The Truants

by Lee Markham

  1

  The banging on the door doesn’t wake the child.

  The child is already awake.

  He lies there, on his mattress, on the floor, in the half-light from the hall, in the filth of his days-old nappy and rolls his eyes towards the door and the cacophony beyond.

  The dog has started barking. Snarling and yelping. Not yapping though. It’s too big to yap. It’s a big black shadow of a dog with a boulder for a head and it is beastly.

  The boy’s night clothes are damp. The saturated nappy is seeping. The bare mattress stained, and thin, and lumpy.

  He lies there and tilts his head and looks disinterestedly at the bedroom door, beyond which the dog is going mental and the front door is being walloped.

  ‘Ste mate, you there? Open up, mate…’

  Mutterings from the room further down the hall.

  Swearing.

  Footsteps. ‘Tell ’im to fuck off, yeah?’ The boy’s mother. ‘We got a fuckin’ kid innit? Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Steven – ‘Ste’ – is at the front door now.

  ‘It’s me mate, it’s Cal. Lemme in, yeah?’

  ‘It’s not even fucking eight in the…’ The dog is still barking and yelping and out of control. The boy hears Ste hiss, and then the dull thud of his boot piling into the dog’s side. The dog squeals, and arfs, and the boy knows how he feels. ‘Will you shut the fuck up. Go on, fuck off. Get back in there. Fucking dog. It’s fucking eight in the morning Cal, what the fuck do you want?’

  ‘What do you think I fucking want Ste. You want me to make an announcement or what? Open the door man.’

  A pause. And then a muttering under breath. And then the door being unlatched and opened.

  ‘You’re not letting the twat in are you Ste?’ The boy’s mother, hollering from the room next door. ‘I thought I told you to tell him to…’

  ‘Donnashutup! It’s not like…’ Ste’s holler runs out of steam and dovetails into a whispered, ‘… Jesus Christ Cal… what happened your arm?’

  ‘Don’t ask. You got any?’

  ‘Course I got some. But what happened your arm?’

  ‘I said don’t ask, didn’t I? Fuck’s sake, man, just sort me out…’

  The front door closes and a shamble of footsteps hustle back down the hall to the front room. The snicker of the dog’s claws on the linoleum. A whistling whine of bruised displeasure.

  Then the sound of muffled conversation from the front room.

  The hushings of a debrief.

  And this is something new. The hush.

  This is new to the child. Hush.

  The child has existed in a cloud of screech since his nine months on remand in his mother’s polluted womb prior to the sentence of life, and this hush is something new. It piques his curiosity. And his curiosity sits him up and gets him out of bed.

  His head itches. He can feel things crawling in his hair. He scratches at them, but it makes no difference. He ignores, as he has now become used to doing, the ache of the bruises on his body. Winces silently at the tightness of skin round the scabs on his leg where the dog has bitten him. His nappy hangs down between his knees and stinks. But he’s up. And he toddles to the door.

  The voices remain hushed as he creeps down the hall. He reaches the door, halfway shut, but open enough for him to peep round and into the room.

  Ste has got his spoon, and is holding the lighter under it. It smoulders and steams and quietly crackles. There is a spike on the table in front of him. The child knows that Ste will point the spike into the spoon in a moment and draw muddy water up into the cylinder. How it goes.

  Cal is sitting in an armchair, nursing his arm. It’s a funny shape, his arm. Wonky. Wrong. His lips are drawn and his teeth hiss and his eyes are wincing.

  The child’s mother sits in another armchair next to Cal. She smokes a cigarette and looks pissed off and glances from Cal to Ste and then back to the TV.

  The TV has on what it always has on. Naked men doing things to a naked girl. The men seem angry. The girl seems… caught. The child doesn’t understand it. But it seems sad. He doesn’t know why.

  The dog is curled up beneath the TV, pretending to mind its own business. Nervously. Eyes flicking left and right.

  Ste does the thing with the spike and passes it across to Cal. Cal moves to take the spike, lets go his wonky arm and hisses in agony. ‘Ste, man… you’re gonna have to help me… my arm’s fucked mate…’

  Ste looks at him with the barest of concern. Then he gets up and starts round the table. Donna glances, grimaces, returns to the TV, stubs out her cigarette, lights another.

  On the floor, just inside the door, the child sees a coat. Cal’s coat. And something in its pocket. Metal. The child toddles in. No one notices. Except the dog, who lifts his head and looks at him.

  The child reaches down and takes the handle of the knife, pulls it from the coat.

  Ste sticks the needle into Cal’s arm and plunges.

  Cal sighs and waits and sighs again.

  Ste pulls the needle free and throws it on the table. ‘That’s a tenner for that… you better have it.’

  ‘I have, mate… it’s in my…’

  The child howls.

  He’s touched the blade and it has seared his finger and drawn blood. A thin slither slice across the pad. But it burns. It burns so much. It’s like nothing the child has ever felt. And he’s felt plenty.

  His mother drops her cigarette and swivels to face him in fright, but without concern. Annoyed.

  Cal also jolts in fright, then shouts in pain as his arm complains.

  The dog leaps to his feet and barks and slavers at the boy.

  And Ste, he stumbles over the coffee table behind his legs, almost goes down. Then he swings a kick at the dog, hits him under the jaw. The dog’s teeth snap shut with an audible click, puncturing its tongue. The dog yowls yet again, and then cowers.

  Then Ste turns to the howling child, strides across the room and swings a fist into the boy’s chest.

  ‘Fuck off back to your room, Petey.’

  The child feels something snap and move and burst.

  All the air in his body leaves him and refuses to return.

  But still the pain in his finger screams loudest.

  He stumbles back and drops the knife.

  ‘Back to your room, Peter,’ Ste repeats, cold blue eyes wide and livid.

  Peter turns and toddles away, stumbling.

  Something feels different this time.

  He snatches at a breath, but can’t seize it.

  The pain is moving away from him.

  He is moving away from himself.

  He drifts back into his room. Back onto his flea-ridden bed.

  He lowers himself down onto his back, and feels different.

  He tries to steal another breath, but can’t find one.

  He lifts his wounded finger up before his face and looks at it. So small an injury, compared to the others. But so loud. Still. Even from this far away.

  He lays his hand back down by his side and doesn’t try to take any more breaths.

  Then he closes his eyes.

  And he dies.

  2

  It isn’t how I’d expected it to be.

  Initially, there is nothing, not even a me to have expectations.

  And that, that void, that absence: that was what I had expected.

  No dreams of tunnels leading to light for me. Too old for all that nonsense. No expectation of her waiting for me in some ephemeral form, floating in some other place where nothing could touch us.

  No.

  What I had expected, and had anticipated, was nothing. An end to all things.

  And peace.

  It was what I had hoped for as I had sat on the bench and remembered her and waited for the sun to rise and devour me.

  And for a time, that is what I got.

  But then it started to slip away.

  The darkness beyond the end of my lif
e, after the fire and the pain, started to recede the moment the child started screaming. And from the infinite side of the outside of time, that scream echoed for what felt an eternity.

  And how I tried to ignore it because I knew what it presaged.

  I’d felt this before – this pouring of my self into the self of another. It was what I felt every time I’d ever fed: I’d pour into my prey, and then drink my self back into myself, leaving my prey a pallid husk of what they had once been when their heart had still skittered. The pale opposite of their shadow. Lifeless and bloodless and gone.

  It had been some time since I’d left myself in one of them and had allowed them to live. If living is what it is called. Making them like me is a young one’s game, and I’d long outgrown it. Leaving splinters of my self, unleashed and entwined with the will of these rats, had diminished me and given them ideas beyond their capacity. That was a time of frenzy. And they too had over-shared, splintered my already splintered self yet further, passing me on and on until I was a ghost haunting the psyche of a mindless horde. A plague.

  A virus.

  It took me centuries to track them down, one by one, and devour them. Until there was only me left.

  And her. Us.

  We never spoke of who had been the first – me, or her – but we both felt the same: that it needed to be just us. That we were monoliths, not pestilence. Gods, not men. I wondered how it started, really started, our otherness. I wondered if we’d once been prey ourselves to the original, or if one of us had perhaps been the first. But centuries as a horde had clouded the linearity of our memory, our history. We couldn’t remember. Memory had blurred. I couldn’t be sure if the splinters of self that we’d collected back had started here, with us, or if it was just chance that the will of the super-self, maturing and wanting to be whole again, had concluded with us. Perhaps, on our way back to wholeness, we’d devoured our Adam and our Eve. Perhaps. Perhaps…

  It had been a bloody and dangerous time. And we’d all wanted to devour each other. Until there were just the two of us left.

  And when at last we became two, we simply wandered and watched, and took what we needed. We dined with kings, and feasted on queens. We went everywhere until there was nowhere left to go, and saw everything until there was nothing left to see, and we sought to find an omega point in the narrative of history. And we found none. Nothing was going anywhere. Everything was going nowhere.

  And we wearied. She wearied. And she wore me down.

  And it all came to an end on that bench.

  Her first.

  Then me.

  Consigned to the darkness by the light of the sun.

  And then the child screams and I feel that pull, that drag, that oh-so-familiar spiral and slump of self into someone else, and confusion reigns. Because I have no hands with which to grab the child, no arms with which to restrain it, no teeth with which to rip it and drain it. I have no means by which I can drink myself back in.

  Because I am gone. And this makes no sense.

  And then something punches me in the chest and time accelerates and the scream collapses in my chest.

  I have no chest, but I feel something snap and move and burst in there.

  All the air in my body leaves me and refuses to return.

  But a pain in my finger screams louder. Loudest.

  I stumble back and drop something.

  ‘Back to your room Peter.’ The voice is unfamiliar. It bubbles through a gauze of disconnection and disorientation. I’m not quite here. Almost, but not quite.

  I turn and stumble away.

  Something feels different this time. The self in here with me has no words, just notions. I wonder if it is an animal. But something feels different to that other self. The violence, that’s nothing new. The pain: same. But the sense that something broke this time. That is new.

  I snatch at a breath, but can’t seize it.

  I allow him – for it is a ‘him’, clarity is blooming, as it always does – I allow him to take us back into his room. Back onto his flea-ridden bed.

  The boy whispers his name to me, in here, and his name is Peter.

  He lowers himself down onto his back, and feels different.

  He feels not alone. He feels me.

  He tries to steal another breath, but can’t find one.

  He lifts his wounded finger up before his face and looks at it. So small an injury, compared to the others. But so loud. Still.

  That is the wound by which I entered him. I know it.

  How has this happened?

  He lays his hand back down by his side and doesn’t try to take any more breaths.

  Then he closes his eyes.

  And he dies.

  For just a moment, he dies, and he submits, and he gives himself to me. This feral little rat-child kneels before me and prays for my grace.

  I give it to him.

  Then I open our eyes.

  And we rise.

  3

  It is mid-morning before the winter sun swings out and around the tower block and starts to peep through the yellowed net that hangs across the little rat’s window.

  We have lain here, still, ever since his rib was broken and his respiratory system failed. We have lain here, watching the light manifest in the window, waiting.

  The rib has already started to knit. I can feel it mend. Perhaps not quite evenly, but not a major problem. It will probably shift again when we move, and will continue to shift for a day or two. But it will stick. He is more me than him now, and I will absorb any adjustments to his physical being as we go. We will take it in our stride. It is how I do things. It is in my nature.

  We lie here and watch the window and wait for the light to be a problem.

  Perhaps the day will be dull enough, and the danger will pass.

  Perhaps the alignment of the building itself will provide enough shade in which we can lurk.

  We will see.

  We lie here and pick lice from our hair and eat them. Little snacks. We are now the top parasite, devouring the parasites that dare to feed on us.

  This amuses me. Somewhat.

  After the initial explosion of violence, after the murder of the rat-child, the volume rapidly dropped in the adjoining room. The filth the rats put in their veins dumbing them down, shutting them up. At some point after that the outsider gathered up his things and sloped off back to his own nest.

  A short while later the dog whimpers. The man-rat swears at it dismissively. It pads softly into the hall, pushes the ratchild’s door open and walks sneakily into the room. It looks across at us from the doorway and growls softly in the back of its throat. We look at it, and it looks back at us, and I hide myself as best I can, deep inside the child.

  Animals, particularly dogs, sense my kind. The old-kind. And they fear us. And fear sometimes makes them behave stupidly. Aggressively. And I can’t afford for that to happen.

  Not yet.

  So the dog growls at the child, threatens him – this is between you and me, got it? – then it walks over to a corner of the room, where a mouldering cardboard box spews toys as damaged by neglect as the child himself, cocks its leg and pisses. The cardboard box takes the brunt of the shower, a small rivulet of amber stench trickling back across the uncarpeted boards of the floor to the bed, where some of it soaks into the child’s mattress, while the rest pools along its edge.

  The dog leans down and sniffs at its mess, drinks some of it, looks up at us and then turns and leaves the room. It knows to make its mess in here. The rats won’t notice it.

  I bare our teeth at the door once it has gone.

  This situation will not be allowed to prevail.

  But my own situation takes priority and I need to understand how I came to be here. Trapped in the body of a ratchild when I should have been gone. Risen.

  Dust.

  I rifle through the memory of the child, and return to the morning. The vortex-like drag from fire-bestowed peace to here. Hell. Through this wo
und on our finger.

  But how?

  I close our eyes and head into him. I wander back into the room of hours before, in the mind of the child, the foul playground of his memory. I creep in with him, and I see the knife, the curiously scorched filigree of its blade. There is something burnt into it and it whispers to us. It is impossible to resist.

  We touch it, and we scream.

  And all hell breaks loose. But this time I slow the explosion down, and observe the blossoming of the violence in detail. Looking for an answer.

  The child’s screech annihilates the sordid calm that preceded it and the three junk-rats become swiftly animated. One of them, the mother, drops her cigarette and turns to snarl at us, her son… the father, if that is what he is, this Ste… he falls back against the table, nearly goes over and attacks the barking dog.

  All of this in the slowest of motions.

  And the third of them, he jolts and then howls and hisses through gritted teeth, holding one arm with his other hand, nursing it as if broken.

  Then he turns to us. Teeth a-hiss. Furious eyes. Spittle at the corners of his mouth.

  And I know him.

  I see him.

  I hear his voice again as he speaks to me on the bench, just before I snapped his arm.

  ‘Fuck you blud…’, and I wonder, is he haunting me or am I haunting him? Is that what this is? In my own memory I feel the knife plunge once more into my flank, I feel the sun take hold of me, and the blade, and I feel it forge us together, binding us.

  And I know now how this has all come to pass. I don’t understand it, but I know.

  I lie there on the bed, breathing in the ammonia-fumed fug of dog waste, eating the bugs that graze on me, watching the window, biding my time and plotting my next move.

  We need to find the knife. I need to find the knife.

  I pull us up from the bed and the splintered rib squalls. The child wants to cry, but I forbid it. I can feel the child pulling at the muscles of its face, trying to force them into that caul that always presages infant mewling, and I slap it down. No, rat. No noise. And he acquiesces. He understands this form of negotiation. His rat-tail curls yet further between his legs.

  We move quietly to the door, and peer round and out into the hall. Sunlight falls through the grimy, frosted window of the front door. Hardly an Elysian sunbeam, but enough at least to trap us in here for the time being.