Chas noted that the small child with two pairs of glasses and Holbeinesque acne had begun to speak but had been interrupted by the gorilla throwing him to the floor and standing on his face.
‘But when we asked people where we could find the screams of the damned and the vale of tears they directed us to you,’ said Daniel.
Silence passed between them like the reaction to a wedding invitation sent to an ex-girlfriend. Is this what people really thought of him, of his work? Chas examined the children’s expressions, it was as if their innocence had not simply been lost but replaced by betrayal.
‘What are you doing to that man’s face?’ asked Daniel with eyes that looked one hundred years old. Chas had seen eyes like this before; it was not a happy memory.
‘I am preparing him for his loved ones.’
‘He looks like an evil clown – are you sure that his family will like it?’ asked Daniel.
Chas looked, really looked at the face he was besmirching. He had never had any complaints but he did gain the sense, in whispered glances, in the shuffle-footed dance of the recently bereaved, that there was much they were not saying.
‘I don’t really know. Perhaps this isn’t about those who have been left behind and what they feel. What are you three doing here, what can I possibly do for you that others can’t?’
‘We are looking for a mountain. The mountain my grandmother lives on,’ said Daniel.
‘Here, in Milton Keynes, a mountain?’
The boys seemed to tense, they must have known that the answer to this question was inevitable. Chas sensed that there was no capacity left in these children for any more rejection. He could not unwind the fates of the friends and family he had left behind, but perhaps here was a chance, possibly his last chance to justify his solitary survival.
‘You know, there might be a mountain here,’ he said, ‘it’s just that I have never looked at it in that way.’
Chapter 37
It had stopped snowing for the first time in several days and the boys trailed a staccato centipede of footprints behind those of Chas, as he stop-start-rested his way through the middle of the old village of Milton Keynes.
Chas paused outside the Swan Inn. ‘You see this tree,’ he gestured at a singularly vacant patch of earth devoid of anything remotely tree-like. ‘It was said that when this ancient elm died, no more male children would be born in the village.’
Dorsal wondered whether he could punch Chas hard enough to cause him tremendous pain without actually killing him. Appraising his potential victim, Dorsal concluded that since Chas’s skin appeared to have been constructed from strips of tissue paper which had been poorly stuck together, anything more than a gentle pat on the back would have eviscerated him. He decided to try looming – it usually initiated a desire for compliance.
‘Is this the way to the mountain?’ Dorsal stood over Chas, grimacing in a manner which would have intimidated a medium-sized Bengal tiger, but Chas had been taken to the brink of death by an enemy which did not countenance the continued existence of his species. This child, albeit a child which appeared to be about to dismantle him as if he were an unwanted Airfix model, could not scare him – he no longer had the capacity for fear.
Chas cleared the snow off a bench which had been positioned for people to admire the now ex-tree and sat down with an exultant groan, his little legs swinging back and forth. ‘Why is this mountain so important to you?’ he asked.
‘My grandmother lives on the mountain – we were hoping she could offer some advice about my father’s problem.’
Daniel sat down on the bench besides Chas and began swinging his legs in time with the old man and they were soon joined by Ferris. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Dorsal hissed, joining them whilst at the same time hoping that someone truly homicidal would not come by at that very moment and witness him letting the side down.
‘And what is your father’s problem?’
‘My failure to die.’
Chas stopped swinging his legs and looked at Daniel as if he had not seen him before. He had been a victim of truth in its every guise, it had crept up in the night and held a knife against his throat, held his head under water, beaten him until he could have reached out and shook death by the hand, he knew truth and this boy was glutted with it.
He roused his joints into movement against a chorus of protests. Every time he sat down he feared he might not have the willpower to stand again, yet willpower defined him. He would always stand and he would always move forwards putting distance between himself and the atrocities of the past.
‘Is your grandmother someone with insight?’
‘My grandmother made my father, helped make my father what he is – I hoped she might be able to suggest a way to stop him.’
‘She killed Batman with her bare hands,’ barked Ferris excitedly, ‘and pushed Darth Vader off Beachy Head.’
‘She understands death,’ added Dorsal.
Chas began walking back towards the town centre, trailed by a phalanx of troubled youth. ‘I understand death too,’ he said, ‘it’s where I grew up.’
Dorsal caught up with Chas, his prodigious footprints devouring those of the old man as if they were plankton. He could have burst him there and then in the snow, like a used paper bag and yet he felt the urge to trust him. Trust did not sit well with Dorsal, he had given it freely to adults and it had earned him abandonment, left him beleaguered, hunched against the ravages of childhood with anger his only refuge. He hungered for destruction, to destroy, it mattered not what or whom and it had already been too long.
They arrived on the outskirts of the town, fists of bitter cold pressing hard against their chests, old and young. An unfashionable district, in a delinquent city, in a country which could neither be shaken, nor stirred. Chas paused outside a butcher’s shop which clung desperately to the husks of neighbouring buildings long since divested of their occupants. As he began to enter, Dorsal grabbed his upper arm. ‘This is no mountain.’
‘I am in no position to ask you to believe in me or any adult,’ Chas unpicked Dorsal’s hand finger by finger, ‘just indulge me for a few more seconds.’
The shop was an Armageddon of severed limbs, blood-spattered walls and sordid weaponry; its proprietor, a slight man with disproportionately huge hands, froze, with what appeared to be a cutlass raised over an unidentifiable lump of animalesque undercarriage.
‘I’m here to show these boys your backyard, Benny,’ said Chas.
The butcher’s eyes flicked towards the rear exit.
‘It isn’t safe, Chas, you know that.’ He lay down the cutlass and wiped the excess offal onto his apron. He knew that no matter how often he did this, he could never get the blood off his hands, it was too late for that, but it was a courtesy, for the children.
‘Still, they need to see it,’ said Chas. ‘I won’t let them get too close.’
Chas shuffled over to the rear exit and the boys followed him into a dank unlit storage area, shutting the butcher’s shop away behind him. Blinks of sunshine licked between the cracks in the back door, saturating Chas’s face with diffused light. It was as if he had become as young as them, that there were now four children, hearts pounding, standing on the brink of an adult world that did not deserve them.
When the door to the backyard was opened the boys were unable to take in what lay before them – they had no frame of reference.
‘When the council built this city, there were the wisps and curls of other, smaller towns in the way of the bulldozers,’ explained Chas. ‘The local people were bought off quickly, they drank the Kool Aid and shut their eyes and when they had counted to ten, everything, the churchyards, the trees, the hedges, the rivers, the animals, everything, was concrete and no longer special and now those they abandoned are here – one on top of the other, on top of the other.’
Piled in the square at the rear of four giant, withered buildings, as high as the eye could see, were thousands upon thousands of gravestones, some smash
ed, some illegible, but many pristine, crypts – doors ajar, inverted angels, hands outstretched, eyes imploring as if this was some new, unforeseen depravity, beyond the travesty of death itself, everything that was loss was there, never to be forgotten but forgotten still. It was the lie told on the deathbed, that goodbye might only mean adieu, the final cogent evidence of betrayal.
And at its peak, where the angels could not reach and where a plateau had formed when the gravestones had settled, someone had made their home in a garden shed and on that garden shed was a sign in large, blood-red neon, flashing on and off, on and off: FUCK OFF (OR DIE).
Daniel had found his grandmother.
Chapter 38
Caldwell Bynes – the head teacher of D’Oily Cart Academy and a man who willingly accepted sole responsibility for the abject lack of educational prowess of generations of North London children – shifted uncomfortably in his exquisitely sumptuous chair, behind his insanely expensive antique desk. Wherever he looked, the horizon was filled to the brim with the deluge of adipose tissue and porcine corpulence that constituted M, Daniel’s father.
‘Will you stop gesticulating with that gun, you’re making me nervous,’ asked Bynes, not unreasonably.
‘I want to know where my son is,’ demanded M.
‘He has become friends with Grellman and the odd child who wears two pairs of glasses and three watches.’
‘Don’t you know the other child’s name?’
‘I try not to know names – they just get in the way of really enjoying the day to day infliction of misery.’
‘I thought Grellman was unable to make friends – I thought his sole purpose was dispensing senseless and arbitrary violence?’
‘So did I but it appears that your son and the other child inadvertently saved his life. I am sure it will all work out for the best and he will rip them limb from limb – it’s what he does best. Anyway the three of them have gone on a quest.’
‘What do you mean “quest” – they aren’t Jason and the fucking Argonauts, they are three eight-year-old boys.’
‘Well, Grellman told me to close the school so they could go out for the day so I didn’t really have any choice. I may be the manager of the zoo but I can’t control what the residents of the insect house get up to.’
‘Daniel is not an insect – he’s my son.’
‘That is a matter of perspective. Daniel believes you intend to kill him, M. He’s telling anyone who will listen, which in truth, is not many people.’ He studied the thirty-two stone policeman who was occupying both of the guest chairs in his office. His shirt was stuck to his tumescent gut by a mixture of acrid sweat and blood, the left arm of his uniform had been almost completely ripped off and he appeared to have used a bottle of human intestines as shampoo. ‘Anyway, what does it matter to you where Daniel is? The whole trying to murder him repeatedly thing would not suggest a high degree of parental empathy.’
M moved with feline grace and lowered his cataclysmic stomach onto Bynes’ desk. The desk made a sound not unlike the plaintive scream of a drone bee during the act of copulation, shortly after its penis has snapped off. It was not a sound that Bynes ever wanted to hear again.
‘My twelfth birthday present from my father was a gun. I did consider shooting my mother who had been killing people for fun for some years, but I decided no, she may be a mass murderer but she’s my mass murderer. My father on the other hand was the bitterest, most unremittingly poisonous fucker that had ever been vomited out onto this shitforsaken cesspit of a planet, so I put a bullet through his head at point blank range. It seems that the bullet missed his cerebral cortex but my mother decided it was better to dump me into foster care believing I had executed him. It wasn’t until a few months ago when the old bastard turned up on my front door that I realised he wasn’t dead. It also transpired that shooting him in the face had impacted on the quality of our relationship quite significantly.’
M dragged Bynes from his chair by his neck as if he were the weight of a glove puppet. Bynes found himself standing on his tiptoes with a gore-soaked gun waving like a metronome back and forth millimetres from his eyes.
‘Don’t lecture me about parental empathy, you cunt.’ As he spat out this final word, aspirated blood sprayed from M’s nose onto Bynes’ face.
‘Are you familiar with the story of Cassandra?’ croaked Bynes. ‘Her ears were licked clean by snakes enabling her to hear the future but she was cursed by Zeus so that no one would believe her predictions. She was shouting into a void like you, M – no one is listening. All these fucking children swarming around my feet like so many cockroaches and their parents bleating because Johnny can’t fucking speak, James can’t spell his own fucking name, James never stops crying, or Daniel won’t die when I try to kill him. You’re just like the rest of them, symptoms of the human disease – I hate the shitting lot of you.’
M released Bynes’ throat from his grip and shifted around the desk, planting his foot between Bynes’ legs. ‘I intend to defenestrate you.’
Bynes stole a glance at his office window – painted closed – offering views of a playground occupied sporadically by children who experienced education as provocation, school as a battlefield, textbooks as graveyards.
‘Well that’s an interesting proposition, M, however you would be hard pressed to throw a child out of that window and God knows I’ve tried, let alone a fully grown adult.’
‘That presupposes that you are in one piece when I do it, wouldn’t you agree?’ M pressed the nozzle of the gun into Bynes’ nose, distending it.
‘The more you threaten me the more I laugh at you,’ replied Bynes with ill-considered defiance.
M burrowed the gun into Bynes’ left nostril until his septum flayed and split. Bynes could tell this meeting was not going especially well.
‘You are a sociopath, M.’
‘I’m a fucking hero, Bynes, I’m what’s stopping the swollen hordes of the unwashed who are massing outside the city gates with their torches and their boiling peat, from smashing down the walls of this Stickle Brick shit pile and murdering you and everyone like you while you are quivering under your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle quilts; I am the Grim Reaper and the tooth fairy; I am beauty and the beast; I am what England sees when it looks in the mirror.’
Bynes’ fingers tiptoed into his desk drawer and caressed a letter opener into his grasp. He pulled away from M and swung his arm in an arc, plunging the blade into M’s stomach. Both men looked down at the blade hanging out of M’s gut. A blood bubble bloomed at the site of the wound and grew impossibly large before bursting, showering M’s shirt with a fine spray of haemoglobin.
‘I wish people would stop making holes in me,’ said M, closing his hand over Bynes’ nose and mouth without taking his eyes away from the wound. Bynes struggled, but his carousel pulled into the tunnel of love, never to emerge.
M began to laugh, ‘I look like a pepperoni pizza,’ which reminded him that he had not eaten for nearly twenty minutes. He decided to return home, order in a Chinese takeaway banquet, put on a Tom Jones CD and then he and his gun would sit and wait for Daniel.
Chapter 39
Chas walked over to the nearest marble angel of death, hanging down bat-like from the random construct of gravestones, tombs, guardians and watchers, and touched her cold outstretched hand. The huge statue and the funereal mountain it was part of wobbled alarmingly.
‘You can’t climb this because it will collapse and crush you,’ said Chas, with as much authority as he could muster.
‘And yet there must be a way,’ said Dorsal.
‘It’s impossible, absolutely impossible,’ sighed Daniel.
‘Are you coming?’ shouted Ferris, as his legs disappeared into a crypt that hung at a perilous angle twenty-five or more metres above their heads.
‘I could have killed him, God knows I’ve had the opportunity,’ grumbled Dorsal, cautiously placing his foot onto the head of a marble griffin. He reached out a hand with unt
ypical largesse for Chas.
‘I’m eighty-two’.
‘And your point is?’ asked Dorsal.
Chas took the bear’s paw of a hand and Dorsal pulled him up and over his head onto the next funereal edifice. With every stuttering foothold Dorsal was at Chas’s back, supporting him as if he were a toddler taking his first few steps for his father. Daniel followed just behind them. Dorsal’s gentle behaviour was not a comforting vision – he reminded Daniel of the kind of animal that nurtures then eats its own young.
They found Ferris sitting on a caryatid in an art nouveau tomb. Dorsal used a leaded glass window as a foothold, pulling first Daniel and then Chas up with him. As he turned to face Ferris he noticed that his arrival had provoked a look of abject horror which even he found surprising. He quickly realised why – the entire tomb was capsizing backwards under their combined weight. Dorsal tried desperately to find a way to brace himself but the tomb was already beyond its tipping point and it began tumbling towards the ground far below.
*
‘I have anticipated my death a hundred times before, only for it to be averted at the last moment. Eventually there is a sense that you have been cheated,’ said Chas, separated from the abyss by Dorsal’s fingertips which clung to his shirt collar.
Dorsal was hanging by his other hand from the wing tip of an angel and Ferris clung to his ears. The plaintive melody of human suffering that had been the theme tune to their ascent continued far above their heads where, in the shed that sat astride the funereal mountain, a man was screaming for mercy in a way that suggested he was not expecting to receive it.
Daniel was nowhere to be seen.
‘If I manage to save your life and we get out of this, Ferris, I’m going to kill you,’ growled Dorsal.
‘You can’t wage war against the entire world, Dorsal, you have to choose a side,’ Ferris whispered.
‘I just want to wage war against you, Ferris,’ replied Dorsal.
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