by Clark, Simon
I guessed Mr Shadow would be just around the corner, so I took the chance to squat down against the wall and grab a breather. Water dripped from me, forming little puddles, trickling away into the gutter.
This couldn’t go on, I was telling myself. Soon I’d just drop with exhaustion. I’d been chased; I’d been in a car wreck; I’d run; I’d seen some bloody terrible things; I’d bust my front teeth and taken the skin off my forehead. I’d nearly drowned. Now, I just wanted to lie down.
But I couldn’t. An overriding longing cut through the exhaustion, even driving out the pain. I had ambition. An ambition that scorched through me and burnt into my mind like molten plastic sticks to skin.
I had to get one back at it. I had to hurt it. It had to feel pain as I had. As those people had in the buildings it had wrecked. That little boy at the train station. Out for a day’s train-spotting, now crushed under a mound of glass and stone.
I remembered his face. How he had looked at me, the orange ice lolly in his hand.
What I’d seen and done that day ran through my head like a video on fast forward.
I saw myself watching it at the market place then trying to run, cracking my jaw against the lamppost, and sitting there thinking: Here it comes. Joe Slatter, you are history.
But the bastard hadn’t come. It had just stood there like some old psycho of a headmaster who’s caught a kid pulling faces. He threatens punishment, but then just stands there, a superannuated sadist, just squeezing out the enjoyment watching the kid squirm as it wonders what the headmaster had planned.
No … Tell it like it really was, Joe.
No, it wasn’t quite like that at all was it?
No, it bloody well was not.
I sat up straight. My fingers tingled. It wasn’t like that at all.
Suddenly I had one of those flashes of understanding that burst on you once in a blue moon.
When I had hurt myself and looked up I had the impression – more than that I knew – the thing could not move. Or didn’t know where to move. It looked confused.
If there was some kind of mental link, busting my teeth was enough to break that connection.
For a few seconds that thing was like a blind man who’d lost his guide dog.
I jumped up and shouted. I had not seen the answer. It had been right before my eyes, but I’d been too bloody stupid. I’d had that bastard on the ropes and never even known it.
Without thinking it through I ran round the corner.
There it was. Standing like Nelson’s friggin’ Column by the crater in the road. Half the buildings, banks and shops were spattered with mud. Water gushed up out of the hole like a fountain, washing down the street in a great muddy brown river. In the middle stood the skip like a failed boat, battered, crumpled, gashed open down one side.
The shadow looked more solid than ever. A huge, dark monstrosity, a raw shape trying hard to look like a man. I’ve said it before, there was no face or eyes – only a sort of shady hollow where the features should have been at the front of the massive head.
It didn’t move, apart from slightly tilting the head forward and downward like that frosty schoolmaster, who buried his rage in some kind of weird ice tomb deep inside of himself.
It looked down at me.
‘You heap of shit!’ I yelled, and added a belittling laugh. ‘What are you going to do now? Throw a tantrum? Smash up someone else’s toys?’
The head, ever so slightly, cocked to one side.
I’ve been around, so I’ve got names that you’d never find in the Bible. I shot them all up at that shadow face.
It continued to look down at me. Impassively. I could almost imagine it saying, ‘You ridiculous little boy, you don’t know the meaning of what you are saying.’
And at that time I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just so elated. I’d found a hole in its armour. Knowing that gave me such a buzz I felt like the king of the world.
It was as it slowly stooped down at me I did what I’d half planned.
I tried to hurt myself.
The thing is, it’s not easy.
How would you hurt yourself?
The adrenalin is flowing so you’re sort of anaesthetized against the common or garden bumps or knocks. Have a fight, you don’t feel the blows until afterwards: ask a boxer.
I punched a wall.
I felt nothing. Sweet FA.
My nerves were dampened down to their roots.
I tried again. Nothing – apart from a bloody smear down the bricks.
I could feel the thing just lean … just lean down toward me.
I bit my lips, my tongue until I heard it crunch between my teeth. Still no pain.
Go straight for the nerve, go straight for the nerve I screamed at myself. What nerve? Belt myself in my bollocks? Rip my skin?
Dick Jarvis’s stag night. As clear as day I saw the coppers; the way they held my arms while another hit my elbow with a truncheon. It left no marks but it hurt so much I’d emptied my gut onto the pavement. What is it? The funny bone? Humerus? Hit that right and you feel as if a red hot skewer’s been rammed down through the centre of your forearm.
An iron railing ran down the edge of the pavement. Never taking my eyes off the shadow as it bent down I cracked my elbow on the top of the railing. Twice. Three times. Then my luck came sailing in. Christ it hurt so much I nearly puked.
Something shuddered through the thing towering over me. The edges blurred. It took a faltering step backwards as if it felt the same wave of nausea as I did.
Again. It only lasted a few seconds, then the edges were hardening up.
Holding my arm, I ran before it knew exactly what it wanted again.
That buzz, the sudden fix of elation left me, leaving room for an equally sudden depression. Its dark, cutting edge bit deep.
So, I’d proved a point. What bloody good had it done me?
I could hurt it by hurting myself. How much did I have to hurt before I could kill it – or at least persuade it to give up the hunt?
Back to square one, Joe Slatter. The idea that once it killed me it would go took root again. Maybe the agony of me being ripped to shreds or slowly crushed into the tarmac would be enough to topple it back to never-never land or wherever the bastard called home.
Again the running. And I knew it followed me. Every so often its impatience would get the better of it. I’d hear shattering glass, concrete splintering under fantastic stresses as it flattened another shop or café.
As I ran along St Sepulchregate, something bright red flew overhead.
I looked up, expecting to see a plane. It was a red Volvo, thrown like a kid chucks a toy. It spun over and over to land with a crash in the little clock tower over a jewellery shop on the corner of the road. The wreckage rolled away noisily down a deserted precinct.
Once more ideas of running went through my head. Doncaster had a small airport. Maybe I could somehow get a plane, persuade a pilot to fly me from the place. Five hundred miles sounded a healthy distance.
How? I had about twenty quid in my pocket. Enough to buy a five minute joyride over the town.
By now it was dusk.
I doubled back up Printing Office Street, shops at either side of me. And when I walked there I did not walk alone. Reflected in the shop windows was another man. A wild-looking man. I stopped and looked at him. His clothes and skin had been stained the same colour as Doncaster’s earth. His hair was stiff, his lips swollen, and when he opened his mouth two front teeth in the bottom jaw had been roughly snapped down to pointed stumps. But the thing I noticed most were the eyes. The eyes burned out of that mud-streaked face like someone had lit a bonfire behind them.
They burned and burned. They fascinated me.
The burning eyes told me something had happened to me.
Joe Slatter was growing into someone different.
I walked on. Slowly this time. And as I walked odd thoughts weaved in and out my head. I saw a shop advertising a sale, a
nd I found myself calmly planning to buy some new jeans. I saw a dog and grunted at it. Maybe I thought I should save it from being flattened. Maybe the old, hairy man who lives in everyone’s head wanted a dog to help with the hunt.
In any event the dog just shot me a suspicious look and slunk off down an alley. Sirens wailed in the distance.
Now I could smell fish and chips cooking. Those frying smells rolled my stomach. I actually felt hungry.
I rounded the corner.
Ahead of me, the cinema. Outside that, a queue of maybe a hundred kids. They were waiting to see some Disney feature.
I stopped dead in the middle of the road. They watched me expectantly.
A car braked and turned to avoid me. I half saw a red face and two fingers thrust furiously out of the open window.
I looked back down the street.
No sign of the shadow. Yet.
In the cinema queue some kids ate sweets or ice-creams, others chased up and down the pavement, or pulled faces at customers in the Acropolis café next door. The kids ranged anything from four to eleven, with a few glum looking teenagers recruited to take along younger brothers and sisters. They all looked different, they all had their own lives and futures. The one overriding thing they had in common was:
They were potential victims.
Like the boy crushed at Sheffield station.
So … The mind that had fired into overdrive saw a hundred victims, a hundred little coffins lying in the front rooms of a hundred homes; undertakers with practiced set expressions screwing down the lids and saying to mothers and fathers, ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t advise you see his face.’
The mental picture – these visions were so bright and solid, solid lumps of image and colour so large they hurt my head … well, they just wouldn’t let me walk on.
What now, Joe? Use your brain. Use your brain. It’s the best weapon you have.
It would have been senseless to get the kids simply to run away. At best they’d only scatter. Some would run right into the thing. They would be easy meat.
This is it. This is where you stop running, Joe Slatter. This is where you stand and fight.
That’s what blasted through my head as I stood there in the middle of the road. Yeah, the time had come. If I did nothing else in my life I’d have to do this.
Another car passed, sounding its horn. I looked round.
There were a couple of pubs, a restaurant, the fish and chip shop with two or three customers; a grey haired man behind the counter dropping chunks of cod, dripping with white batter, into the hot oil. Across the road, a spotty teenage lass in a yellow dress eating chips from a polystyrene tray just gawped at me.
I scanned the rooftops. Five seconds later I saw it. It was coming. The next street, the next but one perhaps. Methodically, unhurried, it worked its way round to me.
Well. If I was the bait I needed a hook.
I stood there mentally hammering away, trying to think of a way. But all that came up were images of what would happen to the kids. They reared up before me. Mangled bodies, torn heads. It tortured me.
Half a lifetime ago, it seemed, I remembered drinking coffee and eating biscuits with Jean. Now she would probably be feeling around her flat, unwrapping the moussaka, pushing it into the microwave, trying to judge the setting so she wouldn’t sit down to luke warm mush. I could still see her at the table, all that dark froth of hair falling over her face. She was lovely. She was still lovely. At that moment I wanted her. I just wanted to put my arms around her and hold her.
I shook. The strength oozed out of me.
Then the thing, whatever it was, giant, demon, ghost, gas robot, stalked round the corner. Higher than a church steeple, it peered down on me and radiated silent waves of hatred.
If it had roared and snarled it wouldn’t have seemed so bad. It was that bottled up rage that was worse. It was holding back all that poisonous anger until the barriers ruptured then …
Then what?
If I had to die, okay. I would die. As long as that bastard died, too.
I took four or five slow steps toward it.
It answered that by closing the gap between us to about thirty metres.
Now it hurt my neck looking up at that dark shadow face.
The spotty girl must have seen it now. The chips slipped from her hand onto the pavement, dribbling curry sauce down her yellow dress.
It’s strange but I was calm as I stood there. Just watching it slowly get closer. I knew that if I hurt, it hurt. Knowing that made me feel good. It gave me the courage to face it head on.
I psyched myself taller, I pictured myself as tall as the shadow. The blood tingled through to my finger ends.
And as I stood there that idea that had hung around in the back rooms of my head for too long finally, but decisively, stepped forward.
I would do it. Yesterday the idea would have been horrifying. After all this: it was exciting.
I was smiling and nodding.
‘That’s it, that’s it,’ I was telling it, ‘come and get yours, you poxy old bastard. Come and get your arse a real good kicking.’
As it began that weird leaning forward again I moved.
I sprinted toward the railing at the edge of the road, vaulted over it and crashed through the door into the chip shop.
The customers jumped back against the wall and stared at me like I was stark staring mad. I jumped over the counter, kicking over the salt pots and boxes of little wooden forks. I stood there behind those big friers where they cook the fish and chips. They were all shiny steel, the size of bathtubs, holding gallons of oil that fizzed and spat. They were so hot they drove out a blue smoke that filled the shop. I felt the heat on my face, smarting my skin. As I bent over one of the friers and looked down into it I could see all those golden bubbles fizzing around pieces of fish. The fried smell scorched my nostrils. How many times hotter than boiling water? I didn’t know. I don’t know now.
Outside, darkness blocked the window. The hammer was about to fall.
Holding onto the hot metal sides of the friers, I leaned forward. Someone shouted. I noticed the hair on the back of my hands singe away to powder. The chip shop owner tried to pull me away.
I held my breath, deliberately screwed my eyes shut.
Then, like someone washing their hair in the sink, I dipped my head into the boiling fat. I dipped my head deeper. Over my scalp, forehead, face then ears. I held it there.
And held it there.
* * *
In the bedroom it was completely dark. I felt Jean press closer to me, her bare skin hot against my arm.
‘Are you happy?’ she whispered, kissing my face. I felt her hair fall over my shoulder. This felt cool and soft and made me think of the past year.
Tonight we had listened to one of those radio plays together. You know, it really wasn’t that bad.
She kissed me again. ‘I asked if you were happy?’
Gently, I hugged her, feeling her ribs under her skin and the notches of her spine.
‘Jean. You always ask if I’m happy.’ I stroked her hair. ‘Yes. I’m happy.’
‘You’re going to stay?’
‘What do you think?’
I smiled, feeling relaxed. She snuggled closer, one hand resting on my chest.
Briefly, the reflected light from a car’s headlights shot into the room, showing the lampshade hanging from the ceiling, a wall plate from Corfu by the wardrobe. I saw in the dressing table mirror my melted face.
Jean hugged her body closely to mine. She was happy.
The car turned away, leaving the room completely dark.
Now we were equal.
Revelling in Brick
and jeans, then went downstairs to catch the news. Watching the headlines seemed important to Mark Stainforth, though he didn’t know why. There was rarely anything that did seem relevant or important. Halfway into the news the tin of oxtail soup had warmed through and he sat watching the rest of the programme, eating th
e soup from the pan, occasionally dipping in pieces of limp ready-sliced bread. Eating out of the pan was a habit he’d acquired soon after Sharon had left. It seemed logical. It saved on washing up. The kids had gone with her. They’d pick up no bad habits. Not from him anyway.
After tea, he automatically ran through his chores ready for work the following day – making sandwiches, putting them into his plastic lunch box with one apple, one piece of cheese (Edam) in foil; polishing his shoes, hanging out a clean shirt; jotting down memos to himself.
Later, with the sun still slicing down through the summer evening sky, and the smell of freshly cut grass juicing the air, Mark took his usual walk, around the quieter parts of the park and down to the wall.
He always ended his walk here. A ten foot high wall, maybe forty yards long. One side of the wall was faced with white stone, the other brick. It was a wall that served no real purpose. On one side lay the park with its bowling green, putting green, trees and rolling turf. On the other lay half an acre of wasteland, comprised largely of grass and nettles.
The texture of the wall fascinated him. He judged it to be around three hundred years old. Originally, it must have been part of the walled garden to a now non-existent manor house. It was built of curiously thin bricks that had been weathered into irregular shapes. The lime mortar was slowly being washed out and lay in soft white mounds like icing sugar at the base of the wall. In some places the bricks had disintegrated entirely, permitting birds to build nests in the deep holes.
The colour of the brick was lovely. A warm orange colour. The tint of summer sunsets. Sometimes he’d touch the crumbling brick. It was warm beneath his fingertips. Like something alive.
As he walked he heard music. Someone carried a radio in his direction. Normally he’d have felt a dull twinge of resignation as the peace was due to be broken.
But the music, an early Eighties’ pop song, and the odd quality of the radio, told him who it would be.
Limping along the path came a thickset dwarfish figure who Mark thought of simply as the Little Man. Mark guessed the Little Man approached forty, but he had one of those faces that didn’t reveal his age. He wore an old grey suit with baggy trousers. His brown hair was neatly combed and he always carried one of those old-fashioned radios in a worn leather-look case. The radio had a large round tuning dial set in the front.