Trapped Between

I still felt sick when I woke up, but a decent night’s sleep had given me the strength to decide to take the bull by the horns and go and try to find him myself.

I felt antsy at school, waiting for the day to be over, waiting for the chance to go to the memorial and see if he’d be there. I’d get there for five o’clock and if he was there I’d ask him what had come over him the night before. I’d ask him what had made him just get up and leave me like that.

I stared at the clock, willing the hands to move faster.

I’d made up my mind the moment I’d opened my eyes, so I’d told my mum, over breakfast, that I was going to stay at school late to do some extra art work.

Another lie.

I did mooch around in the Art room after the bell, so it wasn’t a total fabrication, but as soon as it got to quarter to five I dashed out of the school doors into the drizzle and was on my way to the park.

He was leaning against the statue, staring at me as I approached, and as usual, my heart kicked up a few gears just from looking of him.

I hoped he wouldn’t be angry with me for seeking him out, uninvited. The memory of his cold departure the night before and his intense gaze made me falter, and all of my confidence drained away. I swallow hard.

I tentatively took the final few steps towards him and, as I drew closer, I could see a battle of emotions in his eyes. He closed them for a moment, as if he didn’t want me to see his turmoil, but when he reopened them, they were still wild and raw.

“I haven’t been very fair on you, Beth,” he said in a quiet, strained voice. “I’ve made you say so much, but I haven’t really told you anything about myself.” He stopped and frowned; shaking his head as if he had decided not to say anything else. His eyebrows dropped even further and a muscle began to twitch in his jaw before he finally spoke again. “I’m terrified though, that once you know about me; you won’t want to see me again.”

I looked at his perfect face, at the wild emotions that clouded his grey eyes like a raging storm. I couldn’t imagine anything that could possibly make me never want to be in his company again. I shook my head, baffled, and then smiled, tentatively; trying to encourage him to say whatever was causing him such anguish.

His eyes searched my face for what felt like an eternity and I felt blood begin to warm my cheeks under such scrutiny, but I boldly held his gaze with my own. I don’t know what he saw in my expression, but it seemed to be enough to reassure him somehow.

With a deep breath and a resigned, almost pained look in his eyes, he began to speak.

“I’ve been hanging round here or the market for what feels like a lifetime, only I don’t know what for.” His grey eyes were filled with frustration. “I know that I’m waiting for something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for; nothing ever changes.” His words were fragmented, disjointed as he struggled to say what he meant. He blew out an irritated sigh and pushed his hair back from his forehead. “Nothing ever happens, but this Saturday-”

“Something did happen.” I interrupted him in a whisper. He searched my face again and I knew that my expression must show that I felt that our meeting on Saturday had been as momentous as he did.

“Yes, something did happen,” he repeated softly, smiling cautiously at me. My heart, so steady before, betrayed me and began to race as he seemed to look into the very depths of my soul. I felt myself lean towards him. As quickly as his smile had appeared it vanished again, I straightened up and his eyes hardened with the look of determination. He seemed to collect his thoughts and then began speaking in a more fluid tone than before.

“I’m either here or at the market, and I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing!” he shouted in exasperation. He was on the edge of something huge, an important discovery, but he had no way of uncovering it by himself.

I felt like I was standing with him over the site of his hidden discovery, dangling over the black hole and, once he let me in, I would fall into it with no way of ever climbing back out.

“This is going to sound peculiar, but I think you are supposed to help me, Beth” he implored. “I think that you were supposed to see me in the market on Saturday and that you are supposed to come and find me today to help me figure out what I need to do.” He looked at me with beseeching eyes, like a child pleading for assistance when they are struggling with a really tough problem.

I got it.

Amnesia.

There was no other explanation for what he was saying. Amnesia: that is what the rational and logical side of my brain deduced from his words. But the other, quieter side of my brain screamed that this was something else entirely, something irrational, something illogical.

“Will you help me, Beth?”

“Why…why me?” I stuttered in a small confused voice.

A gentle smile lifted his full lips, and his head tipped to the side in a speculative manner making his unruly fringe fall back into his eyes. He pushed it back again and looked at me with an expression of hope in his imploring grey eyes.

“Because you see me when no one else does,” he said simply, his grey eyes held me motionless. “So, will you help me?”

I looked into his eyes and the hope I saw there, the look of complete faith made up my mind for me, before I really had a chance to think it through.

“Yes,” I whispered.

He looked deep into my eyes again, and I noticed that all the frustration in them had melted away; they shone with fervent thanks.

“How old are you, Beth?”

“Seventeen, why?”

He considered my answer for a moment before shaking his head slightly. “You’re too young to remember,” he said, a sad smile lifted the right hand side of his mouth.

“Remember what?” I was confused. Yet again his abrupt change in the direction of our conversation had me feeling muddled.

“Fifteen years ago there was an incident, on the railway bridge on the other side of town,” he said in a matter of fact tone. His grey eyes penetrated me and I felt weightless, cast away, floating on grey water.

The wheels of recognition in my head juddered, grinding slowly into life. I reached out; trying to steady myself on the grey waves. Why did I feel like I knew something about the railway bridge?

There was something there amongst the grating wheels that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something important.

He looked away, into the light rain that was still coming down around us; fine drizzle that I knew must be playing absolute havoc with my hair. When he looked back at me he seemed to struggle to find the words to carry on.

“The bridge,” I prompted him. “You were saying something about the railway bridge?”

He took a deep breath as if he was preparing to tell me something dreadful. Something that he seemed to think would have me running away from him. Something to do with a bridge that in the back of my mind I was sure I already knew.

“I told you my name is Drew.” A beat of silence. “But I didn’t tell you my full name.” Another pause. “My full name is Andrew-”

“Clayton.” I’d said it before I even knew what had come out of my mouth. I clapped a hand over my mouth as a look of total incredulity crossed his face.

I felt the blood drain from my mine. I couldn’t believe what I had said and what he hadn’t yet denied. I shook my head behind my hand.

No way.

He couldn’t be Andrew Clayton.

He couldn’t be the Andrew Clayton I had just been reading about, the same Andrew Clayton I was supposed to be designing a memorial sculpture in remembrance of.

I sat dumb with wide eyes, staring at his beautiful, solemn face. Seconds slipped by and the silence between us became more and more tense, like a guitar string tuned to tight.

Gradually I managed to kick start my frozen mind back into action and started slowing wading through the quagmire of information that was suddenly buzzing around my brain. He was around my age, he was local but I’d definitely never seen him before this weekend. He seemed to materialise out of thin air and then vanish just as quickly as he had appeared.

This was ridiculous, it was impossible, insane.

I remained motionless; on the outside I was like a statue, but inside I was flailing, turning this way and that trying to get a hold on something that was real. As I floundered there was one thing that held steadfast in the churning confusion of my thoughts, one thing that when I stopped struggling and grabbed into it, it felt sure and familiar under my fingertips, like something I’d always known.

“You’re Andrew Clayton,” I gasped.

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, a fact. It was the steadfast truth in a mass of stormy confusing waves. I grabbed on to it and let myself be buoyed by it before the churning waters of craziness pulled me down, possibly never to surface again.

He held me, frozen, in his piercing grey stare. The waves of disbelief continued to crash into me, threatening to rip my fingers from their hold on the insane fact about who I thought he was.

He simply nodded.

And in that moment, that crazy impossible that was now the possible moment, I noticed something which seemed so minor in comparison. Now that I was no longer drowning, now that I was able to take a breath, I noticed that his trainers, the same grey trainers that he had been wearing in the market, and on both occasions I had been with him, were laced up with dazzling silver laces.

I looked into his anxious face; any thought of his oddly changed laces slipped from my thoughts and my hand seemed to move away from my face with a life of its own, just like it had that first time I had awkwardly tried to wave at him in the market place. His eyes reflected the same wary, incredulous and frightened expression that I knew he could see in mine.

My hand reached towards him and where my fingers should have brushed the grey leather of his jacket, they moved through the drizzle like he wasn’t there at all.

He leapt up, moving quickly away from my trembling, outstretched hand.

“So now you know, do you still want to know me?” His voice was a whisper and his expression was one of such agony that I felt my heart breaking into a million pieces for the pain that was etched into every shadow and line on his face.

“Yes.”

There was nothing else to say and by the time I had finished my breathless, shaking response, he had gone.

Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.

The word repeated itself over and over in my head as I drifted back from the park in a kind of vacant stupor. I was alone again and the waves of craziness had managed to weaken my grip and I was once again cast adrift in the impossibly of it all.

This couldn’t be real.

But he was real enough that I had spent three evenings now in his company.

Yet he couldn’t be real.

How could he be? If he really was the Andrew Clayton who had committed suicide, then he was dead. He had been dead for the last fifteen years.

I turned my key in the front door and the sound of the lock mechanism clunked, snapping me out of my trance and throwing me back onto the warm, comforting shore of reality. I walked into the hallway and realised I felt chilled to the bone, as if I really had been soaked through by a grey, uncontrollable tempest.

My mum and dad were already sitting at the table; they greeted me with their usual smiles as I fell into my chair. I took a deep breath, ignored the warm sands of reality and threw myself back into the waves, tightening my grip onto the impossibleness in the middle of the storm.

“You know how David Pearson in Year 10 killed himself the other day?” My mum and dad froze, forks hovering in front of their mouths, obviously unsure where my question were heading. “Do you know anything about the students a few years ago who also committed suicide?” My ears were full with the sound of crashing waves and screaming winds, but my parents could clearly hear my voice.

My mum nodded sadly. “You mean Sherrie Hoyle and Andrew Clayton?”

“Yes,” I whispered, and I struggled to hear her through the storm.

“I can tell you a bit about Sherrie,” Dad piped up. “She was Pete from works daughter. It was a real tragedy, you know? Pete found her a couple of days before her first exam. She’d hung herself in her bedroom.”

An awful silence descended upon the table as I fought against the beating waves.

“And what about…” I struggled to say his name, struggled to keep holding on.

“Andrew Clayton,” my mum repeated his name again. “I don’t really know much about it. I think Laura had just started at school when he died; he was much older than her. His poor parents still live in Newlington and rumour had it that they weren’t able to identify him after...” she trailed off, obviously uncomfortable discussing gruesome teen suicides at the table in the middle of a meal.

“Why do you ask, love?” Dad raised his eyebrows, his face full of concern.

“It’s for school.” It wasn’t a total lie but I still struggled to meet my dad’s inquiring eyes. “Mr. Sharpe reckons that our art class should create some kind of memorial to remember them.”

“That would be nice, dear.” Mum pushed her chair back from the table and went to rinse her plate at the sink. Her tone of voice made it clear that she wanted the conversation to be over.

Straight after tea I made my excuses and went up to my room. I could still hear my mum’s words echoing round my head, his poor parents weren’t able to identify him. A cold shiver rocketed up my spine and my stomach felt like it was twisted up in knot of seaweed left behind from my struggle with the storm.

Could the story my mum remembered really be about Drew?

Here in my room, back in warm reality, I did what I always did when faced with something I couldn’t quite understand. I flicked open my laptop and pressed the power button.

Three minutes later, still in comforting reality, I was back doing something normal. Typing words into the search bar and moving the mouse from one website to another was something that made me almost feel like myself again. After all, surfing the net was the kind of thing I did most evenings.

But I couldn’t find anything.

I was used to a mass of global information surging beneath my fingertips and yet I was struggling to find pretty much anything at all about a fifteen year old, local teen suicide case. I know the internet wasn’t much cop back in 1998, what with no social media, but surely there would be discussion forums or something mentioning it, wouldn’t there?

In the early hours of the morning I banged the screen down in defeat. I needed to know something more if I was going to him again and I had promised that I would. I needed something that could help me begin to wrap my head around all the impossibleness. Something that would convince me that he was real, something that would assure me he would be waiting for me and that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.

The next morning I prised open my aching eyelids to the sight of sunshine. I’d tossed and turned all night, struggling with horrible dreams about trains hurtling full pelt through the darkness and white corpses with blazing grey eyes mangled into a heap of smashed arms and ruined legs.

I looked at the clock. Damn it, I was late.

I dashed to the bathroom, threw cold water on my face and dragged my toothbrush round my mouth. I tried not to focus on my reflection in the mirror; I knew my usual dark circled eyes would look fifty times worse today after my late night internet search and the nightmares.

I shouted a quick goodbye to my mum, grabbed a muffin from the bread bin and my school bag from where I had dumped it next to the shoe rack the night before. I slammed the front door behind me in desperation to get outside into the fresh morning air to try and shake the cobwebs from my sluggish brain.

I met Jess at the corner and made a real attempt to chat with her as normal. She must have noticed how horrendous I looked but, being the genuine friend that she was, she never mentioned it.

In Philosophy, after lunch, I made paid more attention than usual. I was a conscientious student and always listened hard, trying to get a grasp on the ideas and theories of the ancient scholars, but today’s lesson about purgatory seemed to hold a deeper significance.

My final period of the day was personal study. I wasn’t in the mood to hang out in the common room and Jess, who could tell I wasn’t my usual self, let me go home without much complaint.

It was three o’clock when I got home and I was pleased to see Laura’s car was on the drive. My sister and I had never been the closest of siblings, there was a nine year difference between us and whilst I was growing up the age gap had seemed more like an age gulf. But, since she hadn’t really come home from university, I found that I missed her more than I thought I would. We still weren’t close enough that I could confide in her, but at least we were now able to sit and have a proper conversation.

Laura was in the kitchen brewing a cup of tea and helping herself to the tin of good biscuits my mum kept at the back of the pantry. She whirled round when she heard my footsteps, and when she saw it was me she grinned, revealing bits of chocolate digestive stuck in her teeth.

Gross.

I grabbed a coke out of the fridge and flopped into the chair opposite her. I took a slurp from my can and thought through what my mum had said the night before at dinner, that Laura had been in Year 7 when Drew had died.

I contemplated how to bring up the subject without sounding like a morbid weirdo. Mr. Sharpe’s sculpture idea pushed its way forward once more and, once again, I knew that this was my in. So, faking excitement about my involvement in the memorial sculpture project, I easily brought the conversation round to the names of the students we were aiming to remember.

“I can’t believe another kid has killed themself at Newlington,” she mumbled through a mouthful of Custard Cream. “There must be some kind of curse on that place.”

Of course she remembered both of the other suicides. She had been in Year 7, just as Mum had said, when Drew had died and she was just finishing her A Levels when Sherrie had hung herself. She remembered Sherrie’s story the most and told me pretty much the same thing that Dad had said.

She didn’t know anything new about Drew.

Disillusioned, I looked down at my can as I took another swig. When I glanced back across the table, Laura’s face was screwed up, deep in thought.

“I kept scrapbooks of local news and stuff whilst I was at school,” she said, cramming yet another biscuit in her mouth as she stood up. “If Mum hasn’t slung them out they’ll still be in the big storage box full of my crap in the back of the garage.”

I stayed sat at the table sipping my coke, trying to settle my churning stomach, as she headed out to garage.

If she found those scrapbooks and there was something in it about him, an article, a picture maybe, then I would know for certain, sat here at our kitchen table, that Drew was in fact Andrew Clayton, the boy who had died fifteen years ago.

“Here they are!” she exclaimed triumphantly, coming back through the door with her arms full of ring binders. She threw the pile of dusty folders on the table in front of me. I coughed wafting the dust out of my face and sat, as patiently as I could, as she began to flick through them trying to find what she was looking for.

“Here we go,” she said, pushing the purple, dog eared folder towards me. I bent my head over the double page spread and began pouring over the cut out articles that my eleven year old sister had trimmed out of the paper and neatly stuck down all those years ago.

They all said what I pretty much already knew.

There were a few extra details here and there but nothing that would help me put my manic whirl of thoughts in order.

“I think there’s some more on the next page,” she commented, absentmindedly, as she flicked through a different book full of old cinema tickets.

I turned over the page and all of the breath that I hadn’t realised I’d been holding in whooshed out of my lungs, leaving my heart galloping in my chest and my head spinning.

At the bottom of the final article was a small, grainy black and white photograph. The boy in the photo grinned, self-assuredly, towards the lens, full lips stretching over picture-perfect teeth.

It was him.

Drew.

The boy in grey.

Impossible.