‘I’ve been thinking,’ I say.
‘That’s dangerous.’
And even though what I’m going to say next will wipe the smile off his face, I can’t keep it inside any longer.
‘What if I didn’t walk Ashlee back to her shortcut track that night?’
Sure enough, Mack’s smile disappears. ‘What are you talking about?’
My eyes dart away. I don’t want to see his expression, not when he realises I’ve been lying to him – without meaning to, maybe, but lying all the same.
‘I thought I remembered doing it,’ I say. ‘And when you were all going at me in your garage next morning and wanting answers, when I was stressing about it too, when none of us knew what had happened to Ashlee, I thought I was right. But what if I . . .’
Mack’s eyes narrow.
So I do it – I finally say what’s been going round in my brain. ‘What if I never walked her there? What if I left her somewhere else in the woods? Somewhere else, near the bunker?’
‘But you told us!’
‘I know I did. But what if I’m remembering another time?’
‘You’re getting confused.’ Mack is looking around, checking no one is listening. ‘Course you would have walked her there, that’s what you do – always.’ His eyes are up close and there’s an urging look in them. ‘Course you would!’
But does Mack know how drunk I was that night? Does he know how my body went after Ashlee gave me more of her fairy dust? I pull Mack on again, fast: I need to spill while I got the nerve, and this isn’t the place. I stop in a passageway at the side of the gym, press him against the wall.
‘I mean . . . what if I passed out?’ I say. ‘That night, somewhere in the woods. Maybe it’s why I don’t remember nothing.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Mack shakes his head, pulls the rollie from behind his ear again, lights it quicker than I can stop him. ‘You got home. And Shepherd came after Ashlee as she was walking back to hers. You didn’t pass out. This makes sense.’
I’m thinking about Emily’s eyes, her small tight mouth . . . the way she kept repeating how her father was scared of everything. I focus on a line of graffiti on the wall. Nothing – actually – makes sense. Even now. I grab the rollie off Mack, stomp it into the ground.
‘Maybe me and Ashlee had an argument?’ I say. ‘Maybe she walked off on me? It’s possible.’
And it’s another way Ashlee could’ve got to the bunker. There’s that word I’d remembered next morning too – useless. Why’d she said it to me? Had she got mad?
Mack looks down at his crushed rollie and frowns. ‘You never got angry at her. Don’t think like that.’
But I did, that night I did. I think I did.
‘Don’t let that Shepherd girl get to you, Damo. Don’t let her change what’s true.’
But there’s doubt in Mack’s eyes as he looks at me. He tries to mask it by forcing a kind of grin, but I see it: there, then gone. It’s doubt about me. I feel the heat in my neck spread. We said we were brothers, and brothers don’t keep secrets: they don’t lie. Mack knows this too. Mack knows I’ve let him down, let down all of them. But I’ve let Ashlee down most. I didn’t make sure she got out of the woods; I got drunk and high instead. I left her alone and she found his bunker. What’s true?
‘It’s my fault,’ I say.
‘No! You were just too drunk to remember.’
‘Exactly.’
Mack holds my gaze. ‘Just shut up.’
And now I know we’re thinking the same thing: what exactly did I do that night? Why can’t I remember?
I repeat what Emily Shepherd said yesterday. ‘I was the last person to see her alive.’
‘Apart from him!’ Mack shakes me.
He glances out the passageway to where students are starting to go to class. ‘Listen Damo, we covered for you. We told the cops that we were drinking in the car park and you walked her to that shortcut – I even said I saw you do it! The boys and me believed you when you told us.’
‘I know.’
He looks at me seriously. ‘If you didn’t walk her there, Damo, then we’ve all lied: me, Charlie, Ed! If you tell the coppers this now, they’ll charge us with something, we’ll get a record, we’ll go to jail . . .’ He’s starting to panic.
I try to squeeze my brain into making more sense: try to find a way out of this.
‘OK, so that morning, in your garage . . .’ I try. ‘I was confused, wasn’t thinking straight, I couldn’t remember what’d happened . . . but it didn’t make sense to tell the cops about the Game right then, even you said that. Anyway, right then I thought I did walk her back. It’s only now that I . . .’
I think about the boys staring at me in Mack’s garage, how their faces had relaxed a bit when I’d said I’d walked Ashlee to that track.
‘What do you remember, Damo?’ Mack thumps me against the bricks. ‘Getting home? Saying goodbye to Ashlee? What?’
With the bricks hard against me on one side and Mack pressing from the other I feel squeezed, my lungs tight. Mack’s looking at me desperate.
‘OK!’ I push him off me. ‘I remember fooling about with Ashlee someplace in the woods, I think the Game had finished but . . . I dunno really . . . I remember she gave me loads of her fairy dust and then . . .’ I shrug. ‘Nothing.’
‘Fooling about?’
The heat in my skin spreads. I look at graffiti on the wall, remember what Ashlee had promised that night. Sex. She’d been holding out on me for weeks just to do it then. I’d give her my collar and she’d give me . . . well, she’d give me her.
I force myself to look Mack in the eyes. But he turns away. He’s got it.
‘You been doing that all this time?’ He looks disgusted. ‘While the rest of us have been playing like we’re s’posed to?’
‘We haven’t been going that far. Not all the way. Just messing about, like.’
Mack’s top lip curls. ‘Thought we told each other everything.’
And now I’m worrying about something else. Because if the prosecution accept Shepherd’s plea of manslaughter, maybe there’d be another investigation. Maybe then the police won’t believe that Shepherd took Ashlee to his bunker. Maybe they’d want to interview us all again, find out more of what we were doing in the woods that night. And then? The police would know we’ve all lied.
‘Should we just come clean now?’ I say. ‘Tell the cops what we were really doing, about the Game and everything?’
Mack snorts. ‘You’re the one who said you wanted to keep this secret in the first place, remember? You’re the one who came up with the idea that we were just drinking in the car park and then you walked her back.’
‘But that’s what I thought . . . well, the walking her back part!’
‘And now you’re saying you can’t remember if you passed out instead?’ He gives me a dark look. ‘If it was your fault she was at the bunker?’
‘I’m saying I don’t know!’
‘Thought we trusted each other, Damo!’ He slams the palm of his hand against the bricks. ‘But all these secrets!’
The way he says this sounds like he’s swearing, like he’s accusing the whole world. He looks up the passageway. I guess we both must be late for class by now. I press the back of my head against the bricks.
‘What else you been keeping hidden?’ Mack hisses.
‘Nothing!’
‘No other little games?’ Mack’s eyes are interrogating. I want Mack to keep thumping me against this wall ’til I’m proper hurt. I want to wake up from this. I listen to the sound of our breathing – quick and heavy.
‘I can’t remember.’ I hate how my voice sounds so weak, so pathetic.
There’s a pause. Then suddenly Mack’s grabbing me in a rough sort of hug, then he’s pushing me away just as fast. ‘Don’t do anything, Damo. Don’t tell the other guys, OK? Don’t go to the police.’
‘But—’
‘Not yet.’ He holds my shoulders. ‘You don’t know
anything so how can you? Besides, you didn’t do anything bad that night, nothing you need to feel this fucking guilty about – I know you didn’t.’
I wipe my hands across my eyes and face. Suddenly I don’t know anything at all.
‘We’ll sort this, Damo. Didn’t we sort bad stuff after your old man died?’
‘This is different.’
Mack pulls me off the bricks. ‘Get your head together, Damo,’ he says. ‘That’s all you need to do right now. Then you’ll remember what that bastard’s done.’
21
Emily
It’s three days since the court hearing – Thursday now – two days since Kirsty pushed me. I still don’t want to go to school. This time I use the migraine excuse and Mum believes it: Dad used to get them and I know how to act the part. My head feels fuzzy anyway and my body aches. Mum fusses around me for ages. I almost think she’s going to use my excuse as her excuse for staying home from work too, but eventually I hear the front door click shut behind her. I lie very still for a long time, even try to sleep. But this anxious feeling gets worse – this horrible doubt. So I read Dad’s discharge notes again, all that stuff about him shooting that civilian girl and how it affected him. But I still don’t understand how Dad’s manslaughter plea came from this. Just because Dad shot a girl by accident while he was a soldier, it doesn’t mean he’d strangle Ashlee Parker, even in a flashback. I hate how people just assume these two things go together.
I go downstairs, sit on the couch. After staring a while at the empty space the photos have left on the mantelpiece, I go through the pile of Dad’s mail. Mum’s hardly opened any of it. It’s mostly bills, letters from the police and Dad’s solicitors. There are several letters about his overdue car tax too, one of them threatens to tow the car to the wreckers if he doesn’t pay soon. I put that letter aside so Mum will see it. Already I’m remembering how Dad used to drive that car when we went bird watching, or walking in the mountains, how it carried the three of us each time we moved to another of Dad’s army postings . . . how it drove us here. Mum could be driving that car now, using it to visit Dad in custody. Instead, it’s just another part of Dad that is being ignored, something else I can’t do anything about. But its keys are still hanging with the rest of our keys in the hall. So that’s something, isn’t it?
There are no other houses at the end of our lane where Dad left his old blue Fiesta, so no one is watching me. I step up to the driver’s window, wipe grime away to look in – there’s a crisp packet on the passenger seat, bleached white from the sun. The driver’s door moans as I pull it open. It smells strange in here: a mixture of mustiness, Davidoff aftershave, and salt and vinegar crisps. Odd how these smells can still be here when Dad’s gone. I get in and put the key in the ignition. Maybe I can drive this car to Dad’s prison. Maybe, without Mum with me, Dad might remember more from that night, might talk. Maybe I could hide this car afterwards too, somewhere the council couldn’t take it away.
I turn the key. Suddenly I feel different – like I’m doing something. Finally. But nothing happens. I try again – turning the key harder – same thing. I even pump my foot against the accelerator. It’s no good. Battery’s dead. I sigh out the breath I’ve been holding, thump the steering wheel. It was stupid even trying this. I probably wouldn’t have been able to drive it anyway – Dad never did give me those driving lessons he’d promised. I would have crashed before I even got to the motorway. So this car will end up crushed and useless in a junkyard after all.
I settle against the headrest; shut my eyes. A strange calm seeps into me. The council will tow more than a few sheets of metal when they take this car, our memories will be towed too. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe everything will be like this soon: the photos taken down, the car disappeared . . . it won’t be long before Mum stops mentioning Dad altogether. Then there’ll just be me left to remember him like he was, maybe the only person who ever will.
I rest my forehead against the steering wheel. I’ve only seen Dad once in prison. That was when the liaison officer took us, and Mum and I had sat on the other side of a plastic table and watched Dad shake his head over and over. I’d thought that was a good sign – like he’d been trying to tell us he wasn’t guilty – but when Mum had asked him what he was thinking about, he’d stopped the shaking and had looked at us with fierce eyes. He didn’t speak at all, the whole time we were there. That was when I realised Dad was ill – seriously ill – when I realised I couldn’t ever fix him by myself.
‘He’s in the best place,’ Mum had said afterwards. ‘He’s such a shell of a man.’
Now I’m crying, properly crying, for the first time in ages. Tears are smearing over my cheeks and on to the steering wheel. I’m wrapping my arms around it and holding it tight, as if it’s someone hugging back. Maybe Mum is right and the Dad I remember is just a fantasy. Thinking like this makes me cry harder. Right now I want the council to tow me away too. Just how sick has my dad become? Sick enough that he’s sitting behind bars admitting to a killing he doesn’t remember? Sick enough that he did it?
I stay like this for a long time. When I can move again, I have a plan. I’ll search through the car, take anything out of it I want to keep, then I’ll let it go: this car, these feelings about Dad . . . I’ll try to. Maybe it will be easier if I can forget how life with the Dad from before used to be. Maybe I’ll understand. I try the glove box. It’s rammed with CDs, Beatles ones mostly: Dad’s favourite. I pull out a rusty Swiss army knife, flipping open various parts of it, pressing my thumb against its biggest blade. If I kept pressing, my skin would bleed. I almost want it to. Almost want that kind of pain.
There’s some sort of car logbook too. It’s uncomfortable looking at Dad’s tight, neat handwriting inside it; it reminds me of the notes he used to stick in my school lunchbox whenever he was home on leave: Meet you after school and we’ll go to the woods. Be clever today. Love, Dad. I don’t understand how that Dad could twist out of shape so much, become like a plastic carton morphed by the sun.
I’m about to put the logbook away when I see what’s at the back of it. There are sketches in the corners of the pages, small and delicate, a bit like the ones in the letters Dad sent back from tour. These are different sorts of drawings to the dark scrawls I saw yesterday in the bunker. Here I see larks circling up from grasses, an oak leaf, there’s a detailed drawing of a fox with big, curious eyes. There’s something about the way that fox is looking out from the page that makes me think of Joe. Seeing this reminds me of that drawing game Dad and me played once, so long ago – strange to think of that again after yesterday. And now I’m remembering how Dad once drew Mum as a cat with green eyes and a small, neat mouth; how he’d always draw me as a grey squirrel – messy fur, hiding in trees. I’d always guess the person he was trying to depict in the animal. It hurts to think about it all again.
I close the book and try to shut these thoughts away too. But a loose sheet of paper falls out, and of course I look at it. It’s another sketch, but this one isn’t like the others. At first I think the sketch is just a deer, mid-leap in a forest: a deer being chased by a wolf. But when I look more closely, I know there is something different about it, something familiar. I study the deer’s face. There’s someone I almost recognise in it – an expression, maybe – it’s like Dad’s game again, trying to pick it. I look at this deer’s features carefully, trace its ears with my fingertips. With a gasp, I realise who I’m seeing. I go cold, make sure.
This deer looks like Ashlee Parker. It has the same huge brown eyes, the delicate ears and high cheekbones, the confident, excited expression. I see it all. This creature is beautiful too, like something from one of Dad’s bedtime stories. It’s half girl, half deer. Ashlee.
I wrench my eyes to the creature that’s chasing it: that wolf. It looks savage, like the wolves on the bunker walls do. But as I look at it more carefully, I see that it looks excited too. There are other wolf shadows in the trees behind it. What does it all mean?
br /> There’s a thudding feeling in my ears. Dad hasn’t been in this car since long before Ashlee’s death. The police took him straight from our house that night. So when did he draw this? Why? I go back to the deer’s face, but no matter how hard I look at it I can’t stop seeing Ashlee in it now.
The wolf isn’t as human-looking as the deer; I can’t see anyone in its expression. But all the newspaper headlines of the past eight weeks are rushing back at me, all the stuff people have yelled: He watched her! He’s sick! He’s a murderer! Woodland Stalker! Monster!
I try to keep myself calm. But I’m breathing quicker. And I’m remembering once when Mum said Dad was like a wolf, back when he went quiet and strange after being discharged, back when she’d got angry at him and said he preferred being in the woods alone to anything else.
‘You’re a lone wolf,’ she’d said. ‘You’re turning wild!’
But Dad doesn’t look like the wolf in this picture. Does he?
I open the door and hang my head outside. I breathe in the cold air, stare at the gutter. How would the police interpret this picture? Would they see it as evidence? Evidence of everything they’ve accused Dad of? Evidence that he watched and wanted Ashlee Parker? That he’s a murderer as charged?
I’m grasping at it, crumpling it, but something stops me before I tear it up. I shove it deep into my coat pocket instead. This is only evidence if I show it to someone. And it might not even be evidence at all.
Even so, there’s a weight pressing on my shoulders, making me slow and hunched as I walk to our house. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this sketch has nothing to do with the game Dad and I used to play. Maybe Dad has just drawn a deer, some woods, a wolf. Maybe someone else wouldn’t see Ashlee Parker in this deer’s face. Maybe I’m just panicking.