Bully (19 page)

Blows rained down on me. I saw my own blood waterfalling into the air. And I saw the madness in Twinnie’s eyes. I saw how he was pinning the blame on me for how his life had panned out, just as I was pinning the blame on him.

And then, just as suddenly as it had started, Twinnie’s attack stopped.

‘I’m sorry, Bully,’ he said, half-smiling. Wiping away my blood from the side of his face with the sleeve of his big black Barbour coat. ‘I had to be sure that it was you, mate. And now I am. Nice to see you, me old mucker.’

I flinched away from him as he knelt over me, but he didn’t touch me. Just stared into me with those fiery, beady eyes.

‘You’ll be reet,’ he said, in a voice devoid of any emotion. ‘Just rest your head a minute and then go out and see to Dick, will you? He’s making a racket that’d wake the fucking dead.’

With that he sloped back off to his camp bed and flopped down, picking a porn magazine up from the floor. He didn’t bother looking back over at me. Evidently there were some engaging articles in
Twat Weekly
these days. The only issues I’d seen out there in the desert had been at least two years old and well ‘thumbed.’ I lay on the cold stone of the farmhouse kitchen, gradually becoming aware that Dick was indeed screaming the place down. Occasionally, I tried to get up, but the pain in my head, and in my foot was unbearable. Some hidden, Twinnie-like part of me kept telling me that we should just leave Dick outside, to attract the thing that was once Tommy Peaker or perhaps the slavering mob of men from Newton Mills. But I argued myself down. At some point in this whole damn mess, surely my brain would kick into gear and some sort of feasible plan would present itself. And besides, if there was anyone I wanted left for dead, it was Twinnie.

Dick was in a bad way when I finally got out into the courtyard to see him. He’d lost a lot of blood despite my tourniquet and was sweating profusely, although some of that may have been down to his lack of drugs. As soon as he realised that it was me crouched by his side and not Twinnie, he grasped my hand.

‘I told you; he’s off his head, Twinnie is,’ he gasped. ‘We should never have come up here.’

In the distance, the wind began to howl. Or at least I hoped it was the wind. It reached the farmhouse, trickled along the corrugated iron of the barn and whipped into the plastic sheeting which covered some farm truck or other. It was as though Tommy was reminding us that he was still watching; still laughing.

‘Twinnie saw Tommy as well. He must have, judging by what’s written on that wall… That means we all have, Dick,’ I said, trying to cover up my wounded friend as best I could. ‘This thing’s going to come to a head sooner rather than later, I reckon. He has us where he wants us, and now it’s up to us to decide how we play this. But don’t worry, I’ll try and sort your leg out for now at least.’

‘We’ll be legless together, just like the old days,’ said Dick, but there was absolutely no trace of mirth in his eyes. I gave him a wink, and that probably just looked as though I was trying to blink back the tears.

I climbed to my one and a half feet again. Felt myself almost buckle and fall, but righted myself by holding on to a drainpipe. From inside the farmhouse, I caught the faint smell of cooking. Whatever Twinnie was cooking did not smell good. I tried to ignore the sick feeling that it inspired in my gut and looked around for some way of getting Dick under cover. It was going to rain soon – in fact, a full on storm seemed likely judging by the thick black clouds overhead – and I didn’t think I had the strength for any more dragging. Neither, for that matter, did Dick.

I made up a makeshift stretcher for him out of a decorative wheelbarrow in the garden and somehow managed to wheel him across the courtyard and into the barn. Without any natural light in there, it was difficult to see what was lurking in the corners, but I consoled myself with the fact that at least it wouldn’t be Twinnie.

I slipped back out of the barn and into the courtyard. Already spatters of rain were pebbledashing the concrete. Already, the clouds overhead were starting to breach and the first signs of the storm were beginning. I lurched over, back to the farmhouse, guiding myself along the walls. Propping myself up. When I reached the door, I took a deep breath and entered the stench.

‘You chopped his leg off?’ barked Twinnie, from his camp bed. ‘Otherwise that was fucking fast work, soldier boy.’

He gave me a mock salute and nearly spilled whatever crap was in his plastic bowl all over his purple legs. I simply smiled back at him.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I’ve managed to get him in the barn. Thought I’d come back in here. I’m looking for a knife to cut his tracksuit bottoms off him. So I can get a proper look at the wound
you
gave him.’

‘Or is the knife to slit his moaning, drug-addicted throat? Huh?’

‘Do you have a knife?’ I asked, rapidly growing tired of this game.

‘I’m using it,’ said Twinnie, spearing a huge piece of what looked like barely cooked flesh with a hunting knife and plunging it down his cat’s arse of a mouth. I heard the point of the knife scrape against his jagged little teeth as he pulled it back out.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place by the way,’ I said, while I was waiting for Twinnie to finish his extravagant chewing of the meat. I pointed at the blood-red graffiti on the wall. Smirking as I did so.

Twinnie barked something back to me that was almost totally incomprehensible. A trickle of blood slipped down his purple chin.

‘Knife?’ I said, holding out my hand, half expecting Twinnie to twist it into my naked palm. Almost expecting the jarring pain as it cut through sinew and bone. It looked damn sharp that knife. Probably Twinnie had it singing off a butcher’s steel hymn sheet every morning these days.

He continued his exaggerated chewing, sounding like some predatory animal. And I knew from watching my nature documentaries that an animal like that doesn’t really want to be disturbed while they are eating.

Finally, he stopped; spitting out some gristle onto the floor right by the side of his camp bed. For some reason, all I could think of was how
unhygienic
that was.

‘Think you can come back in here ordering me around like you’re the fucking alpha male of the pack?’ he growled, still accentuating every word with a baton-twirl of the knife. ‘Think being in the army gives you some divine right to be the big boss man?’

I shook my head. ‘Nah Twinnie, I don’t think that at all. I just wanna at least
try
to patch him up…’

‘It’s every man for himself nowadays,’ spat Twinnie. ‘You made that very fucking clear when you went off to the army. You can’t turn back time, mate. You can’t have everything just like it was before you went off on your own like goddamn Rambo.’

I didn’t laugh. I didn’t chill the fuck out. Dick was right; Twinnie was way out west now. He was so far gone that he probably didn’t even know where he’d come from in the first place. He was as much monster as Tommy Peaker now. Somehow, I preferred him as snarling animal rather than his other schizophrenic incarnation; this laughing, faux-friendly madman that would stick you in the back as soon as look at you.

I clenched my fist around the hunting knife and twisted and turned it until it finally came out of the wooden door. Had half a mind to launch it straight back at Twinnie, but when I turned round to face him again, he had the shotgun cocked on his lap. It was pointed directly at me.

‘Just making sure you don’t wanna use that knife for something else,’ he sneered.

‘I’m not like you, Twinnie,’ I said. And then I repeated the same phrase in my head for about the next half hour. What the hell had happened round here while I’d been away?

I managed to put together a rudimentary dressing for Dick’s leg using some of the stuff in my pack, and also some woefully out of date medicines I found under the smashed-up sink in the outhouse next to the barn. I copied the treatment techniques I remembered from the military hospitals back in that desert place; remembering Nurse Thomas tending to Do-Nowt’s stump. I remembered Dr. Montaffian, and started whistling ‘Purple Rain’
as I worked. Part of me wondered whether even that old doctor’s choice of song had been a sign that I hadn’t heeded. Had he been trying to tell me something of this purpling business?

Even after I cleaned and dressed it as best I could, the wound couldn’t stay like that for any more than a few hours, tops, I thought. When I cut Dick’s tracksuit bottoms away and seen the mangled mess that the scattered shotgun pellets had made, I’d been inextricably reminded of my own foot. When I’d not been able to tell what was skin or flesh and what was boot or sock. Dick’s tracksuit bottoms had become so saturated with blood that bits of material clung to the wound and refused to be budged. Dick screamed when I pulled the material away.

He also screamed when I applied the ointment from the outhouse and a bandage from my pack. He screamed whenever shadows moved in the barn and begged me to either stay with him or let him come back into the farmhouse.

‘Please,’ he said, tugging at the sleeve of my t-shirt like a kid would. His breathing was raggedy. Dangerous breathing; like how he’d described the Black Panther breathing. Or how we’d all imagined the Black Panther breathing at any rate.

‘Let me back inside. I’m so c-c-cold…’

‘Too dangerous,’ I said, trying to sound stern, not-to-be-messed-with. ‘I’ll keep checking up on you though, Dick. You’ll be fine.’

I managed to find a few tatty old blankets in that same outhouse and wrapped Dick’s body inside them so tightly that he started to resemble a cocoon. On top of all the blankets, I placed the yellow tarpaulin which I’d wrenched off the broken body of the farm vehicle out in the courtyard. I didn’t know which I felt more sorry for; the rusted, abandoned body of the machine, now left open to the elements after all those years of protection, or Dick; so warped by drugs that he hardly knew where he was any more and hence probably didn’t even know that one of the main reasons I was wrapping him up so tightly was in order that he didn’t try to crawl away in the night, looking for treatment of a different kind to that which I could provide. Treatment which could only be found in the flats above the shops in the main street, with their naked bulbs buzzing with energy that they’d sapped from the drugged-up townsfolk.

And I started thinking about what Twinnie had said about every man for himself. I started to ask myself whether I wouldn’t be better off facing Tommy Peaker alone, without these two crazies holding me back. But that wasn’t the way Tommy wanted it, was it? He wanted us all together, driving each other mad just like we used to. He wanted us to experience that same head loss which had driven us to kill in the first place. And right then, I knew that he had us exactly where he wanted us. He’d be coming, and soon.

Chapter Thirteen

“
No angel born in hell”

Twinnie and I sat around the flickering light from the small blue flame of the camping stove. It wasn’t providing much heat, but as the only torch we’d thought to bring was rapidly running out of batteries – refusing to play ball like every other goddamn piece of equipment we had up here apart from the gun, of course – it was at least providing us with some light. And both of us wanted light. We wanted to be able to see what the other one was doing.

I was sat, cross-legged like in school assembly when we were good little boys, or at least not so bad little boys. God, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat like that. Nor could I really remember being a not-so-bad little boy. Every memory I had seemed soured by the knowledge of what was to come later, like when I remembered that last day we were all at school together. How we’d all scrawled our names across our school shirts. How we’d got the girls to plant big lipstick kisses on the collars. But then we’d got drunk and someone had attempted to burn the school down. Not us, you understand, but we’d been the ringmasters. The ones who’d whipped everyone up into such a frenzy that it all got
waaaaaaay
out of hand, and far too quickly.

Or the time Tommy Peaker got that certificate in assembly for managing to make it in to school every day for two consecutive weeks. The way some of the spods had complained. You know the type: ‘I’ve not had a day off in two
years,
let alone two weeks. Why can’t I have a certificate? Oh sir, please present your penis to me so I can suck it. Please, pretty please…’ How we’d all rolled about laughing when Tommy collected his certificate and started trying to make a speech, holding the crappy piece of scrap paper aloft like it was the FA Cup or something and not just sweet FA. Tommy pointed out to us who the main complainers were, and in the spirit of the day, we set about them all; robbing lunch money here, burning school bags there, pretending to pierce their fucking smarmy faces with their pristine compasses for maths class. How in the end, as always, we took it one step too far and ended up going for the easiest target of the lot; Tommy himself. Twinnie wiped his arse on the certificate and blu-tacked it to the wall of the lad’s bogs using his own shit. Unbelievably it took a whole two weeks for the certificate to be removed by the cleaners. And a whole two weeks for us to see Tommy at school again.

As I thought about the old days, I’d been rubbing at the stump which was formerly known as my foot. When I looked down, I saw that my over-long fingernails were tearing into the plasticy-flesh; trying to scratch the itch that was not really there. Like Hannibal Lecter quizzing that senator in
Silence of the Lambs,
I wondered where it itched on Twinnie. Maybe it itched on his fucking dead twin.