The Shelter

  The Shelter

  James Everington

  Copyright © 2011 by James Everington

  Cover Design © 2011 by James Everington

  Cover Image © Dawid Zagorski

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified as author of the work.

  The Shelter

  It's strange, when I look back on it, that on a day we were worried would be boring, everything changed. It was towards the end of a long, drowsy summer, monotonous with heat and the lack of wind. I still have the nightmares about that day and what followed, when I awake into blackness, and the sheets that I’ve pushed to my feet seem like they’re reaching to drag me down. It’s been twenty years, and still the dreams; maybe writing this will stop them. I don’t want to dream any longer about the day when Mark Galloway said we should cross the fields to the old air raid shelter.

  There were four of us sitting on the bench, or rather sitting on the bench’s back, with our feet resting on the seat. As boys do. We were fidgety, and bored, and didn’t want to admit to each other that we’d burnt out the long anticipated summer holidays too quickly. We’d left ourselves with nothing to do for the next few weeks but sit in the sun, play the same games and pranks, and taunt each other with the same old insults. Many of my memories after that day are hazy from drink or distance, but I can recall sitting on that bench in the sun as clearly as anything in my life.

  Duncan Moore was my best friend, I suppose. We weren’t really very similar, or close. We just hung around together. I’m not sure there's any logic to who boys befriend at that age. Duncan was tall with broad shoulders; he had short cut blond hair and eyes as blue and dull as the summer sky. He always looked hunched and awkward, as if he knew his height was just a temporary victory over his classmates, and one he shouldn’t draw too much attention to. Despite his height, he tended to fade into the background because he did or said so little unprompted. He was, to be frank, thick as the pig shit that they sprayed on the fields behind the village as fertiliser. My school report cards started getting slowly worse after I befriended Duncan; they nose-dived after I met Mark and Tom.

  Duncan may have been stupid, but he wasn’t cruel. Mark and Tom were both stupid and mean; bullies, to put it differently. Tom irremediably so; Mark may have had more to him than that, but I never got to find out.

  The two older boys had started hanging around with Duncan and I at the start of the summer. We didn’t know why. They were two years older than us so we didn’t protest – it made us seem older in the eyes of our classmates. And besides we didn’t want to anger them. But we both knew we were out of our depth – maybe in two years time smoking cigarettes (which Mark stole from his dad) would have been exciting, but at thirteen? I’d just coughed frantically, and the others had laughed equally frantically at me. Similarly I'd hated the taste of the cheap lager Tom and Mark also stole, although now my girlfriend wants me to get help, I drink so much.

  Mark was sitting on the bench next to me, his skinny body erect and his head craning about, as if looking for something to do in the boring ex-mining village in which we lived. But as I said, we’d exhausted it all already. Mark was really tall, and skinny – ‘lanky’ was the word we used, behind his back. His dark shaggy hair was only cut when his mum won on the bingo; it fell into his black eyes and hid a stud in his left ear. He was often scowling, as if thinking about a particularly difficult problem, but when he did smile it was uncharacteristically bright and carefree. Mark’s older brother was in jail for burglary, and village gossips concurred that he would end up in the same place. I don’t know what his home life was like, he never let Duncan or me into his house, only Tom. When they went in to filch something, we had to wait outside – he lived in what was still known as the ‘mining estate’ and I found the rows of long, brown terraces cramped and intimidating.

  He was a bully at school, but in an offhand way, as if it was just the obvious and somewhat boring thing to do. His threats and dinner-money extortions loomed large in the minds of all kids younger than him - he had beat me up a few times, and Duncan too, but he didn’t seem to remember when he started hanging around with us that summer. Mark didn’t do well at school, but he did have a respect for knowledge, or at least for the kind of boyish knowledge that I possessed: knowing how to start fires with a magnifying glass; knowing about that UFO that had crashed in America after the war and been hushed up; knowing that if you scraped the stuff off the back of playing cards you could use it make explosives. He liked people who knew about things like that.

  Tom White was not like that though, he was stupid and had no cunning or sense of fairness of any kind. He lived with his dad, who was an alcoholic and let Tom do whatever he wanted, which Tom did. As a consequence he was known as a troublemaker by the adults, and as a stupid wanker by us kids. We were both right. He was always doing stupid things and getting caught, like trying to escape an after school detention by climbing out the window, but getting stuck because he was so fat. Tom got very angry if anyone called him fat, but he was, and as kids who’d frequently been bullied by him, we felt no shame in saying so behind his back. Tom did whatever Mark said, because Mark was the only person who pretended to like him. Everyone but Tom knew it was just so Mark had someone to do his bidding, and occasionally take the fall if their misdeeds got out of hand. Even Duncan had worked that out.

  And me? Alan Dean?

  I was thirteen, and newly conscious of the fact that I lived in a four bed detached house on the other side of the village from the ‘miners estate’, and that this marked me out to some of my class-mates as ‘posh’ and easy pickings. I was the middle child of three. My sister Kate was eighteen and had just finished her A-Levels. That summer she was still deciding between Liverpool University, Manchester University, or her boyfriend who worked in a twenty-four hour garage. That this decision was taking place at all caused a lot of friction in our household. My younger brother was two, and to me at thirteen completely uninteresting. I didn’t have much to do with either of my siblings; my parents didn’t have favourites but that summer they had a lot on with both Kate and Robert, and I was left much to my own devices. I didn’t feel I could tell them anything.

  I’d always been short and skinny, and when they started to hang around with us Mark and Tom had started to call me ‘the Ethiopian’ after the pictures they'd seen of the famine on TV. I’d like to say that even then I knew it was beneath me to respond to such a crass insult, but I didn’t – I desperately wanted to comeback with something witty and biting, to which they would have no reply. I was fair haired and fair skinned, and blushed a lot, and burnt easily in the summer sun. I probably spent most of that summer holiday looking red. And it was a hot summer, or so I remember it. Certainly that day was, prickly with August heat and the lack of rain or breeze.

  It was hot and we were sitting on the back of the bench, bored – Mark kept half-heartedly giving Duncan a dead-arm and jeering when he flinched; Tom was singing over and over again, “I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves...” I had the feeling that Mark and Tom were becoming bored with Duncan and me, that whatever attraction there had been in befriending kids two years younger than them had paled. That they might get up and leave me and Duncan, just walk away like we were toys they’d outgrown. And I'd have been half glad if they had.

  The
n Mark straightened as something occurred to him, and he spoke without looking at any of us, staring at the terraced houses opposite instead.

  “Hey everyone why don’t we go up to...

  ***

  ... that old air raid shelter that Gordon Ross an’ all them lot were talking about? Up at Clipston?”

  Alan, the smallest of the boys sat on the bench, felt a sinking feeling in his stomach at the words, although he couldn’t have said why. He looked to his left at Duncan, but Duncan was already grinning blankly in agreement with Mark. Whatever sudden disquiet had overtaken Alan was one Duncan obviously didn't share.

  Someone say no, Alan thought.

  “But I thought you couldn’t get in any more,” Tom said, pulling his sweaty white t-shirt away from his chest. “I mean, that’s what Gordon Ross told Mickey and Mickey told me.”

  “So?” Mark said, with annoyance. “So? Have we got anything else to do? I don’t want to sit here all day with you pussies. Anyway, maybe we’ll get it open.”

  “But it’s miles to Clipston!” Tom protested, and Alan felt his heart sink. Tom always moaned when physical activity was suggested, but Mark always goaded him into it by referring to his weight. If that was the only argument Tom had then the matter was as good as settled. Mark stood and stretched his back in a curiously adult and weary manner, and Tom got up slowly too, grumbling. Duncan rose without commenting and waited passively.

  Just let them go without you, Alan thought, still with no idea of why Mark's suggestion had made him feel so tense. Mark turned to look at him, and beneath the humour of his words Alan saw real anger in his dark eyes:

  “You coming, jerk?” he said, and Alan suddenly saw why Mark was angry – he was uneasy himself, and angry at his own unease.

  “Sure I’m coming,” Alan said, standing up.

  ***

  Clipston was a small village of about fifteen houses at most, about two miles from the larger village where the boys all lived. It was largely unknown territory to them because there were no kids in the small community, so none of them had reason to go there. Besides, there was nothing there. Alan had once been up to the woods nearby because he'd heard there was a badger set, but he’d never heard anything about an air raid shelter.

  There was a path across the fields to Clipston, but to get to it the boys had to walk past Alan’s house.

  Alan's mum was in the front garden weeding as they idled past. She looked up squinting in the sun, and waved them over.

  "Hi," she said still on her knees, smiling. Alan muttered a greeting back; his parents always embarrassed him somehow and he was edgy to get away. He knew his mum would probably put a stop to their trip to some abandoned air raid shelter if she knew about it, and while he wanted not to go, he didn't want the reason to be because his mother forbade him to.

  "Hello Mrs Dean," Mark said - like many bullies he was conscientiously polite to the parents of those he tormented. Tom and Duncan hung back looking uncomfortable; Alan hadn't realised before how much Tom smelt, but now he was stood awkwardly in front of his mother he was aware of the stink of BO on the air behind.

  Alan's mum politely said hello back to Mark, but her smile had hardened. Alan knew she thought his friends two troublemakers and an idiot. She was probably right. But he had the vague feeling that he should be allowed to stick to his choices, good or bad.

  "What are you up to darling?" she said brightly, and Alan almost winced. He could picture the others smiling behind him - none of their parents called them "darling". It was embarrassing, just like the fact that both his parents were also teachers. It wasn't fair.

  "We're just going up to Clipston," he said reluctantly. "Just for summit to do."

  "Something," she corrected absently. She always corrected him when he spoke in the same way as the kids from the mining estate. But how could it be wrong when everyone spoke like that?

  "You boys be careful," she continued. "You know what happened to that boy who disappeared," she said, although they didn't know; no one did. "So you all be careful."

  "We'll be careful," Mark said before Alan could answer. She smiled up at him looking slightly uneasy, as if just realising she was knelt down. The four boys turned and walked away, Alan and Mark with a backwards wave, Tom already complaining about the pace.

  They rounded the corner and were out of sight. Alan's mum looked after them for a while, then went back to her weeding.

  ***

  The name of the boy who had disappeared was Martin Longhurst. Invisible at school, he had become famous in the playground after he was no longer around. Whenever there was a new photograph of him on the evening news, or yet another tearful plea by his parents, the boys all discussed it the next morning. Although Alan understood, on some mental level, that it was a dreadful thing that had happened, in his gut he also knew it was something else: exciting. Nothing else had happened in his home village ever.

  Martin, a schoolboy of twelve, had gone out to play, and never returned. His parents had, with a growing sense of panic, called friends, then neighbours, then the police. CCTV had been installed at the shopping precinct recently (since the mine had closed there'd been an increase in robberies) and it showed Martin entering the local shop and leaving five minutes later with his quarter of lemon drops. No one knew where he'd gone after that, or who with.

  It was over a month ago since Martin had vanished. Various theories were discussed at school about what might have happened to him, with the most dramatic being Simon Dillon's claim that Martin had been abducted by gypsy drug dealers to test a new drug on. This theory was scorned by the rest of the school for being unlikely, but not as much as it was admired for its inventiveness. No one quite knew what a 'gypsy' was, but the papers were always going on about them.

  One thing all the theories that Alan had heard in the playground had in common was the assumption that Martin Longhurst was unlikely to be seen alive again, if at all.

  ***

  It seemed a great day. The sky was empty, except for the occasional drone of a light aircraft from the small airfield nearby. There was little to no wind, but they were walking up the side of the field and the high hedge gave them some shelter from the sun. The crop of rapeseed on the other side of the path was already as tall as they were. A farmhouse stood on a hill on the left, and further round were the woods where the boys sometimes played. On the other side of the hedge, and visible through the breaks in it, was a field of green grass which fell away to the road, where glints of racing light indicated cars in the sun. Birds and butterflies darted away as the four boys approached, and while Alan tried to identify them in his head, he knew enough to refrain from doing so aloud.

  The only annoyance as they walked were the little back insects that all seemed to have emerged at once, as they did one day every summer - small black pinpricks of bugs that were attracted to yellow and white clothes, and as a consequence were dotted all over Tom's large white t-shirt, no mattered how much he tried to brush them off. As they walked, the spiders' webs in the hedges were black with the things.

  Duncan, with his passive trudge, led the way; Tom lagged behind moaning; Mark and Alan walked side by side in the middle. Mark stuck out his foot and tripped Duncan up from behind; Tom seemed to take more pleasure in the act that Mark, laughing raucously as Duncan picked himself up and brushed dust from his trousers. Duncan glared at Mark, who stared back impassively. He wants Duncan to say something, Alan thought, he didn't do it to be unkind but to... what?

  But despite his anger Duncan was too scared of Mark to say anything, and he turned and seemed to stoop under his height, and carried on along the path. The others followed. They continued across the fields, talking about such things as boys talked about: who had the best bike; who was the worst teacher to have a detention with; how Gordon Ross wasn't as hard as he claimed; how old you had to be to buy a drink in America; how quickly the summer was going; about a TV programme about Aztec sacrifices; and who had the nicest tits at school. Alan felt uncomf
ortable when they talked about girls in that way, but he had learnt enough to have an answer ready, to avoid leering laughter from the two older boys.

  They came to a small stream bed, which had a wobbly plank across it as a bridge. There was no need to use the plank, as the stream was completely baked dry, but they still did. It sagged dramatically as Tom crossed it, bowing under his weight. He turned round angrily to the others (who had let him cross first) glaring, but they hid their smiles behind blank faces, and only laughed again after he had looked back round.

  Behind them, if they looked, was the last view of their village before it would be out of sight. On the other side of the plank bridge, the path passed by a small farmhouse and then into a small but dark looking copse of trees. Clipston was on the other side. Unconsciously, they all paused before entering the shadows under the trees.

  "Anyone got anything to drink?" Mark said absently, not looking away from the trees.

  "I've got a Coke," Tom said, "but it's mine and I'm having it."

  "Fat bastard," the other three mumbled in union, almost automatically. "Coke only makes you thirstier anyway," Mark said, "they put something in it. Isn't that right Alan?" he added as Tom and Duncan looked at him blankly.

  "Er, yeah," Alan said. "They put something in it, so you buy more." Duncan still looked blank, but Tom just shrugged.

  "I don't care, you're still not having any," he said and took a massive swig, cola dribbling down his chin and staining his t-shirt.

  Let's just go back now, Alan thought suddenly, out of the blue as if it were the thought of another. He looked over his shoulder at their village on the other side of the fields they'd crossed. Just go back. But he didn't move.