by James Barrie
Ellen turned, surprised, holding the spade as you would a weapon. She stared at Jonathan. ‘What?’ she said.
‘My cat,’ Jonathan said. ‘He got out. I saw him going into the hedge. I thought he must have got through.’
‘I haven’t seen a cat,’ Ellen said.
‘Doing a spot of gardening?’ Jonathan asked.
Ellen stuck the spade into the ground ‘What does it look like?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘I suppose you could be burying something…’
Ellen took a step towards him. ‘Burying something? Like what?’
Jonathan thought ‘dog’ but instead said ‘treasure’.
‘Treasure?’ Ellen said, shaking her head. ‘Why would I be burying treasure in the garden?’
‘You know,’ Jonathan said, thinking what to say next so that she wouldn’t think him stupid. ‘It’s Easter soon. You might be planning an Easter Egg hunt…’
She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. ‘I am not planning an Easter egg hunt. I’m just doing a spot of gardening.’
Jonathan looked across at the patch where she had been digging. The soil had been turned over in just one place. The rest of the flower bed was still overgrown. The surface covered by dense weeds. He noticed that the lawn hadn’t been cut for a long time. He noted the little dog turds scattered about. ‘A spot of gardening?’ he said.
‘Yes, a spot of gardening.’
‘Yes, of course… Nice weather for it.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I haven’t heard your dog today…’
‘No,’ Ellen said. ‘Sandy is sleeping. Must have tired herself out.’
‘Right,’ said Jonathan, looking up at the bedroom window. ‘Upstairs.’
‘Yes, upstairs,’ Ellen said. ‘She sleeps on my mum’s bed.’
‘They’re both sleeping?’
‘Yes. They’re both sleeping upstairs.’
‘The curtains…’ Jonathan said, ‘they haven’t been opened in days.’
‘No,’ Ellen said, ‘my mum’s having a lie in. Like I said, they’re sleeping.’
Jonathan couldn’t think what to say next.
They stared at each other a minute.
Ellen took a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket and lit one. She stood staring at Jonathan and took a long drag on her cigarette, still staring at him. She blew smoke towards him.
‘I had an accident,’ Jonathan said. ‘That’s why I’m at home.’
‘I see,’ said Ellen, taking another drag.
‘I’d better get on.’
Ellen didn’t reply.
‘If you see my cat,’ Jonathan said, ‘let me know.’
He turned and made his way slowly back across the lawn towards the French windows. He could feel Ellen’s eyes on his back as he went. He was tempted to turn round but resisted.
He was more convinced than ever that Ellen had killed her mother and her dog. He hadn’t seen her put the dog in the hole. He just knew that she hadn’t been doing ‘a spot of gardening’; she had been burying Sandy.
Theodore watched from the bottom of the hedge as Jonathan returned inside. Then he turned his attention back to Ellen.
She had left the spade sticking in the ground and was now pacing in front of the patio doors, smoking her cigarette. She kept looking at the patch of soil and the hedge which separated her from Emily and Jonathan’s house. She smoked the cigarette down to the filter and then tossed it onto the top of the dog’s grave.
Then she went back into her house, sliding the patio doors closed behind her.
North by Northwest
Theodore approached the dog’s grave and the cigarette butt that still smouldered. Sandy was buried at least two feet below the ground. He wouldn’t be able to dig up the dog, and even if he did, what would he do with it then? He could hardly drag it through the hedge and drop it at Jonathan’s feet.
He walked towards the house, where Ellen was now in the kitchen, vigorously washing her hands in the sink.
He made it to the wall of the house without being seen. In front of him were the sliding glass doors that opened onto the lounge. Above his head was Ellen’s bedroom window.
He was standing on a patio made up of concrete paving slabs. A thousand cigarette ends littered the ground. Theodore noted that some of them had burned down to the filter.
There was a rectangle of lighter grey, measuring about six feet by four feet. Theodore noticed some dark grey marks outside this rectangle. He examined them carefully. They were charcoal. He looked closely at the bricks and mortar of the wall that flanked the sliding doors. In the small crevices, he noted particles of soot. They extended up the wall and stopped at the windowsill of Ellen’s bedroom. The bottom of the windowsill was blackened.
He looked out across the lawn, to where the shed stood.
Had there been two sheds, he wondered, or had the shed been put there to replace one that had burned down. He remembered what Wally had said, ‘Then one weekend he was gone. Whoosh! Just like that.’
He looked up once more at Ellen’s bedroom window and then down at the patio and the cigarette ends that lay there.
Then there was a ringing from inside the house. The telephone went straight to the answerphone.
‘It’s Penny. Can you answer the phone, Ellen?’
Then, ‘I know you’re there… Please just answer the phone. I’m starting to worry. Ellen?’
Theodore saw Ellen enter the room. He pressed himself flat against the ground; he could feel cigarette butts against his abdomen.
‘Just let me speak to mum… I’m going to have to come up if you don’t answer the phone Ellen… I’m worried about you.’
There was a beep. Then the doors slid open. Ellen towered over Theodore. In her hand she held a saucepan. She threw the contents at Theodore.
He was already running towards the hedge that separated the garden from Stuart’s when the water hit him.
At least it’s not soup, Theodore thought, as he dived through the gap in the hedge.
Stuart was in his shed. Theodore was a couple of feet away and could hear tapping coming from inside, and every so often a string of expletives.
‘Rattle, rattle, tap, tap,’ the shed went, and then: ‘Och! Och! Mah cock’s on a block… Och! Och! Mahcocksonablock.’
Theodore narrowed his eyes. I wonder what he’s up to in there, he thought.
He padded down the side of the shed and into the garden. There was no sign of Hamish, the ginger tom. Theodore took the opportunity of spraying parts of the hedge and the side of the shed, expanding his territory. He had no fear of Hamish.
But suddenly there was a whirring overhead. He stopped mid-flow and looked up.
A drone was hovering two feet above him, descending on its sets of propellers.
Theodore dived sideways into the vegetable patch, just avoiding the drone as it dropped at him from out of the skies.
He was hidden by the foliage of potato plants. He could hear the drone go over head, darting up and down the rows of vegetables.
He dashed to another row and the drone descended at the same time, almost catching him with its whirring propellers whipping up the air above his head. Now’s not the time for a fur-cut, thought Theodore.
He glanced up through the vegetable leaves and in the back bedroom window he saw his adversary.
Stuart’s ten-year-old son Dougie was leaning out of his bedroom window, remote controller in hand, piloting the drone that hovered menacingly above Theodore, waiting for the cat’s next move.
Dougie grinned with childish malevolence. To break a butterfly on a wheel was one thing; to conduct an aerial assault on a cat was a new one on Theodore.
No wonder Hamish was keeping out of sight: it was the Easter holidays…
He was going to have to make a break for it, Theodore realised, as the drone swooped low over his hiding place.
The drone came back for a second pass, its propellers clipping th
e tops of the plants and sending them into the air.
Theodore dashed to the edge of the vegetable patch where it joined the lawn. There was a two foot gap he would have to cross to reach the safety of the hedge.
Dougie saw the movement in the plants and sent the drone down the corridor cutting off the cat’s escape.
Theodore miaowed for human intervention.
But Stuart was still tapping away and cursing in his shed; Wally was busy trying to keep his fire going, and Jonathan was back inside, probably watching the rest of North by Northwest.
The drone came down once more, clipping the leaves from above his head. He flattened himself against the ground.
He looked and saw the drone hovering in the air, just a few feet away, its blue and white plastic shell held up by its four whirring propellers. A red light flicked on and off on the underside of the drone: Dougie was recording the attack to enjoy later.
Theodore was fed up of running. He would make a stand. He chose his moment and dashed out onto the strip of lawn.
The drone came straight at him. Theodore jumped and struck out with one paw, aiming it in between the whirring propellers at a circular strip of plastic.
He made contact with the plastic body of the machine, sending it crashing into the side of the shed, where it fell to the ground.
Theodore dashed to the bottom of the hedge as the shed door was thrown open.
‘What’s going on out here,’ shouted Stuart.
‘My drone,’ Dougie shouted down from his bedroom window. ‘It crashed… Sorry!’
‘You bloody tweeny sod!’
Stuart looked at the plastic toy lying on the lawn. ‘It looks like you’ve gone and bust it. Forty quid that cost.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Dougie said. ‘It was that big grey cat.’
Stuart looked around the garden. There were no cats to be seen. ‘Cat, mah arse,’ he said.
‘But dad…’ Dougie began.
‘I may be mad north by northwest,’ Stuart said and waved his forefinger at his son, who was his own spitting image. ‘When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a hacksaw!’
And with this Shakespearean quotation, he went back inside his shed and slammed the door shut behind him.
Scots in Space
Like quite a few people with overactive imaginations, Stuart McRae believed that people originated from outer space. Stuart, however, went one step further. He believed that the different races on Earth came from different planets. The Scots were from one planet, the English another.
The Scots on their home planet had limited food, so had gone in search of other planets. They had discovered Scotland and in its rich soils they had grown the oats from which they made their porridge.
He put his ideas into books: a planned series of Scottish Science Fiction featuring a band of feisty Scots who travel the universe, battling the anaemic English and other alien breeds. His first book in the series, working title: ‘Scots in Space’, was nearing completion and he was looking forward to the royalties pouring in. He would put the money into offshore bank accounts to make sure the English taxman couldn’t get a slice of it. He was even considering opening a Swiss bank account; he admired the Swiss: they knew how to squirrel away other people’s money.
In the meantime, he played househusband to two children: Dougie and Daisy. His wife, Leslie, worked for a bank in the centre of York and made enough money for them to live in reasonable comfort – just until his first book was published, he told Leslie. Then they would leave England, return to Scotland and buy a castle by a loch, and Leslie would not have to work again.
It was just a matter of time before the literary world would bow to his pen.
He bashed another paragraph into his laptop:
The Scots of Scaramanga had long lived under the oppressive oligarchy of the English tyrants. Then, one day, a man emerged who would in time sow the seed of discontent and begin the uprising that would bring down the oligarchs. He was the chosen Scot. His name was Hamish McHaddock. Hamish would bring down the oligarchical governance that oppressed the people of Scaramanga.
Stuart liked the word oligarch. He read out loud his latest paragraph, emphasizing the arch of oligarch each time the word cropped up.
Hamish McHaddock, the hero of his book, was a younger, more handsome, more eloquent version of himself. His adversary, William Weakbladder, was drawn from his neighbour over the hedge, Wally. Though set in outer space, his novel was firmly rooted in Acomb.
He heard Leslie call his name from outside the shed.
For another minute he continued to bash away at the keyboard. Then the shed door swung open. Leslie was standing, arms folded across her chest.
Leslie’s chest was quite formidable. It was what had drawn Stuart to her in their early days of courtship, when he had been the steward on the early morning Edinburgh-bound train that she took each morning. He had impressed her by his knowledge of the Scottish bard. He had quoted Burns to her as he poured her coffee each morning. It had been Leslie who had eventually plucked up the courage to ask if the lyrical train guard would like to meet up after work one day – just for a wee dram. It was Stuart’s gift of the gab that won her heart.
Leslie’s chest had been what had drawn Stuart to his future wife, but what had once been objects of adoration for Stuart had become objects of practical use with the birth of their two children and off limits to Stuart and then after breast-feeding had been done with, they had never returned to their former role.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Leslie said, her arms still folded across her chest.
Stuart’s intergalactic War and Peace was going to have to wait, he realised, saving his work with a control‘s’.
‘Have I forgotten something?’
‘You’re supposed to be taking the kids to parkour,’ Leslie said.
‘I was just finishing this wee paragraph,’ Stuart said.
‘Well, your wee paragraph can wait.’
‘Why can’t you take them?’
‘Because it’s your job to take them,’ Leslie said. ‘And I’m supposed to be working. You know that.’
‘I don’t see why they cannot just jump about the garden.’
‘Look: we’ve already paid for parkour. The kids have been inside all day, playing on their phones, and you went and dug over most of the lawn so you could plant vegetables, so they can’t very well play in the garden.’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take them.’
A mobile phone began to ring from within the house and Leslie dashed back inside.
Stuart shut his shed door and entering the lounge he heard Leslie snap into her phone, ‘Just power off, count to ten and then start it up again… If it still doesn’t work, call me back.’
The garden and shed now quiet, Theodore ventured out from the bottom of the hedge.
There was still no sign of Hamish, so he took the opportunity to empty his bowels in Stuart’s vegetable patch. He kicked some soil over and then gazed at the back of Stuart’s house.
Leslie was pacing in front of the lounge window, her mobile phone in her hand. She was tapping frantically away at the screen.
Leslie was a secret gambling addict. What had started as a bit of harmless fun at the end of the working day had become an all-consuming obsession. At night she would lie in bed clicking away while her husband read a chapter of his book. Stuart wasn’t aware that she had squandered most of their savings. But she knew, with a little bit of luck, she would eventually make it all back and more besides.
She used a website called Doggo Bingo. Doggo was a Yorkshire terrier with spinning pound coins for eyes and a pink tongue that slithered saliva. He wore a top hat with a pink band. A playing card stuck out from the band: the jack of diamonds.
Theodore watched her waste another hundred pounds in less than two minutes on Doggo Bingo, her fingers jabbing away at the screen of her iPhone, her forehead creased.
Humans would be better off without hands.
Theodore glanced at his paws and then back to Leslie’s fingers, still jabbing away at the screen of her iPhone. All pad and no claw, thought Theodore.
Bad Friday
Emily was not in a good mood when she got home.
It was Good Friday, and during her lunch break she had gone out to M&S and bought a whole salmon for dinner, as she was traditionally minded enough to avoid meat on this day. She left the plastic bag containing the fish in her car when she returned to the soft furnishing store for her afternoon shift.
The shop’s owner was on a three week holiday in Thailand and Emily had been left in charge. The widow of a local fish and chip tycoon had entered the shop with the intention of furnishing a dozen properties she had bought on the Terry’s site in York, now named the Chocolate Works, and was going to let them out. Emily had widened her eyes when the woman had taken out her purse and paid in cash. Almost twenty thousand pounds.
How many fish and chips did you have to sell to make that sort of money? How many hours would she have to spend working in a shop to make that sort of money?
The banks were closed as it was a Bank Holiday and wouldn’t be open again until Tuesday. She knew there were such things as night safes but was unsure how they worked. So, rather than leaving the money in the till overnight, she put it in her handbag. They wouldn’t count it until the banks reopened on Tuesday anyway, so what difference did it make?
It had been a sunny afternoon, and when she got back in her car, it stank of fish. She drove home with her windows down.
Now the plastic bag containing the smelly salmon sat next to her handbag containing twenty thousand pounds on the kitchen side.
She removed the salmon and slid it into a dish. She took out a container of mashed potato from the fridge. She removed the cardboard sleeve. She took a knife from the drawer and began to stab the plastic cover, the knife going through the contents and stabbing the wooden counter surface below. She didn’t notice; her attention was focussed on her handbag.
She would take the cash into the bank on Tuesday morning. What did it matter, a few days?
