by Gary McMahon
I stayed low to the ground and followed him through the smelly undergrowth, sweat pouring into my eyes and my jeans getting filthy from the loamy earth. I felt like a soldier lost deep behind enemy lines: a man on a mission, with only his wits to aid him.
Then Grandad stopped, and reached behind him to grab my arm; he dragged me up alongside him, and pointed into the clearing that had appeared ahead. Initially I didn’t realise what I was looking at, but then the details became clear and I was scared all over again.
There seemed to be some kind of shantytown set up in the clearing, with tiny, hastily-assembled lean-to structures and jerry-built dwellings made from corrugated iron sheets. I saw a few caravans dotted here and there, with their doors hanging off the hinges, and no glass in the window frames. They were jacked up with their axles resting on bricks and rocks, the wheels long since removed.
People were sitting at small fires, or wandering around the clearing. Their faces were filthy, and they were dressed in rags. Malnourished bare-chested children ran in and out of the paltry dwellings, bellies distended by starvation, hair falling out in tufts.
A tall woman with prominent ribs and a deformed left arm was breast feeding a baby outside one of the ruined caravans. I stared at her saggy breasts, feeling my burgeoning sexuality rear its ugly head. I was disgusted to find that I had an erection. Then, when I looked at the woman’s face all thoughts of pre-teen lust were forgotten. She was haggard, drawn, barely even there at all. Her eyes were as dead as those of a fish on a slab, and her down-turned mouth revealed stumpy teeth that were black as tar.
None of these shells of people spoke to each other; they seemed too tired, too defeated. It was as if they’d simply given up, and were waiting here to die.
“Let’s go fishing,” said Grandad, and I suddenly remembered where I was, and who I was with.
He leaped to his feet and charged into the clearing, silent as an assassin, quick as a speeding bullet. He headed straight for a group of young girls who were gathered around one of those pitiful fires warming something in a dented baked bean can on the rocks that surrounded the flame.
There was a pause before any of the bedraggled folk realised that anything was amiss, and then the breastfeeding woman noticed him and began to groan.
All hell broke loose: the tattered people scattered like antelope before an attacking cheetah, fleeing and leaving their belongings, running and wailing incoherently; darting into the cover afforded by the trees. Grandad scampered in a straight line towards the girls, intent on his task- whatever that may be.
He grabbed a small one, and tucked her under his arm. Then he turned, and bellowed at me: “Come on, boy! Come on!”
I ran to his side, feeling a strange kind of power as people fled before me.
“What about this one?” yelled Grandad, manhandling the girl onto the ground. She was young – probably about ten years old, perhaps even younger. I stared at her wide frightened eyes, then up at my grandfather. I didn’t know what to say.
“Too small,” he muttered. “Have to throw her back.”
Then he was away, running back into the fray. I saw him grab a lanky woman with dirty black hair and pale blue eyes; he tagged her with the boathook, swinging it so that the point sank into the bare meat of her shoulder. He tugged her towards him. She was screaming hoarsely, strangely, tears gouging clean lines through the layered dirt on her face. And Grandad was laughing, his eyes blazing with a distinctly unhealthy light.
He wrapped her up in the potato sack, trussing the whole package with rope that he pulled out in a neat coil from inside. The woman squirmed quite a bit, but after a few hefty whacks from the boat hook she went still. I could see the sack rising and falling rapidly as she breathed; it’s a sight that has stayed with me, haunting my dreams and staining my waking hours.
Back at the truck, Grandad threw her in the back, securing her there with a chain that was attached to a small motorised winch meant for dragging heavy objects. Her breathing was deeper now, and I thought that she might have passed out.
It was only then that I noticed the hooves. Where the woman’s legs poked out of the frayed end of the sack, a pair of cloven hooves could be seen in place of human feet. And then it clicked, just like that. They had all had hooves instead of feet: the ones that had fled before Grandad, the little one that he’d cast aside in favour of this older female…
As we drove back to the house full night began to bloom; thick black petals of darkness erupting and spreading across the irrevocably altered landscape. I could hear the woman’s hooves skittering in the back of the truck, sense her fear, taste her hatred.
“Our family used to own all this countryside, boy. Long ago, in another time. Your great-great granddaddy was a very rich and famous man. Well respected – so much that a great writer even wrote a book about him, making a story out of his work. He was a scientist, you see; studied genetics. But that was before the government came in and made us sell them everything we had.”
I felt him turn his head to look at me as he spoke, but I couldn’t face him. Not yet.
“But we still have special privileges. License to go where we like, to fish where we want. To continue the family traditions.”
He fell silent then, realising that it was too early for me to respond.
When we reached the house he sent me on in ahead of him, and I heard him grunting as he struggled to unload his catch from the truck. I went into the cold living room, and listened as he dragged her up the stairs. She made tiny yelping noises as he coerced her up each step, and Grandad muttered a constant stream of obscenities to her, or perhaps to himself.
After about half an hour he came back down to find me.
I was sitting in an armchair, my arms wrapped around my middle, and shivering. Grandad stood above me, casting me in his shadow.
“Okay, boy,” he said. “It’s time”
He reached down and took me by the hand, pulled me to my feet, and led me upstairs to the small room. There was a key in the lock, and he turned it and pushed me inside.
“I’m locking you in here with her. By the time I come back for you, you’ll be a man. Don’t disappoint me, boy. This is your rite of passage, your route to manhood. We’ve all gone through it, every male of the clan. Now it’s your turn.”
As the door closed slowly in my face he gave me an exhausted smile.
I turned hesitantly, almost too afraid to face what waited for me inside the room, and couldn’t even find an echo of surprise within me when I saw the hoofed woman sitting naked on the bed. Her wrists were clamped together, and another thick metal chain bound her legs to the iron frame. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, as if in prayer, and her eyes were downcast, staring at the floor.
At last I allowed myself to admit what I was expected to do. It was horrible, vile; tantamount to rape. I was supposed to enter adulthood by coupling with this poor dumb beast, and thus carry on the proud traditions of my forefathers, the bastards who’d owned this land long before my father was even born. Had he done this? If Grandad was to be believed, they all had. Every man who had been born into the bloodline.
I tried to speak to the woman, to reassure her, but the words wouldn’t come. I was mute with horror. Instead I crossed the room towards her. As I got closer I could see that she was silently weeping; and when I put out a hand to wipe away the tears she flinched as if expecting a blow.
“You’re safe with me,” I said, silently cursing my Grandad, and every male who had been here before him. Damning the family name of Moreau.
“Shushshshsh…it’s okay,” I whispered, caressing her sweaty forehead and pushing damp hair out of her eyes.
She looked up at me at last, those cool pale eyes heating up with a glimmer of something that could have been hope. Chest hitching, throat constricting, she opened her mouth and tried to communicate. The cauterised nub that had once been her tongue flapped mutely in her slack jaw; it had been cut out long ago, perhaps on the day of her birth,
rendering her speechless.
That was why none of them had spoken back at the compound. Why they’d just sat in silence, waiting for whoever or whatever came for them.
Shocked and numb and ashamed of who I was, I took her in my arms, felt her trembling warmth against my flesh. I could hold it inside no longer, so I let the rage out in a flood of remorse. I wept and wept until, a long time later, I finally fell asleep in her dirty arms.
Grandad stormed into the room early the next morning, dragging the woman from my bed and carrying her back downstairs. I was unable to read his expression when he looked at me, but was convinced that I had glimpsed pride in his eyes.
As I changed my scruffy clothes I heard the truck pull away outside. A short time later, while I was making coffee in the kitchen, Grandad returned alone. He hadn’t been gone long enough for a return journey to the compound. My heart sank and I refused to contemplate what he might have done with the woman. When he entered the kitchen he was breathing heavily and his face was flushed a deep shade of red. He looked like he’d been exerting himself, carrying out some intensely physical task.
I felt like stabbing him with one of his carving knives, or smashing him over the head with the kettle. Instead, I poured him a coffee and we sat together without speaking until my dad arrived later that morning to take me home.
****
That weekend was never mentioned again; not by my Grandad on the rare occasions that I saw him afterwards, nor by my dad. And certainly not by myself. The subject, it seemed, was taboo, verbotten. So much remained unsaid.
Grandad died five years later, succumbing to a quick and reasonably painless heart attack whilst reading a book on genetics. I wasn’t sorry; I felt little, if any, grief.
My mother went not long after, continuing the legacy of the women in our family dying first. Dad was distraught, and moved into the big old house near Fell. He became a hermit, a recluse; didn’t even turn up for my graduation from university, or my wedding.
He did, however, surface when my son Teddy was born. The old man made the long drive south when the boy was six months old, bearing gifts and smiles and congratulations. Sarah, my wife, was pleased that the family was together, but I just wanted the grizzled old bastard out of my life for good. I certainly didn’t want him anywhere near my son, and after two days of silent pressure he got the message and returned to his house of memories.
Now Teddy is approaching his twelfth year, and my father has started writing to me. Long, rambling letters about tradition and manhood, and anecdotes about when I was a little boy. He even mentioned Grandad in the last missive; and suggested that I let Teddy go and stay with him for a weekend. That he could take the boy fishing, like Grandad did with me.
He even guaranteed that my boy would return to me a man.
Even after all these years I’m afraid to tell him the truth of what went on in the small room that distant summer night when I was twelve years old. It was always assumed that I had done what was expected of me. Become a man. But the truth of it is that I will remain forever a small boy, crying hot tears into the grimy, sweat-stinking breasts of something only partly human - a beast I’d thought existed only in cheap fictions, and whose shabby progenitors had been created long ago in my families own tawdry House of Pain.
Last week I went back there for the first time since that weekend. I told Sarah that I was going to visit my dad. That we were trying to work things out. Instead I took his key and went looking for the compound. The fishing spot. It took some doing, but eventually I found it. A clearing within a dense band of trees and heavy foliage, lean-to shacks and flyblown shelters clustered in little groups. Raggedy, semi-naked figures sitting by waning fires, dragging their chipped hooves on the dusty ground, scratching their mangy hides against the rough-barked trees, or just staring mutely at a purely conceptual space located somewhere beyond the great electrified fence.
Soon the time will come when my son will be summoned to go fishing with his Grandad. Part of me knows exactly what I’ll say when that call comes; another, deeper, much younger part of me isn’t so sure. Perhaps that’s the time when I will truly become a man after all.
SOMETHING IN THE WAY
I
“A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”
Franz Kafka
“Many people attest to the existence of snuff films even though no one has ever actually seen one.”
D.I. Sebastian Fawkes, North Yorkshire Police, Scarbridge Division.
The bar downstairs had closed over an hour ago, sending the drunks and the party people careering off into their own or each other’s beds. After the music stopped, the silence seemed deafening to Pierce, and he turned on his radio to fill the gaps. Johnny Cash sang about some unnamed Hurt in his familiar aching voice; Pierce closed his eyes and drifted in someone else’s pain for a little while. The darkness behind the lids coiled like snakes; Pierce found the illusion strangely comforting.
Various street sounds filtered through from outside: distant stumbling footsteps, cats fighting over the contents of dustbins outside the takeaway pizza joint, car engines purring along the main road, the intermittent ticking of the traffic lights on the corner, changing up and down through their coloured sequence. Pierce slipped into a light doze, the music and night sounds and serpentine blackness lulling him like a nursery rhyme; his breathing became low and regular and his body relaxed for the first time in days.
Another noise, this one more alien to his ears, arose from outside the window, but he ignored the stealthy slithering and drifted into a light doze. The sound continued, growing closer, whatever produced it getting in the way of Pierce’s dreams. It was as if a part of the city itself were reaching out a hand to form an impenetrable barrier around his feelings.
A sudden high-pitched squeal from one of those battling felines pulled him rudely from his slumber and he emerged like a swimmer from the sea; the low slithering sound receded, drawing back into the greater soundtrack of urban life.
He blinked his eyes and clenched his fists, suddenly unaware of his surroundings. When at last he recognised the inside of the cheap room above the down-market bar, he relaxed, but only slightly. He reached out towards the old nightstand, his hand grasping the spiral-bound notebook he kept there, next to a red ballpoint pen. It felt cold and dry, like the skin of a reptile. He pulled it to his chest and clutched it there like a bible, or a treasured thing; and indeed it was treasured. The book was his lifeline, his mind-map, and his mission. It was all he had left, and to lose it would mean the end of everything he’d ever known.
Pierce got to his feet, running a hand through the coarse hairs on his broad chest. As he walked to the bathroom he felt crumbs and dirt on the soles of his bare feet. How had he come to this? Living in a single dirty room above a pick-up joint in a drab northern town, watching transient couples come and go from the vantage point of his smeared window. A twinge of regret tugged at his stomach, trying to make him remember as he pissed in the dirty toilet bowl and stared at his unshaven face in the mirror above the chipped cistern instead, feeling watched by eyes other than his own from behind the glass.
He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want to forget. All he wanted was an answer to it all; any answer would do, and he felt that he was so close to one that he could almost touch it. He glanced back through the doorway at the notebook he’d placed on the bed. The words in that book were his route to that answer, clues to lead him to some sort of revelation. Or were they just the empty doodling of a mad man, straws to be clutched at the wrong end of midnight in a cold bed in a lonely room with nothing to keep him warm but a manufactured sense of purpose?
The radio droned from the side of the bed, some late-night deejay spouting banalities from a studio fifty miles away. Spinning platters of love and heartbreak to soothe the sleepless nights of the lost and the lonely. A voice in the dark who pretended to care, to empathise, but who would climb into his car after his shift and drive home to
his wife who waited in their expensive house somewhere in the suburbs. Just another fraud, another talking head exploiting the misery of those who were always left behind.
Pierce flushed the toilet, the sound of the water swirling in the bowl sounding like wet feet slapping against stone in the cramped room. He walked to the window, looked out at the street, and wondered if he had lost his mind. The view outside offered no response, and life carried on around him. Buildings sat in silence and people slept or fucked or masturbated in the dark. Pierce felt like crying, but knew that he would not; his tears had dried up long ago, before he had accepted that life was what happened to others. People like him knew only the faded wallpaper of cheap rented rooms, the sound of rain on dirty windows, the forlorn and pitiful smile of a tired waitress over the breakfast table.
Pierce sat down on the bed, feeling the thin sheets bunch up against his arse as he settled his weight onto the squeaky mattress. He picked up the notebook, handling it with care and affection. He opened it with his eyes closed, savouring the moment. When he looked down at the first page, his heart felt swollen with some unnameable emotion. It was always the same. The words on the page seemed to promise so much, yet reveal so little.
He wondered again if he had lost his mind. Then he read the words one more time.
Is something in the way?
Five words in red ink on the narrow-lined page. A cryptic question that probably meant nothing to the rest of the world’s population but had come to mean so much to Pierce. A razor-edged enquiry, a hurtful truism: yes, but oh so much more than that.
A clue.
II
It had begun one Friday night in a little dive of a pub near the Victorian town hall building. Pierce was stood up by a girl he had met a few weeks before, a slight young thing with bottle blonde hair and too much make-up who picked him up in a Dixie Fried Chicken place on Pilgrim Street. She took him home for the night, sharing her body and her bed, and he skulked off early the next morning, not wanting to speak to her again. An empty one-night stand, a cheap fuck after a drunken night; but he telephoned her the next day and arranged to meet up for a drink, feeling particularly alone that evening and desperate to use up some nervous energy.