

## The Thrill of the Chase

### By Wendy Maddocks

### © Wendy Maddocks, 2011

**Smashwords Edition, License Notes**

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Other works by Wendy Maddocks

### Stand alone novels

Twisted evil

Into the darkness

### Short story collections

The thrill of the Chase

A Shade too young

### The Shades of Northwood series

Running shoes

Circle of arms

Unfinished business

Kiss at midnight

### Circle of the Fallen series

Angels of America

### Poetry collections

When I was young

Before the dawn

### Screenplays

RISK

### Non-fiction

Student: dazed and confused

CONTENTS

STORMED 3

THE CHASE 5

Cut up by the death of her girlfriend, Stacey decides to take in Northwood Chase = the deadliest road anyone's ever known

ROCK A BYE 19

Northwood Chase saw Chris's family die but the toys think there was something behind it. Drugs, rage, something more? Coco the clown knows.

JUSTICE IN THE BARREL 46

The old gang used to skip school and smoke but that's not daring enough for Tommy. How much damage can he do and get away with it?

TO KILL A WORLD 78

STORMED

The air tingled with the sounds and smells of people having a good time. The trees gave everything that woody smell and made the clearing seem a little sinister in the half-dark. Even the sting of flesh on flesh had hardly registered; had barely penetrated the drink and drugs haze that engulfed everyone and the heat made the beer and smoke seem all the more potent. The toppling lager cans didn't matter. The broken stereo that the host kicked over didn't matter. All that did matter was that the summer was going to last forever and we were all going to live forever. Even me.

That's how I remember it starting – a party to celebrate the end of a school that half of us were expelled from before the end of the year. It was at my friends house but somehow had worked its' way outside. Richie had a nice cabin in the woods where he lived with his parents and his new adopted sister. "Party?" he had asked one morning when we were ditching biology.

"All right." And from that day on any parties were held at his house. It was just a thing we had in our gang – just like we always used my shed to play poker.

"Joey!" Rosie slapped me. "I don't care how stoned you are, I'm not doing that!"

"Why not? You did it before." I knew it was the wrong thing to say when she slapped me again, but I didn't really feel it. Beer really takes the edge off. "I'm going, I'm going." And I tried to go, honest I did – but my legs just gave out. Rosie ended up dragging me to the nearest tree and sitting on said legs anyway. "Rosie, I thought you just said –"

"I'm a girl. I change my mind." I was barely sixteen and not about to argue. "Jesus, Joey, be quiet."

I was back out in the heart of the party ten minutes later – I was sixteen – and treating my friends to my unique version of My Way. A very slurred and mostly made up version, but it was definitely unique. It was getting quite late so we all decided to call it a night, and people started drifting off to their homes. It was just after midnight and the crazy summer heat had finally died back down to double figures and a bit of a breeze was swirling the air up. Rosie left a few minutes later – when I started singing again, incidentally – so I gave her a wave and said I'd see her tomorrow, and Richie, me, Lucy and David were left cleaning up.

"Had a laugh, Luce?"

"Yeah, it's been okay. Had to drag Rosie with me but I think she enjoyed it too." She looked at me and I pretended I had no idea what she was talking about. She wouldn't buy that crap. Like Richie, she's known me since I was practically a foetus. WE were the Three Musketeers growing. Then David joined our primary and we were officially a gang. "How did we get through so much hash? How did we afford so much?"

For some reason, I looked up at a window and saw a white face there, holding a blue piece of cloth to its cheek and dressed in white. I actually thought it was a ghost for a minute and jumped out of my skin. Richie saw me jump and looked up too. "What?"

"W-w-window." I truly did stammer. That's such a pathetic thing to admit to but I have to tell it how it happened. "Ghost."

"Mate, there's no ghost there. That's my sister, Rachel. She doesn't like going outside so she's probably been at that window all night."

David and Lucy were holding each other up with the laughing. It really wasn't that funny. Then the wind blew her bin liner away onto a tree and it was my turn to laugh. "My black bag!" she wailed. She had got about three inches up the tree before she decided it wasn't important enough to rip her new trousers for. "Bugger the bag." And that set us off again – no, I don't know why any more. Everything just seemed so vital back then.

I went straight up to bed when I got home that night after promising Richie we would do a proper clean up in the daylight. I banged on the door to say goodnight to my Dad and brother Tony. I Fell into bed not through exhaustion but because that was the only way I could make sure I landed on the right piece of furniture. The bed and dresser, desk and chest, they all kept moving and switching places so I just threw myself in the general direction of bed because there was nothing else round there. Pyjamas seemed a bit too complex then with a drawstring and all those bottoms so I just crawled into bed fully clothed.

Must have gone out like a light because when I woke up, my watch read something to four. The minute hand got snapped off when Tony decided to put it in his mouth and eat it. He grew out of the eating everything phase – and into the hitting everything that moves one. Tony's a year older than me.

I had thrown all my covers off in my sleep and it was as I tried to grab them all up that I heard it. It was probably the sound that woke me. Normally, I just sleep straight through wind and rain, but maybe I woke up because I was hot and uncomfortable. The wind was whistling and the garden gate was banging. "Tony, fix that sodding gate." I watched from the window as the wind picked up a bit more. Lightning cracked down but no rain followed it. Suddenly, the wind whipped itself into a frenzy, maybe a twister would describe it better – something out of the Wizard of Oz. A tree branch was whisked into the air and crashed against the wall.

It seemed to die down, turn into a light summer breeze again, just as abruptly as it had started and I stumbled back to my bed, knowing my eyes would close in seconds. I slept until noon- I slept and dreamt up a storm.

THE CHASE

I was about to do something very, very stupid. Something that might very well end me. Something I was going to do even though I knew that.

I had been doing stupid things most of my life so no-one would have been surprised I was doing another one. They would have been shocked I was planning it first. Plots, plans, schemes – none of that had ever been my strong point. _Stacey needs to really apply herself._ That's what all my school reports said for about ten years. My teachers all sort of gave up on me towards the end. The only thing I ever really worked at went up in smoke. So that went well. Advice like that is sometimes better when you don't take it, it seems.

Whether it was excitement, nerves or just plain dread I can't say for sure – maybe it was a bit of all three – but I must have made about a dozen or more mistakes on the order forms I had been processing. At the end of my shift, I printed off my spreadsheet, scribbled _sorry_ in pink highlighter on the bottom and added it to the pile of work destined for other departments. After grabbing my jacket and handbag, I signed out and turned to walk towards my flat. Towards the biggest mistake of my life.

My flat was dark when I unlocked the door even though it was still light out. I kept the curtains closed during the day. My partner used to work nights and have to sleep during the days. It was a hard habit to break. I pushed open the red curtains to let the late afternoon sunlight flood the living room before slamming the door on the rest of the busy building.

There was a pizza in the freezer so I chucked it in the oven and opened a bag of shredded salad. Eating something before my big night seemed important and having at least some of it be good for me even more so, although if – when – I killed myself tonight, I wouldn't care.

Or know.

Nor would anyone else.

Because, if I believed everything I heard and read, there wouldn't be enough of me left for a post mortem. An arm here, a leg there, my insides spread all over the road. People would be picking up parts of me for days. If you believed the stories. I really didn't have the choice. I could prove the stories wrong though. I could be the one people talked about for years to come, the one they told their children about. Or I could be just another stupid girl. This was most definitely the craziest thing I had down whilst knowing it could kill me. Okay, the drink and drugs and tats in dodgy places – I had been aware they could be lethal but I was a kid then, I hadn't really _known_. But tonight...

If something went wrong...

I already knew what the accident scene photos would look like.

By the time I had realised all this my salad was starting to go slimy and my pizza was burning, tinging the air with a slightly acid smell. I yanked the door open and grabbed out for something to wave the smoke away and pull the tray out with before the smoke alarm went berserk. Oddly, it flashed through my mind how I wouldn't be any good to anyone if I burned myself. The pizza was drier than papyrus and not one bit of it looked fit for human consumption. My little brother used to take great pleasure in telling me I was not entirely human. My hand was hot and beginning to tingle. I looked down and saw that I was still holding the tray. When I noticed what I was gripping it with I let go and heard a far away crash as it met the tiled floor. My hand was fastened around a wadded up tea towel – one of a trio of twee _home sweet home_ things Lorraina had bought when we moved in together. Neither of us cared much for the sentiment but the pictures were cute and they served their purpose. I should laugh or cry or scream or something. Only I had no energy left for another emotion. So I did something.

"Don't be surprised if I don't make it to work tomorrow," I said into my boss's voicemail. "You can fire me. That might be for the best. Just don't expect me in." I sat there with the phone to my ear for a minute and a forkful of salad halfway to my mouth. It seemed cruel to hang up on him with no explanation. "I'm riding the Chase."

Saying it should have been monumental, an epiphanical moment when the reality hit me. It was just another stupid thing I was going to do. But I wouldn't just go and ride the Chase. I was going to conquer it and control it and make it my bitch. I was going to be the one Northwood Chase didn't take. Oh, plenty of people negotiated the winding, sloping road everyday taking little Tarquin to his chess tournament or trying to delay that dental appointment. But never at 70mph. On two wheels. In the dark.

"Are you totally crazy?"

I had picked up my ringing phone without even realising. Two years of working in a call centre had conditioned me to stop a phone making noise as quickly as possible.

"Stacey, this is... I don't even have the words." My line manager, Mark, sounded tired and frustrated and I wondered what he had interrupted to call me back. "That place kills people, you know."

Silence. His face on my grainy video phone screen was a Kodak moment if ever there was one. It started concerned which was sweet and then... then it just _fell_. "It won't bring her back. You know that."

"That's not what this is about and you know that. I'm doing it because..." Worlds failed me then. There was no solid reason for doing what I was going to do but there were about a hundred blurry ones. "Lorraina didn't die out there just because everyone else does. Just because it's a blind bend. Just because that's the way it is. I'm gonna ride it, I'm gonna beat it and I'm not gonna let it have me."

"So you're trying to prove a point. That you're better."

"I am better."

"And that's the kind of thinking that gets you killed."

It probably wasn't the most mature thing I had ever done but I hung up on him. I put the phone down on my boss. _Good move, Stace_. I felt bad and I doubted there would be a hob waiting for me in the morning. Mark had only been telling me things that were true and that I already knew. Logic was an unforgiving mistress. No-one had ever ridden the Chase and survived. Did I honestly expect to be the first?

Shadows were beginning to invade my front room. Evening. Time to get ready.

Leathers covered me from neck to wrist to ankle. The dying summer was still a touch too warm for such an outfit but going without them was madness. Without my battered and ancient leather, the ground could seriously mess me up and I didn't want to do myself an injury. My feet had swollen too much for anything more than my less-than-practical canvas high-tops. I looked down at the road stretching out in front of me. It was flat at first, tricking many into thinking it was safe to race along but the slight slope and cracked surface began just beyond the first turn. My hands jammed down my helmet and clicked the tinted visor into place before I could think myself out of it. Something tapped the top of my helmet; a chill breathed around me. Rain. Rain was coming. That trip to the garage to pump up my tyres had been sorely needed. Especially considering the amount of power straining underneath little old me.

I revved the engine. Lifted my foot off the ground. Moving now. Still not too late to cease this insanity and go back to my flat. Speed. I needed more speed. I turned around and judged that I needed to give myself just another couple of hundred feet to ensure I was going fast enough to slide round that first bend without tanking. As I walked the bike backwards, I noticed a couple of figures cosied up on the grass bank to the side. Northwood Chase had always been a spot for young lovers. Watching a stupid girl wiping out and then her and her bike go up in a massive fireball – well, that was a hell of a first date.

"Here we go." The Yamaha grunted and growled and then I let it off its leash. The sppedo climbed. The couple turned to look for the noisy engine and they were so young. Kids. There were no street lights so the road was illuminated by my head lamp and a smudge of moonlight. Focus. Tunnel vision. Nothing outside this chicane of broken tarmac exists. Accelerate out of the first turn. Start like you mean it. Keep left so the overgrown hedge does not knock you off balance. I stopped having coherent thoughts right around then. The next few minutes were filled with braking, swerving and movements so fluid and precise that I must have been practising them in my sleep for weeks. And something else. A feeling. Maybe it was the air rushing by and tickling my bare hands. Maybe it was simple relief that it was nearly all over. I was on the straight and my head lamp was blinking off a vandalised _WELCOME TO MILLFORD_ sign. I stamped down and held tight as the twinkling town lights sped my way.

Curve.

Too late.

No, it didn't kill me. I felt gravel slip and slide underneath me as nearly two hundred kilos on two brand new tyres scrabbled for traction. Rain. No proper grip. Back wheel scraped the grass verge. I felt it kick out and carve its own arc in the dirt. My hip was almost touching the ground. I was so far out of control that even a stray pebble could topple me.

But it didn't. I eased my weight to the other side and twisted my handlebars into the skid. Once the bike and the ground realised u was doing what it wanted it was easy enough to ease out of the skid. A quick peek down showed I was still at 65mph. Had I dropped any speed at all? Had that endless instant of panic not screamed _SLOW THE HELL DOWN_? Then I was flashing past the town sign. I veered off on to the grassy bank and started riding in big, shaky circles as I slowed.

"Not tonight!" I yelled at the road. "You're not taking me tonight!" Perhaps 6 dirt doughnuts later, my heart was starting to slow down. Not that I knew it had been racing right along with me until then. Standing there, just staring at Northwood Chase, I began to think about how lucky I was to have survived the journey. No. it was more than luck. Sure, it had scared me and tried to turn me away but I had ridden it out. It had not hurt me because I was not frightened of it. After my Lorraina had died here... there was nothing worse it could do.

I killed the engine, pushed my kickstand down and slid off the bike. I managed just a few steps on spaghetti legs before they totally buckled and I fell to my knees in the long, damp grass. A disembodied hand clap echoed and the young couple from earlier walked into sight. The boy stopped and glanced at me then the bike and then the Chase. He was no doubt wondering how a hundred pound girl could handle nearly 1000 ccs of pure mechanical monster and get it safely round _that_. I shrugged. The girl stepped towards me, staring, wondering how I had managed to do it without getting a scratch on me or the bike. Of course this is all speculation, they could have just been joining the rest of the world in puzzling out just how stupid I really was. My version was better. The boy said something I didn't catch and the girl went back to his side. I noticed that even though they stood close to each other and they had stopped clapping – it was getting a bit creepy in the silent night – they didn't touch each other let alone hold hands. Being physical is usually the first thing people think about when they have just witnessed a miracle but these two were young and probably in shock.

"It's okay. I'm okay," I told them. There was too much shadow and darkness to see their faces but I don't think they quite believed me. "Really not crazy."

"are you sure? That was the maddest thing I've seen," the boy said.

"Seriously? Wait until you walk in on your parents having sex." That had been the maddest thing I ever saw at his age – I thought he was maybe16 or so. Of course, when I was his age I thought my parents were far too old and rusty to be doing it but there they were – screwing together like a freaking Meccano set.

"You could have – should have – wasted out there. It was so cool."

You did it Stace.

Yeah I did.

_I'm so proud of you_.

"I aim to please. Well, not usually but I'm glad my death race was entertaining." The dark was really blanketing the grassy bank now. I glanced at the clock on my phone, miraculously still clipped to my leathers. Praise the completely scientific and rational explanation for everything. When I looked back up, the couple were gone. There were footprints tracking over the wet ground towards town. It would be the responsible thing to do to call Mark and tell him I would be in one perfectly Stacey-shaped piece for work tomorrow... but it was nearly midnight. I could phone my parents but they hadn't even known about my plans for the night. Maybe I could –

_Don't freak out but I'm here_.

A drop of something wet and hot trickled down my spine and into the small of my back, going cool so quickly it made me squirm. Damn rain.

_I always loved it when you did that. Please don't stop_.

"Rain."

_Yes. I'm only allowed to stay for a while so you need to listen and pay attention_.

Near-death experiences often brought hallucinations. It wasn't too unrealistic to believe that the spin on the moving gravel had jarred my nerves so badly that I was hearing things but hallucinations were usually visions and I didn't see anybody. I was having a great night. "What's going on?"

_I'll explain it all. Pin back your flaps. The Chase killed me. But you rode it and it spared you. You were lucky_.

"No. This wasn't luck. This is me – "

You dodged the bullet, so to speak. I was coming home to you that night. After the graveyard shift. And then I ended up in my own grave.

"Where was it? I want to see the spot where you..." I just couldn't say _died._ It was too hard, too final. And since I could hear her now nothing was final.

In a little while, Stacey. The Chase let you live when you really should have died too. You should be here with me now.

"Rain, why can't I see you? If you're real I need to see you." Then I waited. I looked at my phone again and watched as minutes clicked through. Maybe the witching hour, or midnight to non-insane hoping-to-see-a-ghost people, would make her appear before me. No. No Lorraina. No wispy image. "I've missed you, hun. The washing up hasn't been done in a week."

Eating off paper plates and kitchen roll. I remember the days.

I don't know why I did exactly what I did but it made perfect sense to me then. There was an old yew tree further up the road, probably halfway along. I went to it and knelt before it.

You rode the road and it spared you. But they need something in return.

"What?"

It was obvious. Maybe the humanitarian in me stopped me saying it to myself. Maybe I was just being incredibly thick. Or possibly – probably – I was showing her most hated trait in me and I was just being a stubborn as a Brighton donkey.

They say I can come back if you do. And I want to come back so badly.

"And I want you back, Rain." Did I want her back badly enough to give the Chase what it wanted? Stupid question.

It was well after midnight and I could feel my eyes trying to close. Flickering shut then jerking myself into the closest semblance of awake as I could manage. Bed. My nice, warm flat with my nice warm bed and my nice warm alarm clock that would get me up at dawn. "I'm tired Lorraina. Come home with me."

I can't. Not yet anyway.

Then I nodded and went back to get my bike. "I'll see you soon."

It only took twenty minutes to get back to the high-rise where my flat was. The lift was always either broken or swimming in puke and pee so I took the fire escape stairs to my flat. That was not always the best option but I suppose my luck was still running strong because it was empty. My rubber soles thudded on the metal grate as I ran up two at a time. I needed to run ff a bit more energy before I tried to sleep. If I hadn't had an early start tomorrow, I would have ridden my bike around Northwood for a while before jumping the fence to the city athletics track and running a few laps. A girl really has to stay in good shape to tame a bike like my Yammie. My parents had always taken me and my little brother to athletics meets and I'd started running so I could be in one someday. My brother was not an exercise person. He was a don't move if I can help it kind of person. You know, a teenager.

Why didn't it shock me how close I had come to not having a family tonight?

When I got inside and closed the front door, I felt my way over to the lamp and switched it on. A soft glow brightened the room but only slightly. The main light would have tricked my brain into thinking it was day and I was too sleepy to wake now.

Bed.

Too far away.

I grabbed the blanket from the back of the sofa and went around. Oh. A body was already there.

I wish it was me. You never said.

Until that moment I had truly thought it was Rain. Somehow she had found her way back.

The figure turned its' head and threw an arm out in a stretch.

"What are you doing here?" Perhaps engaging a potential ram-raider / attacker was... okay, another stupid thing to do. In a night full of craziness nothing seemed too far out.

The body stayed lying down but turned to face me. I could tell it was a man by the low grunt of a yawn that roared my way. I squinted, glad I hadn't taken my high-tops off because I was already ready to bolt for the door.

"It's only you."

Mark pretended to look upset at that but I knew he was only pretending. I hope so anyway. He did like to play the intimidating, all-powerful boss. It really was only playing though. Everyone knew he was a pussy cat.

"How did you get-"

"Key under the welcome mat. Very cliché."

"It's been a long night, Mark. I'm not feeling very imaginative. So, unless you've changed my business hours to cover two in the morning..."

"You did it. I'm not sure how to deal with this. Do I put you on a warning for endangering our future sales, hug you because you're still here or just yell at you for being so damn reckless?

"All of the above?"

There was quiet for a minute and something must have shown on my face. "What happened?"

He tugged me down on to the sofa. I assumed he would shift so I could sit next to him but he didn't. I ended up lying right next to him. Lorraina and I had chosen a sofa so wide that my feet were dangling over the edge if I sat right back.

"You don't look like you, Stacey. Tell me what happened."

But I couldn't. Not all of it. Not yet. I ran through my bike journey, the twists and bends and my skid, glossing over just how close a call that had been. I left out the part about Lorraina. I was barely making sense of that in my own head. Mark clearly thought I was mentally unstable and confessing to talking to my dead girlfriend would probably send him running for the streets.

"And I'm gonna do it again," I finished. Sleep was creeping up on me which I had thought was an impossibility given the adrenaline still racing through my veins.

Mark shifted me onto the side, sat up and looked at me like I was certifiable. "You're what?" he knew what I said and he knew I meant it. "I thought tonight might have gotten all this out of your system."

"It helped and I'm glad I did it actually. I think the constant trying not to wipe out stops it hurting for a bit. No, that sounds far too emo." What were the right words? If there even were any words to describe it. "It's like I was riding so hard, concentrating, that my mind was just filled with the Chase and nothing else."

"Okay, so it worked once and you were so lucky –"

"It wasn't luck."

"What makes you think it'll work again?"

They can't take you now. Not until you give them something.

"I just know it. I can ride up and down and I'll be okay. When I go again I want you to come and see."

Mark got up so I could stretch out on the sofa and he tucked the blanket around me. "It had the chance to kill me tonight and it didn't take it."

I woke up just an hour or so later to find Mark snuggled into the mismatched armchair with my coat around his shoulders. He had taken off my leathers and trainers but I had been sensible enough to put on hipster shorts and a vest top before leaving the flat – just in case I did end up in an accident tonight, I didn't want anyone seeing me in the altogether. Energy buzzed around me but a sudden thought held me in place.

It's him.

No. it was all wrong.

I twisted myself until I was staring straight up at the dark, bare light fitting dangling above me. Everything was quiet outside. For once. There was the distant rumble of traffic on the road outside my window. Noise carries – even seven stories up. Not even light from the outer corridor leaked through the seal on my door.

A life for a life.

Mark had been a good friend of mine for a while. He'd known Rain since college, hired her as his PA and then employed me about a year ago. So I had him to thank for introducing us. Of course if Mark had never got us together, let us fall in love, then I would not be hurting this way when she was taken away from me. The three of us, or four when he found a date, used to go clubbing together or went to the motor shows we loved. I drooled over the bikes, Mark did the off road courses and Lorraina... I never really asked if she had a favourite thing to do at them. But she came. And she made me love her for that.

I was going to get myself lost in the good memories we had made. It was not going to help me out of the problem I was facing now. In my head, I made a list and tried to put everything clearly and concisely. Like I said, this was not my strong point and therefore very not an easy task for me.

Lorraina died on the Chase.

I miss her.

I raced my bike down that road.

Lorraina came and spoke to me after.

My boss was asleep on my settee when I got home.

I have to kill him.

Of all those things only the fact that I missed Rain didn't sound crazy. Maybe that should have made me wake Mark up and warn him that I was going loopy and possibly homicidal.

No, Stacey. You don't have to hurt him.

I couldn't do that. I mean Mark was a friend to us both and I was having trouble believing Lorraina would ask me to kill him.

It's not me. It's them. They told me to tell you it has to be him.

"I can't do it to him. Mark hasn't done anything to deserve it. He did nothing but love you, hun. I saw how he looked at you. It was the same way you looked at me. Plus, he's my boss."

Please Stacey. I want to come back so much. They need an exchange though.

"Does he have to be –" I swallowed "willing?"

There was no answer. I rooted around in my mind for her voice again. I was clinging, still, to the hope I was hallucinating and everything was in my mind though that was definitely fading fast. Truthfully, I had not really believed that theory all night – well, not after the first few minutes – and my brain had already accepted the fact all of this was real. Oh God. I was glad everything was real, I wasn't dreaming it all up, there was still a chance. But why did I need to cause so much pain to do it.

Properly awake again, I got up and crossed into the kitchen to make myself some hot chocolate. The night had cooled and cold sweat was sticking my vest to my back. Yuck. My milk started warming over the cooker while I plopped chocolate powder and sugar into a mug and reached for a bag of biscuits.

Wait. Something Lorraina had said drifted back to me. _Something in return... life for a life... exchange._ Not once had anyone said Mark. Could it be someone else instead?

No. It must be him. If regaining a love isn't worth losing a friendship, then why do we give it such power\?

So, Mark.

My sticky vest peeled back from my back.

"Christ!" I nearly screamed but I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep silent. Yelling blue murder at three in the morning, halfway up a block of flats, would hardly raise an eyebrow let alone the alarm.

"Mind if I..?" Mark gestured to the milk and mugs.

"Knock yourself out."

"You must be shattered. Why don't you get some sleep and I'll bring this in when it's ready."

As if I could sleep any more tonight when I knew what I had to do. "I spoke to her. To Lorraina."

"I heard you talking in your sleep. Couldn't quite make the words out though."

I knew he'd put it all down to something trivial like a dream. Maybe it was going to work out better if he thought that.

"I'm not tired. I think I need to sit here for a while and think."

"Feel free to think out loud" Mark was like that. He wanted to know everything that was somersaulting through my head but he never made me feel as though I had to tell him.. not talking to him was so easy that it made you want to talk it out with him. And I wanted nothing more than to do that. Maybe I'm too much of a scaredy cat.

"We're not discussing this."

"No?" He got up to pour the hot milk in the mugs then started to stir them up. The man, the friend, I'd been told to kill, was making hot chocolate for me. That was almost enough to make me cry. I could feel my bottom lip start to wobble and I chewed my sore cheek again. No tears. Rain could still come back to me and that was a happy thing.

"Thanks," I said when he gave me my drink. My hands brushed his when I circled the mug. I guess I expected something to happen like in stories, a spark between our fingertips that made me realise I loved him too much too risk him. If that had happened I wouldn't have been surprised. Hell, we'd shared a bed before one far away and drunken night. But no, there was nothing there. Wrong. Immoral. It was as if someone had shut down my emotions and all I knew was how I felt and no how I should feel.

In the dim kitchen light I could look at Mark and see his spiky hair and huge eyes that were exactly the same shade of amber. Dyed hair? Contact lenses? I could see him watching me carefully like he was waiting for me to break a mug and slash my wrists or throw myself out of the widow. I'd gone on a rampage after the police had told me about Lorraina and smashed all the mirrors in the house. A dangerous, extreme and stupid thing to do but it wasn't too much of a leap to imagine I might do something like it again.

"You miss her. I get that." Well, of course he understood. "But it's only been a month. You're still grieving and it makes us do stupid things sometimes. You pushed your luck on that Chase and it'll run out sooner or later. When it does, you'll be joining Rain and –"

"Would that be so bad?"

"Please Stacey. Rain wouldn't want you to miss out on the rest of your life for her."

"I can be with her."

"Enough people have died on that road because they thought they could take it without you adding to their numbers." I hated it when people tried to change my mind with logic. Honestly though, I reckoned he spoke a lot of sense. A lot of people had died on Northwood Chase but they were all people who had either not known or not cared about the death toll. None of them were as good as me. Not a one.

"Please come with me tonight. I'll be fine and you'll see."

The sun was just an hour or two away by my watch. Too wired to sleep. Maybe Mark wouldn't be too peed off with me for falling asleep at my desk. I had a feeling he might be doing the same thing.

No, Stace. No waiting till tonight.

"What if Rain could come back?"

"Random question. She's not coming back, love. It's hard and it hurts and I don't believe the ones who say it gets easier. But she's gone and – "

"What if, though? What if I found a way to get her back but it meant doing something really bad?"

"What brought this on? I know seeing where she crashed can't have been easy. People say things like that bring back memories and you start grieving all over again."

"Not crazy Mark." Just desperate.

I sat on the chair Mark had vacated, huddled under a tatty blanket and listening as Mark banged around in my bathroom. The shower started running.

"Use my new conditioner and I'll kill you!"

"You mean the one in the green bottle that smells like vanilla and mint."

"You arsehole!" I hurled a cushion at the bathroom door because the only way he could have known what the goop smelt like was to open the bottle. Then I realised two things. First, he had man parts and therefore avoided all girly products like they were contagious. Second, Mark had probably just read the label. I had to laugh and,, maybe I was hearing things but I imagined Lorraina was giggling right along with me.

With the daylight getting nearer my conversation with Rain seemed like fantasy. Heat, adrenaline, exhaustion, shock – I'd been through the lot over one night – yay me – and I was still clinging to the idea that hearing her voice had been a hallucination and that maybe she would stay if I admitted I was crazy. I didn't want to be mad though. So there it was.

My girlfriend was dead and there was a probably naked man in our bathroom. I had forced her voice into my head to stop me forgetting her. The cold truth of that made tears sting my eyes again.

I bent down and started picking at the frayed green blanket at my feet.

It has to be now, Stacey. You have to hurry.

No. The voice was my overworked imagination. The theory was to ignore it and let it fade away when... when my mind decided it would be ready to let go of her memory.

Now. You have to make the exchange before the sun comes up.

Imagined or not there was something so desperate about those words that she was impossible to ignore.

Please. Get the bike and run as fast as you can. They're going t make me go to the other place at dawn.

In my mind Rain was crying the same tears that I was. Tired, angry, distressed teardrops. And there was no way that was fake. Why would I even pretend she was in so much pain where she was?

I don't want to go there.

"I know, baby, and I don't want you to go either. But why do I have to do this to Mark?" But I knew why. I had to give up the one person who I loved and still had left so I could have another shot at us. The Rain I had loved would have taken the shot. I wasn't her. "What do I need to do?"

I listened as she gave me some instructions and then I know it sounds really cliché but I _felt_ her leave. It was as though she had been pulled away.

My clothes were scattered around the room where Mark had peeled them off me in the dark. The leather jacket was still wearable but the tight trousers were soaked with sweat and a tiny it of blood – I had a freshly bandaged scrape across my left knee. It was almost daylight and I would be going at barely half the speed of last night – I could probably get away with loose jeans or even shorts. Sweat was already sticking every unclothed inch of me to every other inch and shorts were tempting indeed. But not sensible. So... jeans. High-tops again. Smelly, sweaty, past their useful life. But how comfy? My little brother had bought them for me a few birthdays ago and I'd worn them pretty much every day since. Even at work. Lorrraina had first seen me in them when I turned up for my first day in full biker gear and the make up of an off duty whore. Appearances required effort. I'd rather spend an extra half hour in bed than preening myself, thanks.

"You're crying."

"No, I'm not."

"Trust me. I held you in my arms, I rocked you into sleep on the day of the funeral. There might be no noise to the sobs but I know what you look like when you cry."

I had my back to Mark and I was trying not to let my shoulders jerk but he knew. Maybe I was being too still. Shrug.

"What's wro- stupid question."

"Everything's wrong."

I turned to him and grabbed a scrunchie to tie my hair up. Mark still had wet hair but his own jeans and t-shirt were definitely not his work clothes. Glad to see he had such faith in my ability to function like a normal human being. I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the door with a grin I think was real.

"C'mon. We're Chasin'."

About half way down Northwood Chase there's a yew tree. You know the one.. I died just a few metres from there. And the tree... well it took me. I crawled from the crash site even though I had a broken spine. I know medicine and that a spine smashed into as many pieces as mine and after a wipe out as bad as mine, I would have died instantly. Probably did. But I crawled to the yew. Those few metres seemed like a hundred miles over splintered glass. Gravel and hot tarmac hurts. The yew tree represents death. You find it in graveyards all over town and this one was lust the same. It marks a hundred graves. It marks mine. We can change that. I fell unconscious under the tree. The black branches reached down and held me and forced me to go with it. It swallowed me and I never felt a thing.

Dawn was just half an hour away. Maybe less. There was a smudge of electric orange in the sky, which was turning ever lighter shades of blue. Riding through Northwood with Mark gripping my waist was a thrilling experience. I'd given Mark my motorcycle helmet and it made him look... like an android actually. Being nearly six foot tall and having muscles that came from lifting weights an hour most days should have made him look butch on the back of a bike but no. Not Mark.

"Why are we doing this?" he yelled to me. The rushing air made it hard to hear him but I was not about to slow down or stop to speak to him because I would only end up thinking myself out of this. "Stacey!"

"It's something I have to do okay."

"I get that but do you have to kill me in the process. I know you're going through hell without Rain and maybe you think if you go fast enough your problems won't be able to catch you up but they will. Just stop, face them, cry them away and never forget her."

Amazing. I glanced down at my speedo – just touching 35. Mark was not used to high speeds in the open air so it didn't surprise me that even 35 was freaking out a banger-with-three-working-gears man.

"Thinking you can out-run this sadness... God, it's just pathetic."

I slammed my brakes on. We were near the yew tree from what I remembered.

Mark slid off the bike behind me and followed me as I walked it over to the grassy area at the side. It fell into the thick grass and Mark put the helmet down by it after strapping it around one of the bars. My jacket joined the pile. This was all in silence even though my mind was wading through the sludge of what Mark had said. Was I being selfish| Single-minded? I slapped him.

As I shot my hand out to him, his face fell. My best friend was realising how much he had hurt me. Grief was etched in his own face, loss put shadows under his eyes and there were wrinkles that had not been there a month ago. He was hurting too and I'd been so lost in myself that I had not seen it. There were smiles at work, happy chats at lunch. And all the while he was crying out for a hug. I hugged him.

"I'm sorry Mark. I never asked how you were coping with all this. I mean, you loved her too."

"She knew that. And I think it hurts more because she never loved me."

"She did. If it wasn't for me she would have been with you."

A tiny smile. Barely there but he was trying. Yay me.

"I was the one Rain lived with but part of her heart was with you. You loved her before I even knew her so you have every right to feel like me. And it's just blank, like it's hollow inside my bones and I cry because maybe my tears can fill up the space."

Mark put a hand to one of my burning cheeks and rubbed a thumb over tears I had not known were falling. His hand fell to my waist and he pulled me towards him. Brown eyes so shiny with unshed tears he couldn't see me. But I could see him – hungry and tired. To Mark I was just a girl. Not a bad looking one I admit. But a woman who, with one kiss, could make him forget the chaos he was living in and remind him there was something left worth living for.

"Mark. I'm Stacey remember. Male parts not my thing." I can't say pushing him away was easy. I needed comfort of my own and I wasn't too bothered what shape it came in, but I knew it would be a bad idea. We'd just be using each other for empty sex.

I took his hand and led him over to the road. A couple of early commuters were growling up the road so we waited for them to pass and then crossed.

"Where are we going?"

"I know where she died," I explained. "And I know how. The road sort of moves under people around here and makes them crash. They all die. People assume it's just an accident blackspot."

"This is not a good idea." He held back a little but I pulled him forward.

"Bad ideas are my claim to fame. Seriously, you know that."

The huge yew tree was peeking around the bend we were walking. Every step towards it was an effort. We got there and for a minute or two we just stood looking at it and squeezing each others hands.

"Here."

Here.

How did I convince him to let me kill him and feed him to this tree so I could have my dead girlfriend back at my side? _Light bulb!_ "It's not sun rise yet and the night's not over."

Mark looked confused and I thought my heart was breaking again. There were tyre tracks on the road behind me. This must have been where I skidded last night. Or maybe where Lorraina had braked before wrecking all those weeks ago. Logic said it just couldn't be.

When I turned away from them, Mark was standing a few feet behind me. I back-stepped him then jumped him so hard that my cut leg started to send vibrations right through me. Hell of a time for my mind to remember it could be in physical pain too. My legs braced him against the thick, dark tree trunk. I bent to kiss him. Just to get him to go along with my plan. I never realised I might need that kiss as much as he did. It was as if we were sharing our thoughts and feelings rather than bodily fluids.

"This is no good for you."

"Don't care. Just keep kissing me."

His hand slid under my top. I brushed him away and shook my head. He tried again and I didn't stop him. We loved each other like siblings or an old married couple who knew everything about their partners but this dimly lit tryst had nothing to do with tenderness or intimacy. It was wild and lustful and raw. Two people, one shared loss. Two people who just needed to feel like functioning human beings again.

"Wait. Protection."

"There's no need. I – "

"I've got stuff in the bike. Wait right there." I pinned him against the trunk, chased a kiss off his lips with a grin and wandered back towards my bike.

The sun fully broke the horizon a few minutes later. I spent another few minutes re-belting my trousers and straightening the shirt Mark had been in such a hurry to get off. Then I checked the bandages at my knee. Blood was starting to seep out the edges which meant it was worse than it felt. I'd be spending my morning in casualty. Thrilling.

About ten minutes had passed since I had left Mark and he'd likely be wondering if I'd had second thoughts and ditched him. I went back to the road. The sun was rising quite fast now. A white van passed beeping his horn at me.

Mark was not under the tree. No-one was. There was no sign that he'd ever been here and the only thing that told me he had not just grown bored and wandered away was that there were no footprints on the ground. Maybe I expected his clothes to be left in a crumpled heap. Or his watch lying cracked on the floor, stopped at the exact moment he was taken. Nothing.

"I did it. Now give her back."

I was talking to the tree because it just seemed slightly less mad than shouting at fresh air.

"You promised."

I'm trying to come back. There's something here stopping me.

"You said if I took a life you could come back. You said they just wanted another life, that it didn't matter if it was yours or not."

That's what they told me.

"Is Mark with you? I don't want him to think – " Honestly? I was absolutely tired of thinking myself. But Mark. He couldn't know I'd done this to him.

He only passed through here. They sent him straight to the other place. I don't know what it's like there. I hope it's nice. He deserves to have something nice happen to him.

Ouch.

"I want to speak to who-ever's keeping you there. They promised to return you to me if I became a killer for them."

I thought you did it for me.

They say it's not enough. You gave them a man to pay for your life last night.

True. I could have easily died when I lost control last night. In fact, that stretch had been rock solid before last night.

Now you have to buy mine.

ROCK A BYE

Silently, Chris crept down the stairs, careful to step over the creaky floorboards on stairs 7 and 9. So he had to count every step he took. Probably not the easiest thing to do at midnight when he was still half asleep, but it was that or risk waking the whole house up.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny." His sons' wind-up clown applauded the spectacle of Chris negotiating the stairs in his dressing gown.

After careful consideration (spanning two entire seconds) he decided against kicking the thing down the stairs. He was the only one unable to call the clown a toy, it had always freaked him out a little to be honest. Even when he had had it as a child it had always seemed to watch him and set itself off laughing when he was concentrating on not killing himself. Picking it up, Chris reached the bottom of the stairs and threw the clown onto the toybox by the door. After getting a drink of milk from the blessedly cool kitchen, he thought better of it and retrieved the thing from the toybox. There was a film on TV tonight which looked okay. Ordinarily, he would have just recorded it to watch in the morning but he couldn't sleep. His mind was running too fast through the events of the previous day.

"Bitch of a day, Coco," he muttered. The TV got switched to the right channel then, for no reason whatsoever, he turned the volume down.

_What d'you go and do that for, Bozo?_ the clown asked.

Chris shrugged and slurped his milk through a straw. Why had he done that? He wouldn't wake anyone. Today, his eldest son Jack (whose clown he was talking to) had stormed out of the house after telling Chris and his wife Maria that he hated them, and had swiped his car keys on the way. Angry seventeen year old boys were never the calmest drivers, but put one behind the wheel of a high-performance sports car...

"And we'll join you again in a few minutes for the Midnight Movie – Blood on Blood!" the faceless broadcaster said. Was he really yawning behind that camera and those test shots? Was it a pre-record? He should get paid double time for working at this time of night. "A frightening tale of..." Chris was not going to watch more than a half-lucid glimpse of the film but, at the moment, only the clown knew that.

*

"Who really are you guys anyway?"

Jack was angry and he had every right to be. Chris had tried to talk to the boy rationally but it had been so many years since he had been a teenager himself. _I can't even talk to my own son. How could I forget – teenagers don't run on logic._ "Jack, don't be angry with us."

"Did you think I wouldn't find out? Were you gonna lie to me forever?"

"Jack..."

This time, he turned on her and Chris couldn't do anything but watch. "And you! I hope you've got something important to say Mom- or should that be Maria – because I sure as hell don't want to hear 'we meant to tell you but' again." Jack picked up the clown they had given him when he first arrived here, and threw it against the wall, setting the speaker off again.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny."

Chris grinned slightly at the absurdity. He didn't even know why he had kept the thing beyond his own childhood, let alone passed it on to his son. Not his natural son of course, Maria had had ovarian cancer as a teenager and the doctors said she would never conceive a child of her own. _Soon showed them._ But, for this reason, they had adopted the year old boy Jack when his aunt died. "Jack."

"You know, someone once said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I meant to, I was going to, I should have. So you can save it now. I don't want to hear it." He glared at Chris them Maria and then glanced up at where their daughter, Seraph, was cowering behind the banisters. Seraph, dear, precious Seraph. 10 years old, born a year after Maria had suffered her first miscarriage and all the more special for it.

"Who are they then?" Shouting again, Jack brought Chris back to the present with a jolt. "Who are they? Why did they give me up? And why didn't I know?" Needing his birth certificate for a passport, he had decided to look through the metal safe box where all the important things were kept, stumbling across his adoption certificate instead. Naturally, he had questions, far too many questions, and Chris... he had no answers. Or, at least, no answers that Jack wanted to hear.

"No-one gave you up. Your parents died in an accident just after you were born. You lived with your aunt but she died too so we decided to make you our son."

Upstairs, he could hear Seraph sobbing quietly, her breath hitching. She had never seen her brother so angry and whispered down at them. "Stop it, please. Just stop it." Poor girl, Chris looked up at her with affection. Was it so wrong to love his natural child more than his adopted one? The girl crept down the stairs and looked at all three of them, locked in their war of recriminations.

"And what was I then? Just a time-filler until _she_ came along?"

"Of course not, Jack." Maria reached across and laid a gentle hand on his arm. Jack shook her off with unnecessary force, almost pushing her to the floor. She looked up at him with huge blue eyes that had now lost any defensiveness she had had in the last few hours, and now just seemed incredibly sad. Those sad and too-big eyes watched as Jack ripped his fake leather jacket from the hook.

*

What kind of father are you?

It was almost as thought the clown was accusing him of something. Accusing him of being a bad father maybe. "What could I have done?" he asked. There was no way he could say that the clown was wrong. If he had been a good father, he would never have let what happened happen. So he wasn't a good father but he didn't think he had been a terrible father, and now... and now he wasn't a father at all.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny."

Was the clown mocking him?

No shit, Bozo!

Chris remembered being wary of the clown as a kid, always thinking that it was a bit more than just a toy, and maybe it didn't really have superpowers but it could _do_ something. But he had kept it regardless, possibly hoping that one day it would show its own magic.

Of course I'm not magical. I'm just a stupid wind-up clown.

But Jack had taken to the clown like iron filings to a magnet dragging it everywhere with him, even the dentist, standing it on the roundabout when he went to the playground and even talking to it every night at bedtime. "Long as he likes it," he always said. Seraph had had it for a while when she was a tot but had quickly given it back to Jack, saying 'he looks mean.'

Chris looked at the wind-up thing – he still couldn't bring himself to call it a toy – and narrowed his eyes at it. Okay, he was probably nuts for hating it but he felt as if he needed something to hate. He needed something to blame.

You let him go, Bozo. You let him go with her and you didn't stop him.

Chris glared at the clown. "Shut up, Coco!" How could he have stopped him? The kid was 17 and stuffed with more muscles than he had ever had. Yes, he let Jack go, couldn't stop him, but how was he to know what would happen? Because Jack had stormed out with the keys to the Ferrari Chris had bought with his work bonus (probably wouldn't have been very dramatic to run away in a beat up Vauxhall). Angry at the world and everything in it, he had raced up Northwood Chase and wrapped the car around a tree, killing himself instantly.

And taking Maria and Seraph with him.

"Hoh,hoh, hoh. You're so funny." Hadn't he just shoved that clown under the bed? And yet, here he was again, watching him climb slowly into his jeans and sweater. Like most men, Chris was developing a bit of a beer belly from too many pints and post-pint kebabs. His clothes were the one part of his youth that he could (almost) legitimately still show in public.

"Dad! You're so embarrassing," Jack would always complain. "Why can't you be like everyone else in a flat cap and wear your carpet slippers outside?"

And Chris used to laugh, ruffle his hair and say, "I'm not everyone else, son. I'm my own man, little dude."

Except... he wasn't his own man any more. He was the clowns' man. Chris just wasn't aware of it yet.

He made a decision to go for a walk through town. Maybe it was the fresh air he needed to get some sleep. There were so many thoughts in his head right now; thoughts about how his two beautiful girls had clung to life so desperately after the crash, how Jack had probably been so livid that he didn't even know what he was doing, how none of them should have even been in that car...; that he probably just needed some air to calm himself down. Barely thinking about it, Chris shook a painkiller out of the bottle by his bed and swallowed it dry.

You could swallow the whole bottle. Kill all the pain. No, I've got a better idea, and this is what you do...

Chris put the bottle in his pocket and made his way back downstairs, making sure to step over the 7th and 9th stairs. "No need for that," he told himself. It was probably habit and old ones were notoriously hard to break. One of Seraph's teddies looked out of the half-open toy chest with queerly glittering eyes. "She's not coming home," he told the stuffed toy. It brought a tear to his eye to say it but the bear would be missing her. "She held on but it wasn't long enough." Did the bear know what had happened to his little owner? The clown certainly did.

The new plasma TV glowed quietly in the corner of the back room, he watched a shot of a young woman lying on the floor with her hair streaked with blood. Was that what Maria had looked like before the nurses had cleaned her up at the hospital? It didn't bear thinking about. He switched it off as the credits began to roll. Moonlight shone through the window (there was no Maria to draw the curtains) and lit up the glass topped coffee table. The moon was nearly full but there were no stars out - at least, none that he could see through all the air pollution around. His fuel-burning Ferrari certainly hadn't helped with that particular problem! The milk-rimmed glass lay sideways on the grey fluffy carpet, the dregs spilling out to darken the carpet. Chris caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the sofa, himself bathed in the reflected moonlight. "There's too much damn glass in this house!" he growled, way down low and feeling as taut as a panther about to pounce. Before he even knew what he was doing, Chris sprang his left fist out and shattered the mirror into a thousand tiny pieces of glass, many of them tinkling down to bounce off his own dirty black trainers. Somehow he had expected the mirror shards to penetrate his footwear and draw blood from his flesh. _It would have been fairer,_ he thought in his illogical, grief-driven logic. The clown grinned happily at him. "Stop staring at me. I never liked you anyway, Coco."

I wish I could say the same but I loved you once. Hey Bozo, listen to this. I loved you and I'm just a wind-up toy. Isn't that crazy?

*

At an obscene hour of the morning, Chris Tyler found himself standing at the foot of Northwood Chase, only dimly aware of how foolish he looked, blood dripping from his left hand and a clown toy in the other. "It was here, right." It was not a question. There was a sign saying Northwood Chase set into the overgrown brush at the side of the road.

Part of him wanted to walked up the road, see exactly where his family had met their ends, only his legs wouldn't move. Subconsciously, he might not even want to accept they were both – all – gone. How could that be? They were dead, every inch of him knew that, so why did his subconscious have to be different all the time? "Stupid damn brain," he grumbled and slapped himself on the forehead.

Can't even do that, can you?

Dumbly, Chris shook his head and scuffed his feet on the gravel road. He walked to the roadside and saw two hedgehogs trying to scuttle out of hid way. Out of pure spite, he raised his foot and stamped on one of the small animals with such lethal speed that the animal didn't even have time to raise its' spikes in defence. It lay there with hedgehog brains pouring out of his face, the other one nudged it (probably its matte) and nosed it curiously then looked up at Chris. Then it scurried away from him in case the Murderous Foot should come back for him... killing the hedgehog had made him feel slightly better. The dead hedgehog was safely tucked away by the crumbling fence so that anyone who found it would no doubt think it roadkill, though it was likely that the foxes would have at it before that should happen. He returned to the scene of the hogicide and leaned on a signpost while he waited for dawn to break. it didn't matter how long it took, it would matter how long anything took ever again. He had all the time in the world.

That's the truest thing you've said in days.

Chris turned his back on the road and closed his eyes. Why had he even brought the clown out with him? Carefully placed at his feet, Coco stared up at Chris, not saying anything. When the sun, came up a couple of hours later it was still looking at Chris but instead of seeming sinister as it had through the past few hours, the thing looked like just what it was – a forgotten child's toy. And if the thing was just a toy, why did it make Chris feel uneasy?

Yeah, I'm just a toy, Bozo. I can't be anything else, can I?

When the sun came up and he was aware of life stirring in the air, Chris shook another tablet out of the bottle from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. Then he stared at his empty palm and swallowed a second. The ache of losing his family was still there though. He glanced at where the dead hedgehog was lying prone beneath the crumbling fence, feeling as if he had got only a tiny revenge for them.

An eye for an eye... and the road to hell.

Kicking out at the clown-thing, so it came to rest face down in a crater made by his own foot earlier on, Chris took his first step up the Chase. It wasn't far before he knew exactly where the crash had happened. The policemen who'd been given the plum job of the breaking the news hadn't been able to tell him much about the crash apart from the fact that the car had been going at twice the speed limit. Jack was too young and frustrated to have handled a car safely at half the speed limit, twice it was just a stupid cartoon frame in his head. Under his feet now were thick black tyre tracks where the car had apparently gone into a violent skid and he had hit the brakes, rather than decelerating and turning into the skid, "He was just too young... i never taught him..."

Do you think it's your fault?

The tyre tracks looped and crossed each other as they wound up ultimately at an abrupt halt where it had crunched into a yew tree. Part of him could see the frozen faces of his wife and two children as they screamed their last screams before either the hearse or ambulance carted them away. The terrible sounds of Jack shrieking, "Tyre tracks are all we're leaving!" echoed in his ears.

"Tyre tracks and my broken heart."

There was a transparent red Ferrari snaking its way across the road in slow motion. It crashed into the tree up ahead and exploded too many agonising seconds after impact. See-through metal panels flew through the half-light, twisted and contorted by the heat. A make believe Ferrari badge peeled itself from the crushed-in bonnet and went spinning off to rip through the front tyre. The small but perfectly formed shape of Seraph was hurled through the rear windscreen and Chris automatically looked at the hedge behind the car. If he listened hard enough, even though his death-scene had taken place in a hush only possible this far out of the town, he convinced himself that he could hear the screech of tearing metals, the crackle and roar of a raging fire, the bang of a fuel tank blasting apart. Anything so he wouldn't hear the imagined weakening cries for help as life slipped away from his girls. "Jack was killed on impact," he told himself.

The blue and white police cordon was still standing around the site and there was an officer standing off to one side, presumably guarding the scene but talking to a few people about the crash. He hadn't had much of an inclination to go up that far.

A woman broke off the group when she saw him and headed down the road to meet him. She was saying something but Chris couldn't make it out.

"Sorry. I shouldn't be here," he murmured and started to turn away. The woman caught his arm and smiled. Even though it was still early, her dark-tanned skin was already glistening with sweat and her long hair was tied backed in a scruffy ponytail. "I'm in the way."

"No you're not. Everyone has a right to be here." She moved her hand down and took his torn up knuckles in her hand. He winced. "Sore?"

No shit, Bozo!

"A bit." He let her try to pick some of the glass out then took his hand back. "I punched a mirror out, I don't know why," he added, honestly.

"Fair enough. There isn't always a reason for everything. Don't worry about a thing, Chris." She smiled again. A smile that he didn't even have to see to know it was there.

"How do you know my name?" Chris was sure he hadn't introduced himself.

She shrugged. "Cute clown," she said.

Chris glanced down at his unscathed hand and found the clown gripped tightly within it. He guessed he'd picked it up from the overgrown grass. But why didn't he remember picking it up? And why hadn't he noticed it in his hand? "I... I..."

You couldn't let me go, could you? Go on, tell her. Not like you let them go.

Coco was right, though. He had let Jack go, vaguely hoping that a hate-filled drive would help get it out of his system. Then he had grabbed Seraph and Maria and hauled them along for the ride. Even watching them struggle, he had just let them go, half-glad that it just wasn't him. Feeling guilty wasn't going to help but-

"Hoh, hoh,hoh. You're so funny."

The woman giggled at the wind-up toy. Strangely, Chris didn't ever recall winding it up either. A wisp of a breeze stole about him. It felt good on his face but did not bring forth the tears he had yet to cry. Not once since learning they were dead had he wept. It had been drilled into him from a young age that boys didn't cry, it was girlish to cry – and that was why he couldn't. Oh, he wanted to, wanted to blart like a baby who's been taken off the tit, but he couldn't. The strengthening wind in his eyes stung him.

"Think we're in for it," said the woman. "Never thought I'd ever get to see a real crash site out of the cinema."

"Ferrari, teenage boy at the wheel, disaster from the turn of the ignition." Chris looked down at his dirty and mammal-splattered trainers. "The people in that car... my family. I couldn't stop it."

"Well, I haven't been very sensitive now, have I? I'm Roxy Valer," she held her hand out to him then dropped it when she realised that Chris was not about to take it. "I didn't mean to intrude or anything, I just thought – it was a bit different to have something like this out here – not that it's never happened before – and I just had to come and see. Really, I'll leave you alone." She turned to leave and retrieve her bag from where the police officer was standing. "Sorry we had to meet like this."

Are you just gonna let her go?

"What do you want me to do?"

Fearing the oncoming storm, the officer huddled himself away under the tent the force had erected to stand around and drink coffee under. The one or two other people had drifted away from the scene, doubtlessly thinking there wasn't really anything to see. How could they be so cruel as to think the family were nothing much.

Well, were they?

"You know damn well they are – were. They were everything to me." In his peripheral vision, Chris could just about see the officer sizing him up.

Well, you're arguing with a little, old toy. He's wondering whether to section you.

Was he? Crazy or not, Chris was talking to a clown which was, all said and done, just a toy. But who else was there to speak to? Who else would speak back (without tiptoeing around him)? It started raining light summer rain. It got heavier, the sky got darker, the temperature dropped about thirty degrees in as many seconds. Chris didn't notice. He ducked under the police cordon in a daze, no longer caring if there was anyone watching. The tyre slicks under his feet stopped and were replaced by some dried puddles of blood on the grass. This was it. This was the point the car had been ripped apart in flame, where Jack had died, where his beautiful girls had lain in agony for hours only to be pronounced DOA when the ambulance finally got to them. There were thin scrapes of red paint (blue would have looked better) on the tree and chunks of glass on the ground from the shattered windows on the ground. In blurry rage, Chris raised a foot and stamped down on the glass, enjoying the crunch of glass as much as he had enjoyed the crunch of hedgehog skull. So what if he was destroying evidence? No amount of investigation would bring them back. And the accident-

Was it an accident?

It hadn't been anyone's fault.

Thunder began to roll overhead and Chris jerked himself out of his reverie. He turned on his heels and jogged down the road towards the town, head under his pulled up sweater for cover.

*

The first place he came to in town was a barber shop, closed because the owner was on holiday. Then there was a photoshop, a hotel with iron bars out front, a musty-looking bookshop and the expensive boutique Maria had bought her wedding dress. He couldn't face going in there, not today. At the end of the road was a pub called The Glittering Panther. It sounded like one of those trendy mew chain pubs but his suspicions were left in tatters when he went in. It was like stepping into a timewarp – it looked like the pubs of old, the kind he had frequented when he came of age.

"Large whisky, mate." The bartender glanced at him, then at the clown, shrugged and moved himself to the optic at the other side of the bar. "Students," he muttered. Chris slid himself onto the first bar stool and picked up the clown, fiddled with it, and put it back on the bar. "Hope you get as smashed as I'm planning to," he toasted it and downed his drink in one.

It was stupid to be carting the thing around with him and talking to it but, God knew, he had tried to get rid of it enough times in the past twelve hours; in the house as he dressed, in the brush as he waited for the sun to come up, and now he had half a mind to leave it here.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny."

No fear some drunken old fart past his sell-by date would come and have a deep and meaningful conversation. It would start off nice enough – something about the weather maybe, or the bitter winter ahead that would freeze those roadside cows solid and that squished hedgehog would end up with icicles in the gap where his brain should be. Then it would start talking about Chris when he was a child; how he was scared of a clown toy and used to leave the radio on at night so he wouldn't hear it chattering away, how he hated his father for not loving him and how he was so glad when he eventually died that he spent days, weeks even, imagining how it had happened and how he had shed tears over his graves when only he and Coco knew they were ones of joy. Then his adulthood and how Coco had been passed to Jack in the hope Jack would agree it was sinister and convince Chris he wasn't crazy, adding that Jack had never said such a thing and Chris had always secretly resented him a little for it, now fantasising putting dead flowers on the boys' grave, dead flowers riddled with the maggots that belonged in his dead and bloodshot eyes.

No! This was all wrong. He didn't wish any of those things.

Are you sure about that?

"It's you. You're putting thoughts in my head," he accused, jabbing a fuzzy finger at the clown. His words were quite slurred by this time and a glance at his watch said it was barely lunchtime. Chris swallowed another pill. The label on the bottle advised him not to take the medication with alcohol under any circumstances but "What the hell." Might be the booze intensified the effects. _That sounds great._ "Just you and me now, Coco, old buddy. Now... I know you're probably evil and out to get me dead, but you're all I got now. We gotta stick together from now on. You're the only friend I got left." Chris started rocking on his stool and laughing the high pitched laugh of a man who was off his face and knew it. He shook the remains of the bottle like maracas.

"Jesus Christ! I hope you're planning to eat something on top of that."

"Hm?"

The woman from the Chase stood behind him. Roxy was rubbing her hair dry with a bar towel and the wet scrunchie now hung limply from one wrist. "God, my hair's a mess now. Hey, can we get an ice pack for his hand."

The scruffy kid who had been serving Chris ducked out back, returned with a bucket full of ice cubes and put it on the bar with a shrug. They were the ice cubes used to chill drinks but no way was he going all the way into the kitchen... Roxy grabbed Chris' hand and plunged it into the ice bucket. It sobered him up instantly.

"What did you do for that – that for?" (Sobriety was a subjective matter.)

"Well, you didn't look as if you would've done it for yourself." Thunder rumbled somewhere very far away, but the sky was still dark enough to be laser-bright when the subsequent lightning bolt lit everything up. Roxy, for the tiny, eternal, instant looked liked the girl from the film – long, clumped hair and a face too pale to be truly alive.

Hey, what about me, Bozo. How do I look?

Chris didn't answer or even turn to the thing. It took all the willpower he could muster in his half-wasted state to resist but he did.

"I'm sorry about being on the road. It was private. I guess o didn't think you'd have the guts to go up - a lot of people don't."

"You didn't know."

"Thing is though..." She left the sentence hanging in the air as she ordered pie and chips for her lunch, with a pint to wash it down with. "And the same for my friend. No arguments" he probably wouldn't have eaten of his own accord, no question about that. And who could blame him? The guilt must be horrendous but it-

It was his fault. It was, it was, it was.

"What made you come here?"

"I don't really know." Chris lurched over to an empty table and Roxy followed, carrying a pint of lager in each hand. "Maria never used to drink pints. Said it was unladylike."

"Your wife, right? Oh, I better go get your clown."

If he had been sober, Chris knew he would have stopped her, but that was what it wanted. It needed him left of his right mind... otherwise he wouldn't listen like a good boy.

And we can't have that.

"I just came out for a walk. I think my head was all fuggy after it all, but I ended up on Northwood Chase. I don't even remember how I got there." Chris rubbed his handful of melting ice cubes over his cut knuckles. "Between my house and here... just a blank."

Roxy sat back down and curled her feet under her in the big leather armchair. "So why didn't you think you should be there?"

"I was upset. I should have stayed home."

"Not if there's no-one else there. No-one should have to be on their own." The scruffy-looking bartender brought their meals over and hung around until another table hailed him and the hope of a tip was lost.

The table was scratched and wobbled on one side. Somebody had written something rude about a page three girl and a rugby team on one of the beer mats. It was meant to be funny but Chris barely raised a pitiful chuckle. He picked at his chips, watching Roxy getting stuck in to her lunch.

"Hmf? What?" she mumbled around a mouthful of half-chewed pie.

"Nothing. It's just good to see a girl remember that she doesn't need to starve herself to be sexy."

"Food's there to be eaten, Chris. Although I'd hardly call this food."

He picked up his knife and fork and followed suit. (She was right, it thought food was an ambition.) However, Roxy seemed hungry enough to eat what looked like dog food in pastry, and Chris just knew he had to put something in his stomach.

*

It had stopped raining and the roads were quickly drying out as the sun beat down on them. The gusting wind helped too. Chris had drunk a few cups of coffee to sober himself and retied his trainers. Dried hedgehog brains had crusted themselves over both of them.

I wonder what he's thinking.

"Ow?" It was against his better judgement, against every fibre of him that was screaming at him not to, but he just had to go back to the road. It was not a wise decision after the ghostly images he had seen earlier today. His family had all died there and Chris just wanted to... what? To feel close to them? To fool himself into thinking their demise had been quiet and painless? No, none of those things, he wouldn't lie to himself. It was-

So you can be glad it's them and not you.

"Can it, Coco!" Though he despised himself for it, the clown was half-right. He _was_ glad it hadn't been him. "I wouldn't want them to feel this bad."

Even though it was hot and dry again, the wind was still gusting quite strongly. Was it possible for the air to blow this much and it still be hot enough to fry eggs? The storm clouds had passed and the sky was blue again with hardly a cloud to be seen. If there was such a twisted thing as a good day to die, this was it. Chris stood up, headed for the door and just stood outside for a minute, feeling the sun warm his skin. He had left the stupid clown on the table, confident (and quite creeped out) in the knowledge that the thing would turn up back in his possession sooner or later. The fact made him shudder.

The pub door slammed shut behind him and Chris jumped. His feet were stuck tight to the ground as he look off towards the Chase in the distance. An imagery fire burned low on the hill road and then exploded violently into a fireball, hurtling down the road, making him duck as Chris thought he saw it flying towards his head – going further than was even possible. Gravity would have grounded the shell of his car long before it even reached the bottom of Northwood Chase. Logic did not come into it though. Grief was not rational... was it that crazy to be seeing things. "I'm losing it," Chris grunted. And tore his feet from the melting tarmac.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny," a cheerful voice said. The little clown was standing beside him as he waited on the kerb for the traffic to clear.

"What are you doing here?"

Of course, the clown did not answer.

I'm just a toy. I can't speak.

The cars and vans went past and Chris crossed the road. Before crossing, he grabbed the thing by the floppy, polka-dotted hat it wore and proceeded to carry it in such a fashion until he reached the bottom of the road again. There, he unceremoniously dropped the thing (toys didn't feel pain) on the ground and stared upward, frozen in fear and awe. The road – like a thick, gravelly Reaper – had risen up and eaten Jack, Seraph and Maria. It didn't look as though it had quite had its fill and he silently pitied any more teens who were driving along here. There was a mother struggling up the hill with a kid in a pushchair and another at her elbow. The road had been re-opened for vehicles but very few were using it. In the half an hour that Chris was unable to move, one people carrier and two racing motorbikes went by. Maybe people were avoiding it because of what had happened. Maybe it was because it was just too hot to be sitting behind a wheel all day (though that certainly hadn't stopped anyone in the town.)

Maybe they know something we don't. Maybe they're scared of the road for a reason.

"Maybe..." he let the sentence go, barely realising he had said anything to begin with. He took a few steps along the road and stopped. The clown lay by the side of the road. He went back to pick it up but, even as he did so, he didn't know _why_ he was doing it. He did not even like the stupid, damn thing – much less did he want it intruding on the closest moment he would now ever get with his family.

Because I'm all you got left, Bozo. Doesn't that make u feel great?

*

Hurrying past the murdered hedgehog, Chris stopped as he came to the tyre slicks. He wished he had taught Jack to drive himself and taught him how to avoid head-on collisions with trees and how to get himself out of skids, rather than the lane discipline and how close you can be before you're tailgating the car in front, which really did not seem that important in the grand scheme of things.

Go to it. Go to the tree. It murderered your family... and Jack. Kick the shit out of it.

"It's just a tree. It just stands there and is solid. That's what trees do," he told the clown. Even the police officer had left his post, worried about getting his shiny police shoes getting sunk to deep in the slightly mushy ground, so Chris didn't even have to worry about being seen. Not that he would have really cared. Although mostly sober, he still had enough alcohol in his system to think talking to Coco was a normal as talking to his old cat – Mabel – who had run away and got herself flattened under the wheels of an eighteen wheeler. "It's not the trees fault." To make sure of it, Chris walked up to the yew tree and poked a finger at it, vaguely. "It wasn't was it?"

Chris had fallen to his knees and was caught in that strange no-man's-land between laughing and crying when a different police officer came on duty.

"Are you okay, sir?"

"I'm just fine," he replied. "Never been better. My entire family are dead, a half-million car was totalled in the process. My boss tells me to take all the time I need and I spend it looking like a tramp."

And smelling like one.

This made Chris laugh all the harder and he had to wipe the tears from his eyes before he could refocus on the officers' face. She was wearing tiny glasses that made her eyes seem piggy, and greying once-blonde hair poked out beneath her hat. "Sir, have you been drinking? Do you think you should be here while drunk?"

"Yes and yes. I can't be up here if I'm sober. It hurts too much." The tears started coming again and the constable, just realising he was nothing more than a grieving man, returned to the police tent and took up her position with a young man she appeared to be mentoring.

The young constable slid a sideways glanced at him sideways once or twice but the older woman scuffed him round the side of the head and he fixed his gaze on the grass at his feet. "Can I ask you something?" Chris asked. "Is killing a hedgehog a crime?"

"Why would you ask that sir?"

He pointed down at his muddy trainers and chuckled. Most of the dead animal bits had dried up and flaked off in the heat, and what was left had blended in enough with the muck already there that it could easily be called something he trod in. "Erm, no reason," he said. "Just wondered."

"Look, are you sure you don't want me to get some-one to give you a ride home?"

"He'll be fine, thank you. I'll make sure he's safe."

A voice spoke from behind Chris. Waiting until it had finished speaking, Chris turned round to see who owned it a bit too fast and staggered backwards a few steps trying to regain his balance.

"Hoh, hoh, hoh. You're so funny."

"I've had about e-fucking-nough of you today!" Chris tossed the creepy clown into the air and drop-kicked it over the hill, aiming vaguely for the town he had just left. "You're back."

"And you''ve lost it... completely."

"I killed my family – what do you expect me to do?" The older policewoman looked up quickly from her spot (claiming responsibility for three deaths did that.) "I could've bought a new Astra, or a Mondeo. You know, something sensible but I couldn't even do that! No, I had to be Mr Thinks-he's-25-again and have the shiniest toy. I got a bloody Ferrari and I left the fucking keys on the phone table. I left them where he could get them!" He stopped for breath after this outburst, marvelling that he had even had that many words left in him.

The smile slipped from Roxy's face just for a moment, shocked by his outburst – but given the situation, she could understand it – then she regained her composure and stared straight at him. "It was just a toy, Chris. How could it possibly hurt you?" What made her think it was hurting him?

_Yeah, I'm just a toy, Bozo. Or am I something else? Is that why you hate me? Because I'm something_ more _?_

The stupid wind up thing was halfway down the road... so why was he hearing the clown as clear as if he were standing next to him?

_Because I'm right here._ Chris jerked his head down to the ground, fully expecting to see the clown grinning manically up at him. Of course, there was no clown there. _Not down there, shithead. Here. I'm in your brain. How cool is that?_

"Then damn well get out!"

Roxy stepped back, confused but not entirely scared. Disturbed, maybe, but it would be stupid to be scared. "Chris?"

"Just get out!"

"Do you want me to go?"

"Go on, go!" She turned to leave but Chris grabbed her arm and whirled her around to face him. A single tear was running down her face and again he felt guilty at not being able to grieve properly for them. "No, not you. I want you to stay here. I just have this... no, it's too crazy."

Roxy had been privy to some pretty weird stuff herself over the years and she doubted she'd be too shocked whatever it was. "Really, if you want to be alone for a while, just say." She walked around for a few minutes, identifying the tree the car had tried to hug and standing thoughtfully before it, leaving ample time for him to ask her to leave. He said nothing – that was a good sign, right?

"If I was alone... I think I'd have a breakdown or something." Chris remembered when Jack had entered the local college, Regal Centre, the previous year. He had got good grades and had worked hard for them. "Take a break, kid. You'll burn yourself out."

"I don't want to fail this. If I fail, I'll never get to uni."

"You'll do fine. Just slow it down, okay"

Then Seraph would enter the room, clutching her teddy bear and wearing her rabbit pyjamas. "Daddy, is Jack having a crisis?" Crisis was her favourite word of the moment, must have learned it at school.

"No, babe. Why would our Jack-jack be having a crisis?"

"Well, he looks all white and he threw a book at my teddy." Which was exactly the type of thing a child would pick up and identify with something being wrong. And that was the first hint that Chris got.

Back in the present, Roxy was still scrutinising the yew tree. "It's amazing. The tree isn't damaged at all."

And that was all he needed to hear to finally start the tears flowing. The lack of tree-damage was just what he needed to hear. Chris fell to his knees and sobbed silently. The clown was lying next to the tree, he saw, Roxy picked it up. "This was Jack's toy, wasn't it?" It was less of a question.

Chris tried to play back their pub conversation to see if he had revealed the names of his family, but the memory wouldn't come.

Don't panic, Bozo. I ain't leavin' this spot. I like this tree.

"YOU!" Chris used his muddy sweatshirt sleeves to dry his face. It was really too hot for the sweatshirt but he hadn't brought a t-shirt and sis not want to appear topless in front of this young lady. He felt the ground roll beneath his legs and sprang to his feet. The ground looked to him as though it had folded beneath him – trying to grab at something. Obviously, he knew he was just imagining it, there was nothing trying to eat the ground. It was most likely just his grief catching up with him (and why would grief feed on ground anyway?) Roxy was right; he was losing it.

Every day, Jack had gotten himself into college, only occasionally was he late, and as soon as he got home h e made a start on his coursework. There was no girlfriend to distract him, few friends to take him away from his studies. He had been a straight-A student most of his life and showed no sign of letting the standard slip. Neither Chris nor Maria had noticed what their young daughter had. His face was growing paler by the day; he moved around the house as if he were on automatic transmission; he seemed to work straight through the night and be none the worse for wear the following morning. God, how could he have missed it?

"Why didn't you tell me?" he accused the clown. "Why the hell didn't you tell me? I COULD'VE HELPED!"

Silence from the clown. Silence and another strange look from Roxy. He glanced away, dark was beginning to fall and the two police constables had gone back off duty. In fact, the entire police tent had been dismantled and driven away. There was no danger and no further evidence to suggest, and there was nothing more to suggest it was a crime. Of course, the drivers' body had never been found but they could not examine an invisible corpse.

"Chris, you've been talking to Mr Invisible all day. What's up?" Ashamed and embarrassed, he found something extremely interesting down by his feet. "Who are you so angry with?"

Is it me? Do you blame me? Aww, I haven't done anything.

Chris ignored it.

"Chris, my car's back at the pub – I'm taking you home."
Nodding, he followed her back to the Glittering Panther where they decided to sit and have a drink before going anywhere. It was not right to send a grieving man home alone but what else was there to do? "Who's talking to you? You've been answering some-one – is it Jack?"

(It was the clown.) but even he knew how mad that sounded. "Jack? Why would you think that?"

"It's been really hot lately. They say it's the hottest summer in nearly a century."

"I heard that. We used to spend our summers at home sunbathing in the garden or having barbecues. It won't be the same grilling burgers for one." He smiled thinly, barely noticing that she had changed the subject.

"You'll have to let me know next time. I'm a sucker for a good cook-out."

"Just as long as it doesn't rain like it did earlier."

Self-consciously, Roxy patted her hair down, some bits of which had decided to curl as it dried out. "God, I must look a mess." The bar-tender, the same student as this morning, brought the drinks over with a weary sigh and set down the two glasses of lemonade. His tired shrug and brusque manner were both fully understandable if he had indeed been on duty since Chris had first walked in. "I wonder why rain shrinks everything. My hair was poker straight till i..."

The two carried on making this insignificant small talk until it was officially late enough to leave. Trouble was Chris did not want to move from his seat. Yes, he wanted to go home and sleep away the hours until morning came. His muscles were full of lactic acid and felt too heavy to lift; nerves were all on edge; and yet he didn't want to sleep and waste precious hours he could be

Drowning in self-pity? Guilt?

The unimportant chatter between him and Roxy had been easy and relaxed, the most fun he'd had since the police told him of the crash.

Do you remember it? Oh, come on, Bozo, think!

(Remember what?) he did not know what the clown was talking about, but he was coming to believe that the thing spoke very little sense.

Remember what our little boy blue said? The accident?

Suddenly it was all coming back to him. The part about how his wife and daughter were left horribly injured and would have been severely brain damaged if they had survived, how they were both still clinging onto life by their fingernails. Then the ambulance came and they died on route to the hospital. Surely a collision like that should have killed them outright? Why did they live that long after it? Had they seen or learnt something he needed to know before they lost their hold on life? (And I have to tell him... would have been more important than I need medical attention?) in his mind though, he knew that it was not what had happened to the girls he was meant to be worried about. He should be focussing on what happened to Jack. The police had told him that they believed Jack

You can't call him your son, can you? Not even in death.

They were almost certain that he had been killed right away by sheer force of impact and, although traces of blood had been found in the burnt out shell of the car not belonging to Seraph or Maria, the body had never yet been recovered. As a lawyer Chris knew enough about police practice to know that they would have combed every inch of the road and would be widening the search into this very town and the small village at the head of the Chase. Even though he had not seen anyone actively searching the area, the force had a way of doing things undetected... which made a pleasant change from the clumsy, falling over themselves way they showed you on TV.

When Roxy had brought her three-year-old Toyoto Avensis around to the front of the pub, they drove back in near silence, Roxy following directions and Chris looked out of the window at the town giving way to fields of sheep and horses and haystacks yet to be brought in, which in turn gave way to the houses of Millford. It had cooled down a little with the dusk and the town looked asleep under the moon. The excessive heat of recent days and weeks tended to make everyone lethargic but he had never seen Millford so still and quiet. (It looks dead.)

Roxy followed Chris to his front door and looked up at the window. There was alight on there; Chris just about recalled going to the bathroom before leaving the house. "You can come in for a bit if you want. It's a bit of a mess though." He unlocked the front door and went in.

"What happened in here?" exclaimed Roxy when she saw the shattered mirror on the wall..

Chris showed his scabbing knuckles as if it explained everything. It did.

"Sorry."

"Did you want a drink or something?" Picking up the glass of day old milk scum from the floor, there was a dried pool of liquid beneath it which was giving off a thin, stale smell. "I'm not sure what there is though. I didn't plan for company."

Roxy wiped sweat from her forehead, it was somehow hotter inside than it had been out. "No, that's okay. I should be going anyway."

There was a dingy room back at the Panther waiting for her. Not a wholly inviting prospect but preferrable to driving another 20 miles to her own house. There was nothing to stop her staying here with Chris, he seemed to need the company and even this settee looked more comfortable than the concrete mattress that waited, but she thought that it was probably disrespectful to impose herself on a man who had lost his family.

Right on cue, he did the hard work for her. "I'd like you to stay. There's a sofabed in the spare room. It's more or less an office now but it was going to be a bedroom for our first daughter."

"I thought that-"

"Maria lost a baby before our daughter was born. The doctors never told us but we're sure it was a girl." Satisfied that Roxy was staying the night, Chris went into the kitchen and returned with two icy bottles of Fosters lager. "You never told me – why did you think it was Jack I was talking too?"

The white leather armchair in the corner was covered by a dust sheet from the half-painted window frame so she opted for the red footrest. "I thought you were trying to focus your anger on some-one, even if it was a grief hallucination. A lot of people do it. It's meant to help with the mourning process if you have a place to put your frustration."

"Yes, but why him? I've worked on bereavement law long enough to know you don't usually choose anyone specific, and especially not the deceased."

Deceased? Are you sure about that?

"You blame him for driving under the – what do you call it?"

Everything clicked into place (well, not everything, but the pieces you have) and swam into sharp focus. Like someone had rewound the film so he knew the story. The violent outbursts. The nights where the lights stayed on. Jacks violent outbursts to Seraph and her teddy. The heated and ultimately fatal reaction. "Under the influence of controlled substances."

"Yeah, that."

"He drove a sports car at 100MPH while high on God-knows-what, hating everything because he'd been lied to. With my family in the back." Surprisingly calm about it, Chris picked up a splinter of mirror glass about two inches long and thin as corrugated cardboard. He turned it over in his hands.

"Who were you talking to then, if not Jack?"

"Coco," he whispered way down low, half-afraid to say it much louder in case it should hear him. "Coco... the clown. It's nuts but he started talking to me."

No, I didn't. I haven't just started talking, Bozo, you just started listening. You know that and I know that. Just like when you were little and you thought I could 'do stuff' so you ignored me. But I was always speaking to you, always telling you. And I told your girl but she just thought something was wrong. And I couldn't have that...

He recounted what the clown had told him (suggested) from him being a bad father to how the crash might not have been an accident to how Jack might not even be dead. Roxy shook her head, told him he was crazy, fetched another drink from the kitchen. While she was gone, Chris glanced around at the mess of the half-destroyed room. Jagged chunks of mirror were still wedged in the blond wood frame but there were splinters over the floor and furniture. The TV remote lay on the table before pointing right towards him instead of the TV, its bright red power light glaring at him with its tiny pinpoint red eye. The picture of the bendy clocks was hanging diagonally on the hook. The house was empty and quiet, and he had barely touched anything other than in here, his bedroom and the kitchen cupboards. Still, it did not _feel_ like his house any more. The damage was more than just physical, wasn't it? As he looked down again, not wanting to survey the damage any further, he caught sight of a face in a chunk of mirror. Jack. How..? What..? The spiky, black hair was his. Eyes so green they could have been coloured in with Seraphs pens. Two silver earrings in his right ear, a tiny clear jewel in his lobe and a hoop in the cartilage. A tiny scar on his cheek from falling out of bed the first night out of his cot. It was all Jacks. The image was Jack, no question about but where was it coming from? Was it a reflection? Another hallucination? All of these thoughts flashed though Chris's head in the micro-second before he screamed and turned to see if he was behind him. Hw;d read about it happening; heard things too. People die and you get told but you know it was all a lie because, next thing you know, they're there, reaching, reaching, reaching, and you don't think they can reach but they can and when they do they grab you from behind and then they pull you back. Back into the grave with them.

All he saw behind him was the grinning face of the little clown standing on the coffee table.

"What? What it is it?" asked Roxy, panting a little as she dashed in, bottles in hands. "Did something happen?"

No shit, Bozo!

In spite of himself, Chris chuckled at that. Not, this time, the high laugh of too-much-to-drink, but the natural bubble of amusement. It sounded good.

I was screaming for the sheer fun of it.

Chris laughed again and decided to add his own: "No, I just get my kicks by screaming." Out loud, it didn't seem quite so funny – especially as Roxy looked hurt.

"Chris, take this seriously. Please."

"Roxy." He had her attention now. ""I know you want to help but there's nothing we can do. At least, not tonight, and I haven't got the energy left to think about it." It was a lie. He knew he would not stop thinking about it tonight – the little wind-up thing (Toy! It's a bloody toy!) had raised too many questions for him to sleep without answers. He told her as much.

"What if they're not the answers you want?"

"I don't think there are any answers I'd prefer." He relieved her of both lagers, popped the top on the edge of the table and handed one back. "What were you doing up by the Chase in the first place?"

"I'm studying yew trees and their actual significance in death. It's written about and mythologised pretty much every day. But I don't want the romantic stories about it, nothing in death is romantic, and I wanted something real and recent and, I'm sorry but, it doesn't get any more violent than what happened up there." According to Roxy, the yew tree had been on the road for centuries – since it had been a burial ground before the area was built up. It was very unusual for yews to be found outside of churchyards anymore, and it was particularly rare to find one which had sustained as little damage as that particular one had. "They usually plant them in graveyards and are sometimes called Forever Trees because they represent eternal life. If you believe in it."

No longer even feigning comprehension, Chris shook his head. "You were studying?"

"I never had the chance to go to university when I was a kid so hello home learning. You said you were in bereavement law."

"Yes." He asked himself why he never got Maria to draw her will up but... well, he hardly expected any of this to happen. "Went into criminal law for a bit but i changed after a while. I was seeing too many people get sent down when I knew they were innocent."

"Couldn't do that, I couldn't. Probably be too scared of making a mistake."

"Choose the wrong sub-section or paragraph and a mass murderer walks free, a window smasher gets life. Low pressure job. Do you work?"

"Voluntary. Kids with special needs, like dyslexia and stuff." Mindlessly, she played with her hair, twisting a straight bit in her fingers until it was tight enough to cut off her circulation. "I help them with reading and writing."

"Family?"

"Pain of a big sister and headache of a little one. You? Oh God, that wasn't very sensitive. I'm really sorry. I have no brains left."

"Don't... just don't apologise."

A few drinks and a rock CD later, they were about to wind down their conversation. The silvery moon had been partly clouded over but there was still enough night-light coming through that he hadn't needed to switch the light above halfway on the dimmer switch. They had shared stories about how he had met Maria (in a supermarket, of all places) and the time Roxy had 'resigned' from primary school because she was ready for a new challenge. First cookery disasters (both burning baked beans) and last holidays, to favourite books, to worst mistakes. Fortunately, neither of them were quite drunk enough to start in on alcohol-fuelled existential conversations about philosophy, religion and aliens. (And for that i'm eternally grateful.) a drunken debate on the meaning of life would inevitably lead to the meaning of death and, further to that, the meaning of his family's deaths and what the hell did they die for anyway?

Roxy staggered out of the room, unsteady on her feet for a minute until she leant on the doorframe to get her balance, but nowhere near falling over degree drunk. Chris was. He rolled off the settee and crawled behind her down the hall. Surely a few bottles of beer couldn't have got him that drunk? Then again, with the amount of whisky he had consumed earlier today, he could probably have got drunk on his own sweat. So a few lagers did not really hold much in the way of getting him more sober. Using the banister as support, he hauled himself up and stagger-walked up the stairs. Roxy got him safely to his bedroom door opposite the staircase and toodled off down the short landing to his study, stopping to admire the coloured fridge magnet boards advertising what each one was.

*

According to the red display on is alarm clock, it was just after midnight when he rolled into bed, grateful he had let Maria nag him into getting that _en suite_ bathroom fitted because he surely wouldn't have made the bathroom down the hall.

It was a still dark when he awoke, shaking and sweating, from a dream he could not quite recall – and what was the first thing he saw? Why, Coco the clown, of course. The innocently insane face beaming down at him with those dead-looking crosses for eyes. Chris shot a hand out, reflexively and quicker than he thought possible by conscious effort, and grabbed the thing round the non-throat (or the seam between head and torso.)

Do you get it now? This is all I am – foam and cloth and a mechanism in my back. Oh, and I'm fully flame resistant. Which is more than I can say for them.

The clown seemed to be looking at his bedside table. On it was a silver-framed photo of happier times where all four of them were smiling and laughing with their faces covered in sloppy ice-cream. It had been taken the previous summer when they had visited Aunt Janet in Weymouth.

He remembered how Seraph had slept most of the journey down there and Maria had completed puzzle after puzzle on her little games machine. And what had Jack done?

Oh dear, are we forgetting him already? Still, it's not that much of a shame. Not your real son, was he? Doesn't even matter as much as your precious Seraph.

Chris swung his legs off the bed and stood up. The clown swam in and out of focus and seemed to come closer and then back away. It was because he was swaying. "Bloody idiot," he scolded himself.

Isn't that they way you prefer it? Don't you hate him for not being yours; hate him for taking the girls away with him; hate him for being high when he did it? Don't you just blame him for that? You need somebody to blame so why not Jack? And don't worry... you won't be speaking ill of the dead. Quite. And you can blame him and he won't mind. You can blame World War fucking Two and he wont mind because he's part of Forever now. Or is that just crazy talk?

Maybe it was just his fogged up mind working for him but it made perfect sense. He – it – had said something... Forever. That was it. And Roxy had said something about that earlier, something about forever. If only he wasn't so tired, maybe he could think a little better. Chris threw open the window in his bedroom and stood in front of it to let the night breeze cool his tacky torso. A middle-aged man with a hairy chest and a bit of a beer belly wearing nothing but black boxers and shorts stared back as he tried to waft some fresh air into the room. The air was not fresh, cool, nor breezy but who knew? Maybe the altitude of one entire floor would give the stale, warm and static air some new life.

"Hoh hoh hoh. You're so funny."

"You should see me when I'm halfway normal," he muttered.

Something about yew trees and graveyards... A memory was just beginning to stir in the recesses of his mind when it hit. A flash from his dream.

A BLUR OF RED IN THE DISTANCE AS IT ROARS AWAY INTO THE DISTNCE THE SQUEAL OF BRAKES AND BURNING RUBBER AND THEN IT GOES BLACK TOTALLY BLACK AND THERE'S NOTHING AT ALL UNTIL A CIRCLE OF LIGHT APPEARS BEFORE YOU A SPOTLIGHT WITH A FIGURE WHICH GETS CLOSER AND CLOSER AND IT TURNS TO FACE YOU BUT FOR A MOMENT YOU'RE TRYING TO PULL YOURSELF OUT OF THAT LOVELY BLACKNESS ALL LOVELY AND NUMB YOU DIDNT HAVE TO FEEL ANYTHING THERE BUT THERES A PERSON IN THE SPOTLIGHT WHO YOU CAN'T IGNORE BECAUSE THERE'S MORE RED THICK AND MESSY AT HIS FEET THE RED KEEP DRIPPING ONTO THE GROWING POOL ALL IN THE LITTLE WHITE CIRCLE AND ITS GROWING GROWING THERE'S FAR TOO MUCH BLOOD HERE THIS PERSON SHOULDN'T EVEN BE STANDING BUT THEY ARE AND YOU LOOK UP BUT YOU HEAR THAT NOISE OF BRAKES AND TYRES AGAIN SO YOU SEARCH THE DARKNESS FOR IT BY THE TIME YOU LOOK BACK THE SILHOUETTE IS ALMOST ON TOP OF YOU IT LOOKS DOWN AT YOU WITH DEAD EYES A TORN FACE IT LOOKED HUMAN ONCE NOW IT'S UNRECOGNISABLE BUT IT MOANS AND REACHES FOR YOU WITH ONE BLOODIED HAND AND STRETCHES -

"Hoh hoh hoh. You're so funny."

Chris frowned at the clown and threw it on the bed where it, predictably, rolled over onto its' side and watched him leaning on the window frame. It was inexplicable but he felt oddly threatened by what was really just a toy. And yet... and yet, the clown had told him so much and made him ask so many questions. Maybe he knew things? Maybe he was trying to help?

Maybe you're crazier than a fish at a tea party.

The door opened and a sleepy-looking Roxy stuck her head round to see if he was decent before entering. She had a yellow vest and girl's boxers on but seemed to be feeling the heat despite this. "Chris, what's going on? It sounds like a birthing sow slept here."

You heard it? Damn. I had a dream and fell out of bed."

"That's all?" A nod. "Well don't do it again. A face like this needs beauty sleep."

"Oh. Sorry to wake you."

And thanks for caring and sharing.

Roxy turned around and left again, pausing once to narrow her eyes at the clown. "He's creepy."

Did she hear it too? Could she hear it speak? Of course there was the infinitely more likely answers that her suspicions had been roused by a grown man carting it around, strengthened because he spoke to it and just didn't care much for the evil piece of work.

_Evil? You think I'm evil now? Oh, I might have been quite hurt by that... if I only had a heart,_ it sang. _Not so long ago, you were thinking I could help you. I could tell you things._

He snatched up the clown and threw it against the furthest wall and bounced off, heading straight for his face. His arms flew up to protect himself – he could almost hear it shouting _WHEEEE_ as it flew at him – when it stopped dead in the air and dropped straight down into the middle of the bed. For some reason Chris did not think it at all odd. Toy clowns weren't meant to fire themselves on a perfect trajectory to your head – they were supposed to lie inanimately on a piece of furniture. And it was. A thin, warm breeze blew in and birds started twittering outside. The sky was tinged with a dusky (it should be dawny) purple as the tip of the sun touched the horizon, threatening to break into the night.

Think Bozo, think.

Chris really had no idea what he was meant to be thinking about apart from one word. Forever. Though he knew he would not be able to rest until he had figured it out. Not that he wasn't tired, he was, but there was something more important now. Forever.

"Help me out here." The wind up thing remained silent and still. Chris passed his gaze over the display on his clock – there were numbers on it but they could be anything – but he guessed it was about 5AM; the time the sun seemed to appear in the sky in summer. "What aren't I connecting?"

Were you that out of it last night that you don't remember what she said. Only the silly sausage didn't tell you what you needed to know.

The phone rang by the silver-framed photo. "Hello?"

"Chris?" It was his sister-in-law in Weymouth. "Sorry to phone so early but i just found out what happened. Drew's just left and he's on his way up to you now." Great. An insincerely compassionate visit from the brother he rarely saw would be just the ticket right about now. Because he wasn't on edge quite enough yet. "Chris, are you listening to me?"

She carried on speaking as he actively didn't listen. It wasn't that he didn't like her, not entirely, but that he tended to think of her as a vacuous too-old-to-work hooker. So nothing she said or did had any substance to it. He calmly said "Goodbye" into the receiver and put the phone down, cutting her off mid-sentence.

Oh, Drew's on his way. He'll stop all this madness about evil clowns and Forever trees. And the crash being deliberate to keep the tree alive? Just plain silly.

"What did you say?" As ever, the thing remained silent. "Say that again," he commanded. There was silence in the room. His temper began to run on empty and the little red warning light came on in his head to tell him to refuel. Chris grabbed the clown around the neck and pinned it against the wall next to the window.

"Hoh hoh hoh. You're so funny." And then it went one step further and laughed. Right in his face. Wearing clothes and not threatening a childs' wind-up gizmo probably would have been a good idea but the world hated him so much, it wanted to see him play the tough guy in his underwear.

With a toy!

"Tell me what you know or i sprinkle your insides out the window."

Chris had a feeling that the clown was a bit too well made to be torn open – after all, he – damn, it – had survived being drop kicked down a road and following him everywhere. He could also feel some surprisingly strong muscles at work trying to get free from this strangle hold. In that minute Chris knew that this was no ordinary toy (like he had thought up until now?) The thought of there being small muscles and nerves and a brain inside this... this monstrosity was utterly ridiculous but suddenly entirely credible. It occurred to him that he had never actually seen the clown move; it just appeared by his side all the time.

Let me go!

"Tell me what you know."

The clown made a grunting sound and pushed Chris away with such force that he reeled backwards and fell on the bed. Coco toddled over to him. Watching it walking was a bit like seeing Seraph when she was learning to walk. They stared at each other, one on the bed and one on the floor, and neither spoke for a minute.

You wanna know what I know? You sure? I know some really wild stuff – stuff that'd make your head explode like a popped balloon. You really wanna know what I know?

"Tell me everything."

But there was not much he hadn't already known. What Roxy had said about the yew tree being a Forever tree; Jack had crashed into one but had not been found; and then it asked him why not. True, he could have got out with cuts and bruises and just wandered off but-

But how likely is that? Maybe he didn't mean to crash. Maybe something made him crash and then maybe that something snatched him away. Maybe that's why they can't find him. But what do I know, only I'm not the Bozo here.

An idea hit him. Chris threw the door open and charged down to his study. Roxy opened the door just as he reached for the handle and stared at him. "You ever heard of a t-shirt?"

"Cloth inventions designed to cover a person's top half."

"Do you own one?"

"Several. Something more important to do," he told her and brushed past her. His computer was on standby so waited for it to reload and then logged on. "My brother's coming to visit today. Mandatory compassionate stopover for family."

"is that how you think of it?"

The computer bleeped to tell him it was internet ready. He Googled YEW TREES and came up with roughly 4 squillion hits. Forever trees? No, that could throw anything back and certainly a good few porn sites. Not today. His cursor hovered above the search bar. "You're the expert. What should i type in."

"What exactly are you looking for? You're meant to type in keywords but you have to know what to look for."

"I think it's why yews are called Forever trees and..."

Roxy frowned for a minute, probably trying to figure out all possible ends to the sentence. He had wanted to tell her what the clown had said about how the... what really had the clown said? Nothing, that's what. He had formed some half-baked ideas about the tree being not entirely innocent. How it may have had something to do with Jacks' disappearance. It sounded even stupider than a clown who told him things and insulted him but, he had half of an eighth of a fraction of a notion that the tree had eaten him. Just developed a taste for teenagers, Cajun fried him in a Ferrari, added blood to taste and just yummed him up.

It was insane.

Sitting down before the computer screen, Roxy poised her fingers over the keyboard. It was a broad subject and her own research had led her to spend her nights trawling through hundreds of pages of only loosely relevant material. Luckily, Google had become part of her life (or worryingly. Depends how you look at it) and a good knowledge of using inverted commas and brackets in her search made it quicker to hunt down. She typed in something about myths and trees. Her fingers were flying too speedily for Chris to catch much more than that. This time, it only came up with 34 sites. About halfway down the first page, he stopped her scrolling and pointed to one. It was called _TREE FOOD FOREVER_ , and it sounded like a site devoted to what types of food to give your trees to make them grow well.

"Is it that much more complicated than sunlight and water?"

"Seems so." She clicked to enter the site and the speakers started playing spooky flute music in a minor key. An advert for a garden centre in Scotland flashed up. Not the most promising sign. "I don't think-"

"No, nor do I." Chris turned around and left the room to answer the door. The doorbell had not been rung but he knew it was about to. It would be Drew. His let him into the house in silence and went back up to his study without even greeting the man, not really caring whether his brother followed or not. As it happened, Drew did follow, as Chris had somehow known he would. The words the newcomer started to say died out before they got out of his mouth because Chris did not want to hear it. The clown was stood atop the computer monitor, looking at him, as he had known it would be. Roxy looked up from whatever she was finding so engrossing on the screen and smiled rather nervously. She had spent the night in a virtual strangers house and now another one was standing right there. Knowing what she was thinking, Chris went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "This is my brother, Drew."

Drew looked a little younger than him though he was actually 5 years older. "I feel like I've gained about a decade overnight." It was true. Chris did not even need the mirror to know it.

The mirror's broken, Bozo.

"I thought you got rid of that thing when we were kids. You said it _did things_." Drew waved his hands in the air as if it was a huge joke, and ordinarily it would have been, but nothing seemed even slightly amusing in the harsh light of day. "Jesus, I'm sorry, Chris. I just don't know what to say."

Wrong. Chris knew his brother would find something to say, and he did, but ignoring him was easy. He knew that Drew was just trying to fill the silence filling the room. He knew the sounds were hollow and meaningless. He knew... somehow... he knew all kinds of things.

The time had crept almost to midday again and Chris sat at the kitchen table with Roxy as Drew made them both some coffee. Judging by the amount of empties in the bin, his original idea of weak tea wouldn't cut it.

"So, why are you here again?"

Roxy took a minute to think about it before answering. why actually was she here? It had not been her intention to meet Chris, get trolleyed with him, help him pursue the crazy idea that the tree (an idle piece of forestry!) had had something to do with the three deaths.

_Two deaths and one disappearance!_ The clown barked.

"Yeah, whatever," she whispered back at it.

"You hear it too? I'm not crazy?"

"Maybe we both are."

And that was another thing. He had _known_ that she had been getting messages from the clown from the start. How had he known that? "I got drunk, Roxy drove me home, very kind of her."

"So why is she still here? No offence, missy, but a cutie like you with a widower. Sounds a bit suss."

Okay, now how to get round this one?

"I cut my thigh on the broken mirror. I'm brave but not enough to drive while I'm bleeding." She laughed as gently as trickling water. "How's the coffee doing?"

"Erm, it's getting there." He spooned some granules into three mugs and waited for the kettle to boil. "So, now what?"

"You put hot water in the mug, add milk and sugar and stuff, then drink it. Or eat it, depending whether my sister makes it or not." It was meant to be a light remark but Roxy just wanted to snatch it straight back. It sounded as though she was trying too hard to act normal – only it seemed far too easy to slip up and blurt out, "Oh, and a tree ate your nephew." It didn't matter though. Drew was concentrating harder than usual on the coffee-making ritual to hear the comment. The little light flashed red at the switch to let them know the kettle was away from it's cradle.

Rock-a-bye baby

"Pack it in!"

"Pack what in? Hey, you're not still talking to that toy like you used to, are you?" Drew put the kettle in the cradle and brought the coffee over to the table.

In the tree top

Even if he told his brother the truth, Chris knew there was no way he would be believed. "Come up to the tree with us later?" he asked, all in a rush. He knew something new now. Well, he thought he knew it but... the clown was telling him everything he knew, he was sure of it, and toys, particularly probably evil ones, they could lie, couldn't they? Yet, at the same time, he knew the clown was telling the truth. "Where it happened. It barely has a mark on it but I think you should see it."

When the wind blows

"Okay," Drew replied, hesitantly. Going to the death scene voluntarily was a bit morbid in his opinion. Still, he had come to lend his support for a while and if he was wanted at some tree or other then to the tree he would go. "If you want me to." According to Janet, who had made him drive up in the first place, it just wasn't the done thing to deny a grieving person their wishes. When were you morally allowed to start saying no again, he wondered. He put the three mugs on the table and dished them out – the cherry picture for Roxy, lemon for his brother and Drew was left with the watermelon.

They all sipped away silently. There was no love lost between the two men. A feud had stood and grown between them since childhood, starting from (nothing. Kid rows always start from nothing) and now encompassed almost everything. The way they looked at each other with stony tolerance, the way they acted, as if they were watching themselves. It was in the way Chris had asked Drew to visit the tree; Roxy knew there was a plot at work but her sleep-deprived mind could not work it out. She discovered she was hungry and began to raid the fridge without asking.

"Where did we go wrong?"

The cradle will rock

"I dunno," shrugged Drew. "You did it all and he repays you like this. Bloody kids!"

There was a pause in which Roxy took her head out of the fridge to stare at him only it wasn't Roxy any more, it was Maria. Maria with a trickle of blood coming from her nose like when she used to get hay fever, but with her head cocked at such an impossible angle that her neck just had to be broken. And she was looking at – no, through – Drew, and at Chris with dead blue eyes. "You let this happen," Maria accused him. "This is your fault and you should pay."

"What?" The Roxy/Maria person carried on staring. "You're not her. You can't be her."

"Hey!" Drew clicked his fingers and waved his hands around, looking rather like a pianist before he played. "You still on the planet, mate?"

"Come on, let's go. Roxy?"

They all piled into the Avensis and drove back to the foot of Northwood Chase. There, Roxy Valer parked up and got out. The road was open now but it still seemed a bit disrespectful to drive up. Leaning on the roof of the car, she stubbornly refused to move until she had finished the cereal bar she had found in the fridge. And listened to the breeze getting up around them. No doubt Drew though it was just a summer gust but-

When the bough breaks

"What was it you wanted me to see then? And why d'you bring that bloody toy?" True to form, Coco the clown had managed to cadge a ride with them and was watching them benignly from the backseat.

"This is going to sound totally nuts but..." the words were out almost before he knew it but if there was one thing left to say, it had to be this. "The clown – Coco – he told me that Jack wasn't responsible for the crash really. The tree, up there, the one I'm taking you to, made him go into it. See, it's immortal and it needed him to stay healthy. And he was bubbling over with enough hormones and narcotics to down a elephant herd. For whatever reason, it didn't want the girls and left them to die. But it ate Jack, and that's why the body wasn't recovered."

The cradle will fall

Funny thing about the human mind – it will find a rational explanation, no matter how implausible, for everything. And Drew's went like this:- Poor guy. The loss was too much for him and it tipped him over the edge. They were the insane ramblings of a broken-hearted and lonely man.

They were almost at the tree now. Chris ran his finger around the collar of his Nike t-shirt and hoiked up his jeans. It occurred to him that nothing solids had passed his lips in over a day. Should he be here on an empty stomach? He felt perilously close to throwing up anyway.

"That thing told you all this?" Drew turned around and walked backwards, somehow not losing his balance over the various foothills. (Because it wants it that way.) "You're seriously saying it speaks to you?

And down will come baby

"No that was Google. _HE_ told me Jack wasn't enough."

Drew tried to scream but the growing wind whipped any sound away from him. Tree branches began to droop, until Drew was trapped between them and the trunk, and Chris stood with the clown by his feet, watching as the other man was pressed further and further and further...

Baby and all

JUSTICE IN THE BARREL

That day...

The sun felt brighter and warmer on my skin than it had done for a long time, the children running up and down streets laughed louder and longer than I had ever heard, the grass had looked so much greener than I'd ever seen it. I could go on for pages about how everything about that day seemed to sear itself into my memory that day. If I'm being honest (and I shall try to be so), I would say that day was magical. But perhaps magical is not the right word to describe the day. It was wondrous? Maybe. The perfect word will come to me in time. It always does.

Everything seems to take time lately. But I have enough of it to spend a little on the things that matter. I think I might say the day was somehow encouraging. No, that attempt is far worse than my first thought of magical. For now at least, I'm going to stick with that choice. It is fitting in its' own way. Because, my friend, you must understand that that day did hold its' own variety of magic. Dime store magic, if you will forgive my Americanism. I remember everything you see. The sights, sounds and smells of the day. Yes... dime store magic. Magic used to give the user a quick cheap thrill or to prove useful in the short term. Beware of the three-fold law. The ramifications will one day turn tail and attack he who caused it and it will come back at least three times greater than the original magic use. I used my own dime store magic that day and look at me now. I have paid dearly and I fear my debt has not yet been fully repaid.

I recall that day with total clarity. The events leading up to that day are hazy, as though a thin cloth has been yanked down over my memory, but I suspect my brain has become quite addled since then. However I am not so confused that I don't know what happened. The important parts, the brightest memories, are etched into my brain. My subconscious – maybe even my own consciousness – refuses to let me forget any of it, not even the most minute detail. I made decisions and said things I can never snatch back but I always think of what might have happened if I could have. I have never once wanted to take back what I did though. Not once, not for one moment. So I will write down the story of what happened on and around that day in the hope that it may finally erase the guilt from my body as cleanly as eradicator pens erase ink. I doubt it will happen so easily and quietly as that but, my friend, I shall try my hardest.

I've said I will be honest and I will. I will also be brutal and open. Any memories stirring in me will be documented here as a permanent record. You must be forewarned though that many such memories will not be easy for you to read and will be harder to understand.

I was barely seventeen and I once killed a boy.

In my school days, I played cards in the yard with the others in my small group. We called it a gang but it was no such thing by today's standards. There was me and Bobby, Danny and his girl Georgina.

We used to stay in the far corner of the yard, away from the prying eyes of younger students and teachers who did not really care what we were getting up to around the corner. We played penny poker and penny blackjack. We also used to smoke like chimneys. Occasionally, we would share a joint between the four of us, obviously never on school property. Smoking our way through a pack of cigarettes from the corner shop over the course of a school day became a regular occurrence. Of course, both smoking and gambling were strictly forbidden on school grounds but we were never bothered. Those were two rules none of us minded breaking.

At the ages of fifteen and sixteen, which our group were when we played cards, we were too close to getting out that we weren't concerned about being black marked. We each smoked more when we played and our conversations regularly became busied with thoughts of who we would be glad to leave behind at school.

There was a small hut at the bottom of my garden. It had once been a shed for my father, but had been my own hide-away since I was thirteen. That was the year my old man drank himself to death and consequently had no further use for it. For a time, the hut was known as Tommy's Clubhouse and, to the best of my knowledge, remains to be known as that.

"Ooh, don't go down the end of the garden, love," my mum would say to one or both of my kid sisters, Lauren and Olivia.

"Why not?"

"Tommy's down there with his little friends."

As far as she was concerned, I was either playing everyone at the stack of old board games I had found in the loft, reading comic books (which I have not done since age eleven – childhood!) or I was doing homework for exams in the little study group. Neither or those things could have been further from our minds but we dared not say anything to the contrary. If only she had known what we really did in there... maybe she could have stopped it. Done something. Perhaps that would have been for the worst though.

Our days passed in a smoky haze of gambling, laughing, swapping coins. There was the cigarette smoke which filled the shed and the stink of dope creeping into our hair and clothes. Those were the days. Getting high, owing money and lusting after Georgina, who looked pretty good if Danny had gone out.

A joint between the four of us each week or two was enough for us. Not being really into the drugs scene, we all wanted it just to take the edge off. I was happy with that. The world could go by on its' merry way and I did not care. I had no concerns whether the sun was shining or whether my sisters were about to storm the shed and tattle to my mum. But, as I said, the conversation almost always turned to who we hated most and least at school. I joked about blowing up the school, making the ashes into my leaving gift.

"You'd need a fuckin big ashtray for that one."

"Or you going for the urn, all formal and shit?"

I shrugged. "I guess I'll decide while I'm smoking it." There was uproar in the shed for a while then. All four of us were rolling around the floor in hysterics though not one of us could recall what was so funny five minutes later.

Sixteen, she was. Danny knew I liked her but I was not going to risk our friendship over a girl. Georgina was beautiful though. She had legs that went up to there and a smile that made the rest of the world fall away. She had always been pretty, I knew that, but it was when we were high that I knew she was more than just pretty. Doped up, she was almost naked to us all, there were none of the secrets and barriers that she built up when she was wearing her school uniform in the yard. In fact, she was the first girl that gave me a hard-on that I knew was just for her.

Being around her and not the others was a better high than I could get from any joystick. But I couldn't have her, where the drugs were around whenever I wanted them. Not having Georgie was hard at times, like being told you are nil by mouth when hospitalised with tonsillitis.

I had other things on my mind though and I no longer got hot and bothered about being near Georgie. The cards flew, sweaty pennies were tossed into the centre pile to create a treacherous-looking mountain of metal, the smoke billowed. Once more, she began to fade from being the girl I had wet dreams about every night to being just another member of out gang – one who happened to be a girl. I was smoking more and more pot even though I didn't really need to. I just wanted to. I was totally unaware of whether the sky was still blue or whether I was hungry enough to eat. A couple of times I even forgot what day it was.

"Georgie, what're you planning for your leaving legacy?" Finally! Bobby had managed to locate the letter G in his vocabulary. I wouldn't bet money on it lasting though. I was nearly two pounds up this week from my winnings and was not sold on the idea of losing it all on a bet on Bobby's questionable language skills.

"I'll probably take Mr Green's car for a joyride and scratch something into the bonnet."

"So original." Danny looked at his cards. We were playing blackjack, first to twenty one. He always twisted, no matter what total he already had. "How about taking it for a ride to drain the petrol, then I'll disassemble it and put it in the mechanics lab?"

"That's just mean." But she laughed anyway. Georgie had a giggle like a bubbling stream, there were high, lows, but it seemed to go on forever.

I dealt Danny the nest card – he had twisted like I knew he would – and offered him my joint. We shared everything back then.

"So, how about it?" Georgie looked tempted by the danger but she made the pretence of being caught in a moral dilemma. "If we don't do that, I was just gonna block the toilets and back up the system." Danny looked at Georgie, waiting for her to agree. Bobby concentrated on the cards in his hand. I was idly shuffling the cards I had one, one over the other. But I didn't turn them over or even peek at them – like honour among thieves, there were rules none of us broke.

In a moment of lucidity, I heard rain start to fall outside for a minute, then it stopped. I remember that second, that instant, as if it happened yesterday and not a lifetime ago. It was an eternity away but that moment haunts my nights still. Georgie nodded and giggled the giggle I was once in love with. Right then, I knew I was going to have her. To this day, I have never shared a bed with her but that, my friend, is what happens when you do as many drugs as I did that year. You start getting cocky and believing that you can have anything you want just because you want it.

"Twenty three... I'm bust!"

"Serves you fuckin right for twistin four times." Bobby was the real card shark of the group. He grew up and went on to play high-stakes poker in the bad part of town. The last night of his life, he bet everything he owned including his wife and kids on a straight. He had never been a big winner. "Twenty, I'll stick. So, what're you planning for your leaving gag?"

I was barely seventeen and I once killed a boy.

The rain had stopped and a rainbow was trying to make itself seen through the smoked up shed windows. I turned over my cards and threw them down on the centre pile. The queen of hearts and ace of spades. "I'm going to get myself arrested."

And arrested I did get. At fifteen years, ten months and twelve days I was arrested for breaking and entering. I was caught on the way out of an off-license with packets of cigarettes stuffed into every pocket and three bottles of spirits in my arms. I intended to throw the alcohol away as soon as I got out, after what the drink had dome to my father, I never wanted to touch it. A body search turned up the maryjane I never left home without. In court, the drugs were not brought up. At the end of the trial, I was convicted of breaking and entering, of criminal damage and of stealing.

"You are hereby sentenced to a six month sentence in Rockwood Youth Correction Facility."

I went in with a sentence of six and came out having served four and a bit. The term 'correction' was also far from the truth. I see, with retrospect, that I came out wronger than when I went in. I realise that wronger is not a word but it seems more fitting than more wrong. During my stay there, Bobby, Georgina and Danny came to visit me once a week, but I never once got visited by my mother. I honestly never noticed. I wanted to serve my time, pay my dues and get out. None of the others bothered me and I whiled my days away writing elaborate fantasies and playing solitaire.

Not much of that time is crystal clear to me, but I remember being there instead of shut away at school or home and not being able to see much difference. When I did get out, I went straight home to see my family and walked straight into a fight. My mother had shut my sisters in their room and was awaiting my return by the front window. There were tears in her eyes and angry red spots in her cheeks. She screamed at me for being an irresponsible and childish bastard who was selfish enough to get himself locked up while she had two young girls to look after and who was going to end up like his father if he was not careful. I remember hearing Lauren crying in her room above me, Olivia was quiet and bottled up her emotions. Mostly, I remember really needing a smoke. My mother had never had the longest fuse and she slapped me when she caught me looking at the door. I barely felt it then, I was numb to most things by the time I left the YCF that first time, but I can feel the sting of it now when I think about it. Next thing I knew, she was on the floor and holding her jaw as she looked at me. I had hit my own mother without even realising. I hardly even paused to help her up, didn't even say sorry.

It was winter by then but the drafty little shed at the bottom of the garden was the only place I wanted be. Forgetting about my siblings locked in their rooms and my mum with a broken jaw, I trudged down to my sanctuary and opened the door. Georgie was there trying to roll her joint. She looked at me when I walked in and grinned at me. She had visited me without the others when I was inside and I had fallen in love with her all over again. I rolled it for her and sat down opposite. I did not want to talk and she knew enough not to force the issue. It would have been like trying to turn a front door key in a padlock.

"Thanks for visiting," I managed at last.

"No problem. You looked like you needed a friend."

"Where's the deck?" She handed me the deck of cards, dog-eared and torn by now, and watched me deal for snap. It was a stupid child's game but I didn't have to think about it. I rolled a joint for myself and Georgie and I played for hours.

"I'm splitting up with Danny after Christmas. We don't work any more."

I had been suspecting this for a while, she had seen me in prison alone after all.

"It won't be easy telling him. He'll probably hate me for a long time but I have to tell him. I just don't love him any more."

The stories I had written in the YCF came back to me with startling clarity.. many of the words are still burnt onto the backs of my eyelids. Spectacular mind wanderings of wickedly sharp and curved edges.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked. Dark was falling outside and the temperature had already dropped by several degrees. Yet, neither of us had any intention of seeking the warmth of our own homes. We were high enough, buzzed enough and busy enough with our cards that we were not really bothered by the cold.

"I don't know." That was true enough back then. Asking a sixteen year old boy about hid future was like trying to unlock a padlock with a front door key. It never opened anything. Looking back on it now, I still have not had one of those epiphanies people claim to have about their pasts. I truly believe I did not know and anyone who tries to tell me different has no purpose reading this tale. So you, dear friend, have no choice but to believe in what I say. "I don't know," I said again.

Georgie snapped up a pile of cards on a pair of twos then stared out the window. "Bobby went to college. He's doing maths and engineering. He was always the clever one."

Bobby was no smarter or dumber than the rest of us but I was not surprised to learn he had gotten into college. Then she dropped the bombshell. It was the one I had known was coming – they were both sixteen now, not schoolkids – and that had no effect on me either. She told me she had been sleeping with Danny and that that had made her decide she was better out of the relationship.

"Oh." It was all I could think of to say and the single sound said everything in a way. I can lie awake at nights and think about how that word said everything I wanted to say but I can never find an answer. It just did.

Without a word, she stood up and walked up to the house. I watched her through the window and, for the first time, had conflicting feelings. The game we had been playing was unfinished and her small pile lay face up; her joint lay half-smoked in the ashtray Bobby had swiped for us from the snooker hall. I finished both of them, hers and mine, and collected the cards up. I must have walked back to the house at some point that night though I have no memory of that part.

I know I must have gone back because the gang came around to my house the next day. It was too cold to go down to the shed that day and none of us really wanted to stay in the house either. It was cold there too. So we went to collect some stuff from the shed; papers, cards, a bag of weed... And we went to one of the only places we knew we could go and not get caught. We went back to school. The kids were still in – this would have been just before their lunch break. We got in by saying we were students from a local college (Corey Street, I think it was) and were doing a study on building history or architecture or something like that. Our first lesson as eleven year olds had been that the building was incredibly old and had been used as a hospital during the first and second world wars and that the school was now full of ghosts

"Corner of the yard?" Danny led the way but as we went over, I became sure that a new gang had taken over our corner, proclaiming themselves the new top dogs of the school. "Reckon the kids have taken it?"

"Fuck no! Wouldn't fuckin dare." Bobby followed us anyway. I think he was as curious as the rest of us. There were people sitting in the corner when we got there, just kids who were trading there cigarette football cards. I wonder now if they had actually smoked any of the death sticks that came with the cards. That's really beside the point, isn't it? They left and we resumed our age old positions. I'm never quite sure if we scared them away or if they left of their own accord. Sitting back there in the corner was like going back to an old friend. The corner backed onto the heating vents that came from the carpentry and metalwork rooms. The gravel dug into my thighs and knees when I knelt to deal, just like it always had done. Danny sat opposite me with one arm slung over Georgie like always. Bobby sat cross-legged, looking around at everything. I was more mellow and numbed out that I had been in a long time. We lit up and started playing. Everything seemed to fade into the background again and the day gets all fuzzy. I remember we played penny poker all day only the stakes had risen to two pence or five if you were feeling lucky. I remember been fifty pence down at the end of the day. I remember our card games lay forgotten by the afternoon because I was telling my friends stories about Rockwood. I think I may have romanticised it a little as they stopped interrupting.

Who cared? I didn't.

I was getting stoned with my three best friends in the world. It was my my second day of freedom outside the YCF. It would be Christmas in six weeks. What did I have to worry about?

What I had to worry about was all of it. I came this close to spending Christmas back in Rockwood, just like I had spent my last birthday there. All of us came close to being out into some kind of institute over the next few weeks but I had the closest escape that year. I know Georgina was put in prison some time later but I stopped following her movement years afterwards. Only since starting this record have I tried to trace her again. So you see, dear friend, you have helped me in more ways than you know.

I spent the weeks surrounding the end of the year smoking, smoking, smoking. Christmas passed, for me, in a thick cloud of pot.

"Help us decorate the tree, Tommy."

"Not right now, Liv." I think I did help though. I stood back that evening and saw a green, plastic tree as tall as me. It was decorated in thin strips of gold and silver tinsel, gaudy red baubles hung from nearly every branch, and a string of cheap coloured fairy lights. There was a small angel on top that Lauren had made at school. I was about to take Liv up to bed when I caught sight of something that I just can't forget. Lauren was hanging some streamers with my mother and she was using sellotape to stick up a shiny window picture of a red and silver foil Santa who had a speech bubble under him saying 'Merry Christmas from Woolworths.'

"Come and read me a story."

"In a minute kid." That Santa was so bright and falsely cheerful that it hurt my eyes to look at it. When I saw that sign... I think now that it was the last day I was ever a child, though I thought I had left that time eons behind me when I was sixteen. I was still a boy though. You can not do the things I did and be a man. "Come on then. Bed time, Liv."

A week later, Christmas Eve it would have been (maybe a bit before that even) I was walking out of Woolworths with a paint set under my arm. Lauren had been asking for it as a present but Mum did not have the money. Neither did I but I wasn't bothered. I almost wanted to be caught. No-one even stopped me though; security was not what it is now.

All I wanted was to get everyone the present they wanted so they would all leave me alone. More than once, I found myself chain smoking in my bedroom – regulars cigarettes this time, not my specials – and writing reams of stuff on paper in the tight, Victorian script I had been taught. Probably more fantasy or horror, perhaps a poem or two, though I was never much for the emotional side of words. It grows on you as time passes, you get used to emotion creeping into everything and it no longer feels like a foreign body. Like a wart. Something that hangs on to the web of skin between your thumb and forefinger until you no longer notice it.

Christmas Day passed. I can feel the bruises on my chest from where Lauren jumped on me that morning to wake me. She thought Santa had been. Olivia was still sleeping and my mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

"Merry Christmas, Tommy," she said.

"You too, Mom."

"Hope you get the gifts you want." I must have replied but I don't remember exactly what it was.

There were some packages under the plastic tree, one for each of us off each other. There were probably things there from friends and our extended family but I don't even know who our friends were back then. I still think about the things I wrote in the run up to Christmas but I can not remember just what I wrote. Although the stories are somewhat faded from my mind, I have an idea that they were probably just the ramblings of a confused teenage boy. In its own way, writing has become my life since then. It is not so simple as it became my career or that I used it as a way to express myself, but rather that I refused to do it after my seventeenth year. I know now that I was scared of writing and of what I might say. The rational and the irrational. The fear and the phobia. You, my friend, in your wisdom can decide which one is which.

"You've been spending a lot of time in your room lately."

"I know, Mom."

"Have you been feeling okay?"

"I'm fine. Thank you for my writing set."

"I noticed you'd been lifting every scrap of paper in the house." It was a nice set too. There was a black fountain pen with a wide nib for calligraphy and a narrow nib for writing. There was also a pad of lined paper and a pad of plain, both with a thin zigzag border.

"I've been doing a lot of writing. Just stories."

"I'd like to read them one day. How's the dinner?"

My mother never read any of my stories. Not then, not since. At the time, I think I was just embarrassed to show anyone my secret hobby, later I became ashamed that I could write such drivel and later still, I am wistful that I did not at least keep them for posterity. I also think that, in all the time since I first went to the YCF until the year she finally died of stomach cancer, that was the most civil conversation we shared.

Bobby had gone to the West Indies to spend Christmas and New Year with relatives, while Danny and Georgie had opted to spend the holidays at his parent's rented cabin in the Lakes. I was alone, but with my cards and my thoughts and my drugs, I was never lonely. I tried to teach Lauren how to play blackjack but I gave up for some reason. It was Boxing Day and the chances are good that my mother had finally snapped and hit me again, probably for teaching a young girl to gamble.

I do remember wondering if Georgie had told Danny she wanted to end their relationship. Even then, I doubted it. I decided I was not going to sit around and wait for them to come back to start living again. I didn't need my friends around me before I did anything. So I did the only thing I knew I was good at by myself. Okay, two things. I only remember the second event but I feel sure I did the first because I was sixteen. I whacked one out of the park (another Americanism, I apologise but they are so hard to avoid these days) and got stoned.

I will fast forward about a week to the next event I remember with any clarity. I am being as honest as I can and telling you the things I can recall. Perhaps I only remember these times because they turned out to be so ultimately important. But, equally, there could be no reason behind my selective memory. But I promised you I would tell everything and you agreed to hear me out. This is all I have to tell.

"Happy New Year Tommy." Her. It had to be her.

I was walking down Fircone Lane to buy cigarettes from Rankshaws, the off-license I robbed the year before. Bobby lived at the top of Fircone and we had been buying cigarettes there since we had all been in school uniforms. Always cigarettes though, never alcohol. I don't know about the others, they probably had bought drink from there or another shop at some point, but I never did. To this day, I have never touched a drop. After watching the bottle pull my father under its' spell, I decided that I already possess enough demons to see me through. I didn't and don't need any more dime store magic.

"How you doing today?"

I stopped and turned towards the source of the voice. "Hey."

Martha. She lived at the other end of the road from Bobby and always watched me when I passed. Although a year older than me, Martha had developed quite a soft spot for me over her final year. Of course, it simply wasn't done in school to go out with any boy or girl below your form. Neither of us had school friends to worry about here, there could be no harm in it. My mother had always called her a white trash girl. I see now what she meant but back then, she seemed heaven-sent.

"Morning, angel." That got a smile and she flicked her blonde hair at me. I loved that long hair; I wanted to feel it run through my fingers, I wanted to smell it and breathe it deep. I would later learn that it smelled of peach shampoo and dust from the carefully arranged cushions we fell on.

"Where you off to at this time?"

"Coming to see you of course. Where else would I wanna be?"

I earned another smile. I didn't have much more work to do, the rest was just for show. It didn't matter that we had no-one to act up for.

"You tell me. Must be cold there, all the way from your house." My house was just a few hundred yards across the estate and she well knew it. "You best come in and get warmed up then."

"Well, I came all this way..."

Her own cigarette in one hand, Martha opened the tiny gate to let me in and led me up the garden path by the hand. Inside, she gave me a mug of hot chocolate and a cigarette. "Let's unfreeze those pipes," she whispered to me. I thought it was a strange choice of wording but I didn't question it. Besides, I have heard much more bizarre phraseology since. "The pre-coital fag. Always better than the post-coital one. You remember this one." And she was right because I do not recall there ever being one afterwards in all the times I spent with Martha.

I had barely stubbed my end out in the ashtray when she was on me. We kissed, we fumbled, eventually we fell on top of a sofa with cushions in all the right places. She unzipped me and produced a rubber. I had no idea what to do with it, how to put it on – I knew what it was for and that was it. Sex education was next to non-existent until you taught yourself. What you did get on my estate was strictly limited to, 'if you get a girl up the duff, run like hell and don't look back.' Martha put it on for me.

"You've never been with a girl before, have you?"

"No." I briefly considered lying about it and saying it was not my first time, but the damage had already been done. "Make it something to remember." And she did. At that minute, when I was rock hard and went in, I thought she was turning me into a man. Not a grown-up – a man.

It was something to remember, mostly for the reason that I have spent these last ten years or so trying to forget it. Yet, like a bad smell in a house, I can cover it with all the air freshener in the world, it will always be there underneath. It was over so quick that fist time.

"I think I did something wrong."

"I'll show you what to do this time." I watched her for a second or two when she wasn't watching me. I saw beauty and knowledge. And each had its own little piece of pain. I have never worked out what might have caused the pain but the theories and what happened that day became the subject of my writing up to and during my next stay in Rockwood.

That was a morning that became an afternoon which stretched into an evening before she was done teaching me. She taught me when to go fast, when to go slow, where all her magic places were. She guided me to something she called her G-spot but I have never found it since, either with her or any of the other women I have shared beds. I am sure it moves daily. I learnt where and when to touch, when to be silent and just when to scream. When she gave me my first orgasm, I really had no say over that part.

I went home feeling happy for the first time in ages. A lead weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I understand now that it was just more dime store magic, a momentary solution to my every problem. I had no problems, not then, but everything still felt better. The night of the New Year was colder than it had been all winter. It got colder and when it did I would cry icicles instead of tears. I did not feel the sub-zero temperature that night. I was warm inside – no more would I be waiting for Georgie to give herself to me (though I was confident the day would come) or wonder when I would finally become a man. Losing my virginity to Martha had made me a man as far as I was concerned.

The following day, a knock at my bedroom door awoke me around noon. My bedside alarm clock was buzzing happily away and the red display was flashing at me. I opened my eyes and sat up. Why would anyone be knocking on my door? The girls usually just barged right in and my mother only came in if I was already up. I heard giggles behind the door and I recognised it as Georgina. It was the bubbling stream laugh.

"Get up, you lazy fuck!" Danny.

I waited a minute or two, allowing my eyes adjust to the bright winter sun. the clock stopped buzzing, I probably hit it – I hated anything that woke me up. He must have heard me moving around inside because Danny threw the door open and stalked in. The sun caught his flame red hair and it looked like fire. I saw something else glint on the sun. Georgie was wearing a ring on her left hand, probably a cheap junk store thing but that was it. She didn't look particularly happy about it, Danny was bubbling over with excitement, set to explode, but I didn't care. I needed a smoke.

I had never expected the two of them to call it quits, I found out soon enough that breaking up with some-one was not something you just did. It was like taking an old plaster from a cut. You know that it's best to do it in one short, sharp attack but you don't think you can stand all that pain all at once, so you end up leaving it until it gets dirty and frayed at the edges and, when you decide you really have to be rid of it, you peel it off slowly, fraction by fraction.

Bobby was to come back a day or two after them. I wondered a lot of things that day. If I was keeping any kind of diary, I probably wrote down my worries and questions in it. For me, writing had become something as automatic as breathing and eating. I tried my hardest to avoid sentimentality in my works but I doubt I succeeded entirely. Probably, my worries were tied into one of my stories. I think that was the year that I started writing a little poetry. It was the one place that I could never steer clear of emotions but... oh, why would you wish to know about my teenage writings? They were undoubtedly quite bad and none of them exist any more. Occasionally, I am grateful I gave up writing of any kind that year, the ink would have flowed from my fountain pen until I used it to sign my own death warrant. Other times, I am not so glad for it has made writing this final account so much harder.

"You are hereby sentenced to..." I had been caught smoking dope as I walked down the street. The police had finally found me with drugs on me once too often. I went back to Rockwood YCF for a month that time. I served the entire month too. Like the first time, it was a welcome break. I even stayed clean... some of the time anyway. I did some thinking too. It was warming up outside and we were allowed in the exercise yard behind the building. It was covered with gravel and some-one had taken it upon themselves to draw a rough football pitch on the ground with chalk. Teams were picked and a game was started. The two captains were two boys I vaguely remembered from my first stay, while the referee was one of the staff. The other boys watched and cheered as the battered leather ball was kicked from one end to the other, I crept off and found the furthest corner of the yard.

No-one noticed I was missing from the game. I thought about stuff in my moments of quiet. Would Georgie and Danny getting engaged affect the gang? We had always been so close. Was Martha going to be waiting for me?

My head started to fill with questions but precious few answers. I pulled my papers and tobacco tin from my back pocket and started to roll a joint.

"You sure you should be doing that out here?"

"You think anyone's gonna notice?" I asked back, without looking up. I wasn't in the mood for making friends and I certainly did not want to talk. Now look at me – all I seem to do is talk. However, we did talk a little and buddied up while we were there. His name was James, never Jim, always James. I never heard of him again when I left. We never spoke about what we had done to end up in the YCF but we discussed our lives on the outside and what we wanted to do with our lives. We talked all night long. James was going to be a musician, even though he had no intention of taking music lessons. I told him I had no idea who I was going to be. He thought I should be a writer and make the bestseller list by twenty five. Neither of us had any idea what the future held.

I was barely seventeen and I once killed a boy.

That was the future waiting for me. It is now my past and I must write this story for you, good friend. A man once said that we who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, or something of that nature.

Perhaps now is the time to tell you a little about the questions I ask myself now.

In the years since it happened, I have not written – not until now. This is my last chance to confess what I did and why I did it, though no reason I think of seems good enough. Substance dependency was not the only thing that got passed down the family line, I developed stomach cancer like the one the killed Mum all those years again. I refused treatment. I no longer think I am invincible, as I must have done back in the day. I've come to terms with my own mortality. Some would say it is karma come to punish me for what I did to that young boy, for making him face his own mortality decades before it should have even been a concern of his.

Alas, my friend, I believe in no such thing. My time has come, pure and simple. The Grimmest of Reapers has been lurking around for a while. He's getting restless now but I must finish writing this before I allow myself to surrender to the inviting, velvet darkness he has already tried to trick me into.

I am now tended by a devil a white coat each hour. He injects me with a lovely, warm liquid that makes the world look brighter.

"This will make you a bit more comfortable." He tells me this every day. There is a nil by mouth sign at the end of my bed. Food will not do any damage as I have no treatment for it to interfere with. I also watched the doctor write a big DNR on my file. Do Not Resuscitate. If it is time for me to meet my maker then I will go. Doctors have this curious desire to keep their patients teetering on the very edge of existence. I understand it less and less each day.

At times, I can't write for you, the cancer has spread to my head and it sometimes feels as though I can barely open my own eyes. I know, though, that I do not force myself to wake up that the Reaper will take me and my story will be unfinished.

It was a warm day in April when I got out for the second time. My month was up in March but I served both that and the extra days they added for drugs offences. The only people offended were the officers. That time, I did not make the mistake of going straight home. I went to see Martha instead. She visited me in Rockwood, I think even my mother had deigned to visit me that year. Anyway, I thought I should show a bit of gratitude to Martha for seeing me. She greeted me with a smile and nothing else on.

"Holy shit! I should get arrested more often."

She pulled me inside and shut the door. "Have you ever heard the phrase community service?"

It was over as soon as it started. I shrugged out of my clothes and started. Then I was finished. I had expected to last longer, for it to be a release of pent-up frustrations. But it wasn't. Again, I felt numb from my incarceration. All I wanted was a trip to the shed at home where I could get high.

Something had occurred to me in Rockwood and I have only just remembered it. It's funny how the memory works; how things that didn't matter at sixteen but seem almost crucial now. Back in the clutches of the real world, I never even asked myself if I could love two people at the same time. I had always assumed I couldn't, I had to choose between my love for Martha which was largely based on sex I know now. I thought love and sex were the same thing then but my hormones were raging out of control. Sometimes, they still appear to be the same thing or very close to. It was that or my love for Geogie which ran deep, deep as a river and almost as unending. As my mother was so fond of saying 'life isn't fair.'

The thought of choosing between them was too much for me to handle in that situation. I think the decision was ultimately made for me. In those dark days after my second release, relations with my mother became increasingly volatile. We argued and fought.

"You don't think about anyone but yourself! Leaving me here with the girls while you go get yourself banged up for smoking, snorting and shooting up."

But the girls were here daughters. I was meant to take care of them? "Why do you think I do so much drugs?"

"Because you don't care. You're just like your father... selfish!"

I hit her again. There was a flare of hate inside me, one so bright and intense that it hurt. I ran up to my room and shut the door. Suddenly, I did not want to light up any longer. I wanted to write and mess with my cards and listen to her cry and heave through the door. My alarm clock said it was just after midday, getting up time usually... until I had grown accustomed to the YCFs' wake-up at 6 each morning, 7.30 at weekends. Beside the clock lay my bag of weed and my packet of cigarette papers. My friend must have heard of the temptation of Adam, tasting the forbidden fruit against his better judgement. That is probably my best analogy for it. I didn't want to go straight to drugs, it would block out the then-enjoyable sounds of the damage I had caused. But I did it any way. Sitting there, my smoking joint in one hand and a stack of cards next to me, I watched thunder clouds roll across the sky and start spitting big drops of rain against my window. It was soon raining so hard that I thought I hears the glass rattled in the frame which was perfectly plausible.

Over the next week, the rest of the gang came to see me and we all hung out in the shed. We picked up our old card games and I gambled away the last of the money I had earned working at Rankshaws over the holidays. What other chance had I had to spend it? Our conversations turned to my stay in Rockwood, just as it had done the first time. I may have regaled them with stories of what I did, much as I did the previous year but if I did, I can no longer remember the stories. That boy was so very long ago and so far away that I do not remember much of it. What I do remember, I have vowed to share.

That may have to wait a little while. My personal devil in a white coat comes to ease my pain now.

"This'll make you a bit more comfortable." He produces a syringe and attaches it to the needle in the back of my hand. The barrel of the syringe is full of that lovely, brown liquid. A mass of tubes and wires are stuck on and in various parts of me (not always in places they should ever go) and my liquid has to make its' way through this maze before it can suffuse my near-helpless body with welcome numbness.

"I'm dying. I'm not meant to be comfortable."

"You deserve to have it as easy as the rest of them." I deserve no such mercy but he does not know that, not yet. But you, my friend, will make up your own mind at the end of this tale, though, of course, by then I shall be long gone. "Just wait. Wait till that day comes and you'll be on your knees begging us to bring you back for one last day."

"I will definitely not be begging. It is my time to go."

He shrugs at me and I start to feel the pain-killer course through me. "It's funny how death turns everyone into philosophers."

"It's funny," I agree and watch him carry on along the ward. The syringe barrel is empty in my hand.

I told them a story I still know. There must have been others but this one has not been forgotten like my writings (which always seemed to end with a romantic death where the hero lay bleeding to death on a white rug and coughing up blood as he gasped for enough air to mutter his last words, 'tell Janie, I love her' or 'I'm not scared.' I think I once had one guy say 'I'm gonna rest now, just for a little while.') Nor has that one become buried under the rest of my life in the hope it may never find me again. No, I never lost sight of that story. It was the story of James and of what he told.

"I met this boy inside. James, his name was."

"You ain't tellin me you went homo in there?" Bobby was still... well, he thought he was still over in the West Indies. He appeared to have lost what little subtlety he had ever had.

"You made a friend." Georgie looked up at me through those long eyelashes. I'd chosen Martha. "You didn't like him better than us, did you?"

"Course not. You guys are my best friends in the whole world. But we talked about stuff."

Danny picked up another cards and put down a five of diamonds – I think he was going for a royal flush or four of a kind because he folded with two jacks, two queens and a four. Bobby won that game but I can't remember what with. "About what?"

"Just stuff, you know. Girls, mostly."

"What else? You don't know enough girls to fill six fuckin weeks."

James had moved to the other side of town before getting convicted of his crimes when he was eleven. His father used to beat him and his older brother when he was drunk. For him, it was like being a performing circus animal, whipped and beaten until they succumbed to command. They ran away from home, but the escape did not last long. Anyway, while they were on the run, they found a shop behind the Green Baize snooker hall – where Bobby would meet his end some years later. He told me about this shop with no name on the board and broken windows and falling down support beams out back. It was weapons shop, mainly selling guns. That was the market now. Quick, sudden, non-contact. Ha!

"I went down there a couple of days ago."

"Yeah, and?" they were riveted by the tales I told.

"It's exactly like he said. There's no name on the door. The back beams would fall down in a strong wind. It's like an invisible shop... people go past but no-one goes in. In fact they don't even see it unless they are looking for it." I threw a few silver coins into the pot in the middle. The old transistor radio I'd asked Lauren to fetch down from the kitchen was rattling out the popular music of the day. God only knows what it was. Today's music has filled my head so much that the days of real music are a distant era. "They don't ask for ID or anything. If you got the cash, you got the gun. James told me, he went in there and it was like a different world, like an alternate reality. And it is. A world where everything is permitted and nothing is wrong. A world where laws and police don't exist. The gun shop – even though I've been caught for stuff before, that was one place I felt untouchable. If the filth don't know about the place, they can't arrest me for shooting it up."

"What then?" asked Georgie. "Did you buy one?"

"Well, I was all set to. I chose the one I wanted, this deadly little thing. So, I called for the owner so I could pay. He came out to me but he didn't look at me until I told him that James had mentioned the place to me. He leaned on one of the posts (I was surprised it took his weight) and lifted his head to see straight at me. James hadn't told me about that. The shop wasn't the only thing with no identity; the man had no face either."

The shed was quite for a minute or two as they all processed what I had said. The radio had moved on to the latest sports news. Doubt at my words started to sparkle in Georgie but Bobby and Danny were still stunned into silence. I gave it a few more minutes then I let go of my stifled grin and folded my cards. "Damn, you guys believe some serious shit!"

They ribbed me about it and I suppose I made fun of them for being gullible enough to fall for it. Up until now, that has been the last story I told... well, the only one that hasn't been in a book of fairy tales I used to read to my daughter.

"So there's no man without a face?"

"Nope."

"No different reality?"

"Nuh-uh?"

"Not even a gun shop?"

I shook my head. In fact, there was a shop selling guns down by the Green Baize but even then I knew better than to tell them that.

Two weeks later, I got arrested for the third time. Maybe it was my intention to get a criminal record longer than my sisters were tall. My mother and I had had another fight that descended, as things were apt to do, into a fist fight. I had no way of knowing that she was trying to wean herself off the drink habit she had developed when my father was alive. He had been gone four years or more by then. She pushed me backwards and I fell into the old Welsh dresser in the corner where we kept our display plates and ornaments. Pieces of broken china were sticking into my back and shoulders. Blood was dripping from my cuts and soaking into the old grey carpet.

"Now look what you've done you stupid little boy!"

She kept coming for me. As soon as I had pulled myself from the wreckage of porcelain, she slapped me. It didn't hurt and I didn't bruise; I was so used to being hit by then that I hardly even felt it. Things were broken over that night and we said some pretty mean things to each other. The girls must have been staying with a friend because I do not remember hearing them crying in their room.

As night started to fall, calm should have come with it. It didn't. for whatever reason, she got angrier at me and hit me again. By the morning, I had a bruise as blue as my favourite jeans. I grabbed her wrist as she raised her fist to me for the fourth or fifth time that night, and I smiled because I could hear and feel her bones grinding together. It should have struck me then... how thin she was getting, how she barely ate with the rest of us any more. None of that touched me. I was an angry boy.

"You're just like him, you know. Always thinking about yourself, not that you've got a family to support. No. With you it's all about when you can next get so out of it that we don't even matter. I've got news for you, boy." I tightened my grip and heard her start to whimper. I pushed her away from me and sat down in one of the old mis-matched armchairs. "I could tell you things..."

"Go on then." I knew she hated me, my criminal dabblings, what I'd done to her precious family. The words needed to be said though.

"When you were locked up, I thought about packing up and moving somewhere new with the kids. I didn't want you back. We all know what you and your friends get up to down in that little shack of yours. The girls know. I won't lie if they ask about it."

"What have I been getting up to Mom? Trying to forget that I live in this shithole? Trying to numb out the fact that I hate you and kind of wish you had just left me behind? Trying not to see you turning my family against me? I'll tell you what I've been doing – I've been getting so high that I don't notice or care when you hit me because I'm not my father." She stood over me now, fuming (probably foaming at the mouth if she had been a dog) and I couldn't stop myself. I got up and stopped myself moments before hitting her. I spat her instead.

"You stupid, ungrateful little shit!" she screamed at me and threw me out of the house. It was almost May so it was not terribly cold out but I did not particularly want to sleep on the streets if I could help it. I had no key with me, nobody goes home and carries their key in case they get thrown out.

I heard the door latch and bolt behind me. My intention then was to go straight down to Martha's place. She would let me stay there and give me something constructive to do with my frustration. I had enough pent up anger and energy to do something productive all night. I had only made it to the top end of her road, just outside Bobby's house, when the police caught up to me. Criminal damage. A house brick had found its' way into my hand and then through the front room window. The broken glass made a beautiful tinkling sound as it fell to the floor. Moonlight had reflected off some of it, making it shine like the broken splinters of my family – each beautiful yet terribly deathly to touch.

I spent the night in the cells which was more of a blessing than I could ever have known.

Whilst my teenage self is festering away in a police cell, we will return to the present. It is just as painful as the past but there is just as little hope of ignoring the here and now as there is of the there and then.

When I began writing this tale, my final piece if you will allow, I never intended to write quite so much. A short letter, maybe a page or two, something just to explain what I did and why I did it. The tale has grown beyond expectations, though I have told you nothing I do not think is important. This account is for you, my friend, you and anyone you care to discuss my secrets with.

Incredible as it seems to me as I shuffle through these many pages of tight, plated script (which is not so tight any more) I have not yet reached the part you are undoubtedly most eager to read. There is not much more to come before then but, should it extend further than a page or two, please carry on. Maybe these words will raise new questions but they may answer a few more as the last pages have done. Of course, I do not know for sure what you're questions are but I imagine they are mostly about the reasons behind my actions. Criminal psychiatrists always ask those question and I suspect my new friend does not dare break his chains so early.

Until I got my cancer, until it got to the stage where I could no longer justifiably protest my hospital admission, I kept myself too busy to feel any stirrings of emotions or to be haunted by faces from my past. Lately, though, I seem to have a lot of time on my hands to think about things. I wonder where Georgie is and what she is doing. My search for her has turned up nothing and I do not have the time to look further. I wonder if Martha ever found a new man to spend her life with. Why the police never catch me? Why did my wife leave me for her boss? Why am I going to die alone like the characters in my teenage stories?

The morphine is beginning to kick in. I'm starting to drift off to sle

"Did you see what she did to me? Silly bitch!" Lifting up my shirt, the arresting officer took a quick look at the sticky cuts on my back.

"We'll get some-one to clean that up."

Formally arrested and thrown in cells, I was determined to get my mother back for what she'd done. By the morning, my back had been cleaned of shattered china and my black eye had come up a treat. The prospect of being able to get her charged with assault was sorely tempting. However, in an uncharacteristic gesture of motherly love, she had decided to drop the criminal damage charge she had on me. It didn't seem worth the hassle of pinning one on her. I'd had enough of copshops for a while.

I did go to see Martha that day. That time, I managed to last a bit longer than the one shot I'd managed on my previous release. We talked too. About nothing, everything, anything. The silence, punctuated only by her moans and yells, was killing me.

"Don't do it like that, Tommy." She sat up in her bed and looked at me. She told me to lie still. I did but I was worked up enough without having a girl tell me what to do. That was the first time a girl went down on me.

"Where did you learn that?"

"It's sex without the sex." Her hair tickled across the tops of my legs. I didn't click that she hadn't answered my question until it was too late. "Everyone does it."

"Martha?"

"Mmm?" She stared at me again and I thought of how Georgie stared at me through her lashes. The though came unbidden but not entirely unwanted. "What is it?"

My mind went blank, much as it tends to do now. What had I meant to ask? Something important. "Will you go out with me?" I would lay money that you find that quite amusing. Until then, we had not been seen to step out together, we had not dated. To a sixteen year old boy, or anyone with a good sex drive, you may not think this altogether peculiar. I didn't and still don't. I wanted sex, I got sex. I quickly learnt that that was just the way of the world: want, take, have. It was a good theory at times, then one day, it wasn't.

I spent the next few nights with Martha and the days round at Bobby's, smoking and playing cards until it got dark. Home was the last place I wanted to be but I knew I had to go back sooner or later. My back was healing but I got sharp pains if I moved too quickly, Bobby had an old deck of Shooter cards his father had bought him from the Green Baize. Georgie brought round the weed when we gathered there. It was a tiny tin with a picture of a fairy on a flaming motorbike on the lid. There was not much inside and I thought she must be getting stoned at home too. Did she have a hard time with her family too? She shared what little she had. We managed to make two rollies out of it, one for Bobby and me, the other for her and Danny. We shared everything in those days.

Dealing for poker, Danny threw his pennies into the centre. "So, you and Martha? Serious?"

"Err..." Well, was it? I mean, I was sleeping with her but we had not yet been out together. Did that make it serious or just a casual thing? I would ask her about it later. If I had ever got round to it, I think she would have told me we were still unofficial.

"You'll never guess where some-one got arrested the other day. Tommy. Right outside my fuckin house."

"What for this time?" asked Georgie.

"Mom chucked me out. I helped a brick on its' journey through her window." I folded my hand, I had two pair – tens and sevens – but Bobby had a royal flush or was working on it. He had never had the best poker face in the world.

Stars were still visible in the middle of the day because there were no clouds to hide them. it was nice just looking at them as I puffed away, imagining that each star had a name and was shining just for me. Bobby took the roach from me and looked up too. "What're we staring at the sky for."

"Don't know." And I didn't. over the years that followed, I have stared up and seen nothing but clouds. The sky was clear that day. "Blackjack?"

I took out a few pennies and chucked them into the centre. Then I shuffled and shuffled some more.

"Just deal already," said Georgie. I grinned. It wasn't making her angry that made me smile, it was knowing her frustration was faker than the gold watch Danny had bought from Rankshaws. "I want to win for once." I dealt us all two cards each. She looked at me, waiting for me to resume the story of my latest arrest.

"There's not much more to tell," I told her. Even though the others were listening in, I was somehow only speaking to her. "We had fight. My back and shoulders got pretty messed up. She gave me this beauty here. But I didn't touch her. I was angry enough to kill her that night but, I swear, I never laid a finger on her. She threw me out and locked the door so I picked up a brick and lobbed it through the window. I started to walk down to see Martha. The police caught up with me. Night in the cells."

Danny looked away from me. Maybe he didn't like to think a woman had bested a boy like me – true, I was not as muscle bound and macho as the bodybuilders you see on TV but I could hold my own in a fight. I learnt that on my second visit to Rockwood where it had taken two guards and my wing leader to hold me back after another boy had got into my room to read my work and smoke my weed. As always, he twisted.

"Bust." He handed the joint to Georgie, got up and kissed the top of her head. He left the five and nine of clubs and the jack of diamonds on the browning grass he had been sitting on. "See you later, angel." Angel. I used that name for Martha. People call it to their children now as a proper Christian name; perhaps you, my friend, were even named it by your own parents. "Gotta do something."

He didn't come back that afternoon but he arrived that evening with a new pack of Shooter cards and a bottle of vodka. We played cards until midnight. The others made a start on the bottle but I wouldn't go near it. Bobby got stupidly drunk but Danny and Georgie only had enough to get giggly. If he had not been stabbed repeatedly for losing his bet (he had wagered his family, remember, and his creditors would destroy their lives in the most crushing way imaginable) the drink would have probably got him in the not too distant future. I was seeing a younger, black version of my dad but I did not know it. When I saw dawn begin to break across the sky, it was time to make my way back home to my mother and sisters.

What actually happened when I got back has faded away from my memory so it must not have been as bad as I had feared that day. Lauren was in the kitchen making breakfast for her and Olivia before school. My mom may have still been in bed but there was no shouting, fighting or hating that day, nor for many of the ones that followed.

We largely ignored each other over that time, the way you would ignore an old piece of furniture in your home: it has been there for so long that you get so used to seeing it that you stop noticing it. I spent my time shut away in my room, writing what would later become the penultimate story of my life. I'd had in my mind for a while to have a go at producing a novel about a heroic gangster who got away with all the wrongs he did because they were for the right reasons. Halfway through though, the bad guys he had wronged got on his case and began to hunt him down. He ended up bleeding to death from a punctured something or other with story's last words being 'he died lonely but not alone.' At the time, I thought it was my best story ever.

If I was not writing, I was helping the girls with their homework. Making dinner for them. Making sure they were ready to go out each morning. Teaching them how to cook a meal for themselves. On the occasions the Mom saw fit to hide the drink from herself, she would take care of her own daughters herself. I would say that she took care of her children but I was her son but she never did anything for me from the day she had me arrested to the day she died. On those days, however, I could go to the little hut at the bottom of the garden and smoke the stash I kept down there. If the guys came over, we would play cards and talk about anything that seemed important. If it was too hot, and that summer was truly warm, we would sit outside. More than once, we reminisced about old times in school. It was pure, sepia-toned nostalgia but we all agreed how much simpler things had been when we were kids. Just a year ago.

"If you did something wrong, you got a rap on the knucks and didn't do it again," said Danny.

"Or sent to Rockwood and do it again anyway," I added with a laugh.

Danny shrugged. "Whatever rocks your world, man." It was the first time anyone had called me man and, until I reached the age of forty or so and children thought me old enough to earn their respect, it was the only time.

"Rocks your world. Rocks your fuckin world!" Bobby rooted around in the blue rucksack he carried everywhere with him and produced a stack of plastic disposable cups. He followed this with a two-thirds full bottle of cheap, unbranded whisky. Two thirds, no wonder he was already so happy. He poured out generous measures for each of us and shared mine out between the three of them when I refused. I was not going to be my old man. Georgie looked at her drink but made no move to drink it. I'm quite sure even now that my mother saw the bottle on the grass and assumed I had started drinking.

I saw Georgie shift position until she was sitting cross-legged and she cradled the cup in her hands. Danny was making a start on his and Bobby had already necked his. Her eyes sprung up with tears but she blinked furiously at them, trying to keep then back before anyone saw her cry.

"Tommy, I'm goin whiz. Can I go in?" I think I must have okayed it and somehow I got Danny to disappear. My trick before had been sending him down to the off-license for cigarettes. In any case I found myself alone with Georgina. It was just like I had always wanted it, in the warm summer sun and in the middle of over-grown grass. She looked at me with tears still in her eyes. She tried to rub them away but only succeeded in making them fall. One day, I would have her and kiss those tears away.

"What's wrong?" I thought it might be something to do with Danny; it was more than six months since she had first meant to call it off with him and yet, here she was – engaged to be married to the boy. "Is it him?"

She smiled at me. I never worked out if that smile was happy, sad, or if she was just putting a brave face on things. "Nothing. I'm being silly."

Denial had always worked well with Danny but it had never ever washed with me... and she knew it. "Georgie, you can't sit here crying all day. He'll know something."

She took the tiniest of sips from her glass then put it back down, staring at it almost sadly. "I can't drink that. I just can't." How on earth did the female mind work?

"That's why we've got tears? Because you don't want a drink?" If I had been more aware of the female body, I might have concluded that her hormones were out of control. On the rag as Danny said when she did not join us.

"Pretty much. I said it was silly." The bubbling stream giggle had changed to a hitching laugh I feared right away. Maybe this is what women who did not hit me did when they were upset, but I knew the drink wasn't the be all and end all of it.

I gathered the cards into a stack and cut the deck. I told her to guess the number of the card on top of my half deck. "If you guess the number right, you tell me what's wrong... everything that's bothering you. If you don't get it right, the conversation ends now. Never have to say another word if you don't want."

"Four."

I turned the card over. A four. I had not rigged the deck as I used to but I must have been having a lucky day. "Tell me."

"Well," she started then stopped, cradling the drink thoughtfully again. I wondered what was going through her head but she was a woman – I was learning that there was no sane logic going on there. "It's not that I don't want the drink. It's just... I can't have it. I just can't."

I opened my mouth to say something but was interrupted by Bobby coming out of my house and put his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his mouth to let out and ear-drum bursting whisting. "Ay! Tommy! Your Momma gone walkies again." The interruption was a welcome reprieve from the conversation I had begun – I had no clue what I was going to say to her... or, at least, I don't anymore. Getting up so Bobby could take my place on the ground, I trudged up to the house, angry at Mom for leaving me to care for the girls without even telling me. The flaking green back door was half-open where Bobby had left it while the kitchen it opened into was full of washing up that had to be done. The girls were sitting together (no, actually, it would me more accurate to say they were curled up) on the armchair in the far corner of the lounge. Lounge is possibly a bit pretentious, it gives the impression that it was usual to relax in such a room. You must remember, my friend, that this is the room where I had the majority of my fights with my mother – does that sound like a relaxing situation. A better choice would be to call it a living room but naming things was never my strongest suit.

"Where's Mom?" Liv looked up at me and shrugged. There was something in her eyes, one that I had seen far too often lately. I saw a bright fear inside her, a fear I see has not entirely died, but dulled slightly, when she comes to see me with a family of her own. I cleared some of the dirty plates off the kitchen sideboard and set about making them some beans on toast for dinner. When I went back through, I saw Georgie quietly playing dolls with them both.

"I thought they needed some-one to play with."

There are no words to describe how grateful I was at that moment. Perhaps the words and reasons will come to me in time, but time is something I have precious little of at the moment. My sisters sat on the floor with crossed legs and dug into their food as though they had not eaten all day. At the time, I doubted they had, but I never found out – it was like making a phone call to a friend, you know you should but it never seems important enough to worry about.

"Georgie, it's getting late. Tell me what's wrong?"

Fresh tears sprung up in her eyes and I reached out for her hand. We spoke for a while, I do not recall the exact words after her first statement. "I'm seventeen, I don't even want to be with him any more and I'm stuck with his kid!" My vision filled with the proverbial red mist, only this was tinged with grey and made me want to sit and do nothing rather than get revenge. I was angry at Danny for causing this but I was also angry at Georgina for not getting out of the relationship before this mess could happen. I saw myself doing something then, I think it was my fantasy playing out before me. The version of me grabbed her by the arms so hard she would have marks for days to come. The me I saw held her tight until she softened into my eyes and began to cry hard. It was dark outside and she would look at the stars through wet eyes that had cried so many tears I was sure they would turn to dust. Then I was me again and I knew I had ejaculated in my underwear by the warm sticky feeling. What was so sexy about watching a girl cry so hard and so long?

"Danny knows something's wrong, but he's too stupid to know I'm having a baby. God, how could we let this happen?"

It was my turn to shrug then. I never found out if she told him about the baby but the damage had been done by then anyway. "You shouldn't be smoking." Moms' contribution to my scant school sex education was that pregnant women shouldn't drink or smoke. "Shh. Don't cry, Georgie."

I got up and took the girls' empty plates out, carefully balancing them on top of a stack of washing up. I vowed to tackle it in the morning and I think I did. One problem at a time. I had wanted to walk down and spend the night with Martha but I was not happy about leaving Lauren and Liv alone in the house. Sixteen was far too young to parent a child but what choice did I have? It was nearly midnight when my friends left my garden, and I managed to pack my siblings off to bed. I followed and found my mother passed out on her bed the next morning when I rolled out of bed.

June came and went and July arrived with a heat we had never felt before. I was spending one or two nights a week with Martha, partly so I did not have to go home and face her, partly because I thought I loved Martha, and I did then. I'm not sure in my mind when my mother became an italicised figure but, shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I could no longer stand to be in the same house as her.

Georgie came to see me nearly everyday. Sometimes she was with the other two when they came to play cards, putting a brave smile on so Danny would not suspect. Our talks over poker ranged from my own lovelife to the beautiful church wedding Danny was convinced they were headed for. Till the day he died, he only saw the inside of a church once when he was christened. We had a lot to talk about. Sometimes, we would get drunk and/or stoned out of our faces (no-one noticed that Georgie was not taking part) and ended up having deep philosophical debates over the pros and cons of war or such. Times haven't changed as much as some people claim; not two days ago did I hear the teenagers in the children's schoolroom debating the same issues. Not only that, but they were saying the very same things.

Georgie came to see me alone on other days – the days when Danny was working down at the Green Baize behind the bar. We talked about this and that. I remember one time, it can't have been more than a few days after she told me she was expecting, when she just leaned back against the shed, hands resting gently on her belly, protecting the baby that was growing there. "I want this kid to have a daddy we both love."

Of course, I'd wanted to hear her say that she wanted me to bring up the baby but and endless year of raising my sisters had imbued me with a strange intuition that I'm not positive I really liked. That strange power I possessed for a time faded soon after but it returned as I had my own children. I am digressing again but I find it much easier for my brain to cope with diversions rather than the actual events. I apologise, my friend. She didn't want me, not as her lover anyway. "You know what, Tommy? I think I hate him." There was no mistaking the venom and conviction with which she spoke. Not quite as lethal as a snake bite but the effect was just as powerful.

I had no reply. Not just because I did not know the right words to say (let's face it, whatever I said would be wrong in some way) but also because the left side of my mouth was swollen halfway to shut from my most recent attack from Mom. Attack of the Mother. I feel the potential for a good story but I give you permission to write it in my absence. My mother and I mostly tolerated each other now, we barely spoke but worked around each other in silence. You have heard the saying about cutting the atmosphere with a knife? I think you could have torn the atmosphere in that house with a soup ladle at times. There were days and nights where Mom would simply go missing for a period of time and come back drunk enough to fall over dust. I never figured out how her aim was so good but she never ever missed my face. When she sobered up, we went back to ignoring each other.

"It's your birthday soon." It was indeed. The 2nd August. "What do you want?"

This, I assume, is the part you will be interested in. This is the story of what happened that day and the reason I have been afraid to write all these years. In case I wrote down this very tale. I am quite excited now that I have nearly finished; that it will no long prey on my mind and creep into my dreams like a cloud of tear-gas can work through a sealed room. My secret shall be known and the white-coated devil is quite angry at either me or himself for refusing my drugs until I have shared my secret. But I must finish while my mind is still intact.

Please believe me when I tell you that the preceding pages have been important for both me and you. You will call it 'background' and the Americans will call it 'therapy.' I, however, think it is simply my history.

The day before my seventeenth birthday, things came to a head and I just couldn't stand it any more. For a boy of sixteen still, I was under enormous pressure. If the strain had been physical weight, my back would probably have crumbled underneath it. It may as well have been, because something broke in the end. In my room, I found an old rucksack and packed my few belongings and a change of clothes. The sun glinted off the mirror on the back of my door, I looked at it and raised my shirt. My back was still covered with tiny crescent scars where the broken china had pierced my flesh – my own mother had done that to me. I could not hate her any more it, but I could not forgive her either. It just made me more determined to do what I needed to do.

"Are you going away again?" Little Olivia poked her head around the door and watched me carefully, tracking my every move. "But who'll take care of us and look after us?" It was calm and matter-of-fact though her bottom lip began to tremble and her eyes went glassy. It was probably the greatest show of emotion she ever managed until she got out of that house herself.

"You're her daughter. It's up to your mother now. I'll be gone in the morning." Tiny footsteps ran back along the bare wooden floor and down the stairs. No sets of footsteps came up after her. I sat down anyway, a headache forming behind my eyes. Leaving was certainly the right thing to do and, thanks to Martha, I had somewhere to go and live. One question kept chewing away at me until my brain became gum with no flavour left but which you kept chewing out of habit. What if she went on one of her walkabouts and never came back? What would happen to my sisters. I lay back and fell asleep, not waking until a late summer storm had begun beating at my window. By then, I had made up my mind what to do.

As I slept that afternoon, I dreamt a dreamt that seemed not unpleasant to me but not one I would wish to have again. Thankfully, my wish remained granted until I began writing again but it was unavoidable by then. In the dream, I was sitting in my little hut at the bottom of the garden surrounded by everything I had written. My trusty deck of cards and Georgies' tin with the biker fairy were floating before me, just out of reach. A voice at my ear, it sounded like James from the YCF but it really could have been anyone – maybe even no-one at all. The voice said one thing: "Write for me and you can have it all. Just write." So my dream self wrote. In my dreams now, I am writing a confession that consists of only one line repeated over and over.

I was barely seventeen and I once killed a boy.

I looked down to see what I am writing and noticed that my hand is automatically flying across the page and scratching the page with the fine nib from the fountain pen at Christmas. My hand is cramping but still the voice in my ear tells me to carry on.

"Write more and you can have these things."

The words I was writing that day are both irrelevant and long since forgotten. What I do remember is that I could not put the pen down to rest my aching hand. It seemed somehow attached to me, a part of me. What it really was was much worse than you will surmise from this account but the pain truly was unbearable when it finally registered. Something like a paper cut or splinter that only starts hurting once you see it and know it's there. The end of the nib which stored ink was clamped into my hand and had grown its very own root system into my wrist and arterial system. What I was using was not ink but blood. My blood. Red, sticky, thick blood. The ink of my own pen. The dreams – no, I shall call it a nightmare now – when the nightmares returned, cliché upon cliché appeared in my mind but none seem to fit.

The storm was raging when I woke up and I immediately knew that tensions were running high in the house. My hand still hurt in a crossover from nightmare to reality that had not yet caught up. No matter how hard I scrubbed at it in the bathroom, there seemed to be blood on my right hand. Then it was gone. My brain had finally caught on to the fact I was now awake. Returning to my room, I grabbed my bag and made my way downstairs. I'd had the closest thing to an epiphany I can lay claim to. Much as I loved the girls and much as they needed me; much as I hated her but knew she needed me too; I had no choice but to cut all ties. All or nothing, I believe the saying is – probably what Bobby said on one of his impulsive bets. I never saw him again, unless pictures in papers and items on the TV news count.

"Where will you be when we need you?" When, not if.

"I don't know, Lauren. Just go to bed."

"Are you coming back?"

"No." Listen to me, my friend, you will never comprehend how hard it is to tell a tearful little girl that. Maybe I was a man for that moment because I didn't lie but nothing was further from it. Men do not let the truth be so harsh to delicate children, they tell little white lies to protect them, little white lies that grow and snowball into dirty big grey ones. "I'm leaving for good."

I kissed the top of her headed then walked out of the front door, never intending to so much as glance back.

"Happy birthday," she called after me. I didn't even stop to say goodbye.

That day had probably been the only day I had spent in over a year clean and smoke-free. I'd been fully lucid and maybe that is what drove me to that final act. I had felt the sun beating down on my face, hot enough to make the pavements too hot to walk on. The rain was cooling that rapidly. The grass can't have been greener than ever because it was pushing a hundred degrees in the shade and the grass was all dried out. It looked greener though, but after seeing things through morphined eyes I know that you really can't differentiate the colours while on drugs. I think I heard the neighbourhood rats and cats clattering through the plastic dustbins behind the houses. Maybe that is simply my nostalgia creeping back to add depth.

"Martha." She was my only salvation tonight. The storm had drenched me wetter than a fish. I could dry off there. "Please be at home, angel." And she was at home. You could think I was grateful for that mercy but... well, in a moment.

"Talking to myself already? Jesus, wait 'til you're a granddad." They (I'm not sure who they are, but I know they can't be trusted) say that talking to ones self is the first sign of madness. My priority was getting out of the rain, out of my wet clothes and into a warm bed with my good woman. Si, I shifted my bag to my other shoulder and pressed on my way, hoisting my jacket up and over my head in a feeble attempt to keep myself dry. It was about as useful as trying to make a raging bull stop at a red traffic light. Minutes later, I arrived at the house she shared with her older sister. There was a key hidden under the grey rock by the door, I let myself in. I was not prepared for what I saw, nor what I heard.

There, on the carefully arranged cushions where Martha and I had first fallen and made our own brand of confused love, lay Martha and another boy I knew by the tattoo he had on one shoulder. A dove with a heavy looking chain attached to one of its' spindly little legs. FREEDOM – the word below it. It was the tattoo that told me who it was and I recognised that because I'd been with him when he got it.

Danny. Him and Martha. A kind of dim anger ran through me, just like the dying embers of an extinguished fire. What I felt mostly, also what I feel now, was an uneasy stillness that started in my feet. It took them both a second or two to realise that I was standing there. Martha looked at me and uttered that phrase I have heard so often since.

"It's not what it looks like."

I almost laughed at that. I watched as she pushed Danny away from her. "I saw you making love to my best friend. That's what it looked like." Too hoarse to shout, I carried on in little more than a whisper. "How could you do it?"

"It's only happened tonight. It was-"

"Shut up." To my surprise, she did what I told her. I didn't know where to look and I think that was best in the end. I tried to look at my friend and found myself disgusted with him. He was behind the settee, trying to pull on his jeans.

"We were just... talking. About your birthday. We... wanted to do something."

"Well, you did something, alright." The incredible stillness rose through me and blocked out most of my rational mind. "Hey, stop trying to get away. I'm not angry. I'm fucking furious and I'm gonna kill you but I ain't angry." Before I even knew what I was doing, I pulled the gun I had bought at James' fabled shop with no name and levelled it at his chest. I don't even remember packing it. "Don't stop on my account. Oh, no. go on, take some more. It's what you came for after all." They both just looked at me as though I was crazy. Seventeen with a loaded gun. Can you imagine a crazier sight, dear friend? Dancing earwigs perhaps? Sightseeing monkeys? Or a teenage boy with a loaded gun?

"Now, how long have you two been shagging? Be honest."

"A month or so," Martha told me. She stood on her knees as if shielding him.

This was just one more thing I might be able to handle in time. A few minutes after midnight on my birthday, I could hear her grandfather clock ticking. It told me I had time but time was so long. "Did you know that Georgie is having your bastard child? Need any tips on playing the absentee father?"

"She didn't tell me." It wouldn't have made any difference, he still would have jumped into bed with Martha. See, the problem with Martha and guys in general was that she was such a tragically easy lay. "I would never've..."

"Yes, you would." Arguing that particular point with me would have been like trying to push a sponge through a solid brick wall. It would have gained nothing.

"Dan?" A surge of anger, then it was gone. His name was Danny. "A kid?"

The hate I was feeling for the entire crashed over once more, tsunami-like in its' intensity. I will not allow myself to believe it was the common confusion and resentment that every teenager feels, though, of course, I have no other experience to compare it too . it was more than that, much more.

I hated them both.

The gun shook slightly in my hand. The weight of the bullet chamber righted it.

I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. The bullet flew down the barrel and left the weapon in a flash. Justice in the barrel. The recoil was more than I had reckoned with – the books never tell you that a gun always kicks back – and it knocked me off balance. I fell to the floor, my eyes still closed, hitting my elbow on the cabinet but knowing better than to let go of the gun I was holding. There had been the smacking sound of a bullet into flesh. Too spineless to open my eyes and see who I had shot. I heard a female scream but that didn't mean I hadn't got her. She could have been given a bullet ripping through an artery in her arm or leg and was screaming at her blood loss. I got up and opened my eyes, determined to run from the house before I had to see anything. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of heavy blood-spray all over Martha's naked body. The image is still sharp when I think of her: always blood-stained and screaming. My crime was done, there was no taking this one back... not that I wanted to take away my quick, easy solution.

I was seventeen and I once killed a boy.

After I ran from the house, I went through the next few days under a grey cloud. Until I saw the news report about the shooting, I had not allowed myself to think of it. The cause of death was reported as misadventure and that was good enough for me. I spent my days wandering the streets and my nights finding a decent underground car park to sleep in. I slowly realised that Martha had aided my story. The police had probably spoken to Georgina – what did she know, what might she tell them? she passed me once not so many months afterwards – she was dressed head to toe in leather, covered in the gothic makeup so many of the girls were into and had quite a substantial baby bump. It was still Georgie through and through, from the sad but deep eyes to the babbling brook giggle. When I wished she had taken that drink and flushed that bastard out for good, it wasn't for her. It wasn't for anyone but me. Though, when you find yourself wandering the streets, almost (but never quite) desperate enough for shelter that a stay in the cells looks quite inviting...

So I make my confession.

I was never suspected, arrested nor convicted of my crime but I have served a life sentence regardless. The intense guilt I expected to feel after that day never came; I never received suspicious glances from strangers on the street; nothing. For so long, I had written about people getting away with murder and it seemed so noble and heroic. I wrote no such thing again, nor anything else, for getting away with murder is not noble and heroic – far from it. It is dirty and shameful and worse than the original sin. There is no flare of guilt that burns you up and out as quickly as a gas fire but an ache of self-loathing that grows in your belly and gnaws away at you like a tapeworm.

And now my tale is told, my friend, make of it what you will. I am finally ready to float on a cloud to the Pearly Gates, or jump from the cliff into the very jaws of Hell. Hell, though, is for bad men. Bad boys only go Everywhere. I shall see where I end up now that me confession has been made.

I was barely seventeen and I once killed a boy.

In a few moments, I shall open my bedside locker and take out something I lifted from the trusty nurses' trolley when I first began writing. My first story in forty odd years and now, my friend, I am finished. It shall be my last.

Hypodermic.

Morphine.

Lethal dose.

Dime store magic.

TO KILL A WORLD

The world died last night.

It died and no-one noticed. It didn't explode into some huge flaming fireball like in all those science fiction books, or shrivel up into a tiny crumbling rock like in the cartoons. The death wasn't very dramatic, or memorable, or even very noteworthy to other planets. In fact, most people didn't even feel the world give up. It just shuddered and... died.

Countries were declaring some kind of war every other week, people were trying to hurt each other in the most devastating ways, politically powerful mortal were locked in an endless conflict for supremacy. The world couldn't just let people do this to each other, couldn't just watch everyone destroy one another. So it stopped turning and fell apart. Choking on the car fumes and aerosol gases of cosmetic desires, the once-intact ozone layer developed a pin-prick hole which grew over the millennia until unfiltered sun rays began burning up everything on the surface of the world. Air became filled with displaced anger, confusion and despair. Thick with feeling, inhalation of the air was asphyxiating and exhaling was dangerous beyond contemplation. Curses and fearful yells rang out across the plains of the world, but no-one heard the screams. The grainy, hard-baked earth of the sun-dried lands became soaked with spilled blood and the tears of the helpless. At some point, any person decides enough is enough and refuses to take any more. The world had more than enough. It absorbed more than it should have-

-and it broke down.

I am the only being left on this empty planet to document this event. The world is hollow but full of unfulfilled potential of what it could have been had it not died. There is no heat or coldness left on the planet, no lightness or deepest dark. There is just nothing. Humans and animals and inanimate objects once populated this sorry world, but they are no more. No more joyful laughter, vengeful malevolence or indifferent mortals to walk the earth. The world was like a frightened child, suffering incessant abuse from its' self-proclaimed superiors. But it couldn't stand up to them or report them to some uncaring authority, but it did do the only thing it new how to do. It stopped spinning, stopped providing the fuel for their wasted lives.

Only, people were so busy unknowingly killing the world and deliberately destroying the things that inhabited it, no-one realised what was happening until it was too late. Maybe they would have done something about it if they had been aware, maybe they would have carried on regardless, not even I know for sure.

For one too-brief moment last night everybody froze, stopped fighting or playing, and looked at each other. It was as if they _felt_ something change. But then the world died and the people on it just disappeared. Where they went I have no clue. Now the world is dead and silent. Empty and huge. And this is a new opportunity for the world, a second chance. If humans are seen fit to inhabit this world again, this will be their chance to start all over again. A time to right their mistakes.

I wonder if they'll make the same foul ups again? Start killing the world without even realising it? It's human nature to take advantage of the world, an understandable yet unforgivable mortal habit.

But, for now at least, the world is dead and gone. There is nothing left, everything got used up, and the world needs time to be reborn. It died last night, and no-one even knew. Mortal deaths are emotional for some, always noticed and quietly appreciated, but when the whole world dies? Nobody notices. They sensed a change in the air, a shift in the atmosphere, but they didn't care enough to find out what it was. Not that it would have made much difference. The damage had been done.

I can look down at the pitiful pursuits of vengeful mortals, or people polluting the world with their selfish wishes for attention. I can watch them parading and pity them for, while they bask in their ignorance of their actions, I can luxuriate in the knowledge of the consequences. However, compassion and concern do cross my mind. Are they aware enough to know what they are doing? Were they ever? Until the world stopped turning, until it stopped sustaining their worthless lives, they didn't even realise what the world did for them.

And when the world recovers sufficiently and is lured back to life – what then? Will it die again, like it did last night? Or will it simply refuse to work for the human race until it is treated correctly, with the respect and dignity they should be showing to their fellow men? Or will the world let its' inhabitants live, and absorb their endless unknowing abuse indefinitely because their lives are so pathetically short? I wonder if it even matters. Maybe the world was just doing its' job, turning and moving and choking and dying and living again. Maybe that's what it should do.

If only every moment I have observed on this sorry land could have been like the unearthly calm that reigned in that final instant. If everyone had been that forgiving and peaceful in the eons before, perhaps the world wouldn't have given that one last breath and died. I accept that 58 million tiny mortals will have their differences and were united for one instant only in mutual confusion, but merciless killing for years and years can't be put right in one moment. It was too little, too late.

The world died last night and, with it, so did everything it held. I can document this event, tell the story of how the world was killed, but it is beyond my power and wish to resurrect it. That task is left to the beings who need the world.

About the author

Wendy Maddocks lives in Birmingham, England, with her slightly crazy family. She blames them for her twisted imagination. Sanity is not her friend. She enjoys reading and studying, working out and eating cake, which makes her fat and in need of yet another gym session. (Yes, I'm a masochist!) She also has a fear thing about sheep. After graduating from university, Wendy began publishing her own work online and is always working on new writing projects. What will happen when she runs out of ideas?

No, let's not wonder that.

Connect with her on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/WendyMaddocksAuthor

Tumblr - http://wordsbywenz.tumblr.com/

or on Twitter \- @writerwenz84

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