Bully

by A. J. Kirby

  I needn’t have worried. Twinnie turned back over on the camp-bed eventually, looking, if anything more purple than ever and let out a revolting burp.

  ‘I fancy some scran, Bulls-eye,’ he said. ‘Fancy cooking up some scran for us?’

  And I knew beyond a doubt that he was all right, or as right as he’d ever be. The story he’d told could have been about anyone, I supposed. To him, it was just a story. He could always seem to put barriers in the way of him and whatever was worrying or threatening him. This was the essence of him. It was what made him what he was, for better or worse. When I was younger, I’d have termed the whole psychological mess of him as ‘loose cannon’; now, I suppose, with the benefit of age, I suppose I pretty much accepted that it was in his nature to be so changeable, so divided. So hungry to make up for the part of him that he felt was missing since his twin brother died. And it was this that I hoped to play on if my plan was to pay off.

  ‘What have we got in?’ I asked.

  Twinnie gestured over towards a couple of discarded rabbit carcasses in the corner; the remains of something bigger which was pretty much unidentifiable; dozens of empty crisp packets. I was struck, suddenly, by how much that corner of the room, behind his camp-bed, resembled the lair of some carnivorous beast. It was starting to smell like one. I wondered if Twinnie performed the cardinal sin of shitting where he ate.

  ‘Told you rations were running low,’ he said, by way of explanation, as though I was responsible for gnawing at the bones of the carcasses. I’d not eaten anything since… since… Well, I couldn’t remember. But I supposed that nothing was better than eating the uncooked, unhygienic crap that Twinnie had shovelled down his cat’s arse of a mouth. No wonder he never seemed to leave the confines of the farmhouse kitchen; he was probably too ill to do so.

  I was reminded of watching a documentary once, about a bunch of eight or nine year old lads who’d been left to their own devices in a house for a week. It had taken them little over a day to turn feral; scavenging for food in bins and scrapping for scraps with their best friends of the day before. There was plenty of food in the cupboards, but the lads simply did not know what to do with it unless it was pre-packaged between two buns and came in burger form. They’d eschewed the vegetables in the tray in the fridge; chucking most of them out in fact so they could fit in more cans of fizzy pop.

  Most had been unable to understand what a tin-opener was. And even if they had, they wouldn’t have known what to do with the tins of chopped tomatoes, red kidney beans, sweet corn and the like. In the end, the documentary-makers had to suspend filming after four days, when one of the boys had attempted to stab another with a fork after being accused of stealing the last cheese straw. And the families had complained; said there would be a lasting impact on their sons. Probably, I reflected, the little fuckers would have forgotten the whole thing as soon as they walked through the door to their bedrooms and booted up the games console.

  ‘We could order a takeaway,’ I giggled.

  ‘Fuck yeah,’ said Twinnie.

  ‘And if this is to be our last meal - our last supper – we should push the boat out. Go for something proper extravagant. I fancy a couple of nice juicy steaks. Some chips perhaps. Maybe a little bit of garnish, but no bloody peas.’

  ‘Not just one steak, eh, soldier boy?’ asked Twinnie, but not unkindly. He was playing along for once.

  ‘Nah mate, I could eat a horse now,’ I said.

  Yeah, a horse in the national. The one with the number three on it; just like you, Twinnie. Just like you.

  ‘Know what I’d have,’ grinned Twinnie. ‘Pizza. Pizza every time.’

  We both laughed. Whenever we discussed food when we were younger, we’d always start talking about pizza. Generally this was in order to make Dick feel as bad as possible about his world-renowned pizza-face.

  Laughing with Twinnie again, and I mean really laughing, with no… well, little hidden agenda felt good. It felt like coming home.

  If that home was like the home for the nine year old boys…

  ‘What would you really have? Honest to goodness if it was your last meal?’ I asked.

  ‘We did talk about it in the slammer once, me and Shuffty. I think it must have been around the time they fried this English boy on death row in some state in America. ‘Member that, Gaz? Round that time everyone was talking like what would you do if it was your last day, or who would you do – or do in- if you got one last chance. Think I might’ve said good old Shepherd’s Pie first time, but now, when we might… you know… one of us actually might… I’d go for Christmas Dinner. All the trimmings. Like we had when we were kids and we just ate and ate and ate.’

  ‘Not sure about the trimmings, but there’s gotta be some chickens or turkeys round here somewhere,’ I said, trying to keep the tone light and chatty, ‘up in one of the neighbouring farms or something. How’s about you give me the shotgun for a while and I’ll go on the hunt?’

  Almost imperceptibly, the mood in the farmhouse kitchen changed. Twinnie edged along the camp-bed so his feet were blocking my view of the gun. But he still carried on like we were laughing and joking, like a minute ago.

  ‘Some huntsman you gonna be on that gammy leg of yours, Bull,’ he said.

  ‘There’s life in the old dog yet,’ I answered.

  Twinnie cocked his head to one side and regarded me carefully.

  ‘Tells you what,’ he said, ‘I know I’m not feeling the best at the moment, but I reckon I’d still be better than you. Why don’t you let me go out on the hunt and you go see if there’s any vegetables out front in that garden of theirs?’

  I waited for him to add like a good little woman but he didn’t. This game was being played for high stakes now and both of us knew it. Thing is, Twinnie had absolutely no idea that he’d just stepped right into the trap that I’d laid for him. Hell, he couldn’t have been more caught had he stepped on one of those old rusted metal things that he’d scattered around the kitchen.

  I watched his stand to his feet. He did it gingerly, as though he was worried that his legs would give way beneath him. I caught the wince on his face before he hid it behind his customary sneer. He was in a bad way; we were all in a bad way now. Weak beyond all recognition, just waiting to be picked off by Tommy. But at least I wasn’t number three, and that gave me some room for manoeuvre.

  He walked to the door, trying to make it look like an easy stroll, but I could see that it was not. I also caught a faint whiff of something off about him as he walked past. He’d eaten things he shouldn’t have been eating, had probably got food poisoning by now. Probably it was the best he could do not to shit himself right in front of me. Maybe that was why he always insisted on that purple sleeping back being nearby.

  ‘Oh, Twinnie,’ I said, as though it was an afterthought. ‘Can I have my Zippo back? I’ll get the gas cooker warmed up for when you get back…’

  Twinnie wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure at all, but he probably felt a more pressing need from his bowels and so he dug the lighter out from his pocket. He also tossed me a single Dorchester and Grey, for old time’s sake.

  ‘Don’t say I never give you nothing,’ he said, and walked out the door. I heard him whistling his way across the courtyard, but it wasn’t an easy whistle. Half-howl, if truth be told.

  I lit the fire off the dying embers of the Dorchester and Grey. I was almost sorry to see it go. It had been a good companion for the past few minutes. Thing with Dorchester and Greys is that they’re Superking cigarettes, which means they are about a third longer than normal tabs. Some people call them ‘lamppost cigarettes’, or ‘Dot Cotton snouts’ because of their extra length and because they are primarily smoked by older women. Older women that have been smoking all their lives and who need that little bit extra from their ciggies.

  Most people who smoke normal cigs, when confronted with a Dorchester and Grey will simply grind it out when they get as ‘full’ as they usually do on a normal length cig, leaving
that extra third untouched. But I’m not most people; never have been. I always smoke them right down to the filter. Those last few drags never fail to burn the back of your throat.

  And so with that satisfying sour taste on my tongue, I watched the small flames start to lick at my honorary discharge papers, and then some wood from the pile out in the barn. The old army ID card took a while to go up, but when it did, it kinda shrunk in on itself like when you throw an empty bag of crisps on the fire. When it finally disappeared, it went with a slight ‘pop’ which was a delight to my ears.

  Soon, I had a decent fire going. The Zippo lighter fluid in my pack had helped of course, but I’d also thrown all kinds of stuff on there, some of which must have been flammable. Like the remainder of my small first aid kit and Twinnie’s porno mag; a half-full tank of liquid which I found by the old farm truck which certainly smelled like red diesel but may have simply been home brew made by the mad farmer; some of the old blankets that had cocooned Dick in his final hours; the ornamental wheelbarrow. It was like a bonfire of the past; a kind of cleansing before Tommy got the chance to perform the real thing. It was the wiping out of our histories so that it seemed, we’d died at the same time as him. The saddest thing was that there was so little to burn. We’d done so little with the extra time we’d been had.

  And in those flames I saw the faces of those that we would leave behind. Dick’s children, content in their pushchair behind the counter of the main street café, being fed the occasional – don’t tell mum – spoon of ice cream; Twinnie’s dead twin who would finally be left in peace; Lion’s grandmother who’d always struggled to contain the big brute and who could now shuffle off this mortal coil in her own time without having to think about what effect it would have on him. And then there was the face of Jane, which was framed by one of those daft mortar board things that they make you wear at university graduations; and dad, sipping on a pint of home brew down at the allotment, in front of a pristine clean wall. No graffiti no more; no wasted inheritance; no runaways in the army. One way or another, it was all going to come to a head, the flames agreed, and this would be the quickest, and most painless way of doing it for all concerned.

  Staring into the fire kinda hypnotised me after a while. After a while, when I couldn’t even see the outline of the toffeeworks in the gloom. Soon it seemed like Funnel’s Fine Foods no longer existed at all, even. And all that was left were the massive shadows of the rolling hills and the faraway rush of the water as it passed down the falls in the gorge. Dad would have liked it up there with me now. I suppose just by being here, he might have understood a bit more about me.

  The flames climbed higher. For a moment I feared that they’d started creeping too far over; that the barn would go up, and not the farmhouse, but no, everything stayed on course. The beacon had been lit.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ screamed Twinnie as he rounded the corner. He had a sweat on him and had clearly been running. Must have seen the fire from a way off, which was pretty much the whole point of the thing.

  He dropped two scrawny looking chickens onto the pathway and rushed at me, but I was ready for him and brought him down with the crutch. Which I then held tight against his purple chicken-neck.

  ‘Now then Paul,’ I roared. ‘Why don’t you chill out a little, eh?’

  Twinnie struggled and kicked against me, trying to release himself from the choke-hold, but when they did for my leg in the army, it took nothing away from the strength in my arms. I’d felt it earlier, after he’d told me about what really happened at Grange Heights, and now I felt it again. I felt almost as though Tommy’s strength was being added to mine and we were both grinding the gunmetal grey of the crutch into his sickening throat. He soon realised as much himself and raised both arms in the universal surrender gesture, barely able to speak.

  Gradually, I released him from the grip of the crutch. He started coughing and spluttering. For a moment, I feared that I’d taken it too far, but eventually he rolled away and (I think) was sick in some of the garden’s longer grass.

  ‘What you do that for?’ he gargled as he came crawling back. Purply slime and saliva covered his beard. I wanted to shield my eyes from him. Twinnie had to shield his own eyes from the fire, which was now starting to spit menacingly at us, having clearly swallowed something it shouldn’t have, just as Twinnie had.

  ‘The cooking stove was running out of gas,’ I said, calmly. ‘I thought we’d have a nice barbecue out here instead. What do you think?’

  Twinnie spat out more of the saliva-vomit combo like some tramp that had drunk too much Mad Dog. There were tears in his eyes, but I didn’t confuse them with the real thing. People often get teary-eyed when they are sick.

  ‘I think you’re crazy; why’d you build a bloody fire out here? It’s like a sign to you know who saying look where we are; yoo hoo, come and get us,’ he spat.

  ‘You’d have preferred it out back or in the courtyard, Twinster?’ I asked. ‘Where he’s already shown himself? Where he’s already made off with Dick and he’s come to pay me a visit?’

  ‘But round the front, where the whole fucking town can see?’ he cried.

  ‘Let them see,’ I said, tasting burning on my lips. I was too close to the flames but didn’t want to move away. Didn’t want to show any sign of sanity to him.

  ‘I’m going back to the kitchen. I’ll get some water. Put out these fucking flames,’ he coughed. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  But it was already too late. The fire was out of control now; already licking at the wooden beams on the roof of the farmhouse; already catching around the window frames and tickling at the barn at the side.

  ‘Come on, Twinnie,’ I said, still staring into the flames. ‘Get the feathers off those chickens and we’ll have fried chicken for dinner. Sorry it can’t be Christmas Dinner, but I think the vegetable patch might have been underneath where I started the fire.’

  Twinnie staggered away from me: ‘You’ve finally gone off the fucking edge, Bully,’ he spluttered. ‘I think you’ve gone looney-tune. You’re just like Dick and Lion were just before they were done in.’

  Then Twinnie seemed to put two and two together. If Tommy had gone for the maddest of the bunch first – the bonafide nut-job Lion, who’d actually been housed in a looney bin more than once – and then the second craziest second, then, to him, it made sense that he’d go for the third craziest next. And that would be me. Suddenly, his mood seemed to brighten. He started to dance around me, prodding at me with his finger.

  ‘Bu-lly; Number Three. Bu-lly; Number Three. Bu-lly; Number Three.’

  And I let him do it. I let him prod his finger into my ribs and twist, like he’d once done with a pencil to Tommy, before we made him take his pants down in the dining hall; where we uncovered his embarrassing erection. And I grinned as he did it. I actively encouraged him, letting purple saliva of my own start to foam out of my mouth and down my chin; letting it drip down onto my t-shirt; letting it start to infect me. Because it didn’t matter any more. None of it mattered any more. I’d made my choice between the two monsters and now the cavalry was coming. The cavalry was coming.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Fire is the devil’s only friend”

  The cavalry did come. And they came bearing pitchforks and wielding baseball bats, although where they could have purchased these in a place like Newton Mills was beyond me. They came carrying burning torches, although the point of bringing more fire to a place that was already burning out of control was also beyond me. They came yelling and chanting songs of death. They’d come for Twinnie, who they believed was responsible for the bad spell of events that was erupting in town like a burst sewer pipe. And I’d just shown them exactly where he was.

  They moved en masse up the slope at a constant pace. I heard once, probably in some army morale boosting exercise or other, that the wisdom of the crowd always beats the wisdom of the individual. They backed up their research with some half-baked statistics, and e
veryone knows that 109% of all statistics are completely and utterly made up, like most of my memories probably. But in watching that crowd moving so purposefully up that hill with the common goal of they weren’t exactly sure what, and with the overall plan of… um, ask me another one, I can honestly say I believed in the blind stupidity of the crowd.

  How many times have you joined a queue even though you didn’t even know what you were queuing for? How many times have you seen people grouped in some identikit city centre somewhere and simply gone over to watch whatever mad religious freak was on show there just because everyone else was rubber-necking.

  Approximately twenty percent of the crowd that stamped up to the burning of Summit Farm that day probably actually thought they were going to attend a barbecue, despite the fact that it was actually very late for a barbecue, Maurice, and don’t play that music too loud. I reckoned about another twenty percent had joined in because their friends had.

  Miss, miss I did it because she did it.

  Would you jump off a cliff of she did?

  Well yes actually, miss. Most people are like lemmings; you’re a lemming yourself simply for coming out with such a cliché.

  Okay, so we’re up to forty percent of that crowd, that had now reached the dry stone wall by the way, having absolutely no clue what they were doing there. Let’s start picking on individuals now; take that man in the luminous yellow fleece that was just then trying a novel approach to climbing the wall; by trying to shuffle up and over it on his balloon-like belly, like a sea-lion on land. What did he really think he was doing that evening? A nature walk? If not, why the binoculars?

  But I digress. Perhaps the smoke was starting to get to me just as Twinnie suspected it had. But I didn’t care. As the baying mob stamped and stomped closer they must have picked me out, madly half-limping, half-dancing around the fire singing one particular bit from Don McLean’s American Pie over and over again.