Chapter One PRELUDE TO A DEVIL’S GARDEN
That place was to become known as the Devil’s Garden. The place that spawned death, of a dream, of a life, and you could as well as see spirit’s dancing on the tiptoes of their hooves, hand in hand with witches as they cast their morbid spell. The callused grass their carpet, the impenetrable darkness, their walls. Light was the moon on a moonscape land and here was the hill that they walked hand in hand. To their death, for one. And the man of the hill watched on. I can see it clearly now, but at the time, it was a place of purest paradise…
October 31st, 1968. All Hallows Eve.
As I drove with Tony Hicks down that lonely country road my eyes looked out the window, a mirror in the darkness, the road below already frosted with the cold breath of Jack. The facsimile trees can make you feel trapped in this town, on this stretch of road, like there’s no way out and no world either side of you. Tony grazes my hand at the gear shift, doesn’t bother to say sorry. I just keep looking at my eyes in the darkness, black, with no life behind them. I open my lips and let out my raspy twang, my voice dulling for the small-town hours, when night’s blanket turns everything hazy, ‘These trees take you to the hills’, I say, ‘Imagine being lost out there’, I say, looking to my red nails, ‘Could you ever be found?...’ and my voice trails to a whisper. The radio hits static and Tony carelessly fidgets for the knobs,
‘Bleedin’ car’, he mumbles to himself, his voice harsh like mine, eventually dropping the dial onto Radio 2 as Elvis’ new Devil in Disguise rasps into Tony’s small yellow Bug. We were on our way to the Saints and Sinners ball at Babylon and it all seemed like a sign. I light a cigarette, smiling, Tony’s silk black glove tightly around the steering wheel. He steals a glance at me, his eyes flirtatiously uninterested, before they rest back to where they should be. ‘Alright baby?’, he asks, his sights on Echo projected to glass in the rear-view mirror. Her hair black to my blonde, eyes big to my small. With her mawkishly nice sensibilities she had insisted I sit in the front. Me and Echo never had much in common…
As we pull from the trees, minutes into Alabaster’s heart, Babylon looms. The heating chokes up to full and outside looks as uninviting in temperature as it does in the sting of danger that constantly walks hand in hand with the night. These were the streets I grew up on; gravelly, gritty streets where the Panasonic’s spinning tales of an English nirvana wouldn’t roam.
The car shudders to a stop as it dies, and my ears latch on to the habitual whimper of the engine. You’d always know when Tony was around. He’d had that bug for as long as I knew him, drove it up all the way from London. I watch him pop the latch on the front seat to procure Echo from the back, the way she smiles when his hand grips onto hers. I turn around to Babylon, strangers circling around me, spilling from inside or thronging inwards. A man with the bluest of eyes, set cheekbones and a mop of hair over coarse skin watches me from the doorway, turning around when I catch his glare. ‘Hey January?’, Tony calls from behind me and a Daimlers headlights flash into my eyes as I turn. ‘I can’t give you a lift home, can you get a taxi?’
‘How come?’, I ask accusingly and Echo’s face meets with compunction.
‘I’m going to spend the night Echo’s… Other side of town’, he shrugs unenthusiastically.
‘Yeah, yeah’, I chant, resigned, turning brashly around and slipping on my heel. And the earth turns cold below me, dampness seeping into my tights.
‘Watch yourself girl!’. An arm slips under my shoulder, it’s companion against my waist, hot breath on my neck, ‘State of you like’, Tony chuckles and I slap him indignantly on the arm, slipping back into my heel.
Tony had picked me up outside my house at 17 Brook Well Terrace as I’d clopped down the steps in my brand-new red soled, white laced Oxfords, my brash lips as crimson as my dress. Tony had held out his hand to me from a black silk shirt, Echo hidden in the car, below the heavy dip that rested between my door and the street. ‘You look good’, he had shrugged, his eyes pinned to the Rosemary bush before darting daringly to my eyes. He had that cigarette in his mouth again, but curiously when I caught sight of him without him knowing it, it was never there. ‘Sinner today are we?... shouldn’t take too much effort’, I teased, taking his offered hand as he had pulled me down the steps. It slips inside mine now before harshly dropping it. A split-second affair.
‘Okay?’, he asks, suddenly serious as I nod before he smiles and slaps me comradely on the back. ‘Best get inside then.’, he says popping the collar up on his black coat, reaching blindly for Echo’s hand. Babylon hangs over us, blushing cherry coloured light before dropping back to white, dancing between heaven and hell.
And if you lift your eyes you see the hills, looming like the hunched bodies of monsters against the dark sky. In Alabaster, the city in the North of England in which we lived, you couldn’t help but see the Kookaburra hills. On the horizon. Forever the hills. Looking up to them now, a breeze lifts in my hair like a ghost breaking through; like the time my handbag had pulled in my hands down in the tunnels of Mary Shelley’s Close; like in those moments when something sinister tugs at your body. Tony’s hand hits my back. And Babylon looms.
Inside the heat from too many sweaty bodies and hot breaths hits you like a knife. Thick cigarette smoke lingers by the mist let loose from the from the incongruitous fog machine. If you weren’t careful your mind just might dive, to those bouts of childhood fancy, where you jittered upon the land of the monster from the blue lagoon.
Taking position at the side of the dancefloor Echo runs her tongue into her sticky lip gloss, the sweetly zesty smell of her perfume clinging daintily to her neck. And Tony bites absentmindedly at his lips as the music spumes with pop charts fresh from Radio Carolina. I lost myself in Tony’s dark brown eyes sometimes. But it was always tinged with some drop of a forbidden pleasure. Last year Tony’s dad married my mum, forcing upon me a stepbrother of sorts. We weren’t connected by blood… but the ties still bound us. Still, it wasn’t hard to sink into his protective charm. Tony was the hard man of Brook Well, the suburb of the streets upon which we lived. He was tough on authority and smooth on words making him every parent’s nightmare. But that only made him Prince Charming to us. He was one guy I’d like to have on my hands when this whole world turns to dust.
The only problem, or the principal problem, was that he had a girlfriend. Echo Smith, a soft-spoken girl from Manchester who might as well have been Tony’s opposite. No-one really knew why they were together. All the same, as God can be cruel, they were.
I watch from the side as Tony grabs her, pulling her on front of him, the marble pushing against his back, riding under the leather and leaking beer into his skin. Echo falls onto his lips.
I kick out at the bar with the back of my heel, leaving strange rubber kisses against the chrome, my skirt riding with the bend of my knee and I roll my eyes, ‘Catch you later then.’, I interrupt smoothly.
‘Oh. Dad wants you at Warble Street for family dinner tomorrow’, Tony calls behind me sardonically, breaking away from Echo as the words stop me in my tracks. I shut my eyes and sigh, revulsion hanging thick.
‘Yip’, I dismiss sarcastically, waving my hand behind me into the dancefloor, among angels and demons.
I meet Tammy Hayes at the bar as she’s mid-way through ordering a Strawberry Daiquiri, asking for a straw so she can twist it between her dainty lips while the bartender hangs on her every word. Tammy was my friend from work and spending time with her was bad for the complexion. She ran in the leagues of someone like Ursula Andres and where she went men were soon to follow. ‘Hiya, Janny’, she slurs, but that’s just her voice, in a manner not at all unsexy, towering over me in flats. She was wearing a white silk waistcoat with nothing underneath and a pair of black fishnet stockings under a black skirt risen slightly too high, playing both sides. ‘Not bad huh?’, she notions to the ball, her manner like the fizzy liquid that rides against the glass in her hands- as bubbly as intoxicating. ‘Not bad Tam, ‘ere, I hope you’re not too drunk, you’re my ride’
‘Am I now?’, she raises her eyebrows. ‘How come, Tony ditch ya?’, she sniggers and I shrug. ‘This is my first one’, she subdues, ‘I’ve been on the coke. Scouts honour’, she holds up her fingers and smiles, shoving me on the shoulder. ‘And Tony’s looking especially lascivious tonight, might I say’, she goes on.
‘Shove off, he’s my step- brother in case you’ve forgotten’
‘Yeah, nothing to do with me though, eh? That’s your bad luck’, she chuckles. ‘I’d have my mum for that one. Denying you the hottest bloke on the estate. And how could I forget ‘im, you keep bringing him with you wherever you go… or he follows, one of the two.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘He wasn’t half looking at you funny though.’
‘Yeah. Like bugger off, I’m here with my girlfriend’, I deride, sipping my drink. Tammy chuckles, ‘Won’t be the case long though. I hear she doesn’t put out’ I turn to Echo with her hand in Tony’s russet hair as Tammy takes the opportunity to steal the cherry from my drink.
‘…Ah. Echo’s alright.’
‘Hmm’, Tammy eyes him devilishly, gainsaying the halo upon her head.
‘Just you leave him alone’, I warn loosely as she makes about playing with a cherry stalk on her tongue.
‘Alright’, she grins, the devilish smile there once more on her lips.
I look once more to Tony and Echo, my heart tensing in that oh-so brutal way. I was to marry Alex Bundy that summer. He was an alright guy but you lost a lot of life in the pauses between his words. ‘Do you fancy seeing Night of the Living Dead at the cinema tonight?’ he had asked me that evening, when the sun had already set on an Alabaster night. And my teeth bite lightly around my bottom lip at the memory now. What I answered might have changed my life; ‘Nah your all right. In fact, Alex, I think you deserve someone better.’, I had said, almost in a dream, taking off my ring and putting it lightly down on the kitchen table, the little diamond trembling against mahogany. We wanted mystery. We wanted self-control, and to that effect the likes of Alex Bundy didn’t hit the radar. I picked up my leather jacket and walked out the door. For sure something was in the air this day- a change- and little did I know dropping Alex was just the start.
A little while later I sway a little where I’m standing, I was scared of crocodiles and the floor wasn’t doing much to deter my mind from picturing the swampy Everglades, and crocodiles poking their teeth from the mist. ‘I’m going to go outside for air’, I panic slightly, my dress suddenly inexplicably tight, shouting into Tammy’s ear. ‘Yeah, alright then girl’, she says, spinning around to the handsome bloke at the bar and doing her thing of forgetting I was ever there. On the way out I pass the man with blue eyes who I had caught watching me from before, at the doorway to Babylon, as he shuffles like shackled in chains. I barge past him as his eyes find me once again.
When I get outside I lean against the wintry bricks of Babylon, a cool vibration sinking into my body, though probably just from the ghost of a beat. I rub my heel into the ground, focusing on the crimson shine of my Oxfords as the fugue in my head dissipates. You could see your own reflection in the puddles that night. You didn’t have to try very hard. I blink at my green eyes, warping in the welcoming breeze, the silk of my brash lipstick and the mess of my curled- turned-tangled hair. I slip to a slouch against Babylon’s wall; the brick that’s eaten a centuries dirt but withered with years of the rain’s deadly kiss. I run my hand into the bumps and feel the same sensation below my fingers that I had felt as a child. The bells chime on the Alabaster clock tower as I smile to my sleeping city. I look down, a penny glinting on the pavement as I bend to pick it up, twirling it in my fingers.
Then it happens. I look up and he’s staring in my face. ‘Do you believe in luck then?’ His voice is dispassionate but with a Glaswegian tongue hidden underneath- adjoined to the beast when the heart for a brawl. I blink to two deep eyes; the stars in the sky lost to our light, craving the darkness that lustres there. I swallow to the man before me, I haven’t seen him before but if fate were on my side I’d be seeing him again.
‘Do you?’, I say. And as he stands looking down, he leans beside me against Babylon’s wall, opening his downturned lips,
‘As surely as there’s a God resting in the sky’, he says and it rests uneasy, among soapy eyes and a pungent tongue with bitters. I look down at the pavement, flashing my eyes back up suddenly as a thought strikes my mind,
‘Do you have the time?’, I ask.
‘Yes. Do you have a watch?’, he answers, flatly, pausing for a moment before smiling, and when he does his cheeks bunch up, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘Well uh-.’, I stammer.
‘Had a good night?’, he asks, eying my dress and my reddened skin, sweat clinging to the bitterness of the night, turning sour.
‘It was alright, just the same as every Sunday, really’, I bunch up my nose as he pulls out a cigarette, offering one to me. I shake my head, ‘You?’
‘Just enjoying my last night of freedom.’ I squint my eyebrows, his face sharp beside coal black hair in a quiff. He had on a suit, smart but with a casual edge and brogues scuffed to buggery. He must have been about twenty-six, though there was an oldness about him beyond his years… It must have been the way he leaned. ‘I start work tomorrow’, he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘’Fraid so… you go out on Sundays?’, he asks, and in the way that his voice rises slightly at the end of such a question it’s hard to tell wither he’s disapproving such a thing. Though, the slight smile that appears on his lips afterwards would suggest otherwise.
‘Well, yeah’, I reply, meekly. ‘I know it’s the Holy day and everything but… this is BlackRock street.’
He narrows his eyebrows, coming ever so slightly closer, dropping his voice ‘…You’ve got the Devil in you’, he grins.
‘What?’, I whisper, taken aback. And then my heart steadies as he sweeps a finger in the air across my outfit and I realise what he means. ‘Ah…Saint and Sinners ball.’, I clarify.
‘Good choice...I don’t suit white myself.’
‘So, you have a name?’, I venture.
‘Mack…Scotsman in England.’, he declares for clarification, ‘Everyone calls me that’
‘January’, I say, holding out my hand which he shakes, his bony fingers on my delicate hand.
‘Ah, January has two faces’, he muses whimsically, ‘…Janus is the end and the beginning.’
‘Right.’, I say uncertainly, pushing crinkles into my left eye. ‘The end of what?’
‘Everything.’, he says, his voice soft yet harsh, stepping forwards, whispering, ‘…but it can be the start of something too.’ I smile and a flutter appears in my heart, his eyes intoxicating, the night becoming slow; obsolete; inferior, but he ruins it all, ‘Well January’, he nods his head in goodbye. ‘I’ll be seeing you then.’, he says stepping back. ‘Perhaps…’
‘Wait…’, I bid as a pair of hands appears harshly on my shoulders and Tammy bundles into my eyeline, bouncing excitedly, a man on her arms. ‘January!’, she giggles drunkenly. ‘What are you doing out here?’, she says and I knew, but as I looked to Mack he disappeared to shadows, his tall frame vanishing into the slope of the street, never turning back. I suddenly felt very alone… On Halloween all sorts of madness abounds.
‘What are you looking at?’, Tammy whims, looking down the archway that takes you to Winterbottom Hollow, nothing there but what the earth might have come from on its very first night of creation. ‘Isn’t half creepy down there.’, Tammy goes on, staring into the abyss of darkness before us. Not even the streetlamps shone there.
‘Don’t stare too long.’, I warn huskily, ‘…anyway, I’m aren’t doing nothing, just getting some air.’
‘Good place for murder.’, the man beside Tammy says obliquely, kissing her lightly on the cheek, more heavily on the neck. I’d have interjected but Tammy’s hand was in his jacket and picking up strangers was her thing.
‘One of these days Tam…’, I whisper but she hears me.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’, I shake my head, turning to the street, a bunch of skeletons drinking lager by the bins. The light spills red from Babylon, the music a slurred echo, I shiver at the wind’s deadly caress.
‘We’re going home.’, Tammy suddenly informs me, but something told me the reflexion didn’t count to me.
‘We?, I ask.
‘This is Ted. He’s American. We’re going to go.’, she clarifies feebly, raising her eyebrows in greedy satisfaction, and I suddenly realise ‘Ted’ is the man with blue eyes I’d been catching the eye of all night. Didn’t seem to notice me now though.
‘I’ll see you at work then’, I say ‘…I’ll just get a taxi’ and the man lifts an absent minded, unmoving hand at me to signal humbly goodbye, his hands on Tammy’s shoulders as he led her slowly away. He seemed charming enough.
‘You’re a pal, Jan’, her voice calls without a body from the crowd.
Yeah, that’s me, I mutter sardonically, kicking once more at a puddle. But then a strange feeling sweeps over me and a face to go with it. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a while and hadn’t realised I’d missed.
The moon hung high in the sky, and the clouds they didn’t sweep it. And everything might have been perfect. But as a rat lay dying in the sewer, among the sparkly echoes of moonlight shadow that rested in the puddles around, a lonely magpie screamed over blood.