Bully

by A. J. Kirby

  “Oh, and there we were all in one place,

  A generation lost in space

  With no time left to start again.

  So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick!

  Jack flash sat on a candlestick

  ’Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.”

  They probably wouldn’t have seen Twinnie; he was hunkered down under a collapsed piece of garden furniture; a tea-for-two I believed they were called. He’d been there ever since he’d first laid eyes on them. Perhaps he thought Tommy had opened up the gates of hell and these were all of the tormented souls come to claim him as one of their own, and in a way, he might have been right. He may have hit the coffin nail square on the head with that assertion.

  Only when the slavering zombies reached the thin white fence which surrounded the farmhouse garden from the fields did they stop as though by unspoken command. Some planted their flaming torches in the ground and looked as though they were up for a siege; others tried to douse the flames of their own torches in the wet long grass. Perhaps these people finally realised the stupidity of bringing coals to Newcastle. It did stop me dancing though.

  I stared them down; individually, by the light of the fire, the folk of Newton Mills seemed to glow with greens and yellows and reds, but blended together it simply became a mass of purple being poured forward, colouring everything in its wake. I waited for one of them to step forward. One of them to make a claim to be their leader. In the meantime, I listened to the fire crackling and roaring and otherwise having a whale of a time and I smiled to myself. It was getting closer and closer to the time. It was getting closer and closer to the realisation of the plan. I just hoped Tommy was reading from the same script as me. But then, he didn’t need a script did he? Not when he could read my mind…

  ‘Do you realise that you are trespassing?’ bellowed a man from the middle of the crowd. He had safety in numbers there.

  I laughed at his question.

  ‘Do you realise that there is a farmhouse on fire?’ I shouted back.

  ‘Have you tried to put it out?’ shouted a small woman at the front. ‘It looks pretty dangerous, you should be…’

  The rest of her politely concerned question was drowned out by dissent in the ranks. The people were getting braver; their old wise heads decided that it was time to be brave. Luckily, their combined wisdom hadn’t seen fit to call the fire brigade yet, much like when the school burned down and everyone just stood and watched, open-mouthed as classroom after classroom was engulfed.

  One man decided to speak for all of them. I didn’t know him; no doubt my dad did though. He knew everyone; couldn’t go to one shop in town for a bastard toilet roll without having at least three half-hour conversations with people he knew. By which time he’d probably have shat his kecks.

  ‘We know who you are,’ the man said. ‘We know who both of you are… Where is the other one?’

  I simply stared back at the fat, bearded man. I just had to keep them talking for long enough and Tommy would come.

  ‘Look,’ shouted the man. ‘We know you’ve had a hard time of it, son, but you can’t just go round setting fire to things. That’s arson you know.’

  ‘Sorry Pavarotti,’ I yelled back. And I swear that a couple of the crowd had to stifle their sniggers.

  ‘Is there a working tap in the kitchen that we can get water from?’ he asked. ‘Is there still a kitchen we can go in? This farmhouse was a listed building, you know, and we don’t want to see it wiped off the map, son.’

  The whole scene was rapidly descending into farce. Tommy probably hadn’t shown his face yet because he was probably laughing too much. This was what he’d left behind. This is what he’d clawed and scrambled to try and get back into. What a fucking laugh.

  But I wasn’t laughing any more; Pavarotti started to move over the fence. A couple of the other men followed; handy-looking men, probably just been poured out of the pub. They were bringing weapons. I watched them moving forward, aping the army moves that they’d seen in countless movies no doubt. One of them was going to shout something stupid like ‘cover me’ in a minute.

  ‘You’re not gonna be any trouble are you, lad?’ asked the meatiest of the men. I wasn’t wrong about him being lured from the pub, only he’d probably been lured from the outside of the pub. He looked like a bouncer and he looked like he wanted nothing more than to have a bit of fisticuffs with me. He was probably one of those types that have been rejected from the army young and then spend the rest of their lives working out, cursing the forces under every breath, and trying to pick fights with squaddies on leave at the weekend. He’d seen my khaki t-shirt, the obvious army pants and boots and he wanted a piece of me.

  I started to back away a little. Started to have my first quiver of doubt that Tommy would come. But I felt the fire at my back and knew I couldn’t go any further. I was trapped. From under the garden furniture, Twinnie would have been loving this lunacy. The obvious number three that was probably burned into my flesh on my chest at that very moment. Maybe Tommy had been playing me all along?

  The pub bouncer must have been five paces away from me at most when he abruptly stopped. Certainly he was close enough so I could smell his angry sweat and the cologne he’d tried to mask it with. Certainly I could hear his muscles crinkling and cracking back into place over and above the fire. Certainly I could see the way that his eyes suddenly became like flying saucers. How his mouth dropped open and a piece of chewing gum slipped out and dropped onto his black bomber jacket, where no doubt it would stick and be a nightmare to get out.

  It was as though I was stuck in a freeze-frame. Pavarotti had one leg still up in the air, mid-stride; the other big man had his arms up, covering his face as though he feared he was going to be hit by something. It was only then that I decided that I should probably look round…

  …to see Tommy Peaker. Undoubtedly Tommy Peaker, despite the black balaclava covering his half-face and the black gloves covering his rotten hands. And he was massive. At least eight foot tall; it was as though being so close to something which so closely resembled hell’s burning fires gave him extra power. He was wearing a black leather jacket now which fair strained to keep his burgeoning biceps in check. It looked as though at any moment, his revolting body might break free, like the Incredible Hulk.

  Somewhere, someone screamed. Somewhere else, someone yelled ‘no’. But Tommy only laughed. He was being a showman for only the second time in his life. And just like that time he got the attendance certificate in assembly, he milked it for all it was worth. He lifted the huge barrel of petroleum above his head just like he had with that certificate; just like it was the FA Cup. Like it weighed nothing to him. And with those arms, you could see why.

  He paused a moment and stared back right into the crowd. Hatred burned in his eyes, but something else too; vindication perhaps. And then he brought the barrel crashing down right into the middle of the fire. Flames leaped up all over him. For a moment we could hardly see him, but eventually the black figure emerged again, his leather jacket looking virtually untouched. All around him, flames crawled all over everywhere. The barn became a raging inferno; the farmhouse simply collapsed in on itself like a packet of crisps or my ID badge. When it finally gave up the ghost, it did so with a ‘pop’.

  Something exploded over in the courtyard. Probably the farm vehicle, whatever it was. And then the Newton Millsians were running. Full pelt down the field; trampling over the bodies of their neighbours and relatives; children and wives. There was no such thing as the crowd mentality any more; it was every man, woman and child for himself.

  I felt myself being overwhelmed by the fire. And I welcomed it. It felt toasty and right. Tommy let me know that it was right. His laugh rang out over and above it all. At one point, I swear I could hear him singing, too, as if in answer to my previous verse when I was dancing round the fire:

  “And as the flames climbed high into the night

  To light the sacrificia
l rite,

  I saw Satan laughing with delight

  The day the music died.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Helter skelter”

  Apart from the past month or so, the only other period in my life in which I can remember passing out and waking up in various random places more would be in the height of my teenage years; in the height of the ‘head loss period’, as I’d come to know it. But perhaps the ‘head loss period’ never really went away. Perhaps it was just me that did, and now I was back, clutched to the corpse-like bosom of Newton Mills; I was forever a teenager. Certainly Tommy Peaker was, and part of me had ceased to be completely piss-myself afraid of him, despite his immense new size and despite that new voice of his.

  The fact remained that the more time I spent with him, the more even this incarnation of Tommy reminded me of a fourteen year old, which he was, when you got down to the bare bones of it. As soon as he sensed me stirring, he was on me; rabbit punching me on the shoulders, shrieking into my ears, blowing smoke rings into my face.

  To be fair to Tommy, I don’t think he meant to blow the smoke rings. I don’t think he was showing off or acting the alpha male like Twinnie had been. He couldn’t help it really, what with the massive gouge in his neck which was painfully apparent now we were out in the open and it was morning. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hole. Smoke was trailing out of it – he couldn’t have been properly taking any of it in – and around it, dark, slippery mould was growing. At first I’d thought it the first spoutings of a typical teenage bum-fluff beard, but now I could see it for what it really was; just another part of him festering away.

  ‘Rise and shine, fuckwit,’ he said, finally climbing off me and allowing me to breathe. The more he used that voice, the more I was struck by the fact that it sounded like a fourteen year old boy, using one of those special voice disguiser things. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was just the way that he said things... As though he was mimicking a bad-guy from an action film he’d seen once. Part of me believed that when he left hell, or wherever he’d been, he’d probably been given a choice how he could come back, and had picked that voice to match his new tree-trunk torso. An off-the-shelf scare the living shit out of someone costume, with all the accessories to match.

  ‘Where are we?’ I breathed, or tried not to breathe. The stench of him was overwhelming now, even in the outdoors. It smelled as though something had crawled inside him and died, which I suppose it had.

  Tommy laughed. ‘Have you not worked that out yet, Bully-boy?’

  And for the first time, I allowed myself to take my eyes off him. We were sitting – well, Tommy was; I was lying in a foetal position – on a grassy knoll which looked out over a graveyard that I knew very well. It was one of the places that we used to come and smoke and drink and eventually fuck girls, and generally raise hell. Like many of the graveyards in the town, there was no church attached – Newton Mills folk don’t generally go in for that sort of thing – but it was unmistakably the graveyard from my memories because of the imposing gates. Big wrought iron things with what was supposed to be angels on the top, although they actually looked more like devils, or gargoyles.

  The whole place was overgrown; nature was reclaiming it as its own. Long grass strained through the gates to grab for the legs of passers-by; small trees were erupting from some of the graves; in some places you couldn’t even see the graves at all any more. But strangely, despite all of the trees which flanked the old bone-yard, and the fact that it was day-break, there was absolutely no sound of birds welcoming the dawn. In fact, there was no sound of anything at all, save Tommy’s raspy breathing, and the staccato drumbeat of my own heart. It was as though the place was a vacuum, removed from everyday reality somehow.

  ‘I know this place,’ I whispered. ‘It looks…’

  Of course I remembered the place; it was the Cutter Street graveyard, not far from my house on Hangman’s Row. And the fact that the graveyard had long been concreted over was not the most remarkable aspect of the place must have said something about the strangeness of the situation I now found myself in. Because those of the graves that still could be seen through all the undergrowth and bush were open, as though they’d just been dug by some council lackey keen to earn some overtime, and they were just waiting for the bodies to fill them. There were scores of them; long rectangular channels in the ground, and from the looks of things, they were empty. There was nothing as comforting as fresh flowers by any of the graves.

  ‘What. The. Fuck?’ I spluttered, or asked, or pleaded.

  Tommy slapped me on the back.

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Very… Apt.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. Despite the fact that I’d been passed out for the past God knows how long, I suddenly felt immensely tired. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten and my foot felt as though it was being amputated all over again. And now I was at the decisive moment, that moment when I could plead for my life or change my life or at least try to make everything better, I just couldn’t summon up the energy to argue with any of it. All I wanted was for it to be over with. I was like one of those mountaineers that spends their whole lives planning to conquer some unconquerable peak; spends their whole pension on flying out to whatever far flung place that peak may be in; spends all their available determination on actually reaching the top and then… And then when they reach the top they just have a look out over the rooftops of the world, maybe pose for a photo and plaster a fake smile on their face, and all they can think of is getting back down again. Getting it over with.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Tommy. ‘You feel like you’ve had more than you can take. You feel like you just don’t care any more. But that’s how I felt every day of my miserable fucking existence. And that’s why I wanted to make you go through all of this.’

  ‘But I get the point,’ I moaned. ‘I realise that we did something terrible. I realise that we had to be punished.’

  ‘Sure, sure; you get the point,’ sneered Tommy. I tried not to look at what he was doing with his neck while he spoke. He was always a-fidgeting - always chewing at his nails or at the skin around the nails - but now he was picking bits from around the gaping hole in his neck and popping them into his slavering maw like they were popcorn and we were sitting back and watching his favourite film of all time.

  I sighed, tried to massage my half-foot back into life. It was numb from the way I’d slept; wrecked like a…

  WHAM!

  Tommy’s fist caught me completely by surprise. Left me keeling over, coughing up whatever was left in my gut; my courage, perhaps. I tried to control my breathing. Tried to ignore the fact that it felt like the right hand side of my face was about to fall off.

  ‘We’re not on one of our school trips now,’ said Tommy, standing over me. ‘We’re not on some joy-ride that you can just pick and choose when to get off. This is my world now.’

  He picked up the spear - the spear from the C.U.M building; the spear from Burt’s flat; the spear from my heart – and started to trace the point against my chest. Traced a number four on me, but didn’t commit. Didn’t drive the spear into my flesh.

  ‘You want to know why you’re the last one, don’t you?’ he demanded.

  At that particular moment, knowing why I was the last one was the furthest thing from my mind. Now the pain in my heart had come back. My heart felt like it was about to explode. It was as though it was reminding me that it was still there after all I’d said about it; all I’d inferred about there just being a black hole in there.

  Tommy knelt by my side and started stroking my hair. In a way, it was far more disturbing than when he’d had the spear poking into my chest again, giving me that invisible tattoo of a number four.

  ‘Some part of you wants to know what happened to your friend Twinnie, doesn’t it?’ he continued. ‘Tell you what; why don’t we go take a look at him now?’

  Somehow, I don’t think I had a choice in the matter
. And that was soon made abundantly clear when Tommy grasped me by the collar and started dragging me off the grassy knoll, down towards the open graves. I felt my half-foot bang and crack against every hidden broken bottle, brick, stone and bramble underneath that long grass.

  Tommy barely decreased his pace when we reached the bottom of the slope, and for a second I thought he was going to drag me right on into one of the open graves. Instead, he left me dangling over the lip, on my back, screaming in agony.

  ‘Bully; meet Twinnie,’ he said, gesturing into the open grave.

  And I looked. I knew that I shouldn’t have looked but I did. I couldn’t help myself. Some deep-down part of me wanted to see what had happened to the other monster in my life. Some deep-down part of me wanted to know that Twinnie had gone and would never be coming back.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about what happened at Pompeii; chances are that you have. But it was only when we were doing our pre-op training in Southern Italy that I found out all about it. Mount Vesuvius; the volcano. The eruption. The fleeing Pompeii citizens trying to outrun time and fate and geological fact and then being caught by the lava and preserved in mid-stride, mid-prayer, mid-scream forever. Turned to stone, over time. The piss-artist previously known as Twinnie was just like one of them. In half-crouch, a look of sheer agony on his pinched face. His hands splayed out as though trying to stop the fire from overwhelming him. It looked strangely unreal, or as though a single gust of wind would dismantle all of the dusty particles which now made him up. But then, I figured, there probably wouldn’t be any wind. Not here, not in Tommy’s world.

  And the most horrifying thing of all was the fact that Tommy had now leaped into the grave next to this human statue and was using the spear as a kind of rudimentary chisel with which he could carve the number three, like he was a professional sculptor or something.