He looked out of the window and realised that his memories were going; snow was falling on every image, covering them piece by piece, until there was going to be nothing left, but whiteness.
He had a picture of her, where he was just a baby in her arms and the look on her face made him feel warm inside. No matter how many of his memories faded, that feeling was locked inside forever. It was his to keep. No matter what happened, they couldn’t take it. It was real. It was there. It existed.
He opened the bedroom window and let the cold air fill the room. So fresh, cleaning the room of all the staleness. He stared at the bare sticks protruding from the trees at the back of the house. His mum told him once that bad thoughts were like poison that festered inside you, but he couldn’t help thinking that it would have been so much better if Paula had been the one in the woods that night instead of Maggie’s cousin. His dad had been blinded; he had shards of ice in his eyes like the boy in his mother’s fairy story. Jacob was the only person in this house who could see things for what they really were.
Snow fell on the thick privet hedges that edged the garden next door. The tall wooden fence around it kept him from seeing in properly, but sometimes it felt like that house was watching him. When he was in the garden, he felt it, as though the hedge was moving. He could almost hear it breathing sometimes, like it was alive.
They said that the old woman that used to live there had locked a kid up in their basement just for going to get their ball back. She kept him there for hours. They said that the kid came out with dead eyes, not wanting to talk to anyone about what happened to him. Jacob didn’t believe it, but he kept out of their garden just in case. Betty Anderson had died years ago and her son, Mr Anderson, lived there alone now.
Mr Anderson worked at the library and that’s where Jacob saw him most. Even though he lived next door, he was never out on the front washing his car or doing the lawn like the other neighbours did. The Andersons’ lawn was unkempt with tall grasses and weeds. He had cats everywhere, crawling all over his windowsills and through the long grasses in his garden. The Vincents said that when he cut the lawn once there were two dead ones hidden in the grass.
It was the house they’d dare to do knock and run on, but he never answered the door. That made it worse – as though he was watching. Sometimes when Jacob saw him at the library, he’d tilt his head as though he knew the very deepest thoughts of his soul.
Jacob heard Mr Anderson go out through the back gate and onto the lane. The chill through the window made him shiver as he watched. Mr Anderson slid out of the gate like an eel through water and disappeared through the trees at the back of the house like he did most evenings. He wore different clothes at night too: a black jacket with the hood pulled up and black gloves. He moved differently as well – more determined and with purpose.
At first Jacob had wondered why he didn’t go out the front like everyone else, until he realised what he was doing. There were badgers in the woods. His mum had told him that they had to be kept secret, because people sent dogs down the holes to kill them. Jacob knew that was where Mr Anderson was going. His mum had told him how much Mr Anderson loved animals. That was why he had so many cats; he looked after the stray ones that no one else wanted. He went out at night when the badgers were out and always looked over the fence first to check that the lane was empty. Jacob knew that he was checking for poachers. After Mr Anderson’s mum had died, Jacob’s mum used to take food round for him. She called him a poor soul, said that any man who loved his animals as much as he did was a good man.
Jacob wondered if Mr Anderson had a hideout to watch the badgers from. He imagined so. It would be close to the set and covered by leaves and branches. The gate clicked in the wind. He hadn’t shut it properly again. He’d do it when he came back later though, he always made sure it was shut and he always did it so quietly that sometimes Jacob didn’t even notice him come back home.
Jacob listened as it opened and shut in the wind. He liked the idea of badgers being out there in the woods and Mr Anderson looking after them. As the gate clicked and creaked, he thought how nice it would be to sit in the woods and watch the badgers too. A gust of wind slammed the gate shut with a bang.
Jacob decided to walk out tomorrow and look for prints in the snow. He might even be able to work out where the sets were if he followed Mr Anderson’s footprints. The thought of it made him feel better. It was good to have a different focus. Mr Anderson was free. He could do whatever he wanted. If Jacob could be the same, he knew that he would be happy too.
6
Weeks had passed since Maggie’s cousin Jayne had been found. The initial shock was gone and the town moved back to the usual routine. Jacob thought about it all the time though, he felt it through the absence of Maggie. She’d been the one person to make sense of things. Without her, he was nothing; there was no one else who made him laugh like she did. She had left a void.
The snow had stopped, but there was a new chill – a coldness that ran through him like a crack in a rock. As the washing machine throbbed to a steady beat downstairs he worked on his drawings. He was getting good. Paula couldn’t take this from him. He had memorised the badgers so that he could recreate one with just a few lines.
The thought of them out there in the woods beyond the house was comforting. Mr Anderson went out like clockwork every night and Jacob heard the click of the gate when he left. A few hours later he’d hear it click again as he came back. Jacob was sure he was going to watch the badgers.
His head throbbed. There was something else. A feeling that crept under his skin, slid up through his veins and left his mouth dry and his stomach heavy. It wasn’t something that would go away. He thought of it as bad ink that ran through his veins. Sometimes he looked at his skin and saw it there, as plain as he could see his fingernails or the freckles on his skin: the darkness running through him. Creeping through his body and out of his pores.
Paula had told him that he had his mother’s blood running through him and there was nothing he could do about it: that one day he would end up just like her. She liked to do that, to let him know that it wasn’t just her dark eyes that he’d inherited. It was there to see, under his pale skin and he could feel it rushing through him. Jacob wondered if other people could smell the badness coming out of him – a creeping, throbbing oddness that his stepmother had shown him was there, as much a part of him as his own organs. He’d feel it unexpectedly, when he was at school or stood in newsagents waiting to pay for his sweets and he knew that it was there behind his eyes and anyone who looked close enough would see it inside him.
When he was at the library surrounded by books, he was almost free. The coloured spines held promises of other worlds for him to slip inside and he loved it. He memorised the pictures and held them in his mind to go back to later. He could spend hours in the library, researching things and stepping into unknown places. If he wasn’t even brave enough to run, he could draw. He could create a world on paper where badgers sniffed for grubs and birds chased dragonflies through the trees and he could go anywhere he wanted.
He looked up at the photo of Maggie stuck to his noticeboard. They’d developed it in the photography room at school and she’d grabbed it before it had dried properly and left her thumb print on the bottom of it. The smudge had dried in an arch over the image with ridges from her finger. He liked to touch it sometimes with his own finger as though they were connected. It felt like he’d got a piece of her on that paper. As he stared at it, he realised that he’d done nothing to help her.