Danny Yates Must Die

‘What?’

‘Ha ha, only joking. It’s on Plescent Street, Wheatley 48, a really nice area, all manual lawnmowers and salad sandwiches. I’ve done loads of pickups there and never once got a tip – a sure sign of affluence. Do you know they have a residents’ committee? People round there talk to their neighbours, Dan. Can you believe that?’

‘And you’re sure about this?’

‘Positive. You’ve landed on your feet better than a cottonwool cat with eighteen legs and cast iron paws. Annette has a cat, by the way. It’s called Ribbons. Be nice to it, it bites.’

‘Lucy?’

‘Yup?’

‘Why are you helping me?’

‘I’m not helping you.’

‘You’re going out of your way to take me to a new home.’

‘I’m not helping you.’

‘Yes you are.’

With a screech of tyres the cab swerved to a halt, half climbing the kerb, Lucy scrunching on the handbrake.

Danny’s momentum flung him forward. His seat belt stopped him from melding with the windscreen.

She reached across and unlocked his door, letting it swing open. Upright again, one forearm on the wheel, the other on the back of her seat, she stared him in the eyes. ‘You want to get out?’

‘No.’

‘Then don’t say I’m helping you.’

‘But …’

‘You want to get out?’

He sighed, gazing at the ceiling, then reluctantly pulled the door shut. ‘You’re not helping me.’

‘Damn right I’m not.’ And she steered the cab away from the kerb.

‘Eyes up, shipmates. Plescent Street ahoy.’ Lucy turned her cab up a sloping avenue on Wheatley’s outmost outskirt.

He watched passing rows of neat trimmed housing. Whitewashed picket fencing contained hedges topiaried into trains, snowmen, castellations, airborne kites, friendly dinosaurs, friendly dinosaurs flying kites, kites on castles and snowmen on trains. Each bordered a perfectly square garden.

He’d once seen a documentary: in America, an identical street had built a Berlin Wall at each end then issued residents with ‘passports’ to keep the riff-raff out.

Danny was riff-raff; or he’d have known there were such places in Wheatley. ‘You’re sure this is the right place?’ he asked. ‘There’s not another part of town with the same name?’

‘Course I’m sure. What kind of cabbie do you take me for? I know this city like the back of my hand. Aargh! What’s that on the end of my wrist?’

‘Your hand,’ he said, as unamused as on the first three million occasions she’d cracked that joke.

‘Only joking.’

‘This is the place.’ Lucy scrunched on the handbrake, engine noise dying away.

He gazed out through the windscreen, puzzled, seeing only cherry blossom trees to either side and the crown of the road ahead. Straight backed, head raised to peer over the crown, he saw the green fields of open country beyond. His gaze flicked across that landscape. ‘Where?’

‘There.’

‘Where?’

‘There.’

He watched her, suspecting a practical joke. ‘Where?’

‘Straight ahead.’

Again he looked, still seeing nothing.

Then he grew excited. ‘You’re saying, all that countryside, as far as the eye can see, is my new home? The woman owns the countryside? Lucy, this is fantastic.’

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Danny climbed from the cab, letting its door swing to behind him. It clunked as Lucy pulled it shut.

He stepped forward, eyes fixed on distant fields and a white cottage gleaming in the sun. An imaginary choir sang as he imagined summer days spent running through that long long grass, lazing by that cool cool lake, climbing that distant ridge against a sunset that couldn’t fail to be glorious in such a setting. And he knew at last he’d found happiness.

He heard Lucy approaching behind him. He wanted to hug her, to take her in his arms, spin her round and round and round in slow motion, laughing and giggling stupidly. He decided not to, fearing violence.

‘Danny, the girl’s a student. How could she afford the countryside? She owns just these houses.’

‘Which houses?’

‘Either side.’

‘There are no houses either side.’ His gaze remained on the fields, still dreaming of the days ahead. And this woman? Annette? Beneath the cyberman suit she was Beetlejuice Winona, or as good as? And she liked him? It was as though all the rotten luck he’d ever had was now being cancelled out by the law of averages.

Lucy’s grip forced his head leftward. She said, ‘Look twenty feet, straight ahead.’

‘What about it?’

‘Concentrate really hard.’

He did – convinced she was wasting his time when he could be running around that valley, like the Railway Children as the final credits rolled and they knew everything would be perfect from now on. Ahead he saw nothing but full-bloom cherry blossom stretching down to a stream that seemed made for stickleback jam jar fishing.

Then he frowned.

The harder he looked, the darker those trees became and the fewer of them there were. They twisted, thickened, threatened. Branches became arms. Twigs were fingers reaching out to scratch the eyes of unwary passers by. Bark became the faces of souls who must have done terrible things in life to be so anguished in death. The daisies punctuating the cherry blossom turned into coarse grass to grab the ankles of those foolish enough to encroach, and to tug them to the ground before consuming them.