Bully (15 page)

Chapter Ten

“
Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?”

A sound; for a moment I couldn’t work out exactly what it might have been, but it had certainly shaken me out of my reverie. Then I heard it again; a heavy thud coming from downstairs; the old shop. I glanced over at the armchair, where Burt was fast asleep, still gripping his packet of cigarettes as though they were the only thing ensuring that he’d wake up. Behind him, the thick curtains were still drawn. I couldn’t tell if it was light or dark, night or day. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell whether either of us was alive until Burt gave out a loud snore and my heart nearly did a runner up and out of my chest.

I tried to calm down. Tried to talk myself down from the precipice; at the bottom I could only see madness. Perhaps this was how it had happened for Lion. Perhaps the constant pressure had finally got to him and that was why he’d leaped from the bridge. And then been marked with the number one on his chest.

And how could I stop Tommy Peaker – the new Tommy Peaker – if it was him come a-knocking downstairs? How could I, a semi-cripple now, armed only with my cigarette lighter; protected only by an eighty-year old somnambulist, stop the new big Tommy from straddling my chest, pulling down my trousers and laughing at my shrivelled penis? How could I stop him from carving the great big number two on my hairy chest, above where my heart should have been?

When I heard the sound again, my only reaction was to whimper. Something heavy was being launched against the locked front door. Of that I was sure. I tried to gauge the weight of whatever that heavy object was; tried to decide how much it is that dead people weigh. Was the heaviness all wrapped up in the revenge thing?

My ears pricked up as I heard footsteps walking away from the front door. Heavy tread; purposeful. Strong, I thought.

Go away, go away, go away,
I whispered to myself, or to God, or to Tommy Peaker himself. And for a moment, I almost believed that someone, somewhere had answered my prayer. But then I heard a sound which chilled my blood. Everyone knows what a smashed window sounds like, but at that moment, it sounded to me as loud and overweening as the peal of bells on a Sunday morning, calling the worshippers to one of Newton Mills’s two competing churches. It was loud enough to wake the dead, and was probably intended to do just that.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,
I moaned. Louder and louder I moaned, and yet old Burt still did not rise from his chair. I longed for the strength to pull myself up from the sofa, but now both legs felt numb. I was at the mercy of whatever was coming through that door.

One of the worst nightmares I could imagine was being buried alive, but only just behind that was being completely paralysed, like the man in the old Metallica video, where he was screaming to be put out of his misery and yet nobody could hear him. In that moment, I felt like that man. Trapped – buried alive – within my own body. And for the second time in recent memory, I involuntarily lost control of my bladder. I was becoming just like Tommy Peaker in our school days.

And Tommy Peaker was evidently becoming like me. Relishing the minor details which would build up and finally, make my life the living hell that his had been. I could clearly hear him tramping through the shop downstairs. It had been left, almost exactly as it was on the day Burt was
advised
he could not trade any more, or so he’d told me. Rather like the bedroom of a dead or missing child, I suppose. I imagined the chocolate bars and crisps on the shelves gradually rotting away. The cakes going hard like stones and the biscuits becoming soft and pliable; mossy almost. And through this vision of childhood hell he stepped, knocking over the display rack of birthday cards which were sun-bleached and out of date even when we were boys. Crashing past the arcade machines and their life support machine echo bleeps which probably still sounded once in a while.

Then the footsteps abruptly stopped. I couldn’t help myself from imagining the monstrous Tommy Peaker helping himself to some monstrous snack to build up his strength before his strike. Perhaps a ten-year-mould covered pasty; one of the ones we used to claim contained dog-meat back in the day. Or perhaps he was helping himself to a packet of cigarettes from behind the counter. I listened out for the tell-tale cough as he inhaled. Tommy could never properly
take
cigarettes. Always duck-arsed them; I imagined what he left behind on the filter tip now. What with his half-face and decaying tongue, he’d probably extinguish the thing…

Soon he was moving again. And he reached the bottom of the stairs which led up to Burt’s living quarters and our hideaway. He
told
me that he reached the bottom of the stairs by tapping his misshapen stick or cane – the spear that he had ripped out of me back at the C.U.M building against the door jamb.

Tap, tap, tap. Little pig, little pig, let me in.

I closed my eyes. Like a child does, hoping that the world will simply go away. Hoping that once they were open again, I’d be in a new, brighter reality.

Tap, tap, tap. Little pig, little pig, I’m going to come up there and find you whether you like it or no-ot…

I heard old Burt’s breathing becoming more and more ragged. He was going to wake up and be subjected to whatever fresh hell awaited me. And I felt guilt again. Guilt for having dragged the poor old man into this mess.

Tap, tap…

Tap, tap, nothing. That third tap never came. I waited some interminable amount of time and then gingerly opened my eyes, half expecting Tommy to be rearing up over me, ready to spear me in the heart, but there was nothing there. Just the bare room and Burt, drooling in his chair, still clutching on to his packet of Dorchester and Grey.

I reached under the sofa, for where I hoped my crutch would be. I touched things that were unclean; items which had lain dormant for years. Tried not to think of what they might be. Tried not to imagine them starting to scurry and then bite into my flesh like the rats back at the British military hospital. I forced my fingers to search out the familiar cold, clean metal of the crutch. But it wasn’t there.

Where the hell was it? Had I left it back at the Choke? Had Burt propped it up somewhere else? Or had he hidden it? Was he a part of this grand revenge plan? Was that why he’d lured me back here in my drunken state? Was that why he’d
kept
me here with promises that he’d something to pass on to me? Was Burt undead too? He certainly looked it. But then half of the people in Newton Mills did. Dick included. Me included…

And then I heard a voice on the stairs again.

‘Bully!’ it called. ‘Bully! Come out, come out wherever you are!’

It was pitched higher than the booming voice that Tommy had used on me previously, but still seemed terrifying. The voice was so… inhuman. So unreal; so taunting.

‘Bully!’ it called. ‘Bully! Are you up there? What the hell you doing to that poor old fucker up there?’

I’d heard the voice before. Recently. Very recently. But before I could properly put two and two together, Dick Featherstone ambled into Burt’s front room. He was wearing the same tracksuit that he’d had on when I’d seen him last – looking even more dishevelled, if anything – but he also had on a massive, goonish grin and a kind of sheen of something. Like he was floating almost.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I demanded.

Dick flopped down onto the sofa next to me, barely even bothering to move my half-leg out of the way before he sank into the sofa’s welcoming folds and ruffles.

‘I asked: what the fuck are you doing?’

Dick spun his head around to face me. It took him about twenty seconds to achieve this feat, but once I saw the lolling tongue, the rolling eyeballs and the trickles of sweat which were rolling down his forehead, I knew exactly what was wrong with him.

‘I asked at the Choke where you been, man,’ said Dick, slowly. ‘They told me old Burt looked after you… They told me you came here. So I found where ‘here’ was and then I came round here. Mate. Mate? Are you not pleased… ?’

‘You smashed the old boy’s window,’ I snapped, trying to keep my voice down.

‘Never did that,’ said Dick. ‘No, never smashed no windows or nothing. It was like that when I got here. And I thought you’d done it.’

Dick seemed to find the confusion over the smashed window fairly amusing. But not as amusing as the picture of the horse in the field which was stationed above the fireplace.

‘Nice horse,’ he said. ‘I used to like horses.’

‘Shut up, Dick,’ I snapped. Louder this time. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t you that smashed the window?’

‘I told you… Look I’m sorry about what I said in there. In the Choke. I was in a bad way mate. Strung out. I didn’t know what I was saying. Or who I was saying it to. Lion going like that has fucked me up. I just needed a little taster again tonight, just to set my mind at ease again. I’m okay now. We can talk all you want. I’m glad you’re back.’

Dick beamed over at me. I had the overwhelming urge to punch him in his stupid gurning mouth. But at least he wasn’t Tommy Peaker…

‘I’m sorry, man,’ he repeated. Kinda wailing now.

And that must have been what finally roused Burt from his slumber. Not the thudding of the undead at his door; not the smashing of his front window as they slipped inside; not their
tap, tap, tapping
on the stairs; but a stupid junkie talking nonsense in his front room. He must have had a sixth sense for that kind of thing.

‘Sorry Burt,’ I said, meeting his fiery, yet confused eyes.

‘What’s this one doing here?’ he growled. ‘This one’s no good. No good at all. Look at him…’

Then Burt launched into another machine-gun quick rapid-fire burst of coughing and spluttering. His round face turned blood red. To someone in Dick’s condition, it must have looked as though his whole head was going to explode.

‘Go on over to Burt’s chair and light up a cigarette for him,’ I whispered to Dick, gesturing to the packet of Dorchester and Grey which Burt had finally dropped on the floor.

Amazingly, Dick did as he was told; popped up from the sofa again, skirted the coffee table and reached down for the cigs. Still coughing, Burt tried to lash out, fearing that his prize was being stolen from him. His weak arm-swings only met thin air, but still Dick shuffled away a little before extricating a lone soldier from the pack and lighting it up. He took a long drag before passing it on to Burt’s grateful fingers. Burt finally understood it for the act of kindness it was and calmed down. Or maybe it was only the nicotine that stopped him from being a raging bull.

‘Thank you, lad,’ he breathed, through a thick mouthful of smoke. ‘But what was that you were saying about a smashed window? I heard you talking just as I was waking up… Smackheads are always round this way breaking windows. Is that what you’ve done, lad?’

Dick shook his head and again strenuously denied the accusation: ‘Smackheads go on the rob when they
don’t
have gear. Not when they do.’

I had to admit, Dick actually had a pretty good point. So did Burt, nodding away to himself and examining the perfect smoke ring that he’d just blown from his mouth. Thing was: neither of us believed him. Smackheads are great storytellers, or so I’m told. It
had
to have been him that smashed the window. Probably he just couldn’t remember it, that was all.

‘Well, what are we going to do now that you’re here?’ asked Burt, after a moment’s silence.

Dick and I looked at each other, a little mystified.

‘How’s about I get us all a nice taster of whisky and we have a good old, honest-to-goodness chat about old times?’ continued the suddenly back-to-normal Burt.

‘That sounds nice,’ I said, like a polite young Kingsman doing his duty in the community.
Not
like some fucked-up child killer that was being haunted by the very boy that he killed.

‘That’s a nice horse, Mr. Burt,’ said Dick, by way of thanks. He was pointing at the picture above the electric fire again. Burt raised his eyes to the ceiling as he stumbled past on his way to the kitchenette to grab some glasses. As he rummaged through the cupboards, we heard him cursing and panting, but neither of us made a move to help him. This was his place, his refuge, and we knew better than to demean him like that.

He returned with three tumblers, two which looked as though they’d seen better days. There was a large crack running down the side of one of them, and another looked as though it hadn’t been washed or dusted for about a hundred years. The other – his glass – looked pristine clean however. Burt was clearly not used to company of any kind. My heart, such as it was, went out to the old battler.

The whisky, it turned out, was stuffed down the side of Burt’s chair, and was already half drunk. I wondered if he’d been drinking after he carried me home. I wondered
how
he’d carried me home in the state he’d been.

‘Glenmorangie,’ he said. ‘The best.’

‘You’re spoiling us,’ said Dick.

Burt poured lovingly. Even twisting the bottle at the end of his free pour as though he were a barman in some swanky airport lounge and we were travelling businessmen, ready with cash-dollar tips. He handed one over to me first, then placed one on the table in front of Dick. His own, he drained in one fluid gulp, before pouring another, larger measure. Then he took his seat.

Burt waved away my comment: ‘You were brought here by the wings of destiny. You were brought here because you need answers. Now fire away. We don’t have much time…’

Dick nudged me in the ribs and made a rather too obvious gesture with his hand, indicating the fact that he clearly believed Burt to be drunk, or insane. I tried to ignore my smacked-up friend.