The Moon Is Watching

by Adam Cloake

  Alan tried to stand up, feeling he needed to confront all four of them, his friend as well as his enemies, but Murray kicked him again, in the exact same spot as before, just below the ribs. For a few seconds, Alan found himself furiously gasping, unsure if he would ever be able to breathe again.

  Brogan suddenly released his grip on Ben. Standing back into his own space, he said. “All right, Ben! Maybe I believe you. And maybe I don’t. Let’s see!”

  Brogan bent down and picked up Alan’s rucksack. Still wheezing on the ground, Alan was powerless to stop him. The newly-cut grass under him was cooler now that evening had arrived, but this gave him little comfort.

  Brogan upended the bag. Out fell the towel, followed by Alan’s pens, markers, and magazines. The last item to emerge was the sketch pad. Brogan picked this up, and his fingers proceeded to maul the pages as he flicked through them. The book looked awkward in his big red hands.

  “Jesus!” Brogan laughed, showing some pages around the group. “Look at all the pretty little dresses!” Murray and Smith laughed heartily at these taunts, and even Ben had an embarrassed half-smile on his face. He wanted to turn away and run, to escape from his betrayal, but he knew he would just be making things worse for himself.

  Suddenly, Brogan crudely bunched his fingers around all the pages together, and ripped them away from the spine of the book.

  “No! Don't!” was all that Alan had time to cry out before Smith, who was standing above him, raised his leg and delivered a brutal downward stamp between his shoulder blades. A fresh cascade of pain ripped through Alan, now accompanied by a wave of dizziness and cold nausea. A small spray of vomit spurted into his mouth. Without thinking, he swallowed it back down, refusing to add the indignity of puking to the pain that was already wracking him.

  Brogan walked up close to Ben. It was clear that he had hatched an idea. “So, you two aren’t friends then? Is that right?”

  Ben hesitated for a moment, as he considered redeeming himself for what he had just said. His reply, however, was: “Of course I’m not!” Why had he said this? Was it just simple cowardice? Or was Alan so different, so unusual, that he found it impossible not to deny him?

  “In that case…” Brogan said, holding the pages in front of Ben’s face, “Take these, and tear them up!”

  Ben began to wonder if this was the moment when he would have to deliver his first ever punch. The idea made him queasy. He stood still, staring at the ground, imagining the damage these three boys could do to him.

  “Do you want us to pick on you every single day, Ben?” Brogan asked.

  “No, I don't.”

  “Then take these pages!” The tone in Brogan's voice was hideous, with the quiet ferocity of an older man, a more bitter man. It was the anthropological voice of his father, his grandfather, and all their fathers before, through generations of disappointment and wasted defiance.

  The pain in Alan's side was bad; the pain between his shoulders was worse. He had to turn on his side to see what was happening just a few yards away. As he watched the uncertain way Ben looked at the bunch of sketches, the hitch in Alan’s breath made it sound as if he were sobbing. But he was doing the opposite, fighting to keep the tears at bay. Too weak to stand up, there was nothing he could do to prevent this. Only Ben could do that for him.

  “Do it!” said Brogan.

  “Yeah, do it!” hissed Murray.

  “You’d better do it!” said Smith.

  A few seconds of silence elapsed.

  Ben reached out.

  He took the pages, about forty in all.

  “Ben?” came Alan’s voice from the ground. It quivered with confusion and hurt.

  Ben almost looked down at him, but stopped himself. He exhaled heavily, a sound like resignation. Then he wrapped both hands around the paper.

  He began to rip.

  He began to tear.

  For the next few seconds, the only sound in that meadow by the river was the sound of Alan’s drawings being sundered and destroyed. The pages were halved, quartered, reduced again and again into smaller pieces. Ben was turning forty pages of pristine beauty, which he had been admiring just a short while earlier, into more than four hundred ragged pieces of debris. The renting slashed through Ingrid Bergman’s face, and across Audrey Hepburn’s eyes. It decimated the Catwoman’s PVC.

  Alan remained silent and powerless on the grass. Ben knew – and hated the knowing – that every rasping stroke was shredding the boy, and their friendship, as well as the pages.

  Finally, he stopped.

  Ben stood, surrounded by the result of his cowardice, as the mingled sounds of laughter and cruel cheering assailed him. Perhaps he should have thrown that punch after all. Perhaps he should have taken that beating, on behalf of the two of them. But it was too late now.

  Brogan patted him on the shoulder a few times, as if he were a pet. “Well done, Ben!” he said. “Now you’re a real man.” The penknife had reappeared in his hand, and he used it to give Ben a quick, painful tap on the forehead. The sudden action almost brought tears to Ben’s eyes.

  Then the three older boys began walking away, their playtime over. Murray, as he passed Alan, spat down at him, then laughed and followed after Brogan. Smith took up the rear, first running, then leaping in the air, making whooping noises like the ones he had heard in cowboy films. Murray joined in with him. Brogan walked on silently, his receding back still a force of menace.

  Alan, his breath catching, pushed himself onto his knees. Ben knew the right thing to do would be to go to him, to reach out a helping hand, to behave like a real friend. But he couldn't do any of these things. He was too ashamed even to apologise.

  Eventually, Alan was standing unsteadily before him. He glanced at Ben, and saw that the other boy was not even looking at him. He was staring off in the direction of the road, as if already imagining himself walking away, escaping from this place, and from what he had done.

  After a few seconds, Alan said, in a low voice, “Go home, Ben. I’ll be all right on my own.”

  “Okay!” was Ben’s whispered reply, shocked that this was all he could say. He turned and walked towards the road. His feet felt heavy in his boots, and the walk across the meadow seemed unending.

  Alan, now alone, looked around him. He was surrounded by poisoned snow. The evening breeze was already pushing the fragments of his sketches in the direction of the river. He tried to bend down to pick them up, but felt simultaneous shots of pain along his upper back, his side, and his arm. At the same time, the thought of touching the paper made his heart sink even further. He chose instead to pick up the empty rucksack, abandoning all the other items. He might come back for them tomorrow, if his injuries would allow him.

  Only then, alone, did Alan allow himself to cry. The tears came suddenly, in spasms, each one inflicting fresh stabs of pain throughout his injured body. He cried like this for ten minutes, inwardly hoping the release would make him feel better. Finally, he stopped, realising that the relief had been only minimal.

  He wiped his eyes on the hem of his shirt, and walked out of the meadow.

  The effects of the injury to Alan’s back lasted longer than expected. He told his parents a story about falling out of a tree, because it seemed the most masculine explanation.

  He returned to the meadow the day after the attack. His pens and magazines were still where they had fallen. The hard cover of the sketch pad lay akimbo beside them, and he found his mother’s towel at the edge of the water, where the night-time wind had rolled it. He collected all these things into his bag.

  But the pieces of paper were gone. They were obviously lost, taken by the river.

  Alan walked home despondent for the second day in a row, but at least now his feeling of hopelessness was tempered by a practical acceptance. Perhaps he could use this feeling as a shield to protect himself from his hurt.

  He didn't return to the Casablanca dress for many weeks but, even when he did, he gave up work on it after just
ten minutes. He began to see the needle and thread as symbols of his otherness, of his failure. Besides, he had nobody to share the results with.

  Brogan, Smith, and Murray continued to persecute him. The assaults were usually verbal, especially when there were other children around to act as an audience. During that autumn and winter, he was punched in the arms and shoulders numerous times. His legs were frequently bruised from their kicks, so he only ever wore long trousers in front of his parents, even when summer circled round again. They took this as a sign of his growing up.

  Of course, he fought back every time. Sometimes this response repelled his tormentors, lessening the damage they were willing to inflict. Often, however, if Brogan was in a particularly wicked mood, Alan’s attempts at defending himself made their attacks all the more aggressive. On two occasions, Alan felt the edge of Brogan’s penknife blade pressed into his neck, close enough to leave a small mark. There was nobody there to defend him, and he could offer only a token defence himself.

  Throughout the remainder of their secondary school years, Alan and Ben never spoke to each other again. On the Monday after the incident, Alan arrived in Art class to find Ben sitting in a different part of the room. Alan sat beside the empty chair, and the two boys kept their backs to each other for the rest of the year.

  A few days after the meadow, Ben threw his first ever punch, into the face of one of his classmates. It was the beginning of a series of fights he was involved in that year. He soon became widely known as a bully, a word which he hated. Ben’s aggression, however, was unlike Brogan's, whose assaults against other boys – and girls – seemed driven by an almost psychotic pleasure. Ben's were more a means of pushing his anger outwards, of solving his own inner problems, and he needed victims for this. Also unlike Brogan, Ben never picked on anybody younger or smaller.

  Eventually, the time came for college. Alan and Ben each took the opportunity to finally escape from their small town. Ben set off on his new life as a student of English Lit., although he eventually moved into journalism. Alan, who had dreamed since childhood of designing and making clothes, could not bring himself to pursue this as a college option. In his lowest moods, the idea even repelled him physically. And so, just like both his parents, he chose Accountancy, and failed to derive a single day’s pleasure from his whole college career.

  The two former friends studied in different cities – Alan in Dublin, Ben in Galway. During this time, they saw almost nothing of each other, except infrequently during holiday periods. Even then, they never spoke to each other.

  They graduated around the same time.

  Although Ben regarded himself as a professional journalist, he went on to spend years trapped in the world of a Dublin-based tabloid, writing about crime, criminals, and court cases. He wanted to shine a brighter light on himself, to truly feel he deserved something better, but the sins of his schooldays insisted on throwing their shadows over him, holding him back.

  His romantic relationships, with both women and men, were all short-lived. This included his ill-judged marriage to Linda, a retail manager he had met one drunken night in a club on Harcourt Street. She was the second person Ben had loved in his life, but he couldn’t sustain it.

  The three novels he began all remained unfinished, and he accepted each week's wages with a deep sense of grudge. As time passed, he also found that an increasing proportion of his salary was being soaked up by alcohol. His dependence on this drug had crept inside him unawares, and had established a firm control over his life.

  Ben was approaching his mid-thirties when he first noticed the blood in his urine.

  Alan found himself a junior position in a Chartered Accountancy firm in Dublin. After a year of this, he moved to the open-plan life of a large corporation. He had grown from a shy, introverted boy into a shy, introverted man. He felt himself a prisoner of anxiety and caution, with all thoughts of ambition locked outside himself. Despite his dislike for the work, at least he was proficient with figures, and his younger years of working closely with fabrics and thread had heightened his powers of concentration. As a result, the Finance section became a haven for him, a hiding place where he could work in solitude, and ignore the rest of the world.

  Both Alan and Ben lived alone in different parts of South Dublin.

  Despite their proximity, they never met, or even saw each other.

  Ben entered his grotty little tabloid office late on New Year’s Eve. It was getting close to midnight, so the building was deserted. Everybody else was partying in the city. He had made sure of that before coming back. He sat down at his desk, and unlocked one of the drawers. From this, he produced the secret dossier he kept hidden there. He opened the brown folder, and set aside all the photos of Anthony Brogan contained within. He then took his notebook from his pocket, and transcribed the newest entries from it into the file.

  It almost frightened Ben to think how comprehensive this dossier was becoming.

  There had been no need to expend any of his energy on the other two bullies from his youth. Smith had killed himself and his pregnant girlfriend by misjudging a tight corner on his motorbike one winter night. They were both nineteen. Murray was serving time in Mountjoy Prison following an argument in a pub. His intention had been to glass the other guy in the face. He had missed, and instead sliced open the man’s carotid artery. Once in prison, Murray saw his manslaughter sentence grow ever longer. Not being a particularly smart thug to begin with, he had never developed any talent for hiding his dope, his hooch, or his mobile phones.

  That left just the ringleader, Brogan, still alive and on the loose. But he was the one that Ben really wanted.

  Keeping this man present in his life brought Ben a sadness that he wished he could smother. This was, of course, partly because of the violence he had repeatedly witnessed from Brogan. Equally potent, however, were the memories of his own cruel behaviour, and the children whose schooldays he himself had tarnished.

  Nonetheless, he needed to do this. He had to do something for Alan, provide some form of retribution for him, before he ran out of time. Ben didn’t believe he would ever be capable of doing anything good, either for his old friend or for anybody else. This just wasn’t the way he viewed himself. So, he had chosen this route instead.

  Brogan had left Ireland eleven years earlier, going first to Manchester, then to East London. Using his contacts in the crime department of his sister paper, Ben knew that Brogan worked as a minor enforcer for a drug dealer in West Ham. Although known to the law, his connections helped keep him out of jail, apart from the occasional short stretch. His main area of expertise was encouraging debtors to make their payments promptly. As well as his fists – long honed for just such a career – most of the recent scars he had created came from the point of his favourite weapon, the penknife. Ben wondered if it was the same blood-red one he had carried as a teenager, the one he had so used to frighten so many children. If so, he had graduated as an adult. Now, he used the weapon without restraint. The loutishness of his youth had developed into a searing trail of bloodiness.

  Ben had wanted to visit London, had wanted to find Brogan, to finish the things that had been left unfinished. Twenty-six years on, the sound of tearing paper still reminded him of the torn pain in Alan’s voice when he had said “Go home, Ben. I’ll be all right on my own.” Enough time had passed. An exorcism was required.

  By early November, just as Ben had worked up the courage to book his trip to London, he received a piece of surprising news.

  Brogan had returned to Dublin a few days earlier, around Hallowe’en.

  One of his victims turned out to be related to a police officer, and things needed to be smoothed out over in London. So, Brogan was placed on hiatus back in his home country, out of harm’s way. Ben had no doubt that the man would not be using this recess time innocently.

  He quickly learned who Brogan’s Dublin-based contacts were. He investigated his friends, the bars where he liked to drink, and the clubs which h
e frequented. Finding his temporary address was one of the easiest parts of the hunt, so he spent the next few weeks learning about the neighbourhood on Gardiner Street, and the people who lived there. He developed an idea of how late, or how early, Brogan arrived home each night. He learned the nights when he didn't come home at all, and the nights when he was likely to arrive back in the company of someone else, usually Shelley or Barbara.

  He learned that, after a busy weekend, Brogan liked to come home early on a Monday night, between 9 and 11.00, and that he was usually alone. So, this was the night Ben chose.

  * * *

  At 8.00 on Monday, January 9th, a man in dark grey clothing gained access to Anthony Brogan's flat with a duplicate key that had been made for him a week earlier. He had anonymously hired a pickpocket to steal the original from the cloakroom while Brogan was in one of his favourite clubs. Crime reporters get to know such people. The pickpocket had made a quick imprint in plasticine (or marla) of all the keys on the ring, before returning the bunch to Brogan’s pocket.

  Using the fake key was difficult with the grey leather gloves Ben wore. Besides this, his nerves were jangling. He fumbled the key into the front door lock, hoping he didn’t look the way he felt – like a cat burglar.

  He surveyed the street, trying to appear innocent, nonchalant. At least he was alone, his only witness the full moon above him. He remembered that she had been in the sky the night he had made his decision to pursue this insane plan. Was she there to taunt him, to brew some sort of madness within him?

  As he finally got the door open, Ben shivered – a combination of fear and the frost that followed him inside. He had made a conscious effort to stay away from alcohol for the whole weekend, but now, despite having a clear head, Ben was plagued by the familiar craving for a strong drink.

  His concentration was also affected by the familiar pain that spiked its way across his lower abdomen. As usual, he ignored this.