Стивен Бут: Drowned Lives

Lyrics from ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, © Abkco Music, Inc.

First I see the animal. Its body is a hunched grey shape, outlined by the glow of a lantern and the shadows moving slowly on wet bricks. Billows of warm breath swirl in the fog as it trudges under a bridge to the clatter of its own hooves. Soon I hear the leather harness rustling on its flanks, the line of twisted hemp creaking and sighing as it tightens over the swingletree. I catch the scent of fresh manure, mingled with the tang of earth matted in the animal’s hair and the aroma of oats in its nose tin, moistened by its breath.

Thirty feet behind, the stem of a boat drifts into sight. It moves in silence, but for a murmur of water caressing the keel. A coating of coal dust clings to the oak boards, and the lantern light catches the roof of a squat cabin, where the arc of a tiller rears over the stern.

And then I notice the man. He’s a ghostly silhouette, staring ahead, his eyes fixed on the horse as he judges the curve of the bank and braces the tiller against the pressure of water. There’s a stillness in his manner, an air of concentration as he reads the motion of the boat. When his face emerges from the mist, I recognise the pain that deadens his eyes. It’s the look of a man who has faced betrayal, a man who knows all about fear.

My body aches with tension at the relentless tread of the horse and the slow drift of the boat towards the bridge. Through a gap in the fog, a wooden bollard appears on the wharf for the steerer to tie up his line. Stacks of unmarked boxes lie decaying on the cobbles, slippery with mould.

The second figure barely stirs. His face is invisible behind the collar of a worsted greatcoat as he stands in the shelter of the bridge, his sweat drying cold on his forehead and a faint wheeze in the back of his throat. A chill strikes into his bones from the freezing water and he moves his feet slowly, one after the other, flexing his toes to stop them from going numb. He turns his head to follow the boat and waits for the horse to pass, praying that the fog will muffle his breathing and the painful pounding of his heart.

And finally, I see one more thing. It’s a six-foot boat shaft, tipped with an iron spike, gripped in a waiting hand.

My thoughts are tainted by these images. They’ve grown in my mind like ancient ghosts breathed into a raw, quivering life. They sound and smell too real to be illusions. They’re trying to convince me they’re actual memories.

Yet all this began in that brief instant when the old man’s eyes first met mine. I realise now that he’d already been able to see these images himself, and perhaps he’d been seeing them for years. He was preparing to transfer them to me, like a dying ancestor handing down the secrets of the tribe. My reluctant hand was the next in line. Refusal had never been an option.

There was just one moment when I had the chance to walk away, a second of hesitation when I could have drawn back from the edge. I might have gone back to my Victorian semi, to the constant struggle to pay the bills, to the microwaved meals for one in front of the TV, and the tedious tick of the carriage clock that reminded me constantly of my parents. It wasn’t much, but it was my own life, and I was used to it. If I’d been asked, I would have chosen to keep it.

But I had hesitated, and it was too late. When a voice called my name across the Fosseway restoration site, my shabby, ordinary life sank into that evil-smelling mud where the dumper truck had reversed and churned the earth into a morass. During the weeks that followed, it seemed I would never stop floundering in my efforts to reach firm ground.

Andrew Hadfield was among the work party that day. He’d straightened up and spotted me before I could walk back to my car. He was pointing me out to a tall, elderly man in a dark overcoat who stood at his side. And then Andrew shouted the words I couldn’t help but hear.

‘Hey, Chris! Chris Buckley! There’s someone here who’s dying to meet you!’

I’d been turning over a paragraph in my mind, something about the first small step in a project to re-create a waterway that had lain buried beneath the Staffordshire countryside for forty years. I should have known that no matter how much you dig, or what ancient facts you unearth, you can never restore the past completely. There always have to be compromises, and a great many lies. But, like those muddy enthusiasts shovelling out the first lock of the canal, the knowledge wouldn’t have stopped me digging.

‘Come on, Chris,’ called Andrew. ‘Come over and say hello.’

A gust of chilly wind blew across the fields, and the afternoon sun had slipped behind a mass of grey clouds building up from the east. I was cold and tired, and I wanted to go home. But politeness made me move towards Andrew and the stranger, the sort of courtesy that becomes an obligation. That, and my other major fault — curiosity. An almost fatal combination, as it turned out.

It seemed only a short flicker in time from then to the moment I found the police standing at my door, two hard-faced detectives with nothing but questions in their eyes. That movement was all it took to precipitate my headlong plunge through two centuries of bitterness and hatred, decade upon decade of guilty secrets, and an endless thirst for vengeance.

That step taught me the meaning of betrayal. It took me right to the brink of despair.

And then it showed me death.

It was all about family in the end. That’s how it began, and that was how it finished, too.

There are some families that seem to last forever, perpetuating themselves in infinite generations, son after son marching through the centuries, fecund and proud. They branch off and flourish in great clumps like wild flowers seeding themselves on the wind, until their teeming progeny populate vast swathes of the countryside. But other families are destined to die out, to fade and vanish into history. They wither on the branch like blighted fruit, until just one shrivelled apple is left. Such a family are the Buckleys.

The deaths of my mother and father, coming so close together, should have been a catharsis, a cleansing. When the stonemason added my father’s name to the headstone in the graveyard at St Chad’s, it was a symbolic act that swept the board clean, giving me a chance to start life afresh. Instead, it felt more as though an emptiness had fallen on me, a heavy blanket through which I could barely remember my former life.

It also left me with no family that carried the Buckley name. I had no brothers or sisters, no broods of nephews and nieces. There weren’t any uncles or aunts on my father’s side, and no cousins. And, of course, I had no wife or children of my own to inherit the house, or the carriage clock.

So there was just me. Christopher Buckley, thirty-two years old, single and always likely to be. A man who was about to be made redundant from his position as an Information Officer with Staffordshire County Council. I was the last shrivelled apple, waiting for the next stiff breeze to knock me off the branch. And trying my best to avoid the wasps.

True, there were many friends and acquaintances I’d made over the years in the newspaper, magazine and PR businesses — some former colleagues at the Lichfield Echo , fellow freelancers, councillors, all the contacts I’d cultivated. And recently there were some members of the Waterway Recovery Group I’d come to know through visits to their sites, and asking a lot of questions about a subject that had sparked my interest.