Brock

by Anthony McGowan

  That’s why I was back in the Copse a couple of hours later. I found Kenny’s hat right away. You couldn’t miss the red in all that green and brown. Then I went back to where we’d dug the badgers out. The old badger was still there.

  He looked even bigger dead than he’d looked alive. He was as long as both my arms, stretched out. It didn’t seem right to just leave him there. I was scared to pick him up – I thought he might have fleas or something – so I used my foot to shove him over to his den. It was hard work, and it felt wrong – kicking an animal when it was down, sort of thing. But I got him there, and then I covered him over with the loose soil that was scattered around.

  It was a rubbish grave, but it was better than nothing. I even thought about saying a prayer, but then I felt stupid. So I just said “sorry”, you know, for the part I played in killing him.

  There was no sign of Slag. Jezbo must have carried her off. But I did find Tina. She was lying in the same spot where she’d been left. I thought she must be dead, like Slag and the badger. But she wasn’t. She’d always been a feisty little menace, but now she lay as gentle as a lamb and just looked up at me. I cursed Rich and Rob, then, for leaving the poor little dog here to die alone.

  I picked her up.

  “There, there,” I said.

  I put my fingers near her mouth and she licked them. I decided then that I was going to give her to Kenny to look after. If Rich and Rob complained, then I’d point out they’d left her for dead, so they’d given up any right to her. And if they said any more about it, then I’d fight them.

  I should have gone home then, but for no good reason I decided to have a look at the holes we’d netted up. And there, in the one I’d let the mum escape out of, I saw something. First I thought it was a rabbit because it had a grey back. But then I got closer and I saw the little black and white face.

  It was a baby badger.

  There must have been four, not three, and this one got left behind. It was caught in the net, tangled up. It must have been struggling for ages, and now it was tired out.

  I put Tina down and I began to unravel the badger from the net. I was worried it would try to bite me, but it just lay there and let me free it. Either it was too tired to fight, or it was too small to have learned to hate humans yet.

  I got it free and held it in my hands. It was about the size of the guinea pig we used to have at junior school – what was its name? Snuffy. Yeah, that’s right, Snuffy.

  I looked around. Was the mother about? Surely she would have come back before now, if she was coming.

  I had my big coat on. It used to belong to my dad and it looked like something a tramp would wrap up in to sleep. I put the little badger in the pocket, picked up Tina, and went home.

  Fifteen

  There weren’t any knock-off DVDs in the shed in our back garden any more, but it was still full of crap. There was a broken lawnmower, tins of dried-up paint, cardboard boxes full of wires for electrical gadgets that we didn’t have any more, a broken spade, a broken plant pot and a broken radio.

  I put Tina in one cardboard box and the badger in another. Then I went to get Kenny.

  My dad was in the kitchen drinking something out of a chipped mug and reading a newspaper he must have found somewhere. He needed a shave. Or to grow a proper beard. One or the other.

  He looked up at me.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Just out.”

  “Bit early. Not up to bother, are you?”

  “No, Dad. Where’s Kenny?”

  Dad nodded towards the living room. I went in. Kenny was watching cartoons on telly. His eyes were bright with happiness. That was the great thing about Kenny. Terrible stuff could have happened ten minutes ago, but he’d forget it and just enjoy what was in front of his face.

  “Kenny, come on,” I said.

  “Where? Have you got me my Mars bar?”

  Drat. I’d forgotten about the Mars bar.

  “I’ve got something better than that,” I told him. “But we have to do something first.”

  And so I made Kenny stand outside the shed while I passed him out some of the junk in there. Then we took it down to the skip outside number 54 down the road. As it was Saturday there were no workmen there to bollock us for it.

  Then I let Kenny into the shed and showed him Tina. She managed to look up at him, and she gave her skinny tail a wag.

  “Is that Tina?” Kenny said. His face shone with wonder. “I thought she was dead. Do we have to give her back to Rich?”

  “No,” I said. “They haven’t got any right to a dog. I saved her, and I’m giving her to you to look after.”

  Kenny started to shout out his happiness, but I told him to keep quiet. He was literally shaking with excitement.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  Then I showed him the box with the badger.

  Kenny let out a great sigh.

  “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh! Is it ours? Can we keep it? What’s its name?”

  I thought of the school guinea pig. “Snuffy,” I said. “And it’s a massive secret. If Jezbo finds out, he’ll kill him for sure.”

  “I don’t think Dad will let us keep it,” Kenny said. For once he’d hit on the truth of things.

  “Well, let’s make sure he doesn’t find out,” I said.

  “But can I tell him about Tina?” Kenny asked. “He used to have a puppy, he told me. But it ran away after the milk van and never came back. He’ll let me keep Tina. It’s not like Snuffy.”

  I thought for a couple of seconds. I didn’t see how we could keep the little dog a secret for ever. Plus, I reckoned she needed fixing up a bit, and my dad was always good with us when we got bashed or cut up as little kids. He could get out a splinter before you’d even felt it. “Look out of the window,” he’d say, and then when you looked back it would be gone.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You can tell Dad. In fact, why not show him now? But remember, not a word about Snuffy. If he asks, Tina got in a fight with another dog.”

  So Kenny picked up the box with Tina in it and took it to Dad, who was still in the kitchen reading his paper. Only he wasn’t really reading it. He was just staring into the space where the paper happened to be.

  “What you got there, lad?” he asked when Kenny put the cardboard box on the table.

  “It’s my new dog,” said Kenny. “She’s called Tina. She got bitten by Santa.”

  My dad looked at Kenny, and I thought he was going to smile, which he hadn’t done in a long time. But then he looked back at the dog, and there was nothing there to make anyone smile.

  “I found her in the Copse,” I said.

  “Been in a bit of bother, girl?” said Dad. He peered at Tina. “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

  Then he picked Tina out of the box and put her on the newspaper he’d been reading.

  “Go and get me the TCP from the bathroom,” he said to me. But Kenny ran off and got it. He came back with nearly everything from the bathroom, including toothpaste and shampoo. But the TCP was there. It must have been bought when Mum was still here. Lucky it’s not the kind of thing that goes off.

  Dad filled up a bowl with warm water from the kettle, then poured the TCP in it.

  “Get us some bog roll,” he said.

  Even Kenny couldn’t mess that one up.

  Sixteen

  Half an hour later, Tina was looking a lot better. She was still limp and floppy, but the cuts were clean, and her eyes were brighter.

  “We should take her to the vets to get her stitched up,” my dad said. “But …”

  He didn’t need to finish. There was no money for the vet.

  “We’ll take care of her, Dad,” said Kenny.

  My dad nodded at him. Somehow, in the time it took him to clean up Tina, the whole question of us being all
owed to keep the dog had been forgotten.

  “Aye, well,” Dad said. “See that you do.”

  I looked at the kitchen clock, which was stupid as it hadn’t worked for two years. It only needed a new battery, but that sort of thing never got done in our house. The clock on the cooker still worked. It said it was only eleven in the morning. It felt like too much had happened for it still to be the morning.

  “I’m off out,” my dad said.

  Dad had looked different when he was working on the dog – more like I remembered him. But as he got up and walked out of the house, that all went again. His shoulders slumped like he had a heavy shopping bag in each hand.

  “Give Kenny his dinner,” he said without looking round. “And his tea.”

  “What is there?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Beans on toast.”

  The kitchen door swung behind him but didn’t close properly.

  The rest of that day was all right. We needed money for dog food, so me and Kenny scraped together what was in my sock drawer and his piggy bank. We had seven quid.

  “You stay here and look after Tina,” I said. I went down to the Spar and bought two tins of cheap dog meat.

  When I came back the house was empty. I got in a panic and ran out to the shed, not sure what I was going to find. Well, actually I had a good idea what I’d find, I just didn’t know how it would pan out.

  Kenny looked up, with a gummy, goofy smile.

  “They’re friends now, Snuffy and Tina.”

  Kenny had put Tina into the cardboard box with the little badger. I don’t know if it was because Rich had drowned all her puppies not that long before, or if it was just that she was still too sick to move away, but Tina had curled herself around Snuffy. The badger had its head resting on her side, and its little black eyes looked up at me.

  “Do you think they’ll get married?” Kenny asked.

  I laughed.

  “No, it’s more like Tina’s his mum,” I told him. “I can’t believe it. You’d have thought they’d hate each other. What happened when you first put them in together?”

  “Well, Tina sort of scrunched up in the corner like she was scared. But then Snuffy went up to her and said hello in badger talk, and then they were best friends.”

  I put my arm around my brother.

  “You’re my best friend,” I said.

  “Get off!” He laughed, embarrassed. “You’re my second best friend, after Samit. Samit can do the sound of a machine gun and he can burp the whole alphabet.”

  “So can I,” I said. But I only got as far “g” before I lost it and started laughing.

  I went back to the kitchen, opened the dog food and put it on two plates, then brought it back out. I lifted Tina from the box and put her on the floor next to one plate, and I put the other in the box with the badger. Kenny watched all this without blinking, like he was watching one of his cartoons.

  Tina ate all her food up straight away and then looked up at me, wanting more. The badger was a bit slower, but then he began to nibble. He ate half of what I’d given him, and I gave the rest to Tina. Then the badger did a wee and a poo in the box, which made Kenny laugh like mad. He kept saying “badger poo, badger poo” over and over.

  “Take Tina out into the garden,” I said to him. “I bet she needs to go to the toilet, too.”

  Cardboard boxes was one thing we had plenty of, so I chucked the dirty one away and got a fresh one. This time I put a load of torn-up newspaper in the bottom.

  Kenny appeared at the shed door. “Tina did a wee. But she didn’t want to do a poo.”

  “OK, Kenny.”

  I looked at Tina. She was still pretty shaky, which is what you’d expect after the morning she’d had. I was going to say we should bring her back into the house with us, but then something made me pick her up and put her back with Snuffy. The two of them curled around each other again, as if they’d spent their whole lives doing it.

  We left them to snooze.

  Seventeen

  I had to scrape some blue off the bread before I could make Kenny’s beans on toast, but I read somewhere that it doesn’t do you any harm. Then I told Kenny to go and play at Samit’s house. Samit’s mum and dad are dead nice. Samit is a couple of years younger than Kenny, so they can play together OK.

  Then I went down to the library. The library used to be open all the time, and I used to like going there when my mum and dad fell out. Also it’s good sometimes to have somewhere to go that’s free.

  The library lady has big hair and glasses on a chain round her neck, just like you’d expect, but she’s always dead nice to me. She saw that I liked books about space and aliens, and sometimes she used to recommend things to me, but most of the time she just left me to get on with it. I don’t know what her name is, which is why I always just call her the library lady. She’s got a name badge, but it’s small and I don’t want to stare at her chest in case she thinks I’m a weirdo.

  Since the cuts, the library’s only open some of the time. But on Saturday afternoons it’s open until two, so I was OK.

  I looked in the big reference books first, but there wasn’t much about badgers. I mean, there was loads about their skeletons and that sort of thing, but nothing about how you’d take care of one. Then I went and asked the library lady if there were any books on badgers. She looked on the catalogue on her computer. “I thought so …” she said.

  The book was just called Badger and it had everything you could want to know about badgers in it. It was one of the books you’re not allowed to take home, but I didn’t mind. I sat down at one of the big wooden tables and spent an hour going through it. After that I felt like I was an international badger expert. I knew what they ate (worms), where they lived, what sort of sounds they made, how big their families were, loads of stuff like that. But I still didn’t know how you’d look after one.

  But one thing did stick in my head. The book said that most times there was a main sett where the badger family would live. There’d be quite a few badgers there of different ages, and there’d be loads and loads of tunnels and entrances.

  But then you’d also get what were called “outliers”, which were small badger setts with just one main tunnel. Sometimes a couple of badgers from the main sett would move into an outlier for a while and then go back to the main sett.

  That made me think that the sett that Jezbo had destroyed must be an outlier, and the main sett would be somewhere else. And then I began to think that maybe we could find the real sett, the main one, I mean, and take Snuffy back. Could you do that? Would the mum have him back after I’d touched him and passed on my human smell? It didn’t say in the book.

  “Did you find out what you needed to know?” the library lady asked when I put the book back on the shelf.

  “Yeah, sort of. Not everything.”

  “Is it for your homework?”

  I nodded. I hated to lie to the library lady, but I couldn’t tell anyone that I had a badger, could I? Lying with a nod didn’t seem like proper lying, cos it didn’t come out of my mouth.

  “Why not look online?” she said. “You’ll probably find there’s lots more information there.”

  It wasn’t like the library lady to tell you to look stuff up on the internet. She always said the internet was full of rubbish and that books told you the truth. Plus there was normally a wait to use the two crappy computers they had there, while other people tried to find jobs or sell their junk on eBay. But for a change there was nobody using them, so I went and had a look for badger stuff.

  There were a couple of good websites, and at last I found out what I should be feeding the badger on – the dog food was fine in fact, as he was too old for milk. But what I really needed to know wasn’t there. But one of the sites had a contact phone number. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper, said thanks to the library lady and ran home.
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  Eighteen

  I checked on Tina and the badger. The badger was licking at Tina’s cuts. I felt weird inside. For the past couple of years all my softness had been saved for Kenny. The rest of the time, I’d made myself hard. I mean hard as in not feeling stuff, not thinking about stuff, not caring about stuff. I could never be hard like Jezbo or Rich and Rob. I didn’t even want to be. Anyway, I hadn’t felt much about anything for a long time. But now I stood and looked at those two little creatures in that scuzzy old box and it made me feel … something.

  Then I remembered that I hadn’t given them any water, so I went to the kitchen and filled up a bowl. When I put it in the box they untangled themselves and slurped it all up together. I filled it again and left them to it.

  I had a phone call to make.

  “Hello, Badger Protection League.”

  The guy who picked up the phone didn’t sound like the friendliest man on the planet. Plus, he came across as a bit bored. Straight away everything I’d meant to say went out of my head.

  “Er, hello.”

  “Can I help you?”

  He sounded even more annoyed now. I suppose it was because I was a kid.

  “Yeah, I’ve, er, got this badger.”

  “It’s alive?”

  “Yeah, course. What would I want with a dead badger?”

  “Is it injured?”

  “No. It’s a baby. Not a little baby. I mean a—”

  “You know it’s illegal, don’t you, to take badgers from the wild?”

  “I didn’t take it. I found it. It was on its own, its mum had gone off.”

  “How do you know? Mothers will sometimes leave the young if you disturb them, and then come back later. Was it near the sett?”

  He didn’t sound bored any more.

  “Yeah, no, sort of,” I said. This badger bloke had got me sounding like Kenny.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it was near the sett, but it had been … er … they couldn’t use it any more.”