Free How the Trouble Started by Robert Williams Page A

his brother for doing stupid things, you could tell that he still loved him. l liked that, but it wasn’t just the story of the film that interested me; it was the landscape: the wide blue skies, the long straight roads, the massive yellow fields and the quiet, dusty towns. It looked like a safe place. The kind of place where you could be born, live and die and never have to come across any trouble if you didn’t want to. The kind of place where you sit on your porch at night and watch the sun go down on a quiet day and look forward to more of the same the next day, the day after and for ever.
    In the vanishing my hardware store was on the main street in the middle of the town. We sold everything you could think of: mops, buckets, hammers, nails, screws, paint, paintbrushes, locks and hinges, everything. It was a dusty old store with long shady aisles, wooden floors and high shelves. Every space filled with something someone might want. On the off chance we didn’t have it in stock we would order it for you – all part of the service. During the week I worked there alone. My wife, Lucy, dropped by with sandwiches at lunch and we would eat them at the counter and chat for a while before she headed back home. At weekends business picked up and I employed a Saturday boy who served, and helped customers with their purchases to their cars, whilst I advised and rummaged through the shelves and the stock room for whatever was needed.
    For a while, when the Iowa vanishing was new and fresh, it was a great place to be. I loved settling into bed at night and transporting myself to the middle of America, to my white house with the porch, my store on the main street of a sleepy town, at night my wife next to me, a warm breeze slipping through the room, a dog asleep at the foot of the bed. It was perfect. It was such a good vanishing, so vivid, so calm, that it was one of the few that worked in the daytime too. Sat with my mum eating our tea, neither of us with anything to say, or on a bad day when every thought turned back to the dead little boy, all I needed to do was think of Iowa and I could escape, for a while at least. But vanishings get used up, they wear themselves out through use, and once they’re worn out they’re empty. You can keep trying to go back, you can keep trying to escape, but it’s never the same and eventually they don’t work at all. And then you’re back to reality with a thump, and you have to wait for inspiration to strike again, you have to wait until you’re able to conjure up a whole new vanishing to somewhere else.

13
    We started to make something of the house. Well I did. Just the room upstairs where Jake thought Mrs Lorriemore was shot, and where we did the reading and spent most of our time. I’d had my eyes peeled for a while and found it easy to pick stuff up from out and about. The music room at school was being done up and loads was getting chucked so I acted like a magpie and swooped. And then I found a skip outside one of the big houses on Eastham Street. Eastham Street lies about a mile north of the quarry and is the richest street in town. The houses have lawns that need to be mowed with little tractor lawnmowers and the garages are as big as bungalows. All the children from Eastham Street wear the purple uniform of Greenhurst Private School and nobody from my school knows anyone from that school and you never see any of them out and about in town. And you never see anyone from Eastham Street on Eastham Street, just people who don’t live there walking their dogs up to the woods, gawping at the big houses on their way. I’d clocked the skip on one of my wanderings. It was sat at the end of a long drive and was filled with stuff that didn’t look like it needed to be thrown away at all. I had a rummage, decided what I wanted, and went back when it was dark. But when it came to taking it, when I was stood there, I was nervous. I told myself that nobody would put stuff into a skip that