Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  A few nights after I move in with Janet, Kevin appears at our door. I let him in and watch him stride across the carpet without a flinch or hop or anything. It’s like my favourite TV show has been axed.

  Kevin wears a shirt, but I can make out spots of dried paint on his neck and arms. He looks broader, stronger and his skin seems fresh and alive. Whoever cut his hair recently might have been blind, but it certainly wasn’t the fat Italian who used cut his hair when he was a kid.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I have a nightmare the night Janet and I decide to move back into my place, something about finding the village empty, and the planet too. When I wake up, Janet is gone.

  I crawl across the bed and lay on her side, smelling dried paint mixed with the smell of her musty clothes. There’s still warmth where she had been lying when we fell asleep, the sweat of her body and mine cooling us between the sheets. My hand moves up to her pillow and feels a familiar hard, tubular shape. The cellophane crumples as I grip the stick of rock she has left behind.

  After turning on the light, I sit up and get ready to read the message written through the piece of rock. I blink. Nothing. It’s blank.

  I get up and pull on some clothes. Standing by the window and looking out at the harbour, I see an envelope of Police Blue sky opening and the horizon split with a gush of amber light. A Heavy cloud tinged with blood crowds in around the view and I have to turn away.

  When Janet makes sticks of rock, she always makes them with a message of truth running through them, some statement to sum up how the person purchasing her rock might be feeling at that moment. I guess the idea is that the words are running all the way through, so if you eat it, then you eat your words. But in this time of expensive dentistry, hardly anyone eats the rock they buy, Janet says. They sit in drawers, fresh and hard as they day she rolled and boiled them, with their emotions running through the centre forever.

  I march to Kevin’s room, knock and, when he doesn’t answer, I go in and see the plates of half eaten food piled up on the chest of drawers. Even the sticks of rock he had bought from Janet lay on the floor with a single bite out of them.

  I turn to the cupboard and open it, and see that all his clothes have gone. Kevin has left me, and I wonder where he might have gone. Of course, I don’t wonder for long. An image of him sitting at Maggie Parks’ dining table, shoving food into his gob, sticking his fingers up at the starving children of the world, crashes into my mind.

  There’s a knock at my door and I see a shadow cross the window. I figure it’s the police. Maybe they’ve rumbled Maggie’s plot or have come for Janet, so I open the door slowly and see two men I’ve never seen before. These two men, with their square heads, short dark hair and serious faces, stand with their arms folded, looking me over.

  They need a word with me, is all they say. The slightly taller one, who has green tinged stubble round his face, does most of the talking. I say we can talk just where we are, but suddenly the silent one has a tight grip under my arm and drags me out of the house. I tell him I don’t have any shoes on, but he just shrugs and keeps pulling me down towards the harbour.

  ‘You’re not the police,’ I say and they nod in agreement.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demand to know.

  ‘This is Terry and I’m Steve,’ the talkative one says and smirks.

  I see their car parked awkwardly across the harbour and hear the waves hammering at the rocks and spitting up at the stone wall above the sea. The car’s engine, that moans and coughs, is swallowed up by the sea. When we drive off, it’s like we are submerged in water. Sitting in the back, Terry tight up against me, I feel like my lungs are filling up with seawater. Right now, I wouldn’t mind if it was true.

  Where are we going? I ask, but Terry just smiles and mumbles something about taking a nice drive.

  We seem to be taking the road that runs past Margaret Parks’ house, and that means the woods will appear beside us. I get the same feeling you would if you drove past your place of work on your day off. My stomach slips down to my knees as the greyness of the woods hovers by us. I picture Terry and Steve handing me a shovel and watching, smirking, as I dig a shallow grave.

  If I was in a woods digging my own grave, ready to be shot in the head or smashed over the head with a shovel, Janet would say it was art. She’d like a photo of my dead body, the blood still oozing out my cracked skull. Gangland Hit Red. Body Found A Week Later Green.

  Then I get a funny thought, a sudden realisation that maybe these men may have been sent by the company to scare me. Kevin may have still been sending letters, the last remaining obsession he maybe clinging to.

  ‘Is this about the letters?’ I ask.

  Terry doesn’t look at me and Steve keeps on steering the car up the road and past the drive that leads to Maggie’s house. I tell them that I didn’t write the letters. This time I tell them the whole story, about Kevin stealing my stationery, using my computer to type the letters out. He framed me, I tell them, but they don’t seem interested.

  Eventually the driver stops the car a few hundred yards from Maggie’s house. I listen to the quiet clicking of the engine, a soft hum of warmth. The amber of the morning bursts out from behind the grey clouds and slowly our faces grow pink and alive. We all blink as the night slinks away and leaves us with a new day. I think we all feel a little disappointed.

  ‘You’re going to die,’ Steve says, suddenly.

  He turns in his seat and looks straight into my eyes without the slightest signs of joking. ‘I could take you out there and stab or shoot you and then dump you in the water. Take a boat out to sea and throw you over the side.’

  I don’t say anything, just feel the car getting smaller, sucking me into the backseat and twisting my stomach into a knot. My hands start to vibrate, making a taping sound against the leather interior.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll probably shoot you in the back of the head.’ Steve nods. ‘You on your knees, facing away from me, so you don’t know it’s coming. When will I do it? That’s the question.’

  I try to keep what’s going on inside my head away from my face, especially my eyes. I don’t want him to know images of my family, of my former life, are flashing against a movie screen inside my skull. Someone, anyone, identifying my body. The realisation that this could be it, that maybe this is my last moment on earth, threatens to pour out of my mouth and into my lap. It’s like the Polar Icecaps are melting under my arms.

  These are all the clichés of death. Knowing that the end is coming, trying to choose your last words, it comes down to being this straightforward. There’s nothing special. In this moment, you realise that you’ve never done anything worth noting, apart from rolling round naked in paint in the full view of the rich and the averagely famous. This is not what my parents wanted for me. Learn a trade, my father told me. And remember, he added, whatever you do, never try and fool the tax man.

  ‘Are you going to cry now?’ Steve asks me, his face showing the interested expression of a small child. ‘I bet you are. Some people wet themselves too. Maybe even shit in their pants. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.’

  I think maybe I have an ace up my sleeve. ‘I know Billy Wallis. The East London gangster. He’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Sometimes they vomit,’ Steve says and looks up slightly, the look of someone really trying to remember a specific occasion. ‘This old bastard we took out into this field once, he nearly had a heart attack. Our job was almost over without any bloodshed. Where’s the fun in that? But people think this is all just about sticking a knife between someone’s ribs or putting a bullet into someone’s head, but it’s not that simple. It’s a craft.’

  This is a lecture I could do without. Between Janet and Billy Wallis, and even Maggie, I’m sick of hearing their theories on life.

  ‘The first time you kill someone,’ Steve says, ‘is the hardest, but it gets easier after that. That first time, you and the victim, the target, are both at ground zero. You’re virgins,
if you like, but only one of you really learns anything from the experience. Only one of you grows. My first time, I put a homemade bomb under my girlfriend’s car seat. They found her pelvis a few hundred feet away from the wreckage. She never cheated on me again.’

  The way he’s talking to me, lecturing me, I’m a school kid again that knows nothing about the world. It’s like talking to a war veteran, when all you’ve ever done is get up, go to work in an office and eat your lunch in a nice canteen. You may have once fought a man in a pub, or got in a fight at school, but the war hero has killed men with his bare hands.

  ‘Killing is like losing your virginity,’ Steve says and pulls out a gun from somewhere. He rests on the back of the seat, his eyes flicking from it to me, and back again. ‘When it’s over you feel disappointed, almost lost, but you know it’ll get better.’

  ‘Who’s doing this?’ I ask, hearing my voice crumble out of my mouth, my words all dry and brittle like dust balls. ‘Who sent you to kill me? If it’s the company, I can explain what happened.’

  ‘Someone always has an excuse,’ Steve says and takes a cigarette from nowhere and plants it between his pink lips. He lights it and blows out some smoke, one eye shut. ‘It starts at school. The dog ate your homework. You can’t do PE because you’ve got a knee injury. You haven’t got the money you owe. You didn’t know whose brother he was. Everyone is always trying to blame circumstances, but it’s always themselves bringing about their own self- destruction. If you ask me, people want to die. It’s as if they’re programmed to destroy themselves in the most round about manor. Some people can’t be bothered to put in the time to construct a real complicated situation, so they just slash their wrists or jump in front of a train. Others, they can’t face taking their own life, so they make someone else take the blame. They borrow something they can’t give back, or piss someone off. In the end, it’s all just plain suicide.’

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ I tell him.

  Steve takes the cigarette from out of his mouth and looks at it. ‘Look at me, I’m just as guilty. I know these things will kill me, but I just keep on lighting up. What about those fat fuckers who keep on shovelling food into their mouths? Or the mole covered sun worshippers who baste themselves in cream and lay out in the sun? Don’t tell me that they don’t want to die.’

  ‘I really don’t want to die,’ I say in a voice similar to the schoolboy I once used to see in the bathroom mirror.

  ‘Okay, it’s time,’ Steve says and climbs out the car. He opens my door and pulls me out. He nods towards dark bushes before us, so I start moving, my eyes looking at his gun every few steps. His hand occasionally touches my back, gently moving me forward. I stumble for a moment and he lifts me back up. I keep walking, finding myself staring at a wall at least six feet tall with barbed wire covering the top. From a nearby bush, Steve drags a ladder and tells me to climb the wall. I do as I’m told and carefully avoid the wire and jump to the grass on the other side. Through the sounds of crickets chirping and the blood pounding against my skull, I hear the sea shouting out to me. Steve is beside me, poking the gun into my side, telling me to keep walking.

  ‘We don’t really realise it at the time, but we always chose how we die,’ Steve says and points at the home of Maggie Parks that sits before us. Two of the downstairs lights are on.

  I don’t know why we are approaching the back of Maggie’s house, but I know this is probably be the last thing I will see in this life. Did I choose this moment? I wonder and feel the grass under my feet, crunching, folding back into the earth. Janet would love my last moments on earth filmed for her, so she can watch it again and again. Soon, I realise, I’ll be just like all those paperback novels shoved under a hundred different motorways. My imagination, my life, will be poured back into the earth. The cycle goes on and on.

  Then I realise the purity of Janet’s vision. Her art is in the simplicity of life. Her art is in the life and death and the screwing in-between it. If I could give a stick of rock to Janet it would read: Now I get it. You were right.

  The damp, crunching footsteps behind me get a little quicker. I just keep on marching through the garden, now smelling different scents, hearing different insects chattering in the trees and bushes. I can see the French windows of Maggie’s home, and turn my head a little to the left to see a pair of shoes quickly approaching me. After turning to Steve, hoping to plead again for my life, I see the gun still in his hand and now a large hunting knife in the other. Now the image of death in my head spins round and falls down to my stomach. I grip my sides, picturing a serrated blade tearing into my flesh. I shake my head and take a couple of steps back.

  Steve keeps on walking towards me, his heavy footsteps squelching down the freshly watered grass. Nothing on his face says this is my last moments on earth, but nothing says it isn’t either. He holds the knife out as he stops two feet from me. ‘Here.’

  I look down as he holds the knife out to me and, as if remembering to be safe and polite, turns the handle to me. ‘Take it. Take it. You’ll need it.’

  My hand finds the warm handle, but my eyes stay with Steve as he nods towards the house, a noise like snapping twigs coming from the bushes near the back windows of the house. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see a torch beam split the air. Steve is still watching me, his face dark against the growing light of the scene. He nods and points the gun up towards the scene again saying in a whisper of a voice, ‘Go on, take the knife into the house. Do it now. Trust me, this will work.’

  Looking from the gun to the knife in my own hand, I don’t know which way I should go. I turn and face the house, still expecting a bullet in the back of my skull. I start moving across the grass a little quicker, feeling my feet soak up every droplet of water, becoming lumps of funny shaped ice. By the time I’m a few feet from the glass doors, the knife in my hand is damp with sweat, just like my armpits, and my breath is exploding into the night, beats of my heart burning my skull and flavouring my mouth with iron.

  There is movement to the right of me, maybe a voice whispering. I keep looking at the dark greenery around me, avoiding the arrangements of flowers I can just about make out in the grey light. When I see a blue ghostly shape in the glass doors, I flinch and then see the knife in the vision’s hand. What do I do? Where do I go now? I turn and look towards Steve for reassurance or anything, but the space where he stood is empty. I’m alone, just me and the insects and a sweat soaked blade.

  The body comes from nowhere, grasping me and pushing its full weight on my right side, sending me crashing to the concrete steps underneath me. I put one hand out and feel it hammer the ground, letting out a moan of pain. My hand with the knife in falls to my side, the blade hitting the concrete and sounding out a sharp note into the air. A pair of hands grip my wrists and wrestle with me, although I don’t really move. I lie there and watch the red faces above me, their teeth gritted together, their necks tensed.

  The tension falls away a little from the two bodies as the knife falls from my grasp. One of the bodies relaxes immediately, while the other forces me onto my front and grasps my hands behind my back.

  ‘You have the right….’ Is all I hear as my face finds the cold stone underneath me. I smell damp earth and moss as more words are spat at my ear, along with desperate, exhausted breaths. A couple of clammy hands pull me up, threatening to pull my arms from their sockets. My feet fight to walk, scraping along the stone until I’m being pulled through some bushes and then through a doorway to a car that sits silently on the driveway. I look up as the car lights flicker on and soak a huddled figure standing just on the edge of the gravel. Another larger figure comes towards the huddled figure and puts an arm around their shoulders. When the lights find the faces of the two of them, I see the detective and Maggie looking at me, watching me being squeezed into the waiting police car. Just before the policeman pushes the top of my head inside, I manage to take a look at the old movie star’s face.

  She’s smiling.


  Chapter Eighteen

  The detective looks at me across the desk and sees the tears rolling down my cheeks. These are tears of joy, or more to the point, these are tears that come after you don’t get shot in the back of the head. You’re alive and you almost feel like getting religion, getting on your knees and thanking someone upstairs. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been arrested after trespassing, carrying a large serrated knife towards Maggie Parks’ house. I’m alive.

  ‘It’s been a very strange night for you,’ the detective says and looks at my statement. The paper he’s reading is a bullshit story spattered with tears of relief. I was sobbing, my chest pounding, as I wrote down that I had had a nightmare about Maggie and her indecent assault. Every detail had come back to me and I had grabbed a knife and marched towards her house, just to scare her. Not to kill her, I tell the detective.

  The tired looking policeman rubs a red, dry patch on his forehead and shakes his head a little. ‘But you don’t know where you got the knife? It just appeared in your house?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I tell him. ‘The last people who lived there must have left it.’

  Am I going to prison, I ask him?

  The policeman sighs deeply and leans forward. ‘Well, it seems that Mrs. Parks doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you. She must feel sorry for you. So, they’ll be no trespassing charge, but as for the knife…well, that was a deadly weapon you were carrying.’

  I nod. ‘I just wanted to scare her.’

  What’s going on? he asks me, with something other than the usual police detective look in his eye.

  I shrug. I tell him it must be the trauma.

  ‘I’ve seen this happen before and it doesn’t end up pretty,’ he tells me. ‘Perhaps somebody gets something on somebody. Blackmail or something and they are trying to get them to do something for them, but the person doesn’t want to do it. Maybe they get a gun or a knife and try and fix the situation.’