Mo Sandford

Chapter One

The sea. The sky. The bare land. It seemed to be all that was left after the mine was closed and dismantled, but secreted away in a corner of the stark post-industrial landscape, there was an elegant house. I used to live there.

A copper tinted beech tree copse had been planted to shield Heathcott from the colliery, but the dirt track between them, which tied workplace to heritage, was too well trodden to be hidden. Self-sown saplings straggled across the path, but gaps in the mature trees allowed it to be glimpsed from the house, looking West. My room faced East and I was grateful. The big field which had once been a paddock pressed against my window, with hedgerow oaks and a broad horizon meandering around its untidy tussocks. I was happy there, to begin with.

Forty years have passed since then, struggling with my memories. I had often thought about writing them down, but life there had been so extraordinary, I imagined that no-one would believe me. Then it occurred to me to use them in a novel, where I could disguise truth as fiction and set my readers some problems to solve. So be warned: brace yourself with a stiff drink or a strong coffee; my story is compelling.

Let’s begin with the child of the house. Gideon. His dysfunctional family made life there difficult, especially after his parents divorced. Dinner time with only one of them was especially trying. In protest against their separation, he had made the dining table his own personal battleground. Fish fingers, lined up like soldiers on his dinner plate, were left cold and droopy. An accompanying packet of plain crisps lay unopened, its contents flattened and crushed after a burst of temper.

"Eat your tea.” Gideon’s father was speaking, but his son’s only appetite seemed to be for mischief.

With his finger, Gideon had poked a pea around the rim of his plate, then flicked it towards his pet budgerigar. It fell from his perch like a battered fairground shooting target. Birds didn’t matter much in Gideon’s estimation. They had no souls or feelings, just instincts. His father had said so. 

“If you want to play silly buggers, so can I.” Ronnie glowered menacingly at his son, putting his cutlery down with a clatter. Gideon watched him reach across the table, take his own knife and then cut the cannon ball pea in half. “Half a pea now and the rest later with supper, or else.”

Gideon placed a piece strategically between his front teeth and nibbled at it like a rabbit. If looks could kill, his Father would have skinned him alive before skewering him across an open fire to roast. But no more words were exchanged. Ronnie got up from the table and left the house. His parental visiting time was over. 

That was how life was with Gideon: I always found him a difficult child. He was nine years old going on ten, but his lifelong loneliness was as set as the worry lines across his forehead. Love would always signify hurt to him, so he did his best to avoid it.

Instead, he played games with other people’s lives. Lodgers, like me, who had invaded his home and stolen his privacy. We were a necessary evil for wealthy families like his when they fell on hard times: he made it plain that he hated us.

Gideon was my landlady’s child. They lived on in Heathcott, with ex-husband Ronnie calling in spasmodically after the divorce. Linda had been forced to take in paying guests, providing her with cash instead of family life. Her ‘ex’ was a nightclub owner, a low-grade gangster, who drove an ostentatious Mercedes around their Northern coastal town. Linda dared not take another lover. Ronnie was a jealous man, who would have killed anyone trying to take his place. It wasn’t much of a life for any of them, I thought, despite managing to hang onto their house.

How proud to be Heathcotts, the family had been. They had risen from humble backgrounds to build their very own minor mansion, eighteenth century and elegantly Georgian. It was their badge of affluence and prestige, until the early1980’s when Gideon’s parents had broken up and Linda had found the house expensive to maintain. That was where I came in.

I was a student at the local Art College, looking for digs with a few of my classmates. We could hardly believe our luck when Linda accepted us as lodgers: Heathcott was a dream compared to normal student accommodation. We occupied all but the ground floor, which was distinctly marked ‘Private’. That was the family’s apartment. Our rooms were beautiful but stripped bare, like empty compartments in a treasure chest. Theirs were colourful but packed with tat.

Heathcott sat steadfast on top of a small hill, protected by its stand of trees: below it, a sprawling council housing estate appeared to be holding it under siege. All else of any other note in the district was gone, like the colliery which once financed the house and its owner.  Only the jobless miners and the slag heaps remained. The industrial landscape was being levelled and transformed into a leisure park when I was there: I watched huge ‘Caterpillar’ digger machines eating into the waste tips, opening up sulphurous red hot vents to cool the fiery interior. White heat glowed in the dead of night, accompanied by mechanical monsters which wheezed and groaned in an unseen ballet, carrying on the excavation relentlessly. I soon found the house an unsettling place to live.

The burning slag heap loomed menacingly over Heathcott: it was a living thing, like an erupting volcano. Its enormous size and violence felt ever present and began to fascinate me, although Gideon and his family seemed impervious to it. I started to go there regardless of the danger, photographing its terrible beauty, but in case anyone tried to stop me, I told no-one. I found our wasteland Vesuvius irresistible and visiting it felt like getting high on cocaine. “Surely,’ I thought, ‘one day, Gideon will be tempted to venture up there too.’ 

Just like a child, I loved playing cat n' mouse with the earth movers. “Now you see me, now you don’t,” I shouted at the drivers, but no-one heard. I felt like a will o’ the wisp dancing in the dust clouds until inevitably, I got stuck. My feet broke through blackened crust into the opening of a smouldering underground pit, cooking my boots near to meltdown. All around, the ground pulsated with the power of the machines: I was terrified. Where exactly were they?

Panic stricken, I managed to jerk myself free, but still I could not see. So I moved around quickly, fanning my feet in the acrid air like a fanatical Morris Dancer, trying to stop them burning. Anyone watching might have thought I was completely mad, if they could have seen me through the fog of chemicals and smoke. But then then fear gave way to huge excitement - it was deliciously dangerous, up there on the slag - and next day, my dramatic photographs were a wow at college. I seemed to be onto a winner, until a tutor put my trips to the site into perspective.

“You idiot, you could be killed there. If you fall down a hole again, you could be smothered by coal dust or poisonous fumes, or trapped there and roasted alive. And what if you trip over in front of a digger machine? You’d be crushed, wouldn’t you, like being run-over by a steam roller. You don’t have to die for the sake of your art. Be sensible!”

So that Sunday, I returned for a session free of workmen and machines. The site was desolate and eerily quiet. Without the tracked vehicles stirring dust storms, I could look beyond the slag heap's dark scar to the sea, or study the elegant house below me that I felt so privileged to lodge in. Then when I looked around, I realised that I was standing in a vast wasteland. At last, I was beginning to understand the lie of the land.

The working coal mine must have governed all the land usage and communities in its vicinity, but stripped bare of all industry, there was nothing left. Workers had become unemployed and families were struggling, while I trudged around aimlessly with a camera. Sulphur gas and fumes had yellowed the featureless ashen landscape into a sickly grey mush. 

I decided to return to the house, but disappointment made me careless. I took a casual step forward. The ground welled up as fluid and my right leg was sucked down into deadly liquid slag. How easy it would have been to have drowned in that muck, with black porridge pouring down my throat. Choking. Blinding. Gone. But danger can prompt a split-second response, an instinctive fight for life. I threw myself sideways, counterbalancing the suction, breaking its grip. My body heaved backwards in a spurt of geyser-like mud, followed by a belly-flop: squirming like a worm, I heaved myself onto solid ground.

“I am an idiot!” I shouted, for failing to heed my tutor’s warning. Heathcott was indeed a treacherous place. I should have moved away, instead of re-living quicksand horror every time the nearby beach sagged into liquid underfoot, or soil quickened into bog out in the sodden countryside. The sky glared back at me in sultry shades of grey, warning that winter was on its way, but I stayed.

Now, in telling my tale, I can see that the dour landscape, the house and all that happened there, did conspire to haunt me.

*

Excerpt from the novel ‘Accidental Murder’.

Gerry had been grumbling to himself all morning about the stupid things his wife Catherine said and did. No-one at the pub had wanted to listen, so as usual he drank his lunchtime pint alone, propping up the bar at its far end like any number of sad old men similar to himself all over the world. The thought of this absent company gave him little comfort. He quite enjoyed being miserable alone. After another pint, he had devised at least half a dozen ways to be rid of his tiresome wife. Unfortunately, walking home later, most had been forgotten and the juiciest (drowning her in the bath after making mad passionate love) abandoned (she always locked the bathroom door). When he reached their drive, he braced himself for another afternoon of tedium, followed by annoying comments over dinner and then bed, alone.

As soon as he opened the garden gate, however, it was obvious that something was amiss. Two dogs were barking and another was crying miserably by the side of the pond. Had a heron flown in to steal some fish and spooked them, he wondered? There was a pool of water around the foot of the supporting wall, as though something had been threshing around inside. He shouted “shut up” at the dogs and went over to investigate. His wife’s favourite blue trainers were poking up over the rim.

Another excerpt from ‘Gideon’s Game’.

The kestrel carried his victim aloft by its head: the rest of the rodent dangled, its useless legs twitching as dappled wings rose up in an arc skywards. Copper coloured and quietly magnificent, I watched the hawk race across the dunes with its prey until it became a tiny spot and gone. The sky had been dazzling: when I looked down again, after-images blinded me with red, green and black shifting shapes. I sank to my knees, focussing on the sand by my feet, bleached white and dry like crushed fossilised bones. The air was still. The sea was calm. The beach had worked its soothing magic on me like it always did.

I decided to walk back to the house. Some of the journey was along a dull minor road, but much of it was along field boundaries and footpaths cut centuries ago by fellow travellers. I knew the way well, which was reassuring as the sun was low. Before setting off, I watched the advent of a splendid sunset fill the sky, reflecting in the cool still waters beneath my feet on the cliff top. There was barely a ripple on the dead flat calm until in the distance, I saw a flash of bright water as mammals dressed like fish pirouetted in a maritime ballet. Dolphins. A pod of them. How privileged I felt to share in their exuberance. It was almost dark when I turned for home. I had no idea of what would await me there.’

*

A final tit-bit from ‘Accidental Murder’.

The narrow road leading to the river was awash with surface water, so Gerry drove cautiously. His  dipped headlights threw only a feeble beam, giving little comfort in the oppressively black night. Trees lined the lane on one side, thrashing the power line looped beneath them whenever the wind gusted to gale force. The other side appeared to be bare. Gerry wondered if a wall of flood water was waiting to break free and engulf him. “Grip your hands on the wheel and concentrate on the road ahead,” he told his jittery self. “Drive.”

Watching his progress towards them from under a roadside tree were two roe deer, but Gerry was too preoccupied to notice. His car seemed to be going down into a dip, where the water was muddy brown and bubbled up around the car menacingly. Fear made him cry out.“Can’t turn around to go back; can’t reverse; have to keep going forward.” Behind him in the car’s wake followed the deer, a mother and her fawn. 

The engine spluttered as he ploughed on until suddenly there in front of him, rising up and out from the saturated night, was a bridge. “Perfect,” said Gerry aloud. “I can shelter underneath it and have direct access to the river.” A nearby sign read ‘Nature Reserve.No cycling. Keep dogs under control. No canoeing.’ Underneath, ‘Beware Deer’ was scrawled. Unbelievably, two slender shapes shot past: after they had crossed the river they paused to look back, as if to tell Gerry to hurry across too. He followed and parked the car on the opposite bank’s higher ground. The deer watched until he came within a few metres from them, before melting back into the dark woodland. When they had gone he felt bereft.

Did Gerry ever realise the horror of what he had done? Perhaps he did by that bridge, when he shared an understanding with the deer. Briefly, his guard came down and he felt something - before plunging into even greater depravity.

*

Without giving the plots away and spoiling them, there is a fact that is pertinent to both novels. My stories stem from personal experience and in other words, are not wholly fictional. Gideon’s Game was sparked by hearing an inexplicable child’s voice calling out “Mummy” in a mansion house, more than forty years ago.Accidental Murder stemmed from a ‘what if?’ idea after I had an accident where I almost drowned. The old saying that life can be stranger than fiction has certainly been true for me.