A strange woman in a cream coloured jumper and brown skirt had smiled at her with her black fillings and gappy teeth, seeming like a never ending tunnel from which occasional words tried to make their escape through these small holes. She yawned, making her mouth look like the black hole of Calcutta, but they had been on the train together since dawn. Her face was bulbous with red pimples which should have existed in a volcanic atmosphere.
A young boy sat next to her. Her son presumably. His scruffy short hair flopped forward onto his forehead. Fidgeting in his worn out jeans and T-shirt that brightly brandishing the name of some band she had heard of and recalled hearing the sound of their music, if you could call it that, thrash about her brother's room, when he was still at home.
Martin's disappearance was a mystery. It had been nearly two years since he had been run off, or so they thought. She calculated in her brain that he should be twenty by now. She recalled his sharply defined, pale face, his chin so straight, you could put a ruler to it. He should have left home by now, got himself a job, as he was quite frequently ordered to do so. He tried working for his father, but his heart wasn't in it. Cows and wellingtons weren't his style. He was more at home in a pair of skin tight black jeans, which stretched over his long, thin, cane-like legs combined with a nightmare shade of black T-shirt, adorned with a gothic character, so close to death his bones stuck out. Not dissimilar to Martin, she thought. His clothes, walkman and a few other prize possessions were missing from his room the morning after the fight. Her mother had spent months trying to find him, but to no avail, she had tried to warn her mother that she was wasting her time.
The maternal love that she had longed for was also dead now. Nothing worked out as she had planned. The torture of having her son ripped from her was too much to bear, and the pills and whiskey invited this originally strong, powerful, dominant creature to enter her frothy, foamy bathtub death..
Squeezing between trees and sweeping past forests, where unbeknown to anyone, a body lay, hidden by a thin layer of soil and autumn's heavy chameleon of leaves. No one walked their dogs there, it was too far out of the way and the pathway that had once existed was now drowned in mud and hidden completely from view. The dogs opted for the park on the other side of the farm in preference to the dark dank, dense forest, where wild animals lurked like in a fairy tale wicked witch's garden, their minds felt safer there.
It would be a while before the missing persons report would be filed, and even longer before the police would be combing the area, following the land up from the farm yard, to the empty desolate space of barren land that lay behind it, then on to the oasis, through the fields, where golden flames burnt in the summer but were now just a very badly cut short back and sides. Follow the dirt path where only one person had trod before, even if two had made the journey.
She slumped back, being eaten by the soft seat, remarking a tear in the velvety material that covered it. Someone named Gaz had informed everyone that he had been there in a spray of red graffiti on the wall by her right arm. A Twix wrapper lay crumpled and void next to the crushed carton of juice. Somebody else had had this feast, Jane was starving.
It had been five o'clock in the morning when she ran from the house. The rain dripped off the tip of her drenched peak cap. The insignia could barely be read in the darkness of dawn. On an average day, her father would be awake at this time, feeding the cows or tending to the sheep. Business hadn't been very successful at the time. He blamed it on the vegetarians, but they weren't increasing their consumption of the crops he patchworked across his land. Today wasn't an average day. She hadn't slept all night, voices came to haunt her in her mini-series dreams that strung together the horrors of the crime she had committed. And her father would never awaken again.
