by Peter Ackers
"…THEY SAID HE WAS SOME RUSSIAN SLEEPER…"
Tattoo-guy wheeled through one of only three doors in the entire encircling gallery; it led to a store-room with a steep set of stairs that rose to a hole in the ceiling, uncovered. I saw the night sky through it. Tattoo-guy, wordlessly, went up another rope, this one dangling from a contraption above that looked somewhat like a gibbet. As I saw his legs disappearing through the hole, I noted the irony that for the second time tonight I was about to clamber onto the roof of some stranger's house.
Tattoo-guy was waiting for me in another wheelchair. When I was firmly on the roof, which was flat, he spun his chair and wheeled himself to the low retaining wall, where a small telescope was mounted on a tripod bolted to the roof. A small table nearby bore a bottle of water, an empty orange skin and a plate of stale bread crusts cut from sandwiches. Tattoo-guy enjoyed this spot, it seemed. In the day, I bet it provided a great view over the land. Of course, Tattoo-guy wasn't a day person. I couldn't see far in the dark; what could he wish to view through a telescope at night?
"I live a simple life," he said, somewhat pathetically. "An incident a couple of years ago put me in this chair. That was just a month after my grandfolks left. Today they think I earn good money in Sheffield, which is kind of true. I work for a company with a website. I maintain the website. But I do it from home. I don't know what my grandfolks would do if they knew I was like this, living and staying alone every day."
I stared at him without emotion. I seemed incapable at the moment of feeling any emotion except wonder, impatience, and anger. And in a situation where those emotions weren't usual, I was an empty vessel with eyes that saw but barely registered.
As if realizing that his heart-felt words were wasted, Tattoo-guy's own impatience seemed to notch up a gear. He spun the wheels of his chair and rotated to face the telescope.
"I don't need bloody company. I pay for a woman's touch, makes it no less pleasing. I chat in chatrooms. I watch the hardest porn and the most violent action captured on film. It's all I watch. I have that shit on in the background, loud. Now I'm immune to it all, just like you at the minute. But I don't need some drug to do that. Nothing fazes me now. Come here."
He tapped the telescope, which didn't budge an inch - fixed in place, aimed at one thing and one thing alone. I rushed forward, eager to see.
It took a short time for my eyes to figure out what I was seeing. It was dark, remember, and I was focusing on a small area of land magnified – I suppose it was like staring at a photo with your nose pressed up against it. But soon I understood I was seeing a fenced area like a pen. The fence was wooden posts with scaffolding bars of some ten feet in length, fixed in an X-shape. Sheep could have slipped out by ducking under where the bars met in the centre of the X, but the pen was not for sheep. One lone horse resided, tied to a stake in the middle of the area. It was chestnut in colour, kind of chubby, with a thick black mane. You could lose money in that mane. I couldn't really tell without much by way of perspective, but the horse looked pretty big.
Someone stepped into the picture, left-side. I recognized a farmer's outdoor clothing: thick jacket, tatty baseball cap, muddy boots. He tipped a bucket's contents into a small trough, and the horse strolled over to eat. The burly farmer took a step back to watch. As the horse ate, he took a comb from his pocket and ran it through the creature's bushy but knotted tail with all the care of a hairdresser attending to a client's locks.
The man was bearded against the outdoor weather and his cheeks and nose were red, as if from a lifetime of supping spirits. He looked instantly dodgy. I wondered what this guy had done to Tattoo-guy to make the younger man treat him as an enemy so - and they surely were enemies, I knew that.
Tattoo-guy started talking.
"Day they were due to leave, my grandfolks drove by my school during break. Grandpa stood on top of his car and waved goodbye. I had wanted the day off, to see them off, but missing school wasn't an option in their eyes. They were old-fashioned like that. Never can make up a missed schooling session, he'd once said. Whenever I was ill, he'd just say that a body learning was a body focusing on something other than its illness. Some crap like that -"
The farmer took off his hat to wipe his sweating head. October could be a hot month these days, with global warming and such. The seasons were messed up. Or not. What did I know? He ran a rough hand through thinning hair and slapped the cap back on.
"- So, I went home to an empty house, and a meal in the microwave. Microwave chips and peas in a bag. Fucking disgusting. It was lonely. The house was too big. So I invited schoolfriends over. They came a few nights and they drank all the beer I bought for the house and they caused a mess and they fucked off. And each time they came, they brought strangers. Shit went missing, you know. An ashtray. The dog's bowl. The fucking dog's bowl. Fucking klepto-wankers. Take anything not nailed down. Take the fucking nails you nail it down with. Then one day, enough people for a football match turned up. So we had a football match. We played over on Kenner's land -"
Kenner. I figured he was the farmer, the man Tattoo-guy was watching. I watched him now, as he tended to his horse's appearance while it ate. The man looked simple enough, but then what did that mean? Appearances were often deceptive. The way a person will look, sound, and act are minutiae that are composed even before birth, written into the DNA. That's unchangeable. But external forces that attack us outside the womb are not regulated; the people and things we encounter in life shape the entities we become. Thus a frail man with a tiny moustache can become a second-hand bookshop owner with a penchant for origami, or a lunatic dictator with world-domination plans. In other words, I shouldn't assume that this typical-looking guy combing his horse's tail was simple and boring as any farmer should be. Killers have to have jobs, too. And this guy had done something to Tattoo-guy that had put him in a wheelchair in his prime. That explained the surveillance. It explained the anger almost literally buzzing from within, like electricity from a pylon. It explained Tattoo-guy's take-the-offensive attitude towards my situation with my girl's infidelity.
Right then I didn't like where I was. I had the feeling that Tattoo-guy believed he had found in me a healthy, strong, mobile weapon of vengeance.
"- I was aware of him watching us through his window. Nobody knew much about the guy, so of course rumours sparked into existence. He was on the run, some said. They offered identities from Jimmy Hoffa to Lord bloody Lucan. Then they said he was some Russian sleeper, because he was seen one day taking some Dosteyovsky books out the library - English translations, though, which no one seemed to pick up on. And of course there was the old favourite of assuming someone's more likely to be a child molester the fewer friends they have.
"Anyway, I remember the ball went into the pen, where that horse is. You see that horse, don't you? And they sent me in after it. The horse was nuzzling the ball, like he wanted to play. All the girls loved that horse. Someone knew it was a Colonial Spanish Horse, a leftover from the Golden Age of Spain. Very rare. Kenner paid a lot of money for it, and cares for it more than he ever did his dead wife. And then that bloody Farmer comes running out, bellowing about his private property and danger and shit like that. Everyone scattered. Except me. I had this stupid idea. I'd seen people in films when they slap a horse's arse to get it to run. When that farmer climbed over the fence, shaking his fist at me, I slapped his horse, hoping it would go running round the pen and he'd have to forget about me to chase it."
Just then Tattoo-guy rolled forward, bumping his feet into my leg, and pushed me away from the telescope with one sinewy but powerful arm. I staggered away, shocked but not offended, and watched as he put his eye to the tool. His lips moved as he watched the farmer and horse. His upper lip slid back over his teeth in a kind of grimace, then relaxed, then curled back again.
"My back was broken, spinal nerves all battered and shattered. I lay there for hours it seemed, until a local nurse came. She was off-duty, but someone called her from my
house. I was conscious, but unable to move. Some of the other kids went on playing when they got the ball back. The paramedics had to park on the main road. Don't know why my grandfolks never built a road out here. Never had a car. Never minded the fucking long walk. They had to put me in the back of a fucking Landrover to rumble me over to the ambulance. The farmer was scared they'd put his horse down. It fucking kicked me. Was like a pair of cannon blasting me. The fucking horse didn't even know what it had done. It just kicked me and went on with its fucking life." His lips curled again. "And it'll never know. Can't tell it, can't show it. There'll never be remorse or regret. Look at it now. My life is fucking over and that fucking horse is eating fucking grass."
And then his head drooped, and one hand came up, covered his eyes, rubbed them. Tears. But this wasn't sorrow that had overcome him.
"I can't bear to know that fucking horse is out there!" he croaked, voice loud yet cracked with anger. "But I can't not watch it, either. Every fucking day I have to come up here. Every fucking day. It's like some drug, and I have to have my fix. I wait, I wait for it to turn and look right at me, to give a sign or something, some fucking indication it knows what it's done and is sorry. Hang its head, whinny, anything. But it doesn't. It just fucking wanders around, eating grass, and that's all it fucking does. While I sit in this fucking chair and…"
He moved away from the telescope and reached down. From under the wall, hidden by its shadow, he lifted a rifle, large and powerful-looking, with a telescopic sight. I took a step back, fearing what was about to happen. But Tattoo-guy only lifted the gun to his head and rested his forehead against the stock. He looked comfortable holding the weapon, and I guessed he'd been up here many times, sitting in this very position. Wanting to shoot, but unable to. Scared about reprisals if the farmer found his horse shot to death, probably. The list of suspects out here would be short.
"That animal, he calls it a special name. I can't use that name. It fucks me off when the bad guys in films call their enemies by the surname, offer drinks, all that shit. Ah, Meester Bond! That's not real. I hate that horse so fucking much I can't bring myself to use its name. The thought of it makes me grind my teeth till my jaws ache. I don't know why. I don't know why. And I can't bring myself to shoot it."
I nearly put a hand on his shoulder. But that would have been silly. So I kept my distance and said, "Understandable. They'd know it was you."
"Fuck that!" he spat. "I feel good knowing I could do that fucking animal right now. I don't because I'm scared of what might happen to me." He looked at me, almost pleading. "What if I shoot it and I don't feel better? What if that animal dies without knowing why?"
I couldn't stop myself: "You want it to know why?"
He dropped the gun back into the shadows. It clattered noisily. "But I can't continue like this. I need to move on. And you will help."
I almost laughed. Oh, will I? But I was intrigued.
"Yes, you will," he said, as if reading my thoughts. "You will kill that fucking animal for me. And I will watch. And it will know and it will regret. I just need to see that." He flicked out his hand, grabbed mine, pulled me close. I almost expected him to drag me onto his lap like Santa Claus. "I need to see regret and fear in its eyes, and I think I'll be okay. I'm sure of it. You want to help me be okay, don't you?"
I pulled my hand away. Not because of what he was asking me to do, but simply because he was a guy and I didn't want some strange guy (or any guy) holding my hand like a lover.
"I know how you feel," he said as I backed away. "Your girlfriend. The same anger and hate. You want to see her remorse, too. But you know it won't be enough. It took me two years to come to this decision. You came to my aid just at the right time. Now I can come to yours, if you do this for me. You are on a mission, and you need my answer. You need my answer or you will have deviated, and failed, and will never know if your choice was the right one or not. You need me. You need me to vote. Imagine the pain I feel. It is the pain you feel. Every beat of that animal's heart is the thrust of a knife in mine."
That sounded familiar. Before I could stop it, an image flashed in my head. That guy, thumping away between my girl's legs. Each thump was in tune to my heartbeat, and each thudding heartbeat made my head throb, until Tattoo-guy's voice was drowned and all I could think about was that bastard forker ex-friend of mine thrusting as if into my heart with a knife, and all I could see was her face, contorted in pleasure given by someone that wasn't me.
I clenched my fists and my teeth. I wanted her here, kneeling before me, so I could unload my venom on her.
But she wasn't here.