by Harry Gallon
dead ink
Copyright © Harry Gallon 2017
All rights reserved.
The right of Harry Gallon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.
Paperback ISBN 9781911585060
Hardback ISBN 9781911585046
ePub ISBN 9781911585091
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.
www.deadinkbooks.com
CONTENTS
ONE
The Secret Lives of Hired Guns – Part One
What About the Knife in His Drawer?
If You Could Kill Someone, How Would You Do It?
Says My Dead Little Sister
Digging Dirt – Part One
Digging Dirt – Part Two
The Cure for Love
The Five Second Game – Part One
When I Met My Dead Baby Sister
The Green Plate
TWO
Chainsaw Ballet
Dislodged Hubcaps
Motorbike Rescue
The Next Time I Went Out Shooting
Perambulators
Rendezvous
Plate Lickers
Bin Cakes
I Can Hear My Mother Praying
BB Gun Massacre
Bedsprings
And The Doctor Asks My Mother if She Self-Harms
THREE
Rock Pools
The Secret Lives of Hired Guns – Part Two
Your Bath Isn’t Deep Enough
The Five Second Game – Part Two
The Day I Killed My Brother
The Five Second Game – Part Two (Continued)
I Can Feel My Father Dying
Willow
I Have Thought About Poisoning You
An Invitation to the Death of a Fox
Getting Away with Arson
one
THE SECRET LIVES OF HIRED GUNS – PART ONE
All I can think about is killing pedestrians. Usually it’s with a Bren gun. .303. Small rounds with longevity and long history leaving their mark. I want the dexterity. The curved, 30-round box magazine. I want to mount it on the front of a bus. In a bipod. Ball. Hydraulic gun turret. Bullet-proof glass. Wrist chain to handrails. No escape.
It may be central London that makes me think about killing pedestrians. It may be Kristin Scott Thomas or John Gielgud or Les Misérables. It could just as equally be Heisenberg Says Relax. DOT DOT DOT. And lunch at Pret A Manger. Sometimes it’s the feeling of emptiness I get in the cove between my neck and shoulder, where a Thompson sub-machine gun should be. The later, military version: bolt on the side of the receiver. 20-rounds queuing for the chamber, .45 automatic cartridge, stub-nose. Sea of wooden stock thumping my rocky shore as every round leaves the muzzle, not really aiming, just sort of hoping to hit something fleshy.
My dead little sister, for instance. That would be messy.
My brother’s dead too. I killed him. I used to get my eggs from him but I don’t anymore because I killed him. He had a smallholding and garage in Essex with his wife. She has it by herself, now. They had fifteen chickens and a cockerel his wife kept threatening to kill. I could have had a sister but apparently I killed her too. I pushed her out of our mother’s womb with a soft elbow and an overdeveloped god complex.
Or so my dead sister tells me.
To field-strip your Bren light machine gun you should do the following: remove the magazine and check that the chamber is empty. If the chamber is not empty, clear it. When the chamber is empty, remove the quick-detachable barrel. To remove the quick-detachable barrel, rotate the carrying handle upwards to disengage the barrel catch. Slide the barrel out and away from the receiver, then remove the captive push-pin at the back of the receiver in order to slide out the lower assembly. The lower assembly contains the bolt carrier, the gas piston and the recoil spring. Attached to the lower assembly are the shoulder stock (wooden), the grip (wooden) and the firing mechanism (trigger).
Remove the bipod. Clean all metal parts with a good brand of gun oil. My father recommends Youngs 303. It smells like soggy wood sheds and angry walks on Boxing Day.
The Bren gun is notably reliable. To reassemble, go backwards. Use the bipod to stabilise. Fire up to 500 rounds per minute in short bursts. Don’t get distracted. Spraying wildly at moving targets from a number 76 at Oxford Circus. That’s NOT how Gentleman Jim would have done it.
My uncle, Gentleman Jim, had HIV. But that couldn’t have killed him. It’s not the eighties. It’s not even the nineties. It had to have been something else. The ghost of my sister, perhaps, draped upon me by our mother, who I know loved Jim but couldn’t tell him, and so kept burning herself on the oven.
My brother stole Jim’s motorcycle when he was fifteen. It was too heavy for him. He crashed it and broke his wrist.
Click.
Bone through skin.
It seems likely to have been my father’s indifference to Gentleman Jim’s disappearance that eventually did my uncle in. Or a gun in the right hands. Either way, there was always someone who had it in for Jim. Most of the time it was himself.
What we, my not-yet-dead brother (at least, back then), dead sister and I, knew, or thought we knew, about our uncle, we’d seen through a stranger’s living room window.
It was this: our Uncle Jim pulling a kukri across the stranger’s throat. He pulled the knife tenderly. He looked as though he really cared about the stranger, while he was cutting his oesophagus open. He looked as though he could’ve loved the stranger, as the stranger’s blood bled on him. The look was in the gloves he wore. Black cotton gloves. Not black leather gloves. You’d have thought a hitman would use black leather gloves that were only lined with cotton. You’d have thought a hitman wouldn’t have lingered after having pulled, so tenderly, a very sharp and historically charged tribal and military knife across a stranger’s voice box.
It was so long ago, I can’t even be sure that it happened.
The windows were double glazed. So my not-yet-dead older brother and my already-dead little sister couldn’t have heard anything even if the vocal cords hadn’t been cut. Even if the knife was inserted at the back of the stranger’s ear, instead of under his chin, and drawn down the side of the stranger’s neck to just above where the stranger’s collar bone met the stranger’s sternum, cutting his carotid artery.
Even if, I mean, the stranger had been given the chance to scream.
But Jim was a professional.
He held the stranger tenderly, and the stranger didn’t gasp. He stared, with his mouth full, at Jim, whose expression said, ‘It doesn’t have to hurt.’
The stranger was lying on the floor of his living room. It was a wooden floor. The stranger’s hands were fastened behind his back with a thick black cable tie. Veins were popping and he was squashing his own lungs with the weight of his fear, though most of that weight was being drained onto the reclaimed wood floor of his living room.
Gloves black, face bare. We saw all this through a powerful telescopic sight mounted on a bolt-action Browning .243. A good deer hunting rifle. Gentleman Jim’s rifle. It had a bipod at the base of the barrel. Short wooden stock. Before he died and before I killed my brother but long after my father accidentally blew off part of his foot in a cadet training accident, Jim took us to a field, my brother and sister (dead) and I, where he taught us to shoot high-velocity. Jim rested the rifle on the bonnet of his Toyota pickup truck, pointed it at a target he’d already placed at the other end of the field about 100 metres away. When I fired, the kick made me cry. I d
on’t know how my brother reacted.
We watched Jim with the knife and Jim with the stranger through the telescopic sight on Jim’s rifle. Assassins like, we’d hoped, our uncle: confused at having, at least in our whispering, bedtime imagination, been hired to kill the same stranger as him.
As Jim.
We were hiding in a midnight fort. Lamplight torch dangling from a metre stick crossbeam, load-bearing pillow cases with sweet wrapper skirting boards, a duvet roof and eye-gouged windows. There were plastic soldiers all around us re-enacting Kelly’s Heroes and wondering why our father’s brother always brought his own meat round for supper. Wondering whether humans really did taste like pork.
‘Like pigs?’ I said to my brother, who shook his head in a very adult way.
‘Like pigs,’ said our sister, though only I could hear her.
I didn’t know who to believe. My brother was shaking his head, but if what my dead sister had said was correct, would it even matter if we’d been eating dead humans for dinner?
‘Jim doesn’t cut up his victims,’ said my brother. ‘He’s not a serial killer. He’s just good friends with a butcher. Gives him free cuts of meat, sometimes. For protection.’
‘He’s not a gangster,’ said my sister. ‘He works on a very high and stealthy commission.’
We were three children lost in a cemetery. Throughout our childhood, it seemed like death was always nearby, the way we’d fantasise about Gentleman Jim’s disappearances, the weird men he’d associate with. The weapons. The knives in our mother’s kitchen. And, despite my sister being cold as death, death felt safe and warm, in our pillow fort, while our parents slept and we’d wonder about what, exactly, our uncle really did get up to with that deer hunting rifle, and why he, such a handsome man (according to my mother), never brought any girls round.
‘He pulled the knife across the throat,’ said my brother. Torchlight storyteller (and alive for a few more years), ‘tenderly, as though he was both sad and terribly happy. He pu-u-u-u-ulled the knife across his–’
‘Throat.’
*
Our uncle, Gentleman Jim, kept the kukri knife in the bottom drawer of his desk. Whenever our father took us to visit him, his house always smelled like what I know now to be sex. His sofa sweaty. His bathroom bloody. His study smelled like electricity. His desk smelled like a heart beating outside its chest cavity, on the floor, in the corner, kicked there by whoever tore it out. Electrifying the pool of blood it lay in. Carbonated lightning. Jim’s desk smelled like longing. It was where we, as two-and-a-half partially deceased children, imagined he conducted his nefarious business.
But we didn’t have much to go on. He didn’t have much of a kitchen, so he’d come to ours more often for meals, for our mother’s burnt wrists, and our father’s early exit for evening bell ringing at the church down the road, then a pint.
There were old model planes hanging above his desk. And another drawer to the left of his chair which, locked, contained (according to my brother, who had once previously looked into it through a strong telescopic sight mounted on his forearm), DVDs.
‘What kind of DVDs?’ I’d asked.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘What kind of knife was it?’
‘A kukri,’ said my brother. ‘The knife of the Gurkhas.’
‘It’s the one they have to cut themselves with every time they unsheathe it,’ whispered my sister, so close my brother couldn’t hear her.
We were lying still by the pillows for walls and bedroom architecture. Inside the leaf canopy, within the darkening cemetery. It was late. Midnight. We put the caps back over the scope on the rifle. Our deadly uncle was no longer visible through the stranger’s living room window, and we’d assumed he’d taken the body into the bedroom, which was at the back of the house.
We disengaged the bolt and unloaded the rifle, just like how our uncle had shown us in that field on the bonnet of his pickup truck. We hadn’t needed to fire a shot, so this time I didn’t cry.
It was dark. Darker. We were hidden, pleasingly, inside the belly of a yew tree. Two warm hidden bodies and one dead one.
We approached the stranger’s house slowly. The cemetery was part of a meadow on a hillside. The stranger’s dog was waiting. The stranger’s dog had come home while we were packing the rifle back into its case and loading it into the boot of Jim’s pickup truck which we imagined we’d stolen but which, given the location of our bedtime hideout, was just our father’s armchair. Handbrake kickback. Lazyboy feet on the dashboard. Toyota flatbed, matt black in midnight camouflage but Jim never took it on jobs.
That, at least, made sense.
We approached the stranger’s house. Two dressed up children and their dead sister’s ghost, one long winter coat, deep collar round my neck because, as the youngest, I was the lightest and therefore on top. Next was my sister, though technically lighter because she came out of our mother a few months earlier than me, grey, limp, unable to breathe, and she sat on the shoulders of our five-years-older brother, wet coat cuffs at his ankles. I hadn’t wanted to approach the house. Dark sky, bats swooping and air too thick to breathe. I was small, a Minpin. Living on sibling branches with Christmas tree lighting. But intrigue had got the better of me. Why DID our Uncle Jim keep a kukri knife, with its notch for blood run-off at the base of the blade, and those locked away DVDs of what could, I’d then assumed, only have been sick, perverted recordings of his professional hitman murders?
‘They DID have strange men on the covers,’ said my brother, winding me up.
The stranger’s dog was at the door.
The knife had belonged to our grandfather. He’d taken it from the body of a dead Nepalese soldier in North Africa. Passed it down through the family artery. Each successive generation another notch to add to the list of successfully confused children.
The cemetery smelled like the ocean on a sunny day. And I was the head on a very unconvincing body, knocking on the door of a stranger’s house where a man in his late 30s had just committed murder.
‘It’s not murder,’ said my brother. ‘Uncle Jim’s a hitman.’
I looked at my sister. ‘It’s not murder when it comes with commission,’ she said.
‘Does killing strangers for a living pay well?’ I asked.
‘Idiot,’ said my brother. ‘Of course it pays well.’
‘Then why does he never go shopping?’
‘What?’
‘If Jim has a lot of money for killing somebody bad. They’re all bad, right? Was the stranger bad? If Jim has a lot of money, why does he never buy food?’
My sister said, ‘Because he eats them afterwards, remember?’
‘Shut up,’ said my brother, but not to her. ‘Who’re you talking to?’ he asked me, still under the light of the torch, the metre stick crossbeam it hung from, the duvet for ceiling now lurching in, threatening to send us back to bed. ‘Our dead little sister,’ I shouldn’t have said.
I knocked on the front door of the stranger’s house. The stranger’s dog was sitting by a small sculpture of a frog on the step next to the door. It was looking at our sister’s torso. The stranger’s dog was a spaniel. The frog began casting a shadow from the porch light, which clicked on as we approached. The dog was too low down to set it off. The dog had already knocked but had not yet received a reply. The door opened. Gentleman Jim, as we’d come to know him in this guise – as executioner and advocate of suicide – was drying his hands on a tea towel. He wasn’t smiling. The tea towel had the self-portraits of primary school kids printed on it. They were smiling, mostly.
Jim’s fly was undone.
The stranger’s dog tried to get passed his legs but his legs were iron bars barring entry into what, clearly, had become a dungeon. The dog barked. My brother swayed. His kneecaps were only ten-years-old. I said, ‘We’ve been watching you from our cemetery bush. I mean, from a yew tree. Up there, in the cemetery,’ all three successively turning and pointing back up the hill. Jim said
nothing. Something coughed. It was my belly. It was half-past-eleven and we had school in the morning. ‘We were watching you through a powerful 16x50 scope mounted on a bolt-action Browning .243.’
‘That’s a good rifle,’ said Gentleman Jim, maybe.
My brother creaked under the strain.
‘Who is we?’ Jim said.
‘My associates and me,’ I said. Jim’s moustache twitched. He had a moustache when we were children. Or he always had a moustache. It made him look like a waiter from a restaurant that existed in an era before cigarettes caused cancer and AIDS started killing relationships and people overcame their fear of accidentally killing people by actually killing people. It was an era in which Gentleman Jim looked as though he always should have lived.
‘Clearly we’ve been hired to, um, kill the same stranger,’ I said.
Jim said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and untucked, just a little, at the waist.
The dog whined.
‘We heard grunting,’ I said. ‘We saw you, through our powerful rifle-mounted telescopic sight, holding a strange man’s head with one hand. He was on his hands and his knees, facing you. You were holding something approximately six-and-a-half inches long in the other.’
‘Sixteen inches.’
My brother coughed. ‘It’s practically a machete.’
‘What’s that?’ said Jim.
‘No one,’ I said. ‘I mean, nothing. You want to watch out the police don’t catch you walking around with a knife that big.’
My sister giggled.
Jim said, ‘Is that a threat?’
There was a pause.
‘Have you ever been deer hunting?’ I said. Gentleman Jim looked unimpressed. He raised his eyes and let out a sigh and said, ‘I think you’d better leave.’ And with that, slowly, my brother turned, then my sister turned, so, by force of queer momentum I, too, turned, swaying jaggedly, stumbling back up the hill past the university I’d later attend (before, even, my brother became dead), up the hill to the cemetery, the reality of our beds, dissatisfied in knowing that we knew nothing more about what our dead-eyed uncle did to strange men after dark, though pleased that we, all two-and-a-half of us, had succeeded in making an otherwise redoubtable man sweat.