by Gerard Gray
Steven looked at me with utter contempt.
“I’m going now, but I’ll be back. And don’t you worry; I’ll find the girl. And on finding her, I’ll fuck her brains to a pulp. I promise you the bitch will be dead by… What’s this?” Steven grabbed my face, forcing me to open my mouth.
“You’re bleeding.”
“You kicked me in the head, what did you expect?”
“What, I didn’t…”
Steven let go of my face, slowly walking away from me. He looked like he was in shock. “This is all wrong. This isn’t how it’s meant to be.”
“What?”
“It can’t be helped. I’ll deal with this later.” Steven made to go but stopped just before reaching the stairs.
“Just one more thing: I wasn’t lying when I said I was going to let you go. Of course the girl was never going to see the light of day, but you I was going to let go. Not any more, though. After I’ve dealt with her I’m coming back for you. I hope you’re not too fond of your fingers, because I’m going to cut every last one from your hands and shove them up your arse. And then I’m gong to saw off your head, slowly. In the immortal words of our mutual friends next-door, AKA, the fridge brothers: you’re a fucking dead man.”
My smile began to grow.
“Find something funny, do you?
“Yes.”
“We’ll see who has the last laugh here. We’ll see.”
And with that he stormed out of the room and switched off the lights.
I started to chuckle in the dark. Before I knew it I was laughing my head off, and I didn’t even have a saw. This little joke made me laugh all the harder. I hoped the bastard could hear me, I really did.
Chapter 22
The Headless Cat
The fingers of fear reached out to grab me from all sides of the room. I scrunched myself up into a ball for a couple of seconds before attempting to fight back. “There’s nothing in the dark,” I told myself. “The Holy Spirit will protect me; dad will protect me. They won’t let anything happen to me.”
I wasn’t so convinced anymore. My mum and dad’s lives had been living proof that things didn’t have to work out well in the end. Do things ever work out well in the end? My dad’s life had been more or less an uphill struggle from the day he had turned seven, and I suppose the same could be said for my mum’s life, but for different reasons. My dad’s curse had been my mother’s cross, and she had carried it right to the bitter end. When my dad finally died I had hoped that my mum might finally be allowed to rest, to enjoy her grandchildren. But that wasn’t going to happen, was it?
I hung my head in the dark. I must have slept for a good hour but I was still so very tired. I could barely raise myself off the bed, or was that just despair. All thoughts of escape were now gone and I was no longer laughing. It’s funny how you can be a totally different person from one moment to the next.
I placed my head in my hands and groaned. I had just remembered the person from earlier throwing jibes and stones at the monster. My stomach attempted to commit suicide by leaping off a burning bridge. What the fuck was I doing? I cringed at the memory of the smug little shit taunting the rabid beast. I didn’t know that person. Why was he laughing at the monster? He had won nothing. So why was he laughing?
I groaned again.
If only I’d had sex with that girl. Who knows what would have happened if I’d just had sex with her? He might have let me live; he might have let us both live. Who knows, the girl and I might have come out of this friends due to our shared experience. In years to come, when she finally became an adult, we might have even started seeing each other.
I cringed at how nasty I was being. I wouldn’t do that to Karen. Only a shit would do that.
But wasn’t I a shit? Had I not been a shit for the past six months? At the time I had blamed the fridge brothers for the change in me, but in the end was it simply because I was deeply unhappy with my life?
She made you what you are.
We were happy once.
You were never happy with her.
We used to love each other. We used to have a laugh.
No you didn’t. She laughed at you, not with you. There’s a difference. She thinks you’re useless.
Had Karen subtly treated me like shit from the day I had met her? Words from our past flowed into my head, mellifluous and dark: your legs are too short; your breath stinks of garlic; do you know you come across as slow sometimes – everybody mentions it.
She despises you.
But what would happen to my children if I did leave her for Bunches? They’d grow up to hate me. Perhaps they’d end up being neds, due to me not being around all the time. Would they end up in gangs? I cast my head once more. I can’t live the rest of my life with a woman who despises me, who moans at me constantly? And what will happen when the kids leave home? What will Karen and I do then?
She’ll leave you long before that.
I rolled over and moaned in the dark.
And she’ll take the children.
“Fuck off!”
I had to stop this. I was torturing myself and I knew it. And none of this mattered anyway. My marital problems paled into nothing compared to what Steven was about to do to me next. Soon he would return and the nightmare would begin again, only this time I wouldn’t be the spectator. I would be dead by dawn, if I were lucky. I tried my best to hide my fingers in the dark, scrunching them up tight.
“I’m sorry, Karen. You don’t deserve this abuse. I’m an arse. I’ve been a crap dad and a crap husband. I’m so very sorry. If I ever get out of here I’ll make it up to you and the children, I promise. I’ll be a better husband, a better dad, I promise.”
A black, metallic despair grabbed me by the legs and dragged me off into the darkness.
I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care.
*
My little legs staggered over to where I believed the nearest wall to be. I undid my boxers, pulled out my penis and started to piss for Scotland. A hidden smile rose out of the hissing steam as I imagined myself urinating all over the bastard’s face.
On finishing, I blindly made my way back to the bed and sat myself down. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t see a thing. I should have been used to the dark by now, but I wasn’t.
A fear once again reached out to strangle me. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to cut off my fingers. I shivered with cold, trying not to remember what he did to that poor boy. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake that bludgeoned face from my head, though. It had been unbelievable. The man was a monster; he had butchered him without the slightest compunction.
Oh God, he slit him from ear to ear…
I stopped myself from going any further with my thoughts. I had to stop torturing myself. I wasn’t going to change the future by beating myself up in the past. Think about something else. Think about happier times.
Depp’s face appeared out of the darkness. I could see him grinning, his cheeky little features lighting up the room. He was dancing mockingly beside his little brother, his tongue protruding rudely from his mouth. The boys certainly had rhythm.
They got that from their mum.
I cast my head. I hadn’t meant all that shit earlier. Karen still loved me. I knew that. She just wanted me back, the way I once was – well.
I suddenly remembered my dad.
And then I saw Bunches.
“Dad,” I whispered, “are you there, dad? Please help that girl escape. Don’t let him catch her.”
I’ll try, son.
“Thanks, dad. And could you look after Depp and Michael… and Karen. They’ll be worried out of their wits. I wish you were still here with me.”
Do you really? Would you actually want me back?
I was slightly taken aback by this. “Of course I…” I faltered. He was a physical mess in the end, overweight, his legs useless, dying of renal failure. And of course there was the illness.
Would I want him back like that?
“I would want you back… of course I would. But well. You understand that, don’t you, dad? No manic depression and no renal failure.”
Why didn’t you offer me one of your kidneys?
“What?”
You could have given me one of your kidneys. That would have made me well.
This was something I had never even considered. Perhaps he was just so finished that it was beyond thinking about. He was physically overweight for a start, so they would never have done an operation. Is that why I’d never considered it?
“I didn’t know you wanted me to, dad. You were finished.”
Of course I was finished, because you wouldn’t give me one of your fucking kidneys.
I grimaced on remembering this selfish trait of my dad’s, or should I say of the illness. He had no inhibitions when he was ill; he would simply tell you what he thought.
I dissolved back into the dark, half dreaming, half awake. I saw a time far off in the distant past, a time perhaps just as dark as the one I was living in now. The memory was of my dad, and he was going ill again, but the strange thing was I didn’t pick up on it at first.
You didn’t know me anymore, did you?
“No. Probably not.”
I had been living in London for a number of years at the time, which meant, on average, I only got to see my family about two or three times a year.
“I was living in London, dad. That’s why I didn’t see you anymore.”
Did you even see us that much when you were living in Glasgow?
I thought about this.
“I’m sorry. I suppose I didn’t get to see you that much either. I guess I had been away a long time.” My once finely honed skills of observation, at least where my dad was concerned, had faded.
“You were going ill again, but I didn’t see it.”
No reply. My dad had gone eerily quiet.
I could see myself walking into the past, walking up to my parents’ front door. I had just spent seven hours driving up from London. On entering the house I found my dad sitting in his mechanical chair, his tongue a lapping and a lolling, his hand shaking back and forth. We exchanged a couple of welcoming remarks and then I spotted my mum coming out of the kitchen. On seeing her I felt somewhat unsettled, but my subconscious shook it off.
“The gypsy returns,” I said jokingly.
“Come and give me a hug, London boy.”
I gave my mum a warm hug and then followed her into the kitchen.
“I made you a Chilli. Are you hungry? I put fresh chillies in it.”
“Famished,” I replied, going straight for the fridge. Right enough she had bought me some Thai chillies.
“Ahh, chillies…” I said, picking up the packet, stroking it jokingly against my face.
“Pete, it’s very hot. Try it.”
I tasted the chilli and right enough it was hot, but no way was it hot enough. I am addicted to chillies; at least I was before my stomach problems began.
I looked at my mum again. She looked weathered and worn, but quite well.
“Are you OK?”
“Huh…” she huffed, expelling a puff of exasperated air. “Him. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
I turned around to look at my dad. He was sitting in his chair, a fat, failing invalid. I looked at my mum. I wasn’t sure how to take this. Recently she had gone from being the angel of my youth to a constantly moaning hypochondriac. My sister blamed her German friend, Helga, and I tended to agree.
I looked back at my dad. The poor man had just been in care for six weeks while my mum had had her knee operation. My sister had told me that she had been moaning about him incessantly: the horns and halo effect. As far as my mum was concerned this little man definitely had horns. And that was why I took no notice of her. On this occasion, I was wrong.
Why were you wrong?
My eyes widened in the dark. Floating in the middle of the room was a cat as clear as day, its tail a swirling and a twirling high into the air like the smoke from a chimneystack. It was Tiddles, but not the Tiddles of my cinema room. This Tiddles had a head.
“Tiddles, you found your head?”
No thanks to you.
“What do you mean?”
You certainly know how to hide a head don’t you.
I winced. Tiddles’ voice was wrong. Why was Tiddles’ voice so wrong? And then it dawned on me. The apparition floating in the dark was that of a cat, but the voice was still my dad’s. I felt sick and disorientated. I placed my head on the bed, closed my eyes and attempted to escape back into my waking dream.
I returned to my parents’ living room, my dad lying half asleep in his chair. It was like lucid dreaming. I found myself wondering which one was the real world: the one with the floating cat, or the one with my dad slumbering in his mechanised chair.
I sat myself down on the sofa with an enormous plate of chilli and a bottle of Leffe. I had asked my mum to tape me the UEFA cup match, and by some fluke of the world she had managed it. My mum was over seventy – technical she was not. I switched on the video. Mum had just gone to bed. My dad was sitting beside me, half asleep.
I opened my eyes to find the ethereal Tiddles still floating in the dark.
“Do you want to know the score?” my dad mumbled from his armchair. He had been away at dialysis earlier that evening. It always left him drained.
“No. Definitely not. Don’t tell me.”
“All I’ll say is…”
“No! Don’t tell me.”
My dad said nothing for a couple of seconds and then continued.
“I’ll just say…”
“Quiet!”
“That Celtic had a better game in the second half.”
“OK, don’t tell me anything else.” No way did I want to know the result. If I knew the result I wouldn’t want to watch the match.
“And I’ll just say…”
“Dad!”
“That Larsson got man of the match.”
The actual implications of this conversation went far beyond the result of a football match. In the back of my mind something was niggling, but I thought nothing else of it. He finally mumbled something incoherent and proceeded to fall asleep in his chair. He was exhausted.
Larsson did get man of the match, but it wasn’t the greatest of games. Celtic drew 1-1 at home. As I left the room to go to bed I looked back at my dad, sleeping in his chair. He looked all but finished. Again I had that niggling feeling, but I brushed it aside. I was tired. It was 1:30 in the morning; time for bed.
No sleep for the wicked, aye?
I threw an angry stare at the floating cat, but the feline didn’t flinch an inch. My glower burned and effervesced like a flare before darkening once more. The cat was right: the wicked had no right to rest. I think I had only been asleep for a couple of hours when it started.
“Mary! Mary! It’s 5.30, Mary. You need to get up.”
“Huh?” I mumbled, stirring from my slumber.
“Pete, I’m out of the bathroom, now. You can get in, if you like.”
What the fuck? Was it actually five in the morning? I leaned over and looked at my phone. Right enough it was just after five.
“Mary! I’m hungry.”
I tried my best to ignore my dad’s voice. It was 5.00 in the morning, so by my estimations that meant I’d only had about four hours’ sleep. I turned over in exasperation.
“Do you want some breakfast as well, Pete?”
“No I do not,” I vociferously whispered. “It’s five in the morning. I work hard all week. Let me sleep.”
My dad didn’t seem to care how early it was. All he cared about was the fact that he was wide-awake, so everybody else should be up as well.
My dad babbled on incessantly for the next hour. Every minute, like clockwork, he would say something else, his voice flowing into my room like the frothy waves on a beach. Not quite the tranquil swill of the Bahamas, more the freezing cold wash of a Scottish shoreline.
“Mary, I want my breakfast in my special bowl,” he said rudely. “And I think I’ll have some toast. Are you making toast for Pete? If you are, then I want you to make me one more slice of toast than you make for him.”
What? Did I hear him correctly? Oh bugger. I had forgotten about this.
I slowly dragged myself out of bed. My dad’s dressing gown was lying in the corner, so I put it on. I staggered into the living room to find him beached in his chair as per usual.
“Morning,” I said. “You were up early. What the hell was all that about this morning?”
My dad looked up at me with a sneer. “It’s my house. I make the rules in this house.”
“It’s not your house,” I replied. “It’s yours and mum’s.”
“If I put it to a court of law, they would rule in my favour. Your mother would get nothing.”
“What’re you talking about?” I shook my head in a bid to dissipate the growing anger. I quickly released the pressure by remembering that he was obviously going ill again. No point listening to a word he said.
I walked through to the kitchen.
“He’s going ill again, isn’t he?”
“Do you see what I have to put up with? He’s an ungrateful, rude little devil.”
“Mary. Bring me my tablets.”
“Please!” I shouted back at him.
My mum picked up his tablets from the bench and winced. “He’s ugly. I can’t bear to look at him.” She then disappeared into the living room. I followed her in and watched her place the tablets down onto the little table in front of my dad.
“Thank you,” I said, aiming the reproach at my dad for not acknowledging my mum’s kind gesture. He ignored me, his hand shaking back and forth.
“I need a cup of milk to take my tablets with.”