The Truants

by Lee Markham

  The children were bad. Not bad like John and Cal were bad – they were just little shits. These two were wrong. And they scared her – whatever weaknesses she may have, her instinct wasn’t one of them. She stood and looked at them for a moment. They sat and stared unblinkingly back at her. She started to fidget and tried to think of a way of just removing herself from this situation. She couldn’t understand why she was so terrified. But she was. Perhaps partly the drugs. Just sketching out. But it was definitely them, too. It wasn’t just in her head. It was the way they talked. The way they said ‘I’ like there was just one of them. And the way they didn’t blink, didn’t move. And didn’t seem to breathe.

  ‘What’s he got of yours?’

  ‘A knife.’

  She looked around the room then from discarded flotsam to abandoned jetsam, searching desperately for a knife, any knife, that she could give them to make them go away.

  ‘It’s not here, rat. I’ve already looked.’

  That brought her eyes back to the staring little horrors on the sofa. The little one had ruby lips, like he’d been playing with his mother’s lipstick. She pulled her gaze away from them and her eyes locked on to her cigar box on the table.

  ‘Go on, rat. Take your filth and settle yourself down. I can only assume you don’t know where he is?’

  She shook her head, reached shamelessly for the cigar box, dropped onto the end of the other sofa furthest from the intruders and slid the wooden lid out on its groove. She made a concerted effort not to look at them as she prepared her medicine.

  ‘You know, I sit here and I look at you, and I almost feel sorry for them. The boys, I mean. How else could they be?’ the children pondered aloud. She felt their eyes on her. Her hands trembled, ever so slightly. She needed them steady for the next part. ‘But then, by the same token, how far do we let things go before we say enough?’ She stuck the needle into her arm and plunged.

  She pulled the needle out and dropped it back, unclean, into the cigar box. The older child tilted his head, hopped down from the sofa and started to approach her. Now it was just he that spoke to her. ‘You know what your children have done, don’t you? The older one, Cal, he stabbed me as I sat on a park bench. Minding my own business. Waiting for the sun. He stabbed me because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted. I didn’t have what he wanted. But he stabbed me anyway.’

  Her eyes were half-dopey now, and she half-listened. She looked at the child as he stood over her, telling her his story. The child then clambered up onto the seat next to her and continued with his tale. ‘Now the younger one, John, he stabbed this child here, his leg.’ The boy pointed to the stain-surrounded hole in his school trousers. ‘I don’t think he meant to. I think he was scared, and that perhaps he thought I was someone else, and what he did, he did defensively. But that doesn’t change the fact that he left the boy to bleed on the floor and laughed when he went on his way. So you tell me: should I be expected to forgive them?’

  She shook her head at that and mumbled in their defence. ‘They’re not bad kids, y’know? It’s just their father left and it’s been…’

  The baby boy with the shaved head gazed at her dispassionately and licked his lips.

  ‘Shhh, rat, shhh…’ continued Danny, ‘You are just saying words because you think that’s what is supposed to be done. I’m sure their father never left. I don’t doubt that he was never here in the first place. I’m sure he was just like them. Running around the rubble rutting with any bitch-rat that would open her legs. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘No. He was around and he left. He used to hit me. And Cal. Johnny was too little. He was gone before he was big enough to need hitting.’

  Danny looked at her, considered her and decided to believe her.

  ‘Oh. Well, good for you. Good for you! Perhaps then I can forgive you. But your boys: should I forgive them? For murdering me? Twice?’

  ‘But they can’t have murdered you… you’re not dead…’

  ‘Dead is relative, my dear sweet creature. Very relative indeed. Strangely enough, your boy Cal murdered me and I actually feel more alive than I have done in years. Many, many years. Sadly my plan was for the opposite. And so by giving me life, he has in fact taken it away from me: what is life without the freedom to choose what one does with it? Huh? Even if that choice is death? So he has murdered me. By taking my death, he has taken my life. And he’s dumped it in darling little Peter here, and then put it in the hands of your John, who as we speak is running around this hell sticking me into anyone who happens into his path…’ Danny turned and looked into her confounded face then, and a dark intent clouded his features: ‘…and it simply will not do. I need the knife, rat. Do you understand me?’

  She nodded weakly. She didn’t. Understand. At all. But she believed that he needed the knife.

  ‘I have already dealt with Cal. He sent me here. I didn’t forgive him.’

  Danny reached across and put a small tissue-wrapped bundle in her lap.

  ‘If you help me then I might forgive you. And I might forgive John. Although neither of you deserve it. What Cal did was unforgivable, and he has paid the price you will pay if you let me down.’

  Danny nodded towards the bundle and she looked down at it, then back at Danny, then back at the bundle. Shaking, she reached her nervous fingers down and opened it out. At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at. She thought it was outsized sweetcorn. Broken nuts, maybe.

  ‘His teeth, rat. Cal’s teeth.’

  Danny pushed himself up from the sofa and went back to sit with Peter. The two children resumed their feline observance of the mother who, in spite of the tide of narcotics washing over her, now started to sob, silently, her bottom lip curled, rocking back and forth.

  ‘Hush, rat. Hush. Remember what needs doing. Get me the knife. Or there will be no mercy.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OBSERVATION AND RENDITION

  1

  I left him a note and told him where I planned to do it. The bench. There could be no doubt. It was what he wanted, but I knew that he’d never admit it. I knew he’d never leave unless I left first. That he’d need someone to blame. Because that’s how he was. How he is. How he has been for longer than I care to remember. He wasn’t always this way.

  Age does things. It makes one stubborn. And bitter. Gods, so bitter.

  I remember when we were young. I remember how we would laugh, and fight, and make love. How we lived, with each other, by each other, for, in, of – pick a preposition and in all likelihood our lives at some points entwined as described. We thought it was love. And perhaps it was.

  Perhaps it was.

  I don’t really know what love is, and I’ve spent much time considering it. As much time as anyone has considered anything. More, in fact. More even than him.

  Because I am older than him. Much older. But he has long since lost that truth to the mists, as he has lost so many other truths. His perspective has clouded over and become unbearably opaque. For him, and by extension for me. He expects me to share his bitterness. He thinks it is absolute. Age does that too.

  Yet he was so dear to me at the beginning, so romantic. Not in the sense of the word now. Back then it was something different. Back then the world was a different place. The nights were darker. Life was shorter. And these human creatures lived closer to nature. Their dreams were primitive reels of chasing across plains bearing weapons of stick and flint. But his dreams seemed different. His dreams were more. They were impossible, and they marked him out. He was full of lust and fury. He was glorious.

  And he tasted so unlike anything else I’d ever tasted, I chose to keep him. He was my first of the new kind. More came after him. But he was my first, and that set him apart. I will accept my responsibility on that score: it was I who put him on the pedestal that eventually soured him.

  For so long, he ran with me, hunted with me, lived with me, and he was beautiful.

  But if beauty is in the
eye of the beholder, then time serves only to blind us. Or perhaps time merely serves to erode beauty’s myopia and reveal the base offal at our core, that writhing, desperate need to be something more than life-struck mud and barely repressible appetites. Engines of procreation and decay. Bubbling and gurgling towers of digestion and waste.

  I don’t know. I think these things, and I sound like him. I see him now, as he sees everything. That too, I suppose, has been gifted to us both by age.

  After all these years, lifetimes really, I still don’t even know what beauty is, much less love. Other than that once I found him beautiful, and that I remember thinking I loved him. But he changed. Of course he changed. Everything changed, everything changes. And perhaps that’s what really happened to him – he stopped changing, stopped moving. And like a shark that stops swimming, the stasis brought him low. His vision clouded over and he lost sight of beauty. He started to hate. He started to die.

  He got old.

  And he expected me to get old with him.

  But I couldn’t do it. Because I wasn’t like him.

  When I tasted him that first time, when I gave him the gift, I did so unconditionally. I made no demands. No insistence that he be like me. And I didn’t haunt him. Not as he chose to haunt others he passed the gift on to. He became as me, but he didn’t become me. I didn’t become him. The union of congress, for me, was to taste unity, oneness, and then to let go knowing there was another. That I wasn’t alone.

  It wasn’t like that for him. He would never let go.

  So he was my first, of the new kind, but he was a transgression and I have lived to regret him. I have lived and I have learnt. I am older and wiser. If I were to start again, I would do things differently.

  I have started again.

  It’s not been easy. It has required a lot of planning.

  Years in fact.

  Money wasn’t a problem – plenty of that squirrelled away over the centuries.

  Nonetheless every step had to be taken slowly. Carefully. Because I knew he’d destroy me if he knew. That he’d tear my throat out in a flash if he so much as imagined my intent. Because he’d come to lean on me. He’d never let me go. He’d see me rise before he’d ever let me leave. And so I realised I had to make that lie a truth in his mind: I had to rise if ever I wanted to leave.

  First I had to learn how to lie. And lying is not easy when there is no one else in the world like you. When you are the last of a long-extinct species. I wondered if I could have just run. But I would have had to run for ever. And he would never have stopped chasing me. And his hate would have mushroomed into something I daren’t even consider. Something I need now to be careful to avert.

  No. I had to convince him I’d gone.

  And so first I had to find somewhere to hide.

  I found this new one after some searching, and a number of false starts.

  I had no interest in doing this his way. I would not invade, destroy and possess the way he does. The casual annexing of others as if they had no worth.

  Because they are worth more than anything.

  Everything.

  Because the end of a consciousness is death; and death is the end of all consciousness. There’s no comeback, there’s no going to heaven, that’s it. There is no afterlife. Of that I am certain. There is nothing outside of the universe. Nothing beyond this existence. There is much more to this existence than might perhaps be apparent. But it is all contained within it. I should know. And so what he does, the way he does it, it is murder. It is the act of total destruction. It is absolute.

  Feeding is one thing. There are ways and means. But it is possible to be decent.

  I have regrets. Of course I do. I have done things I wish I hadn’t. But I have chosen not to continue doing them. He has chosen to retreat into hate, from where he can justify what he does, the things he has done. They are rats. And it’s nothing more than they deserve. He blames the victims of his sins for the sins he has perpetrated against them. Which is about as emblematic of their lower nature as anything I can think of. So his hatred of them is really his hatred of himself. Is it not always the case?

  He fell into his hatred like a fever from which he never awoke, and into which he tried to drag me. He went bad. His habits macadamised, and he became a living fossil of something vicious and mindless. Everything he hated in them he embodied in himself. He would never change.

  So I searched for a shell. One that I could inhabit without having to eviscerate. Because, unlike when I gave him the gift, this time I would have to inhabit this new one. I didn’t know if it was possible. I was scared. What if it wasn’t possible? What if there was no way it could be done? Well, if that was the case then perhaps I wouldn’t fake it, perhaps I would stare into the sun and leave. Just as I’d started threatening to do.

  I had to study their physiology. The science of the bodies they lived in. I needed a body that had been deserted. Boarded up. But which still functioned. That would stand up and walk away when I needed it to.

  I searched in hospitals and eventually found a place where they lined them up in rows. They cared for them as much as one might expect given the circumstances of their condition. Their persistent vegetative states. They fed food and liquid into them through pipes, and allowed waste out through pipes too. And every day a physiotherapist would move from bed to bed to put them through basic motions that stopped them wasting away and curling into desiccated claws beneath their white blankets.

  It took time to find the place.

  It took time to figure out how to get in there.

  And then I had to work my way through them until I found one that functioned.

  I went through three of them before I found this one.

  Those three all malfunctioned in one critical way or another. In the first, the left side of his body would only flail randomly in response to any given instruction. I gently stopped his heart.

  The second was haunted by the ghost of its former occupier. I found her, wandering the halls of her broken mind with a candle, looking for the switch that would get things working again. I searched with her for a while. But every fuse box we found was blown beyond repair. I held her in my arms at the end, and shushed her. She cried. She didn’t want to go. But nor did she want to stay. Not in the darkened sarcophagus within which she’d already spent far too long trapped. I held her, and quieted her. I stopped her heart too.

  The third simply suffered massive organ failure within hours of me moving in.

  But the fourth was deserted, I made sure. And everything worked. He had something of a limp, and a dramatic scar that ran from the tip of his cheekbone diagonally back across his temple and into his hairline. But he was young, and in good condition, and he worked.

  All of this also had to be carried out in midwinter. Sunlight was always going to be a problem, but in the winter the likelihood of full, direct sunlight was always reduced. The sun might swing lower in the sky but it was further away, and that eased the intensity of its heat a little. That, coupled with more plentiful overcast days and perhaps a north-facing ward, and we might be getting somewhere. But nonetheless, blistering skin would attract attention. All of these things needed thinking about.

  So the fourth one was good. He was weak. But, with my help, I got him out. And I got him back here. And I started to prepare him. Worked him out. Fed him. Made him strong. Made him me.

  I made some reconstructive changes to his face – just enough to make him not him any more. I kept the scar though. Scars are sacred. And I took his name: Rider, James G.

  Then I start making provisions. I prepared a home. I wanted to be free, but I had no intention of being alone. I intended to give the gift to those who needed it, but not like I’d given it that first time, to the old-one. Not naïvely. I would give it responsibly this time. Things would be different.

  I found help.

  It all took time.

  But if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of experience of, it’s time. />
  Time is everything.

  And eventually I was ready. All of this behind his back: the new body, the new home, family, all of it without him knowing. Until at last I was ready. I, the old, original I, wrote him the note and went to the bench. I waited for the sun. I waited for the sun, and I crossed my fingers.

  I crossed my fingers and I smiled.

  And I woke up as a man.

  And he, he, had no idea.

  He bought it, and he moped, and he burnt, and everything went according to plan.

  Except for the knife.

  The damned knife.

  2

  I track him through the park from a distance and watch as he takes his place on the bench. A CCTV camera blankly observes me trundle down the path. He sits there, upright, proud, reading the story of last week’s burning in the newspaper in the orange glow of the street lamp that bathes the bench in light.

  So, he has lasted a week. I’m not sure whether I am surprised or not. I wasn’t convinced he’d do it. But it is more than a relief that he has chosen to put an end to things. I have built everything on the belief that he would.

  It is cold. It always is. But he exhales no clouds as he breathes – because he doesn’t breathe. He hasn’t breathed for a very, very long time.

  I tug the scarves tight round my mouth and chin, pull my coat’s huge hood down low over my face, tuck my gloved hands into my pockets and wait in the darkness to make sure he goes, that he sees it through. I need to see it to believe it.

  It is something of a surprise that he doesn’t see me. Or smell me. I can smell him. Even from this distance. And I can see every wrinkle of his face, every crease of his coat. But he is sitting in the light. And I probably don’t smell like I used to.

  But still, he must be distracted.

  A good sign.

  Which is when the child enters the scene, stage right. He looks skittish from the off. I catch sight of his orangeoutlined figure the moment he hoves into view from behind the stand of trees that the path curves round as it weaves its way out of the park and back towards the city. He is moving at something between a fast walk and a slow jog.