I pulled into the gravel car park of the Beaumont Arms and went into the public bar. I climbed onto a stool and ordered a large scotch. There was one other customer in the place, some kid in dirty green overalls playing the fruit machine. A bottle of lager was on the table nearby, a cigarette feathering in the ashtray.
I looked at my watch. It was still not yet twelve. I rattled my empty glass on the wooden bar.
I helped Rob drag the body along the edge of the quarry. I held the right arm, my fingers sinking into the cold flesh, and watched Tom’s baseball boots lay down a trail of broken plants and ragged grooves.
Rob had hold of the other arm. It was his idea that we throw Tom from the top of the quarry. The shoreline below was littered with large slabs of shale and other debris and the ‘fall’ would explain the wound above Tom’s ear.
When we reached the spot where we had earlier spied on Tom, I let go of his arm. But instead of flopping to the ground, the arm moved slowly and for one mad moment I thought Tom might still be alive.
I looked over the edge, at the pool of dark blood that had formed around Tom’s head as we had watched life drain out of his body. We would have to go back and bury it later.
I looked at Rob. “We can’t just throw him over the edge,” I said. “It’s Tom.”
He looked at me with hard eyes. “He’s dead, man. He ain’t going feel nothing.”
I looked at the stranger before me — even his voice had taken on a different texture — and for the first time I felt scared. “We should go back, tell someone.” Then, “It was an accident...”
“No,” said Rob calmly. “Everyone knows that I never liked the spoilt fucker. Picked on him. They’ll just think I took it too far this time.” He sounded like he had always known that he would kill him one day.
“But it was an accident.” I had to believe that, for it to have been anything else was beyond my comprehension.
I looked at Tom lying in the undergrowth. Most of the colour had drained from his body but I could see where I had held his skinny arms, the impressions of my fingers deep bruises in his flesh.
Rob grabbed Tom by the ankles and nodded at me. “C’mon, get a hold of his arms.” I took hold. Rob counted to three and we hefted the body off the ground. He moved his arms to the left and grunted at me. I realised he meant for us to swing the body out over the edge. He started counting again, his voice a painful echo in my heart. “One... two... three...”
The body seemed to hang in the air for ever. I didn’t hear it hit the ground.
Tom’s body was found later that evening as the sun fell behind the hills above the quarry and turned the clouds a deep purple so that they looked like bruises floating in the sky. His father had got worried when he had not returned at dusk and, knowing that he had taken off with his new boat, had made straight for the quarry, assuming that Tom had just forgotten the time.
As he walked down the dirt track towards the pond, the spokes of the dying sun picking out the acid shapes that whorled around the breaks in the surface, he realised with mounting horror that the small figure lying in the shale, a twisted arm outstretched to the water in grotesque imitation of a dying man reaching an oasis, was the broken body of his only son. It was a realisation that was to tear his heart from his chest, again and again.
When I returned to the quarry later that evening it seemed like the whole of the village was there, etched into the landscape by a string of brilliant white arc lights that hovered in the darkness like giant fireflies. The sounds of whispered conversations drifted in the air and half-raised arms pointed to the spot where Tom’s body had fallen.
I looked up at the edge of the quarry and saw disembodied faces staring back at me from the bracken. I wondered if the tracks made by Rob and I as we had dragged the body up the hill had been scrambled by these ghouls.
I looked over the faces of the people that were nearest the pond. Their eyes burned with a religious intensity, as if they were waiting for a spiritual cleansing in the murky waters before them.
On the far side of the pond I could see Rob standing next to Tom’s father, tears burning on his cheeks like diamonds embedded in the skin.
The following morning both Rob and I were questioned by the police. I don’t think that they ever really suspected us of having anything to do with Tom’s death, but as we’d been the last ones to have seen him alive, we’d made sure that our stories were in sync just in case. In the event, the police didn’t appear to be interested in finding out what had happened and were happy to absorb the tragic accident explanation that had passed silently through the crowd the previous night.
But far from being relieved at the turn of events, the wall of silence that had been erected around Tom’s death served only to cast a dark shadow in my heart. Although I had not dealt the blow that had killed him, I was as guilty of his murder as Rob, and that guilt pumped through my veins with an intensity that would burst me awake at night in a cold sweat feeling that my head was about to explode.
Rob and I did not speak about the events of that day again, but when I saw him in school, his face open and bright, I immediately understood that it was me who would have to bear the burden of guilt for both of us.
The following November an opportunity for atonement presented itself in the shape of a school science project — a time capsule.
The idea was simple: between us the class would collect a selection of items that best represented the year — a newspaper, magazine, records, pages from a diary, photos — that would then be buried in a specially built chest in the school garden, to be exhumed in the year 2000 when a reunion party would be held.
My mind immediately locked into the possibilities and I volunteered to provide some photographs. On the way home that night I talked Rob into helping me out.
Following Tom’s death the council had finally caved in to pressure from the parents in the village and decided to do something about the quarry, earmarking it as a landfill site. Work was due to start in the New Year. It was my idea to take photos of the area for inclusion in the time capsule. One of my ideas, anyway — Rob would have to wait to hear the other. I arranged to meet him at eight the following Sunday morning.
As we walked down the dirt track the smell of stagnant water assaulted my nostrils. I turned to tell Rob that I had never noticed the smell before and caught him staring at the spot where he had felled Tom. His eyes seemed to be locked inside his head and his face was bleached of colour. I turned and followed his stare to the edge of the pond. I swore I could see the impression that Tom’s body had left.
I swung my rucksack from my back and sat on the shale. I took out the cassette recorder and slotted in a fresh tape.
“What’s that? I thought we were going take some photos,” said Rob. He had stopped several feet from the water’s edge.
“Later,” I said. “We’ve got something else to do first.” I pushed the jack of the microphone into the socket. I cleared my throat, but as I tried to speak my words seemed to spin in the air like dust and vanish before reaching the microphone.
I rewound the tape and started again.
“This is a confession,” I began. “On the twenty-fifth of August, 1976, I, George Lowell, and Robert Irwin murdered Tom Willis...”
“What the fuck!”
I turned off the cassette recorder.
“Rob, we’ve got to do something. I’m a nervous fuckin’ wreck.”
“Shit. You didn’t do anything.”
“I was there,” I said, the calmness of my voice betraying the drumroll of my heart. “I’m as guilty as you are. Rob, we threw him from the top of the fucking quarry!”