“The blust’ring winds, conspiring with my words,
At my lament have moved the leafless trees,
Disrobed the meadows of their flowered green,
Made mountains marsh with spring-tides of my tears,
And broken through the brazen gates of hell.”
-- The Spanish Tragedy, III. vii

Jake eased his foot off the clutch and the Transit glided to a halt, crunching satisfying on the gravel. His hand hesitated over the volume knob on the sound system, the digital display telling him that a mere thirteen, no, twelve seconds of the Isley Brother’s ‘Behind a Painted Smile’ remained. He sat patiently in his seat, drumming his fingers on the faded plastic dash-board in time to the music. As the CD skipped onto the next track, Jake smartly pressed the power button and then pulled the keys out of the ignition. He swept up the jewel-cases on the seat next in one large hand, stashing them in the glove compartment. The catch stuck the first time, and he had to bang hard on the door by the hinge to get it to shut as tight as he wanted, then locked it; turning the key twice just to be sure. People wouldn’t think twice about robbing a white van in as secluded a location as this, and he was damned if they were going to take his music too. Jake knew from personal experience that the back doors wouldn’t pose more than minute’s difficulty for a sharp kid with a screw-driver. It made no difference that the back and side panels sported signs with letters six-inches tall proclaiming that no tools were left in the van. The padlock that Hunter & Sons Reclaimers had made him fit (‘an insurance thing’, apparently) made it a target whilst doing very little to make it any more secure. The sticky hinges on the right-hand door would probably do more to keep people out. Of course the van really was empty, because Jake needed few tools and carried all that he needed with him in an old-fashioned leather roll-up holder when he was on the job, but bored teenagers and desperate junkies never thought of that now did they?

‘Listen to you’ he said to himself. ‘Straight four months and already you’re talking like Bernard Manning.’ Well, straight enough, anyway. Everyone did a bit of cash-in-hand work now and then didn’t they? It was how things went; the working man had enough on his plate making ends meet without the tax man carrying it all off. It wasn’t like he was claiming benefits or anything, like most of the blokes in his local; plumbers and builders and window-cleaners who should have know better. That was taking money from them that needed it, that was. Kind old gents like Mr. Walker who was stuck in a wheel-chair, who he used to push down to the working-men’s club, or to the White Lion on Saturday to watch the footie, before he got this job. Single mother’s with babbies in push-chairs like his mom had been, or Tina who’d been in his class at secondary school; Tina who gave him a cheery wave and a sweet smile when he drove past her and little Harry on their way to the nursery every morning. Jake knew better than that. But this was his money; he was the one earned it and he didn’t see why the VATman got to take his cut, not when he was just doing the odd favour for a friend out of hours. Especially when that ‘friend’ was his uncle Rex. It was Rex who’d got him this job in the first place; recommended him to Richard Hunter, eldest of the late Mr. Hunter’s sons.

Jake jumped down out of the van, and slammed the door behind him. He bent down to tuck the hem of his jogging bottoms into to the tops of his scuffed black work boots. They were steel toe-capped, like the one’s he’d worn when he was younger, except this time he was using them for kicking debris and not for kicking people. You never knew what kind of crap was in old buildings like this; the people might have left long ago but somehow their rubbish accumulated, as if abandoned structures served as a magnet for decay. Maybe the wind blew it all in, if things were left long enough, or maybe it was the rats carrying things away like Magpies. Barbed wire, used needles, nothing would surprise Jake in a place like this. He’d found an old cut-throat razor in an empty warehouse on the canal side once. The crew had been on the job disassembling an old wrought-iron spiral staircase before demolition; shipping it to the Costa del-sol or the south of France or wherever for some twat with too much money. Maybe even putting it straight back up again in the yuppie-kennels they intended to build on the site. He never really asked, just focused on the job and the quality of the make, marvelling at the filigree work and the lack of tool marks. Eyes fixed on the floor as he struggled with the bolts holding the stair-case into the concrete; he’d noticed the wooden handle caked in grime and dust, kneeling to clear the ashes away that covered it. It was authentic; the wood had been well varnished and was still solid despite the damp, and a stamp on the handle proclaimed it had been ‘machined by Moss & Co. 1868’. Thinking that Rex might pay him a tidy bonus for a find like this, he’d made to slip the razor into his pocket, but not before opening it up and having a sly look at the blade. It had taken him a few seconds to realise that the deep orange stain on the blade was dried blood, not rust. He felt a little sick, and resolved that this was something personal, something that the ghosts of a person and a life (even a life in death) clung on to too strongly for Rex to sell. During his tea-break he’d slipped out and pitched the blade into the canal, feeling like a criminal. Which was strange, because he never felt bad about the things he did for Uncle Rex and they were worse than handling a hundred year old murder weapon.

He doubted he’d find anything like that today though; people might not be religious anymore, but they still respected old secluded churches. Sure, gothy kids might come to drink in the graveyards, but even that was out of deference to the atmosphere; because they knew what they stood for, understood their meaning as a symbol and came to share in it. If they just treated them as a rubbish tip now, well that would be different. But all the things they brought with them; candles, chalk, music, cigarettes, lust and sticky red wine; that was just setting up shop. They might as well have moved the altar out through the door, because when the parish had abandoned St. Oswald’s, when the visiting vicar had finished the act of deconsecrating it, the kids had replaced him in performing the offices of the dead. And you never could deconsecrate grave-yards, not unless you dug up all the bodies. ‘Exhumation’, that was what Uncle Rex called it; the same word he used when he talked about finding Art Deco lamps or mounted butterfly collections in the skips executors filled at house clearances.

Jake sang to himself, sotto voice, as he strode towards the crumbling dry-stone wall encircling the church and its graveyard. “My life’s a masquerade, a world of ‘let’s pretend dear’…” The latch on the gate had wedged itself shut; Jake was about to kick it open but then thought better of it. Crouching on his haunches to get a better look at the mechanism, Jake noticed that one of the screws had worked its way loose, warping the wood and pulling the latch-plate away. Pulling a heavy screw-drive from his belt, Jake set to fitting the plate back flush with the frame. “Since you took your love, the tears are never ending…” He could hear the rhythm of the tune in his head, and turned his hand in time as the screw disappeared back into the wood, seemingly slipping between the individual bands of the grain. Satisfied with his work, he opened then gate to its extreme; bouncing it on its hinges and listening for the screech of metal fatigue. He decided that the hinges needed oiling, and that he would look to it first thing when he and the rest of the crew came to start dismantling the place tomorrow. For now though, he had a job to do.

“But I can’t let you know, that I still need you so-no – ." Hang on. Jake drew up short. Maybe he’d been wrong; no kids had been here, he could tell that much. The graves were more than over-grown; they heaved with nettles, weeds and thistles. No kids had sat here, they couldn’t comfortably. No hands had cleaned the moss from the tomb-stones to make out names or dates either; in fact when Jake leant down at the nearest to try for himself, it took a chisel from his belt to prise away the thick rug of lichen that had formed over it. It came away with a pop, the little roots flaking away chunks of stone with them. The same was true of the other yellows grave-stones surrounding him; each was covered with verdant moss, so thickly in fact that they looked like a field of green shields wedged firmly into the ground. Or, he pondered (not realising he wasn’t the first to do so) teeth. Broken, mouldy teeth.

As Jake approached the church, he noticed that that too had been seized by the same sense of decay. The quaint ivy still curled round the trellis which comprised the church’s porch, but it had grown so long that it had begun to knot itself round the weeds which choked the guttering. Jake ducked under into the porch, and that too was alive with weeds thrusting their way up through the paving slabs. Even the immense wooden door, heavy oak panels studded with iron bolts, seemed to be sprouting mould. He could see a mess of cob-webs in the crack of the door, with curling autumn leaves caught in them. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the ludicrous iron key that the council had provided him with; six inches long and on its own brass ring. Despite the great age of the mechanism, the key slid into the lock with little difficulty. Of course it did, he thought to himself. Uncle Rex had been here only a week ago; dragged the curate, some harmless old fool he’d met in a pub through a friend of a friend (that was how Rex worked) down here to open it up for him on the pretence of ‘taking some rubbings.’ What did surprise Jake however was the force he had to exert upon the door with his shoulder to force it open once the bolts were sprung, as if the oak panels in the frame were pushing back at him.

Finally the door gave and a red-faced Jake burst into the silent, cavernous hall of the church. He took a moment to regain his breath, sucked from him by the cold emptiness inside.

“Whenever you’re near, I hide my tears, behind a painted smile” he gasped to himself. The acoustics of the hall were fantastic; the words echoed back to him from the darkened corners so convincingly that he almost called out for whoever was hiding there. But he deliberately turned his back on that thought, and whatever it would have him believe was skulking there; choosing instead to look at the space when the altar should have been. A massive cross, with a crude Christ suffering, thorns twisting round his skull, hung from the far wall; tomorrow’s work no doubt. Thoughtfully he took a step closer, contemplating the image. Its crucifixition was gorey but realistic; the cross was no polished, squared symbol, but two roughly cut and bound logs. The crown of thorns was strikingly executed, and looked like it was meant to be twisted Hawthorne. Curiously there were no nails holding this Christ to the cross, but blood gushed from his hands and feet nonetheless; more twists of whippy, thorny vines held him in place instead. So much blood, in fact, that Jake began to wonder, as if this were a Catholic church. There were plenty of families in the Midlands with Irish ancestry; tempted across the sea to work as navies cutting the canals that were the life-blood of the region, or as part of the stream of cheap labourers that fuelled the mines and factories. Hadn’t he spent New Year’s Eve in an O’Rourke’s swilling Harp lager and downing pints of Guinness and dancing along to the Ceildeh band with scores of pissed revellers? Singing along to ‘The Wild Rover’ and some song about a JCB, he’d realised that even the accordion player had long since forgotten his heritage enough to be unable to tell Jake from any of the plastic paddies who formed the regular crowd. Taking a step closer to examine the wounds in Christ’s hands and feet, Jake’s heart-beat trilled a little when he saw that there were indeed wounds; holes had been sunk in through the hands into the cross. Holes through which two strands of hawthorn ran, binding Him in place.

Catholics really do like their gore, he mused. This was far from the plain, victim-less crosses he’s seen in the other churches they’d worked on; that little Baptist place where’d they’d replaced the original ceiling beams (improvised with railway sleepers) with authentically aged oak, or St. Martin’s where they’d ripped out the choir screen because it was too ‘High Church’. Or maybe this was specific to a working men’s church; the powers-that-be having figured that gruff miners needed a more terrifying God than the grocers and the druggists in the town centre, to keep them away from dice and the demon drink. It certainly put the fear of God into him. Then he noticed that on either side of the Christ were two smaller wooden statues. Oak again, by the look of them. The two figures were identical, but reversed so that they both faced deferentially towards the crucifix, bowing their crowned heads. Each was missing his left arm below the elbow, and held a sapling in his out-stretched right palm. Jake figured they must be Saint Oswalds.

He glanced down at watch, casually at first, then anxiously as he realised that it was already late afternoon. He willed his mind back from roaming over the ornate masonry imposing carvings, and to the job at hand. He doubted that he’d be disturbed in a place as isolated as this, and even if he was, he had a legitimate reason to be there. Or at least a legitimate reason to be there tomorrow, but if he waved his tools and muttered about beaurocratic cock-ups he reckoned he’d could get away with. That was if he was disturbed during day-light of course; if the work dragged on and it got dark before he realised, like he always forgot it did come autumn, well then people were more likely to call the police than challenge him. And it only took one suspicious copper to recognise him, or call the station and get them to check his name and registration, and then he’d be fucked. Jake had a record, and that would be enough to pull him over night when Hunter & Sons explained that he was off the clock. After all, no copper would believe that a druggie (even an ex-druggie) was putting in voluntary overtime. Nor that he was an ex-druggie for that matter; coppers never could stomach the idea that somebody might change. And if some particularly clever bastard decided to check the sites he’d worked for, or if the pencil-pushers at Hunter & Sons got nervous about insurance premiums and did the job for them, then the whole house of cards’d come tumbling down and that’d be Uncle Rex fucked as well. Not that Jake doubted for a minute that Rex wouldn’t have some sly way of getting out of it. Still, it’d be best to get the job done before it got dark; it wasn’t like he’d bought a torch or anything anyway.

“You can’t imagine the tears and sorrow, behind a painted smile.” Jake strode down the transept to the choir-stalls. They were made of old warped oak too, just like the statues, and they looked ancient. Biting at a nail, Jake tried to remember the stuff Uncle Jake had tried to tell him odd times in the shop when he’d been younger, when he’d picked up some old book or leant on one of the old tea-chests. The church was two hundred years old at the most, he knew that much; the date on the grave stone he’d stopped to examine had been 1830 and it had been one of the earliest ones, closest to the shelter of the church. But these stalls looked much older than that. But all that he could think of was a job he’d done for the firm, early on, taking a broken balustrade out of an old staircase in a posh house out in the country. The starched curate in the green blazer had nearly had kittens when they’d had to resort to the circular saw to get it out. He’d taken great pains to tell them all just how old it was; Elizabethan apparently, and worth more than ‘they’d ever see in a lifetime.’ Jake had spat in his mug of tea when he wasn’t looking, and that had earned him grins from the blokes longer in the tooth than he was. The foreman had made to chuck a drill-bit at him, but even he was fighting to control his laughter round a mouthful of bourbon biscuit. And these choir-stalls; they seemed so much older. Not just the wood, though that seemed pretty ancient itself, but the other essential elements too; the varnish, the dust, even the wood worm holes. All seemed far more ancient than anything his uncle had ever shown him

He knelt down to get a closer look. There they were; the carvings Rex had sent him to retrieve, before the rest of the crew got there tomorrow. A face, somewhere between that of a constipated demon and a kindly old man, with heavy cheekbones and eyebrows like nesting badgers. A face which disintegrated into curling rotten leaves at the edges of the design. A face ringed with a spray of hippocampus which blossomed out of each orifice, before twisting together to form a wreath which could have adorned a door at Christmas, or a war memorial. The eyes had the requisite sadness to stretch to a thousand, or even ten thousand dead, or to a child’s last days of innocence.

As Jake ran his finger over the carving, he felt a slight pang of disgust. Though powerful, the carving was crude. The grain of the wood was too exposed; knots in it had caused the corners of the carpentry to warp and bend. Jake had expected better, had seen better, on Welsh love spoons and antique books of wood-cuts in his uncle’s shop. And the least said about the varnishing, the better. A dark stain started somewhere in the corner of the right eye of the figure and seemed to seep out to cover the whole of the foliate face; at least a shade darker than the original wood. But maybe he could do something about that, back in the workshop (Rex kept for him). As he stood to his feet again, Jake reached for his tools. Wood this old was liable to split; it would be a tricky job chipping away the foliate faces without damaging them beyond what was re-saleable. And too much force would take away most of the backing from the choir stalls themselves, and they had to still look undamaged or Hunters & Sons would be onto him. He held the handle of his chisel to the woodwork, comparing the colour and the grain. Perhaps strong coffee mixed with a little wood glue and a dab of brown paint would be enough to cover the patch of fresh wood that would be left afterwards? Cursing, he realised he hadn’t brought his trestle table with him, and strode back towards the doorway.

“I can’t let you see, all the tears I’m crying.” Jake vaulted the gate to the church-yard with a cheery ease, not noticing the screw he’d replaced already starting to protrude from the latch again. Nor the sticky drop of green sap which seemed to accompany it, staining the wood around it the shade of dead leaves and broken roots. Returning with his trestle, he knocked out the legs and set it in the transept, then set to laying out his tools; biggest to smallest from right to left. He quibbled a little over the smallest of the pyramid files and the bevel, just like he always did, and then set to mixing coffee from his thermos and wood glue in an old baked beans tin. With a judicious squeeze of oil paint from the tube he kept in his tool belt, the resultant paste began to take on then same shade as the choir stalls. Then selecting a particularly sharp bladed chisel from the trestle he put the blade flat against the edge of the first carving and brought up his mallet for a firm stroke. As it connected with the chisel handle, a crack reverberated through the old church like the snapping of bone. The noise was enough to make Jake glance around him, momentarily convinced that the Christ upon the cross had split under the tension of the briars upon Him. Then getting a hold of himself, he surveyed the shadows somewhat closer in case someone had crept in behind him. But as he glanced into each corner he saw nothing, save the foliate mask in his peripheral vision, staring determinedly over his shoulder. With a rising sense of anger, he brought the chisel down harder this time, eager to wipe this smirk away from the furniture. He attacked the face from every possible angle, beating out a staccato rhythm with a sustained barrage of chisel blows, till he began to feel the carving give away from the wood of the choir stalls. Then he brought out a thinner blade, more of a pocket knife than a wood-working tool, and set about prying the mask away. It popped into his hands with a creak like a birthing cry.

* * *

The fifteen other carvings offered no less resistance, and it was grown dark by the time Jake had finished. Applying the last coat of ‘concealer’ to the absence the sad faces had left, he wiped the brush on his leg and brought up his torch to survey his handy work. As ever, he had made a proper job of it, and felt a brief flush of pride which died quickly, in the usual manner, when he remembered that the point of his work was not to be noticed, nor appreciated; merely to be accepted. Each of the carvings sat on the trestle next to him, wrapped in chammie cloths and ready to be delivered to uncle Rex. His hands trembling with the stress of the close work, and his face flushed with concentration spent, he paced the nave once before noticing another door, tucked into the left hand wall besides the alter. The curates door, probably. Evidently it was kept in a better state of repair, swinging open with the slightest of nudges. It wasn’t even locked. But rather than the dim and dusty forgotten rooms Jake had been expecting, instead he found himself standing at the head of a flight of stone flags. He felt the cold night air bring the blood into his cheeks like a slap, and realised that the inside of the church had become hot and humid while he had worked; it wasn’t till he stepped outside that he felt the benefit. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see out across the church yard, over the headstones of the interred corpses to the thick brambles that were the outriggers of the woodland beyond the dry stone wall. In the far corner, an outsize Rhododendron lurked; or at least the suggestion of one. Bringing up his torch, Jake saw that it was the vanguard of the forest’s assault, ripping up the wall with its roots and offering purchase on the surrounding soil for a mess of weeds. But they were withered and stunted, and looked more like straw than real plants. Jake had worked for a landscaper’s once, a long time ago, when he was a different Jake; and not even a Jake most of the time, more like an animal. One of his mother’s boyfriends, a tree surgeon, had eventually been persuaded by Poppy to give the boy a chance. Perhaps he saw a chance to redeem him, and by extension her; get him away from the two-up-two-down little house in Rochester Street and his hand out her purse. Perhaps he just wanted to keep her pliable. Either way it had been a mistake, Poppy’s prince charming had quickly found himself down a hedge trimmer and a hundred quid out the cashbox, whilst Jake was flat out on the floor of a squat with a needle sticking out his arm. Still, Jake was a bright lad and the rides to work had been boring; so he’d listened to the guy talking shop. He knew that Rhododendron’s were the curse of your common or suburban gardener the world over, that their roots were persistent and highly toxic. Even now they would be slowly killing the plants they seemed to shelter. Pretty with it, like all the best poisoners.

“You would pity me, and that would feel like dying.” Jake sat down heavily on the top step. He noticed that with all this thought of toxins, his hands had started trembling again; not with exertion this time, but with longing. Strange that, the way the body adopted the same metaphors as the mind eventually. Job done, he felt he at least deserved a smoke, something to calm his nerves. Fuck, the imagery in that place alone was more than enough to set a man’s nerves on edge. He groped in his pockets for his latest crutch, fumbling till he found the Tobacco tin. Funny too, how addiction had taken him full circle. It’d been weed which had started him off, once upon a time; weed before he’d even smoked his first cigarette. Course he’d hacked up his lungs trying to take it back, and the bigger boys who’d persuaded him to try it in the first place had laughed. But then he’d started to take it back better, blowing smoke rings like he’d seen uncle Rex do with his cigars, and they conceded that this little kid was actually pretty cool. Then it was a gradual graduation; glue, poppers, booze, glue again, coke (but not for long), E, meth, crack, and smack. Then borstal, methadone, fags, more booze. Now back to weed. Inside they’d made him admit he had an addictive personality, but that didn’t actually solve anything. So whenever he felt the bite of longing now, he just skinned up. Stoned was good anyway. Stoned was mellow and contemplative. Stoned was not getting up and going out to get anything harder. Stoned put everything into perspective. Not that he would have gone anywhere if he could. Stoned also tended to make him pretty fucking paranoid, he wasn’t going to lie. Opening the tin he took out the Rizzla and a folded playing card, then lay them on his knee. From the back of the packet of papers he tore a strip of cardboard for a roach. A couple of fags were loose inside, and he picked one at random and started to roll it between the palms of his hands, squeezing out the dark flakes of tobacco into the crease of the paper. Next he picked at the little plastic bag which held his weed, tearing the buds between his fingers and scattering them among the tobacco where they seemed to take root; spring up like tiny shoots among dark soil, or insistent dog-wort on a children’s playground. Carefully replacing the baggie, he licked at his finger before stabbing at the stray shreds, catching them as they darted into the corners of the tin. His greed got the better of him, and rather than returning them to the rest of his stash, each went into the joint. Then with a practiced twist of his wrist, Jake rolled and licked the paper into a stiff firework with a wayward fuse, before tamping it down with the butt of the cigarette. Thus primed, Jake then began to rummage in his pocket for a lighter.

Teasing the touch-paper with the flame, Jake lit his joint and began to smoke it with a resolute but cautious urgency, like a nurse applying disinfectant to a man’s chest before the surgeons crack open his ribs. Taking long, methodical drags he felt his composure begin to return. He became a dragon; a dragon who had lost the fire in his belly, reduced to shooting spurts of smoke from his nose. He knew that in exchange he was gradually sacrificing his grasp on reality, but he would rather meet paranoia head on than be held at siege by doubt; doubt which might eventually undermine him. Drugs held few surprises anymore for Jake; the novelty was really nothing new to him. He knew what to expect, even when what he was expecting were hallucinations. Content with familiarity, nerves steadied and disorder restored to his mind, Jake began to relax. Pleased with the ache in his arms and his shoulders which reminded him of careful work painstakingly done, he thought of the meeting with Rex later, and of the pride his uncle would take in him as he greedily un-wrapped his prize. With only the brief work of loading the van to be done, Jake’s fixed on another joint before he left.

But then something happened which surprised Jake greatly.

A sickly sweet smell began to wind its way into Jake’s nostrils; sweeter than the green he was smoking, sweeter even than the sandle-wood incense he used to burn at home to hide his smoking sessions from his mother. Bemused, Jake looked about him, and saw a fleshy pink smoke curling about him. At first he thought it was coming from his joint, that the weed was taking hold and had washed the colour out of vision, but then looking down he saw that the fumes were twisting out of a crack in the slabs at his feet like a snake out of a basket. His eyes grew heavy and other colours began to appear in the smoke; mustard yellow and lime green. He fought to get a hold of himself, focused till sweat began to pour from his forehead, but the smell was suffocating now -- like cloying marzipan.

Then out of the corner of his eye he caught movement. Springy lengths of vine seemed to unfurl themselves from the bushes which loomed in the corners of the graveyard, and the grass and dirt in front of him bulged and writhed like the fur of a dead fox alive with maggots.

Jake lurched to his feet in horror, stumbling up the stairs back into the church.

His trainers echoed on the cobbles -- he tripped rather than ran across the slates. He dared not look back preferring to outrun his terror, but he risked a glance at his feet and saw the thick paisley smoke grasping at his ankles.

He ran harder, sprinting for the trestle where his tools lay. Scrabbling at the table, he grabbed for the nearest of the carvings. As he did his hands jolted the cloth enclosing it loose, to reveal a staring wild face. Not the same face he had chipped from the wood of the choir stalls; this one was contorted into a rictus grin. Jake dropped it like a man bitten. It clattered on the floor, staring back at him. He broke its gaze and looked upwards.

Christ writhed on the cross. The thorns binding him leapt and snapped through the holes in his hands and feet, jolting him like a man electrocuted.

“If I can’t have your love, I don’t need your sympathy.”

Jake felt faint. He vomited thick black bile over his shoes. He grabbed at the next carving on the table, wrapping it tighter. He threw himself at the door, over the threshold and out into the churchyard. The gate collapsed as he fell into it, catching his foot and pulling him to the ground. He crawled out from under it, dragging himself to his feet and toppling into the side of the transit. Scrabbled in his pockets for the keys; couldn’t find them. Scrabbled harder, tore through the linen pocket lining with desperate fingers till he scratched bloody gouges into his thighs. He kept digging, taunted by their jingling, wincing at each as it echoed through the church yard like a cow-bell. As he did he hunched into the side of the van; too terrified too turn, yet feeling with each second the hairs on the back of his neck screaming to him as hope fled; its feet as leaden as his, as leaden as those of a convulsing man in the fit of night terrors.

Then he found them, jammed them into the lock, swung out the door as hard as he could, half climbed half pulled himself into the cabin. He slammed the door, not thinking to lock it. Get a grip Jake. Fists clenched round the steering wheel, muscles spasming. Breathe. Key in the ignition, twist, hear the engine purr, mirror, signal –

Jake froze, his eyes pulled to the tree line.

He didn’t hear the cracking.

“Whenever you’re near, I hide my tears, behind a painted smile.”

* * *

Sound came back to the lane in waves. First the silence, then noises human ears couldn’t detect, then the rustle of the leaves and the growing of the trees. Then the distant groaning of an airplane, the horn of a train and the rumble of cars on the M6. Sounds that carried on the wind in the night but could not be distinguished by day. Then, much louder, the coughing of the transit’s engine and the screeching of the car alarm. And above it all, the stuttering of the CD player, jolted into life.

“Behind a – Behind a – Behind a painted smile.”

Jake might have heard it all, but he couldn’t see the transits lights blaring in the darkness or the buttons on the dashboard winking on and off. Nor could he see the blood collecting in puddles in the floor space, dribbling down the black plastic of the steering wheel. Or the sparkling of shattered glass, smashed into fragments sprinkled across the dashboard and the dirt around the van. Or his own face, crumpled and toothless, crushed into the console by the weight of fresh green wood that lay across him. The right side of Jake’s face, the one that hadn’t broken against the van as Jake was thrown forward, was a mess of grazes and lacerations where splinters of ash speared his face. One had passed through his cheek and buried itself in the soft flesh of his tongue. A branch snapped into a javelin pinioned him through his shattered scapula. Cruel knots of wood like meat hooks buried themselves in his cracked skull.

"January the first was his birthday. I remember: tying a scarf round my neck; pulling on a coat over just too many layers and feeling uncomfortably hot; being so eager and just a little sick to get outside that I ran out in trainers, not my boots - feeling the cold ache and dampness as snow melted into them. Mom had bought a long roll of card that read 'Happy Birthday' and I paced it out into the snow under the window. The ends began to roll after me, so I took off my shoes to weigh each end down, barefoot."

It's a horrible today; rainy and humid as hell (though hell would probably be quite dry...) so I'm thinking cold thoughts and sat in front if the fan in my room. Digging through my moleskein (a present from then brunette) for things to post, I found this. Date says January 30th which was the first time we had proper snow in Cambridge while I've been there, so I blew off work to fuck around in the snow with Henry and then went to the library to write this. The picture at the top is one Henry took, and should be on a Selwyn post card to be honest. It's a view of the gardens and chapel. As for the memory that prompted this story; my dad's birthday. Not sure how old I was, but everything else is really clear. I can even remember which trainers I was wearing; my first 'trendy' ones, Nike's I think. I also remember when they got so ratty my mom gave them to a charity shop. She had to wait till I'd gone to school, because that was pretty much the only time I took them off, even though my toes were starting to stick out at the front. As you can tell, I was rather attached to those trainers...

Prologue

Simon stared at the screen for a moment, willing a title, inspiration even, onto the page in front of him. The page itself was a placeholder; a representation of something yet to be formed, and a mark of absence. It existed to remind him of the potential he was wasting, seven years of education, a childhood spent reading, two more years studying English Literature at university, and seventeen gigabytes of hard disk space on the laptop sat in front of him. The library was warm and still. People sought refuge from the brightness of the day outside, from the harsh dazzling realities of exams and the outside world by sheltering inside, building a wall of textbooks and revision notes around them, adding to their defences as the day went on with mineral water bottle turrets. Screwed up sheets of A4 were boulders ready to rain down on invaders who attempted to breach the panicked, paranoid siege. Further books lined the walls, to add to the walls as the moment for action approached, and the students desperately attempting to fend off the inevitable. They were categorised and indexed, marked out by size and weight and relative need; the medical students, for instance, against whom the sallies of the forces camped outside were most pernicious, most frequent and most concerted, had their own veritable quarry all to themselves. For them also, the consequences of defences broken, of walls smashed or gates opened from inside, were the most severe. The humanities students, for example, could whether a breach, fight a rear-guard action, prevaricate for a year or two, and stave off the forces gathered outside for a little longer. For the Medics however, one mine, one treachery, even the one examination arriving through the privies with stealth and catching them unawares, spelt disaster. The citadel would be ransacked, and the dreams and aspirations it sheltered instantly and irrecoverably put to death.

Only a single book sat next to Simon however. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Apes of God’. The topic of his dissertation and the excuse (for he felt he needed one) for sitting in an obscure corner of the library steeling himself to write. He felt like an impostor, as uninvited in the library as a bookworm. Others came here to pluck books from shelves, stockpile them against a harsh summer term of exams, digesting them throughout the year. He however was there, he thought, to add to the sum total of knowledge; to create rather to devour. While his writings would acquire no class mark, he still felt as he sat there that they would hold a physical presence in that library. After all, sitting there typing away, was he not taking as much room as the first twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? Could he really ever entertain the notion that what he was to write would ever hold as much significance as ‘A – Bouzouki’ to ‘Posie – Quelt’? That was where the feeling of unwelcomeness stemmed from; the thought that if he wrote something poor or formulaic he would be wasting the precious resources of the library; eating into the limited resources of space, time and energy which could on e day be reserved for some more significant, accomplished work. And that was only if he even felt the courage to begin, because not writing, telling himself each day that he had something to contribute, toying over ideas for characters and dialogue in his head and storing them away in his little black mole skein for an indefinite future novel, that was the coward’s way out; an ontological death as pronounced as jumping off one of the stacks with a length of lighting flex tied around his neck to dangle (jerking madly) between ‘832 German lit: medieval-17th C’ and ‘834 German literature: 19th C’. And all the while, from 827 Eliot, Joyce and Forster would look on bemused.

Far better then to challenge himself, for all artists, he thought, must suffer. So he had resolved that he and his degree would suffer together, and that was why he was sat in the library on April 14th (three weeks two days and counting till the exams, his calendar would exclaim each morning, except of course the numbers kept dwindling) trying to write rather than trying to revise. And if he really wanted to challenge himself, then he was going to attempt something he had never tried before. No half-formed ideas, no plot or character archetypes, and no ideas stolen from the world around him. All he had allowed himself, he mused, was 2.5 GHz of processing power, roughly twenty thousand books worth of inspiration, and whatever talent for writing he believed he had. And still nothing. One of those faculties was failing him, but the lilting guitar melodies from his headphones told him that neither technology nor the creativity of others were what was at fault.

He reached for the book next to him, spinning it with a finger till it righted itself, then skimmed his finger down the side facing away from him, down the pulpy mass of pages, till he stopped at random on one and opened it. He was looking for one word to spur him on, one word from which he would force his mind to start to construct a flimsy narrative structure, on the stout foundation of the words (not shoulders) of a giant. He expected to stick a pickaxe into that word and strike a fountain that would flow from it into his head, and that he could then channel it through the aqua-ducts of synapses, fingers and keys onto the screen in front of him. He was preparing himself to place a wealth of expectation on that word, imagining a veritable, rich seam from which a short story would tumble with the barest of scrapes with a trowel or an archaeologist’s toothbrush.

He should have realised that the sentences of another are not flaky sediment that can be brushed away to reveal fossilised ideas beneath which can be plundered beneath, but as carefully constructed a wall as those his fellow students were constructing further down the aisle. He shouldn’t have expected so much.

The word was ‘the’. He swept his finger to the word next to it, taking that one to into his scope. ‘The Encyclical’ then.

Explicit prohemium primi libri.

The Argument

Juliet checked her email compulsively. Each message, she reasoned, could bring urgent news; changes to her examinations perhaps, notifications of possibly life-destroying administrative errors, or notices of congratulation awarding her bursaries she admittedly had never even bothered applying for. Perhaps even the Nobel prize, ten years earlier than even she had dreamed of (since that was when she planned to begin her research in epidemiology). Just because the messages she received the most frequently were those offering the chance to ‘Remain harder longer’, or to ‘$ubmerge her in JizZ’ didn’t mean she could ignore the subsequent batch. After all, she was training to be a doctor. She had responsibilities. And what were the countless testimonials in favour of generic Viagra and horny goat weed but particularly evangelical forms of pharmaceutical advertising? Doctors were always receiving branded pens, desk toys, and even wads of non-consecutively numbered twenty pound notes. Things were no different for medical students, she reasoned, except the incentives were smaller to match the prestige of the practioner. She was, to most of the medical establishment, dirt; fit only to work soul-sapping hours and to lick the boots of superiors and supervisors. She should be flattered that jdixon@gmail (doubtless an industry insider) was eager to contact her with such exciting prospects.

As regularly as she pointed her internet browser email-wards then, and as self-indulgently extravagant her expectations of what waited her there became, she was not expecting the encyclical. ‘Class of 2003’ the subject line read. She had indeed left school in 2003, from the high school in Kidderminster. Seeing this, her eyes scrolled back up the page as she turned the mouse-wheel, curious to see who the message was from. But whilst the address line literally ached with individuals, some whom she recognised from their invariably initial derived designations, many she did not. ‘SalmonGrey’ for instance could be, well, anybody. It only took a moment of stupidity and a blank mind to doom someone to an email address that was as ridiculous as the person who chose it had thought it familiar. The muses do not hand out inspiration equally, and sometimes the person searching for it has to turn instead to posters, books, song lyrics, or even as it appeared here, to tins of emulsion in a study presumably awaiting redecoration.

It was an anonymous message then. Though that could be the fault of anything, from the Internet Service Provider to her Browser, but she deduced that this must be suspicious. Anonymous messages were, she believed, the preserve of ‘phishers’, ‘data miners’ and the numerous other virtual terrorists that the PC magazine she had bought with the laptop had threatened. Having decided to be dubious, her eyes scanned down the screen to the message itself.

The Message

Dear All

I hope you are all doing well, and that you are without exception happy and successful. I really do. Regardless of whether you knew me at school, or if we studiously ignored each other over the tables at the canteen or in the hall. Regardless of whether we only talked when boredom or an awkward seating plan brought us together, or even if you actively hated me behind my back or to my face. I’m saying this because I wanted to free myself from any bad karma, because something made me realise recently that no matter how unhappy your time at school, or how little you might like the people around you, they have an effect upon you. And despite the fact that you might never consider it, you do on them to.

There is no easy way to tell you all this. I am certainly no the best person to do so, and I never thought for a moment that something like this might happen. But that (that I never considered it, I mean) is why I think you all should know. Rachel Taylor… I’m not sure if any of you remember her. She was always a quiet girl at school. Quiet enough to appear anti-social. I didn’t even become aware of her till I started my final year, where she and I were two of five in Mr. Fletcher’s set studying Chemistry. To be honest, I didn’t even recognise her from around school. There was something unassuming about her. She didn’t stand out at all, even as a geek, though I assumed she was the first time I met her. I later learned she had transferred later on, joining halfway through from some other school where she hadn’t been happy. I think her parents had decided that she would fit in better a St. Mary’s but I’m not sure she did. She moved form three times in her first term, she told me, which might be why nobody really noticed her. I really hope this has jogged some people’s memories.

Anyway, we were lab partners, and though I thought she was beneath me, we worked well together. She seemed to know what she was doing, and always listened hard to the teacher. I let her do a lot of the work, but I wasn’t… I don’t think I was using her. I think I gave her something back too, because as we worked she used to ask me questions, about what I’d done at the weekend, where I’d been last night. She seemed to be particularly interested in who was going out with who, so I used to tell her all the gossip from around school. She used to tutt at what I told her, but I think secretly she used to love hearing second-hand about the things the more popular kids were doing. And she would never talk to the class or ask questions. If we ever had to do a presentation or we needed to clarify something with Fletcher, she used to make me do it. In the end I think he decided that it was her, not me, who was the dead weight. When the exams came we revised together in the library in town for a few hours, and she lent me her notes. She’d made, like, twelve sheets of notes on each topic. All underlined in coloured pens, with little flash cards and everything. It was thanks to her I passed Chemistry that year, especially after Mike dumped me the week before; sorry to drag that up if you ever get this message Mike, but I think this is important too, because I told Rachel all about it.

Imagine my surprise then when I arrived at my university orientation day and Rachel was there too! I’d thought I was the only person from St. Mary’s going, but Rachel was sat at the back of the hall. I was excited about making friends, and trying my best to appear cool, and I didn’t even notice her till she got up to leave. I think she must have thought I’d ignored her, because she avoided talking to me after that. To tell the truth though, I’d never even considered that she might be there. She didn’t fit into my impression of what life would be like at Uni, and maybe I blocked her out. I never really saw her after that, after one time when she dodged me on the way into a lecture. I didn’t see her at dinner, or in the library, and she certainly wasn’t in the bar. I kind of assumed she’d found her own group of friends and spent all her time with them. And to be honest I didn’t look for her. I later learned that I was wrong. The girl who lived next door told me that Rachel ate all her meals in her room. I don’t think Rachel had any friends there at all not real friends. Maybe she had people she sat next to in the library or in lectures, but… I think Rachel was terribly alone at University, and that she couldn’t take it.

As I said, I’m not the best person to say this, but I think you all deserve to know. Rachel, she committed suicide in our third term. She slit her wrists and died in the bath, on the ground floor of one of our accommodation blocks late one Friday night. Worse, nobody really thought to look for her over the weekend. It was the cleaner who found her on the Monday. This would have been about the 16th June, a few days before she went home. I think the staff assumed at first that it was exam stress, but Rachel didn’t have any exams that year. Later they told me she’d been cutting herself.

I did have exams that year, but when they were over I took the time to visit Rachel’s grave. I hadn’t really expected to meet anybody there; I kind of assumed Rachel would have been as alone in death as she was in life, but the first time I went there were fresh flowers under her tombstone. I hadn’t remembered to bring anything, so I went back a few later with and lit a candle for Rachel like my dad taught me in the church when I was a little girl. When I went to leave someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me who I was. It was Rachel’s brother, Allen Taylor. I think you will all remember him. He was two years above us at the boy’s school; went out with Sophie when she was head girl. I never made the connection between the two of them though. He asked why was there. When I told him, he asked if me and Rachel had been close at Uni. He gave me a business card with a contact number and an email address, and asked me if I had any photos of Rachel could I please bring them to him. He was back living with them, after her death, and was sure they would be happy for anything that reminded them of her. They had so little, he said. Rachel was a quiet girl, never drew attention to herself and dodged cameras, and now they realised they had nothing to show them what kind of woman she had grown into.

God help me, but I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bear to talk to them and have them ask me questions about Rachel and have to lie back to them, because each time I did would have made me think that there was something else I could have done for her. I know that must have hurt them really badly, but I had nothing for them; no pictures, no anecdotes, nothing. I couldn’t have pretended to them that daughter lead a normal life, and I couldn’t lie and tell them that it had been a happy one. So I’m sending this message to you all, not just because I think that everyone should remember Rachel, but because some of you out there must have been closed to her at school than I was. She must have had other friends. How can one person go through more than seven years of education without being close to anyone? Someone out there must have been close to her. Whoever you, please reply to this address, and send me whatever you have. We can arrange to meet if you’d like. I’d like to know what Rachel was really like, what the people who knew her though of her. Otherwise, please send me any pictures or anything else you have. I’m trying to put together a photo album we can give her parents, as a gift from the people who knew and remember Rachel. Please, there must be someone out there who can help. I mean, no girl can live her life without affecting the people around her in some small way, can she? There’s no way that I was Rachel’s best friend, or that she could have been so invisible to everybody. Is there?

Please don’t hesitate to contact me. I miss you all, and again wish you all the best. Our school days really were the happiest, weren’t they?

Love

Jennifer Blake x x x x x x

The Resolution

Juliet looked at the message with puzzlement. She didn’t recognise the name Rachel Taylor, nor Allen Taylor. The head girl in her year hadn’t been called Sophie. In fact, there hadn’t been just the one; Claire, the teacher’s favourite had been unceremoniously stripped of her position after a video circulated of her performing fellatio on the Rugby captain from the boy’s grammar down the road. Her rival Katherine had taken the position for the remaining term and a half of school. She’d done Chemistry A-level too, but had never had a Mr. Fletcher, and didn’t know one. She certainly didn’t know a Jennifer Blake, and from the sound of the message the girl had been one of the more popular people in her year. None of this was true then, she thought.

Then, scrolling through the email again she saw where the confusion had arisen. Jennifer talked kept mentioning a St. Mary’s. This was a message to the class of 2003, but not her class of 2003. Juliet’s school, the high school to everyone in her home town, had been just that; Kidderminster High. This was a message from another girl at another school. Reading the address line a second time, she realised this was why there was no sender, and why she recognised so few of the email addresses it had been sent to. The message had been forwarded to her; forwarded once or perhaps several times. Re-reading, she realised the message could have come from anywhere. St. Mary’s was as generic a name as any for a secondary school, and the references to a university were similarly vague. This tragedy could have been begun in any school in the country, and unfolded at any university. Indeed, it was only because it was written in English that Juliet assumed it had happened in Britain. The exams mentioned in the message were neither A-levels, nor SATs. This encyclical could have begun life in any English-speaking country in the world.

Somebody had read Jennifer’s message and not been able to help. But in the hope that somewhere this Rachel had had a friend they had forwarded the message on. Someone who had recognised the sadness of Rachel’s plight. Someone who had noticed the note of anguish in Jennifer’s message, the unspoken plea; ‘please don’t let it be my responsibility to look after the lost and the neglected and the forgotten, but dear god please tell me that someone will.’ In doing do, that person had created a shrine to Rachel. They had set rolling a little rocky ball of repressed emotion that turned grew larger each time the message was forwarded, until it hit like an avalanche of grief. Thanks to the person who had forwarded that message, perhaps even to everyone in their contacts list, Rachel was known to more people in death than she ever was in death.

And without really knowing what she was doing, Juliet found herself doing the same.

Tune of the moment: Cool for Cats - Squeeze