The Slaughter

Perhaps the most accurate way to describe childhood is to call it fickle. It is a time where friends become enemies, enemies become friends, and orders are exclusively made to be ignored. My childhood certainly adhered to this rule – though, now that I consider it, it seems rather imposing to impress rules upon the time of my life when I was at my most free, unencumbered as I was by the restraints of society and the band of gold on my finger.

Experiences of my childhood are often sparse in detail, though I recall the key moments, the memories that shaped the rest of my life, and as I sit here to write this I remember one such day with particularly vitality.

It had been almost a fortnight since Toby Whyte and I had been caught on the Lonely Man’s property, and the shared trauma had bonded us.

We had stood, rooted to the spot with fear, as he excused himself from his visitor’s company and escorted us both to our houses, silent and terrifying at the same time. He reported the incident to Toby’s mother, a stout, round woman whose face had reminded of a basset hound’s from the first time I saw her. Mrs Whyte too was terrifying, but in a very physical way: she was so broad that she seemed to block out the sun wherever she stood, and it was widely reported that even breathing in the direction of her wrong side earned five slaps on the backside with a wooden spoon or, if one was particularly unlucky, the edge of a ruler.

Her face mottled in fury as she looked down at Toby, who cowered between his mother’s brutal rage and the Lonely Man’s silent anger. He was handed over, and we exchanged a brief glance that swapped apologies and wishes of luck in the sparse seconds it occurred.

With Toby gone, the Lonely Man’s attention fell on me. I cringed away from his stare.

“You’re the Barnes girl, yes?” he asked. His voice was clipped and sharp, like a dog’s bark. I nodded, too terrified to speak, too terrified to ask how he knew me. He looked at me a moment longer with an absolutely unfathomable expression on his strange face, and eventually said, “Little girls shouldn’t play in the dirt.”

He crouched low. Our eyes met, and he scrubbed at my cheek with his thumb. When he pulled away, the pad of his thumb was coated in a film of mud.

“Run along home, Miss Barnes, and be sure you never set foot on my property again.”

It was more than I had dared to hope. I lifted myself up and away, scampering along the cobbles, my heart racing in my ears. I did not tell my mother or father about what had happened; instead I locked myself in my room with my threadbare copy of Ellis Bell’s Wuthering Heights (to which I felt a particular kinship, as I shared the name of the heroine) and resolved not to go down to dinner. It was a long time before my heart calmed in my chest.

But life went on, as it so often does. The story of our capture became the story of our escape, and the story of our escape became a thrilling escapade, a gripping tale that enraptured the children of the village until they had entirely forgotten the immeasurably less interesting truth.

Our animosity, such as it was, had been ripped asunder and thrown into the wind. We were war heroes, Toby and I, bonded by terror and the threat of death. We held the watch of the other children in everything we did, and formed a group of admirers who scuttled along after us wherever we happened to go. They mostly followed Toby.

He was the youngest of three sons, and, as so often happens, it took him a long time to grow up. He was spoiled, as much as the son of a butcher can be, and it showed. While his older brothers – Richard and Trevor, twin eighteen-year-olds who resembled their mother in every way imaginable – had remained largely independent and forged their own paths, Toby had locked himself in his shell and waited.

I have always thought that he enjoyed this time, being a leader, because he was the youngest of the family, and he wanted to be in control of something. It didn’t matter that something was a group of children at least two years younger than him, and it did not matter that he shared control to some extent with me: he was happy to be looked up to, happy to be the king of his own little land.

Barely a fortnight passed. Toby was gathering his reputation like a cape around him. It deflected hurtful words and his mother’s angry blows. It was as much a suit of armour as it was anything else. And on the day that it started to rain and did not stop for almost a week, Harriet Collingwood arrived at our door.

Harriet Collingwood. My cousin, and my opposite. It was impossible to discern us to be related. Where my skin was freckled, hers was china-doll pale, free of imperfections; where my hair was blonde and lamentably thick, hers was a dark, woodsy brown, silken soft. She was a precocious, spoiled girl, aware of her own beauty, and, at sixteen years old, it was a volatile mix. I equally despised and admired her.

She was to be staying at our house for the duration of the summer due to a lengthy, complicated process I understood little about and knew only as divorce. My mother had failed to enlighten me on what, exactly, it was, and though I had asked my father he had given little by way of reply. All my mother said to me before Hattie arrived was, and I remember this very clearly, “Now, Cathy, remember to be a good girl to your cousin and do try not to crowd her. She’s very sad about the divorce” —there it was, that strange word again— “and I’m sure she’s much too old to be playing with dolls.”

My mother’s words angered me, and so it was with my face twisted into a sulking frown that we welcomed Hattie to our house.

She was wearing a rather beautiful travelling dress that only managed to increase my annoyance, and she swept into the house with a terribly lonely expression on her face, as if she was the quintessential damsel in distress. I could imagine her thoughts running through her head as dreary romantic prose – I am here, alone, abandoned in this hellish place, this ugly rut, this hovel – and felt a rush of anger scald my veins as it passed through them. How dare she look at our home, at our village, with anything less than polite curiosity?

You may read this and wonder why I paint Hattie in such a terrible light, with such an old brush, in such a disconsolate colour. It is not because I am jealous of her, but because she was jealous of me. Harriet Collingwood was a girl who acted twice her age, who lied to appear mature, and who stole from me, amongst other things, my best friend. So, you see, my hatred of her is not entirely misplaced.