The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





HOW THE F*ck did that happen?

Lana was sure she’d walked along a narrow ginnel that should have brought her out somewhere near The Dropped Penny pub, but somehow she found herself standing on top of the Embankment and facing in the wrong direction entirely. She stared down the slope and into the shadows at the bottom of the old railway cutting, picking out the broken timber railway sleepers in the sodium-tinted darkness.

The route she’d taken should have delivered her outside the pub. She knew that; it was a fact, non-negotiable. So what the hell was she doing here, at the opposite end of the Grove, and facing the wrong f*cking way?

Her stomach ached, her legs hurt. Her insides felt battered.

“Keep calm.” She spoke out loud in an attempt to dispel the fear that was creeping up on her from behind, wrapping its arms around her shoulders like an old lover. Time was slowing down. She felt like she’d been out here for hours when in reality she’d only just left Bright’s grotty little gym.

She turned around and stared at the domineering shape of the Needle. This was the closest she’d been to the building in ages. She didn’t like how it looked; the phallic tower made her nervous in a way she could not easily define. It was worse now, at night, and standing so close to its graffiti-covered walls. Out here, in the cold darkness that was bruised by yellow street lights, she could imagine that the place had a consciousness – that it was sentient, and that it was watching her just as closely as she had watched the impassive tower block from her window, night after night, hating it for what it represented, her new life at the bottom of the pile.

“Bastard,” she said, directing the curse at both the building before her and the rotten excuse for a man she’d just left.

She knew what had to be done now. There was no other way. She had offered herself to Monty Bright and he’d taken his fill. Then the f*cker had reneged on his end of a bargain he claimed had never been struck. Bright had proven himself to be a liar, a rapist, and a welcher. And in some ways this last was the worst of all.

He had never intended to cancel her debt, nor had he meant to leave her alone once she had given him what he wanted. This debt, she now realised, would never be paid. It was forever. He had his fingers in her life right up to the knuckle joints, and there was nothing that she could do to break his grip.

She started walking again, past the silent frontages of darkened houses and towards other buildings that had been boarded up and abandoned. Trying to ignore the pain, she kept her eyes on her surroundings. She didn’t like it here, at the centre of the Grove. The air felt different from that on the outskirts. It was as if the callousness that dwelled here had its source on, or under, the very streets she now walked.

Another narrow alley opened up like a mouth in the darkness, a street light picking out its redbrick sides and showing her the way. She headed for the opening, glancing back over her shoulder, and then ducked inside. The alleyway was long, the walls on either side of her were smooth and covered in the same kind of graffiti she saw everywhere around here: badly drawn sex organs, phone numbers and promises of gratification, declarations stating how big someone’s cock was and how deep someone else’s vagina. These primitive designs and renderings all seemed to focus on the subject of sex, as if that were the only language the artists knew how to use. There was nothing erotic about this paintwork, as there might be in true art: there was only crudity and banality, a strange, dull obsession with body parts and their basic functions.

When she emerged from the opposite end of the alley she found herself this time at the south end of the Embankment. She’d been heading east, yet somehow she had ended up facing south. This was wrong; it couldn’t be possible. She felt like she was becoming lost in familiar streets, and each time she tried another route the arrangement of the maze reconfigured itself to strengthen the delusion.

Down on the disused railway line, far enough away that he probably couldn’t even see Lana on her raised vantage point, a man was walking what at first she assumed to be a large, shaggy dog. As the moonlight and the wash of pale illumination from the streetlamps highlighted these figures, Lana saw that the animal was not a dog at all. It was something unusual, an animal she was unable to identify. Its furry body was close to the ground and it possessed far more short, thin legs than was necessary – like a nightmarish cross between a bear and a centipede. Then, as she strained her eyes to make the image clearer, the man and his companion slipped into a patch of shadow and failed to come back into view. She tried to tell herself that the man had not been so thin that he resembled a fluttering paper cut-out. Nor had his arms been so long that his hands reached down past his knees.

Fighting panic, she walked south, along the lip of the Embankment, and then crossed the empty road to walk the fence line of the old factory units. Grove Drive lay on the other side of the blackened factories, and if she walked to the end, then doubled back on herself, she could approach the block of flats where she lived from a different angle entirely. Maybe that way she could solve the puzzle and find her way home.

But when she turned the corner onto what should have been Grove Drive, she found herself back on Grove Road, one of the central rings of the main circle of streets at the heart of the Grove.

It was impossible. She should not – could not – be here. But here she was.

Lana’s hands were shaking. She stuffed them into her coat pockets to try and still them, but as soon as she did so her legs began to tremble. The fear she had managed to repress earlier that evening, when she’d given herself to those men, was now finding a way out into the open. This surreal journey through insanely shifting streets had somehow uncorked the feelings she had forced down into the deepest part of herself.

It was almost a kind of relief.

“I’m going to kill you.” The words, when they came, sounded like they were being spoken by someone else. “I will kill you, Monty Bright.” She hadn’t even known she was going to say these things until she opened her mouth, and even that felt like it was beyond her control, an impulsive act rather than one she had thought about beforehand.

“Kill you.” She didn’t feel ashamed by the threat, or even frightened by the depth of her conviction. She felt strong now that she’d made the decision and confirmed it out loud. The night seemed to steal her words, taking them and stashing them away in some secret nook or cranny made of pure darkness. Those words would remain there, resting on a shelf of night, until the act was done; and only then would they be returned to her, like a promise or prophecy sent home to roost.

As if borne by her newfound sense of righteousness, Lana made her way out of the circle at the centre of the estate, cutting along Grove Lane until she saw the mini roundabout adjacent to The Dropped Penny. She crossed the quiet road, glancing at her watch as she made it to the kerb on the other side. It was 2:30 AM. She felt like it should be close to daybreak, but it was still deep in the early hours of morning, and a long time before most of the denizens of this place would even stir in their beds or even think about waking. The dreams here lay as thick as clouds above the houses; when she glanced up, at the sky, she could almost see their formless gyrations above the rooftops. The Needle stood behind her. She felt as if it were bending forward to mock her while she had her back turned, but nothing could have forced her to turn around and take a look.

She made her way to the Grove Court flats, fumbling with her key as she walked along the path to the main door. Once inside she stood with her back against the door, glad that she had some kind of barrier between her and the labyrinth through which she’d been stumbling like a lost child. She paused there for a while, trying to control her breathing. Finally the shakes had come, and the asthmatic reaction of delayed fright.

“I’ll kill you,” she said again, between rushed breaths. “Kill. You.”

Once she felt calmer she climbed the stairs and entered the flat. The lamp was on in the living room, there was a small black and white television playing on mute. Hailey must have borrowed it from one of her few friends. She couldn’t imagine any of her neighbours dropping it over for them to use. This wasn’t the kind of place where you helped each other out. People kept to themselves, and hid behind their doors at any hint of trouble.

She watched a giant white cat as it tried to climb the Post Office Tower on the tiny screen, and realised that it was a late-night repeat of an old comedy programme from the 1970s: The Goodies. She’d loved the show when she was a young girl, and had never missed an episode. The sight of that stupid cat – a bad special effect from a dated TV show – brought her close to tears for the first time that day.

She exhaled and turned away from the television, heading into the kitchen. She poured herself a large whisky in a tall glass, added a couple of ice cubes from the freezer (there were two left, looking sad and fluffy in the plastic mould), and stood leaning against the workbench as she drank. It was pointless going back into the other room to watch the rest of the show. There were no chairs to sit on, and her lower regions ached too badly to sit on the hard floor.

Tears poured down her cheeks as she finished her drink, but she refused to acknowledge them. If she ignored them, they didn’t exist. She poured another tall drink and drank it without ice – there was none left anyway, and she didn’t feel like scraping it off the inside of the freezer. She was desperate but she still had standards.

She laughed out loud, wiped her face with the back of one hand and used the other to tilt the glass against her open lips and tip the remaining whisky down her throat.

“Mum?”

Hailey’s voice pulled her out of the state of hysteria she’d been dangerously close to embracing. She put down the glass on the bench and pushed herself into the middle of the kitchen. “Hey, baby. Yes, it’s me. I’ve been out for a late drink with Tom.” She smiled but knew it was fooling nobody – not Hailey, and certainly not herself. “What are you doing awake at this time?”

“Mum, something’s happened. Something weird…” The girl was standing at the end of the short hallway, partially inside the living room. She was wearing a white terrycloth robe that was hanging open, the belt undone. Her belly was loose and wrinkled, like a fleshy bag, and it hung down over her waist. There was blood on her thighs. It looked dark in the lamplight, like deep red ink.

“Hailey. What’s wrong? What happened?” She moved quickly, grabbing a couple of tea towels from the top drawer beside the sink and kneeling down in front of her daughter. “What the f*ck’s happened, Hay?”

“They’ve come,” said Hailey, her pale face turned slightly upward. “I asked for help, and help’s arrived.”

“Talk to me, Hailey. Tell me what you’ve done.” Frantically, she checked her daughter’s arms for signs of self-harm or needle marks. Then, finding nothing but smooth white flesh traced with delicate blue veins, she turned her attention to Hailey’s lower anatomy.

She’d given birth, that much was obvious. Her belly was hanging in such a way that it was clear something had recently vacated it. She pushed the loose flesh aside, inspecting the area beneath. There was blood on Hailey’s pubes, and stringy matter pasted to the inner surfaces of her legs. The blood was congealing; it was not running fresh. Whatever had occurred, it was over. The damage was done.

“You’ve had a baby?” She could not believe that she was saying the words.

Hailey laughed. It was an awful sound: empty and uncomprehending. “No, Mum. Not a baby. I’ve deliveredsomething, but it certainly wasn’t a baby.” Hailey’s voice sounded strange, like she was a grown woman and not a little girl. She spoke like an old crone, battered and beaten by life’s traumas but not yet ready to lie down and quit.

Lana decided to change the course of the conversation, to give Hailey some room in which to find her focus. “Where did the TV come from, honey?” She rubbed her daughter’s forearms, as if she were trying to warm them up, to help circulate the blood in her veins.

“Tessa’s mother brought it over. Late on, after you’d gone out.”

Lana had no idea who Tessa was.

“That was nice of her.” She kept rubbing Hailey’s arms. She couldn’t stop. “I’m sorry, honey. Mummy couldn’t make it better.” Tears ran down her cheeks and she stroked Hailey’s cold wrists. “I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t manage it. I’m sorry for your illness, I’m sorry for the things we’ve seen and done. I’m sorry your daddy isn’t around to see how beautiful you are.”

Hailey’s eyelids flickered, and then her eyes slowly closed and opened again. They were completely white, without a trace of pupil or iris. She opened her mouth and a trail of saliva ran down her chin. She was having some kind of fit. Another one.

Lana grabbed her daughter by the shoulders. “Hailey?”

Hailey’s body began to shake. Lana was almost used to this by now, but combined with everything else she was going through it seemed much worse this time.

“Oh, Hailey. Oh, honey.” Lana cradled her child in her arms and reached out to something she didn’t believe in. If there was a God, or some kind of greater power that watched over the fallen, then why would it not answer her pleas? The doctors were useless; they didn’t know what was wrong. None of them could make a proper diagnosis. Maybe all she had left to rely on was whatever might be listening to her prayers.

The shuddering motion stopped. Hailey pushed herself out of her mother’s embrace. Her eyes were normal again. White flecks of spit speckled her chin.

“The Slitten,” said Hailey, her voice low and cold and even. “They’ll help us. Just ask. Ask.”

After everything she’d seen lately – and all the horror she’d experienced in Monty Bright’s basement room – Lana was ready to believe in anything. Any slim hope offered to her looked appealing, even the private fantasy belonging to a damaged teenager. She let go of Hailey and shuffled backwards on her knees, clasping her hands in a clumsy prayer. She lowered her head and gathered whatever energy still inhabited her battered body.

“Just ask.” Hailey’s voice was a whisper, an echo.

Lana stared at her hands, clasped before her in an idiot’s plea. Suddenly this seemed like an absurd children’s game. She pulled her hands apart and wiped them on the front of her dress, as if they were covered in dirt. “No. This is stupid,” she shook her head. “Like I said before, it’s just f*cking stupid.” She stood and walked over to Hailey, manhandling her in a more aggressive way than she first intended. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I always seem to be doing that lately.”

Hailey said nothing. She just allowed herself to be led to the bathroom.

Lana ran the hot water until it was steaming, and added just a little cold so that the water was tolerable to sit in. Then she helped Hailey undress and guided her into the bath. The room was filled with steam. The window glass was opaque. The surface of the mirror was like a cataract-blinded eye. She felt close to a place where all of this made some kind of sense, an alternative world in which pain was simply a method of gaining entry, where trauma was just the price of admittance.

She put Hailey to bed and then took a shower to relax – the faulty shower head decided to work on the third attempt, the water spluttering at first but then flowing with renewed force. But no matter how many times she bathed herself, Lana knew that she would never be rid of the stain of this evening. She was polluted; her body had been changed by what she’d allowed those men to do to her. And the sight of Monty Bright as he shed his wetsuit had imprinted itself on her mind, altering the geometry of her brain forever.

After her shower, she dressed in clean clothes and returned to Hailey’s room. The girl was sleeping, lying in exactly the same position as when Lana had left her before midnight. The girl’s eyes moved rapidly beneath waxy lids; she was seeing something other than the depressing sights around her. Maybe even something wonderful. Lana reached out and stroked Hailey’s forehead, fighting back tears.

Hailey’s eyes opened.

“Just ask.”

Lana took away her hand. She stared at her daughter’s pale face, at her dull, hard eyes. Then she relented. If it made Hailey happy, she could at least do this for the girl, feed her crazy little fantasy.

But somewhere deep inside her, where her hopes and dreams lay dry and withered, like dead flowers, hope stirred.

Lana closed her eyes, once more pretending to pray.

“Help me. Please help.” Lana’s voice sounded different. Her words felt strange as they left her throat. They were like solid objects regurgitated into the room. The words had shape and form: they were alive; and once released, they went out in search of something incredible.

When Lana opened her eyes, Hailey was sitting up in bed, wide awake now. The expression on her daughter’s face was one of bliss, like a child on Christmas morning. She held her hands together in front of her chest, and then slowly, and with great intent, she began to unbutton her nightdress.

Lana leaned back. “What are you doing, honey?” That faint fluttering of hope was gone; the fragment of belief was spent. There was nothing here in this room but a girl who had lost touch with reality and a mother who had failed to protect her.

“I’m summoning them.” Hailey’s breasts looked bigger than when Lana had bathed her earlier; they spilled out of the open neck of the garment, full and firm and lactating. Watery milk striated with pale crimson streaks leaked from the rigid nipples, drawing wet lines down Hailey’s bloodless, paper-thin chest.

Lana stared at her daughter’s body. It had changed. Something beyond understanding had happened.

The sound of rain clawing at the windows. But it wasn’t raining; hadn’t rained for days. Spindly, twig-like shadows crept across the walls and ceiling, pasting darkness upon the walls; the bricks and floorboards creaked as if in preparation for the arrival of something glorious. The air turned dusty and grey light seeped from invisible cracks to baptise the room.

Gossamer filaments drifted down from the ceiling, like the webbing of a spider, but longer, firmer, thicker. At the top of each frosted strand there was a small bundle, like an oversized, blackened fist, which slowly began to unfurl and reveal a lighter underside. Dusty petals opening. Striving for the light.

Lana stared at the ceiling, and at the things making their way down towards her.

“What are they?”

“The Slitten.” Hailey bared her chest to the room, throwing back her head and closing her eyes in an expression of near ecstasy. The Slitten responded en masse. Scores of them dropped like desiccated spiders from the ceiling, rolling across the floor towards the bed. They were shadow and half-light, lines and slashes, more thought than substance. Their features were vague, like stolen shards of daylight trapped in sealed rooms, and their limbs were many and sharp-clawed. When Lana stared straight at them they became blurred, lacking focus. But when she looked off to the side, they solidified and took on form in her peripheral vision. Their desiccated reptilian mouths gaped. The ragged holes in their crisped bodies showed only hollowness within. They were like living fossils, the calcified shells of reanimated prehistoric beasts.

Hailey’s behaviour – along with the baggy clothes, the moodiness, the increasing secrecy –all made sense now, at last, in terms of this virgin birth. She had not been impregnated by some boy on the estate, but she had been filled with wonder. And now those wonders had been delivered into their care.

Her daughter, she now realised, was a being of contrasts: guardian and wet nurse; victim and criminal; strength and fragility; darkness and light.

The Slitten crawled up onto the bed, swarming over their birth-mother and obscuring her lower torso. One by one, they reached up and began to suckle, taking it in turns to slake a thirst born in darkness. Lana watched in awe. Her beautiful daughter was now a mother to monsters and for some reason the thought did not fill her with terror or repulsion. Instead, she felt a strong sense of purpose, and the potential solution to their problems began to take on a kind of clarity that she had not even dared to dream of.

Soon the Slitten were satisfied. They rolled off Hailey, slid from the bed, and gathered around Lana, their movements slow and heavy. They had taken their fill. Their hunger was sated, at least for now.

“Ask them,” said a tired voice from the bed, its owner lost in the growing shadows – shadows that had not been there even seconds before. “Ask them again. It’s why they’re here, to help us. Tell them what you want them to do.”

Lana looked at the resting entities, but only out of the corner of her eye. Then she reached out her hands and began to speak.