Dead Branches Read online

  I kept my eyes on the tractor to avoid looking at the twisted old oak tree in the back corner. It was dead, and at some point, it had been struck by lightning, perhaps more than once, which had almost split the tree in two. There was also a scorch mark on its trunk like a gaping mouth, and the wild branches above were like the hair of some ancient creature, or the snakes of Medusa, and where some low branches had been cut short years ago it looked like it had stumpy limbs. In recent years ivy had started to grow around its base, giving the impression that it had returned to life like some kind of foul, brain-thirsty zombie.

  I’d been scared of the tree ever since Granddad Norman put one of his glass eyes into a knot on the tree’s trunk the day after he told us the story of how he lost his eye. It was not long after they bought the land, which hadn’t been farmed since the Miller boys (whoever they were) had all been killed during the First World War, when Granddad Norman was still only a boy. My great-granddad wanted that land in use, so he gave Granddad Norman, and his older brother, Arthur, one day to clear it.

  Once, there were sheds there, but they’d long since collapsed and the beams were half-buried in the ground. The best method Arthur and Granddad Norman could think of was to drag them out using chains attached to the tractor. They were all set to have the entire field clear, but then they set their sights on the old oak tree, and even though it was before the lightning strike, it already looked dead. They thought that it would come out of the ground as easily as those beams that had only been sunk a year or two. They didn’t reckon on the ancient evil that was holding the cursed oak in place. They tied their chain around the tree, and Arthur started in the tractor. The engine roared and the chain dug into the trunk, and Granddad swears it was on the lean and it looked like it was about to go when he heard something ping. The last thing he saw with his left eye was the broken chain flying towards him.

  It was all for the best, claimed Granddad, because if the tree hadn’t taken his eye, then he would have had to fight in the war and, like Arthur, he might never have come home.

  Putting his glass eye in the tree, the day after he told us that story, was his worst prank yet. He was spying on us from behind the old Ford tractor and he slapped the side of his legs and made a “Hoo-hoo,” sound, as Andy ran off across the field screaming, and he kept laughing until he had to dab at his good eye with a handkerchief.

  I couldn’t look at the tree in case it was looking back and who knows what would have happened if I got caught in its evil glare, so I looked over to the new bypass. John wouldn’t have been playing there. Not while they were working on it. We used to, when it was a huge pile of sand and rubble and it would be left unattended for days at a time, but he was more sensible than to play in the path of a steamroller.

  Chappie sniffed at the tractor wheels and cocked his leg up at it and whined. There was a thin film of dust and dirt on the seat, and it was clear no one had been on it for a while. I lifted a sheet of corrugated iron, and flipped it over, watching the worms wriggle underneath. There was a strong earthy smell, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. We walked close enough to the oak tree to see that there were no footprints in the soft earth around it, but I wasn’t getting any closer than that. We walked to the other side of the field and then I jumped the ditch while Chappie ran down and scrambled back up the other side. We had one of our old dens just off the path that led back to the farmhouse. This one we’d called Narnia, because, when we built it, I was obsessed with the TV series of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe which had been on TV a few months earlier. It was watching that which made me want to read all of the books. Our current base was across the other side of the oil seed rape field, and we called that one Moon Base One (Liam named it) and we had a smaller one, up by the school, which was The Broom Cupboard. Narnia was built where the dyke came to an end a couple of elderberry bushes met and formed a natural shelter. We used to climb down the dyke and hide under the bushes. All that was left in there was some sticks Will had sharpened with his penknife back in the days when we were still Muskehounds. When it rained hard the dyke would get wet at the bottom and Mum told us off for getting our school trousers muddy, so we gave it up. John didn’t even know about this base though, and there was no sign of anyone having been there, so we wandered back home, passing the chicken coop on the way. Something bad had happened there. I saw those mutilated chickens in my head again, and then John’s face. What if the same thing that had gotten the chickens had gotten John too?

  Dad’s boots were by the door. I walked in and he was sitting at the table. His face was red, and his hair was standing up, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He broke off his conversation with Mum when he saw me and stared until I looked away.

  “He’ll be all right,” Mum said. She patted me on the back, and I slipped off my shoes.

  “Can I give his house a call? To see if he’s home?”

  Mum turned away and picked up a tea-towel to wipe a cup which was already dry. “Better leave them alone,” she said, looking down at the cup. “I’m sure he’ll be at home, but his Mum and Dad will be having words with him.”

  Having words. That was adult speak for telling him off.

  With that I filled a beaker with orange squash, ran in some water, and took it up to my room. It was the room at the top of the stairs, with the spare room on the left (piled high with boxes) and the bathroom on the right. Mum and Dad’s room was on the other side of that, but we weren’t allowed in there.

  In our room, my bed was nearest the door and Will’s was on the other side of the room which meant that he had to cross into my side to get to his, so he claimed that he had the better side of the room as it had more privacy. As the older brother, he deserved that.

  On top of our shared set of drawers (top two for Will, bottom two for me) was our TV. We shared that too. It was a 21-inch Philips colour TV with Teletext and a remote control. Attached to that was our Nintendo Entertainment System, a joint Christmas present six months earlier. Will had already started playing again.

  I walked over to the window and looked out. I was glad our bedroom didn’t look out to the rest of the village; I didn’t want to see the school and the estate John lived on. But looking out over the field brought me no comfort either as my eyes always came to rest on the oak tree. I pulled the curtains closed.

  John and I had played football together at lunch time. Some of the boys pretended they were playing for Cameroon. Before Friday night the only thing we knew about them was a few names from the Panini stickers that we had and what was on the Top Trump card – they’d played at one previous world cup, and had drawn all three games, but after they’d beaten Argentina in the opening game of the World Cup their Panini stickers became the hottest property on the playground. A few of us stuck to being England players despite their draw with Ireland. We had a mini-Peter Shilton in goal, a little Gary Lineker up front and John was Paul Gascoigne.

  By afternoon break it was too hot to play so we sat under the shade of the conker tree at the bottom of the school playing field. We argued. John was always bragging about having a Nintendo Entertainment System which was imported from America. He could play all of the latest games, while we didn’t get them for yonks. What’s more, Dad didn’t like the idea of games consoles so any new games for me and Will were limited to Christmas and birthday presents. John had finished Super Mario Bros. 3, while I was still playing the original. I’d been going over to John’s house to play on his game, but that day I couldn’t take any more of his showing off. But if I’d have gone, he’d be at home and everything would have been okay. Instead I’d have to go over to Liam’s because he was so excited about his new set of Top Trumps which we didn’t even get around to playing.

  Will switched off the Nintendo, plugged the aerial back in, and picked up the remote. He opened Ceefax and called out, ‘Belgium two, South Korea nil.’ The South Korean team had two players on each sticker because no one knew who any of them were. Will turned off Ceefax and
switched the TV over for the Netherlands vs Egypt match and beckoned me over to his bed which had a better angle for viewing the TV. I’d been looking forward to seeing Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Basten play for Holland. I’d never seen them play before, but I’d heard that they were like magicians. I’d seen clips of this wonder goal that Van Basten had scored in the European Championships two years ago. He volleyed it in from an impossible angle. There was no way that a normal human being could do that. These guys were more than that. They were super-human.

  Halfway through the first half I found my attention wandering from the screen. I kept looking at the Gameboy – John’s Gameboy – and decided I wanted one last go on that. I picked it up and realised that I’d placed it on top of Deathtrap Dungeon. I stared at the hideous toad creature, with its drool-covered fangs, and its multitude of eyes and quickly flipped the book over. I put the Tetris cartridge in the Gameboy and started a game. I cleared line after line and got my highest score ever, and then I turned it off and slipped it into my school bag, determined to return it to John in the morning.

  Wednesday, 13th June 1990

  Iwoke early. The machines were already at work on the bypass, but it wasn’t the low growl of their machines that woke me. I re-checked my bag, making sure that John’s Gameboy was still there, carefully wrapped in the school sweater that the bright light pouring through the crack in the curtains suggested I wouldn’t need.

  I opened the curtains to let more of the morning sunshine in, ignoring Will’s groans as he turned away from the light and pulled his duvet, which he must have kicked off during the night, back over himself. It was a hazy morning; I couldn’t see the old pumping station where the Little Ouse met the Great Ouse, which you could normally see on a clear day. I looked at the yellow machines, diggers, steamrollers and tipper trucks, and thought about how much closer they could have been.

  A man from the Highways Agency had come to discuss buying some of Dad’s land in order to keep the bypass as straight as possible. It would have taken a small chunk of the back field – the bit where nothing was planted, and that horrible tree stood. Dad could have put up a reasonable argument. He could have said that he wasn’t selling because the further away the noise of the bypass was the better it was for him. He could have argued that he was planning to clear up that bit of land and plant it up, and it would cost him his livelihood to sell it, but reasonable argument wasn’t something that Dad did.

  Dad held a grudge against the parish council and as a result every type of council or Government official. First of all, there had been a land dispute with Peter Dalby (which meant I wasn’t supposed to speak to Ian Dalby at school anymore) where they’d sided with the Dalby family. Then there was the planning application for a new shed for Dad to store crops in, which was turned down and he was still fighting. Dad’s view was not so much you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours, but if I can’t have it, you can’t have it either. So instead of turning them down he had them out to survey, waiting for them to make an offer, sat on it for weeks, and then turned them away.

  Dad wasn’t in a good mood. I’d gone downstairs to get myself breakfast, and he was already sitting at the table. He’d not shaved, so his face looked grey, and his eyes were puffy.

  “Up early, boy,” he said. “Shit the bed?”

  He’d say this from time to time, usually when he was in a better mood, but his voice was low and flat, like when he was reading a letter out loud that had annoyed him.

  “You want some breakfast, Tom?” Mum said, getting up from the table and taking Dad’s plate with her.

  “I was going to have cereal,” I said, and went over to the cupboard and took out the box of Rice Krispies.

  “Don’t speak to your dad then,” Dad muttered. He got up and went out of the back door. “Ignorant little shit,” he said.

  I looked up at Mum, and she looked at me and smiled. “Any plans for after school today?”

  “Probably hang out with Liam and Andy,” I said as I turned away from her, not wanting her to see how Dad had made me feel.

  I didn’t wait for Will because he liked to walk slowly and chat to people, sometimes older kids from the college, walking in the opposite direction towards the bus stop, as if he had set himself a challenge to arrive as close to the bell as possible, and I wanted to catch John on the playground as he arrived to say that I was sorry for not going over to play.

  When the bell rang, I was still waiting. I told myself that he might be late. But John was never late. As the last few pupils deserted the playground and went into the school, including Will who punched me playfully on the shoulder as he passed, I looked out at the concrete and followed a crisp packet that scuttled along on the gentle breeze and a hard lump, like an undigested piece of meat, seemed to solidify in my stomach.

  I was last into our classroom. I looked straight at John’s seat, and when I saw it was empty, confirming that he hadn’t used some kind of ninja-like skills to sneak past me, that lump in my gut seem to get bigger.

  “Sit down, Thomas,” said Mrs Palmer. She’d been our teacher since the September. She had dark brown hair with a ruler-straight fringe, wonky teeth, and always wore mustard-coloured cardigans. People said she smelled of cucumber, but I’d never noticed. She wasn’t strict and, on some days, she would let us out to break early. Also, she’d taken me off the reading scheme and made me a free-reader, so I could read any book in the library, and it was her that said I was ready to read The Chronicles of Narnia.

  That morning, she read out the register and when she got to the Gs and called out John’s name (they were in surname order) we all turned to look at his seat. It was odd for him not to be there. It was odd for anyone to be absent and it usually led to stories spreading about the missing person having the squits, the squirts, or the runs, but it seemed different this time and no one said a word.

  I felt sick. The lump in my stomach was breaking down and trying to make its way back up my throat. A couple of times I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting, and I couldn’t get the bitter taste out of my mouth.

  “Can I go to the toilet, Mrs Palmer?” I asked.

  She came over to look at my book.

  “Thomas, you’ve not done a single one of these sums,” she said, poking at my exercise book with her finger.

  I hadn’t even realised we were doing maths. “I’m desperate,” I said, swallowing hard again.

  “Okay, off you go. But I expect much more effort when you get back, or you’ll be staying in at break.”

  To get to the toilets I had to go past the headmaster’s office. Mr Inglehart was sitting at his desk, and I was sure that I could see a policeman sitting opposite him. I couldn’t loiter outside there to listen in for two reasons: one, I was still about ninety per cent sure that I was going to throw up, and two, because Mr Jenkins, the school caretaker, was leaning on his mop at the end of the corridor. He was a whistler, but no one ever recognised any of the songs he whistled. His beard was so big and bushy that the end of the mop handle had become lost in it. He had a habit of marching children who were found hanging around the corridors to Mr Inglehart’s office, and while that would have given me a better idea of what was going on in there, I didn’t much want to chuck my guts up in front of my headmaster and a policeman.

  In the toilets, I splashed some water on my face and took some long, deep breaths. I started to feel better. I went into one of the cubicles and locked the door. After a few seconds I remembered that this was the toilet that John had dropped the red food colouring into, making the water go a deep, dark red. Then I’d waited in the cubicle next door, and John in the one on the other side. We waited for someone to come in to see how they reacted. We could barely contain out laughter every time the toilet door opened. Unfortunately, the first couple of visitors were only using the urinals, and we needed someone to come into the cubicle to do a turd.

  “The ideal scenario,” John had said while plotting this prank, “would be for someone to com
e in, and not look before they do a dump. When they look round, they’ll think they’ve shit blood!” He’d laughed so hard that he couldn’t breathe until I slapped his back.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite how it worked out, but the results were still hilarious. We heard the door creak open, and then, a few seconds later, there was a high-pitched girly scream, and heavy footsteps as someone fled from the toilets.

  John and I dashed out of the toilets howling with laughter, and quickly made our way into the corridor to catch a glimpse of the girly screamer. It was a year-three boy in Andy’s class called Jimmy Wilson.

  It wasn’t until the next week that we got wind of a significant number of year three kids pretending to be Ghostbusters. We found Andy on the playground and he filled in the gaps.

  “Jimmy saw a ghost in the toilets,” he said, his eyes wide.

  It turned out that Jimmy’s older brother, Gavin, who was at college, had been telling Jimmy for years that the toilets at the school were haunted, and this was the proof that Jimmy needed.

  “So, what did Jimmy do?” John asked, winking at me and thinking about that girly scream.

  “He says he yelled at it, and it dissolved into goo in the toilet.”

  “Right,” said John, slowly and sarcastically. Then he looked around at Jimmy. “Hey Jimmy, can we play?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I guess you can be ghosts.”

  “No, I want to be a Ghostbuster. You be a ghost.”