Mr Ermey's Funeral Read online

  2

  The garage was gone, the painting was gone, and everything was a movie.

  A puddle exploded into a thousand spatters as a Wellington boot crashed into frame, captured in extreme close up. The film cut to a medium shot of a girl in a yellow cagoule, jumping and stamping from one puddle to the next.

  A jaunty music cue began. Woodwind.

  Mary watched the luminous hooded figure leap beneath the drizzle, the earthly pools becoming heavenly portraits once more. As the music quickly grew sombre, the entrance to St Vincent’s was revealed. The stone pillars were dark and gleaming, the gates chained together loosely, but securely. The camera panned right, detailing the open pedestrian entrance, then a full-length Steadicam shot followed the heroine as she progressed towards the school buildings. A wide crane shot established the playground. The music swelled as it lowered, revealing the assembled actors, huddled beneath the old shelter. They looked exactly as they always had done: Alex straddled his bike; Tom bounced his football; and Buddy practised his James Dean thing, smoking cigarettes and looking moody.

  The camera sank to the girl’s shoulders, which disappeared, and Mary realised the film was now showing her point of view.

  “Hi ya,” she said, feeling the words come out of her mouth and being unable to stop them.

  The trio flinched and turned towards her.

  I remember this, she thought.

  “Hi ya,” Buddy said, but without much enthusiasm. “Smoke?”

  She nodded and glanced at the others. Tom, in his slinky black tracksuit and matching trainers, reversed his baseball cap and started to bounce his football off his knee. Alex remained astride his crossbar, his shoulders hunched over the handlebars; he started to inspect the floor with the toe of a dirty trainer.

  Cigarette smoke hung in the damp air, sharp and tangy. Buddy lit a cigarette and handed it to her.

  “What were you lot talkin about then?” she asked, blowing a cloud into the warm, damp air. Buddy lit another Marlboro. Alex kept his eyes to the floor. Tom kept bouncing.

  After a couple of drags, Buddy answered for them:

  “Last week.”

  Mary pushed back her hood and leant against a support, feeling it give, then settle. She ran a hand through her unkempt hair and gazed out into the dreary playground. “Last week was bad,” she said, and drew hard, holding in the smoke for maximum effect. The light-headedness that followed made her feel more confident, but it also played tricks with her perspective, making things seem both near and far away at the same time.

  “I still think we should tell,” Alex said, rocking back and forth on the BMX, still trying to tunnel an escape with his toe.

  “And what do you think’ll happen if we do tell?” Mary said. “We’ll never be allowed to play out here again. And I probably won’t be allowed out at all, ‘cos I’m a girl.”

  “’Cos I’m a girl!” Tom laughed, watching his ball, “’Cos I’m a girl! ’Cos I’m a girl!”

  The others smiled, even Mary, who said, “We were all wondering why you’d been acting funny lately.”

  Silence.

  Mary looked back out into the playground, watching the rain, trying to isolate individual drops as they made needles in the sky, and trying to pretend that her friends weren’t getting ready to dump her. It was funny how she didn’t see it at the time – it seemed so obvious now in this action-replay. She heard herself say, “And anyway, we had nothing to do with him going missing, so there’s nothing to tell.” Then she took another hard drag and held it again.

  Alex looked up. “We saw him go down there, didn’t we?” He cocked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing to the woods. “The police need to know they’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “They’re probably not looking anyway,” Buddy said.

  “Things’ll never be the same if we tell,” Tom said, still bouncing his ball. “They won’t, you know. Besides, they’ll wonder why we didn’t tell before now. It’s been a week already – that’s too long to turn round and go, ‘Oh yeah, I remember beating up that little kid.’”

  Mary felt a strong urge to slash Tom’s football, just for the hell of it.

  Alex stopped grinding his trainer on the floor and looked up. “We’ll just say we were scared that people would think we had something to do with his going missing.”

  “I’m not scared,” Buddy said, flicking ash at Alex’s feet.

  “Well I’m not scared either. I’m just saying that we could say we were, because it sounds like a good reason for not coming out with the truth right away.”

  Buddy drew on his cigarette, contemplating this.

  Mary flicked her half-smoked cigarette into the wet playground. “We had nothing to do with it,” she said, “isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s true, Alex,” Buddy said. “We had nothing to do with that little bastard’s kidnapping or whatever it was. I’m not going to cop the flak.”

  The two boys stared at each other as the drizzle began to soften and fade.

  “Okay,” Alex said, putting his hands up in mock surrender, a smile spreading across his lips. “We don’t tell.” He sat on the bicycle seat and pulled at the brakes, but his eyes never left Buddy’s.

  Buddy crushed out his smoke and stepped forward. “Okay,” he said, making sure he had everyone’s attention. “And we don’t ever talk about it again.”

  Alex nodded slowly, twisting his handlebars, making a scrunching sound with the tyre.

  Buddy looked at Tom: “What about you?”

  “Fine by me.”

  Then Mary: “And you?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it in the first place.” Mary balled her fists in her pockets.

  “I bet you didn’t,” Alex muttered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Buddy cut in, “that no one ever talks about it again as from now. Or else they’ve got me to deal with.”

  Mary looked at Buddy. “Fine.”

  Alex looked up, “Buddy, you know I can deal with you any day of the week. But fine anyway, just because it is.”

  Tom rolled his eyes. “So,” he announced, “who wants to play hide and seek?”

  “Well, what else are we here for?” Buddy said, and only now did Mary notice how quickly he said it.

  Ah yes, she thought, they really planned this, didn’t they?

  “Mary, you’re ‘it’.”

  Of course I am.

  She put her hood up and stepped into the playground. Reaching the usual mark, Mary placed her hands over her face and played the part:

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...”

  As they left the old shelter, they hardly made a sound.

  Long after she had finished counting, Mary finally lowered her hands and looked out into the empty playground.

  “Coming ready or not,” she whispered.

  Sunlight dappled the glistening tarmac, turning it silver. Far beyond the old shelter, beyond Tithborough woods, beyond its narrow, flowing river, and beyond the countless houses, pubs, and shops, rose Bracton Hill. Not quite a mountain, it looked like the belly of a pregnant woman on her back, its beacon forming a sticky-out belly button. Mary imagined herself sitting there, far away on the edge of the world, surveying the other Pennine hills, looking out to Westport, on the distant coast, to the taller buildings of Lenerton, or maybe just taking in Bracton itself.

  Laughter drifted across the playground – it was coming from the woods.

  Laughter? I don’t remember anyone laughing.

  For a moment, it struck her that the past five years had been a dream, and that she would actually find the others, and they would play again, this time with her own chance to hide, and that when they started actually attending this school, it would be the old gang that started, and not simply four individuals.

  Mary ran to the shelter, hope coursing through her veins. Breathing hard, she peered into the woods, fully expecting to see the tell-tale clues:
Alex’s wheel poking out from behind a tree; the orange glint of Buddy lighting up; and maybe even Tom’s football, casually rolling across the floor. Instead, all she saw was undergrowth, dirt, and trees, everything glazed by the morning downfall.

  “Mary?”

  She turned.

  David Hartman was dressed in black: black leather shoes, black trousers, black suit jacket, black tie, and a black top hat. His shirt was white and stiff.

  Mary’s mouth was dry. A small, hurt noise came from the back of her throat.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. With scrubbed and manicured fingers, David removed an invisible piece of lint from his jacket’s breast and tossed it away. “You look different.”

  She blinked, and then scrunched her forehead, trying to focus on him. “David?”

  “Yes?”

  “David, where have you been?”

  A smile spread across his young face, and he raised an eyebrow. “Where have I been? What a strange thing to ask. Where do you think I’ve been?”

  Mary slowly walked backwards until one of the shelter’s supports dug into her back. David copied her, retreating to a nearby support; he folded his arms and leant against it. Mary put her hands behind her back, feeling the cold, rough surface of the rusty metal. “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, her eyes lowered.

  “Sure you do. You came back here to paint this place, and then you got the jitters about what you did here. Or what you didn’t do, if you really want to get down to it. You ask me where I’ve been…but I’ve been here all along.”

  “You’ve been here?”

  “Of course.”

  Mary’s eyes grew wide. She reached out and traced her fingers along the rim of David’s top hat, then, cautiously, she rested a hand on his shoulder. The fabric was soft, expensive.

  “Come on, let me show you something,” David said, turning and slipping an arm through hers. As he led her out onto the playground, the day suddenly grew warmer and brighter and the air exploded with the hazy scent of pollen. Roughly halfway, he came to a stop. “You were about here,” he said, pointing at the floor. “Which means that,” he uncoupled himself and turned around, both hands aloft, making an invisible frame with his thumbs and index fingers, “this should just be about right. Now then-”

  “Wait!”

  “Yes?”

  “What happened to you?” Mary could feel hot tears in her throat. “After we…left you, the police said you disappeared. Everyone thought you were abducted. Kidnapped or something.”

  David turned to her and stepped closer. “And how exactly did you leave me?”

  Mary’s face was burning, and her words were giant lumps impossible to either say or swallow. She breathed slowly and hoped the question would go away.

  “I thought not,” David said. “Never mind. Disappearing is easy, and it can happen to anyone. The day is full of cracks through which we might slip.” He pointed at the old shelter. “Look.”

  Mary raised her eyes. The canopy was different; where it was flat, it now raised to a peak in the middle. And there was something hung below it.

  Transfixed, Mary began to slowly walk towards the shelter; its roof began to solidify and straighten, and a translucent wooden front materialized like a gauze curtain. At last she recognised the object set beneath the roof’s peak – an oval shaped lamp – and as she did, she realised she was looking at her father’s garage.

  Her studio.

  David stepped up beside her and waved a hand in front of her face; the garage doors – which were just about reaching solidity – vanished, revealing the interior of her studio. Missing the fourth wall, it looked like a film set.

  Her desk and her father’s assorted odds and ends stood to the left, and her easel stood at the far right, at the back. Centre stage was her chair, which had been removed from its usual position at the desk and placed beneath a roof beam. Mary Townsend, of 12 Sycamore Drive, Bracton, Lancashire was standing on it, her neck fastened to the beam by a short rope.

  Before the little girl standing beside David Hartman had time to scream, the young woman in the garage kicked the chair away.

  3

  Mary opened her eyes.

  The crashing sound was overwhelming, but gone quickly. Lost in an indigo darkness, coolness washed over her.

  Chapter Five

  1

  For the last five years, Helen Brenné had worn a short bob of blonde hair that, despite her almost constant efforts to tuck it behind her ears, always tumbled across her forehead whenever she leant over her schoolwork. Also, while pondering over an equation or geometric conundrum, Helen would nibble on the end of a pencil; if the problem was particularly tricky, she would rattle the eraser between her teeth. Like every other girl at St Vincent’s, Helen wore a blue and grey striped tie, a white blouse, and a grey skirt and jumper. Unlike every other girl, however, she made this drab uniform look good. Stylish, even.

  Alex Turner knew these things well – he thought of them often, and had done ever since his first day at high school.

  Owing to a sudden and uncharacteristic moment of stage fright, Alex’s first day at St Vincent’s was everyone else’s second, therefore he would never experience that strange, awkward fumble when pupils from different primary schools come together and somehow organise themselves into an improvised – yet apparently unchangeable – classroom seating plan. As with every other class on that tortuous first day, he seemed somehow later than everyone else, one step behind in his navigation of the buildings, and so when he walked into Mr Roberts’s Maths lesson everyone else was already at their places. The few remaining empty desks had sports bags and satchels strategically positioned on them: warnings from their adjacent owners to stay away. Some, he noticed, even set out their things onto nearby spaces as he approached.

  After enduring an eternity of sniggering and staring, Alex noticed an empty space next to the girl with the short, yellow bob and the pencil in her mouth; she had smiled at him, and he had sat down before she changed her mind. He took out his new pencil case – a wooden one with a sliding tray and a twisting mechanism between its two compartments – extracted a black fountain pen his mother had bought at his special request, and wrote his name on the front of the red exercise book Mr Roberts had just handed him.

  Then the pretty blonde girl next to him did something both wonderful and terrible. She leant over, peered at his exercise book, and whispered, “Hello, Alex Turner, I’m Helen Brenné.”

  *

  Alex stopped dabbing shaving cream on his chin, set down the purple canister decorated with a gold star on the side of the sink, and blinked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. A dream surfaced in the back of his mind – something about the old gang – and he shook it free; it was just another thing to regret, after all, and wasn’t that just the way of it? As soon as you started editing the past, a list emerged; where did you stop? For perhaps the thousandth time, however, he wondered what life would be like if Helen hadn’t introduced herself in that easy, confident way. Or, more specifically, if they hadn’t become friends.

  Would he have asked her out by now?

  Would she have been more inclined to say yes?

  His reflection raised its eyebrows. And when was the last time you asked a girl out, anyway?

  “Mary,” he murmured. “And she said yes.”

  And you, what, held hands a couple of times? That was in primary school. That was just pretending to go out.

  The reflection nodded, and he did too. He took a blue disposable razor from the soap dish, swished it in the milky water, and raised it to his cheek, trying to estimate the right amount of pressure; sometimes the blade snagged, and sometimes it cut – either way, he always seemed to end up with either a bad case of shaving rash or bits of toilet roll stuck all over his face. He pressed the cold blade against his skin and pulled it through the thick foam, already realising he’d messed it up. Blood appeared.

  Anyway, he thought, haven’t you alre
ady asked her out?

  Yes, of sorts. Short of declaring his love, Alex thought he’d made his feelings fairly clear; he had suggested that they go to the cinema once, and he had also invited her on one of his and Craig’s weekend trips up Bracton Hill. Both invitations had been met with excuses regarding homework.

  “The thing is,” he told the half-shaved face scowling at him, “I just need to know one way or the other. Does she like me, or doesn’t she like me?”

  He carried on rinsing and shaving, rinsing and shaving.

  The words sounded right.

  Rinse.

  Sensible, even.

  Shave.

  Knowing one way or the other would help him put this useless crush – if it was useless – behind him, and maybe let him get interested in other girls.

  Rinse.

  Still, not knowing had its charms too.

  Shave.

  Not knowing was a lottery ticket he never really had to check – that was the beauty of it. Not knowing meant there was still a possibility.

  He pulled the plug and splashed his face. His hands felt the memory of his old BMX’s handgrips – the fine, rubber ribs, soft beneath his fingers – and a series of images flashed in before him: Buddy offering Mary a cigarette, like a condemned prisoner; Tom bouncing his ball; their sheepish scurry into Tithborough woods.

  He shook his head. Once you start, where do you stop?

  Alex patted his face dry then rubbed on some blue aftershave gel, clenching his teeth. Then he returned to his room and tried to get ready for school without thinking of Helen Brenné, or any other situation he wished he had approached differently.

  2

  The corridor smelled of fresh paint and stale central heating. At the door, Buddy turned his head, straining to hear.

  Pete said, “What are you-”