Every Fox is a Rabid Fox

by Harry Gallon

  ‘He’d stand at the fence round our garden,’ my father told us often, ‘when we were stationed abroad with his regiment, in various countries suffering varying degrees of unrest. During riots and guerrillas and fighting for independence, he’d stand with his shotgun, in case anyone broke into our compound. And when the stone-throwing subsided and the yelling subsided and the shadows in the evening creeping along the perimeter garden fence subsided he’d come inside for the whisky he’d hidden earlier on behind every curtain in the house–’

  Gulp.

  ‘–and he’d–’

  ‘Yes?’ said my brother.

  ‘Tell us about the gun?’ asked my dead sister.

  ‘–he’d–’

  ‘What, Dad?’

  As if we were there, on the veranda.

  SMACK!

  ‘Was it something Jim did?’

  Never.

  A little later, when I and my brother and spectral dead sister were teenagers, we’d ask our father, feeling the clarity of some years behind us, ‘What did Jim ever do to make our grandfather hi–’

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘But what about the letters in the attic? The possible love affairs he could have had?’

  ‘Boys,’ from our mother, always open ear through the kitchen door from where she could hear us polishing guns, ‘don’t bother your father,’ pushing herself into a corner, stirring the mixing bowl. Preparing dessert. ‘Another bin cake?’ our father would blurt out. To deride her. To keep his whisky not behind the curtain but inside of her. ‘My favourite. How many have you chucked away this time?’

  ‘They’re too young,’ her eyes would tell him, from some corner of the kitchen or while stoking the fire or when administering the terrier’s insulin injection.

  ‘Psst,’ Dad whispering so she couldn’t hear, ‘he used to hit him because he fancied bo–.’

  ‘Stop!’

  Somewhere, a cough.

  ‘Your mother’s baking a cake, boys,’ our father would say loudly instead. ‘You can have some after lunch.’

  ‘Bit ironic,’ said my brother, still thinking about Jim, ‘given that he’d sent you and Jim to boarding school.’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ said our father. ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I found a machine gun washed up on a beach?’ In fact, he did. It was mangled. ‘I’d always wanted to find a gold doubloon,’ said our father, who cleaned his shotgun with the same fingers he used to touch our mother.

  ‘Youngs 303,’ he’d say. ‘That’s what it needs,’ wielding a shoulder stock and foregrip. ‘Give it a good clean.’

  Smells like pheasant, death and family.

  Again, digging dirt: my brother went into the understairs cupboard, to where the big metal gun cabinet is still fastened with rawl bolts to the outside wall, facing away from the cupboard door, behind some camouflage jackets, and took five rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges out of a damp cardboard box and into the kitchen.

  Our parents were at church in the village: Mother flirting with evening mass, Father ringing the bells.

  My brother placed the rusting 12 bore cartridges onto the kitchen table next to a chopping board. It was the garlic and onion chopping board. It was the ace-of-spades-shaped chopping board. My brother placed one cartridge onto the chopping board then covered it with a tea towel. He said, ‘Hand me a large, sharp kitchen knife.’ And I handed him a large, sharp kitchen knife. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to do this in Dad’s shed?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said my not-yet-dead brother.

  ‘Do it in Dad’s shed,’ said our sister, dead, who whispered in my ear: ‘He’ll know that you went in there. That you used his tools. His workbench and vice and his hacksaw. He’ll catch you and smack you, just like he does in the car.’

  ‘The only way to get away with using dad’s tools,’ said my not-yet-but-possibly-soon-because-he’s-cutting-open-a-shotgun-cartridge-dead brother, ‘is if we do this wrong and set the rusting percussion cap off, igniting the powder, propelling the shot, blowing our hands off and bleeding to death. That way he couldn’t punish us.’ My brother paused, thought, then said, ‘Actually, I think he still would.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said our sister. ‘Not like you killed me. Maybe take off some digits, a hand or three? You have four between you. Just remember.’

  ‘What?’ I asked her.

  ‘Remember–’

  ‘Who’re you talking to?’ said my brother.

  ‘–to turn your head away.’

  I turned my head away and said, ‘It’d be better to empty the shot out first.’ My brother concurred. With one hand he held the tea towel over the percussion cap, as if all the stains of our mother’s cooking could protect him from an explosion. With the other he cut the crimp off the end of the cartridge, emptied the metal ball bearings into a dirty coffee mug by the sink, removed the wad and emptied the explosive charge into a clean tea cup on the dresser. Each time he cut, pressing down carefully with the kitchen knife, he turned his head towards me, so that at least I’d see the look in his eye if, somehow, the powder (smokeless, so you can see the fall of your bird) ignited, expanded, exploded outward and took off however much of his thirteen-year-old body was in the way.

  I’d see it again.

  Soon.

  In the silence that followed my still-alive brother took a hammer and a nail. They were our father’s hammer and nail. They came from his quick access hammer and nail drawer in the dresser. There was also a light bulb drawer and a battery drawer and a ‘Do not go in there’ drawer, but that one was in the bathroom and belonged exclusively to our mother.

  He hammered the nail, gently, into one of the disconnected percussion caps–

  Tap.

  –rendering it useless.

  Then he repeated the procedure on the four remaining rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges until there were five empty cartridges with five deactivated percussion caps in front of us, five lots of ball-bearing shot sitting in a coffee mug, five discarded wads and a great huge pile of smokeless explosive charge plopped in a clean tea cup he then placed on the ace-of-spades-shaped chopping board. The powder (smokeless) wasn’t really powder, more a lot of very thin paper-like squares, similar to cheap lino tiles or acid tabs.

  ‘Smells weird,’ I said.

  ‘Like garlic and onion,’ said my brother, who then took the clean tea cup and emptied the tabs into one deactivated cartridge. He tamped the tabs down with the back of a ballpoint pen, then added some more.

  ‘Go and get your tin,’ he told me.

  So I went and got my tin.

  I kept my tin under my bed.

  No one was supposed to know about my tin.

  It was an ammunition tin (200 rounds). It had 1942 stamped on the side, and it opened with a clasp. ‘How’d you know about my tin?’ I asked.

  ‘We share a bedroom, idiot.’

  My brother opened my tin and took out a French banger. The last one left over from the family holiday we’d all dragged ourselves through a year previously.

  ‘I don’t want him having those,’ our mother had said to our father, who’d given me the money. ‘He’s a growing boy,’ my father said back at her. ‘He should be allowed to destroy things.’

  My brother took out the banger, pulled out the green fuse (waterproof) and put it on the chopping board. Then he snapped the banger in two with his fingers, emptied the powder inside it (this time it really was powder) into the decommissioned shotgun cartridge. Then he took some kitchen roll and stuffed it into the top, covered it with a lot of electrical tape, poked a hole through the tape with the nail, inserted the fuse through the hole until the end of it touched the explosive, put the whole thing back down on the table, smiled and said, ‘Now we have a grenade.’

  DIGGING DIRT – PART TWO

  For a long time I couldn’t stop thinking about burning things down. As a child. As a student. I wanted to burn down every house that I lived in. With my parents, before they broke up. With Willow
, before we did. That’s why digging dirt was so appealing. It takes a lot of heat to set dirt on fire. More heat than is needed to burn down a house. Dirt wasn’t as flammable back then. Seeing my suddenly-dead, hopefully-dead, older brother’s body fat combusting in midair before it hit the ground changed all that.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Many years earlier I suffered a bad bike crash. We’d dug the dirt and built the jumps and I pedalled fast down the path we’d made through the woods and then I was lying on my back, chest crushed by a large branch jutting out from a tree at the edge of the run-up. Blunt branch, like buffers at the end of a railway line.

  Thump.

  I had a habit of tilting sideways in midair. Over jumps we’d dug out of dirt. Left great canyons of earth in some farmer’s field.

  Thump.

  Listing like a ship. Listing like my head would list in my eventual London bed, listening to the bedsprings sing with the pump pump pumping blood of heart through brain.

  ‘Sit up, you idiot,’ my still-alive brother said to me. With water (bottled) and a hand on my back, other hand dropping the bottle, unclasping the clasp of my helmet.

  It was bright red, with barbed wire printed on it.

  *

  ‘Sit up now, you piece of shit,’ my long dead sister hisses at me. ‘Sit up and stand up and look up at the smoke.’ Something’s burning. ‘Oh, something’s always burning in London.’

  ‘Is it the Shard?’ I say. You can see the Shard from one of the windows in my flat. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Shard just blew up?’

  ‘Only if you were in it,’ says my sister. Mine. Because our brother is dead and she’s all I’ve got left. ‘And yet–’

  ‘Yes?’ she says, while I’m waltzing, hungover, to and from the bathroom, the kitchen, the cupboards, the bin. I sank a bottle of wine last night. Again.

  ‘–why doesn’t he follow me around like you do?’ I ask her. ‘I killed him too, didn’t I?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t think that’s true,’ she says, floating, as though perched on an open branch end, waiting for me to crash my bike. ‘Maybe he thinks it’s your father’s fault? He’s the one who taught you the Five Second Game, after all.’

  Wait.

  ‘Maybe he never believed in an afterlife. In heaven or hell or whatever else there might be. Maybe his body just burned away, and you’ve only yourself to blame for my being here.’

  Okay.

  Digging dirt: piles of earth, like the gravel we dredged from the waste area beside the watercress beds in the winter, by the river near our childhood home, which had ceased to flow and left dozens of trout to suffocate.

  We upped our game.

  Now we had a grenade.

  Our father cleaning his father’s BSA double-barrelled (side-by-side) 12 bore shotgun (the same one from the guerrilla stories) on the kitchen table, our mother in the kitchen with–

  ‘Ah, another bin cake, wonderful,’ from Father, hands covered in gun oil. Oily hands all over our mother, disarming every sense that she possessed until he drove her to–

  Well, yes, but we’re not quite there yet.

  To strip your double-barrelled 12 bore shotgun, first remove the forward stock. Then break the barrels and cock the firing pins. Remove the barrels from the rear stock and trigger mechanism. Do not pull the triggers. Lay the barrels on some newspaper. Handle all metal with an oiled rag. Youngs 303 is preferable. Pull the barrels through in this order:

  With a phosphor bronze brush (point down for best results).

  With a wire loop (and an oiled tissue attached to it).

  With a wool mop.

  The phosphor bronze brush makes a mess (hence the newspaper). Use an old toothbrush to scrub the action, trigger and break mechanism. Reverse to reassemble. Do not pull the triggers.

  *

  Digging dirt by the empty concrete reservoir in the field behind our house. Its roof had caved on so we covered half of it with a few sheets of corrugated iron. Piled wood chips in from behind the farm buildings where our father left logs he’d cut from fallen trees. My brother, saving up all his pocket money for new suspension forks for his bike. Our dead little sister throwing sticks between the spokes of our wheels.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ she says to me now. ‘That thumping in your chest? It’s not the blunt tree trunk you swerved into. It’s your heart struggling to beat.’

  I’m going to die.

  ‘Your brother doesn’t haunt you because –’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘–he–’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘–hates–’

  ‘I need–’

  ‘–you.’

  What do I need? To know why I chose to close my eyes at that exact moment. To know why I didn’t just blow my head off, instead, with the little .410 that my father gave me, the one that’d once belonged to Uncle Jim. Five seconds. Don’t rush it. Up the stakes if the weather is shit. And if it’s dark, turn the lights off. If the moon is bright, you won’t need them anyway. Suits always had suited my brother, but our mother would’ve definitely preferred a daughter.

  On the day we burned down the barn my brother and I arrived in the woods at the top of the field behind our house and found that the dirt we’d dug to jump our bikes over had been flattened. Our canyons filled in. Our footprints rolled and the old shovels we’d stowed in a tree root rabbit hole removed, snapped and discarded. Our dirt trod flat told a secret. The remains of our spades were broken bones, the frames of our bikes scattered skeletons that lay prostrate on the topsoil.

  Wheels spinning.

  It was a sunny day. The air smelled like rapeseed. The earth smelled like cow shit. The world smelled like adolescent sex. We could see the heat shimmering, cheap, on the road above the village our parents had, once, insisted we all live in together.

  ‘Better for bringing up children,’ said Father, a mover; not Mother, who’d had to quit the shitty little town she’d grown up in to raise his–

  Cough.

  –her children. No longer moving (unless you count into stagnation, though that was already inhabited).

  Above the village you could see for miles. All the houses and the school building lay warm in a little valley beside a chalk-bed-clear river. There were farm buildings dotted here and there. We knew the farmer whose land we’d been digging on. He was a friend of our father’s. They rang the church bells together, evenings. Sank pints. Dad had built a downstairs bathroom in an annexe off his house. The annexe was for the farmer’s mother, who was dying. We’d already had to knock on his door and ‘Excuse me, can we have our spades back’ several times before.

  And he returned them, with a ‘Don’t do it again.’

  ‘And don’t do it again.’

  ‘And again.’

  So, really, it was our fault.

  ‘But we have a grenade, now,’ repeated my brother, holding a broken shovel in one hand and the bomb we’d made in the other.

  ‘Go and strap it to one of his cows,’ said our sister.

  I told her, ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Then go and burn down his barn,’ she said, which is what my brother, still young, was going to suggest anyway, short of posting it through his letter box, which we decided not to do because he had a daughter who was our age (roughly), and she was quite nice at school, despite smelling of Cheesestrings.

  ‘Do we throw it like a grenade?’ I asked my brother, once we’d cycled to the barn at the top of the village.

  ‘We light it first,’ said my brother. And he did, lit it with a half-inched cigarette lighter, threw, then hid next to me behind a couple of elder trees. The barn was full of dry straw and hot asbestos, it being summer, the beams so rusting the colour of dried blood. Oh wow, how it all went up, how it snapped, crackled and popped like breakfast.

  A few hours later, our mother stood rabid at the door, like an earthquake, feet at the corners and arms at the sides, shaking the foundations of the farmer who wagg
ed the fingers of one hand like podgy pink dildos, while with the other he held a dead fox.

  ‘They done it,’ he said.

  The fox knew it.

  ‘They done it alright,’ he said. ‘They’ve been digging up my land all summer.’

  My sister stood giggling behind Mother. Always behind Mother. She never saw Mother. Her eyes never opened. I don’t suppose my mother even cried when the doctor told her that one of her twins was missing. Still, she wasn’t about to let this village green stranger place arson on the only children she had left.

  ‘How dare you,’ she said.

  And DARE you.

  ‘OUT!’

  Our sister, wet with dried blood and placenta, hoping we were done for, looked bored.

  The police must’ve found the percussion cap. We knew that asbestos is poisonous when it burns, but we’d no idea that, when heated, it would explode. You could see it from the hill on the other side of the valley. We knew because that’s where we watched it from, having gone the long way round. Collected shovels. Collected spades. Suspected arson. Imminent repercussion. Leaflets left by the neighbourhood watch and the village association through letter boxes warning good citizens that yobs and vagrants, probably from one of the nearby council estates, were about. But ammunition was already littering their lives. And besides, it only made a loud fizz then sort of burnt out before we left. ‘Not packed tight enough,’ my brother said later that evening after the farmer had left and our mother had sat down to read and wait for our father to get home from work. My brother went searching for closure in the understairs cupboard, to where the metal gun cabinet is still fixed to the outside wall with rawl bolts and covered with old camouflage coats. He took the damp box of old rusting 12 bore cartridges that, once, had belonged to our grandfather and–

  ‘Fuck sake,’ he said. ‘There aren’t enough left.’

  THE CURE FOR LOVE

  I lay in the bath for three hours this morning, thinking about the stranger’s wife. And the kukri knife. And the dog barking in the frog-like shadow. And what the police think they’re doing, not yet having arrested anyone for all the small deaths connected to my uncle over the years.