Blood
Chapter Two
Fiction from me as we head toward Halloween. I’ll post one chapter every Friday at 9pm.
This is Chapter Two. To start from the beginning — Blood: Chapter One.
Blood
II.
Jake and Matthew passed the time in a sort of games room, which also had a tumble drier in it in the corner. They listened to their new music, and Jake watched Matthew play computer games. This was his preference, as he didn’t have a console at home and felt cackhanded when he tried to play — but Matthew felt bad about it, and tried to devise a way for Jake to ‘join in’ which involved essentially getting him to run a book, and having them both place bets on how Matthew would do. Jake didn’t need Matthew to do this, and he tried to say so, but he thought it was kind of him that he did.
There was a mishap during dinner when Matthew, messing about, knocked his glass of squash over, right onto Jake’s plate. Matthew’s mother immediately grabbed Jake’s wet chicken kiev, wiped it with paper towels, and stuck it under the grill; Jim said he’d have it, and she answered, well, maybe we’ll share it. Half and half. Onto a new plate from the cupboard, for Jake, Matthew’s mother donated her own kiev, and Jim put about half his peas and carrots next to it. Jake was perversely delighted by all this, since he was always anxious about doing something wrong when eating at other people’s houses, and the fact that Matthew had done something stupid was a great relief to him. In terms of being stressful to his hosts, it would be hard to do worse.
After that, Jake found his way to the downstairs toilet and hid in there for twenty minutes. Taking this time to wind down, and to think, did not go well for him; the desire to go home reasserted itself, and became, this late in the day, overwhelming. Instead of re-joining Matthew, he began to haunt the ground floor of the house looking for the telephone.
He had done this before: he would ring his mum, he would beg to go home, and she would be frustrated, and angry, but she would, eventually, if he was lucky, come and get him. In his pocket was a piece of paper on which his mother had written her half-sister’s telephone number, which he kept taking out and re-reading, as if he had to memorize it.
The phone at one end of the hallway didn’t work; there was no dial tone. Jake went and hid in the bathroom for another five minutes. Very rarely did he find himself actually crying. For now he felt shaken, but calm — he was as exhausted, as hollowed-out, as if he had been crying, but he had not. He never did, in the moments of experiencing it most intensely, recall the word ‘homesickness’, so he never found out whether it would have helped to do so. They can’t just not have a phone, he thought; and on a second search of the ground floor he discovered what could only be the one working telephone, which was in the kitchen, by the back door, and was nestled under a busy corkboard in a chaos of notes, phonebooks, diaries, pens, pencils, and elastic bands.
It rang. Jake jumped, and stood bolt upright, considering his options. He couldn’t run back into the hallway, as someone would be coming to take the call. Briefly he considered hiding under the table, but he would be found, and he would be embarrassed. So he opened the back door and stepped outside, closing it after him as quickly as he could. He gasped as a shrill outside light detected his presence and came alive.
Jake, attempting to dart away to some unseen corner, realized he was hiding again, and felt ashamed. So he abandoned hiding and wandered about nowhere in particular, for a few minutes, anxiously. If it got much later, his mother, when finally he got hold of her, might be able to say to him, no — it’s too late to come and get you.
It made Jake jump when Matthew leapt out from behind the corner of the house, roaring like a T-rex. He was on a rescue mission. Jake’s search for the phone had been conducted, or so he thought, discreetly; but Matthew’s parents had known exactly what was going on, and had been expecting it, because it happened every single time. Matthew’s mother had primed Matthew, earlier, to make sure Jake was okay in general; and just now she had briefly excused herself from her phonecall, having seen Jake in the gloom outside through the window, and had shouted through the house to Matthew, telling him to go out and make sure Jake was alright.
Matthew was not a guileful boy, but he was generous in spirit and had a lot of ideas. His tactic was simply to throw a whole load of them at Jake until one landed well. ‘We could do… We could play Mario Kart? Or we could go in the top field, and climb the cross trees? Maybe Stitch can come? We can… hit some nettles?’ Jake wanted to go home, still, and Matthew could see it. ‘Have you seen the secret passage?’
Jake wanted to see the secret passage. Matthew had done it. Jake was thrilled by this idea, and couldn’t disguise it. He tried to make Matthew take him back in via the front door, so that they weren’t spotted by his mum, who was still on the phone, but Matthew just said ‘No, it’s in here.’ And they clattered in, veering round the huge heavy kitchen table, toward a similarly solid wooden door with a calendar pinned to it.
‘What are you boys up to?’
‘Nothing mum!’ said Matthew, opening the door. The room was full of food. He grabbed Jake’s arm. ‘In here!’
They were inside a larder, with walls of stone and ancient rickety shelves from floor to ceiling. Or maybe it was a pantry. Jake didn’t know the difference. Matthew stretched his arm past Jake and pulled the door shut. It was cold in there, among the tins and jars, and pitch dark. Jake heard Matthew jostle and knock things as he turned around tightly. There was a bash, a rattle, a creak, a snapping noise, then the sound of a pull-cord, and with the sudden light, Jake saw that the back of this tiny storeroom opened with a rickety door into a narrow staircase, going upwards and around. It really was a secret passage!
‘Come on.’
They went in, and went up — every creaking stair sounded hollow, and their shoes made a loud cantering rhythm — until another wormwood-riddled door at the top opened onto the landing, about halfway along it. The toilet, bedrooms, and the main stairs were to their right, at the far end. Jake wondered why these second secret stairs existed at all, while also envying them intensely. He thought they were the best thing he had seen in a house. The old door to the secret passage slammed heavily behind them, making Matthew’s mother jump all the way downstairs. After her little shriek, she apologised down the phone.
‘This is the fields that were here before the farm was here,’ said Matthew, pointing at a framed map on the wall. He had adopted the mode of tour guide. So it is a farm, thought Jake. Or was. Matthew carried on, toward the far end of the landing, saying ‘boring’ or ‘don’t know’ to a few pictures and portraits before stopping at the last. ‘This is… nanna’s… mum’s… mum. Nanna’s nanna. Oh, and that’s where dad goes at night.’
Jake looked where Matthew was pointing, to a floor-to-ceiling alcove, off the left of the very end of the landing. He asked what it was.
‘He’s got a slipdisc.’
Jake didn’t know what that was, or what to say, but his face must have asked for him.
‘It’s a kind of a bad back. Sometimes it’s so bad in the night he goes and stands there instead of sleeping. Or sometimes he does sleep, but standing up. If you keep this one shut, the light from there doesn’t get there in the morning,’ Matthew said, slapping his flat palm on a wooden panel and then waving in the direction of distant windows. Jake hadn’t even noticed that the end wall of the landing had a shuttered window. He had questions, but he didn’t voice them, or even have the chance to.
‘Pills don’t work on a slipdisc: it’s a different kind of pain,’ Matthew said, authoritatively. ‘One night, I went for a wee, in the night, and I saw dad was there. I went down there to talk to him, and he didn’t even open his eyes… all he said was “ssssshhhhhh” a few times. So I went to bed… and then in the morning, he didn’t remember!’
Jake was sincerely awed by this. Matthew had mimicked the ‘ssssshhhhh’ noise very, very quietly, and without putting his finger to his lips — but he had closed his eyes, and held his head slightly higher. Jake did not get as far as feeling sorry for Jim; he was simply stunned to imagine that someone could be in so much pain that they turned to stone, or in this case to furniture. He realised he had been imagining Jim as an imposing old grandfather clock, surveying the corridor from one end, like the one downstairs.
Matthew rushed up another staircase, to the top storey, leaving Jake waiting for a minute. When he returned, he carried a couple of very heavy looking jumpers. They were going outside after all.
The two boys returned to ground level via the less secret route, Matthew grabbed a torch from the pocket of a vast coat in the porch, and Jake followed him out into the dusk.
For a time they were aimless. Matthew equipped them both with plastic rods, two foot long each, which were useless for pretend sword fighting — they kept getting caught on each other — but excellent, it turned out, for bashing down thickets of stinging nettles. Stitch was with them, and every layer of nettles beaten back or down seemed to reveal to him exciting new odours worthy of intense investigation. After a while, Jake examined his plastic rod, and noticed it was not a cylinder but a sort of X shape, and that it had strange moulded bits at intervals along it. He asked about it.
‘It’s for an electric fence,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s plastic instead of wood, so the electricity doesn’t—’ Matthew stopped, suddenly, then continued. ‘Instead of metal, I mean. It’s probably on! We should go and piss on it.’
The word surprised Jake more than the suggestion, but they were, he thought, far out of earshot of any parents. As he had this thought, he heard Matthew’s mother yell from the back door: ‘Matthew! Jacob! Where are you? Have you boys got Stitch with you?’ — and Matthew, louder than Jake had ever heard anyone shout, responded ‘Yeah, he’s here!’
Stitch lolloped back to the farmhouse to the calling of Matthew’s mother. He had to have injections because he was old, Matthew explained.
Not five minutes later they were a field away from the immediate grounds of the house, in a far corner; and perpendicular to the fence they’d been following was a thin white string stretching as far as they could see in either direction, flecked with silver, and held taut and upright by the same plastic poles they were holding. Occasionally there was a faint click. Jake didn’t need a piss — he’d had a piss before, he said, using the word deliberately — which Matthew teased was a lie, saying he was just scared of getting electrocuted. Matthew stood a foot and a half back from this lethal cable, pulled his dick out of his jeans, pointed it forward, and swung his hips from side to side: there was a delay of about a second before a magnificent fusillade of piss sprayed all over, some of it toward the electric fence, but no small amount splashing on Jake.
Jake really didn’t care about getting some piss on him: he was preoccupied with the terror that his friend was about to be zapped to a crisp, and that he would have to run back to the farm with the terrible news, or run along the fence to switch the battery off, or... he didn’t know. He wiped the back of his hand on his jeans. Matthew meanwhile was having a great time. Nothing at all electrical had happened. He grabbed Jake’s hand, still laughing, then said, ‘Wait…’ and rested his other hand on the white fence. Nothing happened. Jake frowned. And as he frowned, the pain and the jolt went through both of them and smarted their hands, and they both yelped, and fell about laughing. They joined hands again, and this time it was Jake’s turn to press his hand on the fence. He happened to time it so the jolt was immediate, and again they were flung apart in pain and pleasure. It was an incredibly weird feeling. They couldn’t get enough of it, and shocked each other nine more times.
Half an hour later, further up this gentle hill, perhaps a kilometre from the house, Matthew luxuriated three or four yards up a tree. His feet were on one bough, and he gripped firmly with both his hands onto a bough above; he kept swaying his body in all directions as he chatted, sometimes wrapping his hands and swivelling his feet and turning completely around like a gymnast in the branches. He was completely at home, he had had years of knowing his way around these trees. Jake was almost as high up, in a tree just opposite, clinging on so tightly that Matthew could have been forgiven for worrying about him — but he didn’t. There were five trees, planted in an X shape, like the dots on a die. From a distance it looked like a lonely copse on the horizon, crowning a shallow hill.
The boys, as they swung and clung and clambered about, could see for miles in every direction. Jake found the light to be spooky, but the experience, all of it at once, to be overwhelmingly new and beautiful. The fields all about had been drained of their green and magicked into an encircling estuary of charcoal patches, desolate blue clumps like bruises in the dark, and mysterious animal noises. The mysterious animal noises sounded, to Jake, like they were sad, like they were going to stay sad forever. Meanwhile in one special direction the horizon underlined a low, glowing curtain of blazing pink. Jake let the sight of it hypnotize him.
‘That’s town,’ said Matthew, pointing.
Slightly to the left of the pink fire, and down a bit in the darkness, were the speckly golden flickers of distant human habitation. It looked unlikely. Town, thought Jake, had been strange; he hadn’t liked it. The first thing that came to mind when he recalled it now was that he hadn’t spotted any other children there. There were not enough pedestrian crossings, and traffic had been constant. There were basically two roads running through it, which met at a crossing. It was a small town, all steep and crinkled up, and all of it different heights, as if it was the shell of a vast mollusc, two or three miles across, the un-buried half of which had been smashed or eroded away, so that all that remained was a dense-packed pit of baroquely wrangled gaps and ridges. You could walk down one side-street for a bit, having gone the wrong way, and get past a bank of stickyweed, only to look beyond it and see, yards below you, the rooves of a terrace, as if you were on a cliff-edge above them. It hadn’t helped, when they had got lost earlier, that in this tiny, tightly-packed town, none of the little alleyways which anywhere else would connect a place to itself were places you could go through. They were always closed off at some point. Jake had counted seventeen PRIVATE PROPERTY signs before he got bored of it. He hated those signs; they reminded him of a painted board saying KEEP OUT which had stuck forever in his memory from an old film called 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. In that instance, it had meant mortal danger. Here, or rather there, in this wrong little town nestled in the dark below the horizon, they had just meant that any attempt to wander deeper into its whorls was bluntly curtailed. Jake, who was having a fragile day anyway, had become hurt and enraged, like a caged animal, had encountered those signs as a cumulative, barbarous curtailment of his freedom to explore, perhaps even to escape. It was as if the mollusc — the actual soft wibbly creature that had lived in that huge buried shell — had once had thousands of tiny tendrils, all of them mutilated and pinked in the last few centuries by gates and signs and alarm systems. In particular he was thinking now about the river that cut through the town: he didn’t understand why the riverbank, which he thought was something you should be able to walk along, was all just people’s gardens, and you weren’t allowed in. Were you allowed through their bit of water in a boat, he thought. And what if you were a cat, or a dog, or if you were a fish in the river, how could they stop you?
‘Are you cold? I think we should go back, I’m cold,’ Matthew said, vanishing Jake’s intense reverie in an instant, as if he was tearing a cobweb.
Jake blinked and shook his head with this return to reality. He could have sworn it had got darker, and the pink over there — he thought of it as a corner, now — had got fainter, smaller, and redder. As to Matthew’s suggestion, he was undecided. He wanted to stay out, but Matthew was right, it was cold. And it would be properly dark, soon. He wondered about a compromise, and suggested they go through one more gate, one field further in the direction opposite the last of the light.
‘I don’t go past the cross trees,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s bad past here.’
Jake had no answer to this. He started to ask a question, but Matthew interrupted. ‘If you go all the way down, as far as the marsh…’
There was an immense silence, as big as the starry sky.
‘Dad says down there used to be the sea,’ Matthew suddenly said; and then he shocked Jake by leaping all the way to the ground in a single movement. He landed heavily, fell forward onto his palms, picked himself up, and dusted his hands: ‘It’s where we’re going fishing tomorrow. Race you to the other fence!’
Jake climbed down, carefully, before making a clumsy final drop from the lowest bough. Matthew, sportingly, had waited for this; but as soon as Jake’s feet were on the ground, he was away. Onyourmarksgetsetgo!, one word. They tore to the other side of the field, as fast as they possibly could without falling flat on their faces.
Matthew declared himself the winner, for good reason. As their own panting subsided, both boys heard someone breathe out, loudly. It was right next to them, just behind and between them, barely a foot above. Just once, a single exhalation. They jumped apart from each other, away from it, and both yelled wordlessly.
‘Who is it?!’ bellowed Matthew, without thinking.
There was nobody there. There was moonlight enough now to see that there was nobody there. Matthew smiled, and started laughing. Jake took a little longer to move on from the shock; he turned the torch on and shined it about, but it didn’t make any difference. He got Matthew to stop laughing and stand still for a second, and it was indeed total silence that they listened to. Even the sad animal noises seemed to have stopped.
‘This one isn’t electric,’ said Matthew, firmly grasping an un-barbed few inches of barbed wire in his fist and yanking the fence they had arrived at back and forth. As they walked homeward along it, they decided between them that it was night-time, and that despite the tinctures of moonlight the torch should be switched on the whole time. The first thing it illuminated, a yard ahead, was a salt-lick, hanging from the fence. Jake had never seen one, and Matthew explained what it was for. What he couldn’t explain was why there seemed to be a splash of blood on it, so they got closer to investigate, and found underneath it a dead bird. It looked like it had been run over; its head was completely caved in.
‘Ahh!’ said Matthew, suddenly very excited. ‘When we were at Rookery there was a massive dead bird. We found it in orienteering.’
Jake had left Matthew’s school just one term before this notorious trip. Every year, the kids in that form were taken to an outdoor education centre, where they stayed for a whole week. Jake would have dreaded it, a week away from home. He would also, as this very evening demonstrated, have had a splendid time, so long as he was distracted out of his clinginess and his homesickness.
‘They gave us this sort of pack — it was all — there was — I can’t remember, it was compasses and that sort of thing. Maps of the hill and the bit where Rookery was, and the first day, the first task on the whole week, there was a sheet for points. If you found a bone it was five points, if you got an eggshell it was ten points. I can’t remember the other ones. Oh a feather! That was one point or something. I was on a team with Edward and Louis, Jon, Jenna Bryher, and Carl Kay, and we got halfway up the hill when we found this big huge dead bird, it was a black bird but it wasn’t a blackbird, it was massive, and it was crawling with maggots and its eyes were all dripping out on its beak. It was better than anything we had already, and it was a hundred percent better than anything any other team had.’
Jake kept turning to grin at him, even in the dark.
‘We got it back to Rookery car park and dropped it on the floor and its guts and maggots all fell out, and Miss Morgan screamed!’
Jake loved this story, from beginning to end. He cackled at the joy of the adventure, and at the misfortune of the squeamish classroom assistant, even though she’d been his favourite.
‘Mr Wilson was cross with us, but he wasn’t really cross. He said we’d get a bonus point, but actually, we didn’t get one. We should have got eight hundred.’
They discussed the point-scoring system, and how unjust it was that the Downash House team hadn’t been awarded any points whatsoever for their game-changingly impressive cadaver.
There now followed a period of quiet, as they tramped along, and Matthew at last got lost in thought. His mention of the sea, plus the more recent mention of compasses, had got Jake fantasizing about his favourite thing, which was old-fashioned ships. He thought of all old-fashioned ships as pirate ships. He knew about compasses, and about sextants, and how to read maps, and he even knew that it was possible to navigate by the stars, though he hadn’t yet been able to understand anything which claimed to explain how. He had a quick look upwards, but recognized only Orion and his belt.
Jake mused aloud to Matthew about the idea he was having, which was orienteering, but at sea. Navigation, and also finding. Matthew countered that there was nothing to find at sea, and Jake joked that you got seaweed, for one point; and planks, and mermaids, and if you were lucky you got treasure. He couldn’t quite tell in the dimness whether Matthew was laughing at him or at his jokes, but it didn’t matter right now. He had been put, at last, at his ease, and he was comfortable and happy.
Matthew, who had the torch, pointed it toward the fence, at a large clump of matted, off-white wool that was tangled there. ‘Look, that’s three points, probably!’ And he walked over to it. ‘It’s a piranha,’ he said, mockingly; but it was a good-natured concession in a very weak disguise.
Jake’s fancy was still steering by the stars. ‘I wish I could go on a pirate ship,’ he said, kicking a wooden fence post repeatedly.
‘Ow, shit!’ — as Jake had spoken, Matthew had roughly tugged the wool from the fence, and a barb on the wire had dragged along the back of his hand and gouged it. He was already bleeding, and as he shook his hand as if to dry it, drips landed on his jumper. He tried to rub the blood away, or in, with the palm of his other hand, but it didn’t help. Jake looked on, wide-eyed. Matthew picked up the torch he’d dropped and got Jake to shine it at his wound. It was not as bad as they thought, but it was over an inch long, and it was still bleeding. Jake tried a swear, about how it must have ‘fucking hurt’.
‘It fucking does.’
Despite this upset, they stamped the last of the way back to the farm in a good mood. Jake felt different, as if he was a different person. He had completely forgotten that he had ever not wanted to be there; and just as it wasn’t he who had spilled something at dinner, it also wasn’t he who had injured himself. Matthew’s parents were briefly alarmed, when the boys made a grand racket re-entering the bright, warm kitchen; but the wound was cleaned, and dressed, and bandaged, and Matthew was very proud of it indeed. As they sat there in the kitchen, Matthew declared, suddenly and embarrassingly: ‘Jake wants to be a pirate.’
Jake’s face froze. Matthew’s parents both looked at him incredulously for a few seconds, while Matthew grinned broadly. It was his mother who laughed first, utterly surprised that piracy, of all things, should be what Jake daydreamt about. It hadn’t been an unkind laugh, though, and Jake didn’t feel the need to mount a defence, nor to mention that that wasn’t quite what he’d said. ‘We’ll have to get you a parrot,’ said Matthew’s mother.
‘Pirates are very different these days, Jake,’ said Jim, without further explanation.
Matthew ignored his wittering parents: ‘And, we heard a ghost, over from the cross trees.’ He leapt down from his chair and shouted ‘Arrr!’ at the three of them in turn — louder each time — before scampering out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the toilet. They heard the door slam, then bounce, then wobble open again as a shout of ‘Shiver me timbers!’ and a happy laugh clattered back down the hallway.