The Hiding Place(36)

1992


Chris found it. That was his knack. Finding stuff.

Like me, he was an unusual addition to Hurst’s gang: tall and lanky with white-blond hair that stuck up like electrified straw and a stutter that got worse when he was nervous (and like most awkward, nerdy kids, Chris spent a lot of his schooldays being nervous).

No one could fathom why Hurst took him under his wing. But I got it. Hurst may have been a bully, but he was also smart. He had a way of knowing who to crush, and who to keep. And Chris had his uses. I guess we all did.

While Hurst’s casual associates were the usual mixture of posers and brawlers, his inner circle was a little different. Fletch was the muscle. The brainless thug who would laugh at Hurst’s jokes, lick his arse and smash heads. Chris was the brains. The misfit, the misunderstood genius. His flair for science helped us create the best homemade stink bombs, ingenious booby traps for unsuspecting victims and, once, a chemical explosion that caused the whole school to be evacuated at the expense, and job, of a stand-in science teacher.

But Chris had another useful quirk. A feverish curiosity. A desire to find out stuff, and to find stuff. A way of seeing things that other people couldn’t. If you wanted to get hold of some exam papers, Chris would find a way to get them. A spot to stand in the fields to see into the girls’ changing rooms, Chris could calculate the best vantage point. A way to break into the store and steal sweets and fireworks, Chris could devise a plan to do it.

If his skull hadn’t smashed open in the schoolyard and his brilliant brains spilled all over the stained gray concrete, Chris would have grown up to be a billionaire entrepreneur…or a criminal mastermind. That’s what I had always thought.

When he blustered into the kids’ playground that Friday evening, late as usual, because Chris was always late—not fashionably, but red-faced, tie askew, food down his shirt and apologetically so—he was even more flushed and frantic than normal. Straight off, I knew something was up.

“All right, Chris?”

“The site. F–f–f–found. G–g–g–ground.”

When nervous, Chris’s stutter worsened; he became almost entirely incomprehensible.

I glanced over at Hurst and Fletch. Marie wasn’t with us that evening, as she had to help her mum with some chores, so there was just the three of us, killing time, talking shit. In a way, it was a good thing. As much as I liked Marie…well, that was the problem. I liked Marie. Too much. And when she was with us, she was with Hurst, his arm slung proprietorially around her shoulders.

Now, he dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, jumped down from the climbing frame and regarded Chris in the hazy evening twilight.

“All right, mate. Calm down. Fuck’s sake, you sound like a fucking Speak & Spell.”

Fletch chortled like someone had just filled his cigarette with laughing gas.

Chris’s face flamed harder, cheeks fire-engine red in his pale face. His hair was tousled and tufted like a particularly windswept haystack and his sweatshirt was creased and crusted with dirt. But the thing I noticed most about him was his eyes. Always a startling blue, that night they blazed. Sometimes, though I didn’t like to admit it, because it made me sound a bit weird and gay, Chris looked like some kind of beautiful crazed angel.

“Leave him,” I said to Hurst.

I was the only one who could get away with speaking to Hurst like that. He listened to me. I guess that was my use. I was his voice of reason. He trusted me. The fact that I often did his English homework for him didn’t hurt either.

I ground out my own cigarette. I never really liked them that much. Just like beer. The taste made me want to spit and wipe my tongue. Of course, I have grown older, wiser and more addicted since then.

“Breathe,” I said to Chris. “Speak slowly. Tell us.”

Chris nodded and attempted to rein in his manic huffing and puffing. He clutched his hands together tightly in front of him, trying to get control over his nerves and his stutter.

“Fucking retard,” Fletch muttered, and spat a huge gob of phlegm onto the ground.

Hurst gave me a look. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a slightly melted Wham bar and held it out to Chris, like offering a treat to a puppy.

“Here.”

Contrary to what is believed nowadays, a sugary snack was about the only thing that could calm Chris down. Perhaps that was why he nearly always had a constant supply of them.

Chris accepted the Wham bar, chewed a bit and then, still half chewing, said:

“Been up…up at the old mine.”

“Okay.”

All of us kids went up there and messed around sometimes. Before they started to demolish the old buildings we would sneak in and steal stuff. Useless stuff. Bits of old metal and machinery. Just to prove we’d been. But Chris went up there a lot. On his own, which was odd. But then everything about Chris was odd, so much so that it just became normal after a while. When I asked him once why he went up there so much, he said:

“I have to look.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Conversations with Chris could be frustrating. I fought my irritation down as he struggled to find his words without them breaking into pieces on his tongue.

Finally, he said: “I found something. In the g–g–ground. C–c–could be a way in.”