by A. J. Kirby
‘Someone else has moved in there. Some other old guy,’ I said.
Dad brought my head back against his chest. I could hear the haphazard beating of his heart that was once so true. I used to sit on his knee and listen to its metronomic progression every evening when I was little, when he thought I was sat watching cartoons. I always had my eyes closed… Or did I? Was I remembering something else? Was it someone else’s memory I was clinging to? Was it some film I’d seen at the barracks or rented from M & S Video Supplies?
‘You’re in shock son. Everything must have been building up,’ whispered dad. ‘What with your leg and everything. And coming back here to find out about Lion, and now this… Well, it’s hardly surprising… We can get you help, lad.’
‘I can’t take it any more,’ I sobbed. ‘Help me, dad.’
‘I’ll always help you, son,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘That – along with worrying – well, they’re kind of my only profession nowadays. But listen; first I need you to come with me to the police station. You need to tell them about the state he was in. Rule yourself out of the enquiries, so to speak.’
‘But… but… you said that it wasn’t Burt that was in the shop on Dye Lane. You said there was…’
‘Not Burt, Gary; Dick. You need to tell them about Dick.’
Chapter Fifteen
“The sacrificial rite”
Now I’m not sure what real or fictitious memories are any more, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I do seem to have this nagging recollection of dad always saying to me: ‘If I’ve told you once, Gary, I’ve told you a thousand times.’ That morning, up on the top field of Summit Farm, dad must have had to explain about Dick’s death about a thousand times, and still I had questions. Still I couldn’t get it through my ‘thick skull’ that two of us were down now. Fifty percent. Old Tommy Peaker was half-way through his revenge mission, and I’d barely even had time to formulate a plan.
So, it’s probably best that I just let dad explain what happened to Dick, or at least, what the police figured happened. Because it’s all still mucked up in my head.
It was one of the early shift that found him. They start at six am. In fact, the only time the toffeeworks has not got workers in it is between the hours of five and six, so that’s when they thought he must have done it. They try to keep the machines running for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, only closing down because of new noise and environmental regulations. Honestly, it’s a surprise they haven’t got round that by employing quieter machines. They’re still processing the workers here, Gary; they still are.
Anyway, I’d better get off my high-horse hadn’t I? A young lad found him; lad by the name of Mark Birch. Nice boy. The quiet type; I used to know his dad. Now Mark was a dedicated worker. Would never complain because he just thought himself lucky to have a job. Just the type that the toffeeworks like. Now Mark was always charged with getting in there early; going round and switching on the machines and getting them warmed up. Done it for the past ten years now, so it’s second nature to him. I suppose they made him into a kind of machine himself.
Anyway, yes; I’ll get on with it. So Mark gets to work at a quarter to six in the morning. Has to walk there every day as there aren’t any buses running at that time in the morning. How convenient for him, eh? And when he gets to the gate, he can tell that something isn’t right. You know that feeling you get that you can’t quite put your finger on. Like you’ve suddenly had an eighth of a premonition and you just know something bad is going to happen.
Don’t give me that look, son, you know that if I’m telling the story I’ll tell it like this. I suppose I’m trying to soften the blow for you in a way...
He checks all the locks and they’re all fine. So he tries to forget that feeling that he’s just had and he opens up just as he always has for ten years. And he goes into the kitchenette and makes himself a brew, and then ever so slowly ambles into the main hall where the machines are; the mixing vats and the like. And I don’t know about you, but once you know a place like the back of your hand, you just don’t really look up. Ever. You tend to stare at your feet or at the cup of steaming coffee that you’ve got in your hands. You don’t really feel the need to look right up there in the rafters.
Now this is all second hand – third hand maybe – but this is what I heard. For some reason – perhaps it was the funny feeling that he got outside the gates – Mark Birch looks up into the rafters this morning. And he sees your friend Richard Featherstone hanging from a noose which has been tied around one of the rafters. How he’s managed to get himself up there nobody can really tell. How he’s managed to get in there without breaking through the chains on the gate, nobody rightly knows. All they know is that he’d hung himself.
Of course, could be that he managed to slip in during the night shift. Most of the people that do the night shift take in hip-flasks and the like just to get them through it. And you can’t really blame them. Or I suppose you can if they fail to spot someone slipping into the building that’ll then go on to kill themselves.
Anyway, police think open and shut case despite the fact that it would have been so difficult for him to get up there. I suppose they reckon that it would be just as hard for someone else to get up there and do it to him, and suicide’s the easiest explanation. Less questions asked. Less leg-work. Less misery for all concerned. Apart from poor Dick’s kids and that girlfriend of his that he treated so badly.
What did Newton Mills do to those boys, Gary? What did it do?
Oh, and before I forget, there was one other thing. One other thing that was pretty weird to tell you the truth. And I only know this because I spoke to Mark’s dad. When they cut Dick down from the rafters, they found this strange sticky substance on his chest. At first they thought it was blood, but when one brave soul actually sniffed the stuff, they realised that it was from the mix that goes into make those Strawberry Skulls sweets. You know the ones?
Anyway, yes; he’d daubed red candy on his own chest. Now why on earth would anyone want to do that?
I screwed up my eyes and tore at the grass we were sitting on. I had to feel something tangible. Had to hold on. It felt like the grass was the only thing keeping me from falling off the precipice.
‘What had he daubed on his own chest, dad?’ I asked.
Dad shook his head; he thought he’d already gone too far. Probably thought he shouldn’t have broken the news to me while I was still so fucked up. But he thought I knew. And that’s why he thought I was fucked up in the first place. Only too late did he realise that instead of actually discussing Dick’s death like rational human beings, he was breaking the news to me…
‘Was it a number?’ I continued.
‘How do you know that?’ sighed dad. ‘Or should I not ask. Was this some stupid prank gone-wrong, Gary? Did Twinnie have something to do with this? Did you?’
‘No prank,’ I managed to say. ‘Not a prank at all.’
‘Well you clearly seem to know more than you’re letting on,’ said dad. ‘Would you mind telling me what the fuck is going on?’
I thought of all the times I hadn’t been able to explain myself to my dad in the past. I thought of all the opportunities he’d given me, but it just hadn’t been the right time, or I hadn’t been in the right mood, or I just couldn’t tell him any more because it had got that bad. And suddenly I wanted to tell him everything.
‘It’s bad shit,’ I said. ‘Rotten to the core.’
‘And this bad shit started before you got back? You just happened to get mixed in with it, like you used to?’
‘No,’ I breathed, attempting to bite the bullet. Finding it cold and steely and not at all easy to grip between the teeth. ‘This bad shit started a long, long time ago. Back when we were kids. We did something that was unforgivable…’
‘Everything’s forgivable,’ said dad, reaching out and draping an arm over my shoulder. ‘You just have to know the right people to ask for forgiveness.’
‘But… if you knew… You’d walk away from me now and you’d never want to see me again.’
‘I never see you anyway, Gary. Where would be the difference?’
He was staring out over the town and in that moment, I knew he hated it just as much as I did. But he loved it too. I could see the way his eyes followed the path of the river in the gorge or the shape of the hills across the way… Or maybe it was the geography of the town that he loved, and the buildings and the people that he hated. Maybe he, like everyone else, was seduced by the beauty of the place on a summer’s day, and never saw until too late what it was like on a damp winter evening, when all of the insects came out from under their rocks looking to feed on the hope and blood of those that weren’t taken yet.
‘Just trust me on this, dad. You wouldn’t want to know me…’
‘I should have moved away from here after your mum… after your mum died. I should have taken you and your brother away. But I was too worried about how we’d cope with all the upheaval. I put too many obstacles in our way…’
‘Dad; me and Steve would never have stood for it if you made us move away from here. It’s in our blood. You can’t help it. Nobody can help it. It’s just the way things were meant to be.’
Dad nodded, wiped away one of his own tears.
I shuddered at the thought of what I now had to do. What I was now going to force myself to do. I was going to come clean; they have it just right that term. Because that was what it was starting to feel like, the more I was starting to open up to this stranger; my dad. It felt as though years and years of grime were about to be washed away. And I didn’t care what would happen to me.
I shivered again.
‘You all right, Gary?’ asked dad. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I’m all right,’ I breathed. ‘I need to tell you…’
‘But you’re not right, Gary. Look at the state of you. You’re turning blue with cold. You’re nearly purple with cold,’ said dad. ‘Let’s get you back home and in front of the fire. We don’t have to go up to the police station today. Not if you’re not up to it. You’ve had a shock son.’
I raised my eyes to the sky, suddenly remembering why it was I could never tell dad anything. He just didn’t want to listen. His heart was already pummelled and battered to a pulp by what had happened to mum and to Steve. He knew he couldn’t take any more and so he just talked and talked and talked but never really said anything. And here was me thinking old daddy would be here to save the day. More fool me.
Dad climbed to his feet and dusted down his jeans. I don’t know why he bothered; they were covered in mud anyway from when I’d knocked him to the ground. Dried blood coated one side of his face too. He wouldn’t exactly pass muster walking down the main street like that.
‘You coming?’ he said, offering me his hand. Again, he said it like he was shouting down a well; like his hand was a bucket being lowered. A bucket containing my life preserver.
‘I can’t dad,’ I said, coldly. ‘Deep down, you know that. This whole thing has to finish and it’ll finish up here, at Summit Farm.’
Dad jogged from one foot to the other, trying to get the feeling back. I had the feeling that he’d been doing similar ever since mum died.
‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ he said, finally, without looking at me.
‘Yes it does, dad. Yes it does.’
And he walked away from me then. Walked away although I knew it was the final spear in his heart to do so. Walked away and back into the town that he so loved and so hated and which had ruined his whole family’s life. I hoped that he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Certainly not anything as stupid as I was now planning to do.
Chapter Sixteen
“Fists of rage”
After we killed Tommy Peaker, everything went on as per usual. It was mad – ‘fucking mad’ as Twinnie put it – but nobody seemed to give a shit at all about the disappearance of that poor little boy from Newton Mills School. We sat in soulless classrooms and barely listened as the register was read out and Tommy once again didn’t answer his call. Of course, there were the whisperings in the dark corridors or in the toilets, probably in the staff room too. Rumours were spread about the Black Panther. One rumour in particular involved a group of boys that had gone on an ill-advised camping trip up at Grange Heights. Apparently one of them had seen the beast carrying a piece of young Tommy’s clothing between his teeth.
But the police scoffed at the tales. They had enough trouble dealing with Tommy’s mum who made herself an ever-present in the police waiting room, bringing along her hip-flask and occasionally a male associate for company. The police could always tell when it was time for her to go home because she’d start trying to climb on the counter like some demented chimpanzee, mascara lines streaked down her face. She’d attempt to beat whichever officer was manning the reception desk with the spike of a stiletto shoe until whatever male companion was with her beat a hasty retreat, realising there’d be no nookie tonight, and the policeman in question would simply knock her off the desk. She’d usually then just lie there and wait for someone to come off duty and drive her home like a regular taxi service.
They ran a couple of stories in the local rag for the first few weeks after Tommy didn’t come home. But the tragic fact remained that he didn’t have the proper angelic features in order to spur the public into action. In the photo which the family provided – the one that they used for all the media stuff – Tommy looked rather like the younger incarnation of a sex pest; even the teachers said it, in the quiet of the staff room. Even the neighbours said it. And they said more. They told all about how he was such a strange little boy. ‘Always running about with his penis in his hand,’ they said. ‘Once wanked off a stray dog,’ they said. Used to try and stare through their curtains and steal their milk bottles. Couldn’t be bothered with school and hadn’t achieved anything noteworthy even when he had.
Nobody knew who said it first, but someone did and soon everyone was saying it: ‘I wouldn’t have blamed the kid if he’d run away. He was always trouble, and the state of his mum… well… he’s probably on the streets in London or Manchester now. He’ll cope. There’s nothing we can do any more.’
And in the school, girls that had never known Tommy, but who’d skriked their eyes out and won sympathy off all and sundry for weeks on end, stopped mentioning his name. Stopped trying to get petitions signed, although there was never any purpose to the petitions in the first place. They ran out of excuses not to do their homework and started looking for the next victim to claim as their own.
Mrs. Peaker still turned up at the police station, but now she was pretty much turfed out as soon as she made it through the doors. And no lift home was offered now either. Instead she lurked like a ghost in the dark pockets of pubs ready to shriek at anyone that would listen about her darling son Tommy and did they know what had happened to him? And wouldn’t they kindly buy her a drink?
The Peaker family home, if anything, got into a worse state of disrepair. One day a window simply fell out of its frame, nearly decapitating a poor paper boy that was simply minding his own business, trying to skirt around the pack of baying dogs that had gathered in the front yard. Apparently, the damp inside the house had got so bad that everything was simply rotting away or breaking or fusing or collapsing into dust and mould.
Some on the estate, the more house proud amongst them, started to feel like the Peaker home was an eyesore. A slight on all the hard work they’d put into their herbaceous borders and scissor-trimmed metre-square lawns. Committee meetings were held in local pubs – the ones that Mrs. Peaker was already barred from – and it was decided that a letter should be drafted to the council. They wanted her removed, they claimed, or else rent would not be paid. We may only be tenants, but we have rights too, you know.
At school, Tommy’s name passed from being mentioned in whispers to being used as the butt of sick jokes within weeks. His legend
ary wanking and his fishy smell and his too-short school-kecks were all valid subjects for a dig. But then, eventually, the teachers stopped bothering to read his name out at all in registration. They blanked him out, just as we had.
And us boys got on with doing what we did best; making everyone else’s lives a misery. We found other hangers-on to coerce into doing our dirty work for us; other willing boys that would steal from the tuck-shop and then pass on their ill-gotten gains hand-over-fist; other boys that would steal Mr. Sharp’s hubcaps; other boys that would daub blood-red graffiti all over the headmaster’s office door, informing him that he was a ‘right cunt.’
Of course, they didn’t ask Twinnie or Dick or Lion to bother coming back for the exams. They advised them to go out looking for jobs. They were always looking out for fresh blood up at the toffee works, dontchaknow? But none of them listened; Twinnie carried on the small-scale drug-dealing business he’d started at school. And his best customer kept coming a-knocking on a daily basis. Yeah, even at that stage, Dick was too fucked-up all the time to get himself a job. Lion did a bit of manual labouring at a local building site, but his poor time-keeping – he never was any good at getting out of bed before midday – soon caught up with him. As did the site foreman once he found out that the four of us were using the little portacabin on site as our temporary – and I was tempted to say ‘clubhouse’ here, but that wasn’t what it was at all – fallout shelter.
We’d go in there and play cards and have a couple of trips or a wrap of speed or a bottle or two of Ice Dragon. But already things were starting to change between us all. I could sense it; I had changed. I’d stayed on at school for some reason. Probably because I couldn’t be arsed arguing with dad about it. And anyway, I took my medicine. I numbly slipped into my seat in that exam hall – the dining hall, actually, just made over a little bit – and blankly filled out their forms. Got reasonable grades too, believe it or not. Then slipped numbly into college and more exams and met Jane.