by Harry Gallon
‘But you finally managed to get out of the house,’ says Willow. My pillow to be dry on. To apologise to and to sigh on. ‘Have you eaten?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘And your dead little sister?’
‘She’s at home folding oven pizza boxes in half. And old milk bottles and orange juice cartons. She’s building a tower out of the recycling.’
‘The Tower of Babel in your recycling bin?’
‘That’s right. She wants to climb to heaven.’
Willow laughs. Willow humours me. Willow doesn’t ask questions about the haunting. She’s heard enough about it already. She’s concerned, but she doesn’t want to press me.
‘She’s washing out pots of hummus,’ I say, ‘and draining jars of pickled dill cucumbers.’
Laying foundations of glass. And plastic that buckles in half when you pour boiling water on it.
‘Well, good,’ says Willow as we walk together through the park in the approach to the dark of a dead evening, coffees to go, silent as drones but more conspicuous. And Willow’s the siren in the distance while I just keep walking, eyes following the childish cries vying on scooters, banking heavily to avoid toddlers and parents and a schoolgirl with long braided hair who hasn’t noticed that the bottle of Diet Coke in her blazer pocket is leaking heavily and trailing a long line behind her, like petrol.
I start thumbing my lighter. I could be the cause. Willow looks forward determinedly to reduce the gravity of the looks she shoots my way, occasionally, point-blank; corner-eye glances that don’t improve the quality of my mental state, nor her ability to see my life now for what it really is (an epilogue), but rather which betray to me the fact that she, clearly, has no idea how to talk to me anymore. We’re older. Everything’s on the edge of flammable and I’m the one holding the lighter.
I can see this bothering her. I can see her trying to care. She once knew me, knew me well, feels obliged. I get it. A child goes by on a small bike, loudly. Easy target. Back of the head, off his bike and into the duckweed stream next to the path we’re following.
Willow drifts, a whale. Look up and she’s a passenger jet. Four engines, more debris. A Boeing 747, or an AirBus A380. Drifting between clouds, through sea. And I’m a bottom feeder. Except the difference here is that her undercarriage, as she comes into land, isn’t dangling like some great mammalian phallus from her blubber. It’s still up inside her. And if she stays with me much longer we’re both going to crash.
I want to apologise.
‘My father–’
‘What?’
Asks Willow.
‘My father tried calling me earlier. When my sister started folding those oven pizza boxes and milk bottles and orange juice cartons.’
‘Did you answer?’ says Willow.
‘I was in the bath.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘For three hours.’
‘You must’ve been very wrinkly.’
‘He left a message.’
‘Look at the size of the stick that dog’s got,’ says Willow, laughing a little while a pigeon creeps over like a troop-carrying glider and I thumb my lighter some more. ‘Wants me to go see him,’ I tell her.
‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘I said–’
‘Well, that’s, uh, great.’
She stops. We’re on the path that runs diagonally through the centre of the park, approaching the ponds, the fountain, the–
‘Why’ve you stopped? I ask.
Willow looks at me. Willow says, ‘Really? I could’ve fucked up my life and that’s all you’ve got to say?’ She shakes her head, smiles. ‘I suppose I don’t know what I expected.’
‘Alright then, you’re a fucking idiot.’
Pause.
‘Aren’t you on the pill?’
‘No.’
‘Morning after?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why worry?’
‘I threw up this morning,’ she says.
‘When?’
It’s a big stick.
‘Probably about an hour-and-fifty-seven minutes into your bath.’
Three-and-a-half feet.
‘My housemate kept feeding the cat feta cheese. He was cutting it into cubes and putting them onto a plate.’
‘Was it the green plate?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I’d had a superfood smoothie. Spinach, avocado and kiwi. And the cat’s tongue kept making weird noises.’
‘So take another.’
‘Smoothie?’
I roll my eyes. ‘Another pill, for fuck sake.’
‘Why are you being a dick?’ she says. ‘I’ve been trying to make you feel better.’
I cough. We carry on walking. ‘Have you told your boyfriend?’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing, he’s just not my boyfriend.’
‘I’m pretty sure I’m sterile,’ I say.
‘From the accident?’ she says. ‘Is that possible?’ My left foot and left shoe keep rubbing together. Dry humping each other. Heel swelling so I have a slight limp. The wind makes my nose run and I keep checking to make sure it’s not blood. ‘Why’d your housemate give the cat cheese?’ I ask.
‘His girlfriend dumped him. Now we can’t listen to sad songs in the kitchen.’
‘Did he cry?’
‘He was more upset when David Bowie died.’
‘Cat get halloumi?’
‘Something like that,’ she says. ‘Look, I’m working this afternoon but I’m around later if you want to get another drink.’
THE FIVE SECOND GAME – PART ONE
There are two versions of the Five Second Game. The first one involves a shotgun. The second one involves a car. Those are the main tools you need to play the Five Second Game, though of course there are other things on the list. For the first version, these include: a good pair of boots, camouflage trousers and jacket, dark, fingerless gloves, a camouflage hat and a face mask (that, too, should preferably be camouflage).
There are no straight lines in nature.
There are no skin-coloured trees.
These, the other things you need, also include, for the second version of the Five Second Game: enough petrol to operate a car, some friends, some cans of lager and a bag of weed.
The items on these lists are surplus. You don’t actually need them to successfully play the Five Second Game, either version. In fact you should be alone. If you’re not alone, you may accidentally kill someone. And that’s not the idea. The idea is to almost kill yourself. To come within a slip of the foot to pulling the trigger.
Boom.
And within three-and-a-half feet of hitting SMACK that tree at the side of the road.
My father was an early advocate of the second version of the Five Second Game: closing your eyes while driving, seeing if you can count to five before you either A) lose your nerve, or B) die.
This can also be done at night.
You don’t have to close your eyes.
You simply turn off your lights.
Version two is a selfish game. There’s likely to be collateral. My father said that Gentleman Jim invented it when they were kids, because the machine guns and rifles they’d been given to play with in the Combined Cadet Force at boarding school were only ever loaded with blanks and they weren’t allowed to point them at the other boys, the ones who gave them birthday bumps each year. And maybe Jim wanted to kill them. And maybe Jim wanted to die. But I can’t understand why he’d put my father, his younger brother, in the passenger seat, and try.
You pick up the kid whose birthday it is by the legs and the arms so his arse hangs down in a squatting position. Then you drop him. Then you lift him.
Then you drop him.
He’s fourteen.
He’s fifteen.
He’s stealing a car with his younger brother. He’s light as a feather because you outnumbe
r him. ‘I don’t care if you look at pornography,’ said his father, at the table, during school holidays, ‘as long as it’s not gay.’ They were working class boys, really. They didn’t belong there, in public school. They closed their eyes. They drove as fast as they could. Only–
‘Only what?’ I ask my sister, who’s changing the bins.
‘Only, Gentleman Jim, our uncle, never actually closed his eyes. He loved his brother too much to risk his life. Funny–’
‘Please.’
‘–how you, the younger, too, take after your father.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask her.
The recycling’s a real mess.
‘Oh,’ she says, sorting tea bags and eggshells, ‘you’ll see.’
*
I lied before. Or rather, I didn’t tell the whole truth. Version one is selfish too. It goes like this: put the shotgun under your chin. Count to one.
Two.
Three.
Four.
You’re still alive. You’re younger. You had all the camouflage gear beforehand, when your father wouldn’t let you take the real guns out, so you, me, we’re digging dirt with our hands, building fence-panel pillboxes and constructing artery trenches to play soldiers in. Making war in the old watercress bed gravel pits, with bb guns for arms instead. They sting. My dead brother, who was still my not-yet-dead brother back then, invented one particularly unsettling role-play game in which one of us would play a downed pilot, armed only with a pen knife and a spring-powered toy pistol we’d somehow convinced our mother to buy us from a mail order catalogue. The pilot would find somewhere in the woods behind our house to hide, while the other, usually my alive older brother, would patrol in search of the man his imaginary comrades in an imaginary air force had shot down. And, since he’d be armed with a battery-powered toy machine gun that fired one-hundred-and-fifty plastic ball bearings per minute, capture him easily, bring him (usually me) back to the camp we’d dug in the gravel pits, and torture him.
To torture your younger brother you make him squat, arms extended, palms down, then lay a long, heavy branch across his arms. If he drops the branch, he has to dig dirt.
And dig.
And dig.
Our father had a deal with the farmer whose barn we’d burnt down. The farmer said we could shoot all the pests on his land, in exchange for having the pests on his land shot. But no pigeon, rabbit or crow had ever thrown a homemade hand grenade into an asbestos barn filled with straw before. So when I first played the Five Second Game (version one), I almost ridded him of his greatest foe. Our father was on the other side of the field with the pigeon call, flushing the birds down towards me. I was standing in a bush beneath an old yew tree at the top of the down – wild flowers, dry earth, rolled fields below and the smell of burnt wood – with an old .410 that had belonged to Gentleman Jim: rusty, with a worn old hammer and flecks of white paint on the stock, loaded, upturned and the end of the barrel cradling the butt of my chin.
‘You should have pulled the trigger,’ says my delightfully dead little sister. ‘You should’ve pulled the trigger and saved your brother’s life.’
‘It’s too late for that now,’ I tell her, at the window of my flatblock tower.
‘Our father would’ve thought you’d just shot a bird. Or tried to. He’d have called you on that little walkie-talkie you used and heard you gurgling.’
‘Gurgling?’
‘Yes, gurgling. With blood sloshing out of your mouth, or something. Thick and slow and dehydrated. Like cum from your third wank of the day. Because you, a fuck-up from an early age, couldn’t even blow your own head off right. Christ,’ she says, ‘first it was me, then it was him. When will it end?’
I tell her to fuck off.
She’s screaming, ‘You’re a plate licker!’
‘It was our brother, alive, who threw that grenade.’
‘And our mother who denied it,’ she says.
‘She wasn’t your mother,’ I tell her, high up in the tower but alone and alone and alone, ‘little one, sister. You didn’t even slide out of her. You, yes, you didn’t even bounce off the ground.’
‘You pushed me,’ she says.
‘So?’
‘You closed your eyes and–’
Pray for lightning.
‘Did nothing? I did nothing as you were sucked back into the lining of her womb.’
The vanishing twin.
‘You’re a syndrome,’ I tell her, looking out of the window and aiming down the sights of an imaginary Lee-Enfield No. 4–
Bolt open.
Bolt closed.
–at the pedestrians crossing the common. ‘Did you know our, I mean MY, father almost blew off his foot with a Lee-Enfield? It was during a training camp with the cadets.’
She’s rolling her eyes. She’s banging her drum. The tower sprouting out of the recycling bin is leaning threateningly.
He was at public school at the time. Deported from the family table. Gentleman Jim went too, to relinquish ploughs and chain harrows for pips and cap badges. A family theme.
If he drops the branch in the watercress beds by the stream, he has to dig.
And dig.
And dig.
‘I’ll straighten you out,’ said my grandfather to Jim, with a smack to him, his head and slurp behind the whisky curtain and a mother (not mine, yet) who went to the downstairs bathroom to throw up.
Her body was rejecting her.
‘Really?’ I ask my sister, still clicking bolts and wondering how long it’s been since I left my flat. ‘Yes,’ she tells me. ‘Like yours. Your grandmother could feel something inside her. And no, it wasn’t the corpse of a daughter.’ My grandmother said nothing while my grandfather beat his son. And Gentleman Jim, the man always inside him, said nothing while it happened. That’s where he got his name from. Maybe. Not necessarily from the way in which he collected those debts.
‘By sitting on borrowers’ chests?’
‘That’s right, yes,’ says my sister. ‘By keeping his mouth shut. Really shut. And not ever crying. Not even letting our father, his younger brother, see the bruising.’
He only opened himself up to men who had good, righteous and rigid ideas to put in him.
‘I’ll straighten you out,’ said an officer of the army, not a father, after hearing the rumours that his oldest son was–
‘So he sent him to an all-boys school?’
‘I know,’ sister giggling. ‘Anyway, you were going to tell me–’
‘About our father? When he was younger? And his brother wasn’t dead, either? And he wasn’t on the verge of shooting himself in the foot? Yes, he shot himself in the foot with a Lee-Enfield No. 4. That’s the later war model. It has a protruding barrel at the end of the stock and the sight was redesigned to feature a rear receiver aperture and an additional ladder aperture that could be flipped up. More accurate than mid-barrel sights. It was also–’
‘Yawn.’
‘You don’t have to be here, you know,’ I tell my sister. ‘You don’t live here. You don’t live.’
‘Then who writes your shopping list?’ she says. ‘And who throws your eggshells away? I’m making your life appear normal. I’m keeping you alive.’ She gets a toenail between her teeth. ‘For now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you know that no one can love you. And you don’t yet deserve the relief that you think you’ll get if you die.’
Pause.
‘–lighter,’ I say. ‘It was also lighter than the version before.’
The Lee-Enfield No. 4 holds 10 rounds. High capacity for a bolt-action rifle. All 10 rounds can be fired off with accurate effect in one minute by a properly trained solder. But boys are not soldiers. They’re also not children. They cannot be left to convalesce. They must be put to some form of training. Load up some rifles with blank ammunition. Shoot yourself in the foot in the hope that the empty cartridge casing may splinter enough to puncture your boot, then hope that the wound
is bad enough to get you sent home to a mother too busy throwing up to listen and a father who jokes about chemical castration every time your brother mentions enjoying rugby lessons.
“Just don’t enjoy them too much.”
*
Shotgun ammunition is expensive. My mother didn’t go to the downstairs toilet to throw up her own parasites in an attempt to escape. She just made cakes. But then, our father didn’t beat us. He merely teased us, in spite of Gentleman Jim, who may have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Revenge, or repentance, for a string of dead strangers. Or just one confused, unfaithful, husband, who had a fetish for black cotton gloves, and men.
I only played version one, the Five Second Game, once. The adrenaline was too much. I took my chin off the barrel, leant the gun against a tree. Leant the gun against my mother who got married too young; against my grandmother who made the mistake of telling her husband about that time she kissed another girl in an Anderson shelter, during the Blitz. Oh, he didn’t like that one bit. I leant the gun against the tree.
And had a wank–
BANG.
–then mopped it up with a dock leaf. The vanishing twin, reabsorbed. But no tree is the colour of skin.
When my father, all camouflaged and face masked, arrived, he said, ‘I was hiding up by the remains of that barn. Looks like arson to me. Did you get anything, by the way? I heard a shot.’
‘I dropped my gun, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Listen: you should ALWAYS leave the safety on when your gun isn’t in the firing position. That’s why it’s so close to your thumb – so you can click it off at the last minute, right before pulling the trigger.’
Click.
‘Jesus,’ said my father. ‘You’re not hurt, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you’re too young for this after all. Christ, I hate it when your mother’s right.’
‘We don’t have to tell her,’ I said.
My father smiled.
There was a pause.
And there is a pause. My dead little sister is writing another list.
My father and I walked back to the car. We’d left it in the farmer’s yard. My father had picked up the old .410, wiped off the dirt, broken the barrel and removed the empty cartridge.