Baildon Moor - Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Baildon Moor, October 1993

 

Three weeks into his first term, Billy invited us to his house in Baildon.

‘Make a weekend of it,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘Come over Saturday night, and we’ll go out for a few drinks. You can crash over if you like.’

Unusually, Sullivan had no gigs scheduled so once I’d finished in the shop on a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon we drove out to Baildon in my beaten-up old Land Rover. I’d acquired the Landy cheaply – almost criminally so – a few months back from a guy that Sullivan knew from the comic shop. The lack of power steering meant it was totally impractical for day-to-day driving, and it rattled once you went above forty but I’d fallen in love with it. Sullivan on the other hand took the piss, and referred to it – not without affection - as The Wreck of the Hesperus.

We bought a bottle of Scotch on the way as a housewarming present. It was the first time that Sullivan and I had been to Billy’s new house; he wouldn’t let us help him move in and instead his mum had driven up from Salford with his belongings in the back of her Austin Allegro and his bicycle strapped to the roof. She’d described the house as being “homely” and “in a quiet area”.

She wasn’t joking. We followed Billy’s instructions and drove through Bradford, north over the river and through the other side of Baildon. I was certain we’d taken a wrong turn – we had arrived in the middle of nowhere with the moors spread out beneath us like a great dappled tablecloth – but Sullivan checked the directions again and told me to take left turn past the golf course and then another left down a track. At last we came to a small farmhouse - all weathered russet bricks and a sagging roofline. It looked like something from Wuthering Heights.

‘Is this it?’ I asked. The farmhouse was the only building in sight.

‘Must be,’ said Sullivan. I parked the Wreck and he got out of the car, strode off and knocked on the door.

This lonely farmhouse was the right place after all. Billy let us in and gave us a guided tour.

‘This is the kitchen,’ he said, describing an expansive room with a huge butler sink, a chest freezer, an enormous black range and a solid pine table that would have happily seated twelve. ‘We live in here mainly; the Aga’s always on an’ keeps it warm.’

‘Here’s the bathroom,’ he said, opening a door off the kitchen, to reveal a freestanding, claw footed bath and lavatory with a high level cistern. ‘And this is the parlour’, he said as he showed us another smaller, chilly room off the kitchen. The parlour had a sofa and threadbare carpets and a stack of wooden chairs in one corner:  a hundred years ago it would have been the room saved for best, never used except when important visitors came. It looked to be the same now.

‘And there’s the two bedrooms,’ he continued. ‘But Marie’s asleep upstairs and Rudy’s not around.’

‘Marie?’ said Sullivan.

Billy blushed a girlish pink. ‘Marie’s my…well, she’s my girlfriend. We’ve been seeing each other a couple of weeks now…’ he trailed off, embarrassed.

‘Look forward to meeting her, our kid,’ said Sullivan. ‘And Rudy’s the guy you share with, right?’

‘Right. He’s out at the moment – in fact he’s out a lot, but I’m sure he’ll be back in a bit. He didn’t say where he was going.’

At that moment a blonde girl came down the stairs. Billy put an arm around her waist and introduced us.

‘Marie, this is my brother Sullivan, and this is Sullivan’s girlfriend Julianne. Sullivan, Julianne, this is Marie.’

‘Please to meet you,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ Marie said, peering at me through a curtain of blonde hair. She picked at her false nails and looked bored.

‘So how did you two meet?’ asked Sullivan.

‘Marie’s a student nurse,’ said Billy. ‘We met in the union bar on campus.’

I must be getting old, I thought. Marie looked about fourteen.

 

That night we all walked into Baildon village to the local pub. Rudy had come home not long after we arrived and he joined us for drinks. More was the pity; he was a plump, damply sweaty Southern lad with BO and thick glasses. He stared at me constantly the whole evening. Maybe he’d never met a real live woman before: I even caught him licking his lips at one point.  Honestly, he gave me the creeps.

Marie was immature and whiny; it was clear she adored Billy but she clung to him all night like a shipwrecked sailor. She held his hand constantly, sat on his lap and kissed him in front of everyone – everything about her screamed insecurity. She followed him to the bar when he bought a round, and I was only surprised she didn’t follow him to the toilet too.

 

After an uncomfortable hour, Sullivan and I made our excuses, picked up our drinks and went to play pool.

‘No way is she eighteen,’ Sullivan said once we’d reached the safety of the table.

 ‘Thank God for that, I thought it was just me. She can’t be a day over fifteen. Student nurse, my arse.’

‘I’ll have a word later,’ he said and potted two reds straight off the break.

 

At closing time we went back to the farmhouse; after drinking a few pints of cider I had I even managed to exchange a few words with the malodorous Rudy on the journey home.

We sat in the kitchen in the warmth of the Aga and Sullivan produced the whisky, which we poured into mugs and I rolled a couple of joints to pass around. Marie took a mouthful of whisky but pulled a face like a cat taking medicine.

‘Ewww,’ she said. ‘Is it meant ter taste like that?’

Billy rushed to the fridge and took out a bottle of Coke. He topped her drink up but the rest of us had to make do with tap water.

He put on a Young Ones video; Sullivan, Billy and I all had a fit of hysterical giggles at the University Challenge scene, but Marie just sat there, drinking whisky and Coke and looking blank. Rudy whistled a tuneless monotone under his breath and laughed at peculiar moments, as if he had his own private TV show running in his head.

I was feeling pleasantly mellow when suddenly Marie leapt up on wobbly Bambi legs and announced that she was going to be sick. She just made it to the bathroom in time.

Poor kid, she had looked as pale as milk and sounded as though she were being turned inside out. Billy rushed to be with her (now that really was true love in action) and ten minutes or so later they both emerged from the bathroom, Marie collapsed in Billy’s arms like a dead puppet: all clotted, dripping hair and ruined mascara.

‘Sorry…I need to take her to bed,’ said Billy

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Sullivan, passing a joint to me as he went. The video had finished and all I could hear was Rudy’s wet breathing and dull whistle. I couldn’t bear to be alone in the same room with him so I held the joint in the tips of my fingers and passed it over at arm’s length to avoid his clammy touch, and went upstairs.

Marie was out cold. The guys had put her clumsily on the bed and were faffing about what to do next; I shooed them away to give her some privacy. As I peeled off her cheap, thin jeans I was surprised to see that her legs and body were covered in hard, red bites; I’d seen something like that once before on a kid at uni who’d made the mistake of buying a second-hand mattress. Those were bed bug bites – something that belonged in Dickensian squalor, not in late twentieth century Bradford.

I rolled Marie onto her side so she wouldn’t choke if she was sick in her sleep, and covered her with the duvet.

I stumbled downstairs and scrubbed my hands in the vast sink. I itched all over.

‘Are you alright?’ said Sullivan.

‘Just tired.’ I furtively scratched my arms. ‘Think I might call it a night,’

‘Have you brought sleeping bags and stuff? You can sleep in the parlour if you want,’ Billy said, and we traipsed out to the Wreck to get our things.

The moors were like black velvet under a moonless sky.