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A Willerby Story

“So, which will you be?” asked Jim, on our first visit to the Green Man, the evening after the day we moved in. “The type who leave after a year or two, or the type who never leave?”

It wasn’t the sort of question that needed an answer.

We just smiled back.

“There’s two sorts who move into Willerby,” said Jim. “Those that fit, and those that don’t. Visitors and Lifers.”

“Which sort do you think we’ll be?” Rebecca asked, grinning, face and hair dusty, arms chafed from lugging about our boxes and crates.

Jim gave an appraising look. “You can never tell to begin with.”

Later, our two-year-old, Jess, fast asleep on a mattress on the downstairs bedroom floor, and our room alive with the sounds and smells of the night drifting through open windows, Rebecca rolled over to me, “What type do you think we are?”

“I think we’re lifers,” I said. “I definitely hope we are.”

“Me too,” said Rebecca.

…

Willerby was everything we’d hoped for.

It was slow and quiet with a small churchyard full of graves carved with the surnames of our neighbours. An ancient church with even older earthwork barrows scattered around it. A pub on a river – The Green Man - usually sleepy but occasionally lively at the weekend, when it didn’t close until the last local staggered out. A green, with a rusting bandstand, where brass bands played in the summer. Solid and timeless, and so different to the teeming, morphing, ever-changing streets from which we’d spent years mapping our escape.

And we had spent years mapping escape.

Wage slaves to companies in the day, freelance workers in the evenings, gradually increasing private clients and commissions until we were dependent on only ourselves. Weekends driving around the countryside, tea in cafes, picnics in fields, researching schools, doing sums on the back of beermats and cafe menus until one day we found the cottage in Willerby and the pieces all fell into place.

Then the selling up, the good luck cards, the awkward drunken farewell parties, and the last-minute doubts about a lack of supermarkets and cafes, all forgotten the moment the removal van turned the bend in the lane and was gone.

Willerby.

We joined the councils and the groups. We volunteered at the fete. We went to church when there was a service. We didn’t pry, we gossiped just the right amount, and we soon fit in.

…

“That thing in films,” Jim asked one night in the Green Man’s snug years later, after we’d been out in the woods at dusk with our cameras looking for badgers, “when someone says to someone, ‘just do this thing and don’t ask any questions because there isn’t time?’ Would you?”

I thought for a moment, imagined Rebecca calling and telling me to pack up and drive somewhere without explanation as there wasn’t time for one.

“Yeah,” I said, “if I trusted the person asking, then yes, I think I would.”

“Do you trust me?” asked Jim.

“Not a bit.”

“I’m not joking, Sam,” Jim said. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes!” I said. “Now stop being weird.”

“This is that film,” he said, “and this is me telling you. Move away from the village as soon as you can. And if you can’t do that, then don’t let your children play in the shortcuts. Keep them out. And don’t ask me about this, not now, not ever. Just keep them out.”

He finished what was left of his beer, dropped money on the bar and left.

…

Although there was only one paved road and a few dozen houses, Willerby was full of shortcuts; alleys, snickets, passages, ginnels, jittes, lanes and cut-bys. They connected the church and barrow to gardens, gardens to farms, farms to allotments, allotments to fields, and fields to the old Paddox estate and the derelict railway cuttings, copses and ancient woods that bordered the village on three sides.

The shortcuts were the haunts of the village children who knew them so well that they hardly used the road at all, moving around so stealthily it was disconcerting.

Stopping Jess - and then Danny, when he came along - from using them would have been impossible without forbidding them from playing outside at all, which was unquestionable, as it was the main reason we’d moved from the city to begin with.

I told Rebecca what Jim had said. She looked puzzled. “That’s odd,” she said. “I wonder what he meant.”

Jim never mentioned what he’d said to me in the pub again, but occasionally I’d see him looking worried, leaning on his spade in his allotment or in his chair next to the rosebush opposite the bus stop, watching the children romp around, ducking and diving joyfully in and out of the shortcuts.

I wondered what he was thinking.

But I never asked, and he never said.

…

“You can get to the church straight from the Smart’s farm,” Jess said once at breakfast when she was about twelve, “through a ginnel.”

“You can’t,” Rebecca said, bouncing Danny on her hip, putting away the cereal at the same time. “The road is in the way.”

“You can, though,” Jess said. “You to have take the shortcut inside the shortcut, but you can. It’s a safe one. I do it all the time. Everybody does.”

“You mean there’s a ginnel to the road which picks up again the other side of it?” I asked.

“No,” said Jess. “It goes straight there. Through a shortcut.”

“How does it cross the road then?” I asked.

“I don’t know” Jess said. “It just does. Bye! See you at lunch!”

And then in a flurry of sun-browned elbows and scratched knees, she was gone.

…

The shortcuts were cunning; connected in ways that meant the children could get to places far quicker than they really had any right to. You’d see them playing up by the top field, and then, what seemed like only seconds later, you’d hear them playing on the other side of the village by the last house before the bend.

Rebecca and I did talk about it, and about what Jim had said, but only occasionally and only idly, and thought it said more about something going on with him than anything in the real world.

After all, the evidence was that the shortcuts allowed people to move around the village faster than you’d expect because the children really did move around the village faster than you’d expect.

There was, we thought, nothing strange about it - beyond the everyday marvel of dense geography well understood by people who live in small places, especially country children allowed to roam and explore.

One summer afternoon, while Rebecca was working in London and the children at school, I tried the shortcuts myself, but was driven back by the long grass, nettles, scratchy branches and biting insects.

After that I left them to the children.

Sometimes we wouldn’t see them the whole day and it’d be darkening by the time they got back. Sometimes when they got back, they seemed surprised how late it was.

But children lose track of time.

We never really worried.

After all this is why we’d moved out of the city.

…

One spring Jim had a heart attack and died while planting potatoes in his allotment.

“Did you know he’d been married?” said Mauve, at his wake in the pub, a neighbour and the person who’d known Jim the longest. “It’s a sad story.”

“I didn’t!” I said, surprised.

“He’d never talk about it,” Mauve said, “and he didn’t like anyone else talking about it either.

“They had a child, Lucy. She disappeared while Jim was away at sea with the Merchant Navy. They never found a body, but there’s lots of places for a child to get lost around here. It used to happen sometimes when children were allowed to play outside more – tragic but nobody’s fault. Only a couple of months after that, his wife, Rachel, disappeared too. The police said they thought she must have run away to start again, or she killed herself somewhere. She’d been beside herself ever since their girl vanished – didn’t seem to know where she was, became like a child herself really. Jim did what he could, but she was never right after, wandering around, peering in the hedges, asking people she ran into if they’d seen her child. Then one day she was just gone like Lucy was. No note. No body. Nothing.”

“That’s awful,” Rebecca said. “We had no idea. How old was she?”

“Lucy?” said Mauve, “Eleven. Just a little older than Danny is now.”

That night, after we had both cried - for Jim had been a very good friend to us all, especially with Danny’s difficulties – I lay awake thinking about what he had said to me in the pub so long ago: “Don’t let them play in the shortcuts,” he’d said. “Keep them out.”

…

“Could someone get lost in the shortcuts?” I asked Jess, back from university on a reading week.

“Oh yes,” she said straightaway, “You need to know the way. And there’s cuttings and snickets you have to know not to take.”

“How do you learn?” I asked, surprised by how sure she sounded.

“The older children teach the younger ones,” she said, “Then, when they get older, they teach the new younger ones. You teach them safe paths and to stay away from the dangerous paths, especially the shortcuts in the shortcuts.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen if you got lost?”

“You could disappear forever and end up somewhere you can’t find your way back from,” said Jess, “But it doesn’t happen if you are careful and know the rules. I don’t use the shortcuts anymore. As we got older, they gave us all the creeps. The people who’ve got lost there and never got out. And all the people, all the things that could get in if someone forgot to close a gate.”

She shuddered dramatically, “Brrrr!” then kissed me on the cheek, “I’m staying at Nina’s tonight so we can go to the pubs in town. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And in a swish of skirts and long hair, she was gone.

…

I didn’t stop Danny playing in the shortcuts. Jess and generations of other village children had done so. And Jess was fine.

She’d outgrown the shortcuts. So I told myself not to worry, because if she’d turned out fine and outgrown the shortcuts Danny would too, surely?

But he was different.

He played alone.

He was bolder, and more inquisitive. He took more risks.

He stayed out longer than Jess had and as safe as everyone always said Willerby was, I worried.

Until, one day, he stayed out so late it had been dark for nearly two hours and he still wasn’t home. We nearly called the police. He surfaced just before we did.

The next day I phoned Jess to ask her what she thought I should do.

“He knows the safe routes,” she said, loud music and shouting in the background. “I taught him carefully.”

“But what if he takes one of the unsafe routes?” I asked.

There was a long pause on the line.

“Do you think he might?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know. Do you think he might?”

Jess sighed. “Is he there?” she asked. “Put him on the phone.”

Danny grunted at her. “You aren’t mum and dad,” I heard him muttering. “Anyway, I won’t… I know, stop going on about it, I already know,” he said. He hung up and shuffled back to his bedroom.

I followed him with my eyes, hoping he knew how much I loved him, and wishing I was able to show it in a way that didn’t embarrass him or make him respond in ways that hurt my feelings.

Then he went missing again.

We called the police. They sent a team.

It was a terrible night. Blue flashing lights and helicopters overhead, tea we didn’t drink with neighbours, dogs barking in the bushes.

Rebecca and I were wild with worry and harsh words to each other that we didn’t really mean and regretted as soon as we said them. The autumn air filled with the sound of hoarsening voices shouting Danny’s name.

“They won’t find him,” Jess said on the phone. “They need people who know where to look. You won’t just stumble over them. I’ll come back. If Danny is lost, he knows to stay put and not move. He’s been taught that. He’ll know help is on the way.”

“Get here soon,” I said.

“I’m setting off right now,” said Jess. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

…

“It’s been a long time since I took a shortcut,” Jess said early the next morning, in the dawn light outside our house. “But I remember how to do it. You don’t know, so you have to do exactly what I say. Follow me.”

A quarter of a mile past the house, we stopped.

“Here we are then. Come on,” Jess said. She swung her backpack onto her shoulders, lifted a drooping branch, stepped through a gap in the hedge and was gone.

I followed her in.

…

“Take a minute, dad.” Jess said. “Take a good, long minute. Look around but don’t look up yet.”

We were between two hedges that formed a narrow, winding passage big enough for two people to stand next to each other with their arms just touching.

The hedges were tightly packed but it was still somehow dimmer than it should have been an hour after dawn.

“Dad?” said Jess. “Look up, slowly now.”

I did. And gasped.

The hedges were impossibly tall, rising straight up on both sides like the walls of a fortress. They were dotted with white and red blossom. In the almost total quiet, there was rustling.

Hundreds of feet up there was a line of blue sky.

It couldn’t be real – it was too much geography to fold into the hedge we’d come through. Too much geography to fit into Willerby at all.

“Sometimes the weather is different to outside,” said Jess. “Sometimes it’s cold and snowing, and sometimes there’s so much wind it’s hard to walk. On days like that, we don’t go further. I’m glad it isn’t like that today. See, we aren’t really in the same space. We’ve gone somewhere else – an in-between place. Stay close and don’t touch anything. And whatever you do, don’t touch any doors or gates. It’s very easy to get lost in the shortcuts.”

Jess walked in front with me following behind.

The passage twisted, curved and turned. But, as far as we went, and we walked for a long time, the hedge walls remained exactly the same distance apart, as if they’d been cut with a set square.

There were openings on both sides, sometimes so close they were almost touching, sometimes hundreds of feet apart. Some were just gaps in the hedge, too overgrown to see into; others had doors and gates. A white picket; a door thick with iron studs like a dungeon; a simple red door with a grinning cast-iron demon as a knocker. It was sticking its tongue out and its grotesque wink knotted my stomach.

“We’ll reach the Seagate soon,” Jess said. “You can look through that one.”

“We’re here,” she said, ten minutes later.

The gates were made of wrought iron and were twenty feet tall. On each side was a squat stone plinth with carved griffins.

“We like this one,” Jess said. “Everybody does, because you can see through it without opening it – so it’s interesting and beautiful in a scary way, but it is safe.”

“What’s to stop you opening any door and just looking through?” I asked.

“Almost all of them are locked,” Jess said. “You’d have to try lots to find an open one. And if it’s open, well that means somebody – or something, who knows what – wants it open. That’s not a good reason to go in.”

She paused for a moment, then shook her head.

“We all do it though,” she said. “Test the doors. And the thrill of finding an open one - it’s so tempting – you just take one more step.”

“Have you ever…?” I asked.

“No,” Jess said. “Never. We were taught by the big kids not to. We were made to promise. But you can look through this gate. It’s safe.”

…

The Seagate was on top of a cliff that was thousands of feet high.

I leaned forward and looked down between the bars.

Below, as distant as if Jess and I were standing on top of a skyscraper, churned an orange sea that stretched all the way to the horizon, where two purple suns hung in a red sky dotted with green clouds. The sea churned below us, and vast foam-topped waves broke against the cliff with a roar like thunder breaking.

The ocean was limitless with a sense of breadth and depth that dwarfed anything I’ve seen before or since.

“It’s always like this,” Jess said. “It never changes, except sometimes birds fly past, but they aren’t our sort of birds – they’re bigger and they don’t have feathers.”

“Could Danny have fallen?” I asked.

“No,” said Jess, “Not here. The gate is always locked. There’s no way to get in.”

“But one of the other doors? Could he have gone through one?

“Do you think Danny would?” I asked.

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” Jess said. She sighed. “I think he might. I think that’s what he’s done. But it isn’t hopeless. There are rules when you’ve broken rules. One is you leave something of yours outside the door you’ve gone into. Something people who come to look for you would know belongs to you. That’s what we’re looking for. Something by a door that belongs to Danny. When we find that, we’ll know where he went.”

“And he’ll be there?” I asked.

“I hope so. But it’s easy to get lost in the shortcuts. And sometimes unlocked doors lock themselves. But not often. That doesn’t usually happen.”

…

We walked for hours, down the same impossibly high hedge-lined path, past lots of entrances – some so small you’d have to crawl through, some so big they didn’t seem on the same scale as the rest of the world - but none had anything left outside until, at last, Jess called out.

“Oh, thank heavens - I see something!”

Ahead, lying on the ground right in front of a rough-hewn wooden oval door, was a blue cap. My heart leapt.

We drew nearer and it was Danny’s hat - a wide brimmed Toronto Blue Jays cap, bought for two pounds in a Beckworth charity shop when he’d been eight. The hat had been too big and we’d tried to dissuade him, but he wanted it nonetheless and he’d grown into it.

“That’s where he went then,” said Jess. “In there.”

The door wasn’t remarkable compared to others we’d been past. It was wooden and painted green.

The only unusual thing was its shape – a perfect oval.

Jess tried it. For an awful moment it didn’t move and, thinking about what she had said about doors that locked themselves, my knees went weak. But it was merely stuck. Jess put her shoulder to it, and with a jolt, it opened inwards.

I rushed forward, but Jess stepped ahead of me.

“No, dad,” she said. “You can’t go in there. I have to do it.”

“I want to go in too,” I said.

“I know. But you can’t. There are other rules I haven’t time to teach you. If you go in, we’ll all be in terrible danger.”

“But what if you get lost?” I asked.

Jess looked troubled. “I’ll try really hard not to,” she said.

I do not know how long I waited. It wasn’t minutes, but it wasn’t hours and hours.

I wondered how long I should wait, and what I should do if I got a point where I felt I’d waited too long. But all my thoughts were abstract. Unreal.

All I was certain about was that I could wait a long time.

Then the door opened. Jess stepped out.

And Danny stepped out after her.

“Dad!” Danny said, half-crying. “I went in. I know I shouldn’t have. And then the door was locked and I couldn’t get back. I waited for such a long time. I didn’t move. I didn’t go into the forest – there were things in it. I could hear them. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again. I won’t go in the short cuts ever again.”

We were crying and hugging, in a way we had never done before, until we remembered where we were and the people waiting for us.

…

Later that evening, after Danny was in bed, and the police had gone, the village finally quiet, Jess came to find me just before we all turned in.

“Danny had these,” she said, and slipped two pieces of paper into my hand; a child’s library card and an old, paper driving license. “He says they were outside that green door. That’s why he thought it would be OK to go in.”

…

We weren’t lifers after all.

As Jim had advised us years before, we sold the house and bought one back in the same city we’d left.

It was better for Danny, for all sorts of reasons.

Just before we left, I visited Jim’s grave in the churchyard by the barrows.

I told his headstone what I knew, and I buried the library card and driving license a few inches into his grave.

I wish I could have given them to him before he died.

It might have been no better for him, but it couldn’t have been worse.