On Deadly Ground

‘Right…I said that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  The audience laughed with us, feeling that fine old tequila burn by proxy.

  ‘Anyway. I was fifteen?’

  ‘Sixteen, Rick, sixteen.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. Anyway. I wrote this song.’

  ‘Kiss Crimson?’

  ‘Right. I played it in that old high school band I had back then, Terror Firmer. There was this girl at school…Tracy Turner…’

  Wolf whistles from the audience.

  ‘That’s the one.’ I grinned back at them. ‘Tasty Turner as she was better known. Anyway…where the Hell was I? Oh, yeah. Tasty— I mean — Tracy Turner asked me if she could include the song on a demo tape she was recording in Manchester. Sure, I said, then forgot all about it. Then out of the blue, months later, I get a call from Tracy—only now she’s called Cher Gaynor and she’d been packaged into a group called Beat Girl. Kiss Crimson went onto their first album which made it to, let’s see, number fifty-three in the charts.’

  ‘But it made money, Kid,’ Stephen said, lounging back in the chair.

  ‘It made money,’ I agreed. ‘And it’s still making it. The PRS cheques keep rolling. And the music publisher pays a royalty every Christmas and Midsummer’s day. But for godsakes…’ Grinning, I covered my ears. ‘Can’t anyone put me out of my misery and turn that racket off? They didn’t use the whole song, only the chorus and the guitar riff. The rest is a computer-driven drum beat. It’s murder.’

  Everyone laughed but Stephen leaned forward and held up his beer bottle in toast. And, quite seriously, he said, ‘I’m proud of you, Rick. I wish I’d pulled something like that off when I was sixteen.’

  The audience were getting drunker. The time was way past two. If we’d have been in a town the police would have been called long ago to close the party down, but there were only the badgers and the bats to hear us out there on the hillside at Ben Cavellero’s house. So we drank, barbecued more sausages, and, by starshine, all the girls fell in love with my brother Stephen Kennedy. Tirelessly, he still performed to camera, even though by this time Dean had switched it off.

  ‘Food. Now believe it or not, boys and girls, I can actually cook,’ he was declaiming to the lens, bottle of wine in his fist. ‘I’m not a great cook, but I’m not a bad cook. Now this is my favourite recipe…if you’re at home, grab a pencil and paper. If you’re in bed, ladies, grab your lipstick and write it down on your old man’s back. If you’ve got no lipstick borrow your old man’s lipstick and still write it on his back…you want a drink of my wine, you have a drink of my wine…’ Ruth had claimed him; both her arms were tightly round his waist. I glanced at Howard Sparkman; he just smiled and nodded in approval. He didn’t mind.

  ‘Right…’ Stephen was slurring happily. ‘All rii-iight! This is what you do to make tomato jam, although now I guess I should call it tomato jelly. Take one pound of sugar; one pound of tomatoes and boil together in a pan. Then how do you know when it’s ready? Take a little, little bit out on a spoon, put it on a little, little plate. Then leave it to cool. Once it forms a skin it’s ready for the jar. And it tastes absolutely freaking gorgeous.’

  Next thing he and Ruth were sharing a single chair; they were eating one another’s tongues; her long curly black hair hung down over the back of the chair, sweeping the ground as she turned her head from side to side.

  I’d intended doing what I’d promised myself I’d do. Finally make a move on Kate Robinson. But she’d left with her friends.

  But I was on too much of a high to worry that much. I knew where I could get hold of her phone number. Maybe I’d ring her Sunday.

  I lounged back in one of the canvas chairs and looked at my friends. Some I’d known since I was nine. Right then it felt just so amazingly, wonderfully, incredibly good to be alive and to be there, and to be part of it all. There was Howard Sparkman munching something black and burnt from the end of a stick. The delighted expression on his face sang clear and loud that he loved every mouthful. I scanned the faces of other old and trusted friends: I saw Dean Skilton, propping up a tree; he was half-asleep, a champagne bottle hanging from one hand. That’s right, Dean; even if you can’t stay awake don’t let go of your booze. The rest were there, too: Sophie Edwards, Barry Fripp, Andrew Lewis, Joe Field, Craig Hartnel.

  I felt this deep, deep contentment and kinship. I can close my eyes and see them now. Laughing, talking, finding lost jackets and shoes, ready for the night-time stroll back home.

  You see, I remember it so well because that was the last time I would see them all together in one place. And for some, it was the last time I would see them alive.

  Chapter 8

  The following day, Saturday, old man Robyns, the manager of the small supermarket in West Garforth where I’d been working through the summer, noticed that my eyes had bags bigger than the sacks of carrots I was shifting in the warehouse. He owed me a few hours in lieu so good-naturedly he urged me to grab them while I could, and maybe catch up on some sleep.

  So I was back in Fairburn by 2:30 on that glorious July day, with the sun shining and children blasting each other with hose pipes in gardens; everywhere there were girls and yet more girls in shorts and halter tops showing acres of golden, golden skin.

  Humming the melody line of a song I was composing, I cut from Boycott Drive to Trueman Way and headed for the house with ivy rising in a green blush across the brickwork. That house had been home for the last ten years. It stood in line with a dozen other houses: all similar but different enough to be comfortably distinctive. There was a BMW or two parked in garden drives. I gave a cheerful, ‘Allo, Roger!’ to a middle-aged man in RayBans waxing his Porsche. He was the anchorman on the local TV news programme.

  Trueman Way had been colonized by partners of law firms, senior policemen and successful sportsmen. It certainly wasn’t the worst place I could have spent my teenage years. At school I pretended I hated it, but secretly I loved the broad street lined with cherry trees that, when they were in blossom, looked like they were heaped with strawberry ice cream. I was proud of the neighbourliness. I could walk down the street, hearing a barrage of friendly greetings: ‘Good morning, Rick…How’s life treating you…Grand weather we’re having…’

  The view from the back of the house was down over fields to the flat valley bottom that rolled away to the city of Leeds in the hazy distance. The front windows looked out on a meadow known as King Elmet’s Mile. Just why it was so named was vigorously debated at parish council meetings, because King Elmet’s Mile was a two-hundred-metre-wide band of grass stretching the length of Trueman Way. Which was far less than even one half of a mile.

  ‘All right! Kid Kennedy!’ Stephen’s full-blooded shout came from the lounge as I heeled the back door shut behind me. ‘I didn’t expect you till six.’

  ‘I’d got some time owing to me. They’ve given me the afternoon off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone? I could have fixed you some hash.’

  ‘No probs. I’ve eaten. Are you decent in there?’ I called cheerfully through the door. ‘I mean, are you alone or did Ruth call?’

  ‘Yes, I’m decent and, yes, she phoned this morning.’ Stephen sauntered into the kitchen sipping from a two-litre Coke bottle. He wore cut-offs, a loose white cotton shirt and squash shoes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’m meeting her tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Nice one.’

  ‘And Carol phoned. She’s driving me to York on Monday for a day of culture round your fine museums.’

  I shook my head, grinning. ‘You’ll have to take that dick of yours in for a retread by the time you fly back home.’

  He winked. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

  I pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge and took a long hard pull. ‘Christ, it’s hot.’

  ‘Sue Rothwell, you know her?’

  ‘Yeah, heiress to the Rothwell family fortune. They own the biggest house in Fairburn. Why?’


  ‘She dropped by earlier. Asked if we fancied going up to use her pool.’

  ‘You’re putting me on?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Hell, she’s never even spoken to me before, never mind getting an invite to wallow in the pool. Have you seen the size of it? You could float an aircraft carrier in there.’

  ‘You hang onto my shirt tails, kid, I’ll take you places you’ve never been before.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘She says get there about seven. She’s got some more friends dropping by.’

  ‘They’ll be snooty.’

  ‘So…we’ll lower the tone. They’ll love it.’ Stephen thumbed the button on the TV mounted on brackets over the freezer. ‘I just wanted to catch the end of this.’

  ‘You’re not developing a taste for cricket, are you?’

  ‘Cricket? No, it’s years since I saw a match. Can’t stand the game these days.’ He nodded up at the TV. ‘Have a gander at that. Mount St Helens popped her top again in Washington State.’

  ‘But that’s miles from where you live in Seattle, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but pretty awesome, eh? I once toured out that way with Dad about seven or eight years ago. The last vacation we had together before he went completely pussy-holic. Wow, look at that lava stream. You’d need asbestos stockings to surf that momma.’

  For a moment we stood and watched the spumes of fire and the orange gobs of lava spurting into the sky. Then came shots of cars and houses being engulfed by volcanic ash. The reporter told of six deaths caused by the eruption. Four of those were sightseers who hadn’t heard about what fates befall curious cats.

  The news report went on to recap about the spectacular increase in volcanic activity over the last eighteen months. Scientists were already linking some losses of transatlantic shipping to volcanic activity on the ocean floor. There were the usual computer animations to help us poor saps out in TV Land to understand it all. Off the east coast of America there was something picturesquely known as the Blake Ridge-Carolina Rise where vast pockets of methane gas were locked up beneath layers of ocean sediment. In the last three months four of these gas reservoirs had erupted without warning, killing millions of fish and tearing apart a couple of merchant ships.

  An expert was wheeled in to link these methane eruptions and volcanic activity with some other less spectacular geological comings and goings, along with a rash of quakes along the world’s fault lines.

  This was a cue for library footage of the quakes that had torn Los Angeles in two again and killed half the population of Tampico in Mexico.

  ‘You must remember,’ the professor of something or other was saying through this amazing handlebar moustache that looked as if it had been nailed to his upper lip. ‘You must remember that the Earth is basically a ball of molten rock and iron enclosed by a comparatively thin skin of cooler solidified rock. Occasionally she can flex her muscles and that’s when the Earth will literally move for all of us.’

  Cut away to pretty lady reporter smiling nervously at the slightly mucky joke.

  Prof continued, ‘Two hundred and fifty million years ago huge volcanic eruption on a global scale resulted in massive extinctions at the boundary of the Permian and Triassic periods. Do you realize that this dramatic period of volcanic holocaust resulted in ninety per cent of marine species and seventy per cent of terrestrial vertebrates being wiped out?’

  ‘Knows his stuff, doesn’t he, Kid?’ Stephen gazed dreamily at the TV that now showed shots of a lava flow crumbling into the sea in clouds of steam.

  Prof was getting into his stride now and really buzzing the lecture through that handlebar moustache. ‘For a million years the volcanoes expelled between two and three million cubic kilometres of lava. Abrupt global cooling would have resulted due to sulphates being projected into the atmosphere by these devastating eruptions. Ice caps expanded, sea levels dropped and whole species were wiped off the face of the planet.’

  There came another report about hydrothermal vents that spewed out boiling water in an area known as Broken Spur in the mid-Atlantic and how these were spreading out across the ocean floor. As always the reporter rounded off the piece with an ‘and now a nearer-home story’ about some mud springs in Wiltshire. There were shots of a hydro-geologist lowering a probe that looked something like an old baked-beans can on the end of a line into the mud and announcing that over the last ten months the temperature of the mud had increased by three degrees Celsius.

  ‘My God, Carruthers!’ Stephen aped an upper-crust English accent. ‘Three degrees. Could this really mark the end of civilization as we know it? Saddle up my filly, boy, we’ll head for the hills.’

  ‘We’re already there. This is the highest point for miles around.’

  ‘Well, we’ll saddle up some pretty filly anyway and ride her around the garden until she drops.’

  ‘In this heat, I’d drop first,’ I said, grinning, and took a hefty swig of orange juice.

  ‘Young lad like you?’ Stephen laughed. ‘You should have loads of energy. Hey—’ He stood up, struck by an idea. ‘Race you down to the bridge again on Oak Lane.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘I kid you not, kiddo.’

  ‘I need to phone round the others in the band about rehearsals tomorrow.’

  ‘It can wait.’

  He looked at me, the grin still in place, but I saw the challenge writ large in those blue eyes.

  ‘What kind of start do I get?’

  ‘None!’

  With that he ran across the kitchen, swung open the door and tore across the back lawn.

  I couldn’t stop the grin on my own face as I followed.

  Already he’d reached the wall that separated the garden from the dirt track that ran down through the fields at the back. I dodged round the loungers on the grass, then long-jumped the ornamental pond and followed hard.

  I was laughing under my breath. Suddenly the years had rolled back to when I was nine and he was fifteen. This used to be a regular Sunday afternoon event. ‘Race you down to the bridge’ he’d say. In those days no way could I even half-compete with a fifteen-year-old so he’d give me a head start. Sometimes still nonchalantly lounging on his bed, munching an apple as he thumbed through Playboy, he’d tell me to get running and he’d catch me up. And then beat me to the bridge.

  He always did, of course. I’d run as fast as I could, little PVC trainers slapping down on the cinder track, my Robocop mask jiggling round the back of my neck, held there by shearing elastic. Then I’d hear the muscular thump of his feet hitting the ground. Then it always happened to me. The strength, for some reason, would go right out of my body when I heard those pounding feet. I could almost believe he had vampire powers and had the ability to drain the strength out of me and into him. I’d feel as if I was running in slow motion even though the bushes at the side of the track were just a green blur.

  Sometimes he’d nearly let me reach the bridge. Then I’d hear a cry. I’d turn and see him hobbling along; he’d point at his foot, his face a picture of agony. I’d see him mouth the word ‘ankle.’ Panting, I’d stand there, waiting for him to hobble up.

  Then, suddenly, the grimace would snap to a grin and he’d bound by me shouting, ‘Sucker!’ And, naturally, he’d always reach the bridge first to bounce up and down triumphantly, his fists punching high into the air.

  Now I had him in my sights. He was about twenty paces ahead of me, his hair blowing out in the slipstream, arms pumping, long legs eating the track. The sheer speed caused the white shirt to inflate, making it appear as if he had an impossibly huge torso and arms.

  I’d run races at school but I wasn’t that much of an athlete. It was more a lack of competitive spirit than lack of leg muscle and stamina. But when I saw my brother sprinting down that track, cinders coining up in splashes of black as his feet struck the ground, something clicked inside me. This heat ignited in my stomach until it felt as if I’d swallowed a burning log. That hea
t streamed out into my arms and legs. I locked everything into that run; I felt as if something inside me had shifted up a gear and, believe me, I felt as if I actually flew along that track. I’d never felt so determined or run so fast.

  I’d heard Stephen shouting comments, ‘come on, rubber legs…I’ve seen faster tortoises…’ But as I drew level with him he clammed up and I saw a look of concentration come into his eyes that bordered on the ferocious.

  He’d not anticipated this. That the little brother could grow up and run as fast as he could.

  No, scratch that…replace with run FASTER than he could.

  Arms windmilling, panting like racehorses, we cannoned down the grass slope that separated the track from Oak Lane. Now we slammed onto hard tarmac, feet sounding like gunshots. Now the river was on our right, the meadow on our left. The bridge was up ahead about two hundred metres away, spanning the river like a timber finishing tape.

  This sheer rush of energy kicked through me. And, Christ, it felt so good…so amazingly, fucking good. I was faster than him; I heard him panting some way behind me. Already I saw myself jumping up and down on that bridge, fisting the air like I’d seen him do, shouting those same taunts he’d used on me when I was that little nine-year-old, puffing and panting along the lane like a knackered old steam engine that was on its last lumbering run to the scrap heap.

  Now I was the winner. I wondered what effect that would have on Stephen. I’d never beaten him at anything before—ever.

  Revenge.

  Christ, that’s the feeling that was spilling through me from burning head to beating sole. Revenge…sweet, sweet, sweet revenge.

  ‘Rick…Rick! Christ…will you…will you take a look at that?’

  I thought it was the old sprained ankle trick. But there was some inflection in the voice—astonishment coloured with something near to disgust. I slowed and looked down into the river.

  The sight of it stopped me dead.

  Stephen came up panting. Even though he was holding his side where the stitch stabbed deep he, too, was staring in wonder at the river.