Bully Read online

  Me Tarzan; you Jane.

  At first, it really did feel as though I had been raised in a jungle and she in her posh suburban home where they had crockery and condiments and everything. Maybe she saw me as a bit of rough – although she said later that it was something crap like the ‘wistful look that came into my eyes when I thought nobody was looking’ that first attracted her to me. And of course, I never introduced her to Twinnie, Dick or Lion, because I knew that the first thing that attracted me to her would be the very thing they comment on. Loudly and to her face.

  She had an excellent rack on her, did Jane. And for a while I was the envy of the college. All of the spods in the classes kept looking over and you could see them thinking: Is she really going out with him?

  Fuck ‘em all, I thought. And in the end, so did she. When her family found out we’d got engaged at eighteen, they went ballistic as only good middle class parents can; all smashing inanimate objects and screaming at the light fixtures and hugging cushions. Promises that she should never ‘darken their door again’, were hastily followed up, within a day or two, by hourly calls which my dad had to field from a gin-soaked mother and a father that just didn’t understand how his daughter’s tits had caused them so many bloody problems when all he wanted to do was weed the acre garden in peace.

  Jane lived at our house on Hangman’s Row, off and on, for about eighteen months, I think. I say off and on, because I often had head loss periods. Weeks or months in which I’d spiral off on this whirlwind path of self-destruction. Anyone that got in the way was likely to be carried away with me and plunged off whatever precipice I’d reached. In the end, she stayed on longer than I did.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. She aced the exams in college and was offered a place at a fair to middling university. I didn’t see myself moving off to some fucking suburb of some big city somewhere, fading away into nothingness like her dad and mine, and so I forbade it. I stopped her from going. I used every trick in the book, most of which were emotional blackmail-related. I told her that the job at the metalworks that I’d somehow wisecracked my way into, had always been my mum’s dream for me, or somesuch crap, and she took it. She took it hook, line and sinker.

  And sinker I did. Although not yet. First there was the world of work.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Certainly I hadn’t been expecting it to be just an extension of school as it was. In fact, in that metalworks, there was actually more childishness, more pettiness, more bullying and more gossip than I’d ever seen at school. We dished it out for breakfast, lunch and supper, along with the slop they served us from the godawful work’s canteen. And it was easy to fall in with lads similar to Twinnie and Dick, too. I seemed to have some sixth sense for wrong-‘uns. And they seemed to have a sixth sense for me. We were the alpha males and we ruled the roost.

  Until I first thought I saw Tommy again. Sitting on his own in the smoking room looking as pathetic and piss-stained as he always used to. I saw him a few times after that; always hunched over his roll-up, which he’d be making over a pristine copy of The Sun. Only after a while did I pluck up the courage to go in there. But as it turned out, the person I thought was Tommy was actually his brother; Danny Peaker. A ‘right little scrote’ according to the other metalworkers I spoke to. Apparently, he wasn’t ‘all there upstairs’, but he was handy with a sweeping brush when he needed to be, and so they kept him on, half in the capacity of general dogsbody, half as court jester.

  I tried to speak to Danny Peaker once. Got nothing in return apart from some incomprehensible mumble and a shower of rolling tobacco on my trainers after I’d made him jump. And right then, I knew that we’d got away with it forever. The whole of Tommy’s family were so pathetic that nobody even cared about them. They’d been chewed up and spat out by a resurrection of that same system which cleansed Newton Mills of the millworkers in the last century. Only now, instead of actual machines, there were little walking time bombs like our lot doing the work for them. What a fucking laugh, eh?

  That night, the dreams started again. And the only way I could get them to stop was to run and run as fast as I could. Away from Jane. Away from dad. Away from Twinnie and Lion and Dick. Away from Tommy Peaker. Straight into the army. Straight on that massive boat across the many seas and oceans we crossed, until eventually, I became just like everyone else for a time. We were all killers.

  So I suppose, as I hold the hunting knife over my wrist, you could say that I got what I deserved. Nasty all my life; deserves a nasty end. But do you remember something I told you a long time ago, about bullies being insecure deep-down? Well at that moment, I knew it to be true. Because I was scared to see my own blood. Sounds stupid after everything that had happened, but I was. Just like when the military policeman that so looked like Tommy Lee Jones was fiddling with my tubes at the American hospital…

  And I just sat and I sat in the barn at Summit Farm, listening to the faraway sounds of Twinnie singing – yes singing; he knew what I was planning to do – and I teased the blade along my wrist. But I was never really serious about it. I was still waiting for something – anything – to happen that would make everything okay in the end.

  And then I heard another sound. Coming from right behind me. Snuffly breathing. Kinda whistly, through nostrils that weren’t properly all there. Through a face that had been ravaged by time…

  I sat up, erect. Felt the hairs on the back of my neck become erect too. And I almost felt like ghostly fingers were being run through them. Tickling, tickling, tickling. But not in a nice way. More like in the way that just tells you that you can’t do anything about it, even if you want it to.

  I knew straight away that I wasn’t in the presence of a fox, or even Black Panther, that had just strayed into the barn by accident, say. Without even turning my head, I could sense the size of the thing that loomed behind me. It cast no shadow; it was all shadow anyway. But it somehow implied that it could snap my head off like it was the top of a dandelion.

  ‘Who-who’s there,’ I stammered. Already knowing the answer. My fucking nose could have told me the answer immediately. That same salty, fishy smell that I remembered from the military hospital.

  My mind began to slip over the precipice:

  Doctor, doctor, my ghostly stalker has no nose.

  Oh really? How does he smell?

  Well, he is a supernatural force, see, so he doesn’t really use the sense of smell to be honest. He can rely on things like the fabled sixth sense… Oh hold on, this is a joke, right? Let me start again. He smells awful. Smells like the fucking grave, doc. He smells like someone that’s been buried in his own shit and piss, half eaten alive by animals, then died, then rotted, then somehow come back to life, but still without any proper control over his bodily functions. That okay doc? That answer your goddamn question?

  I tried to allow myself to fall this time. Tried not to rely on memory as a crutch to keep me limping along. The thing was stroking my back now, like particularly sex-starved teenage boys do to girls that have drunk too much at parties. Girls who have been sick, but the boy still thinks there is a chance of a bit of how’s your father.

  How is your father?

  He’s as fucking purple as the rest of us. He’s so purple that he won’t even listen when his son tries to confess murder to him.

  The thing continued to stroke my back. Wax-on, wax-off, like Mr. Miyagi. And I felt myself being dragged back from the precipice again. The wind was no longer rushing through my hair. The ground was not rushing up to meet me: splat. I was already on solid ground.

  Not yet, said the voice of Tommy Peaker. Not yet. It’s not ready yet. There’s still something that needs to happen.

  ‘What? What needs to happen? You want me to get eaten alive by rats again? You want to hang me from the rafters like Dick or push me into the gorge like Lion?’ I gasped.

  Tut, tut, tut, said Tommy Peaker. They did that to themselves, Bully; you must know that by now. After all that bloody
idiot Burt told you…

  ‘Gonna carve a bloody number three on my chest, are you?’ I wailed. I tried to move the hunting knife up closer to my chest, but felt heavy weights attached to my arms. I looked down and Tommy wasn’t touching me; what was it that stayed my arm? Hope, perhaps? Gimme one more chance, please gimme one more, I’ll be a good boy now hope?

  There, there, Bulls-eye, said Tommy, who’d resumed stroking my back now. You know you’re not number three, don’t you? Just like you know that I never had a brother called Danny. I had three sisters, Bully. Three sisters; you used to say that it was one each for you, Lion and Twinnie. Always left Dick out. Quite ironic that, given his name. Your memory’s shot to shit though mate, isn’t it?

  When I finally dared myself to turn round, there was nobody there, but I knew there had been. And I knew he’d been there for a long, long time. Since the metalworks. Since before then, even.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I saw satan laughing with delight”

  Twinnie looked particularly pleased with himself when I limped back into the farmhouse. He had one of my Dorchester and Grey’s sticking out of the far corner of his mouth and one eye half closed as a stream of smoke billowed upwards and settled just below the mouldy ceiling.

  ‘Couldn’t do it then, soldier boy?’ he asked, through the other side of his mouth, like a cowboy. Like Clint Eastwood. ‘Better give me that knife back then, just in case.’

  I tossed it back to him, handle-first. It bounced a little way in front of him and then landed blade-first on the stone floor. The blade sang out in complaint.

  ‘Careful, soldier boy; wouldn’t want anyone else getting hurt,’ said Twinnie. ‘It’s a bloody epidemic around here at the moment.’

  Seeing that I wasn’t going to pose any threat to him, he tucked his legs inside the sleeping bag and made himself into a nice, snug cocoon. He was settling in for the evening, like there was a good solid detective drama on the telly and the female lead was one of those actresses that always got her tits out, no matter what role she was playing; grieving mother, nun, detective, victim.

  ‘Can I have one of my safe-keeping cigarettes now please?’ I asked.

  Twinnie made this face as though he was umming and ahhing over some great universal subject like life or death. He sucked his thin jaw one way and then the other, pursing his cat’s arse lips.

  ‘Well,’ he said, finally. ‘I’m not really sure what I can say to that, Gary. After all, the whole rationing situation was re-assessed when you proposed that you were going to do yourself in. You can’t very well expect me to go through the whole paperwork, the whole red-tape of beaurocracy, just so’s you now fancy a cigarette rather than killing yourself. What’s it going to be next, eh? You gonna ask me if you can have a go on my camp-bed and then claim it as your own? Is that your game?

  ‘No game,’ I said wearily. ‘Just thought we could have a nice talk that’s all. And it’s better to talk when you have a ciggie on the go.’

  Twinnie chucked over the remaining third of the Dorchester and Grey which had been hanging out of his mouth ever since I’d made my return to the farmhouse. It landed on my arm, fiercely burning the hairs on the wrist.

  ‘There you go, soldier boy,’ he smiled. ‘Don’t say I never give you nothing.’

  ‘Okay Twinnie,’ I said, through a cloud of smoke. ‘I wondered what your plan is. If you even have a plan. Because I’ve just seen – well, felt – you know who right behind me in the barn and he told me that there’s something we need to do.’

  Twinnie started evil-laughing again: ‘You telling me that you know who has come and saved you again? That you’ve miraculously survived death twice because of the fair hand of the very thing that is trying to kill us?’

  ‘How do you know he’s trying to kill us?’

  ‘You told me he was…’

  ‘No; how do you know that he’s trying to kill us. You seemed to know that before Dick and me got up here. Lion seemed to know it too. Now I’d like to know exactly what happened when you saw him?’

  Twinnie sighed, sparked up another of my cigarettes and rolled over on the camp-bed. For a while I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but slowly, and in this pathetic-sounding voice that I thought I remembered from a long, long time ago, he started to recount the tale.

  I’m not saying that I’m sure or anything, but it was Lion that first said something. And you know how mad he can get. Could get. Fuck; I keep forgetting. Anyway, I tried to meet him a couple of times, in the pub, like. Tried to get things back to the ay they used to be. I missed the big bastard, I really did. And I’m not saying I don’t like my own company, but sometimes I just need someone to bounce off. You know what I mean?

  Like I can get these great ideas in my head when I’m on the bus going nowhere in particular and I’ll suddenly think of some great joke about the bird that’s sat in front or the spak that’s had to be wedged in by the luggage rack. And I’ll turn around, you know, like I expect someone to be there. And then they ain’t there and I have to stop smirking at what’s going on in my suede or people will start thinking I’m a loon.

  It was all right inside. It really was. Whenever I thought of something to say, I could just kick the bottom of old Shuffty’s bunk – that was who I was sharing with – and he’d grunt and then I could just go on and on about whatever it was that I fancied going on about. Could be something important, could be something about why the chips from the canteen always stunk so bad when you shat them out in the can.

  So when I got out that second time, I wanted someone around that I could bounce off. Not because I was lonely, just because… Well, I thought people might benefit from hearing what I had to say. And I tried meeting up with Dick for a while, but the daft fucker was so unreliable. Sometimes he’d never show up. Sometimes he’d show up and he was itching, literally itching for some more of that shite that he enjoys pumping in his veins. Other times, he had that shite in his blood and you just couldn’t get on a level with him; know what I mean? Sometimes, I’d try and drink, like, a whole bottle of whisky or something, but it was like one of them platform computer games and our levels never seemed to match exactly. Like he’d be Sonic on some rising platform and I’d be Tails and I’d be sinking down, man. Do you know what I mean?

  Then Dick told me that he’d started seeing Lion round and about the town again. Apparently he’d been inside too, but a looney bin for him, not the slammer. Anyway, so I kept going out round the pubs looking for him. Tried the Choke, the Three Legs, the Shire, the Bucket of Frogs. Loads of them, I tried, but the people in there always told me that Lion had just moved on. Funny thing was, there were a couple of times when I swore I saw him legging it out to the bogs just as I walked in, but then, if that was the way he wanted to play it, then fucking let him. I wouldn’t go chasing the big bastard.

  First time I saw him when there was no way he was getting away was up at that offie on main street. ‘Member the one? The one where they had that bird from a couple of years above us – well, a few years above us – and she always just gave us booze so we’d stop pestering her.

  So I was walking down the aisle and there was nowhere he could hide unless he dived into one of the fridges, and you know what he says to me:

  ‘All right Twinnie, I been looking for you.’

  Well, I couldn’t believe that. The fat fucker was clearly lying, and I could see that he was scared of me by that shifty look that he got in his eyes. So I tried to calm him down by jabbing him a few rabbit punches right on his flabby arm. But he didn’t like that one bit. In the end, I calmed him down by shouting him a couple of cans of the old Spesh Brew and sitting on a bench on the prom on main street with him. I did ask him if he wanted to come to the pub, but he kept muttering something about ‘enclosed spaces’ or shit like that.

  So we sat on the prom and talked like old times. Well, I did. And we drank a couple of Spesh Brews together and we even had a bit of a laugh. After an hour or so of that I told h
im I had somewhere better to be, but I told him where I’d be that next day, and of course he never showed up.

  So it went on like that for a while; the near-misses, the oh-so-closes, the ‘he’s just popped-outs.’ And then I bumped into him again. Pure chance. Right outside his gaff, or where some fucker or other told me his gaff was. At first, like last time, he looked like he was shitting bricks. Tried to blend in with the wheelie bins or whatever. But I soon coaxed him out with booze.

  ‘Why you scared of me?’ I asked him.

  And he went all sheepish white and that. Could hardly speak for a while.

  And then he said something which, well, it fucked me over for a bit, to be honest with you. Daft fat bastard said that every time he’d seen me, and I mean every time, I’d not been alone. He said that there was another ‘presence’ – that’s what he said presence – at my shoulder. Said it was a big dock-off feller, but that he smelled a lot, you know. And he also said that the smell was unmistakable. Told me that I’d had fucking you know who sat on my goddamn shoulder for the best part of six weeks.

  Course I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  I asked him: ‘Is he there now?’

  And Lion just nodded, all sheepish again and then said that he had to go back inside as he was expecting his social worker round at any time.

  When Twinnie finished his story he was quiet for a long time. For a while, I wasn’t sure whether he’d fallen asleep he was that quiet. There was no lighting up my cigarettes, no cruel laughter, no knives thrown. And I worried that I’d pushed him too far by making him tell me the story. I worried that the memories might mess with his head too much and stop me from achieving the next part of the plan.