The Hiding Place(2)
He faces the first bedroom door, a bitter metallic taste in his mouth, and then, slowly, eases it open.
It’s a woman’s room. Clean, neat and empty. Wardrobe in one corner, chest of drawers by the window, large bed covered with a pristine cream duvet. On the bedside table, a lamp and a solitary picture in a plain wooden frame. He walks over and picks it up. A young boy, ten or eleven, small and wiry, with a toothy smile and messy blond hair. Oh God, he finds himself praying. Please, God, no.
With an even heavier heart he walks back out into the corridor to find Cheryl looking pale and tense.
“Bathroom’s empty,” she says, and he knows that she is thinking the same thing. Only one room left. Only one door to open to reveal the grand prize. He angrily swats away a fly and would have taken a steadying breath if the smell hadn’t already been choking him. Instead, he reaches for the handle and pushes the door open.
Cheryl is too tough to be sick, but he still hears her make a retching noise. His own stomach gives a good solid heave but he manages to fight the nausea back down.
When he thought this was bad, he was wrong. This is a fucking nightmare.
The boy lies on his bed, dressed in an oversized T-shirt, baggy shorts and white sports socks. The elastic of the socks digs into the swollen flesh of his legs.
Bright white socks, Gary can’t help noticing. Blindingly white. Fresh-on white. Like a detergent ad. Or perhaps they just seem that way because everything else is red. Dark red. Streaking the oversized T-shirt, smeared all over the pillows and sheets. And where the boy’s face should be just a big mushy mess of red, features indiscernible, crawling with busy black bodies, flies and beetles, wriggling in and out of the ruined flesh.
His mind flicks back to the splintered TV screen and the puddle of blood on the floor, and suddenly he sees it. The boy’s head being smashed into the TV again and again, then hammered into the floor until he is unrecognizable, until he has no face.
And maybe that was the point, he thinks, as he raises his eyes to the other red. The most obvious red. The red it is impossible to miss. Big letters scrawled across the wall above the boy’s body:
NOT MY SON
1
Never go back. That’s what people always tell you. Things will have changed. They won’t be the way you remembered. Leave the past in the past. Of course, the last one is easier said than done. The past has a habit of repeating on you. Like bad curry.
I don’t want to go back. Really. There are several things higher up on my wish list, like being eaten alive by rats, or line dancing. This is how badly I don’t want to see the craphole I grew up in ever again. But sometimes, there is no choice except the wrong choice.
That’s why I find myself driving along a winding road, through the North Nottinghamshire countryside, at barely seven o’clock in the morning. I haven’t seen this road for a long time. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen 7 a.m. for a long time.
The road is quiet. Only a couple of cars overtake me, one blaring its horn (no doubt the driver indicating that I am impeding his Lewis Hamilton–esque progress to whatever shitty job he simply must get to a few minutes sooner). To be fair to him, I do drive slowly. Nose to the windshield, hands gripping the steering wheel with white, peaked knuckles slowly.
I don’t like driving. I try not to whenever possible. I walk or take buses, or trains for longer journeys. Unfortunately, Arnhill is not on any main bus routes and the nearest train station is twelve miles away. Driving is the only real option. Again, sometimes you have no choice.
I signal and turn off the main road onto a series of even narrower, more treacherous country lanes. Fields of turgid brown and dirty green sprawl out on either side, pigs snuffle the air from rusted corrugated huts, in between tumbledown copses of silver birch. Sherwood Forest, or what remains of it. The only places you’re likely to find Robin Hood and Little John these days are on badly painted signs above run-down pubs. The men inside are usually more than merry and the only thing they’ll rob you of is your teeth, if you look at them the wrong way.
It is not necessarily grim up north. Nottinghamshire is not even that far north—unless you have never left the hellish embrace of the M25—but it is somehow colorless, flat, sapped of the vitality you would expect from the countryside. Like the mines that were once so prevalent here have somehow scooped the life out of the place from within.
Finally, a long time since I’ve seen anything resembling civilization, or even a McDonald’s, I pass a crooked and weathered sign on my left: arnhill welcomes you.
Underneath, some eloquent little shit has added: to get fucked.
Arnhill is not a welcoming village. It is bitter and brooding and sour. It keeps to itself and views visitors with distrust. It is stoic and steadfast and weary all at the same time. It is the sort of village that glowers at you when you arrive and spits on the ground in disgust as you leave.
Apart from a couple of farmhouses and older stone cottages on the outskirts, Arnhill is not quaint or picturesque. Even though the pit closed for good almost thirty years ago, its legacy still runs through the place like the ore through the earth. There are no thatched roofs or hanging baskets. The only things hanging outside the houses here are lines of washing and the occasional St. George’s flag.
Rows of uniform sooty-bricked terraces squat along a main road, along with one dilapidated pub: the Running Fox. There used to be two more—the Arnhill Arms and the Bull—but they shut down a long time ago. Back in the day (my day), the landlord of the Fox—Gypsy—would turn a blind eye to some of us older kids drinking in there. I still remember throwing up three pints of Snakebite, and what felt like most of my guts, in the filthy toilets, only to emerge to find him standing there with a mop and bucket.