Crankwood Chapter 1

The man they found hanging from a willow tree that in turn overlooked the river. It seemed a secret place of green and tall grass. To judge by the man’s blackened and bloated face, no one had been around for a while.
A little way downstream they found the remains of a fire, cold, old and wet.
Maybe, they thought, he had built a fire whilst he contemplated carefully whatever it was he had to consider. Fatalistic thoughts burning away with the flames.

No one came to claim the body. He was eventually identified as one of the old walkers. These were the tramps that at times infested the area. Bearded and dirty, apparent down and outs. People who had opted out of the system they were at odds with and spent their time walking the lanes, sleeping rough.
Of course there were apocryphal stories about these beggars. Most where stinking rich. Each had a vast fortune hidden away brought back from or stolen from who knows where. Mythical treasure and always gold. In these frugal times gold was the only thing to keep its value and these dregs of humanity did not trust banks, investments or moneylenders. Many a local had wished for half the fortune they said.
Yet these were the times when our leaders, who had no apparent concept of what life was really like, told us we had never had it so good. This was our Golden Age.

In the case of this particular unfortunate, the local constabulary had at one point, and for a brief time considered foul play. But as this was a golden age, and a time when everyone from the smallest toddler to the oldest still ambulant could walk the highways with nary a thought for personal safety, the idea was soon dismissed as a passing fancy of youth.
This was well before the horrific child murders in the place not too far north of here.

A suicide this was, officially and as such it would remain. Murders just did not happen in this place they said. Not until much later anyway.

The body when cut down was removed to a small incongruous, Victorian red brick building that stood at the end of a magnificent avenue of poplar. This, rather quaint building, served a dual function as both occasional mortuary and pumping station for the local sewage farm. Acquiring by such, a blush of romance that would otherwise not have touched it.

The willow from which the body hung also gained notoriety in the minds of small boys and courting couples. The river continued to flow and became all the more lonely.

Of course a strange death such as this became a talking point for the entire community. The first and second houses where alive with it.
The victim/suicide, was originally of eastern European descent, come over some twenty years before as a refugee. According to one story they said.
In another, or as maybe part of the same fable, a wife and single child had run away. These were, in the view of all that heard them, the understandable reasons for giving up and opting out. The horrors of war and the loss of a family, who could blame him? Then to finally end it all, this all made sense.
It was romantic said the community gossip. It was a shame and such a one. The hearts of over the fence maunderers reached out.
Sources had no idea of the present location of wife and daughter. But the inefficient constabulary searched in a self admittedly cursory manner. The spouse and offspring had inherited the fabled fortune however and it was this rather than the reasons for suicide, which seemed now self evident, that became the paramount topic of conversation.
Exactly what was going to happen to all that money? Who would get it? It would probably disappear into some bottomless subterranean vault and never see the light of day again they thought. What was the use in that?
This and far more fanciful theories were memawed over countless back fences between they and them.

But then, what did the poor man have to spend his money on? It must indeed be a pretty penny by now, they said because everyone and his dog had allowed the poor beggar something at some time. Even if it was just that, a penny. He didn’t spend, any amount, anywhere on anything. Unless it was gold. This from the shopkeepers who obviously thought they knew about this sort of thing.
In fact all this gossip was on very good authority, as sure as I’m standing here, they, said.

The gossip flowed around the village; they always had an opinion. Up and down, eddies and currents of conjecture and supposition passing obviously unnoticed and unconcerned across the still blue corpse that was laid out on a concrete slab in the Pumping House.

It was in a similar way that rumour floated and buzzed unknown around our innocent and largely unconcerned hero’s head.
The boy had always liked birds. For as long as anyone could remember he had the strangest hobby of any child in the village. If it comes to that, he had the only hobby that could be called such, of any child in the village. He was the boy that liked birds; he was the boy who had trained a hawk.
Ornithology was the word he used, when he talked of it, which wasn’t often, or Falconry. Hoity toity little bastard. Everybody seemed to remember that and hold it against him. It was like the word homosexual, something that did not enter into the lives of most.

He did like to keep himself to himself. He was very queer; the older one’s said. He was queer the younger one’s said not meaning the same thing.
He didn’t mix with girls, said these same young contemporaries. It was early days yet, said his elders but he was showing all the symptoms. What of? Of being a pansy, of course. He was certainly funny, peculiar. He would bear watching. But with a father like that, what could you expect? That Mother was never there as well. Who looked after him? He was beaten at home they said. He was beaten up whenever we get our hands on him others said.

At least he was clever. He would do well, provided he did not burn himself out, young.
Everyone knew of someone, a brother, cousin or friend, either sadly no longer with us or wasting away grey haired and drooling in a wheel chair. Dead at seventeen a sad but inevitable victim of brain fever. That was what studying and reading too much did to you.
As bad in its way as playing with yourself. Not that they would talk about that. That was a sin and the surest way to the drooling wheel chair they knew.
But then, so was being queer. Or funny peculiar. Anyway, they said, contradicting themselves, it was a good job his mother loved him. Perhaps a little too much, since you ask. Nothing wrong with that of course. With a husband who drank all the money and was never in what else could you expect?

All this speculation would be discussed, formulated, graded and cross-referenced across garden gate, back fence, in corner shop. Wherever two or more where gathered together in anybody’s name.
Minor connections would be made and afforded a status by this that common sense and plain interest would have denied.
Gossip would be mimed, articulated and exaggerated using nothing more than a brief conspiratorial whisper. A technique developed in the mill weaving rooms for communicating across the racket of Mule and Jenny and now used to communicate secret news of import. “You’ll never believe this, but you know what he’s got up to now?”

In pursuit of his solitary hobby, it was observed that the boy spent a lot of time sitting in a small hessian hide at the bottom of the sewage farm. Near to the effluent outlet that pumped a steady stream of filth and rubber Johnnies, untreated into the river, to hang, like suicides on the overhanging branches of the trees.
He was watching birds, presumably. Why the sewage works, no one seemed to know.

Two old men, ex miners, kept the sewage farm running. Two old archetypes in flat caps with clogs and white mufflers.
These two spent most of their time making mugs of scaldingly hot tea and smoking extra strong unfiltered cigarettes and reading pornography from two old green lockers piled high with mouldering magazines.

Tommy and Albert, their names, as old, it seemed to the boy, as the building itself and just as unchanging.
Occasionally they would invite him in for a cup of tea. They would show him, as a treat, the pornographic photographs in the magazines and attempt to judge his reaction by looking at him askance.
The boy and his latent sexual preferences had been a topic of conversation here also.

“Here, young un, hast a seen this? By Christ, that ud make thee badly eh?” Everything was strangely a statement and a question.
The boy would dutifully and politely study the hand-coloured photograph of a young woman with beach ball or occasional hose pipe.
This show was usually accompanied by a sly wink and a nudge to the ribs, spilling scalding tea. Tommy would look at Albert, knowingly.

“Ee, ah bet that ud make thy prick stand up on its own. Make thy pants favver an Indian tent, eh?”
Again the boys reaction would be observed, minutely as he held the magazine at arms length.

“Eee, ah don’t know Albert, what does your think?”

So would the boy’s as yet ambiguous sexuality be discussed? Across him, over his head. But once the preliminary ritual had been observed, it would be forgotten.
If indeed he was a pansy, what did it matter. He would not last long round here.
Tommy would light his pipe and Albert would disappear with one of the magazines, to the outside toilet. A toilet on sewage farm. Something vaguely symmetrical about that. It was a thought that pleased the boy.

The entrance to the mortuary side of the building was through a side door kept hidden behind a shiny sick yellow curtain. The boy knew all about this side of things. Tommy had invited him in once when Albert was at the toilet. The boy was still unsure about what had happened. Tommy had started sweating and asking very strange questions. Once he had heard Albert’s whistling return he had herded the boy out into the main room again. Strange suspicions were beginning to form in the boy’s mind. Loosely to take shape.

Now, behind that door was the body. Lying on one of the slabs. Presumably staring sightless at the underside of a sheet.
The boy found himself wondering, peculiarly, if the tongue protruded from the blackened mouth. It was said, that hanged men were prone to spontaneous erections. He found he quite liked the concept as it passed equally spontaneously through his mind and out again. Or was a spontaneous erection, (savoured once again, a minor déjà vu) was only a symptom of the freshly hung. This silent mental wordplay amused briefly, causing Tommy to look around at the startled giggle. Surprising in its rarity.

“Tha’art boggerts lad!” was the comment as he went back to mashing his tea in a large brown pint sized mug.

Committing suicide, oh, oh, the boy allowed the thought. This was something else entirely. A man who had killed himself. Gathering around a yet unidentified centre his thoughts floated loosely. An island, a rock in midstream as he shifted the currents by passing the thought around.
This was the first dead man he had known, apart from Grandfather. It was an experience to savour, certainly.
What was this apparently pathetic creature thinking about? Why did he do it? What was so bad about his life that it would cause him to take such a drastic and irrevocable step?
He would certainly be in hell now for doing such a thing. His mother and Pastor McBride had told him just what a heinous sin against God suicide was.
I wonder if I will ever get to that state, thought the boy. Deciding almost immediately with the unquenched optimism of youth.

Given a chance, he must look in the mortuary room. Given a chance, he must look at the body. The first really dead man he had known. (Daffy, Grandfather was not quite dead when he last saw him, unless you count the ghost.) The first dead body he had yet to see.
He tried to grasp the importance of this thought. He was almost aware that it had infinite significance for the rest of his life. His head pricked with it. He was hot and it was not just hot tea.

He left the pump house and moved down to the hide. Here he kept a desultory watch. What did he see? Who knows? Something happened, of course. It could not be said that he sat in complete stasis. Or perhaps it could and he did.
Maybe a heron flew in to land in front of the hide, frog hunting. Plunging bill, one foot and a statue. Ok a flock of loud lapwing spinning and corkscrewing. The odd duck or two, landing, feet splayed on the water. What does it matter. He saw nothing but a dead old man. He saw a man he had spoken to. Someone he had exchanged ideas with.

Now was that not strange? Ideas that were no longer there. They no longer existed. Ideas needed to continue. They should be immortal. These things were precious.
This was a mind gone and worse, memory. Thoughts, fresh and alive a few days, weeks ago, passed on and gone forever from the source.
Maybe that’s what it meant to pass on. If the old man had deliberately looked for someone to pass on to. He committed suicide.

He knew he was going to die. Before he spoke to the boy, under that very willow. He knew he was going to take this way out.
There was no doubt about it now. The boy had to see him. To see him would be to know. I was, the boy thought, with a frisson of pride, the last person to see him alive. I was a bag for his last vital thoughts. What did he want to give me? This last musing struck home with some considerable force. Before they had spoken the old man had spent some time looking. He had needed to in order to find him.

When the boy did not wish it, he was never found. The old man had judged and searched in his last hours. He had spent some of his precious time looking. Did he know who he wanted? Did he know what he wanted?
As far as he knew, the boy had never set eyes on the old man before the conversation they had beside the river and later by the tree. This the boy had forgotten. This eluded; this was the fly that could not be caught. This was the irritation that could not be scratched.
The boy knew he had been told something of import and had been shown a tree. A special, important tree. Something significant had happened. The precise sequence of events slipped and fell even as he attempted to catch and hold them.

Coolness, the lack of something. The absence of a spark. Plastic and old plastic at that. Cracked and broken, empty. Yellow and old, a doll.

A sheet that had been gingerly pulled back. Dirty and yellow. A smell, a pricking at the back of nostrils and neck. A coldness to his back that was the wall and the tiles.

Old grey hairs that curled on the chest and weirdly up the nose. The nostrils that where very wide. Foreshortened like the body in ‘The Rout of San Romano’, a picture in his children’s encyclopaedia. The body was observed from the feet upwards. He could see the grey, yellow, hard, cracked soles of the feet in minute detail. He could see up across the chest and into the nostrils, like two dark symmetrical caves that seemed, strangely to be growing larger as he watched. Taking up now most of the room. Grey curly hairs as thick as cables and darkness leading downward into even more and deeper darkness from which there was no escape. The boy collapsed.