Animal Kingdom

by Stephen Sewell

  ‘It’s a suit,’ Darren said, not interested in Pope’s shit.

  ‘What? Do you think it looks good on you?’ Pope persisted.

  It was the sort of wind-up Pope got up to when he wanted you to do something for him. ‘Looks gay—are you gay?’ he asked.

  Darren wasn’t up to it. ‘Fuck off, will ya?’ he said. Darren was the quiet one, the one who went along with things, and even he’d had enough.

  ‘It’s a serious question,’ Pope said. ‘I don’t care if you’re gay or you’re not gay, you know.’

  Darren was big enough to thump him, but would never dare, not knowing what Pope would do when he was in a mood like this. And it was dark. Darren knew how dark it was.

  ‘It’s all right if you are, mate,’ Pope said. ‘I just want you to tell me about it, you know? I don’t care whether you’re gay or you’re not gay; I just want you to talk to me about it.’

  It was like a slow drip eroding your resistance, undercutting you as you tried to ignore it. Eventually you’d throw a punch, you’d be so hurt and angry, and, quick as a flash, Pope would have your arm so far up your back you’d think he was going to snap it off. And then he’d twist it a bit more, just to see you cry.

  So Darren resisted, biting his tongue, and opened the fridge to get something out.

  ‘You making yourself a drink?’ Pope asked, seeing another line of attack.

  ‘Yep,’ Darren answered.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a bourbon and coke.’

  ‘Bourbon and coke’s not a very gay drink,’ Pope said.

  He didn’t even need to think about it; it was part of his DNA: he knew which buttons to press.

  ‘I think—look, if you’re a gay man, if you are, and you want to make yourself a gay drink—you know what I mean? This is what I’m talking about, mate. I just want you to tell me things, you know? It just kills me to see you living a lie.’

  ‘Look, will you fuck off?’ Darren said, picking up the drink. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ Pope asked suddenly, staring straight ahead into the shadows.

  And Darren knew exactly what he was talking about, because he’d been thinking about it, too. ‘I think we should be there for Cath,’ he said, ‘and the family and that.’

  Darren didn’t need much encouragement to do nothing, because that was basically his attitude to everything. If the mower was broken he’d just let the grass grow till someone told him to get it fixed. It wasn’t that he was either lazy or cowardly, though he had a big streak of both. Mainly, it was that he was the baby of the family and his mother had just never let go. Darren supposed she liked him being the baby because it made her forget she was getting old; that’s why he’d never told her about the herpes.

  ‘What are you gonna do, Darren?’ Pope asked pointedly, looking straight at him.

  Darren knew what he was saying, but how much trouble does anyone want in their life? ‘It’s wrong and all that,’ he said, ‘but, you know …’ He trailed off.

  Turning towards him, Pope laid it on. ‘You know, if Baz was still here right now, and we’d just been to your funeral, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because he’d have already done something about it.’

  That wasn’t true. Not because Baz was a coward—he wasn’t, and everyone who knew him knew that—but because he was too smart to do something that stupid, a lot smarter than Pope or any of the rest of them.

  ‘Now, if you don’t want to do anything because you’re scared,’ Pope continued, asking almost as an afterthought, ‘Is it because you’re scared?’

  He was looking straight at Darren now, so there was no escape.

  ‘It’s all right if you are. I just want you to tell me about it. Just talk to me.’

  But Pope didn’t want to talk to anyone, and he wasn’t interested in what Darren had to say. All Pope wanted to do was hammer the coppers and hammer them hard. It wasn’t even because Baz was a mate who deserved revenge.

  It was because Pope wanted blood.

  SEVEN

  J was in the shower the following morning when Pope burst straight in and pulled the curtain aside.

  ‘Where’s Craig?’ he demanded.

  J was a kid, a seventeen-year-old boy, and here he was, starkers in the shower, with a grown man standing over him asking something he didn’t even know the answer to.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said, trying to cover himself.

  What was it? What was actually wrong with Pope? Was he gay, but not man enough to admit it?

  ‘I need a favour, yeah?’ Pope said, glancing down at J’s cock. ‘You’re good with cars, right?’

  J was okay with cars, but he wasn’t a professional or anything. He didn’t make a habit of stealing people’s cars, but he could get one going if he needed to.

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered, wondering what Pope was up to.

  ‘Okay, you get me a Commodore or something like that,’ Pope said, ‘and bring it to Darren’s place. At two o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  What sort of shit was Pope pulling with a stolen car at two o’clock in the morning?

  ‘How come?’ J asked.

  It was the first time he had ever questioned any of them. He knew Pope and Craig didn’t want a stolen car at two in the morning to go for a joy ride, and felt he had the right to know what they did want it for.

  ‘Because I told you to,’ Pope answered gruffly, turning back towards the door.

  This was it—J’s baptism. This is where he started to learn what it was like to be part of the Cody family.

  He heard the door slam shut, and pulled the shower curtain across. The water was going cold, but he stood there, shivering and wondering what Pope was up to.

  Stealing the car wasn’t hard—that wasn’t why J didn’t want to do it; it was because he didn’t want to be part of something that could go out of control, and, knowing the little he did about Pope, that’s what he expected to happen.

  Pope was weird. Disconnected. He had this odd way of looking at you sometimes, like he was looking straight through you to something on the other side, something that you couldn’t see yourself.

  He didn’t do many drugs—he was spaced enough as it was—but the ones he did were heavy-duty. Benzodiazepine. Quaaludes. Nose bleeders. The kind of stuff that put holes in your brain, like any of them needed another hole. And then the other things to smooth him back out: the injectables. And when he took drugs, it wasn’t for the fun of it, not to have a good time, like normal people; it was to let himself go madder than he already was.

  In fact, no-one ever had a good time around Pope: you were just too scared. Breathless scared, because at any moment you knew he could do the maddest shit, like stand up and set fire to the cat or put your head through the TV because he couldn’t stand that Daryl Somers for one more second.

  Mad shit. Dangerous shit. That was the sort of shit he liked.

  There was an anger there, too, a deep, hard anger that no-one who knew him could ever work out. But if you’d seen how he’d been bashed as a kid—not by Smurf, but by some of the men in her life, men who’d bashed her as well—if you’d seen that, you’d understand what it was about him that was so frightening. He was like one of those attack dogs that never lets go, even after they’re dead; you’ve got to break their jaws and prise them off. That’s what he was like.

  And it was a wonder that someone hadn’t already put a bullet in him or tossed him in jail and thrown away the key.

  J got the car and drove it over to Darren’s.

  The thing about stealing cars, or stealing anything, really, is that you’ve just got to believe it’s yours. If you’re nervy or fidgety, if you don’t want to be there, you’ll blow it for sure. When you steal something, you’ve just got to walk up to it and claim it. Everything about you has got to say This is mine, and, if it does, even if the guy who owns it is standing there, he’ll be thrown. And then if he challenges you, you just say, Oh, sorry, mate, my mistake, and
walk away.

  Confidence, that’s the thing. You’ve got to be confident. That’s the first thing they’ll teach you in business school. And when you think of the most successful businessmen— Donald Trump, Alan Bond—that’s the thing they’ve got as well.

  If you say it’s yours, it’s yours—that’s the way it works in this society.

  By the time J got to the house, Darren had already bonged himself into the Twilight Zone and was seeing little blue flashes everywhere.

  Catching sight of J, Pope demanded, ‘Have you got the car?’

  ‘Yes,’ J answered apprehensively.

  There was this weird, heavy feeling in the place, like something really bad was going down.

  Craig was in the other room, wired up and pacing around like a caged lion.

  ‘Where is it?’ Pope asked.

  J told him it was parked around the back, and then Pope laid into Darren. ‘What are you doing that for?’ he snapped as Darren reached for another pipe. ‘What are you doing that now for? What makes you think that’s a good idea to do that now?’

  Darren hardly even looked at him, he was so tight.

  It was like there was a haze in the air, some evil menace.

  Darren eventually stood and made for the door.

  Turning towards him, Pope hissed, ‘The bag. Get the bag.’

  Craig came in from the other room and stalked past J without even looking at him. The brothers were together, but it was like they were just three separate beings, all focused on a single thing.

  Darren went into the back and returned with a long sports bag with something in it, then went out the front door without saying a word.

  ‘Anyone calls while we’re out,’ Pope said to J, ‘tell them Darren’s in the shower.’

  And that was it. In a minute, they were gone. J didn’t know where, but he knew it wasn’t to collect money for the Little Sisters of the Poor. And it wasn’t to do any of the normal shit you’d expect idiots like Pope and his brothers to do. They weren’t on their way to sell drugs or smash open warehouse doors. J didn’t know what it was, and didn’t want to know.

  There’s a way of living in this world, a way of being, where you don’t see anything apart from what matters to you, and that’s the way most people live, because, as soon as you start seeing the big picture, it gets too difficult. In the big picture, we’re all dead anyhow.

  One time J had read this story about an Antarctic explorer. Maybe at school. The guy was lost, a million miles from safety. He didn’t have anything. His dogs were dead; his mates were dead. He pulled his boot off one time, and the heel of his foot came off, just raw flesh, the boot full of blood, so he just put it back on so he could keep walking.

  But he had this one thing he did. He carved a spoon out of a piece of wood. He didn’t have anything to eat, but he carved a spoon out of part of his sled. And J thought about that a lot. Why would someone spend the energy on something so pointless? And then he realised: it was to stop himself from thinking about where he was, because, if he had, he would have just given up and died.

  You have to keep going, that’s the thing. You have to keep your head down and just keep going.

  J didn’t know if that’s what Pope and the others thought, but he did know something. They were stepping away from whatever it was they knew, and they were going deeper than they’d ever been before.

  He couldn’t go home—he didn’t have a car and anyhow he was part of their alibi, he realised. He slumped down and turned on the telly. There was nothing on—late-night junk, with phone-sex ads every five seconds. After a while, he dozed off into a light sleep but kept waking up thinking someone was breaking in, and then realising he was still asleep, dreaming. It was like there was a net over his face that he couldn’t get off, no matter how hard he tried; something was trying to trap him.

  A bit later, he woke up for real, but it was still dark. He got up and made himself some toast. The TV was still on, still with the same crap on it. Women with big tits; unbelievable deals on steak knives. The planet’s unconscious seeping through the airwaves: the picture wasn’t pretty.

  The toast got burned, and, as he was scraping it off in the sink, Darren charged back in and shot straight past him to the bathroom.

  ‘Darren?’ J asked, watching him go.

  He waited for a minute, expecting Pope and Craig to come in as well, but, when they didn’t, he followed Darren down the hall.

  He was sitting on the bath, scrubbing his shoes with a brush, like they were covered in something he really wanted to get off, but J couldn’t see what.

  ‘Darren?’ he said, but Darren didn’t say a word. ‘What happened, Darren?’

  Darren didn’t even look up; he just kept scraping away at his shoes, like he was in shock. ‘Where’s Pope and Craig?’ J asked.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Darren said. That was it, just ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Should I go home?’ J asked, but Darren didn’t answer; he was somewhere else, somewhere bad.

  J didn’t have a car, so he couldn’t go home. He didn’t know the layout of the house, and was scared of what he’d find if he started looking, so he lay down on the sofa again instead. He didn’t want to be there at all—he didn’t want to be within a thousand miles of there with them the way they were—but he didn’t have a choice. There was a blanket that Darren had been using lying on the couch, so he just cuddled up under that and went back to sleep.

  Sometime in the middle of the night the phone rang— the house phone. It rang and rang and rang, like it was ringing inside his dreams, and when he finally realised it was a real phone and picked it up, he wasn’t sure where he was.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked, spooked and still half asleep.

  But there was no answer.

  ‘Yes?’ he repeated. ‘Who’s there?’

  It was quiet except for the sound of breathing on the other end.

  ‘Who is it?’ J asked, frightened, and then he heard a click, and the line went dead.

  Fuck, what was going on? What had they all got up to?

  The following day, or at least when a thin, sickly sun peeped through the overcast sky, things weren’t much better. J made his way home, and when Pope had finally appeared he slumped into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea.

  ‘What happened to the Commodore?’ J asked nervously.

  ‘Burned it.’

  ‘Why? What’d you do?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ Pope answered, and, looking directly at him, he continued, ‘We were with you all night, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ J answered reluctantly.

  ‘You rubbed it down, didn’t you?’ Pope continued. ‘You got rid of your prints?’

  ‘Sure,’ J answered. But he couldn’t remember whether he had or not, and was starting to panic.

  But that was all Pope said and J was too scared to ask anything else.

  Eventually Pope set himself up in front of the TV with his little chemistry set and his syringe, and was watching the cricket. ‘Hey. Hey, this Sri Lankan guy here, what’s his name?’ he asked, friendly and relaxed after his shot.

  ‘Muralitharan,’ J answered.

  ‘What?’ Pope asked.

  ‘Muralitharan,’ J repeated.

  ‘Yeah. He’s funny,’ Pope said, chuckling inanely as he settled into the couch.

  ‘Where’s Craig?’ J finally got up the courage to ask.

  ‘I dunno,’ Pope answered, still fixated on the cricket. Then, looking up like he’d just thought of something, he asked, ‘Hey, who cuts your hair?’

  That was the last question J was expecting. ‘Nicky,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’ Pope answered. ‘Do you think she might cut my hair if I asked her?’

  J had already decided that if Pope asked Nicky anything, he’d drop him. He’d felt Pope creeping up on him like a disease, like something crawling under his skin.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, turning back down the corridor so he didn’t have to listen to him any more.


  ‘Where are you going?’ Pope asked, as if he had the right to know everyone’s business.

  ‘Just going to my room,’ J answered without turning.

  ‘Listen,’ Pope continued.

  J stopped and stood with his back to him.

  ‘You know if you ever want to talk about anything, or anything, I’m there, right?’

  Was he joking?

  ‘I mean, if you need help with anything or whatever,’ Pope added.

  J didn’t know what to make of him. Was he a psycho? He would stand over you one minute like he was your boss— because I told you to—and then act as if he was your best mate the next. As if you’d want someone like him to know your secrets in a million years.

  ‘I’d like to do that for you,’ he concluded.

  It took J’s breath away. Pope actually thought he was the head of the family now, after Baz’s death, the daddy bear. He was so far removed from reality that he thought it perfectly normal to offer fatherly advice to someone he’d forced into being an accomplice to whatever fucked-up crime he’d just committed.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ J said, walking away, not hoping anything, just hoping Pope’d shut up.

  But he should have walked away a lot sooner, because as he moved down the corridor he saw two SOG guys in their full metal jacket clobber stalking past the front door and down the side of the house, and then two more heading straight for him, guns pointed, and roaring. Only he was so shocked, he couldn’t hear what they were saying; if he could have, he would have heard them screaming ‘On the floor! On the floor!’ And outside he would have seen the street filled with flashing lights and snipers and military-style vehicles with police choppers hovering overhead as the law descended on them.

  Before he knew it, he was wobbling on his knees with his hands up behind his head and an M16 pointing straight at him, just like they’d pointed it straight at Baz. Even though it was happening right in front of him, he still didn’t know what was happening.

  This is how you die, he thought.

  And he was right.

  Pope seemed unfazed, his head pressed against the floor, his hands being cable-tied behind his back like he was an Arab terrorist or something. Maybe he was used to it. Or the drugs had taken the edge off things. Perhaps he was too stupid to know what was going on or perhaps this was just the way it was—and he didn’t give a fuck any more.