The Chalk Man Read online

  I suppose I have a small crush on Chloe, not that I would ever admit it. I know she sees me more as a protective uncle than as a prospective boyfriend. I would never want to make her feel uncomfortable by letting her think that I view her with anything other than paternal fondness. I am also well aware that, in my position, in a small town, a relationship with a much younger woman could easily be misconstrued.

  “When’s your other ‘old acquaintance’ arriving?” she asks as she brings her coffee to the table.

  I push back my chair and stand. “Around seven.” I pause. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “Think I’ll pass. Don’t want to spoil your catch-up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe another time, though. From what you’ve said, he seems an interesting character.”

  “Yes.” I force a smile. “Interesting is one word for it.”

  —

  The school is a brisk fifteen-minute walk from my house. On a day like today—a pleasantly warm summer day, a hint of blue beckoning between the thin layer of cloud—it’s a relaxing walk. A way to get my thoughts in order before work begins.

  In term time, this can be useful. Many of the kids I teach at Anderbury Academy are what we call “challenging.” In my day, they would have been called “a bunch of little shits.” Some days, I need to mentally prepare myself to deal with them. Other days, the only preparation that helps is a shot of vodka in my morning coffee.

  Like many small market towns, Anderbury looks, to the casual eye, like a picturesque place to live. Quaint cobbled streets, tea shops and a semi-famous cathedral. There’s a market twice a week, and plenty of pretty parks and riverside walks. It’s only a short drive to the sandy beaches of Bournemouth and the open heathland of the New Forest.

  Scratch the surface, though, and you’ll find the tourist sheen is just that. Much of the work here is seasonal, and unemployment is high. Groups of bored youths hang around the shops and in the parks. Teenage mums wheel screaming babies up and down the high street. This is not new, but it does seem to have become more prevalent. Or maybe that’s just my perception. Often, what comes with age is not wisdom but intolerance.

  I reach the gates to Old Meadows Park. My teenage stomping ground. It has changed a lot since my day. Obviously. There’s a new skate park, and the playground where our gang used to hang out has been usurped by a new, modern “recreation area” at the other end of the park. There are rope swings and a huge tunnel slide, zip-wires and all manner of cool stuff that we couldn’t even have dreamed of when we were young.

  Strangely, the old play area remains, abandoned and derelict. The climbing frame has rusted, the swings are tangled over the tops of the bars and the once bright paint on the wooden roundabout is blistered and flaking, daubed with ancient graffiti by people who have long forgotten why Helen is a bitch or why on earth they hearted Andy W.

  I stand for a moment, staring at it, remembering.

  The faint squeak of the baby swing, the biting chill of the early-morning air, the crispness of white chalk on black tarmac. Another message. But this one was different. Not a chalk man…something else.

  I turn abruptly. Not now. Not again. I won’t be drawn back in.

  —

  My work at school doesn’t take long. I’m finished by lunchtime. I gather my books, lock up and walk back toward the town center.

  The Bull stands on the corner of the high street, the last of the remaining “locals.” Anderbury used to have two other pubs, The Dragon and The Wheatsheaf, then the chains moved in. The old locals closed and Gav’s parents were forced to cut prices, host ladies’ nights, do happy hours and “welcome families” in order to survive.

  Eventually, they had had enough. They moved to Majorca, where they now run a bar called Britz. Gav, who had worked part-time in the pub since he turned sixteen, took over the beer pumps and has been there ever since.

  I push open the heavy old door and step inside. Hoppo and Gav sit at our usual table, in the corner by the window. From the waist up, Gav is still bulky, large enough to remind me why we used to call him Fat Gav. But now the bulk is more muscle than flab. His arms are tree trunks, veins standing out like taut blue wires. His face is chiseled, his shorn hair gray and sparse.

  Hoppo has hardly changed at all. In his plumbers’ overalls, if you squinted slightly, he could still be mistaken for a twelve-year-old boy playing dress-up.

  The two of them are deep in conversation. Their barely touched pints sit on the table. Guinness for Hoppo and a Diet Coke for Gav, who rarely drinks.

  I order a Taylor’s Mild from a surly-looking girl behind the bar who frowns at me, then frowns at the pump as though it has mortally offended her.

  “Need to change the barrel,” she mutters.

  “Okay.”

  I wait. She rolls her eyes.

  “I’ll bring it over.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turn and walk across the pub. When I glance back she still hasn’t moved.

  I sit down on a rickety stool, next to Hoppo.

  “Afternoon.”

  They look up, and straightaway I can tell that something is wrong. Something has happened. Gav wheels himself out from behind the table. The muscles in his arms are in stark contrast to the wasted limbs that rest idly in his wheelchair.

  I turn on my stool. “Gav? What—”

  His fist flies toward my face, my left cheek explodes with pain, and I topple backward onto the floor.

  He stares down at me. “How long have you known?”

  1986

  Despite being the biggest, and our gang’s unspoken leader, Fat Gav was actually the youngest.

  His birthday was at the beginning of August, at the start of the school holidays. We were all pretty jealous of this. Me in particular. I was the oldest. My birthday was also in the holidays, three days before Christmas. It meant, instead of getting two proper presents, I nearly always got one “big” present, or two not so good ones.

  Fat Gav always got loads of presents. Not just because his mum and dad were loaded but also because he had a million relatives. Aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents.

  I was a bit jealous of this, too. I only had my mum and dad and my gran, who we didn’t see very often because she lived miles away, and also because she was going a “bit doolally,” as Dad put it. I didn’t really like visiting her. Her living room was always too hot and smelly, and she always had the same stupid film playing on the telly.

  “Wasn’t Julie Andrews beautiful?” she would sigh, misty-eyed, and we all had to nod and say “yes” and eat soft digestives out of this rusty old biscuit tin that had dancing reindeer all around the side.

  Fat Gav’s mum and dad threw a big party for him every year. This year, they were having a barbecue. There was going to be a magician and even a disco afterward.

  My mum rolled her eyes when she saw the invitation. I knew she didn’t really like Fat Gav’s mum and dad. I heard her once tell Dad that they were “often-contagious.” When I got older, I realized she’d actually said “ostentatious,” but for years I thought she meant that they harbored some strange disease.

  “A disco, Geoff?” she said to my dad in an odd tone of voice. I couldn’t decide if it was good or bad. “What d’you think of that?”

  Dad moved over from where he was doing the washing-up and glanced at the invite. “Sounds like fun,” he said.

  “You can’t come, Dad,” I said. “This is a kids’ party. You’re not invited.”

  “Actually, we are,” Mum said, and pointed at the invitation. “ ‘Mums and Dads welcome. Bring a sausage.’ ”

  I looked at it again and frowned. Mums and dads at a kids’ party? I didn’t think that was a good idea. Not a good idea at all.

  —

  “So what are you getting Fat Gav for his birthday?” Hoppo asked.

  We were sitting in the park on the climbing frame, swinging our legs and sucking on cola ice pops. Murphy, Hopp
o’s old black Labrador, lay on the ground beneath us, dozing in the shade.

  This was around the end of July, almost two months after the terrible day at the fair and a week before Fat Gav’s birthday. Things were starting to get back to normal, and I was glad. I wasn’t really a kid who liked excitement or unexpected drama. I was—and have remained—someone who likes routine. Even at twelve, my sock drawer was always neatly arranged and my books and tapes were stored in alphabetical order.

  Perhaps it was because everything else in our house was kind of chaotic. It wasn’t fully built, for a start. Again, this was typical of the difference between my mum and dad and other parents I knew. Aside from Hoppo, who lived with his mum in an old terraced house, most of the kids at school lived in nice, modern houses with neat, square gardens that all looked the same.

  We lived in this ugly old Victorian house which seemed to be constantly surrounded by scaffolding. Out back, it had a big, overgrown garden that I had never managed to fight my way to the end of, and upstairs, at least two rooms where you could see the sky through the ceiling.

  Mum and Dad had bought it as a “doer-upper” when I was really small. That was eight years ago and, as far as I could tell, there was still a lot more doing-upping required. The main rooms were all liveable-ish. But the hallway and kitchen had bare plaster on the walls, and nowhere had any carpet.

  Upstairs, we still had the old bathroom. A prehistoric enamel bath with its own resident house spider, a sink that leaked and an ancient loo with a long chain flush. And no shower.

  As a twelve-year-old kid, I found it mortally embarrassing. We didn’t even have an electric fire. Dad had to chop logs outside, bring them in and light a fire. Like it was the frigging Dark Ages.

  “When are we going to finish getting the house built?” I would ask sometimes.

  “Well, building work takes time and money,” Dad would say.

  “Haven’t we got any money? Mum’s a doctor. Fat Gav says doctors make loads of money.”

  Dad sighed. “We’ve discussed this before, Eddie. Fa— Gavin does not know everything about everything. And you have to remember, my work isn’t as well paid as some, or as regular.”

  More than once I almost blurted out, “Why can’t you just go and get a proper job, then?” But that would upset my dad and I didn’t like to do that.

  I knew Dad often felt guilty about money because he didn’t earn as much as Mum. In between the stuff he wrote for magazines he was trying to write a book.

  “Things will change when I’m a bestselling author,” he would often say, with a laugh and a wink. He pretended he was joking, but secretly I think he believed that, one day, it would actually happen.

  It never did. He got close. I know he submitted manuscripts to agents and even had some interest from one for a while. But somehow, nothing ever came of it. Perhaps, if he hadn’t started to get ill, he might have eventually made it. As it was, when the illness started to eat away at his mind, the first thing it swallowed was the thing he loved the most. His words.

  I sucked harder on my ice pop. “I haven’t really thought about a present,” I said to Hoppo.

  A lie. I had thought about it, long and hard. That was the problem with Fat Gav. He had pretty much everything and buying him a present he liked was really difficult.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Dunno yet.”

  I changed tack. “Is your mum coming to the party?”

  He pulled a face. “I’m not sure. She might be working.”

  Hoppo’s mum worked as a cleaner. You’d often see her trundling around the streets in her rusty old Reliant Robin, the boot piled high with mops and buckets.

  Metal Mickey called her “a gyppo” behind Hoppo’s back. I thought that was a bit cruel, but it’s true that she did look a bit like a gypsy, with her straggly gray hair and shapeless dresses.

  I’m not sure where Hoppo’s dad was. Hoppo never really spoke about him, but I got the impression he had left when Hoppo was small. Hoppo had an older brother, too, but he’d gone to join the army or something. Thinking back, I guess one of the reasons our gang all hung out together was that none of our families was exactly “normal.”

  “Are your mum and dad coming?” Hoppo asked.

  “Think so. Just hope they don’t make it really boring.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll be okay. And there is gonna be a magician.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both grinned, then Hoppo said, “We could go down the shops now, if you like, look for something for Fat Gav?”

  I hesitated. I liked hanging out with Hoppo. You didn’t have to act clever all the time. Or be on guard. It was just easy.

  Hoppo wasn’t the brightest kid but he was one of those kids who just knew how to be. He didn’t try to be liked by everyone, like Fat Gav, or change his face to fit in, like Metal Mickey, and I kind of respected him for that.

  That’s why I felt a bit bad now when I said, “Sorry, I can’t. I have to get back, to help Dad with some stuff in the house.”

  That was usually my get-out clause. No one could doubt that there was plenty of “stuff” that needed doing in our house.

  Hoppo nodded, finished his ice pop and chucked the wrapper on the floor. “Okay. Well, I’m gonna walk Murphy.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “See you.”

  He ambled away, floppy bits of fringe swinging in his face, Murphy loping by his side. I chucked my ice-pop wrapper in the bin and headed off in the opposite direction, toward home. And then, when I was sure I was out of sight, I made a U-turn and started walking back into town.

  I didn’t like lying to Hoppo, but there are some things you can’t share, even with your best friends. Kids have secrets, too. More so than adults, sometimes.

  Out of our gang, I knew I was the nerdy one; studious, slightly square. I was the sort of kid who liked to collect stuff—stamps, coins, model cars. Other stuff, too: shells, bird skulls from the woods, keys. Surprising how often you would find a lost key. I liked the idea that I could sneak into people’s houses, even if I didn’t know who the keys belonged to or where the people lived.

  I was pretty precious about my collections. I hid them well and kept them safe. I suppose, in a way, I liked the feeling of control. Kids don’t have a lot of control over their lives, but only I knew what was in my boxes, and only I could add stuff or take it away.

  Since the fair, I had been collecting more and more. Stuff I found, stuff people left lying around. (I had started to notice how careless people were; like they didn’t realize how important it was to hold on to things or they could be gone forever.)

  And sometimes—if I saw something I absolutely had to have—I took stuff I really should have paid for.

  —

  Anderbury was not a big town but it got really busy in summer with coachloads of tourists, most of them American. They hobbled around, cluttering up the narrow pavements in their flowered sundresses and baggy shorts, squinting at maps and pointing up at buildings.

  As well as the cathedral, there was a market square with a big Debenhams, a lot of small tea shops and one posh hotel. The high street had mostly boring shops like a supermarket and a chemist’s and a bookshop. However, it also had a huge Woolworths.

  As kids, Woolworths—or “Woolies,” as everyone called it—was our absolute favorite shop. It had everything you could ever want. Aisle upon aisle of toys, from big, expensive ones to loads of cheap plastic crap which you could buy a ton of and still have change left for the pick-and-mix counter.

  It also had a really mean security guard called Jimbo who we were all pretty scared of. Jimbo was a skinhead and I’d heard that beneath his uniform he had a load of tattoos, including a huge swastika on his back.

  Fortunately, Jimbo was pretty useless at his job. He spent most of his time loitering outside, smoking and leering at girls. That meant, if you were smart and quick, it was dead easy to avoid Jimbo’s attention by just waiting unt
il he was distracted.

  Today my luck was in. A group of teenage girls was hanging around the phone box just down the street. It was warm, so they were wearing miniskirts or shorts. Jimbo was leaning against the corner of the store, a cigarette dangling from his fingers, tongue scraping the floor, even though the girls were only a couple of years older than me, and he was like thirty or something.

  I scooted across the road and waltzed straight through the entrance. The store spread out in front of me. Rows of sweets and the pick-and-mix counter to my left. To my right, tapes and records. Straight ahead, the toy aisles. I felt a flutter of anticipation. But I couldn’t savor it. Or linger. One of the staff might notice.

  I walked purposefully toward the toys, scanning the rows and assessing my options. Too expensive. Too big. Too cheap. Too lame. Then I saw it. A Magic 8 Ball. Steven Gemmel had one. He’d brought it into school one day and I remember thinking it was ace. I was also pretty sure that Fat Gav didn’t have one. That alone made it special. As did the fact that it was the last one on the shelf.

  I picked it up and glanced around. Then, in one swift move, I slipped it into my rucksack.

  I sauntered back toward the sweets. The next bit took nerve. I could feel the weight of my illicit plunder banging against my back. I grabbed a pick-and-mix bag and forced myself to take my time, choosing a selection of fizzy cola bottles, white mice and flying saucers. Then I walked up to the till.

  A fat woman with a huge, very curly perm weighed the sweets and smiled at me. “43p, love.”

  “Thanks.”

  I counted out some change from my pocket and handed it over.

  She started to chuck it into the till then frowned. “You’re 1p short, love.”

  “Oh.”

  Crap. I fumbled in my pocket again. I didn’t have anything else.

  “I, erm, I’d better put something back,” I said, cheeks burning, hands sweating, the bag on my back feeling heavier than ever.

  Perm Lady looked at me for a moment and then she leaned forward and gave me a wink. Her eyelids were all crinkly, like wrinkled-up paper. “Don’t worry, love. Pretend I counted wrong.”