Frank forces a facsimile of a smile.
‘Aye,’ Vincent says, ‘but get on the wrong side of him and say goodbye to your knackers. Some cunt tried getting in here about five year back, and he didn’t get ten steps inside the yard before Ludwig was on him. I heard the screams from upstairs and when I got down all I found was a trail of gore going back over the wall and a ripped-off ballsack, still in its trackies. Ludwig was chewing one knacker, but he left the other for, like, elevenses, you might say. I was there when he ate it. It burst like a fucking goooozeberry.’ He pops his lips deep inside his beard. ‘You lads believe that?’
Scott nods violently.
Vincent sets the head with a thump to face them. The thing is attached to a dark mahogany shield of the sort deer and elk are traditionally mounted. The head itself is a distended horrorshow that reminds Frank of a news report he’d once seen about a botched drug trial, where the heads of the participants had swelled into hellacious blackberries. Between his eternally parted jaws, Ludwig’s yellow fangs are visible. A pink tongue cradled in dead meat and bone. Ears all over the place.
Vincent’s voice roughens. ‘I backed over him in the van last week. I’d had a few, you know…His guts were hanging out his arse.’ He traces a thick thumb sensually down the thing’s muzzle. ‘I couldn’t bear to be parted, so I stuffed him. Done it myself.’
Frank gazes into the glass of Ludwig’s dumb, dark eyes. The left one is set significantly lower than the right.
‘Point is,’ Vincent continues, ‘his head was the only thing I could save, and it’s a bugger to hang. I’m doing it wonky, and I keep changing my mind about where he’ll look best. See.’ He points to dozens of holes drilled around the room. ‘I need to take it in with my own eye. Get a bead on it. This is where you lads come in.’
‘Isn’t there anybody else in to help out?’ Frank asks.
Vincent eyes crawling again. ‘No, Frank, I’m all alone.’
‘It’s just that, well, Pam wants Scott back for his tea. His exams are coming up and you know what kids are like these days, what with their computer games and that. I was thinking, maybe he could say what you invited him round to say, then let him be on his way. I’ll stay, of course, and help you with…with Ludwig. How about that?’
Vincent strokes Ludwig gently between its offset ears. ‘We’ll get to my business with your boy after. This is a three-man job. One to hold Ludwig, one to see if he’s in the right place, and one for a second opinion. Because mistakes are so easy to make, aren’t they, Frank?’
He paws the head and waits for Frank to reply, but it’s Scott who speaks.
‘Alright, Mr Barr,’ he says. ‘What do you want us to do?’
—
In the clearing of knotweed, Tommy explained Clocks. A simple game: ‘Right, everybody stands in a circle with the well in the middle and then someone – me – is three o’clock, right? So I run and jump over and tag nine o’clock – that’s my opposite – then he’s got to jump, right? That’s one round. Then nine o’clock says another time and it starts again, only you’ve got to get faster and faster. Get it?’
They got it. Frank, light-headed with trepidation, was six o’clock and, over the well, facing him, was Alan. Midnight. The sun sank behind the water tower and the first bats came out. In the centre of the circle of boys, the well seemed to expand with each passing second.
Tommy went first. Stocky but athletic, he sailed over the hole with ease to tag Brian Simm, who cleared it in similar fashion. More boys followed. The pace cranked up, the boys dragging heels through the dust like toros before a matador, fake-screaming to throw off jumpers on the final steps of their approach. Frank looked over at Alan. He was rocking on his heels, transfixed. Then it was Rob’s turn. Rob was Frank’s friend and a little on the heavy side. He lolloped towards the well and for the heart-freezing second he was airborne, Frank thought he wasn’t going to make it, but then he clipped the far side of the rim and sprawled into the dirt. The boys whooped. Rob looked green, hollowed-out, his croaked ‘six’ barely audible above the frenzy. But Frank heard, and on legs that felt like draft-excluding snakes, he sprinted at the well. They’d done long-jump at school – success lay in counting the steps of your run-up, but how many steps had he taken? Ten? Fifteen? Too late anyway – he was already up on the rim, the wind howling in his ears – so he threw a mental prayer into the void and jumped…
…and to this day he can’t explain it. A psychic break, maybe, brought on by acute terror, but as he flew through space his nostrils filled with the dank, undeniable stench of mildew and he blacked out. Only that wasn’t right, because far off in the darkness there was a tiny, dusky circle of light which, peering closer, contained a mote-like speck floating across the centre. It was him, Frank, seeing himself through someone else’s eyes. Someone at the bottom of the well! But before he could understand more, he landed on the other side of the well and snapped back to himself, crackling volts. Alan was ahead, grinning, awed. He held out his hand for Frank to slap – go Alan! Fucking go! – and then he – Alan – took off as fast as he could, his arms and legs pumping like an engine of steam-powered Victoriana. The loudest cheer of all went up, but Frank was still too buzzed – still too confused – after his own jump to see what was about to happen, until it was too late.
Brian had teed the ball up at the nine o’clock position and Tommy, who’d had trials for Hartlepool FC, stood poised a few steps behind. When Alan jumped Tommy booted the ball so hard it went egg-shaped. It hit him square in the temple, blasting his glasses twenty feet off his face. Alan came apart in mid-air. He was almost beautiful, like a ballet dancer, like art…
But then he was falling into the well and the boys were screaming for real.
—
The TV in the corner is muted, the sound replaced by multi-coloured, error strewn Ceefax subtitles. A gardening show. The host hefts a long weed from the earth, silent soil tumbling from roots. She thrusts it at the camera, and Frank clings to these seconds of normalcy. On the arm of the settee is an old power drill that sends a ripple of unease through him.
Turquoise lettering:
You must showno mrcy with these terrors.
Or they will come backw ith avengnence.
‘You hold Ludwig,’ Vincent dumps the head into his arms. It’s dismayingly heavy.
‘He didn’t feel right before. Too light,’ Vincent says. ‘So I filled him with sand.’ He points Scott over to the far end of the room. ‘Go over there. You’re my adviser.’
Frank clasps the head to his chest. His arms ache already. ‘Where do you want it?’
‘Well…’ Vincent says, ‘let’s try over the mantelpiece first. Scotty?’
Scott shrugs. Frank walks stiffly to the mantelpiece and heaves the head onto it.
There’s a framed picture there: Vincent, a lifetime younger, with his arm around his wife. Beside that is what appears to be a small trophy no bigger than an egg cup, but which on closer inspection turns out to be a tiny urn. JEAN PENELOPE ANNE BARR engraved on a brass plaque two-inches long.
‘I said over the mantelpiece,’ Vincent’s tone is chummy. A tone Frank has heard before, in a different time.
Frank takes a deep breath and hoists Ludwig up against the wall.
‘Not bad,’ Vincent says.
Sweat runs down Frank’s back. Shoulders quivering.
‘Scott?’
‘Good,’ Scott mumbles. ‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t mince your words, do you? I think we need a comparison. Hey Frank, try over there, the opposite wall.’
Frank rests the head on the mantelpiece, summoning strength. An overpowering bouquet of decay emanates from Ludwig’s core as he bundles the thing into his criss-crossed arms and waddles across the room.
‘Next to the window, aye,’ Vincent says. ‘Between the window and the picture of Jean doing the Timewarp. Aye, rig
ht there.’
There is no mantelpiece for support this time. Frank presses the back of the wooden shield against the wall and slides it upwards.
‘Watch the fucking wallpaper.’ Vincent says. ‘Lift the cunt.’
‘But there’s holes drilled all over already,’ Scott says.
‘Holes you can fix, scrapes you can’t.’
Frank’s seen weightlifters do this. He dips at the knees and uses the resulting momentum to launch Ludwig into the air, snapping his legs and arms straight in unison.
‘Left a bit,’ Vincent says.
Frank goes left.
‘Down. Just a touch.’
Frank goes down. Just a touch. Grimacing.
‘There. Scott?’
The hollow enthusiasm in his son’s voice is touching. ‘It looks great! So much better than the mantelpiece. This is definitely the best place, definitely.’
Vincent sucks his teeth. ‘It’s top of the list for now, I’ll give you that. But let’s experiment.’
Frank imagines the chaos inside his own body – ligaments tearing free of bone, a tsunami of ruptured blood and lactic acid scouring crosshatched musculature. His shirt is drenched.
They try Ludwig near the TV, but it’s deemed too off-putting. Next, by the door to the kitchen, but the light switch is an encumbrance. Frank’s exhaustion is beyond concealment. Sweat burning in his eyes, he lumbers about the room with the dog’s head sagging lower and lower in his arms. He catches Scott’s eye. Scott is scared.
Vincent leans against the wall, one hand tucked into his waistcoat. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I think Scott was right. Next to the window was the winner all along. Frank, your boy’s got a future in – whatsit? – interior design.’ Suddenly there are three long, evil screws jutting from his fist. He transfers the screws to his mouth and claws become fangs. He picks up the power drill and speaks from around the screws, ‘Go on, Frank. Next to the window it is. Think you’ve got one more in you?’
All Frank can do is nod. His thoughts are sparks in the dark, confused and sporadic. Autopilot guides him back to the window. The framed picture of Vincent’s wife swims before his eyes. She must have died in the early 90s, around the time he’d started seeing Pam. He could remember watching the funeral procession as it cinched a slow noose around the estate, JEAN spelled out in neat yellow blossoms on the coffin. She had asked him a question the last time he had been in this house: What kind of human being does what you did? It is a question for which he still has no decent answer.
One more lift. But can he? It’s all growing dim, his consciousness dissipating, but then, from some unknowable distance, he hears his father’s loose change clattering onto floorboards; sees him as he was then: still young, wobbling on one leg to free his foot from his trouser cuff.
Frank feels Ludwig in his hands, feels the acid in his jugular, and lifts.
Vincent speaks from directly behind him, pinning him to the wall. He no longer sounds friendly. ‘Left a bit,’ he says.
Frank goes left a bit, arms shaking freely. Vincent inserts the first brutal screw into the plaque, brushing the barrel of the drill against Frank’s right cheek and, without warning, pumps the trigger. The noise is deafening. Frank’s eyes and nose fill with brick dust.
The drill bit is hot when it caresses Frank’s left cheek. Vincent’s beard tickling his sweaty neck. ‘Big man, aren’t you?’ he whispers. ‘Bigger than your da.’
This time Frank is braced for the sound. When both screws are in and Ludwig is secure, he slides out from between Vincent and the wall and staggers over to the settee with all the dignity remaining to him. Scott, who’s been watching from the corner, sits with him. They don’t look at each other. Frank’s mouth is too full of saliva to speak. His ears ring.
Vincent secures the final screw and tosses the drill aside without admiring his handiwork. The gardening show is still on. The host strokes a cluster of small, fragile flowers:
They are delicate things. Too delicate to
fend fot Themselve s.
—
All he could do – all any of them could do – was watch him fall. He’s dead, Frank thought, even as Alan’s momentum carried his unconscious frame across the drop and smashed his solar plexus into the rim’s inside edge; his body snapping – crack – into an L, chest slamming into the raised steel ledge, legs dangling puppet-like in space.
Around the clock face, time stood still. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. And then two things happened almost simultaneously:
Alan came to.
And Alan began slipping into the hole.
(Now take a moment here. Put yourself in Alan’s shoes: head pounding, you regain consciousness and blink myopically into the dusk as a crushing but as-yet indistinct humiliation settles over you. Your legs don’t feel right. You hear your Dunlop Green-Flashed feet clang against the vertical shaft and then, in your first true moment of comprehension, you look behind yourself only to confront the widening abyss staring back…
Can you imagine that?
Well?)
The boys watched, stunned, as Alan slid into the hole. Hands clawing at the rusted rim, whining like AM-radio. And still none of them moved.
‘Frank,’ Alan whimpered, and Frank jolted awake. He wasn’t aware Alan even knew his name. He sprinted round the well, grabbed Alan’s wrists, but the boy’s terror weighed tonnes. He was slipping rapidly through his grip, but then Rob was there and, with a wrist each, they hauled him out, all three of them tumbling into the dirt. Alan was missing a Dunlop and his right trouser leg was sheered haberdasher-like from knee to groin. He gripped the leg tightly, curling the rest of himself around it. In the twilight, the blood slipping through his fingers was crude oil.
The boys, who had been clustering around, backed off.
The jagged rim of the well. They may as well have dragged him over a giant, rusted cheese grater.
When Tommy ran, the others followed. Only Frank, Rob, and Alan remained.
‘Mate, this is bad,’ Rob said.
Black blood soaked the ground. Frank turned to say something to Rob, but Rob, too, was disappearing into the knotweed. Frank didn’t blame him.
He rocked Alan’s shoulder gently. ‘Hey? Alan, hey?’
Alan didn’t move. Not even a moan escaped him.
Overhead, bats stitched the night into place.
And while he may still have been a teenage boy in possession of only the dimmest sense of the world outside himself, exactly how oblivious was Frank to the fact that his life was about to hurtle down one of two paths? Was he aware on some metaphysical level that one path in particular would set in motion a sequence of events whose consequences would reverberate across three entire generations? Or was he, to put it crudely, s-h-i-t-t-i-n-g himself?
Again, put yourself in his shoes. What would you have done?
—
Frank is scooped out. He puts a hand on Scott’s knee – I’m alright – but the urge to close his eyes is immense.
‘He’s gone in the kitchen,’ Scott says.
Ludwig’s huge, deformed head stares benignly down on them.
‘Why can’t we go?’ Scott asks.
The thought has crossed his mind, too, but he says, ‘No, and you know why.’ He holds out his arms so Scott can help him up.
In the kitchen, Vincent leans against the counter and drinks from a dark bottle. He raises it in sombre greeting. ‘Got the thirst,’ he says.
The kitchen is large. Scuffed counters, tarnished sink, a fridge which, judging by the Italia’90 magnet, must still chug CFCs. The oven hob is spattered with brittle, black grease. A chip pan similarly caked. The bin overflowing with silver trays, pizza boxes, ale bottles. Dirty boot prints crisscross lino so worn in places it’s as if the kitchen has been floored with medieval parchment. Most of the room is taken up by a massive table. There’s
a leash and collar on it. Ludwig’s, no doubt.
Vincent says, ‘I’ve been getting sentimental lately. Me. What the fuck’s that about?’
Frank says, ‘If Scott could just say what he came here to say, we’ll leave you be.’
Vincent tips the bottle this way and that, watching the final inches of liquid roll. ‘In a second, in a second…So, this sentimentality, it got me thinking why. You know? Why now?’
Frank notices how both collar and leash are stained with something dark.
Vincent finishes the bottle. There’s another on the counter, which he opens with his teeth, spitting the cap across the room. ‘Is this what happens when you get to my age? Am I supposed to take stock?’ he says, ‘Most people I know are dead. My folks. My brothers – Kit, Eddie…Curley died this year. Most of my mates, too. Jean…’ He takes a long pull on the bottle. ‘Everyone’s going, or gone…and now there’s that Butler girl, too. You mark me, she won’t be back. She’s not the first to go missing round here.’
‘She’s not?’ Frank says.
‘Nah. People have been going missing as far back as I can remember. Young lasses, mostly. They’re never found.’
‘I didn’t know.’
Vincent isn’t listening. ‘And it’s not just people, now it’s the estate. The other week some cunt from that Rowan-Tree housing association come round wanting to buy this place. I says, to do what with? He says, to regenerate. So I told him to fuck off, only not as politely.’ He tink-tinks the lip of the bottle against his rotten teeth. ‘They been round yours yet, these cunts?’
‘We don’t have a mortgage, so no.’
‘Oh aye? So you would’ve had a vote?’
Frank steadies his voice. ‘Yes.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘So how did you vote? Yes or no?’
Vincent’s big, Frank thinks, but he’s also in his seventies. If he took a swing, surely that had to count for something?
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