A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Read online

  The dry fibres caught instantly. Jack screamed, a high, hysterical note, the flame lighting up his face. The rope thrashed in my hands, like a snake once more. A snake of snapping, crackling fire. I threw it at him and ran.

  He screamed again as I reached the door, and something made me turn around.

  Jack stood rooted to the spot in the hall, terror on his face. The burning rope had fallen at his feet, and formed a ring of fire about him. The whitish smoke poured up and billowed away, and with it came the whispers I’d heard as I approached the house. And then, from the shadows in the flat, I saw movement. Pale figures stepped forward, towards Jack, uncaring of the flames that raced across the carpet and up the walls, even though they were naked. They were pallid and gaunt, and their dark eyes burned with something cold and reptilian.

  ‘Man!’ Jack screamed to me. ‘Don’t leave me like this! Man!’

  But there was nothing I could do. He’d made his bed, made his deal. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t have interfered.

  Their pale hands were all reaching out. Jack’s knees buckled and he sank down. His face grew more gaunt; his hands were thin bundles of sticks. He was losing all that he had taken.

  I tore myself away from the sight and ran out through the front door, slamming it behind me. Jack screamed again. I didn’t stop running till I was out of the house and in my car, and driving. I wept all the way home.

  The next day I learned the house had burned to the ground. Everyone inside had got out, except for one man, a tenant on the top floor called John Edwards. They found his remains among the ashes. No one was able to explain the forty other sets of fragmentary human remains that were found with him.

  Sheila emigrated a few months later, to Australia with a new boyfriend. By then she wasn’t worried about me anymore; Lorry had come back and we were pretty happy. Apparently Mad Dog was serving a life sentence for murder, and had found Jesus; he’d written to her saying he could no longer see her, as she was part of a life now over

  It’s been two years since then. Lorry and I are still together. We’re even talking about trying for a kid. I suppose stranger things have happened.

  Yes, life is good. I’m happy.

  But now and again I remember Jack. I try to remember the good times, and while I’m not religious, now and again I sneak into church and light a candle and hope for the best. But I don’t think it’ll do much good.

  Even if I’d wanted to interfere, I couldn’t have. But even so . . .

  Had I wanted to? Yes, of course I had.

  He was my friend.

  . . . And Dream of Avalon

  WHEN ALL YOU THOUGHT would hold you up gave way, where else was there to go but back? Matthew had been able to think of nowhere, but all the same, at the slip road, he stopped the car.

  There’s a time you’re attached to as though by elastic; sooner or later, it pulls you back again. Perhaps it’s when you’re a child; perhaps later. When you’re, say, nineteen—friendless childhood and unhappy schooling behind you—and at college, yet to collide head-on with realities like mortgages, bills, salaries, and jobs that become a ball and chain instead of a means to an end.

  He couldn’t see the house from here, only the lake, sparkling in the summer sun. He rubbed his face. It hadn’t been a short journey; he felt equal parts tired and foolish. Someone else would be living there now, or staying there at least. Students, maybe. And what would he say to them? What could he?

  I was here once. So what? they’d say. I was like you once. They’d surely turn their faces from him then, rejecting the inevitability of what lay ahead, its narrowing down of choices, so sure there was a way out, to escape the leaden monotony that seemed to grab everyone else. Like death, you believe, in that one and golden time, that it can never happen to you. As he’d believed, that summer.

  As much as he still wanted to believe that some achieved that escape velocity, he doubted it.

  What do you want?

  To touch base once more, perhaps. Be reminded of how it had been, and felt. Let the old magic rub off on his fingers again, as though it could heal him, or at least point him towards some private Avalon.

  Stupid, a self-made superstition, but it was all he had, a measure of how low he’d sunk. There might be no magic left. Only bricks and mortar, dull and prosaic as all else now. But he could hardly leave emptier than he was.

  So, in the end, he drove down.

  There were still trees lining the sides of the slip road, long white silver birches, as the gravel spat and crackled under his wheels. Back then, he’d thought of white columns, marble in the moonlight as he’d driven down with the rest, all smashed on fat, leafy joints. Today, he saw the dark spots on their bark, pittings of lichen or moss, and could only think of bones driven into the soil.

  Rounding the road’s last bend, he felt something break achingly and drop away from him; a last rag of hope, perhaps. The forecourt had come into view. It had been a clean asphalt apron, back then. Now he could already see the shrubs bulging and cracking the surface, casting long spidery shadows in the evening light.

  He almost stopped then, almost turned back. But somewhere on the gravel road he’d passed a point of no return, and could only let the car cruise to a halt almost of its own accord, as if the sight that met his eyes had drained the battery as it had him.

  There was the house, all right, the big old house called Avalon. Or what remained of it. Most of the roof had fallen in, and the east wall. The windows were empty, and around those not thickened with ivy into green-edged holes, the smoke of some ancient burning still lingered in smudges of black. The door was gone too; the sunlight, breaking in through the roof, showed him glimpses of the desuetude beyond.

  It had been a beautiful place; even he, religiously left-wing as only the young and middle-class can be, had had to admit. The wide lawns were a snarl of weeds now, the flowering bushes long choked and gone. The ornamental fountain, with its Manekin-Pis style figurine they’d laughed over and, one drunken night, sought to emulate, had been smashed, two hollow legs, green with verdigris and slimy moss, all that remained. Beside the lawn, more ivy rose in a wide low hump, like a barrow for his hopes. Wind flicked loose creepers up from the bodywork of a long-abandoned car. It looked like a Jag, an old E-Type, like the one Ben used to drive. Ben had been car crazy; he’d bought the Jag from his dad’s scrapyard and spent years lovingly restoring it. Matthew remembered it on the road to Avalon that first night as they’d all come down, red paint glinting darkly in the moonlight, and Ben with one arm hung out the window and the wind blowing sandy hair back from his chiselled face. Some part of himself, Matthew thought, might have been in love with Ben. But only a little. Not like with Emily.

  Even a ruin can be beautiful, in its way, but not this one, not one so fresh and rich in personal significance. For perhaps the first time in his adult life, Matthew wept. Only briefly, and mostly dry sobs, but a couple of tears seeped out. That in itself might be something; he’d never been a man who easily cried.

  In a sense, perhaps, it was better this way. There were no residents, no one to disturb his reverie, no one to chase him off or break the spell. He would not be made to feel a sad, lonely failure with so little to show he could only come back to moon over his lost youth. He knew all that already. He had not come here to be reminded of it, but to forget. And to remember. That summer. The boys of summer.

  ‘The Boys of Summer’. That had been their song. Don Henley. Middle-aged eighties pop-rock he’d ordinarily have turned his oh-so-serious nose up at. But it had fitted them. Cheap sentiment, perhaps, but at the time it had seemed so right, to all of them—young and fit, clean and happy, full of wild joy. Immortal. For a moment, the memory of it was so fresh, so clear, he thought he could hear it again, faintly, as if playing on the stereo of a passing car, or inside the shell of its former home, but when he stopped humming it, there was only silence.

  Eight weeks it had lasted, eight golden, glorious weeks. It had been Holly’s ide
a. Against all expectations they’d been bosom friends—well, maybe it hadn’t been so unlikely. Holly had been higher up the class scale than him or practically anyone else on their year. And like him, in rebellion against her parents, her upbringing, against everything. It was before you realised the leaden strength of monotony, mediocrity, and apathy, their slow grinding force, when the feeling you had, the passion you knew, the fire you held, seemed great enough to blow them all away.

  Avalon had belonged to a friend or relative of her family, Matthew forgot which. Had never been able to remember, even then. It hadn’t mattered, wasn’t important. Whoever he was—it had been a he, Matthew knew that at least—he’d been willing to rent it out for the summer. Cellar stocked, wine, beer and food. A bargain rate, seeing as it was Holly. One lump sum, if she and her friends could drum it up between them.

  And of course they had. A dozen of them, twenty? He’d racked up an overdraft at the bank for spending-money, dealt a little grass and speed on the side for the rest. Driving down crammed into half-a-dozen beat-up old cars, through a hot summer night. Looking up to see the trees’ spread branches whip and cut and slice the moon to ribbons that healed effortlessly back again. Stoned to glory on the back seat, he’d mused on the image and thought it fit them all—their light, their brightness, would never die, could never be broken. He’d even—God help him—written a poem that was probably still in his flat somewhere, or his ex-wife’s loft, never to see daylight again, he hoped.

  That said, the others had whooped and applauded when he’d read it out that summer—the second night? The second week? The second month? Hands had thumped at his back, cans of lager had been thrust towards him and he’d glowed. Such pride. Such pride.

  Which goeth before a fall.

  The air in the car felt suddenly stale; unbreathable. He threw the door open, climbed out, stretched aching limbs. There was a wind off the lake, light and not too cold, and this at least still smelt fresh and clean. On the far side of the water, there was the hill, still thick with trees—that, at least, hadn’t changed, hadn’t fallen and decayed—that curved round on his left to bracket the lake’s far end. To his right, a face of stone rose sheer to cup the road. On the hill, willows trailed in the water, giving way to birches and oaks further up and finally pines at the top. These last twitched in a sudden gust of wind; he smelt their sap.

  There was no traffic on the road. He’d lived too long in the city, or long enough; the great hush that descended, broken only by the soughing of trees and the soft slap of wave on stone, was alien to him. But not unpleasant. He felt no sense of threat. Instead, he felt cushioned and comforted, and not alone.

  He walked across the forecourt until it gave way to the concrete landing stage. Weeds prised up through the gaps; the old mooring rings were thick hoops of rust. Yes, there’d been boats here; they’d taken them out on the lake time after time, right across to the hill. He went to the edge and looked down. The guardrail on the stone steps was rusted too; the wind might crack it if it rose a notch. The shore it led down to was gravel, grey contrast to the gold at the hill’s foot, sand soft as icing sugar. And there was still a boat. It slouched in the shallows with its stern full of stagnant water. Matthew felt his brightening mood dim a little, but then looked back across the lake, at what remained the same. He sat down at the edge of the landing stage, feet dangling into space, and watched the sun begin to sink.

  There was a noise behind him, thin and faint, a dry scratching. It was sudden and he jumped, but when he looked there was nothing to see, except a flicker of motion in one of Avalon’s empty windows. A frond of ivy, caught by a gust. He relaxed again, gazing back towards the hill.

  He’d gone boating out there with Holly a couple of times. Strange, really. He’d chased—well, yearned or lusted after—most of the girls on his course at one time or another, but never her. She wasn’t unattractive, with a squarish, strong-boned face and thick honey-coloured hair, but there had never been anything between them of that kind, a circuit with some vital connection absent.

  Now Emily, on the other hand . . . he couldn’t help but smile. Emily had that effect on everyone. Always smiling, whether in mischief or simple joy it was impossible to tell. It had been puppy love, maybe, but love, still. And then there had been Camilla, Claire, and Chloe, the three C’s as they were called, and Danielle—and Holly, and Sam, and Brian, and Pete, and Adam, and Ben, and Foxy, and Karl . . .

  All the boys of summer. Even the girls.

  Nothing lasts. He sighed. That was the sorrow of it. Everything ends.

  The sun sank a little lower. The green began to fade from the hillside, though the dusk was still warm. Silhouetted, its lines grew jagged, less comforting than before. It occurred to him that at nineteen he might have found some meaning there, but he doubted it. At nineteen he might have flattered himself he could make a poem of it that wouldn’t be excruciatingly painful to read in maturity, but the metaphor intrinsic to the image he’d have rejected as too bleak.

  He’d gone up the hillside once with Emily. They’d packed some food and borrowed the boat. He remembered the heady pine scent, the dappled cool of the tree cover, the bright jags of sun through the mesh of leaves and branches that cut the moon by night. That and the excited banging of his heart throughout, the silent prayer she’d agreed to this jaunt for the same reason he’d suggested it, and the soaring, unbelieving joy when he knew she had.

  The wind wrinkled the lake surface; the hilltop’s jagged lines wavered and crumpled. Something skittered behind him. He turned in time to see it skip from the cracked asphalt before it spun down like a sycamore seed.

  It landed face-down, some glossy image on its fallen side. A photograph; taken, discarded, caught by the wind. He turned it over.

  That night, one of the nights—they’d all blurred seamlessly into one another, impossible to separate or pin down—they’d all got together in the front garden, and Holly had set up her camera on a timer before running back to them, dropping down beside him where he was on one knee, an arm flung casually round Emily’s shoulders, the other slipping round hers, their warmth drawn close and treasured, lover and friend. . . .

  And then they’d all gone home. The summer had ended, as everything does. The first breath of autumn had ghosted through the birches, sycamores, and oaks; the willow trees had wept their leaves away. The three C’s had left first, inseparable as always; all three had sought and found jobs with a firm in London. Later that day, it had been Adam and Ben; Danielle too, bickering with Adam, their raised voices fading with the engine’s growl. A note of discord, even then; a harbinger.

  Over the next few days, the crowds had dispersed. Emily had gone the day before he was due to leave with Holly and Sam. They’d hugged and kissed to such an extent that the others had made retching noises and stuck their fingers down their throats. The intensity of the parting, remembered now, seemed to come almost from a foreknowledge of what was coming to an end. They’d exchanged phone numbers, promised to call. She’d waved from the car. He’d cried a little. Others had teased him, more or less gently, but only Holly had understood, bringing him a joint as he sat in the garden, hugging him round the shoulders, talking softly, seeking to reassure.

  It would have been kinder to be brutally honest, perhaps, but had even Holly known?

  In the end you could sum it up in two short words: Summer’s gone.

  She and Emily were the only ones he’d stayed in touch with afterwards, but even their signals had faded. Less and less to hold them together; finally, nothing at all.

  Just before they’d lost contact, Holly had told him about Sam.

  Years later, there’d been one final encounter: he’d run into Karl in a Manchester bar, tired, run down, and a good two stone heavier than Matt remembered him; he’d just lost his job, and Matt had been all at a loss for a single word that could help.

  The photograph in his hands was a little worse for wear, but considering the time elapsed it was virtually pristine. Th
ere they all were. All the boys of summer.

  The wind gathered and blew again; the picture leapt from his hand before he could grip it tight. The wind caught it once more; it spun and flew over the dulling lake like a dazzled moth.

  The wind’s hiss died and left only the lapping of the lake, into which another sound intruded. Music; sweet music.

  He turned, slowly, towards Avalon. Don Henley’s voice grew louder; the guitars built, the music rising. And inside the house, light rose in the empty windows, like the glow inside a lantern in the waxing of a candle flame.

  In the windows, shadows moved. One raised a hand and waved.

  Another shadow flickered in the doorway, growing; what cast it moved forward into the dying light.

  ‘Matt?’

  Her figure was more rounded now, less lithe, than in the old days, and her hair cut shorter, but he would always know her voice. On the third try, he managed to speak. ‘Holly?’

  ‘Yeah! What you doing here?’

  ‘I . . .’ The music was booming out now. ‘Just dropped by.’

  ‘Yeah? Brill! Come on in!’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Holly came down the path towards him. ‘We get together every now and then. Roughing it a little, but you know. It’s all right inside. We’ve done it up. Come and see. The gang’s all here.’

  The music and the wind. ‘Emily’s here,’ she added. ‘She’d love to see you again.’

  ‘Emily?’ said Matt.

  And suddenly there were tears in his eyes. Holly grinned. ‘Same old Matt. Always were a soft sod, weren’t you?’

  ‘Holly . . .’

  ‘C’mere.’ They hugged tightly. She was solid, real in his grasp.

  ‘Holly . . .’

  She sniffed. ‘Change the record, you big girl’s blouse, or you’ll have me at it too. Now come on.’