Every Fox is a Rabid Fox

by Harry Gallon

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Makes the rent cheaper, eh.’

  I didn’t reply. My mother limped to the fridge and said, ‘Who wants another glass?’

  *

  Dad drove my grandmother back to the home a few hours later, Jim back to his. Brother and Stephanie were in our old room upstairs which my parents had converted, since we’d left, into a spare. Removed concave and cabin beds. Replaced curtains and hurtled a second-hand queen-size up the stairs. I’d be on the sofa. Stood on the patio with a cigarette, waiting for everyone to go to bed.

  My mother sat on one of the kitchen chairs by the back door. It was almost dark. The sky was changing and she was convalescing between exercises in preparation. Waiting for the day when I’d graduated, would no longer require her signature on my tenancy agreements in guarantee of rent payment. Waiting to leave.

  ‘Did you say something?’ she asked, as I watched my dead sister, floppy and dripping, and eyeing me through a hole in one of our mother’s large terracotta flowerpots, which I’d accidentally made with a black widow slingshot when I was younger.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ I said, lying down on the grass by the old overgrown garden hedge, ‘about a dream I had recently.’ I neglected to mention her intention to leave because I didn’t want to discourage her.

  ‘What dream was that?’ she asked, rubbing her arms with a G&T.

  ‘I dreamt that I’d been hanged,’ I said. My mother didn’t say anything. She kept rubbing but no longer her skin, more at the sky and contrails. Stubborn. Unlikely that she’d ever rely on a man to make her day again. She’d do it. She’d leave. I knew it. The dead foetus of her daughter could prove it, but I didn’t want to ask. In her silence I looked at my mother, feeling very twenty-one. Just on the cusp, but not quite ready. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean to–’

  ‘Why’d they hang you?’ she asked, flexing her toes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Could’ve been infanticide. Could’ve been manslaughter that hadn’t happened yet.

  ‘And did you die?’ she asked me. My mother was itchy. I could see her fingering her wedding ring with less care than my father gave the washers he kept in his tool box.

  So like a man.

  ‘It’s a bad omen,’ she said, ‘to die in a dream.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, feeling balmy, ‘I did. But it was a good thing. I remember being led to a large wooden platform through a crowd of all my friends. But they were made-up friends. Dream friends. Some people I recognised from real life, but otherwise they were made-up. And the light was strange. Like now. Both dawn and dusk simultaneously. Everything was blue and–’

  The flowerpot exploded. Fertilised soil and terracotta went everywhere except on my mother, who lay, feet up, waiting, having not even noticed. The church bells down in the village were tolling loudly, then stopped as if suddenly muted.

  ‘There’s a cold spot at the bottom of the hill,’ said my mother. ‘Your father walks through it on his way home from the village. I think he passes through the spirits of the dead.’ She shook her head slowly and sniffed. ‘He thinks I’m stupid.’ She upturned her G&T. The remaining ice and pinched lime wedge dropped carelessly onto what was left of her once decorative flowerbed. It had become a graveyard for plastic soldiers I’d long since left to grow brittle in the sun. ‘How’s your foot?’ I asked, looking at her toes. Both legs were stretched out. One, the left, was wrapped in a Tubigrip that partially covered some dark stains on her skin left by her cheap leather shoes. ‘It’s fine. Not really much you can do, apart from rest,’ she said. ‘The doctor was more interested in my arms.’

  We both looked at my mother’s arms.

  ‘He asked me if I self-harm.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘I just told him I’m bad at cooking.’

  There was a pause.

  Then my mother said, ‘Your father will be home soon.’ She stood up. ‘I’m sure you’ll be ready to get out of here, too.’ She stood, limped over, trying not to put too much pressure on her foot, and kissed me on the head. ‘You need a shower,’ she said. ‘There’s soil in your hair.’

  It was dark when my brother came outside. He was holding a toothbrush. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  I said, ‘For what?’

  He said, ‘I should’ve invited you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. I took a drag, dropped my fag into the terracotta pot. Empty. Sister evacuated. ‘I’m happy for you,’ I said. There was a pause. ‘Though, I didn’t think you’d do anything like this.’

  ‘Get married?’

  ‘Yes.’ I reached into my pocket for some tobacco. ‘You want one?’

  My brother said, ‘No.’ He coughed. ‘How’s university?’

  ‘It’s fine, but I don’t want to be there anymore.’

  ‘What about your girlfriend?’

  ‘Willow? I don’t know. I think she’s losing interest.’

  ‘So drop out.’

  ‘I don’t want to come back here.’

  ‘Mum wouldn’t mind. She just wants you to be happy.’

  ‘That’s the problem. Besides, I’m almost finished.’ Another pause. My brother shoved his toothbrush into his mouth and Stephanie came out with some water. ‘Did you tell him?’ she said. My brother held up a finger.

  ‘Tell me what?’ I asked.

  My brother spat into the flowerbed, showering the plastic soldiers. Stephanie handed him the glass of water. He sipped. She said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  My brother spat again.

  The soil was an Oreo milkshake.

  ‘You’re the first person we’ve told,’ he said.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  Stephanie smiled, kissed my brother on the cheek then left.

  ‘Jim’s leaving,’ my brother said. ‘I overheard him talking to Mum in the kitchen.’

  ‘Did he ask her to go with him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it to do with their affair?’

  My brother stepped a little closer, shook his head. He said, ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Why is Jim leaving?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he’s ill,’ my brother said. ‘You know that.’

  three

  ROCK POOLS

  ‘I bet his career caught up with him,’ said my sister. She was squatting in a pair of clear pink sparkly jelly shoes, poking a dead fish in the eye. ‘But the Canary Islands? It’s all volcanic rock. High spots. Nowhere to hide.’

  I was standing at the sea shore, my toes curled round the edge of a rocky shelf which dove six feet down towards a rocky sea bed. The tide was out, and the Atlantic Ocean only just made it over the rock wall to cover my ankles.

  ‘Where do you think the bullet will enter his body?’ said my sister.

  ‘What bullet?’

  ‘You’re right. It’ll have to be a knife.’

  ‘Oh God –’

  ‘But then–’

  ‘–not this–’

  ‘–that makes–’

  ‘–again.’

  ‘–no sense.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘It’s going to happen slowly,’ I said. Or maybe I didn’t say anything. I was staring at the boulders on the sea bed. They’d been shaped by the water. Smoothed. Piled one on top of the other as they fell into the ocean. Risen. Boulders which had been piled on and on and green and blue and which would, too, keep rising. Six feet between these boulders and me above the surface, which was a clean face in a morning window. Just little caves and cracks between each rock that made up the floor. A labyrinth in which tiny creatures could get lost and keep swimming without ever reaching the bottom.

  ‘It’s not that often your uncle is an assassin,’ my sister told me, as though the thought had never occurred. As though I hadn’t lain awake at night wondering if Gentleman Jim might one day kill my father then marry my mother. ‘I know what you’re going to say: “He’s not my uncle.” Well, I’m here too, aren’t I? Yo
u shoved me in your hand luggage and brought me on that plane,’ said my sister, as she held the fish’s eye on the end of a salt-dried stick before flicking it into the sea.

  I hadn’t been home much since we celebrated my brother’s marriage. By this point his first child had been born.

  It’s a boy.

  ‘What do you think happened to this fish?’ said my sister from beneath a white cotton sun hat. She was tapping its xylophone ribs. Running a pudgy finger up and down vertebrae chimes. Or maybe they were the metal railings outside a primary school. ‘Do you think something had been chasing it? Or maybe someone was trying to catch it? And the fish bit the hook but fought the fisherman and broke the line. Except the struggle used up all its will to keep on living, so it swam into a rock pool and waited for the tide to go out and the sun to dry the water, then died.’

  I hadn’t been home because there wasn’t one. My mother had finally left. My father wouldn’t get dressed unless he had a bathroom to fit. It took Jim nearing death to get him to put his shoes on.

  ‘Do you like my dress?’ said my sister, whose fingers I could smell from where I stood and can still smell from here. ‘It’s what our mother would’ve dressed me in at roughly the age of four, had I, you know, lived.’ I was still standing on the edge of the shelf. A dozen tiny fish swam in the ankle-deep water that made it over the top of the rock. The rock was black and rough as pumice. I put my weight on one foot then twisted it ninety degrees, exfoliating as the skin was shed like sand blown from a windy beach.

  ‘Why do you think he chose for it to be here?’ said my sister.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His safe house. For when a job went wrong or his own boss turned on him. They’d have sent another assassin to kill him, but Gentleman Jim can’t be killed by just any human being.’

  ‘Maybe he chose this place to have a gun fight,’ I said.

  ‘You could be right,’ said my sister. ‘Remember the road on the drive in from the airport? Rocky outcrops to knock heads on. There’d be hired guns, fresh from the supermarket towns around London, who’d been flown out by known employers of cockney assassins after being pushed out of their old territories by a higher price of living. Bodies subject to inflation. They’d know him, Gentleman Jim. They’d have pulled the knife together. Cut throats and worn gloves and filled Tupperware bowls with his blood.’

  ‘Jim’s not a serial killer,’ I told her, feeling older and annoyed. Feeling exactly how my brother felt, I suppose, whenever I spoke about Jim. ‘He’d never take pleasure in murder.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he?’ she said.

  There was a long pause. I used that long pause to ignore her. The long pause was a vast hazy cruise liner passing from left across my picture to right into the frame which, actually, was a hibernating marina at the other end of the beach. Any second now the ship would be directly in line with my sister’s flicked fish eye, floating dull as Fahrenheit sky and the blurry boat that passed. All sea-smoothed glass. Not as sharp as the broken Budweiser I’d circumnavigated in bare feet round the corner of the rocks at this end of the beach, near a tiny football stadium and its perimeter of palm trees. An old stone home still further on and nearer the mountain that would shadow it if the sun didn’t stay directly at noon all day. Keeping the Spanish indoors so the English get pink on the beaches, though it was January and I’d seen barely any of them as it was.

  ‘Don’t you remember the way he grinned when he held that man in front of him,’ said my sister, ‘while we watched from the hollowed-out yew tree? And that young man he tied to the bed with rope?’

  How he’d loosened his tie.

  How he’d held his glass of orange light and looked out of the window and sighed, as though he’d seen me, knew he couldn’t stop me being curious but no, nephew, this was not the way to go about it.

  ‘He’s a tortured soul,’ said my sister, feigning romance. ‘A tragic figure no one could love or abhor, not even a mother.’

  Jim had let go. Jim had let go and let go and let go. It was my father’s idea to visit him. They often spoke on the phone. Get out of that house. Abroad for a year. Can you honestly tell me you didn’t see it coming? She’s happier, and so will you be, in time. Jim coughed a lot. His skin looked baggy. He didn’t have much time.

  ‘He knows they’ll find him here,’ said my sister.

  She was kissing the dead fish’s head.

  She sounded older.

  Her voice was deeper.

  Grown twenty years. Grown taller. Grown breasts and thighs and thick skin on the balls of her feet.

  ‘Jim WANTS them to kill him,’ she said.

  She was deeper.

  The cruise liner had by now almost completely crossed the vista, from the cliff at the side of the mountain towards the marina.

  My sister said, ‘Jim isn’t dying. Jim’s running. Jim lied.’

  I stood, feet side by side sliding along the landscape, feeling alien. The boulders were open and the ocean darker off the side of the shelf, while the tide, that could, reached up and flirted with the rock, and kept my feet in cool, salty socks. I wasn’t wearing anything else except trunks and sun cream.

  I smelled like a baby.

  Earlier in the day I’d been swimming and found what I thought were the remains of an ancient civilisation. It was about twelve feet below the surface, partially buried. But ten seconds before drowning I realised it was just a piece of old pipeline.

  I decided to leave my sister with her rotting fish and walk a little further along the rock shelf, to where the rock itself grew darker and higher the closer it got to the foot of the cliff. I stopped where the rock shelf was at least three feet above the surface and the sea could no longer tease me. The rock shelf here wasn’t slippery. It was parched and sharp as the beak of the bird which had heard my sister’s fish pop its last bubble in those shallows, then glided down lazily to peck at it.

  I looked to the right, towards the town and the beach and the marina, where the masts were obscuring the horizon and the wake of the cruise liner was tickling the boats at mooring. I looked to the left and saw a bare-chested young woman sunbathing on a tiny stone beach, right beneath the tall cliff at the foot of the mountain. The young woman saw me looking and turned onto her front.

  ‘You don’t think he can just retire, do you?’ said my sister. ‘It’s not that simple. It can’t be that simple. Not for a person like him.’

  ‘Like who?’ I said, though I knew.

  ‘Like Jim,’ said my sister. ‘The world won’t let him have a happy ending. The world, the old world, the one that he grew up in, the one that made him, has already rejected him.’

  She paused.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Do you really still think that they are going to kill him?’ I asked, though I didn’t even know who they were anymore.

  ‘Yes,’ said my sister. ‘With a high-velocity rifle, probably. In the arms of a good marksman, positioned at the top of that mountain,’ pointing, ‘while Jim’s sitting at a café down by the beach one morning.’

  ‘Seems more likely,’ I said, ‘that he’ll slowly waste away. Just like Grandma.’

  ‘No, that’s what’ll happen to your father,’ said my sister. ‘Jim’s more like your brother. Or rather, your brother’s more like Jim.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘So who does that make me like?’ I asked, repositioning myself to face her only to find that she’d gone. My heels were kissing the edge of the higher rock shelf. I couldn’t tell how deep the water was there. I looked over my shoulder and could see the green boulders. Their alleyways and cellars and all that could’ve led on endlessly to nowhere. I faced forward, with my chin up and my back straight and my arms up at right angles, towards the mountain, the house, and the palm trees round the stadium, then let myself fall.

  The ocean had been sunbathing all day. It was warm and lacklustre by now. I could see through it like fibre optic cable. Zeroed in on th
e waving shape of a half-naked woman standing on the shelf above me, looking down. She stood there for what seemed like hours as I sank to the boulders. When she jumped in it seemed too sudden. She grabbed me and dragged me and swam me to the edge of the shelf, where she spoke at me in Spanish.

  She looked a lot older, up close.

  When I climbed out I couldn’t see my sister. She’d left the fish bones to decompose further in the sun, having picked the flesh off the head and dropped it, in chunks, one by one, in a trail that led back to town.

  I went and found Jim who was sitting at a table outside a cafe by the sea wall. He was drinking a coffee. Looking pale. I sat down opposite him on the chair where I’d left my towel before I’d walked down the beach. There was a packet of cigarettes on the table and as I lit one Jim said, ‘Those’ll kill you, you know,’ before coughing for nine seconds straight.

  ‘Why did you decide to come here?’ I asked him.

  He took a sip of coffee.

  ‘You know, the first week I was here,’ he said, ‘I was in a bar just up the road there,’ pointing. ‘I’d been walking around, trying to get an idea of where things are, what time the shops open, you know. It was late and I found a bar. It has beaded curtains for doors when it’s open, and a pool table. I hadn’t played pool in years. Not since I was your age, living in London.’

  ‘I didn’t know you lived in London.’

  ‘That’s right. I worked for a wood veneer manufacturer, as a driver.’

  He coughed.

  His skin looked transparent.

  He was thinner.

  ‘So I went in because I wanted to play some pool, and the owner of the bar challenged me to a game.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘I did,’ said Jim. ‘And as a reward the owner offered me a large shot of his homemade liquor. I can’t remember how strong it was or what it was called. So we drank it (it was quite sweet) and he asked me, in quite lazy English, the same question you just asked me.’