First chapter Clone

Then Along Came JOE

David Timmins

If you keep forgetting to close the front door, one day someone or something will come in.

The Churchyard

                                                                        2000

Down a small private road cobbled road in a quieter part of Oxford there is a small Anglican Church and wrapped loosely around it is an old graveyard which had not received new recipients for a very long time.

The more observant person would have noticed how pristine the cobbles were as if they had only recently been laid and then the contradiction in that all sorts of small pretty flowers and moss were growing in-between them almost as if this concourse had been arranged solely for their purpose . 

The church strangely despite having been closed for as long as local residents could remember was well maintained and had never been vandalized.

But the reason for this would become apparent the closer anyone got to the grounds for gradually a sense of foreboding would spread through any visitor and fill them with a feeling which was so strong that most would turn round long before arriving at the perimeter.

The fox was hungry, it hadn’t eaten for a long time but this was about to change and despite trying to prevent it saliva started to form around its mouth in anticipation of a large meal.  

It knew this area well, there were no holes for the rabbit to bolt down and the ground was relatively flat with scarce vegetation but the fox never went to deep as to why this particular animal had been stupid enough to go out in broad daylight.

Rabbits would normally stay in a colony and few would stray far away from their warren as to use the human adage there was safety in numbers but not because they would help each other if danger threatened quite the opposite, it was more that they played the percentage game.

It was an inbred instinct to realize that the greater the numbers the more chance that someone else would become the meal of the day.

The rabbit was tiring, it could feel the energy draining from its body and several times it stumbled as its feet got caught in clumps of wild grass and all the time the fox got closer.

The rabbit’s vision became clouded, the heart was beating so fast that it almost burst through the sides of the chest and gradually fear of death started to close down body functions in an effort to anaesthetise the pain that it was about to feel.

Now it was only instinct that kept it going.

The fox was now so close that the rabbit could hear the breath coming out of its mouth.

Then it saw the gate; it was wide open as if it was beckoning, it made no sense but it knew that if he could get through it he would be safe.

It was close but one last effort and then he was through.

The fox slowed, stopped, whined and pawed the ground he didn’t understand why but he could not get to the animal on the other side.

There was no physical barrier but something that was far more impenetrable.

The rabbit heartbeat slowed and it turned and faced the predator and casually nibbled some of the lush grass; the fox growled in frustration and glared at the prey that was now teasing him then he tried once more to get to the rabbit but something wouldn’t allow him to pass through.

The church was selective in who it welcomed and twelve year old Jenny Oliver was one of a small number that fitted into that bracket.

Jenny had watched the fox chase the rabbit as far as the gate and was not surprised when it could not go any further she remembered a few weeks previous when a sparrow hawk had dived from high in the sky and dropped unerringly down towards an unsuspecting pigeon then at the last minute and for no apparent reason it seemed to hit an invisible barrier.

The pigeon continued to feed as if nothing had happened and the hawk flew off totally bewildered.    

The churchyard made Jenny feel at home, part of the congregation that long ago, well congregated inside it.

The church had a soul, she sensed it, and it would look after her, keep her safe.

To her this was not a place where dead people were buried it was only their bodies that had been placed in the ground, a body was what the mind lived in, it housed what they had become throughout their lives and now all that information was somewhere else. 

She like so many generations of children before her would spend many hours reading the inscriptions on the stones.

Most were brief just giving names and dates but some contained enough facts for her to construct a story from them.

But there was never enough detail, how she wished that she knew more about the people that were so briefly described for some of them would have so many interesting things to tell her about their lives.

But the way around this was to copy the more interesting inscriptions that were on some gravestones into the large memo pad that she trundled around with her then at the end of the day she would take it home then spend time trying to find a little bit more about them from the internet. 

Imagination is a stairway to dreams and it was one of the two abilities she considered that she possessed the other one was a logical mind that found mathematics far easier than children who were much older.   

Jenny was different to most other children she rarely smiled, loathed school, and hated most lessons mainly because she didn’t understand them, that was apart from maths because her analytic mind meant that this particular subject made her shine like a star in comparison to the other pupils.

But that clinical mind meant that she had no real friends, was too serious, and never mixed, but despite all these deficits Jenny was totally indifferent to all these shortcomings.

Only later did the word autism arrive into her life, they said that it was only marginal but this offered an explanation for what other people called her deficiencies, no one actually said anything to her about the A word but she was very good at hearing what was said behind closed doors.

Her mom said her ears were as big as a brickhouse spider, actually she used another word instead of brick but Jenny didn’t like those sorts of words something her mother was aware of which was why she used them a lot.

Jenny didn’t like her mom.

Until that word arrived most people would have put the fact that she was withdrawn down to her dad leaving when she was only five and her mother’s drinking problem getting progressively worse from that point.

Her mom never held her or said she loved her but she was fine with that because she had never felt any affection for her mother and that applied to most other people as well.

Then there were the men that her mother sometimes brought home from the pub where she worked as a barmaid; how she hated those nights.

On those occasions Jenny would go to her to her bedroom and lock the door, she never used to lock it but that changed when one of her mom’s men friends tried to grope her while her mom was getting some more cans from the local shop but he stopped pretty quick when her trainer connected with whatever was between his legs.

He called her a bitch and said she would regret doing that.

At thirteen Jenny was small and skinny for her age and would scream if she was forced to wear a dress much preferring a pair of worn out jeans and trainers instead.

The denim shirt was from a second hand shop just round the corner from her where she lived it was a place that she liked to brows in and the woman in there never bothered her in fact they let her have the top for free. It was one of the only times she said thank you.

Not straight away but a few days later.

Her hair was quite dark with just a tint of auburn, it was thicker than it should have been but only because it was quite matted due to lack of washing and brushing.

Her eyes were bright blue and focused with a sharp intensity at whatever she was looking at and stayed in that position far longer than was necessary, most people found it disconcerting but as a social worker tried to explain to her mother this was because her mind lagged several seconds behind the incoming signals.

Her mom said she was weird.

She was pretty when a smile crept across her freckled face but she wasn’t pretty very often.

The churchyard was her favourite place it was where she was at her happiest.

It was a warm mid-summer day when she met the man with the white hair    

It happened while she was sitting on Mr James grave which was so big that she needed to climb up a set of built in stone steps to reach the plinth at the very top where she would sit down and dangle her legs over the side.

It was big because this was because it wasn’t a tombstone in the normal sense but a vault and she assumed that what remained of Mr James was inside.

The only reason she knew it was a vault was because the manufacture had left a small brass plate on the side saying just that but what she wasn’t sure about was if Mr James was standing upright inside it or lying down.

She considered both possibilities but the answer would never be clear cut because Mr James wife, two sons, and a daughter were inside with him.

It didn’t seem right that they would all be piled on top of one another but if they were in a standing position would they be placed so that they were be facing in the same direction or would they be looking at one another.

That latter might be a bit scary because there wouldn’t be much left of them by now because the date Mr James had died was over one hundred and twenty years ago and his wife only two years later.

The inscription said that she missed him so much and wanted to be with him again.

The first time she read those words it made her cry.

The vault was in a central position and when she sat on the top it was possible to see nearly the entire cemetery and especially the five graves that intrigued her the most but not because of the inscriptions carved on them in fact quite the opposite.

The graves were parallel with a much wider gap in-between them than most other graves and what made them unusual was that there were no dates on them just the first names of five women or as she considered later perhaps they were only babies or children that had died.

She thought long and hard as to the reasons behind this lack of information and spent hours just walking from one to the other then back again in an effort to find a clue to who and why.

Then in a moment of inspiration it came to her, the moss and weathering on the two outer graves were totally different, one had aged badly but the other seemed relatively new.  It was possible that all of them had died one after another but with a lot of year’s in-between the timeline, maybe one generation after another.

There was another strange thing about the graves, every week the five graves had fresh flowers placed on them, but she never saw anyone put them there.

Mary was the first to be buried, followed by Sarah, Jane, Rebeca, then finally Suzie; she knew them off by heart.

The warmth was starting to fade as the sun edged towards the horizon; this was her clock, nearly time to go home.

She sighed another night of arguments with her mother unless she had drunk too much already and was sprawled in an ungainly heap across the sofa.

‘That was a long sigh for someone of your age.’ A man’s voice said quietly.

 She turned to where the sound came from and was startled to see a young man with pure white hair sitting right beside her his legs dangling over the side of the vault in exactly the same manner that hers were and his gaze was focused in the direction that she had been looking.

There was a silence as she gathered her thoughts and a long gap before she spoke because there always was.

‘I never heard you coming.’

‘Most people don’t,’ he replied.

‘No one usually comes here.’

‘You have to be a very special person for the church to let you in, quite a few people start to   walk towards the gate but only a few are allowed to enter and you saw what happened to the rabbit and fox.’

‘Yes, but I don’t understand.’

‘Understanding for most comes with age, and to answer your question on Mr James they are all lying down side by side.

Mr James was a really nice man and was lucky enough to live a long happy life surrounded by people who loved him. I remember that his nose was quite red especially when he got old, it was brought on mainly by drinking too much whisky; this despite only buying the best’

‘I can’t remember asking you about how they were buried,’

‘You never did, but all the children that sit on there have more or less the same thoughts and eventually they always ask that question,’ he looked at her and smiled, ‘so now I give the answer before they ask.’

‘Oh, I have never seen any other children in here just the man with long beard that walks all-round the cemetery checking every stone as if he is searching for someone.’

‘You’re the first to come here for a very a long time but the man with the white beard is Mr J Redding and he is looking for his daughters grave, she died when she was only seven, his memory is quite bad now, I suppose I should help him but it gives him something to do.’

‘Oh that’s such a shame. Do you live close by?’

  ‘In the chapel on the opposite side of the church, maybe you could walk up there tomorrow and I could show you around and tell you all about the people who are in the cemetery; if you look through the trees you will just about see the tallest spire where I live.’

She looked really hard in the direction he had indicated and could just make out a terracotta spire.

‘I can see it,’ she said as she turned back towards him.

But the man with the white hair was no longer there he seemed to have disappeared in an instant; still the following day she would see him again.

Jenny was about to start home when a strange thought came into her mind and she walked to the far side of the cemetery where there was a small hill with primroses growing on it.

Spread randomly among the flowers were some of the oldest graves, so old that many were leaning at different angles and others had surrender to the laws of gravity and rested peacefully on the ground mirroring the position of the people who lay beneath them.

She moved slowly past each one and then she found it a stone at such an angle that she need to get on her hands and knees to read the well-worn inscription and she read it out loud.

‘Here lies the remains of Mr J Redding and his wife June both have joined their daughter in heaven, may they all rest in peace.’

Somehow she was not surprised; tomorrow she would remind the man with the white hair to help Mr Redding remember where his daughter was.

And she only had to wait a few hours until she met him again.

The prettiness stayed with her all the way home.

But the prettiness disappeared when she got home, that man was there and her mother wasn’t.     

Was it the next day when she found herself  she running to the churchyard, it seemed longer and something was slightly different for once she was inside the gate a new type of warmth surrounded her as if a favourite blanket had been wrapped around her body and how secure and loved she felt.

Jenny sat on the end of the vault that the James family were in and swung her legs backwards and forwards so that her heels banged reassuringly against the stonework.

Was that children’s voices she could hear, but no children ever came here not in all the time she had been coming.

They were calling her, and by her name how could they know her name it didn’t make much sense, they shouted for her to come over to them.

It would so good to have friends and they were all about her own age she, ran as fast as she could and they all gathered around her as if they had been her friends forever.

‘You know my name but I don’t know yours.’

Of course you do,’ the dark haired one said, you know all our five names you see them every time you come here but let’s play; we have lots of things to show and tell you then later we will go and see John Smith.

He is such an interesting person.’

Soon there would be six children’s graves in the churchyard.