Broken Toys

by Jackson Lear

  The boys lowered their eyes. Suddenly the fun was over. “They all say that,” mumbled Warrick.

  “They all say what?” James asked.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Warrick.

  “No, I think you do know what they say. What is it?”

  Warrick bit his lip and hoped he wasn’t about to spark a round of fury. “They say we’re just kids, that we don’t know what it’s like to be an adult, that we’re just dumb and we won’t understand.”

  James leered at the threesome sitting around his kitchen table. “So you boys want to be men?”

  They all shrugged.

  “You want to take charge and have people respect you?”

  They all shrugged again.

  “You all want to swear when you want, without someone shouting at you for it?”

  They all cracked a smile and nodded.

  “Then fucking swear.”

  Everything fell quiet for a few seconds, broken by Daniel mumbling: “Fuckity fucking fuck fuck.”

  Warrick and Ian smiled and went for it. “Bugger shit balls!”

  “Fucking shitty fuck dick!”

  “Motherfucker cock monster.”

  James smiled at how easily they were amused. “Have you ever called a woman a cunt?”

  Their faces dropped into shock. “You can’t say that word,” Ian said.

  “I can’t call a woman a cunt?” James asked.

  “My mum grounded me for asking her what it meant,” said Ian.

  “Then your mum is a cunt,” said James. “Say it.”

  “Say ... cunt?”

  “No, say: ‘My mum is a cunt.’”

  Ian’s face went ashen white, but in a quiet whisper he was able to mutter: “My mum is a cunt.”

  “And my dad takes it up the arse.”

  “‘And my dad takes it up the arse.’”

  James caught an uncertain look in Warrick’s face. “If you’re wondering what taking it up the arse is, it’s what queers do to each other for fun.”

  “Oh,” said Warrick.

  James looked over the three of them again and rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake. It means a queer takes his dick and sticks it up a man’s arsehole. When you’re shitting on the toilet, that’s where a queer sticks his dick. He sticks it in the shit. That is taking it up the arse.”

  Warrick’s eyes widened as the visual popped into his head. Then he pointed at Ian. “Your dad takes it up the arse like a queer!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Ian.

  James snorted a laugh, hawked a cough and swallowed the contents. “So that’s what you fellas were doing in my garden? Trying to be men? Smoking, drinking, looking at titties in a magazine?”

  “We thought it would be fun,” said Daniel.

  “You should’ve brought better beer for that. Have you seen a real pair of titties before?”

  Daniel nodded. “Lots of them.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’ve seen some.”

  “I’m not interested in twelve year old girl titties, they don’t have any. I’m talking about real, big, huge tits.” James held his hands out as though he was trying to carry a sack of potatoes in each hand.

  “Some,” said Daniel. “On the beach.”

  “They were hanging free, were they?”

  “The ladies were topless and lying down.”

  “What about their pussies? The hairy bit where you stick your dick inside? Have you seen any of those?”

  “Some,” said Daniel.

  “I bet you’ve never put your dick inside a girl,” said James. “The easiest way is to a pay a girl, then they’ll do anything, because they’re whores who just want money. You pay a girl a few pounds and she’ll bend over and drop her panties. You can put your dick in her pussy and she’ll pretend to have fun, because she’s just thinking of the money and the nice things she can buy with it. Fifty pounds might be enough.”

  Daniel’s eyes lit up.

  “Yeah, I bet your daddy has fifty pounds in his wallet. You just find a nice girl who’ll take your money and you won’t need those magazines anymore. If she’s a little nervous then you just give her some whiskey.”

  Daniel processed the information with a nod. James reached out and took the gun from his hands and laid it on the table. “It looked like you were about to drop it. You can’t do that with a gun. You drop it and you might break it. If you break it and then try to shoot it you might lose your hand when the bullet explodes with no where to go.”

  “Sorry,” said Daniel.

  James stared him down. “You have a sister?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Emily.”

  “Younger or older?”

  “She’s older.”

  “And how old is Emily?” James asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen, is she? Sixteen and a half? Almost seventeen?”

  “Just sixteen,” said Daniel.

  “So what does Emily look like?”

  Daniel shrugged. “She’s tall, I guess.”

  “Everyone’s taller than you,” said James, as he chuckled to himself. “Is she taller than your mum?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else? What does she look like?”

  “She has brown hair.”

  “Is she fat?” James asked.

  “No.”

  James leaned back and smiled. “You know what the best thing about having a sister is? Knowing what they look like naked. You know what she looks like naked?”

  Daniel felt himself blush. He lowered his eyes and stared at the tips of his shoes. “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Then you haven’t tried,” said James. “No imagination either.” James looked over the table towards the Smith & Wesson. He slid it towards himself and turned it over in his hands. “I’ll tell you what. We’re friends now, aren’t we? I’ll let you borrow this gun.”

  Daniel rose in his seat with almost unbridled glee.

  “You can’t keep it, but you can borrow it for a while,” said James. “I’m not stupid, so I’m not going to give you any bullets for it. You’ll have to earn those. But you can play with the empty gun and practice your aim a little, practice carrying it and see how it is.” He handed it over to Daniel. Warrick and Ian shrank with disappointment.

  Daniel felt the gun drop into his hands. It seemed a lot heavier this time around. His fingers instinctively wrapped around the grip and his index finger curled around the trigger.

  “You’re not a queer, are you?” James asked.

  Daniel jolted back in surprise. “No.”

  “You don’t want to kiss or fuck other men?”

  “No!” said Daniel.

  “You prefer to kiss a woman and put your dick inside her, right?”

  “Yes,” said Daniel.

  “Good. I couldn’t give a gun to someone who doesn’t want to fuck a girl, you know? Having a gun like that is for men. Real men. You know those porn mags you boys had in my garden?”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s what boys use. You know what men use?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “They use something from an actual woman. You don’t need to jerk off into your hand when you have something better, and you with an actual sister is perfect.”

  The glimmer of recognition was still as distant as ever in Daniel’s eyes. It felt as though James was always speaking in a second language, one so close to English that it infuriated Daniel that he didn’t understand completely.

  James leaned in. “It’s okay, I wouldn’t expect you to know until you tried it. It is so much better jerking off to a lady’s knickers than just staring at some mag. You get me now?”

  That flicker of light turned towards a moment of fear.

  “This is what you do,” said James, as he leaned even closer to Daniel. “You go home, go through your sister’s clothes, the ones that are about to be washed. You find a nice pair of panties and a bra and you
smell them. You then jerk yourself off with them until you come, and it will be the best thing you have ever felt.” James looked over to Warrick and Ian. “If the three of you want something better than just that, you go to your mum’s panties and bra. They will have something nice, they all do. You swap them around so you’re not jerking off into your mum’s panties, that’s not good for anyone to think of. But doing it to someone else’s mum is okay. You jerk off real good into those. Then, tomorrow, you come back here with some clean panties, not just rinsed off after you’ve jerked off into them, I want fresh ones. You each bring panties and bras from your mums, your sisters, your aunties, your friends, all of them. Bring them here and I’ll get you some bullets to play with. You can shoot them at trees and scare the squirrels away. You boys understand?”

  Daniel nodded. Ian and Warrick looked a little more apprehensive, but the swirling warmth in their stomachs from the whiskey spoke to them and forced them to nod as well.

  “Something from each of the ladies in your life,” said James. “Something real nice as well, okay?”

  Daniel nodded again, leading the other two to do the same.

  “You’re all on holidays now, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Then you can come at eleven o’clock. That will give you time in the afternoon to shoot off some bullets without anyone seeing you, okay?”

  “Okay,” Daniel said, feeling a swirl in his groin build.

  James poured the boys another drink and smiled to himself. With any luck he would have some of Claire Baxter’s underwear by lunch time tomorrow.

  22

  Josh

  Josh always assumed that he had been a reasonably smart kid, one who could sense danger and opportunity in equal measures. After all, when he was fifteen, he had snuck down to London almost every week on the train, to go to various comic book stores and load up on the latest issues and collector cards. Then he would head back to Luxford and sell them to anyone at school who offered enough cash, as such items were impossible to find in Luxford’s sole newsagent. Josh made a fortune.

  He also had a strategy for getting to know the popular girls a little better. Before every exam he would find himself at their house and fire questions and answers at the stressed-out beauty queens. The payoff came a couple of weeks later. Someone always held a party once the exams were over. Josh was there in a shirt and casual tie, ready to benefit from the thanks for being the hero to the damsels in distress. It was a technique he carried over to university.

  Unfortunately, as he sat in his spare room digging through the boxes of high school crap his mum had dumped him with, his diary from when he was sixteen suggested that Josh was a little misguided and woefully ill equipped to deal with the real world that lay in wait just a few years later. He also found his SWOT analysis of who to study with. He could only hope that his parents never found it.

  ‘Naomi. Dumb as a brick and frigid. Don’t waste your time.

  Susanna. Sounds too similar to Mum. Bad mental picture.

  Lucy. Hasn’t figured out that I want to make out with her. Thinks I’m doing this out of the goodness of my own heart. Bless.

  Danielle. Mark Dexter is her boyfriend. Avoid at all costs.

  Nancy. Ha! Fat and ugly. No way.

  Harriet. All systems go. Likes vodka and Dirty Dancing.’

  The entries got worse. His teenage thoughts on how the world worked were … flawed, to say the least. He expected to go to university and study business, graduate at twenty two, and land a job the very next day. On the side of that he would continue with his band. At work he would find a manager he could stick beside, a mentor, someone who Josh could spend his lunch breaks with and absorb every last trick of the trade that would put him ahead of his peers. Whenever a promotion came along he would be the main contender. His rapid rise through business would mean that a head hunter from another firm would come along and poach him with the offer of a better salary. His job would take him around Europe, he would own his own house within five years of leaving university and he would drive an Aston Martin.

  The thirty-four year old Josh had to remind himself that all of his life advice at sixteen had come from TV.

  I should keep these and show them to my kids, he thought. At least then they might see that the world isn’t served on a silver platter.

  He put the diary away and picked another at random.

  ‘Zone one booby traps in place. Secret rattlers, spot lights and emergency exit. Rations for three days. Secret code - * * -.’

  Josh dropped into a vacant gaze as he tried to remember what all of the codes and details meant. He flipped to the front and found the date. On the following pages were the Zone Two details in someone else’s handwriting. If he had to guess he would have gone with Anthony’s, making Zone One Josh’s house.

  The missing girl, he thought.

  Everything clicked into place. Luxford had been worked into a frenzy, St. Bart’s especially, when Catherine Shievers disappeared. Every household had enforced a strict curfew. Kids had to be driven everywhere and were forbidden to walk alone. Phone calls were an hourly necessity so that parents knew where their kids were.

  Josh and Anthony had little choice but to entertain themselves while mostly under house arrest.

  ‘17:34. Mr Erikson arrives home.

  17:39. Mrs Davies drives onto Fielding Street in her blue Vauxhall. Has several bags of groceries.’

  The entries lasted a month. Josh must have stood at the window in the spare room for hours writing down everything he saw. Several entries were of Mr Erikson coming home, several were of Mrs Davies in her blue Vauxhall. Twenty years later he found a discrepancy.

  ‘18:00. Mr Erikson still not home.

  19:00. Mr Erikson still not home.

  19:47. Mr Erikson gets out of a taxi at the end of Fielding Street, walks home while trying to tuck his shirt into his trousers.’

  Just what had Mr Erikson been up to that evening, all those years ago? Perhaps it was a farewell party for someone at work and they all had a few drinks. Maybe he had been sleeping with the secretary.

  Further into the book were hand-drawn maps of Luxford. Some of the houses were numbered with the names of the residents. Josh had run up to each house and checked their mail to get their name. He had been looking for something suspicious, but only now did he realise that if anyone had seen him go through their mail he would have been the suspicious one, hauled in front of the police to explain why he was going through everyone’s legally protected mail.

  He had forty pages of maps and notes. The amount of obsessive detail caused a shiver to run through Josh’s shoulders.

  You were looking for a murderer. He had passed every house in town. Someone in one of those was the last to see Catherine alive.

  Josh flipped through the rest of the book to see if there was an end date to the madness. Instead, his detective agency morphed into another beast entirely. One of the crude drawings showed a teacher rambling through a speech while his class were fast asleep. Lyrics to popular songs were re-written and given fake magazine reviews by DJ Josh and Saint Anthony. There was a list of girls all ranked together, based on hair length, size, breasts, how close to Josh and Anthony’s houses they lived, sense of humour, and then given an overall score. Alana Sirkis was the winner. Josh had to search through the year book to find out who she was. She was tall, brunette, and had a nice smile. Josh realised he was looking at a fourteen year old girl and quickly closed the yearbook.

  He never knew Catherine or had even heard her name until she disappeared. He had a vague memory of a school remembrance in her honour. Her parents turned up to thank everyone for their support. It ended up being a half day filled with lots of tears.

  On the last page of the diary was a note of defeat. ‘If she’s in Luxford, she’s in someone’s house.’

  He flipped through some of the maps showing off large gardens and empty houses.

  All right, if Catherine’s body is still in Luxfor
d she’s probably buried under someone’s rose bush. So … who’s still living here after twenty years, too afraid to move in case the new owner digs up their back garden to build a pagoda or something else?

  That would certainly reduce the number of suspects, but twenty years of keeping a body secret was a tough ask.

  No one else has gone missing so it’s not like we have a serial killer on our hands. We just have someone who overpowered her and has been calm enough to keep that secret to themselves.

  Josh stared off into space and began tapping the edge of his diary.

  23

  Ian

  There was a cluster of trees along a steep embankment that overlooked the train tracks beside Luxford. It led towards several dips and valleys that had been left to nature for decades as environmentalists lobbied to retain the natural landscape and prevent developers from laying tonnes of concrete over the town’s heritage. None of these politics were known at all to Daniel, Ian, and Warrick, but there they were, playing amongst the trees, climbing through the valleys until they finally reached a safe place to pull out the Smith & Wesson that James had given them. Just that morning they had rummaged through their mums’ underwear drawers, as well as Daniel’s sister’s, and exchanged four panties and four bras for eight bullets.

  Daniel pulled the unloaded gun out of his bag, took aim at the closest tree and fired off an imaginary round.

  “Paaah,” he muttered, imagining the sound of the bullet escaping the gun. “Fuck yeah.” He fired off another couple of empty rounds, listening to the gun click with excitement as it appeased the bloodlust of its holder. After a minute of shooting nothing but air, Daniel decided that Warrick could have a go.

  Warrick aimed from one tree to another, imagining that someone was using it as cover. When it came to Ian’s turn he tried to quick-draw the gun from his pants, to mixed results.

  “You do that and you’re going to shoot your dick off,” said Daniel.

  “Not if I leave one chamber empty.”

  “Yeah? And what happens if you pull the trigger as you’re pulling it out of your trousers? You’ll shoot yourself.”