The King's Shilling

by Fraser John Macnaught

  In the late 80s, when he was already well into his 40s, Cracker Booth developed a taste for freebasing and various psychotropic drugs which, in the long run, tended not to agree with him too well. He underwent a serious of ‘psychotic events’, basically losing his marbles, talking to God, drifting in the ozone layer, on several memorable occasions appearing stark naked in the town centre on market day, screaming frantic warnings to passing citizens about the imminent apocalypse, deadly meteorite attacks, alien abductions, or whatever warped fantasies had addled his brain that week. The family had finally set him up in a comfortable semi-detached on the outskirts of town, overlooking the moors, with a couple of sturdy minders to keep him out of trouble, and by all accounts he’d settled down, regaining a degree of terrestrial normality, spending his days fishing, growing prize marrows and building model-railway layouts. He was still regarded as the Booth clan godfather and treated with all due respect, but the day-to-day running of the family business had been left to Jimmy and various cousins. It probably made sense.

  Jimmy himself had 7, 11 or 14 children, depending on who you believed. By 2, 5 or 14 different women, depending on how much booze the particular claimant had imbibed.

  The two I knew best, unfortunately, were Terry, who had been in my class at junior school, and Tracy, for whom the term “village bike” could have been invented. She’d been a precocious girl, to put it mildly. From about the age of 12, her trick had been to take an indelible felt-tip pen and sign her name on the dick of any kid dumb enough to drop his drawers in her presence. Some of the sadder victims were proud of the mostly shrunken, wrinkled inscriptions, which they imagined were proof that they’d finally “done it”. They refused to wash their todgers for weeks afterwards, often leading to no end of havoc in the school showers, for one sordid reason or another. Others were either ashamed and unduly reticent to talk about the experience, or terrified their more respectable girlfriends might find out one day, by somehow managing to decipher a faint trace of Tracy’s handiwork if things ever developed that far.

  The thing was, Tracy was actually a very attractive girl, if you happened to like firm breasts, slim waists, tight buttocks and slender legs, all carefully gift-packaged in come-fuck-me black stockings, glittery tank tops and fetishist-heaven boots… Which many did… But she was toxic. She seemed to take a vicious, sadistic pleasure in breaking up apparently happy couples, turning close friends into the bitterest of enemies, hurting and infecting innocent men and women alike, just to see them squirm, just because she could. Dishing out the same pain and degradation she was rumoured to suffer at home on anyone she chanced upon.

  Terry was just a stupid vicious bastard with the advantage over most poor slobs of never having to be scared. He knew he could do pretty much what he wanted, whenever and against whomever he wanted, confident that he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in the full weight of the Booths’ rep and muscle and, in a more literal sense, in their ability to influence judicial decisions with bribes, threats and occasional beatings.

  A Booth clan member had to do something seriously stupid and heinous to get put away – although it had happened – and one incident exemplifying their penchant for violence, their paranoia and over-sensitivity and their ability to wriggle free of legal hassles, despite the conclusive evidence, had become the stuff of folklore on the West Yorkshire pub scene.

  Some local wag had seen fit to stand up at an open-mike comedy night at the White Hart. Maybe he didn’t know any better. Maybe he was so shit-faced on coke and Special Brew that he didn’t give a toss. But he started laying in to the Booth family. He compared them to the Borgias and to the Krays and to any number of clichéd inbred degenerates: Okies, banjo-playing hillbillies, Belgian paedophiles… He didn’t even seem to grasp the fact that the audience were wincing and shuffling their feet, looking nervously over towards the bar where one of the female Booth cousins was chugging down rum and limes with a bevy of check-out girls from KwikSave on a girls’ night out.

  “So this Booth brother goes to the flicks with his sister, and lo and behold, Booth genetic instincts being what they are, they start necking and petting. Five minutes later, they’re in the bog and he’s shagging her on the crapper, up every hole he can find. “Fuckin’ hell”, she goes, “you’re even better than Dad!” (pause for laughs, which don’t come….) “I know”, he says, “Mum told me!” ” …

  His finale, apparently, sealed his fate.

  “So I saw this wedding photo in the paper the other day. One look at it, and you just knew it was a Booth clan tribal ceremony. Not so much wedding snaps, as juvie court mug shots… You know, lank greasy hair, toothless grin, pustules and warts, tufts of hair sprouting out of the Hawaiian shirt, three-day beard, massive beer belly, Russian mobster tattoos and more muscle than a wrestler on steroids…. And that was just the bride!”

  He was found three days later, writhing in a pool of blood, piss and vomit in the pub car-park, his face a criss-cross lattice of Stanley knife slashes and half his tongue cut off with a pair of gardening shears. All ten of his fingers had been broken.

  The case hadn’t even got to a preliminary hearing.

  Chapter 3

  Halifax, November 23rd 2001

  So I’m still sitting in the Nag’s Head, swilling the last mouthful of bitter round the bottom of my glass while Terry Booth chats to his cousin at the bar, occasionally looking over at me. He’s enjoying himself, biding his time, milking the build-up for all it’s worth, almost rubbing his hands together in keen anticipation of what’s to come. Whatever that might be. He’s received a couple of calls and conferred with his cousin and I’m guessing everything’s in place.

  My options are limited. I could try and leg it out the back door, but they’ve probably got someone watching. I don’t have a mobile, it’s back at the hotel, and anyway, who am I going to call? The cops? Hardly… I could ask the barman to call me a cab and run and jump into it and try to get back to the hotel, but I have a feeling they’ll have those bases covered too. So I wait…

  And then I decide to move.

  I stand up and walk to the door and Terry leans back on his barstool as I pass and says “Nice to see you, Paul. Keep well. Mind how you go”.

  And he’s laughing as I walk through the door and into the car-park.

  There’s no-one there.

  So I walk back towards the motel, keeping an eye on passing cars, aware of the wind that’s come up and the flakes of snow that have started to fall and how cold it is.

  A police car appears a hundred yards away and I briefly consider hailing it, when I see that it’s slowing down. It comes to a stop beside me and as I bend down to look in the window as it starts to slide down, the back door opens and a big bloke gets out and he’s wearing a balaclava with tiny eye-holes. He pulls out a huge knife and I step back and there’s someone behind me now, and they’re putting a cloth bag over my head and then my hands are tied behind my back. I put up a token struggle but there’s not really any point. I can hear the police car pulling away and another vehicle squealing to a halt. A door opens… I’m bundled into the back seat and two blokes sit on top of me. I can’t see a thing and I can barely breathe and the car speeds away and I know I’m in trouble.

  We drive for almost an hour, up into the hills, the last 30 minutes or so on rough roads, and from the suspension, I’m guessing were in a 4x4. Some serious off-road driving. Sometimes steep, up and down, sometimes through water. No-one says a word. There’s music coming from up front, death metal and grunge and heavy rock, at a strangely subdued level, but apart from that, nothing; no chatter, no laughs, not a sound.

  When we finally stop, the two blokes get off me and I realise how heavy they were. My whole body is stiff and aching and sore as they pull me out and stand me up and walk me a few yards away and then there’s silence. And then I feel a boot in my groin and it’s agony and I know it’s Terry Booth. I’m on my knees and I’m being beaten with bats and 2x4s and wrenches and crowbars. On my arms
, on my head, on my legs, everywhere. I roll over and over and that stops nothing. The blows keep coming and the pain sometimes fades when I feel like I’m blacking out but then it starts again. And then it stops.

  Then I feel another boot on the side of my head and hard vicious taps with hard metal objects on places where it hurts beyond hurting; on my shins, on my ears, on my elbows, on my nose, and I try to scream but there’s blood in my mouth and I’m choking. I feel like I’m falling but I know I’m already on the ground, down and out. And then there’s nothing.

  There’s a lot of nothing for what seems like a long time and then I’m suddenly colder than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m lying in cold, freezing water and I’m almost happy when I realise I can smell it because that means I’m alive and no-one’s hitting me any more. It smells like pig shit or sheep shit… some kind of animal shit, and I’m lying in it and it’s freezing. And then I realise why it feels so cold and so wet… it’s because I’m naked… I try to open my eyes and then realise they are open, but I’ve still got a bag over my head. But my hands aren’t tied any more… so I grab the bag and take it off and it’s still dark. It’s dark because it’s the middle of the night and I’m in the middle of nowhere and there are no lights anywhere and there’s no moon, just a faint glimmer in the air that allows me to see the snow falling and the vague shape of my own naked body standing in a quagmire of peat and shit and icy water on a moor somewhere and nothing else. There isn’t a sound apart from the wind whipping through the heather and whatever scrubby vegetation there is around me and there’s a pulsing throbbing in my head and my teeth are chattering. There’s no car and no people and the bastards have stripped me naked and even taken my shoes and socks but I’m not sure I can walk anyway… It doesn’t take too much effort for me to work out that I’ve probably got a couple of cracked ribs and a broken finger or two, some severely bruised limbs, my nose is smashed and I’ve lost some teeth and the temperature’s about minus five, not including the wind chill factor, and I’m more than likely about 20 miles away from the nearest sign of civilisation. With a bit of luck, I may have another hour before I’m frozen dead meat.

  The Best Present I Ever Got By Paul Boyd aged 11

  When I was 10 (last year) I got a very good present. Mr Hartley gave me an air rifle and he said I have to shoot the birds that was eating his fruit and veg and he will give me a shilling for every bird what I shoot. He said a shilling is like a 10p piece. So I did my sums and if I shoot 10 birds Mr Hartley will give me 1 pound. I can by some sweets and stuf with 1 pound and pehraps a present for Sarah. The shooting is hard and I practissed with tin cans in the garden. Then I shot a bird and Mr Hartley gave me a shilling. I gave the shilling to Sarah like a present and then she gave me the Best Present I Ever Got. She made a whole in the shilling and put it on a neckless and gave it to me and said this is for you its like a Saint Cristophes medal but diferent and it will keep you safe and you will think about me. But it’s not the same shilling cos I kept the one you gave me and this is another one and we have one each. The shilling is round my neck on a chane ekcept when I have a bath cos Mum says the chane will go rustie. My Mum and Dad give me presents some times but my shilling on a chane is the Best Present I Ever Got.

  I’m dying but I decide I don’t want to die yet and so I have to move. My eyes are a bit more used to the light now and I can make out the lay of the land… I’m on a flattish hill covered in heather and gorse and bogs and rough stones but the horizon line fades into grey mist and snow flurries and there are no landmarks, not even any walls or trees and I don’t know which direction might be best. My head hurts like fuck but I try to think. Where’s the pole star? Is there any moss growing on a tree stump that’ll tell me where the north is? Can I see the track we came in on or tyre tracks or any signs at all that might give me a clue? But the snow’s covered everything and I can’t see much anyway… Fuck it, I’m wasting time, I have to run, I have to keep my circulation going, I have to overcome the pain and concentrate on moving.

  Something clicks in my head and so I reach down into the cold shitty mud and smear as much of it as I can on my body, hoping it might dry a bit and conserve a millionth of a degree of body heat, and I find some tufts of sheep wool and stick them on the mud and then I start to run.

  My legs feel like stiff cold icicles that might crack at any moment and I stumble over stones and rough spiny branches and after two minutes I know the soles of my feet are lacerated and bleeding but I keep going. I concentrate on breathing and counting my breaths, trying to ignore the sharp stabbing knives in my chest and pretending not to think about the scraping sound I’m sure is fractured bone splinters from my ribs grinding together and digging into my lungs and filling them with blood because I’m coughing up blood and breathing’s like sucking down razor blades and spitting out broken glass. And then I find some more bits of wool and stick them on the mud because it seems to work a bit and I run on and I try to think about something other than agony and broken bones and the freezing cold that makes my whole body feel like a fleshless flayed skeleton and there are cold white flashes in my head like a dazzling strobe light and I’m scared shitless.

  What I Did on My Holidays By Sarah Hartley aged 9

  On my holidays me and my friend made a hidingplace on an iland. We made a tresure map with a X and berried some secrets and then we hiden the map in our other hidingplace in the summerhouse. Then we prickt our fingers and mixt the bloud and sweared to never to tell nobody. But some times I hide things in the hidingplace like gold and jewals. Then we did swimming in the lake but my Dad was cross because we had no costumes and he said we shoudent.

  I’m falling down a steep bank, rolling over pointed rocks and slashing thorns and piercing sharp broken branches and I collide with something hard, face first and it’s a stone wall. I’m stunned and I think my neck’s broken and I can taste blood dribbling into my mouth… I feel my right eye and my forehead’s incrusted with bits of stone and my eye’s swelling and closing as I feel it, and I’m wondering if I can ever stand up again… Somehow I manage it and I look round for a moment, steadying myself against the wall and I see nothing except snow and more snow and decide to follow the wall which slopes downhill and so I start running again and I’m surprised that I can... And then I see something just ahead of me on the ground and I stop and pick it up. It’s a plastic shopping bag with a Coke tin inside it. There are maybe three drops of slushy frozen Coke in the tin and I swallow them, tasting the sugar, and I put the plastic bag over my head, tying the handles together under my chin, and I press on. 45% of body heat is lost through the head… I remember someone telling me that, but who? I don’t know… and I don’t know how long I’ve been running… ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? I can barely feel my fingers and toes and my thigh muscles feel like they’re going to snap. I count my breaths again, one every four paces, and I start counting out loud, just to hear something apart from my own wheezing and the throbbing in my head that beats time like a hammer on an anvil with every step. And the snow keeps coming, whipping at me in spiralling corkscrew gusts, blowing cold white stabbing icy shards into my eyes and mouth and I’m beginning to feel hypnotised as I run into the whirling white vortex ahead of me as if it’s the snow moving and I’m just running on a treadmill, going nowhere, just waiting to fall off and be swallowed up by the cold ground and die and no-one will ever care.

  Wintertime By Sarah Hartley aged 9

  When its wintertime its very cold and it snows a lot. One time me and my friend Paul builded a snowman in my garden and it was snow-ing a lot and we went into a hut in the garden and played with some plantpots and some string because it was very cold. After a bit we wanted to go home and have some tea but the door was shut. We pusht and pusht but the door was jammmed and stuck and we was stuck too. It was like a emmerjancy so we found some blankits and sacks and playd at beeing campers for a bit untill I started to cry so Paul told me some funy storys and I laffed. Then he got more cold so I rubed his finge
rs and he rubed myne and I found some sweeties in a pockit and we had a picknick. I had 7 sweeties and I gave Paul 4 and I said I wasnt hungrie any more. We was singing some Xmas caroles like A Way in a Mandger when my dad opned the door and he said the snow was 3 feet deep and the door was blockt and he was cross but not too cross and we went inside and had tea. Winter is fun some times but some times winter is danjorous too if you have an emerjancy like what we did.

  I’m beyond cold. Cold would be good. This is absolute zero cold. Breathing is torture and I feel like someone’s pushed a thin glass tube in my mouth and poured liquid nitrogen down it and I have to try to cough it back up to stay alive. Except the nitrogen stays down there and I don’t seem to be breathing at all. I can feel my pulse slowing and even my head’s numb now and there are cold scabby crusts on my lips from frozen saliva and blood and there are waves of cold cramp making my stomach shrivel up, slicing through me like cold steel scalpels and then I hear a dog barking…

  I stop and suck in cold air and listen and pant and there’s nothing, I’ve imagined it, so I start running again. My legs are elastic and like jelly now and I wobble and weave and feel drunk and I have a vision of a pint of beer in a warm pub with a warm fire and a warm voice talking to me and I can smell warm sausages and onions and I run on. Suddenly I’m on a sort of track that goes left and right, with a wire fence running along it and the snow clears for a moment and I see a flash of light in the sky. I look up and there’s another flash and I’m thinking it’s a star or a plane or a satellite when I see two flashes and I wonder if I’m hallucinating. The flashes don’t move but keep flashing and I realise it’s a television mast and I know where I might be. A faint rush of adrenaline flows through me but then I feel sick again and almost double up in agony but I think of something else and scramble over the wire fence and start heading for the television mast trying to imagine what I might find there. I’ve gone about 100 yards when there’s a steep bank in front of me and I climb up on my hands and knees, crawling forward and slipping back and edging forward again, trying to get a handhold on icy stones that break loose and I slide back down, pushing with my feet to get a grip on ice-covered slime and frozen rock and somehow I get to the top and I’m exhausted… I’m utterly drained and my batteries are flat… I think my heart’s stopped beating... Game over… I can’t go any further. I lie down on my stomach and think about resting for a minute and feel snow falling on my back and I want to go to sleep and I close my eyes and I know time’s running out and I’m dying.