The Truants

by Lee Markham

  I take the scissors in my older hands and turn to the younger me, and we snip away at the unruly blond locks that are teaming with lice, fattened and herding. I dispose of the hair in the toy box, where it will later burn, along with anything else that needs disposing of. Once most of the hair is gone, I turn the child to look at me. He smiles, and I smile back.

  His smile is his, his own, not mine.

  And my smile is mine, my own, writ large across the face of the older child.

  We hold like that for a moment. We neither of us expected it. And yet here it is.

  The older child doesn’t join in. He’s not in the mood. And he wants to get on with it.

  I nod, for all of us, take the shampoo and the razors in one of Danny’s hands, and the little one’s hand in the other before leading them through to the bathroom and closing the door behind us.

  The dog continues his watch.

  It is as filthy in here as it is everywhere else. I help the little one into the bath, remove his stained vest and saturated nappy. The older child baulks somewhat at the little one’s filth, but he endures it stoically and helps get the job done. We attach the short rubber shower-adapter to the taps and run the water as quietly as possible, mostly cold with just a dash enough of warm so as not to actually hurt. Then we hose him down. Inside, in here, with us, he squeals and complains, but without much conviction. This is new to him and he doesn’t like it, but a better part of him appreciates it.

  We shampoo his whole body, including his head. Especially his head. Then we take a razor from the packet and carefully shave his scalp. We take the top off a couple of louse bites and the scent of his blood drives us all crazy. But we contain ourselves. Then we rinse him down and lift him out. The only towel we have to dry him with is musty, stiff and scratchy but it will do.

  Back in the bedroom we put him in his suit. No nappy. He won’t be needing one any more. Not as long as he has me, and he has me until this is done. Once he is ready we stand back and look at him. He gives us a twirl. The older child smiles at that. His first smile this side of death. He enjoys it.

  Then we send Peter through with two words: get her.

  He marches off proudly, but quietly. The older child lies down and closes his eyes and allows my focus to stay with Peter. So I toddle down the hall. The dog glances over its shoulder at me as I approach. The next few minutes are the most open to possible deviation from the carefully plotted course. Ideally we can extract the mother without waking the man-rat. It all depends on her.

  Peter and I gently order the dog to his feet. He stands, wearily, and we send him into the room while we wait in the doorway to oversee things. The male is sprawled across the armchair, asleep. Drug sleep. There is a nervous twitch ticking away in the wrist of his right hand. A sleeping dog who, for the time being, we would prefer to let lie.

  The dog moves closer to the mother and pushes his muzzle into her face and snuffles and licks. She pushes him away and rolls away from him. The dog perseveres, nibbles at her ear. Tugs at her hair. She rolls back and her eyes half open. She goes to smack the dog, but all intent escapes her when she sees the child, shaved and suited, at the foot of the sofa beyond the beast. Her face forms the dumb sign for question, and I have the child speak. ‘Mother. Please. Come with me.’

  It is the longest sentence he has ever spoken.

  Then the dog backs away and the boy waves for her to follow.

  She pushes herself half upright and watches him go, gormless disbelief honking silently from her face.

  Once the dog has backed out from between the coffee table and the sofa, he turns and pads weakly out of the room. ‘Come along Mother,’ the child trills.

  I then open the eyes of the older child and ready him in the room.

  The dog and Peter come through first. Peter turns and waits for her.

  She shambles in after him.

  Peter looks up at her and says, ‘Mama.’

  She leans down to touch his naked scalp and says, ‘What happened your…?’

  Peter springs then, wraps his arms round her neck and swings into her arms. I have Danny leap at the same time, onto her back and reaching round, covering her mouth and clamping it shut. Peter then sinks his teeth into the doughy flesh that covers her collarbone and takes a sip. She tries to shake us off, but stumbles and goes down. She tries to scream, tries to breathe, and flails and flaps.

  And then I’m ripped apart again – this time intentionally – and I’m in, and she is mine, and it is done.

  We lie there, the three of us, the three of me, wrapped round each other for a short moment and we simply exist. The moment is almost post-coital.

  Once we have caught our breath, I get her up and set her to work, and allow Peter and Danny to rest. I take her through to the sty that she calls her bedroom and have her root around until she has found a belt. We then head quietly back into the living room and investigate the man-rat. The female is surer of the depth of his unconsciousness than I am. She seems confident that we can bind him and that he will remain out. That he would in fact remain out if the world were to end. I believe her.

  So we hoist him upright, cross his arms in his lap, throw the belt round his wrists, pull it tight and then tie it in a knot at the buckle. Then we take one of the reels of nylon cord from the back pocket of our dirty tracksuit bottoms, wind it round him once, tie another knot, then wind it round him four or five times more, tie it tight, then snip off what’s left with the hairdressing scissors. Then we bind his feet.

  Once he is bound we have Danny come through and tie her up on the sofa – all for show, of course – and then Danny heads back through, and the mother lies there and waits for him to wake up.

  And once he is awake, we will work together to ensure that he will fear us, because then he will do what we need him to do. He will help us find the one with the knife, the one with the broken arm. And then we shall start putting things right.

  2

  When Ste came to, when he surfaced from the brown haze, Donna was whining and his hands were tied behind him. He was bound to the chair in which he’d passed out that morning.

  ‘Wha…?’

  He scanned the room and found it much as he recalled leaving it. There was a bag of gear on the table, all his kit. Telly was still there. He’d not been robbed.

  Donna was tied up too. She was prone on the sofa, weeping and whimpering. She wasn’t secured to anything, not as Ste was to the chair, but nor was she making any attempt to escape.

  Ste wasn’t scared. He was angry. Always his first recourse. He thrashed in his chair, but to no avail.

  ‘What the fuck’s goin’ on, Don?’

  Her head snapped to face him and she sobbed, panicking. ‘Don’t know Ste… think it musta been a bad batch… don’t make no sense…’ She was gulping for air between each spoken clause, hysterical drama-school crying.

  Ste just frowned at her like an idiot. He didn’t even ask her what the fuck she was talking about. It went without saying. It always did.

  ‘Well are you just gonna just lie there like a fat cunt or are you gonna come over here and help untie me?’

  ‘I can’t…’ she wheezed desperately, ‘… he’s got Petey and said if I moved he’d… he’d…’

  ‘Said he’d what? Who said?’ Ste decided right then that the second he got loose he was gonna beat the living shit out of the stupid bitch.

  ‘I said if she moved, I’d cut the boy’s head off and put it back where it came from.’

  For the briefest of moments Ste was dumbstruck: there was a nigger-child in the shadow of the doorway, tipping his head to indicate Donna’s groin as the place he had threatened to shove Petey’s head.

  Then the dumbstruck moment passed, and Ste laughed.

  ‘Go on then. Little cunt would probably love it up there, hey, Don?’ Ste sniggered at his own wit and grinned. Then the grin disappeared and the anger returned. ‘Fuck’s sake Donna, get off the fucken sofa and get over here. It’s just a kid, wh
at the fuck’s he gonna…?’

  ‘No Ste, don’t, you don’t…’ she whispered. She wouldn’t even look at the child.

  ‘She’s quite right, Steven, you don’t understand. And nor, in all likelihood, will you ever. But that’s neither here nor there. I came here for something and I intend to get it. And you will help me.’

  The incongruity of the child’s sing-song pre-teen voice and his older, dustier words was entirely lost on Ste. He thrust forward in his chair and hissed, ‘You can go fuck yourself you nigger piece of shit and when I get out of this I’m going to fuck your arse and then I’m going to fucking kill you…’

  The child then moved so quickly, and so silently, it was as if he were smoke. In the blinking of an eye he was face to face with Ste. The pale-blueness of his eyes was wrong. The pallor of his skin was wrong. Something about his teeth when he smiled – wrong. But Ste managed to push most of that to one side. Whatever may or may not have been wrong, or right, this was still just a nigger-child in his home, threatening him.

  Ste spat in his face.

  The child’s smile broadened and his arm moved in a blur to one side. There was a short, sharp ripping sound, like Velcro being unfastened. The child held Ste’s gaze, eyeball to eyeball, and Ste found himself strangely transfixed. Even when the heat, swiftly followed by the pain, bloomed on the side of his head.

  The child held up something for Ste to see and released him from his hypnotic gaze. Ste couldn’t immediately make out what it was he was looking at. His face was a mask of combined confusion and rapidly amplifying agony.

  ‘Your ear, rat. I don’t think you’ll be fucking my, or anyone else’s, arse anytime soon. Nor do I think it’ll be you killing me. What say you?’

  Donna turned away from the whole scene, and curled into as close to a ball as she could. She made a curious, reedy, whistling noise. The child looked at her, then back at Ste. Then he turned and moved back across the room to sit in the seat opposite Ste. He dropped the ear on the table as he went.

  ‘I say fuck you,’ Ste managed to sigh through the excruciating pain he now endured. He said it, but the words lacked bite this time. They were a lie. Front. But it wasn’t just the pain that had quieted him. He was now afflicted by uncertainty. Doubt. Something he hadn’t tasted since he was a smaller man than the litany of so-called fathers his mother had foisted on him in his youth.

  ‘I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do.’ The child exhaled melodramatically. ‘Perhaps a little more persuasion needed, then.’

  Ste slumped back in his chair, an over-engineered expression of insouciance on his face, feigned disinterest. But not feigned enough. His fingers picked and fidgeted at each other. He looked at the child in the chair opposite, who in turn looked towards the door and trilled two words: ‘Here boy.’

  There then followed the sound of movement from Peter’s bedroom. Ste turned to watch the doorway, and Donna peeped out from her flinch position too. They heard the dog padding across the boy’s room, out into the hall and towards the doorway. When he crossed the threshold into the room Donna moaned, and Ste gasped.

  The dog’s eyes were glazed and open at half-mast. He had tiny baby bite marks intermittently pocking his hide, and dried blood had woven trails in tendrils across his coat. And sat astride him, squeaky-clean and wearing brand-new clothes – a little wedding suit, white socks – his head shaved and a crimson clown’s mouth smeared across his lips, was Peter. He looked malevolently at his mother, and then at Ste. Then he looked at the older child, and they both smirked at each other. Quite the jolly prank.

  ‘Down boy,’ commanded the older child, and the dog obeyed, his ears pulled back in terror that was now innate. The dog looked across at Ste, his dull eyes conveying everything that needed conveyance – the beast had been bested and the kids were in control.

  Peter swung his leg up and over the dog’s back and dismounted with a cruel flourish. Peter and the other child’s smirks both broadened simultaneously – they were enjoying this, but they seemed not to be a ‘they’. They seemed as one.

  Ste pushed himself back into his chair and fell utterly silent, rapt and unmoored by the scene playing out before him. Peter pranced across the room to the older child and leant in to whisper something in his ear. The older child grinned and swivelled his eyes to Ste as he did so. He nodded and licked his lips.

  Peter then held his chubby little baby hands up to his mouth and chuckled bashfully. It should have sounded innocent, but the blood on his face, and the outfit, made it the absolute opposite. It sounded terrible, and Ste wanted to cover his ears.

  His ear.

  Then Peter saw something on the table before him and abruptly ceased his giggling. The other child followed his gaze, raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Go on then.’ The baby scuttled across the room, seized the ear from where it had been discarded and put it to his lips. He hummed as he chewed and gnawed at what little could be wrung from the scrap. But he was still thirsty when he was done, and he started to bleat.

  ‘Hush now. There’s plenty more where that came from,’ consoled the older child. Both children turned to look at Ste.

  Ste’s eyes widened, understanding now. And believing. All front dissipated. ‘No. Oh god, no. Please. Take her…’ He nodded towards Donna, who now did nothing but shiver on the sofa, ‘Take her.’

  ‘Stop your squealing, rat. We’ll take what we want, when we want it,’ the older child intoned. He looked at Peter and then the dog. Peter heeded a wordless instruction and turned away from Ste and his mother, went back to the dog, lay down on the floor beside it, put his mouth to his belly, bit down – the dog squeaked feebly but made no move to resist – and the child suckled.

  It sounded like the end of a milkshake being pulled through a straw.

  Ste sobbed. ‘What the fuck is going on? This can’t be happening…’ His face crumpled, and he collapsed into himself. He became the child he’d once been before other kinds of monsters had turned him into the monster he’d become – and he cried, and feared, much as he had done back then.

  ‘Shhhh, rat. Hush now. No need for tears. We don’t need you for that.’ He tipped his head back at the baby as he fed. ‘No. I can think of no chalice more toxic.’ The child shuddered his distaste at the very notion. ‘All I need from you is one small thing.’

  ‘What? Anything!’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes… anything…’

  ‘Good.’

  The child picked up Ste’s mobile from the littered table. He studied it, fiddled with it and then held it up in front of Ste. Ste looked at it – the small screen read ‘Cal’ – then back at the child, and didn’t understand. The child looked hard into Ste’s eyes, shook the phone in his face, pointed assertively at the floor and said two words: ‘Summon him.’

  ‘OK,’ Ste nodded, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good rat… good rat…’

  And then Ste did what he had to do.

  3

  The world swims back into weak focus to the shrill, repetitive strains of his mobile phone. It squalls at him, and vibrates weakly from his pocket. His eyes slowly open and he looks up at the ceiling, bathed in the prickly afterglow of the drugs. With the soothing opiate high tide now quickly receding, he can sense the shingle of his arm’s agony lurking there in the shallows, waiting to pounce and consume him once again.

  He lets the call go to voicemail.

  With every breath he takes the tide recedes further, the pain screams louder, the shingle ripping and roaring with every retreating wave, and the clarity of his world sharpens in every way. And that clarity also presages a shattering confusion and broadening sense of disbelief. The old fucker on the bench, the knife, the fire.

  His arm.

  It doesn’t make sense.

  Nightmare.

  But here he is, lying on his bed, bracing himself for the full subsonic glory of his agony to swoop back in. Waiting for the drop. He’s going to need more drugs.

  His phone goes
off again.

  He almost reaches for it with his bad arm, but remembers just in time. He’s starting to get used to it now, that’s how much the insane truth of the last twenty-four hours is starting to sink in. He reaches across himself with his good arm and awkwardly fishes the phone from his pocket. He examines the screen before answering it: Ste.

  He frowns. Ste never calls him. But he answers it nonetheless.

  He listens to what Ste has to say.

  ‘Really?’

  What Ste has to say is the last thing he might ever have expected.

  So unexpected, and so welcome, that he fails to notice the peculiarity of the peripheral detail. Ste has just told him that he left his gear round at Ste’s place, and did he want to pop back and get it? Oh, and could he bring the knife. Pete’s had an allergic reaction and the doctors might need to just do a quick test. Tetanus and whatnot. Y’know?

  ‘Yeah yeah. OK. I’ll be there in a bit.’

  And then he is gone.

  And the waves pull back and the shingle roars and Cal moans in distress. He pushes himself carefully upright, but all the care in the world doesn’t blunt the fangs of it. He looks down at the floor by his feet. One foot naked, the other still socked and shoed. A needle lies on the floor just by the bare foot, and a couple of spots of congealed blood dot the carpet in between. His baggy of gear is there too. Couple of shots left. Good. He’s going to need them.

  His baggy’s here?

  But Ste said…

  Cal pauses and thinks then.

  Ste said he’d left his gear round his. Ste must be fucked. Cal smiles. It’s not often that people fuck up in his favour. But it had to happen at some point.

  Maths isn’t it, you stupid cunt?

  That’s what his dad always used to say, usually just before he smashed the shit out of something. Or someone. Cal had never understood what he’d meant. Still didn’t.

  Cal thinks about shooting up quickly now, his arm screams out for it, but then he reconsiders. It’d only slow him down and opportunity might give up knocking – he could be back at Ste’s in fifteen minutes, his arm would survive and he could shoot up then and be a baggy up on what he’s got right now. It is as close to thinking beyond the short term as he has managed in quite some years.