Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

  ‘They could be fatter,’ he says.

  ‘They’re the finest swine you’ll ever taste,’ says the woman, trying not to look at his arm. ‘Feed a family for so many sunrises. See you right through the snow time. They’re breeders too.’

  The hairy man looks at her again. He looks her up and down in a way that makes her feel naked. Stares.

  ‘What about those dogs?’

  ‘What about them?’ says the man.

  ‘I’ll need one to drive them.’

  ‘Don’t you have your own?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I come in what I wear. I carry all I need inside me.’

  The man and the woman look at each other. The light is fading rapidly now. Without saying a word they know they are in silent agreement. This is what they have walked across the plains for. They have little choice.

  ‘If you take the swine you can have one of the dogs.’

  The hairy man considers the offer. Even though he knows he is going to accept it he prolongs his response. He looks at the woman again and she feels her stomach turn sour.

  ‘The swine and one dog is a fair exchange for what I have.’

  ‘How are we to believe you?’

  ‘Believe me?’

  ‘How are we to believe it works?’ says the woman.

  ‘Have you appeased the gods fully?’ says the hairy man with the small arm.

  ‘Yes. Daily.’

  ‘Then the gods know.’

  ‘But how are we to know?’

  He shrugs. ‘Because today is the day when the sun shines brightest and longest, and at sunrise the world is born anew. Because I drink a bowl of pig’s blood every day and I have done this many times before. Ask others.’

  ‘Ask who?’

  The hairy man looks around. He points to two men and a women. One of the men is bent over and packing away a stack of willow-branch baskets.

  ‘We accept,’ says the woman.

  The hairy man nods to the centre of the stone circle.

  ‘Then we pray to the gods and we wait,’ says the hairy man. ‘We wait until just before daylight.’

  He looks at the man for a moment.

  ‘Not you, though. Just me and her.’

  Crouched once again in a copse, he watches as the first fingers of light curl around the edge of the night. Backlit, the clouds become illuminated.

  He hears the tentative call of the first waking bird, a budding song still in search of a melody.

  The tall dark woman and the beautiful woman with no teeth told him he had to leave and not return until the day was fully light and the dew had dried on the grass. They pointed to the trees and told him he could sleep there, and that he must not enter the stone circle. To do that would be to go against the gods. To go against the gods would spoil the ritual for everyone. And the ritual happens but twice a year; on the longest, brightest day of sun and the shortest, darkest day of ice.

  They could not guarantee his safety if he disturbed the ritual.

  He is hungry but he cannot eat. He is thirsty but he dare not lift a cup to wet his lips. Instead he is crouched like a banished creature in a dark corner of the copse, unmoving.

  And now he sees the first shaft of light pierce a cloud like a bone needle through cowhide. It shines straight between two of the standing stones and directly into the centre of the stone circle. The light and the stones are perfectly aligned.

  Even from this distance he see shapes; the shapes of bodies twisting and writhing.

  Many of them tangled in union.

  As the sun strengthens, the beam stays trained on the circle, and its warming rays widen to bathe it entirely in glorious life-giving light.

  She is somewhere in there.

  The hairy man is upon her and he is holding her. His shrunken arm is surprisingly strong as he adeptly turns her over and arranges her. She is only half aware of the movements from the others within the circle but the sounds are difficult to ignore. The moaning, the sobbing. The grunting. Her knees are sore on the hard dry ground, and he has his hands in her hair and his breath in her ear. She can smell him. As she feels the rising sun warm her back she gives herself to him, to the ritual. To the gods. She closes her eyes and drifts somewhere else, and for a while time slips away and then it feels as if many hands are on her, as if many fingers are running through her hair, grabbing at it and knotting it around a hand or many hands. There are mouths on her. All over, hot, wet mouths. It is as if she is being touched, inside and out, and the moaning and the sobbing and the grunting is loud now, and it is all around, and she is surprised to hear that she is moaning and sobbing and grunting too, and the sun is rising and burning and moiling. Light spreads across the circle and the stones cast long shadows like contorted creatures and colours swirl behind her eyes, but she refuses to open them. She is being pushed and pulled, and there are hands and mouths upon her, and her back is burning and the colours are swirling, and there is laughter and screams and howls and whimpers and the sound of bellowing, and the shadows bend and stretch as the sun encircles them, and they are all at its centre as seeds take root in the soil of longing. And the gods grant them their wishes.

  There is still a frost on the ground, and the first shoots of spring have not yet pushed through the frozen carpet that covers the soil, as she lies in agony in the shadowed shell of the cave.

  He is by her side, with a stick for her to bite down on, and water, and the fire is blazing. He has enough wood stacked so that it could burn for days. There is food too. He has made the correct preparations.

  The woman’s legs are wide apart and she faints from the pain but when she comes around the head is there, poking out, a small dark wet dome of thick hair, and then two eyes are peeking out at the world, seeking a light for guidance.

  She screams and the baby slithers out on to the bed of moss.

  The dog pads over and tries to lick the child free of the slick film that covers it but the man slaps it away. The baby is silent but breathing.

  He wipes its face and crouches down to bite the cord. And that is when he sees it in the half-light made by the flicker of flames: one arm so small it is almost unreal.

  The child gurgles and opens its eyes. It reaches out for him.

  He extends a finger and the child’s tiny digits curl around it.

  They grip.

  Suburban Animals

  Before everything.

  Before anxiety stalked the fallow meadows of our adult minds, there was adolescence: that time trap between bodies old and new, when innocence was a commodity, a virtue.

  We lived in the suburbs and the suburbs seemed to go on forever. Nothing but mile after mile of tarmac and culs-de-sac curving around dead-end corners. Low houses with double-glazed windows that reflected vapour trails as they cross-hatched the young summer sky marked the limit of our world, the only one we knew. We occupied these spaces entirely.

  Suburbia: a combination of the words suburb and utopia; each iteration different, yet somehow the same. Ours was a microcosm of houses built from the same blueprint, outside of which waxed cars sat gleaming on new driveways laid by a team of travellers who had come from a campsite up near Consett to resurface half the estate several seasons earlier. Hundreds of houses sported the same sets of vertical blinds in their living room windows too, sold to the owners by a single salesman on a winning streak.

  Here we roamed a labyrinth of post-war new-builds constructed for an emerging lower middle class, a place promising minimal crime, green spaces and easy access to motorways taking you to Edinburgh or London, Sunderland or St-Tropez.

  There was a shopping precinct, playing fields and endless alleyways hosting outdated graffiti slowly fading from view like a pavement artist’s chalk masterpiece in the rain. There was a church for believers, a rest home for the elderly and a graveyard waiting to be filled.

  Beyond the houses, where creosote-stained fences demarcated the struggle between new suburban and old rural, lay wheat fields, and beyond
the wheat fields were more estates where once there had been old parish villages devoted to the mining of coal. These further-flung conurbations mirrored our lives from across the scrublands. And stalking the perimeter of the estate, leafy lanes provided deep cover for day-long games and the covert depositing of secret stashes of pornography.

  We had gardens, we had trees, we had freedom.

  There was little wildlife in the suburbs, though. No foxes or squirrels or badgers or deer, just soft cats and overfed dogs.

  And people.

  Suburban animals.

  We were playing cricket on the school fields during the holidays when Duncan was bowled out by his brother Luke.

  Duncan was two years older than the rest of us, and had been born with Down’s syndrome. He liked to ride his bike to my house without using the pedals, preferring to power along with his feet in great loping strides.

  The brothers came from a loving family. Their parents were older than the rest of ours, and Christians, but they didn’t press the point. And Duncan was not special or tapped. He was simply one of us.

  But he had his rituals, and one of his favourites was that every time he was bowled out in a game of cricket he would snatch the stumps from the soil and hurl them at anyone within reach. What began once in a fit of genuine anger had now turned into a game in which we all had to yell ‘Duncan – no! ’ as three sharpened stumps came flying towards our heads, and Duncan guffawed with delight.

  Sometimes he liked to drop his trousers and wave his oversized cock about. Duncan had hit puberty before the rest of us, and was covered in hair down there. Thick, dark tangles of it. A mass of tiny wires. It was hard not to look, if only to see what lay ahead for us; he might have had to go to a different school, and would live a shorter life, but Duncan had a larger, hairier appendage and was playing his young adulthood to his advantage.

  After a morning on the open fields we’d moved over to the all-weather football pitch, whose AstroTurf could take the skin clean off a knee and leave a red-raw medallion shape beneath your stonewashed jeans if you mistimed a sliding tackle.

  The ball was being lazily hoofed about when the boys appeared. There were three of them, the same age as Duncan. They came on to the pitch and sauntered over, snatching the ball from mid-air. Duncan tried to grab it back but they passed it to one another in a way designed to make him look foolish, and suddenly the summer’s day had cracks in its blue-glazed veneer. In that moment I wished that we had the cricket stumps to hand, so that Duncan’s inhibitions might prompt him to skewer one of their skulls.

  Any young boy knows that such cliques rely on power, and the power in this group lay in Kyle Todd, an indulged boy with hair so blonde he could almost pass for an albino. He often rode new BMX bikes, each latest model replacing the last, sported expensive trainers and carried himself with the confidence of someone who, superficially at least, was treated as royalty at home, but who was now taking those parental shortcomings out on anyone who was smaller, younger or happier than him.

  Duncan’s anger was rising, and when that happened he wore it on the soft round features of his face, his hands slowly curling into fists and his cheeks flushing plum. Luke and I advanced to try and get the ball back, but before we reached them Toddsy bounced it off Duncan’s head and the three of them roared with laughter. We heard the noise the ball made and then Duncan wail out of frustration rather than pain. Even at twelve, the rest of us could see that this was a predictable scene from a high school morality film, but we also knew we had to see it through to the inevitable conclusion. That fact was inescapable.

  The ball rolled away and I bent to retrieve it, but one of the other boys punted it way down to the other end of the pitch.

  Somewhere far away a car alarm was going off, insistent but ignored and therefore entirely ineffective. I also heard a bird, a seagull, though we were miles from the sea.

  The boys started taunting Duncan with words you know but don’t need to see written down; words that split the sanctity of the suburbs. They made mocking gestures that years later an American presidential candidate would make on live television and still be voted in by the electorate. Gestures that further cracked the carapace of our childhoods. Toddsy swigged from a can of Coke, and spat some of it in our direction. It dribbled down his stupid chin.

  We asked them to stop, pulled Duncan back. We led him away, back to our ball, to our game, to our summer.

  Smirking and drooling, Toddsy turned and left, his honking lickspittle lackeys following in swaggering pursuit.

  We calmed Duncan down, threw our damp T-shirts to the ground and got a kick-about going, but the boys were still there, lurking in the dark corner of the pitch in a tight huddle of sharp laughter and raging hormones. The chain-link fence that surrounded the pitch as if it were a prison yard cast a curious shadow on the fake green turf, and I could see what they were doing back there: Toddsy was urinating into the Coke can. They all were, one after the other.

  I whistled to Luke and nodded in their direction. Noted the development.

  We carried on with our game, and the heat prickled on unblemished skin turning pink in the first flush of holiday time. Duncan scored a belter in the imaginary top corner and did his customary celebration of a long lap of honour, with one arm outstretched and a finger pointing to the sky. His smile was as bright as the sun, life-giving. We laughed along with him.

  Then the boys returned. Toddsy returned.

  Now his arm was extended.

  ‘Duncan,’ he said, ‘we brought a drink for you.’

  He was offering the can to him.

  ‘Don’t take it, Duncan,’ said Luke.

  ‘He’s pissed in it,’ I said.

  And the thing with Duncan was, if you said not to do something, he did it. That’s just the way it was. Same with the cricket stumps. Same with jumping off the shed roof. Same with dropping an empty glass bottle on to the cracked stone flags of the shopping precinct. With Duncan, don’t meant do. It wasn’t a problem; it just meant a little explaining or cleaning up for Luke afterwards. It was Duncan’s way and he was one of us.

  I could see where some of the warm piss had missed the hole in the top of the can and pooled in the little declivity around the rim. It was quite dark in colour; the tone of a hot day. It wasn’t cola. It definitely wasn’t that.

  The three lads were leering, and Duncan was grinning. He wanted their gift. He knew he couldn’t have it, and he wanted it more than anything.

  ‘Don’t, Duncan.’

  Don’t meant do.

  Toddsy continued to hold the can out. An offering. The gap between him and Duncan – between Duncan and the can – narrowed and there were no gulls or planes in the sky now. There was not even a solitary cloud, just a deep-blue bank of endless summer, as if the universe beyond it were entirely empty, and someone somewhere on the estate was mowing a lawn to keen precision.

  Time slowed, spooled away towards mythology. There was Toddsy and there was Duncan and there was the warm can of urine. Duncan laughed. He chuckled.

  ‘Here you go, have a drink on us,’ said Toddsy.

  Duncan advanced. Flanked by his friends, Toddsy gestured with the can. Invited him. Urged him.

  ‘Go on.’

  Now we were all shouting: ‘Duncan, don’t.’

  Don’t meant do.

  Duncan reached out for the can and he took it.

  He took the can of piss and he smiled as he raised it to his lips and had a sip, a gulp, and as he did Luke leaped forward and yelled out – ‘Duncan – no! ’ – and he slapped it from his big brother’s hand. It landed on the ground between Duncan and Toddsy, and its contents glugged on to the coarse green plastic of the fake football pitch.

  The sun beat down and no one said anything. Instead ‘Duncan – no!’ hung there, filling the silence between us. Those two words were weighted with feeling; weighted with anger and brotherly love and horror and cruelty. They were a single sound rising from deep within, the sound of the thin shell
of innocence shattering forever.

  After everything.

  After we grew into men and went out into the world, to jobs and wives and children, I looked up Toddsy on Facebook. After more than thirty years it took less than five seconds to locate him.

  He runs a business laying patios in Sunderland. He has kids. I found his address online and I visited his house on Google Maps. It is a red-brick new-build in the style of a faux-townhouse. I have dragged and dropped the yellow icon on Street View and I’ve stood outside it. I’ve positioned myself at the bottom of his driveway. I’ve zoomed in on the windows. I’ve found the room in which he sleeps.

  On my computer screen the sun is shining and the day is bright, just like it was all those years ago. The street sits beneath another rare clear blue sky, once again so devoid of cloud as to be almost unreal.

  The house is not far from the sea.

  I think I hear seagulls.

  The Whip Hand

  The waltzer ground to a premature halt for the first time that summer.

  The ride screeched, juddered angrily and finally sighed. The spinning cars slowly came to a standstill on their tilted axes and the screams of the riders faded away in their tight young throats. Without the accelerated action of movement to accompany it, the pulsing electro music that pumped out of the speakers and echoed across the half-empty showground alongside the operator’s stock set of phrases – Hold tight, here we go! – suddenly seemed hollow and banal.

  Beneath the running boards, on a shaded patch of sun-starved grass that had turned an acidic yellow, Walt Moody lay half pulled into the cogs and axels of the machinery, dragged there like a helpless rag doll. One entire hand, wrist and arm were gone. Processed into a paste. His shoulder had been sucked in too but it was the big bone joint that connected his limb to his torso that had caused the greasy cogs to jam and the power switch to trip.

  He had died in silence, a grease gun in his remaining hand and torn strips of oily rags hanging from his belt loops. A tailor-made cigarette hung suspended from his lower lip for a moment, still smoking, then fell to the parched turf. Here Walt Moody lay in the receding days of a long arid summer, pulped and pooling on dry soil split from a prolonged drought.