Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  ‘You could get a set of contact lenses and then get a leather jacket.’

  ‘You can’t get contacts until you’re a bit older,’ I said. ‘Your eyesight has to grow like your body and your mind.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Jamie replied. He spat lengthily to show his disgust. ‘I’d get one of those biker jackets with brass buckles and zips. I don’t care for the silver ones, they’re a bit tacky.’

  ‘How are we going to get into the store?’ The problem had just occurred to me and it put a stop to Jamie’s waffle. ‘The door is heavy and so are those grids.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Jamie. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ I knew he hadn’t, it was just like him. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘you’re the genius, the man with all the ideas. Out with it.’

  This was the moment I should have thought of the hacksaw and cutting the lock or, better still, unscrewing the bolt or the grids with a screwdriver. But instead of that my mind skipped clean over them and started thinking on that explosion we had been done out of the night before and how this door could be the chance we needed to have one of our very own. I got real excited thinking about it. I could see it already in my mind.

  ‘We could blow the door off the hinges,’ I said. ‘An explosion.’

  ‘How? We know nothing about explosives and even if we did where would we get them?’

  ‘Bolt bombs,’ I said. ‘There has to be some way we could rig up a massive bolt bomb to the door.’ All us kids at some time or other had made bolt bombs. They’re simple enough to make. All you need is two long bolts and a nut plus a carton of red matches. Just thread the nut onto the top of the bolt and fill it with red sulphur from the matches. Then screw in the other bolt as tightly as possible and you’re ready. All you have to do then is throw the whole thing at a wall or whatever and it explodes with a bang and a flash. It can be dangerous enough because the bolts come apart with terrific force and have been known to land fifty yards away. I reckoned if there was some way of containing and directing the force of the explosion, then the door would be no problem. I explained it to Jamie and he saw the beauty of it. For once he also saw the flaw in it.

  ‘But how do we rig it up? It’s no use throwing a bomb at it from a distance, no matter how big. It’ll go all over the place. We’ll have to be quick with an idea as well, those bottles won’t be there forever.’

  He was looking at me, putting it up to me and that worried me because right then I was stuck for ideas. My brain just wouldn’t work, it seemed to have seized. It shouldn’t have been like that either. I was the one who read all the books, the one who knew things. Jamie was disappointed when I shook my head. He stood up and spat, doing his hard man bit.

  ‘Not good,’ he said. ‘Not good at all. We’ll have to think harder.’

  ‘All I know is that it will have to be fixed in place and it will have to be a lot bigger than any we’ve ever used before.’

  We walked along by the river and came out at the end of town. I didn’t speak; I was too busy thinking and I was still finding it hard to come up with ideas. I knew that the bomb would have to be fixed to the door, taped like I’d seen it done in movies, and I knew it would have to be a tubular one of some sort. But the most difficult detail of all was the triggering device. That was the thing which had me really stumped.

  I left Jamie at the back of the house, told him I’d see him the following day after I’d had some time to think. He told me to think hard because we hadn’t much time. I walked on without saying anything and came up the back garden to our house. I went straight into the garden shed. This is where I do any thinking I have to do. It’s an ordinary timber shed full of tools and plastic drums with weed-killer and so on. But the main thing is that it’s quiet. My parents rarely come here and my brother never comes here – he’s too busy getting drunk.

  I sat down on the lawn mower – I had plenty to think about. I began to run through several experiments in my mind with tubular piping. This was the best I could come up with – copper piping, about one and a half-inch diameter packed with sulphur and sealed at both ends with brass fittings. I reckoned that would do the trick but it still left the problem of the trigger mechanism. I began to think of how easy it looked in those westerns I’d seen on television when the outlaws came to blow up a safe, how they fed out a slick-looking length of black fuse connected to five or six sticks of dynamite that looked like those sticks of rock you get on school tours with ‘A Present from Knock’ running all the way through them. The outlaws lit the fuse and it buzzed along nicely while they hunkered down behind a table in the next room with their fingers in their ears. I would have given anything for twenty yards of that fuse then.

  On the floor was a ball of brown string my mom used for tying up bean plants. I took it up and played with it for a while. It was very fine, hopeless for anything I had in mind, but it gave me a clue. I ran out of the shed and straight through the house and into the street. I had a feeling I could get exactly what I needed.

  I was running towards Francie Doyle’s pub, the smallest and oldest pub in town, a tiny place with wooden counters running parallel to each other, a place where you can buy beer or a pair of those nailed boots he keeps hanging from the ceiling or a pair of those long drawers I had seen my grandfather wearing. It’s a treasure trove of all sorts of things. Francie was the only one in the bar when I walked in, behind the counter mopping it with a not-too-clean cloth.

  ‘Well, young man, aren’t you a bit young for places like this?’

  Francie was a strict old man, he didn’t like kids in his pub, but I liked him anyway. Sometimes when the door to his sitting-room was open you could see through to a big cabinet that was packed tight with books; big, serious-looking ones with black covers. I had seen them several times when I had come here to get Dad for his dinner on Sunday afternoons. I itched to know what those books were about. Dad had often said that Francie was real smart, that he could talk about anything. But right then I had more than talk on my mind.

  ‘Can I borrow some twine, Francie? I’m making a kite and I need some of that white twine to tie the struts.’

  ‘A kite, by God. Well, we’ll have to see what we can do.’ He walked over to the opposite counter and was rummaging underneath it. ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘Oh, a good bit, it’s going to be a big kite.’

  He came up from beneath the counter with a big ball of white hemp twine. He began looping it from elbow to palm. He stopped after a few loops. ‘Is that enough?’

  I scrunched up my face. ‘I think I’ll need more than that. It’s going to be very big and I need it to be strong.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s a kite you’re making and not some class of an airplane? You’re not thinking of leaving us altogether – flying away and never coming back?’ He was now winding the loops on his elbow back onto the ball and when he had it all wound in he tossed it to me. ‘Have the lot. It mightn’t work the first time.’

  I hugged the ball. ‘Thanks a lot, Francie, this’ll do the job.’

  ‘Think of me when you’re flying,’ he called as I shot out the door.

  I ran down the street with the ball under my jumper, straight through the house, just stopping long enough to pick up a box of matches from the kitchen, and into the shed. I cut off a few feet of twine and dipped it into the fuel tank of the lawn mower. There was good soakage in the twine. When I pulled it out it had changed colour to a light brown and was real limp. I stretched it out on the ground and lit the end of it. The flame travelled along it nicely, not one of those busy demon flames sputtering and fizzing like you see in westerns but with a blue peak that moved quickly enough to take it where it had to go. I must have been grinning back to my ears. At last I had the triggering mechanism and the whole thing figured out. I did a small war dance to celebrate, shaking my fist and howling like a dog. I had been worried there for a while. I thought I had run clean out of ideas. But it wasn’t like that. My brain had just got stuck in neutral for a while. It happe
ns to the best of us.

  Jamie came over next day and I explained everything to him, the bomb and its triggering device. He looked at the ball of twine dubiously.

  ‘Does it work? It looks a bit rough.’

  I cut off a few feet and ran a demonstration for him. The flame ran as smoothly as before. Jamie had a grin on his face.

  ‘I think we’re ready to rock,’ he said. ‘We need lots of other stuff as well. Can you get hold of a piece of copper piping about this thick with brass fittings on the end? About a foot long?’

  ‘No problem, the old man has plenty in the shed.’

  ‘We need it drilled as well. Two holes opposite each other, one bigger than the other. We need the fuse knotted in the small one and run out the big one through the sulphur.’

  ‘The old man will do that for me. I’ll tell him I’m doing some project for school.’

  ‘OK, those are the easy bits though. We’re going to need an awful lot of sulphur to fill a pipe that big. Both of us will have to go to every shop and pub in town and buy a carton of red matches. That’ll be twenty cartons, nearly ten thousand matches.’

  ‘Christ, we’ll be stripping the heads off them till Christmas.’

  ‘It’s the only way we can get that amount of sulphur. It has to be done. We have to be careful we don’t turn up in the same shops and pubs too soon after each other. You do it this evening after dinner, I’ll do it tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Sound. When do you think you’ll be ready?’

  ‘If we have everything together by tomorrow evening, the matches and the pipe, and if we get five cartons done tomorrow and the day after, we should be ready by Monday night.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking too. After the weekend the town should be nice and quiet.’

  ‘That’s right. This tape,’ I held up a roll of white insulating tape, ‘can be used to fix the bomb to the door. Just above the bolt.’

  ‘You have it all figured out, Owl. You’re a smug git.’

  I was grinning again. I could see in my mind all the pieces of the bomb – the pipe, the fuse, the sulphur and tape – lying there waiting to be put together so that they could come apart with a big bang. I began thinking that if this explosion went well I might move onto bigger things like remote-control devices or one of those plunger explosives you see in westerns. I’d have to read up about them and the materials would be hard to find but right then I had no doubt that if I put my mind to it I would be able to do it. It was a great feeling, knowing you could do these things. I felt like I could live forever.

  Jamie was laughing to himself on the lawn mower.

  ‘This day week Charles Coen will be minus one door. Not that the fucker will miss it with the insurance coughing up.’ He rose from the lawn mower. ‘I’d better go. Mom will have the dinner ready and I have a lot of matches to buy.’

  ‘OK, it’s time for me to eat as well. Call round again tomorrow evening.’

  He left and I went inside, washed my hands and sat at the table. My brother was there, his head bent over the table, rolling a smoke. His black hair was hanging in his food and his leather jacket was hanging from the chair. He lifted his head and I could see that he was just up even though it was well after four. He seemed to be a lot paler these days, even paler than he usually was. Not that he was ever the picture of health. But today his eyes looked like burnt holes in a blanket. I decided to get the first word in.

  ‘How is the waster?’ I asked. The table was full of food so I started to tuck in. Mom passed behind me and ruffled my hair.

  ‘Eat up, good boy,’ she said.

  ‘And what has our resident genius been studying today?’ He finished rolling his smoke and was clearing the tobacco off the table into his pouch. ‘Was it perhaps some study on the migration of rats from central Asia to the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century? Or was it something on the occurrence of leprosy in Paris during the Age of Reason? Or was it something local, Owl – a short comparative study of indigenous snake venoms before the arrival of our patron saint?’

  ‘Fuck off, you waster.’ I had to hiss that because Mom didn’t like me using bad language. My brother was pulling lazily on his fag. His eyes seemed to glow blackly.

  ‘You didn’t happen to see any anacondas on your travels today, Owl? You’d want to watch yourself in that long grass in the garden. You’d never know what might be lurking in it.’ He was talking about a nature programme I’d seen last week about snakes. It had shown this boa constrictor strangling and eating an ass. When I had told him about it he hadn’t believed a word of it.

  ‘It wasn’t an anaconda, you ignorant fucker. It was a boa.’ He was trying to make me look stupid now. I wanted to ignore him but he kept on.

  ‘Three months it took for this boa to digest this ass.’ He was laughing now, using that hooting laugh, hoo hoo hoo, he used specially to make me look foolish. ‘Three months and nothing but digesting. No time to look for women snakes or read a book or even an hour’s sleep. Every minute of his day taken up digesting this ass. Christ, nature is a fright, hoo hoo hoo.’

  Mom re-entered the room. ‘Can’t you leave the child alone and not be persecuting him? Let him eat in peace. Why do you always have to be at him?’

  ‘Some child. All he ever talks of is diseases and plagues and misery.’ He did a perfect mimic of me. ‘Did you know that the bubonic plague wiped out a third of the population of Europe in the mid-fourteenth century? Imagine that – a whole third.’

  ‘At least he has an interest in something.’ Mom was patting down my hair again. Mom always took my side and so would Dad too if he had been there.

  ‘Oh yes, he has interests all right. His mind is full of destruction and death and misery. A nice, polite boy is our Owl. What do you want to be when you grow up, Owl?’ He put on the childish voice again. ‘When I grow up I want to be an executioner.’

  ‘I never said that,’ I roared.

  ‘You did say it, you young fucker.’ Now he was roaring too. ‘I was here in the room.’ He put on the childish voice again. ‘When I grow up I want to be an executioner.’

  ‘For God’s sake can’t you leave the child alone.’ Now Mom was roaring. ‘He’s a good boy and he does what he’s told. If you had half the interest he has you might make something of yourself.’

  ‘Yah,’ he said with disgust, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. ‘I’ve had enough of this shite. I’m going out.’

  ‘You can’t go out without your tea.’

  ‘Fuck the tea,’ he roared from the hallway. The door slammed behind him and the house was quiet. I buttered a slice of bread with a smirk. I’d beaten him again.

  I went to get the matches the following evening. That was a job in itself. I started at one end of the town and went into every pub and shop. Some of the shopkeepers wanted to know why it had to be red matches; weren’t brown ones just as good? I just shrugged and said that I was told to get red ones. That set some of them muttering and grumbling and shaking their heads but I managed to get them anyway. Half an hour later I was back in the shed with ten cartons of matches. Jamie was there waiting for me. He was holding the length of copper piping with brass stops neatly fitted. It was drilled too and whoever did it had done a real neat job. There were two holes opposite each other, one twice as big as the other so as to let the flame into the sulphur. The twine threaded tightly into the smaller one.

  ‘Are you sure this will work?’ Jamie was asking again. ‘Are you sure it will explode?’

  ‘It should do. When the flame goes in the sulphur ignites. Because it’s contained and pressurized it should explode. It should work, the principle behind all explosives is much the same. Have you done many matches?’

  ‘About four cartons. I did two yesterday and a couple before I came here. If I get three done this evening I’ll be well ahead. It’s a pisser of a job though, it takes ages.’

  ‘I know, I have to start yet. I hope to get a few cartons done before I go to bed.’

&
nbsp; ‘How are we fixed? Have we nearly everything done?’

  ‘We’ve just the matches to do. If you bring your lot over tomorrow evening we can put it together and be ready. I should be ready by the evening. We’ll make a check of everything tomorrow evening, make sure we’re not missing anything and then hide it here till bedtime.’

  ‘OK, I’ll let you get on with it. You’ll need all the time you can get to do those matches. Don’t forget to hide the pipe too.’

  He pulled the door after him and I started on the matches. It was awful work. I sat on the lawnmower engine scraping the heads off those matches into a pea can. I threw the waste matches into a shopping bag; I was going to stuff it in the rubbish bin when I’d finished. I was thinking on one detail as I worked, one small detail that worried me. Everything now hinged on the sulphur exploding under pressure. I knew about black powder explosives, that they were a mixture of sulphur and nitrates and that those nitrates could be found in compost and dung heaps if they were left standing long enough. But it would have been impossible to get those nitrates in this little town. No one had compost heaps, no one had any gardens at all, and the farms outside town had slurry pits which were no good. Even if there were dung heaps outside the town it would be just a chance that there was potassium nitrate crystallized in it. I was just hoping that the sulphur would go off like an explosive as I’d said it would. I was praying it would – I’d look really stupid if it didn’t. All my good ideas would be for nothing. If my brother heard about it he would never let me hear the last of it.

  Bit by bit the tiny red pieces filled up the bottom of the pea can. I calculated that when we had done the twenty cartons we would have over two pea cans. That would be more than enough to fill the pipe. We would probably have some left over. Better to be safe than sorry. Two and a half hours later, coming up to teatime I had four cartons done, over two thousand matches. The sulphur filled the tin over halfway. It looked real innocent stuff, red and gritty like heavy sand. I wondered was this what semtex looked like; I’d heard a lot about it on the news lately. My wondering came quickly to an end. Mom was at the back door yelling for me. I tidied away the stuff quickly. It was time to eat again and I was hungry.