by Harry Gallon
‘And?’
‘Wait. He said, “Nobody comes here. No tourists. No English. This place doesn’t even have a hotel.”’
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
‘I just said, “Exactly.”’
My father was standing near the entrance to the marina, fishing by the harbour wall as the tide began to come in. ‘What about my mother,’ I asked Jim, who’d shrunk.
‘I should think she’s happier, now,’ he said. ‘Does that surprise you?’
I looked at my father all the way over there and said, ‘No.’
‘She was always very good to me, your mother. And I love her very much, as does he.’ And Jim looked towards him too. ‘But they’d been together since they were very young.’
‘Like my brother and Stephanie?’
‘Yes, I suppose. But your brother is older, in certain ways. He knows better already, really, because he grew up in a different age.’
Pause.
‘Did you ever have an affair with her?’
‘Your mother?’ Jim laughed, started spooning half-melted sugar from his coffee glass and asked about my new job.
‘Good pay for a graduate,’ I told him.
My father walked over empty handed. ‘Had a big one, there,’ he said. ‘Little bastard broke my line.’
Jim nodded, began coughing again. Said, ‘I think I’ll go for a swim.’
‘Stay near the shore,’ my father said. ‘And watch your breathing. Otherwise I’m coming in to get you.’
THE SECRET LIVES OF HIRED GUNS – PART TWO
Jim died a year later. Not long before my brother. My mother told me. She phoned me. ‘Are you sitting down?’ she’d said. ‘I’ve got some bad news.’ I could tell she wasn’t sure how to carry herself. I could almost see it. She was sitting in her new car, talking to me via Bluetooth. The signal kept being interrupted. She spoke slowly, as though there was no time for anything else.
It hit her hard.
‘Hold on,’ said my sister, who was with me at the time. ‘Let me guess: Jim’s head has been exploded.’ I held my mother on the line, phone against shoulder.
‘What?’ I asked her. ‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve always known,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been waiting for it to happen.’
I was on a lunch break. New job. Had just been to Pret and was sitting on a curb near Liverpool Street, chewing a sandwich and waiting for my coffee to cool down. It was good timing. I looked at my sister suspiciously. Swallowed. Put the phone back to my ear. My mother said, ‘Hold on, sorry.’ She was parking her car. ‘Right. Okay. Jim’s dead.’
My sister leapt. Tore her tights. Frightened a gang of pigeons. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘They got him.’ She was much bigger than usual, had camouflaged herself pencil skirt charcoal and concrete. Cracked cackling mouth corners and eye posters on billboard nostrils flaring when she widened everything and said, ‘He must’ve died instantly. A rifle shot of that calibre would’ve taken more than just his crown off. It would have wrenched his soul free.’
It began to rain.
‘It’s no surprise, of course,’ said my mother, after she’d been silent for a while and I’d been silent for a while too. She was sniffing. ‘And it’s for the best.’
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine. Just stopped for a breather.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home,’ she said. She’d been living in a flat near Colchester. Had wanted to be closer to my brother, Stephanie, and the children after she finally left my father. She’d got a job with a travel agency, selling package holidays. Buying Indian takeaways and walking her rescue dog. ‘Took the afternoon off,’ she said.
‘I’m going to come and see you. I’ll speak to my boss. Take the day off tomorrow.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘I’m fine. It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming.’
‘Why didn’t Dad tell me?’
She coughed.
‘He’s gone back out there,’ she said, ‘to, um, collect the remains.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ said my sister, who’d bitten the feet off a pigeon and was watching it flap around, dragging bloody streamers across the pavement. ‘She’s lying.’ I’d taken my tie off, or at least loosened it slightly. I said to my sister, impatiently, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father didn’t go out there to get Jim’s body,’ she said. ‘Your father went there to kill him.’
YOUR BATH ISN’T DEEP ENOUGH
I got fired from my job today. I don’t like loose ends. I like closure. You can drown in a few centimetres of bath water, and people would forever say, ‘Of all the liquids his parents spilled to enable their child to die, this was the way he decided?’ Like you’re still waiting in the tub. Turning into a fish while the water evaporates. Suffocating. Rot.
I love you.
At least you tried.
I got fired. My phone rang, with something garbled about new directions. Life changes following large, unexpected upheavals. It went like this: ‘Listen.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m from HR.
‘You’ve been off for three months.
‘We’re all very sorry about what happened.
‘But you haven’t responded to our emails or answered our calls.
‘We need to discuss your future with the company.
‘We feel that it’s time to draw a line and inform you that we no longer consider your contribution necessary.
‘We’re letting you go.
‘You will, of course, be given redundancy pay. And we’d be glad to provide you with a reference.
‘Do you have any questions?’
Click.
I’ve been systematically unsubscribing from estate agency and concert ticket mailing lists. I’ve been lying for hours in the bath. I’ve been lying FOR HOURS dreaming up reckless unconventional shopping lists that I’m never going to fulfil. Topping up the temperature with hosepipes of hot water and toes to try and warm my digestive system in the hope that the heat will help all the shit that’s become impacted in my lower intestine slide out. Coffee and cigarettes. Coffee and cigarettes. Turns out it’s just gas. Googling reasons why my stomach gets bloated. Allergens, maybe. Should eat three meals a day. And why is it taking so long for the cut I got from the bicycle chainring to heal? I think I’m bleeding internally. Ruptured stomach. Fissured anus. Blood seeping out like fishy air from a pinch flat. Patch it up. Everything’s fine.
I’ve become what people rely on when they get home from work. Something dull. Something to fulfil their need to be looked at. To be smiled at. To be cried at and told, ‘Thank you.’ And told, ‘Thank you.’ And then to tell everyone, ‘You’ve helped me. Now everything’s going to be fine.’
You’re a normal human being, for once. A normal human being. Needed by someone so in need that all he can think about is a few centimetres of water. And what his mother would say if someone called her and told her that’s the way her last remaining child decided to die.
Fine.
At least it wasn’t a gun.
At least she wouldn’t be the one to find me.
I’ve become what people rely on, only there’s no one relying on me.
My phone rings again. I left it resting on the radiator. Back-facing camera covered with electrical tape. Vibrations worming their way to the cracked lino floor. I reach, dry my hand with the towel by the door. Seems laughable to care. Hit speaker. ‘Hello Mum.’
‘Darling,’ she says. ‘How’re you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I spoke to Willow the other day.’
‘You did?’
‘She says she’s concerned about you.’
‘She is?’
‘Very concerned.’
‘We haven’t spoken in a while.’
‘I didn’t know you two were seeing each other again.’
‘We’re not.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
There’s a pause. Slow gurgle air pocket from the pipe below the bath. Cracked plug. Dribbling water. Hit the hot tap to refill. So hot my feet feel cold. My mother says, ‘Where are you?’
I say, ‘I’m in the bath.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Are you alright?’ I ask.
‘Oh, you know me,’ she says. ‘It’s never easy.’
‘How’re your feet?’
‘They’re not done carrying me yet.’
‘I quit my job today.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s fine. I don’t want to be there anyway.’
‘You’re going to look for another one, though, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You promise?’
Another pause.
‘Yes.’
I assume she’s nodding. I know she’s driving. She’s always driving. Her reception’s never good. She says, ‘I’ll do a nice, big online shop for you.’
She says, ‘I’ll send you some treats.’
She says, ‘I think you should come and stay with me for a while.’
She says, ‘I miss you.’
THE FIVE SECOND GAME – PART TWO
I was asleep when they found me at the side of the road. I was sleeping in the warm petroleum body fat glow of my combusting brother. Newly deceased. Newly killed by me. Head flipped over like the pickup truck he was still strapped into, eyes closed as though it was he who had decided now was a good time to play the Five Second Game.
Part Two.
It wasn’t the fumes of the burning fuel tank contents or the dribbling, temperate human fat or the queer flow of tyre rubber which dropped like tired napalm onto the road, sizzling, and eventually caught the tarmac alight, threatening the wetness of the bramble bushes that held the disgruntled entrails of my mother’s old green bike.
It’d been thrown from the truck on impact. Bounced like a dead baby’s head, then relaxed, like me, in the foliage.
It wasn’t the soft French kiss of the English rain on my forehead which put me to sleep, though it may have been the head wound. Or the shock of my leg breaking. Of my tibia snapping like a rifle report and my fibula bayoneting through my skin.
Crack.
Staying awake seemed like a chore, lying, as I was, where the road met the shore of the verge.
It could’ve been the prospect of still having to get to the crematorium, where my mother and father and other people’s mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and maybe some lingering grandparents in diapers had already gathered, to not only mourn one burning corpse, but to inform them all of another.
And besides, I already had a pyre.
It could just as easily have been The Mike Curb Congregation on the stereo, still playing Burning Bridges upside down in the upturned Toyota cabin. That had me smiling. Had me coughing to sing along until the acid in the battery underneath the inverted car bonnet started boiling, boiled over and exploded the electrics with a KA-FFT-FTT, sizzling. ‘Must be the shock of the leg breaking,’ said a voice above me. A stranger’s voice. ‘And the concussion.’
‘Not to mention the death of his passenger,’ said another stranger beside me. ‘Boiled alive by their own combustion. What an awful, terrible way to–’
‘Shh,’ said the first voice. ‘He’s been unconscious since the accident. He doesn’t know that the passenger’s dead.’ My eyelids kept flickering. I was trying to keep them closed but my eyelids kept on whispering to each other: ‘Did you see what I just saw?’
‘I’m not sure if he tried to save him.’
My eyelids were attempting to make the words I’d eventually say when I decided to pretend to wake up and make up some lie about how our Toyota pickup truck had ended up down the side of an embankment just off the M3.
‘I thought it set fire to the tarmac?’ said my left eyelid.
‘And I thought it was on the M5?’ said my right.
Everything went silent as the strangers above and beside me restarted: ‘It’s not a bad head wound,’ one said. ‘But that leg looks rather angry.’
‘And he’s lost both his eyebrows, poor bastard.’
KA-FFT-FTT-FFT-T-T
*
When you were dying I was dreaming of pillboxes. Say it out loud. When you were burning I was dreaming of pillboxes. Say it again. When you were melting I was taking apart a Bren gun. Field-stripping. And everything smelled of old paper, leather and gun oil.
Youngs 303.
Say it again.
When you–
Say it louder.
–were burning. When you were turning into carbon I was dreaming.
‘You were sleeping,’ said my sister. She, too, was also dead, but had been so for a while longer.
This you know.
‘You weren’t even trying to save him,’ she said to me as we stood rickety in vertigo and on crutches staring out of a thirteenth floor hospital window. ‘While you were dreaming,’ she said, snakelike, grasping my leg, her head supporting an unimaginative ponytail, ‘our brother was burning alive.’
‘He was unconscious,’ I said. ‘He was already dead,’ in a whisper, cracking, in case a real human would hear and take me back to the bed I was meant to be in. ‘And he was never, ever your brother.’
My sister sighed. She said, ‘I’m not surprised, what with your history. And our family’s unlawful profession. Do you know what our mother did, when you elbowed me out of her womb? She mopped me up. She erased the blood.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘Her body reabsorbed you without her even knowing. I didn’t push you out. You were never dead because your lungs were too underdeveloped to have even been able to take a breath. I wasn’t a murderer.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s debatable. In any case, you are now.’
Tears started filling me eyes.
‘Come now,’ said my sister, sniffing my groin through the hospital gown, ‘there’s no need to get overly emotional. I didn’t make you close your eyes, did I? It was always going to happen.’
She paused.
‘You really need a wash.’
Outside, thirteen floors below us, a heavy excavator was separating chunks of stone and concrete from steel bars in a construction site that had once been the original hospital building. Everything was very quiet. The building I was in was very new. It had a helipad on the roof which I’d been air-ambulanced through a week before. The walls were white and the floor was drawn with coloured lines and nothing smelled yet. ‘I bet it hurts,’ said my sister, tapping the cast round my leg. ‘Should you be standing on that yet?’ She seemed much more alive after my brother had – what was it, passed to the other side? That’s what they’d told me when I woke up earlier than they’d expected and asked the nurse attending to me, ‘Where is he?’
‘Where’s who?’
‘My brother.’
‘Oh. Well, he’s in the morgue, unfortunately,’ he said, then walked off with a bag full of my piss.
‘I suppose it should hurt,’ said my sister, ‘knowing what you’ve accomplished. And all in your early twenties. Very impressive.’
When we were teenagers my brother stole Uncle Jim’s motorbike and crashed it through a hedgerow. It wasn’t a hard fall, but the weight of the bike and his attempts to keep it upright fractured his left wrist. It wasn’t a bad break. I went with him to the hospital. Our mother drove. The A&E department looked like a primary school. Underfunded and staffed by old women in dark dresses. Strong smell of disinfectant and vomit. Damp bricks and decrepit mortar. But now I was in concrete. Inches and inches thick. When my brother’s body was burning I was unconscious and dreaming of pillboxes.
‘You better be quick,’ said my sister. ‘Someone’ll come to check on you, and you’re not meant to be out of bed.’
She paused.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Knowing what I did?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The metal pins they drilled into your leg.’
&nb
sp; They did.
‘They’re going to keep holding you together. And not even time or the weather will break you.’ She could barely conceal her laughter.
‘Are you staying or going?’ I asked her impatiently, still looking out of the window.
She said, ‘You should’ve taken the train.’
I said, ‘Yes, I should have.’
‘There are pillboxes dotted all along the sides of British railways. A decaying reminder of better times when we all thought we were going to die together. The journey would’ve only taken you a couple of hours.’
‘But we–’
‘Got lazy?’ she said, as I stood, aching, looking down at the man in the cab of the heavy excavator, picking up concrete and pieces of metal, tearing them apart from each other. ‘YOU got lazy, though, didn’t you.’
‘–wanted to take the old Toyota. It used to belong to Jim, remember?’
‘Whatever. You got tired. You’d had too much to drink, too much to sniff the night before. You closed your eyes.’
‘He was driving from Essex and offered to pick me up.’
‘You counted one, two, three, four – did he ask you to drive, or did you insist?’
There were a few doctors and nurses and paramedics and board members with brief cases smoking cigarettes in a circle outside the ambulance entrance to the hospital, thirteen floors below us. ‘Do you think you could hit them from here?’ said my dead little sister.
I said, ‘Yes.’
‘What rifle would you use?’ she asked.
For a moment I was silent, but then I said, ‘Mauser, 98K, Kar.’
‘How many rounds does that hold?’ she said.
And I told her, ‘Five.’
THE DAY I KILLED MY BROTHER
It starts with a bicycle flying through the air. In slow motion. The Mike Curb Congregation on the stereo, Burning Bridges playing. Cutting back and forth between us in the car, turning over and over until the bicycle hits the ground.