A Season For Everything by Matthew Fairman (e reader txt) 📖

'That used to be the old fire station.’ he thought to himself ‘and after that it was a video shop. The one on the corner was the butchers and that became a nail bar. In the end all we had were nail bars and beauty salon. Nothing of any use to anyone any more.' He kicked at a flattened can as he walked along, it bounced and rattled up the street. 'All people want is shit. Shit, shit and more shit. They don't really know they're actually alive.'

A narrow lane cut through to some garages and led around to the back of an abandoned factory and their derelict workshops. He crossed an open car lot that was used by some of the townsfolk as a popular dumping ground. Weeds had begun to reclaim the concrete surface that was crumbling and pock marked in places. An upturned sofa, it's lining torn and the springs exposed. Car tyres, a shopping trolley, a stack of half burnt pallets on a sodden mattress. A rusting yellow generator forgotten, filthy and flyblown. Itself a victim of the numerous types of failed contracts, lost opportunities and half hearted regeneration projects that came and went and never came back again. The money finally running out. At the end of the lot was a muddy path through some tall nettles. It was well used by dog walkers and teenagers alike. The high banks of the railway tracks were covered with buddleia and blackberry bushes. Their purple blossom a distant memory, the hard black fruits on the thorny brambles a left over reminder of a summer past. A low tunnel beneath the train tracks opened out onto a disused towpath. The path ran alongside the railway line for some distance before making its own way south away from the town and up to a disused quarry. The canal was mostly dry from water except in a few boggy places. If you looked carefully enough you could still make out the trees that had been planted at even spaces along its route. Beaton always felt like he was walking through the onion layers of time when he walked along here. From the Car park to the Railway tracks and out onto the old canal.

Beaton and not been out here for years. This was the very place he had last spent time with Marie.

'How can you just up and leave somebody, no word, nothing. It was cold, inhuman, heartless.' Maybe they had been too young, maybe he hadn't always been very loving. 'I did try, I did try. I got help but she was the one that gave up on me. I never gave up on her.' After Marie was gone he had scarcely time to grieve for his loss before he had thrown himself back into his work and started reassembling his life. Memories of a young nervous girl with long chestnut curls.

'You know that I love you Beaton and what we share can never be taken away.' He paused to watch a Heron fishing in some shallow water some distance off, ‘They're quite rare now', he thought to himself but the memories of Marie still forced themselves back into his head. 'We met at the wrong time' she had said to him once, what did that even mean. ‘People meet when they meet, that couldn't be controlled.

The heron made a quick stab at something in the water with its long smooth beak. An excited dog bounded up behind Beaton and with a flapping of it's great wings the Bird launched itself up into the air. The concentric ripples on the black oily surface calmed and faded and all traces of the magnificent creature were finally gone. The Springer Spaniel stared up at Beaton, with it's tongue lolling and a keen idiotic expression.’

‘You scared her off you stupid fool.’ he muttered to himself. He patted the dogs flanks and ruffled the hair under its chin but on hearing a shrill whistle the dog up and went in a burst of excitement back in the direction it had come from. The happy, contented, dutiful dog.

The dark brown limbs of the trees were touched with fine filaments of gold. The winter sun was weak and low and the pale sky faded into a hazy brown where it fell behind the woods up ahead. He had been walking the tow path for a good while it seemed. The temperature dropped as he entered the woods. The canopy let little light through its tangled thatch to create a gloomy, heavy atmosphere. The path through the woods was high banked on either side and climbed up and away from the tow path. There was little trace of the Town here. The ground was muddy and bare and in places the path became so boggy that Beaton had to pick his way carefully along its banks to get around the wide puddles.

‘I wonder what she looks like now, its been so long since I’ve seen her. I always imagined that we would grow old together. I guess I’m jaded, I just gave up after she left. Its not like I haven’t had my chances. The desire has just disappeared.’ He had tried to find her several times, aggressively pursuing her for the first three years after her departure. He then hit a dead wall and was forced to give up. Deep down he was glad that he still, in name at least, had a wife but it was the final thing that kept her in his life. It kept him waiting, hoping and even if he knew that she was never coming back, he still at least had a wife. He believed he was in love with her and he nurtured and mourned this unrequited love until it became a source of comfort to him. After all it was the only thing he had left. So Beaton continued to work as if nothing had changed and carried on as he had always done, his home a shrine to the past. Not more than a week ago Marie had rung Beaton. She had demanded a divorce. It was as abrupt as her flight from his life and just as final. He refused. He called her a whore and swore that he would kill her if he ever got his hands on her. She had ruined his life.

The woods began to thin out and the light breaking through was a welcome change from the heavy atmosphere of the dense canopy.

'I always feel I'm being watched in here, the path sits so low, it would be the perfect place for an ambush'.

The path broke free of the trees and ran between two rude wooden fences that cut across a wild meadow for roughly half a kilometre or so. A stile gave way to a wide trackway that ran crosswise to the muddy path he was on. Heading southwards, the trackway climbed upwards as it hugged the steep brow of the valley side. The ground rolling away to his left revealed the Town below. Its rows of houses laid out before him, his whole world so small, so tiny. Maybe this was where Marie had been when she had made up her mind to leave him and never come back.

'What have I waited here for. Preserving a dead memory while she's been carrying on like I never existed.'

The clumps of trees in the distance gave a deceptive impression of how large the wooded quarry actually was. At one time the whole of the landscape was dominated by the great forests that ran the length and breadth of the country. Now the towns and cities with their surrounding agricultural and industrial landscapes had divided and scarred the land. Forcing the trees to retreat, to cluster in the nooks of valleys and crowd along the edges of rivers and lakes. The trackway approached the old stone quarry from above and from this angle the woods appeared to be little more than a small grove. The trees covering the descending slopes of the hillside formed what was a surprisingly large forest littered with the disused mining pits that had once been the main source of the towns wealth. Huge white dolomites of oolitic limestone had been heaved from the bowels of this earth and transported on the canals all over the countryside. An enterprise which was in its own way as every bit as breathtaking as the construction of stonehenge or some such ancient monument.

The entrance to the woods ran around the tops of the largest of the pits. Beaton had always been surprised at how easy it was to become lost in here as it all looked so familiar. It was if a giant hand had taken an ice cream scoop to the land and removed great concave chunks from the hillside. From these open cast mines, engineers had dug out a warren of tunnels into the valley side as it had become harder to extract more and more of the stone. Cracks in the earth and sumps were not unknown, rifts in the rich brown earth revealing the clean chalky white glow of the limestone just beneath its surface. A series of small winding paths linked the pits, they were steep and knotted with the roots of trees. Large coiled ferns grew between the boulders that were strewn all around. The ground, alive with rotting leaves, gave off a heady verdant black smell. The air here was always damp, the temperature low.

'This place always feels prehistoric.’ Beaton thought to himself. ‘It is like stepping into another world. The air feels cooler and the light, there’s something different about it. It’s like the quarry wants you to be here. I never could really explain it.’

Someone had made a circular hearth of large stones in one of the pits. The stones were burnt ashen white along their inner wall. An empty vodka bottle in a blue plastic bag. Further along he found the severed rope swing dangling, ominous, a hangman's noose. The blue nylon rope was tied to a thick tree limb jutting out over a sheer drop, its ends frayed and worn like the tail of a horse. It had been there ever since he was a boy. The walls of the cliff formed the shape of a horse shoe. He peered over the edge, it made him feel a little queazy. There were too many childhood ghosts in these woods for him to ever feel like he was alone. Another life buried beneath the one which he had created for himself. The mild mannered man that his colleagues at work knew and his neighbours saw, a million miles away from the person he saw inside. The real Beaton that Maria had finally discovered for herself. The man who she had discovered that made her leave hand never come back.

At the bottom of the pit was the wreck of a burnt out old motorbike. Somebody had thrown down some tins of paint, there were large purple splatter marks on some of the rocks below. He made his way down along the top of the cliff edge until he reached the bottom of the pit. He looked up to where he had been standing. The rope swing didn't seem so high from down here. The old bike lay on its side.

'I wonder if they drove it off the top or set it alight from down here?'

He turned over one of the paint tins with his foot. Black water slopped out onto his shoe. At the bottom of the tin was a thick hard crust of dried purple paint. Beaton made his way through the boulder field towards the base of the cliff. The cave entrance was like the gaping maw of some hungry beast. Its grimacing mouth turned down at each corner. Although at first you had to crouch to enter inside, the floor quickly fell away into a large domed entrance chamber.

‘Marie was always so scared