The Dark Inside (18 page)

Then, as gently as she could, she took hold of James’s two dislocated fingers and snapped them back into their joints one after the other. And, although it was no more painful for him than
watching it happen to someone else, he began to remember where he was and what had happened to him on the moor.

After fixing his hand, the old woman prepared a poultice. She selected various herbs, which looked to have been freshly picked, from her pockets, and dropped them into a black casserole dish she
had found in a cupboard and boiled them gently on the stove. A sweet, oaty smell swelled in the room and fogged the windows. She soaked a dishcloth in the thin water then laid it over James’s
wounds and left it there.

All three of them sat in silence until the old woman removed the poultice, dressed the wounds and informed Billy they could leave.

Billy stood up. Helped the half-naked boy from his chair and led him towards the door.

When the old woman picked up a knife from the drying rack beside the sink and turned to go upstairs, James halted, despite Billy trying to push him on.

‘I won’t go with you if anything happens to them,’ he said. But Billy just started dragging him towards the door. And James yelled and grabbed at the door frame and clung on.
‘If you hurt them then I’ll know there’s something good in the world. Something really good!’

The old woman motioned to Billy and he stopped trying to pull the boy out through the doorway.

‘Why would you think that, my love?’ she asked.

James wiped his eyes and coughed to clear his throat. He drew in a breath and shuddered. ‘Because how else could there be something as horrible and as evil as you?’ he said.

When she waved her hand, Billy wrenched James out through the doorway into the yard despite his crying.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching the boy being dragged towards the sky-blue Ford. Then she turned and went upstairs, the leather pouch clinking in her skirt pocket.

The farmer and his wife were lying on the crimson eiderdown covering their bed. Dressed in their clothes. Fast asleep. Chests rising and falling. The old woman’s eyes flicked back and
forth between their soft white necks and the knife in her hand.

She could hear James outside, screaming and shouting, and Billy cursing out loud. As the noise grew louder, she walked to the half-open window and looked down at James, who was clinging on to
the car door as Billy tried to shove him inside. The more he kicked out, determined not to go in, the angrier and rougher Billy became until he raised his arm to strike the boy.

‘No!’ she cried out. The two of them stopped and looked up, blinking in the sunlight at her. ‘We don’t want to go hurting him! You’re not yer da!’

Billy slapped the top of the car. ‘He says he won’t go in! How else is he gonna learn to do what he’s told?’

The old woman stared down at them.

Clouds drifted.

A bird drummed past the window.

Her knees creaked.

‘They’re going to be all right,’ she shouted eventually. ‘As long as you get in the car. You’re gonna have to trust us.’ And with that she walked away from
the window and back to the bed. After stowing the knife in her waistband, she leant over the sleeping couple and blew into her fists, opening one each over the face of the farmer and his wife, and
waited for their eyes to flicker open.

‘We’re leaving now,’ she said to them. ‘So you best come and wave us off.’

Downstairs, in the kitchen, she nodded approvingly when she saw James sitting in the back seat of the car, watching the house. Billy was waiting in the driver’s seat, drumming the steering
wheel with his thumbs. When she saw the farmer’s Lanber shotgun with the walnut stock resting against the wall in the porch, she picked it up. And then she turned to the farmer who was
standing with his wife, waiting to be told what to do.

‘Do you have any cartridges for this?’

The farmer disappeared into the boot room beside the kitchen, returning with a box of cartridges that he handed to her.

‘Now you make sure and wave us off, then you can go back to doing whatever you was busy on.’

She walked out into the yard. Climbed into the passenger seat of the Ford, and smiled at the little wooden man sitting in the footwell by her feet and leant down and whispered something. Then
she handed the shotgun and cartridges to Billy.

‘What do we need these for?’

‘We need to go up on to the moor.’

‘Why?’ asked Billy. ‘We’ve got the boy.’

The old woman sat still and looked out at the moorland.

‘Because we have to if we want to keep him,’ she said, staring out through the windscreen.

Billy hesitated, and then he turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. As the car began to move, the old woman turned and waved at the farmer and his wife. But James
didn’t wave. He just watched them, telling himself to try and keep remembering their smiling faces.

When the car came out of the yard, it stopped beside the track, leading away from the lane that would take them back to the main road.

‘You’re sure?’ Billy asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘I will. Take the track on to the moor.’ The old woman looked back at James slumped in the seat with his head still turned, staring back at the farmer and his wife.
‘They’ll be OK,’ she said to him. ‘But they won’t remember you. So you best forget them too. We made a bargain, remember? So you be good now. You wouldn’t want
to go back on yer word now, would you?’

And then she turned round and settled back in her seat, and closed her eyes.

James sat, looking out of the window, his mind only half working as the pain in his shoulders lurked just below the surface of him. He felt leaden and sore, a lump of a boy, as the car moved.
Finally, he managed to lean forward, swallowing sharply as the wounds on his shoulders creaked.

‘Thank you,’ he said quietly before sitting back in the seat and breathing away the pain as well as he could. But all the time he kept telling himself he would run away as soon as he
had enough strength, escaping again just like he and Webster had done before. Whenever the opportunity arose.

As the car bumped along the track, he noticed a black dot high above them in the sky. A bird of some sort. Circling slowly. Growing larger in the blue. As it dropped lower and lower, he saw it
was a crow, its black fingers spread at the ends of its wings. It swooped past and landed in the scrub ahead of them, and hopped through the heather, stopping on the track in front of the car.

Billy braked.

The engine throbbed.

A wind rocked the car.

The bird stared up at them as the old woman began muttering under her breath, and it seemed to James the crow was joining in with her, talking too.

As soon as she stopped, it launched itself into the air, catching the wind and spiralling higher and higher, until James lost sight of it against the sun.

It was five minutes before the old woman said anything, her shoulders twitching, her head moving slowly back and forth.

‘Straight ahead,’ she whispered to Billy.

Billy looked back once more at the sky-blue Ford parked on the track before the ground swallowed him up. He reckoned he must have walked more than half a mile after following
the rabbit run over the scrub before reaching the gully. The backs of his heels were beginning to rub raw. His boots were not meant for this type of walking.

As he trod carefully down, below the level of the moor, the air began to cool. Instead of gorse and heather to his right, there was just a wall of hard brown rock. Billy patted it with the flat
of his hand, as though calming the spirit of a horse, and then continued on down the trail, such as it was, the rock face guiding him.

Loose stones ran ahead of him, chattering. Some falling over the edge into the tea-coloured river below. Billy peered to his left all the way down. The water was running hard and fast, a
yellowish curd riding the surface, clinging to the edges of rocks.

The noise of the water rose with the spray and he heard nothing else as he walked carefully down.

When he reached the bottom, he followed the river’s flow, slowing when he saw a pool ahead of him, dark and oily, with currents circling the surface.

He stopped when he saw the dead sheep in front of him, lying on a flat section of rock overhanging the pool, its head looking down at the water. There was no blood. Just scree pooled nearby. He
looked up at the sheer rock face above, all the way to the blue sky at the top, wondering what might have caused the creature to fall. It could have been an accident. Or something might have scared
the animal over the edge.

Billy moved warily as he passed it, its pink tongue hanging from the corner of its mouth.

Rounding a sharp bend, just past the pool, he stopped again and held his breath.

Webster was crouched on a bed of flat rock by the water’s edge. Semi-naked, his trousers ripped and torn around his ankles. His wet black hair was scraped back and glistening, and there
were ugly grey scars on his shoulders.

Billy crept slowly, letting the water cover the sound of his footsteps.

But Webster seemed to hear him anyway and looked up.

Quickly, Billy raised the gun.

And fired.

James listened. The old woman listened. But there was only the echo of the single gunshot rolling over the moor until it was gone, wasted into the wind.

‘A clean kill then,’ she said, smiling, as if trying to soften the blow. James wanted to fling open the door and run, but the old woman’s smile forced him to shrink deeper into
the seat and close his eyes. In the dark he saw the face of Webster staring back at him. As though the man was trapped inside his head forever. James whispered to him, telling him he was safe now
and could never be harmed again by anything or anyone. All the anger and disappointment at what Webster had done was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was spent. Or maybe it was still raging somewhere
out of sight. James didn’t know. All he could do in that cold, hard moment as the wind whistled round the car was to sob for the man who had been his friend, his ally against the pain in the
world.

He opened his eyes and wiped the wet in them when he heard Billy’s boots clumping down the track. The old woman leant across and opened the driver’s door, and Billy sat down behind
the wheel. In one hand was the Lanber shotgun. In the other was a heart. Slippery and glistening. It had been rinsed somewhere in water.

‘This what you wanted?’

The old woman nodded.

‘You should have wrapped it in something soft, like bracken,’ she said before Billy could complain about carrying it back.

She lifted the heart carefully out of his hand and wrapped it in her black shawl, then bound it up inside a white supermarket bag which had been scrunched in a ball beside the wooden mannequin
in the footwell.

The heart sat on her lap.

Like shopping
, James thought.

Billy wiped his hands on a chamois leather, which he stuffed back into the doorwell beside him, and then started up the Ford. He drove back along the track and then out on to the lane to join a
road.

When he reached a junction, the car turned left and gradually the road became larger and wider.

Eventually, they turned on to a slip road which led them down to a motorway.

No one spoke for the whole journey back to the fair.

It was almost dark when the car pulled up in the traveller camp. James recognized Billy’s caravan, its bright green writing electric in the headlights, but not the place
in which it was standing, with concrete blocks wedged behind the wheels.

The fair had moved on since he had tried to bargain for his gold. Now it was pitched in the field adjoining the one that Billy had stopped in, outside a different town that shimmered orange in
the near distance, pumping thumping music into the night sky that seemed to make the stars sparkle.

James had no idea where he was after losing track of the road signs as the roads narrowed and the day wound round to dusk. He thought he could smell the sea, but he couldn’t be sure.

A toilet flushed somewhere.

A dog barked.

Billy took James by the arm and led him across the dark field to another smaller clearing, away from the knot of caravans and the fairground. There they found an old wagon cage on wheels, which
was wooden, except for the black metal bars down one side. It looked old and brittle in the moonlight. There were washed-out patterns in red and green on the thin panels above and below the bars.
The rest of it was a weather-blistered blue.

Without saying a word, Billy dragged James up a set of white painted steps, opened the steel door and pushed the boy inside.

The door slammed shut.

A lock turned.

And James rushed back to the door.

But there was no handle on the inside.

And the steel felt solid and strong when he pressed his hands against it.

He ran across the wooden floor to the bars and looked out between them. Billy was walking away to the left, back towards the caravans standing out of sight, and he soon disappeared into the
dark. James could still hear the fairground, even though he couldn’t see it, and pushed his face as far as he could into the gap between two cold bars and yelled.

Laughter in the distance.

A faint hubbub.

The odd delighted scream keening.

James shouted until he was hoarse.

But no one came.

Boots clumped up the steps. A key clicked round in the lock.

The steel door opened and Billy trudged into the dim-lit wagon with a bucket which he set down in a corner on the bare wooden floor. He drew out a metal bowl full of something hot and steaming
from the bucket, and then reached back in, retrieving a wooden cup which he placed on the floor. Billy took a wooden spoon out of his back trouser pocket and held out the bowl.

‘Ma says to eat this broth. It’ll help you feel better.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘She’ll be along in a minute. You can tell her yerself if you want.’ Billy put the bowl on the floor beside the cup and slid the spoon into the steaming mixture. ‘The
cup’s for water. Just tip it up and drink. It won’t run out. The bucket’s for yer business.’