Why I Went Back Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781448188406

  Version 1.0

  First published in 2016 by

  Andersen Press Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.andersenpress.co.uk

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The right of James Clammer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Text copyright © James Clammer, 2016

  Extracts from pages 3, 4, 108 and 112 of Beowulf, edited with an introduction, glossary and notes by Michael Alexander (Penguin Classics, 1995) are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

  Copyright © Michael Alexander, 1995

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  ISBN 978 1 78344 377 2

  For Katie

  Chapter 1

  If you know anyone who knows anyone who wants to find out about magic – specifically whether it’s true or not – then send them along to me, because I can tell them for sure.

  I’m not talking old-fashioned stuff like rabbits out of hats or sawing the lady in half, which is so historical by now it’s practically written into those same books that go on about fat old Queen Victoria in black. And I don’t mean the modern stuff either, like you see on TV, where a man with a sharp suit and a beard hypnotises a bunch of builders into dressing up as women or something stupid like that.

  That isn’t what I’m talking about. Not at all.

  Crazy, scary, ancient magic. That’s what I mean. The sort of thing that if you came across it for real you’d suffocate and almost fall down with fear right deep in your deepest core and no way, no way, would you ever brush it off or forget about it. And then pretty soon it would get so big inside that you’d have to tell someone about it, get it off your chest, as they say.

  That’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this down as a story, from beginning to end.

  Another is so I can come back in six months’ or a year’s time and check my head against this account, which is 100% true by the way with nothing added and nothing taken away. I know for sure, now, that I’m different from Mum, who has this whole parallel universe going on inside her head, things that never happened and people that never existed. I know, now, that my feet are planted forever in the mud and the puddles and everything. But sometimes it’s good to have proof, separately-existing proof.

  Maybe you don’t know anyone who’s interested in magic. Maybe you’re not even that bothered yourself. Feel free to bail out now, if that’s the case. Stop reading, do something else instead. Only I don’t think you will. Because it’s the one thing everybody’s interested in, right? Everybody wants confirmation.

  And that’s exactly what I can give you.

  You want to hear the story?

  Go.

  Chapter 2

  It starts in the dark, in winter, with a click and a chase.

  There I was, standing half-dressed and frozen solid in the middle of my bedroom, the warm square of bed behind me and the black square of window in front dribbling winter rain. I always pulled the curtain back without turning the light on because, first, I wanted to see what the weather was doing and it was easier to see in the darkness and, second, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself – every other house and the whole wide world, it seemed, being wrapped snug and slumbering in the black night.

  4.16, the red lights of the digital clock said. It was a regular thing, being up at this hour. How long since I’d been doing it? Two weeks? Three? Not that I liked it. I hated it. God how I hated it. I wanted to be back in that warm bed, hands between my legs, dreaming of girls like any normal fourteen-year-old boy should be.

  I should probably introduce myself. I may not be the best student at St Stephen’s (in fact most people think I’m a bit of a bully, which I’m happy to let them go on thinking) but I’ve read a few books on the sly and I know that about here’s the time you Get To Meet The Main Character. You know the routine – what colour their eyes are and the shape of their nose and what size shoes they wear and all about their brothers and sisters and everything. Well, I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and all that other stuff can wait, because I’m the main character and I’m real and more than just a shoe size.

  Aidan Hale, that’s my name, and if you want to know what I look like, all I can think to say is that once I heard a friend of Dad’s describing me as a skinny streak of piss. So that gives you an idea, even if my skin isn’t really yellow. And if you want to know the reason I was up at stupid o’clock, it’s because I was going out to work. Just then I was working six days a week and I would have worked seven if I could’ve got away with it.

  Or at least I was, until that click.

  Someone was lifting the latch on the passageway gate, the brickwork passage that joins our house to next door.

  Someone was coming in.

  I pressed my face to the rain-dribbled windowpane, cowling my hands round to stop any reflection. The moon showed a little of its light through waste-water clouds. Out in the street a dark shape slouched by a lamppost. The slouch told you straight off that the shape was a he, and that the he was a teenager. Not too big. I felt pretty certain I could have him if it came to a fight.

  Trouble was, he had a mate. And one second later the mate’s coming out from under our passageway, wheeling my bike with him. A lighter flared, cupped close in a hand that looked like a pink fleshy flower, as he hitched the bike past the clicking closing gat
e. The mate was quite a bit bigger than the slouching teenager. I noticed that right away. I’m always sizing people up and reckoning my chances – girls and boys (for different reasons of course). It’s like an automatic thing with me. Maybe everyone does it, I don’t know.

  My bike. So what, you’re asking? A bike’s a bike. They break, or you grow out of them, and then you get another one. Don’t you?

  Not here. For a start it was brand new, almost. The Pacific Blue frame, the eighteen Shimano gears, the back suspension I’d spent ages adjusting. We didn’t exactly have what those English literature writers in the classroom would call a surfeit of funds, which meant having anything new was special, something you wanted to hold onto. Mum had never worked because of what went on inside her head. Take where she was just then for example. It wasn’t the first place the JobCentre went to when they had a vacancy, put it that way. And as for Dad – Dad was just a postman, and they don’t bring in so much money even with overtime, which he hadn’t done in years.

  In fact (if you want to know the truth, which I’ve promised to tell) Dad had pretty much stopped being a postman at all, and that was why I needed the bike. Not because it was new, not really, but because without it how was I going to transport the Big Bag, the one hidden downstairs with its piles of letters already sorted into street and house order?

  I watched them give the bike a quick lookover by the wet light of the streetlamp. They weren’t stupid, you could tell from their body language they were scared and wanted to get out of there as fast as possible but still they couldn’t resist having a quick gloat over what they’d plundered. One of them said something and they both laughed without making a noise and that was when every part of my head started clanging. It was like all the veins feeding my heart and kidneys etc had short-circuited so that every last bit of blood was slamming into my eardrums instead. Those scumbags. My bike. How could they? How had they even known it was there? I needed that bike. I needed it to stop all the bad things that were happening to us from getting any worse.

  I heard the wheels ticking softly in the black night. They were on the road. They were going, leaving. And suddenly I couldn’t believe it, how I’d been standing there like I was in a trance or something, looking down at them stealing from me without doing a single thing about it. Somehow it had been too easy to watch, a scene from a film almost, what with them in the light of the lamp and me in the dark and the bedroom window between us like a screen at the multiplex.

  Dressed in three maybe four seconds. I didn’t bother with the outdoor gear, the big coat, the waterproof trousers. The rain wasn’t as bad tonight and anyway that stuff rustled and I knew I needed to be silent. Jeans, jumper, trainers and out of the house. I was well practised at that. Dad was fast asleep as usual. It took a lot to get him out of bed these days, what with all the sleeping pills the doctor was giving him.

  Down the stairs, easing the door shut behind me. Past the place where I kept the Big Bag hidden with its pre-sorted letters and packets. I thought then, the way you think through a whole complicated situation in a split second, about everything that had happened in those three weeks. The black mornings stealing out of the house, pushing the bike from the passageway. Coasting off through the dead streets praying not to see a single person till it was time to turn round and come home. The terrible Thursday night that had started it all, Mum bent up in a corner, not responding even when you poked or prodded her, and the house filling up with police and paramedics and the woman with the careful deep voice who’d called herself a doctor, the woman who’d signed the papers.

  Mum got sectioned, see.

  Not everyone knows what that is. If you don’t, count yourself lucky.

  I turned down the road the teenagers had taken. I had to move fast if I wasn’t to lose sight of them. The rain was coming down harder than I’d thought. I started to run, silent and accurate on the slick streets. I didn’t care any more how big the second one was. When I caught up with them they’d both be dead and that was a fact.

  Chapter 3

  Pretty soon all that running’d got me pumped up. They’d both got bikes, this pair of scumbags. At first it didn’t matter. Once they’d got away from the Immediate Vicinity they were casual as anything, larking about, looping in circles, the one riding my bike, the Pacific Blue, wobbling on purpose like it was too difficult to control. They were going somewhere but it didn’t seem to matter much when they arrived. Easy enough for me to get close and jump them when neither was expecting it. Then I made a noise – I must have made a noise though I don’t remember doing it. Maybe my trainer splashed in a puddle or something. All at once they were alert, bristling, like those gazelles you see on David Attenborough when they know a lion’s onto them. And then the chase really began.

  I’m OK at running. They asked me to represent the school one time but then old Sandifer called me into his office once too often and I told him I didn’t give a monkey’s nuts about it any more. The thing with running is the rhythm. You can’t speed up and speed up and expect to sustain it. And suddenly I needed to get turbo-charged and stay there because that scumbag pair were streaking away like the cops were about to get them in a headlock.

  I needed that bike. Worst case scenario, any bike. I couldn’t lose that race.

  The streets flew around me – the orange streetlamps and the rising and falling kerbs and the rain everywhere. I never ran like that before in my life. The weird thing was it was almost like I was looking at someone else running and not doing it myself. I had this idea (don’t laugh) that if you took a film of me from above, tearing through the streets, and turned me into a dot instead of a person then I’d look like one of those particles whizzing round the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland or wherever it is. Anyway I was keeping them in sight and I’d already guessed where they were headed. There was a turning at a roundabout – no cars around at that time of night of course – and once I saw them take it I knew for sure. Not that I slowed down. Everything in my head was blurring and if I’m honest I was getting a buzz from that ultrahigh level of exercise and what you might call the Righteousness Of My Anger. It was like all the walls between the compartments or boxes in my brain were dissolving, becoming one long landscape instead.

  Next thing, I was standing somewhere on the old industrial estate, holding this brick I’d scooped from a pile of rubbish, ready to use it on whoever next popped up in front of my face.

  But I’d lost them – or they’d lost me – in the maze of buildings.

  I looked at the brick. I listened to my chest and my heart, the invincible muscle-bag that always pumps you from past to future. Both sounded about ready to go into orbit. Puffing hard, I slid into a patch of scrubby shadow next to a derelict warehouse.

  Silence all around. A bird soared, black against grey rainclouds. Where was he going, so high up there?

  I thought about what it would mean for me if I really did smash someone with that brick. What it would mean for what the teachers at school liked to call my Long Term Future.

  I nestled the brick into a stack of sodden weeds, shuddered out a long soundless breath, decided to try using my brain instead.

  The industrial estate. I looked around, as well as I could in the dark and the rain. A few of the buildings here were still in use but most were abandoned places where people never went, secret spaces filled with weird-looking machinery and mountains of broken glass and rotten timber. There were about a million places to hide but only one road in and out. From where I was standing in that scrubby bit of shadow I could see the road, so I knew the scumbag twins hadn’t used it to escape. They might have dumped the bikes and gone across the wet fields but somehow that didn’t feel like their style.

  They were here somewhere. All I had to do was listen and watch and wait for them to give themselves away.

  It happened almost immediately.

  Chapter 4

  The voices were low, urgent, worried.

  I slipped through the shadows, trying to loc
ate them. Which direction? Far edge of the estate. My legs felt shaky now I’d stopped running. I knew I wouldn’t be able to chase them if they got away a second time.

  Take it easy. Watch where you’re putting your feet. Keep your breathing under control. Act like someone from one of those old-time movies, escaping the Germans.

  The moon had gone for good, lost behind bottled-up cloud. Turning a corner into a sodden overgrown alley I saw, at the far end, the glowing tip of a cigarette. A match flared and another tip joined it.

  Then another.

  ‘… believe you did that. And letting someone follow you.’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone, Christy, promise.’

  ‘Well, was there or wasn’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know, we just thought that – hey!’

  One of the red cigarette tips flew sideways and dropped out of sight.

  ‘Idiot!’

  I went closer, zigzagging in slow motion, testing each step for stones or sticks or anything that might make a noise, watching as I brushed against a bush and a thousand raindrops exploded silent against my shoulder.

  ‘What are you, some kind of retard? Don’t you remember what we agreed? And then you go out nicking bikes!’

  ‘Sorry, Christy …’

  ‘And you should have stopped him, Deano. I mean, it’s not like you’re unknown or anything …’

  ‘Just having a laugh, that’s all it was.’

  ‘For this piece of crap?’ Something clattered in the darkness and I knew it was the Pacific Blue being kicked to the ground. Whoever Christy was (they said it so it sounded like crispy), he wasn’t making much of an effort to keep quiet. His voice sounded odd and scratchy, like his throat was full of salt and scabs. ‘We don’t do this any more. Not since – that.’ A burning cigarette tip stabbed back and forth, indicating the building behind them. ‘Let’s get this sorted right now. Were you followed or not?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Deano?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. William here was imagining it.’

  ‘William Here!’ Christy said. ‘William Here would probably hand over the key!’