by Harry Gallon
I killed my brother on the same day as Gentleman Jim’s funeral. I’d had to take the day off work, which suited me anyway because I’d drunk a lot the night before and was feeling pretty hungover. My brother was his own boss. He’d left his apprentice in charge of the motorbike garage he’d started a few years before and darted round his cottage, looking for a clean white shirt. He only had one. I have three. And everything he touched came up dirty. It was the grease and the engine oil buried beneath his fingernails. He also smelled like metal.
The funeral was held at a crematorium not far from the village we grew up in. Jim had wanted to be burned, apparently. He’d wanted his ashes to be scattered, nonchalantly as fag ends, in gutters along the roadway. Jim wasn’t one for ceremony. And there wouldn’t have been many people there, anyway. Two less, even, after my brother and I had spun out on the motorway and rolled away down an embankment.
It was the first day off I’d taken since starting my job after graduation. I could’ve taken the train from Paddington Station, but my older brother was driving from Essex and had offered to stop in London to give me a ride. He wasn’t due to arrive at our meeting point until around 10 o’clock. I woke up at half-six. Picked a shirt. Black tie. The one that looks green in the light. My father had bought me some silver cufflinks for a graduation present. They must’ve cost him a lot. They have my initials embossed on them. When I got my first month’s pay I went straight to Oxford Street and bought a suit and some smart shoes.
On the day I killed my brother I spent an hour looking at ties. I only have five.
I decided to change in the car. My brother said he’d drive into London as far as the North Circular, so we agreed to meet in Edmonton. I could’ve taken a train or a bus but I decided to ride our mother’s old green Traffic Master. She hadn’t wanted to take it with her when she left my father.
I stuffed my suit into a backpack with my smart shoes, tie, and shirt. Cufflinks my father gave me. Neither my brother nor I were planning on staying the night anywhere, least of all at our old home, so there was no need to pack a toothbrush.
‘Aren’t you sweaty?’ my brother asked me.
I said, ‘No. And it’s raining, anyway.’
‘Well,’ he said, getting out. We were in a car park. ‘I didn’t bring any ratchet straps.’
I said, ‘I’m sure it’ll be alright.’ I put the bike into the back of the old Toyota pickup truck. It bounced around on the hard suspension and lounged on the arches at stop lights. ‘You could’ve shaved,’ said my brother, as I batted his finger from the patches of hair under my chin. ‘We’ll stop at some services on the motorway so you can change.’
There was a pause.
There were roadworks near Brent Cross which had us stop-starting along rows of moped terraces and houses protected by dilapidated fences, and industrial estate wind turbine engines unwinding, as we, brothers, merged and merged again and when we got to the A40 we finally opened up to fifty, and stayed there until it became the M40 and we stopped for coffee. When I came out of the service station wearing my suit my brother was leaning against the car, guarding the bike, throwing me the keys after I said, ‘Let me drive.’
‘Remember when you stole Jim’s motorbike?’ I said. My brother was rubbing his thumb. ‘They gave you a pink cast, right?’
He said, ‘It was blue.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I do.’
Another pause.
‘Do you ever feel like you weren’t really there, when we were kids?’
‘I didn’t think I was anywhere else,’ said my brother, flexing his index finger.
‘You weren’t there when Dad smacked us with his flipflop?’
The one with the rainbow strap.
‘Or when he grabbed us by the back of our necks to wash our mouths out with soap?’
‘Why are you asking me this?’ said my brother, adjusting the rear view mirror.
‘I can’t see if you do that.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I feel like we’ve been waiting for this day for our entire lives,’ I said. ‘And now that it’s here, I don’t really believe it.’
‘Have you heard from Dad?’ said my brother.
Have you spoken to him? Has he telephoned you and told you what state the body is in? Was in, when they (who?) found him?
Was the head split open, losing brain?
Was the throat slit and bleeding?
Was it a mercy killing?
‘Do you remember the name of the song that was in Kelly’s Heroes?’ I asked my brother, who was checking his phone.
He said, ‘Yes.’
‘Do you know how it happened?’ I asked him, while he hummed in the rain and I drove. ‘Because I’m thinking it was a single high-velocity round to the head.’
‘Of course THIS had to be the weather today,’ said my brother. ‘The man retires to a hot Spanish island, and when he dies from natural,’ looking at me, ‘causes the family he was trying to escape from decide to bury him in the rain. In the English fucking rain.’ He rolled his eyes.
‘I don’t think he was escaping us, was he?’
‘Not you or me,’ said my brother.
‘And not our mother, either,’ I said. ‘He loved her, whether they had that affair or not.’
‘How could that possibly have happened?’ he said.
Something moved on the back seat.
‘Do you ever wish you could mount a cannon on the front of your car?’ I said. ‘So you could blow all the traffic away?’
My brother laughed. ‘How soon after it happened did Dad fly out there?’ he said.
‘He was there already,’ I said.
‘Who told you that?’
‘It was–’
I turned around but the back seat was empty.
‘Was it Mum?’ asked my brother. ‘I didn’t realise they were talking.’
‘She’s with him now, isn’t she, helping to sort everything out?’
My brother laughed. ‘I can’t get used to their being near each other, never mind get along’ he said. ‘Seems like they were never meant to have been together at all.’
‘I suppose change follows naturally after large, unexpected upheavals.’
‘There was nothing unexpected about Jim’s death,’ he said. ‘Or the divorce. I suppose we can ask Dad when we get there, anyway.’
‘Will you roll me a cigarette?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe those two.’
‘Mum and Dad?’
‘Dad and Jim. The love they had for each other. The closeness they shared as brothers, after what their own father put them through. How he treated Jim, and how Jim was treated by everyone who thought they knew him.’
‘And?’
‘And yet Dad still ended up resenting him.’
‘Was that Jim’s reason for leaving?’
He looked at me with impatience. ‘Jim just wanted to die peacefully and in his own way. You know that already, so take whatever crap you’ve got stuck in your head and flush it.’
I sniffed.
‘He just didn’t want to waste away in front of us,’ said my brother, ‘like Granny.’
‘How polite.’
*
The last thing my brother said to me was, ‘Open your fucking eyes.’ The last thing I said to my brother was, ‘Want to have a go?’ Everything that happened after that was noise. Not loud, white noise. Underwater noise. Ear infection noise. And muscle tension. The cracking of glass and then a great big loud HA HA HA darkness.
‘We’re coming off in a couple of miles,’ said my brother.
‘Do you remember the Five Second Game?’ I asked him.
And he’d said, ‘No,’ which seemed like an invitation.
‘Dad and Uncle Jim used to play it when they were teenagers,’ I told him. ‘They’d invented it, or something.’
My brother said, ‘So what is it?’
I said, ‘It’s when you’re driving and you close your eyes for five–’
> ‘Oh yeah,’ said my brother. ‘I didn’t realise it had a name.’
‘Well, that’s all thanks to me,’ I said. ‘I used to play it when we went shooting.’
‘How?’
‘I held the barrel of the .410 under my chin and counted to five.’
‘With your finger on the trigger?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I wish you hadn’t just told me that.’
‘Two miles until our junction,’ I said. ‘Want to have a go?’ My brother plugged his phone into the aux cable, selected Burning Bridges by The Mike Curb Congregation and pressed play. I closed my eyes. ‘Count to five,’ I heard a young girl say.
My brother said this wasn’t fun.
‘This isn’t funny,’ he told me.
I was already on two-point-three.
From somewhere behind me my dead sister said, ‘Three.’
My brother tried to reach over and take hold of the steering wheel, but I pushed his arm away.
‘Four.’
‘Open your fucking eyes,’ he shouted.
‘Five,’ she yelled.
I opened my eyes but it was too late. We’d drifted onto an exit I hadn’t prepared for. The speedometer was years past caring. The sound the engine made said EIGHTY.
It wasn’t the Five Second Game that killed my older brother.
It was my decision to play it.
It was the speed at which we hit that corner.
And it was the rain, which caught the back wheels of the old Toyota and flicked the tail sideways. If you enter a spin, steer inwards. I knew this. It was the impact of my brother’s head against the windscreen and the crushing force of the crushed cab ceiling which killed him. Not the fire which melted him, which is some consolation. There were no airbags. Wouldn’t have mattered. The cab had partially collapsed. When the tail flicked out I did steer into it, but the car hit the barrier at the side of the slip road which rose quickly up an embankment to a roundabout and a bridge over the motorway. And with its wide wheel base and high off-road ground clearance the Toyota rode straight up and over that barrier.
Which is roughly when the bicycle started flying through the air.
In slow motion.
The Mike Curb Congregation, Burning Bridges, on the stereo, cutting back and forth between us in the car, turning over and over, and the bicycle finally hitting the ground.
Alright.
It ends–
Alright.
–with a crack–
Alright.
–as my head–
Alright.
–hits the window.
THE FIVE SECOND GAME – PART TWO (CONTINUED)
To field-strip your Mauser Kar98K you do this: rotate the cleaning rod (located beneath the barrel at the end of the forestock). Extract. Use the end of the cleaning rod to remove the magazine base plate (located in front of the trigger guard). Insert the cleaning rod. Depress the cleaning rod. Pull the cleaning rod to the rear. Remove the magazine base plate and the magazine assembly. When the magazine base is empty the bolt assembly locks. Turn the safety catch to the safe position (not the extra-safe position) and pull the bolt stop (located on the left side of the bolt assembly) out. Then slide the bolt casing from the receiver.
Depress the bolt lock on the bolt casing and rotate. Slide the bolt assembly and firing pin out of the bolt casing. Take the magazine base plate and insert it into the extractor (located on the bolt face). Turn anti-clockwise. Insert the bolt assembly and firing pin into the disassembly tool (embedded in the rear stock). Pull down and lift off the cocking piece. Then the safety catch. Then the pin spring.
And, finally, remove the firing pin.
Use a pull-through to clean dirt, residue and fingerprints from all metal parts. Reverse the process to reassemble. Oil to finish.
*
‘Why that particular rifle?’ said my sister, spinning shark-like in my wheel chair while I looked down from the thirteenth floor to the empty space where the paramedics and brief cases had been. I said, ‘My father took us to a regimental museum once. It was our grandfather’s regiment. There was no one else in there and the man on the door gave us a personal tour and took some of the rifles out of their cabinets. One was a Bren. One was a Mauser that’d been captured by the regiment and kept as a trophy. Also, I used to use it a lot when I played Call of Duty.’
The Mauser Kar98K (Karabiner) chambers the Mauser 7.9x57mm cartridge. Rimless and bottlenecked. With an effective range of up to 500 metres and a 2,000 metre mark on the rear sight (if you’re feeling lucky).
‘Are you feeling lucky?’ asked my sister, dead (could be deader).
‘I’m a good shot,’ I told her. ‘Don’t you remember when we joined the Army Cadets?’
‘It was a fling,’ she’d said.
She stopped spinning. ‘I remember you dragging me there.’
‘I didn’t want to go either,’ I said.
‘I remember you dragging me along,’ she said, ‘although I will admit that I did, and do still, quite want to see you in a hole in the ground.’
The doctors and nurses and paramedics and board members with brief cases smoking cigarettes by the ambulance entrance were no more than 100 metres away. Five rounds is not a lot. The Mauser Kar98K is renowned for its accuracy but not its rate of fire.
BANG.
And they’d almost certainly have a good chance to scatter.
‘Do you remember when we visited the Army Air Corps for a day?’ I said to my sister. ‘We practised marching and we practised shooting on their range.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I remember one of the cadets taking part of his toe off with a blank round,’ she said. ‘Do you think he’d done it on purpose, like Dad?’
I didn’t reply.
After we’d burned down the barn I’d wanted to get my hands on a real grenade. The Air Corps instructors didn’t know that I’d done all this already. In a past life. A legacy. My boots were too big for me. German paratrooper boots. Wide base. Flat feet. My mother never met my father’s eye when I put on the parade tie or the camouflage jacket. Rubbed the scars on her arms and wrote a shopping list instead.
‘I’m surprised you can stand already,’ said my sister. ‘How many days has it been? They must’ve used pretty strong pins. Expensive pins. I suppose you’ll have to decide if the titanium holding you together is worth more than your brother’s life. Not to mention whether, now, our mother wishes she’d left you alone to dig your own hole, with a rifle rather than a steering wheel.’ My sister laughed. A man in hospital scrubs and Crocs was hugging a woman. He gave her a cigarette and she wiped her eyes. Someone was eating a salad pot on the steps leading up to the door. A dog was tied to a railing, looking anxious. The man in the heavy excavator was taking a tabloid newspaper into a tall, green, portable toilet. My sister said, ‘When will she be here?’
She meant our mother.
Someone was walking towards us. I could hear their footsteps approaching and I imagined their eyes, raised to heaven as they followed the coloured lines or, maybe, glued to strange information on a clipboard. ‘They’re coming for you,’ said my sister, who’d stood up. ‘Better get back in this wheelchair.’
I CAN FEEL MY FATHER DYING
He started dying long ago. Shot through and hanged and plucked and cut up until he resembled something new, but not better. Better dead, my father always said. Better that, than in some home. But which home he meant was never specified. He never left the end-of-terrace house in front of the field with the abandoned concrete reservoir. He never wasn’t there. Whistling up the stairs. Cleaning shotguns on the dining room table. Leaving cartridges on the dresser, in preparation for an intruder he could shoot and defeather. Hang for three days. Pluck, like he plucked my mother, then diced into one of her cakes.
He’d wait by the landline, clutching the address book with the rose petal cover and our surname embossed like brail or scar tissue, as if to prove that we existed; that the family he’d creat
ed could be as legitimate as the names that’d been listed in the book itself. Names that met other people for drinks on a Friday. Names he remembered from boarding school and had contacted in an attempt to refind old friendships, but which had long since become unobtainable to the likes of him. Bewildered unavailability mistaken for rejection. A personal shanking below the lowest, most pointless rib bone, at a 75 degree angle. The knife just kissing the lung. Oxygen exiting slowly for an agonising and lowly death.
My father is an inner tube. Rubber cracked and slapped across the face of his mother, who was unable to cut the bailer twine that dead creatures dangled from, on her Keep Calm and Carry On porch. Instead she coughed up a tapeworm. Instead she lost her mind. It walked off with her husband’s medals, born down the aisle of a church and cushioned by a flag. Suffered for, bled for, amputated for and, instead of rationally abhorred, wept for.
Ding ding.
My father rang the bells.
My father calls me. His remaining son has become a series of biro-dug crosses on those tea-stained treasure map address book pages. All the rest, or at least most, have been entrenched by a man grasping his fountain pen so hard all the blood has rushed out of his knuckles, and the line of the word he is writing–
Fuck you.
–bends the nib and almost tears through the paper.
Fuck out of my life, will you?
He sits on his bones on his favourite bar stool, alone in the village pub, wrapping himself round a reconditioned 1st generation iPhone, stalking old school friends on Facebook but unsure which buttons to press.
‘What took you so long to answer?’
‘I didn’t hear it, that’s all.’
‘You going deaf, boy?’
I just don’t want to speak to you.
‘I can’t believe you would see me calling and not immediately pick up your phone.’
I feel septic.
‘How’re you?’ he asks.
‘Fine, got a cut that won’t heal.’
I can hear him thinking, standing by the table in the hallway, slightly too wide now to get past comfortably. Notepad and pens. Drawer for some stamps. Everything covered in dust. ‘How long’s this been going on for?’ he asks me.