Seeing the Wires

by Patrick Thompson

That happened when we killed Mrs Bolton.

  She was our first victim. I knew we couldn’t take weapons with us. The parchment said so. You would find something there, and that would do the job. Everyone had knives, water, electricity, string. There would be something you could use. Jack objected to this, naturally.

  ‘Well what if we took a penknife? That’s just for sharpening pencils with.’

  ‘Then why would we be taking it with us?’

  ‘To stab her.’

  ‘Then it’d count as a weapon.’

  ‘Oh, would it? That’s my plan fucked then. How about if we took half a brick? Half a brick isn’t a weapon.’

  ‘It is if you hit someone with it.’

  ‘Well what if I took one and you didn’t know about it? Would that count? You could find it there then.’

  ‘We don’t take anything with us. We use something we find and we take part of the body with us when we go.’

  ‘Well it beats going to the school disco. I still think I could have something, though. If you didn’t know I was carrying it.’

  We were on our way to see Mrs Bolton. She lived alone, which was helpful. She lived on the Russells Hall Estate, which was also helpful. No one there would pop round to see what the matter was if we made too much noise. They only popped round to the neighbour’s house when the neighbour was out at work. Walking there, we didn’t pass anyone except for bored teenagers. They swore elaborately and at some length.

  ‘Ignore them,’ I said. ‘We’ll outlive them.’

  ‘There’ll be more of them,’ said Jack. ‘Teenagers are like that.’

  We reached the last house in a row of identical houses.

  ‘Here?’ asked Jack.

  I nodded. ‘Number fifteen,’ I said.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘We don’t know her. I know about her. Mrs Bolton. Old woman. Forty, fifty, you know, old. Lives on her own, except maybe for one or two cats.’

  ‘Cats?’

  ‘Cats. Furry things, about so big, eat fish and purr. They do have them in Dudley, don’t they? In tins perhaps?’

  ‘I meant, do we have to kill them too?’

  I was surprised by that. We weren’t into random cruelty.

  ‘Christ, no,’ I said. ‘What do you take me for? The cats live.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jack, relieved.

  ‘Now, the cover story.’

  ‘What cover story?’

  ‘This one. We’ve broken down. We want to use the telephone. You’ve hurt your leg. Can you limp?’

  ‘Like this?’

  Jack tried a few paces. I’ve seen more convincing limping. Still, Mrs Bolton was old and old people will fall for anything.

  ‘It’ll have to do. If I’d have thought about it earlier I’d have bruised you, given you a kick or two. That’d help.’

  ‘Not me, it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Too late now anyway.’

  ‘Hold on, how did I hurt my leg? We broke down, we didn’t crash. What happened to my leg?’

  ‘Right, forget the leg.’

  ‘What’s happened to this forward planning?’

  ‘It’s adapted to the situation. That’s the sign of good planning. I’m ready for all contingencies.’

  ‘You’re ready for a padded fucking cell. So, we’ve broken down, we want to use the telephone, then what?’

  ‘We get in and split up. The one she’s not looking at grabs whatever looks most likely to kill her and hits her with it. After that we can both join in and finish her off.’

  ‘And if she makes a noise?’

  ‘Don’t let her make a noise. Hit her really hard.’

  ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘I am. I’ve studied the signs. She’s going to a better place.’

  ‘Not too difficult, if you start from Russells Hall Estate. Then we get to live forever?’

  ‘We’ll run through the theory of it another time. For now, let’s get this one done.’

  ‘No problem. After you, then.’

  ‘After me,’ I said, strolling to the door of number fifteen and knocking loudly on the door.

  IV

  Mrs Bolton stood in the centre of her front room in a sea of cats. Jack was pretending to telephone for assistance, having actually dialled a random 0898 number. I was attempting to get on Mrs Bolton’s blind side without putting my feet on any cats. I wanted to get there so that I could kill her without distressing her unnecessarily, but the cats were making it difficult. They kept looking at me with large round reflective eyes as though they knew what I was up to. It was also difficult because Mrs Bolton had the sort of uncorrected squint you wouldn’t normally expect to find outside of documentaries about third world countries where the nearest hospital is eight hundred miles away and the only surgeon died the year before last. Her eyes looked away from each other as if they were afraid of her nose. They might well have been. It was a frightening nose, with tufts of hair and a sticky drip that never fell dangling from its tip. Her left eye looked left and her right eye looked right. It was impossible to say whether both eyes were in working order or, if not, which one was. She had an apparent field of vision of 270 degrees. I thought that the best way to take her by surprise would be from the front, as she couldn’t possibly focus there. I couldn’t say so.

  Jack said: ‘Car. Yes, the distributor. It’s fallen off,’ to which the reply seemed to be an orgasmic moan. I circled Mrs Bolton, searching for something to hit her with. Cats rubbed my ankles. They rubbed Jack’s ankles.

  ‘They like you,’ said Mrs Bolton.

  ‘They’re such good judges of character. Bless their little hearts.’

  They said owners grew to resemble their pets. It was true. Mrs Bolton was covered in cat hair, and she stank of cat piss. She was wearing a number of cardigans, each of them clogged with fur.

  I spotted a huge vase resting on a small round table and homed in on it. It looked heavy. It should do the trick. I reached out for it.

  It was heavy. I tried to lift it. It stayed where it was.

  ‘And the spark plug,’ said Jack, ‘that’s split.’

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Bolton.

  ‘Yes please,’ we both answered. We didn’t know who she was talking to. She was looking at both of us, and we were on opposite sides of the room.

  ‘I’ll get the kettle,’ she said. As she made for the door I tried to take advantage of my position. I hauled at the vase and it moved. I got a grip on its neck and lost it. It swivelled from my grasp and fell among the cats, causing consternation. It had been heavy because it had been full of water.

  It became empty. The floor became wet. The cats became lively and vocal.

  ‘What!’ shouted Mrs Bolton, turning from the door, all cardigans and indignation. ‘Cat murderer!’

  She flew at me like a knitted rocket. I fell among the cats. She fell on me.

  ‘Sam!’ cried Jack. He dropped the telephone and grasped Mrs Bolton by the neck, turning her over, freeing me.

  ‘Don’t strangle her,’ I said, standing and shaking cats from my arms. ‘We have to use something here. That’s part of it. We have to use something she owns.’

  Mrs Bolton lay on her back struggling, wild-eyed. But then, Mrs Bolton had been wild-eyed before we’d met her. We couldn’t be blamed for her facial problems. Jack held her down.

  ‘Do something,’ he said. ‘She’s gone mental.’

  I couldn’t find anything to use as a weapon. The television was too heavy and its flex was too short. Mrs Bolton began to gather breath for a scream.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Jack. Mrs Bolton looked offended. She paused, and then opened her mouth.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. I picked up the largest and slowest of the cats, a fat black thing like an overstuffed cushion, and dropped it over Mrs Bolton’s face.

  Her scream was muffled.

  I put my hands on the cat and pressed it firmly over her face. Her feet scrabbled on the floor. Her slippers fell off.

>   The state of her feet … I mean, honestly, we were doing her a favour.

  She struggled harder.

  The fat cat purred. It was having a nice time. The other cats gathered and watched. They began to sniff at Mrs Bolton’s outlying regions. They had always liked Mrs Bolton as a source of food, and now she was becoming a different one.

  Mrs Bolton’s struggles gradually abated. The fat cat purred and unleashed a contented fishy yawn. The telephone dangled, and a tiny voice told tales that you wouldn’t tell your mother.

  V

  We took one of her toes with us and buried it at the end of the railway lines. The cats got the rest.

  VI

  My uncle, Mickey Payne, used to talk about the old railway lines. He told us he had some trouble there once.

  ‘You’ve had trouble everywhere,’ my father said. My mother was upstairs. She doesn’t like Mickey. He’s a bit rough. He’s got scars on his hands and his face. He told me he was in the army and they were on active duty and someone rolled a grenade at them.

  You think about things like that, things like grenades, and you think about what they’re for and killing five people is nothing anymore. Killing five people doesn’t come close. There are people out there making flame throwers, nerve gases, improved strains of Ebola, faster-acting Lassa. I haven’t done anything on that scale. All I did was kill five people. That’s nothing.

  I wonder whether Mickey killed people when he was in the army. He wasn’t in action when he was injured. His squad were walking to the pub and someone rolled a grenade at them. The four of them stood and looked at it and then, that’s as much as he can tell me. Whatever else happened, happened out of real time. The next thing he remembers is the hospital.

  ‘Dishy nurses,’ he’ll say, sitting in my father’s chair. He always sits in that one. I think my father is afraid of him. I’m sure he isn’t really my uncle.

  I asked my father, ‘Who would throw a grenade at Uncle Mickey?’

  My father said he’d try to get a list together when he had a spare month.

  I think about it. What did Mickey do afterwards? He left the army.

  ‘Hands were no good after that,’ he’ll say, sitting in my father’s favourite chair, a cigarette in one hand, a cheap beer in the other. ‘Shot to buggery.’

  He doesn’t swear the way my friends do. He just swears, it’s just what he does. He can’t speak without swearing. I imagined him swearing at the men who’d rolled a grenade into his patrol. He would never say where it had happened.

  ‘It didn’t make the news,’ he’d say. ‘The brass wanted it out of the papers. Look bad on them, see. Look bad on the rest of them.’

  My father didn’t believe it. He didn’t say so, but I could tell. I think Uncle Mickey could tell, too. I think he knew. When my father was there he’d keep talking about it.

  He said he’d been in trouble by the old railway line.

  ‘There’s a tunnel there,’ he said.

  This was last Sunday, and it had been weeks since we’d been there. The ritual was done. I looked in the mirror every day and I didn’t look any older.

  I suppose you notice it happening, getting older? Or is it something that creeps up on you?

  ‘You know that tunnel?’ he asked. ‘Dark as a black cat’s arsehole at midnight.’

  ‘Never been down there,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, raising what was left of his eyebrows. Most of the right one was missing, and there were scars running over his nose and down to his jaw.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he said. He couldn’t have known anything. There were only six people involved, not counting myself. One of them was Jack. The rest were dead.

  ‘I don’t go out much,’ I said.

  ‘I’d try and get used to it,’ he said. Ash fell from his cigarette and landed on the carpet.

  ‘Clean that up,’ my father said after Mickey Payne had gone home. He lived somewhere in Tipton. ‘Don’t let your mother find it.’

  My mother stays away from Mickey Payne. I know the bigger picture, I know the history that we all fit into, but I don’t know all of my parents’ history. They have stories hidden away.

  So do I, by the way. I’ve had to tell a few lies. It comes with the territory. I’ve told Jack one or two. I’ve told myself a couple. Seems unfair not to if you’re lying to everyone else.

  VII

  After we buried the last part of the last victim, we watched the dog for a while. It kept out of reach.

  ‘It wants the bones,’ said Jack. ‘Dogs like bones.’

  I looked for something to throw at it. There was nothing available. The mud was too muddy and Jack was too heavy. The dog circled us at a distance then eventually moved off, scrambling up the embankment and vanishing into the shrubbery.

  ‘All done,’ I said. ‘That’s us finished. Now all we have to do is live forever. That wasn’t so painful, was it?’

  ‘Could have been worse,’ agreed Jack. ‘I don’t feel any different though. Should I feel different?’

  ‘You should look different, never mind feel different. This is only eternal life, not a miracle.’

  ‘Yeah well. Ask me again in two hundred years.’

  Jack gave the grave a last look and then followed me through the tunnel. I knew he’d be all right. It was nothing he couldn’t cope with. He’d enjoyed the deaths, as far as I could tell. He might not be stable, but I was fairly sure that he wouldn’t tell anyone what we’d done.

  PART FIVE

  Sam, aged thirty

  Chapter Ten

  I

  I called work on Monday morning and told them I wasn’t feeling well. Which wasn’t quite true. I was feeling fucking awful.

  Eddie would have our names in print. The whole story would be in the local paper, all because of some insane thing Jack had come up with.

  I brushed my hair in the wrong direction and went to the newsagent before I shaved. If my name was in the paper, I didn’t want people recognizing me. This was Dudley, and if people thought that I was a mass murderer they might ask for my autograph. Perhaps Eddie would have treated the story as a joke. Perhaps his editor would have turned it down. I presumed he had an editor. I bought the Pensnett Herald without looking at it and skulked home.

  Everyone seemed to be looking at me. Perhaps that was because I was skulking, unshaven, and had my hair brushed the wrong way. I got home, locked myself in, and unfolded the paper.

  The story was on page one. Well, the first part of it was. There was more of it on pages two and three. It was interrupted by a full-page advertisement for a furniture warehouse, and then returned on page five. Page six was the letters page, and that was full of the usual grumbles (‘I fought in three world wars …’, ‘Why do young people go to London? We have everything you want here in Pensnett …’). We weren’t in the classified ads or the sports pages, just those four full-page spreads. I had another look at them. The first time I hadn’t read them. I’d seen them, but it hadn’t got into my head. My brain wasn’t able to accept the information.

  I gave it a nip of whisky. That calmed it down.

  I don’t normally drink in the morning, but normal rules didn’t apply. It wasn’t a normal day.

  On page one there was a headline.

  DUDLEY MURDER COUPLE MURDER FIVE.

  Under that was a photograph of Jack, next to a photograph of me. Mine was an old school photograph taken on the one day in my life when I’d brushed my hair the wrong way by accident. The photo of Jack was recent. In case there was any doubt as to who the murderers were, our names were printed in what looked to me like ninety-point type. Below that was some of Eddie’s more excitable prose.

  On page two was Jack’s confession. He’d assisted in the murders of five people. Parts of them had been buried in various places in Dudley. There were photographs of some of the places. I knew them, as they’d been in the documentary that had started Jack’s delusions.

  On page three was a ma
p of Dudley, with the MURDER SITES marked, and the SHALLOW GRAVES noted.

  On page four was a list of other famous Dudley-based killers, including a paragraph about Cuddles, the killer whale. It also mentioned James Whale, who spent part of his life in Dudley before going to Hollywood and not coming back. While he was there he directed Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, both starring Boris Karloff. The article included Frankenstein’s hapless creation in its list of Dudley murderers.

  I had another nip of whisky. The whole thing was ridiculous. Jack was mad. They’d dig where he said the bodies were buried, find nothing, and that’d be that. This time next week, I thought, it’ll all be over. I could do the digging for them, if they liked. I was good at digging.

  After a week we’d only be featuring on the letters page. Then that would be that. Some good could come of it, I realized.

  Fame gets you free drinks in a Dudley local.

  I had another nip of whisky. I imagined being in a pub, a week later, with people buying me whiskies.

  ‘So how did it feel?’ they’d ask.

  That’s a terrific question. If a reporter ever asks you how it felt when your family melted or you were diagnosed with leprosy, put your finger in their eye – any finger, although obviously lepers may have fewer to choose from, either eye – and ask them how that feels.

  I had another nip of whisky. I was upset at some level. That would be why I was thinking cruel thoughts about lepers and reporters and melting families. I was upset and slightly drunk. But then I realized there was no need to be, because Jack would soon be found out.

  What would happen to him? Would he be taken away somewhere? I didn’t know what happened. From my own observations I’d developed a theory that violently unstable people were given supervisory jobs in care homes for quietly unstable people, while dangerously unstable people were given bus passes and made to spend their lives orbiting the West Midlands.

  Still, Jack would have to undergo treatment, if not imprisonment. He’d be carted off somewhere and given the sort of drugs only available in secure institutions and school playgrounds.