It was leaving seven thirty by the time Howard Dirk-Huntley had both kids and the retriever on board the Range Rover. Sorrell, climbing in as usual, his school cap screwed up in his pocket, still sticking a slice of jammy toast into his mouth, staining his cheeks blood red; Tabitha, walking sedately round the lawn of number 2 Altmore Road, keeping to the path, holding her school bag over her head to protect her long hair from the onslaught of rain. She slid up on to the front seat beside her dad, pulling her school skirt around her knees before dropping her bag into the footwell. Isla, the retriever, bounced around in excitement behind the grille, shaking and splattering the windows with fine spray in anticipation of a day at the family allotment, playing in the mud and getting filthy.
The interior of the Overfinch stank of damp dog.
Tabitha turned up the heater, steaming up the windows, ‘When is this rain going to stop, Daddy? I bet hockey will be cancelled tomorrow.’
Howard put the Range Rover into drive, and contemplated the luxury of a lie-in on a Saturday morning, a rare event with a thirteen-year-old daughter who played for her school team, usually in pouring rain, usually at the other end of the country. ‘It will stop when it stops.’ He adjusted the de-mister, waiting for the windscreen to clear. ‘You both have money? All your books? Sorrell, have you got your training shoes and not your football boots? You will be playing indoors today. Mummy did tell you that last night. Three times.’
‘Yes,’ the boy said automatically, then thought for a moment. ‘No.’
Howard blasphemed under his breath and put the vehicle back to park.
‘Mummy says you have to pay a pound every time you swear. Double for the “f” word,’ said Tabitha, contemplating the shape of her eyebrows in the vanity mirror.
‘She doesn’t have to run you two to school though, does she? You hang on here, I’ll get them.’ He slipped his seat belt off and opened the door, bracing himself to go out into the driving rain, a quick run up the driveway to the front door where Esther was now standing, the trainers hanging from the crook of her first finger of her right hand, a five-pound note in the palm of her left.
‘Three times I reminded him,’ her chubby face set in that no-nonsense gurn that made her look like her mother.
‘I might be home earlier if this weather doesn’t let up; I’ll text you and let you know. Bye.’ He tucked his head down and looked back to the Range Rover, where Sorrell had taken his cap out of his pocket and was squeezing it through the grille, goading Isla to chew it.
Howard bounced into his seat and slammed the door. The Range Rover squeaked. Metal scraped against metal from the rear somewhere. ‘If she bites that, you are not getting another one. You will have to go to school with a frayed hat and then you will feel quite silly, won’t you, Sorrell? There will be a deduction of house points.’ And another bloody letter home to us, he thought. ‘For every action there is a consequence, and you have to be responsible for your own actions, you know this. We have talked about this before …’
‘So tell somebody who cares,’ said Sorrell, airily. ‘Isla’s bored. Can we go to school now? Action: drive. Consequence: we get to school without being bored. Simples.’
Howard cursed again but remembered to do it quietly this time.
The Range Rover groaned a little, giving a small judder. ‘Sorrell! Stop making that bloody dog jump about!’ shouted Howard.
‘That’s another pound,’ said Tabitha, as her Dad took his hands off the steering wheel, trying to figure out what that slight tremor was. The position of the seat was shifting under his bodyweight. He pulled on the handbrake, sensing the movement but not being able to process it.
Then the Range Rover started moving sideways.
Then backwards.
Howard slipped it into drive, instinct telling him to move the vehicle forwards. He jammed his foot on the accelerator a minute too late. The Range Rover slid backwards, downwards. Howard grabbed on to the steering wheel with one hand, the other arm instinctively reaching out for his daughter. Tabitha braced herself against the back of her seat screaming; Isla started barking as Sorrell shouted, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’
In the rear-view mirror, Howard saw the back of the vehicle slide, the rear window obliterated by black, thick mud. The Range Rover creaked and groaned, punctuated by loud banging as clumps of earth hit the roof and the wings. Then it rotated slightly. There was a teeth-grinding screech as the concrete lip chewed the back axle.
All went silent, just the huff-huff of the dog panting and a squeak as the Range Rover swung, seemingly in mid-air.
Tabitha reached for the door.
‘Don’t Tabs.’ Howard put his hand out to stop her, ‘Just stay still.’
The vehicle ticked and tocked, tilting back and forth. The rear window bobbed up and down. The view was totally obscured.
‘Is everybody OK? You Tab?’
‘Yes Daddy.’
‘Sorrell?’
‘Yes. Isla’s OK too, Daddy.’
Howard saw the front door of the house open. Esther appeared, her mouth opened in a scream, both hands up, telling them not to move. She ran across the garden, slipping and sliding in the grass. Howard opened the window to hear Esther shouting … down a hole, sinkhole, get out for God’s sake, get out the car …
Esther leaned across the gap from the jagged edge of concrete, pawing thin air, but couldn’t reach her son.
‘Esther, stop. Everybody stay where you are,’ shouted Howard. Even the dog stayed still. The neighbour, Michael Broadfoot, appeared in his peripheral vision, dressed in his jogging bottoms and extra-large He-man T-shirt, eyes full of too-early-in-the-morning confusion.
‘Oh my God.’ Broadfoot pointed. ‘Jesus Christ. Rach? Call 999.’
Rachel, the breadwinner, appeared at their front door, dressed in a dark business suit, mobile in hand, already dialling.
There was a creak and a crumple of metal as the rear of the Range Rover juddered down and sideways another ten inches. Sorrell screamed. All he could see now was dark, muddy walls, streaming with rainwater, all around him.
Broadfoot ran across his front garden, vaulted his eighteen stone over the small hedge and hurried to the vehicle.
‘I can’t get out; if I do the whole thing will go down. Esther, climb on the front, for God’s sake, give it some counterweight.’
Esther stood watching the hole, hearing the swirling, sucking water at the bottom, a grey living entity that rushed up towards her, eating at the sides of the hole, causing it to crumble. It was devouring the earth.
‘Esther, you have to move.’ Broadfoot pulled her out of the way. ‘Sit there, stick your whole bodyweight on it.’ He went to the back, reached over the expanse of fresh air, and leant down to open the rear passenger door. The vehicle lurched alarmingly as the boy scrabbled to the side of the seat.
The door held fast. Broadfoot could hear Howard shouting about child locks. ‘Put down the window, son.’
Wide eyed, the boy did so, and reached his arms out, not looking down. Broadfoot pulled him clear, swinging him across the gap.
The boy was chanting the dog’s name; answering whimpers came from the back as the dog struggled against the grille.
It was crossing Broadfoot’s mind to try to get the dog out when the concrete underneath gave way again, another slice slithering into the water below. He jumped back just in time. The dog was out of reach now.
Howard saw Tabitha opening her window, saw Broadfoot’s big tattooed hands reach in. He leaned across to shove her up and out through the window as hard as he could. It all went into slow motion, his hands reaching into fresh air and the Range Rover screeching and lurching before it plunged into nothingness.
Jock Aird was mooching about Altmore House, drinking tea and nibbling at ginger nuts. Sleep was not a friend of the elderly, and he always rose early in the summer to get the best of the day, which was a laugh in this weather. He had spent an hour with Betty, his old collie, strolling around Altmore Wood, where as a pup she had chased rats and rabbits. The dog walked slowly now, waddling about with her Marilyn Monroe swagger. She must be about fourteen now, give or take a year or so. Jock was seventy, give or take a year or five.
They took their time to relish the early morning quiet of the world in general and Altmore Road in particular, before the rat run of the little people going from A to B then B to A, the dance of their cars in and out of driveways. It made him laugh.
Every morning they went out the back of the house, down the path, and up round to the Devil’s Pulpit, where Betty would slump down, her nose twitching in the air as she scented the nocturnal visitors to her wood. Jock would sit on his stone and roll a cigarette, both of them content with the company of the tiredness in their bones. In her youth, Betty had stood at the top of the Pulpit and, at the scent of a rabbit, dashed over the lip, down into the brambles and the thorns forty feet below, delighting in the thrill of the chase.
Which had always been Jock’s philosophy with the fairer sex.
This was a time to reminisce, enjoying a smoke. No matter how often he sat there, his mind wandered back at some point to that day: the day the woods had lost their innocence; the day Sue Melrose and her two wee boys had been killed.
Twenty-three years ago. Give or take.
The trees had grown dark on that day. The sun never penetrated the canopy now, as if the leaves had covered their shame. Nobody used the woods any more, not the way they used to. People stayed on the perimeter path. Parents kept their kids close. Like the wee refugee at number 8, a young girl stuck with her two wee bairns and a husband that couldn’t get out the door quick enough.
Back in those days, Jock and Andrew had managed the wood. They would chop up overgrown trees and collect the fallen branches to feed their fires over the long cold winter. Jock still went out to chop firewood. It took a lot longer now. The winters seemed to last a lot longer, too; the summers were gone in a single breath.
But no matter what the weather was, no matter how his memories hurt, he would return until the day he died. An hour and a half walk, then back in for a pot of mashed tea. Their normal routine. From their viewpoint on the top floor of the house, they could watch all the comings and goings of the rat run below; get to know all the secrets of the little line of cottages that looked on to the woods. His family had owned them all at one time.
In one way or another.
Times change.
People don’t.
Today, when Jock came in from the walk, he took off his boots, shook out his waterproofs and left them to dry in the small, unlocked porch at the back. Then he rolled off his thick wool socks to the thin socks underneath. He rubbed Betty with a worn towel, leaving her silverback sticking up and spikey. She then trudged up the stairs to wait in front of the wood-burning stove as he boiled the kettle, made a pot of tea, placed a cup and two packets of ginger biscuits on a tray – dark, chocolate-covered Border biscuits for him, and plain ginger nuts for Betty. Then he came up to join her.
He had his dining table and one chair at the window. Betty’s big brown eyes watching from her folded blanket in front of the fire, eyes moving from him to the ginger nuts and back to him as he poured the tea out. The street was shimmering like a rainbow trout today, a glimmering iridescence of blues and yellows.
Most days it was the grey of a hunting shark.
He could spend hours watching his little empire. Brian, the arse with the plastic grass at number 12, who wanted the world to think he owned a Bentley when any idiot could see it was a Chrysler 300. With a Bentley badge on it.
He worked in a gym or something. They had fake tans, him and his skinny missus, who went out running with earphones in and dressed her dog up. They looked like they never ate. His bird might look amazing, but Jock knew what Brian got up to out the back door of number 4.
Nobody seemed happy with themselves nowadays. Everybody wanted to be with someone else or be somewhere else. Either they wanted to move out of this street or to stay here and change it into something that it would never be.
Lynda at number 10 would be slowly drowning her misery in vodka and her detective stories. He wondered if she had heard from her daughter. Barbara had run off to Spain – bloody right, too. Shame, but Lynda could be a right bitch, drunk or sober. She never looked out for her neighbour, the wee refugee with the two bairns. Jennifer? Now that lassie was a worn-out, determined woman. And she was well mannered; said hello sometimes when not fussing over her boys. Her husband was never here. Jock had scraped the snow from her path when he saw her struggling with the wee ones. He hadn’t said.
Then there was the posh wanker who had bought Andrew Gyle’s old house and the Melrose house next door and knocked back through. Jock had spent a wonderful afternoon once watching them trying to get a Rayburn in the front door when the back of the house had French windows. Then there was the absurdity of the Wednesday firewood delivery when they lived across the road from an overgrown forest. The scarfed harpy had said they didn’t like to use up natural resources. Jock couldn’t think of an answer to that one.
Jock liked it when Esther, the scarfed harpy, came flying out the house, charging up Altmore Road like she owned it, ready to complain with both barrels. They were desperate for the other houses to refurb, to drive up the property value; then they could afford to relocate to the country. But, for now, they kept a goat and some chickens in their back garden and an allotment in Hardgate. They quoted Scottish heritage and history but it was all about commodity, something that could be bought and sold.
In his day a home was a home.
The scarfed harpy had dared to come to his door once, complaining that Betty had given their retriever fleas – working-class fleas. He had been whittling wood, so he’d had a knife in his hand when he had gone round the house in response to her banging the front door that didn’t open.
So she’d called the police. Cow …
And now Betty was supposed to be on a lead.
No chance. This was her home. It had been in his family for over three hundred years, give or take. Before that there had been a smaller house, and beyond that, for a couple of years, there had been a small church – a simple dry-stone building, enough for the local community. If the old tales were true, the church had been washed away and sucked into the Devil’s Pulpit. The graveyard had been on the higher ground, so they had built the new church up there. If the older tales were true, the Devil had preached from the Pulpit as the old church was devoured and then God had chased him. In his haste, the Devil had left a claw on the floor of the forest, known as the Doon, or the Dubhan as it appeared on older maps, where Altmore was Alltmohr. One old map he owned showed Clachan Stone – the centre of the Doon – as the Devil’s Claw. The youngsters used to inject their heroin there until Jock scared them away. With his shotgun.
His family had farmed this land for generations; his father had built the six cottages for the farm workers and the bigger house at the bottom for the manager. Then they had been swallowed up by the Glasgow sprawl and there was only the street and the woods left. They were even building on the other side of the hill now.
At half seven, Jock was supping his second cup of tea. His teeth were lying on the saucer, so he could suck on the ginger biscuits without any crumbs getting under his false teeth. He snuggled into his seat and settled down to watch the Friday morning Altmore Road rat run. A toothless grin spread across his face as he heard the sound of a minor earthquake and twisting metal, saw the wanker’s Range Rover go backwards into a hole in his front garden. He hadn’t seen that happen since Jimmy McGarrigle’s ploughshare disappeared in the home field in 1962.
So he settled back to enjoy the spectacle.