- 7 -
Alex Slater felt like death warmed through when he arrived at the Tanner’s house on Brewer Street. It was just before ten-thirty, and Brewer Street was bathed in darkness as thick as pitch. He counted the cars lined up against the curb as he walked. At the corner of Brewer Street and Dipton Walk he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. When he tried to focus on it though, it was gone. A shadow swallowed by hungrier shadows. But the afterimage remained, impossible to shake off: someone, no more than a dark smudge, really, crouched amongst the roadside trees. Perfectly still. Watching. A sickle moon ghosted occasionally through the low lying cloudbank, and irregular flashes of lightning highlighted the grim doorways and blind windows of the old Kingsbridge School across the street. Someone had set a six stick bonfire burning in the yard. The rain was busy dousing it. Street lights puddled amber on the pavement. The dark was swirling, spitting rain that broke and ran on the glass.
Beth was standing at the window, steam corkscrewing from her mug.
Alex waved as he opened the garden gate but she didn’t seem to see him. He had had nineteen years to get used to the fact that he was no giant. Grinning, he remembered a full week he’d wasted one summer dangling by his feet from the dizzy heights of Dipton Wood, trying to stretch another inch or two out of his body.
He tapped on the door and waited. Beth was holding a towel when she opened the door. Shaking himself off like a wet terrier, Alex reached to wrap his arms around her but Beth shrugged off the closeness and left him holding the towel. Closing the door behind him, Alex followed her into the house. He stopped in front of the hallway mirror to towel his hair dry and wrap a makeshift turban around his head. When Alex finally followed her into the lounge he had most of his hair tucked in beneath the towel. A runic cross dangled from his left ear, catching the white light of the television as it slithered over the room. The cross glinted like some half-glimpsed sunken treasure.
“What say we go upstairs?” Alex asked Beth with a smirk.
Beth was sat cross-legged on the floor, hunched over a half-played hand of solitaire. The index finger of her right hand twitched slightly every now and again, tapping a rhythm in time with her thoughts. She snorted; an abrupt, derisive sound, as she flipped over the King of Hearts. “What say we don't,” she said, moving the King to open a new row.
“Fine by me, I guess.” Alex shrugged. “You want to do it on the floor then? Down here in front of the fire? Nice and toastie, like?”
Beth laughed. Sitting back against the couch, she ran a lazy hand through her cherry-blossom hair. “No, I don't think so,” she said finally. Her voice was heavy, pronouncing a verdict that said guilty all the way.
Alex sighed. Condemned by his own forgetfulness. “Look, I already said I'm sorry about forgetting the rubbers, but that doesn't mean we can't, you know, fool around a bit.”
“Don't worry about it; we aren't going to be needing condoms in a hurry.”
“I don't get it, Beth. One minute you’re all over me, the next, well Jesus…What’s the matter with you?”
Beth rubbed at her eyes. They felt tacky with mascara. She looked up at him and all she could think was God, how pathetic. My own little dwarf biker from Hell. She had to bite her tongue to keep from getting the giggles. The thought was so damned silly. She didn't want to laugh at Alex. Not tonight.
He mustered a weak smile and cleared his throat nervously. Beth leaned back to look him up and down.
“Just go home,” she said wearily. “Please, Alex.”
“I don't understand, Beth. What did I do?” Alex could feel his ears and cheeks burning, and was half aware that the look on his face must have turned sickly. His hands felt clammy. His stomach turned over and his shoulders slumped. He pulled the towel from his hair and started scrunching the dampness out of it.
In the kitchen, the kettle began to squeal.
“Saved by the whistle,” he joked lamely.
“Not this time,” Beth muttered absently as she pushed herself up. She padded through to the kitchen, her bare feet slapping loudly on the cold linoleum. The kitchen smelled thickly of the fish and chip supper she’d shared with her two sisters, Ellen and Sarah. Beth crossed to the small gas hob and lifted the kettle from one of the rings.
Alex hovered uncertainly in the doorway. His face ran the gamut of emotions as he tried to fathom out what was happening between them. “Look, whatever I've done, I'm sorry,” he offered.
Beth looked up from pouring out a mug of instant coffee. She shook her head again. It was all she could do. She didn't want to cry. She really didn't want to cry. She could feel the tightness building in her throat, as if it was crammed with rubber. She could feel the tears rising, unbidden, in her eyes, reducing the kitchen to a swimming blur of colour. She wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
“No,” she said in a voice far from steady. “You don't know, do you?”
“I just thought –“
“Well, you know what thought thought, don't you,” Beth raised the mug to her lips. She desperately wanted to smoke a cigarette. For one thing, a smoke would kill the lousy taste in her throat, and for another, it would give her something to do with the hand that wasn't holding the mug.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she replied, and that was the truth of it. The wind rustling through the neat lines of trees on Brewer Street was coming from the bleak north, from the midnight blue of the North Sea off beyond Moses Hill. The thought of the tiny life growing molecule by molecule in that secret place inside her was more frightening than anything she had ever thought about. For the first time in her life, Beth Tanner had a glimpse of the real meaning of the word lonely. “I’m not okay, Alex. I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” he repeated stupidly.
“You can say it. Your prick won’t drop off, you know.”
There was an awkward moment of nothingness between them. Then Alex leaned forward slightly and slipped his arms around her waist. He tried to kiss Beth, to let her know everything was going to be alright but she pulled back as if he’d tried to put a hot coal to her lips.
“You’re not… mad?” she said, managing a thin sunless smile.
“Mad? Jesus, no… shocked I guess, but not mad… What are we going to do?”
“What do you want to do? One chance, Alex. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” he looked like a gradually waking sleepwalker: dazed, blinking and confused.
She drew a deep breath. “Let’s see if I can help you out. I’ve had more time to get used to the idea of being a parent. Not just nappies and three a.m. feeds. We’ve got three options as I see it. We can get married and keep the baby. Not get married and still keep the baby, or –“
“Beth!”
“ –Or I could get an abortion.”
He was sinking. Drowning. “I think I can scrape up some cash for an abortion, but not enough…”
Beth laughed. A bitter laugh. “Wrong answer. I’m not ashamed and I’m not a whore. I want to keep it, Alex.”
He stared at her stupidly. “Christ, I need a fag,” he said, fumbling for the golden packet of Benson’s he’d picked up from The Railway House on the way over. “You want one?” he offered.
“No. They’re bad for the baby.”
“God, yeah, sorry,” Alex said, striking the match. “Don’t suppose this is much good either. Oh man, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know any more than you do. We aren’t born with some genetic code that says we know how to handle this kind of stuff. I’m just as scared as you are, only I have to learn real quick whether I want to or not.”
She was pleased to see that her words were having some kind of effect; the anxious confused look was fading a little from his face but his eyes were still wide. Shell-shock, she thought and had to stamp hard on the glow it lit inside her.
He laughed. Only it wasn’t really a laugh. “Okay… let’s get married. We can do this
.”
“No,” Beth said as gently as she could. “I don’t want to marry you, Alex.”
He tried to put on a brave face, but it was as if that face was made of Playdoh ™, his features sagging as her words sank in. “Why not?” was all he could say.
“Why not?” she mimicked. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “You’re priceless, Alex. I don’t want anything from you. Not now. Not ever.” Instinctively, her hand rested on her stomach. Her gaze shifted to the windowsill. A perfect ring of white had settled at the bottom of the ClearBlue test tube. “You’ve done more than enough, believe me.”
- 8 -
There were three of them huddled beneath the branches of Hangman’s Oak. Smeared with blood and grit a blackened figure looked up at Monk Sanders. It was the face of a woman, alabaster pale and distorted by a pained leer. Her left eye was swollen shut, the other was dilated so much it appeared irisless. She brought a gnarled, arthritic hand up to screen her from the lights of the Land rover and the driving rain. The woman's mouth gaped open, her lips curling back on sharp teeth that were blood-washed and clogged with strings of meat. Saliva hung in a string from her chin. The skin around her mouth was covered in pustules and weeping sores. Patches of flaking skin showed where her hair had come out in ragged clumps. The headlights bathed the driveway in light.
“Oh, sweet Jesus God alive…” Richie moaned. He couldn’t take his eyes off the head of the old man wedged in the cleft of the old tree. The eye sockets gaped emptily, like twin moons in a Martian sky, torn ligaments rashers of bloody red cloud. “Oh no… oh no… Oh no, no, no.”
Monk was smiling broadly. The warm rain had matted his short-cropped hair flat to his scalp. He looked – almost – like a childish drawing, a comic book hero come to life. The image would have been funny if it wasn't for the blankness behind Monk's eyes.
Monk walked around to the back of the Land Rover. The rain ran down his face and neck but he didn’t make a move to pull up the collar of his thick goose-down jacket. The hatchback door opened onto a second one of high tensile steel. The back of the Land Rover had been turned into a detention cage.
As a jag of lightning lanced through the dark storm, Richie saw a second skinny figure staring at him. A naked man. His face was raw with burns and tatters of clothing clung to the runny sores on his chest. And a child. No more than eleven or twelve.
“Come on,” Monk yelled, rounding on the huddled figures. “Or you'll miss all the fun.” His lips twisted as if he were whispering something to the nearest one. He pulled a taser from beneath his jacket and levelled it at the woman.
“Bahd, Bahd, Bahd,” she lisped, saliva flecks spat from her ruined lips. The sounds came out slow and dragging, not words at all. They matched the hallucinatory slow motion drawl of the whole nightmarish scene. The woman slapped herself a stinging blow across the face. One of the sores above her left eye burst, releasing a viscous fluid that trickled like yellow lava down her cheek. It was all Richie could do to stare as she tangled the skeletal fingers of her hand within her hair and started wrenching it until a handful of bloodied roots tugged free. She tilted her head to the storm. Both mouth and breath filled with rain. Clutching a switch of her own bloodied hair in her hand, she started thrashing and slapping at herself again, only this time as she slapped, she shrieked and clawed at her face as well, dragging fingernails down her cheeks, gouging out bloody runnels.
Monk lashed out with his booted foot.
His kick caught the woman under the chin. The blow snapped her head back and lifted her bodily. Her mouth sprayed blood and spittle as she came down on her back, arms and legs akimbo in a whorish sprawl. The tattered rags of her skirt were kinked up around her knees.
The woman gave vent to a feverish howl.
With a final bellow of rage Monk Sanders lashed out with the taser. A jolt of electricity lanced the woman's breast with a bolt that burned and blackened the grimy fabric of her drenched blouse. She doubled-over, dragging her legs in under her chest. Thunder roared.
Caught in the headlights, the other hideous monstrosities were backing off, scrabbling and pawing at the rain-soaked cinders. Richie moved forward, stepping on something soft. With the cloying sickness of fear in his stomach, he took a deep breath and looked down. He wished they’d killed the Land Rover's headlights. Instead, he saw the eyeball that was smeared across the toe of his boot like a squashed oyster. Richie turned and vomited into the undergrowth beneath the oak.
“COME ON, KID!” Monk yelled over the storm. “YOU GONNA GIVE ME A HAND OR NOT?” The roar of the rain drowned the rest of his words. Monk rounded on the skinny man who was on his knees, cowering from the taser. He lunged forward, hitting the skinny man hard with the plastic handle of the taser and spinning him away. The skinny man tilted his head back and opened his mouth to cry out but he couldn’t make a sound. Desperately, he tried to hit Monk with his bare fist, but the Marylander anticipated the telegraphed swing and side-stepped the wild punch easily. He slammed his knee up into the man's face.
Monk stepped back and let him slump to the floor. He wrapped his fingers in a clump of singed hair, yanked the skinny man’s head back and jammed it down again with a wet smack, forcing the miserable wretch to eat a mouthful of mud.
Grunting his satisfaction, Monk straddled the naked man and pulled his arms up hard behind his back. He snapped a pair of metal cuffs around the skinny man’s wrists and then dragged him kicking and struggling to the Land Rover's detention cage.
The woman was out of commission, semi-conscious and moaning on the floor. The child had backed off and was keeping out of the way, his head jerking back and forth wildly. Suddenly, he pressed his hands to his temples and bayed. A second later the woman copied him. The skinny man jerked convulsively against the cuffs but couldn't get his hands up and screamed harder than both of them for it.
Around them, the ever present hissing and spattering of the rain was like the breath of the storm itself.
Richie stared at the head lodged in the tree trunk while Monk dragged the screaming woman into the darkness beyond the Landover's headlights. He heard the ratcheting of the bolt being shot into place, loud like the crack of a rifle shot slicing through the summer's tears. He grimaced, turning his back on the severed head, and joined Monk by the tailgate.
Monk looked up. “Take care of the kid.” He said, gesturing towards the boy hunkered down in the no-man's land between the oak and the barn, and headed toward the open door of the farmhouse. Monk Sanders paused on the fringe of the Land Rover's lights, and turned to look back. They illuminated his face from below, and by a trick of light caused his eyes to look both ancient and mad. His expression did not change in the few seconds that passed. His smiling face continued to be distorted by the light, flickering between the mask of a withered demon, and the face of a middle aged drill sergeant. Then he turned away as if uninterested by what he saw, breaking the eye contact and shattering the illusion.
Slowly, watching Monk's retreating back, Richie pulled the collar of his leather jacket tight around his throat and breathed: “No use standing here like an idiot.”
The child, with his peculiar lopsided grin and the crop of raw pimples on his chin, looked almost normal. Rain that might have been tears ran down his inflamed cheeks. His shirt was soaked and clinging to his body. His ribcage heaved as he sucked in ragged gasps of air. He looked up as Richie approached.
“Nice and easy little fella,” Richie soothed.
The child was rocking back on his haunches. When Richie was close enough to reach out and touch, the boy lunged, lashing a clawed hand out at his face. Richie tried to duck under it, but took a handful of raking nails across his cheek. The boy’s head rammed him in his stomach, but instead of knocking him down, sent him staggering backwards.
Unbalanced, Richie lashed out with the taser; the plastic handle slapped against the child's face, a jolt of electricity crackling uselessly between the points. The boy staggered, lurching from side to side, and then flung both
hands up to defend his face as Richie thrust with the taser again. He sprawled awkwardly onto his backside, fingers pawing pathetically at the dirt. In a heartbeat the boy was shivering uncontrollably. He pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Lifted his head and saw Richie in front of him.
Before he could wriggle away Richie grabbed a handful of his hair and dragged the boy, on his knees, back to the rear of the Land Rover. In the back of the Land Rover, the woman looked up. Sweat ran in rivulets down her forehead. She was pressed back into the corner of the cage, her legs drawn up, flattening her breasts. The skinny man was curled up at her feet, chin pressed down against his emaciated ribcage, arms up, shielding his head. He made sobbing, whining noises. Richie grabbed the still groggy boy under both arms and hauled him up bodily.
Whimpers and grunts snuffled from inside the cage.
The boy twisted and jerked, teeth biting wildly, as Richie bundled him into the back, then slammed the tailgate down, trapping all three of them in the detention cage.
Walking away from the Land Rover, Richie realised that held been holding his breath all through the struggle. He inhaled. The air was warm and muggy and hard to swallow. Near the farmhouse door he passed a steel drum filled with stagnant rain water. It smelled rank and buzzed with skaters and flies.
The farmhouse door was open.
Walking inside, Richie found himself in a long, narrow kitchen. Cupboards lined one of the stone walls, a pot-bellied iron stove, breakfast bench and boiler, another. A stainless steel drainer and sink stood under the room's only window. Drying dishes were racked up on the drainer. There was no refrigerator. A flex and bare bulb hung suspended from the ceiling, and a gas lamp rested atop one of the cupboards. There was a hole in the floor where a bare board had been pried loose. The floorboard leaned against one of the walls. A long refectory table stood in the centre of the room. There were a few chairs scattered about, straight-back oaks without cushions.
Sufferer's Song Page 3
