Autumn Read online

  But Matthew was right. Veronica’s mother was right too. Caron had run out of options. Bob had threatened her recently, and she knew it wouldn’t be long before those threats were realised. She feared for her safety. She feared for Matthew’s safety. But she couldn’t see a way out.

  Go upstairs right now. Pack his stuff in a suitcase and leave it outside. Dead-bolt the door tonight and don’t let him back in. To hell with what the neighbours think.

  #

  Caron didn’t confront her husband. She didn’t bolt the door or change the locks or scatter his smalls around the front garden as she’d planned. Her sudden elation ended as quickly as it had begun because, when she went back downstairs to tell Matthew he was right and that she was finally going to do something about it, she found her son dead on the kitchen floor. His skin was white, his lips blue-tinged. Blood dribbled down his chin. She called for an ambulance, but no one answered. No one answered… how could that be? She went outside and screamed for help but no one came. She did everything she could to try and resuscitate her son, but he didn’t respond. She banged on next door’s window, even lowered herself to hammer on the door of Jeremy Phelps, the peeping tom from across the way, but no one helped. She found the lady from five doors down – the one with all the kids by different dads – dead behind the wheel of her car. Her kids were in the seat behind her, their lives abruptly ended before the school run had begun, all tangled-up with each other like they’d died trying to escape.

  For the longest time she just sat there on the floor next to Matthew, holding his cold hand, her brain unable to process what had happened. None of it made any sense. Foolishly she began to try and convince herself that this was somehow her fault, that this was the price she’d had to pay for thinking those thoughts, for even daring to consider confronting Bob. It sounded ridiculous, but she couldn’t think of any alternative, and no matter how bizarre her thoughts, they couldn’t match the nightmare of this terrible reality. She switched on the TV for the news, but every channel was silent.

  Eventually, Caron forced herself to leave the house again and look for help. She changed her clothes, fixed her make-up and hair, found a pair of sensible shoes, and walked into town. Everywhere was the same as Wilmington Avenue: everything silent, everything still.

  She’d been walking for the best part of two hours when she finally heard something which gave her the faintest glimmer of hope. It wasn’t much – just the muffled thump – thump – thump of music playing in a confined space, somewhere nearby. She kept walking, getting closer. And then she saw movement in a car up ahead: the only car with lights on and windows steamed up with condensation. The car rattled with the deafening volume of the music playing inside.

  Caron yanked the door open and recoiled at the strong smell of sweat and stale fast food. There was a scrawny-looking kid in a tracksuit and baseball cap behind the wheel and he sat up fast, a guilty expression on his face like she’d caught him doing something he shouldn’t. He wafted away smoke from a spliff.

  ‘Fuck me, lady, you scared the shit out of me.’

  Caron didn’t wait to be invited. She sat down next to him and closed the door behind her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you know what happened, missus?’

  ‘My son’s dead.’

  ‘I’m thinkin’ they’re all dead.’

  She just stared at him, a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue. There was no point asking anything. He obviously knew as little as she did. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Dunno. I’m scared.’

  ‘Me too. Can I stay with you?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘I’m Caron.’

  ‘They just call me Webb.’

  JULIET APPLEBY

  ‘So what time will you be home tonight?’ asked Mrs Appleby, frustrated. She stared at her daughter across the breakfast table. Sometimes trying to get information out of Juliet was like trying to get blood out of a stone. She’d always been the same.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered in a quiet, mumbling voice that her mother had to strain to hear.

  ‘You know how your father gets if you’re not back when he’s expecting you.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t help it if I have to stop back after school…’

  ‘He has to have his meal before half-six otherwise it keeps him awake all night. And you know how he likes us all to eat together. It’s an important part of family life.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Dad says so. He likes his routine, that’s all. And he likes to know where you are. He likes to know you’re safe.’

  ‘I know that, Mom, but…’

  ‘But what, love?’

  ‘I’m thirty-nine, for crying out loud.’

  #

  Juliet closed the front door and walked to her car. She could feel them both watching her, though they always pretended not to. She brushed her long, wind-swept hair out of her eyes and looked back. There they were, both of them hiding behind the net curtains, Mom in front and Dad standing just behind. He spent most of his life hiding behind Mom. Inside the house, he was king, and he’d make sure they both understood that in no uncertain terms. Stick him outside and force him to face the rest of the world, though, and he crumbled. The accident twelve years ago (which was still a taboo subject) had devastated his confidence and unbalanced his temperament. He struggled to interact properly with anyone outside the immediate family. Outside the house, Dad would always get angry or confrontational with some poor unsuspecting soul and it would inevitably be left to Mom or Juliet to smooth things over and sort things out.

  Juliet sat down in the car and started the engine. Poor Mom, she thought, looking back at her again. She’d dedicated her life to Dad. She’d put up with years of his moaning and mood swings and tempers. In some ways, though, she was just as bad as him; as Dad relied on Mom, so Mom relied on Juliet. And who was there for her? No one. On the few occasions she’d been brave enough to start talking about leaving home and setting up on her own, it was usually Mom who came up with a list of reasons why she couldn’t leave and why she had to stay, why they needed her around. It was emotional blackmail, and more fool Juliet for believing it. Her friends at the nursery told her she should just pack her bags and leave, but it was easy for them. She’d left it too late and now she was trapped in a career looking after other people’s children when she should have been raising her own. Fat chance of that happening now. She hadn’t ever had a ‘proper’ relationship. She often thought about the cruel irony of her life: there she was, a thirty-nine year old virgin, surrounded by the fruits of other people’s sexual encounters.

  A quick wave to Mom and Dad (even though they thought she couldn’t see them) and she was off. A ten minute drive into the centre of Rowley and she’d be there.

  #

  Juliet was always the first to get to work. She arrived ages before anyone else. At this time there were only ever a couple of people around, usually just Jackson the caretaker and Ken Andrews, the head of the school to which the nursery was attached.

  ‘Morning, Joanne,’ Andrews shouted, waving to her across the playground. Bloody man, she thought. All the years she’d been working at the school and he’d never once got her name right. Occasionally she thought he did it on purpose to wind her up, other times she decided he was just plain ignorant. But the fact was he continually got her name wrong because he rarely had reason to speak to her about anything of importance, and because she’d left it too long to correct him without embarrassment. To say that Juliet melted into the background was an understatement. She preferred it when no one noticed her.

  The prefabricated hut used for the nursery class had been opened up as usual. It was always cold first thing, even in summer, and this September morning was no exception. She glanced up at the clock on the wall: half an hour until the children were due. Probably twenty-five minutes before any of the other staff would grace her with their presence. As low, depressed and dejected as she could ever rememb
er feeling, she prepared the room for the morning’s activities.

  #

  Bloody hell, what was that?

  Juliet stopped what she was doing and looked up. Fifteen minutes now to the start of class and she’d just heard an almighty crash outside. It sounded like kids messing around on the concrete steps which led up to the classroom door. Juliet didn’t like confrontation, even with the children, so she kept her head down and hoped that whoever it was would go away as quickly as they’d arrived. Maybe they’d just miss-kicked a football?

  Suddenly another sound, this one very different to the first. It sounded like someone coughing. Juliet crept towards the window and peered outside. The playground was empty, the birds flying between the roof of the school building and the rubbish bins the only movement she could see. She was about to go back to what she’d been doing when she noticed a foot hanging over the edge of the steps. So there were kids messing around after all… She pressed her ear against the classroom door. When she couldn’t hear anything outside, she very slowly pushed the it open and there, lying on the steps in front of her, was the lifeless body of Sam Peters, one of the boys who’d been in the nursery class last year. Panicking, Juliet slammed the door shut again and leant against it.

  What do I do?

  Shall I just pretend I didn’t hear anything and let someone else find him? Will they believe me? Will they think it’s got something to do with me?

  Overcome with nerves, she slid down to the floor and held her head in her hands. She screwed her eyes tightly shut but she could still see Sam. She’d only been looking at him for a second or two, but there was no question he was dead. His face was contorted with pain and there were glistening dribbles of dark blood down the front of his yellow school sweatshirt.

  #

  No one’s coming. Christ, no one’s coming.

  Twenty minutes later and still no one else had arrived. Where were the other children and the rest of the staff? Juliet remained where she was, frozen in position with fear. If she waited long enough, surely someone else would come and find the body? She’d just plead ignorance; pretend she hadn’t heard anything.

  The longer she waited, the more her conscience competed with her fear. She stood up and crept towards the window again and peered outside, immediately hiding again when she saw Sam’s foot.

  But she had to do something. She couldn’t just sit here all day knowing that poor boy was out on the step.

  The main school office was directly across the playground from the nursery hut. Juliet decided she’d make a run for it. She’d open the door, run down the steps, sprint to the other building then find the head or anyone else, and tell them what had happened, despite the fact she didn’t know herself.

  She had to do it right now.

  Juliet put on her coat and, taking a deep breath, opened the classroom door and burst out into the open. Forcing herself to look anywhere but down at the body on the steps, she half-jumped, half-tripped over the boy’s corpse, landing awkwardly, twisting her ankle and almost falling over. Managing to just about keep her balance she ran across the playground with the all-consuming silence ringing loud in her ears.

  Ken Andrews was dead. She found him in the corner of his office, buried under a pile of papers he’d knocked off his desk in his death throes. She also found the school secretary’s corpse in the short corridor which ran between the office and the staff room, and in the staff room she found three more dead teachers.

  In a vacant, disorientated daze, Juliet roamed the school, struggling to function, barely even aware what she was doing. She then walked the surrounding streets for more than an hour, knocking on doors, looking for someone who could explain what had happened. But all she found were more bodies. Children and parents that she recognised, others she didn’t, all of them dead.

  #

  A quarter past five.

  After what had happened at school, Juliet returned home before midday and found both of her elderly parents dead. Mom was in the bathroom, sprawled across the floor with her knickers around her ankles, neck twisted, and Dad, as always, was in his armchair. She’d wept for them both of course (especially Mom), and had felt a real sense of devastation and loss, but after a while the hurt had, unexpectedly, begun to fade. In a strange, perverse kind of way, she began to enjoy the freedom that this dark day had given her. She’d never had the house to herself for any length of time like this before. She hadn’t had to eat at any particular time of day (not that she felt like eating anything anyway) and she hadn’t had to sit through Dad’s choice of television programmes (not that the television was working). She hadn’t had to explain her movements every time she got up out of her chair, or tell her parents about her day at work in excruciating detail, or listen to Mom telling her what all her friends were doing and how their kids had all flown the nest and made their own lives…

  For the first time in a very long time, Juliet felt free.

  #

  Her quiet, insignificant world had been turned upside down. She’d seen hundreds of bodies and hadn’t known why any of them had died. As day turned into night she tried to make contact with her few friends, her neighbours, the local police and pretty much everyone else she could think of in the local vicinity, but she hadn’t reached anyone. Her telephone went unanswered. No one came to any of the doors she knocked on.

  Frightened and bewildered, but also feeling strangely empowered, Juliet sat alone in her bedroom on her teddy-bear strewn single bed. She gave up trying to make sense of what had happened, and so buried herself in another trashy chick-lit novel instead.

  At the end of the first day she moved Mom and Dad into the back room. When she woke up on the second day she dug two deep holes in the garden and buried them both. Dad had always said he wanted them to be buried in the same plot, but she knew Mom wouldn’t have liked that. She’d loved Dad right ’til their unexpected end, but like Juliet, Mom had had enough of him too.

  KAREN CHASE

  ‘What the hell do you call that?’

  I looked at him for a second. Was that a trick question? ‘I call it what you ordered,’ I answered. ‘Full English breakfast: bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, mushrooms, hash browns and baked beans.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like the picture in the menu.’

  He opened the menu up, laid it out flat on the table in front of him and jabbed his finger angrily at the photograph at the top of the breakfast section.

  ‘I know, but that’s only a representation,’ I tried to explain.

  ‘Not good enough,’ he interrupted. ‘I appreciate there will inevitably be differences between a photograph and the actual meal, but what you’ve served up here bears very little resemblance to the food I ordered. The bacon’s undercooked, the sausage overcooked. The mushrooms are cold, the scrambled egg is lumpy. Do I need to go on?’

  ‘So do you want me to—?’

  ‘That was what I ordered,’ he sighed, cutting across me and tapping the photograph with his finger again, ‘and that is what I expect to be served. Now you be a good girl and run along to your kitchen and try again.’

  A genuine complaint I can deal with, but I have a real problem with being patronised. I was so angry I couldn’t move. It was one of those second-long moments which felt like it dragged on forever. Did I try and argue with this pathetic little man, did I tell him what he could do with his bloody breakfast, or did I just swallow my pride, pick up the plate and take it back to the kitchen? Much as I wanted to take either of the first two options, common-sense and nerves got the better of me. I picked up the plate and stormed back to the kitchen.

  ‘Bloody man,’ I shouted as I pushed through the swinging door and threw the plate onto the work surface. Jamie and Keith, the so-called chefs, were playing football with a lettuce. They both just looked at me.

  ‘Who’s rattled your cage?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Fucking idiot outside. Wants his breakfast to look exactly the same as the picture in the menu.’

  ‘Tell
him to fuck off and get a life,’ Keith said as he kicked the lettuce out the back door. I stared at the pair of them, waiting for either one of them to move.

  ‘What do you expect me to do about it?’ said Jamie.

  ‘Make another bloody breakfast,’ I told him. ‘You’re the cook, aren’t you?’

  It was as if I’d asked him to prepare forty meals in four minutes. All I wanted was for him to do his job, what he was being paid for. If he’d done it right first time he wouldn’t have had to do it again.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. He studied the faded photograph on a copy of the menu stuck to the wall, then took the food from the original plate, rearranged it on a clean one, added another sausage and another rasher of bacon, warmed it up in the microwave, then slid it across the work surface towards me.

  ‘And you expect me to take this out to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he grunted. ‘Looks more like it does on the menu now, doesn’t it?’

  Keith started to snigger from behind a newspaper. There was no point arguing with either of the chimps I was working with, so I picked up the plate. I stood behind the doors for a couple of seconds to compose myself and looked into the restaurant through the small porthole window. I could see my nightmare customer looking at his watch and tapping his fingers on the table impatiently, and I knew that whatever I did wasn’t going to be good enough. If I went back too quickly he’d accuse me of not having had time to prepare his food properly. If I kept him waiting he’d be even more annoyed… I gave it a few seconds longer, took a deep breath, then went back out.