They walk across the living room and Sean turns the key before shunting the big glass door to one side. They step into heat and traffic noise. There is a faint brown smog, as if the sky needs cleaning. Daniel can feel sweat running down the small of his back.
Sean fixes the pistol on a Volvo travelling in one direction then follows an Alfa Romeo going the other way. We could kill someone and they’d never find out who did it. Daniel explains that the police would use the hole in the windscreen and the hole in the driver’s body to work out exactly where the shot came from. Elementary, my dear Watson, says Sean.
Let’s go to the woods.
Is the gun loaded?
Course it’s loaded, says Sean.
The woods rise up on the other side of the ring road, a swathe of no-man’s-land between town proper and country proper. People park their cars at the picnic area by Pennington on the far side of the hill and walk their dogs among the oak and ash and rowan, but the roar of the dual carriageway and the syringes and the crushed lager cans dissuade most of them from coming down its northern flank.
They wait on the grass verge, the warm shock waves of passing lorries thumping them and sucking at their clothes. Go, shouts Sean and they sprint to the central reservation, vaulting the scratchy S-shaped barrier, pausing on the ribbon of balding grass then running across the second carriageway to the gritty lay-by with its moraine of shattered furniture and black bags of rubbish ripped open by rats and foxes. All that bacteria breeding in the sun. There is an upturned pram. They unhook the clanky gate where the rutted track begins. Sean has the gun in a yellow Gola bag thrown over his shoulder.
They pass the scrapyard with its corrugated-iron castellations. They pass the Roberts’ house. A horsebox with a flat tyre, a floodlight roped to a telegraph pole. Robert Hales and Robert Hales and Robert Hales, grandfather, father and son, all bearing the same name and all living under the same roof. The youngest Robert Hales is two years above them at school. He has a biscuity unwashed smell and bones that look slightly too big for his skin. He used to come in with small animals in a cake tin. Stag beetle, mouse, wren, grass snake. Donnie Farr grabbed the last of these and used it to chase other children round the playground before whipping its head against one of the goalposts. Robert pushed Donnie to the ground, took hold of the fingers of his left hand and bent them backwards until two of them snapped.
The curtains in the Roberts’ house are closed, however, and there is no red van parked outside so they walk on towards the corner where the path narrows and turns into the trees. Slabs of dusty sunlight are neatly stacked at the same angle between the branches. The bubbling runs of a blackbird’s call. An empty pack of pork scratchings trodden into cracked and powdery earth. Luckily the junkies and lager drinkers don’t have a great deal of stamina and if you walk for ten minutes the litter thins out and if it weren’t for the smell of exhaust fumes you could imagine that the roar of traffic was a great cataract pouring into a ravine to your left.
They find a clearing that contains the last few broken branches of a den they built earlier in the summer where they drank Babycham and smoked six menthol cigarettes and were violently sick. Let’s do it here. Sean finds a log to use as a shooting gallery and Daniel is sent in search of targets. He climbs the boundary fence and roots around among the hawthorn bushes which line the hard shoulder, coming back with two empty beer bottles, a battered plastic oil can and a muddy teddy bear with both arms missing. He feels exhausted by the heat. He imagines standing on the lawn at home, squeezing the end of the hose with his thumb and making rainbows in the cold falling water. He arranges the objects at regular intervals along the log. He thinks about the child who once owned the teddy bear and regrets having picked it up but doesn’t say anything.
Sean raises the gun and moves his feet apart to brace himself. Daniel sees the pad of Sean’s forefinger flatten as he begins to squeeze the trigger. A deep, cathedral quiet. The traffic stops. The blackbird no longer sings. He can hear the shuttle of his own blood.
He is not aware of the shot itself, only the loose rattle of scattering birds. He sees Sean being thrown backwards as if a big animal has charged and struck him in the centre of his chest mid-leap. The oil can, the bottles and the bear are still standing.
Oh my God. Sean gets to his feet. Oh my God. He begins dancing. He has clearly never done anything this exciting in his life. Oh my God.
A military plane banks overhead. Daniel is both disappointed and relieved that he is not offered the second shot. Sean breathes deeply and theatrically. He braces himself again, wipes the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt and raises the gun. This time the noise is breathtakingly loud. It seems obvious to Daniel that many, many people will have heard it.
What are you doing? It is the youngest Robert Hales.
They jump, both of them, but Sean recovers his composure quickest. What do you think we’re doing?
You’ve got a gun. Despite the heat, Robert is wearing a battered orange cagoule.
Duh.
Let me have a go.
Yeh, right, says Sean.
I want a go, says Robert. He steps forward. He is taller than Sean by a good six inches.
Just as he did in the bedroom, Sean lifts his arm until the gun is pointing directly at Robert’s face. No way, José.
Daniel realises that Sean may kill Robert. He is excited by this possibility. He will be a witness to a crime. People will respect him and feel sorry for him.
Robert doesn’t move. Five, maybe ten seconds. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Daniel can’t tell if Robert is terrified or utterly unafraid. Finally he says, I’m going to kill you, not in the way kids say it to one another in the playground but in the way you say, I’m going to the shop. He walks away without looking back. Sean aims at him till he vanishes. The two of them listen to the fading crunch of twigs and dry leaves under his trainers. Spastic. Sean lets his arm slump. Bloody spastic. He walks up to the teddy bear and places the barrel in the centre of its forehead. Daniel thinks how similar they look, the bear and Robert, uninterested, staring straight ahead. But Sean can’t be bothered to waste another bullet. Shit. Robert’s appearance has made the adventure seem mundane. Sean throws the gun into the Gola bag. Let’s go.
They walk back through the woods, taking the long route that loops up the hill and comes out on the far side of the scrapyard, avoiding the Roberts’ house altogether. Gnats and dirty heat. Daniel has dog shit on his left shoe which he has not been able to scrape off completely.
His sister, Helen, was unexpectedly born breech. The cord became trapped while her head was coming out and she was deprived of oxygen. Daniel is not told about this until he is sixteen. He knows only that there is a light in her eyes which stutters briefly sometimes then comes back on. He knows only that she has trouble with numbers, counting objects, telling the time.
She will leave school at sixteen with no qualifications, living at home and working in a furniture warehouse, then in a greengrocer’s. She will change doctors and get better drugs. Ethosuximide. Valproic acid. The petit mal will stop. She will be easily confused but she will be plump and blonde and pretty and people will like her instinctively. She’ll meet Garry at a night club. Overweight, thirty-five, detached house, owner of a taxi firm, a big man in a small world. They will marry and it will take Daniel a long time to realise that this is a happy ending.
The noise is nothing more than a brief hiss followed by a clatter of foliage. Crossbow? Catapult? Then a second shot. It is the oddest thing, but Daniel will swear that he saw it before he heard it, before Sean felt it even. A pink stripe appears on the skin just above Sean’s elbow. He yelps and lifts his arm. Bastard.
They squat on the path, hearts hammering. Sean twists his arm to inspect the damage. There is no bleeding, just a red weal, as if he had leant against the rim of a hot pan. Robert must be somewhere farther down the hill. The hole in the windscreen, the hole in the driver’s body. But Daniel can see nothing without lifting
his head above the undergrowth. The best plan would be to run away as fast as they can so that Robert is forced to aim between the trees at two moving targets, but Sean is taking the gun out of the bag. I’m going to get him.
Don’t be stupid.
And what’s your brilliant idea?
Another hiss, another clatter. They duck simultaneously. For a couple of seconds Sean looks frightened. Then he doesn’t. This way. He starts to commando-crawl through a gap in the brambles.
Daniel follows him only because he doesn’t want to be alone. Sean holds the gun in his hand as he crawls. Daniel thinks how easy it would be for him to pull the trigger accidentally. Cracked seed cases, dry leaves and curls of broken bark. They drag themselves between the gnarly trunks. Born and bred in a briar patch. He tries to pretend that they are in a film but he can’t do it.
They are moving in the wrong direction, away from the scrapyard. And this is Robert’s back garden. He will know every inch of the wood. Daniel scratches his cheek on a thorn and squeezes his eyes shut until the pain dies away so that he doesn’t cry out. He touches his face. Blood on his dirty fingers.
They find themselves under a low dome of branches just big enough for them to lie stretched out, a place where an animal might sleep, perhaps. Improbably, they hear the sound of an ice-cream van, far off.
No fourth shot.
What do we do now?
We wait, says Sean.
What for?
Till it’s dark.
Daniel looks at his watch. At six his mother will call Sean’s flat, at seven she will ring the police. He rolls onto his back and narrows his eyelids so that the light falling from the canopy becomes a shimmer of overlapping circles in white and yellow and lime green. The smell of dog shit comes and goes. Is this is a safe place or a trap? He imagines Robert looking down at the two of them lying there under the brambles. Fish in a barrel. The way Donnie wept when his fingers snapped.
After twenty minutes the tension begins to ease. Perhaps this was what Robert intended after all, to scare them then go home and sit in front of the TV laughing. Forty minutes. Daniel hasn’t had anything to drink since breakfast. He has a headache and he can feel little gluey lumps around the edge of his dry lips. They decide to run for it. They no longer believe that Robert is waiting for them, but the running will amplify the excitement of their escape and recapture a little of their injured dignity.
And this is when they hear the footsteps. A crackle, then silence, then another crackle. Someone is moving gingerly through the undergrowth nearby, trying not to be heard. Each heartbeat seems to tighten a screw at the base of Daniel’s skull. Sean picks up the gun and rolls onto his stomach, elbows braced in the dirt. Crackle. Daniel pictures Robert as a native hunter. Quiver, loincloth, arrow in the notch, two crooked fingers holding the bowstring taut. The steps move to the right. Either he doesn’t know where they are or he is circling them, choosing his direction of approach. Come on, says Sean to himself, turning slowly so that the gun points constantly towards the direction of the noise. Come on.
Daniel wants it to happen quickly. He doesn’t know how much longer he can bear this before jumping up and shouting, Here I am! like Paul used to do during games of hide-and-seek. Then everything goes quiet. No steps. No crackle. Midges scribble the air. The soft roar of the cataract. Sean looks genuinely frightened now.
A stick snaps behind them and they twist onto their backs just as the silhouette springs up and shuts out the dazzle of the sun. Sean fires and the gun is so close to Daniel’s head that he will hear nothing for the next few minutes, just a fizz like rain on pylon wires.
He sees straightaway that it is not Robert. Then he sees nothing because he is kicked hard in the stomach and the pain consumes him. When he uncurls and opens his eyes he finds himself looking into a face. It is not a human face. It is the face of a roe deer and it is shockingly big. He tries to back away but the brambles imprison him. The deer is running on its side, wheezing and struggling in vain to get to its feet. A smell like the camel house at the zoo. Wet black eyes, the jaws working and working, the stiff little tongue poking in and out. Breath gargles through a patch of bloody fur on its neck. It scrabbles and twitches. He can’t bear to look but can’t make himself turn away. The expression on its face. It looks like someone turned into a deer in a fairy tale, crying out for help but unable to form the words.
Two minutes. Three. It’s weakening visibly, sinking into the cold black water that lies just under the surface of all we do. That desperate hunger for more time, more light. Whenever Daniel hears the phrase fighting for your life this is the picture that will come back to him.
Sean hoists his leg over its body and sits on the deer’s chest. He presses the end of the barrel to the side of its head and fires. Bang…bang…bang…bang…Each shot sending the deer’s body into a brief spasm. The gun is finally empty. A few seconds of stillness then a fifth spasm. It stops moving. Oh yes, says Sean, letting out a long sigh, Oh yes, as if he has been dreaming about this moment for a long time.
Fingers of gluey blood start to crawl out from under the head. Daniel wants to cry but something inside him is blocked or broken.
Sean says, We have to get it back.
Back where?
To the flat.
Why?
To cook it.
Daniel has no idea what to say. A part of him still thinks of the deer as human. A part of him thinks that, in some inexplicable way, it is Robert transformed. A fly investigates one of the animal’s eyes.
Sean stands up and stamps the brambles aside, snapping their stems with the heel of his trainers so they don’t spring back. We can skin it.
He tells Daniel to return to the lay-by to fetch the pram they saw beside the rubbish bags. Daniel goes because he needs to be away from Sean and the deer. He walks past the scrapyard. He wants to bump into Robert, hoping that he will be dragged back into the previous adventure, but the curtains are still closed and the house is silent. He removes the loop of green twine and opens the clangy gate. There is a brown Mercedes in the lay-by. The driver watches him from the other side of the windscreen but Daniel cannot make out the man’s face. He turns the pram over. It is an old-fashioned cartoon pram with a concertina hood and leaf-spring suspension. The rusty handle is bent, the navy upholstery is torn and two of the wheels are tyreless. He drags it back through the gate, closing it behind him.
It’s a trick of the light, of course. Time is nothing but forks and fractures. You step off the kerb a moment later. You light a cigarette for the woman in the red dress. You turn over the exam paper and see all the questions you’ve revised, or none of them. Every moment a bullet dodged, every moment an opportunity missed. A firestorm of ghost lives speeding away into the dark.
Perhaps the difference is this, that he will notice, that he will come to picture things in this way when others don’t, that he will remember an August afternoon when he was ten years old and feel the vertigo you feel walking away unharmed from a car crash. Or not quite unharmed, for he will come to realise that a part of himself peeled away and now exists in a parallel universe to which he has no access.
When they lift the deer onto the pram it farts and shits itself. It doesn’t smell like the camel house now. Daniel is certain that it would be easier to drag the body but says nothing, and only when the track flattens out by the scrapyard and they are finally free of the roots and the sun-hardened ruts does the pram finally begin to roll a little.
The man is sitting against the bonnet of his Mercedes, as if he has arranged himself for a better view of the second act. He has shoulder-length black hair, a cheap blue suit and a heavy gold bracelet. Sean shuts the gate and reattaches the loop of green twine. The man lights a cigarette. Lads. It’s all he says. The smallest of nods. No smile, no wave. He will recur in Daniel’s dreams for years, sitting there at the edge of whatever else is going on. Cigarette, gold bracelet. Lads.
They stand at the side of the carriageway. Hot dust, hot metal. Da
niel sees drivers glance at them, glance away then glance back again. Three, two, one. The pram is less stable at speed and less inclined to travel in a straight line and they reach the central reservation accompanied by a hiss of air brakes and the angry honk of a lorry that comes perilously close to hitting them in the fast lane.
Clumsily, they heave the deer and the pram over the barrier. This takes a good deal of time and the strip of yellow grass is not wide. Police, says Sean, and Daniel turns in time to see the orange stripe of a white Rover slide past, lights and siren coming on as it goes up the hill. It will turn at the roundabout and come down the other carriageway. They have a minute at most.
Now, yells Sean, and the relief Daniel feels when they bump over the kerb of the service road and heave the pram up the bank through the line of stunted trees into the park makes him whoop. The Warrens, says Sean, panting, and they keep their momentum up past a gaggle of rubbernecking children on the climbing frame and into the network of walled paths round the back of the estate. They stop by the peeling red lock-ups and wait. No siren. No squeal of tyres. Daniel’s head pulses. He needs to lie down in the dark.
They push the pram across the parched quadrangle to Orchard Tower. An elderly lady watches them, transfixed. Polyester floral dress and varicose veins. Sean gives her a jokey salute. Mrs. Daley.
The double doors are easy but it takes some juggling to get the pram and the deer into the lift and they leave a great lick of blood across the mirror that covers one of the side walls. Sean puts his finger into it and writes the word MURDER in capital letters on the glass at head height. The lift bumps to a halt, the chime goes and the doors open.
Later when he tells the story to people they won’t understand. Why didn’t he run away? His friend had a loaded gun. He will be repeatedly amazed at how poorly everyone remembers their childhoods, how they project their adult selves back into those bleached-out photographs, those sandals, those tiny chairs. As if choosing, as if deciding, as if saying no were simply skills you could learn, like tying your shoelaces or riding a bike. Things happened to you. If you were lucky you got an education. If you were lucky you weren’t abused by the guy who ran the five-a-side. If you were very lucky you finally ended up in a place where you could say, I’m going to study accountancy…I’d like to live in the countryside…I want to spend the rest of my life with you.