Love Me to Death Read online

  Mr Anderson took another step closer and gripped the bin bag as the boy concentrated on the food. As he stared at the boy’s thick hair the urge to begin built. His skin was pale and pock marked, like air bubbles in dried clay. This time it would be perfect. Mr Anderson looked over his shoulder at the trees heavy with snow, and thought of his car, parked up at the top of the hill. It wasn’t far to drag him. He might even get him to the cellar.

  ‘I work with young people,’ Mr Anderson said. ‘I have done for years. That’s why I noticed you the other day. You look like you need help.’

  The boy’s brow crinkled and a look of suspicion came across his face.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Mr Anderson asked, with an attempt at a smile that was not returned. The boy had stopped eating.

  ‘I don’t need nothing else.’

  ‘It’s going to get cold. Colder than this.’ Mr Anderson swallowed and looked at the wrinkles on the boy’s forehead. He would score them into the clay, like waves on the sea, before he added the hair.

  ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘You need somewhere warm. Living like this isn’t right.’

  ‘Money would be good.’

  Mr Anderson smirked. ‘I’ve got something better.’

  The boy sneered. ‘No thanks, mate.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is yet?’

  He laughed to himself. ‘I ain’t into that.’

  Mr Anderson frowned. Did he think he was suggesting something unsavoury? He looked at the boy’s hands – fingernails black with dirt and the missing tooth at the side of his mouth – and pictured the figure he would make, raven hair against white clay.

  ‘I’m here to help,’ he said, as he gripped the plastic bag.

  ‘I don’t need it.’

  The boy looked him up and down as though he was filth. This boy in his dirty coat and house of rubbish was looking at him as though he was disgusting! Mr Anderson’s shoulders tensed.

  ‘I can make you family.’ Mr Anderson attempted a reassuring smile.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Me and you.’

  The boy laughed. ‘You’re off your fucking head, mate.’

  His shoulders tensed as the boy stopped eating.

  ‘Eat up your dinner, you bad boy!’ he shouted.

  ‘Piss off, you freak.’

  The boy kicked the food over and Mr Anderson watched it melt the snow in a brown pile of mush. His mother’s pills had been wasted. He hadn’t eaten enough.

  Mr Anderson started to reach for the knife in his pocket as the boy squared up to him. It wasn’t going to work. He was big, bigger than he’d first thought, and ready to fight.

  ‘Keep the container,’ Mr Anderson said, as he pretended to walk away.

  Mr Anderson wondered whether to rush at him. He had to be awake so that he could look in his eyes, but if he could weaken him, it still could work.

  ‘We’ll be family,’ he said, under his breath.

  The boy looked at him with disgust. ‘Fuck off.’

  Mr Anderson’s hand tightened around the wooden handle in his pocket and as he held the bin bag in the other, the adrenaline built. He stopped, closed his eyes and inhaled, feeling a sense of peace before he began. Before he turned around, the sound of bicycles came from further down the tunnel.

  Mr Anderson walked into the undergrowth, behind the bushes, before whoever it was got close enough to see him. The twigs underfoot and brambles caught on his shoes as he pushed through them. He stopped to look back, when he was far enough away not to be seen. The tent was hidden from view under the arch and he couldn’t see the boy. If it had been seconds later then he’d have been caught in the act. He strained his neck to see better as three boys appeared from the mouth of the tunnel. One of them he recognised: it was Jacob, Jacob Clarke. He couldn’t believe it.

  Mr Anderson left before he was seen. He almost lost his footing on the frozen ground as he scrambled back up the hill and it was a relief when he finally got back to his house. He fumbled with the key until he got in and slammed the door behind him. The house was so beautifully peaceful and quiet. The street outside was empty too. There was nothing. No sounds of cars. Certainly no police sirens, just a calming stillness. The blade of the knife glinted, sharp and clean, as he placed it on the table and dropped the bag on the floor.

  Mr Anderson went into the front room and looked at his modelling tools. The sight of them made him even more determined. He stared at the little figure, waiting to be given life. His family was all he could think about. The boy’s long black hair was going to look striking against the yellow material he’d take from the tent.

  The thought of preparing him for Cage Hill made the hairs on his arms stand up. He would whisper in his ear at the end, tell him where he was going, a whisper as gentle as the breeze through the grasses by The Cage. He tilted his head at his modelling equipment. The pale white clay that he would use to make the face would seem even whiter against the darkness of the hair. He would need to extend the legs; they were too short and he imagined how they would kick and struggle at the end.

  Mr Anderson started to whistle as he made his way upstairs to the bathroom and didn’t even stop when he passed his mother’s bedroom. He glanced through the door at the neatly made bed and porcelain jar on the lace doily where she’d always kept it. The wardrobe doors were shut, with all her precious things safely inside. What a day! Jacob Clarke had surprised him again. They had a connection that couldn’t be ignored. Mr Anderson thought of him lying in the room beyond as he glanced over at the wall of the house that divided them and wondered what it all meant.

  13

  Jacob followed behind the Vincents on his bike. The tent wasn’t where they’d said it was. It wasn’t even near the woods. It was under one of the arches down the deserted railway track and not near to the place where Jayne was found. Jacob and the Vincents parked their bikes further up and pushed them, as they walked towards the tent.

  At first, you couldn’t notice it, but when you got closer it was there. It would have been bright yellow when it was new, but now it was dirty, black and stained.

  ‘That’s him,’ Billy Vincent said. He licked his lips. He had a look in his eye that was there when he chased the cats, a wildness that made Jacob uncomfortable.

  At the time it made sense to come, but now that he was here, Jacob stared at the tent and didn’t want to go closer.

  ‘There could be a girl in there now,’ Billy said.

  There were some old cardboard boxes at the back of arch behind the tent and a few cans.

  ‘Or a body,’ Billy Vincent continued.

  Jacob could tell he was enjoying the drama of it. This wasn’t really about Maggie or her cousin. He was getting a kick out of it.

  Billy Vincent bent down and picked up a pebble.

  ‘What you doing?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘What does it look like? Get some.’

  Matty Vincent paused and Jacob hoped he was going to tell him to stop, but he didn’t. He picked up one himself. The vein in his neck tensed as he got another one and Jacob was glad that Maggie wasn’t here to see how he picked them up with just one hand and held them as though they were weightless.

  Jacob stood there.

  ‘There’s some over there. Hurry up,’ Billy told him.

  Jacob stuttered, ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘You limp prick. If Maggie was here, she’d do it,’ Billy said.

  Jacob went over to the side of the tracks and bent down. He picked up half a brick from the edge of the grass verge and came over to Billy Vincent. He didn’t want them to tell her that he was a coward and he wanted to make sure that if this person had anything to do with Jayne that he’d helped stop him.

  The sound of footsteps broke the silence and before Jacob could say anything, Billy Vincent put his arm back and threw a stone, before the person had a chance to emerge. It went arching through the air and hit the door of the tent with a loud thud. Someone shouted from inside the tent a
nd Billy started to pelt it, before the pair of brothers ran away back towards the bikes.

  Jacob stood in the middle of tracks, unmoving, as a boy staggered out of the tent. His face was a stream of red dark blood and his arm was placed over the top of his head, ready.

  ‘Come on, you dick,’ Billy Vincent shouted back at Jacob as he grabbed his bike and pedalled away.

  Jacob turned and ran. It was hard to pick up the bike and the front tyre skidded on the snow. The boy from the tent had started to come after him, shouting obscenities and clutching the cut on his head.

  When they got back to the road, the Vincents were laughing, Billy’s eyes streaming with tears.

  ‘Your face. I thought he’d got you,’ he said to Jacob.

  Jacob looked at the excited look on Billy’s face and decided that they were just a pair of little shits and so was he for joining in with it.

  ‘He didn’t look very old,’ Jacob said.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Billy Vincent replied.

  Jacob stayed away from the railway arches after that. He knew that the homeless boy had seen him there and he wasn’t going to chance running into him again. He didn’t need to worry though, because the Vincents told him that the next day the tent had gone. The boy had moved on, just like the Vincents said that he would. They congratulated each other on a job well done and the gleam in Billy Vincent’s eye was pure pleasure.

  Jacob wanted to talk to his dad about it, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell him what they’d done. Instead they ended up talking about Maggie and how a dog walker had given the police a description of man he’d seen coming out of the woods that night. It didn’t sound anything like the person from the tent. The description was of a small man, in a long grey coat and sharp features – a man who merged into the shadows and disappeared into the trees. The boy that Jacob Clarke saw stagger out of the tent was tall and round-faced, so Jacob Clarke knew that there was another thing for him to be ashamed of, another thing that he’d see when he lay in bed at night: the face of that boy who they could have beaten to death with a rock and for what?

  *

  The boy in the tent was gone. When Mr Anderson cycled past early this morning, the tent had been packed up and there was no sign of him anywhere. If anyone had walked down the old railway tracks that morning Mr Anderson would have introduced them to the modelling knife in his coat pocket. He was furious. It was deserted though, with only the sound of a blackbird and the chatter of blue tits in the trees by the lane to break the silence. Mr Anderson looked at the patch where the tent had been, one wet piece of soil without any snow and next to it, the frozen remains of corned beef hash beside an upturned plastic container. The ground around it glistened and sparkled and he thought about the yellow of the tent and the deep red speckles in the snow that should have been there instead. It was a tragedy.

  Later at work, the library was quiet. Noreen had spent most of the morning talking about the fat content of potatoes with one of the other women. The more banal the thing, the more interested they were; it was beyond his comprehension. The one thing he had in common with them was a healthy disdain for the customers. A shared dislike for the ones who ‘lost’ their books or brought them back with pages stuck together with miscellaneous substances.

  He didn’t smile. He dealt with everyone efficiently and correctly, there was no need for grinning or commenting on the weather. He didn’t enjoy the interactions and the stupid questions that inconvenienced his day. ‘I’m after a book I read years ago. It was red. There was a dog in it?’ Unbelievable. He liked to see their books though. He enjoyed getting a glimpse inside their heads to find out what made them tick. Science fiction, books on vegetarian baking, erotic fiction, books about the war. He knew them better than their own families did. He knew what was inside their heads and that pleased him.

  He hadn’t seen much of Jacob Clarke, but he was in the library again today; he’d caught a glimpse of him earlier. Jacob wasn’t in his usual seat though and he wondered if he was keeping out of his way. Mr Anderson’s interest in him was growing. He’d been surprised to see Jacob slide a book off the shelf and drop it into his bag the other day. It was easy to find out which one he’d taken, it was the only one missing from the section. When he’d looked it up, he got a surprise – a book on a local workhouse, an old asylum near to Cage Hill at Lyme Park. It felt like a sign.

  He was certain that it was Jacob he’d seen on his bike by the yellow tent and there had been the encounter on the lane too. Mr Anderson wondered if Jacob was responsible for the boy going missing. If somehow, he knew what he was planning. He couldn’t though. Could he? The pull was getting stronger though and the connection they had was almost physical now.

  He had been watching Jacob through the bookcases whenever he got the chance to. Jacob was usually reading an art book or something from the nature section. His fingers would trace over the page sometimes, as though he wanted to step inside it and disappear. Mr Anderson knew what Jacob wanted to escape from, because he’d heard it through the walls at home. He knew more than Jacob would ever realise. There was a reason that Jacob had been at that tent, and perhaps the reason was that he could still be family – maybe he could still be one of the chosen few.

  Noreen was by the desk again, glancing over to see what he was doing. Mr Anderson wondered why she kept going back and forth, moving and hovering around like a deranged bee. There was no getting away from her at the moment. As he walked into the staff room for his break, he heard her say something to one of the other women about needing five minutes, and it wasn’t long before she was in there too.

  She’d been in the staff room when he’d arrived for work too. There was something different about her. She looked… odd. He took out a Tupperware box from his rucksack to put in the fridge. It was a small box, with his usual lunch inside: four slices of medium white bread with ham and English mustard with the crusts cut off, kept in a small plastic bag so that he could feed the birds. It pleased him that he was his own person now and he could eat what he wanted, do what he pleased, no more sitting down in the cellar.

  He felt Noreen watching, and as he glanced back, she looked away. Had she changed her hair? It looked like she had. There was a slide in it too. Something colourful and bright that didn’t suit her.

  ‘Lovely day?’ she said. ‘Especially for cycling. A good day in all ways.’

  It wasn’t. It had been hard for him to cycle in this morning. The wind had been against him and he’d come in flushed and panting. It was not a good day either, the yellow tent had gone and the white clay figure was faceless and naked.

  ‘I can still smell the outside on you,’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘Smell it?’ he asked.

  She looked embarrassed and started to fumble with something in her hand. He wondered if she had reasons to be suspicious. He turned around to check what she was doing.

  ‘The outside. It was very fresh this morning. I don’t think we’ll get rain though.’

  He stared back at her. ‘They didn’t forecast rain.’

  ‘Well, that means it’s bound to chuck it down.’ She laughed at her own joke and he realised that she was wearing newly applied pink lipstick too. He frowned over at her as he put the sandwiches in the fridge in case she was here to take one.

  ‘I’m going out on the floor,’ he told her. He could always come back and check on the sandwiches later.

  ‘Are you not having a drink? I can make you one.’

  ‘I don’t have a dry mouth. I’ll leave my sandwiches for later. I have four,’ he told her. Just in case she thought that she might take one without him noticing. It had taken him a while to get used to leaving them in there unattended as it was.

  After he left, it wasn’t long before she was out too, which further annoyed him. He caught her looking at him through the bookshelves three times during the morning. The woman was up to something and it had been going on all week. Hanging around the desk when she should have been sh
elving and trying to talk to him. She’d been in the staff room twice at lunch and sat opposite him for the full hour, pretending to read a book.

  Perhaps she was trying to find out ways to get rid of him. He knew that he didn’t fit in with the rest of them here. This might be their way to persuade him to go, to chip away at him like an old bit of stone until he crumbled.

  He tried to stay out of her way for the rest of the day and when it was time to leave, he looked over to where Jacob Clarke normally sat and saw the empty chair. Noreen had distracted him enough that he hadn’t been able to keep his usual eye on him. He went to the toilet so that she couldn’t speak to him before she left. He was unsettled and restless by the time the library closed.

  When he left work, there was laughter from a group of girls sharing a bottle of vodka on a nearby bench, huddled up as the wind whipped around their bare legs. They passed a bottle between them and didn’t concern themselves with him. He was nothing to them; inconsequential, like the buildings and the lampposts. A few months ago, he’d have been over, shouting them to move along, but not now. Now he would be as quiet as a shadow.

  As he looked at the pale legs of the girls in front of him, he pictured the half-finished doll back home. Jacob Clarke eased into his thoughts again and he couldn’t help wondering what he’d say to a drive up to the old asylum. Mr Anderson knew not to let his emotion run away with him though, and wondered if what happened to the boy in the tent had been for the best. He’d told him his name the first night and that was a mistake. Jacob Clarke may have done him a favour and now, the doll was unfinished and genderless. It was ready and so was he.

  The light from the security lamp went out and put the bench in darkness. The girls got up as he locked up the main library door. They linked arms and stopped on the corner before one of them walked off in a different direction. She was slight, with a tiny waist and hair up in a ponytail. He looked at her pale slim legs in the half-light, whiter than porcelain, and imagined rolling out the moistened clay to a long slender line to create that same look. The way the moonlight shone on her bare skin made it look like she had already been carved from clay – she was flawless. Overpowering her would be easy; she was a small thing and she was drunk. Mr Anderson was annoyed at himself for only having the knife with him, but he decided to make do.