Bully

by A. J. Kirby

  ‘What happened to him?’ I gasped.

  Tommy looked up from his work, hand still hovering over Twinnie’s chest, ready to make the final incision.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to know? I thought you just wanted this over with?’

  I clutched my head in my hands and started to rock back and forth.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I wailed, as though I was offering up some primitive prayer to some primitive deity; good or bad, I didn’t know. Didn’t care.

  Twinnie was the easiest of the lot. So far. He’d always had a death-wish. He was broken-up inside. Always thought that there was something better going on somewhere else, somewhere where he was not; where his dead twin brother was. Twinnie lived like he wanted to make everyone else in the world feel the way he did; lonely, abandoned and lost.

  It was his lifelong ambition to find somebody that he could be as close to as he remembered that he was with his brother in the first year of his life. But the ironic thing was that he never let anyone get close enough to him anyway. He always fought people off; either through fists or through verbal cruelty or through sheer ignorance. I don’t know…

  You probably don’t know this, but during the last year I was alive, I used to go round and stay at Twinnie’s house nearly every night. Sometimes he used to beg and plead me to go round. And when I did, I’d take the top bunk, he’d take the bottom and we’d talk all night. It was like he couldn’t stop sometimes. And I’d sit, with my legs dangling over the edge of the bunk, and it felt like I was sitting on his shoulder.

  Of course, he didn’t want any of you lot knowing about the fact he always needed people around him, or how he’d cry out in the night, so he swore me to secrecy, the poor deluded fucker. And after a while, he came to rely on me being there. And he hated the fact that he relied upon someone like me. Sometimes when I got there, he’d punch me in the face, just so I knew where I stood.

  He spent all his life with a heart of stone so I turned the whole of him into stone. Apt, don’t you think? At the end, up at Summit Farm, he denied me again. He’d been denying me for years although I’d sat on his shoulder almost the whole time, even after I was killed. But eventually I realised I’d been wasting my time with him, when you should have been the one that I was speaking to. It was you that I had unfinished business with…

  That fire turned him to stone because he’d purpled more than any other person that Newton Mills has ever known. That fire, Bully; have you not wondered why you have no discernible scar tissue from it? No burns? I’m not the monster that you think I am. Nobody else in that crowd got remotely hurt, you know. It was an illusion, just like so many things have been. Only, it was a chemical illusion – an illusion in space and time - and that just happened to react with Twinnie’s particular chemical make-up. In essence, he self-destructed, just like the others…

  Dick hung himself from those rafters at Funnels toffeeworks no matter what you might think. He was so determined for a fix that when I told him the Strawberry Skull mix was laced with the brown stuff, he couldn’t help himself. And he was sooooo disappointed, so hopeless, that he couldn’t stop himself. He just gave up. Just like the rest of you have. Some value you lot put on life, eh?

  Lion? He was always fleeing the scene wasn’t he? Always diving away from the chaos when it all got too much for him… And so he dived into the gorge. I had nothing to do with it. Not really…

  Tommy put the finishing touches on the number three on his masterpiece statue and the finishing touches on his story. I’d examined pretty much every part of bare skin on my body while he’d been speaking and could find no burns. The only scar I found was the one on my arm. The one from my flight from Grange Heights, and not from falling off my bike on the cobbles, as I’d previously thought.

  ‘I’m not lying to you, Bully,’ said Tommy, wiping the sweat from his brow, as well as some flesh, I noticed. Evidently carving into a statue was not as easy as it looked.

  ‘But Dick wouldn’t have… couldn’t have…’

  ‘You’ll discover reserves of strength that you never knew you had, Bully. When your time comes.’

  ‘I tried to tell the police,’ I breathed. ‘Afterwards…’

  ‘But you didn’t, Bully. And you were the only one amongst them that had any decency at all. After you fell up at Grange Heights, you just became like someone else.’

  ‘Grange Heights… you were there?’

  ‘I’ve always been there. In a way. Or I suppose that you could say that looking back, I’ve always been there. I suppose I’m your guilt, Bully. That’s who I am at the end of the day, and that’s why I looked different when I appeared to each of the others. Lion saw me as I actually was. Under every bench, every streetlight, every bar, he saw the fourteen year old Tommy Peaker. Twinnie saw me – eventually – as a tiny little devil on his shoulder. Dick saw me as the endless thirst that he had to quench with drugs. You see me as a nine foot tall monster, don’t you?

  ‘Eight…’ I stammered, but then Tommy hop-skip-an-a-jumped out of the grave and I saw that he was clearly nine foot now. And growing all the time.

  Tommy winked at me when he saw that I’d put two and two together. Unfortunately, the effect of this was somewhat lessened when his bottom eyelid fell off and then his left eyeball started hanging by a veiny thread. As though embarrassed by his appearance he tried to pop it back in, but seemed to struggle a little. When he looked back at me he seemed a little sheepish for a moment, just like that time when we’d pulled his kecks down in the dining hall and revealed his erect penis.

  ‘Oops,’ he laughed. ‘I’m falling apart a bit here, Bully. But not as much as you are eh? Your mind’s all over the shop now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you saying this is all in my imagination?’ I gasped.

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Tommy. ‘But what used to be your imagination is now a graveyard of broken dreams and memories that don’t compute. That make any sense to you, eh?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Think about it like this,’ said Tommy. ‘Let’s say I’ve dragged you back and forth in time over the past few months. Made you a bit confused about what’s happening and what’s not… Well just think about how it’s been for me for the past twelve years. That’s how I’ve lived, Bully. Or died, you might say… I’ve been constantly remembering things but I’ve not had anyone around to confirm if it was true or not. Thought I was going mad, Bulls-eye…

  Dreaming, waking, dying, it all became one to me, so it felt sometimes that I’d never lived at all.

  Did you never wonder why all your memories seemed so mixed-together? How you couldn’t pinpoint when one ran into another? Where you really were, all this time?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I muttered.

  ‘Here’s an example for you: remember your friend Do-Nowt from the military hospital? Sure he was there. But he was never there at the same time as you… That’s why you thought he just disappeared. But I had no beef with Do-Nowt; never touched a hair on his Yorkie head. It just so happened that you were there a long, long time after the place was deserted. Just you never really knew that…’

  ‘Is… is… Do-Nowt really okay?’ I stammered. The illusion that I’d spoken to him had felt so real… The pain when he’d been taken from me had been so real. Why was this happening to me?

  ‘He’s okay, right?’ I cried, looking for further confirmation.

  Tommy shot me a frosty look: ‘Of course he is. But keep your voice down. Here’s something else: that fire at Summit Farm that I’ve only just pulled you out of? That happened way back when you were seventeen, eighteen. I’m afraid I’ve been playing with your lives… all of your lives… ever since you stepped into that C.U.M building and I saw that I had to act. I couldn’t have no desert-folk taking you for their revenge when I wanted you for mine!’

  I remembered something: ‘My dad told me something about Burt having been dead for about ten years or something… but it really felt like I was
with him the other night… In his flat.’

  ‘Course it would. Because you were there. It’s just that you weren’t there when you thought you were there, if you know what I mean? Most likely, you and Dick broke in there on one of your ‘head-loss phases’ back in the day… Spoke to the old loon then… Memory has a funny way of playing tricks with you like that.’

  ‘So what now?’ I asked. It wasn’t the uppermost question in my mind, but it would do. It would do.

  ‘Now, Bully, I’d like to take you on a tour of a few of the other graves. Just to give you the heads-up on what I’ve got planned for my little memorial garden here… Hey, here’s a thought; bent down like that, we could almost turn your mate Twinnie into a seat for the elderly when their poor feet get too tired of wandering round admiring the sights. What do you reckon?’

  I kept my mouth clamped shut.

  ‘Wanna see some more of my garden?’

  ‘I don’t think I really want to see any more…’

  Tommy grabbed my t-shirt collar, started dragging me along the first row of graves.

  ‘Now this one, of course, is for our old pal Dick. And I was sorely tempted to have my grave-digger dig it out in the sign of a massive dick, just like the ones he used to force me to draw on the blackboards before the teacher walked in, every lesson. I got chucked out every time, didn’t I? No wonder I never learned anything. No wonder I never had the sense to stop hanging around with dead wood like you.’

  Dick’s grave was as yet unoccupied, but inside I could see that some of the traps from the Summit farmhouse were already being put to good use.

  ‘Just in case something happens to him like it did to me,’ winked Tommy.

  And we moved on. I could already see the massive headstone hanging above the next grave, as though it was readying itself to jump in. Already knew it was being prepared for Lion.

  ‘Just need to wait for the Newton Mills coppers to release their bodies and then I’ll take custody of them both,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure you’ll agree, they are very, very valuable additions to my collection. Sure they don’t have the shock-value of a Twinnie, but they’ll be worth a lot in their own right in a few years mark my words.’

  It struck me that Tommy was starting to sound like some rare art collector, and certainly the ‘frames’ that he’d made in which to hang his works were impressive. The graves looked… distinguished. Much better than the graves I remembered in the Cutter Street Cemetery; graves which hadn’t been tended, let alone visited for over a century.

  ‘And now we move on to exhibit “d”. I know what you’re thinking, Bully, but this one really isn’t for you. As I’m sure you’ll eventually hear, through the graveyard telegraph or somesuch; this one’s for Mr. Swann. Remember him? Nice feller, but had no idea, or no gumption how to tackle the very real problem of bullying at Newton Mills School. I’m sure you remember the time at the dinner hall? When you and your friend Twinnie sexually abused me? Well, I found him complicit in that crime and I decided that Gerald Swann, of 24 Turner Street, should also join us here.

  Right about now, his friends will be waking up in his house. They had a heavy night last night, although they can’t remember why – they only thought they had a couple of pints… Anyway, pretty soon, one of them will wake up busting for the toilet. They’ll go in Gerald Swann’s bathroom and they’ll find him dead in the bathtub. Of course, it’ll look as though he’s drowned, but there’ll always be that nagging doubt. You see they won’t find any water in the bath, and when they check a little bit more, they’ll discover that the water was turned off about two days ago. You see Gerald Swann was drowning in his own ignorance all of his life. He couldn’t even see the misery that people like you were inflicting on people like me. Couldn’t see the wood for the trees… And what a nice, apt way for him to go, eh?

  When he plunged his head under that imaginary water it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen… Oh, I would have taken you to see it too, only you were passed out up there on that grassy knoll. You miss a lot being passed out, don’t you Bully? It’s almost like you’re burying your head in the sand…’

  I had the sudden feeling that Tommy was trying to tell me something, but to be honest, it was so hard to think when my head was banging off old, decrepit gravestones; the ones that had been moved out of the way to make room for Tommy’s new ‘garden’ that in the end, my only concern was trying to make sure that I blocked out what was happening to me as best I could.

  ‘This next one’s one of my particular favourites,’ continued Tommy, approaching the last grave on the first row. ‘In fact, it’s such a favourite that I’m going to save it til right at the end.’

  My grave. I was looking headlong into my own grave. And for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off a worm that was nonchalantly crawling across the bottom of it. All I could think was that the poor worm was going to be my company in there for whatever remained of my life… and what came after of course.

  ‘A very spacious grave, don’t you think; for a terrace? And sure, the décor needs a bit of work, but with a healthy attitude, the occupant could give this place the real King’s treatment. The Kingsman’s treatment… The square-footage is also good for the sell-on value; out here, death-space sells by the foot, you know, Bully? Quite funny that, isn’t it, after what happened to your foot?’

  I didn’t laugh. Neither did Tommy for once.

  ‘Okay… bad joke. But back to more pressing matters; do you know who the ideal occupant of this particular death-space would be? A retiree. Someone that really doesn’t care whether they have a room with a view any more. Someone that doesn’t ever really have any visitors, and so doesn’t need the extra space. Someone that takes pride in digging in the ground and in having dirt underneath their fingernails when they get home…

  Someone that just needs a bed in which to rest his head and a few friendly neighbours like Gerald Swann, Twinnie and Dick to look in on him every once in a while. Of course, he wouldn’t really like it if any of these visitors asked him for a coffee or washed up in his sink. And he certainly wouldn’t like it if that visitor started trying to talk about very serious things.

  I tell you what, Bully; let’s call it an old folk’s home. And do you know who my very first resident will be?’

  At first I couldn’t bring myself to even say his name. At first I didn’t want to say his name in front of Tommy. But it was already clear that Tommy knew everything it was possible to know about my old dad. And it was clear that this was going to be how the final game was played out. This was what Tommy had been keeping me alive for all this time. So I would know what real, raw pain felt like. And how that pain can somehow feel even worse when it is inflicted on someone other than yourself. Someone who you care about more than life itself.

  My life, my world, had been collapsing in on itself like an empty packet of crisps in a fire. And now, finally, it imploded with an audible ‘pop’. All of the seasons I’d ever experienced; all of the conversations I’d overheard; all of the spinning plates which made up my life suddenly spun into each other. Newton Mills as it was, is, and will be engulfed me. Things I’d done, secretly hoped for, and tried to deny swished around my face like branches from some overhanging pussy willow. The steady drip-drop of water torture memories became a full on torrent which spewed me out somewhere, I hardly knew when.

  I was a-time-travellin’ man, and the whole goddamn thing was giving me the worst kind of jetlag ever. I’d finally fallen off that precipice; madness raced up at me, ready to crack me on the jaw.

  Chapter Twenty

  “A long, long time ago...

  I can still remember”

  Autumn always made Newton Mills look a bit dishevelled. Maybe it was because when the leaves were on the trees, it went some way to hiding the run-down nature of the town. In autumn, it had nowhere left to hide. The school in particular looked like some kind of shanty town from a documentary about South America that we’d watched in Geography; none of th
e buildings seemed to match. There were the prefabricated buildings running down the hill which the teachers euphemistically called the terrapins; next to them was the brand spanking new metal and concrete leisure centre which had to be built after local goodfornothings burned down the old one (I remember cheering and dancing in the flames but didn’t start it, all right?); then there was the main block of the school, the old posh grammar school bit with the domed roof on the library and the sweeping driveway out the front.

  The four of us had bored of terrorising the new first year students and had retired onto the fields down below the terrapins where we could listen to some tunes on this little radio we’d found in one of the ruck-sacks that we’d ransacked outside the assembly hall. And we could maybe light a cheeky cig if none of the teachers happened down that way. In the main, hardly any of them did; they all got in their cars at the end of lessons and drove to the end of the road where they could have their own cigarettes in peace and not be pestered by the over-enthusiastic head-teacher for smoking on school property. Mr. Swann was a particularly bad one for that kind of thing; always sloping off when there was work to be done. Always ignoring what was going on around him as though he couldn’t hear or couldn’t see. It was like he was encased in some kind of fish bowl which he couldn’t be bothered to look out of.

  We were playing this new game we’d invented called ‘raps’. Raps used to be used as a punishment in card games - you were supposed to gather the whole deck together and lightly rap the knuckle of the opposing player - but we’d soon grown bored of the actual games and moved on to pure torture instead. Just taking it in turns to hit each other and hurt each other for no other reason than that we were bored. Bored of school, bored of lunch-times, bored of Newton Mills. Twinnie in particular had the fine art of getting a whole deck of cards into a sharp point which would break the skin on first contact. He’d already drawn a fair amount of blood from Lion’s hand and was now getting ready for his final shot. He narrowed his beady eyes and pursed his lips in anticipation. Although much the bigger lad, Lion looked very worried…