Strapping the torch on, Nugget used the handles for support and swung into the room. He was still holding onto the handles when he saw that Bru had stayed outside, framed in the tall slit of partial doorway.
‘Come on, boy.’ Nugget crooked his finger, calling the dog. The dog leant forward. ‘That’s it, good boy, come on.’ Bru crept in, head low and tail down.
Once inside, Nugget saw that the boats halved the room, passing beneath a small coffee table, one of the dining chairs and over an upturned box, straight as a Roman road, determined as a cockroach migration. To the right of the line was what he took to be the living area. A large sofa and leather armchair faced an open fireplace, embers still glowing in the hearth. To the left, the dining area, a table and chairs, next to what he remembered as being the kitchen.
Fascination popped the torchlight around the room without method, erratic as the speeding thoughts in Nugget’s head. It wasn’t dirty, as the smell had suggested. Although it was a world created without recent adult guidance, a kind of order was in place. But the manner of things gave a sense of the awful. Animal traps, both gins and snares, against the back wall. Pelts draped over the sofa gave it the look of a sleeping bear. Worst of all were the skeletal remains. Piled in the space beneath the stairs on the far wall, chalk collections with the look of both ossuary and shrine; the charnel-house contents of some other way of life – size-graded cairns of skulls, limbs, ribcages, the awkward shapes of pelvis and scapula; the tiny disassociated links of the tails, feet and spinal columns of all manner and size of beast.
‘Jesus.’
He covered his eyes against it but still saw the retinal print of what he had found. Turning away, he opened his eyes to journey with the boats toward the wan square of the far window, to be somewhere else. As he became accustomed to the surroundings, his attention returned to the boats.
‘Just look at all that fucking money, Bru. It’s why we’re here, boy. And there’s more, lots more.’
He held some of the notes to Bru’s muzzle.
‘I don’t know why I waited for him to be gone. Every time I delivered one of those little fat envelopes I knew I needed it more than he did. I know for a fact that these paper fucking boats are only part of my treasure. Let’s find it. Search, Bru. Pieces of steak, pieces of steak.’
Nugget knew the boy had never bought anything with the money. On the rare occasion he had been seen in the village, he was avoided but watched. After his first ill-fated attempt to buy clothes, he’d never again stepped into a shop. ‘We don’t stock your size,’ Mac the tailor had told him. ‘It’ll be years until we do.’ He’d been bundled out, unaware that every junior-sized item of clothing had been removed from the store, too painful a reminder, and sent overseas through the auspices of Father Finnegan and his church. For a while, women’s clothes disappeared from washing lines and reappeared on the boy, including a T-shirt of Lynne’s. Nobody demanded or wanted them back. This stopped when clothes they had seen Shep wear came to fit him. The one display along Main Street that had attracted him back into town was the bookshop. He would look at the books the way others would watch a bank of televisions, transported, as though imagining the lives and journeys within each volume. It struck Nugget as strange that he never tried to buy one. They all knew he could read. He scanned the room for a bookshelf, concentrating, chewing his lip.
He stopped.
‘Christ, Nugget.’
He slapped himself across the forehead, knocking his torch to the floor.
‘Books?’ he said, focusing the light before refitting it. ‘We’re not here for books. Come on, Bru.’
His mission back on track, he proceeded to ransack the place, pulling drawers open, smacking cupboard doors back on their hinges and flipping the lids off any boxes he found. Nothing.
‘Lynne’s right, Bru.’ His breathing was shallow and rapid. ‘I was stupid for leaving it this long. I don’t know what I’ll do if someone else has got to it first. Every delivery was an investment. That’s what I’d tell her. Well, Nugget’s here to withdraw.’
The circle of his searchlight flashed across the wall, stopped and backtracked. On the mantelpiece was a neat pyramid of packages, offset like brickwork, their placing so uniformly precise that they had looked to be part of the fireplace surround, an intricate carving, the peak of which obscured a small section of the mirror that hung above the fire. Nugget cooed.
He ran his hands down the sides of the money mound. He was gentle with the unopened packets. Something halfway between a sob and a whimper escaped from him. For the second time that night, his cock pushed against his trousers. He looked into the mirror, euphoric and amphetamine-stiffened. The three gold teeth that gave him his name, two incisors and a canine, shone in the torch beam. He yanked his zip down and pulled his erection out, tugging until jism sizzled on the embers. His scrotum hung soft and warm in the updraught as he subsided. The base of his shaft rubbed against the nylon zipper of his work-issue trousers as he teased the final drops out, sliming over his fingers as he pushed it back in. He began to weep. His nose ran. He wiped his hand across it but only succeeded in swapping snot for salty ejaculate. Forced into his nose, the smell was even stronger than that of the house. His innards lurched. He leant against the mirror.
A glimmer behind him caught his attention. It came from the bottom of the largest mound of bones. Low in the reflection he saw the ivory dome of a human skull. He vomited, sluicing his nostrils with whisky and bile, spraying the sleeping bear. The acid boiled in his windpipe. Sweat iced his body as he hunched over, leaning on his knees, spitting. When he could stand, he used the strength remaining in his shaking frame to scoop the packets of money into his postbag. He closed the flap and embraced them.
He shivered as he stooped to inspect the skull. He wondered if it had been the starting point, the foundation; if the rest of the skeleton was at the bottom of each pile. A silver chain was threaded through both eye sockets, wrapped a couple of times around the ridge of bone that separated them. The large crucifix attached to the chain leant against the skull, partially occluding one of the sockets. Nugget moved the cross to reveal an irregular dent in the forehead. Hairline cracks radiated from it in all directions. He shook with wheezy laughter.
‘So that’s where you got to, you fucking mad bastard.’ He knelt. ‘Father Finnegan – Fireball Finnegan. Just look at you. Here all the time. Jesus. And the company you’re keeping.’
He lifted the crucifix and wiped it. It was heavy, solid silver. It wouldn’t fit through the eye socket and he couldn’t find the end of the chain, so he tried easing it free with gentle pulling. When the whole pile of bones shifted, he started and dropped it, his breath arrested, waiting for the collapse. Bru backed away, growling.
‘It’s okay, boy. It’s okay.’ He dragged the dog close with the hand not holding onto the money. ‘It would only have been a bonus anyway, and hard to sell. We’ve got what we came for. We’ll take the boats. He can keep it.’
He managed a grin as he sat back, able to relax with the skull now he knew who it was.
‘Seems like yesterday, seeing that cross again. The fucking trouble you caused. You fucked with this village more than anything else, you know that? Poor Mary, she still thinks you’re coming back. Can you believe that? She wrote to the Pope asking where you’d been sent. No reply. She had a baby boy; he’s got your hair.’ Nugget made the sign of the cross. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; but not as much as you did.’ He stood and backed away from the priest’s skull. ‘You look better without the moustache, though, I’ll grant you that.’
He poured whisky into his mouth and rinsed it around until the burning of his gums took his mind off the taste of the vomit. He crossed the line of boats and spat into the fire. Whoosh. Embers ignited the fumes and Bru barked at the violent flare as the whole room momentarily lit up.
‘Hush now,’ Nugget said, staring down his almost c
oncave chest to his stomach. ‘Bru, that’s enough. No more. You hear me?’
Strings of puke and bile on his jacket had glistened in the light from the fireball. He felt soiled. He needed to wash his hands.
He entered the kitchen looking for the sink and stopped. A rust-coloured fox fur was spread across the wooden draining board. Bloody water drained into the enamel sink. A stockpot sat on the wood-burning stove. He shuddered as he reached out and touched the lid. The pot and the stove were cold. He couldn’t bring himself to look inside; didn’t want to be confronted with the head, the skeleton, the whole body, meat and all, whatever was in there. Bru brushed against his legs, going further into the room, and he heard the dog licking.
‘What you got, boy?’ he said, glancing down. As he did, his light passed over Bru onto the redness on the floor and his legs gave way.
Bru was licking his face when he came to.
He pushed him away, wiping his face hard against the taste of ripening flesh on his lips. But Bru came back.
‘No.’
He pushed the dog again and followed it with a two-footed kick that sent him sliding back across the kitchen floor into the skinned carcass of the fox, stretched out on sacking on the floor, muscle and sinew exposed, white teeth bared in a perpetual snarl, a big chunk of the hindquarter eaten away.
‘No, I said. Stay away from me, Bru. Just stay away.’
A protruding fox eye reflected jade green. Bru whined and edged forward, brushing the floor with his tail as he followed Nugget, keeping his distance as his master dragged himself out of the room.
Nugget couldn’t look at the dog as he sat leaning against the staircase.
The banister was sticky. Like the chair and the dining table, it was stained with an unholy patina, as if the juice of the boy had seeped into the furniture, stained the floorboards and nourished the whole building with his containment. Nugget used the wall for support as he made his way up the stairs.
The state of the bathroom on the half-landing surprised him. He’d expected the smell to make his eyes water, tidemarks around the bath, and for the toilet to be brown with use. It was clean. He didn’t even stop Bru drinking from the bowl.
‘At least it’ll take some of the fox off.’
Before Bru knew anything about it, Nugget had grabbed his collar and held his head down while he flushed the chain. Bru’s bark spluttered as the water cascaded about him and Nugget attacked his stained muzzle, rubbing water through his teeth and over his fur as he cleaned him. The thought of the dog licking his face made his innards buckle again, forcing viscous yellow dregs up into his mouth. He spat them into the sink as Bru shook himself dry. Swilling the bile down the drain with the traces of vomit and fox flesh he’d soaped off his hands, he felt weak and light-headed, as if he was ridding himself of strength. He dried his hands and threw the rough towel into the bath before leaving.
Standing on the half-landing, he glanced up into the darkness of the top floor.
Those that had to pass the church on the way home had. Nobody was waiting to confess. Wittin kicked the baptismal font.
‘They could all go to prison,’ he said. ‘On my word, the whole lot of them. And they deserve to.’
His words echoed for a moment, sounding silly and as empty as the church.
He heard the latch of the door as it was lifted. Mary Magnal entered the church.
‘Mary.’
‘Father.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’d like you to hear my confession.’
‘Of course.’
Inside the confessional, he waited for Mary to be ready. Sounds he was familiar with, having heard many tiresome confessions from the woman already. She did the annoying small sigh thing she always did before she started.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been—’
‘I know, Mary. It was this morning. Less than a day has passed.’
‘But the day has contained sin, Father.’
‘Indeed. Please, continue.’
‘Father, I committed an act of violence. I struck a priest.’
‘Okay.’ He waited. ‘And?’
‘And?’
‘Is there anything else, Mary? Anything you feel you may need God’s forgiveness for?’
A small sigh before, ‘I took pleasure from the death of another.’
‘Mary, you did more than that.’ Wittin put his face against the grille, close to the woman’s. ‘What happened tonight was wrong.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry? It was a sin.’
‘What happened tonight was right.’
‘Mary, have you heard yourself?’
‘I took pleasure from it. I take pleasure from it. It will be my eternal sin.’
Wittin groaned as he sat back.
‘Mary, you’re the truest Christian soldier in the village. If I don’t have you, whom do I have? We could do the right thing, by God, by the church, by the boy you buried.’
‘You would do more harm than good.’
‘But to say nothing is to go to hell. We could lead the way, you and I.’
‘John Cutter led the way,’ she said. ‘You could follow.’
‘Mary, thou shalt not kill.’
He listened to the sounds of Mary Magnal preparing to leave.
Seven years earlier
‘Do you think Alice and Jonny have kissed?’ said Jean, the moment she thought they were out of Alice’s earshot.
‘No,’ said Jenny, ‘don’t be silly, he’s …’ She stopped and looked down at Jean. ‘Do you?’
‘I think so.’
Jenny looked anxious. ‘But you don’t know?’ She put her ponytail in her mouth.
‘Stop it.’ Jean flicked the hair away. Jenny flinched, contracting, as if in anticipation of a further commotion. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jean, quickly. She took Jenny’s hand. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.’
Jean was always telling Jenny off for chewing the ends of her hair. Mrs Cutter chewed her hair all the time. What Jean didn’t know was that sometimes it was the only thing that stopped Mrs Cutter crying.
‘It’s okay, I’m sorry.’
‘Jenny, what for?’
‘For not being happy for Alice any more.’
‘But why?’
‘She’s too young.’ Jenny’s face creased with concern. ‘I’m scared for her.’
‘Scared?’
‘What if her dad finds out? Do you think he’ll be angry? He will, won’t he? We can’t say anything, if we see him.’
‘Jenny, slow down. I don’t know what you mean.’
Jenny Cutter worried her hair around the fingers of her free hand as she studied the snowflakes building up on her coat sleeve.
‘My dad would be angry. I just know it.’
‘Mr Corggie’s different.’
‘You think so? Because he’s a doctor?’
‘No, because he’s different. And anyway, even if they do kiss, that’s okay, isn’t it? It’s not … you know.’
‘The other thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘That would make Mr Corggie angry, I’ll bet.’
‘That would make any daddy angry.’
The two girls looked at each other. Jean smiled and Jenny responded.
‘You okay?’
‘Yes.’
Jean took Jenny’s hand. Jenny had something of the rag-dolly about her, twig-limbed, loose-jointed and small of waist, as ready to be picked up and held as dangled or thrown.
‘Where are your new boots?’ asked Jean. ‘I’ve only just noticed.’
Jenny favoured chunky footwear that anchored her and looked like it stopped her spindly frame from blowing away. Looking down at her slip-ons, well broken in and daily polished, she shook her head.
<
br /> ‘I decided to save them.’
‘For best?’
Jenny shrugged.
‘Jenny.’
A few seconds passed.
‘Calvin laughed at them. He made me not like them any more. I told my mum they were a bit sore. She said I should wear them around the house until I break them in.’
‘Jenny, why do you care what Calvin thinks? He’s stupid and fat.’
‘I don’t, not really.’
‘You should tell him then.’
‘I know. I will.’
Jenny knew swear words, proper ones, those associated with craftsmen and criminals, and had mastered how to use them. Most of the boys had been their targets. Most of the boys had at some point laughed at her. The only one who didn’t find her amusing was Dog Evans. He never laughed and he didn’t scare Jenny Cutter.
The only person who scared Jenny was her father, Police Officer John Cutter. He’d never laid a hand on her, but he ruled their home with the threat of the back of it.
He hadn’t frowned or scowled or passed comment. But John Cutter didn’t say anything nice about Jenny’s new boots when she left for school the previous morning. He said nothing when she returned home. He cleaned them and gave them their first polish and left them on the stairs for her to take up when she went to her bed. But Jenny could hear them, his words from the shopping trip to the city, a trip he always hated and ruined for Jenny and her mother. ‘Unsuitable … poorly manufactured … impractical for the winter … they wouldn’t last five minutes … expensive …’ All delivered as sound advice from one who knew, in the reasonable yet joyless tone that was already anticipating ‘I told you so’.
Jenny had loved her mum for insisting she got the boots, for telling her that once in a while pretty was enough; men didn’t understand this. Her father shook his head, handed over the money and walked away while her mum paid. He was silent throughout the journey home. Sitting behind him, Jenny had taken the boots off as quietly as she could and put them back in their box.
The Wrong Child Page 5