by Harry Gallon
‘What kind of cake is it?’ I asked her, just as Father emerged with a whistle and suggested, ‘The usual, no doubt.’
‘I think he’s jealous,’ my dead sister whispered to me. We’d gone understairs and were sitting under the cabin bed. ‘I think he suspects that your mother and Jim had a love affair.’
‘A what?’
‘Or that they’re having one right now.’
‘I don’t want to be of those kids with divorced parents,’ I said, with my head round the socks I was putting on and downstairs the dog barking as the telephone began to ring. ‘I wonder who you’ll live with,’ said my sister, unwilling to miss a chance to wind me up. ‘Probably your father. I wouldn’t blame mum if she just ran away with him.’
‘With who?’
‘With Jim.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You never listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t you appreciate all the information that I give you? Your uncle’s a dangerous man. And a handsome one, too.’
‘He’s too old for you.’
‘Age isn’t a problem when you’ve never really been born. I was reabsorbed, remember? Reabsorbed by our mother, so therefore I live inside her. She didn’t wipe me up with a dishcloth off the floor of the downstairs bathroom. I’m not a cum stain or shit stain or why-hasn’t-it-happened period pain, like you fucking well are.’
She paused.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
I was turning on the PlayStation.
‘You’re getting fat,’ said my sister, half hanging from the bed.
‘I know what you’re doing up there, young man,’ my father shouted up the stairs. ‘Wash your hands and come get in the car.’
‘Where are we going?’ I shouted.
‘To pick up your uncle,’ he yelled back. ‘His motorbike isn’t working.’
*
Northern mockingbirds are rarely, if ever, seen in Britain or continental Europe. Eurasian jays prefer north-west Africa to North America. It was a Sunday in Southern England and my father had finally diagnosed me insane.
What a relief.
We’d gone to pick up Uncle Jim from town. Broken bike. Car horn father. Mother couldn’t imagine who’d do such a thing.
I was yawning. Dad was beeping.
‘I can’t express how grateful I am to have you guys around,’ said Jim round the table, reaching out over half-empty serving dishes and taking my mother’s hand. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. It’s a bit scary, actually. No one’s ever done something like this before.’ My father looked away and under the table my sister was whispering something so loud no one could hear it: ‘Don’t worry, he’ll pin it on one of his enemies.’
She was kneeling. In knee-high white socks. Hair in a bob. Feeding our still-alive terrier scraps of cheap beef I’d had only a little trouble shifting from the eyes of my mother, who kept repeating, ‘This is great.’
Back and forth.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’
Fresh leeks from the garden and fresh plasters on her arm.
‘He’ll assume it was another assassin,’ said my sister, teasing the terrier until it got bored and tried to sniff Jim’s balls instead. My sister followed the dog. ‘She can probably smell his last victim’s DNA.’
‘Stop looking at your lap, boy. Have some manners.’
‘Sorry Dad,’ I said.
My father turned back to Jim. ‘Don’t you think it could’ve been him?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. No, it can’t have been. It was a very amicable breakup,’ said Jim. ‘We had a good, long chat in the pub.’
‘Maybe he saw you with some other fella,’ said my father. ‘You do look like you had one hell of a night.’
‘Oh, leave him alone,’ said my mother. ‘Do you want some cake?’
My sister was sitting between my mother and Jim, sucking a wooden spoon.
‘What did you get up to last night, anyway?’ asked my father.
‘That’s none of our business,’ said my mother, nodding in my direction and in the direction of my still-alive brother, who was brooding.
Smiling, Jim said, ‘I’d love some.’
My father raised his eyes.
Outside someone was hoovering. Near the fence that separates the back garden. In the pine trees. My father stood up and walked to the window. ‘There’s a bloody great jay in that tree,’ he said, and in my brother’s direction continued, ‘quick, get your air rifle.’
My brother frowned, shook his head and helped himself to more bread sauce until my father stopped standing at the window and went into the cupboard underneath the stairs to get the .410. ‘Go on then,’ he said to me as he broke the gun and from the dressing table picked up a cartridge before passing both across the table. I looked towards my mother but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where is she?’ I asked my sister, who was pawing for a treat by Jim’s legs. When my father had gone to the cupboard my mother had disappeared. ‘Who cares,’ said my sister, ‘I bet you could really impress him,’ meaning Jim, ‘if you take that gun and with one shot plop that bird off its perch in the pine tree. Show him you’re dangerous. Show him you can’t be messed with.’
I walked outside very carefully. Our backdoor creaked heavily so I took a good thirty seconds just to open then close it behind me. Eurasian jays are good at mimicry. They can make you believe they’re something else. This bird had stopped hoovering and was creaking down at me, suspicious. My sister had followed me outside and was hiding behind the remains of an old bicycle frame next to the broken greenhouse. My father was watching through the kitchen window, making sure I lifted the gun properly, stood properly, breathed properly.
‘I know where your mother is,’ my sister whispered to me. ‘She’s round the other side of the house with Uncle Jim.’ I looked at the kitchen window. My father pointed at the tree. Jim was no longer sitting at the table. The jay kept creaking. I left the gun by the broken bike frame and walked to the front of the house. As I approached I heard sniffing. My mother and Jim were smoking cigarettes by the front door and there were tears in my mother’s eyes, though she smiled when she saw me.
BANG.
My mother winced as she took a drag. ‘Would you just give us a moment, little man?’ said my uncle. I walked back round the corner of the house, where I stood, listening. ‘It’s relentless,’ said my mother.
Drag.
‘Just relentless.’
Drag.
‘My food. My driving. The way I try to raise our children. You know he still wants to send them to public school? But with what money?’
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Jim. ‘He just wants what he thinks is best for them.’
For a while my mother said nothing. I’d slumped down at the side of the house, in the flowerbed with the discarded toy army men.
‘It’s the guns, too,’ she said, after lighting another cigarette. ‘This obsession with shooting. Even at the dinner table. He can’t help but get up to kill something.’
‘It’s meant to be sporting,’ said Jim.
‘But a mockingbird?’ said my mother. ‘He makes our youngest son shoot a mockingbird?’
‘It was a jay, dear,’ said my father, who’d gone back into the house, through the dining room to the front hallway by the staircase and the front door, opened it and stepped outside. ‘A Eurasian jay. Those two birds are not the same.’
I could hear her stamp out her cigarette on the concrete pathway.
‘Smoking again, are we?’ said my father, which sent my mother storming past me, still crouched in the flowerbed, half-hidden but never gotten rid of. She, Mother, stopped briefly, looked as though she was about to say something. Maybe she sensed the presence of her miscarried daughter. Certainly she saw me eavesdropping.
She kept walking.
That’s when my sister appeared. She was holding the dead bird. ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said. ‘Look how blue it is.’
I said, ‘Shh,’ still trying to l
isten. My sister shrugged, dropped the bird and left.
‘Why do you encourage her?’ my father asked Jim round the corner.
‘Smoking?’ said Jim, who himself was lighting another.
‘Not only that,’ said my father. ‘She’s mothering these boys too much.’
‘They’re just close.’
‘Too close, I think.’
‘She said you want to send them to boarding school.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s only ever been a thought. It might do them good, like us. We turned out fine, didn’t we?’
Drag.
‘We only went there because our dad was an officer.’
‘We went for a walk last weekend,’ said my father. ‘Her sister came round with her kids. The children took their bikes but he–’
Meaning me.
‘–had a tantrum.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. Something about pushing his bike up a hill? That’s right, it got a puncture. So he just dumped it in a hedge at the side of the road. He’s meant to be a fucking man, but he’s mad as anything.’
My uncle laughed. ‘He’s still a child,’ he said, taking a drag. ‘Has he heard the story about how you two got together?’
My father coughed in the smoke. ‘No, he hasn’t. Besides, her bike was actually broken. She needed help.’
‘How old were you when you got married?’ said Jim.
‘It was different then,’ said my father.
‘Maybe,’ said Jim. ‘At least you’re right about one thing: she really did have a good reason to drop her bike that day. In fact, I’m surprised it’s the only thing she did drop, after she saw me on my motorbike.’
‘Very funny.’
Just then my mother reappeared, holding a trowel. She picked up the dead bird and walked quickly, with purpose, round the side of the house to my father. ‘Bury it,’ she told him, holding out both of her hands.
My father said, ‘Look, it’s just a–’
‘Bury it.’
I CAN HEAR MY MOTHER PRAYING
I’ve been repairing the entrails of my mother’s old green bicycle ever since I killed my brother. There was nothing of him left to touch, let alone fix. His flesh was dr-dr-dripping from his skeleton while everyone else we knew was gathering for somebody else’s funeral. It’s funny, really. The old green bike’s been chained to the railing on the concrete walkway outside the front door of my flat ever since it was given back to me by the fire brigade. Or the police. Or the forensics team. I don’t know what any of them were searching for when they took it. It was a tool inadvertently used to introduce my parents, so maybe it was considered a murder weapon.
I want to burn everything down. I want to burn down that house and my house, but I can hear my mother whisper. She’s saying please. Her words are WD-40 destroying rust. They didn’t start with her old green bike flying through the air but that certainly amplifies them. Makes them echo through fat rolls whenever I squat to undo the de-rusted bolts.
I’ve been assessing potential fire escapes. The walkway on the sixth floor to which my front door leads looks out across a school playground. It’d be a hell of a spectacle to fall during school hours. I don’t trust the elevator mechanism in this building. It’s wide enough for cadavers.
I can hear her. She’s miles away, with a new life in better weather. But whereas my father always chose to blame the universe for his misfortunes, she knew it was easier to rely upon it for answers. It took a long time for her to realise (and my father never did) that the reasons for most things are in the silence that answers you.
It’s an eighty foot drop from the walkway. Not what I’d intended, really. And anyway, it’d be too easy to escape down the stairway. You don’t take elevators during fiery situations, and I’m a coward. I already tried squeezing my foot into the rubbish shoot, but it barely takes a shopping bag full of used tissues and uneaten curry as it is.
I don’t think the other mothers would ever forgive me if I set fire to a large family building 150 feet from their children’s school.
I’ve built the pyre but my mother’s been praying for rain.
There’d be no evidence for the police to obtain. Dust burnt.
New plan.
The school children are playing football. One of them drops from an abusive tackle and scrapes his knee on the tarmac. No dirt to dig into. And some of the older kids are lingering on the peripheries, passing fivers through the high metal fence to someone selling weed. Another stands with his hands in his pockets by the corner of one of the school buildings. Bunsen burners through the open windows as, head-down, he whistles when student teachers my age, carrying lanyards and litter-picking claw arms, get too close.
Her prayers are inside the chainring. Her prayers are squeaking. My mother’s old green bicycle has needed oiling for a very long time, but now the rims are bent and some of the spokes are snapped. There’s a significant dent in the crossbar. Load-bearing chain tension left lying on the side of the M1.
Or was it the M11?
I spend a lot of my time nowadays lying in bed smoking cigarettes, thinking about how quickly the place will catch fire if I move everything into the centre of each room and collect all the dust and fluff and pubic hair that’s gathered by the skirting. I could turn everything I own and rent into a tinder box, then hit it with a high-velocity shot of deodorant can and lighter. Whole place would go up like a Sherman tank. And I could stand across the road, stand on the opposite pavement, and watch as everything I don’t want goes up in smoke.
Her words are terrifying. They bring me back to that home with an urgency. Sent my brother and sister, Mother, Father and me to church ceremony. They lit candles for phantom babies and candles for dying marriages and candles for just because. Full circle. Last pew. Scrutinising neighbours. Hands on brown radiators. Father ringing the bells all by himself. No one we know actually believes this shit, but there’s a desperate need to be part of something.
‘It’s no use,’ I say to the railing outside, out loud, flicking my fag end down down down six floors and onto the pavement behind the school playground. ‘I can’t bang this dent out.’
My hammer’s softer than the bike.
My parents almost didn’t have us. They tried and tried, but nothing happened. Just before they conceived my brother, my father told my mother, ‘It’s better to have tried.’ They gave up and bought the terrier. Then BOOM. My brother. BOOM, me. And boom, the dog would get hit by a car on the road outside our house many years later. My brother and I dug the grave while our mother prayed and our father checked the time, the dog’s death an omen that reassured him he could at least blame the careless driver for ruining his marriage.
Getting the back wheel off is a chore. The rear mudguard is held on with oestrogen and a thick black cable tie which refuses to be cut with anything I have in my cardboard toolbox. Both tyres are flat, but the rubber didn’t melt. The bike was thrown at least fifteen feet into a damp English hedgerow before everything caught on fire and exploded. The tyres are simply corroded. They’re outdated. Old. The rims are rusted and the rust has stained the rubber orange. Brown, even. There’s black gunk oozing out of the hub gear and the handlebar has been pinched inward, presumably by the impact.
It bounced several times.
My dead little sister says, ‘You should chuck it over the edge.’
She’s been watching me all morning through the kitchen window.
The school bell rings. A rusted bolt finally gives on the end of the crank shaft and the chainring catches my finger. My mother prays from the new flat she rents alone, watching out for tetanus. She wanted to be closer to Stephanie, to her grandchild and, soon, her dead son’s new baby. More focused on hysterectomies. Left me just enough time to shout, ‘Fuck,’ loud enough for the kids hanging out by the high metal fence to hear, and look up, before being ordered into a line outside the science block.
Nearby, a church bell rings two o’clock.
BB GUN MASSACRE
Once, a tree fell down in our village and crushed a tree surgeon’s apprentice.
SPLAT.
One of the controlling wires snapped.
CRACK.
When it snapped the tree fell the incorrect way, which also happened to be directly onto the corpse (née body) of a sixteen-year-old boy, still holding a saw.
It was a beech tree.
He’d been in my brother’s class.
My father had a chainsaw, too. My brother and I used to go into the woods at the top of the field behind our house with him, to chop wood. He didn’t stop aspiring to be detached from the rest of the village. They, after all, kept hiring the same tree surgeon to alter the aesthetics of their greens.
The woods my father used to chop in were behind the field with the old abandoned concrete reservoir in it. There was a new reservoir, somewhere. It was metal, shiny. My brother found it one day, while our father was chainsawing the remains of a beech that had fallen in high winds. I’d climbed up another tree, and couldn’t get back down. I yelled, but no one could hear me.
*
The soundtrack is: a scarecrow banger thrown onto a village hall dance floor during the annual flower show, disrupting a hokey cokey.
No.
Police sirens. Testing the response time of the London Metropolitan Police Service (I always wanted to test the response time of the London Metropolitan Police Service). Always wanted to test the response time of my nerves. It started with the Five Second Game (part one), when I held the playground end of that .410 shotgun under my chin. Loaded.
The sound track is: click. Or the soundtrack is a little boy stuck up a tree. Or maybe the soundtrack is, actually, one of my grandfather’s dead, rusted shotgun cartridges, requisitioned from the old understairs gun cabinet (next to the door for the downstairs bathroom), redistributed into an angry old farmer’s barn.
That’s a fizz.
A fizz from my brother, who laughed popping candy laughter like tin and pebbles. Or a cheap guitar amp meddling with the course of a stream’s water. Or the sound of reams of paper being torn by his younger brother–