by Mark Tilbury
‘There’s bound to be beds or something upstairs.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Only one way to find out.’ He stood up.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘Nah. You stay here and keep an eye on the fire.’ He flicked his lighter on and ambled across the room towards the door.
I watched his shadow disappear from view, leaving me on my own, with just the fire and an overactive imagination for company. I had a nasty tingling sensation in my stomach.
Don’t be stupid. It’s no different to when Liam was here.
But, it was. It was quieter. Deathly quiet, you might say. Broken glass littered the floor. The light from the fire gave it the appearance of hot coals. Something moved behind the bar; a shadow among the dripping shards of glass. My heart thudded in my chest. I tried not to look, but it was as if my eyes were hell-bent on disobeying the last dregs of good sense still left in my head.
My mother stood behind the bar, a duster in one skeletal hand, a tin of polish in the other. Her mouth hung open, exposing broken tombstone teeth. One eye stared at the wall, the other squinted at me through a mound of purple rotting flesh. Strands of hair sprouted from her mostly bald scalp.
I closed my eyes. Rubbed them hard enough to bring tears, and looked again.
‘You can’t make shit shine, Mikey,’ she said, spraying the rotting wood with a burst of Mr. Sheen.
‘Mum?’ The word came out barely formed. More of a sob.
She shook her head. A clump of hair fell onto the bar with a portion of her scalp. ‘I worked my fingers to the bone, Mikey. Looking after him. Making excuses for him.’ She banged the polish down on the counter and ran those bony fingers through what was left of her hair. Several detached from her hand and knotted themselves in the matted strands like witch’s curlers.
I stared at her the same way you might look at an accident. I stuffed my fingers into my mouth and bit down.
‘Make sure you follow your heart, Mikey. Do the right thing and follow your heart.’
I gripped the sides of the crate and squeezed my eyes shut again. I shook my head, trying to dislodge that awful image of her decomposing corpse. I wanted to run, scoot through that cat flap, and never look back.
After a few minutes, marked only by the throbbing pulse of my heart in my ears, I finally found the courage to look again. She was gone. I let out my breath, unaware until now that I’d been holding it.
‘There ain’t no beds, but there’s a double mattress on the floor in one of the bedrooms.’
I screamed at the sudden sound of Liam’s voice. I fell sideways off the crate, landing on broken glass and gashing my hand.
‘What’s the matter with you, jumpy-drawers?’
I climbed slowly to my feet, nursing my injured hand, eyes fixed on the bar. Thankfully, my mother’s rotting corpse was still no longer there.
‘Mikey?’
I sat back on the crate. My knees were knocking together so badly I thought he would hear them. Now what did I say? My mother just paid a flying visit straight from the grave? I made a snap decision not to tell him about her. And another to go and check the bar for signs of finger bones, pieces of scalp, and hair. ‘Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.’
Liam sat down. ‘You look like you’ve just seen a fucking ghost.’
I almost laughed out loud at the irony of his words. ‘I’m just a bit jumpy. I keep thinking Kraft or Malloy will come out of nowhere and drag us back to Woodside.’
‘If that wanker turns up here, I’ll kill him, and burn his body on the fire.’
Something in Liam’s voice told me he meant every word. ‘Me, too,’ I said, with less conviction.
‘I’d chop him up into tiny pieces and grind his bones to powder.’
‘No more than he deserves.’ I glanced nervously over my shoulder at the bar for signs of corpses.
‘Anyway, I thought we could go top to tail on the mattress. Use our bags as pillows.’
‘What about blankets? It’ll be freezing in the night.’
‘I’ll cuddle you, sweetie-pie.’
I hoped he was joking. ‘But, seriously, what are we going to do?’
‘Have a rummage. See if we can find something. If we can’t, we’ll drag the mattress down here in front of the fire.’
‘Okay.’
‘And make sure you have a piss first. I don’t want you waking me up in the middle of the night to take you to the toilet.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ I said, thinking I was exactly that. I sucked blood off my hand. It tasted bitter and coppery and strangely comforting. We sat in silence for ages, just staring into the fire. ‘Do you miss your parents, Mikey?’
‘I miss my mum. My old man can go to fucking hell, for all I care.’
‘Why?’
I told him. Everything. Spilled my guts, like a stuffed bear might spill its filling. Told him about the murder. Rachel and Oxo. How me and Tommy Preston had rescued Oxo from Finley’s Farm. How the authorities had carted me off to Woodside.
When I was finished, Liam did a strange thing. He reached out and rubbed my arm the same way my mother used to when I was sick or afraid of something. Gently, up and down. ‘That’s fucking shit, Mikey. Really shit.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
‘Your mum should have called the cops on your old man. Got the bastard arrested.’
‘She was scared of him, Liam. Scared of what he’d do when the cops went away, back to their nice, cosy lives. I mean, they would hardly lock him up forever just for beating her up, would they?’
He shook his head. ‘They might have locked him up long enough for you to get away from him.’
I wished with all my heart I could rewind my life and do one thing different. Stop what had happened that night. But, I couldn’t. It was done. Over. My mum was dead forever, and my old man was rotting away in jail somewhere. I hoped with all my heart he was suffering. Guilt. Illness. Anything.
‘Maybe we could go and see your dog,’ Liam suggested. ‘Did this Rachel woman definitely keep him?’
I perked up. ‘Said she would. Do you really want to go to see him?’
‘I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t mean it, Mikey. Oxo sounds like a great dog.’
Just the thought of seeing him again brought a lump to my throat. ‘I’d really like that.’
‘Then, we’ll do it.’
I glanced at him. He looked like a cartoon character. His frizzy hair made him look as if he’d been plugged into a main’s socket. His wonky tooth hung on for dear life to his mouth by its chewing gum roots. ‘Do you want to talk about what happened to you? How you wound up at Woodside?’
He didn’t answer for a while. Part of me wondered if he would clam up. Finally, he said, ‘You sure you want to hear it?’
I was.
And so, he told me. ‘My parents didn’t die in a car crash like I told you. Well, not exactly. More metaphorically.’
‘What the fuck’s that when it’s at home?’
He looked at me as if I was the dumbest thing to walk the Earth since the dinosaurs. ‘It means not literally, dough-brain.’ He paused. When he spoke again, his voice barely rose above a whisper, as if telling me the greatest secret ever told. ‘I don’t want you to think for one minute I didn’t love my mother, Mikey, because I did. She was all right, mostly, but she had a weakness.’
‘Weakness?’
He paused again. ‘She was a tart.’
‘Your mum?’ I said, shocked.
‘No, my Uncle Tom.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I only know what I heard when they argued. He accused her of having an affair with some teacher at school.’
‘A teacher? Bloody hell.’ If the teachers at my school were anything to go by, I couldn’t believe such a thing was even possible.
Liam fiddled with his lone tooth, stretching the chewing gum like elastic. ‘Yeah. Mr. Finnegan. A math teacher at the school where she taught. Some pos
h-knob’s place in Slough. She was an English teacher, but she taught art as well. She was really pretty, Mikey. I’m not surprised men fancied her.’
I wondered what went wrong with Liam. Perhaps he’d inherited his dad’s looks.
‘I felt sorry for my dad,’ Liam said. ‘He was a builder. Good with his hands, but useless with his mouth. She used to win every argument they had. He’d go around banging doors, throwing his weight about, stuff like that, but it didn’t seem to bother her.’
I wondered if this would end up the same way as my parents had.
‘By the end, she was sleeping in the spare room. I heard my dad crying one night. It was fucking horrible, Mikey. Dad’s aren’t supposed to cry, are they? They’re meant to be your hero. I put my head under the pillow to drown it out.’
‘I know how that is.’
‘Shit happens, right? But, sometimes that shit stinks so bad, you can’t ever get rid of it. It’s there forever. Right inside your brain. Anyway, we had a last Christmas together. Turkey and all the trimmings. Opened our presents. All the excitement, followed by the disappointment. All those brightly coloured parcels never turn out to be what you hoped for, do they?’
‘No.’
‘Like life.’
Even though he was only a year older than me, it was as if he had an adult’s head on a boy’s shoulders. To be honest, I never expected much from Christmas when I’d lived at home; not with my old man drinking most of the money down the pub.
‘She left on Boxing Day. Just like that, Mikey. Gone like a puff of smoke. A letter explaining how we would be better off without her. That she loved me. Crap like that.’
‘I’m sorry, mate.’
‘Don’t be. Her choice. My dad or Mr. Finnegan, with hairs on his fucking chin-ne-gan, or whatever the stupid song is. She chose Finnegan. Perhaps he had a bigger dick.’
I said nothing.
‘What do you reckon, Mikey? Is it better to stay with someone you don’t love, or run off into the arms of someone you do?’
‘I don’t know.’ A genuine answer. I just wished my mother had found someone to run off with. Someone to start again with. A Mr. Finnegan to begin again.
‘I’ve thought about this a lot. I reckon it’s only all right to do it if you’re not going to break someone else’s heart. Because that’s what she did, Mikey. She broke my dad’s heart. Smashed into a thousand pieces. Left him like poor old Humpty-Dumpty at the bottom of that fucking wall.’
I couldn’t help thinking it was equally bad to stay with someone you didn’t love.
‘He carried on as best he could. Going to work, coming home, burning my tea, drinking, getting up late, looking like shit, crying…’
I waited for him to carry on. He seemed mesmerised by the fire, and then he turned to me, tears glistening in his eyes. ‘I want you to promise me you won’t tell no one what I’m about to tell you. Do you promise?’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—’
‘I want to tell you. I trust you. But, you’ve gotta promise.’
‘I promise.’
‘Swear on your life.’
‘I swear on my life.’
‘It was January thirty-first. Two years ago. I walked home from school. freezing cold, wishing to Christ there was one teacher at school who would take an interest in what I wanted to do, instead of filling my head with a load of crap. But, something else was nagging me all the way home. A horrible feeling in my guts something was wrong. Really wrong. Do you believe in instinct, Mikey?’
I wasn’t sure, but said I did.
‘I had a front door key. My dad was never home from work much before six. Sometimes later, when he was working away on a job. I didn’t mind. I thought it was cool having my own key. Grown up. Making myself a sandwich and sitting in front of the telly. He’d mostly go to the chippy when he got home, or cook something simple, like egg and chips and beans. Mum would have had a fit if she’d seen how we were living, but it was none of her business anymore. She sent me a card with some money in it the week after she left. I threw the card and the money on the fire. I was still so angry with her.’
‘I can see why.’
Liam didn’t seem to hear me. ‘Anyway, like I said, I knew something was wrong all the way home. Then I saw my dad’s builder’s van in the drive. At first, I thought he’d come home early, but that couldn’t be right, because he had a massive job on in Hazlechurch. That’s when I saw smoke coming out the bottom of the garage door.’
At first, I thought he meant the house was on fire. ‘Shit.’
‘I already knew, Mikey. Even before I legged it through the house to the garage. He’d gassed himself. Stupid fucker only went and ran a hosepipe from the exhaust and fed it into the front of the car.’
‘Oh, fuck.’
‘He took the easy way out. The coward’s way out. I don’t know how long he’d been in the car. It was my mum’s old run-around. He looked fucking weird. All red, like a lobster. Smoke filled the garage. I turned the engine off, and phoned an ambulance, but I knew he was already dead, Mikey. Knew it.’
‘Shit…’
He pulled the lone tooth out of his mouth and fiddled with the chewing gum. ‘It was worse for your mum, Mikey. She had no choice.’
Was there such a thing as worse when it came to tragedy? We sat in silence for a while, the log spitting and throwing sparks onto the floor. And then, I asked how come he’d ended up at Woodside.
He studied his tooth as if it might be an ancient artefact. ‘I ended up in borstal.’
‘How?’
‘I lost it, Mikey. Lost the plot. Went fucking nuts. Out of control. I point blank refused to live with my mum and that fancy teacher friend of hers. I went to stay with dad’s business partner and his wife for a while. But, I was a fucking nightmare. They had this drinks’ cabinet in the corner of their living room. More like a bar. Optics, everything. Brandy and Scotch in decanters. Crystal tumblers. I smashed the lot up one afternoon after getting sent home from school for smoking.’
‘No one could blame you for—’
‘It was a shitty thing to do. They were only trying to help. But, I didn’t want help. I wanted my old man back. I wanted my mum back. I wanted to go back to before she buggered off. Colin and Margaret were really good about me smashing up their bar. They didn’t call the cops. Said they understood, but they didn’t. How could they? I wanted revenge. I wanted someone to pay. Someone to take notice of me. Be sorry for what had happened.’
I knew better than most how that felt. I also understood no one could ever take away the pain. Make you feel better. You just had to swallow it, digest it, and if you were really lucky, crap it right out of your system one day.
Liam threw his tooth into the fire. ‘There was this teacher at school. Mr. Hartson. As far as teachers went, he was one of the better ones. Let you get on with it. Talked to you properly. But, I started to believe he was my mum’s new boyfriend, Mr. Fancy Finnegan. I know it sounds stupid, Mikey, but I really believed it. The day I attacked him, I could feel it building up all morning, swelling inside me. I had double chemistry with him straight after lunch. All I could think about was attacking him, getting revenge. Sounds fucking crazy, doesn’t it?’
‘It sounds as if you just got messed up by what happened.’
‘He was writing something on the blackboard. Some chemical equation crap. It might as well have been Japanese for all I cared. I stood up and walked up behind him, got to within a few feet of him before he twigged and turned around. It was as if I was encased in a bubble, just me and him. The rest of the classroom faded to nothing. He dropped the chalk. His mouth hung open; it reminded me of a polo mint. Then, I went for him. Hit him again and again. He eventually got me in a headlock. He was shouting for someone to get a teacher. Every time he spoke, he squeezed my neck harder. I couldn’t breathe. Then the world went black. I came around in the medical room.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I got expelled for that. You
know what, Mikey? No one ever asked me how I felt. I got sent to borstal for six months. Just like that. Bam. It’s as if they’re doing their best to make sure you get completely fucked up. And, believe me, borstal fucks you up. You’re not allowed to walk anywhere. It’s like being in the army, only ten times worse. The short sharp shock. That’s what they call it. It’s just fucking legalised assault. The same as Woodside. No one wants to help you. All they want to do is make you feel like a worthless bag of shit. The police, the politicians, the cunts at Woodside. They get off on it, Mikey. They fucking well get off on it.’
I thought of Mr. Davies. Malloy. Reader. Kraft. Liam was right. They didn’t just do what they did to discipline you; they did it because they enjoyed watching you suffer.
We sat in silence for a while. Everything we had said seemed to cement our friendship. Moved it on to another level. He reached down and picked up a piece of broken glass. ‘Are you still bleeding?’
I looked at my hand, touched it. Wet and sticky. ‘Yes.’
He drew the glass across the palm of his hand, deep enough to cut. He dropped the makeshift weapon and held out his hand. ‘Blood-brothers?’
I pressed my wound against his. Hard. ‘Blood-brothers.’
After a few seconds, he withdrew his hand. ‘I promise to look out for you. Always be on your side, no matter what. Do you promise back, Mikey?’
I promised.
‘We’ll take the world on. We’ll take the fucking lot of them on.’
Right then, in the glow of that fire, I truly believed that me and Liam Truman were invincible.
But, we weren’t.
He jumped up. ‘Come on. We’ll drag the mattress down here for the night. I can’t be bothered looking for bedding.’
We ate the sandwiches out of his bag. A hearty meal of stale cheese and tomato, but they tasted grand. I imagined I was a cowboy, John Wayne, sitting in front of a camp fire eating beef jerky, Indians waiting beyond the hills to attack. Ready for anything those darned Indians had to throw at us.
We spent our first night of freedom on that filthy pub floor. Liam fell asleep more or less straight away, his breathing heavy, a strange gurgling noise in the back of his throat. I slept fitfully, terrified we would catch the place on fire and end up getting sent to borstal.
