by Harry Gallon
Me.
–every time he (I) tries (try) to write a sorry letter (‘I’m sorry’) to his widowed wife (‘for killing my brother’) for killing her husband, the love of her (‘and ruining your’) life.
*
For a while it was The Mike Curb Congregation and their song Burning Bridges, from the war film Kelly’s Heroes. Then it wasn’t. And now, again, it is.
*
I think it is also the sound of the earth. Not the earth revolving round the sun, or round someone – a brother, a sister, a mother, a father. Nor is it the sound of the hurt. Rather, it’s the actual sound of the earth, and digging. We were always digging dirt.
So close to last words: ‘We were always digging dirt.’
We were always digging dirt, so the soundtrack is a shovel penetrating the topsoil earth and moving it.
Sort of a SCHH-K-K-K, then a sprinkle.
Digging dirt, building mounds of earth which sunk in the rain or were ploughed away by a farmer who’d lost himself in search of tubercular badgers, or a den of foxes to burn down, because it’s easier to feel in control when your subordinates, though they may possess impressive biological weapons, don’t have syringes to inject them with, or thumbs.
With that in mind, the sound could be a bicycle freewheel spinning. Click-click-clicking. Or a spanner round a headset, turning. Or a bottom bracket burning as you’re racing down a hill. Or children playing soldiers. Shouting orders. Digging dirt. Gravel pits. Army boots. The soundtrack shooting up your arm with a shivering sting as a horsefly drinks your blood. A little death which comes as quickly as a lip to a wasp sting. That first jump in a river. That drink of liver fluke water. My father spent Seventies summers being avoided by his parents, on cadet training camps with his brother, where men groomed child soldiers and ruling classes to stand in line. My father was the last one standing–
He’d recalled, after I was born, when he’d lost all optimism, ‘All I’ve achieved is a son, then you. But everyone I know without a vagina is a father (except your uncle, though he may as well have one too (ha!), so the best advice I’d give you, if you want to prove yourself, and I mean really PROVE yourself, is to pick up the gun and breathe out as you pull the trigger.’
It gets bigger.
–and hadn’t stepped back quick enough when the sergeant requested a man (ha!) to carry the Bren.
My dream. Heavy, but with a high rate of fire.
Uncle Jim was upstream. And not yet an uncle. So Jim was upstream with the regimental cadet force public schoolboy swimming team–
Clothing optional, predictably rejected.
–and had taken it upon himself, after having successfully bathed with his classmates while their World War Two era uniforms, boots, helmets, webbing and outdated blank-firing weapons stood huddled together in tipi formations, feeling drab, to explore the area upstream with a cup of milky World War Two era tea from a camping stove kettle, in his hand. All he found was the body of a dead deer, rotting partially into and out of the river.
He didn’t have the heart to tell the other toy soldiers, as a lower class of male than his father. He did, however, make a mental note to tell his brother not to drink the water fresh; to boil everything on the stove from now on into the future. Meanwhile, behind the great trunk of an old yew tree, his brother, who just wanted to be left alone, was aiming a blank-firing Lee-Enfield No.4 at his foot, closing his eyes and hoping for a superficial wound.
*
What’s that?’ says Willow, spilled on my sofa like a feather-filled duvet in winter. ‘Oh that?’ I say whilst standing at the window where I’ve been smoking and thinking about blowing up the Shard, ‘that’s an M16A2 assault rifle.’
To field-strip your M16A2 assault rifle you must first pop out the two pins which connect the lower receiver to the upper receiver. The pins are located above the pistol grip and the magazine well. Once removed, slide the upper receiver (attached to the barrel) off the lower receiver (attached to the rear stock, grip and trigger). Slide the bolt assembly out by pulling back the charging handle. Remove the pin on the right side of the bolt carrier to free the firing pin, then remove the bolt from the bolt carrier by ejecting the bolt pin. You can only eject the bolt pin once the firing pin has been freed.
Clean, then reverse to reassemble.
Willow’s wearing one of my t-shirts. The one that says, ‘Heisenberg Says Relax’ on it. She’s also holding a glass of wine. It’s weird. ‘How long do you think it would take to get shot if I went into the Underground with that?’ I say, pointing at the M16A2 assault rifle, which is squashed behind the fake leather Ikea armchair, teasing the wall with its black metal barrel, flaunting its flash suppressor.
‘I think that depends a lot on which tube station you took it to,’ says Willow, drinking.
‘How about Bethnal Green?’ I say. ‘The tiles. The old rails. The draught.’
The soundtrack could be an echo.
‘There’re often a lot of people there,’ I say. ‘Quick response time from the police, but I may get to shoot at least one person in the leg before they kill me.’
Willow picks up the bottle. It’s a top-shelf sauvignon blanc and I can still just about afford it. ‘Do you think I’ve put on weight?’ I ask her.
‘A little,’ she says. ‘I thought you were walking more?’
‘I haven’t moved all day.’
I can hear a whimper. A night-time shiver of children’s laughter.
‘When I was younger I had a Heckler & Koch MP5SD3.’
‘What’s that?’ she says.
‘A type of German machine pistol.’
Willow rolls her eyes.
‘You could call it a sub-machine gun, too. Do you know what SD stands for?’
She shakes her head.
‘SD stands for Schalldämpfer. That means sound suppressor. It had four joules of power and was made out of ABS plastic, except for the stock which was part metal, as was the barrel. The stock was collapsible. Shatterable, too, if you dropped it. Which I did. Or rather, my mother knocked it off the arm of a chair, where I’d left it after playing with my brother.’
‘She probably did that on purpose,’ says Willow.
‘Maybe. Guns make her nervous.’
‘What would you wear, if you infiltrated a tube station?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far.’
‘A suit would be good.’ Willow stands up. ‘Or a puffer jacket, padded out with bags of rice.’ She walks towards me.
‘Wild rice?’
She shrugs. ‘How about quinoa?’ she asks me, grinning. ‘The cops would definitely go for that.’ She rolls a cigarette impatiently.
Willow is pressed up against me. Willow’s arm is reaching behind me. Willow’s mind is on the no-longer-used balcony, popping off–
‘How many bullets does it carry?’
Willow’s fingers round the barrel.
Willow’s pulling out the rifle.
I light another cigarette and say, ‘Well, it’s a bb gun, but a real one takes thirty.’
Willow’s standing four feet away from me now, holding the M16, pointing it at me. ‘It feels flimsy,’ she says. ‘How do you fire it?’
‘To cock your M16A2 assault rifle you simply pull back the charging handle.’
‘Like this?’ Willow pulls back the charging handle with her right hand. With her left hand she holds the forestock. Her shoulder is cradling the rear.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’ll need to research the depths of the stations,’ she says.
Get down on your knees.
‘What’ll you do until the police arrive? Kill everybody?’
‘It could be an elaborate joke,’ I say. ‘We–’
‘We?’
‘–could equip people with blood packs.’
‘Explosive blood packs?’ says Willow
‘Yes,’ I tell her, proudly, ‘explosive blood packs.’
Look directly up at me.
‘Too muc
h,’ she says. ‘They’ll shoot you for sure if they see anyone who looks dead. Won’t be much of a joke then, will it.’
‘I’d need wrapping paper, or something similar,’ I tell her, ‘in order to get the rifle down there. If I took one step out of my front door with that thing, the police would be there.’
Open your mouth.
‘Then we may as well just shoot you now,’ says Willow, staring down the barrel at me.
Says Willow, gripping the rifle with whitening knuckles.
Says Willow, pulling the shitty, fake plastic trigger.
Pop.
Willow smiles. ‘It’s just as well it’s a toy, then,’ she says, putting it back behind the sofa before sitting down on the floor in front of me. ‘Why do you still have it?’ she asks.
I say, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asks.
I say, ‘No.’
‘You have an erection,’ she says.
‘I know. I used to have an S10 1986 issue gas mask, too.’
‘Why’d you get rid of it?’
‘Couldn’t breathe when I wore it.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ says Willow.
BEDSPRINGS
The power cable to the bedside light twitches every time Willow’s heart beats. We flipped the mattress before we tried to sleep. The bedside light is attached to the headboard. The power cable runs horizontally from the socket above the skirting board. It has a small switch about three quarters of the way along it. When we flipped the mattress a load of dust blew up in a grey four-cornered mushroom cloud. Willow said, ‘When was the last time you cleaned under there?’
‘I’ve been meaning to have a bonfire,’ I told her.
She said, ‘Cut the crap.’
We didn’t bother to make the bed back up. We’d had a lot of wine. And my nose keeps dribbling. Could be blood. Internal rupture. Body knows better than me. Wants out. Forces me to keep checking to see if my snot is red. I said to Willow, ‘I don’t want to get snot all over the pillow case.’ It was already on her shirt collar. Willow stripped everything bare. Then she lay on the bed, spread her arms, threw her feet, and said, ‘It hasn’t changed.’
I lie with my mouth open, warm inside the bare duvet. Polyester bobbles exfoliate. Sweat glands are open and on parade. Follicles dilate. Pave the way. I roll over. Scrotum enveloping my inner thigh like feather down or clear honey on a hot day. I reach towards the bedside table behind me for a tissue. There are none. A police car drives past with its lights flashing but no siren. The power cable to the bedside light twitches. I can hear Willow’s heart beating through the bedsprings. Revitalised. Calm. Jurassic Park glass of water in relentless metal springs singing her sonar blip.
I envy her.
Start drooling more.
Heart like a rubber ball bouncing off the bedroom walls. Always coming back.
Oh, I envy her.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I’d said. And like lead in a river sank down behind her on the bed. We didn’t have sex. We just lay, me lining the edge of the bed while her breath kept ramming the wall.
I suck in so aggressively I half expected my frontal lobe to detach. Down throat. Hit lung peninsular with meteoric power. Bleed. Colour of migraine. Rot. Bridging the gap between having a stroke and knowing you’re probably going to have one eventually. Be reduced to a vegetative state in a care home. The police car has stopped moving. Its lights block the street lamps and turn the room into blue blood, flashing.
Maybe they’re finally coming for me.
I get up and go to the bathroom. Sit on the toilet, lid down, naked. Goose pimples. Try blowing my nose. No blood on the paper. Not even a common cold. Still, something’s wrong. My hands are shaking. Think about running a quick bath but I can’t stand up. Feet glued to the floor. Freezing. I rub my face, my hair. Try listening for something, anything. Dead sister. Weeping sister. She wept for me earlier. Gun in my mouth. Now nothing. Something’s wrong. I’m completely alone.
The door opens. Willow stands there fully clothed, rubbing her eye. ‘I think I’m going to go,’ she says.
AND THE DOCTOR ASKS MY MOTHER IF SHE SELF-HARMS
On the day my brother got married I was in a lecture. It was a hot day. Rain suits London better. My brother was in a registry office somewhere and I was trying to pay attention to the professor who was introducing us to our dissertation proposals.
I was struggling to hear because the room I was sitting in was hot. It was a large room but it felt small. It felt like I was sitting inside a cowrie shell that’d washed up on a beach. And I was trying harder not to fall asleep. Back then, every time I fell asleep I had the same recurring dream in which I died. I wasn’t even lying in bed. I was sitting in a foldable chair. But the glare from the glass bottle eyes of my little sister, twisting boredom and rigor mortis between her dead little fingers in that lecture theatre, cold as latent air conditioning, sweaty as corpses in the sun, kept my heart rate supernaturally high, though not frightened.
‘It’s relieving,’ she whispered, ‘death.’
I was biting my lip.
‘Feels like paradise,’ she said. ‘But not like heaven.’
Rolling my eyes.
‘More like you’re just on holiday. Like you’re sitting on the hot dry sand of a tropical beach–’
Digging soil skin with fingernails.
‘–while the bother of living is a faraway thing.’
My ankles were itching profusely. I had an appointment with the university counsellor and would have to leave early, then dinner with Willow. It was hot and my blood has always been tasty. ‘Let me get that for you,’ said my sister, on the floor, knees bent legs folded arms out hands holding my ankles, dead ripped brown fingernails scratching the mosquito bites I’d woken up with. ‘They’re symmetrical,’ she said to me teasingly, then took off my shoes and took off my socks in the row at the back of the lecture hall. I’d put my phone on airplane mode so I didn’t know that my brother was getting married. Somewhere, in a registry office, with just Stephanie, whom I’d only met twice, and the junior mechanic my brother employed as a witness.
I wasn’t exactly moving. I wasn’t exactly trying to stop my sister from scratching the itch on my ankles. I turned my head a little, maybe, just to see if her actions were attracting attention, but all I got were looks from other students who’d noticed me looking at them.
‘They’re getting redder,’ she’d said, then, holding my bare feet close to her and stroking the area around the bites I’d received during the night. ‘That tickles,’ I said as my sister slid closer and began groping my toes with the crisp batter of her decomposed tongue. She was running her dry, flaky hands all around my shin bones and poking her nose against the hum of blood which had begun retreating back up towards my heart, beating faster as I tried not to laugh. ‘Could you hold this, please?’ I said to her, waving a book in her face while I tried to pick up my bag. My knuckles had turned white and I was gripping one of the arm rests at the side of the foldable auditorium seat while the professor–
“You might get a 2:1, but you won’t get a First.”
–was clicking faster and faster through slides. My spine had gone straight ,and there was no way I could stop squirming without alerting the girl in the seat nine feet away from me of what, if anything, was happening.
Click.
My sister was stroking my knees. I leant to the side and reached into my bag. Pulled out a bottle of water. It was warm and tasted of chlorine. ‘Just hold this for me, now, please,’ I said loudly, standing, shivering in prickly heat before actually giving my sister anything to hold. Book and notepaper spilling. Finding it hard to breathe. Water bottle lid fell and rolled down the stepped hill to the front of the hall without hitting anyone’s feet.
Bent slightly in the middle, I dithered off to the back of the auditorium and went out through the back door.
I didn’t notice the piss on the floor of the toilet, even though my feet were bare. I was b
reathing heavily and staring at myself in the huge wall-sized mirror, whispering: ‘We’re always together. We’re always together.’
It’d been okay at first, for years a nuisance. Now she was a pain.
I turned airplane mode off. Triggered the motion sensor on the tap. Wash hands. Return to seat. My phone vibrated. There was a picture of my brother with a haircut and Stephanie in a chintz dress and a message that said, ‘GUESS WHAT?’
Back in the auditorium everyone else had left. I sat down in my chair next to where my sister had left my shoes and socks, preferring herself to rock back and forth somewhere else rather than wipe the piss off my toes. The mosquito bites on my ankles were meningitis red, the plains of skin white because my blood had not been invited back down from my ventricles yet.
When I finally arrived at the counsellor’s office, her door was locked.
*
‘It’s gorgeous,’ said my mother, who’d transformed over the previous year-and-a-half into a flute glass of cheap sparkling wine, an impatient sigh, an itchy foot healing after pulling a muscle whilst walking. She’d started walking. She needed the practice. She held her new daughter-in-law’s hand and examined the ring her eldest son hadn’t asked her advice on before buying. ‘I just wish you could’ve told us first,’ she’d said, then, whispering so that Stephanie couldn’t hear, ‘you could’ve had your grandmother’s,’ which was just about the only valuable thing she owned. It was the Easter holidays and I’d come home for a few days. My brother was there with his new wife. So was Gentleman Jim, though he was obviously alone and looking frail. Lunch outside. Even my grandmother. Excavated from her hole and unwittingly breaking Kettle Chips into a pot of taramasalata.
‘You really should have told us,’ said our father angrily, fingers prickling with heat and a chin that shook the parasol.
‘We wanted to do it our own way,’ said my brother, without meeting his eye. Black fingernails. Jim sat silently in the corner, looking older and wheezing. ‘He’s had too much already,’ said our father, raising his eyes at his own brother in an attempt to show mine that he couldn’t hear, rather than wouldn’t, the reasons why they’d chosen not to invite any family members. ‘Probably a good thing that Jim didn’t go along,’ said Dad, ‘what with him always threatening to bring one of his shady friends.’ He laughed. Looked at me. ‘And how’s that girl of yours?’