Pinprick (9 page)

Almost all of the homeless people that applied for accommodation were more than willing to abide by the rules for the sanctity of what Shane offered. There were a few slip ups when a handful of people tried to cheat the system; there always were and there always would be, but overall it was a successful project.

People couldn’t argue with the fact that the pros outweighed the cons. Street begging and drug-related crimes in the surrounding area had decreased dramatically. A few hundred of his tenants were given jobs with the local council’s Waste Disposal Unit so Shane was literally cleaning up the streets. His tenants were free to leave occupancy whenever they chose and he had initiatives set in place to help them move on.

Then the press performed their usual trick of delving into the past and there they discovered his secret. It was plastered across the face of every newspaper he saw. So, not only did everyone in the village have a theory about what happened, but everyone in the country.

When Shane faced the Media at a press conference he had gotten angry at the questions and blurted out that he’d give fifty thousand pounds to anyone who could solve his mystery. It was that challenge which led to him being tested by every professional in medical science.

That had all been years ago though and nobody had ever claimed the reward money. He doubted anyone ever would.

Things were looking up for him now and he had been viewing possible sites in Manchester and Birmingham for HHS2. Things were going so well he might even set up sites in both cities. After all, it was his aim was to have one in at least three major cities across England. The last thing he needed was the latest rehash of his story tainting his current projects.

He hadn’t really paid any attention to where he was wandering until he noticed the familiar whitewashed historical building beside him. Like most of the buildings in the town centre the lower halves had been turned into shops decades ago and the only thing that never really changed were the second or third storeys. A little Chinese Herbal Remedies boutique was the present occupant of the premises and an old bald Chinese man stood at a counter reading a newspaper. Shane never went in but wasn’t really surprised that Starchild’s Sci-fi was gone. Most independent businesses were vanishing nowadays. He paid it no more mind and crossed the road towards a set of high black railed gates set in a brick wall.

He crunched across the gravelly driveway leading up to the mansion house. Christchurch Mansion was a large red bricked Tudor building which was now a museum. Even though Shane had been there numerous times in his life he had never had any interest in going inside. The land on which the building was situated was a public park of around seventy acres.

Walking through the park brought back happy memories of sunshine, lollipops and running around chasing squirrels with Catherine. Back when they were kids it was a real treat to come here and they had always had loads of fun. As he walked past a long silver slide that cascaded like a waterfall from the top of a grassy mound he smiled at how, in some ways, he was glad things didn’t change. Several children raced up the dirt track worn in the grass by thousands of feet over the years, eager to whiz down the slide again.

His Dad was always exhausted after they’d been to the park and as a treat, although Shane realised it was more for his Father’s benefit now, his Father would take them to The Fox and Hounds, a pub at the side of the park.

Aside from a new seating area and garden furniture The Fox hadn’t changed. He crossed the beer garden and went in. He hated how dark pubs were, purely for how bright everything seemed once you came back outside. A plump middle-aged woman took his money and gave him a cold pint of lager. Shane retreated to the beer garden and found a seat beneath a red Budweiser parasol.

Shane was pleased that the beer garden was deserted apart from an elderly couple sharing a bottle of white wine. He took a blister pack of headache tablets out of his pocket and pushed the last two into his palm. Taking a sip of his lager to moisten his mouth he popped the glossy white capsules onto his tongue and made a mental reminder to buy more on his way back through town.

Half way down his pint Shane heard shuffling footsteps crossing the concrete floor and put his glass down. A dishevelled tramp staggered towards the elderly couple. Long, greasy strands of white hair fell out from a woollen hat and were tangled up in his massive beard. Dark tattered clothes in numerous layers made him appear a lot fatter than he was. The elderly couple looked slightly uncomfortable as the tramp sat down heavily on the picnic bench next to the gentleman. His wife screwed up her face in disgust at the intrusion.

Shane sipped his pint and tried not to pay too much attention. The tramp mumbled a few sentences before rifling through the ashtray on the couple’s table retrieving virtually spent cigarette butts and shoving them in his coat pockets. He grumbled something else to the old man and pointed to one of his eyes. Both the man and woman shook their heads emphatically and watched in relief as the tramp pushed himself up using the table for support and moved away from them.

Oh for Christ sake!
Shane muttered under his breath as the tramp made his way towards him. Just the sight of the man in front of him made him feel sick despite having met hundreds of homeless people through his HHS project. No doubt he was about to repeat the same spiel he’d given to the old couple.

The tramp slumped down opposite Shane. He took little solace in the fact they had a picnic bench between them. The man reeked, the smell an overpowering mix of stale sweat, damp, urine and god knew what else.

“Good afternoon sir, I’m sorry to bother you.” The tramp slurred his greeting and his putrid breath stunk of alcohol and decay that mingled with the fumes of the full ashtray on the table between them. He understood how people got into these states but that did not mean he wanted to be this close to someone so foul.

The tramp searched through the ashes in the tray as he had done at the previous bench, his dirt caked fingers collecting its rewards. Having nothing else to do, Shane watched him, taking in his torn khaki anorak and what looked like an imperceptible comic strip across his faded t-shirt.

“I wouldn’t normally ask…”

Shane had heard every approach in several different languages from beggars all over the world but it always came down to the same thing, asking for money. Instead of striking up conversation Shane preferred the direct approach to begging. Just ask.

“…but you see I lost my eye a year back and this one’s started to go the same…” the tramp pointed a gnarly yellow fingernail at his right eye and the thick milky white cataract that obscured it. It was so far matured it made the eye look like the white of a boiled egg. Shane had a mental image of something piercing it and yellowy orange yolk dribbling out. Feeling queasy at that vision he just stared at his drink and let the tramp get to the point.

“Could you spare a bit of money so I can get myself something to eat?” He looked sincerely out of his one good eye and his forehead wrinkled even more as he stared at Shane properly for the first time.

“I know you, don’t I?”

Shane smiled politely and simply said, “I get that a lot, I’m on TV now and then. Infamous politician.”

The tramp shook his head and scratched his beard thinking about what Shane had said.

“Well, you ain’t David Cameron are you? Don’t have enough hair or look Nazi enough for that!” He opened his mouth wide and cackled, his devastated teeth like blackened stumps after a forest fire. Then he gasped and slammed his fist down on the table. The elderly couple shook their heads in bewilderment at the sudden outburst. A bony finger pointed at Shane with accusation.

“I know who you are!”

Shane wondered if he really did. The tramp glared from his one eye and started singing a nursery rhyme.

“Little Shane Colbert has lost his friends,

And doesn’t know where to find them.

Did he leave them alone, to rot down to bone?

Will they come home dragging their entrails behind them?

Shane stood up to leave.

“That’s what they used to sing about you isn’t it?” the tramp asked.

Just hearing the stupid rhyme again tightened a knot of rage inside of him but he was used to the fact that he couldn’t outrun his past.

“Yes they did, very creative too.”

The tramp’s breathing sped up and he glared coldly at Shane.

“You don’t remember me do you?”

Shane searched the tramp’s face and tried to iron out the wrinkles. There was something about him Shane realised that was familiar. Something about his face, the prominent forehead and Roman nose. Then it struck him like a spear of ice through the chest.

“Alan?”

The tramp nodded and got to his feet and glanced about at a group of teenagers who had just entered the beer garden.

“This man” he shouted making sure he had everyone’s attention.

“This man! This man killed my daughter!”

Chapter Eight

Shane just sat mouth agape. He hadn’t seen this man since he’d last been in Starchild’s. The fact that he had not long walked past the premises that once was occupied by Alan and his daughter coupled with his vision of Malcolm was really starting to get to him. Too many coincidences, all the elements of his past were swarming around him like vultures on a weakened, soon to be cadaver. All this was leading somewhere and a large part of him dreaded what remained at the end.

Alan, upon realising the old couple weren’t taking anything he said seriously, seemed to fold in on himself and crumple back onto the bench.

“You killed my little girl,” he said in a barely perceptible whisper. He snatched the pint glass from Shane and downed it.

“I never killed Daria,” Shane said as he stared at his hands, half expecting them to be covered in the indelible blood of his friends. Daria hadn’t been out that night, he was certain of that much. She usually went everywhere with Johnny but he remembered him saying she was sick and she looked all forlorn and maudlin over his absence. Besides he remembered that it was her anger over Johnny’s disappearance that had got him banned from going in Alan’s shop.

“I didn’t kill her!” he said louder.

“Do you know what happened to Daria?”

Alan closed his good eye and peered out of the milky orb of his bad one.

Shane’s initial thought was that Daria had gone missing but that couldn’t be true unless it happened at a much later date.

“No, I don’t know what happened to her, the last time I saw her was when you both kicked me out of your shop.”

Alan scowled at him as a tear oozed from the crusted corner of his bad eye.

“You never actually pushed her, but it was your hand on her back.”

“Pushed her?” Shane asked with genuine concern, “what happened Alan?”

Alan scratched at his scraggly beard and hocked a wad of brown phlegm into the ashtray where it rolled and balled and was coated with grey ash. “You know the Orwell Bridge.”

The Orwell Bridge, Shane knew it of course. It was the colossal bridge that spanned the River Orwell like a many-legged Brontosaurus. When he was a child, his dad would take him to watch its construction every Sunday afternoon for three years. They’d drive to a layby at the riverside and gaze up in wonder at something so big being created.

Shane still remembered the thrill of driving across it for the first time, the excitement mingled with fear as the road felt like it was hundreds of miles up in the sky.

“She jumped?”

Shane knew the answer. Ever since the bridge officially opened in ‘82 it was notorious as a favourite suicide spot. He recalled some tragedy about a doctor and his family that made the mainstream news a couple of years previously. To some it was known as Suicide Bridge.

Alan nodded and wiped a filthy palm over his face.

“That’s awful, I’m so sorry. Do you know why?”

“You remember that Michael Caine film they made where those helicopters flew under the bridge?” Alan asked, assuming Shane would know.

The Fourth Protocol
. Shane nodded; he remembered it well, late eighties, Michael Caine, Pierce Brosnan, MI5, KGB, espionage and all that jazz.

“She did it not long after that, one weekday morning at half eight. When I got up she weren’t there. We always had breakfast together before we went downstairs to open the shop. I knew she’d been feeling ill so I thought I’d forgotten about a doctor’s appointment, or maybe she’d gone up to Heath Road Hospital for something to do with the baby.”

“What the fuck? She was pregnant?” Shane cursed in disbelief.

Alan laughed bitterly without humour at his outburst.

“Was she pregnant? She’d got a fucking week left man!” He bashed a fist on the bench making the empty pint glass bounce and shatter on the floor. A beefy looking man jogged out of the pub and looked their way.

“You causing trouble again Al? You know I told you to scarper last time you were bothering my customers!”

Shane quickly fumbled in his wallet and flipped the barman a twenty.

“For the glass, two beers and something stronger too.”

The barman took the note off Shane and crouched down to pick up the pieces of glass.

“You know him?” he said, nodding over a shoulder at Alan.

“Yeah we go way back,” Shane replied.

The barman left and returned a few minutes later with two pints and two fingers of whisky. Shane shot back the whisky and grimaced at its burn. Alan drained his glass of the last drop and continued his story.

“I don’t know how the hell she got up onto the edge of the bridge with how big she’d got. But she did,” Alan sighed and gulped down a third of the beer. “The police came into the shop and suggested I close for the day. They took me upstairs and told me that a heavily pregnant young woman had jumped off the bridge that morning and had been carrying identification that led them to believe it was Daria. The bottom fell out of my world then.”

“My god!” Shane said for want of anything else.

“That’s not the worst of it” Alan said finishing his pint.

“If she’d have jumped off the part which runs over the water it would have been bad yeah, but she didn’t. She jumped off over the road and straight through the fucking roof of a school bus!”

Shane hid his face in his hands and shook his head.

“Twelve kids, including my unborn grandchild, were killed on the bus, and another five in the ten car pile-up it caused. That’s a total of eighteen lives with Daria.”

Shane sat with his face in his hands, his elbows on his knees.

“Why, why did she do it?” he mumbled through his fingers.

“Johnny. She was heartbroken after he vanished. She pined for him. Even carrying his baby wasn’t enough to stop her from sinking so low. The doctor wouldn’t put her on any medication for the depression as he didn’t want it to harm the baby. Ha! Fucking fat lot of good that did!” Alan paused and pulled his coat around him despite the hot weather. “And the nightmares gave her no respite.”

“Nightmares?”

Alan nodded.

“Almost every night she had dreams about Johnny. Always the same thing, a great big steaming pile of gore like he’d been splatted by a giant flyswatter, only his face recognizable. ‘Tell Shane to remember. Tell Shane to remember.’ That’s what Johnny would say to her every time. She’d got it into her head, as a lot of people had, that you were somehow responsible and that you were faking your memory loss to cover something up. When the investigations had dried up and nothing more could be done she couldn’t handle it I reckon.”

Shane wept openly, tears that hadn’t properly run for years burst their dam and there was nothing he could do to prevent them.

“If it’s any consolation I don’t really think you’re responsible,” Alan said quietly and Shane squinted at him through red rimmed eyes. “Some things never get solved. I only said what I said to see how you’d react.” Alan stood up ready to leave. “I’ve not got much time left, life’s been hard, but for the record, could you indulge a dying man? Are you responsible for your friends disappearing?”

“I…,” Shane wiped at the tears with his middle fingers, “I don’t remember!”

Alan’s laughter was more wheeze and death-rattle than laugh and tailed off into a hacking cough.

“If only you could remember eh?” He staggered away from Shane, muttering under his breath. “That’s what they all say.”

He left the beer garden without saying goodbye. Shane stared through the golden liquid in his glass.

He wandered back through the town in a daze brought on by a combination of the alcohol, the shocking tragedy of Daria and her baby, and a headache.

In his mind, he pictured Daria standing at the edge of the bridge, her brown hair billowing out behind her caught up by the wind, one hand on the concrete barrier, the other resting on her almost full-term pregnant belly. Maybe she muttered some words of comfort to the unborn child. He saw her struggling to the climb up the edge, kicking her shoes off in the process to grip and push with her toes.

There she sat on the ledge gazing down at the toy cars and model river. Perhaps someone spotted her. Maybe a car stopped, maybe they didn’t. Most probably no one did. On the busy the four lane road no-one would’ve dared stop.

And down she plummets.

He was still preoccupied when he took a seat on the upper deck of the double decker school bus, his knuckles white from clenching the cold metal hand rail on the seat in front.

A light fitting above the centre aisle swung down and sent a schoolboy flying through a side window as something red exploded through the ceiling like tin foil. A woman at the front screamed, her eyes bulged and then she disappeared from view; swallowed up in a twisted mass of red blood and grey metal. Shane ducked. He remembered the years of flight attendant’s advice and kept his head between his knees with his arms around his head.

Shane was thrown forward as the bus driver slammed on the brakes, the wheels squealed to a standstill, followed immediately by a crash from behind as other traffic drove into the bus.

When the bus finally shuddered to a standstill, he thought he saw a little hand like a centrepiece amongst the gore.

He seemed to be hanging above the wreckage looking down upon the gaping hole in the roof of the red bus, stopped diagonally across both road lanes. Piled up behind it were half a dozen cars in various states of concertina, bonnets and boots and bodies crushed together in a heap of total devastation.

He vomited on the ground, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around. He was stood at the park’s entrance. He held onto the black railings and waited for the nausea to pass. He watched as a few women with children passed by and tutted in disapproval at the sight of the sweaty bald man standing there with his puddle of sick. Shane paid them no attention and headed towards the town centre.

After stopping off at a chemist to get more painkillers he fetched his order from Marks and Spencer’s and ordered a taxi. Yet again the closer he got to his childhood home the more intense the ringing in his head became. He swallowed two painkillers dry, grimaced at the bitter taste they left on his tongue, closed his eyes and wished himself away from there.

When Shane got back to his parents’ house Catherine looked up as he stumbled in like a drunkard. She was preparing yet another meal while Jennifer read at the table.

His head pounded like it would crack open like a shell and the pressure that had been building up in the cab came to a great crescendo so intense that he fell to his knees with a groan.

Catherine rushed to her brother just as he emptied the contents of his stomach on the tiled floor. Before he had a chance to speak, to offer an apology, he retched so hard it made his throat muscles cramp and left him hunched over gasping in pain.

“Jen, call the doctor’s surgery at once!” Catherine barked at her daughter and crouched by Shane. She rubbed his back and shushed his attempt to talk.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” she asked not really expecting an answer.

Shane slowed his frantic breathing and sat back on his haunches. He felt the wet of yet another nosebleed on his upper lip, the pressure in his head had lessened now that had happened.

“I guess you wouldn’t believe me if I said travel sickness?”

Catherine grabbed a nearby tea towel from a counter and handed it to him.

“I don’t know what to believe dear brother, but you need to see a doctor.”

Jennifer ran into the kitchen, concern etched on her face.

“Dr Marshall is on his way!”

Shane was about to protest and complain at the thought of the ancient old doctor rushing to his aid but saw the looks of worry on their faces and kept quiet.

“Jen, take Shane’s stuff up to his room please.” Catherine nodded to the half dozen shopping bags strewn across the kitchen doorstep.

Jennifer picked up Shane’s shopping without a word.

Catherine helped Shane to his feet and sat him on the nearest chair. She knelt on the floor beside him and brushed her hair from her eyes. For a moment a flicker of genuine concern sparkled in her eyes.

“Whatever’s wrong, you know you can still tell me.”

Shane reached down and held his sister’s hand tightly for fear that this glimmer of the old Catherine might float away.

“I wish there was something to tell you. I’ve gotten worse since I came back here.”

Catherine sighed and rested her cheek on his knee. Deep down she had regrets over the path in life she had taken, and seeing her brother again brought back all the memories of how things once were. But now she had Jack and her amazing daughters. Jennifer and Angela were both like her in so many ways. Angela was a dutiful little housewife and a caring mother in the making, while Jennifer was the wayward, adventurous and rebellious teenager. It was like she was watching two parallel versions of her life being played out. Angela would be how she always was, now and forever, and there wouldn’t be many surprises, but with Jennifer who knew? Catherine hoped that Jennifer would have the life she had wanted for herself, before she met Jack.