I feel as bare and as stripped as the trees in front of us, as if I’m losing everything that once made me who I am. I watch the wind push a tree so far backwards it’s as if its trunk should snap. Another tree curves forward into a tight fist. The whole of Darkwood is churning, mixing up like a brew. All these leaves spinning away.
‘Will you ever go in there again?’ I say.
The question surprises both of us. Suddenly I have a memory of Mum in the woods, so clearly, showing me the tiny snow-white mushrooms that grow near the caves. She’d said they were fairies’ umbrellas, something to stop their wings from getting wet. Once, Mum loved these woods as much as me. Today she walks over and snaps the window shut. She sits on the end of my bed with a serious face.
‘We need to move away,’ she says. ‘From Darkwood and all of this. Just as soon as the conviction’s over and done with – get away from all those trees.’
I think of autumn leaves the colour of fire, the different kinds of mushroom there’d be right now, all the creatures getting ready to hibernate: all the things we wouldn’t see if we left.
‘We can become a new kind of family,’ she says. ‘Just us.’
I stare through the glass so hard my eyes ache. Shellshock, they used to call the thing Dad caught from combat . . . but right now, I think I’ve got it too; I think Mum and I both have. Shellshock from what happened that night, from what everyone says Dad is.
‘I was thinking we could go up north,’ she’s saying. ‘Maybe live with Granny and Grandpa for a while? Just until things calm down.’
She’s suggested this before. When the brick came through our front window, a few days after Dad’s arrest, Mum even talked about changing our names.
‘We could be Hughes? Go back to my maiden name?’ she’d said.
But if we move up north to become Hughes with Granny and Grandpa, what does this mean? It’s easier for Mum; she becomes a daughter again with two parents to look after her. But me? I become someone I’ve never been: a one-parent child, someone with a buried past that can never be talked about. I lose my name and everything that currently makes me me: Darkwood, Dad, my friends. Unlike Mum, who can get another name and another husband, I can never forget what it means to be Dad’s daughter. He’s inside me. Like the woods are.
‘I can’t,’ I say. And Mum looks like I’ve slapped her.
‘It’ll be good,’ she tries to reason. ‘Something new . . . a sort of . . . chance.’
She’s half-hearted now, though. She’d probably love to move us into some sparkling new flat in a gated housing estate, somewhere it’s colder and wetter and where we’d never want to go outside. But leaving Darkwood is like pulling out a part of me. It’s like removing a lung. Having Dad gone is like that too. Thinking that Dad might have – actually – done this thing, thinking that he even meant to do it, is like having my heart strained through my ribs.
‘It’s not going to get any easier after your father’s conviction,’ Mum says. ‘If he’s convicted of manslaughter, everyone in town will feel sorry for us, or think we’re strange. If it’s murder, they’ll hate us even more.’
I can tell by the way she’s glancing at my door that she wants to be back downstairs, away from me and nearer her booze, closer to something that gives her the answers she wants. She tucks me in, her freezing fingertips against my cheek for a moment.
‘Rest now, Em. Just sleep a while. Things’ll be easier then.’
Her voice is like a tiny animal, and it claws at me. And even though there are still a hundred questions and worries in my mind, somehow I still shut my eyes. Somehow I sink down again into that pit, into that quiet, dark place where it feels like things will never be easier, no matter what Mum says.
24
Damon
I’m getting that buzzy feeling as soon as I’m travelling down the high street. The pubs are busy – it is Friday night after all. I take a wide berth of The City Arms, where Mack’s dad drinks. If he catches sight of me, I know how it’ll be: he’ll place a sweaty arm round my shoulders, sneak me past the bouncers, and put a piss-warm ale in front of me and say it’s for my dad. Or maybe he’d place two beers in front of me tonight and say one’s for Ashlee. That’s the last way I want to remember her, by drinking and only remembering the good times.
I need to remember that night.
I move quick, weaving through a crowd of swaying army boys out on the pull. Their eyes land on the combat shirt I’m wearing under my duffle coat – Dad’s shirt.
‘Hey, fighter boy,’ one of them says. ‘When you going to join us on duty?’
‘Nice shirt!’ I hear from someone else.
I flip the bird, glare at them. ‘Piss off!’
I don’t care if they get lairy; I can handle myself. I need to wear this shirt now, need to do as many things as possible the same as that night. That’s what the article said. I’m not stopping to explain nothing.
I cross the street, push through a few students dressed up for Halloween already. A blonde girl with a big pretty mouth reaches out to touch my arm, then giggles. It would be easy to stop and let her touch me more, she’s already moving closer and she looks a bit like Ashlee. Maybe being with a girl like her could help me remember?
‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re drunk.’
She pouts and tries to look sexy, but just stumbles on her heels. Already I see her girlfriends closing down on me, glaring like I’ve done something wrong. I get out of there.
Tonight’s about Ashlee. Only Ashlee. It’s about getting my head straight and working out what happened. Wearing this shirt is just the start. I jog, and immediately feel better. Darkwood always was our own kind of Friday night pub, my own kind of addiction. I have to slow as I hit the main drag of bars, though. Something’s stabbing at me, somewhere behind my ribs, and it’s not because I’m short of breath. It’s because I shouldn’t be excited about playing the Game again. It’s because if Ashlee had never played our Game, she’d still be alive. This ache hurts so much I have to stop in a shop doorway. I focus on the Halloween stuff hanging in the windows just to think of something else. It doesn’t help. Halloween’s not something easy to think about, either. I can still see Ashlee’s excited face when she’d said we should play the Game on Halloween.
‘We’ll dress up,’ she’d said. ‘There’ll be loads of freaky people in the woods so it’ll be better . . . risky . . .’
I breathe in deep. Halloween’s tomorrow.
I see my face reflected back at me in the glass, my eyes empty-looking. I glare. In the window my cheekbones stand out, and there’s stubble on my chin. Only it doesn’t make me look hard, like I thought it would. I look like someone pretending. Ashlee would’ve laughed. She’d laugh at how much of a pussy I’m being right now too. She’d be teasing me, saying she was going to catch me tonight, saying she’d take my collar.
‘Gonna get you,’ she’d say.
She never could get me, though, not really; she wasn’t strong enough. I’d go along with her fighting me so I could start kissing her quicker, pretend she hurt me more than she did.
But she’s got me now. By being gone, she’s really proper got me. If this was her Game Plan, it was a good one. I touch my collar in my pocket, think about touching hers instead . . . unbuckling it, not wanting to do it too soon or too quick . . . not wanting it to be all over. I lean forward ’til I feel the cold glass on my forehead. I try to remember what it was like to be on top of her, inside. The police never asked if we’d had sex that night and they check for things like that . . . don’t they? And, much as I want to, I can’t remember it. Is that why I’d been angry? Because I’d wanted to do it and she didn’t? Or was I too drunk and she got mad? Did we not, actually, do it at all? I want to press my head so hard into this window that its glass smashes and cuts me, that alarms go off.
There’s an old couple gawping at me – probably thinking I’m another teenage alcoholic with too much cider in my belly, about to be sick and slump in it in this doorway. L
ife would be easier if that was all I was. I stumble past them, playing up to it, knowing Ashlee would’ve laughed at this . . . wondering if maybe she is, somewhere. Then I keep going for the woods.
I slink straight through the empty car park and on to the main path in Darkwood, don’t even look at Ashlee’s tribute pile. I focus on remembering how we’d walked into the woods that night. We’d been laughing and joking, high already. It’s a full moon again tonight, like how it always is when we play. Even so, I’m still stumbling on the rough ground. An arm shoots out and grabs me when I’m nearly at the clearing where we start.
‘Damo?’
‘Jesus, man!’
My heart’s hammering like a frickin’ machine gun as Mack pushes me against a tree and holds his face close. He’s checking my expression. ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Damo?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
He digs about in his inside coat pocket, takes out a small bottle of the hard stuff, the stuff that burns your throat as you swallow . . . the stuff Ashlee liked.
‘I don’t even know why you suggested this right now, Damo. It’s too soon. Least wait until after the trial. There might still be coppers in here!’
‘They left ages ago.’
Though I’m not sure about this.
Mack holds the bottle out to me, but even the smell makes me feel ill. I think of my vomit in the toilet in Mack’s garage that morning after. But I take a swig anyway, big as I can without gagging, because that night I was drunk, crazy drunk. And I want to remember everything.
Mack keeps his face close, checking me.
‘I need to do this,’ I say. ‘It’s important. One last time. Just to . . . just to settle things.’
And, for whatever reason, Mack backs off. He runs a hand across his neck. ‘You know, you and I could just play, without the others. Like we used to?’
This option is tempting – it’s easier. But I want everything to be as close to how it was that night, want to give myself the best chance like that internet page said.
‘Don’t go easy on me,’ I say.
‘The Game as it used to be, eh?’ Mack nods. ‘Maybe that’s what we all need.’
He tries to smile. I realise then that Mack has been different these last few weeks too – quieter and tenser, doesn’t talk about the army so much, or about Ashlee, or even about getting away from this town – all that stuff he used to say constantly. Maybe this Game tonight will snap him out of that, snap us all out.
Mack cuffs his hand round the back of my neck, pulls me on. Right now, with just the two of us here, it feels like how things used to be, when Mack and me first played, before the other two joined, before Ashlee: when one of us had a twenty-second start and the other one chased. When we’d fight ’til someone called surrender, punching hard, trying to hold out longest. After my old man died, fighting and running with Mack was the only thing that ever made me feel any better. Until we started the Game anyway. Until Ashlee. Fighting with Mack was about getting rid of something inside, that hard, angry ball that sat deep, bringing it out. It was like our own private Fight Club in the woods.
‘It’ll be like this on the front line,’ Mack had said, ‘withstanding pain, just reacting . . . surviving. It’s practice!’
Maybe I need to feel like that again. Maybe a good fight would knock some sense into me. Because when you feel pain – actual physical, hurting pain – you stop focusing on the inside stuff so much.
We walk the last few metres together to the Game clearing. Charlie and Ed are already there, leaning either side of a pine tree. When we get close, Ed pushes himself off and starts bouncing on his toes. Mack doesn’t get the hard stuff out for them and I’m glad; seems like they’ve had a couple of cans already. But Ed takes out a little packet of white powder, exactly like the one I remember Ashlee having that night: fairy dust. How’d he get that? He holds it out like an invitation, and I’m thinking about it and I’m even wondering if I should – whether that’d help me remember – but Mack grabs it fast and stomps it into the mud.
‘We’re not doing that shit any more,’ he says firm. ‘Not in this Game. Not when we’re meant to be training for the fucking army!’
I breathe out slowly, relieved. Maybe it was the fairy dust that sent me crazy that night. Maybe I can’t remember anything because I did too much of it.
‘Mack’s right,’ I say, backing him.
Ed shrugs, picks the packet out of the mud, wipes it on his shirt and shoves it into his pocket. He doesn’t meet my eyes. I’m about to demand where he got it from but Charlie steps between us.
‘What’s the plan, then?’ Charlie says. ‘How we playing?’
‘Original rules,’ I say.
I look around at the three of them. The atmosphere’s different tonight, different without Ashlee. The boys look harder somehow, more serious. More like soldiers. But it doesn’t feel like the early Games before she joined us either.
‘Collars,’ I say, and we pull them out of our pockets.
The boys already have their own, so no one hands back anyone else’s or boasts about being the winner of the last Game. Guess they must’ve talked about that Game without me, they must’ve already given back the collars that were won. No one says anything about Ashlee’s missing collar.
‘One more Game,’ I say. ‘To remember Ashlee. Like our own kind of . . .’ And I’m about to say funeral but it doesn’t feel right.
‘Celebration,’ Mack says fast. And I feel myself colour up from not even thinking of this word. ‘Celebration of her life.’
‘She’d want that,’ Charlie says. ‘A final Game.’
Ed nods too, shuffling his feet.
They all look at me, maybe to check if this is what I want too. I get a sense of all of us being in this together, like brothers, I almost open my mouth and tell them everything. These are my best mates after all, so why shouldn’t I just come clean about what I don’t remember from that night? Maybe we could even work it out together.
Before I can, Mack steps forward and takes the collar from my hand, wraps it around my neck. He finds a hole to put it on, one that’s loose so it’ll be easier to get off. When Ashlee had put my collar on, she’d pull it tight enough to feel like it was choking me. She’d brush her fingers down the inside of my arm after, almost like an apology . . . or a promise.
Mack steps back and does his own; its tiny silver studs glint in the moonlight. I glance across to Charlie’s collar: black and thin and hard to remove. Then Ed’s: worn leather that’s kind of scratchy, a lot like mine. I know how they all feel wrapped around my neck, and I remember how Ashlee’s collar always felt too tight. Perhaps that’s why she’d chosen it; she’d known it’d feel uncomfortable around our boy-sized necks. I’d buckle it gentle and loose each time.
‘Tighter than that,’ she’d say. ‘It’ll fall off.’
Maybe it did. Maybe that’s why it was never found.
The boys are staring at me, waiting.
‘One hour,’ I say. ‘You know the rules: keep your collar, get the others, person with the most wins. Play ’til our phone alarms go; message if you sign off.’
Then I hesitate. I’m thinking of Shepherd’s bunker, wondering if I can find that while we’re playing tonight, wondering if there are other places out here that might give me answers too.
‘Meet back here after?’ Mack fills my silence. ‘Or just go home?’
Charlie shrugs. ‘We’ll find each other anyway. We usually do.’
Usually.
Not that night, though. Least, I don’t think we did.
There doesn’t seem much else to do other than call it. Apart from one thing. I get Mack’s lighter, flick it and make a tiny flame.
‘For Ashlee,’ I say.
The others echo it. ‘For Ashlee.’
I see Mack staring at the forest floor, looking ’bout as upset as I feel. I sense Ed shuffling again. Charlie coughs. Perhaps we all need this Game tonight, even if it’s just for the running in th
e dark. Maybe we’ll remember how Ashlee meant something to each of us, how she’s left a gap. The lighter flickers, burns my fingers.
I make my hand into the shape of a gun and I call the order. Without Ashlee here, I point my hand first at Ed, and then to Charlie, then Mack. I make the sound of a gunshot as I fire it at my own head last. I think about how I’d done this with Emily Shepherd too, up on the Leap, how she’d stood wide-eyed as if I was really going to shoot her with only my fingers.
Ashlee used to wink at me when I’d fire. On that night she’d poked her tongue out slowly and I’d wanted to taste it. I remember that.
I take my phone out and set the alarm for one hour so the others can see; they do the same. Mack’s watching me with eyebrows raised, still checking I’m fine. Then we huddle in close and I begin the count.
‘One . . .’
I falter. This is when Ashlee would’ve run. She’d get the best head start – only fair. I can see her, almost, running away, smiling as she’d disappear down the path. I blink; breathe in, start again louder.
‘One . . .’
Ed goes instead, taking off quick into the trees with a howl.
‘. . . two, three, four . . .’
I know where I’ll run: down the bike trail and deeper into the woods, like I did at the beginning of that night.
‘. . . seven, eight, nine, ten . . .’
At twenty seconds it’s Charlie, howling like a banshee and heading in the same direction. At forty, it’s Mack. He grins before he goes, makes a fist for me to lock into.
‘You’ll be OK,’ he says, more a statement than a question. ‘Just play it like it used to be. Use the Game to forget about things for a while. Relax!’
But I want to remember.
He makes a long quiet howl, moves off slower than the other two, looking around as if he’s expecting them to pounce straight up. Then it’s me. It’s the most risky spot being last – you’re more likely to be jumped on and lose your collar immediately – but when I call, I always take it. When Mack calls, he takes it too.
‘Bigger the risk, better the training,’ he says.