The Barn Run - Part 1

In the summer of ‘98, the roads melted. Five cars got stuck in the tar on Wilson’s Lane; five drivers who’d have a tale to tell and a something to bitch about for years. But for us—for me, Stephi and Jojo—that day was going to shape the rest of our lives, and we weren’t even in the cars.

It was August. We were back at school the next month, and there were exams. When you’re sixteen, it doesn’t matter how many books you wade through, someone’s always writing more to add to the pile so you never quite catch up. When Stephi and Jojo called by and said they were going up Wilson’s, I told them to count me out. I’d be in deep shit if I flunked.

Stephi’s shoulders slumped. She said she thought it might be fun to hang out for a while. It’d give me a break. Stephi and me, we weren’t dating, or anything, but it hurt to see her disappointed—made me feel, like, empty inside.

A small push from my mum convinced me studying would wait. My mum’s a teacher—she should know. “Go on,” she said, “get out of here. It’ll do you good.” And, “The more you try to cram in, the less will sink in, and the less you’ll understand.”

A change of tee-shirt, a pair of trainers, and the three us were out of there before anyone changed their minds.

On Wilson’s, the engines were off. It was hard to tell where wheels ended and wet tar started. One of the drivers had lost a shoe in the tar. A couple of paces away, a grey sock. The cops had cordoned off the stretch of road with traffic cones and, further up, yellow diversion signs sent everything from cycles to seventeen tonners down twisting rural lanes which they’d block up on every bend.

The main attraction was Jojo’s old man in the Dooker’s BreakDown Truck, chugging black clouds from the cab-stack as it tried to winch a car free. Car tyres, it turned out, just don’t like that sort of stressing, and one them blew like a grenade going off. The car creaked and lurched, and from the lack of light getting through the underside, the exhaust was embedded in the wet blackstuff.

It was then that Jojo gave me a nudge. He nodded his head to the field opposite.

There, watching us from the other side of the fence, was a huge woman with a scowl on her face like she’d just been snorting onion juice. She was drab and grey, with frizzed out hair, and the sort of wide shoulders rugby players would kill for.

Jojo said she was Fat Cassie. Also known as Crazy Cassie.

“They say she killed her husband,” Stephi said.

Jojo nodded. “Slit his throat with a knife, and buried him behind the barn.”