The Chalk Man Read online

  “Shit!”

  “What?” Hoppo asked.

  “My wallet. I’ve lost it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m frigging sure.”

  But I checked my other pocket just in case. Both empty. Crap.

  “Well, where did you have it last?” Nicky asked.

  I tried to think. I knew I’d had it after the last ride, because I checked. Plus, we bought hot dogs afterward. I didn’t have a go on the Hook a Duck so…

  “The hot-dog stall.”

  The hot-dog stall was all the way across the fair, in the opposite direction to the Orbiter and the Meteorite.

  “Shit,” I said again.

  “Come on,” Hoppo said. “Let’s go and look.”

  “What’s the point?” Metal Mickey said. “Someone’ll have picked it up by now.”

  “I could lend you some money,” Fat Gav said. “But I haven’t got much left.”

  I was pretty sure this was a lie. Fat Gav always had more money than the rest of us. Just like he always had the best toys and the newest, shiniest bike. His dad owned one of the local pubs, The Bull, and his mum was an Avon lady. Fat Gav was generous, but I also knew he really wanted to go on some more rides.

  I shook my head anyway. “Thanks. It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t. I could feel tears burning behind my eyes. It wasn’t just the lost money. It was feeling stupid, it was the spoiled day. It was knowing that Mum would be all annoyed and say, “I told you so.”

  “You lot go on,” I said. “I’ll go back and have a look. No point us all wasting our time.”

  “Cool,” Metal Mickey said. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  They all shambled off. I could see they were relieved. It wasn’t their money lost, or their day ruined. I started to trudge back across the fair, toward the hot-dog stall. It was right across from the Waltzers, so I used that as a marker. You couldn’t really miss the old carnival ride. Right in the center of the fairground.

  Music blared out, distorted through the ancient speakers. Multicolored lights flashed and the riders screamed as the wooden carriages spun round and round, faster and faster on the revolving wooden carousel.

  As I got closer, I started looking down, shuffling along more carefully, scanning the ground. Rubbish, hot-dog wrappers, no wallet. ’Course not. Metal Mickey was right. Someone would have picked it up and nicked my money.

  I sighed and looked up. I spotted the Pale Man first. That wasn’t his name, of course. I found out afterward his name was Mr. Halloran and he was our new teacher.

  It was hard to miss the Pale Man. He was very tall, for a start, and thin. He wore stonewashed jeans, a baggy white shirt and a big straw hat. He looked like this ancient seventies singer my mum liked. David Bowie.

  The Pale Man stood near the hot-dog stall, drinking a blue slushy through a straw and watching the Waltzers. Well, I thought he was watching the Waltzers.

  I found myself looking in the same direction, and that’s when I saw the girl. I was still pissed off about my wallet but I was also a twelve-year-old boy with hormones just starting to bubble and simmer. Nights in my room weren’t always spent reading comic books by torchlight under my bedcovers.

  The girl was standing with a blond friend I vaguely recognized from around town (her dad was a policeman or something), but my mind instantly dismissed her. It’s a sad fact that beauty, real beauty, just eclipses everything and everyone around it. Blond Friend was pretty, but Waltzer Girl—as I would always think of her, even after I learned her name—was properly beautiful. Tall and slim, with long, dark hair and even longer legs, so smooth and brown they gleamed in the sun. She wore a rara skirt, and a baggy vest with “Relax” scrawled on it over a fluorescent-green bra top. She tucked her hair behind one ear and a gold hoop earring gleamed in the sun.

  I’m slightly ashamed to say I didn’t notice her face much at first, but when she turned to talk to Blond Friend I wasn’t disappointed. It was heartachingly pretty, with full lips and tilted almond eyes.

  And then it was gone.

  One minute she was there, her face was there, the next there was this terrible, eardrum-wrenching noise, like some great beast had bellowed from the bowels of the earth. Later, I found out it was the sound of the slew ring on the ancient Waltzers’ axis snapping after too much use and too little maintenance. I saw a flash of silver and her face, or half of it, was sheared away, leaving a gaping mass of gristle, bone and blood. So much blood.

  Fractions of a second later, before I even had a chance to open my mouth to scream, something huge and purple and black came tearing past. There was a deafening crash—the loose Waltzer carriage smashing into the hot-dog stall in a hail of flying metal and splinters of wood—and more screaming and yelling as people dived out of the way. I found myself bowled over and knocked to the ground.

  Other people fell on top of me. Someone’s foot stamped down on my wrist. A knee clipped my head. A boot kicked me in the ribs. I yelped but somehow managed to bundle myself up and roll over. Then I yelped again. Waltzer Girl lay next to me. Mercifully, her hair had fallen over her face, but I recognized the T-shirt and fluorescent bra top, even though both were soaked through with blood. More blood ran down her leg. A second piece of sharp metal had sliced right through the bone, just below her knee. Her lower leg was barely hanging on, tethered only by stringy tendons.

  I started to scramble away—she was obviously dead. I couldn’t do anything—and that was when her hand reached out and grabbed my arm.

  She turned her bloody, ravaged face toward me. Somewhere, within all the red, a single brown eye stared at me. The other rested limply on her ruined cheek.

  “Help me,” she rasped. “Help me.”

  I wanted to run. I wanted to scream and cry and be sick all at once. I might have done all three if another, large, firm hand hadn’t clamped down on my shoulder and a soft voice hadn’t said, “It’s okay. I know you’re scared, but I need you to listen to me very carefully and do just what I say.”

  I turned. The Pale Man stared down at me. Only now did I realize that his face, beneath the wide-brimmed hat, was almost as white as his shirt. Even his eyes were a misty, translucent gray. He looked like a ghost, or a vampire, and under any other circumstances I would probably have been scared of him. But right now he was an adult, and I needed an adult to tell me what to do.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Ed—Eddie.”

  “Okay, Eddie. You hurt?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. But this young lady is, so we need to help her, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “This is what I need you to do…hold her leg here, and hold on tight, really tight.”

  He took my hands and placed them around the girl’s leg. It felt hot and slimy with blood.

  “Got it?”

  I nodded again. I could taste fear, bitter and metallic, on my tongue. I could feel blood seeping between my fingers, even though I was holding on really tight, as tightly as I could…

  In the distance, a lot farther away it seemed than the sounds actually were, I could hear music pounding and screams of enjoyment. The girl’s screams had stopped. She lay motionless and quiet now, just the low rasp of her breathing, and even that was growing fainter.

  “Eddie, you have to concentrate. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I stared at the Pale Man. He unwound his belt from his jeans. It was a long belt, too long for his skinny waist, and it had extra holes in it where he had made it smaller. Funny, the weird things you notice at the crappiest moments. Like I noticed that Waltzer Girl’s shoe had come off. A jelly shoe. Pink and sparkly. And I thought how she probably wasn’t going to need it again, what with her leg almost cut in two.

  “You still with me, Eddie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Almost there. You’re doing great, Eddie.”

  The Pale Man took the belt and wrapped it around the top of the girl’s leg. He p
ulled hard, really hard. He was stronger than he looked. Almost straightaway I could feel the gush of blood slowing.

  He looked at me and nodded. “You can let go now. I’ve got it.”

  I took my hands away. Now the tension had gone, they started to shake. I wrapped them around my body, under my arms.

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know. Hopefully, they can save her leg.”

  “What about her face?” I whispered.

  He looked up at me, and something in those pale gray eyes stilled me. “Were you looking at her face before, Eddie?”

  I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what to say, or understand why his voice didn’t sound so friendly anymore.

  Then he looked away again and said quietly, “She’ll live. That’s the important thing.”

  And that was when a huge crack of thunder broke overhead and the first drops of rain started to fall.

  I guess it was the first time I understood how things can change in an instant. All the stuff we take for granted can just be ripped away. Maybe that’s why I took it. To hold on to something. To keep it safe. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  But like a lot of stuff we tell ourselves, that was probably just a pile of stinking Buckaroo.

  —

  The local paper called us heroes. They got Mr. Halloran and me back together in the park and they took our photo.

  Incredibly, the two people in the Waltzer carriage that broke loose suffered only broken bones, cuts and bruises. A few other bystanders caught some nasty gashes that needed stitches, and there were a few more fractures and cracked ribs in the stampede to get out of the way.

  Even Waltzer Girl (whose name was actually Elisa) lived. The doctors managed to reattach her leg and somehow save her eye. The papers called it a miracle. They didn’t say so much about the rest of her face.

  Gradually, as with all dramas and tragedies, interest in it started to fade. Fat Gav stopped cracking bad-taste jokes (mostly about being legless), and even Metal Mickey got bored of calling me “Hero Boy” and asking where I’d left my cape. Other news and gossip took its place. There was a car crash on the A36, and the cousin of one of the kids at school died, and then Marie Bishop, who was in the fifth year, got pregnant. So life, as it tends to, moved on.

  I wasn’t so bothered. I’d got a bit tired of the story myself. And I wasn’t really the sort of kid who likes being the center of attention. Plus, the less I talked about it, the less often I had to picture Waltzer Girl’s missing face. The nightmares started to fade away. My secret trips to the laundry basket with soiled sheets became less frequent.

  Mum asked me a couple of times if I wanted to visit Waltzer Girl in hospital. I always said no. I didn’t want to see her again. Didn’t want to look at her ruined face. Didn’t want those brown eyes to stare at me accusingly: I know you were going to run away, Eddie. Until Mr. Halloran grabbed you, you would have left me there to die.

  I think Mr. Halloran visited. A lot. I guess he had the time. He wasn’t due to start teaching at our school until September. Apparently, he had decided to move into his rented cottage a few months early so he could settle into the town first.

  I supposed it was a good idea. It gave everyone a chance to get used to seeing him around. Got all the questions out of the way before he stepped into the classroom:

  What was wrong with his skin? He was an albino, the adults explained patiently. That meant he was missing something called a “pigment” that made most people’s skin a normal pink or brown color. And his eyes? Same thing. They were just missing pigment. So, he wasn’t a freak, or a monster or a ghost? No. Just a normal man with a medical condition.

  They were wrong. Mr. Halloran was many things, but normal was never one of them.

  2016

  The letter arrives without a flourish or fanfare or even a sense of foreboding. It slips through the letter box, sandwiched between a charity envelope for Macmillan and a flyer for a new pizza takeaway.

  And who the hell sent letters these days, anyway? Even my mother has, at the age of seventy-eight, embraced email, Twitter and Facebook. In fact, she is far more tech savvy than me. I’m a bit of a Luddite. This is of constant amusement to my pupils, whose talk about Snapchat, favorites, tags and Instagram might as well be a foreign language. I thought I taught English, I often tell them ruefully. I haven’t got a flying Buckaroo what you lot are talking about.

  I don’t recognize the handwriting on the envelope, but then I barely recognize my own these days. It’s all keyboards and touchscreens now.

  I slit the envelope open and regard the contents while sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of coffee. Actually, that’s not quite true. I sit at the table, staring at the contents as a cup of coffee grows cold beside me.

  “What’s that?”

  I start and glance around. Chloe pads into the kitchen, sleep-crumpled and yawning. Her dyed black hair is loose, the choppy fringe stuck up in cowlicks. She wears an old Cure sweatshirt and the remains of last night’s makeup.

  “This,” I say, carefully folding it up, “is what we call a letter. People used to use them as a means of communication in the olden days.”

  She gives me a withering look, along with her middle finger. “I know you’re talking, but all I hear is blah, blah, blah.”

  “That’s the problem with young people these days. They just don’t listen.”

  “Ed, you’re barely old enough to be my dad, so why do you sound like my grandfather?”

  She’s right. I am forty-two and Chloe is somewhere in her late twenties. (I think. She has never said and I am too much of a gentleman to ask.) Not so many years between us, but it often feels like decades.

  Chloe is youthful and cool and could pass for a teenager. I am not and could possibly pass for a pensioner. You might kindly call my look “careworn.” Although I’ve found it’s not cares that wear you down but worries and regrets.

  My hair is still thick and mostly dark, but my laughter lines lost their sense of humor some time ago. Like a lot of tall people, I stoop, and my favored clothes are what Chloe calls “charity-shop chic.” Suits, waistcoats and proper shoes. I do own some jeans but I don’t wear them to work and—unless I am hunkered down in my study—I’m usually working, often taking on extra tutoring in the holidays.

  I could say this is because I love teaching, but nobody loves their job that much. I do it because I need the money. It’s also the reason Chloe lives here. She’s my lodger and, I like to think, a friend.

  Admittedly, we’re an odd couple. Chloe is not the type of lodger I would normally take in. But I had just been let down by another would-be tenant and the daughter of an acquaintance knew “this girl” who urgently needed a room. It seems to work, and the rent helps. As does the company.

  It might seem strange that I need a lodger at all. I’m relatively well paid, the house I live in was given to me by my mum, and I’m sure most people presume this means a cozy, mortgage-free existence.

  The sad truth is that the house was bought when interest rates were in double figures, was remortgaged once to pay for renovations, and then again to pay for my dad’s care when his decline became too much to deal with at home.

  Mum and I lived here together until five years ago, when she met Gerry, a jovial ex-banker who decided to chuck it all in for a self-sufficient lifestyle in a self-built eco home in the Wiltshire countryside.

  I have nothing against Gerry. I have nothing really for him either, but he seems to make Mum happy, and that, as we are fond of lying, is the main thing. I suppose, even though I’m forty-two, a part of me doesn’t want Mum to be happy with any man other than my dad. This is childish, immature and selfish. And I’m good with that.

  Besides, at seventy-eight, Mum, quite frankly, does not give a shit. Those weren’t the exact words she used when she told me she had decided to move in with Gerry, but I got the subtext:

  “I need to get away from this place, Ed. There are too many me
mories.”

  “You want to sell the house?”

  “No. I want you to have it, Ed. With a little love, it could be a wonderful family home.”

  “Mum, I don’t even have a partner, let alone a family.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “If you don’t want the house, just sell it.”

  “No. I just…I just want you to be happy.”

  “So who’s your letter from?” Chloe asks, walking over to the coffee machine and pouring out a mug.

  I slip it into the pocket of my dressing gown. “No one important.”

  “Oooh. Mysterious.”

  “Not really. Just…an old acquaintance.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Another one? Wow. They’re all coming out of the woodwork. Never knew you were so popular.”

  I frown. And then I remember that I told her about my dinner guest tonight.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “I am. For someone so unsociable, the fact you have any friends is astounding.”

  “I have friends, here in Anderbury. You know them. Gav and Hoppo.”

  “They don’t count.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re not really friends. They’re just people you’ve known all your life.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of a friend?”

  “No, that’s the definition of parochial. People you feel obliged to hang around with out of habit and history rather than any real desire for their company.”

  She has a point. Sort of.

  “Anyway,” I change the subject, “I’d better go and get dressed. I have to go into school today.”

  “Isn’t it the holidays?”

  “Contrary to popular belief, a teacher’s work does not end when school is out for summer.”

  “Never had you down as an Alice Cooper fan.”

  “I love her music,” I say, deadpan.

  Chloe smiles, a quirky lopsided smile that turns her somewhat plain face into something remarkable. Some women are like that. Unusual, even strange-looking, at first glance, but then a smile or a subtle cock of an eyebrow transforms them.