GREGORY N. TAYLOR

Chapter 1

4:40 p.m. Christmas Eve, Friday 24th December, 1965.

 

Hannah walked across to the television and turned it on. The on/off knob, which doubled as the volume switch, was a little loose and she had to remember to press it at the same time as twisting it, so that it didn’t fall off. She really should contact the TV rental company and ask them to send a repairman out to fix it, or perhaps even change the set for another one. It would have to be the same model though, as she couldn’t afford an upgrade. She’d heard that there was a chance that colour television would be introduced in Britain in a couple of years, and she’d see if she could afford an upgrade then. Her son, Simon, would love that. Once the TV had warmed up, she tuned the channel to BBC1 and sat down to watch. A Mr. Magoo cartoon, ‘Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol’, was about to finish and then it would be Jackanory with the actress Wendy Hiller reading ‘Little Grey Rabbit’s Christmas’. Hannah enjoyed watching Jackanory, even though her childhood was now far behind her. The first episode of Jackanory had been broadcast only eleven days earlier, when the actor Lee Montague read the fairy story ‘Cap-o’-Rushes’. Hannah had been hooked since that very first episode and decided to put aside fifteen minutes each day to watch the programme, whether or not Simon watched with her.

     This would be the third successive Christmas that she would spend alone with Simon; she was beginning to get used to Christmases with just the two of them now. Simon’s father, Richard, had left three years ago. Not to the day, but almost. She’d tried so many times to forget that day in November 1962 when Richard had arrived home from work, placed his briefcase on the kitchen table, and brazenly announced to his wife that he’d met someone else and was moving to Cardiff to be with his new love. Hannah had always thought the stories of travelling salesmen cheating on their wives were just clichés – but Richard had proved the stereotype to be true, at least in this instance. He’d given her the old line that it wasn’t her, it was him. At first she didn’t believe him, but once she and Simon had got over the initial shock, she was able to realise that it was indeed him. She had tried to ignore her gut feeling that something was wrong but eventually couldn’t deny that her husband certainly seemed to be less committed to their relationship than previously, which coincided with the expansion of his sales territory to include South Wales. It took some time to recover but, after a while, when Hannah had decided that it was his loss and not hers, she felt empowered and able to continue her life without him. Anyway, she still had Simon and she felt that she could face anything with her boy by her side.

     Their house was a typical two up, two down terraced house with a small back garden. Hannah didn’t have much spare money but she did her best to keep their home clean and tidy and tried not to let her son want for anything. She always looked well-dressed, and that was in no small part thanks to the mail order company that allowed her to pay by weekly instalments for her purchases. It was also another source of income, as she passed the catalogue around her friends and family making a little money from the commission gained as an agent. It was a happy home, and she and Simon made a small but happy family.

     Simon was upstairs in his bedroom playing with his train set. His mother had tried to get him interested in watching Jackanory, but at the moment he was more interested in playing with his toys. He had told her that perhaps he’d give the programme a try after Christmas. He was wearing his favourite green checked shirt and a new pair of jeans that his mother had bought the week before from the local supermarket. He didn’t mind wearing the jeans inside the house, where nobody could see the label on the back-pocket, but if he went outside he preferred to wear shorts – even if it was cold – rather than wear the supermarket’s own brand jeans. He was average height for his age, had semi crew-cut, dark brown hair and a pair of NHS spectacles resting on his nose. His friends at school called him the Milky Bar Kid, saying that he looked like the boy from the TV advert, but he didn’t mind. After all, the Milky Bar Kid was ‘strong and tough’.

     Simon’s bedroom was directly above the staircase, and the recess that allowed people to go up and downstairs without hitting their heads, protruded into his room, providing a convenient base upon which his model train layout was set up. Ordinarily this architectural feature might be thought of as a nuisance but – with his parents’ help – it had been turned into the foundations for a miniature wonderland which had Simon’s train set as its focal point.

     And what a train set it was!

     It was a real feat of miniature domestic civil engineering. The tracks were set amongst papier-mâché hills, moulded by Simon with the help of his mother. Simon had painted the hills, but anything that required finer detail than broad brush strokes had been lovingly painted by Hannah. The hills were peppered with model shrubs and trees that he bought (with his own pocket money) from the local model shop. But the pièce de résistance was the attention paid to the buildings. These were bought in kit form printed on durable cardboard and then assembled and placed in position in the diorama. Simon’s father had installed electric lighting in the station, sheds and houses, so that at night the landscape was a small forest of glistening lights. None of his friends had such a realistic train set; it was amazing what his dad had been able to do with clear Christmas tree light bulbs and ingenuity. Standing on the station platforms and on the roads were several OO scale plastic figures of people waiting for trains, a person riding a motor scooter, a postman, and a man walking his dog. All had been carefully and lovingly painted by Simon’s mother’s steady hand.

Simon still saw quite a lot of his father, but it wasn’t the same as having him at home. He had a special relationship with his father, one of love but also one of wonder at the things that Richard could do. Simon missed his dad. Hannah called up the stairs.

     “Simon, your programme’s about to start. It’s nearly five o’clock. Joe Brown’s on this week. You like him.”

     In reality, it was only a quarter to five but Simon’s mother always exaggerated the lateness of the hour. At first it had been a ruse to make sure that Simon got out of bed in time to have breakfast before he went to school, but now it had become a habit. Although Simon was fully aware of his mother’s strategy, he didn’t let on.

     Simon loved Crackerjack. Five to five on a Friday afternoon was his favourite time. He would sit in front of the small screen TV waiting impatiently for the cry of ‘It's Friday, it's five to five and it's Crackerjack’. That night the programme was actually due to start five minutes later, at five o’clock, but that was probably due to it being Christmas Eve and they certainly wouldn’t change their catchphrase just because of that. Every time somebody on the show mentioned the word ‘Crackerjack’ the studio audience of children would erupt in unison, shouting out ‘Crackerjack’ and children all over the country, watching at home, would do the same. Simon was no exception. He loved shouting ‘Crackerjack’ back at the TV, even though he knew that the only person who could actually hear him was his mother. His favourite part was the little play that the presenters performed at the end of each show, shoehorning the latest pop songs into the rather dubious comedy-drama finale of the programme. He’d have liked to watch Crackerjack every night of the week, but one night a week of Simon shouting at the TV was plenty enough for his mother’s nerves. At least watching Doctor Who on Saturday nights was a much quieter experience, albeit a little more frightening.

Simon turned the dial of his train set control to the off position and the OO/HO gauge model of the Princess Victoria steam locomotive halted abruptly. Simon loved this particular locomotive

     “On my way down, Mum,”

     He hoisted his leg over the varnished bannister and slid down it to the bottom of the stairs. Like all children, this was his favourite way of going downstairs but he was careful to make sure he only did it when his mother couldn’t see. He thought that she probably knew what he was up to, but he didn’t see any point in putting his suspicions to the test.

     Simon trotted into the living room and flopped into a soft armchair. He started half-watching Jackanory but he considered the ‘Little Grey Rabbit’ stories too young for him now. He had no idea why his mother was watching either; she was a grown-up. If the story was too young for him, then it was definitely too young for her. His favourite books were the Jennings books; he couldn’t get enough of the schoolboy adventures of Jennings and his best friend Darbishire. If those books were featured on Jackanory, he’d definitely watch the programme.

     The two-seater sofa was vacant but he preferred the way that the armchair kind of wrapped itself around him. Hannah liked the sofa too, but when her back was playing her up – as it was that day – she preferred the more rigid posture that a wooden dining-room chair forced her to take. For some reason it seemed to alleviate the pain. Hannah looked over at her son.

     “There’s jelly and ice-cream in the fridge.”

     She knew that Crackerjack coupled with jelly and ice-cream was a combination that her son could never resist.

     “What flavour is it, Mum?”

     “Go and fetch it and you’ll find out, won’t you?”

     Simon poured himself out of the armchair and skipped into the kitchen. He was in a very good mood. He opened the fridge door and saw two glass dishes, each containing a good portion of raspberry jelly. Then he opened the freezer compartment and took out a tub of raspberry ripple ice-cream, the best ice-cream in the world. He strolled across the kitchen to the welsh dresser and opened the second drawer down, his hand scrambling around inside it trying to find the ice-cream scoop. Scoop found, he stood for a moment looking at the freshly sharpened carving knife sitting in its block on the nearby worktop.

     “What’s keeping you Simon? Your TV programme will be starting soon.”

     “Be there in a minute, Mum.”

     Simon peeked through the kitchen doorway and saw his mother sitting bolt upright on the dining room chair, waiting patiently for her dessert.

     He went back to look at the carving knife, caressing it with his eyes. This was too good an opportunity to miss. He pulled open another drawer, into which lots of plastic carrier bags had been stuffed. He dug around inside the draw, the mass of plastic bags threatening to swallow his hand, until he found what he was looking for – a particularly large green plastic carrier bag. Simon had hidden it at the bottom of the drawer several weeks earlier as it had the number one quality necessary to help him in his venture – no air holes. From the next drawer down – the knick-knack drawer - he took a length of strong but flexible wire, and two rolls of gaffer tape.

Simon quietly crept up behind his mother and in one swift movement he pulled the plastic bag over her head. She started flailing around, panicking, wondering what on earth was going on. He pulled hard on the bag, securing it by wrapping the wire around the entrance of the bag, causing Hannah to choke as it tightened around her neck. He was pleased but not particularly surprised at the success of his plan so far; he had been practising this manoeuvre for weeks using his old, dilapidated but large teddy bear. He continued to pull the wire taut, bracing his feet against the chair legs to help him fight against the resistance that his mother was putting up. After a brief struggle, the lack of air caused Hannah to lose consciousness. Satisfied that he hadn’t accidentally killed her and that she wasn’t going to wake up anytime soon, Simon removed the bag and looked at his mother sitting there, not lifeless but certainly helpless.

     He took the gaffer tape and carefully bound her ankles to the chair legs and her wrists to the upright of the chair-back so that she couldn’t escape when she woke up. He had plenty of gaffer tape left over so he decided that it would be a good idea to use it all up. He continued wrapping the tape around her calves and forearms, pinning her limbs to the chair in a vice-like grip. Then he tore off the last strip of tape and covered her mouth with it.

     Simon stepped back and admired his handiwork. He’d done a very professional job - Hannah wasn’t going anywhere. He went back into the kitchen and returned, dragging another kitchen chair behind him. He pulled it past his unconscious mother and placed it in front of her, at a distance of about three feet. Spinning the chair round to face his mother, he sat down, toying with the carving knife. On TV, Leslie Crowther was telling a losing contestant that she had won a Crackerjack pencil. The responding roar of ‘Crackerjack’ interrupted Simon’s concentration for a couple of seconds as he felt a compulsion to join in. He couldn’t stop himself. Pavlov would have been proud of him.

     “Crackerjack!”

     His shout didn’t wake up his mother but a few minutes later Hannah regained consciousness and found her movements severely restricted. She moved her head downwards to see that she was tied to a chair. Who had done this to her? Her eyes darted around the room looking for signs of an intruder but all she could see was her ten year old son sitting opposite her, silently studying her. Surely Simon couldn’t have done this? But there was nobody else around. She felt decidedly unsettled at how remarkably composed and unfazed her son seemed to be.

Simon looked his mother up and down, took a deep breath, and spoke.

     “Hi Mum.”

     Hi Mum? His mother was secured by gaffer tape and all he could come up with was ‘hi Mum’?

Simon pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. They had an annoying habit of slipping.

     “I imagine you’re wondering what’s happening to you, Hannah. Well, this is when you pay for your sins. You’ve wronged me, wronged me very greatly indeed.”

     Hannah was confused. Simon had never called her by her first name before. Of course he knew her real name, but she was his mum and he always referred to her as such. She’d always done her best for Simon, she’d made sure that he never went without, no matter how tight money became. She knew that he wasn’t overjoyed with the jeans that she had bought him, but she couldn’t afford the fancy brands like Levi or Wrangler. What complaints could a ten year old boy have that would make him do something like this?

     “Think back to before you were born, Hannah. In fact think back to long before you were born, think back to about 150 years ago. Not so easy for you, is it? But I remember it as if it were yesterday. You see, we knew each other in a past life, Hannah. You were Joseph Grimes, an overseer on a cotton plantation in Louisiana; a hard and unfair taskmaster and way too fond of the booze. You were a drunken bully”

     Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What had got into her sweet, loving son? He’d gone crazy. Was he possessed or something? How could he know about her previous lives? After all, she had no memories of any. He’d obviously gone insane. Reincarnation was just a myth. Simon continued.

     “My name was Ruth and I was a slave on the plantation. I was a good worker. I always brought in my quota of cotton. Hell, I often surpassed my quota. Of course my conditions weren’t that great – I was a slave, but I did have a family. A family that I loved with all my heart. I had a wonderful husband and a beautiful little daughter. One night, a few months after my husband had fallen ill with a fever and passed away, you came to my hut and battered on the door, demanding to be let in. I was frightened and hid behind my daughter`s bed, huddled together with her, hoping that you`d get bored and go away. But then I heard an almighty crash – loud enough to awaken my poor dead husband – and saw you stumbling into the house, saliva dribbling down onto your chin, the door barely hanging on its hinges. You were stinking drunk.” 

Hannah wanted this nightmare to be over, but she was in no position to do anything about it. She wanted to shout at him, to beg him to let her go, to promise that they’d find someone to help rid him of this dreadful sickness or whatever it was that was affecting his mind. But the tape over her mouth was stuck fast. She was powerless to do or say anything.

     “I stayed as quiet as I could, quiet as a mouse, pulling my daughter behind me to protect her, but you spotted us and hauled the bed away from us. The door was broken but you weren’t afraid of anyone seeing you; after all, you were the overseer – you were untouchable. I shouted and pleaded with you to get out, to leave us alone, I begged you to let my daughter leave, whilst you did whatever you wanted to do to me. But you blocked the doorway with the wardrobe.

     “You just grinned that sickly, disgusting grin of yours, dragged me to my feet, and then punched me full in the face. I crumpled to the floor. You unbuckled your belt, allowing your trousers to drop to the floor and, despite all the whiskey that you had drunk, you managed to get a hard on – the pleasure of the pain you were inflicting or were about to inflict on me overpowering the effects of the liquor that you had thrown down your throat. 

     “I called to my child to hide in another room but you told her that if she did so you would kill us both. I told her to close her eyes and cover her ears but you repeated the same threat. And then... and then you climbed on top of me, clawing at my dress and undergarments with your fat stubby fingers, ripping them off and exposing my womanhood. You raped me, you bastard. You raped me in front of my little girl. And that’s why you must die. That’s why you must die. Not because you raped me – I could have lived with that - but because you raped me in front of my six year old daughter, destroying her innocence in one fell swoop – you sick fuck” 

     Simon stopped fidgeting with the knife and grasped its hilt.

     “What goes around, comes around, Grimes!”

 Simon stood up and drove the blade deep into his mother’s abdomen. He twisted the knife and drew it free, blood dripping off its blade. Hannah grimaced with the sudden pain. Again, he drove the knife home, this time just below the ribcage. A third lunge buried the blade in Hannah’s abdomen, and the fourth and final attack was a slicing motion that opened Hannah’s throat, leaving a gaping wound, dripping crimson, as if a macabre smile had been painted onto her neck 

Simon let the knife fall to the floor and went upstairs to his bedroom. He opened a drawer and searched for a clean pair of Y-fronts. He casually changed into the clean underwear, putting his used underpants into the laundry basket on the upstairs landing just as he would have done on any other day, even though there was no one to wash them now. He put his jeans back on, tucking his shirt into his jeans before refastening the blue and red snake belt and walking over to his train set, where he picked up the Princess Victoria locomotive and put it into his pocket.

     He left the bedroom, not bothering to close the door, and stopped at the top of the stairs. He paused for a couple of seconds and then lifted his leg over the bannister and slid down to the bottom of the stairs. Dismounting from the bannister he looked towards the upstairs landing. He smiled and spoke aloud to himself.

     “Why not? Who’s going to stop me?”

     He jogged back upstairs and climbed back onto the bannister. He slid down again, this time letting out a ‘whoop’ as if he were a cowboy on a bucking bronco. He dismounted the bannister and turned towards the front door.

     He opened the door and stepped outside. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, it being Christmas Eve, but the house was situated on a main road and he knew that there would still be some cars, trucks, and buses passing his house. Not everyone was at home with their families yet. He took a few paces forward and stood by the kerb, looking to his right, watching the oncoming vehicles. A grey Ford Anglia and a black Austin Morris 1100 drove past. Simon was very good at recognizing cars thanks to the Observers book of Automobiles that his father had given him last Christmas. He also had an Observers book of birds, but it was much easier to car-watch than bird-watch. Especially when you lived on a main road. A light-blue Triumph Herald convertible approached with its roof down. The couple inside must have been crazy; Simon could feel the cold evening air trying to cut through him.      He tried in vain to blow smoke rings from his breath as it left his mouth, just like his dad had been able to do when smoking a cigarette. He heard a louder engine. That was more like it. This was almost certainly a lorry. He took a better look and could see that the headlights were set too high and too far apart to be those of a car. As the vehicle got closer he could make out the shape of a dumper-truck. He sang quietly to himself.

     “The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough,

     And only the best is good enough,

     The creamiest milk,         

     The whitest bar,

     The good taste that’s in Milky Bar.”

     He made a few silent calculations and then, at the perfect moment, he shouted as loud as he could

     “THE MILKY BARS ARE ON ME!”

     The impact was inevitable as Simon walked calmly into the path of the diesel-powered monster. His head smashed against the front of the vehicle before being forced to follow his body as it was dragged underneath the truck, the weight of the nearside wheels crushing his small form as they passed over him. The driver braked hard, pulling back on the steering wheel as if that would somehow help the vehicle to stop and avoid what had just happened. After what seemed an eternity the truck skidded to a halt and stood there, motionless, apparently untouched except for some blood that was dripping down over the sky blue bonnet and a small portion of Simon’s scalp that had become lodged in a space between the bumper and the cab of the vehicle.