Chapter 4 – Two Nights Earlier...
1.
Since he was lying on his back and staring at the sky, he couldn’t see that his body had been outlined in chalk. He was also equally unaware that the girl was sitting next to him on the grass. Then he heard her gentle voice echoing through his mind again:
“Don't forget to remember the Saints; Benedict, George, Andrew and Gregory, all of whom play a part in our history; but also of a story borne of September, so please do not forget to remember.”
Oliver sat up and saw where he was. Green and yellow seating surrounded all four sides of the football pitch, while he, the girl and his chalk outline were all within the centre circle.
The aggressive light from the floodlights at the four corners of the stadium made shadows in four directions from their bodies. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked at the girl; realising that, no matter how silly it might have been, he had missed her.
“Is that a rhyme or a riddle?” he asked.
She offered only a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders and the hint of a grin. She was shuffling a pack of cards and started dealing them out as she replied to his question.
“Just a little guidance,” she told him, laying another card down and shouting “SNAP!” as she did so.
He shook his head.
“So, I take it that you've always wanted to play here,” he said.
“Ever since I was a kid.”
She raised the next card above her head and, with a single violent swing of her right arm, she brought it down.
2.
Her hand fell upon longer, thicker grass. She moved it; revealing the two of hearts underneath.
“SNAP!” they both shouted at the same time.
Joining their hands together again, they stood and stared at the landscape in front of them.
The sun, although shrouded by clouds, illuminated it enough to reveal the vastness of a field of emerald hills and valleys. Without another word the two of them started walking; exploring the lovely undulations stretching out for miles ahead.
For a long while they walked and the landscape didn't change, until they saw something small ahead of them. Far off in the distance, on the grass there was a black book.
It started out as little more than a dirty speck on the green. With each step though, the book grew bigger; both higher and wider; almost doubling in size each time they looked at it. By the time they got within fifty yards, it had become so vast that it was the only thing they could see.
They kept going towards it and it continued to expand; vast and black, towering over their heads and up into the delicate wisps of cloud above. When they finally reached it, there was little choice about what they should do. Oliver and the girl, both took hold of the right-hand edge of black leather that bound the monstrous pages together and they pulled with all the strength they had.
Oliver felt the strain in every muscle of his body. He glanced at the girl and saw the redness of her face. And then the front cover moved. Only slowly and very slightly but there was no doubt about it. This was all the encouragement they needed and gradually their combined strength was able to coax the book fully open.
They stood back to look at the inside cover and blank white opening page.
“Shall we?” the girl asked.
“Absolutely,” he said, taking hold of her hand before doubt could take hold of him.
There were no glances back and Oliver and the girl stepped straight into the pages of the book.
3.
Everything was white and it was almost unbearable to Oliver. There was unnatural nothingness and brightness everywhere. He was standing on something he assumed was paper, but had no idea how it was holding him up and the only thing that reassured him was the fact the girl was still with him.
The problem was that she didn't stay there for long. Far off in the distance, there were typed black ink words; tiny marks tarnishing the white and too far away to be read or understood.
“What does it say?” she asked.
Oliver didn't want to find out but didn't get the chance to tell her that. She was already running towards the words and he had little choice but to follow her.
He dragged his feet every step of the way. Scuffing them along the paper but leaving no marks and no trace behind. As he did this, the words grew larger and he couldn't bring himself to read them. All he saw was that the girl had stopped running and was staring up at what was written.
As soon as he was back at her side, she grabbed his hand and looked at him. She seemed nervous.
“Are you all right? What's the matter?” she asked him.
“What? Why do you ask?”
She simply pointed to the words and Oliver read them:
'A sense of foreboding swept over him about where he was and where he might be heading. It was a feeling too familiar from many years before and not even the wondrous woman, who had just run ahead to explore, could do anything to dispel it. He continued to walk but with each step, whatever was making him want to turn back grew stronger. He realised then that he felt stretched, like he was being pulled apart by the need to be wherever she was and the need to stay away from what was causing him discomfort. Eventually he reached her, though the feeling did not lift. She turned to him and asked, “Are you all right? What's the matter?”
These words threw him into a momentary panic. 'How did she know? Was he really so transparently obvious?' Not for the first time, his words didn’t entirely reflect his thoughts. Instead, he replied, “What? Why do you ask?” To his surprise however, she didn’t answer, pointing instead to the dark words that were written in front of him'.
Everything was quiet for a few moments and in a place so empty and airless that’s something which can soon become oppressive. It was no surprise to Oliver when the girl eventually asked, “Can we get out of here?”
“I'm not sure,” he said, “But that definitely sounds like a good idea.”
He stared back at where they had just been and found it was a mirror image of the page and the words. There was a shrug of his shoulders as he looked at her again. She didn't see it though. She was already studying the words more closely and soon noticed something significant.
“Up there!” she said.
The point of her finger showed him what she had seen. Just above the top line of words, there was a red and black drawing of a door.
He shook his head in disbelief. He could already tell that it was their only escape route.
“Okay... So how do we get up there?”
The girl's words were the most obvious example of thinking out loud Oliver had ever heard.
“Uh... Well... We... Could climb up the words,” she said to him.
Oliver’s worry was obvious. She tried to reassure him:
“Look, I'm with you. I'm sure we'll be all right as long as we're together."
They were only words but he couldn't deny that she made him feel safe. He trusted her simply because he wanted to. She held out her hand to him, he took it, and they walked together towards the words.
At the bottom of the page, they found that each letter was at least six feet tall; roughly the same height as Oliver and nearly half a foot taller than the girl. Taken as a whole, the page was a genuinely imposing sight.
“Okay,” Oliver said, looking all the way up at where the words began.
It looked dizzyingly far away, like spots of black fading into the still dominant white; a spectral fade that he almost got lost in until he found something else to say.
“Where do we start?” he asked the girl.
Her thinking was much more practical and uncluttered.
“I think the ’t’s, 'm's, 'w's and capital letters might be easiest to climb.”
It was a sensible solution that was better than any idea Oliver could come up with. The sixteen lines built on top of each other were still a fairly overwhelming proposition but that didn't stop him grasping the bottom curve of the letter 't' in 'fro
nt' and pulling himself up; the combination of his strength and body weight squeezing black ink out of the letter and causing a steady drip onto the clean paper below.
Oliver stood inside the cradle of the letter’s curve and saw the girl reaching up towards him. He took her hand and pulled her up into the letter.
They both looked up at the ink cross at the neck of the 't'. This would be their next platform and stepping stone to the words above. Oliver made use of the gentle bounce of the inky letter to leap and grab onto the top of the dash. Inch by agonising inch, he dragged himself up until he was standing on top of the cross. He knelt down and helped the girl again.
Their next move was to jump to the 'n' that was next to it, followed by the 'o', 'r', and 'f'. Once there, they both had to climb to the top to reach up to the word 'To', which was directly above them.
The climb that followed led them towards the upper left of the page. From the capital 'T' of 'To' they jumped across to a quotation mark, then a question mark and to the top of a 'k'. Up and across they went, with Oliver taking hold of a comma, before he and the girl moved onto 'e' and 'm'; the dot of an 'i' led up to the 'o' of 'into'; bouncing left to an 'm' and another 'i' before the tail of a 'y' snaked down and they both shimmied up it, to bounce across to 'are' and up to 'discomfort'.
Oliver felt no danger at any point in the climb. At the same time though, there was still worry about what he would find at its end. That was the reason that the progress he and the girl made became increasingly slow. Moving from letter to line in virtual slow motion, he decided to look down to distract himself from thoughts of what was above. He found nothing to help him; only more whiteness and swirls and drops of black ink bleeding together in the distance.
Oliver's worry remained and despite his best efforts, their progress was steady. After climbing from a 'g' to 'explore', he realised there were only two more lines left to climb. A leap to one word and a climb up two others took Oliver and the girl to the top line of words. Several more steps and jumps to the right found them standing on 'where' and looking up at the door that was just out of their reach.
He thought about suggesting they give up there and then but was too aware that there was nowhere else to go.
“I'm going to have to give you a leg up,” he eventually said to the girl.
She nodded in agreement and he crouched down with fingers linked and palms facing upwards. The girl placed her right foot into his hands and allowed him to push her up. With some effort, her hand grasped the scarlet door handle and pulled it; ducking her head away as it swung open.
Oliver didn’t see her jump into the open doorway, although he did feel the vanishing of her weight from his arms. It was only then that he looked and saw she was gone. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if she might have woken up and was overcome by a strange mixture of sadness and relief. Her hand reappeared above him and reached down from the doorway.
“Come on,” he heard her say and he knew he couldn’t resist.
Oliver grabbed her hand and allowed her to pull him up and through the door.
4.
The corridor, with its magnolia walls and grey lockers, was bland and made even blander by the dull lighting. The sight of it was still enough to cause nausea to rise up in Oliver's stomach as he felt a pounding sensation in his blood.
“Fuck!” he said loudly, “We have to go back.”
He turned and pushed open the door he’d just come through, but the pages of the book had closed to him and there was only a classroom on the other side.
There was a lot about the room he recognised. The wooden desks and chairs, the faces of kids he remembered, and Mr Samuels standing in front of the blackboard giving a history lesson. No one reacted to Oliver's sudden entrance and he realised that he was invisible to the teacher and the children.
A swift search of the room, revealed no other door and no escape route. His desperation grew as the sound of pens scratching on paper became louder. He tried to open a window but it didn't move and the scratching became more and more oppressive. With no chance of escape, all he could do was leave the room and the horrible noise behind him with a slam of the door.
Back in the corridor, the noise was gone but there was little relief. He knew that he didn't dare stay. The girl was only a few feet from him, so he went to her and grabbed her hand to pull her away from the greatest fear in his nightmare of memories.
“What's going on,” she asked.
“We've got to get out of here.”
She asked him why. He didn't answer. Turning a corner in the corridor they were faced with a wall of grey lockers and only one other person, who was standing with his back to them and his face obscured by his open locker. Oliver would still have recognised Johnny anywhere; dressed in his usual, jeans, jacket and red t-shirt.
Johnny closed the locker and Oliver was ready to go over to him; to take him and the girl away from the school; from the place that scared him the most. In fact, the only thing that stopped him was the fact that it was already too late for Johnny. He tried to edge away, so he wouldn't have to see what had already happened.
From out of the dark at the other end of the corridor, four young men walked towards Johnny. They were all dressed in black and their short hair highlighted the harsh unpleasantness of their faces.
Johnny noticed them and leaned back against the lockers. He looked relaxed, even when one of the boys started speaking to him. The face that spat out these words was the one Oliver remembered best and hated the most. This time he could see the hatred in that boy's eyes and could be completely sure that his own hatred and fear were justified.
He finally remembered that the name that went with that face was Jim Brady, and his three friends were Christian Samuels, Darren Matthews, and Lee Kember.
“Oi Youngblood!” Brady sneered, “Where's ya little boyfriend today?”
Childish taunts and being faced by a gang of four couldn’t intimidate Johnny. He almost sounded bored as he replied:
“Morning boys. Still as clever as ever I see.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP YOUNGBLOOD!” Darren Matthews shouted back at him, “Looks like you're in trouble right here, right now.”
Brady simply glared into Johnny's face.
“So what ya gonna do about it, big shot?” he asked.
Johnny wasn't about to back down.
“That's so sweet,” he said, with a smile on his lips, “You're almost finishing each other’s sentences... It brings a warm glow to my heart lads, it really does. Yer know it's just a pity that you're all THICK AS FUCKING PIGSHIT!”
Johnny looked directly into the eyes of Jim Brady and in an instant something changed. There was something in those eyes he hadn't seen before; something Oliver thought he understood and which chilled him to the depths of his soul.
Brady didn’t move when Johnny suddenly tried to run past him. He didn't need to. Samuels and Kember had already closed in and blocked his escape route.
“Not this time,” Kember told him.
Brady leaned in towards Johnny and almost whispered, “Oh dear, I think you might be fucked this time, mate.”
The first punch left Johnny winded, while the second pushed him back into the solid metal of the lockers. More followed to his jaw and chest through a flurry of eight hands. He fell to the ground and kicks from leather boots joined with the punches. Watching helplessly, Oliver started to cry.
The attack stopped and Brady looked down on his victim.
“You disappoint me Youngblood... I thought you was a real man... Can't you show me nothing but weakness.”
Johnny looked up through bruised and blackening eyes and his bloodied lips turned into a smile. Defiant to the end, laughter spilled out from somewhere inside him.
“There's four of you and you talk to me about weakness.”
He pushed his pained frame up off the floor to stand at his full height. He steadied himself and then angrily took off his black leather jacket and threw it down onto t
he floor. Johnny slowly and very deliberately moved his face in towards Brady's.
“What's the matter?” Johnny asked through gritted teeth, “Are yer afraid something bad's gonna happen to yer?”
There was no pause. No empty moment of reflection before Johnny launched his cracked and broken body into Brady.
They’d traded only a couple of blows when Brady's friends pushed Johnny back, smashing his head into the lockers. Visibly dazed and with hands at his throat and his arms held, he was powerless to protect himself from the flashing blade of Brady's knife as it plunged into his chest twice in quick succession.
Oliver turned his face away and watched his younger self walk around the corner to view the final moments of the murder. A howl of anguish escaped his throat. The same sound that had come from him the first time he’d seen his friend die. And like then, it was nothing less than the expression of the purest pain he’d ever known.
Johnny's body slumped onto the floor and the gang scattered like rats into the shadowy far end of the corridor. Oliver sat on the floor watching himself rush over to Johnny and try to save him.
“HELP!” he shouted, “SOMEONE FUCKING HELP ME! SOMEONE PLEASE!”
Bitter tears fell as he slumped down to his knees, holding his dead friend's hand while a pool of blood covered the ground beneath him.
“Jesus, Johnny,” was the only other thing he managed to say.
It was almost unbearable to watch, even from a distance, and so Oliver looked at the girl again. There was immense sadness on her face.
“I got held up... I was meant to meet him five minutes earlier... But I overslept.”
The expression on her face changed into something he recognised. It was simple understanding. He ignored it. His mind was already being consumed by the thoughts of his seventeen year old self and in trying to rewrite his own miserable history.
5.
“If I'd run instead of walked.” he said to himself.
He ran through the school's black iron gates. He picked up speed and the soles of his shoes pounded upon the concrete path that led him towards the main school building. Nothing stopped or slowed him and he sprinted through the courtyard and the double doors that led into the red building.
Oliver felt no tiredness in his legs, so he carried on running along the deserted corridors until he turned the corner to where he knew Johnny would be. He arrived in time but couldn't go any further. His way was blocked by an invisible barrier; a wall that separated him from his friend and stopped him from being saved.
Kicks and punches and strikes from a nearby fire extinguisher did nothing to break down what was between him and the sight of his friend's murder. He dropped the fire extinguisher and sunk to his knees. The girl knelt down next to him.
“There's nothing you could've done,” she said to him.
Oliver shook his head. He hadn't finished torturing himself.
6.
In the next moment, he was running through the school gates again. This time, he went a different way, taking a left turn through different corridors to approach his friend from the other direction. After passing Brady's gang, he found another invisible wall that stopped him again.
Frustration piled upon his misery and his fists rained thumps onto the wall of clear air but it was no use. Brady and his friends wandered past and there was still nothing to stop what Oliver wished had never happened.
That was when exhaustion and despair struck him. He sank to the ground and tears fell uncontrollably down his cheeks and chin.
The girl returned to his side.
“It's not your fault,” she told him.
It wasn't what he wanted to hear.
“What the fuck do you know?” he asked, his voice cracking with emotion, “It was me that started all this... My best friend...”
He swallowed, trying to gather himself and stop more tears from falling.
“All of this happened because I got into a fight with those guys and Johnny backed me up... I had no idea it... It's just... It should've been me...”
He felt her hand on his arm.
“Hey,” she said, softly.
She was too close. He flinched and pulled away from her.
“Fuck you,” he said to her, “Don't even try... Don't try to take it away.”
Oliver barely noticed her confusion. Instead, his eyes were narrowing and his mind was distorting her.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked angrily.
“Calm down,” she told him.
It was already too late. The chaos of emotions within him had become too much to control and what was fair had become the last thing he wanted to consider.
“You're the one who brought me back,” he said to her, “I never wanted to come here.”
“Then why the hell did you?”
“Because you wanted me to.”
“And what kind of a stupid reason is that?”
He had no answer.
“Fuck off then,” he said angrily, “Who are you to say anything anyway? You don't know me... All you give me is pain and trouble.”
“Then at least I know you well enough to do that!”
His voice lowered in response, although there was no let-up in intensity when he said to her, “Please just go, whatever the hell your name is. Stay away... I need you to give up on me, okay.”
“I can't do that.”
Oliver stood and pulled the girl roughly up onto her feet.
“Please go away,” he begged her, “GO AWAY! GO THE FUCK AWAY! I CAN'T DEAL WITH... This.”
It was almost as if he had no physical strength left to hold him up and so he fell to the floor, as his tears fell in waves and sadness finally overwhelmed him.
7.
He sat alone on the ground with a book in his hands; back in the endless green grass of the field. The sun was setting, and glowing a deeply uncomfortable shade of orange. Something told Oliver that it wasn’t the end but also that something definitely was ending.
The book was open in his hands and his eyes peered through the haze of tears at the last of its leather bound pages. What he saw were words increasingly distorted by the running of ink and salt water:
‘As he sat reading the book, he realised that his unhappiness had been magnified. Accompanying the disappearance of the words in front of his eyes was overwhelming self-loathing and self-pity. Not only had he lost his friend but he also had no idea where the girl who lived inside his dreams and dreamt inside his life could be found.’
He finished reading as his tears washed it all away, leaving behind only the whiteness of blank pages.
8.
A damp pillow and guilt were the first things Oliver felt the next morning. The room was dark, with greyness seeping through the cotton curtains to magnify the gloom in the sky. There was no need to see the rain so he let the shade remain, while his thoughts slowly bloomed into unpleasant reality.
In several different ways, Oliver felt like he was broken, and yet, he remained aware that he was alive and relatively well. That didn't stop him thinking about packing his things away and leaving.
Ignoring everything he'd had to face up to was certainly the easiest option. That didn’t make it the best one though, and so it wasn’t quite enough to make him go.
Out of nowhere, he felt strength that had been missing for too long. There was nothing about the last few days that made him want the previous night’s dreaming to be the last time he saw and spoke to her.
He eventually opened the curtains and saw the ripples forming on the surface of the river; raindrops circling as miniature aftershocks with the combined strength to sway the static grey boats on their moorings. That was when he decided not to go out into the city again that day.
The weather didn't help but Oliver had another reason for not wanting to leave the comfort of the hotel. He knew he would just end up retracing his steps from the day before because, as far as he could tell, the girl hadn't given him any more clues to help him find
her.
He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the sound of his own breathing, until he became distracted by the rumbling of his stomach. He was surprised that it had somehow reached lunchtime without him realising. As he put on his shoes and walked to the door, he only wondered if it was because he'd overslept, or if the hours of that miserable morning had actually passed him by as quickly as minutes.
9.
After returning from the almost empty restaurant, Oliver found his room was much the same as he'd left it, with little sign of any more sunlight showing through the darkness. Despite this, he felt warm and opened the window just enough to let in a lovely breeze.
With the flick of a switch, his attention turned to the television perched on a long wooden cabinet. Sitting on the duvet and mattress with his back to the headboard, he flicked between channels, searching for some distraction.
It didn't entirely work. New channels only offered static images with bland voiceovers. He flicked onto an old western and tried to work out what was going on, even though it was already more than half way through. He soon gave up.
Then he heard a noise from outside. It was distant but triumphant; the roar of twenty six thousand people all at once, travelling from the football ground, across about half a mile and into his hotel room.
Oliver switched the television off to listen more closely. There was nothing so loud or obvious, just the constant sound of soft rain tapping on the surface of the city. He sighed and glanced towards the dark-wood bedside table and the book that was on it.
The book felt heavy in his hands and, when he began to read, the words were confusing to him. He was trying too hard to understand what they all meant and it was only when he calmed down that he was able to enjoy the beauty of the poems.
As he read the opening lines of ‘We’ll go no more a Roving’, the sweet spell was broken by the ringing of the telephone. Oliver tried to ignore it. It was no good. It rang and rang, until he eventually gave in to its ugly sound. The book went back to where it had been before and Oliver picked up the telephone receiver; beaten without a word.
“Hello,” he said to his brother, “Oh yeah... Yes I'm still...”
As usual, he waited while Stephen spoke.
“Look Stephen, I never asked you to do that...” he told him more forcefully. It didn't last. Passivity soon returned:
“What? No... I, I still don't... Tomorrow? No I can't I... I'm sorry... I appreciate that but...”
The choice that Oliver was offered was to have no choice and no say about when he would be leaving.
“All right, all right, all right,” he agreed with a sigh, “I'll come back... Yeah. Yeah... So when exactly did you order the...”
Once again he didn't get to finish his question.
“Oh right,” he said instead with nothing left in his voice except defeat, “That should give me enough time to get... I guess I'll be back by tomorrow evening then.”
“You'd better be,” was all he heard Stephen say in reply.
His brother said goodbye and hung up.
10.
It was only later that Oliver understood that there was something he could do on his last night in Norwich. And so, he raided the mini-bar and set about getting himself drunk. He knew it wasn't big or clever, but at least it made him feel better, at least until the point where it made him feel a whole lot worse.
Thoughts of his wasted passive life hurt so much that he was almost pleased when the room finally started to spin. Oliver tried closing his eyes but his mind continued to circle. He tried to undress and fell gracelessly in a sideways dive onto the floor when he took off his trousers.
The entire process was exhausting and he was soon crawling beneath the bedcovers. His mind found little comfort in this and he just about remembered to turn out the bedside light before losing consciousness.