Bully (28 page)

When he plunged his head under that imaginary water it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen… Oh, I would have taken you to see it too, only you were passed out up there on that grassy knoll. You miss a lot being passed out, don’t you Bully? It’s almost like you’re burying your head in the sand…’

I had the sudden feeling that Tommy was trying to tell me something, but to be honest, it was so hard to think when my head was banging off old, decrepit gravestones; the ones that had been moved out of the way to make room for Tommy’s new ‘garden’ that in the end, my only concern was trying to make sure that I blocked out what was happening to me as best I could.

‘
This next one’s one of my particular favourites,’
continued Tommy, approaching the last grave on the first row.
‘In fact, it’s such a favourite that I’m going to save it til right at the end.’

My grave. I was looking headlong into my own grave. And for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off a worm that was nonchalantly crawling across the bottom of it. All I could think was that the poor worm was going to be my company in there for whatever remained of my life… and what came after of course.

‘
A very spacious grave, don’t you think; for a terrace? And sure, the décor needs a bit of work, but with a healthy attitude, the occupant could give this place the real King’s treatment. The Kingsman’s treatment… The square-footage is also good for the sell-on value; out here, death-space sells by the foot, you know, Bully? Quite funny that, isn’t it, after what happened to your foot?’

I didn’t laugh. Neither did Tommy for once.

‘
Okay… bad joke. But back to more pressing matters; do you know who the ideal occupant of this particular death-space would be? A retiree. Someone that really doesn’t care whether they have a room with a view any more. Someone that doesn’t ever really have any visitors, and so doesn’t need the extra space. Someone that takes pride in digging in the ground and in having dirt underneath their fingernails when they get home…

Someone that just needs a bed in which to rest his head and a few friendly neighbours like Gerald Swann, Twinnie and Dick to look in on him every once in a while. Of course, he wouldn’t really like it if any of these visitors asked him for a coffee or washed up in his sink. And he certainly wouldn’t like it if that visitor started trying to talk about very serious things.

I tell you what, Bully; let’s call it an old folk’s home. And do you know who my very first resident will be?’

At first I couldn’t bring myself to even say his name. At first I
didn’t
want to say
his name in front of Tommy. But it was already clear that Tommy knew everything it was possible to know about my old dad. And it was clear that this was going to be how the final game was played out. This was what Tommy had been keeping me alive for all this time. So I would know what real, raw pain felt like. And how that pain can somehow feel even worse when it is inflicted on someone other than yourself. Someone who you care about more than life itself.

My life, my world, had been collapsing in on itself like an empty packet of crisps in a fire. And now, finally, it imploded with an audible ‘pop’. All of the seasons I’d ever experienced; all of the conversations I’d overheard; all of the spinning plates which made up my life suddenly spun into each other. Newton Mills as it was, is, and will be engulfed me. Things I’d done, secretly hoped for, and tried to deny swished around my face like branches from some overhanging pussy willow. The steady drip-drop of water torture memories became a full on torrent which spewed me out somewhere, I hardly knew when.

I was a-time-travellin’ man, and the whole goddamn thing was giving me the worst kind of jetlag ever. I’d finally fallen off that precipice; madness raced up at me, ready to crack me on the jaw.

Chapter Twenty

“
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember”

Autumn always made Newton Mills look a bit dishevelled. Maybe it was because when the leaves were on the trees, it went some way to hiding the run-down nature of the town. In autumn, it had nowhere left to hide. The school in particular looked like some kind of shanty town from a documentary about South America that we’d watched in Geography; none of the buildings seemed to match. There were the prefabricated buildings running down the hill which the teachers euphemistically called the terrapins; next to them was the brand spanking new metal and concrete leisure centre which had to be built after local goodfornothings burned down the old one (I remember cheering and dancing in the flames but didn’t start it, all right?); then there was the main block of the school, the old posh grammar school bit with the domed roof on the library and the sweeping driveway out the front.

The four of us had bored of terrorising the new first year students and had retired onto the fields down below the terrapins where we could listen to some tunes on this little radio we’d found in one of the ruck-sacks that we’d ransacked outside the assembly hall. And we could maybe light a cheeky cig if none of the teachers happened down that way. In the main, hardly any of them did; they all got in their cars at the end of lessons and drove to the end of the road where they could have their own cigarettes in peace and not be pestered by the over-enthusiastic head-teacher for smoking on school property. Mr. Swann was a particularly bad one for that kind of thing; always sloping off when there was work to be done. Always ignoring what was going on around him as though he couldn’t hear or couldn’t see. It was like he was encased in some kind of fish bowl which he couldn’t be bothered to look out of.

We were playing this new game we’d invented called ‘raps’. Raps used to be used as a punishment in card games - you were supposed to gather the whole deck together and lightly rap the knuckle of the opposing player - but we’d soon grown bored of the actual games and moved on to pure torture instead. Just taking it in turns to hit each other and hurt each other for no other reason than that we were bored. Bored of school, bored of lunch-times, bored of Newton Mills. Twinnie in particular had the fine art of getting a whole deck of cards into a sharp point which would break the skin on first contact. He’d already drawn a fair amount of blood from Lion’s hand and was now getting ready for his final shot. He narrowed his beady eyes and pursed his lips in anticipation. Although much the bigger lad, Lion looked very worried…

‘I’m sure you’ve already had your three goes,’ he pleaded. I noticed that his right eye was twitching a little bit as though he was close to crying. His big face was getting redder by the minute and his freckles seemed to be twinkling like shitty stars.

‘
Two
goes,’ said Twinnie, flicking through the cards, seemingly injecting them with some kind of static charge. ‘This is the last one. Then you get to have a go at me.’

Twinnie wasn’t worried about the reprise attack from Lion; Lion’s hand was knackered now and would be no good for getting the cards nice and tightly packed and ready to hurt.

The artist formerly known as Paul Morton stuck his tongue out of his cat’s-arse mouth in concentration as he made his own final preparations and then lifted his hand with the deck of cards in it into the air. This was where Twinnie’s true skill for the game came into play. He made the opponent wait. He made the opponent imagine the pain in his head
waaaaaaay
before the actual hit, so in fact the hit was at least twice as bad as it ever would have been. My eyes darted to Lion, whose own eyes were pleading. His clenched fist trembled. He looked as though he was going to surrender. He was going to hand the game to…

‘Wait!’ shouted Dick. ‘Not yet.’

Twinnie sighed deeply, dropped the cards onto the grass and turned to Dick. Lion took the opportunity to withdraw his battered hand and shove it into his armpit to alleviate the throbbing. We heard the tinny echoes of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ from the stolen radio in his jacket pocket.

‘That little shithouse Tommy Peaker’s coming,’ continued Dick, nodding his shaven head up the hill. We all turned to look. Tommy Peaker was indeed snowballing down the hill on legs which were whirring like tiny wheels in a cartoon.

‘Look at the state of the little twat,’ sneered Twinnie. He, more than any of the others, made no secret of his hatred for the hangers-on that we attracted. I suppose that it had maybe something to do with the loss of his twin but he never seemed to trust anyone but the three of us, and even that, I thought, was a kind of trust for convenience’s sake while we wasted five years at upper school and before we could go and do our dad’s jobs in the factories.

‘Little bell-end,’ said Dick. He was always one for following Twinnie was Dick. Maybe he wanted to be second in command or something. Not that Twinnie was the leader either, just that he liked to think of himself as such.

We all climbed to our feet and waited for Tommy to come to us. Poor bastard was almost slipping in the mud off the path now but none of us stood forward to lend him a helping hand. And even if he had have slipped, it couldn’t have made his clothes look any worse. Our school didn’t have a proper uniform but ‘encouraged’ students to wear white shirts and black trousers; Tommy’s get-up was what looked like his mam’s cast-off white blouse and black leggings of some description. There were whopping great tears at the knees, I already knew. On his feet, he wore black PE pumps like we used to wear at primary school. We, of course, were all decked out in the latest Nike trainers with the pump-up cushioned soles. We’d managed to stab compasses into the air bubbles on the trainers of nearly every other no-mark in the school that dared wear them.

Tommy arrived at last, gasping and panting for breath. He sort of bowed to us, he was that bent over from the effort of running so fast. Don McLean started singing about ‘bad news on the doorstep.’

‘What you wanting, Squeaker?’ asked Lion, towering over him like some giant troll or something. We called Tommy ‘Squeaker’, because that was our rather juvenile name for a fart, and that was what Tommy was; a little fart.

‘Had another wank you wanna tell us about, eh?’ Lion continued, wrinkling his nose as though sniffing the air around the little lad. I had to bite back a bout of the giggles.

Tommy shook his head and looked embarrassed. He’d once tried to ingratiate himself with us lot by telling us all that he masturbated a lot, and I mean a lot. He bragged that he could do it twelve times in a day. But after he’d told us that we noticed that this weird fishy smell always clung to Tommy and so we all figured that he just left the discharge seeping into his black leggings and underpants that his mam would never wash.

‘Tell us what you’re here for then you little fuck-wit,’ said Twinnie, who looked as though he’d already run out of patience and looked likely to clock him at any given moment.

‘Come on Tommy, what’s to do?’ I said, mockingly putting my arm around him and then scraping my knuckles across the top of his hair – it
wrecks
that, if you do it right. I let him go when I realised that he still hadn’t even told us why he’d been running.

On the radio, Don McLean sang ‘dirges in the dark’ and finally Tommy got his breath back, finally he recovered from my knuckle-dusting. He moved in closer to us, a little smile playing on the corners of his lips. I figured that he had some pretty good information on him for him to be acting so conspiratorial around us. Maybe he thought that with the information he was about to impart, he’d move higher up the ladder or something. Not that there was a ladder. Not that we wouldn’t kick it away once he was climbing it…

‘You’ve gotta come with me. Someone’s found somethin’ at the graveyard off Cutter Street,’ he half-whispered, half-trumpeted from the hills, if such a thing were possible. I suppose, in hindsight, what he did was
stage-whispered.

‘Found what?’ I said, moving in on him again. Cutter Street was quite close to our house, after all, and was pretty much the epicentre of our graveyard-based operations by that time.

‘Probably some of Twinnie’s used rubber johnnies,’ cracked Lion, who I sensed was still mortally wounded by being whipped at raps. Twinnie shot him a look of disgust but made no comment.

‘No… no… they found a skull,’ cried Tommy, almost tripping over his words in the effort to get them out so quickly.

We all stood in silence and looked at Tommy Peaker. For only the second time in his life he had centre stage. I could tell that he loved it. The little jig-eared fuck never got any attention at school unless it was the teachers getting at him for something or other or us taking the piss out of him; probably got none at home either. Not while his mum kept entertaining her male associates on a daily basis, only acknowledging him when she wanted him to refill their drinks. Not while his sisters were becoming the local bikes; at some point or other all of us fancied pulling a few wheelies on one of them birds…

‘It’s real,’ he whispered. ‘Not like that one that they have up in the biology labs. This one’s got, like, all this
stuff
on it… And you should see the teeth. The teeth, man. They’re all rotten and everything. Like Burt from the shop…’

‘You’re not lying are you, Squeaker?’ asked Twinnie. And from the way he said it, I could tell that one false move from Tommy now would bring us all crashing down like the deck of cards. One false move and we’d give him a kicking as bad as the one we gave him a year or so back. When he had to be off school for at least two months.

‘No word of a lie,’ he gasped. He was still a little breathless. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was his fabled asthma, I don’t know. ‘Mark found it – you know Mark don’t you?’

Yeah, we all knew Mark, or Sparky Marky as he’d wanted us to call him, back before he realised who we were. When he finally did realise who we were – fucking predatory animals – it was too late for him and the name Manky Marky had stuck. He was another runtish little lad from the year below. The sort that always had green snot running out of one nostril or other until he reached secondary school. The sort who, in olden days would perhaps not even have survived the first winter. Yeah we all knew Mark. And he knew us.