The Dead of Summer Read online

  We divided the cans between us and started firing them at the trolley. I was first to hit it square on the wheel and Kyle turned to me with one of his rare smiles. ‘Not bad,’ he said, pursing his lips and nodding admiringly. ‘Not bad at all.’ Happiness exploded in my guts. I grinned back at him like a moron, far too chuffed to try and look cool.

  And then it happened. None of us had seen them coming. Mike, Marco, Lee and this other kid called Dean just appeared out of nowhere. It was like someone had suddenly thrown a black blanket over us. Marco and Lee grabbed hold of me and Denis, and Mike and Dean grabbed Kyle. Within seconds they had him over the railings, dangling him by his ankles so he swung twenty metres above the Quaggy. When I struggled, Marco just held my arms tighter.

  ‘Think you’re a fucking comedian, don’t you?’ Mike was shouting down to Kyle. ‘Think you’re well funny! Not fucking laughing now though, are you? Last person who slagged off my family ended up in hospital, you pikey little cunt.’ I was certain they were going to drop Kyle on his head and I didn’t know what to do. Every time I struggled, Marco would slap my head and tighten his hold. It seemed to go on for hours.

  But suddenly Lee shouted, ‘Old Bill!’, and I could have cried with relief when I saw the police car pull up next to us. The two coppers stared out at us, bored, their engine growling irritably. Mike and Dean had Kyle pulled back over the railings in a second. They legged it across the road, disappearing down a side-street. The police didn’t even bother to get out of the car, just watched Kyle gasping bug-eyed on the pavement for a few moments, then drove on.

  The three of us stared at each other, too stunned to speak. Then suddenly Kyle sped off, his skinny little legs powering on double speed. When Denis and I caught him up he wouldn’t look at us. ‘If I see that cunt again I will kill him,’ he said, his voice tight with rage. He stared straight ahead, his face and fists clenched. ‘I will fucking kill him. I will get a hammer and beat his head to a fucking pulp. Or I will get a knife and stab him in the face or I will stand on his neck until he can’t breathe any more. I fucking would, you know.’ He turned to glare at me as if I was going to argue about it. I could think of nothing to say; could only stare at him, mesmerised.

  A few days later Kyle came and knocked for me and we walked round to Denis’s house. I was relieved to see his place was as shit as mine. We rang the doorbell on the peeling yellow door and it played ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Immediately a lady no taller than me with a helmet of hair like a Playmobil figure opened the door, like she’d been waiting there ready in case anyone should call. It was Gloria, Denis’s mum. Her skin was blue-black and shiny as a beetle. Everything about her was tiny: her hands, her slippers, her eyes. She looked at me suspiciously, her nose wrinkling like a raisin. I couldn’t believe she was related to Denis. He was twice the size of her.

  ‘Yes, dear?’ Before I could answer she spied Kyle standing behind me. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She said sullenly, not hiding her disappointment.

  ‘Is Denis in?’ I asked.

  She stood aside. ‘Come on then.’ She kissed her teeth quietly as me and Kyle walked past her into the hot brown hall. ‘Den!’ she screeched up the stairs, her voice surprisingly loud. ‘Visitors!’

  Gloria nodded at us to follow her into the kitchen where she sat at the table and stared stonily at Kyle. Kyle stared back at her. I looked around the room. It was plastic and shiny and as clean and tidy as ours was messy. Gospel played on the radio. The wall was covered in brightly coloured religious pictures like you used to find at Deptford market for 50p. A plastic Jesus on a plastic cross was pinned on the wall above the sink, Christ’s garish face contorted in cartoon shades of grief.

  On the mantelpiece above a gas fire was a framed photo of Denis. It was the one used later by all the newspapers. The famous one, where he’s wearing the red and blue sweatshirt and his face is all round and shiny and happy and he looks a bit like that kid from ‘Different Strokes’. I reckon the newspaper people deliberately picked a photo where he looked a total flid, for the same reasons they made so much of his church-going and learning difficulties and picked that photo of Kyle looking even more rat-faced and cold-eyed than usual. God knows where they got that one of me. Push, I expect.

  I looked at a banner pinned to the wall. It said, ‘Repent and ye shall be saved.’ Denis’s mum followed my gaze.

  ‘What’s your name, dear?’ she asked, so I told her.

  ‘Have you found Jesus yet, Anita?’ she said.

  I looked down at my feet. ‘Um …’ I bit my lip.

  ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, Anita,’ said Gloria, sternly. ‘For they shall see God. Matthew, five, verse eight.’ Her little brown eyes bored into me.

  I heard Kyle breathing loudly beside me, and out of the corner of my eye saw his mouth twitch. I looked away, sucking the insides of my cheeks. Luckily, at that moment Denis came bounding in. As usual, his big, dumb face looked made up to see us. You just couldn’t ever catch Denis in a bad mood. His mum immediately jumped up and started fiddling with him. She brushed fluff off his T-shirt and pulled his trousers higher. ‘You’re not going to get yourself all dirty now are you, Denis?’ she said, reaching up to cup his podgy cheek in her tiny hand. ‘And don’t be late. We got to do the flowers in the church tomorrow and you know you promised Reverend Gary that you’d keep up with your reading over the summer.’

  I heard a squeak from Kyle and knew that if I met his eyes we’d both start pissing ourselves. Denis shot us a suspicious look. ‘Oh Mum, I gotta go. Leave off!’

  We piled out into the street. Denis walked in silence for a while, shooting anxious glances to me and Kyle. But we didn’t take the piss. We always kept our noses out of each other’s business, never talked or asked about each other’s lives. When we were together, we had better things to do.

  five

  New Cross Hospital. 4 September 1986. Transcription of interview between Dr C Barton and Anita Naidu. Police copy.

  It was really cold. I was so cold in the end I was shaking and my teeth were rattling. I tried to keep track of how long I was down there but it just went on and on forever. Hours. I had a lighter in my pocket but I just couldn’t get the guts up to work it. I didn’t want to see them. I just couldn’t face looking at them. But in the end I got it out. My hands were shaking so much that I dropped it and that’s when I found it, the shoe, I mean. I was feeling about on the floor for the lighter and I felt, it, this little cold wet thing and I picked it up and I screamed, I couldn’t help it, I screamed and screamed and I just couldn’t stop screaming once I’d started because it was a little girl’s shoe, a little girl’s red shoe and that was the most horrible thing of all, that really freaked me out, because I knew what it meant, I knew whose it was. I went to the top of the steps then, just threw myself at the boards, I was banging and banging on them, screaming and screaming but they wouldn’t budge, not even a little bit and in the end I went back down and curled up because I knew there wasn’t any point in screaming anymore. I didn’t know you could be that scared.

  At the factory today Linda Bennet, the new girl who works in packaging, sliced her finger off with the guillotine. I only realised what was going on when I glanced up and saw the crowd of people huddled around her. Only then did I hear her screams. Somebody had wrapped her severed finger in some tissue and wrapped her wounded hand up too and Linda held her bloody finger in her bloody hand and screamed and screamed and screamed. An endless wailing drone of loss and shock and horror. It made my head hurt. I went back to my sticky labels and thought back to a time when I was a little girl in Leeds.

  I must have been about five. Susan Price was my best friend. She was in my class and lived two streets away and we did everything together. On this one, cold, sunny, winter’s day my mum drove us to the park in our old white Ford. It had faded red leather seats and rattled. Susan and I were in the back, wrapped in coats and scarves and mittens, beside ourselves with excitement to be going to the swings. It seemed to take fore
ver. We were both screaming and laughing and carrying on, working ourselves into a frenzy of giggles, desperate to escape the hot car and get to the park, to the swings and the slides and to run and run under the sky. My mum was singing along to the radio as she drove us through flashing sunlight.

  When the car finally stopped, Susan and I tumbled out and despite my mother calling after us to come back, we ran to the top of a steep, grassy hill on the edge of the park. For only a moment we looked down at the swings and slide and duck pond far away at the bottom, and without a word but at exactly the same time, Susan and I lay down and began to roll down the hill. I was wearing a pink, puffy, nylon jacket with a hood, and as I rolled faster and faster, the hood flipped up to cover my face. Faster and faster I rolled and with every turn the cold, hard grass and mud, then the pink nylon hood, then the shining sky jumped up to meet me. Grass, hood, sky, grass, hood, sky. I remember being hot and sweaty in my coat, I remember my cold nose, the grassy smells, my mother’s voice calling and calling my name from the top of the hill, laughter and excitement in my throat. Hood, grass, sky, hood, grass, sky, round and round and over and over wrapped in hot clammy pinkness until I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe.

  At the bottom Susan and I collided and we lay for a moment side by side just looking up at the shining blue sky streaked with powdery clouds. I remember thinking that it looked as if a giant wearing welly boots had trodden flour into the blueness. Then Susan and I gazed at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed, the warm air bubbling from our mouths into the freezing air. Every inch of me laughed, even my eyelashes were happy.

  When my mother finally reached us, out of breath and cross, she gazed at us whooping and spluttering at the sky for a few moments until she shook her head and sighed and smiled and said, ‘Oh, you funny little buggers. What am I ever going to do with you?’

  That was happiness. That was love.

  I must have been smiling because suddenly Candice Stamp, who also works in sticky labels, was thrusting her white, doughy face in mine and hissing like a gas leak, ‘It’s not funny, you bloody weirdo,’ and there I was, back in the factory, Linda’s howls of pain filling my ears once more.

  I was twenty yesterday. Look, there on my table is a card from Malcolm. It’s there, next to my collection of newspaper cuttings: my file of pre-teen terrorists, adolescent assassins, mini murderers.

  Six weeks ago I got home from the shops to find Malcolm standing outside my door. Just standing there staring at his feet. I didn’t have a clue what to do. Stupid I suppose but I am so unused to speaking to people I couldn’t quite remember how to, for a second. If there had been anyone watching I guess we’d have looked quite comical. Both of us just standing there, frozen, him staring at his feet, me staring at the door, neither of us speaking.

  Nothing happened for a bit. Finally he said, ‘My name’s Malcolm.’ He stammered a little over his name. ‘Anita,’ I said. It came out as a squeak. He asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with him on Saturday morning. I said, ‘OK then’. He said he’d meet me outside the flats at ten then. I nodded. We stood there in silence for a second or two then he walked off suddenly, really quickly, down the corridor to his flat. And I was so shocked that I just stood there for a few moments, staring at the bit of air he’d just been standing in. When I got in my flat I sat on my bed in my coat, still holding my plastic bag with my beans and milk in it, my heart going like the clappers until I realised, suddenly, that I had been sitting, there, in the dark, in my coat, holding my shopping for a very long time.

  Sometimes I lie on the little bed here and listen to the kids playing in the street below, their taunts and shrieks drifting past my window, their laughter filled with casual cruelty, easy threat. The memories come easily. I can smell the sweet stench of molasses from the animal-feed factory, see the muddy roll of the river, hear Denis talking nonsense, feel the sun on my face. I remember the view from Point Hill, the creek filled with ducks and shopping trolleys and dead branches with twigs like clawing, drowning fingers, how Denis and I hung on Kyle’s every word.

  Every morning Kyle would knock for me and we’d walk around the corner to pick up Denis. One day they took me to their secret hideout. It wasn’t much of a place but I was made up to go there. Along the river past the power station, through the patches of empty wasteland that reeked of those musky white flower-bushes, past the gasworks and scrapyards then out through the grounds of an old, deserted factory. Kyle and Denis led me to a small red-bricked outbuilding that lay crumbling in the dust and the heat. It was empty apart from a couple of broken chairs and a beaten-up metal chest.

  Kyle opened it and pulled out a cardboard box containing his cave-finding stash. I looked through it. Library books months out of date on subterranean London, a map of the Thames’ banks from Woolwich to Rotherhithe, a plan he’d drawn himself of Greenwich Park, red crosses dotted, apparently randomly (signalling, I found out later, the entrances to the water conduits), a torch, some rope, and a small, rather crappy-looking penknife.

  I leafed through one of the books. It fell open on some black and white sketches of the cave Kyle had told me about, the chalk mine under Point Hill. Kyle watched me. ‘There are other mines nearby,’ he said. ‘Sand mines. You can only get to them by breaking into people’s back gardens, apparently.’ Something about his face told me he’d already tried that. So that’s where you go to at night, I thought.

  He took the book from me and leafed through it until he found what he was looking for. ‘Listen to this,’ he said, then started reading, “'A report from the Greenwich Borough Council in 1914 describes another sand mine in the Greenwich area. It says, ‘One can wander about in what seems to be a perfect maze of tunnels for a considerable distance’. The mine described on the previous page is nothing as great as this report suggests so there must either be further workings beyond the roof collapses or another mine as yet unfound.”’

  Kyle snapped the book shut, a glint of excitement in his eyes and repeated, ‘Another mine as yet unfound. But I’m going to find it,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to find it if it fucking kills me.’

  They seemed endless, those long hot days. The summer stretched before us and felt to me to be more real than anything else in my life before had been, or since, come to think of it. It was like every bit of me was concentrated into those weeks, that they eclipsed everything, both my past and my future. That summer was like a flaming meteor tearing through blackness, through nothingness. And I sensed that I would always feel that way about it, for the rest of my life.

  When we weren’t looking for caves we’d go to the park and look for the entrances to the conduits. Other days we’d get the bus to Woolwich to watch the boats but mainly we’d hang around the river’s edge in Greenwich, climbing the fences into the old boat-yards or breaking into the scrap heaps looking for stuff to nick. Sometimes Denis would bring food from home and we’d make little fires to cook it on. It always tasted like shit but it made us feel intrepid, like we could live out there forever if necessary, on our wits and burnt bits of bacon.

  Neither Kyle nor I were big talkers, and a lot of the time we’d just listen to Denis banging on, his endless stories and tangents on anything from cavemen to his favourite kind of cake a running soundtrack to whatever we were doing that day. When Kyle did speak I’d hold onto his every word, turning them over in my mind like marbles when I was alone. And as I’ve said, none of us ever really mentioned our families, though of course I was still desperately curious about Kyle’s. Which is why I remember so clearly, and was so surprised, by something he said one day.

  We were sitting by the river as usual and I was half listening to Denis going on about crocodiles in Africa. I only really started paying attention when I heard him say, ‘That’s where my dad is.’ I looked at him, an eyebrow raised, and he said, ‘It’s true! No lies! My dad’s a missionary in Africa.’

  I probably said something along the lines of ‘Yeh, right,’ or ‘Bollocks’ because
I remember Denis going, ‘No lies! He is in Africa and it’s true because my mum told me.’

  It seemed very important to him that we believed him, so he kept going on about it, elaborating more and more, and I kept making the same ‘Bollocks’ face all the way through, just to wind him up.

  ‘He goes all over the world, he does,’ Denis was saying, ‘he’s spreading the word of our Lord.’ He said it so solemnly I sniggered, and Denis blurted in desperation, ‘In fact, he probably isn’t even in Africa any more, he’s probably gone to America by now, he’s probably in Disney Land with …’

  I started laughing, ‘With who?’ I asked.

  ‘Edward Woodward,’ he said lamely, then bit his lip while I pissed myself.

  That’s when Kyle said, not looking at us, almost to himself, ‘My dad’s in America’.

  ‘Really?’ I said, a bit too eagerly.

  ‘He moved there when him and Mum split up,’ he said, then he turned his slate-grey eyes on me. ‘He wanted to take me and my sister with him but …’ he stopped then, and looked off into the distance. I nodded, silently urging him to go on, ‘But they wouldn’t have it. Granddad and Mum. They wouldn’t have it. So we moved down here instead. And Dad went to America.’

  He shrugged, looked away, and then continued gazing out to the river. I was so stunned that he had brought up Katie that I didn’t know what to say. I had been so curious about his sister’s disappearance, so desperate to ask him about it and yet so certain that it was off-limits, that I couldn’t quite believe he’d mentioned her like that. I tried to work up the courage to ask him about her, but I knew it was hopeless the moment he shifted his big, cold eyes back to me, blinked his dismissal, then got up and walked to the edge of the river to throw stones into the water.