Bully

by A. J. Kirby

  ‘I’m sure you’ve already had your three goes,’ he pleaded. I noticed that his right eye was twitching a little bit as though he was close to crying. His big face was getting redder by the minute and his freckles seemed to be twinkling like shitty stars.

  ‘Two goes,’ said Twinnie, flicking through the cards, seemingly injecting them with some kind of static charge. ‘This is the last one. Then you get to have a go at me.’

  Twinnie wasn’t worried about the reprise attack from Lion; Lion’s hand was knackered now and would be no good for getting the cards nice and tightly packed and ready to hurt.

  The artist formerly known as Paul Morton stuck his tongue out of his cat’s-arse mouth in concentration as he made his own final preparations and then lifted his hand with the deck of cards in it into the air. This was where Twinnie’s true skill for the game came into play. He made the opponent wait. He made the opponent imagine the pain in his head waaaaaaay before the actual hit, so in fact the hit was at least twice as bad as it ever would have been. My eyes darted to Lion, whose own eyes were pleading. His clenched fist trembled. He looked as though he was going to surrender. He was going to hand the game to…

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Dick. ‘Not yet.’

  Twinnie sighed deeply, dropped the cards onto the grass and turned to Dick. Lion took the opportunity to withdraw his battered hand and shove it into his armpit to alleviate the throbbing. We heard the tinny echoes of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ from the stolen radio in his jacket pocket.

  ‘That little shithouse Tommy Peaker’s coming,’ continued Dick, nodding his shaven head up the hill. We all turned to look. Tommy Peaker was indeed snowballing down the hill on legs which were whirring like tiny wheels in a cartoon.

  ‘Look at the state of the little twat,’ sneered Twinnie. He, more than any of the others, made no secret of his hatred for the hangers-on that we attracted. I suppose that it had maybe something to do with the loss of his twin but he never seemed to trust anyone but the three of us, and even that, I thought, was a kind of trust for convenience’s sake while we wasted five years at upper school and before we could go and do our dad’s jobs in the factories.

  ‘Little bell-end,’ said Dick. He was always one for following Twinnie was Dick. Maybe he wanted to be second in command or something. Not that Twinnie was the leader either, just that he liked to think of himself as such.

  We all climbed to our feet and waited for Tommy to come to us. Poor bastard was almost slipping in the mud off the path now but none of us stood forward to lend him a helping hand. And even if he had have slipped, it couldn’t have made his clothes look any worse. Our school didn’t have a proper uniform but ‘encouraged’ students to wear white shirts and black trousers; Tommy’s get-up was what looked like his mam’s cast-off white blouse and black leggings of some description. There were whopping great tears at the knees, I already knew. On his feet, he wore black PE pumps like we used to wear at primary school. We, of course, were all decked out in the latest Nike trainers with the pump-up cushioned soles. We’d managed to stab compasses into the air bubbles on the trainers of nearly every other no-mark in the school that dared wear them.

  Tommy arrived at last, gasping and panting for breath. He sort of bowed to us, he was that bent over from the effort of running so fast. Don McLean started singing about ‘bad news on the doorstep.’

  ‘What you wanting, Squeaker?’ asked Lion, towering over him like some giant troll or something. We called Tommy ‘Squeaker’, because that was our rather juvenile name for a fart, and that was what Tommy was; a little fart.

  ‘Had another wank you wanna tell us about, eh?’ Lion continued, wrinkling his nose as though sniffing the air around the little lad. I had to bite back a bout of the giggles.

  Tommy shook his head and looked embarrassed. He’d once tried to ingratiate himself with us lot by telling us all that he masturbated a lot, and I mean a lot. He bragged that he could do it twelve times in a day. But after he’d told us that we noticed that this weird fishy smell always clung to Tommy and so we all figured that he just left the discharge seeping into his black leggings and underpants that his mam would never wash.

  ‘Tell us what you’re here for then you little fuck-wit,’ said Twinnie, who looked as though he’d already run out of patience and looked likely to clock him at any given moment.

  ‘Come on Tommy, what’s to do?’ I said, mockingly putting my arm around him and then scraping my knuckles across the top of his hair – it wrecks that, if you do it right. I let him go when I realised that he still hadn’t even told us why he’d been running.

  On the radio, Don McLean sang ‘dirges in the dark’ and finally Tommy got his breath back, finally he recovered from my knuckle-dusting. He moved in closer to us, a little smile playing on the corners of his lips. I figured that he had some pretty good information on him for him to be acting so conspiratorial around us. Maybe he thought that with the information he was about to impart, he’d move higher up the ladder or something. Not that there was a ladder. Not that we wouldn’t kick it away once he was climbing it…

  ‘You’ve gotta come with me. Someone’s found somethin’ at the graveyard off Cutter Street,’ he half-whispered, half-trumpeted from the hills, if such a thing were possible. I suppose, in hindsight, what he did was stage-whispered.

  ‘Found what?’ I said, moving in on him again. Cutter Street was quite close to our house, after all, and was pretty much the epicentre of our graveyard-based operations by that time.

  ‘Probably some of Twinnie’s used rubber johnnies,’ cracked Lion, who I sensed was still mortally wounded by being whipped at raps. Twinnie shot him a look of disgust but made no comment.

  ‘No… no… they found a skull,’ cried Tommy, almost tripping over his words in the effort to get them out so quickly.

  We all stood in silence and looked at Tommy Peaker. For only the second time in his life he had centre stage. I could tell that he loved it. The little jig-eared fuck never got any attention at school unless it was the teachers getting at him for something or other or us taking the piss out of him; probably got none at home either. Not while his mum kept entertaining her male associates on a daily basis, only acknowledging him when she wanted him to refill their drinks. Not while his sisters were becoming the local bikes; at some point or other all of us fancied pulling a few wheelies on one of them birds…

  ‘It’s real,’ he whispered. ‘Not like that one that they have up in the biology labs. This one’s got, like, all this stuff on it… And you should see the teeth. The teeth, man. They’re all rotten and everything. Like Burt from the shop…’

  ‘You’re not lying are you, Squeaker?’ asked Twinnie. And from the way he said it, I could tell that one false move from Tommy now would bring us all crashing down like the deck of cards. One false move and we’d give him a kicking as bad as the one we gave him a year or so back. When he had to be off school for at least two months.

  ‘No word of a lie,’ he gasped. He was still a little breathless. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was his fabled asthma, I don’t know. ‘Mark found it – you know Mark don’t you?’

  Yeah, we all knew Mark, or Sparky Marky as he’d wanted us to call him, back before he realised who we were. When he finally did realise who we were – fucking predatory animals – it was too late for him and the name Manky Marky had stuck. He was another runtish little lad from the year below. The sort that always had green snot running out of one nostril or other until he reached secondary school. The sort who, in olden days would perhaps not even have survived the first winter. Yeah we all knew Mark. And he knew us.

  ‘Well, we were all playing Running the Gauntlet down at the Cutter Street cemetery. Loads of us. It was a right laugh…’

  Running the Gauntlet was a game which, if we’d had any sense about us, we’d have copyrighted when we got the chance. We invented it, see, and although we’d long grown tired of it, it was still played with gay abandon, in some form or other, by group
s of kids in virtually every year of our school. If only we could have made a board game version of it and tried to sell it to Waddingtons…

  But I’m not sure if Waddingtons would have been interested in our game. I’m not sure that making a kid run over the top of as many graves as he could while everyone else simply threw shit at him – anything they could find – until he finally surrendered, would fit in with their ideals of ‘fun for all the family’. I’m not sure if they’d have agreed that it fit the age bracket of eight years up, either. And the game wouldn’t have been easy to replicate en masse; it wouldn’t have easily translated to other towns and villages or cities, where there weren’t the sheer number of graveyards. Where there wasn’t a plot of some form or other at the end of every fucking street.

  ‘And?’ demanded Twinnie.

  ‘Yeah, don’t go pretending you got friends, Peaker; just tell us the details,’ said Dick, like a dick.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tommy, flinching involuntarily. He did it so many times these days that it had developed into a kind of nervous tic. ‘So anyway; Mark was running the gauntlet and he was doing pretty well at it. Getting pretty close to your record, Bully. And I reckon that’s why he was just so desperate to make that last grave, right over at the back of the bone-yard. Barry lobbed this half-brick over at him and Mark just made this mad leap over all that overgrown grass and shit… For a second, we all just stood back and watched and we were thinkin’ he’s gonna make it, he’s gonna make it and then Mark came crashing down right on top of the grave. Landed so hard that his leg went right through the topsoil. Landed so hard that he opened up this hole at the top. When we all went over, he already had his arm reached right in there. And when he pulled out the skull, all the younger kids just ran away. And it was pretty scary…’

  ‘So where’s the skull now?’ I asked.

  ‘Still down there… I came to tell you lot as quick as I could.’

  ‘It better still be there,’ warned Twinnie.

  On the radio, Don McLean warned that it was a day for dying.

  And so, the five of us slipped through the woods that marked the bottom boundary of Newton Mills School. We cut across Church Street lower down, where we were sure that we wouldn’t be seen. Almost had to turn back when we saw the familiar sight of Mr. Swann’s car pulled up haphazardly against the kerb, but when we saw the smoke inside, we knew we were all right.

  We started to get excited as we climbed over the allotment wall and Twinnie started to run. Trampled all over the plot right next to my dad’s, but I didn’t care. The chase was on. Soon we were all shouting and laughing and generally had a good time like we were the boys in Stand by Me. We were off to see part of a body; we knew that this was a major step in our school-of-hard-knocks education. We knew it was an event that would long live in the memory. I suppose I was the Geordie character, trying to eek out meaning from the encounter; Dick and Lion were like Vern Tessio and the other one – the boggle –eyed one… But that was where the comparison fell down. Twinnie was no Chris Chambers. In fact he was more like Ace Merrill; dangerous, unpredictable. A force of nature.

  We could see the crowd of kids even as we turned the corner from Hangman’s Row and onto Cutter Street. Hoards of them, like the school had burned down again and everyone had been turfed out. Half of them probably had no idea why they were there; the other half were only there ‘cos their friends were. We barged through them all, sending snotty-nosed bastards skittling off all over the place. The cocks of the school were here now, and the rules of the game had changed. Soon, the crowd became aware of our presence. Silence started to creep in. Nobody wanted to be the one poor fucker that was picked on for the habitual beating. Nobody wanted to be forced to run the gauntlet; not if we were playing.

  We reached the gates; those big black imposing things. Twin gargoyles stared down at us; dared us to go through. And we stared right back at them as we squeezed between the bars. Through the gates, there were only a few stray boys knocking around, and we soon sent them off with a dad-like clip round the ear and warnings not to come back.

  We were left alone. Just me, Twinnie, Dick, Lion, Tommy and Manky Mark. Manky Mark who was sitting over in the far corner of the cemetery, holding the skull out in front of him like he was practicing for the school production of Hamlet. We picked out our path between the graves and made for him. Everything was under cover of the fallen golden leaves, you could barely tell where path ended and grave began. We could barely tell what we were walking on. A million people in a million other-worlds suddenly shivered involuntarily and asked:

  Did someone just step on my grave?

  As soon as we reached Sparky, Twinnie took the skull from him. And then he just looked at it as though he didn’t really know what to do with it. It was a skull. It was part of a dead human. It had strange fission-marks on the top of it; a big crack on the cheek-bone; big gaping eye sockets; a pronounced forehead. But it didn’t do anything.

  Twinnie started manipulating the jaw; making the rotten teeth clack-clack together.

  ‘I’m coming to get you, Tommy Peaker,’ he said in this terrible ghost-voice.

  Tommy’s bottom lip quivered, but only for a moment. Then he realised that he’d better start running. Twinnie was already almost on him, waving the skull around like it was just another half-brick.

  ‘Get him, Twinnie,’ roared Dick.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ muttered Lion.

  I kept schtum. Watched Manky Mark’s reaction. Was he going to stick up for his ‘friend?’ Was he going to make any move to put a halt to the inevitable beating that Tommy was going to take? Evidently not. Quietly, he started to walk away from us. He stalked back across that bone-yard and made for the gates. He never once looked back, never once took the time to check whether Tommy was being forced to kiss the skull, never once took the time to check whether Tommy was being forced to take down his pants and allow the skull’s rotten teeth to touch his tiny prick.

  Which is what was happening. Already the skull had become just another torture-instrument. Already, it was secondary to the main game; making Tommy Peaker’s life as miserable as possible in as many inventive ways as possible.

  ‘Here; have a look at this,’ said Lion, tapping me on the shoulder. Like me, he’d shunned the torture session. Like me, I think he still had some kind of secret reverence for the graveyard. He still believed that otherworldly things could happen in places like that and that there was some mystery in the world.

  He led me over to the grave right in the corner. It was almost hidden by thick bushes but we pushed our way through. It was the grave in which Mark had found the skull. Must have been; there was a massive gaping hole in the middle of it.

  ‘I just stuck my hand in there,’ said Lion, as though he wanted a gold star or something. ‘There’s other bones in there. Dare you to have a go…’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Boring.’

  ‘You’re chicken-shit,’ laughed Lion. ‘You don’t wanna put your hand in there in case something reaches out and grabs you…’

  Lion was right. I’d seen that film round at Twinnie’s once. He’d rented it from M and S Video Supplies despite clearly being fourteen. It was the one where stray bony hands kept pushing out from the graves and pulling people in with them.

  ‘Give us one of your tabs and I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I bet you didn’t really do it, anyway. Nobody saw you do it so why am I supposed to believe you?’

  Lion grinned. Pulled his deck of Dorchester and Grey from his trouser pocket. Held them out to me.

  ‘Dorchester and Grey Lion?’ I said, taking one. ‘Fuck’s sake mate. These are Dot Cotton fags.’

  ‘I know mate. Pinched ‘em out me mam’s handbag this morning. She’ll go ape-shit when she realises…’

  I accepted the light. Inhaled the sickly flavour. Realised for the nth time that I absolutely detested the taste of cigarettes, but quite liked the head-rush that they gave me. The extra courage, the extra fuck-it-allness that even hold
ing a ciggie gave me. And then, before I could even give myself a chance to think twice, I bent down and thrust my arm elbow-deep into the hole. Felt live things scurrying away. Felt cold, dead bone. Felt something else which felt like a pulse; like the earth itself was pulsing. And then I think I felt the earth around the hole start to give way. And I think I felt myself being sucked into the hole. And I think I felt like I was drowning or about to be buried alive. To spend the remaining moments of my life with that pulsing thing that was under the earth.

  I yanked my arm out sharpish.

  Lion whistled through his teeth.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell, Bully,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d really do it!’

  I grinned; put on this daft old-woman voice: ‘I’ll do anything for a Dorchester and Grey.’

  Lion didn’t laugh like I hoped he would. Instead he was staring intently at my arm with an expression which bordered on the horrified.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What the fuck you looking at me like that for?’

  Again he didn’t answer. I looked down at my arm. All of my fingers and most of my wrist was stained this awful purple colour. It was like someone had spilled a whole glass of Ribena over me and I’d just left it.

  ‘Aaaagh,’ I screamed. ‘Get it off me, get it off me…’

  I started chasing Lion around, trying to wipe the mould or the stain or whatever it was off onto his school shirt. Dick and Twinnie must have been alerted by our noise because they were soon over with us, dragging Tommy Peaker behind them by the collar of his shirt. The collar was ripping badly now and there seemed to be a bad cut on his neck, too.

  ‘Where’s the skull?’ I asked, rubbing a leaf on my arm. The purple was disappearing rapidly now. Almost as quickly as it had come on.