Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  They’d been talking about wild animals and Prentiss had been telling Howard about lions. “No different here from what they are at Longleat,” he’d said. “Told Lord Bath as much when I visited the place.”

  “He did, you know,” said Mrs Prentiss earnestly.

  “I said to his Lordship, what’s the bloody point of going all the way to Africa when you’ve got what we want to see right here in England.”

  “That’s true,” said Mrs Prentiss. “He said that.”

  “We went to the Windsor Safari Park last year,” Prentiss said. “Lions all round the car. Tame as anything. Gave one of ‘em a bar of choclate.”

  “. . . a bar of chocolate,” echoed Mrs Prentiss.

  “I wouldn’t try that here if I were you,” Howard had said, disengaging himself.

  At noon each day Howard took a group to see the lions being fed. This was done in a ten-acre enclosure with high fences all round. He’d get the guests there about five minutes to twelve, just before the meat arrived. Usually there were half a dozen cars and the two hotel kombis, between twenty and thirty people all told. The vehicles would go into the enclosure and draw up in a semi-circle near the middle where they bristled with telephoto lenses.

  It was always a nervous time for the lions. There were fourteen of them including cubs and at this time of day they were very hungry. Howard had built several platforms eight to ten feet high of rough logs and some lions would lie watchfully on the platforms while others would pace up and down, tails moving from side to side; hungry expectant, and on a knife-edge of tension.

  On this day the cars and minibuses had drawn up in their places some minutes before the meat was due and he and his black game-ranger had seen everyone settled down and quiet. Then the Ford truck protected by heavy wire netting all around it had come into the enclosure, the gates had been shut and the truck driven to the centre of the area. The lions had come bounding down from their platforms and, with the others, had run after the truck. Great gobbets of donkey and goat meat were flung on to the ground in the middle of the enclosure and the lions fell upon them, growling and snarling. At this point the fat Englishman, Prentiss, followed by his wife, got out of his car and began to walk towards the lions, taking photographs. Howard had not seen him at first because he was hidden by the other kombi. Then he heard his game-ranger shout and saw the incredible sight of the English couple ambling along, the man taking photographs, the wife holding a second camera.

  “Get back!” Howard shouted. “Get back to your car!”

  They either did not hear or did not take notice. He saw the game-ranger get out of his own kombi and go after them.

  Fourteen hungry lions, lionesses and cubs, all after a share of food make an atavistic sight as they tear whole joints from each other and it was this that the hotel guests had come to see. Always, at the beginning of their meal the lions were nervous and there was a great deal of snarling and posturing, as the hierarchy sorted itself out. It was towards this complex and dangerous behavioural mêlée that Prentiss and his wife were moving.

  “GET BACK!” Howard shouted again. “YOU ARE IN DANGER!” But the couple who had visited the lions of Longleat in Wiltshire and the Windsor Safari Park near London were not to be deterred. Howard scooped up his .375 Magnum and shouted to his startled passengers, “Nobody move out of here!” Then he was running towards the couple, with the ranger converging on them from the far side of the cars.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he yelled at Prentiss when he reached him. “Are you bloody mad? Get back to your car!” He put out a hand to grab Prentiss by the arm and turn him physically in the direction he wished him to go. What happened next took only a matter of seconds. A young lion with a short mane had only a moment before been relieved of a piece of meat by a bigger and stronger male, had then taken a small piece from one of the cubs and must have felt threatened by the presence of humans, for it dropped the meat and charged at the group now made up of Prentiss, his wife, Howard and the ranger.

  They saw the lion together. Mrs Prentiss screamed. Prentiss threw his arms up in front of his face and Howard . . . something, some message or impulse went astray in his head, for instead of his brain telling his arms to bring up the gun, it told his legs to run. He turned in terror, blindly, the gun slipping from his hand, but Prentiss was in the way and he tried to fling him aside. In that moment the lion crashed into him, spinning him over on to his back and churning at his stomach with its back claws, trying to disembowel him. He had a flashing memory of teeth above him, of the foetid stink of the animal’s breath, of its weight, of the roar of the ranger’s gun, then merciful darkness. It had been some weeks before he came back to real consciousness in his hospital room. By then he was a hero. What the watchers in their cars had seen, because it was what they had wanted to see, was Howard flinging himself in front of Prentiss and in so doing losing his rifle. Shortly afterwards Michel Blanchet had come to see him and given him the chance of coming to London. Howard was, as he had said, a brave man and he could always use brave men.

  * * *

  He fought his way back to the present, back to the room in the house just off Eaton Square, which was horrible enough, yet at that moment seemed preferable to his memories.

  “We can’t just bloody sit here,” Dave was saying, rubbing the palm of his right hand up and down his thigh.

  “Be cool,” Jacmel said.

  “Cool! I like that. That’s nice, that is. Half the coppers in London down there at the end of the street and you say be cool.”

  “Not only in the street,” Jacmel said. “Up there and up there . . .” He pointed to the dark windows that overlooked the front of the house.

  “What’s up there?” Dave said. Then his eyes widened as he understood. “You mean up there?”

  “They are not fools.”

  “Jesus,” Dave stepped farther away from the window. “And you do nothing?”

  “It makes no difference,” Jacmel said. “We have the boy. It makes no difference if they have all the English police. All the English army–”

  “You keep on bloody saying that but what about us in here with that . . . that. . .”

  “It is not here in this room.”

  “We can’t stay here all the time, I mean . . .”

  “If you want to piss, then piss,” Jacmel said.

  “It’s not that,” Dave said, curiously embarrassed. “It’s just that. . . look, why not make them give us some of that serum stuff. We could tell them that if they didn’t we would cut off one of his ears. Like they did to that kid in Italy.”

  Jacmel shook his head. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “It is a war, this; between him and me.”

  “Who?”

  “The big man, the policeman. He wants us to stay, no? The longer he can keep us in here the better for him. This is what they do. They keep you in one place for days, for weeks. They have everything, you have nothing; they have the world around them, you have silence. Yes? That is what we have to fight and anything that makes us weaker helps them. If he knows we have a poisonous reptile here in the house with us he must know we are afraid. But until now he knows nothing. Not even how many we are, nor who we are. Everything he does not know makes it stronger for us. You understand?”

  Dave said nothing. He was unconvinced. “Don’t worry,” Jacmel said. “When you wish to piss he will go first.” He pointed his thumb at Howard.

  “Here he comes!” Dave said in a harsh whisper as though his voice might carry down to the big man shambling through the mist towards the house.

  * * *

  Bulloch came on past the Citroen and the yellow Cortina, the only two cars in the cul-de-sac, and as he passed the Citroen he bent and looked in the windows. That was careless, he thought, the key was still in the ignition. He opened the door and pulled it out. Then he looked at the Cortina. The key was gone. All right, he thought, we’ll deal with that one later. Not now. Now it was time to show the flag, make the dirt sweat a bit. He came o
n, heavy-footed, until he reached the pavement in front of the house, where he stopped. He hunched down in his sheepskin coat and looked at the house from underneath his eyebrows. Nothing at the downstairs windows. No tell-tale movement of curtains. Well, they’d have been bloody fools to stay there. First floor. Two good big windows, long, rather like French windows, opening on to tiny wrought-iron balconies. There was something different about the windows on the first floor compared with the others in the house; they were not like dead eyes; there was the faintest life there. Warmth. That’s where they were then. Must have a light on somewhere; probably covered with a towel, almost impossible to see it in the orange glow of the street lamps. Who were they trying to fool anyway? Then he realized they had probably done it because they had guessed there were marksmen in the adjoining houses. They weren’t such fools. Still, anyone could have thought of that. It wasn’t particularly clever. All it did was show the dirt were thinking.

  How many, he wondered? Two for sure. Could be more. French. Political? Hadn’t sounded political. They usually shot their mouths off in the first minute with their demands. What were the French mixed up in? Algeria was over, so was Indo-China; there were some former French colonies in Africa but there’d been no excitement there. Blacks had simply taken over and shot their opposition or put them in jail, as far as he could tell–or care. Owner of the house was a wealthy Frenchman. Voice from the house was French. They had the boy. Straight kidnapping? French crime. Remember the Peugeot kid.

  Nash must have got on to them. But how? Anyway, you didn’t handle something like this on your own. Whole bloody force would have known about it. You don’t just go and knock at the door and say I’m a copper and you’d better stop kidnapping that boy. Or if you did you got the shotgun treatment and you bloody deserved it. What the hell had Nash been doing there? If he knew that he’d know a lot.

  He thought he saw just the smallest movement of one of the curtains in the upstairs room. Good, he thought, they’re watching. He turned slowly so that his back was to the house. Let them have his arse, he thought. Of course they could put a bullet through his head as soon as wink. They’d shot Nash. They weren’t shy about it. He felt the protective anger build up like a carapace shielding his back and his nerves. Bloody dirt.

  The minutes ticked by. Ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty . . . His feet began to freeze and the cold slowly crept up from his toes through his feet to his ankles like damp rising in a rotten wall. This was the worst part, he thought, but he would not move. No stamping up and down. No blowing on the hands. No exercises to keep warm. That was part of everyday life; that’s what normal people would be doing. He gets cold just like us, they’d think, looking at him. He wasn’t like them; not like the dirt. And he’d show them he wasn’t and sooner or later something inside them would recognize that and they would cringe a little and that would be the beginning of the end. What did the kids call it these days? You psyched someone; you did it on the tennis court or on the battlefield. Psyched. That was it. Well, this was his battlefield and he didn’t need stupid long-haired words to explain what he was doing. Christ, the way they used words these days. Only pure English spoken in these islands was north of the border. Any Scot could teach these bastards about words.

  Stamping was a weakness. Blowing on hands was a weakness. Walking up and down a weakness. They mightn’t recognize this at the beginning but his presence, his strength would wear on them in the end. The end . . . would they shoot the boy in the end? Would they strangle him? Hit him from behind? In spite of himself, Bulloch shivered. Not his problem. Don’t think about it. If you think about it your resolve goes. Hard. That’s how it had to be played; hard. The old woman in Sutherland Street. She’d only lived a few days after they broke that siege. People had said he’d been too rough. That a little of the gently-bentley treatment might have got her out sooner. You couldn’t tell . . . But a boy. Christ . . . What was he, ten? Well, where the hell were his parents? You didn’t fuck off half way round the world and leave your ten-year-old in charge of some poncy chauffeur and a French maid, then ask him, Bulloch, to pick up the pieces. It would never have happened when he was a kid. Never . . . Don’t think about the boy. Think about something else. Think about the cold that was numbing his calf muscles.

  Cold. Real cold. He’d known real cold. This was pansy stuff. Edinburgh on a February day. An east wind howling in off the Firth. Binns corner, waiting in the terrible cold for his mother to finish work in the packing room. Too frightened to go home by himself in case his father was already there. That had been cold. When you were hungry the cold always felt worse.

  And in the school holidays, the winter holidays, getting up at six to look for golf balls on the Braid Hills or Craiglockhart or even out at Gullane: Dunlop 65s, Warwicks, Penfolds. Like bloody diamonds because during the war you couldn’t get them. Hands and knees in the grass where the duffers sliced. Beating through the whinns in a northerly gale, nose streaming, eyes weeping, knuckles orangey-blue. That had been cold. And then when you had found a few balls, round to the clubhouse and a knock at the shop door and the secretary would come out and see what you had to sell. Dunlop 65s ninepence, all the rest sixpence, less if they were badly cut, and he knew the bloody secretary sold them at nearly twice what he paid him. Then home with the money and sometimes his mother would buy a couple of baps and have something warm herself if his father wasn’t there; and sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he’d get a few weeks for petty thieving, sometimes a couple of days for drunk and disorderly. Often he wished they’d cart him off to Barlinnie Gaol and throw away the key. That’s where he’d first come across the dirt: his father.

  Bulloch stood there in front of the house staring into the heavy mist, unmoving, gross, smelling the smell of his childhood, the smell of coal fires, heavy now on the London air, unable to escape because of the low cloud layer. The smell caught him at the back of the nose: Edinburgh winters, the whole Gothic skyline belching smoke.

  They’d lived up a stair on the Royal Mile between the Castle and Holyrood House. The Royal Mile! The Stinking Mile more like it. Full of bloody tourists gawping at the tartan shops and the trinkets. The Happy Haggis. The Frying Scotsman. Jesus bloody save us from winsome Scots. What the tourists didn’t do was poke their snouts into the wynds and smell the smell of urine and vomit. Who could blame them? They’d come to Scotland to look for Rob Roy and Bonnie Prince Charlie and buy up kilts and sporrans to wear at Caledonian Society meetings back home in Woolloomooloo and Bloemfontein. They hadn’t come to see Hamish Bulloch, Esq, sleeping it off by the dirtbins in the pale sun.

  That was a time he just might have made something of himself. As a kid his mother had given him an old set of his grandfather’s golf clubs, hickory shafted, still called by the old names, mashie and niblick and cleek, and when he was looking for lost balls he’d play as many holes as he could– out of sight of the clubhouse of course, for he couldn’t afford the green fees–and the old men who sat on the benches in the August wind would say they hadn’t seen a better swing since Harry Vardon. Once a pro told him he had the makings of a champion. He had; he knew he had. But there was never the time to practise and he’d gone into the Army the day he had left school and they’d shipped him out to Burma and by the time the war was over the world was a different place and there wasn’t much time for hickory-shafted golf clubs.

  His mother was dying when he came back and if his father had been at home when he got there he’d have killed him with his own hands for what he’d brought her to. Daughter of a school-master in Dundee. That’s what she’d been. And married Hamish Bulloch, Esq, self-employed builder. Jesus. He’d never been able to keep out of prison long enough to dig a set of foundations. He tried to recall his mother’s face but could only bring back a hazy figure, short, plump– dumpy she would have been called. But lovely silky brown hair that she wore in a plait. It was she who had fought to keep him at school when their family circumstances cried out for him to find work; it was she who heard h
im his lessons, who gave him a love of words and reading. How she’d ever married his father he could not think. Had there been some chemistry there in the early days or was his the only proposal? He didn’t know and never would now, for she died six months after VJ Day.

  Bulloch only saw his father once more after that. It was on an evening in early May and he was coming down the Lothian Road near Toll Cross and he’d looked over a wall into a derelict building site where a group of meths drinkers were huddled round a fire of old door-frames and one of them had looked up. The face was covered in stubble and there were sores at the corners of his mouth. He had recognized Hamish Bulloch, Esq, self-employed builder, but there was no corresponding recognition in the blank drugged eyes that looked up at him. They simply looked up and looked away and Bulloch walked on down towards Prince’s Street. A week later he left Edinburgh for London, he was in his early twenties and had been to war, but all he had so far gained from life was a store of hatred. At first it centred solely on his father but then shifted to embrace those like his father. Once, when he was twelve, he had heard a neighbour talking about his father. She and another neighbour had been gossiping on the stairs and they had not known he was listening. They’d talked about his mother, too, saying how much better she was than his father. Then one had described him as dirt. Bulloch had often read of children flying to the defence of their parents when they heard them criticized. But he had simply stood there listening and then had crept away. He agreed with them. His father was dirt. And there were thousands like him.

  In London he joined the Metropolitan Police and for twenty-five years he had been looking for the dirt and been paid for it. In a strange way he was a happy man. His own man, too. There’d been Muriel, of course, and the flat in Notting Hill Gate (Kensington, she’d insisted) but that was a long time ago. Seventeen or eighteen years. Couldn’t even remember what she looked like. How long had the marriage lasted? Eighteen months? Two years? Could hardly call it a marriage. They’d wanted different things. She’d wanted a Chesterfield suite and doilies. He’d wanted six pints of a Sunday lunchtime and a chance to get the dirty water off his chest. He doubted she’d ever seen a naked man before they were married and was quite sure she’d never had one on top of her. Doilies and butter-knives and coasters under the glasses and don’t touch me there I don’t like it.