Bear Necessity

by James Gould-Bourn

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  For my mum and dad, Linda and Phillip Gould-Bourn

  CHAPTER 1

  Danny Malooley was four years old when he learned the hard way that lemon-scented soap tasted nothing like lemons and everything like soap. When he was twelve, while saving a cat that may or may not have needed saving, Danny learned the hard way that there was no such thing as a painless, nor dignified, way to fall out of a sycamore tree. When he was seventeen, he learned the hard way that all it took to become a father was a three-liter bottle of cheap cider, a girlfriend to share it with, an awkward fumble on the Hackney Downs, and a general disregard for the basic laws of nature; and when he was twenty-eight, he learned in the hardest way imaginable that all it took to dim the stars, stop the clocks, and bring the earth to a shuddering halt was one small, invisible sliver of ice on a country road.

  A screech of tires tore Danny from his sleep, or it could have been a scream, he wasn’t quite sure. He sat up and scanned the room, trying to connect the sound with his surroundings until his brain woke up and told him it was a nightmare. Lying back down on his sweat-soaked pillow, he looked at the clock on the bedside table: 6:59 a.m., the digits bright in the morning gloom. He switched off the alarm before the numbers rolled over and gently ran his hand across the empty pillow beside him. Then, heaving the clammy duvet aside and crawling out of bed, he ignored his reflection in the wardrobe mirror and slowly dressed in yesterday’s clothes.

  Will’s bedroom door was ajar, so Danny pulled it shut on his way to the kitchen. Filling the kettle and setting it to boil, he dropped some dry but not yet furry bread into the toaster and turned on the radio, more out of habit than a desire to know what was happening in the world. The newsreader murmured to herself in the background while he surveyed the postcard view from the window—“postcard” due to the size of the window, not because of the beauty beyond it. The sky was as blue as the Victoria Line, but the beaming sun did little to brighten the landscape. Danny often thought the housing estate actually looked worse in the sunlight, mainly because more of it was visible. Just as poor lighting could make a Tinder date attractive or a run-down restaurant quaint, so too could a leaden sky help to partially conceal the full grim reality of the Palmerston estate. As he gazed at the wall of concrete housing blocks that mercifully obscured his view of even more concrete housing blocks, Danny once again resolved to move, just as he had done yesterday, and just like he’d do again tomorrow.

  He ate his breakfast at the dining room table, his eyes fixed on the same wall he’d stared at so much over the last fourteen months that the paper had started to curl beneath the weight of his gaze, but Danny hadn’t noticed. Nor had he noticed the darkening patch of carpet in the hallway, sullied by the work boots he kicked off every day without first banging the mud from their soles, or the film of grime on the windows that gave whoever looked through them an early glimpse of what to expect from cataracts, or the potted carcass on the windowsill that had once been a healthy philodendron but now resembled a clump of irradiated potato peel. He wouldn’t even have noticed the post were it not for the fact that it always arrived during breakfast, causing him to flinch as it clattered through the letterbox and landed on the mat.

  Two white envelopes sat in the hallway. The first contained a passive-aggressive reminder from his water provider that he was two months behind on his payments. The second was a final notification about his unpaid electricity bill, much of it written in bold red letters, especially the words court, bailiff, prosecution, and, somewhat bizarrely, thank you, which made it seem more like a threat than a common expression of gratitude.

  Danny frowned and stroked his stubble, the four-day bristles rasping beneath his nail-bitten fingers. He looked at the whiteboard on the wall where a thick wad of paper was held in place by a couple of souvenir magnets from Australia. Above it, written in bold black letters, was the word UNPAID. Two sheets of paper hung next to the bundle. This was the PAID pile. He added the new arrivals to the bigger stack, which held for less than a second before the magnets gave way and dumped the bills in a fluttering mess across the floor. Danny sighed and gathered them up. Then, using a third magnet, this one shaped like the Sydney Opera House, he reattached the bills to the whiteboard and scribbled Buy more magnets! beside them.

  “Will!” he shouted from the kitchen doorway. “You up?”

  Will heard his dad but didn’t respond as he continued to examine the bruise on his arm. It looked like a storm was raging between his bony shoulder and what passed for his bicep, a blue-black cloud on milky-white skin. Will gently probed it with his finger, unaware of just how tender it was until the slightest pressure triggered a dull ache that seemed to engulf his entire upper arm.

  “Come on, Will, breakfast!” shouted Danny, his voice already weary.

  Will plucked his crumpled school shirt from the door handle and winced as he carefully fed his arm through the sleeve.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” said Danny as Will shuffled past the kitchen door and slumped down at the table. Danny joined him a few minutes later with a mug in one hand and a plate of toast in the other. He put them down in front of Will and took the seat opposite.

  Will studied the plate through his sandy-blond fringe, which covered the two-inch scar at his hairline. Thomas the Tank Engine peered at him between two slices of peanut-buttered toast while James the Red Engine grinned almost mockingly from the mug.

  “Eat up or you’ll be late,” said Danny. He took a mouthful of cold tea and grimaced.

  Will swiveled his mug until the train disappeared from view. He took a tentative bite of his toast and placed the remainder over Thomas’s face.

  “Remember it’s your mum’s birthday today,” said Danny.

  Will stopped chewing and stared at his plate. The murmur of the radio crept into the silence between them.

  “Will?” said Danny.

  Will nodded once without looking up.

  The doorbell rang and Danny stood to answer it. He squinted through the spyhole to find Mohammed waiting in the open-air corridor. The boy was chubby with thick-rimmed glasses and a hearing aid behind each of his ears. London lurked over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Mr. Malooley,” he said as Danny opened the door. “Did you know that a blue whale’s fart bubbles are so big you can fit an entire horse inside them?”

  “No, Mo. I can honestly say I did not know that.”

  “Saw it on Animal Planet last night,” said Mo, who enjoyed watching wildlife documentaries as much as most eleven-year-olds enjoyed watching people seriously injure themselves on YouTube.

  “Sounds a bit cruel,” said Danny. “How did they even get a horse inside a whale fart?”

  “Don’t know,” said Mo. “They didn’t show that bit.”

  “Right.” Danny frowned as he pondered the logistics of such an experiment.

  “Is Will ready yet?”

  “Give him two mins, he’s just eating—”

  Will barged past Danny and into the corridor before he could finish his sentence.

  “Bye, Mr. Malooley,” said Mo as Will roughly guided his friend towards the stairwell.

  “Bye, Mo. Will, see you after school, okay?”

  Will didn’t respond as he disappeared around the corner.

  Back in the living room, Danny
gathered the cups and plates from the table. He poured Will’s untouched tea down the sink and tipped his uneaten toast into the bin. It was the same routine he’d performed almost every day since the accident.

  CHAPTER 2

  Danny crossed the building site in a yellow hard hat and a high-vis jacket that flapped in the wind. He aimed for Alf, the foreman, who was similarly dressed but holding a clipboard. Alf was a stout and balding man with a face like a boxer who never kept his guard up. Noticing Danny approaching, he looked over his shoulder at the black-suited, bony-faced, pale-skinned man standing nearby, who could have been mistaken for Death were he not wearing a safety helmet. The man tapped his watch and pointed at Danny. Alf sighed.

  “Morning, Alf,” said Danny, shouting over the noise as cranes loaded with pallets pivoted slowly overhead while the shuddering arms of excavators scooped up huge wads of earth.

  “You’re late, Dan.”

  Danny frowned and checked his phone. “Not by my clock,” he said, showing the screen to Alf.

  “By his,” said Alf, ignoring the phone and nodding towards the man in the suit.

  “Who’s that?” said Danny.

  “Viktor Orlov. New project manager.”

  “Orlov?”

  “Cossack,” said Alf. “Real ball-breaker. Already fired two people this morning. He’s coming down hard on everyone.”

  Danny stared at the man in the suit. The man stared back with a frosty gaze.

  “Anyway, get moving,” said Alf. “You’re on cement with Ivan. And, Danny?”

  “Yes, Alf?”

  “Don’t be late again.”

  Danny grabbed a shovel and went to join Ivan, a Ukrainian man-mountain of muscle and broken English who could move more earth than an excavator and build things quicker than a Minecraft champion. Danny suspected that Ivan had killed at least one person in his lifetime, probably with his bare hands. This hunch was largely inspired by the gallery of crude prison tattoos that adorned his bulging forearms, which were covered with jagged words, ugly faces—there was even a completed noughts-and-crosses board on his left arm, near the elbow—and other random scribbles that Danny was too afraid to ask about.

  The two had been friends since Danny saved Ivan’s life a couple of years ago. That, at least, was how Danny and everybody else on the building site remembered it, but Ivan refuted this version of events. Ivan had only been on the job for two weeks when a rogue piece of scaffolding came loose in a gale. The steel tube would have landed directly on his head had Danny, who happened to be working nearby, not barged the big man out of the way (almost dislocating his shoulder in the process). But while Danny was hailed a hero that day, Ivan, who had, in his own words, once been run over by a tank and survived, stubbornly maintained that a thirty-kilo pole to the head was unlikely to even cost him a sick day, let alone kill him, and that everybody was just being melodramatic “like the EastEnders.” The whole thing had become something of a running joke between them, although Danny was the only one who seemed to find it funny.

  “Danylo,” said Ivan as he slapped a wad of cement into a wheelbarrow.

  “All right, Ivan. Who’s the tool in the suit?” Danny cast a thumb over his shoulder.

  “So,” said Ivan, “you have met Viktor.”

  “Alf says he’s already fired two people this morning.”

  “They send him from Moscow. They say we do not work fast enough.”

  “And they think we’ll work faster if they fire us?” said Danny.

  Ivan shrugged. “In Ukraine we have word for man like Viktor.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Danny. “What?”

  “Asshole,” said Ivan.

  Danny laughed. “How was your holiday?” he asked, digging into the wet cement.

  “Holiday?” said Ivan. “What holiday? I take Ivana to Odessa. I spend the week with her family. Her mother, she hate me. And her father. And her sister. Even the dog hate me.”

  “I can see,” said Danny, pointing to a set of teeth marks on Ivan’s forearm.

  “What?” said Ivan, following his finger. “Oh. No. That was her grandmother.”

  “Right.”

  Ivan removed a bundle of paper from his pocket and sheepishly handed it to Danny.

  “Here,” he said.

  Danny knew what it was before he’d even opened it. A week after the scaffolding incident, Ivan had invited Danny, his wife Liz, and Will over for dinner. They’d barely spoken since Danny had (or hadn’t, depending which camp you were in) stopped Ivan from getting skewered by a six-foot pole. Apart from that day, in fact, the two men had barely spoken at all, and Ivan gave no explanation for the invitation, although Danny had always taken it to be a subtle form of thank-you. They’d spent what turned out to be the first of many evenings around a dinner table together, eating, laughing, and drinking too much horilka (Liz drank more than anybody, and consequently suffered more than anybody) while Will and Yuri—Ivan and Ivana’s son—played Xbox and bonded over their mutual embarrassment at seeing their parents having fun. At some point in the night, Liz had fallen in love with Ivana’s collection of painted wooden eggs that she kept on the windowsill. Ever since then, whenever they went back to Ukraine, Ivan had returned with a wooden egg for Liz, something he’d continued to do despite the tragic change in circumstances.

  “Thanks,” said Danny, turning the colorful ornament over in his hand. He knew how awkward these moments were for Ivan, who must have wondered more than once whether or not to abandon the tradition, but Danny was grateful that he hadn’t.

  “How is Will?” said Ivan, keen to move the conversation along.

  “He’s fine,” said Danny, slipping the egg into his jacket pocket. “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “He still does not talk?”

  “Nope. Not a word. Not even in his sleep.”

  A man arrived with an empty wheelbarrow and waddled away with the full one.

  “You know,” said Ivan, “maybe he is speaking.”

  “Not to me, he isn’t.”

  “No, I mean, being quiet can also be loud, you understand?”

  “Not really, no,” said Danny.

  “Look,” said Ivan, standing his shovel in the wet cement and leaning on the handle. “When Ivana she is angry with me, sometimes she yell and call me stupid asshole, but sometimes, when she is really angry, she say nothing for many days. She is quiet, like mouse, but I know she is still telling me something, you know?”

  “Like what?” said Danny.

  Ivan shrugged. “Like how she would like to put my head in oven.”

  “You think Will’s trying to tell me to put my head in the oven?”

  “No, but maybe you just do not hear what he is saying.”

  “Well, if he’s trying to tell me something, I wish he’d just come out and say it,” said Danny. “It’s been over a year now. Whatever he wants to say to me, it can’t be any worse than the silence.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Girls pretended not to watch boys while gossiping in groups or playing with their phones, and boys pretended not to watch girls while secretly trying to impress them, mainly by playing keep-away and filming each other thumping unsuspecting classmates in their nonvital organs. Everybody was watching everybody, but nobody made eye contact. It was like one big staring competition, one where you could blink as much as you wanted to but shriveled up like a salted slug if someone caught you looking at them. Only one person had the confidence to hold the gaze of every pair of eyes in the schoolyard, and that day, like most days, Mark had Will in his sights.

  “Seriously, it was crazy!” said Mo as they weaved their way through the crowds towards school. “These lions, there were, like, eight of them or something, well, lionesses actually, lions don’t really hunt, and they were eating this buffalo, or a bison or whatever, but it was still alive, and it was just, like, standing there and eating grass while they were eating it, and—”

  Will jabbed Mo in the ribs with his elbow.

  “What w
as that for?” said Mo, rubbing his side.

  Will nodded at the three scruffy boys approaching from across the yard. They were taller and older than Will and Mo, and they swaggered like they knew it. Their shirts were untucked and their ties were loose like a trio of overworked detectives, but if Mark and his goons were spotted near a crime then they probably weren’t trying to solve it. Mark was the shortest member of his posse by a good few inches, but the boy made up for his lack of stature, and looks, and intelligence, with his reputation as Richmond High’s most notorious terrorist. You didn’t have to do anything wrong to find yourself on his bad side (otherwise known as his only side). Simply existing was enough to have your name involuntarily entered into the Markus Robson lottery of pain, and for reasons that Will had never been able to fathom, his name seemed to come up at least twice as often as anybody else’s.

  “Come on,” said Mo. They picked up the pace, suddenly eager to get to class. The older boys also sped up, scurrying through the crowd like three ferrets after the same trouser leg.

  “Look who it is, lads,” said Mark as he blocked the main entrance. “Dumb and dumber. Or should that be deaf and dumber?”

  “I told you already, I’m not deaf,” said Mo. “I have—”

  “What?” asked Mark, cupping his hand behind his bigger ear. “I can’t hear you, mate.”

  “I said I’m not deaf, I just—”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m—”

  “Can’t hear you, Mo, speak up,” said Mark.

  Mo sighed, the joke finally sinking in. “Idiot,” he muttered as he fiddled with his hearing aid.

  “What was that?” said Mark.

  “I thought you couldn’t hear me?” said Mo sarcastically.

  “Best watch that mouth of yours, Mo,” said Mark. He yanked Mo’s tie with a violent tug that turned the knot into a peanut. “Learn a trick from your boyfriend here.”

  Mark turned on Will while Mo struggled to loosen his tie.

  “What you looking at?” he said.