Luke didn’t argue when the teacher suggested they put the bike in his car. His back was still aching, one of his elbows was bruised and stiffening, and he didn’t want to cycle home. For the first few miles they talked about the grenades but soon they ran out of knowledge, meaning and words. Mr Martin seemed both ill at ease and a bit too interested in him and Luke looked out of the window, trying to seem engrossed in the fields and the houses they passed as if he could project himself completely out of the car.
In the end the teacher couldn’t keep it in any more. ‘That stuff about the vineyard, Luke. How did you know?’
‘I’m not sure, sir.’
The teacher studied him for a moment. ‘It’s time off. Forget the sir. I’ve never taught you, have I?’
‘No.’
‘You just came to my History Club? Once, was it?’
‘Twice. I came on the field trip to Dunster Castle.’
‘Oh, yes.’
The teacher clearly didn’t remember what had happened – the row with the other kids. He shrugged. ‘I feel I know you, that’s all. I mean more than just knowing your face from school assembly and so on. Can you remember anything else?’
‘No,’ he said, which was true in a way. Luke didn’t want to talk about it. The whole thing seemed best left behind, miles away and unreal.
‘Have you ever had anything like that before?’
‘How do you mean, like that?’
‘Well, odd thoughts. Stuff from the past, memories.’
‘No,’ said the boy and turned away deliberately, staring again out of the side window. As if the question had sparked them off, his mind filled with brief images of men with spades at Montacute, digging on that hill, and they were not today’s wispy amateurs but solid men of old. They were burying it . . . or were they digging it up? Of course there was a big hole there, he thought. It would have needed a big hole. Like recapturing a dream as daytime took over, he couldn’t quite capture what ‘it’ was. He leaned his head against the cold glass, watching the trees streaming by. They made him drowsy. Gradually, as the engine droned and the world tore past, he fell into a trance and a series of faces came to his mind’s eye – tiny faces but clearly formed, one after another.
Girls’ faces.
Each one hung there beyond the window glass, tipped a little to one side or the other. Each one was as clear as a photograph and utterly different from the last – fair, dark, elfin, apple-cheeked, blue, brown, green-eyed. Each one was utterly the same. The same girl lived behind the eyes.
He had neglected to breathe and now took in a long gulp of air.
‘Are you all right?’ someone asked. He had forgotten Michael Martin, forgotten he was in a car, and had no clear idea how long they had been driving.
‘Why do you ask?’ he replied and saw the teacher’s eyebrows rise. As he said it, he knew it was not the way the boy Luke would have answered and it surprised him that he no longer felt quite like the boy Luke. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m fine,’ but the indrawn breath had turned around into a long sigh and left him heartsick. He turned back to the window and tried to see the faces again but there were road signs instead. They were on the A38, slowing for the turn-off. He looked up and saw the ridge rising and the thing that was in him, the thing that was pushing out the boy, rose with it.
The teacher stopped the car. ‘I’m up that way,’ he said, pointing at a small lane leading up the slope, ‘but I can take you home if you want. Cucklington, you said?’
The sign to Cucklington pointed south. ‘It’s only two miles,’ the boy replied. ‘I can bike it.’
The teacher lifted the bicycle out of the car and drove away.
The boy laid it on the grass and sat down, looking after the car as it disappeared between narrow banks. He had been up that way before, but only once. Five, maybe six years ago? Primary school – and he had friends then. The teacher had asked him about odd stuff, and if he had wanted to answer he would have said that day might have been the start of it.
There had been three of them, always three – Zach and Ryan and Luke their leader, bursting through the woods up there on the ridge, yelling and darting, legs pumping on bikes they knew would fly if pedalled hard enough. They were ten years old and gravity held them lightly. The sun flashed green and blue in the broken roof of leaves as they swerved and leapt through a wild world beyond parental eyes, a first visit to the scene of older brothers’ boasts. They wanted to be heroes too.
Passing a perfect hump where tree roots heaved up earth, they had skidded round, rear wheels locked. Zach jumped it first and landed shouting his exaggeration. ‘I got air. Wow! Did you see that? Three feet.’
Ryan went next but barely hopped, fiddling intently with his gears all the way back as if thwarted by mechanics.
Their leader Luke attacked it last, taking the longest run-up to fulfil their expectations. Luke was a brave, inventive boy and they liked to see him set the standard. He rushed the ramp, jerked head and shoulders back to make the jump, then froze, still staring upwards instead of at his landing point.
They saw the bike rear backwards, hurling him abruptly to the solid earth, and went fearfully to pick him up.
‘You really stacked it,’ Ryan said, avoiding looking at the blood flowing from Luke’s chin, but his friend was oblivious to the injury, searching up through the trees.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see where he went?’
‘Who?’
‘The man on the parachute. He’s come down. He must have done.’ Luke was standing up and staring into the woods. ‘We have to go and find him.’
He climbed the bank, questing through the trees, searching left and right. They followed, frightened by his sudden mania.
‘There’s nothing,’ Ryan said in the end. ‘There’s no one here. You banged your head.’
‘It was a yellow parachute. You saw the plane.’
‘There wasn’t any plane.’
‘Come on, you must have heard it.’
‘No.’
‘You couldn’t not have heard it. It was roaring and banging.’
The vivid image was still in Luke’s head. Straight wings, two propellers, one of them stopped, smoke pouring out behind, a greasy burning line across the sky, its belly pale green with stark black crosses from a war that was no more than history.
They all looked up at a clear and silent sky, and that was when Luke’s friends began to think him odd.
Now he felt odder still, staring up the lane where the teacher had gone, pulled in two directions. Neither of them was the road that led to Cucklington. Montacute was tugging him gently back – not the place, but the brief and shocking power that had travelled up his arm. The faces of three girls swam in his mind’s eye – vaguer, blurrier now, too far away. He felt a sad and fading need to see them properly but the lane ahead called him too and that was stronger. It was the right and only way to go, more like the way home than the Cucklington road with its cheerless, pointless bungalow at the other end. He pushed his bike in the wheel-tracks of the teacher’s car and every step he took felt a step nearer to something.
A sign pointed left to Pen Selwood and he stared at the name, pulled by it, but the other road had a stronger pull so he ignored it, went straight on, curving around a bend until he came to a gap in the trees and a gate on the right and a cottage beyond it and knew this was what was calling him. He pushed the gate open, wheeled his bicycle through as if dreaming, stood staring at the front door and the low windows, and was amazed when that door opened and the teacher came out to stare at him in matching amazement.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded the boy.
‘Me? I live here. What are you doing here? You followed me? Why did you do that?’
‘No. How could I? You drove off.’
‘Luke, why are you here?’
‘When did you buy this house?’
‘What an odd question.’
‘When?’
The teacher frowned in thought. ‘It was nineteen ninety,’ he said, and looked hard at the boy who took a few steps back from the porch and scanned the front of the house from side to side, frowning as if it was lying to him.
‘What was it like then?’
‘It was a complete ruin. Why?’
‘I remember it like that.’
‘No, you couldn’t possibly. You weren’t born.’
‘I know you from before.’
‘Before what? Before today? Of course you do.’
‘From back then, from when you first saw it.’
The teacher was shaking his head. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.
The boy saw a hint of fright in the teacher’s face. He repeated it urgently as if he had to get through to the older man. ‘I tell you I knew you then.’
‘Stop it, Luke. You fell. Are you feeling ill?’ But the boy found the familiar name was no longer so familiar. It glanced off him.
‘I’m taking you home,’ said the teacher. ‘Get in the car.’
As they drove away, three images spun, swirling and colliding in Luke’s head – the girls, the cottage, the teacher’s face. He could get no purchase on them. They wouldn’t stick but when they were approaching Cucklington they drove past the remains of an ivy-clad barn and the sight of it altered the teacher’s cottage in Luke’s mind’s eye. The ivy spread up the gable end beside the road. The roof sank, the glass splintered away, and a man was standing outside it. Then that man changed too and merged into the teacher in the seat next to him, but younger – no grey in his face nor in his hair.
‘Where do I go?’ the teacher asked him at the village sign but the boy just gazed at him. The teacher looked back in blank bewilderment.
‘Luke, where’s your house?’
‘I don’t think I’m Luke. I’m not, am I?’
‘Of course you are.’
‘No.’
‘I’m taking you home. Will there be someone there?’
‘Don’t.’ The boy was rubbing his head as if he could massage Luke away. ‘I can’t remember my name.’ He stared at the teacher again. ‘You have to tell me.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘I think you do. What was I called when I met you?’
‘Today?’
‘No. You do know what I mean. I’m sure you do. Way before that. At your house. When you first came.’
All the teacher could do was shake his head in mute distress but the boy went on, pitiless, unstoppable now as other fragments surfaced. ‘You were poking around. Your car was parked in the lane.’ His voice sounded far away and his face was screwed up, concentrating fiercely, ‘It was a dark blue car. You’d gone inside where you had no right to be. No right at all. It wasn’t yours. Not then. I caught you looking in the cellar.’
‘Someone’s told you,’ said the teacher faintly.
‘I caught you there. You know I did.’
‘You didn’t. That wasn’t you. That was an old man. Who told you?’
‘What was the old man called?’
The teacher found he didn’t want to say. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘It’s the whole point,’ said the boy. ‘You have to tell me his name.’
‘Why?’
The boy stared at him and all Michael Martin could do was flinch away as if a snake was coiled in the seat beside him, and the only explanation came to him and it was worse than having no explanation at all. Across years of sadness he was back there again, back at the cottage she had found by chance, poking around in the ruins. All those years ago, before this boy was born.
‘Because it’s my name, don’t you see?’ The boy was shaking. ‘Tell me my name.’ He was shouting now, roaring his distress. ‘You must help me. I can’t remember. Please tell me. Please.’
And of course Mike knew the name which filled his head – the name of the old man who had caught them in the cottage, the old man who destroyed his life, the old man who was dead before this boy was born. He could not say it.
‘Stop it,’ he said and reached out his arm, not sure if he was trying to keep Luke at bay or to comfort him.
The boy glared at him, jerked the car door open, shouted, ‘Get away from me.’
A man and a woman were walking down the lane. The woman ran to him. ‘Lukey,’ she said, staring through the windscreen at the white-faced teacher, ‘is something wrong?’ and the man said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’