Dark Companions Page 2

  Not that we became friends immediately. He was my parents’ latest paper boy. For several days we examined each other warily. He was taller than me, which was intimidating, but seemed unsure how to arrange his lankiness. Eventually he said “What’re you reading?”

  He sounded as though reading was a waste of time. “A book,” I retorted.

  At last, when I’d let him see that it was Mickey Spillane, he said “Can I read it after you?”

  ‘‘It isn’t mine. It’s the shop’s.”

  “All right, so I’ll buy it.” He did so at once, paying my father. He was certainly wealthier than me. When my resentment of his gesture had cooled somewhat, I realised that he was letting me finish what was now his book. I dawdled over it to make him complain, but he never did. Perhaps he might be worth knowing.

  My instinct was accurate: he proved to be generous—not only with money, though his father made plenty of that in home improvements, but also in introducing me to his friends. Quite soon I had my place in the tribe at the top of the pedestrian subway, though secretly I was glad that we never exchanged more than ritual insults with the other gangs. Perhaps the police station, looming in the background, restrained hostilities.

  Mark was generous too with his ideas. Although Ben, a burly lad, was nominal leader of the gang, it was Mark who suggested most of our activities. Had he taken to delivering papers to save himself from boredom—or, as I wondered afterwards, to distract himself from his thoughts?

  It was Mark who brought his skates so that we could brave the slope of the pedestrian subway, who let us ride his bicycle around the side streets, who found ways into derelict houses, who brought his transistor radio so that we could hear the first Beatles records as the traffic passed unheeding on West Derby Road. But was all this a means of distracting us from the park?

  No doubt it was inevitable that Ben resented his supremacy. Perhaps he deduced, in his slow and stolid way, that Mark disliked the park. Certainly he hit upon the ideal method to challenge him.

  It was a hot summer evening. By then I was thirteen. Dust and fumes drifted in the wakes of cars; wagons clattered repetitively across the railway bridge. We lolled about the pavement, kicking Coca-Cola caps. Suddenly Ben said “I know something we can do.”

  We trooped after him, dodging an aggressive gang of taxis, towards the police station. He might have meant us to play some trick there; when he swaggered past, I’m sure everyone was relieved—everyone except Mark, for Ben was leading us onto Orphan Drive.

  Heat shivered above the tarmac. Beside us in the park, twilight gathered beneath the trees, which stirred stealthily. The island in the lake creaked with ducks; swollen litter drifted sluggishly, or tried to climb the bank. I could sense Mark’s nervousness. He had turned his radio louder; a misshapen Elvis Presley blundered out of the static, then sank back into incoherence as a neighbouring wave band seeped into his voice. Why was Mark on edge? I could see only the dimming sky, trees on the far side of the lake diluted by haze, the gleam of bottle caps like eyes atop a floating mound of litter, the glittering of broken bottles in the lawns.

  We passed the locked ice-cream kiosk. Ben was heading for the circular pool, whose margin was surrounded by a fluorescent orange tape tied between iron poles, a makeshift fence. I felt Mark’s hesitation, as though he were a scared dog dragged by a lead. The lead was pride: he couldn’t show fear, especially when none of us knew Ben’s plan.

  A new concrete path had been laid around the pool. “We’ll write our names in that,” Ben said.

  The dark pool swayed as though trying to douse reflected lights. Black clouds spread over the sky and loomed in the pool; the threat of a storm lurked behind us. The brick shelter was very dim, and looked cavernous. I strode to the orange fence, not wanting to be last, and poked the concrete with my toe. “We can’t,” I said; for some reason, I felt relieved. “It’s set.”

  Someone had been there before us, before the concrete had hardened. Footprints led from the dark shelter towards us. As they advanced they faded, no doubt because the concrete had been setting. They looked as though the man had suffered from a limp.

  When I pointed them out, Mark flinched, for we heard the radio swing wide of comprehensibility. “What’s up with you?” Ben demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s getting dark,” I said, not as an answer but to coax everyone back towards the main road. But my remark inspired Ben; contempt grew in his eyes. “I know what it is,” he said, gesturing at Mark. “This is where he used to be scared.”

  “Who was scared? I wasn’t bloody scared.”

  “Not much you weren’t. You didn’t look it,” Ben scoffed, and told us “Old Willy used to chase him all round the pool. He used to hate him, did old Willy. Mark used to run away from him. I never. I wasn’t scared.”

  “You watch who you’re calling scared. If you’d seen what I did to that old bastard—”

  Perhaps the movements around us silenced him. Our surroundings were crowded with dark shifting: the sky unfurled darkness, muddy shapes rushed at us in the pool, a shadow huddled restlessly in one corner of the shelter. But Ben wasn’t impressed by the drooping boast. “Go on,” he sneered. “You’re scared now. Bet you wouldn’t dare go in his shelter.”

  “Who wouldn’t? You watch it, you!”

  “Go on, then. Let’s see you do it.”

  We must all have been aware of Mark’s fear. His whole body was stiff as a puppet’s. I was ready to intervene—to say, lying, that I thought the police were near—when he gave a shrug of despair and stepped forward. Climbing gingerly over the tape as though it were electrified, he advanced onto the concrete.

  He strode towards the shelter. He had turned the radio full on; I could hear nothing else, only watch the shifting of dim shapes deep in the reflected sky, watch Mark stepping in the footprints for bravado. They swallowed his feet. He was nearly at the shelter when I saw him glance at the radio.

  The song had slipped awry again; another wave band seeped in, a blurred muttering. I thought it must be Mark’s infectious nervousness that made me hear it forming into words. “Come on, son. Let’s have a look at you.” But why shouldn’t the words have been real, fragments of a radio play?

  Mark was still walking, his gaze held by the radio. He seemed almost hypnotised; otherwise he would surely have flinched back from the huddled shadow that surged forward from the corner by the bench, even though it must have been the shadow of a cloud.

  As his foot touched the shelter I called nervously “Come on, Mark. Let’s go and skate.” I felt as though I’d saved him. But when he came hurrying back, he refused to look at me or at anyone else.

  For the next few days he hardly spoke to me. Perhaps he thought of avoiding my parents’ shop. Certainly he stayed away from the gang—which turned out to be all to the good, for Ben, robbed of Mark’s ideas, could think only of shoplifting. They were soon caught, for they weren’t very skilful. After that my father had doubts about Mark, but Mark had always been scrupulously honest in deliveries; after some reflection, my father kept him on. Eventually Mark began to talk to me again, though not about the park.

  That was frustrating: I wanted to tell him how the shelter looked now. I still passed it on my way home, though from a different school. Someone had been scrawling on the shelter. That was hardly unusual—graffiti filled the pedestrian subway, and even claimed the ends of streets—but the words were odd, to say the least: like the scribbles on the walls of a psychotic’s cell, or the gibberish of an invocation. DO THE BASTARD. BOTTLE UP HIS EYES. HOOK THEM OUT. PUSH HIS HEAD IN. Tangled amid them, like chewed bones, gleamed the eroded slashes of MACK TOSH WILLY.

  I wasn’t as frustrated by the conversational taboo as I might have been, for I’d met my first girlfriend. Kim was her name; she lived in a flat on my block, and because of her parents’ trade, seemed always to smell of fish and chips. She obviously looked up to me—for one thing, I’d begun to read for pleasure again, which few of her
friends could be bothered attempting. She told me her secrets, which was a new experience for me, strange and rather exciting—as was being seen on West Derby Road with a girl on my arm, any girl. I was happy to ignore the jeers of Ben and cronies.

  She loved the park. Often we strolled through, scattering charitable crumbs to ducks. Most of all she loved to watch the model yachts, when the snarling model motor-boats left them alone to glide over the pool. I enjoyed watching too, while holding her warm if rather clammy hand. The breeze carried away her culinary scent. But I couldn’t help noticing that the shelter now displayed screaming faces with red bursts for eyes. I have never seen drawings of violence on walls elsewhere.

  My relationship with Kim was short-lived. Like most such teenage experiences, our parting was not romantic and poignant, if partings ever are, but harsh and hysterical. It happened one evening as we made our way to the fair that visited Newsham Park each summer.

  Across the lake we could hear shrieks that mingled panic and delight as cars on metal poles swung girls into the air, and the blurred roaring of an ancient pop song, like the voice of an enormous radio. On the Ferris wheel, coloured lights sailed up, painting airborne faces. The twilight shone like a Christmas tree; the lights swam in the pool. That was why Kim said “Let’s sit and look first.”

  The only bench was in the shelter. Tangles of letters dripped trails of dried paint, like blood; mutilated faces shrieked soundlessly. Still, I thought I could bear the shelter. Sitting with Kim gave me the chance to touch her breasts, such as they were, through the collapsing deceptively large cups of her bra. Tonight she smelled of newspapers, as though she had been wrapped in them for me to take out; she must have been serving at the counter. Nevertheless I kissed her, and ignored the fact that one corner of the shelter was dark as a spider’s crevice.

  But she had noticed; I felt her shrink away from the corner. Had she noticed more than I? Or was it her infectious wariness that made the dark beside us look more solid, about to shuffle towards us along the bench? I was uneasy, but the din and the lights of the fairground were reassuring. I determined to make the most of Kim’s need for protection, but she pushed my hand away. “Don’t,” she said irritably and made to stand up.

  At that moment I heard a blurred voice. “Popeye,” it muttered as if to itself; it sounded gleeful. “Popeye.” Was it part of the fair? It might have been a stallholder’s voice, distorted by the uproar, for it said “I’ve got something for you.”

  The struggles of Kim’s hand in mine excited me. “Let me go,” she was wailing. Because I managed not to be afraid, I was more pleased than dismayed by her fear—and I was eager to let my imagination flourish, for it was better than reading a ghost story. I peered into the dark corner to see what horrors I could imagine.

  Then Kim wrenched herself free and ran around the pool. Disappointed and angry, I pursued her. “Go away,” she cried. “You’re horrible. I never want to speak to you again.” For a while I chased her along the dim paths, but once I began to plead I grew furious with myself. She wasn’t worth the embarrassment. I let her go and returned to the fair, to wander desultorily for a while. When I’d stayed long enough to prevent my parents from wondering why I was home early, I walked home.

  I meant to sit in the shelter for a while, to see if anything happened, but someone was already there. I couldn’t make out much about him, and didn’t like to go closer. He must have been wearing spectacles, for his eyes seemed perfectly circular and gleamed like metal, not like eyes at all.

  I quickly forgot that glimpse, for I discovered Kim hadn’t been exaggerating: she refused to speak to me. I stalked off to buy fish and chips elsewhere, and decided that I hadn’t liked her anyway. My one lingering disappointment, I found glumly, was that I had nobody with whom to go to the fairground. Eventually, when the fair and the school holidays were approaching their end, I said to Mark “Shall we go to the fair tonight?”

  He hesitated, but didn’t seem especially wary. “All right,” he said with the indifference we were beginning to affect about everything.

  At sunset the horizon looked like a furnace, and that was how the park felt. Couples rambled sluggishly along the paths; panting dogs splashed in the lake. Between the trees the lights of the fairground shimmered and twinkled, cheap multicoloured stars. As we passed the pool, I noticed that the air was quivering above the footprints in the concrete, and looked darkened, perhaps by dust. Impulsively I said “What did you do to old Willy?”

  “Shut up.” I’d never heard Mark so savage or withdrawn. “I wish I hadn’t done it.”

  I might have retorted to his rudeness, but instead I let myself be captured by the fairground, by the glade of light amid the balding rutted green. Couples and gangs roamed, harangued a shade half-heartedly by stallholders. Young children hid their faces in pink candy floss. A siren thin as a Christmas party hooter set the Dodgems running. Mark and I rode a tilting bucket above the fuzzy clamour of music, the splashes of glaring light, the cramped crowd. Secretly I felt a little sick, but the ride seemed to help Mark regain his confidence. Shortly, as we were playing a pinball machine with senile flippers, he said “Look, there’s Loma and what’s-her-name.”

  It took me a while to be sure, where he was pointing: at a tall bosomy girl, who probably looked several years older than she was, and a girl of about my height and age, her small bright face sketched with makeup. By this time I was following him eagerly.

  The tall girl was Lorna; her friend’s name was Carol. We strolled for a while, picking our way over power cables, and Carol and I began to like each other; her scent was sweet, if rather overpowering. As the fair began to close, Mark easily won trinkets at a shooting gallery and presented them to the girls, which helped us persuade them to meet us on Saturday night. By now Mark never looked towards the shelter—I think not from wariness but because it had ceased to worry him, at least for the moment. I glanced across, and could just distinguish someone pacing unevenly round the pool, as if impatient for a delayed meeting.

  If Mark had noticed, would it have made any difference? Not in the long run, I try to believe. But however I rationalise, I know that some of the blame was mine.

  We were to meet Lorna and Carol on our side of the park in order to take them to the Carlton cinema nearby. We arrived late, having taken our time over sprucing ourselves; we didn’t want to seem too eager to meet them. Beside the police station, at the entrance to the park, a triangular island of pavement large enough to contain a spinney of trees divided the road. The girls were meant to be waiting at the nearest point of the triangle. But the island was deserted except for the caged darkness beneath the trees.

  We waited. Shop windows on West Derby Road glared fluorescent green. Behind us trees whispered, creaking. We kept glancing into the park, but the only figure I could distinguish on the dark paths was alone. Eventually, for something to do, we strolled desultorily around the island.

  It was I who saw the message first, large letters scrawled on the corner nearest the park. Was it Lorna’s or Carol’s handwriting? It rather shocked me, for it looked semiliterate. But she must have had to use a stone as a pencil, which couldn’t have helped; indeed, some letters had had to be dug out of the moss that coated stretches of the pavement. MARK SEE YOU AT SHELTER, the message said.

  I felt him withdraw a little. “Which shelter?” he muttered.

  “I expect they mean the one near the kiosk,” I said to reassure him.

  We hurried along Orphan Drive. Above the lamps, patches of foliage shone harshly. Before we reached the pool we crossed the bridge, from which in daylight manna rained down to the ducks, and entered the park. The fair had gone into hibernation; the paths and the mazes of tree trunks were silent and very dark. Occasional dim movements made me think that we were passing the girls, but the figure that was wandering a nearby path looked far too bulky

  The shelter was at the edge of the main green, near the football pitch. Beyond the green, tower blocks loomed in glaring a
uras. Each of the four sides of the shelter was an alcove housing a bench. As we peered into each, jeers or curses challenged us.

  “I know where they’ll be,” Mark said. “In the one by the bowling green. That’s near where they live.”

  But we were closer to the shelter by the pool. Nevertheless I followed him onto the park road. As we turned towards the bowling green I glanced towards the pool, but the streetlamps dazzled me. I followed him along a narrow path between hedges to the green, and almost tripped over his ankles as he stopped shortThe shelter was empty, alone with its view of the decaying Georgian houses on the far side of the bowling green.

  To my surprise and annoyance, he still didn’t head for the pool. Instead, we made for the disused bandstand hidden in a ring of bushes. Its only tune now was the clink of broken bricks. I was sure that the girls wouldn’t have called it a shelter, and of course it was deserted. Obese dim bushes hemmed us in. “Come on,” I said, “or we’ll miss them. They must be by the pool.”

  “They won’t be there,” he said—stupidly, I thought.

  Did I realise how nervous he suddenly was? Perhaps, but it only annoyed me. After all, how else could I meet Carol again? I didn’t know her address. “Oh, all right,” I scoffed, “if you want us to miss them.”

  I saw him stiffen. Perhaps my contempt hurt him more than Ben’s had; for one thing, he was older. Before I knew what he intended he was striding towards the pool, so rapidly that I would have had to run to keep up with him—which, given the hostility that had flared between us, I refused to do. I strolled after him rather disdainfully. That was how I came to glimpse movement in one of the islands of dimness between the lamps of the park road. I glanced towards it and saw, several hundred yards away, the girls.

  After a pause they responded to my waving—somewhat timidly, I thought. “There they are,” I called to Mark. He must have been at the pool by now, but I had difficulty in glimpsing him beyond the glare of the lamps. I was beckoning the girls to hurry when I heard his radio blur into speech.