Bully (27 page)

Tommy knelt by my side and started stroking my hair. In a way, it was far more disturbing than when he’d had the spear poking into my chest again, giving me that invisible tattoo of a number four.

‘
Some part of you wants to know what happened to your friend Twinnie, doesn’t it?’
he continued.
‘Tell you what; why don’t we go take a look at him now?’

Somehow, I don’t think I had a choice in the matter. And that was soon made abundantly clear when Tommy grasped me by the collar and started dragging me off the grassy knoll, down towards the open graves. I felt my half-foot bang and crack against every hidden broken bottle, brick, stone and bramble underneath that long grass.

Tommy barely decreased his pace when we reached the bottom of the slope, and for a second I thought he was going to drag me right on into one of the open graves. Instead, he left me dangling over the lip, on my back, screaming in agony.

‘
Bully; meet Twinnie,’
he said, gesturing into the open grave.

And I looked. I knew that I shouldn’t have looked but I did. I couldn’t help myself. Some deep-down part of me
wanted
to see what had happened to the other monster in my life. Some deep-down part of me wanted to know that Twinnie had gone and would never be coming back.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about what happened at Pompeii; chances are that you have. But it was only when we were doing our pre-op training in Southern Italy that I found out all about it. Mount Vesuvius; the volcano. The eruption. The fleeing Pompeii citizens trying to outrun time and fate and geological fact and then being caught by the lava and preserved in mid-stride, mid-prayer, mid-scream
forever.
Turned to stone, over time. The piss-artist previously known as Twinnie was just like one of them. In half-crouch, a look of sheer agony on his pinched face. His hands splayed out as though trying to stop the fire from overwhelming him. It looked strangely unreal, or as though a single gust of wind would dismantle all of the dusty particles which now made him up. But then, I figured, there probably wouldn’t be any wind. Not here, not in Tommy’s world.

And the most horrifying thing of all was the fact that Tommy had now leaped into the grave next to this human statue and was using the spear as a kind of rudimentary chisel with which he could carve the number three, like he was a professional sculptor or something.

‘What happened to him?’ I gasped.

Tommy looked up from his work, hand still hovering over Twinnie’s chest, ready to make the final incision.

‘
I thought you didn’t want to know? I thought you just wanted this over with?’

I clutched my head in my hands and started to rock back and forth.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I wailed, as though I was offering up some primitive prayer to some primitive deity; good or bad, I didn’t know. Didn’t care.

Twinnie was the easiest of the lot. So far. He’d always had a death-wish. He was broken-up inside. Always thought that there was something better going on somewhere else, somewhere where he was not; where his dead twin brother was. Twinnie lived like he wanted to make everyone else in the world feel the way he did; lonely, abandoned and lost.

It was his lifelong ambition to find somebody that he could be as close to as he remembered that he was with his brother in the first year of his life. But the ironic thing was that he never let anyone get close enough to him anyway. He always fought people off; either through fists or through verbal cruelty or through sheer ignorance. I don’t know…

You probably don’t know this, but during the last year I was alive, I used to go round and stay at Twinnie’s house nearly every night. Sometimes he used to beg and plead me to go round. And when I did, I’d take the top bunk, he’d take the bottom and we’d talk all night. It was like he couldn’t stop sometimes. And I’d sit, with my legs dangling over the edge of the bunk, and it felt like I was sitting on his shoulder.

Of course, he didn’t want any of you lot knowing about the fact he always needed people around him, or how he’d cry out in the night, so he swore me to secrecy, the poor deluded fucker. And after a while, he came to rely on me being there. And he hated the fact that he relied upon someone like me. Sometimes when I got there, he’d punch me in the face, just so I knew where I stood.

He spent all his life with a heart of stone so I turned the whole of him into stone. Apt, don’t you think? At the end, up at Summit Farm, he denied me again. He’d been denying me for years although I’d sat on his shoulder almost the whole time, even after I was killed. But eventually I realised I’d been wasting my time with him, when you should have been the one that I was speaking to. It was you that I had unfinished business with…

That fire turned him to stone because he’d purpled more than any other person that Newton Mills has ever known. That fire, Bully; have you not wondered why you have no discernible scar tissue from it? No burns? I’m not the monster that you think I am. Nobody else in that crowd got remotely hurt, you know. It was an illusion, just like so many things have been. Only, it was a chemical illusion – an illusion in space and time - and that just happened to react with Twinnie’s particular chemical make-up. In essence, he self-destructed, just like the others…

Dick hung himself from those rafters at Funnels toffeeworks no matter what you might think. He was so determined for a fix that when I told him the Strawberry Skull mix was laced with the brown stuff, he couldn’t help himself. And he was sooooo disappointed, so hopeless, that he couldn’t stop himself. He just gave up. Just like the rest of you have. Some value you lot put on life, eh?

Lion? He was always fleeing the scene wasn’t he? Always diving away from the chaos when it all got too much for him… And so he dived into the gorge. I had nothing to do with it. Not really…

Tommy put the finishing touches on the number three on his masterpiece statue and the finishing touches on his story. I’d examined pretty much every part of bare skin on my body while he’d been speaking and could find no burns. The only scar I found was the one on my arm. The one from my flight from Grange Heights, and not from falling off my bike on the cobbles, as I’d previously thought.

‘I’m not lying to you, Bully,’
said Tommy, wiping the sweat from his brow, as well as some flesh, I noticed. Evidently carving into a statue was not as easy as it looked.

‘But Dick wouldn’t have… couldn’t have…’

‘You’ll discover reserves of strength that you never knew you had, Bully. When your time comes.’

‘I tried to tell the police,’ I breathed. ‘Afterwards…’

‘But you didn’t, Bully. And you were the only one amongst them that had any decency at all. After you fell up at Grange Heights, you just became like someone else.’

‘Grange Heights… you were there?’

‘I’ve always been there. In a way. Or I suppose that you could say that looking back, I’ve always been there. I suppose I’m your guilt, Bully. That’s who I am at the end of the day, and that’s why I looked different when I appeared to each of the others. Lion saw me as I actually was. Under every bench, every streetlight, every bar, he saw the fourteen year old Tommy Peaker. Twinnie saw me – eventually – as a tiny little devil on his shoulder. Dick saw me as the endless thirst that he had to quench with drugs. You see me as a nine foot tall monster, don’t you?

‘Eight…’ I stammered, but then Tommy hop-skip-an-a-jumped out of the grave and I saw that he was clearly nine foot now. And growing all the time.

Tommy winked at me when he saw that I’d put two and two together. Unfortunately, the effect of this was somewhat lessened when his bottom eyelid fell off and then his left eyeball started hanging by a veiny thread. As though embarrassed by his appearance he tried to pop it back in, but seemed to struggle a little. When he looked back at me he seemed a little sheepish for a moment, just like that time when we’d pulled his kecks down in the dining hall and revealed his erect penis.

‘Oops,’
he laughed.
‘I’m falling apart a bit here, Bully. But not as much as you are eh? Your mind’s all over the shop now, isn’t it?’

‘Are you saying this is all in my imagination?’ I gasped.

‘Not at all, not at all,’
said Tommy.
‘But what used to be your imagination is now a graveyard of broken dreams and memories that don’t compute. That make any sense to you, eh?’

I shook my head.

‘
Think about it like this,’
said Tommy
. ‘Let’s say I’ve dragged you back and forth in time over the past few months. Made you a bit confused about what’s happening and what’s not… Well just think about how it’s been for me for the past twelve years. That’s how I’ve lived, Bully. Or died, you might say… I’ve been constantly remembering things but I’ve not had anyone around to confirm if it was true or not. Thought I was going mad, Bulls-eye…

Dreaming, waking, dying, it all became one to me, so it felt sometimes that I’d never lived at all.

Did you never wonder why all your memories seemed so mixed-together? How you couldn’t pinpoint when one ran into another? Where you really were, all this time?’

‘I don’t understand,’ I muttered.

‘
Here’s an example for you: remember your friend Do-Nowt from the military hospital? Sure he was there. But he was never there at the same time as you… That’s why you thought he just disappeared. But I had no beef with Do-Nowt; never touched a hair on his Yorkie head. It just so happened that you were there a long, long time after the place was deserted. Just you never really knew that…’

‘Is… is… Do-Nowt really okay?’ I stammered. The illusion that I’d spoken to him had felt so real… The pain when he’d been taken from me had been so real. Why was this happening to me?

‘He’s okay, right?’ I cried, looking for further confirmation.

Tommy shot me a frosty look:
‘Of course he is. But keep your voice down. Here’s something else: that fire at Summit Farm that I’ve only just pulled you out of? That happened way back when you were seventeen, eighteen. I’m afraid I’ve been playing with your lives… all of your lives… ever since you stepped into that C.U.M building and I saw that I had to act. I couldn’t have no desert-folk taking you for their revenge when I wanted you for mine!’

I remembered something: ‘My dad told me something about Burt having been dead for about ten years or something… but it really felt like I was with him the other night… In his flat.’

‘
Course it would. Because you were there. It’s just that you weren’t there when you thought you were there, if you know what I mean? Most likely, you and Dick broke in there on one of your ‘head-loss phases’ back in the day… Spoke to the old loon then… Memory has a funny way of playing tricks with you like that.’

‘So what now?’ I asked. It wasn’t the uppermost question in my mind, but it would do. It would do.

‘
Now, Bully, I’d like to take you on a tour of a few of the other graves. Just to give you the heads-up on what I’ve got planned for my little memorial garden here… Hey, here’s a thought; bent down like that, we could almost turn your mate Twinnie into a seat for the elderly when their poor feet get too tired of wandering round admiring the sights. What do you reckon?’

I kept my mouth clamped shut.

‘
Wanna see some more of my garden?’

‘I don’t think I really want to see any more…’

Tommy grabbed my t-shirt collar, started dragging me along the first row of graves.

‘
Now this one, of course, is for our old pal Dick. And I was sorely tempted to have my grave-digger dig it out in the sign of a massive dick, just like the ones he used to force me to draw on the blackboards before the teacher walked in, every lesson. I got chucked out every time, didn’t I? No wonder I never learned anything. No wonder I never had the sense to stop hanging around with dead wood like you.’

Dick’s grave was as yet unoccupied, but inside I could see that some of the traps from the Summit farmhouse were already being put to good use.

‘
Just in case something happens to him like it did to me,’
winked Tommy.

And we moved on. I could already see the massive headstone hanging above the next grave, as though it was readying itself to jump in. Already knew it was being prepared for Lion.

‘
Just need to wait for the Newton Mills coppers to release their bodies and then I’ll take custody of them both,’
he said.
‘And I’m sure you’ll agree, they are very, very valuable additions to my collection. Sure they don’t have the shock-value of a Twinnie, but they’ll be worth a lot in their own right in a few years mark my words.’

It struck me that Tommy was starting to sound like some rare art collector, and certainly the ‘frames’ that he’d made in which to hang his works were impressive. The graves looked… distinguished. Much better than the graves I remembered in the Cutter Street Cemetery; graves which hadn’t been tended, let alone visited for over a century.

‘
And now we move on to exhibit “d”. I know what you’re thinking, Bully, but this one really isn’t for you. As I’m sure you’ll eventually hear, through the graveyard telegraph or somesuch; this one’s for Mr. Swann. Remember him? Nice feller, but had no idea, or no gumption how to tackle the very real problem of bullying at Newton Mills School. I’m sure you remember the time at the dinner hall? When you and your friend Twinnie sexually abused me? Well, I found him complicit in that crime and I decided that Gerald Swann, of 24 Turner Street, should also join us here.

Right about now, his friends will be waking up in his house. They had a heavy night last night, although they can’t remember why – they only thought they had a couple of pints… Anyway, pretty soon, one of them will wake up busting for the toilet. They’ll go in Gerald Swann’s bathroom and they’ll find him dead in the bathtub. Of course, it’ll look as though he’s drowned, but there’ll always be that nagging doubt. You see they won’t find any water in the bath, and when they check a little bit more, they’ll discover that the water was turned off about two days ago. You see Gerald Swann was drowning in his own ignorance all of his life. He couldn’t even see the misery that people like you were inflicting on people like me. Couldn’t see the wood for the trees… And what a nice, apt way for him to go, eh?