DEATH IN BARKER’S FIELD

An odd little tale that spans a long life time.

She looked so pale as she sat in her wheelchair. Almost grey, he thought. And so still. Not dead, but almost, and old enough for the truth, surely

“I meant it when I said it that first time, what, seventy years ago,” he whispered, and she blinked. Almost. But he knew she heard him. He knew she understood. But he continued anyway.

“When I told you that if you weren’t careful I’d find myself falling in love with you,” he smiled.

Her breath was faint, almost as if it wasn’t there.

“And I meant it, you know, my angel. I could feel myself changing with every glance I made at you, like a madness in my head.”

Her lips parted. She was thinking. She always looked like that when she was thinking of what to say. Then, when she’d arranged her thoughts properly inside her head and only then would she say them. Quietly, so that only he could hear.

“We were so young back then, though,” he sighed, “how old were we? Thirteen? Something like that, and if my old man had heard me talking of love he’d have taken his belt to me for being stupid! But it wasn’t stupid was it, angel?”

This time her eyes crinkled into a tiny smile. She remembered all right, of course she did.

They’d been on the park. It was summer and the flower beds were a blaze of colour, a rainbow on a world that had so many years earlier been dark with war. The other kids, and that’s what they’d been, kids, melted away. Tea time, he supposed, though the sun was still well in the sky, and that left just the two of them.

“And you smiled at me,” he whispered, “my angel smiled at me! And I knew, of course I knew, what I’ve known ever since.”

“Love…” The sound escaped from between her lips, the monosyllable that meant everything.

“And so the years passed and our teens became a wonderful collage of sweet thoughts and sweeter kisses…” he murmured, the years melting in his memory until they became as one.

She’d tasted to sweet and her smiles had been so bright.

And maybe she remembered too. It was hard to tell, though surely she must have. Probably, if she could have done she would have smiled and nodded, but the shadow of humour did flicker on her face for a moment. She remembered all right.

“Then the darkness fell,” he sighed, “and never was there darkness so drab and bleak, and none of it any right to exist in the sunshine of our lives.”

The tiny smile faded away. She knew what he meant. She wanted to forget it. But some things are too monumental to forget.

“Love,” she whispered. He could see that her lips were dry and he moistened them with a damp sponge.

“We would have got married,” he sighed, “but the children died. All fifteen of them, boys and girls, lovely, bright, cheerful. And we never knew why.”

A shadow wiped the least of smiles from her face. That day, way back when they were still young, had dawned and wiped every trace of joy from their lives.

“The police,” he whispered, “they said you’d killed them! You! Of all the insane things for them to even start to think, madness even after what I’d seen.”

She understood. He could tell from her half-closed eyes set so prettily on her pale face.

“I’ve always loved your eyes,” he told her, “back then and now. I said to you then that no matter what happens in the world I’d always love you. Until the day I die, I said, and I meant it.”

She moved ever so slightly. He could sense her thoughts as shades of the darkness entered them. But the darkness had got to be even darker because the wretched police said they had evidence. They even had the knife they said she’d used to slash the life out of a Sunday School class of fifteen innocent children.

“They said they were your finger prints on the handle, and of course they were! You used it to cut the cake! Of course you’d touched the knife! And there you were with the children having a Sunday School picnic on Barker’s field. The grass was green, summery like today, and the sandwiches were filled with meat paste, the lemonade more water than lemon, and the cake a Victoria sponge. You cut it into slices…”

She nodded, imperceptibly. She’d never liked him mentioning it, but it was the one thing that had marred their promised life together. And they had promised each other, to be in love for ever, to hope and dream as one no matter whatever happened.

Then the children had been slaughtered in Barker’s field

All of them!

There had been blood everywhere, young blood. He’d been the first on the scene, called by a shocked old gentleman who had come across the carnage.

And he’d seen her sitting on the grass, smiling, knife in hand, and fifteen bleeding bodies all around her.

“It was then that I wished I’d never joined the force,” he whispered, “the young woman I loved so dearly, and all that blood, all those gashed and murdered children…”

“Take … me…” she breathed.

“I knew it can’t have been you. Someone must have crept up to your little group and done the dreadful deed. So I told you, didn’t I, that I would always love you. Then and forever.”

It was in his mind as bright as if it had been yesterday. Even now he couldn’t begin to work out how she could have murdered fifteen young children, and he couldn’t work it out because he knew deep in his heart that there was no way she could have done it. Not on her own. Not without help.

“They took you to court and might have hanged you. People like you were hanged in those days. But instead you spent the rest of your life, what should have been our lives, in the madhouse.”

“Hos-pital,” she breathed, barely audibly.

“You went behind a tree,” he told her as if he had seen her do it, “you went for a wee behind that tree and told the little ones to shut their eyes because if they opened them they might see what you were doing, and that wouldn’t be right.”

She shook her head.

“I know that’s what must have happened, and then the bad man came and killed the children, blinded as they were by shutting their eyes tight shut.”

She slumped in her wheel chair. He wasn’t listening, was he? But she’d seen it all, knickers round her ankles so that she couldn’t run, and the daft one, Jonny something or other, the one they blamed for everything that went wrong, he’d grabbed the knife, she was sure that’s what must have happened… but it was all fading now, bit by bit, the past and Barker’s Field, fragmenting into insane tiles of shattered memory.

But before it went completely she saw, like a flicker of candlelight guttering and dying, the young policeman as he came from nowhere, it seemed, and slashed and tore and destroyed fifteen beautiful young lives.

“You know, don’t you?” he asked, but he was too late. The tiles of memory had faded into the monochrome of lost dreams, lost hopes, and lost memories.

It was too late for apologies and much too late for forgiveness.

© Peter Rogerson 06.08.21

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