Truestory Page 2

  I inched towards the till, waiting for a fat woman to pay for a load of cake. I was going to have to choose what tea I wanted. Peppermint? Camomile? Blackcurrant-flavoured Rooibos?

  Who cared? I didn’t even want a cup of tea. But I had to have a cup of tea because a cup of tea and a biscuit in a café was my weekly treat for being trapped at Backwoods day in day out, year after year.

  ‘Earl Grey, please.’ I smiled at the girl but she didn’t smile back and I felt stupid. I bit my lip; the back of my throat tightened and burned. I’d better not start crying. I snatched the change, resenting her sticky fingers all over it, and without saying thanks went and sat by the window.

  I broke the biscuit into crumbs and stirred my tea until it went cold. I watched the shoppers trail past with their miserable faces. What was keeping them trapped in their dreary lives? Maybe they weren’t trapped. Maybe they wanted to traipse about the grey precinct on a Tuesday afternoon carting their carrier bags of cheap crap from the pound shop with only a trip round Farmfoods to look forward to.

  Maybe it was only me who might start screaming and never stop.

  I was thinking about Duncan’s suit in the skip dripping with paint and slipping between the floorboards and I wondered if there was such a thing as a council incinerator. Perhaps I could throw my old junk into a fire and watch it burn, see it singe and smoulder and burst into flames until there was nothing left but a pile of ashes.

  My phone beeped and I jumped. A text from Sam. My heart raced as if I’d been punched. I stopped breathing. What now?

  MUM BUY EAR DEFENDERS. URGENT.

  What the hell? I stared at the phone then chucked it in my bag.

  The pull back to the farm was immediate and irresistible; I had a panicky urge to wave a magic wand and be back there straight away.

  Sometimes it took days to calm Sam down after a bad do, days that stretched and swirled around me, holding me fast, suffocating me. Days like the ones after Duncan lit the fire with Sam’s map and we were forced to turn the house upside down searching for every map he’d ever drawn – and he could remember every single one. Days like the ones after Sam’s first computer died and he wouldn’t stop crying and refused to eat or sleep and barricaded himself in his room biting his hands and his arms until they bled and his sheets were all stuck to him and the scabs turned septic.

  I don’t believe in God but I started praying. Oh God let it be all right. Please, God, let it be all right.

  I couldn’t get back to the farm fast enough yet I had an overwhelming urge to head in the opposite direction – trees and hedges whizzing past in a blur – my foot flat down, air ripping through the car window, and never stop, never have to face the day-to-day reality of life with Sam.

  I mean, ear defenders? What the hell was going on? Was Duncan yelling and storming about in a temper? Had he started some half-cocked building project? Had he picked up that guitar he’d bought in the pub and never played? Or, God forbid was he trying to bully Sam into learning to box again?

  Would I never learn that I couldn’t leave them together, even for an hour?

  I jumped a red light, squeezing through as the other lights turned green and I hammered it back to the farm. I shot through the gate, crunching over the potholes, stones flying. I pulled up and took a couple of deep breaths.

  After the panic of getting back I didn’t want to go inside. I gripped the wheel. I wanted to lean my forehead on it, close my eyes and let life wash over me, but I couldn’t. I glanced up at Sam’s bedroom window, but he wasn’t looking for me; there was no shadowy figure hovering behind the curtains. I let a second of peace pass, then another, but I couldn’t hide in the car all day; I had to go and pay the price for that cold cup of tea and crumbled up shortbread biscuit.

  In the kitchen Duncan was squatting beside his stupid new cartridge press, muttering. He had a spanner in his hand, which was a bad sign.

  ‘Fuckin’ thing’s fucked – ’

  I took in the scene and for a second was torn between ignoring him and yelling at him. I’d told him that cartridge press was another waste of time and money – which had been obvious all along unless you were Duncan.

  Duncan lived in a world where you could Get Rich Quick – he really believed it. No matter how many times his daft schemes didn’t work, he kept coming up with another, and another – endless new ways of wasting what bit of ready cash we had.

  This cartridge press was the latest. With this contraption Duncan was going to manufacture shotgun cartridges. In the kitchen. Like that was going to work. He’d come back one night with a mouldering pile of junk that was ‘all he needed’. Casings, shot, caps, gunpowder, everything. Bought from someone in the pub. Obviously.

  ‘This fucking thing’s knackered me gun.’

  I dumped my bag on the table.

  ‘Where’s Sam?’

  Duncan bobbed his head about, squinting up into the machine.

  ‘It’s fucking warped – ’

  I went to the stove and picked up the omelette pan from lunchtime and looked at the other greasy pans, the sauce bottles, the buttery knives and the scattered crumbs.

  ‘I said, where’s Sam?’

  He glanced at me for the first time since I’d come in.

  ‘Sam?’ He went back to his cartridge press. ‘He’ll be about.’

  I gripped the pan handle so tight my knuckles went white. I wanted to crash the pan onto the stove, knock the crap on the floor, smash up the cartridge press and bash the pan off the corner of the table until either the table or the pan or my arm gave way. But I couldn’t because – as I well knew – loud noises and sudden movements were NOT ALLOWED.

  I forced myself to put down the pan. I took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out slowly.

  Duncan dropped his spanner. ‘Would you believe this fuckin’ pile of shit.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Trying out some cartridges.’

  ‘Where?’

  He wrenched at the press and avoided my eye. ‘Using that knackered weather vane on the barn end for target practice,’ he said. ‘Cartridge wasn’t right. I dropped the effing gun out the bathroom window.’

  So this was what Duncan got up to when he was supposed to be looking after Sam – the kid who was terrified of loud noises.

  Flinging my coat over one of the armchairs by the range, I marched across the kitchen and ran upstairs. If Sam was chucking a fit somewhere, one of us had better go and sort it out. And as usual it had better be me.

  He wasn’t there. I flew from his bedroom to the bathroom and back – pulling off his quilt to see the rumples and grooves left by his body, his woolly hat stuffed with cotton wool, his headphones – but no Sam.

  I glanced down the side of the bed where he hid his worn-out trainers in case I threw them away. They’d gone. They were old aerobics trainers of mine from twenty-odd years ago – they’d been blue then, they were grey now, like everything Sam agreed to wear, and they were worn soft and thin on the sole. Sam could run fast in them – like the wind when he wanted to. In fact he told me he could fly in those trainers and that only one step in every two or three actually touched the ground.

  I’d explained Newton’s third law of motion to him – not that I understood it myself – but we’d Googled it together. I told Sam he didn’t have the fixed wings and high speeds to generate the lift and thrust to take off over Backwoods and soar away over The Wildwood. He wasn’t convinced. As logical as Sam was about some things, he was stubborn and pig-headed about others, and there was no arguing with him when he got certain ideas in his head.

  I clattered through the kitchen and out the back door. Duncan didn’t look up – his bum was stuck in the air, jeans sliding down.

  I jogged down the lane.

  Sam had to be with Jeannie. He had to be. But that didn’t stop my heart from racing and my imagination running riot. Was he crying? Was he hysterical? Was he hurting himself? Had he got there in exactly 823 steps?

  I sl
owed to a walk, out of breath, my throat stinging.

  He must have been terrified by Duncan’s shotgun blasts and run off as far as he dared down Hell Fire Pass – to Jeannie’s cottage. He always counted his steps as he hurtled along to make sure he got there in exactly 823.

  He believed he had to make it in 823 because this would keep his world safe but if he took 822 or 824 he’d lose control of his world which would spin off into chaos. Like I said: there was no arguing with him when he got certain ideas in his head.

  There was a new grave by Jeannie’s front door. A homemade wooden cross had been hammered in, knocked up from an old floorboard with words on it done in a fancy stencil: Here lies the dust of Banjo Patterson.

  I tapped at the front door and went in.

  Sam was sitting at the kitchen table and Jeannie was in her wicker armchair by the range. They were drinking Jeannie’s homemade lemonade – proper lemonade made with proper lemons – not like the fizzy junk I bought at Lo-Cost that had never seen a lemon. Sam was gulping it down.

  ‘You all right, Sam? I said, but he didn’t answer and carried on gulping and gazing about him.

  I could tell right away he’d got here in 823 steps.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Jeannie. ‘Sit down.’

  I dragged a chair out and slumped on it to let my thudding heart subside.

  Jeannie’s cottage always looked like a bomb had exploded in a jumble sale. It was the very opposite of Sam’s own room which had everything in its place: the pens in separate tubs all sorted into colours; the paper lying flat and smooth on shelves; his laptop folded on his desk; and his trainers hidden six inches apart down the side of his bed.

  Sam’s room could not have been more different from this and I wouldn’t have expected him to like it here, but there was nothing straightforward about Sam, and he did like it, he definitely did.

  I quite liked it too. Jeannie’s cottage had candles all over the place, usually in things not made for candles – saucers, jelly moulds, tea pots, shells – and at night she lit them and sat in the twinkly dark.

  If Sam came down she told him stories.

  She told him all sorts; she said she was a fabulist, a myth maker, a reader of auras. I wasn’t even sure what those things were and sometimes I wished she wouldn’t fill his head with all sorts of rubbish, but he seemed to like it – and at least spending time with Jeannie was something. She told him about time travelling and visiting other planets and revisiting former lives. She had one heck of an imagination; there was no doubt about that.

  A few weeks ago she told us she’d had visions of spaceships landing in the Nevada Desert – a visit that had been verified by NASA. I’d sat there half-smiling and keeping schtum but Sam had drunk it all in and later at home he’d brought it up again.

  ‘Jeannie saw space ships. In the Nevada Desert.’

  I wasn’t in the mood and carried on reading my ‘True Life’ magazine story about a woman with two wombs giving birth to clones.

  ‘She saw spaceships,’ he said again.

  I didn’t look up. ‘I think Jeannie’s got a bit of a screw loose.’

  Sam was silent and I was immediately gripped with regret. I tore my eyes from my magazine and could see he was weighing up the phrase ‘a bit of a screw loose’. I flicked my magazine shut.

  ‘A bit of a screw loose only means being a bit different.’

  Sam said nothing and slipped away to his room.

  Since then he hadn’t mentioned any of Jeannie’s stories.

  Jeannie shuffled to the dresser and took the jug of lemonade to refill Sam’s glass.

  ‘Lemonade?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  She picked up a glass on the table, examined it for dregs and filled it for me.

  Then she plopped the jug back on the dresser beside a rusty safe with its door open. The safe was full of chocolate biscuits. On top was a puppet with its strings in a knot. The dresser shelves were full of hard-backed books and an ancient radio that was wafting with cobwebs.

  She took the biscuits and passed them to Sam. It was no wonder he ate next to nothing at home.

  We sat munching and sipping.

  I think it was this that Sam loved as much as the lemonade, the biscuits and the stories – the silence, the peace, and the chance just to be.

  I gazed at the giant dresser. Jeannie always said she never swept cobwebs away because it left spiders homeless and hungry. She’d told us many a time about her pet spider, Septimus, who lived in the top corner of the dresser and was 20 years old.

  Next to the radio was a bowl of cookie dough. Today it was green, which I hoped meant it was peppermint. There were also carved wooden boxes that Jeannie claimed to have brought back from the Orient full of priceless treasure. Sam rooted through the priceless treasure from time to time and said it looked like buttons, buckles, pins and brooches. There were binocular cases with no binoculars, lanterns full of fir cones, copper jugs so dusty I could see Sam’s initials written on them, and ticking clocks that she wound up every day or two.

  Stuck in between were postcards from the Taj Mahal, Table Mountain and Ayers Rock. There were curling photos of dogs and cats, each marked with a name: Leaky, Tombstone, Janet – the same names as on the graves outside. One of the armchairs was piled with kindling that Jeannie had dragged back from The Wildwood. The walls were covered in paintings and framed photographs of a woman wearing long silk or velvet dresses covered in jewels and feathers, which Jeannie said was her.

  Stuck between the paintings and the photographs were Sam’s maps: all the same, all of Backwoods Farm, Big Hill, the Wild Wood, The Pile of Rubble Covered in Weeds, and the lane to Jeannie’s cottage, 823 steps down HELL FIRE PASS.

  ‘We buried Banjo Patterson,’ said Sam, and he took another swig of his lemonade. ‘He’s going to turn to dust, like we all will.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ I said. Although neither of them looked very upset. It wasn’t as if Jeannie was short of animals – I could spot at least five pairs of eyes from where I was sitting. They were tucked away among Jeannie’s stuff – dogs and cats she’d rescued from outhouses and waste ground and car parks; dogs and cats with bad habits and no manners that scratched and bit and only had one ear. They found corners and gaps to nestle in and to watch and to hide. One cat was hunkered down on top of the dresser, its shoulders sticking up like a gargoyle’s, watching Sam drink his lemonade. On the bookcase a tabby cat was curled up neatly on a round fruit cake which made a perfect camouflage.

  Yes, there were plenty left all right.

  Jeannie made a toast with her lemonade.

  ‘Here’s to Banjo,’ she said. She bent down and picked up a basket with a sleeping cat in it that looked all flat and stiff. For a second I thought another one had bit the dust. Then she flipped the basket and the cat over and wound a key on the bottom. It started purring – a loud ticking that for a second made Sam put his hands over his ears. She dropped it on the floor and rested her feet on it. The cat’s belly was rising and falling.

  ‘In’t it sweet?’ she said.

  I wouldn’t have expected Sam to like it in Jeannie’s cottage but he did, he liked it a lot because it was peaceful and because Jeannie was there.

  Sam had trusted Jeannie since before he could remember. He was a toddler when we were walking down the lane together and one of Jeannie’s cats scratched him. It was sitting on a tree stump by her cottage and he’d tried to stroke it and the cat swiped at him. He tried a second time and it swiped again, this time catching him with a claw. Sam was part furious and part frustrated that he couldn’t stroke it.

  He started yelling – a real bawl – that brought Jeannie outside. I’d sort of known Jeannie for years as the crazy old cat-woman in the cottage down the road, but I’d barely had a conversation with her. I was going out to work every day before Sam came along – and Sam didn’t come along until we’d been married thirteen years.

  Anyway that day she was wearing a purple dressing gown w
ith an orange flowery towel wrapped round her head. She cut quite a figure and I expected Sam’s crying to get worse but she rubbed the cat’s ears in a way that turned the animal into an ecstatic jelly. She nodded for Sam to stroke it. He stopped sobbing and buried his little fist in the cat’s furry belly, a beam spreading across his face. The whole time he kept his eyes fixed on Jeannie; this vibrant vision who could entrance cats, do magic and make his dreams come true.

  I felt pretty similar myself. Even at that age – two years old – Sam could not tolerate strangers and as a rule curled up into a ball, like a little hedgehog, until they left him alone, but not Jeannie.

  I watched, amazed, as Sam stroked the cat and made his first and only friend. After that Jeannie’s cats and Jeannie’s cottage became fixtures on our walks. As Sam got older and his world shrank to almost nothing there were times I wondered if he’d leave his bedroom at all if it wasn’t for Jeannie and her cats.

  Chapter 4

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  How strong is my mind?

  Truestory

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 16.40

  Is it possible to use the power of my mind to make people do what I want?

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  RootToot

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 16.49

  Sure. Why not? Psychos do it all the time.

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  SpiritLove

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 16.55

  Come over to Spirit&Soul Spiritual Community. We can show you the power of the mind. You’ll be amazed what you can achieve with the right guidance. And if you like us and become a full member you’ll get the gift of an in-depth numerology report for only $25. Just click here.