Kit's Wilderness Read Free Page A

playing down there by the river. They’d come out from the dark. The ones they hadn’t been able to get out from the blocked tunnels. The ones that hadn’t been properly buried.”
    “And did you?”
    “We said we did. Sometimes I almost believed we did. I squinted, saw them there at dusk, on misty days, days when the sun glared and the earth shimmered, days when the things you see seem to shift and change . . .” He laughed. “Who knows, Kit? We were young. You start to believe anything when you’re young. And it was all so long ago.”
    That night, I stared out from my window across the wilderness, watched for skinny children playing. I narrowed my eyes, squinted, saw nothing but a dark thickset form walking above the river, a black dog at its heels. John Askew, aged thirteen, watched by Christopher Watson, aged thirteen.

 

    I t was Grandpa who showed me Askew’s place. We wandered one day toward the fringes of Stoneygate, where the houses petered out and the hills started. Skylarks flew up from the turf before us, gulls flew in with the mist from the sea. There were lanes that followed the tracks of abandoned coal lines, fields and paddocks that rose toward distant dark and misty moors. Ruined stone walls, ruined cottages with weeds growing through gaping windows. All around were ancient hawthorn hedges, red berries burning brightly among the dark green tiny leaves.
    “Went nesting here as a lad,” Grandpa said. “Shinned up to the nests, popped the egg into my mouth, clambered down to my mates. Cut pinholes in them, blew the insides out, rested them in neat rows in boxes of sand. Not a thing that’s done these days. Against the law. But then it was what all lads did. And there were rules: Don’t leave any less than two, don’t destroy the nest. Rules that let the bird families survive, generation after generation.”
    Grandpa cast his eyes across the steepening landscape, pointed to where the disappeared pits once were.
    “Now it’s proper countryside again,” he said. “A great place for you to live and grow. Great place for young life to flourish.”
    And he closed his eyes and smiled and listened to the larks, dark tiny specks that belted out their songs from high up in the sky.
    The Askews lived in the final street, a potholed cul-de-sac of old pit cottages before the hills started. Most of the cottages were boarded up. Close by were a shuttered Coop Store and a tumbledown pub, The Fox.
    Grandpa pointed into the cul-de-sac. A skinny dog roamed there, its tail curled up between its legs.
    “That’s the one,” he said. “In the corner there. Where your mate lives.”
    Curtains were closed at the windows. There was an upturned pram in the beaten garden, an empty rabbit hutch. We stood for a moment. We saw the curtains tugged aside a few inches, a woman’s face peeping out. Nothing but the dog moved. There was sudden music from another of the houses, a heavy pounding beat, then a woman’s bitter scream, and silence again. The woman at Askew’s window stared. She stood in front of the curtain, holding a baby in her arms, watching us.
    “The mother,” said Grandpa, and we turned away.
    We met the father as we passed The Fox. He stumbled out, cupped a cigarette to his mouth and tried to light it. He muttered and cursed, leaned against the pub wall, flashed his eyes at us. His face was red and strained.
    Grandpa nodded at him. “Askew,” he said in greeting.
    The man stared at us, blinked, refocused. “It’s you,” he said. “Watson.”
    “Aye,” said Grandpa. “And this is my lad. My son’s lad, Christopher.”
    The man glared at me, spat down onto the broken pavement.
    “Christopher Watson, eh?” he said. He wiped his lips with his sleeve. He coughed and cursed. “So what am I to do, eh? Kiss his bloody precious feet, eh?” He stuck his head forward. “Eh?” he said. “Eh?” Then laughed and coughed and cursed again.
    Grandpa drew me on, back toward home, back toward the