August 2006

“When I was younger, nine or ten, maybe,” said Rosalyn, “I used to imagine living in a place like this and setting up…  I don’t know.  A kind of extended country park thing.  Complete with theme park rides and zoo animals.”

Denny nodded.  It was getting on for midnight, and the three of them- him, Rosalyn and Judith- were lying across the twin sofas in the living room, drinking hot chocolate and talking about nothing in particular.  To Denny’s right, there were two big, red curtains drawn across the French doors, keeping out the forest.  “Like in Chessington?”

“No,” said Rosalyn, frowning in concentration, “The point was, it would mostly be a wood.  Just, every so often, there’d be a clearing with something interesting in it.” 

“Always something interesting in a wood,” said Judith.  The TV was next to them, completely blank.  No matter how late they stayed up, they never seemed to keep it turned on after about ten.  Maybe it would have felt disrespectful to the owls and bats nearby.

“I used to imagine living in the jungle and leading an army of animals,” said Denny, “I think I settled on sloths, in the end.  They seemed like they’d give me the least trouble.”

Rosalyn laughed.  “Do you want to get some more of those marshmallows?”

“Alright.”  Denny got up and went to the cupboard before Rosalyn or Judith could.  There was such a thing as being gentlemanly.  The kitchen was neatly packed into a corner of the main room, adjacent to the sofas and TV.  When they’d first come here, Denny had assumed they’d mostly be eating takeaway, but it had turned out that they all knew how to cook more things than they thought.  Most of it involved eggs or pasta.

“I still think we could probably get a campfire going out there,” said Rosalyn, nodding towards the French windows, through which (hidden by the curtains), there was a little patio where birds and squirrels sometimes came in search of breadcrumbs. 

“Best not,” said Denny, putting two more marshmallows into her mug.  The packet did say “Cooking Marshmallows,” so it seemed a shame to waste them on hot chocolate, but when it came to campfires, Denny didn’t know what was safe and legal and what wasn’t, and none of them wanted to be responsible for burning down half the forest.  “We could try roasting them over a candle.  Or putting them in the microwave.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalyn noncommittally.  Her voice was almost a yawn.

There were some days here when Denny was almost sorry to go to bed.  Some days you wanted to stretch out as far as they would go.  But at least around here, odds were good that tomorrow would be similar.

*

There were still days when Denny woke up and listened to the army march for hours, because it seemed like the most sensible thing to do.  The closest thing to a place where he actually belonged, instead of awkwardly sticking out, going through the motions and getting in everyone’s way.  The closest thing to feeling solid, and not as if the self he knew was about to dissolve and be replaced by something terrible.

The first day they were here, he’d got Judith and Rosalyn to promise to lock their bedroom doors at night.  If it had been John or Octavia or Alex, they’d have gone into their usual speech about how Denny didn’t have to worry and they always felt safe around him, and then Denny wouldn’t have been able to sleep for fear that they deliberately hadn’t locked it to show how much they trusted him.  But Judith and Rosalyn had just shared a glance, and then Rosalyn nodded and said, “If it makes you feel better.”

When Denny wasn’t listening to the invisible army, they spent a lot of time exploring the woods.  More often, though, they just sat and read.  Denny hadn’t had any trouble concentrating on books since they’d got here- maybe because he didn’t have to keep an ear out in case he was called away to do something else.  He’d read his way through most of the cottage’s bookshelf at this point.  It probably wouldn’t be long before they had to go out and buy some more.  Judith said there was probably a bookshop in town.

Rosalyn, who’d been working on Philosophy coursework almost constantly for two months, could often be drawn into long conversations about religion.  She was particularly interested in the Problem of Evil.  “Some people say that suffering’s a test,” she told him, “But it’s not exactly an even test, is it?  I mean, think about the Queen- she was born with money and power, so she’s had a lot of opportunity to do a whole lot of good and a whole lot of evil, if she wanted.”

“I don’t think the Queen’s done anything evil…” said Denny, a little uncertainly.  It wasn’t as if he was an expert.

“No, no- I just meant she could have done, if she’d wanted to.  She’s able to affect the lives of a lot of people.  And she’s had a long life, so she’s had a lot of time to do it.  Now, compare that to someone who was born on the same day as her, but in a slum.  Or somebody who died of cot death when they were six months old.  The Queen’s definitely had a more… comprehensive test than those people.”  She waved her bookmark in the air.  “So I think, if suffering’s a test, it can’t be a test of individuals.  It’s got to be a test of the species as a whole.”

Judith laughed.  “Do you think we’re going to pass?”

*

(From ‘On the Trail of Kelpie and Silkie’ by Rosalyn Pepper, published 2012)

The graffiti on the railway bridge referred to a woman being forced to marry a man after he stole her sealskin, which is a myth that turns up over and over again across different cultures, most commonly in Scotland.  Silkies (more commonly known as “selkies”) are people who can turn into seals, or possibly seals who can turn into people.  The legend goes that silkies take off their seal-skins so that they can walk about on land, but that one day a young (human) man found the skin of a beautiful female silkie and hid it, so that she couldn’t return to the sea and he could have her as his wife.

So, why didn’t he destroy the skin?  The legend doesn’t say.  Maybe he knew it was her only incentive to come with him, the hope that one day he’d let his guard down and give her enough clues to find it.  And according to the legend, that’s exactly what happened, after about seven years.  She found the skin and went straight back to the sea, leaving behind her kidnapper-husband and their half-silkie children.  You can’t help but wonder how they felt about all this, but the legend doesn’t bother with that, either.

Sometimes there’s a second half to the story, in which fishermen kill the woman’s new silkie husband and children, and she curses the entire island in revenge.  Maybe that would turn out to be relevant to whatever had happened in Coney Park, and maybe it wouldn’t.  Only one way to find out.

*

The first time they’d gone into town, Rosalyn and Judith had told Denny he could wait in the car while they went into the supermarket, but Denny hated that idea.  He wasn’t such a hopeless case that he couldn’t stand going into a shop when he had to.  Even at his worst, he was OK with having other people around.  Especially at his worst.  More people meant more chances for somebody to stop him if a blackout hit.

The supermarket was a cosy, golden-brown place that smelled of baking bread, and every Monday it was the same thing.  They looked at the newspaper headlines (but never actually bought any), then checked the magazine rack to see if there was anything interesting there (Rosalyn liked TotalFilm and NME, and Judith had once surprised him by getting Cosmopolitan), then onto ready meals, then meat and fish, cereal, and so on.  Up one aisle, and down the next.  There was a sort of rhythm.

“We should get one of those food pyramid posters,” said Rosalyn, as they headed to the tills, “I always feel like I’m not eating enough of something.”

“I think you do alright,” said Denny.  The last aisle had a shelf full of stuffed toys, including black panthers and lemurs with soft fur and blue glass eyes.  The first time they’d come here, Rosalyn had exclaimed over how well-made they were, and Denny had felt a pang of fear for her.  The world had a habit of doing awful things to sweet, gentle people who went into raptures over soft toys.  “I think if we got scurvy, we’d notice.”

“Yeah.”  Rosalyn ruffled her own hair.  Denny had never seen anyone else do that.  “I guess I just worry that I’m eating too much cheese.”

“We can eat something else instead, if you like,” said Judith, “If you want a break from it.”

“Yeah.  More rice or something.  Or fish.”  Rosalyn looked up and down the aisle, as if in a daze.  “You know what my brother told me?  He said, the cheaper food is, the more likely it is to make you fat.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s got something to do with fats and sugars being cheaper than other things.  So a hundred years ago, the poorest people would have been all skinny and malnourished-looking, but today, the poorest people are more likely to be fat.  And people look down their noses and say, oh, it’s because poor people are lazy, but that’s not why.”

Denny had heard something like this before.  “But that’s only true in First World countries, right?  They probably don’t get many fats and sugars in rural African communities.”

“I guess so.  But what he was saying was, someone can be fat and still really malnourished.”

Denny hoped she wasn’t talking about herself.  She was well-padded and round-cheeked, with arms that looked like rolls of pink dough, and it suited her.  Denny had seen a picture of her from a few years ago, when she’d weighed less, and it had made her look like she was made out of twigs and coathangers.  “Well, we don’t need to worry about that.  We get plenty of vegetables.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalyn.  She sounded genuine, so Denny relaxed.  They joined the queue at the tills.  “Plus all this country air.  That’s got to be good for us.”

Denny thought about Pinder and the others finding him missing and panicking in case he was rampaging around the woods.  Denny thought of himself hiding in the bushes and eating picnickers, and smiled.  The country air wouldn’t have done them much good.

Rosalyn tapped something in the trolley.  “See?  Cooking marshmallows, again.  We’re going to have to build a fire at some point.”

“Let’s start with a candle and work our way up,” said Denny.

*

This week, they didn’t drive home straight after packing the food into the back of the car.  This week, they had a job to do.

Coney Park was little more than a village.  The high street, with the lake at one end and a roundabout at the other, took less than ten minutes for them to walk from end to end.  As far as they could tell, most of the shops, cafes and pubs in town existed in that one little area, and today, Rosalyn intended to go into as many of them as she could, show the picture on her phone to whoever would look at it, and ask them what they thought it was referring to.

She’d been worried that people would tell her to sod off, or shrug their shoulders and say that it was probably somebody’s idea of a joke.  But that wasn’t how it turned out at all.

The elderly man behind the till at the newsagent said, “Well, there were a few cases of people pretending to be drowning as a joke.  Kids, mostly.  Then half the time it would be the person who came to rescue them who ended up drowning instead.  And of course they just got a slap on the wrist for it.  Life’s just not fair.”

“But there was one girl,” said the old lady behind Rosalyn in the queue, “This was years ago…  Some bullies pulled her into the water and threw rocks at her to stop her from getting out.  It was a terrible tragedy.  The bullies were never brought to trial.  They had rich parents, you see, and they made it go away.”

In the dark, cluttered antiques shop next door, the owner said, “Yeah, there was a woman who drowned herself in the lake a few years ago.  Apparently, she’d been having an affair with her boss, and when she told him she was pregnant he gave her the sack and went back to his wife.”  He handed the phone back to Rosalyn.  “But the person you really want to talk to is June Shepherd down at the tourist information centre.  She’s a local historian- she’ll know about this kind of thing.”

A young woman in Oxfam said, a bit uncertainly, “I heard…  It’s a horrible story, really…  There was a woman who left her children in the car while she went to the supermarket, but when she came back, the car was gone, with the children inside.  They found the car a few weeks later, completely burnt out.  But the children were never seen again.  Awful…”

*

(From ‘On the Trail of Kelpie and Silkie’ by Rosalyn Pepper, published 2012)

There were other rumours, too.  A family killed in a storm eighty years ago and rumoured to haunt the banks of the lake.  A woman whose husband suspected her of having an affair and drowned her.  A brutal criminal gang (who chose to operate out of suburban Surrey, for some reason) who’d torture to death anyone who went out on a certain night.  A woman who’d seduce men, then drug and rob them.

And there was nothing on the internet about any of them.

Here’s what I could verify:  Coney Park has existed, as a settlement of one kind or another, since around the 12^th Century.  Historically, its economy was based on fishing and farming, but in the 1950s a number of car and machinery manufacturers set up not far away, and that changed things.  Today, approximately a third of the adults who live in Coney Park commute to London (an hour’s drive, depending on which part of London you mean).  The area is fairly wealthy.  There are five private schools within ten miles- three primary, two secondary.

And that’s it.  I couldn’t find any significant news stories that had taken place in Coney Park.  Nothing about a family killed in a storm, or about two children kidnapped from a supermarket car park, or about school bullies throwing stones and drowning their friend.  If anything sinister had happened in Coney Park over the last eight hundred years, it had gone more-or-less under the radar.

(To Be Continued)