Why I Went Back Page 5

  ‘You can walk out of here today,’ Deano said. ‘This morning. Carry on to – wherever it was you were going. Wouldn’t that be nice? Only tell us where the rest of it is.’ You knew by his voice how uncertain he was about the whole thing, how he was looking for a way out just as much as Haxforth was.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Haxforth said. ‘Everything’s changed, since I was here last. Even the hills look different.’

  ‘Even the hills? What you going on about?’

  ‘Tell us about the bracelet again,’ Christy demanded. ‘Tell us how it’s linked with the other stuff, all the stuff you told us about when we found you on that path.’

  ‘I was hungry then. I hadn’t eaten in two days. I was delirious, I don’t remember what I said.’

  ‘You said you found it in a cave, that you knew where there was loads more stuff like it.’

  ‘I did, but that’s all there was. There’s nothing else there now.’

  ‘Damn right there isn’t. Sixty miles we drove, to find that out. It wasn’t even a proper cave!’

  ‘We fed you, didn’t we?’ said Deano. ‘We saved your life. So tell us where the rest of it is.’

  ‘I don’t know. I must have been confused. There isn’t any more …’

  ‘Your story keeps changing, doesn’t it?’ Christy said. ‘Because that’s not what you told us to begin with. Not at all. We think you need to do better. We think it’s time for specifics.’

  I dipped my head, trying to get a better view.

  Be very very careful.

  ‘Chocolate?’ A head hovered close to the pallet bed and for a moment I saw Christy’s face, a pugged-up nose and two eyes round with anger.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Haxforth said.

  ‘Come and get it then.’ The head bobbed away.

  Haxforth stood, held out his hand. The grey Admiral hoodie hung like a skirt about his knees. Christy punched him once, hard, in the stomach and as he flew back across the wooden pallets Haxforth looked straight at me, straight through the cricket-ball-sized hole at me with those colourless depthless eyes. A coin-sized dollop of blood was seeping already from between his pinched-together lips.

  ‘You don’t wander around with a bracelet like that, made of solid gold, and forget everything about it,’ bellowed Christy. ‘What is it – Roman? Something ancient anyway. It’s worth a fortune, even I can see that!’

  Haxforth mumbled something I couldn’t hear. He was doubling up, pulling the greasy blankets and clothes around him as tight as he could.

  Christy made a sort of gurgling noise in his throat and then he let rip.

  ‘Just bloody –’

  Kick.

  ‘Tell us –’

  Kick.

  ‘Where!’

  Kick.

  ‘Bloody ghost!’

  I shrank away from the hole. I wanted to scream out, You’ve already locked him up and starved him you cowards. What more do you want? But I didn’t. I ran. Fear made me fast and soundless. Down the corridor, through the field of rusting machines, up the stairs thick with pigeon droppings. At the door to the roof I could still hear Haxforth grunting and crying out in pain.

  Mum bent up in the corner. Me panicked I was going schizo like her. Haxforth being kicked and beaten. It was all getting mixed up in my head, all the nightmare things crashing in together.

  Me on the roof, tears dropping off my chin.

  I didn’t bother with school.

  Chapter 14

  It was winter-dark outside, beginning to rain, and the cup of tea I’d made a minute ago was cold already in my hands. I sat at the kitchen table. The clock on the microwave said 09.35. I had an idea what they’d be doing in class – trying to make us speak gobfuls of useless French again – but I didn’t care enough to worry about it.

  For the twentieth or maybe thirtieth time I looked at the thing Haxforth had given me. It was a clasp, a coiled hinge like a safety pin at one end and an arrowhead catch at the other. It lay there in my hand, small and heavy and yellow with deep lines down its length like waves on the sea. How nice it would be to sit staring at it all day, I thought. How nice to just do that and nothing else.

  There was a knock on the door. Automatically I stood up to answer and it wasn’t until I saw the big burly figure in the frosted glass that I thought maybe I should be upstairs hiding instead. But by then it was too late. The big burly figure was tapping on the glass, asking where Dad was.

  I opened the door.

  ‘All right, Aidan,’ said the man. He was wearing shorts even though it was December and he had big black tattoos down both legs. Royal Mail boots, Royal Mail coat. The same guy I’d overheard once calling me a skinny streak of piss.

  ‘All right, Hawkie,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s your dad then?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘He’s not. Least, he’s not where he should be.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Can you tell him when you see him that I came round?’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘He hasn’t been answering his phone, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  He looked at me closely. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘Dentist’s appointment,’ I lied.

  Hawkie turned to go, turned to walk out of the passageway and back into the rain. ‘What time’s he getting home from work these days?’

  ‘Not really sure,’ I said.

  ‘All right, all right. Just remember. I need to talk to him.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  I went out into the street and watched Hawkie till he disappeared round the corner. The sky was like a lump of dough with all its living yeast particles dead and extinct but the rain felt good for once, soft and clean on my skin and not too cold. I went back through the gate and passageway, into the garden and over to the shed.

  The shed. I swear Dad didn’t even go inside it any more. Just glanced around to make sure the neighbours weren’t watching before he chucked the stuff in and went back to the house. Back to his three places, the kitchen table, the sofa, the bed. Back to chips and curry sauce. Back to sitting and staring.

  Three weeks he’d been doing it, ever since the start of Mum’s breakdown when the witches and warlocks and world leaders started meaning more to her than we did. At first I didn’t think it mattered. I tried to kid myself this was part of his routine, something I’d never noticed before. Then when I couldn’t pretend any longer I told myself that even if it was wrong it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t important, not like if he’d murdered someone and buried the body or robbed a bank or cheated some old biddy out of her life savings.

  Stupid me.

  Because at school, researching a project online, I saw this news story by accident:

  Postman Jailed after Filling Flat with Stolen Mail

  Matthew Greenwood, 26, of Erdington, Birmingham, was today jailed for 14 months after admitting the theft of more than 20,000 items of mail. Greenwood, a Royal Mail employee since leaving school at 16, had hidden so much post in his flat that he was unable to enter his own bedroom, bathroom or kitchen.

  The massive theft, which had been carried out over a year-long period, only came to light when Greenwood’s bath sprung a leak. James Garrard, a plumber who had been called in by a couple who lived downstairs from Greenwood, said: ‘When I arrived at the property, water was pouring through the ceiling. I knew right away it was mains, so after knocking on Greenwood’s door and getting no reply I called the letting agency. As it was an emergency, they gave me permission to break in. The mail almost fell on top of me when the door gave way. The first thing I did was call the police.’

  Greenwood admitted interfering with mail, criminal damage and arson, as he had earlier tried to destroy the evidence.

  Judge Charles Duncan said: ‘You have caused immense distress to thousands of people as you wilfully stole from them and neglected your duties. Among the items you attempted to destroy were irreplaceable family photographs and
a present for a sick child. In such cases the public expects a custodial sentence, and today that is what I am giving you.’

  Outside court a spokesman for Royal Mail said: ‘The vast majority of our postmen and women are honest, hardworking people who will always go that extra mile to deliver the mail safely and speedily. Thankfully cases like this are extremely rare. There can be no excuse for Greenwood’s behaviour, and we will always prosecute anybody who abuses their position of trust in our organisation.’

  I read it twice, three times, to make sure I’d understood it right. I hit the print button. And then all I remember is sitting there in the computer suite going hot and cold with panic.

  That’s Dad, I thought. That’s what my dad’s doing. Only he hasn’t been caught yet. Something happened to him when Mum went nuts and now he can’t handle being a postman any more and he’s taking his mail home from work and hiding it in our garden shed.

  That man in the news story got fourteen months in prison for doing the same thing.

  And then I thought, If Mum’s in hospital and Dad’s in jail, what’s going to happen to me?

  I’ll be taken away, that’s what. Put into some care home, miles from anywhere, miles from Mum, some place like a prison itself where you’re locked down all the time and where the staff come into your room at night with sweets even though you know it’s not the sweets they’re really interested in.

  So I was doing Dad’s job. Or at least I was trying try to, in the dark and in secret, until he pulled out of this thing that was making him stay in bed or stop in front of the TV for days on end.

  I knew the route pretty well. How for example Lowther Road looped back on itself so that if you were ready with the post for Ferndale Terrace you could save time. How there was a little alley on Cant’s Lane where you could get through to the Bowcliffe flats without going all the way around. How on Annandale Avenue the numbers went up in order rather than odds one side and evens the other. How 49 Old School Place had tight black bristles inside the letterbox which ripped the mail if you weren’t careful. Complaints were the last thing Dad needed. The dog at 122 Cheswood Road who dozed by the door and started barking if you were too loud, and the man on Ingram Way who left for work each morning at exactly the same time in his big silver BMW, and how the water gushed across the road on Kingfisher Drive every time it rained, turning the junction into a swimming pool.

  I knew it all. Just like Dad.

  Every night after he went to sleep I’d take out the mail and sort it in my room. Loads of it was junk, selling pizzas or broadband or charity, and all that stuff I slung back inside the shed, as far from the door as possible. At first I tried putting it in carrier bags and dumping it but I soon stopped that, there was too much. Everything else I arranged by street and house number and stuffed into the Big Bag, an old zip-up cricket thing of Dad’s with enough space for bat and pads and helmet. Once it was full it was about all I could do to carry it and get on the bike at the same time. My heavy, heavy homework. I came off a couple of times at first but it soon got lighter once you’d done a few streets. A cricket bag in December – it made me laugh. But nobody saw me, nobody made the connection. I didn’t want them to either. It’d mean awkward questions.

  Only, however hard I tried, however early I got up, the mail never stopped. It never went down. It was filling up the shed. I thought about it all the time, I dreamed about it crashing down on me, choking me, suffocating me. Collapsing paper houses, the queen’s head flickering in front of my face, eyes fierce, full of punishment. Feet changing shape as I tried to run away.

  And now Christmas was coming – coming fast. Every day the post was getting heavier, a stream turning into a torrent turning into a river. A river inside a shed.

  The shed. I went over to it, pulling back the black bolt that didn’t even lock. Piles of mail, snowdrifts almost, new deposits left since I last opened the door so that straightaway a fresh panic threatened because how much longer could I really stay on top of this? I kicked my way inside though, taking care to stop the letters and packets and parcels from falling through the open doorway, doing my best to focus instead on the yellow clasp with the arrowhead catch still lying back on the kitchen table.

  Prison. Trying to keep Dad out when I knew someone who was already in one.

  I looked along the high tool shelves thick with grey granular dirt. There was nothing else there that’d cut chain, but then I’d known that anyhow. It didn’t matter, I had a different plan now. A new plan.

  The mail. Somewhere in that mountain of post there’d be cash, folded fives and tens and twenties. They were meant for someone else, but they had my name on them now. I’d resisted before but this was an emergency. You didn’t have to be much of a guesser to know which items to try: the ones that looked like birthday cards, in their colourful square-shaped envelopes. Or anything in fact with weak glue, anything you could open easily and then reseal and smooth down and no-one ever knows. If it meant a few items having to go undelivered – well, that was just a risk I’d have to take. The alternative was leaving Haxforth to starve, or be beaten to death by Christy and his little tribe of psychopaths.

  Find the money, take the money, buy a hacksaw, brand new. Then back to the Brace Brothers factory, cut the chain, get Haxforth over to that place on Northcote Road.

  They ran a homeless hostel of some sort there, I felt pretty certain.

  Chapter 15

  Thank you (and sorry):

  Mrs M. Montague of 39 Wren’s Nest Close – £5

  Philip Lewry of Harefield Road – £10

  Ms Annie Fraser-Howe of Flat 6, Langney Place, Totland Terrace – £50

  Fifty pounds.

  I couldn’t believe it when that dropped out from between the thin handwritten sheets inside the envelope. A fifty-pound note. I’d never held one or even seen one before. Pink and red and silver-stripped, two men with their high collars and steam-age inventions and that weird thing they all have written on them, I PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND …

  I looked at it, examined it. The detail was incredible, all the little traps they’d put in to stop forgers. I realised I was holding my breath, trying to decide what to do.

  Five pounds from Mrs Montague and ten from Philip Lewry. Surely fifteen pounds would buy a new hacksaw? Why was I going on, opening more letters, prying into the lives of people like Annie Fraser-Howe?

  Because I could. Because I was getting greedy. I knew I couldn’t rely on Dad for dinner money or anything else. My phone’d already been cut off because he hadn’t paid the contract. See, the one thing about money and needing it but not being able to get it any normal way is that it stops you acting nice. It makes doing things like stealing seem OK. And if the chance comes along for a bit extra, you take it, because that extra might mean SAFETY.

  Every thief for himself – isn’t that what Haxforth said?

  All the same, I stared at that big pink note for a long time.

  OK.

  Stop.

  Breathe.

  Count to twenty.

  I folded it up and stuck it in my back pocket. This is the first time, I told myself. Make sure it’s the last. It wasn’t like I could really do it again anyway, in case it came back to bite Dad some day.

  I looked down at the letters scattered about my bedroom, the latest load from the shed. I’d smuggled them in under my coat, opened maybe sixty or seventy to get to those three banknotes, slicing carefully under the envelope-flaps using one of the sharp knives we’d hidden from Mum. All of them I could seal back up and deliver tomorrow. All except those three. I gathered them up, those three, hid them behind my fake-wood chest of drawers, then I shoved the rest of the mail under the bed and pulled the quilt down to the floor just-got-up-style.

  Outside in the rain I unlocked the racing bike. Dad still hadn’t noticed that the Pacific Blue had gone. Where was he anyway? Visiting Mum at Tredegar House? Delivering post like Royal Mail paid him to?

  Fat chance.

&nb
sp; I cycled over to the shopping park, the three banknotes tucked safe into my jeans alongside the clasp. Part of me was already spending that money, and not in B&Q.

  ‘Where are your hacksaws?’ I asked a young tattooed guy in an orange apron. ‘I need the sharpest one you’ve got.’

  ‘They’re all sharp.’ He dug something out, a bit of dirt, from beneath a fingernail. ‘What is it you want to cut?’

  ‘Bit of chain,’ I said.

  ‘How thick?’

  ‘About so.’ I showed him with my thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Take you ages with a hacksaw. I’d use a bolt cutter instead.’

  ‘Can you show me where they are?’

  ‘This way.’

  We stopped in front of a wall of tools and he took down something like a pair of garden shears with a snubby nose and two long handles. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘It’s heavy. You put your chain in there and push. Cut anything, that will.’

  I weighed the bolt cutters in my arms. I could see right away they’d do the job. They’d fit into the Big Bag OK, too.

  ‘How much are these?’

  ‘Don’t know. Eighteen quid or something. Whatever it says on the tag. Pay at the front of the shop.’

  The woman at the till looked at me funny when I handed over the fifty but I stared her out and she gave me the change fine.

  Chapter 16

  The rain’d stopped by the time I got home. I’d spent quite a while inside a cafe, staring out at the town’s lights and all their puddled reflections, cups of tea and a Full English courtesy of Annie Fraser-Howe and the others I’d pinched from. Now it was afternoon, past three. Soon the plan in my head, the invisible lines leading to Haxforth’s release, would be real and achieved. Whatever else happened after that, I could go back to concentrating on the Christmas rush.

  I got the bike secured and the bolt cutters hidden inside the Big Bag then went to put my key in the door, thinking and assuming the house to be empty. There was someone moving around in the kitchen though. A moment later Dad opened the lock from the other side.