Like Rats

by Adam Watts

‘Yeah, I know it’s just a pheasant but I still don’t want it in my face. It’s bleeding everywhere.’

  ‘You’ve gotta toughen up, old son. If you’re this distressed about a bird for the dinner table then how on earth are you gonna cope when we’ve got a horde of zombies baying at the fences, hungry for our brains? Because you know they’ll find us one day. We’ll need headshots a-plenty.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that day will ever come. And even if they do decide to take a trip out into the countryside in search of bumpkin-brains, then I’m pretty sure your homemade arsenal isn’t going to do us a great deal of good.’

  ‘So says the man who just nailed a pheasant with a sling-shot. You never hear of David and Goliath? That crazy bastard took down a giant, Pres, a proper fucking giant.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a story to be taken literally, Stan.’

  ‘God’s own words,’ he says, with a slanted and smug grin.

  ‘One of the flock now, are you?’

  ‘I’d say I’m more of a shepherd than a sheep. I’ll leave the bleating to you. Come on, let’s get this one strung up. I wanna see if I can nail one too.’

  Stan wraps a length of twine around the bird’s feet and hangs it from a low branch. Blood drips down from the mess that was once its head. Gruesome or not, Frida will be pleased to have something good for her stewing pot. And I’ll no doubt be pleased to shovel whatever she makes into my guilty little face.

  Stan and I climb back up to the ‘lookout post’ to lay in wait for another innocent beast. It’ll probably take a while, since me and Stan find it hard to stay quiet for more than a minute or two at a time. I swear there are actual turkeys with a firmer grasp of stealth than us, but it’s not like we’ve got a great deal else to do today, or any other day for that matter. I can’t remember what it felt like to be busy. Stressful probably.

  ‘There’s something coming,’ Stan whispers. ‘A proper beast of a hog.’

  ‘A hog? Where?’ I say, scanning the trees beyond the grass for some brutish pig, furtively lurking in the shadows.

  ‘Look, there!’ Stan points out straight in front of him. ‘We can eat for a month on that fat fucker. Check out them jowls.’

  And then, lumbering across the field, I see what Stan’s pointing at; it’s Harry Cobden. I punch him in the arm. Stan laughs it off. He loads a stone into his slingshot and pulls back.

  ‘Don’t!’ I tell him. But he sends the stone hurtling within a whisker of Harry’s fat head.

  Stan leaps up, surprised by the accuracy of his aim. ‘Sorry, Officer! Thought you were a hog!’

  Harry stops and glares at us as we try to stifle our laughter. ‘A missile travelling at that speed could have caused serious injury,’ he bellows. ‘Do you realise I could’ve been dead?’ He storms towards us, his pink face steams like hot slab of gammon.

  ‘I said sorry,’ calls Stan. ‘You should be more careful. We’re always a bit twitchy when we’re on perimeter duty.’

  ‘Sitting in a tree playing with catapults like a couple of insolent school boys does not amount to perimeter duty. The purpose of perimeter duty is to patrol the perimeter, in its entirety.’

  ‘We’re getting around to it,’ Stan tells him.

  Harry looks at the dead pheasant hanging beneath us. ‘And I suppose that will be shared equally amongst the villagers?’

  ‘I shot it for Frida,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sure she’ll divvy it up one way or another.’

  Harry snorts derisively. ‘That’s your game is it? Take her the odd game bird in the hope that she turns a blind eye to how you take advantage of her. I wish she could see you two for the waste of space you really are. Couple of no good lay-abouts’

  ‘Lay-abouts?’ says Stan. ‘And what exactly is there to do in this place? Hunt for meaningful employment? Or should I just make up a job for myself like you did? Sheriff!’

  ‘Well, I suppose every village needs an idiot.’ Harry turns his eyes to me. ‘But you… you’re worse than him. The village idiot’s side-kick.’

  ‘Whatever you think, Harry,’ I say.

  ‘It’s what everyone thinks.’

  ‘Not true.’

  ‘Tell me then, what do you actually contribute? Because as far as I can see you’re just a spoilt kid who got lucky and was fenced in to the very village he was born in. You sit in your parents’ house, you follow him around and you mooch off the likes of Frida. All your life you’ve sat around being waited on hand and foot like a little prince, and even when times got tough the army just put up a fence around you.’

  ‘Fuck you, Harry,’ Stan says.

  ‘That’s quite a vocabulary you’ve got there, my little word-smith.’

  ‘You got a point to make or are you just acting out to compensate for the whole tiny-penis-vibe you give off?’

  ‘Pathetic children. You know, there’s people like me who had to suffer and strive to get here, people who deserve this place. But you two… neither of you lost a damn thing in your lives.’

  ‘Bullshit! I call bullshit!’ Stan says.

  As much as I want to agree with Stan, Harry’s probably right, and he knows it. The outright bastard. He performs an about-turn and marches away.

  ‘Tuesday, or whatever it is you call her, was looking for you,’ Harry calls back, without turning. ‘No idea what a lovely girl like that sees in you.’

  Stan turns grey. He slept with Tuesday when she first arrived at the village. The details of that amorous encounter have thus far remained undisclosed. And when a person as crude, senseless and uninhibited as Stan won’t tell you about something, you know something horrible occurred.

  ‘That sick bastard’s going to tell her where we are, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, probably,’ I say.

  ‘Jesus. I can’t be doing with Tuesday right now. I’d rather take my chances on the other side of the fence.’

  ‘Honestly, Stan. What the hell happened with her?’

  ‘Still not telling. I’ll take it to my grave.’

  ‘It’s probably not even that bad,’ I say, trying once more to loosen his tongue.

  ‘Still not telling.’

  ‘Stan, you once told me that your mum caught you wanking to pictures of Carol Vorderman. It cannot be worse than that.’

  ‘It is. Plus, in my defence, Carol Vorderman has a prime pair of fun-bags on her. In fact, her tits are the only aspect of maths I ever enjoyed.’

  ‘Maybe the government employed her to trick innocent young men into taking an interest in numbers,’ I say, prodding him in the ribs. ‘Like a big-titted Trojan number-horse.’

  Stan sniggers and snorts at my uncharacteristically crude attempt at humour. ‘But seriously, Pres, I can’t be doing with Tuesday right now. That girl is a serious crank. Honestly, I only fucked her because society was falling! Who knew I’d be stuck here with her all this time?’

  ‘Hey, at least you’ve had sex since the fences went up. Spare a thought for those of us who’ve yet to pop our post-apocalyptic cherries.’

  ‘Maybe Eve could help you out,’ he says, jumping down from the tree and setting about untying the pheasant. ‘Of course, that’d involve you putting yourself out there, wouldn’t it…’

  This is the kind of statement I tend not to respond to. It only complicates things. Better to just jump down after him.

  How to Avoid a Dead Girl Walking.

  Having not managed to murder any other lifeforms with the catapult, Stan and I dropped the pheasant off to Frida. She was pleased with what we gave her and found great amusement in the disproportionate amount of guilt I felt at having taken the bird’s life. She told me that I’m a ‘sweet boy’, which forced me to remind her that I’m not far off entering my thirties, which technically qualifies me as a man, even if Harry Cobden refuses to acknowledge me as such.

  I left Stan with Frida. She’ll probably cook for him and he’ll probably stay the night in her spare room, even though it’s no longer going ‘spare’ since he practically lives in there.
I don’t remember the last time I saw him at his uncle’s house – not inside it anyway. It’s not something he’s ever seemed particularly keen to discuss, so I’ve chosen not to push him on the matter.

  Frida asked me to stay for some food but I declined. I felt like coming back home. In the wake of what’s happened in the wider world, I feel fortunate that I still have one. It’s the only house I ever lived in. My parents left it to me when they died, which was (mercifully) a few years before the whole country went mad. Mum went first; a stroke. Dad turned thin and grey over the ensuing months. Winter took him quietly in his sleep. I remember my dad telling me on an almost daily basis that the country was going to the dogs and my mum would roll her eyes and tell him not to overreact. I always took his observations to be a by-product of his age (he was not a young father) and I must admit that I clucked my tongue (and meant it) every time he spat bile about Tony Blair taking us all to hell in a hand-basket. I always hated that phrase. It always seemed like something people said if they’d just attempted to justify an immensely shitty opinion about something they knew nothing about.

  The house is a large four-bed detached. More rooms than a family of three really needed. Since the moment they died I’ve found myself using less and less of the available space in the old homestead. The empty quiet seemed to draw in around me, so I shut the doors on it. Whole rooms are now matted with dust, even the living room; the room that housed the TV. There’s been nothing on the airwaves for two years, so what’s the point of being in there? We could watch a DVD, I suppose, but we’re used to the fact that our resources are limited and what little power our generators can make needs to be conserved for when we really need it. A few months back we had a screening of a film in the village hall. It was nice. Something that we used to take for granted and do almost every day was suddenly a treat again, like when you used to go to the cinema as a kid. We watched Forrest Gump, we ate popcorn and huddled under blankets. Eve cried a few times and Stan sat in a grump the whole night because Tuesday was there and she wouldn’t stop asking dumb questions about the plot: ‘But what’s he keep runnin’ for?’, ‘Is he special needs or just a bit thick?’

  So apart from the bathroom, the kitchen and my bedroom, the rest of the old house is pretty much useless to me. As is most of the stuff in it. ‘Stuff’ has somewhat lost its value in this new world. The iPhone which had come to permanently inhabit the palm of my hand was now just a glossy brick sat in a box under my bed; because there are some things in life that there’s just not an app for.

  Toasters, kettles, microwaves; all scrap too. All gathering dust, waiting in vain to be of use again.

  Who knows, there may come a time when I can plug the Nintendo back in and play a little Mario Kart, but I don’t know whether I really care all that much anymore. Some things just stop being important. Like holidays, or the idea of a new car or a ‘big night out’ with friends. I used to be held in this odd state of purgatory, wedged awkwardly between the warm memories of past glories and the prospect of better things to come. I was always making plans, always reminiscing, but I don’t think I truly enjoyed a single moment of my life in the there and then. Enjoying the moment was never my forte; regrets and good intentions, though, I was always good at those. You’d think that being acutely aware of this massive flaw would have driven me to do something about it, but I never did. Although, I always intended to…

  There was a girl; because wasn’t there always? Her name was Elise and she made all kinds of wonderful thunder in my heart. She liked me too, as it happened, although I never quite figured out why. She was so far out of my league, but it never seemed to occur to her. She used to ask me out all the time and though I wanted to say yes, I never got around to it. Such a simple word, but it evaded me every time. Elise was always within easy reach, but I never bothered reaching. What if… that’s what I kept thinking. What if she was just playing a joke on me? What if she eventually figured out that I wasn’t good enough for her? What if I fell in love and she didn’t? What if she met somebody better? What if she got fat, like her mum? Anyway… I shot a million chances with her and before long we began to move in different circles and eventually lost touch. Just before I turned eighteen I heard that she’d died in a car accident. Her boyfriend had been drinking, she hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, there were drugs in the car and she had wounds to her body not caused by the crash. I often wondered whether my dithering is what doomed her. Hard to say. How far back should you trace a tragedy? Whose fault is anything? Just fate I suppose, scattering opportunities in our paths, daring us to take them or move on, rolling the dice in the shadow of the reaper.

  You’d be forgiven for thinking that Elise’s death would’ve shocked the inaction right out of me, like a sharp electric toe punting me up the arse. But it didn’t. I remember wondering whether I’d dodged a bullet, like her dying was the missing piece of the puzzle that could finally explain my complete inability to say yes to such an insanely lovely girl. I must have known she was a dead girl walking, like I’d sensed something dark in her future that I wanted to avoid. That all seems like another life now. And I suppose it was. A life outside of this village, if only by a few miles.

  The fences that surround this village have always existed, at least figuratively. Not a lot of people came, not a lot of people went. It’s too boring a place to attract visitors and too reassuring and comfortable to force anyone too far beyond its half a square mile of Little England. It was an easy place to settle in and an even easier place to get stuck in. I used to make plans to leave, to get out and see the world; a lovely idea in prospect, but only ever in prospect. I used to blame my parents for that, what with them being such cautious people with little taste for adventure. I assumed – as all young people do – that I was fundamentally different to them and would therefore eschew their conservative prudence. I was clearly kidding myself. I still find myself resenting them a little bit. Like, maybe if they’d have encouraged me to have grown some balls when I was younger I’d have left this place, ended up in a whole other country and completely escaped the collapse of society. I could be sunning my skin in Hawaii or ‘finding myself’ in the outback of Australia. But then, who’s to say I wouldn’t have ended up in some second-rate British city, nothing but a meal ticket for the horde when they rose up that weekend two years ago. I suppose I could have ended up somewhere better, but the way I see it – the way I really see it – is that I could’ve ended up somewhere much worse.

  I like to think I’m here for a reason. Fate has contained me. So… with the past a bland catastrophe and the future stunted and uncertain, I feel I have little other choice than to live well and truly in the present. Hands off the wheel. One day at a time. No regrets, no plans.

  If only that were true.

  The Unscratchable Itch.

  ‘Why would you do this to me?’ Stan pleads. ‘What did I ever do to deserve this? Have I not been good to you? Have I not opened your mind to a world beyond your limited horizons?’

  ‘I had no choice,’ Eve says. ‘What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘You could have sent her on one of those things… y’know?’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Yeah, one of those things… like a job, but for an idiot. To send her off somewhere she won’t bother us.’

  Eve scrunches her face up and stifles a smirk, she starts to shake her head.

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Eve. You forget I know how clever you are,’ Stan says. ‘Please… can’t you just do my thinking for me?’

  I clear my throat and quietly offer, ‘I think he means a fool’s errand.’

  ‘You’re harsh on her, Stan,’ Eve tells him, still shaking her head.

  ‘In what way? She’s a thick twat.’

  Eve and I both suck in through our teeth at Stan’s assessment of Tuesday. Admittedly she comes out with some stuff that’ll jangle your brain a bit, but calling her a thick twat seems a little harsh.

  ‘Listen t
o you two pretending you actually give a shit about her. Especially you, Eve. Don’t think I haven’t seen the looks you give her.’

  ‘I’ll admit she can be a little…’

  ‘Twat?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Ok, fine… Mong? Is mong better?’

  ‘Are we really using the word mong?’

  ‘Mong’s not a good word,’ I add.

  ‘That’s funny, Pres, because I distinctly remember you saying the other day that she was a bit mongy.’

  ‘You said mongy.’

  ‘Yes! But you didn’t disagree. In fact, you laughed. So you’re more culpable than me.’

  ‘Eve, please tell Stan never to say culpable ever again. It sounds wrong coming out of that mouth!’

  ‘Listen, Shakespeare, just because I didn’t get a degree in twat-ology, or whatever you studied, it doesn’t mean I’m thick. I’ve got street-smarts.’

  ‘Yes, Stan… we all know you went to The University of Life…’

  ‘Well not all of us are privately educated, Pimms drinking, tennis bell-ends, are we?’ he says, pointing accusingly at Eve and I in turn.

  ‘Stan,’ says Eve, ‘I lived all my life on a council estate with my mum and my aunt, both of whom were completely mental.’

  ‘That may be true,’ he says, ‘but I bet you still like Pimms.’

  ‘I do like Pimms. It’s true. That’s why I had to leave the estate forever. It happened at Christmas… to this day the sound of sleigh-bells makes me tearful...’

  Stan pulls a confused face at me. ‘I can’t tell whether she’s taking the piss.’

  I shrug. Each and every one of us could be living a lie right now. We’ve all told stories about who we used to be, what we used to be and how we got to this place, and it’s doubtful that we’ll ever be held accountable for any of it. We all got the chance to become something new when the fences went up. A fresh start in a grave new world.

  ‘So anyway…’ Stan says, ‘remind me why you invited Tuesday along this evening. Is the company of two such fine hunks of manliness not enough for you?’