Bully (7 page)

It took me a moment to remember that I’d had to wedge the front door to our building shut with a large stone. In that moment, I pulled at the door handle as though none other than Tommy Peaker were on the other side, pulling against me. Cursing, I kicked the stone away and entered my worst nightmare. Not only was the body of Bolton now gone, but Do-Nowt was now nowhere to be seen. It felt like the cruellest practical joke in the world. Even then, I believed that everybody was going to jump out of some concealed door and burst out laughing. Do-Nowt would be back on two-legs, the broken man holding some kind of mask that he’d been wearing to fool me. Even Tommy would be there, holding up some stilts and a wad of tissues that he’d stuffed down his jumper to make himself seem bulkier.

I started to laugh; quietly at first, but rising into a crescendo which could best be described as a howl. Why was this happening to me? Why was I being tormented so? Ah, who was I kidding? I knew exactly why, didn’t I? It was a little dead boy’s sick revenge fantasy and I’d blundered straight into it. I laughed again, and cried, and laughed again. I slumped down onto the stone floor and rested my forehead against its coldness. I waited for death to come take me. I gave up. Now I really was that wildebeest on the African plain. I felt death’s teeth start to clamp around my ankle, ripping into the flesh. I carried on laughing hysterically.

I came to with a nagging coldness around my groin area. It felt like an old familiar friend, that clammy wetness, so it took me a while to figure out just what it was. When I did, I was disgusted; I’d pissed myself. Somewhere amid all the laugh-crying and the wailing and the giving up, I’d just let my bladder give way and then I’d slept in it. I wrinkled my nose and took in the smell. The hospital now smelled like Tommy’s house back in Newton Mills. It
reeked
of piss, as though not only had I pissed in my combat trousers, I’d also showered all of the empty beds with it, and the blue medical curtains. Some awful voice in the back of my head reminded me that this was exactly the sort of humiliation we’d heaped upon Tommy that day in the playground when Twinnie had kept kicking and kicking until we feared there’d be nothing of the lad left. Absently, I wondered whether Tommy had pissed himself in the grave that we’d put him in and I concluded that he probably had. There was nowhere else that he could have gone.

I felt something start to nibble at my ankle again as though my awakening had reminded death that it still had a job to do. It gnawed at my
cartilage
and sinew. I heard the screech of sharp teeth against bone. I felt fresh blood starting to seep out, beginning to take consciousness with it. I hardly dared look down for fear that I’d see Tommy’s new bright eyes staring glassily back at me. But then something crawled across my face; a rat. And it didn’t crawl quickly as though it was scared. In fact, it stopped to wash its blood-coated paws right on my chin. Flecks of the thing’s saliva flew into my open mouth. Summoning energy that I never knew I possessed, I flung out an arm and knocked it onto the floor where it scurried away giving a prolonged indignant squeak. It would come back, it told me. It would come back and with greater numbers.

Finally I looked down at my leg and saw the one remaining rat still chewing at my flesh. It had now removed a good portion of the top half of my boot, sock and foot. Underneath all of the blood, I could see either the tongue of the boot or a large flap of skin within the rat’s jaws. He was pulling and pulling at it; trying to tear it loose. I looked at it with vaguely confused eyes. Was that really my foot dribbling through the shiny black leather? It certainly didn’t
feel
as though any damage had been done and yet veins spilled out of the mess and mixed with the shoelaces to form a bloody portion of overcooked spaghetti.

All I could feel was a slight tingle, like pins and needles. When I tried to kick the rat away, something snapped and my foot started to hang loose like the front door on its one hinge. The rat darted back away from me but not too far. Not far enough to convince me that he wouldn’t be back for more too. And I swear that as I looked at him, his chops collapsed into this deathly grin. His bared teeth were covered in my blood.

Then I decided that I’d probably seen enough to warrant a scream. Then I decided that it didn’t matter if I screamed so loud that I made my head explode. Mine was the scream of a victim, of somebody that is constantly and consistently tortured until they cannot bear it any more. Mine was the scream of somebody that has been bullied to within an inch of their life.

‘Kill me!’ I screamed. ‘Or let me die!’

This time when the corrugated iron creaked in response, I
knew
that it was Tommy’s laughter, Tommy’s revenge. All I could think about was his not-quite-all-there gap-toothed grin; his freckly face and pathetic floppy ears. I felt the anger starting to creep up within me. Suddenly, I wanted to smash his face in. Suddenly, I wanted to inflict great pain.

I used the anger to crawl over to the bed. It wasn’t easy, not with one leg trailing behind me like a piece of heavy wood, but I made it through gritted-teeth- perseverance and anger. I smashed one hand down onto the bed head and tried to pull myself up with it. In the corner of my eye, I saw rats streaming through the crack in the wall. Some rats were even plucking up the courage to follow my trail of blood, and once they had that taste, courage became secondary. Blood-lust was all for them.

Sweat pissed down my forehead. My arm threatened to give up the ghost entirely, but somehow, I managed to drag myself upright. I loomed over the rats and sneered. Some started to back away from me, but when they saw my near-collapse when I tried to put weight on my mangled foot, when they saw the spray of blood that erupted from within me, they came back at me.

And then I saw it; the piece of metal that Tommy had been using as a cane was leaning against the wall by the door. If I could just make it to the cane, I could somehow limp my way out of there.

Slowly, I started to move. I longed for a weapon with which I could hold back this accumulating black tide of rats; a flame-thrower perhaps, or a carefully-flighted grenade. Goddamn it, I would have taken an A-Bomb right then, if it meant that those fucking rats would get a taste of their own medicine. In my final moments, I would have seen
their
paws and furry limbs being ripped to shreds as well as my own.

The tidal wave of my own anger was the thing that carried me through those terrible moments. It numbed me against the pain in my foot. It allowed me to finally gain the door and to grab at the metal cane. Sure, it made me linger longer than I should have done at the door as I beat the cane down onto the heads of the nearest rats, but eventually it dragged me out of there and into the open air.

I was surprised to see that it had become light during my time back in our building. It was as though, upon seeing myself being eaten alive, I’d automatically assumed that I’d never see sunlight again. But anger had seen me through, and it continued to be my friend as I crossed the centre of the courtyard and made directly for the gate.

Only after I’d thrown off the tarpaulin and gunned the engine of the Red Cross jeep did I allow that little whimper to escape from the knot of sustained terror which gripped my heart. Only then did I understand that Tommy’s revenge was not some terrible practical joke, but was actually something which looked a lot like hell on earth.

Chapter Five

“
Can you teach me how to dance real slow?”

Dr. Montaffian told me, in that typically forthright manner of his, that when they found me they virtually had to peel what was left of my ruined foot off the accelerator pedal of the Red Cross jeep. Apparently, I’d driven straight into the barrier at the military check-point. I’d lost so much blood that they thought I hadn’t even seen the thing. I knew better. Even though I couldn’t remember any of it, I knew that with death on my tail, I wouldn’t have wanted to wait until the barrier lifted. Taking my foot off the pedal would have been tantamount to allowing Tommy in through the back door.

Yet again, I found myself in hospital, only this time it was a proper hospital; one run with military precision by the Americans. It had to be the Americans. Even accounting for my grogginess during my first meeting with the doctor - hell, even before then - I’d known. For this was a place which stunk of money, sparkled with efficiency and oozed confidence. Instead of the commandeered farm buildings of the British hospital, the Americans had built their own space and it was all gunmetal grey walls and proper sterility. Full of hushed voices reverberating along corridors and blazing lights on every ceiling, night and day. Like a proper hospital should be, if they ever expect any of the patients to survive.

Despite the fact that I was rigged up to all kinds of bleeping electronic equipment and had tubes sticking out of every available vein, I should have felt a strange kind of reassurance. And the fact that it looked like an episode of
ER,
rather than the goddamn
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
slaughterhouse I’d escaped from, should have had me thinking: ‘Nothing but the best for a Kingsman.’ But it didn’t.

I cracked open my eyes, feeling the build-up of the mucus that mothers like to tell their children is called ‘sleep’ weighing heavily on the lids. I took another look around the small room which they had installed me in. There was no corrugated iron to be seen; no other patients either. Just me, the big comfortable bed and the machines that were arranged around me ready to take care of my every bodily need. But what about my mental needs?

Almost without knowing I was doing it, I took furtive glances for shadows lurking in the corners of the room, but it was too light for that. I should have felt reassured… But I didn’t. I felt my heart marching along far too quickly. It would stumble and fall like poor Selly if it continued like that.

I felt heaviness around my head like water. Pressing, pressing. Like there were hands there, forceful as a vice but soft too, so the fingers didn’t even make an impression on my head. And now, as I looked back at the machinery, I realised that it actually looked like praying relatives collected around a death-bed. Waiting. Just waiting.

I looked for comfort somewhere, anywhere in the room and settled on the fact that although it was cold and impersonal, at least it felt secure; cell-like. And from the look of the weighty door, it did look as though they had me imprisoned, but then I wasn’t worried about getting out, I was more worried about
something
getting in. In a space so sophisticated, some people better off than me could have readily believed that monsters didn’t exist, but I knew better. I knew about Tommy Peaker and what he’d done to me. And almost as soon as I even
thought
his name, I was wracked with more excruciating pain from my foot, and from my shoulder and from my chest and I’d find it difficult not to scream.

Okay, I suppose I did scream. And then, shortly afterwards, I saw a face squashed up against the small grilled-window on the door, fogging up the glass with her breath. But presently, the figure slipped away back into the corridor instead of coming in again and administering me with the cure-all, forget-all drug which I so needed. They probably had me smacked up to the eyeballs on methadone or something, but in a country like Afghanistan, they could have got hold of some proper H for me. Hell, in Mayo province alone, they had more opium fields than in the whole of the world’s second biggest heroin-producing
country
. Hell, they could have reached out into the hospital garden, if there was such a thing, and plucked out a few choice poppies for me.

Why weren’t they coming in? Why weren’t they telling me what was going on?

My mind tripped back to the horror videos I’d watched in my youth. All of the awful things they could do to you even in a hospital as professional-looking as this. I’d seen films about people being kidnapped for their organs. Some spooky surgeon would just cut out people’s hearts without anaesthetic, on beds just like this one, and stick them in the chest of some rich guy that just had to carry on living. I’d seen films about body-snatchers lurking through wards. I’d seen films about… Oh why was I choosing to concentrate on thoughts like that?

I suppose it is part and parcel of bullying that the bullied develops this all-encompassing fear of
everything.
And in the end, they end up torturing themselves almost as badly as the torment which has been dished out by the bully. Tommy Peaker – whisper the name – hadn’t needed to warn me that he would watch me. Some part of him was already inside me, meddling with the wiring of my brain.

And with that thought, I suppose I screamed again. And this time, as I watched through the glass, a figure appeared. And this time, the figure at the door passed an access badge along a reader. Heavy locks clicked back. The figure ran a hand through his hair, paused for a moment as though composing his thoughts, and then stepped into my cell.

‘I’m, uh, sorry, Lance Corporal Bull,’ he began, absently looking around the room for something; refusing to meet my wild eyes. ‘I’m sorry we kept you waiting, only… Only I’m only just back from trying to scrape two of our own boys off a dirt track. These road-side bombs… Simply terrible.’

I grunted by way of response.

‘Don’t know if you remember me from yesterday, son,’ he continued. ‘I’m Dr. Montaffian and I’m apparently scheduled in to treat you today.’

Treatment?
What were they planning to do to me? I studied his face carefully for any signs of what was to come. Dr. Montaffian was a grim-faced little Yankee with salt and pepper grey hair, a goatee beard and a big tattoo on his right arm. He didn’t look like a doctor. He didn’t
sound
like a doctor either. As he reached over to the foot of the bed and picked up a flip-chart which obviously contained my observation records, he began whistling that old Prince number, ‘Purple Rain’.