And When I Die

by Russel D. McLean

  I should be terrified. I should scream.

  Look at him, a voice in my head says. Remember what he’s done. Be afraid.

  This is Ray. The man who saved me from the playground bullies. My avenging angel.

  He killed a boy who hurt you. You never wanted that.

  Was that the only way he knew how to deal with problems? Death. Violence. Was he born a monster? Or made that way by his father, his brother, the world he came into?

  Did he save me because it was the right thing to do?

  Or because of what his dad had drummed into him about family?

  I say, ‘Do you remember…what you did for me? When I was seventeen…when…’

  ‘The...lad who cheated…on you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nods. ‘Do you…know what…I did?’ It doesn’t seem strange to him that I’m asking about something that happened almost ten years ago.

  ‘Was he the first man you killed?’

  ‘No.’ How do I respond to that?

  ‘How many?’

  He shakes his head. Either he doesn’t know or he doesn’t want to say.

  ‘He was…he was the first…I chose.’ He doesn’t seem to know how to form the thought, how to tell me what he’s thinking. Then: ‘Did anyone ever tell you about my condition?’

  ‘That there was something wrong with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Something…wrong.’ His features twist uncomfortably, lips move up on side, that plastic skin wrinkling. Smiling?

  ‘Beyond killing people?’ I try not to laugh as I speak, but it’s hard. There’s a surrealism to our conversation that makes me wonder if this whole day – maybe my whole life – hasn’t been a dream.

  ‘Aye. Beyond that.’ He hesitates.

  I wonder if he’s ever had this long a conversation with anyone before. He was always a man of few words; the strong silent type taken to the extremes of machismo. Preferring to communicate with a look or a gesture.

  Or worse, as I was beginning to realise.

  ‘So tell me,’ I say. Remembering when we were younger, how I’d treat it like a game, trying to talk to him. But this Raymond is even more closed off than the one I remember.

  He takes a deep breath. Coughs gently. No blood this time. Just killing time.

  ‘When I…was a wee man…I bit things. Nothing unusual. Lots of children do it. But I bit…myself. Hands. Fingers. Would bleed. But…wouldn’t stop. Frightened Mum…and Dad,’

  He smiled, or at least his warped face crinkled into the approximation of one. If you didn’t listen to what he was actually saying you could imagine he was reminiscing about the happiest moments of his childhood: fairgrounds, candy floss, getting to ride on the big wheel where he could see across the rooftops of the city and so far beyond to the horizon, where possibilities seemed infinite and enticing to a young child.

  But he was talking about biting and blood and the fact that he didn’t know what was happening.

  And didn’t care.

  ‘It continued. Didn’t grow out of it. Was tested. All the time. Tests every day. I’d fall over…and not cry. Trapped my…hand in…a drawer. Broke fingers. Couldn’t...didn’t understand…why they stopped…working. Doctors said…I was slow. Mental retardation. That was the…phrase.’

  Aye, it was. Back in the day. The 1980s: ignorance’s last gasp. At least in the mainstream. ‘But that wasn’t what was wrong?’ The Ray I knew was sharp, intelligent. Cunning in his own way. He just didn’t like to talk was all.

  ‘Later…they…found the truth. Congenital…insensitivity…to pain.’ He takes a deep breath, starts coughing again, with that turn of the head so he doesn’t have to face me. The arm comes up to cover his mouth. I think about the blood spitting from between his lips, spattering the material of his jacket. He recovers, turns back to face me.

  I think about that for a second. Can’t imagine it.

  ‘Understand pain. Feel pressure. Degrees. Know when I’m touching something. But pain…doesn’t register. Don’t know when…something’s hurting me…when there’s…too much pressure. When something’s broken or...’ he trails off. I wonder how long it’s been since he’s talked about this with anyone outside of a doctor. Or if he’s even talked to a medical professional since childhood. Surely if it was as bad as he’s telling me, he’d have been in hospitals most of his childhood. So why don’t I know about it? Of course, he’s ten years older than me. I missed a lot of his life. And our family are good at keeping secrets. Never trust an outsider.

  Ray tells me how Uncle Derek had been prepared for the worst. A child who doesn’t feel pain isn’t Superman. He’s more vulnerable than any kid who screams his head off the moment he gets a scratch or a bump.

  I understand. I trained to be a nurse. Know what pain is, why we need it. I’ve never come across Ray’s condition, but then if it’s as rare as he claims, there’s no reason I would have.

  Pain is the body’s way of alerting us to a problem. Without pain it’s tough to tell when something’s wrong, when you need to get yourself checked out. Ray tells me about severe cases of the condition, where people have died from infections because they had no idea that a piece of grit or duct was stuck in their eyes. Or others who scratched themselves on nails or branches, never noticed, never did anything and then wound up losing their limbs.

  Or worse.

  ‘I’m lucky,’ he says, ‘…not so bad. Can still sweat.’ There were cases, he tells me, of people so immune to pain, whose nerve receptors were so shut off, that they couldn’t sweat or even tell when it was time to go the bathroom. Without sweat, your body suffers. If you don’t go to the bathroom, your body suffers. Basic facts of medical science that anyone with rudimentary training could understand.

  I remember a few years back, some student coming in with kidney stones that got trapped in his urethra. He was in agony, the trapped stone had caused a backlog – over a pint of urine waiting to escape, the lad unable to deal with the pain which some schmuck GP had thought was appendicitis. Had some enterprising senior nurse not thought to do an ultrasound on him, he’d have been dead.

  ‘Some…poor bastards,’ Ray says, ‘Carry an alarm…tell them…when to go…to the toilet. Otherwise…they’d forget.’

  So Ray’s lucky. Take your luck where you can.

  Variants of his condition, he tells me, can come with other problems. Mental health issues are not uncommon.

  ‘Like depression?’

  He shakes his head. ‘And…others,’ he says.

  The car begins to feel like a confessional. I always hated confessionals.

  We’re closed in, locked together in darkness. He’s telling me things that I’m sure he hasn’t talked to anyone about in a very long time.

  Why me? Because I’m here? Because I’m his cousin?

  Because no-one else has asked him?

  He reaches out with the hand he hasn’t coughed into. I try not to flinch, but I still struggle with the fight or flight instinct. His heavy fingers grab my hair. Not roughly. More like taking hold of a delicate silk curtain, admiring the way it feels against his skin. I let him rub my hair between his fingers. Nothing threatening or sexual. More a longing for something he knows he can never have.

  How can you trust a man you watched kill his own father? A man you know whose response to a threat is to remove it in the most permanent fashion possible?

  Is it the same way that people make friends with lions? A leap of faith? Trusting that the odds are in your favour?

  I don’t want to end up like Uncle Derek.

  Or Neil.

  I watched him die in front of me. Saw the red blossom in his chest, his body give in and fall to the ground. I watched the life leave his body. Nothing spiritual about the experience. No great mysteries revealed, just the ugliness and indignity of death.

  Now I was calm, I had the space to think about what had happened, realise how inhuman and distanced my reaction had been at the time. Realise that,

  I let
him die.

  Didn’t do or say anything. And the truth is that I thought, as he fell to the ground, this is no less than he deserves. Does that make me a bad person?

  Neil had been an aging lech. Wasn’t blood, wasn’t family. I tolerated him because he was a friend of Uncle Derek’s. And in the end, watching him die, I hadn’t felt anything beyond a sense that one way or another, he’d always been going to die like that.

  Does my own darkness manifest itself differently?

  I have never gone to the police. Always refused to assist them in their enquiries. Never dobbed on a family member, reproached them for what they’ve done. I’ve simply refused to join in. Steadfastly created a life that allows me a level of deniability. And then, even when it got too much, what I did was leave. I didn’t say anything to the police, didn’t break the code of silence. Simply walked away, tried to pretend I was better than them.

  And I am. I am.

  Ray is still touching my hair. Suddenly he grabs a fistful and pulls me over to him. The smell of rotting flesh gets worse. My stomach turns. The insides of my nasal cavities stings.

  He forces me to look at him.

  ‘Don’t…’ he says, ‘think this…changes anything.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I will…kill you. If… I have to.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  Ray looks like a monster.

  But then, we’re all monsters. All of us Scobies. On the inside. Ray’s skin has been burned away. He can’t hide the truth from himself, or anyone else, any more.

  Part of me thinks that maybe Ray has the right idea.

  That we, the Scobies, all of us, might deserve to die.

  JOHN

  Tony’s house in Newton Mearns. A new-build bungalow he thinks is smart, the kind of home to aspire to. Small lawn out front, back garden paved over. Everything about the place is boxy and impermanent. His dad’s palace out in Newlands has character. This place cost a bomb and has no soul.

  The taxi pulls over and I pass the driver too much cash, let him keep the difference. I climb out, pull my jacket tighter. The city clouded over about an hour ago, and now there’s a fine mist in the air that soaks coolly through my clothes.

  I walk to the front, knock three times and walk in.

  Anthony’s in the front room with Wayne and Pete. All three look up. Serious expressions.

  All the money he has, his furniture still looks like a cheap job lot. Nothing in the room speaks of taste or even comfort. Like he saw what was advertised the most on TV, went in and asked for that.

  ‘Where’s Dunc?’

  ‘To bollocks with the fat bastard,’ Anthony says. ‘He’s gone to ground. Into a hole, pissing himself with fear. Same as you were going to do.’ He laughs. Gestures expansively in my direction. ‘This daft wee prick was going to call the cops.’

  I wonder if anyone’s going to jump me.

  Pete shakes his head. ‘No need for them, pal.’

  Wayne says, ‘We got the connections. And the tools.’

  As well as dealing in the hard stuff, the lads supply hardware to anyone with enough scratch. Handguns. Rifles. A limited line in explosives. They’ve both done time, but rather than learning valuable lessons about contributing, they treated incarceration like a criminal convention; built their list of contacts, expanded their reach. Whisper was that most of their weapons came from former IRA dealers looking for new opportunities in a post-armistice world.

  I say, ‘Your plan is...is to kill him?’

  Anthony says, ‘Aye. Before he kills me. It’s a brother eat brother world. Keep up, pal.’

  ‘You... we already fucked up killing him,’ I say. ‘And that was when we had a plan. Time to prepare.’

  Pete says, ‘Thanks to you, we know the car he’s driving.’

  Wayne nods. ‘It’s a start. Better than nothing.’

  Anthony says, ‘And I know my brother’s old contacts. He’s not working alone. He’s got the guns from somewhere. Someone’s been holing him up, too. I find out who that is, I’ll fuck them up. And then...’ He pauses, relishing the moment, as though he’s been waiting for it all his life, ‘I’ll kill my brother.’

  KAT

  Nineteen years old.

  A gentle patter against my bedroom window.

  That’s what I remember.

  Like those American movies where the girl is woken from sleep. And she gets up – hair always perfect, of course – and goes to see what the noise is. Discovers her boyfriend trying to wake her without disturbing the parental units.

  Of course, there was no handsome quarterback boyfriend with a gentle heart waiting for me in the back garden. Not even John Cusack with a boom box. Not how things happen in the Southside. Instead, it was my cousin Anthony, half hidden in shadow, trying not to set off the rear garden lights Dad had installed a couple of years previously.

  Motion-activated rear garden lights. Talk about your status symbols.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘The fuck does it look like?’

  In the still of early morning, even a harsh whisper sounded like Brian Blessed roaring at the top of his lungs

  I hesitated. Considered slamming the window, getting some ear plugs and letting Tony freeze his arse out there in the pre-dawn cold.

  Then he stepped out where I could see him. Covered in blood. Enough that you knew he’d been in a good scrap. One where the other guy came off worse.

  My first coherent thought: he shouldn’t have been wearing a white shirt.

  ‘Let me in.’

  Okay, maybe not some teen romance. More a vampire film. One where the idiot, virginal girl lets the bloodsucking fiend into the house. And once he’s inside, that’s it, game over.

  I let him in the kitchen door, sneaked him up to my room. Telling myself, what’s the harm? He’s family after all. On the upstairs landing, the floorboards creaked. We stopped stock-still, like kids in the playground playing at Sleeping Lions.

  I expected Mum to come out, see Tony, snap completely. But nothing happened.

  We stood like that maybe thirty seconds before Tony started moving again. I was another ten seconds behind him.

  When I closed the door to my room, he undressed in front of me like it was the most casual thing in the world. Stripped down to his boxers. Gave me this odd little look, cocking his head to one side before grabbing the spare dressing gown, the light brown one I’d worn until I was sixteen and never quite found the time to throw out. It was frayed around the edges, and didn’t quite fit him properly. All the same, it was better than a blood-spattered shirt. He didn’t look so scary any more. Just a little ridiculous.

  Which meant I could breathe normally.

  I said, ‘What happened?’

  He didn’t reply. Went to the window and looked outside. I’m not sure what he expected to see. The view wasn’t great. The most you could really see was next door’s garden that backed onto ours. And, occasionally, the sight of the neighbours making love in the upper-rear bedroom. When friends slept over, we’d watch and giggle as their loose flesh jiggled around. Maybe they thought they looked hot, but mostly they just looked like a pair of drowning walruses. But Tony wasn’t looking to perv, he was looking out there like he could see the whole city laid before him. Trying to see what it was he had been running from.

  I said it again: ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Some prick picked a fight. I finished it.’ More than a dash of pride in his explanation.

  Tony, twenty-one, already on a steady diet of powder and booze. Snorted rather than injected on some messed up principle he had about HIV. Although I knew for a fact that he didn’t use condoms, good Catholic boy that he was. Not through personal experience, of course, but reliable anecdotal evidence. He was, as with all my family, a mass of contradictions. None of them good.

  ‘I’m drinking,’ he said, finally turning away from the window, sitting on the far end of my bed. I was glad of the distance between us, sitting cross-legged on one of the large pillow
s near the head. Aye, we’re family, but I’m aware that when he gets high, he forgets the most basic social conventions, never mind the absolutes. He’d never tried anything before, but a little warning voice at the back of my brain slickly and sickly insisted there’s a first time for everything.

  ‘I’m drinking,’ he said again. ‘I’m drinking and this arsehole is sitting next to me at the bar. Pissed, of course. Weedy wee bollocks. Thick glasses. Michael Caine, aye? So, anyway, he’s sitting next to me, trying to chat up the wee girl behind the bar. She’s fit, like. I mean, serious set of legs, nice tits, great arse. Big glasses, like, but you can’t have everything.’ He grinned. ‘And so the tube is trying to pick her up and failing. What I do is tip her the wink. And she’s on me. I mean, really. Maybe it’s so’s the eejit gets the hint, or maybe she knows a good thing when she sees it. But still he keeps trying. Doesn’t get the message. I decide he’s just drunk and because I’m a magnanimous prick, let it go. Long as he isn’t trying to cop a feel, I figure she can just bat it off. Job like that, guess you get used to it.’

  Who said chivalry was dead?

  ‘So I get up to go take a piss and he follows me. Into the bathroom. Believe it? Not like we’re piss pals or something. He’s following me because he wants to tell me to lay off and you know he’s onto a good thing with the bird, and he wants me to leave her the fuck alone. So I tell him he’s being a prick and reckon that’s it, but he doesn’t let up.’

  ‘So you hurt him?’

  ‘What, you think I’m just a thug? I’m a Scobie. You know how Dad tells it, we bend the rules, but we’re good, honest people. What you see, it’s what you get. Aye? Besides, he starts it. The prick, I mean. Swings the first punch. I just fight back.’

  Maybe with anyone else you could believe it was just a fight that got out of hand. But then you look at Tony and what you see in his eyes is a powder-fuelled lust.

  He gets off on fighting the same way other men get off on women. In fact, I think he might be more into the fighting. Because that adrenaline high was still in him. He was shaking at the memory. Not with fear. Excitement. He was turned on, I’m sure of it.