The Brightlings

3. A new name for everything

The village green narrows at the southern corner and leads into a quiet lane that is almost completely shaded by trees. Felix is already tiring of Cookie's constant chatter, as they walk past a row of identical bungalows, which are the newest addition to the village, and slightly out of place in terms of their design. The grey-haired residents are out in their gardens, pruning rose bushes, mowing their lawns and washing their cars. Each bungalow displays a poster in one of the front windows. The bold red lettering reads 'NO FESTIVAL'. 

Beyond the houses the tarmac soon runs out, and the surface of the lane becomes an uneven gravel track with overgrown grass verges on both sides. Clusters of tiny droppings around the many potholes indicate that this lane does not hold much in the way of traffic danger to the local wildlife.

Felix is still carrying the walkie-talkie, and he attempts to clip it to his belt. He barely touches it when the loud squelching sound starts up again. He looks closer to check if he has pressed a button or if it is damaged in some way. There are no signs of any cracks in the plastic casing. It must be the battery. He bangs the side of it with his hand. The squelching stops after several seconds, and is replaced by a very faint voice. Felix holds it up to his ear, nervous that it might once again make the louder noise. He can just about make out what sounds like snippets of a conversation. He can't hear what they are saying, but they sound excited or angry. He can't work out which. The voices suddenly rise in tone and volume, and then follows a sudden clattering noise and another blast of squelching.

Stupid thing.

He wonders how they can sell a toy that does that. It'll make some poor kid go deaf one day, although his brother is already doing a good job of that himself, what with his headphones and Lucy's old hits tapes from the 1980s.

"Told you it was broken," huffs Cookie.

They walk on for several minutes, leaving the village behind them, and stop briefly so that Cookie can climb a gate. The bright sunlight through the gap in the hedgerow is very appealing, so Felix joins him, standing on the bottom bar with a view down across a blanket of grassy meadow towards a swathe of dense dark woodland. There is a herd of cows lying in the shade at the bottom, and he notices a high red brick wall through the trees to the left, that appears to run the whole length of the field and beyond. 

Cookie has spotted it too.

"What's in there?" 

"It must be the grounds of the old manor house. Gran used to tell me stories of how she used to play there when she was a little girl, but I don't know much else about it. We should try and have a look."

They continue along the track and eventually reach a crossroads where the red wall turns a corner and runs alongside the track ahead of them. Down to the right the track is blocked by a large nettle patch that is growing around, over and through the shell of a rusty old Land Rover. Felix assumes that it leads down to the woodland that they were looking out over from the gap in the verge. Up ahead there appears to be a break in the wall, which, as they get closer, turns out to be a large pair of wrought iron gates fixed between two sandstone pillars, topped with carvings of sleeping lions. There is a bulky chain with a silver padlock firmly holding them together, and along the top there is a line of twisted barbed wire.

A tapping sound catches Felix's attention, and on peering through and into the end of a long driveway he makes eye contact with a tall, skinny man clad in oily blue overalls, a dark green waxed-jacket and red leather gloves. The man is struggling with a claw hammer and a bag of nails, trying to fix a 'Keep Out' sign to the trunk of a large tree. He doesn't look away, and Felix finds himself quickly averting his eyes towards his feet and hurrying Cookie along.