“What do you think? I’m in the park.”
“Just finishing my homework.”
“Wha?” Duncan improved on this by adding “Doing your housework?”
“Homework,” Robbie said, not without resentment. “I’m on the last lap.”
“Whose?” Duncan didn’t wait for an answer. “Hurry up or I’ll of smoked it all.”
Robbie found some words to change as he transcribed the paragraph. Shutting the computer down, he hurried out of the house. Across the road Laburnum Place was just a pair of stubby terraces of houses almost as compressed as his, but the next street—Waterworks Street—led to the park. A wind urged clouds across the black October sky while another brought a thick stink up from the grain silos at the Seaforth docks. Robbie heard explosions and saw violent glares along the cross streets, but war hadn’t broken out yet; they were premature fireworks, and the huge prolonged crash behind him wasn’t the work of a bomb—it was another delivery of scrap at the yard beyond the Strand shopping mall.
A pedestrian crossing guarded by nervous amber beacons ended at the park gates. Shadows of bushes sprawled across the concrete path leading to a disused bandstand. Sleepy pigeons fluttered on the cupola as if waiting to compete for a position on the birdless weathervane. There was no sign of Duncan inside the railings that encircled the bandstand, but Robbie located him by the smell of skunk.
The other thirteen-year-old was sitting on the balustrade at the top of a wide flight of steps that climbed beside a bowling green. Above him a noseless whitish statue on a pedestal brandished the stump of a wrist like the victim of a maniac with a cleaver. Behind the statue a deserted basketball court was overlooked by houses at least twice the size of Robbie’s. Duncan must have watched him search around the bandstand, since the vantage point commanded a view in every direction. Robbie ran up the steps two at a time as leaves slithered underfoot, crunching like a baby’s bones. “Give us some,” he said.
Though Duncan hadn’t finished the fat joint, perhaps he had already smoked one. He took a drag before passing Robbie the remains. “It’s fucking special, that,” he gasped as he laboured to contain the smoke.
Robbie inhaled as much as he could and held it until he had to let some of it out through his nose. More emerged in a series of belches while Duncan had another toke. “You’re right,” Robbie said, or someone using his voice did.
“Wha?”
“It’s special.”
“Fucking special.”
“Fucking,” Robbie had to agree as, with a rumble, the world started to collapse. It was another crash of scrap down by the river, but he could barely hold onto that sense of it. The statue pointed the gun barrel of its arm at a silhouetted tree, bits of which swelled up to flap across the park. Fallen leaves cawed as a tree took them back, and he was afraid he’d smoked too much too soon. In a bid to recover control of the teeming interior of his skull he said “Do you know what they’re talking about?”
“The crows? They’s saying they’s black. Respect, man,” Duncan called to them.
“Not them.” Robbie laughed, but it didn’t help much. “The mams,” he said.
“Can’t hear them. Can you?”
“Course I can’t,” Robbie said, hoping their voices wouldn’t invade the cavern above his eyes. “I know what they’re disgusting, though.”
He wasn’t sure if he’d intended to use the wrong word. “Wha?” Duncan said.
“The most evillest film anyone’s ever made anywhere ever.”
Duncan passed him the smouldering roach. As the tip reddened like a warning light he said “Bet I know which.”
Robbie exhaled the token toke as if he were anxious to discover “Which?”
“Chucky. One of his.”
The idea lit Duncan’s face up. It glared pale as plastic, and lines like stitches pinched his red eyes narrow while his teeth gleamed unnaturally white. The jagged lines were shadows of twigs cast by a firework in the sky, however much they lingered, and Robbie tried to erase them by asking “How did you know that?”
“Give us that if you’re not having it.” Duncan sucked the roach down to his fingertips and doused it on his tongue and threw his head back to swallow it. At last he said “I know everything, that’s why. You turn into a puppet if you watch those films.”
“Films can’t do that. They’re just films.”
“Those ones can. It started round here.”
Robbie had a notion that he already knew all this, and yet he had to ask “What did?”
“Two kids killed a littler one like Chucky does. It was up the road when my mam was living with my real dad before they had me. And then some bigger kids tortured some girl and they were listening to Chucky when they did. A man that had a shop with Chucky videos by the Strand, someone smashed the window and stabbed him with the glass. Chucky does that to people, and a kid in Liverpool stabbed his mam’s friend and said Chucky made him. And there was a Paki shop up the road they set fire to because he had magazines with Chucky in them.”
Robbie was distracted by a sense of being spied upon. The watchful face was on a screen. He glanced towards it and saw curtains bring the film to an end—no, fall shut at the window of a house beyond the basketball court. “Want to see him?” Duncan said.
Robbie saw shadows clawing their way up through the concrete paths. Pigeons shivered as they strutted across the dim stage of the bandstand like the opening act of a show whose star performer was about to appear. Surely their feathers were only trembling in the wind. “Where?” he risked asking.
“At mine next time they have a meeting.”
“You’ve never got those films.”
“I can get them whenever I want them, and lots of others she doesn’t like too.”
“Why don’t we get some of those? Can you get—”
“You’re not scared of Chucky, are you?” Duncan’s grin widened as if stitches were about to split his cheeks. “Godzillions of kids have watched him and they haven’t done anything. Even girls,” he said and let his grin drop. “If we smoke enough we’ll be too stoned for him to make us.” His gaze strayed past Robbie, and he slipped down from the balustrade. “Time we went,” he said.
Robbie twisted around to see red and blue fireworks in the gateway beyond the basketball court. They were the roof lights of a police car, and Duncan had already dodged behind the cleaver victim’s plinth. “Don’t go that way,” Robbie had to whisper in case the crows raised the alarm. “Someone in those houses called the police.”
“I’m not going. I’m gone,” Duncan said and crouched lower. “You go somewhere else.”
Robbie was sure that if he encountered the police his face would betray him, grinning too much while he struggled not to grin. He retreated down the steps and showed Duncan his severed head. “Catch you at school. Me, not the police.”
“They won’t bother much about kids having a smoke. Wait till they’ve gone and we’ll skin up again.”
“You can,” Robbie said and ran down the steps, desperate to leave behind the swarms of beetles that crunched underfoot. The police might hear that, or the applause his sprint past the bandstand earned from his pigeon audience. He skidded to a halt at the gates that framed the pedestrian crossing, where the beacons were trying to measure his pulse, and then he dashed across the road. Lights flared down the cross streets, but they were fireworks, not police speeding to cut him off. Nobody grabbed him from behind as his key scrabbled to let him into the house.
How long did he have to spend at perfecting the use of the toothbrush on the teeth a face was baring in the mirror? Only the fear that his mother would see that he’d changed sent him to bed. The bed was a boat in which he was floating away from explosions on a beach, and then he was brought home by the soundtrack– the thud of the front door, the trundling of the bicycle along the hall, the thump of the dropped rucksack. Other noises followed—some that he was embarrassed to overhear—but the impact of the rucksack left an echo in his skull. It br
ought him out of his room once he believed his mother was asleep.
A streetlamp lowered its bulbous head to watch him through the window over the front door. Suppose his mother had left the pages with Midge? They were in the rucksack, and he took them into the front room. Since he couldn’t risk switching the light on, he tiptoed to the window and unfolded the crumpled wad in the glare from the street. Except for the poster for a showing of all five Chucky films and a talk about them, the sheets were copies of newspaper reports. Fifteen years ago but less than a mile away, two boys not even his age had tortured a toddler to death. Several newspapers blamed a Chucky film, and one said For the sake of ALL our kids…BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY. The bold letters seemed to glisten like the stitches on Chucky’s face. He wasn’t so easily destroyed, even if the cinemas in Liverpool had banned him. He’d made some young kidnappers use his voice while they were torturing a girl, and it had been Chucky’s idea for a seven-year-old Liverpool boy to stab his mother’s friend twenty-one times with a kitchen knife. Newspapers had tried to have him stopped, but two more films had been made about him, though they hadn’t been shown in Liverpool. Now he was getting his way there too. No wonder he was grinning, and as Robbie stared into the gleeful eyes the expression tugged at his own mouth.
It must be all right to watch the films when you were old enough—otherwise the dockland cinema wouldn’t be allowed to show them. The showing was for adults only, but videos didn’t need to be. If Duncan could watch them, Robbie could; he wasn’t going to let his mother make his friend despise him. He was years older than any of the boys Chucky had manipulated. Maybe they’d all been young enough to play with dolls and believe in them along with Christmas and fathers and the other things that went away as you grew up. Being frightened of films must do, and it was time it did. Robbie folded the pages and stowed them in the rucksack and took his grin to bed.
He always felt dull the morning after he’d had a smoke, but his mother brightened him. “Good job we’ve got that dinner,” she said over breakfast. “We’re at Midge’s again. They have to be stopped, those films.”
She was on her way to work at Frugo in the mall by the time he left the house. He joined the parade of boys and girls in black and white, which seemed to lead to a funeral for the past—a Liverpool history lesson where most of his classmates were silent as mourners. He didn’t have a chance to speak to Duncan until the morning break. As they emerged into the corridor Duncan said “I’ve got them.”
“Chucky.”
As Duncan’s grin confirmed this, a girl they didn’t even know demanded “What about him?”
“We’re going to see him,” Robbie said.
“My mother says nobody should out of respect.”
“That’s what crows get,” said Duncan.
She and her friend blinked blankly in unison. “They’ll bring him back,” the other girl said with an extravagant shudder.
“Who will?” Robbie protested in case he was being accused.
“Anyone that watches him.”
“Anyone that does when they know they shouldn’t,” said her friend. “That’s like trying to call him up.”
“It’s like calling up a demon so you’ll get possessed,” the first girl said.
“These won’t, though.”
Their scorn provoked Robbie to blurt “Why won’t we?”
“They’ll never let you in to see those films.”
“We don’t care. We—”
“We’ll get in anyway,” Duncan interrupted. “Chucky’ll let us in so we can see him.”
He mustn’t want the girls to know about the viewing session at his house. He wasn’t quite as reckless as he liked Robbie to think. The girls scoffed at him and ran into the schoolyard as Duncan muttered “I’ve got two for tonight. I’ll text you when.”
For the rest of the day Robbie was dry-mouthed and brittle-skulled and barely able to sit still. He had to at dinner so that his mother wouldn’t notice. “Lots of homework again?” she said.
“Like last night.”
This was cleverer than usual, because she didn’t realise. He must be growing up. “Never mind, you’ve got all evening,” she told him.
He was altering an article about the slums of Victorian Liverpool when his mobile took a message. shes gon cum ruond, it said.
Comming, Robbie responded. His head tingled and throbbed while he searched for words to change so that he could leave the house. Televisions relayed images from room to room all the way along the street to the Jawbone Tavern. Duncan and his mother lived in a house as small as Robbie’s almost opposite the pub. His friend and a smell of skunk met Robbie at the front door. “Better be ready for this,” Duncan said.
Robbie hesitated, only to see several men emerging from the pub for presumably another kind of smoke. Duncan raised two fingers, displaying the joint and gesturing at the men. “Get some of that. Last night’s was for wimps.”
“Not out here. Someone might see.”
“I don’t want her smelling it in the house.” With a protracted red-eyed look Duncan said “Go out the back.”
He needn’t make it seem as if Robbie’s caution were the problem. Robbie followed him along the hall, which at least was free of bicycles, and through a kitchen cluttered with furniture into the yard. He had a manly toke that made him thoroughly aware of the spectators—upstairs windows, all of them lifeless except for the wailing of a child somewhere he couldn’t locate. Before he and Duncan finished the joint he’d had enough of the windowless cell above which fireworks clawed at the sky on his behalf. “Where’s Chucky, then?” he said.
“Waiting for you.”
Duncan meant for both of them, of course. He led Robbie to the front room, where a plump couch and two undernourished chairs were miming patience at a blank television. The chair that had been on less of a diet was occupied by a romance of the Liverpool slums, while a woman’s orange cardigan sprawled across half of the couch. Duncan slipped a disc into the player and lounged beside the cardigan. “Chuck that,” he said.
Robbie laid the rumpled paperback on the carpet and propped his spine—more especially the cumbersome head it was sprouting—against the chair as child’s play started on the screen. That was the name of the film and, he supposed, what you called the mischief that the Chucky doll got up to once a killer’s spirit hid inside it. Why did everyone blame the boy who owned the doll? Why couldn’t they see that the doll was pretending to be him? They even took him to a psychiatrist for the doll to kill. At last the boy’s mother caught Chucky misbehaving and the boy helped throw him on a fire, burning him for the sake of all the kids as the paper said you should, though the mother still had to blow him to bits with a gun. Robbie was relieved she’d seen the truth at last. As he let go of the bony arms of the chair, which had apparently been bruising his hands for some time, Duncan said “Wimp.”
“Who is?”
“Him, going crying to his mam. Hope the other one’s better.”
How could the doll come back? It had grown its stitches now, but this wasn’t even its second film, and so Robbie couldn’t tell what had revived it. It killed a woman who used to go with the killer, and then it put her inside a girl doll. As that one began to speak, a noise crept into the room—giggling that ballooned into shrieks. “What’s so funny?” Robbie was panicked into asking.
“It’s Marge out of the Simpsons.”
At once Robbie recognised the croaky female voice from his mother’s favourite cartoon show. He felt isolated with the sight of Marge Simpson disguised as a doll that helped Chucky kill people. Eventually she was burned alive, which didn’t finish her off, and Chucky was exhaustively shot once again despite shouting “I’ll be back.” Didn’t someone else say that? How many films had Chucky and his partner taken over? A baby or a bloody doll popped out of her to end the film. Duncan ejected the disc and set about searching the cable channels, which fluttered past like slides snatching at the chance to move until Robbie cried “He’s there.”
>
Duncan jumped up, and the cardigan cowered away from him, flailing an armless arm. “Who?” he snarled, dashing to the window.
“Chucky. Not out there.”
Duncan shut the curtains and glared at Robbie, whether for unnerving him or because he hadn’t pointed out that passers-by could see what they were watching. “That’s not him.”
“It’s one of him,” Robbie protested, but as the grinning doll sprang from under a boy’s bed Duncan poked the information button to reveal it was a Spielberg film. It was meant to be about a poltergeist, which didn’t reassure Robbie. “I’d better get home before she does,” he said.
Duncan grinned like Chucky. “You’re never scared of your mam.”
“I’m not scared of any fucker or any fucking thing.”
“Better believe I’m not. My dad tried to make me scared of stupid fucking Chucky. Not my real dad, the one I got for my birthday when I was four.”
“What did he do?”
“Never mind what he done.” Having stared at Robbie, Duncan added “Said Chucky would get me if I was bad. That’s what they used to tell kids.”
Had someone once told Robbie that? It seemed uneasily familiar. “They didn’t know what they were on about,” Duncan said. “That’s not how Chucky works.”
He meant in the films, of course—he couldn’t mean anything else. “See you at school,” Robbie said.
“Shut it on your way out. I’m going to watch him give the doctor shocks again.”
The street was deserted. Lamps patched the pavements with light, which mouldered on the roofs of parked cars. If Robbie were a girl or in a film he might be daunted by the gaps between the vehicles, where a small jerky figure could dart out as its victim reached one of the stretches of pavement the lamps didn’t entirely illuminate. The only place he had to look for Chucky was on all the televisions, and he was lingering outside a window to see that no doll attacked the young couple in bed on the screen when a woman in an armchair caught sight of him. As she sprang to her feet he fled home. She didn’t chase him, but did she know where he lived? Suppose she told his mother? She couldn’t say he’d been looking for Chucky; nobody knew that, not even Duncan. Chucky was safe in his head where nobody would notice him.
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