Black Wood Page 2

  When I arrive, she’s already there, which is odd as I’ve arrived twenty minutes early. She’s sitting outside, sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette. She looks like a silent movie actress. A black dress reaches down to just above her knees, topped with a pashmina to keep the autumn chill out. I walk over to the table and am about to sit down when she takes off her sunglasses and looks up at me.

  I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I’m stunned, and I stand there for a moment, my face going red, feeling like an idiot. I don’t know if she notices, but she gestures to the chair and tells me to sit down.

  She hasn’t aged a day. A cliché, I know, but true nonetheless. There is a darkness in her eyes that some would no doubt attribute to the trials of life. But I know better. I know that darkness has always been there. Poor Samantha. Had she been born in New York or LA, she could have been queen of the catwalk and the fashion magazines. Her curse was to have been born in Concord.

  “How’re you doing?” I say.

  “Good, good.”

  “You look great.” I sound like a kid. But then, I feel like a kid. She gives me a look that’s just the right balance between modesty and self-awareness. “You seriously haven’t aged a day. I can’t believe it’s been twenty years.”

  She looks surprised, as though she wasn’t expecting small talk, that we were going to get straight down to brass tacks. Nonetheless, she goes along with it.

  “Has it? I didn’t keep track. I tried to forget about Concord.”

  “Little hard to forget what went on there.”

  She takes another drag on the cigarette and extinguishes it. “Oh, believe me, there are ways and means to forget things.”

  I wonder what ways and means she’d used.

  “So, you’ve never been back?” I ask her.

  “No.”

  “Your parents ...”

  “They’re dead.”

  “I’m sorry. You went back for their funerals?”

  She fixes me with an icy stare. “No.”

  Man, this is one cold bitch. I thought she had changed. She’s still the same ruthless girl from High School.

  I am so turned on right now.

  “So, what are doing with yourself?” I ask.

  “I’m actually between things at the moment. You?” She doesn’t sound like she’s that interested.

  “I’m a writer, remember?”

  “You’re still doing that?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  There’s an awkward pause for a moment, and then she says, “I would ask if it was anything I’d read, but I’m not a big reader.”

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t have, anyway. I don’t write pot boilers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know ... trashy, pulp stuff.”

  “I never did read anything you wrote, you know.”

  “I’ll have to rectify that.”

  “No. You don’t. I was just saying.”

  As we’re talking, I notice that a number of men passing by our table all glance in her direction. It’s not hard to see why. I wonder if they look at me and wonder what she’s doing having lunch with me. This gives me great satisfaction.

  “I also teach,” I say. “English. At a local community college.”

  “I thought those who couldn’t do, teach.”

  “I believe the phrase is ‘Those who can’t teach, teach gym’.”

  She doesn’t answer but her eyes say: That’s the joke. I drop my head and hope I’m not blushing. She looks at me, and her face goes serious. “Look, I have money, but I can’t afford to be paying it to a blackmailer.”

  “You think it’s blackmail?”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say he wanted money, did he?”

  “No. But why else would he call to tell me that he knew about ...” She lowers her voice. “... about it?”

  “What if he was trying to help?”

  “Help how?”

  “To warn us.”

  “Why would he want to warn us?”

  “I dunno ... I thought, maybe ... it might be Charlie.”

  Her face gets even more serious now; in fact, it takes on an almost deathly pallor.

  “Charlie is dead” she says. “Or if he’s not, he’s ... Look, one way or another, Charlie dropped out ... dropped off the planet. He’s not going to be ringing us up twenty years later filling us in on all the gossip in Concord.”

  “Ringing you up.”

  “Ringing me up. Whatever. It’s not Charlie. Besides, don’t you think I would have recognised the voice?”

  “People can disguise voices.”

  She looks at me like I’ve lost it.

  “No,” I say. “No ... I know you’re right. Stupid. So, did he say anything else?”

  “No.”

  “And what did he sound like? I mean, was he young, old?”

  “What am I, a fucking cop? I don’t know.”

  And there’s that tongue.

  “Look,” she says, fixing me with those ancient eyes. “This is serious shit here. What are we going to do?”

  We’re interrupted by a waiter. She orders a steak. I order a salad. When the food arrives, she dives into it like an Olympic swimmer. I remember, when she’s nervous, she eats. I like to watch her eat. Even though she piles the food in, she still eats it sensually. Then again, to me, she does everything sensually. I like the way her lips glide along the fork and scoop the food into her mouth. She moves it around her mouth slowly, chewing, savouring for a moment, then gulping it down and grabbing the next forkful. It’s an intense operation, and she’s extremely focused. She also talks with her mouth full.

  “Well?” she says.

  “I think ... I think, we wait.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What else can we do? Until we know what he wants ... if he wants something, there’s nothing else we can do.”

  She drops the fork and takes a drink of white wine. “I hate waiting.”

  “You hate not being in control,” I say. She gives me a blank look – no emotion – but doesn’t answer.

  “Fine,” she says, finally, almost under her breath. “We wait.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’d known Samantha and Charlie my whole life. Well, when I say that, I mean I grew up with them ... I doubt I ever really knew them. As far as Samantha goes, she wasn’t the type of girl who would have had much to do with somebody like me. And as for Charlie ... I guess you’ll see what I mean about Charlie.

  But, like I said, I grew up with them, so technically, I knew them. The funny thing about Samantha, Charlie and me, we were like some kind of anthropological experiment. There was me in the middle – Mr. Average, the kind of guy nobody notices, who gets good grades, is useless at sports, and basically goes through his whole school life barely causing a ripple. My parents were lower middle-class; we lived in the suburbs, we had a station wagon, we ticked all the boxes. As far as I could tell, my parents were happy with their lives. I think it’s what they always wanted. As for me, I never thought about it much.

  No, that’s a lie; I thought about it.

  The truth is, I always wanted somebody else’s life. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen in the suburbs. My path was laid out for me and I followed it like a roadmap.

  Unlike Sam and Charlie.

  Samantha wasn’t popular because she was a little rich kid – she was lower middle-class, just like me. Well, not quite. My dad was a foreman; her dad worked at the local law firm. There’s a thing called “Just Noticeable Difference”. It’s the smallest discernible difference between two things. If you looked at their salaries, their houses, their cars, there was very little difference. But, in a small town, the just noticeable difference becomes much bigger. It was about the big things certainly – their house was a little bigger than ours, their car a little better – but it was also about the small things, the sometimes almost-imperceptible things. The dinner parties they got invited to, the stat
ion of women who went to lunch with Samantha’s mother. Having said that, we grew up on the same street, and that’s how I knew Samantha. Although we barely said two words to each other until that final year.

  Samantha was what was called “preppy”. The name came from people who went to private preparatory schools in the 50s and 60s, but by the time we were in school, you didn’t have to be ultra-rich to be “preppy”. However, it did mean you came from some kind of money. I wasn’t “preppy”; Samantha and her boyfriend, Dale, were. They wore polo shirts from Lacoste or Ralph Lauren with the collars up, khakis, penny loafers. They shopped at LL Bean, wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. Their clothes and bags or purses always seemed to have a nautical theme going on even though no one was near water.

  But, with Samantha, it wasn’t just money or designer clothes – Samantha was who she was. For a start, she was gorgeous (I was about to say “drop dead”, but I’m a writer, I need to avoid these clichés). I won’t describe her to you; it wouldn’t matter, I couldn’t do her justice. I could tell you the colour of her hair and her eyes, how tall she was, how slim. I could describe her forever, but I still wouldn’t capture her. Think about that person you knew in High School – your first crush – and think of how they looked, or how you remember they looked. That’s how I remember Samantha.

  But it wasn’t just her looks. Yes, all the guys wanted to nail her, but all the girls also wanted to be her friend. And you don’t get that just by being good-looking. She had an aura around her (there I go with the clichés again). But that’s what it was. It drew you in, and when you spoke to her, it was like there was nobody else around. Of course, like I said, I didn’t find that out until the last year. But even before she ever opened her mouth to me, I saw it – everybody did.

  And that’s why Samantha was the most popular girl in High School.

  And that’s why I liked her. It’s the age-old story. Boys are mean to girls because they like them; girls are mean to boys because they like them. They say that girls are attracted to the bad boys ... well, it works both ways. Why did I like her? Because she was mean to me, because she ignored me. That just made her all the more attractive. You’ve all experienced it; that boy or girl you wanted to know more than anyone else in the world but who wouldn’t give you the time of day. It wasn’t about her looks or her body, although I won’t deny that they had a part to play. But there was something else, something I saw that first day in the Black Wood that sucked me in. I can’t explain it but it never let me go.

  Charlie didn’t grow up on my street but – like Samantha – I knew him all my life. But in this case, I wasn’t alone. Everyone knew Charlie – Charlie was the Town Freak. And when I say that, I don’t mean those guys who hung out, smoking, in the toilets. The Freak was a real loner, the kind of guy who – nowadays – people might expect to strap explosives to their chest and go shoot up a school.

  See, the Freaks aren’t like the troublemakers, the dropouts, the ones smoking in the toilets, trying to sneak into the girl’s locker room, or starting fights in the canteen. The dropouts are just the flipside of the jocks. They’re part of the whole circle of High School life – from the Football Jock and the Prom Queen, to the dropouts, or people like me, who get good grades and don’t do anything that anyone ever notices. And the subcultures within these groups: stoners, nerds, Goths, and so on. All of these groups sub-divided within themselves. And why did they do that? Because they obviously hadn’t learned any lessons from the bullying they received from the jocks. They’d been placed into a socially unacceptable bracket by the jocks, and they in turn decided to place each other into socially unacceptable brackets. They decided they must find somebody else to pick on within their circle. So the geeks become “Math Geeks” or “Band Geeks”. All of these people are outsiders, and they wear their position on the periphery as a badge of courage. But nine times out of ten, they’d like to be on the inside just as much as the Jocks and the Prom Queens. They’d never say it – they’d probably never even think it – but the fact still exists: they want to be accepted just like everyone else.

  Of course, I’m looking back through the prism of twenty years. But I doubt much has changed in that time. School is like anything else in life, fashions change but the generalities remain constant. Death and taxes, as they say.

  The difference with the Freaks is that they don’t want to be inside the circle. In fact, it’s not even about whether or not they want to be inside it: they don’t even acknowledge its existence. Most of the outsiders play at being different; the Freaks really are different. There’s something there that’s not quite right. Their heads are not wired like everyone else’s. Everyone else – no matter how much they pretend otherwise – they really care. They care about how they look, they care about how they dress, and most importantly – although they would never admit it – they care about what other people think of them. Especially the ones they pretend to despise. None of that applies to the Freak. The Freak doesn’t give a shit. And that’s what makes the Freak scary. And not ‘good’ scary, as in “wears a leather jacket, drives a little too fast, and might stand you up on a date” scary; but “might pluck out your eyes and fuck the sockets” kind of scary.

  And you don’t get that way living in the suburbs with your nice folks, Dad working in the bank, Mom staying at home to bake cookies. You get that when Dad’s an alcoholic and Mom’s out blowing guys on the street corner just to get enough money for the gas bill. The outsiders liked to pretend that that was their family background. They’d stand there in a haze of Marlboro smoke and false bravado and tell how their parents were dicks and how they didn’t understand them and what a shitty life they had. But the most that ever happened to them was that Dad took a belt or the back of his hand to them a few times. The Freak didn’t stand there bitching and moaning about his family, but you could see it in their eyes. The way they never made eye contact with people, always walking with their head down. And not in some insecure, nervous way; just detached, not part of the world.

  That was Charlie. Charlie came from the wrong side of the tracks, but he didn’t wear it as a badge of honour to get himself into some club. Rumour had it, he came from a broken home, but he didn’t take pride in that. In fact, he never talked about it. That kind of family background was pure gold in certain circles if you wanted to be the outsider. But not to Charlie. And, like I said, he wasn’t a troublemaker, he wasn’t the kind who got into fights. Or, at least, he didn’t go looking for them. But sometimes they came looking for him and he’d do his best to avoid getting his ass kicked.

  The rest of the time, Charlie just skirted the periphery. He rarely spoke in class unless forced to, but he did the work and got pretty good grades. That was another way you could tell he didn’t want to be like the troublemakers, to whom an F was a distinction. Other than that, Charlie just kind of existed, an object of curiosity and ridicule, and the cause of slight apprehension.

  And that, as I said, was the anthropological chart: Mr. Average in the middle, and on opposite ends of the spectrum, Ms. Popular and the Freak. Sounds like the makings of an Eighties teen comedy, or three-fifths of the cast of The Breakfast Club. But what happened between Sam, Charlie and me that summer we graduated High School was no comedy.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I saw the whole thing happen between Charlie and Dale. Of course, I didn’t realise at the time what the repercussions would be, not just for Charlie, Dale, and Sam, but that I’d be dragged into the whole thing as well. All I thought was that it was just another typical day for Charlie, another jock trying to pick a fight with him.

  At the time, I didn’t know what started it. Not that these things ever had to be about anything – the initial spark was usually just an excuse to open a dialogue, which quickly descended from talking to pushing to punching. Whatever the reason, Dale Williams cornered Charlie outside the toilets and said something to him. I was walking up the corridor towards them, but I was too far away to hear what they were saying. The first thin
g I noticed was that Dale was on his own. That was odd. Guys like Dale always travelled in packs, just in case the poor, defenceless mark actually managed to get the upper hand and land a punch. The second thing was how animated Dale looked. It didn’t look like he was just busting balls or making fun of Charlie; it looked like he was really pissed about something. His face was getting redder, his voice louder. Charlie had his head down the whole time. He wasn’t reacting at all to what Dale was saying. At least, until Dale landed the first punch.

  Charlie didn’t seem to expect the punch, which is another thing I found odd. Given his history with Dale and others like him, I was pretty sure that Charlie would know that when someone like Dale was in your face, then something else was going to follow close behind. Why hadn’t he ducked; why hadn’t he pulled back out of the way? I wasn’t as close to Dale as Charlie was and even I could see the punch coming seconds before it landed. Charlie just stood there as if he was going to take it, or as if he didn’t think it would actually land.

  But it did. Caught him right on the jaw. His head spun round and his body jerked like a spasm had gone through it. I thought he was going to hit the ground, but he kept his footing. After he’d steadied himself, he looked around at Dale, and the look on his face was one of incomprehension. I didn’t understand it ... why the hell was he confused?

  Dale moved forward for the second round, but as disorientated as Charlie was, he wasn’t getting caught a second time. He moved to the left and Dale’s punch caught the air. Now it was Charlie’s turn. He lunged for Dale, and in the split-second before he moved, his expression changed. It was as if he understood, as if whatever turmoil was going on in his head suddenly became clear. And when he lunged for Dale, he did it with a speed and a ferocity I’d never seen in Charlie before.

  He caught hold of Dale’s shirt and propelled him backwards so fast, Dale couldn’t even register what was happening. There was a crash as he slammed Dale into one of the lockers with such force, the door buckled against Dale’s weight. Now it was Dale’s turn to be disoriented. He was staring straight ahead at Charlie, but through him, as though he couldn’t see him, as though he was trying to comprehend how things could have changed so quickly. But before he had a chance to, Charlie threw him to the ground.