He closed his eyes, put his hands to his ears, bent forwards and pressed his palms together tight, tight. Swayed, sobbed.
Something warm in his trousers. It ran down his legs and turned cold.
He had wet himself.
Mik sat on his bed and stared into the forest wallpaper. Never had he felt so lost. Tengil’s men patrolled the ramparts with sword and spear. He would never get away from here alive. He felt the blood stop flowing in his veins. Felt his heart stiffen and stop beating. He was already dead. Nothing else was possible.
Eva stood in the door.
‘You don’t wet your bed as well?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Good. Now go to bed and I’ll lock the door. There’s a potty under the bed.’
So she went, and he was locked in with a potty.
He wanted his cushion.
He wanted to go home.
All he wanted to do was get up out of bed and go home.
But which direction was it?
And the door was locked. Why had she locked it? Mik fingered his dead mobile. He wanted to phone Pi. He wanted to phone Tony and Lena. He wanted to phone someone who would save him. He wanted to phone Tengil and tell him to go to hell. Mik let out a cry and hurled the mobile at the wall so it made a groove in the forest wallpaper and a mess of the phone. He placed a chair against the wall, climbed up and felt the window. It was nailed shut. Far down below was the lake.
The evening sky was golden yellow and the water still and shimmering. Someone was swimming with a horse at the little beach. Mik saw a bird sitting high up in a tree. He knew nothing about birds, but he recognised this one. It was a hawk owl.
THE DOG FEEDER
The dogs barked and stood on their hind legs behind the wire fencing. Mik wiped the dog saliva from his face, pressed his hand to his bladder and convinced himself there was not a drop left. He had peed several times before going to the dog kennels. But how was he going to get the food bowls into the cages without opening the doors? And what if he needed a crap? Suppose he messed his pants? That simply mustn’t happen. If it did he might as well let himself be eaten alive.
Oh shit, his whole body was shaking. His front teeth chattered. The sound of the barking was tearing his ears to shreds.
If you refuse, Niklas had said, I’ll shoot you with the air rifle. A rogue shot in the eye. How unfortunate that would be.
Could they really tell the difference between him and the food? What would be left? Perhaps a piece of bone, chewed clean. Probably not even that. They crushed the bones to get at the marrowbone jelly. Marrowbone jelly contained a lot of goodness. It was nutritious.
If he died, who would care? Because there was no doubt he was going to die. He had mixed together fourteen bowls of food. He had to open fourteen cages. How great were his chances of surviving? Fairly small, and this was day one of … ? How long did he have to be here? The dogs barked; the wire mesh rattled. He might just as well die right away. Shit himself and die. They probably ate shit too.
Mik opened the cage door. The dog fell silent and stopped hurling itself at the wire mesh. Throat, thought Mik, protect your throat. But the dog didn’t throw itself at him. It ran round in tight circles and whined until the bowl stood on the concrete floor. The dog gulped down the food, swallowing without chewing, and when the food had gone it lay on its bed in the cage, completely quiet and with its chin resting on its paws. Mik quickly picked up the bowl and closed the cage door.
The next dog behaved the same way, and the one after that. They only cared about the food, not him. They fell silent, one by one.
In the ninth cage something odd happened. This dog was slightly smaller than the others and didn’t come rushing up to the food bowl. It cowered in a corner of the cage, trembling. Number Nine was afraid of him. It didn’t dare eat while Mik was in the cage. He had to go out and shut the door before the dog would come up to the bowl.
The big dog, Jasack, had his food last. His coat was matted and resembled a wilted bramble bush. The massive head looked like a tyrannosaurus with bad teeth. He ate slowly and farted. The bowl got so clean it gleamed. His legs were stiff and he lay down with great difficulty. Jasack farted again. Apart from that, it was silent in the kennels.
Mik looked into Number Nine’s cage. The dog backed away.
‘Boo,’ said Mik.
Number Nine jumped.
‘Only joking.’
Hello Tony,
Everything smells of dog shit. Seven days. It feels like seven years. It’s evening and I’m sitting locked in my room. I’m a prisoner here. A concentration camp. It’s a room in the cellar with forest wallpaper. Tall pines from floor to ceiling. When I wake up in the morning I think I’m lost in a forest. This is a strange place I’ve ended up in. We have porridge for breakfast. You know how I hate porridge. It’s all going to go horribly wrong. But I think it already has. My dysfunctional foster brother is called Niklas and when he’s not giving me grief or shooting birds he’s on the internet checking out gun sites. My dysfunctional foster sister is called Louise and whips her horse. My dysfunctional foster father is called Rickard. He’s always in a foul mood and finding more work for me to do. I rake the gravel, cut the grass, feed the dogs. In the beginning I was afraid the dogs would kill me. But they’re stupid and only think of food. My dysfunctional foster mother is angry. If I eat too much she has a go at me. If I don’t eat enough she says I’m so spoiled the food isn’t good enough for me. I get totally nervous and don’t know how to behave. She cries when no one is looking. I wonder if Niklas knows why he shoots birds. If Louise knows why she whips her horse. If their mum knows why she cries. It’s important to know why. You can’t throw a stone at someone’s head without knowing why. I know why I’m here. I wonder if Dad does.
I’m locked in with a potty. Good night.
Best wishes,
Mik.
THE DOG TURD KING
It was quiet at the breakfast table. Mik looked down into his bowl of porridge. Slimy lumps of glue swam in the milk. He didn’t like porridge, never had. If he held his nose it didn’t taste so bad. But it wasn’t the taste that was disgusting, it was the slimy feeling of swallowing a fistful of frogspawn. And holding his nose didn’t help. He was going to be sick.
‘What are you up to?’ said Rickard. ‘Eat like a normal human being. You can’t sit here making a fuss every morning.’
Louise glared at him. ‘Is that object going to live here long?’
‘Where else would he live?’ said Eva.
Niklas didn’t have to eat porridge. He ate cornflakes. Mik had tried to get cornflakes too. He wasn’t allowed. Here the rule was to eat porridge for breakfast. Unprocessed oats to provide the energy to cope with real work. When he tried to ask why Niklas didn’t have to eat porridge, Rickard flew into a rage.
‘Stop questioning every damn thing. You live here now and you’ll just have to follow our rules.’
‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Mik.
‘Don’t be disgusting at the table,’ said Eva.
Nobody believed him. But if he was sick now, all over the table, would he be given cornflakes? Why not? Actually there were so many weird rules here that it was completely impossible to know when you were breaking one.
The tadpoles wanted to come up. They wriggled in his throat. Mik tried to think of something else. He thought of the lake down there and of the red canoe. And then for a while of the blue canoe. Which one was best?
‘Can I paddle one of the canoes?’ he asked and swallowed.
‘Can you swim?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to paddle home, then?’ said Louise and laughed.
Mik looked at her breasts. He felt the contents of his stomach rising. The tadpoles were swimming round, going faster and faster in a whirlpool. He held his gaze a little too long on the breasts. It wasn’t deliberate. He swallowed and swallowed.
‘Filthy little kid!’ shouted Louise, standing up. ‘He really annoy
s me.’
Eva looked at Mik in astonishment.
‘What has he done?’
Mik swallowed. His throat stung from all the oxygen.
‘He’s always staring at my breasts. He’s disturbed.’
‘Yep,’ said Niklas. ‘That’s why he’s here.’
Mik was sick in his porridge bowl. His stomach threw up cascades, wave after wave until it was empty. Louise screamed and rushed from the table. Niklas stared wide-eyed and noticed he had porridge in his cornflakes.
‘What on earth …’ shouted Eva.
All the porridge was back on the table. Tears ran from Mik’s eyes. He stopped breathing, got tunnel vision and fainted face down in his bowl. Rickard lifted up his head by the hair and held it there until he came round.
‘Can I have cornflakes instead?’
Yes, porridge is disgusting, thought Mik, as he walked towards the dog kennels. On a scale of one to ten it was a six, maybe a seven. It all depended what you compared it with. Sick is disgusting. Blood is disgusting. Death is not disgusting. Snakes are not disgusting. Spiders are not disgusting. You mustn’t confuse things you are afraid of with things that are disgusting. Mix things up and you won’t know where you are.
There were dog turds in every cage.
Rickard had left it too late before taking the dogs out of their cages. Turds in every cage hadn’t happened before. The disgusting thing about dog poo was that it was so like human poo. Horse poo, elk poo and rabbit poo were something completely different and not at all disgusting. You could have them in your pocket. But dog poo. You wouldn’t want that in your pocket.
The stench hung so heavy and brown over the entire dog kennels that it ought to be visible. Mik filled a bucket with hot water and threw in a few capfuls of cleaning liquid with a lemon fragrance. First he picked up what was possible to pick up using a spade and scraper and put it in the wheelbarrow, cage by cage. Then he cleaned with a mop and cloth, but the lemon didn’t stand a chance. The combination resulted in a smell that was completely sick. Lemon poo.
Perhaps a slightly more yellow smell, but the brown won hands down.
Dog poo wasn’t simply dog poo. Some turds were hard and neat and easy to get up with the spade. Easy work with not a splodge left to mess up the concrete floor. They were dream turds from dogs that were healthy. From these dream turds there was a whole scale of softer varieties down to a watery brown muck. Those dogs were not too healthy. In the cages of Number Nine and Jasack, the poo was always hopelessly runny. Cleaning cloth, lemon liquid and effort. Giving the dogs their food was a minor thing compared with cleaning up their poo.
Every time he finished he ran down to the beach, but the smell hung around. It had crawled into his body. It was impossible to get rid of it. The shit was under his nails. The shit went in through his pores. The shit was mixed in with his blood. He had a faint but constant taste of dog shit far back on his tongue. Dog shit and a little lemon.
Mik wrung the cloth out over the bucket. The difficult thing was cleaning it up without spreading it around. A technique was required, otherwise he would soon have smeared it over the whole floor of the cage.
To cope with the work you had to think of it as a kind of paint or a bad pea soup and not think that it had been moulded into curves on its way through the intestines of these vile creatures and squeezed out through a bumhole.
The best thing was to think about something completely different: wonder what Pi’s doing now? Perhaps she’s swimming in Lake Selet? Wonder what it looks like there in the summer? Maybe she’s swimming naked? He couldn’t picture that and was bewildered that he had even thought of it.
Mik cleaned the cloth and the mop and rinsed out the bucket. He pushed the wheelbarrow outside and emptied it on the dung heap behind the hen house. Now there were twenty-four hours until he had to scrub dog poo again. Filled with a sense of freedom, he ran down to the lake. Took deep breaths, airing his lungs.
Louise came riding up from the beach. Instantly Mik stopped. She held the horse motionless in front of him. It was big. Shiny, wet, black and big. Louise sat high up, luminous in a wet white strappy top.
The horse stamped and snorted. Its hooves were huge and very close. Mik backed away. She stared at him and, pointing her whip out sideways, said, ‘Go drown yourself.’
He stepped down into the ditch and she rode past.
The sun was high over the lake and the water lay as shiny as melted metal. Some ducks came out from the reeds and flew outstretched over the lake with whining wing beats. He pushed the canoe out into the water and stepped in carefully. Silently he glided out. Small fish leapt on the surface. Screams and laughter from children swimming could be heard in the distance. Mik held the paddle over his knees. It dripped cold water onto his leg. The canoe glided along and he held his open hand in the water. It was cool.
Somewhere there is a pretty little stream with a stone bridge, just like in Nangijala. That’s where I’ll sit and wait for Tony. Perhaps ten years, perhaps thirty, but for me it will be like a single breath. And when he comes we’ll go fishing in the stream together. Petals from the cherry trees fall like snow on us. They stick in our hair and he laughs. I’ll wait for Tony and we’ll go fishing.
She is standing there with her green umbrella by the house and Tony says, ‘Are we going to live here?’
‘Yes, it’s our house.’
And she has made pancakes.
How far is it to Nangijala?
He was already a long way from the shore. Out here he was free. He lay down in the canoe, looking up at the summer sky. One cloud looked like a duck. Another one looked like a bear, then came a dragon, followed by a bus.
Wonder what kind of fish there are in this stream?
At ten past nine he was locked in his room. He had fallen asleep in the canoe and drifted a long way away. A wind had come up and it had taken him the whole day to paddle back against the headwind. He had blisters on his hands. Rickard and Eva were absolutely furious. That was the last time he would be paddling a canoe.
Hello Tony,
I’ve thought a lot about dog poo. I mean, I’m not trying to be funny. This isn’t poo and fart jokes. Dog poo isn’t funny. What I was thinking was that I’m not afraid of dog poo. I can hold it in my hands. I can switch off the poo section in my brain. But I’m afraid I’m going mad. If you can pick up dog poo with your hands then your actual main socket in your brain must be loose. Think if I suddenly start eating dog turds? I don’t think I can stay here. I’m so homesick. A hawk owl sits in the tree down by the lake. That means something. If anything means anything. But I think it does.
I still haven’t had a letter from you. Don’t you have a pen, or what?
Best wishes,
The Dog Turd King.
DID MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER PEE IN HIS TROUSERS?
All the dogs had been given their food. It was quiet in the kennels. The strange thing was that the dogs didn’t all look the same any longer. At first Mik had only seen big black hairy dogs, but now he could tell the difference between them. They also had their different ways, just like people. Some were disobedient; some seemed intelligent, others incredibly thick. Number Nine was afraid; Jasack was old, whiny and farty. And all of them were desperately hungry. They lived for mealtimes, and the person who fed them became their friend; it was as simple as that. In fact, the dogs were the most normal things here. They ate and crapped and wanted to play and run.
Mik collected the bowls and started washing them up. Niklas came into the workroom.
‘Hi. Do you want to do something cool?’
Mik stood amazed, the frothy washing-up brush in his hand.
‘What kind of something cool?’
‘All you’ve got to do is hold this can.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ve just got to stand there and hold the can. It’s not difficult.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘Shoot.’
‘The can?’
&n
bsp; ‘Yes.’
‘Never,’ said Mik and turned away to carry on with the washing-up.
‘Are you scared? I can hit anything. I’m a good shot.’
‘You can just as easily put the can on a rock or a tree stump,’ said Mik, piling the bowls on the draining rack.
Niklas grinned; Mik knew that, even though he had his back to him. You could hear it because his smile wasn’t silent. It gave off a smearing sound. Maybe it was the freckles protesting about being pulled into lines in his ugly mug.
‘You’re scared. You’ll wet yourself.’
‘No, I won’t, because I’m not going to hold your rotten can. Stand it on a rock.’
‘That’s not as exciting.’
‘Then you can hold the can and I’ll shoot,’ said Mik.
‘You can’t shoot. And if you don’t hold the can I’ll tell Louise you spy on her when she’s swimming.’
‘I’ve never done that,’ said Mik.
‘She swims naked. Her and the horse.’
‘I haven’t watched.’
‘Doesn’t matter. She’ll kill you when she finds out.’
Mik put the last food bowl on the draining rack. Now he was Niklas’s toad again. Up to the tenth floor, freefall and see what happens. Two days earlier, when Mik was sweaty from cutting the grass outside the kennels, Niklas had kindly brought him a glass of water. It was vinegar. It was a surprise.
This time there was at least a choice. Be trampled to death by Louise and her big black horse or hold the can. A third choice would have been to knock Niklas down. Only headbutt him, smack that idiotic grin so it turned into a mess of blood and teeth between fat swollen lips.
But on a scale of one to ten the chances were zero that he would get away with it. Hell, thought Mik. I might be able to put up with being in this awful place if I could only be left in peace. If I did my work and then could be left alone. Dogs, dog poo, potty, porridge and forest wallpaper. But being a toad …
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