Jago (73 page)

‘Great Western’ first appeared in
New Worlds
(1997), edited by David Garnett, and ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ first appeared in
The Time Out Book of London Short Stories, Volume 2
(2000), edited by Nicholas Royle. Obviously, these stories take place in a different continuum from
Jago;
‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ also offers a different version of the Diogenes Club and associated characters from those found in the
Anno Dracula
books and my Diogenes Club stories.

‘Cold Snap’, in
Secret Files of the Diogenes Club,
incidentally features some of the characters from
Jago
too; it will reappear when Titan Books reissue that collection.

Y
ou know
Watership Down
,’ Teddy said, hefting his .22 to his shoulder and tracking an invisible rabbit through muddy green grass. ‘You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the film, you’ve bought the video, now…’

He made a pow sound and jerked his rifle as if he’d fired.

‘…eat the pie!’

Terry grunted but didn’t laugh. He hadn’t read a book since Janet and John and only watched videos with exploding cars or big teats in them.

It was a waste, really. Only having Terry as an audience for his funnies.

‘Weren’t no rabbit in they ditch,’ Terry said, missing the point.

His brother’s gun scattered so much shot into anything he hit that it was useless for eating. To Terry, eating wasn’t the point: shooting was the point, killing was the point.

It was another boring summer. No school, no work, no nothing. Teddy wanted to hitch round the country on his own, but Dad insisted he hang around Alder with Terry. Dad had the idea he could keep his brother out of trouble.

Dad was daft.

They were walking on the B-road that snaked out across the moor. It had been wet and everything was a stark green. One of Teddy’s boots was worn through at the sole; every time he put his foot in a puddle his sock got a soak.

A blue van drove along and the brothers had to edge into a lay-by to let it pass. Teddy recognised Goddard, the vet. Someone out this way had trouble. How animals managed to survive the millions of years before they invented vets was a puzzle. Of course, back in prehistoric ages they hadn’t had Terry Gilpin to worry about.

It was another day of poking around the countryside in search of something for Terry to kill. And of Teddy cracking funnies his brother didn’t understand.

‘Youm hear about Sharon Coram’s tattoos?’ Teddy said.

Terry’s interest almost perked. Sharon was the girl who shagged everyone in Alder. Actually, Teddy figured she shagged everyone except Terry, which was why his brother was so interested.

‘Tattoos?’

‘Yeah, got ’em done over Taunton way. One of they New Age Traveller blokes.’

‘Sharon an’t got no tattoos.’

‘Not where you can see ’em. On her inner thighs, up under her skirts, so they rub together when she walks. She’m got Prince Charles on one side and Lady Di on the other.’

‘You’m shittin’ me,’ Terry said.

‘Know what happened when she got home and showed em to Gary Chilcot?’

Gary was more or less Sharon’s most regular boyfriend.

Terry shook his head.

‘Gary takes off her jeans and her knickers and that and says, “well, I don’t recognise the face on the right or the one on the left…”’

Teddy paused, to punch up the laugh line.

‘“…but the one in the middle’s Terry Gilpin.”’

There was a long pause. Teddy had meant to say the name of a teacher they didn’t like or some old village git, but the last time he’d told the funny he got laughs using his brother’s name.

Gears ground painfully in Terry’s mind.

‘You callin’ I a cunt?’ he said, making a fist around his shotgun.

‘It’s a funny, thicko,’ Teddy said.

Terry took a grip on Teddy’s shoulder and squeezed. Teddy’s arm popped and sharp pains leaped across his back.

After the hurting stopped, things were even. Teddy was fed up with this. Every day, Terry would find some excuse to maul him. Usually he didn’t even have to tell a funny or pull a stunt.

‘Let’s go rattin’,’ Terry said.

They were out near the Starkey farm anyway. It had once been one of the biggest in the county but bits had been sold off years ago and Jimmy Starkey just had a few fields with a couple of cows and an overgrown patch next to the house where all the rubbish of the village ended up. The yard, which was piled high with rotting junk, was the source of a smell famous throughout the village as the Starkey Stench. The pile was alive with rats and Starkey had been known to let village kids pop off guns at them. They were doing him a favour, really. The last time Teddy and Terry had freed the Starkey Stench of rats, Jimmy had given them a couple of fivers and a gallon of his home brew.

But since then, Terry had been found out as the one who cut up the tyres on Jimmy’s car. He had been pissed on cider and didn’t remember why he’d done it. A typical Terry stunt: useless, pointless and doomed.

Usually when you got near the Starkey farm, just about when the Stench hit the nostrils, your ears would be assaulted by yapping. Jimmy had a dog called Vindaloo, a mongrel old as Cliff Richard and noisier than a rusty chainsaw. If Vindaloo still had teeth, Jimmy wouldn’t have to let kids shoot his rats. The dog had been a well-known biter of vermin. Newcomers always thought him a dangerous child-killer, though Vindaloo had never, so far as Teddy knew, laid claw or tooth on human flesh.

When they got to the Starkey yard, with the Stench all around them, Teddy saw Vindaloo in an old plastic laundry basket by the front door. He was breathing badly.

Teddy knelt by the dog and realised Vindaloo smelled badly too. He started a feeble whine. Teddy stroked and the dog leaked a gallon of spit from his loose mouth.

Terry stood in the yard, looking at the pile of rubbish. It seemed to seethe. Yesterday’s rain had turned much of it to sludge. A rat poked its head out of a hole near the top and vanished again. The rodents had tunnelled extensively in the pile, like Vietnamese soldiers in a Chuck Norris video. There could be dozens of them, slipping in and out of secret entrances, carrying off food, spreading disease.

Something close to Teddy mooed, and he jumped. A cow plodded around the side of the house, wandering loose. Someone must have forgotten to close a gate. The milker shouldn’t be this close to the house.

Jimmy Starkey didn’t have many cows, so each was important. He was one of those farmers who treated animals better than anything else. He kept Vindaloo around long after he was any use and lavished such care on his livestock that they were always taking show prizes bigger farmers, who just spent money on theirs, tried all year to snaffle.

Teddy had the idea there was something wrong at the Starkey farm. Jimmy wasn’t likely to leave a gate open. He practically brought his cows breakfast in bed. And Vindaloo was not the lovably obnoxious monster Teddy had known since he was a kid.

Even the Stench was different somehow.

‘You go in an’ ask en,’ Terry said. He was just bright enough to realise Jimmy would still not be pleased to see him.

Teddy knocked on the door. His shoulder twinged again. Terry had really hurt him this time. Maybe dislocated something.

Inside the farmhouse, someone said something. The door was unlatched. It swung open.

Teddy stepped inside. Like a lot of old places, it had a low ceiling and he had to stoop.

‘Mr Starkey?’

He found Jimmy in his front room, sat in an old chair. He was in a state, hair uncombed and eyes red. Afternoon telly was on with the sound down. Some soap serial with shaky walls and smiling Australians.

‘Mind if we rat your pile?’ Teddy asked.

‘What?’

Jimmy looked up. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

‘We’re rattin’. Shootin’ rats.’

Jimmy shook his head, understanding.

‘Yurp, of course you can shoot rats.’

With a gulp of anxiety in his stomach, Teddy noticed Jimmy had a gun in his lap. It was an old pistol, almost an antique.

‘Mr Starkey, you’m all right?’

Jimmy looked down at his gun and up at Teddy.

‘No,’ he said.

Teddy wanted to leave. He was worried about what Jimmy would do with the gun.

‘Donal Goddard offered to put ’en to sleep,’ Jimmy said. ‘But I couldn’t let en. It shouldn’t be a stranger. I should do it myself. Too sick to be any use to hisself. All he’m got in front of en is pain.’

Jimmy held up the gun.

‘But I can’t do it. I just can’t. I thought I could, but…’

Teddy understood.

‘It’s Vindaloo,’ he said.

Jimmy nodded sadly. ‘He’m has got to be put out of his misery. Teddy boy, please do it for me. Vindaloo always liked you.’

Teddy thought about it and agreed.

‘Thank ’ee, boy,’ Jimmy said. ‘Rat any time you want.’

Teddy turned away, and left the front room. He held up his .22. It wasn’t powerful but if he held it to Vindaloo’s head it should do the job.

It wasn’t pleasant but it had to be done.

As he stooped to go through the farmhouse’s low door, another jolt of pain writhed up his back. And an idea for a stunt.

It was too good to miss. Terry would shit himself.

His brother was standing in the middle of the yard looking at the rubbish, drawing beads with his gun. The loose cow was near him, chewing a tuft of grass that grew out of a rotten cardboard box.

Teddy paused in the doorway to get worked up and came out muttering to himself.

‘Rude old bugger,’ he said, ‘callin’ me filth, callin’ youm a tosser. He’m out of order completely. He’m got to cause to spit on us Gilpins. He’m no better’n us. No better ’t all.’

Terry looked at him, jaw slack.

‘We’m can’t rat,’ Teddy told him, pretending fury. ‘Bloody Jimmy Starkey ordered us off his property pronto. Says he’ll put a boot to your arse if’n he sees you again. He cuffed I round the earhole.’

Terry’s face sagged as it sank in.

‘Tell ’ee what,’ Teddy said, sharply. ‘He’m been so bloody rude, I’m gonna shoot his dog.’

Quickly, Teddy jammed the .22 barrel against the back of Vindaloo’s skull and fired. The shot was muffled. The dog jerked and was cleanly dead.

Teddy looked up as his brother goggled. He’d been right: his brother was completely whacked, eyes wide, mouth open.

Slowly, horribly, a grin spread across Terry’s face. His teeth and eyes gleamed.

‘Yeah,’ he said, raising his shotgun and aiming from the hip, pulling both triggers at once, ‘and I’m gonna shoot his cow.’

Terry’s shotgun made a noise Teddy would hear for months.

C
leared paths were no good for Allie. She wasn’t supposed to be after rabbits on Squire Maskell’s land. Most of Alder Hill was wildwood, trees webbed together by a growth of bramble nastier than barb wire. Thorns jabbed into skin and stayed, like bee-sting.

Just after dawn, the air had a chilly bite but the sunlight was pure and strong. Later, it would get warm; now, her hands and knees were frozen from dew-damp grass and iron-hard ground.

The Reeve was making a show of being tough on poaching, handing down short sharp sentences. She’d already got a stripe across her palm for setting snares. Everyone West of Bristol knew Reeve Draper was Maskell’s creature. Serfdom might have been abolished, but the old squires clung to their pre-War position, through habit as much as tenacity.

Since taking her lash, administered under the Village Oak by Constable Erskine with a razor-strop, she’d grown craftier. Wiry enough to tunnel through bramble, she made and travelled her own secret, thorny paths. She’d take Maskell’s rabbits, even if the Reeve’s Constable striped her like a tiger.

She set a few snares in obvious spots, where Stan Budge would find and destroy them. Maskell’s gamekeeper wouldn’t be happy if he thought no one was even trying to poach. The trick was to set snares invisibly, in places Budge was too grown-up, too far off the ground, to look.

Even so, none of her nooses had caught anything.

All Spring, she’d been hearing gunfire from Alder Hill, resonating across the moors like thunder. Maskell had the Gilpin Brothers out with Browning rifles. They were supposed to be ratting, but the object of the exercise was to end poaching by killing off all the game.

There were rabbit and pigeon carcasses about, some crackly bone bundles in packets of dry skin, some recent enough to seem shocked to death. It was a sinful waste, what with hungry people queuing up for parish hand-outs. Quite a few trees had yellow-orange badges, where Terry or Teddy Gilpin shot wide of the mark. Squire Maskell would not be heartbroken if one of those wild shots finished up in her.

Susan told her over and over to be mindful of men with guns. She had a quite reasonable horror of firearms. Too many people on Sedgemoor died with their gumboots on and a bullet in them. Allie’s Dad and Susan’s husband, for two. Susan wouldn’t have a gun in the house.

For poaching, Allie didn’t like guns anyway. Too loud. She had a catapult made from a garden fork, double-strength rubber stretched between steel tines. She could put a nail through half inch of plywood from twenty-five feet.

She wriggled out of her tunnel, pushing aside a circle of bramble she’d fixed to hinge like a lid, and emerged in a clearing of loose earth and shale. During the Civil War, a bomb had fallen here and fizzled. Eventually, the woods would close over the scar.

When she stood up, she could see across the moors, as far as Achelzoy. At night, the infernal lights of Bridgwater pinked the horizon, clawing a ragged red edge in the curtain of dark. Now, she could make out the road winding through the wetlands. The sun, still low, glinted and glimmered in sodden fields, mirror-fragments strewn in a carpet of grass. There were dangerous marshes out there. Cows were sucked under if they set a hoof wrong.

Something moved near the edge of the clearing.

Allie had her catapult primed, her eye fixed on the rabbit. Crouching, still as a statue, she concentrated. Jack Coney nibbled on nothing, unconcerned. She pinched the nail-head, imagining a point between the ears where she would strike.