Black Wood Read online

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, if you know that, why are you asking me what I’m doing here?”

  “Because I’m confused. You’re Ms. Popular and I’m the Freak and never the twain shall meet. But ...”

  “Yeah, but ...”

  “But there is something. I don’t know what it is, but I know there’s a reason why we’re doing this. I just thought, for you, maybe ... I don’t know ... Girls kinda like the danger thing.”

  “You obviously haven’t had many girlfriends then. We don’t go around looking to get punched in the face.”

  His head dropped. “I’m sorry I did that to you.”

  Samantha shrugged. “Well, if that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “But, seriously, where’s the future for us, Sam? I’m some guy’s gonna be working in a warehouse, and you’re gonna be a lawyer. Why would we kid ourselves here?”

  “I told you that’s not what I wanted to be.”

  “Maybe ‘want’ doesn’t come into it.”

  “Does for me. I’m getting out of here.”

  There was a determination in her voice when she said it that left me in no doubt she would.

  “Where would you go?” Charlie said.

  “I don’t know ... don’t care really, as long as it’s out of here. New York ... California. Maybe even Europe. I could see myself sitting in a Parisian café, smoking a cigarette and drinking an espresso.” She gestured theatrically as she said it.

  “I could see that too.”

  “I don’t care, y’know? I just want to see what’s outside of here. See the world outside of this fucking dump. I feel like I’m in a bubble. It’s like that movie where the guy lives in this small town and he thinks that that’s all there is, that there’s no world outside of it. And everybody around him, all his friends and family, they all just want him to believe that. That’s what it’s like, y’know? My parents try to pretend that this life is so great. ‘We grew up here, we married here, we raised a family here, why can’t you? Life is better in a small town. Why would you want to go to a big city with all that crime and noise and pollution?’ Because I want crime, noise and pollution. I want my senses to be battered, not numbed into submission by this fucking town. You understand, right? Don’t you ever want to get out?”

  “Of course. But I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my grandfather. Who’d look after him?”

  “Don’t they have old folk’s homes?”

  “Yeah, for the rich. You know how much those things cost? I’m all he’s got. Like when I was a kid, he was all I had. I’m not going to leave him there.”

  She put her hand to his lips, as if she’d heard enough talk of problems. That wasn’t why she was there.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  And he did.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The first time I spoke to Samantha face to face was in my own backyard. This wouldn’t have happened under normal circumstances. As I said previously, my father was not in the same league as Mr. Pierce. But a strange thing had happened. My father’s company had developed a particular type of drill. Indeed, my father had been instrumental in the design and was the foreman on the project. One of Mr. Pierce’s clients was interested in buying a large consignment. Mr. Pierce was to get a large commission from the sale, so he was suddenly very interested in my father’s product. He’d gone to the plant and met various managers who pointed him in my father’s direction. They met a few times and eventually my father invited him around for dinner.

  I think my father knew he wasn’t in Harry Pierce’s league but perhaps thought that this might be the moment where he got called off the bench, so to speak. Any fool could have told him that wasn’t going to happen. They’d both moved into the neighbourhood at around the same time, but while my father had stayed in his position at work, Mr. Pierce had moved up through the ranks, and it wouldn’t be long before he moved his family to more affluent surroundings. But only someone outside the situation could see that. When you’re that immersed in it, you believe anything can happen. And that’s what my poor deluded father believed.

  He also told Harry Pierce that his son would be there, so that led me to believe that not only did he think he was about to move into the upper echelons of society, he also had some crazy notion that Samantha Pierce might be interested in me. My parents told them that they should bring their daughter along.

  When I found out about the dinner, I was in a state somewhere between ecstasy and terror. Samantha Pierce was going to be sitting at my dining-room table. What would I say to her? Would I be able to speak? I planned the whole thing out in advance: what I was going to wear, what I was going to say. I put my budding writing skills to good use by writing out some subjects we might talk about, some lines I could use to sound erudite and sophisticated. But when the night actually came, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to open my mouth, I was so nervous.

  When the doorbell rang, my father, my mother and I lined up in front of the door as the Pierces entered, shaking hands and exchanging air kisses. Mr. Pierce burst in the door and shook my father’s hand with the assuredness of someone who knows they have the upper-hand. He made some lame joke and my parents laughed nervously and insincerely. He had the kind of booming authoritarian voice that made my father’s voice sound like a whisper. Nowhere near as gregarious as her husband, Mrs. Pierce stood quietly beside him, but there was something about her too; a certain confidence or smugness, as her eyes darted around the room – the only thing on her that moved – taking in and processing everything in a matter of seconds.

  There was an awkward silence for a moment. I had my head down and didn’t want to look up in case I lost control. I heard Mrs. Pierce say, “And this is our daughter, Samantha,” and I couldn’t keep my head down any longer. She was standing there with an expression of either disdain or boredom, I couldn’t tell which. She was wearing a cream dress that came to just below her knees, with a black cardigan around her shoulders. I caught sight of the tiniest sliver of cleavage above the top of the dress, and I thought back to that day in the Black Wood. She caught me looking at her breasts and I snapped my head back down to the floor again.

  My father ushered them into the living-room and started pouring drinks. My mother turned to me and said, “Why don’t you take Samantha out to the backyard? It’s a lovely evening.” My heart almost exploded in my chest. I shook my head as discreetly as I could and whispered under my breath that I didn’t want to, but my mother ignored me and nudged Samantha in my direction. She looked as appalled by the idea as I was, although for markedly different reasons, I was sure.

  “This way,” I managed to croak, and she followed me. I motioned to a bench, but she leaned against the back door. I stood awkwardly beside her.

  “Smaller than ours,” she said. I didn’t know the answer to that.

  “How’s school?” I asked her. She threw me a glance that said, I wouldn’t speak to you there, what makes you think I’m going to speak to you here? But she didn’t say that; what she actually said was, “Got any smokes?”

  “No,” I said, a little too loudly. “It’s my parent’s house.”

  She sat down on the bench. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “Lighten up. You’re such a goody-two-shoes, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said, but I shrugged when I said it, and she seemed to nod to herself. We sat there in silence. There were so many things I wanted to ask her. What was she doing with Charlie? What was he like? Had she found out his secrets? Did she find out why he punched her? But, of course, I knew going in that I would never have the guts to ask her any of those things. Just talking to her was as brave as I was going to get.

  She crossed her legs, and the dress rode up an inch or two. There was a graze about the size of my thumb on her knee that had recently scabbed over.

  “What happened to your knee?” I said.

  “Carpet burns.” I felt my face go red.
And then, in case I didn’t get the message, she leaned in closer and said quietly, “You know ... from fucking.”

  Oh, I know all about it, I wanted to say. You think you’re so smart, but I know one of your secrets.

  “You got a girlfriend?” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “What ... you don’t know?” She was smirking.

  “No, I know ... I just ...” I didn’t know what. I didn’t know why I’d said that. Stupid. I thought she might let it go, but she said, “You just what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You got a girlfriend or not?”

  “We broke up.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Why do have to be like that?” I said, suddenly, in a fit of bravery. Or lunacy. She didn’t answer me. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” I muttered, under my breath. She looked at me like I was some kind of lunatic.

  “Lucky?” she said. “Why? Because I’m popular. And pretty.”

  “Yeah. And humble.” I don’t know where I found the balls.

  “That’s not what I think. It’s what other people think. Anyway, it’s true, isn’t it? The popular part? That’s why I’m sooo lucky.”

  “Yeah. That is why you’re so lucky.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “How is there any other way to see it?”

  “You try living my life and you’ll see it.”

  There was silence again for a moment.

  “So, who do you like?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Girls ... what girls do you like?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “Go on. I’m curious.”

  “No, you’re just gonna make fun of me.”

  “I promise, I won’t. Who do you like?”

  I could hardly tell her it was her, so I gave her a name, some girl who wasn’t completely out of my league.

  “God, she’s such a nerd.”

  “See? Told you you’d make fun of me.”

  “I’m not making fun of you ... I’m making fun of her. Why don’t you ask her out? Oh wait, I forgot, you’ve got a girlfriend. You still haven’t told me her name.”

  My pause was way too long. “Amy ...” I started, but I was only halfway through my fake girlfriend’s name when I heard my Mother call us for dinner. Samantha got up from the bench and went back inside. We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the dinner. I sat beside her at the dinner table, but she didn’t even look at me. Throughout the dinner the adults were engrossed in conversation and didn’t notice that we were sitting there in silence. But I didn’t care. I didn’t show it outwardly, but inside, I was beaming. I’d sat inches away from Samantha Pierce on the same bench – and we’d had our first real conversation. That was all I needed.

  It was a start.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  And I’m back in Concord again. The place of my rotten childhood. The place of my adolescent stumblings and failures. It doesn’t hold very many good memories for me. Apart from that summer with Charlie and Sam.

  You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe. But – technically – he did, so he didn’t really know what he was talking about. Still. Nice title. And I know what he meant.

  That’s how I feel driving around Concord. Everything is similar, yet completely different. Things haven’t changed much – a new store here, an old store gone there. The town is laid out just the same, the same symmetrical blocks leading from the town square. I see familiar sights, but they don’t affect me. I feel neither happy nor sad to see them. That’s the difference, I think. I’m no longer seeing this town through an eighteen-year-old’s eyes. That’s why you can’t go home again. You can go back to your hometown, but it’s not home any longer. It looks the same, but it doesn’t look the same, because you’re looking at it with different eyes.

  At the end of that summer, I left for college. That had been the plan all along. I might have entertained other notions during the summer about what might happen if I stayed in Concord and didn’t go to college. But, by the time that summer ended – and after what happened between Sam, Charlie and I – I was disabused of any such notions. In the fall, I went to college.

  I went to the University of Massachusetts to study English literature and got a First Class Honours degree. I could have gone on to do my Masters, my Doctorate even, and probably have aced those as well, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to focus on my writing. I had to focus on my writing. There was so much stuff I wanted to write. So many books in me. And I knew there was only one place I could do it: New York. I was a small-town boy, but my dreams were always of New York. For me, New York was Mecca – from Whitman to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Philip Roth and beyond. If I was going to be a writer, it would have to be in New York. After I graduated, I moved to New York and began to teach.

  Life there wasn’t easy at first. It was all menial labour for the first couple of years: working in diners and bars. Eventually, I got a job as a copywriter at a small publishing company that published educational textbooks. It was an important job because it paid well, which meant I could start to live the lifestyle I needed to live to write. Up until that point, I was working long hours and awkward shifts. There was never time to write, or if there was, I was too tired. I was living in an apartment in Alphabet City with an Albanian chef with questionable hygiene, and a woman I was convinced was a prostitute. It was awful, but I couldn’t afford any better until I got the copywriting job. Then, I was able to move out and into more comfortable surroundings. The job was nine to five; it gave me my evenings and nights to write. Sometimes, I’d even get up in the mornings and write before I went to work. I was consumed by it.

  My lack of funds was a good excuse not to have to go home to visit. I stayed in touch by phone. But I never went back until my father died. That was eight years after I left. It was a total shock. He had a massive heart attack. It was genetic. Happened to his father and his father before him. He was only fifty-six. I came home to help my mother with the arrangements. It soon became clear that she wasn’t going to be able to cope on her own. She had no income; she didn’t drive; she relied on my father for everything. Her sister asked her to come live with her in Idaho, so we decided to sell the house and she could live comfortably off the money. She’s still in Idaho. I call every week and visit occasionally.

  That’s another reason, I suppose, why the town doesn’t affect me anymore. Home really isn’t here anymore. The house is gone. Someone else bought it, renovated it. It looks completely different now.

  I park the car behind the local Costco and take a walk down Main St. I move quickly with my head down so as not to attract attention. It lasts for all of five minutes.

  “Yoo-hoo. Hello? Yoo-hoo.”

  There’s an old bat at the other side of the road waving at me. I do my best to ignore her, but she starts making her way across the street. I speed up but she’s surprisingly sprightly. I decide I better stop before she alerts the whole street.

  “Yes, hello,” I say. I vaguely remember her.

  “I thought it was you. My God, I haven’t seen you in years. How long has it been?”

  “I don’t know ... ten, I think. My father’s funeral.”

  “Of course. A tragedy. And now you’re back.”

  “No, not back, just paying a visit.”

  “Really? Any other relatives still in town?”

  “No, no relatives.”

  “And you had no brothers and sisters?”

  Nosy cow. “No,” I say, wondering how to get away from her.

  “There’s someone else in the house now, of course. They’ve been there a few years. Lovely couple. No children, though. Very sad.”

  As she’s talking, I’m looking left and right to see if she’s attracting attention to me. Luckily, it’s early afternoon, there’s not many on the street. Most people are still in work.

  “So, what are you doing with yourself these days?” she says.

  “I
’m a writer.”

  “No, really? Have you written anything I would have read?”

  “Probably not. I write literary fiction.”

  “Oh. I like romances.”

  I figure if I have to endure the old bat’s cross-examination, I may as well make it useful.

  “So,” I say. “What’s been happening in the old town of late? Anything exciting?”

  “Oh no, same as always. Nothing much happens around here. Of course, that’s the way we like it.”

  “Yes, well, I really must go. I’m running late. It was nice seeing you again.”

  I take off down the street before she has a chance to interrogate me further. I’m afraid of getting caught by anyone else so I turn down a side street. I’m walking so fast that, before I realise, I’ve moved away from the town centre and I’m heading in the direction of the Black Wood. Then, I see it up ahead.

  The Concord Mall.

  I’m taken aback by the size of it. It’s bigger than I expected, covering nearly the whole area of what was the Black Wood. It’s exactly what the powers-that-be felt the town’s flagging economy needed. After all, we already had a mall – or, at least, what we locals referred to as a mall. In reality, it was something that the people in the big cities would have laughed their asses off at. They would have called it a corner store. No, what was needed was one of those behemoths, those monstrosities that have everything you would ever need. The kind of place where – if you needed to – you could spend the rest of your life there and have everything you could want, and never have to go outside into the world again. The kind of place that when the zombie apocalypse happened, all you needed to do was lock the doors and know that you were safe forever.

  Despite the fact that the Black Wood is gone, I know our spot. The same spot where I observed Sam and Charlie on numerous days and nights. I stand in front of the door and look up at the sign. And where would the body be?

  Body in aisle four. Body in aisle four. (I like that. I must write that down.)

  I walk inside, take a stroll around. It looks like every other Mall ever built. I try to picture where the spot would be. It’s hard to do in the artificial light and overall blandness of the whole place, but I eventually narrow it down to the cereal aisle or the frozen food aisle of the Safeway supermarket. I stand there with my eyes closed, imagining a body lying underneath the white-tiled floor. When I open them again, there’s a small child and his mother staring at me. I make for the exit as quickly as I can and head back to my car.