Chapter One
Little Yellow Rock
There was a man who was not my father who travelled over a hundred miles to die. I found him when I came home to Liverpool one day in the middle of summer.
It began in the early hours when the pinks and purples spread out across the sky. My sister and I had decided to meet up for coffee that morning. We hadn’t really seen each other in about five years, and I’d hardly even spoken to my family in that time. We’d been kids last time I was here, so Elizabeth thought it would be a good idea to catch-up. I waited for her at the wall of the bridge across the road from the train station where the road passed over the railway. I decided I wanted a better look of the place, so I climbed up onto the wall.
By the time she arrived, dark clouds were lifting their heads above the Welsh mountains and heading our way. ‘What are you doing?’ her voice came from behind me. The sound of her voice was like someone pulling me out of a dream and placing me in another.
‘Nothing,’ I said, standing on the wall. ‘I was just thinking.’
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘The past,’ I said. ‘You know, when we were kids playing in the street. Remember that?’
‘Yeah, up on the hill.’ She looked at me, not intensely, but with the same indirect look a doctor might give a patient. ‘What are you doing up there?’
Elizabeth was going through a phase of changing her hair colour every week. This time it was ash blonde. She put her bag down and climbed up onto the wall, straining with her weight as she pulled herself up. Ahead of us was the railway, the green shrubbery on the slopes, the dirt, the brownish colour of the buildings. Everything was lit up and coloured gold like syrup. Soon, it went quiet when the last couple of cars had driven off. The seagulls squawked and the magpies made sounds like maracas.
‘You’re just not used to being back,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Everything’s changed since you were last here.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said.
‘I saw Lily earlier on today,’ she said.
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. She’s got her own place now. She moved out of her granddad’s a while ago.’
One of the memories I was afraid to go back to was Lily O’Reily. Even the thought of her made me tentative like I was a boy again. A churn of butter in my stomach, hot acid in my heart. We were only young back then. We didn’t know what we were doing. I only have fragments of memories and voices, especially from that summer ten years ago when it all fell apart. Lily wasn’t part of the things that we did, my brothers and I, she was different from the rest of us. She was always more mature than us, had her head screwed on, always knew what she was doing. It was my fault we’d been separated. My eyes tracked the double silver shine of the railway up to the horizon where it was clear and lucid like cut glass.
‘One for sorrow,’ Elizabeth said, pointing towards the tracks.
I looked where she pointed and saw a magpie. Black and white and where the sun shone, blue. It ruffled its feathers and twisted its head to look at us, then it flew away into the hot, bright atmosphere, enveloped by the whiteness of the sun.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘There. See?’ she said, pointing. ‘The little yellow rock.’
I didn’t know I was looking at it at first. I thought I was just tired or the heat was playing tricks on my eyes. But it was there. I could see it from the bridge, a gold or yellow rock sticking out between the tracks.
‘It’s just a rock,’ I said. The glare of light from the tracks caught the yellow glow of the rock. I wiped sweat from my forehead, brackish and oily. Exhaust fumes made the atmosphere heavier and heavier.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘We should go down and have a look.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘It could be worth something,’ she said. ‘It looks like gold.’
I couldn’t look away but at the same time I couldn’t figure out what it was. Too many drunk evenings played havoc on my brain. I looked around, felt the dark and the light and the glaring orange sun. Birds flew overhead and vanished.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
From the corner where a billboard advertised shampoo, the road turned onto another road where the post office was, and further along this road the tall fence alongside the tracks had been eaten away with rust.
We jumped down off the wall and walked around the corner near the post office. The fence was so rusted in one place it had turned orange and flaked off into an oily, sand-like dust leaving sharp rough edges which we could push to one side since it wasn’t fixed in place at the bottom. It was hot to touch. The offensive vinegary smell of overgrown weeds filled the air. We crawled through the old rusted railings trying not to scratch ourselves on the sharp metal points. I looked back to see if anyone was around or if anyone from the post office had seen us climb through. No one had. The weeds entangled around each other in green knots and some strangled flower-heads lolled to one side. We slid down a small steep slope, carefully placing our feet into small invisible grooves within the weeds, aware of the ever-present danger of the railway at the bottom. Litter seemed to grow with the weeds where part of a rusted bicycle lay forgotten. Soon the weeds cleared and there was just the steep slope of hard soil. And the little yellow rock. I was so drawn to it I forgot Elizabeth was there. I checked the trains weren’t coming. The thin weedy shrubbery smelled odd, musty and toxic, and my hands were cut up from sharp rocks and creeping thistle on the way down. That was when Elizabeth fell.
She went down quickly, toppling over herself, her legs turning in the air, then she rolled a few times, stopping just short of the tracks. At first, she didn’t move, and I thought she might have been unconscious, but as I called down to her she began to get up. Her scream was a sudden, unexpected shriek like a bird with a broken wing, which echoed from the slope to the black tunnel a little further ahead. I made my way down, keeping my balance as my feet slipped on the hard soil and I stumbled to the bottom of the slope to help her. I tried to calm her down, but in her panic her shaking hands gripped my arms. Her bottom lip was fat and bleeding and a dirty bruise had appeared above her left eye. But her eyes, I noticed, looked past me, at something over my shoulder.
I turned around and saw the thing she had seen. It was the yellow rock lying in the dirt between the sleepers. The blackness of the tunnel before it like a gaping mouth. But the longer I looked at it, my mind tried to piece together what it was. What I saw was not a yellow rock at all. It was a skull.
We both stood there in the baking hot sun and didn’t say a word. The colour now like a tobacco-stain rather than gold. We just looked at it and it looked at us. Its old face partly crumbled to ash, smiling as if it was happy to see us.
I heard the rumble of an approaching train, and I thought we should move.
‘Who is that?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It is a person, though? Isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I think it is.’
The sound of the train became louder and louder as it got closer to us and soon it barged through with all its bluster, a wavering tremor through the ground and shooting electrical whips went through the rails. There was a hot electricity all around as if a thunderstorm was about to descend. We climbed up the slope and crawled back through the fence leaving the skull where it was as the train shot past pushing a violent cloud of hot air. We walked to the nearest café without saying a word as a magpie made a maraca sound somewhere above us.
© Michael Holloway
Cover photo by Darius K on Unsplash