Every Fox is a Rabid Fox

by Harry Gallon

  They’re only supposed to burn for an hour, and that one was mostly gone.

  I took a drink.

  ‘What made you choose poison, anyway?’ I asked her.

  She shrugged.

  ‘The thought of sitting opposite someone at dinner. Someone I had once known but no longer wanted to. The thought of watching them realise they were about to die. That it was already too late. And that there’s no sense in a struggle.’

  A pause.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, and she smiled a little. ‘Wouldn’t mind a cigarette though. Do you want to go outside?’

  ‘It’s a bit cold.’

  ‘Have you got a filter?’

  ‘Let me roll one for you.’ She took some tobacco out of a tote bag on the floor, put a filter between her lips while she pulled out a paper, leaving a little bit of lipstick on the end.

  ‘It might kill you,’ she said, passing me the cigarette then starting again.

  ‘Cancer,’ I said, ‘or your poisoned lipstick?’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Another candle, then?’

  ‘It’s not burnt out yet. But I could do with another drink.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Already. Is that bartender you know on tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think she ever leaves,’ I said. ‘Come on, I’ll meet you outside.’

  *

  When I wake up Willow’s standing by the bedroom window smoking a cigarette. There’s a half-empty glass on the bedside table. It’s not my bedside table. I cough. She says, ‘So,’ without turning round. ‘So,’ blowing smoke out the window (only open a little), ‘So-o-o-o,’ out of her mouth, into the draught and, like the smoke from the incense burning on the windowsill and drifting slowly outside, ‘So, you’re not dead, then.’

  I cough again, take a sip from last night’s drink, thinly veiled with a layer of dust, feel a slight crack in the centre of my bottom lip threatening to split open again. ‘How did I do this?’

  ‘I hit you,’ says Willow. ‘You passed out and I hit you.’ She takes a drag. ‘We shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘I’m not wearing a condom. Did you–’

  ‘No.’ She takes another drag. ‘When was the last time you were checked?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Well go then.’

  ‘Right now?’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘I’ll have to go get a pill, anyway, for fuck sake.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘Come have a look,’ she says, still standing by the window in a t-shirt, bare feet, small Persian carpet by a chair and a desk that looks unused, except for an empty bottle of wine. Outside, three men are attacking a tree. ‘They’ve been doing it for hours,’ she says. ‘It’s almost beautiful, I suppose.’ One of the men is jumping between the branches on a line attached to a harness hooked up to the top of the trunk. ‘See how his chainsaw dangles by his feet? He just swings about then whips it up when he needs it.’ It’s a small chainsaw, thirteen inch bar. He uses it with one hand. A second man, looking up, stands below in the neighbour’s garden. When a branch falls to the ground he picks it up and chucks it over the fence to a third man operating a wood chipper in the street. ‘This is the last tree,’ says Willow. ‘They did the other two while you were still asleep.’

  She puts her fag out on the windowsill. There’s a callus on her middle finger. It’s orange, from too much smoking. Stabbing out. Incense uselessly drifts out the window. I cough.

  She says, ‘How’d you sleep?’

  ‘Fine. Had a weird dream.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got hanged.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She rolls her eyes, tries not to smile, asks me, ‘Did you die?’ but I lie and say I can’t remember. ‘If you die in a dream you die in real life,’ says Willow. She walks over to the bed and sits back down, chainsaw in head and planes to Stansted and City airports with vapour trails outside. ‘How about you, anyway?’ I ask, sucking my swollen finger.

  ‘Badly,’ says Willow. ‘We shouldn’t have done that.’ She rolls another cigarette. Willow’s fingers are blood red and when she’s rolled it she lights it and tries to take a drag from it but I kiss her. Quickly. Her lips are cold. I feel their moisture on the wind through the open window. She smiles like she doesn’t know if she should, then says, ‘It’s disappointing of you.’

  ‘That I passed out?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘not the sex. When I asked you how you’d kill someone.’

  ‘I chose a gun.’

  ’Yes. It’s just so like a man.’

  DISLODGED HUBCAPS

  I can feel myself growing fatter. My muscles relaxing. Dissolving in bath water. Scrotum melting and spreading out like oil slick. Leg hair dancing. Toes grasping for the hot tap because I’ve been convalescing for roughly an hour. Keep meaning to climb out, dry off, go for a walk in the warmer air. But my towel’s all the way over there, hanging on the hook on the back of the door. Keep feeling my testicles for lumps. And what’s the point in making lunch? I’ve only been planning it all morning. I’ve got the shopping list my sister made for me. It just says cornflakes. And I’ve already missed breakfast. But sugar is bad for you and my thighs are chafing and I’ve got flat feet. Couldn’t join the army if I wanted to and anyway I’ve already brushed my teeth. The bubbles are blue and float around my pubic hair, popping pop pop POP when I clench to pump blood into my dick, make it feel bigger as it emerges from the waterline, which is lowering because the plug has a crack in it.

  My neck is itchy.

  Earlier this morning, Willow sat staring at the portrait of young Stalin on her bedroom wall above the unused desk and dirty, neglected underwear which melted onto the floor. After giving her some money for the pill I left her at the pharmacy and walked three miles back to my house. It wasn’t easy. Leg’s barely healed. Can’t cross roads that quickly. Drivers impatient. Dislodged hubcaps make me nervous. People driving around unaware that the sides of their wheels are jutting out like bone, snapped, to detach then lie there and litter the edge of the road. My head’s killing me. My heart was beating and hasn’t stopped since I walked back through my own door, locked it, lay in the bath still in my clothes and waited for it to fill up.

  Real itchy.

  A train leaves the station on the other side of the common. My bubble bath pops, the water level slowly decreases and I try to shrink myself and go with it as the sound of the train fades away and I think about my brother sitting at the side of the railway tracks at one end of the viaduct by our parents’ old house, near the gravel pits which we dug out to hide ourselves in.

  He was clutching a tuft of grass.

  ‘The air can pull you back in,’ he said. ‘It’s the same with water. That’s why you should never jump off the side of a ship.’

  ‘Why would you jump off the side of a ship?’ I asked, from inside a derelict pillbox.

  ‘If you were trying to kill yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Why would I want to kill myself?’ I said, poking my head through a small hole in the concrete. My brother sighed. ‘Maybe,’ he said, letting go of the grass, ‘someone was already trying to kill you, and you didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.’

  ‘Is it safe to come out yet?’ one leg out of the pillbox door.

  ‘Yes,’ said my brother. ‘The next train won’t be along for another half hour.’ He paused. ‘Are you coming out of there or what?’ He stood up, looking very adult, and I walked out through the low concrete door with my stick for a gun and followed him along the tracks and onto the bridge. When we were in the middle he turned round and said, ‘You can see our house from here,’ then pointed up through the valley.

  He was carrying an old guitar amp.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he said.

  I managed to take my phone out of my pocket before I got in the bath. It’s resting on the radiator. Keeps lighting u
p. Missed calls from my father. Texts from my mother. My stomach grumbles.

  Cornflakes.

  I twist the cold tap with my toes and throw a stream of fresh milk into the bowl. Stops me sweating. Stops me obsessing about cancerous testicles and nosebleeds and why it stings when I piss and how many hairs can I count on my chest? Not many. When I got in the bath, after walking the three-or-so miles between Willow’s flat and mine, I lay patiently and waited for my head to be submerged. Four minutes of listening to the vibrations of departing trains from the station across the common bore their way into the foundations of this block building and into my bathwater. Tiny bubbles of conversation dislodging from armpits and ear canals with a slight tickle, extreme desire to retract foreskin and clean under but, yes, the trousers. Arsehole, too, and toe jam consolidated by shoes, which might be ruined. Things that keep you normal. Text messages from Mother. Missed calls from Father. I held my breath, horizontal, for as long as was possible (thirty seconds, smoker), listening to the occupant of the flat below me practice a DJ set, or hang pictures of family members not yet dead, or fuck someone very loudly, with a quarter-inch jack plugged in up his backside and attached to a submerged, reverberating guitar amp pointed directly upwards, possibly even attached to the ceiling below my feet, with which I keep turning the taps to counteract the broken plug.

  I’m listening.

  ‘Throw it,’ said my not-yet-dead-but-possibly-soon-because-the-next-train-was-due brother, who’d handed me his own crappy old guitar amplifier. We were standing on the viaduct, overlooking the watercress beds, the old abandoned concrete reservoir partially hidden by elder trees, a minute grey speck at the top of the big field behind our house and not that far from the barn we destroyed, our house there too, chimney coughing afterschool 60s Parkray what-to-dos into back-from-work arguments of WHERE ARE THE BOYS?

  It was a school night.

  ‘This amp’s shite, anyway,’ said my brother, referring to the 10 watt chipboard box he’d got at the discount shop in town, because he just wanted something good to smash, and had made me carry most of the way through the field to the gravel pit, to the holes we’d dug to commit our fantasy war crimes in, across the barbed wire enclosure by the watercress beds (private property) and the streams and meandering tributaries depositing forlorn winter fish in oxygen-free lagoons when the main river (it happened each year) gave up and waltzed to the sea.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  There was a hum.

  ‘Is that the train coming?’

  Clearly one of us had discounted the other rails, those that carry trains towards London.

  I said to my brother urgently, ‘Let’s go.’

  There was only a metre or so gap between where we were standing and the tracks that were carrying the approaching train. My brother said, ‘No.’ My brother said, ‘Not until you drop it.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because it’ll be good for you,’ he said, as I leant over the brick kiln edge and let go.

  Thirty seconds.

  The guitar amp didn’t really smash when it crashed into the stream that ran from the disused, discarded, outsmarted sluice gates at the opposite end of the watercress beds. It didn’t really splash, either. It just sort of flopped, after falling in drunken slow motion, a sort of afterschool delirium, into the chalk riverbed. And sat, partially submerged, taking on water amongst the remnants of an old perambulator, some bottles of beer and a fridge-freezer that probably hadn’t been hauled all the way up here, just lazily dumped underneath.

  As the bath refills I sink my head without a sound. Without a BOOM travelling through the water except for gunshot pallets dropped CRACK banging on the concrete in the building site behind my flat. The gravelly drawl of the extractor fan tampering with leaves that’ve fallen through the wire mesh on the roof, somehow, and got caught in the belly button fluff fan-mechanism. A useless sluice gate pulled out by a discontented farmer as he dredges the part of the river that runs through his land, council on his back to flush all the crap downstream.

  I believe I killed Gentleman Jim when I heard, as a child, that my mother, God bless her, once had an affair with him.

  Just a thought.

  The sound of the guitar amp slapping the shallow stream temporarily drowned out the hum from the railway tracks as the fast train (only three stops) approached the viaduct. When we were back on the earth embankment we held onto large tufts of wild grass by the abandoned pillbox. ‘To stop the suction,’ my brother yelled as the train passed feverishly, trying to ravage us, trying to untangle us, trying to end our misery. When it was over my brother re-righted his hair, scrunched his face and stood up. ‘It’s a very selfish thing to do,’ he continued, ‘standing at the side of a train track. The drivers get all kinds of mental issues, even if they miss you.’

  I was standing in front of a tree, pissing.

  ‘Good fun, though.’

  My brother, feeling as alive as a crash survivor, said, as he began to crab-step down the side of the embankment back to the stream where the guitar amp lay collecting duck weed, ‘Just remember: it can be a noble thing, standing at the side of a railway line, especially if you get hit.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘the train driver can claim medical leave,’ twirling his fingers by the side of his ear.

  ‘Does the same go for the drivers of boats?’ I asked.

  ‘The drivers of boats are called captains. Or maybe they’re helmsmen. And no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because people can’t walk on water.’

  On the way home, after we’d traversed the poplars at the edge of the watercress beds and jumped over the holes we’d dug in the gravel pits and climbed the stile over the footbridge by the concrete housing for the unhoused, rusting sluice gates and crossed the field and reached the road, I made sure to step on every loose paving stone, see-sawing, just in case there was water beneath them.

  The bathwater begins to get higher. I take a deep breath. This time I’m counting to forty.

  MOTORBIKE RESCUE

  The first time I heard my sister speak I was lying in bed in the dark. My brother was staying the night at a friend’s house and I’d been put to bed early while my parents ordered curry, got tipsy on cheap chardonnay in a way to make their secretive, whispered, obligatory sex my gun oil wreck of a father administered agreeable. Bedroom door closed to the sound of, ‘Be quiet.’ And, drunk, ‘Don’t raise your eyes at me,’ with a timid, ‘Could you just slow down a bit?’ in response.

  I’d grown out of checking for house fires ever since I’d found my dead little sister reanimated beneath the sink by the toilet under the boiler in the bathroom. With wax for eyes, that refracted light like my grandfather’s crystal whisky glass hidden behind a curtain while Mother the hoover sucked back up the mess of placenta and blood, as though she saw it too. Door closed, butter knife blade of light, heavy weight on my feet, like Father sneaking in on Christmas Eve, drunk and mince pied, buttery air under eye, over tired, and left stockings he felt ashamed for not being able to fill up.

  The first thing my sister said to me was this: ‘I taste like car keys.’ It was dark and I’d only noticed the weight on my legs when it’d began to creep up from my feet, then, ‘Keys. If you suck them, they taste like blood,’ and I knew it was her. She smelled like our mother. Like post traumatic stress disorder. Like a birth that resembled, at least to my imagination, an unsatisfying defecation.

  ‘It’s the iron,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked her.’

  ‘It’s good to finally meet you, too,’ she said.

  I was lying on my back. Her weight was pressing on my bladder, having crawled up my body and grown many years older since I found her, during an interval, crying quietly on the cold tiled floor beneath the sink near the boiler by the toilet in the bathroom downstairs. Pressing out the piss I was desperately trying to hold in but couldn’t. I’d ruined my tolerance
for dehydration. Would shrivel to lichen on a gravestone. All those alarm clock fire watch intervals late at night. Wake up, sit up, get up and check the house isn’t burning down–

  Silly boy.

  –though really, I realised then, as my sister applied all her pressure until I gave in, closed my eyes and pissed myself, that I should’ve just started the fire.

  *

  I am alive because of Gentleman Jim. My mother was stranded at the side of a road with her bicycle. It had a puncture, or a rounded crank shaft, and couldn’t be pedalled any further. Jim was out on his motorbike. It was hot. It was a sunny day. The air smelled like rape and hay fever.

  I know this because she told me.

  My sister.

  My parents never actually elaborated. My father didn’t know it. And my mother had tried to forget about it altogether.

  ‘She loved him,’ said my sister in the dark. I’d assumed she meant my father, to whom Jim had introduced her at the pub after stopping by the side of the road and offering to give her a ride.

  ‘They hid her bike in a bush,’ said my sister. ‘I know this because I can see it. Turn on the light and you’ll see it too.’ But I was soaked through and clasped by the gold moons and stars that were printed on my duvet. ‘I don’t want to see you,’ I said to her, feeling itchy and uncomfortably warm. ‘Too late,’ said my sister, who felt fully grown while she straddled me. ‘The bubble has blown.’

  Pop.

  ‘You blew it up with that first shot.’

  Bang.

  ‘Though, let’s be honest, who could miss a vertical rabbit at thirty yards with a shotgun? BLAM,’ she shouted, slapping my chest with a much larger hand then I’d expected, before shrinking.

  Loved him?

  ‘Loved who?’ I asked.

  ‘Loved Jim,’ she said. ‘Rode his motorbike with him, with her arms around him on the back of his seat. She’d only been in the area visiting relatives. What else could’ve made her stay forever?’