The Concrete Grove Read online

  “Who is he, this man? A loan shark?”

  She nodded. “His name is Monty Bright.”

  “I don’t know the name. Then again, why would I? I don’t know anyone round here.” He took a mug from her hand and sipped the hot coffee.

  “I got myself in a bit of trouble. Hailey and me, we needed things. She needed things. She’s a teenage girl, how could I deny her?” She drank from her mug, lowering her head but not taking her eyes from him. “I was stupid.”

  “I’m not going to judge you, Lana. I know nothing about your situation. I do know that you don’t belong here. I’ll be honest; I did some research on the internet. If that offends you, I’ll leave and you never have to see me again.”

  Her dark eyes flashed with anger for a second, but then she smiled. Putting down her cup on the windowsill, she walked towards him, stopping only inches away. “That’s fine. I gave up my right to privacy when the newspapers started sniffing around Timothy. That’s my husband, the one who killed those people.”

  “You don’t need to explain anything.” Tom licked his lips. “I’ll take you at face value if you do the same for me.”

  Lana turned away, picked up her cup, and stood with her back against the wall. She lifted one leg, placing the sole of her foot against the wall, and blew on her coffee. “Hot,” she said, unnecessarily. Then she took another sip.

  “Do you owe this man – this Monty Bright – a lot of money? I mean, if it’s a small sum I might be able to help.” He was testing her, pressing her buttons, seeing how far she would go. Trying to figure out exactly what she wanted from him.

  “I don’t want your money, Tom. I want your friendship.”

  “I suppose that’s something we both need,” said Tom. “My wife… she’s lost to me. She’s a paraplegic. I’ve tried my best, but there’s nothing there. Just a shell of what we used to have. All I am is her carer; she doesn’t need a lover these days, just somebody to keep her clean and feed her medicine.” He smiled, but it was as bitter as the coffee.

  “My turn.” Lana did not move from her spot on the carpet. “I borrowed three grand from Bright. Now, with his fucking criminal rate of interest, I owe him twenty grand. It’s like a game to him: he enjoys having people in his debt. I think it’s his drug, the way he gets his kicks. Fuck knows, he doesn’t need the cash. He’s loaded.” She shook her head. Fingers of black hair came free and plucked at her cheeks.

  “What is this,” said Tom, “Quid proquo? Tit for tat?”

  Lana laughed, throwing back her head. Rogue sunlight caught in her hair and was held there, amid the thick black tresses. “We’re a couple of fuck-ups, aren’t we? Real class acts.”

  They had moved together across the room without Tom realising. One minute there was space between them, the next they were almost touching. Holding his mug in one hand, he raised the other to waist level. Lana did the same, opening her fingers and reaching for him. Their hands met, the fingers entwining, forming a knot that he felt might never be broken.

  “Is this what we want?” His voice cracked. “I mean, do we really need more problems than we both already have?”

  Lana sighed. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  But the decision was taken from them; it had already been made. When they kissed, it came as a surprise. Tom knew it was happening, but it shocked him just the same, like a tiny electrical charge. Her tongue was warm and smooth. He licked her perfect teeth; she snapped her jaws together, pretending to bite.

  They did not move apart for a long time, and when finally they did, the damage was already done.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HAILEY WENT TO her room early that evening. She was tired, washed-out. Her stomach felt oddly empty, as if she hadn’t eaten for days, and her throat was parched. No matter how much water she drank – and she had consumed at least a litre of the stuff since returning home from school – she still felt thirsty.

  She lay low down on her bed with her arms by her side. Her bare feet hung over the edge of the mattress. There was a breeze coming in through the open window and it felt good against her body. She was naked. She didn’t know why she had not put on her pyjamas, but it had something to do with a vague yearning to feel the air on her skin, allowing it to breathe.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. Apparently Tom was coming to take them out for the day, to Hadrian’s Wall. Her mum had seen him earlier today, and they had discussed the outing. She said that Tom wanted them all to be together. In fact he had insisted that Hailey come along.

  Hailey knew that Tom was married, and that his wife was ill. Her mother had let it slip, and then tried to lie her way out of the situation.

  Tom wanted to fuck her mum. It was obvious. The way he looked at her, with hungry eyes and his lips slightly parted. He’d looked at Hailey the same way, when she had first met him. He probably wanted to fuck her, too.

  She wondered about his wife: whether he still slept with her, or if her condition denied him a sex life. Maybe he was sick of masturbating, and saw her mother as a viable receptacle for his desires.

  Hailey smiled. These thoughts – illicit, virtually obscene – were new to her. Never before had she considered such things. She’d kissed a couple of boys, one at a school party who had been all hands, and the other on her way home from school just for the hell of it, but still she failed to see the appeal of tasting the spit and enduring the clumsy touch of a classmate. Some of the girls in her class talked about giving blow jobs and hand jobs, and one or two of them claimed to have gone all the way with their boyfriends. Hailey suspected that most of them were lying, just to give the impression that they were grown up, women of the world instead of blinkered little girls from the estates.

  She smiled, reached down and stroked her flat belly. It pulsed softly. She liked the sensation: it was erotic, how she imagined the touch of a grown man’s hand in the same place might feel – a man rather than a silly schoolboy. Somewhere deep inside of her a door had opened, and the woman she would soon be was peeking out, taking stock, getting things in order before she stepped across the threshold.

  It started to rain. She turned to face the window, the gap where the curtains had not been fully closed. Street lights. Rain. Shimmering on the glass. The sight was like a promise of beauty, but one from which she was separated, as if by physical barrier.

  She closed her eyes and fell into sleep as if it were a hole in the ground. One second she was awake, the next she was dreaming.

  SHE IS STANDING before the Needle, still naked. The ground is wet beneath her bare feet but the rain has stopped. Lights move beyond the unbarred upper storey windows of the tower block; unstable figures move within the spots of illumination, waving their hands like stage magicians.

  She walks towards the building, feeling the cold air as it caresses her skin. Her legs feel long, lithe, and her nipples stiffen because of the chill. She enters the building through the front door, but is not aware of doing so. She simply takes another step and she is inside, standing in the foyer. The concrete floor has cracked open in several places, and thick, gnarly roots poke through the gaps. Large patches of wall inside the foyer are covered in thick swathes of bark; it feels like she is standing inside a hollowed-out tree.

  The sound of humming is everywhere. She looks up and around, at the branches forming a lattice across the shattered concrete ceiling and the rough bark that covers the walls. Hummingbirds have made strange conical nests. She moves towards one of the walls, reaches out and touches the bark. It is hard, rough. One of the nests is within reach, so she runs her fingers over it. The nest is made of human hair and what look like finger bones – she can make out the gristly knuckle joints. A tiny blue hummingbird flies out of the hole at the narrow end of the cone, and then it hovers before her face. Its wings move faster than she can see; there is just a blue-grey blur, a glorious vision of rapid movement. The hummingbird’s eyes are black. Its beak is ruby red.

  “Hello,” says Hailey, moving her hand, trying to catch t
he bird on her palm. “I won’t hurt you.”

  The bird flies backwards, gliding like a smaller dream within the larger dream she inhabits. It opens its red beak and unfurls a long, thin tongue or proboscis. Like a soft, hollow tube, the tongue unrolls, growing longer and longer, until eventually it reaches the floor, its end scraping in the dust. More hummingbirds join the first, flying from other nests, some of which are located high overhead. The walls no longer contain any trace of concrete; they are all dark brown, an armoured layer of bark. The floor has turned to vegetation. The roots crawl and writhe, like snakes, around Hailey’s feet. Weird insects burrow beneath this mulch, their bodies displacing the earth and making small heaving tracks across the ground.

  “Where am I?” It seems like such a huge question. The answer must be equally as large, perhaps so big that the universe cannot contain it.

  The birds form a circle around her, like the flipside of a Disney cartoon, where the magic animals arrive to help the princess. But these birds, she knows deep inside, are not here to offer her aid. They are trying to warn her, or perhaps to scare her away. They are the harbingers of something else – something large and old and terrible. Like the small fishes that feed on a shark’s back, these things co-exist alongside the monstrous, and by doing so have become like tiny monsters themselves. Their beauty is not joyous; it is terrifying. It is the beauty of decay and degradation, the empty grandeur of destruction.

  Hailey does not know where this knowledge comes from. It is just sitting in her head, waiting to be accessed.

  “You’re old, aren’t you? So very old.” Her voice echoes within the tree-chamber. When she glances away from the birds, once again inspecting her surroundings, she sees that she is now standing at the centre of a small grove of tall oak trees. She knows they are oaks because she recognises them from school, when she and her classmates did a nature project and had to draw the leaves of different species of tree – oak, maple, pine, willow. The oak tree was her favourite: there is something mysterious and majestic about the oak. It is one of the bones of England.

  The trees lean in towards her, as if attempting to pass on some secret knowledge. They grow as she watches, dwarfing her, becoming the likeness of what they used to be, thousands of years ago, when this land belonged to nature and contained some kind of indigenous power. But man came along and dug up the land, shattered and fragmented whatever power was buried here, and poisoned it.

  “Is this home? Is it where we belong?” She isn’t sure if she means her family or everyone else, perhaps she is referring to all of humanity. “Is it where we started? Where we’ll end up?”

  The trees shudder, as if her words have made an impact. Then, slowly, they draw back, moving away. Leaves fall like solidified tears upon the ground. They turn dark as they tumble, crisping as if they are being dried out in an oven. The fat roots slither across them, folding over the fallen debris, crushing it and turning it to compost. Great slabs of concrete erupt through the mat of knotted roots and branches, noisily reclaiming the space, raping it and making it unfit for anything but human habitation. The only animal corrupt enough to live here is man.

  Suddenly Hailey understands everything. Then, just as quickly, she realises that she understands nothing. She begins to cry but doesn’t know who – or what – the tears are for. The trees diminish, shrinking, shedding their leaves, going to ground. The hummingbirds take frenzied flight above her head, performing wild, graceless loop-the-loops and almost crashing into each other in their haste. The sound of their wings is that of a million little heartbeats; their vibrant colours are like paint splashes in the air.

  Far off, somewhere deep within this ravaged primeval forest, a beast cries out in the throes of either hunger or despair.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LANA USED TO look forward to the weekends. She remembered a time when everything in her world was stable, and she worked part-time at a solicitor’s office in Newcastle. She was the best legal secretary in the firm, commanding a higher salary and better benefits than her peers, and the senior partners thought a lot of her.

  Then Timothy had gone spectacularly off the rails. He had invested all their money in a long-distance haulage business that was actually part of an elaborate front for human trafficking, and the world she had so carefully created began to fall apart. It took less than a year for her loving husband to turn from a responsible family man, a respectable investor (or so she’d thought, before he threw in with gangsters) and property developer, into a murderer and a suicide.

  It had taken such a short time to fall a great distance. But was the distance really so great? In all honesty, was the difference between family man and vengeful, paranoiac killer so huge? Sometimes, when she remembered him caressing her, whispering his desperate plans for their future into her ear, she thought there was hardly any difference at all.

  Weekends these days were much the same as the rest of the week, apart from the fact that Hailey did not have to go to school. Hailey usually stayed in bed until just before noon, watching her DVDs and reading her books and magazines. But now she could no longer do that – her television was gone, the DVDs were useless without a player, and only the books remained.

  Today they were both up and ready before nine o'clock. Lana was dressed in jeans and hiking boots, with a good fleecy jacket she’d bought years ago, in more affluent times. Hailey was wearing a pair of battered charity-shop Nikes, her best skinny jeans, and a man’s padded coat that looked so big on her frame Lana suspected she’d either stolen it or been given it by a mystery boyfriend.

  Tom had said that he would pick them up at ten, and even though Hailey showed no interest at all in the planned day trip Lana felt as excited as a schoolgirl preparing for a first date. She knew that she was using this as a distraction from her troubles, that Tom’s unexpected arrival on the scene had offered her a smokescreen behind which to hide everything else. But she didn’t care; she was happy – albeit a muted sort of happiness – and she would allow nothing to spoil that feeling. Even if it was just for a day.

  Self-delusion, she thought, is often just another coping mechanism.

  She heard a car horn blaring outside, and when she rushed over to the window she saw Tom’s car parked in the bus lay-by across the street. She waved but he didn’t see her. He was staring straight ahead at a figure that had just stumbled through a narrow ginnel along Grove Lane and was making its way slowly and awkwardly across the road in front of the block of flats in which she lived.

  “What is it, Mum? Who’s that?”

  Lana stared at the figure. “I’m not sure, honey. But he looks drunk.”

  “Or stoned,” said Hailey.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Lana felt a formless fear moving at her core. This was the kind of thing she hated most: social terrors in the early morning, or the middle of the day. At night she could almost accept this kind of behaviour, or at least convince herself that she could deal with the threat by locking it out. But during the hours of daylight, when the world was meant to be bright and without shadows, the sight of a junkie staggering about in the road was akin to a personal insult.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get down there before that idiot causes a commotion. Tom’s waiting. We don’t want him to have any hassle.” What she really meant was that she didn’t want him changing his mind and driving away.

  Their footsteps sounded hollow as they hurried down the stairwell, and they both moved with a sense of urgency, as if something were pursuing them. Lana felt fingers of terror brush along her spine, and was prompted to look back over her shoulder. Dusty shadows quivered down the stairs. She looked away, feeling absurd that she should be so afraid.

  Lana burst through the doors, tightening her grip on the cooler bag she’d slung over one shoulder. The other hand clasped her handbag, and she wished it contained something she could use as a weapon. Mace. A pair of nail scissors.

  The man was now standing in front of Tom’s car, weaving on the spo
t like a listing galleon. His hands were raised and grasping, as if he were trying to grab handfuls of fresh air.

  “I know him,” said Hailey, slowing down as they crossed the road and approached the mini roundabout. “It’s that junkie – what’s his name again?”

  Lana reached out and grabbed her daughter’s hand, dragging her towards the car. Tom had seen them. He opened the driver’s door and set one foot outside. “Everything okay?” His voice was quiet; the slight breeze took it and lifted it above the rooftops, carrying it away like a scrap of litter.

  Lana nodded. “Hurry, now.”

  “Banjo!” Hailey stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand slipped from Lana’s grip.

  “What are you saying?” Lana spun on her heels, keeping one eye on the unsteady fool who was still standing directly in front of Tom’s car, staring into the windscreen but clearly seeing nothing outside the theatre of his own head.

  “That’s his name: Banjo. He always hangs around here. Went missing a few days ago – I remember somebody was asking around for him, wanting to know if anyone had seen him. He’s just a harmless druggie dude.”

  “Come on. Let’s just go.” Lana tugged the girl across the road, to the car. Tom was now fully out of the vehicle. He was torn between watching the junkie and greeting the two women.

  “Who the hell’s this?” He half smiled, half grimaced.

  “Just some local druggie,” said Lana. “Let’s get in the car.”

  Tom nodded. “Nice to see you, too.” The smile grew, making his face look younger, cleaner, nicer.

  Lana shook her head. “Sorry. This place. It spoils everything.”

  Tom opened the rear door and then walked around the back of the car to open the passenger door. He stood, balanced in a moment where he was not quite sure who would sit where.

  “Fuck!”