Killing Woods (10 page)

The way he says this sounds like he's swearing, like he's accusing the whole world. He looks up the passageway. I guess we both must be late for class by now. I press the back of my head against the bricks.

‘What else you been keeping hidden?' Mack hisses.

‘Nothing!'

‘No other little games?' Mack's eyes are interrogating. I want Mack to keep thumping me against this wall 'til I'm proper hurt. I want to wake up from this. I listen to the sound of our breathing – quick and heavy.

‘I can't remember.' I hate how my voice sounds so weak, so pathetic.

There's a pause. Then suddenly Mack's grabbing me in a rough sort of hug, then he's pushing me away just as fast. ‘Don't do anything, Damo. Don't tell the other guys, OK? Don't go to the police.'

‘But—'

‘Not yet.' He holds my shoulders. ‘You don't know anything so how can you? Besides, you didn't do anything bad that night, nothing you need to feel this fucking guilty about – I know you didn't.'

I wipe my hands across my eyes and face. Suddenly I don't know anything at all.

‘We'll sort this, Damo. Didn't we sort bad stuff after your old man died?'

‘This is different.'

Mack pulls me off the bricks. ‘Get your head together, Damo,' he says. ‘That's all you need to do right now. Then you'll remember what that bastard's done.'

21

Emily

I
t's three days since the court hearing – Thursday now – two days since Kirsty pushed me. I still don't want to go to school. This time I use the migraine excuse and Mum believes it: Dad used to get them and I know how to act the part. My head feels fuzzy anyway and my body aches. Mum fusses around me for ages. I almost think she's going to use my excuse as her excuse for staying home from work too, but eventually I hear the front door click shut behind her. I lie very still for a long time, even try to sleep. But this anxious feeling gets worse – this horrible doubt. So I read Dad's discharge notes again, all that stuff about him shooting that civilian girl and how it affected him. But I still don't understand how Dad's manslaughter
plea came from this. Just because Dad shot a girl by accident while he was a soldier, it doesn't mean he'd strangle Ashlee Parker, even in a flashback. I hate how people just assume these two things go together.

I go downstairs, sit on the couch. After staring a while at the empty space the photos have left on the mantelpiece, I go through the pile of Dad's mail. Mum's hardly opened any of it. It's mostly bills, letters from the police and Dad's solicitors. There are several letters about his overdue car tax too, one of them threatens to tow the car to the wreckers if he doesn't pay soon. I put that letter aside so Mum will see it. Already I'm remembering how Dad used to drive that car when we went bird watching, or walking in the mountains, how it carried the three of us each time we moved to another of Dad's army postings . . . how it drove us here. Mum could be driving that car now, using it to visit Dad in custody. Instead, it's just another part of Dad that is being ignored, something else I can't do anything about. But its keys are still hanging with the rest of our keys in the hall. So that's something, isn't it?

There are no other houses at the end of our lane where Dad left his old blue Fiesta, so no one is watching me. I step up to the driver's window, wipe grime away to look in – there's a crisp packet on the passenger seat, bleached white from the sun. The driver's door moans as I pull it open. It smells strange in here: a mixture of mustiness, Davidoff aftershave, and salt and vinegar crisps. Odd how these smells can still be here when Dad's gone. I get in and
put the key in the ignition. Maybe I can drive this car to Dad's prison. Maybe, without Mum with me, Dad might remember more from that night, might talk. Maybe I could hide this car afterwards too, somewhere the council couldn't take it away.

I turn the key. Suddenly I feel different – like I'm doing something.
Finally
. But nothing happens. I try again – turning the key harder – same thing. I even pump my foot against the accelerator. It's no good. Battery's dead. I sigh out the breath I've been holding, thump the steering wheel. It was stupid even trying this. I probably wouldn't have been able to drive it anyway – Dad never did give me those driving lessons he'd promised. I would have crashed before I even got to the motorway. So this car will end up crushed and useless in a junkyard after all.

I settle against the headrest; shut my eyes. A strange calm seeps into me. The council will tow more than a few sheets of metal when they take this car, our memories will be towed too. Maybe that's OK. Maybe everything will be like this soon: the photos taken down, the car disappeared . . . it won't be long before Mum stops mentioning Dad altogether. Then there'll just be me left to remember him like he was, maybe the only person who ever will.

I rest my forehead against the steering wheel. I've only seen Dad once in prison. That was when the liaison officer took us, and Mum and I had sat on the other side of a plastic table and watched Dad shake his head over and over. I'd thought that was a good sign – like he'd been trying to tell us he wasn't guilty – but when Mum had
asked him what he was thinking about, he'd stopped the shaking and had looked at us with fierce eyes. He didn't speak at all, the whole time we were there. That was when I realised Dad was ill – seriously ill – when I realised I couldn't ever fix him by myself.

‘He's in the best place,' Mum had said afterwards. ‘He's such a shell of a man.'

Now I'm crying, properly crying, for the first time in ages. Tears are smearing over my cheeks and on to the steering wheel. I'm wrapping my arms around it and holding it tight, as if it's someone hugging back. Maybe Mum is right and the Dad I remember is just a fantasy. Thinking like this makes me cry harder. Right now I want the council to tow me away too. Just how sick has my dad become? Sick enough that he's sitting behind bars admitting to a killing he doesn't remember? Sick enough that he did it?

I stay like this for a long time. When I can move again, I have a plan. I'll search through the car, take anything out of it I want to keep, then I'll let it go: this car, these feelings about Dad . . . I'll try to. Maybe it will be easier if I can forget how life with the Dad from before used to be. Maybe I'll understand. I try the glove box. It's rammed with CDs, Beatles ones mostly: Dad's favourite. I pull out a rusty Swiss army knife, flipping open various parts of it, pressing my thumb against its biggest blade. If I kept pressing, my skin would bleed. I almost want it to. Almost want that kind of pain.

There's some sort of car logbook too. It's uncomfortable
looking at Dad's tight, neat handwriting inside it; it reminds me of the notes he used to stick in my school lunchbox whenever he was home on leave:
Meet you after school and we'll go to the woods. Be clever today. Love, Dad
. I don't understand how
that
Dad could twist out of shape so much, become like a plastic carton morphed by the sun.

I'm about to put the logbook away when I see what's at the back of it. There are sketches in the corners of the pages, small and delicate, a bit like the ones in the letters Dad sent back from tour. These are different sorts of drawings to the dark scrawls I saw yesterday in the bunker. Here I see larks circling up from grasses, an oak leaf, there's a detailed drawing of a fox with big, curious eyes. There's something about the way that fox is looking out from the page that makes me think of Joe. Seeing this reminds me of that drawing game Dad and me played once, so long ago – strange to think of that again after yesterday. And now I'm remembering how Dad once drew Mum as a cat with green eyes and a small, neat mouth; how he'd always draw me as a grey squirrel – messy fur, hiding in trees. I'd always guess the person he was trying to depict in the animal. It hurts to think about it all again.

I close the book and try to shut these thoughts away too. But a loose sheet of paper falls out, and of course I look at it. It's another sketch, but this one isn't like the others. At first I think the sketch is just a deer, mid-leap in a forest: a deer being chased by a wolf. But when I look more closely, I know there is something different about it,
something familiar. I study the deer's face. There's someone I almost recognise in it – an expression, maybe – it's like Dad's game again, trying to pick it. I look at this deer's features carefully, trace its ears with my fingertips. With a gasp, I realise who I'm seeing. I go cold, make sure.

This deer looks like Ashlee Parker. It has the same huge brown eyes, the delicate ears and high cheekbones, the confident, excited expression. I see it all. This creature is beautiful too, like something from one of Dad's bedtime stories. It's half girl, half deer. Ashlee.

I wrench my eyes to the creature that's chasing it: that wolf. It looks savage, like the wolves on the bunker walls do. But as I look at it more carefully, I see that it looks excited too. There are other wolf shadows in the trees behind it. What does it all mean?

There's a thudding feeling in my ears. Dad hasn't been in this car since long before Ashlee's death. The police took him straight from our house that night. So when did he draw this? Why? I go back to the deer's face, but no matter how hard I look at it I can't stop seeing Ashlee in it now.

The wolf isn't as human-looking as the deer; I can't see anyone in its expression. But all the newspaper headlines of the past eight weeks are rushing back at me, all the stuff people have yelled:
He watched her
!
He's sick! He's a murderer! Woodland Stalker! Monster!

I try to keep myself calm. But I'm breathing quicker. And I'm remembering once when Mum said Dad was like a wolf, back when he went quiet and strange after being
discharged, back when she'd got angry at him and said he preferred being in the woods alone to anything else.

‘You're a lone wolf,' she'd said. ‘You're turning wild!'

But Dad doesn't look like the wolf in this picture. Does he?

I open the door and hang my head outside. I breathe in the cold air, stare at the gutter. How would the police interpret this picture? Would they see it as evidence? Evidence of everything they've accused Dad of? Evidence that he watched and wanted Ashlee Parker? That he's a murderer as charged?

I'm grasping at it, crumpling it, but something stops me before I tear it up. I shove it deep into my coat pocket instead. This is only evidence if I show it to someone. And it might not even be evidence at all.

Even so, there's a weight pressing on my shoulders, making me slow and hunched as I walk to our house. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this sketch has nothing to do with the game Dad and I used to play. Maybe Dad has just drawn a deer, some woods, a wolf. Maybe someone else wouldn't see Ashlee Parker in this deer's face. Maybe I'm just panicking.

I want to be wrong.

But I feel different and heavy and strange as I crawl into bed. It's like I'm falling, tumbling into a deep, dark pit, getting closer to something. Something I don't want to see.

22

Damon

S
he's still not at school, that's two days now. I grab Joe Wilder's arm as he slinks past me in a corridor, just go ahead and ask him.

‘What do you want her for?' he says.

I study his face to see what he thinks of me now: it might be the first time we've talked since I dropped him from the cross-country team. First time I've stood this close to him since that day in the woods. He still doesn't meet my eyes.

‘Just checking she's OK, that's all,' I say. ‘Thought you'd know.'

‘Why do you even care?'

He turns away, and I'm suddenly thinking about that
day in the woods all over again, when I'd wanted to hit him, when he'd run. What would happen if one of us told the police about that day? Which one of us would the cops think of as a weirdo then?

‘You been watching anything in the woods lately?' I ask him. ‘Following anyone?'

He pinks up. ‘Get lost.'

‘Hey, I haven't finished talking to you!'

But he doesn't care. Already he's hurrying towards the canteen, joining up with that Mina girl again. I'm glad I kicked him off the team. He wouldn't make it this year anyway, wouldn't take it serious enough: he'd spend too long with his head behind a lens concentrating on things he shouldn't. Perhaps I should've punched some sense into him while I had the chance.

‘Wilder!' I call out. ‘Wait!'

But he's proper ignoring me now, hurrying up to his friend.

I go in late to Biology, don't apologise. Charlie shuffles over from where he's saved me a seat. I'm buzzing after talking with Wilder, angry. Maybe I could've got some answers off him. Wilder knows Darkwood. He knows a lot.

‘What's up?' Charlie says, noticing.

I don't know whether I should tell him all that stuff I said to Mack yesterday, or whether I should keep quiet 'til I've figured things out. As I turn to him, Ms Mitani comes over to our bench.

‘Charlie!' she warns. ‘No talking!'

She ignores me, though, teachers give me an easy time these days. I look out the window, don't even pretend to concentrate on the book open in front of me. Once I would have cared about stuff like this. Now, learning about photosynthesis seems a bit bollocks. When Ashlee used to sit next to me in this class she'd draw hearts on my arm, press her thigh against mine and whisper in my ear. She'd always want to go further with whatever experiment we were doing: always wanted to know what would happen next, wanted to test the theories a little more. If she wasn't so clever we'd never have got away with it. I think I learnt more in biology from the stuff she did by accident than the stuff we were meant to be doing. There is still one of her long, blonde hairs caught in my textbook: I haven't opened up Chapter Five because of it, don't want to lose it. I clench my fingers into my palms. These thoughts aren't helping anything.

So I think about Emily Shepherd instead. What's she doing away from school? Is anyone else even bothered that she's not here? When I missed school for a week, not long after everything happened, the school was ringing just 'bout every day, and a counsellor and a doctor came round to check on me. Maybe killers' daughters don't get the same treatment.

Ms Mitani is handing out what looks like weeds; she drops a few scalpels and a pile of toothpicks on each bench too. As she strolls around the lab, she's describing a plant's sex organs, explaining how to open ovaries. She says the word
pistil
really slowly and someone sniggers.
She's gone mad if she thinks our class can have any sort of serious lesson on this. If Ashlee were here, she'd be leaning over and repeating
pistil
really low in my ear, her fingers digging under my shirt at the base of my spine and pressing at where my tatt is.

‘You do it,' I say to Charlie, pushing across the plant.

He bypasses the toothpicks, cuts straight through the middle of our stem with a pair of scissors. Yellowish pus spews out. When Ms Mitani is at the other end of the lab I lean over to him. ‘You ever found Shepherd's bunker? You ever seen it when we were playing the Game?'

He shakes his head, frowns. Perhaps he's wondering why I'm asking this now, here.

‘It's got to be somewhere in the southern section,' he says.

But that's as much as anyone knows. That's where the police were looking the week after Ashlee died, the section where the woods were closed off. I watch Charlie scrape slimy stuff from the plant to the bench.

‘It's near Game Play,' I say. ‘Has to be. Maybe it's even
in
Game Play.'

Maybe it's near Ashlee's shortcut home too.

Like the missing collar, the location of Shepherd's bunker is bugging me. If I could work out where it is – if I knew how close it is to Ashlee's shortcut track – something might make sense. Maybe I could work out how Shepherd could've watched her – how she got to his bunker – maybe something about him would make sense too.

‘It's weird we never came across it,' I say again. ‘Weird we never saw Shepherd in the woods either . . . I mean, if he was meant to be watching Ashlee all that time.'

Charlie gives me a look like I'm an idiot. ‘It's a bunker, that's why. And Shepherd was a soldier. We
wouldn't
see him, would we,
wouldn't
find it.'

I look out the window. Just because Charlie's from an army family he thinks he knows everything. But my old man was a corporal, higher up than Charlie's dad, and decorated; Charlie's dad hasn't even got an active service role. And just because my old man's dead . . . I'm still an army kid. I know about bunkers.

‘Why'd you want to find it anyway?' Charlie says.

Now he's looking at me like I'm some sort of sicko, like he's thinking that if it was his girlfriend who had died there he wouldn't want to go and see it. But what if that bunker is where Ashlee's collar is? What if this is why I can't find it? What if I didn't take it from Ashlee's neck that night at all, and Shepherd did? What if he kept it as a souvenir? Because they say that, don't they, about murderers . . . that they take souvenirs of who they kill? The police might not have picked it up either; they wouldn't have known it was important. Finding Ashlee's collar near that bunker would be proof Shepherd did everything.

I push the plant guts about in front of me. Then I pull my phone out of my pocket, don't even care that Ms Mitani might notice. I click on to the internet and go to one of the pages I started looking at last night when I couldn't sleep. It's about memory, all the different ways
you can lose it.
Alcohol-induced blackouts don't stop the memories entirely
– it says –
rather your ability to access them
.

Is this what I have, an
alcohol-induced blackout
? And does this mean that I can still get the memories back somehow?
Access
them? Does it work the same for fairy dust-induced blackouts too?

I scroll down the page on my phone. I read comments from people who've managed to get their memories back after they've been drunk or drugged. There's a section that gives tips on how:
Talk to someone . . . write down everything you can remember, revisit where the memory took place . . . relive what you were doing at the last point you remember
. . .

When Charlie looks over I shove the phone back in my pocket. But I've decided – I've spent long enough sitting around waiting for these memories to come back by themselves, I need to force them. I need to find answers for the questions Emily Shepherd was asking me. I need to be certain.

‘We should play the Game again,' I say.

Charlie stares. I'm thinking that he's going to say no – that playing the Game again would be the last thing he'd want to do now.

‘It'll be different without Ashlee,' he says slowly. ‘You really want to?'

I nod. Charlie
has
to agree, they all do. If that article is right, playing the Game again might be the only way to remember where I last saw Ashlee in Darkwood, what happened to her collar, how I got home.

‘Maybe it's time to start training again,' I say, remembering
Mack's words about this from the Leap. I turn my head to the window. I actually don't give a shit about training to join the army no more; I'm not sure I even give a shit about pretending to. ‘Or maybe we just play it to remember Ashlee.'

Charlie thinks about this. ‘Kind of like our own private funeral, you mean? Like a
let go
?'

‘Yeah, kind of.'

Charlie nods. ‘Letting go is good.'

I watch him swallow. I see stubble and shaving cuts on his neck. I try to remember when I'd seen Ashlee's collar there too. He hadn't won it very often, probably the least out of all of us boys.

When I ask him why, he shrugs. ‘It's not like I held back or anything. I played hard like she wanted.' He looks down at the desk.

I suddenly feel jealous that he'd played with her at all. That he'd played hard. Fought her.

‘Most times I couldn't ever find her,' he says. ‘She was always after you.'

I turn to watch a rugby match get going on the playing fields outside, see the teams bash against each other in the scrum. I'm waiting for Charlie to ask me about Ashlee's collar – because I'm thinking it too, ain't I? – that maybe we should bury that collar in the woods, in the place we always start the Game, that
this
would be a proper let go.

If I had it to bury, that is.

I remember when Ashlee came into the pet shop with me to get it. She'd chosen the collar that was pink and
sparkly with fake diamond things on it and fluffy padding inside.

‘It'll be too easy to see you with that on,' I'd said. ‘You'll get caught straight up.'

She'd wanted it anyway; she was stubborn like that. She'd chosen a heart-shaped dog tag to get her initials engraved on to. I'd paid.

‘Don't go all scaredy-cat on us,' I'd said. ‘The boys play rough.'

I'd been grinning, half-joking. None of the boys would play rough with her; they wouldn't play proper rough. She'd get caught whatever collar she had on. But she was real serious about wanting to join, ever since the first time I'd accidentally blabbed about the Game to her. Eventually she'd worn me down to play, and eventually I'd bought her the collar.

‘I can handle it,' she'd said. ‘I'm as tough as you – it'll be fun!'

She'd said that, since she wanted to join the army like we did, it was only fair that she had a chance to play too.

So where did her collar go?

Charlie's prodding a scalpel in my arm. ‘Damo?' he's saying. ‘You OK?'

I rest my head on the lab bench. ‘Peachy. Don't I look it?'

He laughs and goes back to the plant. I hear him snipping the petals off. This bench smells like dead things and formaldehyde, it's hard against my cheekbone; I'm so desperate for sleep that I try shutting my eyes. Maybe if I
can sleep, I'll dream, and if I dream I'll remember. And I almost do it, almost slip. My head sinks down, heavy. And there, for a moment, is something: Darkwood; running; chasing Ashlee through the forest; her kissing me hard and saying
do it . . . do it
. . .

Useless
. . .

But already I'm out of the dream before it's even started. I'm coming back to class, hearing the voices and laughter around me. Maybe they're talking about me –
look at that poor fucker that everyone dies on . . . look how he's not coping at all
.

I open my eyes. There are broken bits of plant all over the lab, people laughing as they chuck pieces at each other when Ms Mitani's not looking. I see the ripped petals on our bench, the spewed out seeds . . . the destruction.

I've realised something, though – that internet article is right. The more I force my mind on to Ashlee and that night, the more I do remember. It's a start.

‘Tomorrow night,' I say to Charlie, sitting up from the bench. ‘There's a full moon then, near enough. Tomorrow we'll play.'

He nods. ‘Sure, mate. If you like. One more Game to remember Ashlee then.'