.

“I’m sorry.” She hitched closer again, so that her thigh brushed against his leg. “I shouldn’t be burdening you with this. All my troubles, my f*cking woes.” She tried to laugh but it didn’t quite work: the sound was shrill, pitched almost at breaking point. “It’s just that everything seems to be turning bad, and I have nobody else to talk to.”

Tom held her hand. It was warm, despite the chill. “Listen, I’m here for you. I don’t know what it is, but we have a connection here. I’m married, you have your own responsibilities, yet we’re drawn together. Or am I reading this all the wrong way, and you just need someone to lean on? I can be that, too… if that’s all you want.”

She shook her head. The movement was vigorous, as if she were trying to convince more than just Tom of her motives. “No, that’s not all I want. I need someone to hold me in the night, to make love to me and make me remember that I’m a woman and not just a single mother, a statistic struggling to cope. I need… I need. That’s all.”

Her hand ran along his thigh, moving into his lap to cup him there. She squeezed, softly at first and then harder, and Tom felt like he was about to burst apart at the seams.

“I think I need you, Tom.” Her eyes were wet, but she did not cry. Her neck blushed red; her cheeks took on a little of that colour.

“We’ll work something out. I promise. Because I think I need you, too.”

They both looked over at Hailey at the same time, as if she had called out to them.

The girl was standing motionless, turned slightly away from them but with the side of her face still visible, about a hundred metres along the wall. Her hand was outstretched, the palm held flat, and a tiny red and gold bird was perched at its centre. Hailey’s lips were moving, as if she were talking to the creature. Then, as they both watched in silence, the brightly-hued bird rose and hovered inches above Hailey’s hand before skimming off across the top of the wall, where it disappeared into the shuddering dimness beyond.