Wasteland
By the edge of the park was an area where a railway had once been, but now it was cordoned off by a tall fence and dense with bushes and trees. One Sunday afternoon as Chris and I were playing out, Kenny, who was a couple years older, offered to take us over there to show us two secret underground bunkers he'd discovered. We weren't sure if we believed him, but all the same, it sounded interesting.
The fence was topped with barbed wire, but Kenny brought us to a concealed slit and we were in. We headed up through the thick foliage, beating our way with sticks. Finally Kenny said, "Stop here, this is it." And sure enough, we watched him lift a hatch from the earth. Steel steps led down to a concrete room. Kenny lit a candle to show us the surround. "See, told you I weren't lying."
The walls were damp and stained, the floor spongy with old rags and newspapers. Chris found a tin that contained some rusty old tools, and Kenny found some pages from a magazine that he wouldn't let us see. He told us we were too young. "Too young for what?" Chris asked.
"For sex," Kenny said, folding them and putting them in his pocket. "Me, though, I know all about that kind of thing. I've had sex plenty of times."
Kenny was already at secondary school so he probably had. He went to some kind of special school, but told people it was because he had special talents. He hung around mostly on his own or with kids who were younger, but nobody questioned him. Kenny was pretty hard.
He sat on a chair and we watched him light a cigarette. He inhaled then blew out the smoke in rings. The light from the candle painted his face in shadows.
"This is where I bring them," he said.
"Who?" Chris asked.
"Girls, who else."
"What for?"
"For nookie, you mug."
He stood up. "Come on, let's go. I'll show you the other bunker. The next one's better. It's haunted."
We headed up, and set off deeper into the woods. The day had grown overcast.
"Watch out for the human traps," Kenny said.
"What?"
"This area's out of bounds so they put down traps, don't they. Get caught in one and it'll take your fucking legs off."
"You mean rat traps?" Chris said.
"No, human - I'm serious, watch where you step."
Chris looked at me and I shook my head. Kenny was probably only trying to scare us. But even so, the place was starting to make me nervous. I wanted to leave, but didn't want to be seen to be bottling out.
"There's guards as well," Kenny said, looking up and around him. "I've heard the army does secret training here. That's why this area's private. You get them camouflaged in the trees with rifles. If we get spotted then hit the floor. Either that or run."
"I don't know about this," Chris said, hesitating. "I think we should turn back."
"Don't be silly. It's just stuff I've heard. It's probably not even true. We haven't come all this way for nothing."
He led us on. The foliage was getting denser. Distant thunder sounded.
"This next bunker's great," Kenny said. "There's all these weird symbols painted on the walls and stuff. It must have been used by a bunch of weirdos once."
"What for?"
"Devil worship I reckon. Rituals and stuff. They sacrifice things - animals and that. Babies even. That's what I mean when I say it's haunted."
Chris stopped. "I'm not doing this. I'm going home."
He started to head back, but Kenny grabbed him. "Listen, wanker, are you fucking chicken or something?"
Chris looked down. "No."
"Well get fucking moving then," Kenny said, pushing him on ahead. "I'm leading this trek and you two do as I say, do you hear me?"
We carried on, Chris holding back tears.
After a while Kenny softened up a bit. "Listen, when we hit bunker number two I might give you a fag to share. Have either of you smoked before?"
We told him we hadn't.
"You'll like it," he said. "Smoking your first snout is like having your first legover with a girl."
We headed through a passage thick with nettles. We were there. "Right, you two can lift the hatch this time. Weighs a fucking ton."
We crouched down and heaved it open, both falling back from the effort.
Crows cackled out from the trees. Then we saw Kenny staring straight ahead. "What's up?" we asked, and a noise came from his mouth.
At first, it looked like a pile of rags hanging from a tree. Then we saw it was a man. Hovering in the air. He was dead.
Kenny shot back through the woods and we followed on screaming. Then next thing, Kenny was gone and we were lost, panicking, desperate to get out. We finally found a part of the fence and scrambled over, cutting ourselves on the barbed wire. We flagged a dog walker, Chris having an asthma attack and me stumbling over my words telling the man what we'd seen. He told us to stay where we were and ran to a phone box to get help.
Chris and I had to have stitches on our cuts and speak to the police. Looking back, though we got over it all fairly quickly. Nobody wanted to tell us much, but we found out anyway. The man had been an escapee from a mental hospital, and had been hanging there for a couple of days. We never talked about it much, managed to put it behind us.
Kenny, on the other hand, never seemed the same again. Not to us anyway. He mostly avoided us; a nod in passing maybe, that was about it. It affected him, and we soon learned why. His own dad had killed himself in exactly the same way.
A couple of years later, my family moved out of London and I lost contact with Chris and everyone else. Bumping into an old friend years later in the nineties, I heard Chris became an electrician, got married and moved to Australia. Kenny, I heard, stayed with his mum until she died. He never really settled into any kind of work and did a few years in prison. Quite sad really.
I'm thinking of all of this because yesterday down in London on some business, I took a mad whim and visited my old area for the first time in decades. I was eleven when I moved away; I'm thirty eight now.
Getting out of my car and walking around, it was quite a shock. The woods had gone. So had the park. So had the street where I grew up and several streets around it. A retail park and a housing estate were there now. If I tried to pinpoint the vicinity where we'd seen the man hanging, I wouldn't have known where to start.
I sat in an empty cafe and had tea and a bun. I stared out the window as a light rain fell over the half-let retail park and the blocks of flats behind. The area was unrecognizable. I almost wished I hadn't returned.
"We're closing," the woman said, turning the sign on the door.
I left.
As I reached my car, a man shuffled past me on the street. Khaki jacket, growth of beard, Tennents Super. I stopped and watched him as he went. He, in turn glanced over his shoulder for a second before carrying on. There was something about him - I was almost sure.
"Kenny," I called out. But he had gone. Turned onto the estate.
Video: Kamikaze – P J Harvey
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