by Paul Harris
“Did you see that?” asked Finn with a tremor in his voice.
“What?”
“Something moved.”
“It was you, hurling yourself all over the place.”
“No, it was a rat. I think it was a rat. A massive rat with a massive tail. Let’s go.”
As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they managed to get a better idea of the surrounding topography. Dust lay everywhere in thick ghostly coats, as did cardboard boxes, some open, some still sealed with tape. Rotten fruit had been trodden into the decaying carpet. A box of tomatoes lay open and Finn thought he could see evidence of tiny bite marks in the soft mushy flesh.
“What’s that in your hand?” asked Lenny as he peered through the gloom at the ridiculous form of his younger brother examining rotting fruit for miniscule teeth marks.
“I don’t know,” replied Finn, his attention elsewhere, “it was on that shelf with the packets of bacon and salami.”
“Show me.” Lenny took the object from him and began to examine it. He turned it over and over in his hands.
“What do you think it is?” asked Finn, finally tiring of examining tomato pulp.
“It’s a stamp. A date stamp. The shady old sod’s been changing the sell-by-dates on his out of date stock.”
“Damn it!” exclaimed Finn in a sudden outburst.
“What is it?”
“I thought those Hula Hoops I had out of here tasted a bit ropey. I had the threepenny-bits for days afterwards.”
“From Hula Hoops? Are you sure it was the Hula Hoops?”
“Barbecue beef flavour, mate. You gotta be careful with meat.”
“You certainly have,” sighed Lenny and then his spirits were suddenly lifted when he spotted the wall safe. It was perhaps eighteen inches long and twelve inches high. There was plenty of room inside for lots of notes; bundles of currency. The safe door was white with a large black dial in the middle of it. Lenny began to rummage amongst the keys in his hand, searching for a likely fit for the safe. “Any idea which one it is?”
“None of them,” replied Finn, his voice dead and joyless.
“What do you mean, none of them?” Lenny was becoming agitated and was rotating from one key to the next with more and more excitement. “Have you seen how many keys are here? One of them must fit it!”
“It’s a combination lock, Len.”
The words were on the tip of Lenny’s tongue. He was about to berate Finn for being a fool and an idiot, when the cool chill of truth descended on him. He’d seen the dial; he’d seen the combination lock, but it just hadn’t registered.
“What do we do, Len?”
Lenny didn’t have the answers any more. He gazed despairingly at Finn, the bunch of keys dangling impotently from his fingers. He raised his hands to his face and smashed his head against the wall next to the impenetrable safe. He held it there: his head resting against the wall. Finn thought he was going to cry. Lenny took a deep breath and then the lights came on.
“Why have you turned the lights on?” Lenny demanded to know without removing his brow from the wall.
“I haven’t,” Finn whispered in response.
“You’ll draw attention to us.”
Finn didn’t reply but somebody else did. “I turned the lights on.”
Lenny turned from the wall to see Finn with his back to him. He was face to face with Mr Singh who was standing in the doorway that led to the shop front. He was gripping the handle of his cricket bat and looking rather peeved. Finn’s fingers were twitching nervously as he considered his next move.
“What are you doing here, boys?”
But for the beating of their hearts, there was silence, which was only broken when Mr Singh’s keys finally slipped from Lenny’s fingers and crashed into a crate of out of date Foster’s cans. A cloud of dust rose into the air like a tiny atomic detonation.
“You found my spare keys,” said Mr Singh with feigned jubilation. “I’d been wondering where I put them.” He placed the cricket back down on the shelf next to the date stamp. As he moved forwards, Finn edged away from him. He picked his keys up and hung them on their hook next to the safe. He was close now; close enough for either party to land a blow.
“Let me ask you something,” he said.
Lenny and Finn stood and faced him with deliberate insouciance.
“Who, on God’s green Earth, do you boys imagine would hang the keys to a safe next to the safe that they opened?” His normally calm voice was perceptibly rising. “Really? Do you think I’m that foolish? Is that it?” It was rising to something of a shriek. “I’ll show you who’s foolish.” Mr Singh shoved Lenny out of his way with a shoulder barge and, with just one slight movement of his hand, swung the door to the safe wide open.
Finn’s jaw dropped. He wondered why anyone in their right mind would leave a safe containing millions of pounds wide open like that. Lenny was feeling a little cramped. Mr Singh was still leaning over him in order to continue his exploration of the safe. The feeling of claustrophobia was mingling with something else. He suggested to himself that it may have been nausea and humiliation.
But, unfortunately, Mr Singh hadn’t finished his ego-piercing outburst. “It wasn’t even locked! See? Who’s the fool now?”
“The person who forgot to lock it?” ventured Finn confidently, completely misunderstanding the rhetorical nature of Singh’s tirade.
“It’s never locked. I don’t know the combination, so why would I lock it? It was here when I bought the shop. It’s nothing more than a cupboard. Look! Help yourselves.”
Finn peered into the safe. Lenny was still attempting to disengage himself from Singh’s armpits.
“What’s that?” asked Finn.
Mr Singh recovered a folded sheet of paper from inside the safe and began to flick the dust off it. “You want it?” he asked Finn, stretching out his arm and offering it to him.
“What is it? Is it valuable?”
“I don’t know.” He unfolded the piece of paper. “It’s a list of names and addresses of people I’ve never heard of.”
“Can I see it? Perhaps I might know who they are. They might be kings and queens or really rich politicians or film stars or footballers.”
“You want it, you take it,” said Singh and then he laughed, in fact he veritably bellowed with laughter. He laughed so much that his spectacles slid down his face.
“Let’s go,” hissed Lenny, forcing his way past the mirthfully trembling figure of the store keeper.
Finn hadn’t closed his mouth since the safe had astonishingly sprung open at just a touch. He had begun to dribble down his shirt. Now, realising at last that his hopes of great wealth had been dashed, his self-control expired and he grabbed the nearest weapon to hand and attacked Mr Singh with it. The shopkeeper continued to howl with laughter as Finn flayed him with a stick of rhubarb that was turning slightly black. He may have laughed even louder at the sight of the decaying vegetable falling apart in Finn’s hands. Lenny grabbed his brother, dragged him from the storeroom, and back down the passageway at the side of the shop. Finn continued to curse at the top of his voice and hurl portions of rotting matter in the general direction of Mr Singh’s mocking laughter.
Unbeknown to Lenny and Finn, a shadowy figure lurked nearby. He had been following them for nearly an hour; all the way from the bridge where he had been waiting. He had been sitting on a bench, writing things down in a notebook when he’d had the great fortune of spotting the boys slinking along the High Street at, what he thought, was a peculiar time of night for them to be slinking anywhere. He had embarked upon a covert pursuit and he had hit the jackpot. He had watched them break into the shop and he had heard the kerfuffle from within, and it had all been recorded on his smartphone.
As the two brothers burst from the passageway, violently remonstrating with one another, the shadowy figure stepped further back into the shadows. He felt a squashy substance beneath one of his feet and smelled the unmistakable odou
r of unsealed dog excrement. He hoped that the smell wouldn’t draw the attention of the vicious robbers, so he remained stock-still and hardly breathed as they passed him by, his feet sliding slightly towards them.
“What did you hit him with the rhubarb for?”
“I forgot where he put the bat.”
“He can do us for assault now, you idiot!”
“What? Assault with a deadly vegetable?” Finn laughed at his own witticism. “We’ve robbed the geezer how many times? And he’s never called Old Bill once.”
“There’s always a first time. We never assaulted him before. Remember he’s got us on CCTV.”
“Stop going on! You’re doing my head in! Stop worrying.”
“I’m doing your head in? You’re doing my head in!” retorted Lenny.
“What’s that? You haven’t shit yourself, have you? That’s disgusting!”
“Of course I haven’t. Stop talking crap!”
“You smell of crap!”
As they began ambling off towards the High Street like a couple of battle-scarred veterans, still sniping at one another, the shadowy figure took a notebook from the Batman bag that was slung over his shoulder and began to scribble in it. The light was poor so he edged nearer to the street lamp that stood outside the shop, scraping the sole of his shoe on the pavement. Mr Singh was peering down the poorly-lit passageway at him. “What do you want? What are you writing?” he yelled before throwing a tomato in the general direction of the lamppost and the silhouetted figure lurking beneath it. The shadowy figure hurriedly deposited his notebook and pen in his bag and began to follow Lenny and Finn, taking great care to stay out of sight.
The quarter moon still hung haphazardly in Capote’s big annihilating sky as it spread like a canvas across the horizon, its sea of stars slowly being swallowed up by the swarming clouds. In only moments, the crisp darkness became a tumult of cloud formations in every shade of grey there ever was. A distant rumble of thunder broke the eerie silence. In one of the side streets, a car alarm was activated. A black cat, with its tail aloft, raced across the shadowy figure’s path and he quickened his pace. A bolt of lightning lit the sky for just a second but Lenny and Finn were now well out of sight. He had lost them.
It began to rain, only lightly at first but, with certain inevitability, it became heavier and heavier until it was bouncing off the roads in great waves. As Lenny and Finn passed the hoarding along the perimeter of the construction site, they took a short detour around the stream of mud that was being washed into the street by the heavy downfall.
“I wish I’d brought my jacket,” complained Finn, his white t-shirt turning transparent in the deluge, and clinging to him.
“I thought you did,” replied Lenny. “I’m sure you came out in one.”
Finn stopped walking. Lenny tightened the draw-strings on his hood and watched the rainwater pouring off his brother’s head and nose and chin. “You look like a drownded rat,” he laughed.
“Damn!” muttered Finn. “You know what I did?”
Lenny took his glasses off and gave them a futile wipe on his trouser leg. “What? Where did you leave it?”
“I took it off when I thought the old man was going to come at us with the cricket bat.”
“You left it back there?” Lenny began to walk off. Finn ran after him, splashing through the rapidly forming puddles of water. “We’re not going back for it so don’t even suggest it.”
“But, we have to,” whined Finn. “It was my best one.”
“We’re never going back there again. The place is cursed. He’ll end up shooting us.”
“What with? His cricket bat?”
Chapter Twelve
In a Small Churchyard in Hertfordshire
In a small churchyard in Hertfordshire, a group of mourners are gathered around a wooden box in silence. Their heads are bowed beneath a leaden sky and they are impervious to the steadfastly unrelenting afternoon drizzle. The ladies hold black umbrellas above their heads and the men hold onto the ladies. The tails of long black overcoats flutter in the breeze. The men, and some of the women, are dressed in inexpensive black suits. Some of them have never before been worn and their owners hope it will be some time before they’re worn again. One can almost tell the occupation of the men by the suits they wear and the way that they wear them. Some look comfortable, as if dressing in such attire is a daily routine. Others appear somewhat at unease and fidget with their neck-ties. Indeed, some suits don’t fit at all. Some will be returned to Asda the following day.
All around them are trees erupting from the soil of the dead, representing every shade of green imaginable. Beyond the trees, stone walls covered in moss zig-zag from side to side through the rolling fields of lush green summer crops. Finally, the power lines sweep across the horizon, propped up by gigantic pylons, and away, away into the distance, delivering electricity for the living.
As picturesque as all this is, it is yet a scene of savagery and brutality. Monique stands alone with her head bowed, cut off from the main group. She focuses on a clump of buttercups hanging limply from their stalks. Beside her, an ancient headstone tilts to one side. The words, “Beloved Sister and Mother” are barely legible in the decaying stone. The old stones are interspersed with shiny new ones of polished granite. The new headstones have immaculately arranged flowers laid upon them. The old ones have nothing. No one remembers.
Monique raises her eyes just for a moment. Peter’s mother smiles insincerely through the rain at her but makes no effort to disguise her loathing. There is accusation deep in her eyes.
“It wasn’t my fault,” mutters Monique to nobody in particular through her heart-felt tears.
The sun briefly breaks through the clouds and casts long, low shadows across the thick carpet of cemetery grass. Its rays bounce off the stones and off patent leather shoes. Monique spots the beginnings of a rainbow, but not the middle or the end, and not the pot of gold. The shadows of the gravestones send a shiver down her spine. The birds singing cheerfully in the trees present an uncomfortably inappropriate spectacle.
The service concluded, the sombre party makes its way down a gravel path to the car park. The path has centuries old stones embedded in it. Monique brings up the rear of the train. She watches the daisies being trampled underfoot. An old wooden gate, leading out into a country lane, is hanging from its hinges. Wooden benches, devoid of varnish or paint, line their route. Randomly placed flagstones, as old as the tombs, litter the lawns. A man in a flat cap, and bearing a shovel, marches past them. One of Peter’s young cousins flirts with her boyfriend. They giggle as the gravel path crunches beneath their feet. They don’t even pretend to care.
As they pass the angular brown stone church, the vicar is waiting for them. Monique wonders what short cut he has taken to get there so quickly. He shakes each of their hands as they thank him for the service. Monique admires the stained glass windows of the church, although they are poorly exhibited behind rusty wire mesh. A damp St George’s flag hangs limply from a white flag pole high above the steeple.
In the car park, Peter’s cousin makes a phone call and laughs heartily at her boyfriend’s humorous antics. The various members of Peter’s family climb into their various modes of transport and drive the two miles to Peter’s parents’ house. Monique is left standing in the rain. The vicar waves a final farewell to her as he opens the vicarage door and lets himself into the warmth and the dry. Still, she does not regret making the journey; it is her place. She is the one who knew him better than all of them. She alone is genuinely grieving. She alone loved Peter; really loved him.
She walks down the hill to a telephone box and calls a taxi to the railway station; and onto London. She sits on a bench to wait for it, alone and friendless; scared, scarred, and helpless. On the opposite side of the road, on a grass verge, a squirrel is proudly displaying a piece of bread in his mouth. He reaches up high on his hind legs, turning his head from left to right and back again. A magpie lands on a wall beh
ind him but he is too busy showing off his bread to notice. Another one lands on the grass not two feet away from him. He jerks his head towards the bird, and the bird stabs back at him with its beak. The first magpie descends from the wall and flaps about the squirrel’s head. The squirrel soon becomes confused and disorientated as the two birds peck at him and flap their wings, screaming and cawing. He drops the bread from his mouth. One of the birds collects it in their beak, and they both fly away. Their happy song sounds like laughter.
The squirrel looks sad. He is defeated, deflated, and beaten. He skulks away, dragging his flaccid bushy tail on the ground behind him. Nature can be so cruel.
Leather & Oak
Rodney was pacing up and down across the oak panelled floor, muttering incoherently to himself, and occasionally pausing to tap his fingers impatiently on the bar, when Sol pushed the door open and joined him a whole ten minutes past the designated time. Sol knew what a stickler Rodney was for punctuality and was well prepared to face his ire.
“I’ve been waiting fucking ages!”
“We said seven! It’s only ten past now.”
“Not for you. To be served. These country pubs take the piss. They serve the locals first.”
“Just chill out, Rod. You know?” Sol glanced with some alarm at Rodney’s chest. Rodney missed the implication and, in hindsight, Sol was glad that he had.
“They’re quick enough to take the money out of your hand and throw it in the till. They don’t hang about then, do they?”
Sol rolled his eyes and made quite sure that Rodney didn’t see him do it. He took a ten pound note from his wallet and approached the bar as Rodney continued to march backwards and forwards like an overly anxious Coldstream Guard. Needless to say, Sol was immediately served by a well turned out young lady with a reassuringly chirpy disposition.