This Song is for You

(Loosely based on Grimm’s The Juniper Tree)

Ken and Eileen Roach were a lovely couple. Everyone said so, everyone that is who didn’t know or cared not to know about the gaping hole at the heart of their relationship. Even those close friends and relatives who knew about the hole were amazed at the couple’s loving resilience in the face of such deep shadow, and unlike so many people who find that their strength and union is built on sand rather than on firm foundations, Ken and Eileen simply wouldn’t let the darkness at the heart of their marriage tear their relationship apart, choosing instead to face their enemy in a committed search for the one thing that could complete the turn of the seasons in their lives. That simple thing was a child.

Ken and Eileen Roach lived on what had once been a decaying council housing estate in a small post-industrial town to the north-west of Birmingham, an estate that was by degrees being regenerated by a mixed bag of home owners, buy-to-let investors and housing trust managers. They took pride in their home and without the expense of youngsters nipping at their heels they were able to fill their lives with activities designed to displace their mutual sense of loss and longing. They tried keeping a dog, but found the urban sprawl too bleak a thing to impose on such an innocent creature. They kept a cat just long enough to form a deep, surrogate attachment to the creature’s aloof singularity, before Eileen watched Mister Tibbles play a one sided game of tag with the postal service van one rainy May morning. Ultimately, facing the reality of time’s drip southwards, and the sharp scythe wielded by the grim reaper of domesticated animals, the couple found solace in their passionate love for one another. Their love was born of hope and that hope always took the form of imagined blue lines and smiling doctors, but their loving was in vain.

As Ken and Eileen grew steadily into the trunk stiffening years of their mid-thirties, Ken, moved by an unconscious desire to nurture and grow, turned the back garden of their modest home into a vegetable grower’s delight, with rows of broad beans, green beans, carrots and parsnips swelling with each alternate kiss of the sun and caress of summer rain. Both he and Eileen particularly loved the smell of their garlic bed and the way that sunlight thickened the broad, upright blades of their maturing crop. Man and wife tended their plants, made sure that their supporting canes were securely tied, weeded and hoed beds, watered and pricked out, and through their horticultural therapy they began the process of contemplation, of imagining their lives lived forever in the shadow of the hole.

They decided on one last shake of the dice. Ken and Eileen, both being able to work in full time jobs, saved and scrimped and carried each other all the way to the fertility clinic, where they found sympathy, helping hands, many months of pain and many dashed expectations. But hope is a powerful thing. As the couple’s time of fecundity faded, and as their reserves of money and physical strength began to dwindle, Eileen prayed to every saint under the sun for a child. Just when her faith was beginning to crack under the intense pressure of wanting, of needing, she was suddenly and wonderfully rewarded. On her final visit to the clinic she was greeted by the beaming face of her consultant, all of which made her death nine and a half months later, shortly after the birth of her son, that much harder for Ken to bear.

Bear it, however, he did. Following a polite if sparse cremation service held in the clean but anonymous halls of blonde wood and magnolia paint at the local crematorium, and with the memory of the pastor’s mistaken belief that his wife’s name was Aileen twitching behind his eyes, Ken carried out Eileen’s last wish, which was to have her ashes scattered on the garlic beds. Her posthumous instructions were quite specific and Ken dug her ashes deep into the soft brown loam while his infant son sat wrapped in soft, white baby wools in his buggy, gurgling at the sky and staring out at the vaguely muscled shape of his perspiring father. The boy was called Alan, being as close to Eileen as Ken could get in the memorial naming of his son, and Ken perspired a great deal over the next few years bringing him up single-handedly.

Ken found company difficult, preferring the routines of parenthood, work and horticulture to the efforts and strains inherent in the pursuit of conviviality and social exchange with his peers. The seasons passed in a confusion of school uniforms and shoe sizes, just as much as they passed through the ever present need to prepare flower beds, to stake out fresh young plants and to harvest.

Through it all the boy matured into a quiet but strong thirteen year old who was never ashamed to scratch the dirt out from under his fingernails after grubbing up the last of the late potatoes. Ken still grieved for his wife, but the years made the tears taste less bitter and fall less frequently, and with his strapping son rapidly becoming his closest friend, he began to feel in his bones an old, familiar stirring. As young Alan blossomed, finding girls and music and the dreams of unchecked possibilities breasting the far hill scapes of his world view, so too Ken determined to be a part of his son’s emerging life. He allowed himself to be dragged back into the maelstrom of human connectivity.

In short, following a cock up in the parental chauffeuring rota for one of Alan’s school discos, Ken first, and quite literally, bumped into, then dated and finally married Helen Morrison, the mother of one of Alan’s classmates. For her part, Helen, who was recently divorced, saw in Ken a stability sadly lacking in her first husband, a stability backed up by a solid job, a ripe vegetable patch and a bank account in which her new husband had accumulated the not inconsiderable proceeds of a life lived quietly and productively.

At first, when the cherub’s blush still burned crimson upon the new Mrs Roach’s cheek, this new nuclear family, being father, son, mother and daughter, enjoyed the full warmth and vigour of recent fusion. Ken loved his son and did his best to welcome his new step-daughter into their lives, treading carefully and methodically through the minefield laid out before him by a new wife with strange new ways, by his own teenage son and by a new teenage daughter, about whom he knew very little.

Helen loved her daughter and, although giving a certain amount of leeway to the bachelor boys and their antisocial habits in the early stages of the marriage, she soon set about ordering the world according to her own particular preferences. This largely consisted of ensuring that her husband made generous provision for the necessities of life, and in ensuring that young Alan understood clearly and irrevocably that teenage boys were the scum of the earth.

Helen’s view of youth was entirely sexist. She favoured her daughter in every way that she could and, when faced with the sullen and unresponsive glottal brutality of a pubescent teenage male, Helen rapidly came to the conclusion that something had to be done about the boy. If her primary aim in life was to secure her own happiness, her secondary aim was to ensure that her daughter, abandoned as she was by her own father, should become the sole heir to the Roach family fortune.

Alan’s behaviour took a rapid turn for the worse, adding fuel to the fire of his step-mother’s dislike and resulting in ever increasing levels of intolerance and maltreatment. Between the two of them a low-level, guerrilla war was declared. Helen Roach was a mistress of dissembling and guile, and so ensured that poor, short-sighted Ken’s view of the wider world was unadulterated by fact. She left him with the glossed impression that all was well with his personal kingdom and that Alan was a perfectly healthy, if moody, teenage boy.

The one saving grace amid the intense but unseen brutality was Lucy. She was quite unlike her mother, and although ravaged by the same hormonal imbalances and certain confusions that beset Alan, she tried hard not to allow herself to be brow beaten by her mother’s general attitudes and specific goals, although her mother sought to make her daughter complicit in her disapproval of her step-son as a way of protecting both of their interests. The truth was, however, that Lucy had known Alan since they first started primary school together, and although she had never thought of him in terms of love during the occasional friendships of their early years, now that they were both at senior school, now that they were bound up together by contract, she found that she did love her step-brother.

Whenever she could she tried to soften her mother’s blows and to create an oasis of calm at which she hoped the two of them might meet and overcome their differences and find some common ground. Unfortunately, as she and her step-brother grew up together and prepared to leave school at sixteen, the antagonism between step-mother and step-son only grew worse. Helen was determined that Alan should leave home at the earliest opportunity and made her plans accordingly.

In those last months before Alan was due to finish at school, Ken started to feel his age. Where once he could dig for hours on end and spend time out of doors on the coldest or wettest of days without complaint, he now found that his bones and his muscles, complained ever more loudly. At the end of a sullen afternoon of black clouds and driving rain, Ken stood by the back door dripping from head to toe and he turned to his wife and said, “You know, I don’t think I can keep this garden going anymore, not like I used to”.

Helen looked up briefly from the game show that she was watching on the kitchen television and nodded in his general direction. After a few moments, during which Ken struggled to reach down and pull his galoshes off, she turned to him, cigarette in hand, and said, “Maybe it’s time we had a change. Why don’t we do like those tele gardeners and have it done over. I mean, we could have a nice patio or some decking, plant a few flowers and shrubs, and you could have a small veg patch up by the shed. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to stop growing things, I know how much you love it, but what if we had somewhere nice to sit of an evening and have a glass of wine? What do you think?”

After a long hot bath and a stiff whisky Ken sat and pondered the garden. One part of him wanted to keep the vegetable patches exactly as they were, but it was a part of him that had been a long time buried under the turned topsoil of family life. He fetched one of his gardening books from an alcove shelf in the living room and leafed through the sections that showed keen gardeners how to build walls and fill holes with hardcore, and as he read the hints, tips and instructions, Ken realised that his weary bones ached for a change. It was a good idea and he told Helen just that, much to her pleasure and satisfaction. Ken started to sketch out plans for a patio. It would be somewhere to sit under a broad, green, canvas brolly on hot summer afternoons, somewhere that he could rest and admire the shapes and flights of colour that would fill his new flower garden.

The following weekend Ken returned to the damp soil and started to dig his vegetable patches one last time, but instead of preparing the soil for fresh planting he dug out footings and cleared the way for a bricklayer to come round as soon as the weather permitted. Over a couple of weekends he and the bricklayer constructed a wall and piles of hardcore, soft sand and gravel were deposited on the driveway. Ken and a reluctant Alan began to lay the base of their new patio right on top of the once blooming but now abandoned garlic patch in which the first Mrs Roach’s ashes lay buried.

The next Sunday evening, with both of the Roach boys quite worn out by the wheeling of barrow loads of hardcore into the brick curtained hole where the new patio was taking shape, Helen Roach suggested her husband go down to the pub for a couple of beers. While not a common thing for her to do, she had, of late, started to encourage her husband to spend the odd evening in the lounge bar of the Red Lion, especially on a Thursday when his inevitable armchair snoring disturbed a particularly good night on the box. In making her offer, which seemed at face value to be a kindness, she knew perfectly well that Ken would go and that he would stay in the pub until closing time. She also knew that Lucy would be out at a friend’s house until nine o’clock, leaving her at home all alone, alone with Alan, who was at an age when he still preferred a set of headphones in his bedroom to the embarrassing company of his father in the pub, no matter that his father would pay for the beer.

Helen also knew that Ken would be uncomfortable with the idea of accompanying his son because of the inconvenience of age, for although the landlord sometimes turned a blind eye to underage drinking, he always kept Sunday evening as a child free haven for the exhausted parents of the parish. The family ate supper in tired silence, after which Helen washed up, Ken accompanied Lucy to the main road and Alan lay down on his bed with a motorbike magazine and the latest hard-ass bass lines thumping through his stereo headphones. The only sound that disturbed the otherwise quiet house was that of Mrs Roach using the electric carving knife to dismember the remains of the beef joint ready for the making of soup later in the week.

Alan nearly jumped out of his skin when his step-mother opened the door to his bedroom without knocking. He was even more surprised when, instead of standing there and making sarcastic comments about the state of the room, she smiled and asked him for some help.

“Sorry to disturb you, love, but I think I’ve broken the Moulinex, do you think you could have a look for me?”

Alan leaned over, killed the stereo and hauled himself wearily to his feet. As he walked past his step-mother he looked at her quizzically, saw nothing but bland middle aged smugness, and trotted down the stairs. Behind him Helen Roach’s smile broadened into a black grin and her eyes flashed with the fire of pure hatred. She felt as though the blood coursing through her veins had been infused with raw, unadulterated gunpowder. It was as if, having opened her mind to the dark side in her plotting and scheming, she had welcomed in the spirit of the lycanthrope, although she remained sufficiently cold-blooded not to have changed her shape.

In the kitchen Alan unplugged the carving knife and checked the fuse. Finding nothing wrong he plugged it in again at the wall and hit the start button. The twin electric blades flashed back and forth just as they should do.

“Oh”, exclaimed his step-mother, “Well, it seems to be working now. I don’t know what could’ve happened. They just stopped.”

“Yeah”, muttered the boy. “Might’ve overheated”.

“May I”, said his step-mother, taking the electric carving knife from him gingerly, and before Alan could nod his agreement or say another word, Helen Roach turned the blades to the horizontal plane, brought her arm up and embedded the knife’s whirring blades in Alan’s neck.

The struggle was brief. Alan saw the knife come towards him, but his mind couldn’t relate the physical position of the thing with the possibility that his step-mother intended to harm him. By the time that he did make the connection he was sinking to the floor and losing consciousness, his head and shoulders wrapped in an old bath towel that his step-mother had thrown over his head as she struck to soak up the inevitable streams of blood.

The incision and the severance of head from body was reasonably neatly done despite the violence of the electro-mechanical blades, a testament to Helen Roach’s culinary dexterity and carving skills. She soaked up the blood and spillage, tidied up Alan’s ragged edges, and with the needle that she usually used to finish stuffing the Christmas turkey, she loosely sewed Alan’s head back onto his shoulders. Then she put his body into a hooded top to hide the seam, and propped him up in a chair at the kitchen table.

By the time that the kitchen was spick and span once again it was one minute to nine and part two of her plan was about to commence. On cue Helen Roach heard a key in the front door lock, followed by the muffled sounds of Lucy taking off her coat and shoes, and padding towards the kitchen in her socks. The door swung open and Helen Roach turned from the kettle that she had just filled and asked, “Nice time, love? Fancy a cup of tea?”

Lucy nodded and went over and sat opposite Alan’s body, while her mother took a mug from the tree beside the kettle, crossing her fingers as she did so. Neither mother nor daughter said anything, preferring to listen to the hubble and bubble of rapidly boiling water, until, with the steam rising and tea bags in cups, Lucy’s mother asked Alan’s body if it wanted a cup of tea as well. Alan’s body, in perfect mimicry of a real live teenage boy, remained silent and morose.

“He’s been like that all night”, said Mrs. Roach. “Came down here just after you left complaining of a headache. Do you think he’s nodded off?”

Lucy asked her step-brother if he was awake and receiving no reply assumed that he had fallen asleep at the table.

“Typical boy!” she snorted, reaching over to prod him awake. Her fingers pushed into the flesh of his shoulder, but instead of meeting the firmly relaxed muscle of a live body, they melted into soft, lifeless flesh, and so began the slow twist and turn of Alan’s corpse as it loosed itself from the temporary vice that held it between chair and table. The cadaver started to slide grotesquely to the floor.

Lucy’s eyes opened wider and wider as Alan’s body disintegrated in front of her. His trunk and limbs began to slide towards the floor while his head fell backwards, suspended in the hood of his jumper. The stitches holding Alan’s head to his neck snapped, making a brief and unnerving sound like the hem of a skirt ripping on a twig, and the hooded top spilled backwards, snagging on a splinter in the chair back, so that, after an awful, oozing second or two of scraping and sliding, there were two dull thuds and all that Lucy could see was a disembodied hoodie containing her step-brother’s severed head hanging from the back of the kitchen chair directly opposite where she sat.

Lucy screwed her eyes shut, willing herself away from this gruesome dream, praying for the darkness to smother her like it had when her real father had first left home and she used to run to her mother’s bed for comfort. This nightmare, however, had no happy ending and just as she tried to unglue her eyes and scream, her mother slapped a hand over her daughter’s mouth and whispered very softly in her ear.

“You did that...you broke your brother...which is very bad, very bad indeed...you’re a horrible, nasty little girl...but Mummy still loves you...Mummy still loves you...Mummy will always love you...”

The scream buried itself deep inside Lucy, tearing reason and rationale apart as it bit savagely into her psyche. Slowly, and in a maddening whirl of confusion, recrimination and tears, Lucy begun to piece together the utter horror and enormity of what her mother was saying.

Realising that her daughter had briefly entered into a state of extreme shock, Helen repeated over and over again by rote the mantra that blamed Lucy for Alan’s death. She was determined to ensure that Lucy, in taking the blame upon herself, would be her accomplice and her alibi, whatever it might cost in short term discomfort for them both.

Lucy wept and wept throughout the ordeal, hanging onto her mother’s arm with feral strength as they dragged Alan’s torso out into the garden and rolled it into the pit that had been dug for the patio. Then, while Lucy, working on auto-pilot, cleaned the kitchen up again, her mother moved the torso, the head, the hoodie and two black bin liners full of soiled cleaning materials to an as yet unfilled area in the new patio base and proceeded to bury Alan’s mortal remains under lumps of hardcore and a layer of gravel.

In the two hours between finishing the evening’s murderous chores and Ken’s return from the pub, Helen Roach’s insidiously persuasive skills were brought to bear on her daughter, convincing Lucy that she had killed her step-brother, but that her mother loved her so much that so long as Lucy never uttered another word on the subject of Alan’s disappearance, then she would protect her forever and a day.

Fortified by her mother’s understanding, loyalty and love, and by two Valium and a large, sugared brandy, Lucy managed to crawl up to her bedroom just a few moments before Ken stumbled through the front door. Lucy locked her bedroom door, buried her head under her pillow and gently wept herself into a fitful chemical sleep.

Monday morning’s breakfast was unusually quiet. Lucy sat in silence at the kitchen table staring at the early morning news on the television while her mother busied herself with toast and tea, smoking the first cigarette of the day as if her life depended on it. Ken was nursing a dull head and an urgent desire for sugary drinks, but lacking the wherewithal to solve either problem he did his best to bury himself in the nutritional information on the back of the cereal packet. As the minutes ticked by and Helen Roach sucked down on the butt of her third cigarette, it appeared as if no one in the Roach household had any intention of going to work or to school that day.

Eventually, however, Ken rose from the table, went out into the hallway and hollered up the stairs.

“Alan! Shift yourself! You’re going to be late”.

Hearing nothing from the boy’s room, not even the disgruntled creaking of bed springs, Ken trudged up to the boy’s room, ready to give him a bloody good earful. It wasn’t the boy, however, who had to bear the brunt of his hung over ill temper.

“What do you mean, he’s gone off with his mates?” yelled Ken at the two women in his life.

“Just upped and went”, said Helen, “right after you went out. Said he’s sixteen and can do what he likes. Took a bag and went... didn’t he, love?”

Lucy tried to bury her head in the neck of her school blouse, her cheeks and ears blushing crimson as she thought about the body under the gravel and how she had killed her step-brother. She couldn’t look at her step-father, knowing that if she did she would unravel, so she mumbled an affirmative and rushed out of the room, collected her school bag from the foot of the stairs and ran out of the house, her eyes brimming with tears.

“This bloody family’s falling apart”, said Ken, giving his wife a look of sheer exasperation. “I mean, he never even said goodbye. And Lucy? What was all that about?”

“I know, love, but they’re teenagers, all hormones and attitude. Alan’s bound to come back in a little while, when he needs something. He’s just flexing his muscles, growing up a bit, that’s all. You’ll see.”

Helen Roach put her arm around her husband’s waist and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Why don’t you phone in sick today. Stay at home and have a rest, you’ll feel better.”

Ken did just that, croaking down the phone to his boss to complain about a twenty-four hour bug. Then rather than sit around moping, he changed into his gardening clothes and went outside. Ken worked like a Trojan all day long, driven on by the ingratitude of all those he loved, each one of whom left him when it suited them, all that is except the second Mrs. Roach. By tea time he had laid all of the remaining hardcore, covered it with gravel and soft sand, and raked it level and smooth so that he could begin laying the slabs the following weekend.

That night, unseen by her mother and stepfather, Lucy took Alan’s St Christopher medallion from his bedside table and buried it where she and her mother had interred Alan’s broken body. Before laying the medallion under the gravel Lucy kissed it and silently begged Alan for forgiveness. As she did this she was surprised but strangely comforted by a strong smell of garlic that rose up from underneath the levelled hardcore, and for some reason that she didn’t understand she felt as though something good might come of this mess after all, although she couldn’t imagine what that might be.

A few days later Lucy was listening to a late night radio programme on her MP3 player while lying in bed trying to fend off the nightmares that inevitably came after dark. The DJ introduced a new song by an unknown singer, a song that was, he said, all set to take the clubs and the charts by storm. Even at Lucy’s tender age the seeds of cynicism had begun to take root, especially now that hope seemed so far away, and she mentally went “whatever” as the DJ waxed lyrically about the new voice on the block. However, as soon as the DJ shut up and the haunting melody of the new song began to drift through Lucy’s headphones she knew that this was something different. Lucy had never bought into the concept that art or music could change lives or move mountains, but with every hook and drum beat, with every lilting nuance of the boy’s soft voice, she sensed a shift in the world and she knew instinctively that she had to download the song immediately.

Within a week the song was being played everywhere. It was an instant hit, making number one in charts across the world and appearing as an essential tune on play lists and set lists wherever good music was played. A video appeared on television, but this offered no hints as to who the band might be, showing only shots of raw and wild nature in its many coated splendours.

Strangely, there were no public images of the boy, and no one who commented on popular culture seemed to have any idea who the singer or the band might be. Even the record label was a mystery, no one in the industry having heard of Allium Records. In the end it didn’t matter that the source of the recording, the name of the band and the identity of the singer were unknown, because you couldn’t walk past any radio, stereo or television without hearing the sublime melodic phrasing of the hit of the year.

In the Roach house the new wonder song inspired a strange mixture of emotions and reactions. Ken Roach was indifferent to any outside stimuli, wrapped as he was in a blanket of personal suffering. That his boy, his one link back to his beloved first wife, should treat him in such a cavalier fashion, whatever the promptings of teenage hormones, was too hard to bear. He tried to respond to his wife and step-daughter, but apart from the odd brief conversation he preferred to occupy his time with work, well away from the sounds of the radio. If he had heard the song while at work or in the car, it simply hadn’t registered.

Not that he would have heard the radio in the house. Immediately after the disposal of Alan’s body Helen Roach found that coping with her daughter’s stress and grief was far harder than she had ever imagined it would be. Rather rapidly, Helen Roach found that dealing with the world through a haze of cigarette smoke and vodka fumes was the only way in which she could make sense of her strange new world order. The booze and the nicotine worked wonders on her disturbed state of mind.

However, even with the benefits of chemical sedation she dared not turn on the television or the radio unless Lucy was in the room in case she heard about crimes that might remind her about the body under the patio. It was, of course, impossible that anyone had reported Alan missing, with the only two people who knew about the boy’s unnatural disappearance being complicit in the cover up.

Ever since the moment when Helen convinced her daughter that she had knocked her step-brother’s head off, Lucy sought solace in her own company in her bedroom. She withdrew from her mother and no matter how desperate the look in her mother’s alcohol skewed eyes, she would not be drawn back into the bosom of her mother’s awful love, which is why, as the days passed and the new song hit the headlines and the airwaves, the only person who knew anything of it or enjoyed its strange and comforting melodies was Lucy, who saw no reason to share her comfort with anyone else. Apart from the tinny hiss from Lucy’s headphones the Roach household was as silent as the grave for weeks after the murder.

The world of popular music moves rapidly at the best of times, with one hit wonders appearing and disappearing without trace all too frequently. This new song was, however a phenomenon, sitting at number one in the charts in England for week after week, during which time the unknown band were awarded a succession of silver, gold and platinum disks, a host of awards, and plaudits of the most outrageous kind. It was inevitable, therefore, that even Ken’s indifference and Helen’s defensive walls would be breached. The sheer volume of air time made over to the spiritual harmonies and spectral tones of the song made it impossible for anyone to ignore forever.

Ken first became aware of the haunting but strangely comforting melody down at his local pub one evening a few weeks after Alan’s rude and abrupt departure. As he sat on his own on a stool at one end of the bar nursing a pint of bitter, ignoring the world from behind a face fit to curdle concrete, he suddenly started to hear the sounds of people’s voices around him. For the last few weeks he had shut out the sounds of life, preferring the solitude of personal contemplation to the banality of human contact, but here in the soft tawny light of the lounge bar at the Red Lion those trivial voices broke through on the back of an ethereal sub tone that slowly built up throughout the evening until, towards closing time, Ken realised that he was listening to the same song being played over and over again on the jukebox. This song, a song that he had never heard before but seemed to know instinctively, filled him with warmth and life, and quite to the barman’s shock and pleasant surprise, Ken ordered his last pint with a smile.

Unlike her daughter and now her husband, Helen found no comfort in the wonder song. She remained firm in her insistence that neither radio nor television should be switched on during any news program, telling her husband that the world was full of too much bad news already without adding to her misery. However, when Lucy was at school and Ken was at work, Helen watched daytime soaps, chat shows and old black and white films because she felt safe in the arms of Richard and Judy.

Unfortunately, Richard and Judy betrayed her one Tuesday afternoon by reporting on the wonder song and the mysterious singer, playing the track three times during the programme. The melodies stole their way from the television right into the core of Helen’s brain, lodging there like a worm under the bark of a rotting tree. This worm wriggled to the beat of one particular song, and as it wriggled so it nibbled away at what remained of Hel