The Truants

by Lee Markham

  I take us back to the bed and lie us down. This time will be best spent allowing the rib to knit. If the knife is still here in this nest, it won’t go anywhere without me hearing it leave, and if it’s already gone, then we will have to think of how to find it and take it back.

  But for now, rest.

  And so we lie here.

  The window threatens to throw the sun our way for a brief spell in the afternoon, but then something shuts it off. Probably another tower. And once it is extinguished, I know it is safe to venture out from the room and look for the knife.

  The dog hears us move across the room and comes to meet us at the door. Once again I retreat into the child and allow him to deal with the beast. The boy cowers and backs away. The dog pulls its lips back and bares its teeth, but doesn’t make a sound. It glances back over its shoulder. Then it pushes its way into the rat-child’s room and allows itself a low, rumbling snarl.

  And this is good.

  Because this time I am ready.

  Once the dog has moved fully into the room I take full control of the child and reveal myself to the dog. The hound’s eyes widen and his lips pull back from his teeth in fearful aggression. I leap first. Up and onto the top of his snout. He leaps back in shock, whimpers but doesn’t bark. For the moment he is too surprised to mount any form of defence, he just writhes and shakes his blocky head, trying to throw us off.

  I clamp our chubby baby legs round his muzzle and tighten them, locking his jaws closed. He crashes back against the wall of the room, head still thrashing left and right, and I can feel a desperate howl starting to brew. I throw our arms round his throat and choke it off.

  And then we hold on until he starts to fade. He skitters blindly around the room, and manages to squeeze out a feeble whistle as he thrashes for his life. Eventually he falls to the floor, unconscious, but not yet dead. He’s no use to us dead.

  I look down on him, his eyes rolled back and slightly open, tongue lolling from the side of his mouth.

  Then we get down on our knees and examine his foreleg – there is a vein here that will do. We sniff it out, and then we bite. Our milk teeth aren’t built for this kind of work, but they’re all we’ve got and so we make them suffice. We gnaw our way through, we tap in and we take a drink. But not too much. It’s cheap and it’s nasty, but it will sate us for now.

  And when the dog awakens, we won’t be alone.

  Not any more.

  Small steps.

  We drop the dog’s paw and stand, ready to search the other room for the knife, when it happens again. That pulling away and pouring into. And the I that has possessed this rat-child is suddenly sundered, ripped in two and poured into another rat somewhere else entirely. We, Peter and I, fall to our knees and forward, dizzy, agonised, a Himalayan buzzing tearing through our whole being.

  This is difficult. Almost impossible. Then it is done and I am here, and I am there. And the there I find myself transported to is some other corner of this concrete hell, shadow-ridden and unsafe. There is a hole in my leg, and two rat-youths are looking down at me as I lie there on the ground, and they are laughing. And there, in the left hand of one of the rat-youths, is the knife.

  It is out there. Unleashed. Spilling me into the scum of all creation.

  Laughing as it goes.

  The rat-youths skip away into the shadows, laughing and whooping, kicking cans and spitting. Then a street-rat comes to aid this new rat-child I’ve infected, his face swaddled in filthy rags and lurking within the shadowed confines of an oversized hood: the fell uniform of the so-called meek that the good Lord saw fit to bequeath to the earth. He turns our face to his, this homeless street-rat, and says, ‘Look at me, child.’

  The rat-child is dazed and adrift in here, and so I look at this filthy vermin.

  I look at him. I show myself and I speak to him. And he backs away.

  As well he might.

  Then this new rat-child drags himself away, oblivious of me within him, oblivious of everything other than his idiot need to get home, back to his nest, where he thinks he will be safe. He drags himself away, and makes it as far as the sanctuary of a fetid stairwell. A pack of work-rats loitering there tie his leg, our leg, and hold our hand and tell us everything will be OK, and do nothing for him as he slips into the night.

  And back in the room, with the baby and the dog, I understand that things are now even worse than I’d thought.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TRUANCY AND TERROR

  1

  They should have been at school but had better things to do. There were things to take and things to break, and there was nothing in any classroom that came close to those imperatives.

  They couldn’t head back to the flat until John’s mum had fucked off out. She didn’t care whether they were at school or not. It’s just that she was a bitch. So for now they skulked and they lurked, dragging their toes across the floor as they walked, ducking into shops that didn’t recognise them and hadn’t banned them. Sitting on cold, damp bus-stop benches drinking shoplifted alcopops, and calling people names.

  The other kids knew to avoid them, but sometimes John and Bobby would latch on to the more meek and aggravate and pester until they were either told to get lost, or until the pestered had made it too close to school for John and Bobby to go any further. The amount of effort they actually put into avoiding effort was quite something. They were dedicated. Focused. And there was a part of them that desperately wanted to be a part of the world they laughed and spat at. But their stubborn pre-teen minds would never allow that. They would never submit.

  They were both twelve years old.

  And so they kicked around the clogged school-run streets of the city, keeping their heads down and their necks out. Mixing their signals. Crying for help. Being ignored.

  Abandoned.

  Alone.

  And adrift.

  They did this for two hours, as they did most term-time weekdays, then they headed back in the direction of the flat. They hung back and watched John’s mum scuttle out and away down towards the bus stop. John didn’t know where she went. Or what she did when she got there. Sometimes she came back with money. Sometimes she came back with other stuff. They headed up and around and in, each casually discarding their drained bottles in the stairwell on the way up.

  They let themselves in, dumped their coats on the floor, kept their shoes on and raided the kitchen. Bread and jam. No butter. No plates. Made sandwiches on the counter. Left the jam out, lid on the side. Dirty knives on the counter.

  Obese bin-bags blistering like blackened boils in the corner.

  In the sitting room they flicked the TV on and didn’t really watch it. Morning-telly shite. People shouting at each other in front of a room full of people who were encouraging them to get shouty. John rooted through the overflowing ashtray, emptied the last few tokes-worth of tobacco out onto the littered coffee table and pulled a pack of silver king skins from the fruit bowl (which contained keys and pizza flyers and coppers and fluff and dust, but, crucially, no fruit). Bobby handed him a small lump of sticky black tarry shit. John quickly built a bifter. Then they kicked back and sparked up.

  Which was how they were sitting when they heard the front door.

  Bobby sat bolt-upright in alarm, as he did every time.

  John looked at him calmly and said, ‘Cal.’ As he did every time.

  Bobby relaxed.

  John then watched the door cautiously for a moment, just in case.

  There was some rustling in the hallway, the clatter of something being dropped, and then the noise peeled off into another section of the flat. John’s brow furrowed. Cal would usually come through and give him grief. But not this morning. Something must be up. And somewhere deep down John felt let down. Again.

  He pushed himself up from the sofa, edged out into the hall and moved stealthily down towards Cal’s room. Bobby watched him go with the vaguest interest for the briefest moment before turning back to the telly, his ey
es bloodshot and dopey. Cal’s door was ajar and John crept up to it, his foot brushing against something on the floor as it went, and he peeped in through the gap. Cal was sat on the end of his bed, trouser leg rolled up, one foot naked, spiking a needle into the skin between his first and second toes. He was doing it left-handed, his right arm resting awkwardly across his other thigh. Cold beads of sweat stood out on his brow.

  Cal was sixteen years old. And he was right-handed. He was doing it wrong. Something was wrong. John frowned, stepped closer and pushed the door slightly further open. It creaked.

  Cal spun to face his kid brother and looked as if he was gonna say something, shout something, when his eyes widened as his right arm shifted in the course of him turning. He cried out in agony, and John saw that his arm was crooked and loose an inch or two below the elbow. John took a step back and felt his blood run cold. He was squeamish when it came to broken bones and the like. It gave him the fizz to think of them.

  ‘What happened your arm, Cal?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Cal hissed through clenched teeth.

  John looked at his brother. He had no particular feelings for him. He remembered a time when he was much younger when they had played together, but that was ancient history. And it had always been by Cal’s rules anyway. There’d never been a time that Cal hadn’t bashed him, or shoved him around, taken the toys from his hands and left him wailing – but when they’d been younger… well, they’d been younger, and closer by default. John had been five, maybe six, when his brother had graduated full-time to the streets. More than half a lifetime ago. They were pretty much strangers now.

  But John still knew to be cautious of Cal. Thems was the rules. He might be an idiot, like everyone told him, but he wasn’t stupid. He looked at his brother then, really looked, with the needle sticking out of his foot, nursing his snapped arm, sweating and in agony. Cal was down. And the germ of an idea poked its nose up out of the fertile ground of John’s meaner intent.

  ‘Doesn’t look like nothing happened to me. Looks fucked to me.’

  Cal turned his head to John once again, rage now holding hands with the agony in his eyes. ‘You still here? Fuck off.’

  John smiled. ‘Might. In a minute. Once you’ve told me what happened your arm.’

  ‘I said fuck off Johnny.’

  ‘You gonna make me?’ John smirked gleefully.

  Cal’s eyes widened at that, and for a moment he had no words. John’s smirk broadened into a grin, and something in it caused Cal to frown. He hadn’t really noticed his brother for years, other than when he was kicking him to one side to take what he wanted. He noticed him now. He was getting big. And he was starting to look a bit like their dad. Cal remembered their dad. And he was scared of him. But he wasn’t scared of John. That would be ridiculous.

  He wasn’t scared of John.

  Ridiculous.

  No.

  ‘What’s it look like? I fucking broke it, didn’t I? Now will you fuck off ?’

  ‘I can see you fucking broke it, Cal. I asked how you broke it?’

  Cal shook his head and screwed up his face. He’d been wracking his brain, ever since that old cunt had snapped his arm like a twig before exploding, to think of how to explain what had happened. But the shock of the injury, coupled with the shock of how he’d sustained it and all the rest, had closed off the whole area of his brain that cooked up the simple lies. The area that his mum had made her own before Dad had left: walked into the door, slipped in the bath, fell down the stairs – that kind of thing.

  ‘Fell down some fucking stairs, alright?’

  John narrowed his eyes and considered this for a moment. He didn’t buy it.

  ‘Why’ve you not gone to hospital?’

  Because I stabbed an evil old bastard in the park and he snapped my arm and then burst into flames and people might be looking for me is why. He didn’t say it. He couldn’t believe it. It was all a complete nightmare. And besides, the gear was kicking in now and… just gonna lie down for a minute, just wait for this to take the edge off.

  Take all the edges off.

  No. Sharp. Edges.

  ‘Just wanted to take some medicine first Johnny, alright? I’ll go to the hospital in a bit. Just leave me be, alright?’

  John watched his brother sink back into his duvet, his legs still hanging over the foot of the bed. He turned then and went back out into the hall.

  Cal was full of shit. Literally.

  He kicked something on the floor, and it skittered and glittered along the linoleum ahead of him, catching his eye. He went over, stopped and looked down at it. It lay across the threshold between the hallway and the living room.

  ‘Wha’s up with Cal?’ Bobby mumbled from a slump on the sofa.

  John looked back over his shoulder and saw Cal’s hooded coat dumped on the floor inside the front door. Then back down at what lay by his feet. It must have fallen from one of the pockets when Cal had stumbled in.

  ‘He’s a cock is what’s up with Cal,’ Johnny answered distractedly.

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  John nudged the knife with the toe of his shoe. It was a Stanley knife, blade out two notches. One of the metal-handled efforts. Solid. Weighty. But the blade was tattooed in the most hypnotic way. John squatted down and looked closely at it. The black tiger-stripes burnt into the blade reminded him of the trails raindrops would weave as they fattened and became too heavy to cling to rain-struck windows. He remembered watching the rain on the windows when he was little. He remembered liking it. He remembered when he was little and would sit and watch the rain on the windows for what seemed like hours and he would feel OK. It had made a kind of sense to him that he couldn’t put into words, but which made everything else seem acceptable. It made everything seem as if it had its place, even the bad stuff, and that if things got too much, they’d simply roll away under their own weight.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing John?’ Bobby was stood right next to him.

  John hadn’t heard him move.

  He’d been somewhere else entirely.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He reached down and very carefully picked up the knife, and clicked the blade carefully back into the handle. He didn’t want to touch the blade. There was something about it. But he wanted the knife. It was his now.

  He pocketed it, went back to the sofa, flopped onto it and dumped his feet up on the coffee table.

  ‘You skinning up or what?’

  2

  Danny’s mother won’t be home for an hour or so, but that’s OK. He’s come to the library with a couple of friends and they’re happy enough working their way through pawed copies of Asterix and Tintin. They share jokes and secrets and laugh quietly, shoulders hunched, careful not to make too much noise. They’re good lads. Happy lads. No bother. They should be doing their homework, but hell, sometimes homework can wait.

  The time went too quickly this afternoon. There was a lightness to being today that none of them would have described as such, even if they’d had the vocabulary to do so. No reason. Just was. In spite of the grey, shortening days and chill of looming winter. Perhaps even because of it. Sometimes having no expectations delivers the greatest delights. When friendship and company are easy, and life doesn’t make promises and just gets on with simply living. This happens only occasionally, and even then mostly only to kids, and usually they grow out of it. They don’t even miss it until they become parents themselves, and then it’s replaced by a warm sadness that sees them through for the better part of the rest of their lives.

  And so a terrible absence of concern; the cruel teeth in the hungry jaws of destiny.

  The genetics of tragedy haunting the blood of catastrophe.

  So it goes.

  Because Danny heads off first. He says goodbye to his friends, takes two Tintins and one Asterix over to the machine and checks them out. Puts them in his backpack. Leaves the library and then skips guilelessly away into the quickening darkness, towards home.
>
  Mum has told him to get back in good time today. She’s doing bolognaise. He loves bolognaise. And they’re going to eat it in front of the telly, with the heater on and the lights down low, and they’re going to watch Harry Potter. The third one. Some of the kids at school say it’s weird. But his friends, his best friends, say it is the best one.

  It’s got werewolves.

  He smiles.

  He is ten minutes away from death.

  While Danny is checking books out from the library, John and Bobby are stealing alcohol from a newsagent two streets away. It’s not the first time, and the guy behind the counter gives chase. They bolt, pulling down a rack of postcards across the door as they go and making good their escape. They duck sharply left, down the narrow cut-through to the alley that runs behind the main precinct, and then, a few hundred metres further on, they duck left again, through another narrow dink between two buildings and out into a main street one block over, laughing and whooping as they go. The till-jockey from the store having long since given up.

  And so, stoned, and hepped-up on adrenaline, they park themselves underneath a graffitied climbing frame in a disused playground and dare each other to down it in one. Which they do. Bang. Super-strength. Tipsy. Like it. Heheheh. Then John pulls a ready-made spliff from the inside pocket of his coat, sparks it and takes a deep pull before passing it across to Bobby. Bobby tugs, coughs, John chuckles, Bobby tugs again, holds it, nods, tugs again, holds it, exhales, leans back, blows a raspberry. And so on. And then they move on. Back into the world, to look for more stuff – more stuff to do, more stuff to take, more stuff to break.

  Whatever.

  But, as much as they think they are big-men, they are not. They are boys. And there are dangers. And they rarely look out for them.

  They wobble out of the playground and back down towards the main thoroughfare – shops and people and stuff. Back towards school. Not ideal, but not a problem: they can duck around behind the library and go that way. And either way, school finished an hour or two ago in any case. Still – there might be teachers hanging around and they’re a pain in the arse 24/7. Booky bastards.