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Hullo. It's been a strange year: some stratospheric highs and catastrophic lows. A big deal for me personally - way behind the birth of my son, natch - has been the fact that I've written more, creatively, than ever. The old Cyril Connolly thing about the 'enemy of promise' seems not to have applied - though it has to be said I'm not in a position to judge whether anything I do can actually be described as displaying 'promise'.
Anyhoo - among the things I've worked on was a major project that I decided to put on ice about three months ago in favour of something completely different (which, incidentally, is going pretty well). As it's now semi-abandoned, I couldn't see any harm in posting a chapter up here for people to - try to - read during the traditional pre-, inter- and post-Christmas lull. It doesn't really stand up as a self-contained story, but was meant instead to establish the main themes and one of the main characters of the book.
I've broken it into the three or four loose sections that, on the printed page, are divided by three little asterisks - hopefully, this will make it easier to read on a browser than might otherwise have been the case.
As I say - the whole thing's on the backburner at the moment, but I might return to it late next year. In addition to what's below, I completed another couple of chapters and a prologue, which establishes the context of this character, plus a number of others, many years later, standing around the body of someone they've just killed. After the prologue, this chapter and subsequent others flashback to the earlier lives of each of the killers, trying to trace how they arrived at that disastrous moment.
Any constructive or destructive criticism very welcome!
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David James Holliday is nine. He wastes so many long summer evenings wandering along the banks of the Wass, this tense, brown flank of advancing water that shoulders its way out of the northern dales before slowing to an ooze through the dairy belt and trying to halt itself completely between the sighing acres of the east riding, that he seems certain to remain, through the rest of his childhood, an unteachable dreamer. His favourite thing is to pace out the three or four mile stretch he instinctively thinks of as his own country, turning the day’s events over in his mind and measuring them against his longings (escape, revenge, vindication) while the light over the pastures and the river’s slow-moving surface changes from yellow to violet.
A parched farm track leads from the edge of the village to the grassy dip that allows first sight of the Wass; then there is a place where the hedgerow gives way to a couple of strands of Neolithic barbed wire. With almost automatic movements, David stoops, hooks his thumbs round the lower strand (keeping his palms daintily clear of the barbs), pushes downwards and plops smoothly through the gap. Dusting his hands against his shorts, he strikes out across the closely cropped baize, eventually joining a cow track that runs parallel to the river. There is no breeze and little sound: only the sarcastic braying of a triumphant mallard, somewhere out of sight. Seen from the bank top, the water reflects the sky perfectly. It is the colour of the inside of a freshwater mussel shell.
Momentary concentric ripples expand and disperse as invisible insects graze the surface. David thinks about the fish that move, unseen for now, under this radiant membrane. At morning break there had been a conversation about fishing and Russell had told a good story about a pike that broke his brother Graham’s rod the Sunday before. David doesn’t fish, but he knows that there are supposed to be pike in his stretch of water, especially in the shade of the disused railway bridge, ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away. He imagines a couple of them, waiting there. He thinks of pike as being like a cross between a shark and an alligator, only not as big. Pike can be dangerous to people – Russell had mentioned the story they’d all heard before about the girl, someone’s sister, who had lost two toes to a pike about five years ago and was now at the highschool. She has to wear a special shoe to make up for her missing toes and her brother will smack anyone who makes fun of her about it, because she cries so easily. No one at break had questioned the story but they were all aware that no one really knows whether or not it is completely true. David wants it to be true, though; he wants very hard for it to be true.
A large, fast, winged creature passes between the little boy and the sun (which is like a tiny, burning blob on the slatey horizon); the shadow skids over his face. A wingbeat too late, he follows its noiseless scoop over the water and into the boughs that overhang the bank opposite, but sees only a vague whiteness or pale grey – no outline, not even a distinct movement. It just disappears. David stops and shields his eyes and stares hard at the rank of sagging branches that rub their snouts against the murky, rippled versions of themselves rubbing back in rippling sympathy. He’s on the look-out now for: foliage nodding under an extra weight; a lethal splash; the blade of an outstretched wing; a pair of eyes. He waits. The moment is full of coiled energy. Perfectly still now. He is immersed. Will it move again? What does it eat? The picture he is looking at is mostly brown and green and wet and slow-moving; something in there is utterly different and must eventually reveal itself. If he can only wait.
He feels the air like a cool sheet against his bare arms and legs, and he feels the sandals pressing up into the soles of his feet. This is what waiting is like. The bird is a pair of eyes and an intelligence, hiding just beyond a thin curtain of leaves and maybe laughing at him. This is his punishment for thinking about the idiots at school rather than keeping his eyes peeled, as dad always said. He won’t see the bird now. The shade across the water thickens into a broth and it is over; the coiled energy has seeped from the moment, leaving nothing but the husk of itself – a boy standing on the bank, watching where the bird went. He turns and pads onwards, the section of still leaves chafing at the edge of his vision until a heaped knot of green-black bramble saunters into the space between him and the river.
For ages David has preferred to be by himself rather than playing with other boys from the village. From the beginning it was because they were from families to do with farming and he and his mum and dad and Jason were incomers. It was a word he first heard spat out by the curly-headed teenager with the lazy eyelid, slouching there against the pebble-dash concrete bin by the telephone box on the green, his Tomohawk slung down gleaming in long grass and stubby nettles that the mower man had missed, scraps of torn chewing gum wrapper drifting from the destroyed fingers at his belt buckle to the dark furry leaves and soft green mesh at his ankles.
“You’re a townie,” said the youth, without malice or warmth, as David walked by with a handful of letters to post in the pillar box at the far end of the village.
“No,” David replied, “we were in Flax before and now we’re here. We’ve never lived in a town, ever.”
“Whatever you are,” said the teenager, whose name was later Rosco Malton, “you’re an incomer and you don’t belong in this village.”
It was as though David had been hypnotised by the lazy eyelid – an unhatched egg of swivelling tics – because when the attack happened it came so fast he hardly knew whether to cry until he was on his forearms and belly in the nettles, with the letters in the bin and the bigger boy up onto his bike and wheelieing down the road.
Never mind that David became friends with Gav Malton when he started at Most Primary, later that summer. Never mind that David and Gav were joined by Rosco on a couple of the long bike rides that they went on the following spring. Whenever David saw that eye or that hair or that pair of bare arms rearing out of a tee-shirt with the sleeves torn off, he was always reminded of how he felt as he leaned over the edge of that bin, wiping the filth off his dad’s poor letters, his forehead and cheeks burning and tear-drenched, his hands red and yellow and trembling with angry blebs.
He tells himself he would do anything to avoid feeling like that again, but the main thing he has done is to spend most of his time alone – except for those times company was unavoidable or when attempts to avoid it might be taken the wrong way. He has withdrawn from the life of the village. David is nine and withdrawal is the only trick he knows.
A season-bleached wooden fence marks the frontier of the ragged pasture on this side of the Wass. Beyond it, a tangle of thorn bushes, young trees and tall riverside weeds swells and thickens. As he approaches, David rolls that word – beyond – around the front of his mind; it eases him into adventure mode, heightening his sense of nature (branches, nettles, mud, brambles, crows) as an adversary he needs to guard against. He takes the fence at a run, pivoting smoothly between the lowest and second lowest rails. Through clenched teeth he stage-whispers his private action theme, an improvisation on the signature tunes of the shows that have begun to dominate teatime television. Knight Rider, Airwolf, Street Hawk, The A-Team. His surroundings are now terrain. Needing a weapon, he closes in on a clump of elder at the foot of an ill-looking sycamore. A sediment of many autumns, the ground is springy and crackles with twigs, egging him on into a running stoop, a sharp feint and a roll. He ducks through the gently nodding canopy of elder leaves and rummages about the roots of the tree for a decent stick. Rifle or machine gun is the question. Rising back to a crouch, he assesses each stick by how well its length, kinks and protuberances might serve as stock, grip and magazine – sometimes raising one to his shoulder to take aim, sometimes breaking off a piece to improve the proportions.
Judging the sights of one promising candidate, his gaze overshoots the gnarled muzzle to settle on a more thrilling alternative: twice the thickness of an adult thumb for at least five feet of its length, a broadsword of elder rising in an unbroken column from the churned-up leaf-rug to the diseased lower branches of the tree.
It will be three years before David learns about the principles of leverage, but fragments of instinct guide his hands as he takes hold of the staff, leans back on one foot and turns the sapling’s height against itself. A few moments of sustained tugging have no effect; he pulls the elder a little closer to his chest and waits. There is the musky odour of the leaves and the thin sheathe of the bark. Before he sees anything he feels the vibrations through his palms: something untying itself deep in the base of the plant. The shin of it buckles, becomes an ankle, then ruptures – a ragged cream mouth groans wide and expires. Just a few whimpering creaks as the boy works the staff free of the splintered stump.
He strips away the leaves and soft green offshoots, then moves to a little clearing, his new sword held two-handed in front of him. With a practice swing he carves a ghost-moan out of the still air: oh. And again: no. Relishing the heft of it, David slices a dozen times more, twisting his whole body into the swing and drawing out a louder and lower note with each try. No. No – no – no – NO. NO. NO. Flushed and panting, he looks around for something to hack or bludgeon.
That lopsided bush of wild rose, standing near a fork in the path like a beggar man trying to decide which route to take, might present a worthy adversary. Dead twigs to shatter, living stem to chop, vengeful thorns to evade. David resumes his rasped action theme and strides towards it, readying himself for some serious destruction. The first blow glances off the elastic halo of young growth; the second finds the woody core of the trunk, making the whole bush shudder. The third swing of the sword is aimed at the grey patch that looks like a dead or dying bough, which David expects will dissolve with a sudden crackle. Instead, it flings out a puff of feathers and, half a second later, a wave of witheringly putrid air. The dead pigeon cartwheels down from its perch and the little boy reels back four, five steps – discarding his contaminated sword and yanking the hem of his tee-shirt upwards to cover his mouth and nose.
“FUFFthin ELL.”
The bird barely looks like it was ever alive. Scraps of matter cling to the quivering twigs.
“TCHEE-zus.”
Still shielding the lower half of his face, David gingerly leans forward to study the stinking relic. The pigeon must have been dead for days. It lies on its back with one wing half outstretched, as though pointing to an omen of the future, and the other folded close against its body. The inner surface of feathers is matted and, in some places, has come away in clumps; the little feathers covering its breast are ruffled outwards, its lungs stilled as it was taking a deep breath. Above its shoulders, the soft flesh of the neck has been entirely eaten away by invisible creatures or processes, baring the dirty S of spinal cord that still connects the skull to the body. Head thrown back, miming triumph or hysterical amusement. Beak parted, eyes gone. Arching its back against the soft ground, the pigeon holds the pose it died into, its joints as rigid as a picture frame or an icicle – but lighter than either, lighter than a skeletal leaf, desiccated of all solidity.
He lowers the fabric from his nose and sniffs minutely at the air, as though checking whether the smell is as quite bad as his instincts insist. Of course it is. Its layered awfulness is a gateau of superlatives: rankest cheese, foulest slurry-pit, most rotten tooth.
Once more aware of his appearance in his own imagination, David allows the front of his tee-shirt to fall from his grip; he smoothes the fabric over his flat belly and sides. Coercing his frown into a hyphen of pretend impassivity, he steps forward and – breathing only through his mouth – lowers himself to his haunches in an exaggerated display of studying the pigeon. His field of vision is overlaid by a spectral depiction of the scene coming into focus in the forequarters of his mind. An inked frame in the top left-hand corner of the page of a comic book: himself in profile, a crouching silhouette with a grim, reflective mien. He rests his elbows on his knees, interlaces his fingers and looks straight through the remains of the bird, perfectly mimicking the posture of his imagined self, casting a brooding gaze into the crosshatched murk. The upper third of the cartoon panel is occupied by a think-bubble, linked to his head by three ovals of diminishing size, in which the unusually bold capitals of the lettering signal the significance of the thought: THE UNMISTAKABLE STENCH OF DEATH!
And in the next panel, a close-up: BUT WHO – OR WHAT – COULD HAVE DONE SUCH A THING?Posts: 8657
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He carries on through the trees and emerges into a sloping weed-meadow of willow herb, nettles and, along the riverbank, giant hogweed. Between the chunky, motionless stems the surface of the Wass looks much darker now; overhead, the sky is like a hollowed-out quarry. It is the end of the day and the gloom and the great birds are gathering in the upper boughs of the opposite bank. The squat stone pillars and green-brown girders of the disused railway bridge come into view: the frontier of David’s territory and a favourite spot for village youths if ever the weather’s hot enough for swimming. Scalps of green erupt from the nooks and joints of the bridge, their streamers and tendrils and broad, nodding leaves reaching out into a space over the water that is thick with the ghosts of kids bombing and pencil-diving and swinging from ropes – the sloughed skins of a thousand summer days.
Neil sells, he recites to himself, snail shells on the snail shore.
He is looking for the spoil heap of mashed stone that marks where he needs to veer towards the riverside, if he wants to locate the snail shore. This and other traces of the railway age rear at intervals from the lumpy drifts of undergrowth: a sheared-off concrete pillar, an unsalvageable contrivance of cast-iron cogs, a jetty to nowhere. Passing each of these, he catches sight of the spoil heap and starts to creep down towards the water’s edge, parting the curtain of willow herb in front of him, wary of stray nettles brushing against his bare legs. The snail shore is a clipped toenail of fine shingle and pulverised shells, untouched by the hooves or filth of cattle, which David discovered during one of his early summer expeditions; visible only from the opposite bank and a certain place on the bridge, it’s the lowest point along the edge of the Wass that is still dry enough to allow sitting. Normally, he busies himself hunting for flat pebbles to skim across the water before sinking into a reflective crouch for an eternity of thirty minutes or so – tonight, though, the languor has already taken hold and he sits, legs crossed, on the broad, flat stone that’s one of his two or three usual perches, resting his elbows against his thighs and his chin on top of his folded hands.
His gaze settles on the thin canopy of gnats, weaving mindlessly over the dimming water; his thoughts prowl round the dead bird, the bird’s life before it died, its death, the deadness of the bird and death as a sentient force in the world. One thing is for certain: the explanations offered by his mum and dad do not match up with the evidence he has seen so far.
“Like going to sleep,” said his mum, at the sink, chopping freshly peeled carrots for a stew, and not looking at him. “Just like going to sleep then waking up in heaven, provided you’ve been good all your life.”
His dad was rather different:
“You mean nana?” he asked, laying down his pen, taking his glasses off and resting them on one of the squat turrets of paperwork. Nana had died three years ago, between Christmas and New Year. She had been dad’s mum – dad’s dad was long gone.
“No, not really. Just: what happens to you, when you die? And what comes next after that?”
“What did your mother say?”
“Nothing much. Just: you fall to sleep then if you’ve been good you go to heaven.”
“Is that right.” Not quite a question: like a question, but not meant to be answered. A lot of the things David’s dad said weren’t meant to be answered.
“And I suppose you’d like to go to heaven when you die. Which, by the way, will be a long time from now.”
Silence.
“Well that’s all right. But what do you reckon happens if you aren’t good? If you don’t behave yourself. Like the other day, when you were fighting with Jason about Snoopy.”
“I wasn’t fighting. He wouldn’t let me play with Snoopy – he acts like he’s the only one who’s allowed to do anything with him.”
“That animal isn’t a toy. Jason walks him more than anyone else – and looks after him. If he’s anyone’s, he’s Jason’s.
“But–”
“But that’s not the point. The point is, you don’t automatically get into heaven after you die. If you’ve been bad or selfish the whole way through your life, you don’t get anywhere near the place.”
“You go to hell?”
“No such thing, sunshine.” David’s dad rubbed his eyes, his left hand feeling about his paperwork for his glasses. “Once you’ve had your chips you get buried and you stay put – in your coffin, which eventually rots, then the worms get at you.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Did…? Do you think nana went to heaven?”
“I hope so.”
David had thought for a moment about the alternative. He thinks about it again as the evening chill raises goose bumps on his forearms. Nana in a box underground: cold and still and wrapped in the dressing gown he had last seen her in – all faded flowers and bobbly fake fleece. He imagines the silence inside the coffin being nibbled away by the insistent sound of the worms trying to get in; gnawing at the seams of the box, writhing against the wood and probing for weaknesses.
It wasn’t fair. Jason had been allowed to go to the funeral and David had been left with the Smalls next door. He wasn’t old enough. At a loss for what to do with the little boy, the elderly couple had given him a pot of bubble mixture with which to amuse himself in the back yard. At first, he had been annoyed to be given something so babyish, but the fine winter afternoon was perfect for sending bubbles high into the air, a gentle breeze sucking them up over the ancient orange tiles of the wash house. David had seated himself on the edge of a stone flower trough and, ignoring the chilly patches where mixture had dripped onto his woollen gloves, concentrated hard on blowing gently enough but steadily enough to produce a stream of perfect, medium-sized bubbles.
The bubbles rose in groups or singly, each carrying a highlight of the weak winter sun. Little travellers, they paused and doubled back on themselves at about the height of the cast-iron guttering, as though summoning the resolve necessary to set out on the journey proper. They jerkily paced the air two, three, four times before they were caught by a current and, all of a sudden, dashed clear of the earth-bound universe. Though most vanished before they were higher than the roofs, a determined few sailed on, locked into an uneven but strangely calm ascent. Up to the thin, cloudless blue: David’s private messengers, David’s private messages to his nana.
It bothers him, now, that these two images of death – burial and decay under the soil or ghostly ascension to heaven – still seem equally true and right, while obviously wholly contradictory. Every detail of either possibility is a rejection of the other. The rotten innards of the bird simply cannot exist in the same world as nana’s undying soul; the place past the sky where the bubbles finally arrive becomes grotesque and unreal when the gnawing sound of the worms returns. These things belong to separate universes, opposite universes, and even at nine years old, David feels certain that there’s no other universe but this one. He narrows his eyes in an attempt to see through the deeper gloom spreading out across the Wass and it isn’t hard to imagine all the other dead creatures concealed by the brambles and willow herb and riverside weeds: the eyeless rabbits, bloat-chested rats and songless thrushes. He imagines their spirits suspended, like a mist, over their remains and tries to picture an ascent, a gentle curling upwards, away from the soil and up through the leaves and out through the open air. Can the rot be left behind? Do the souls of animals have power or direction or independence? He takes it for granted that if there is a heaven, animals will go there too (how could they not be rewarded for their selfless, never-tiring animalness?) but the rupture between those rotting bodies and the gleaming, translucent realm of afterwards is beyond his ability to comprehend.
An uneasy wish, like the urge to peel back a partly healed scab, announces itself in David’s core. A desire to be there at the final crisis of a life; to witness with his own eyes the change from alive to dead and – maybe, amid the sombre glamour of the grieving family, the last words and the hand closing the eyelids – to catch a glimpse of the ascent of the dead one’s spirit. Only this can bring satisfaction, he decides: seeing at last the crossing of one of us from this bank to the one opposite. And again he sees himself as though depicted in the final frame of a story in a comic, seated on the edge of the bed of a dying relative, his face creased with concern and pain and, increasingly, a kind of illusionless wisdom.
The river is almost black and even the snail shore is starting to feel damp now. It’s maybe time to call it a night.
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Ducking back through the barbed wire, David feels the rusty strands give up a little of the warmth of the day; on the other side, he lets go of them and the twanging vibrations seem somehow amplified in the poised stillness of the evening. Lights from the village slide and wink through the dark blue intricacy of the hedge-backs as he returns along the dusty farm track, rubbing his forearms against the chill. His legs are cold as meat from the fridge and he instructs himself to wear cords the next time he sets off along the riverside so late. It’s not August yet, as mum would say.
The cinders give way to ragged, then smooth asphalt. The houses at the edge of the village are old-fashioned workers’ cottages, with white-painted sash windows and meticulously abundant front gardens; these are succeeded by larger, broader-shouldered buildings that signal the status of their inhabitants by their dazed symmetry, their mortarless sandstone grid, their creamily polished brass letterboxes. Approaching the crossroads next to the pub, David hears the throaty noise of a tractor, echoing up the high street around the corner – an angry globe of sound thrown back on its source by the house fronts. A canvas-topped International 135 swings into view, pulling behind it a decrepit wooden trailer heaped high with barley, maybe the last load of the day. As is village custom, David waves at the dark mass behind the wheel. It takes him a couple of moments to recognise Mister Malton – Gav and Roscoe’s father – who responds with the loose-handed pointing gesture that passes for a greeting among the tractor drivers round here. A friendly gesture, but one that sometimes unnerves David. The tractor and trailer swish past him, pulling dust and diesel fumes in their wake, the yammering engine pitching its protest a note higher as Mister Malton drops gear going into a turn-off.
He continues down past the green (and the telephone box where Roscoe thumped him that time) before veering up the avenue with the newer houses, towards the motorway side of the village. As the usual clumps of buildings and markers – the bus shelter, the bungalow where Mrs Pearce lives, the garden with all the gnomes – spool past, they seem to set off a twitchy unease inside him. Not quite guilt or dread, more a feeling that he might already be in trouble without fully knowing it. Reaching his own gate does nothing to diminish this feeling. The porch light is on: the long-established signal, in his mum’s private lexicon, that night has fallen and anyone who is out now ought to have been in a long time ago. Creeping up the drive, and inwardly mapping his silent progress through the hall, up the stairs and into the cosy impunity of his room, David is barely aware that a light is burning in the garage – such a minor oddness even seems of a piece with the faintly sinister turn the evening is taking. He reaches for the handle but, in the moment between grasping it and pressing down, there is a surge of voices from inside and the door is snatched open by his father, who looms tall, shadow-faced, wondering.
“Ah. So you’ve not run away.”
“I was down by the river.” No – not that. “I was down by the bridge, in the woods.”
“And you lost track of time.”
David’s dad was not known for beating around the bush.
“I – yes. Sorry, Dad.”
“Well, you can make yourself useful,” the steaming mug he holds in one hand is transferred to the other, gripped by base and rim and offered to David handle-first. “Take this to Jason, it’ll warm him up a bit.”
A beat-and-a-half of not knowing paralyses the boy; the heat passes through the mug and sears his dad’s fingers: “Go on – take it!”
David does and catches the syrupy tang of hot Ribena. His dad turns back into the house, rattled, rubbing his fingers against the seat of his trousers: “Take it to him – he’s in the garage, he’s with the dog.”
The door shuts and David makes a face. He continues down the drive, idly imagining what Jason might be doing in the garage – his dad’s tone had suggested some sort of chore, maybe trimming Snoopy’s claws or giving him a bath, though neither seems particularly likely at this hour on a school night. The garage is a low, brick-built affair, remarkable only for being one of the first on the street to have a steel, lift-and-over door. Its distinctly posher-looking gable-ended counterparts across the road each have timber double-doors, smartly painted to match the front door of their respective houses. David steps out onto the lawn and walks down the side of the silent building, concentrating on the tilting surface of the drink and trying to decide whether he too would like a mug. As he opens the side-door of the garage and enters with a quick side step he is about to ask the first of a list of questions, but finds himself silenced by the strange and serious scene that awaits him.
Between the rear bumper of their dad’s ancient brown Saab and the bicycles, old newspapers and boxed junk heaped against the back wall, Jason had pulled together a tangle of old blankets, the cleanest and newest of which are twisted round into a sort of peak. He sits beside this, leaning over what looks like a white-wrapped bundle, his bottom resting on a wedge of folded polythene tillage sacks. An old table lamp with its shade removed provides the light, but the 60-watt bulb is only able to cast a yellowy bright-dark about the interior; surfaces in the light emit a dull glare, while those in the shade throb with electric blackness. Jason is wearing the thick, grubby anorak he usually takes when he goes fishing on a cold day, but he has also rigged up a portable two-bar electric heater that David had thought banished to the attic years ago. Jason is rocking slightly and making reassuring noises, fully absorbed by the white bundle which David now realises is Snoopy: the tip of the little dog’s snout just visible beyond the hem of the ravelled blanket.
He closes the door behind him and Jason looks up.
“Oh. Thanks.”
It takes David a moment to realise his brother is thanking him for the Ribena. He nips the inside of his lip with annoyance at his own slowness tonight.
“Where do you want it?”
“Over there – that box with the writing on it, there.”
David feels a stab of foreboding: normally the sound of a fresh voice sets off a spasm of delighted reorientation in the dog as it jerks round to greet whoever has just appeared with its full attention and its flapping scarf of tongue. Right now, though, there is nothing but a creaky exhalation and a hesitant writhe beneath the thick material. He steps forward, places the mug within Jason’s reach and stands over them, looking more closely at what he can see of Snoopy. Framed separately from its body, the dog’s face is more strikingly Spaniel than ever, as if it needed to be held still before a single breed could rise out of its features and predominate. Its hot cocoa eyes are flattened to slits, long lashes rimed with matter; the gleaming track of a tear meanders from the corner of its eye down to the ruffled fur at its jaw. It breathes with some difficulty, nostrils flaring and white foam flecking the liver-coloured flesh of its lips.
“What happened to him?”
Jason is making soothing noises as he strokes the dog’s quivering side; he breaks off to speak: “Dad found him at the side of the road. He thinks he’s maybe been hit by a car. That was about seven o’clock. He rang the vet and he said we should try and keep him warm and see what he’s like in the morning.”
“Why don’t you take him inside – that’s warmer for him, isn’t it?”
“We were inside. But he’s – he made a mess. He kept making a mess. He’s lost control of his…” Jason shakes his head. “Mum wouldn’t have him inside.”
“What about the vet’s – why can’t we take him to the vet’s? He’d be able to make him better.”
“You know what he’s like.”
“The vet?”
“Dad.”
The dog coughs painfully and Jason’s head bows and he makes shushing noises. Seeing his older brother being brave is starting to frighten David.
“He’s going to get better isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. He was bleeding before, from a cut in the back of his head. I think he’s been hit really hard in the head and it’s maybe given him brain damage. And I don’t know if he’s maybe got a few cracked ribs,” a frown, or something worse, twists his face and his head drops still lower. “I think we’ll have to see if he’s got any better by the morning.”
The phrase sounds tinny and dismal and distant.
“I just want to try and calm him down and help him get some sleep. And I don’t want to leave him on his own.”
The idea that an animal or person could ever be left to suffer alone with cracked ribs and brain damage has never occurred to David before now. The idea of lying there, shaking and frightened and not knowing whether you’re ever again going to enjoy the jolly, taken-for-granted oblivion of wellness – and not having someone there to comfort you and bring you what you ask for and say that it’s going to be all right and sounding like they mean it. And being alone when that inevitable, pitiless dark visitor enters the room and takes up his place at your bedside. It is a terrible thing to think about.
He wants to join his brother and help to reassure the little dog that things are going to be all right, but there’s nowhere to sit right beside them. Instead, he drops to his haunches so that he is, at least, at the same level as they are. He reaches out to try to stroke the mound in the blankets that looks like one of Snoopy’s legs. The gesture feels awkward and arbitrary and at this moment the dog is seized by another spasm of coughing – only this time it sounds and feels more like retching. A retching laugh, like Mutley from the Dick Dastardly show.
The little dog laughed to see such fun.
David withdraws his hand as Jason tries again to soothe Snoopy. He settles back onto the balls of his feet and interlaces his fingers. A second or two too late, he realises he has adopted the same pose as when he was looking at the dead bird – more accurately, when he was watching himself looking at the dead bird. He feels two spots of heat – hotter than nettle rash – in his cheeks as he remembers his self-dramatising vanity, his fathomless stupidity in those moments in the woods and by the river. His desperate wish to watch someone dying, his longing for the moment when the flesh gives up its ghost and that ghost rises upwards, like blown bubbles, to the kingdom in the sky.
The little dog laughed to see such fun.
The spasm shakes loose the blanket round Snoopy’s head. Jason gathers the folds together again, shushing and stroking, and when his hand moves clear of the dog’s mouth, there is a bright, spit-marbled coin of blood on the inside of his wrist. As the coughing subsides some other crisis grips the dog’s frame and it seems to be trying to arch its back, tilt its head backwards, but it can’t. Snoopy’s eyes roll up in their filmy sockets, baring trembling thirds of yellow white; they roll up feverishly, insistently – as though the little dog were paralysed but trying to warn with its eyes of some terrible danger from above. David opens his mouth to say something, horribly aware that there is nothing he can say that isn’t obvious or useless.
Not looking at him – in his own universe with the dog, in fact – Jason says, “Why don’t you go inside now.”
It is the flat, insufferable, unanswerable tone of their father. David leaves his brother and goes inside.
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posted
There is a click and David rolls over in bed. He finished crying hours ago and the house has been quiet for a long time. Sleep will not come and the blackness outside his window is more hateful than ever. Beyond the still of the room and the warm smells of himself and the oddity of Jason’s unoccupied bed, there are the sounds of his father in the bathroom: trickling water, the opened and closed cabinet, a cough and clearing of the throat. The cord-pull twangs the light off and there is the sound, the adult presence, of his father shuffling along the landing, then descending into the depths of the house.
I never meant this. I never meant any of this when I made my wish. For the thousandth time, for the time before the next thousand times. It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault. I never meant it. It’s not fair. His father’s favourite response: life’s not fair.
There are more clicks from outside the house, a creak and the fumbling rattle of the back door being locked. Then slow, considered steps up the stairs. Instinctively, David feigns sleep. The bedroom door opens and their dad backs into the room, with Jason asleep in his arms. With only the broad shaft of landing light to see by, he lays Jason on his bed and gently undresses him and gently draws his pyjamas around him and gently slides him under the covers.
For a moment he stands over his sleeping child and then David sees him do something he’s never seen his dad do before: he bends forward, strokes aside the boy’s fringe and places a kiss on Jason’s forehead. Watching this through three-quarters closed eyes and a blur of eyelashes, David is outraged by this little intimacy and by the fact that Jason is able to sleep while he can’t and while Snoopy lies cold in the garage.
Unthinking, he intrudes: “Dad?”
His father straightens and turns to look at him. His eyes are bright with tears and he says nothing. David is as quiet as a mouse. The look his father gives him is the only time David will ever see such hurt and candour and anger in his father’s eyes. He clenches his fists and turns and leaves the room.
Dark again, with Jason’s steady breathing. David will never forget that look.
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posted
Ben that's tremendous. Really deliberate, evocative and genuine. I did start making notes on what I liked best - things like "unhatched egg of swivelling tics", the process of selecting a stick-gun and the description of everything becoming 'terrain' when you're acting out TV fantasies in your head. It seems cliched to say it but there was a genuine feeling of being transported back to the age of nine, and that sense of past-time swimming back up to greet you is one of the most exciting and warming gifts you can get from fiction. I think it was kovacs that said your imagery tends to reach beyond the obvious and provide somethign fresh - and that's very much in evidence here. It's totally involving and feels absolutely right, in terms of the thought processes and reactions of David. The sense of alienation is clearly and - you know - poingantly without being at all sentimental. In fact the tone of objective observation while allowing emotion and abstract feelings to be clearly visible lends the writing a real sense of weight, honesty and worth. There were one or two moments when I wasn't quite convinced - like the comment on David thinking of "death as a sentient force in the universe", but only because previously you'd gone to the effort of firmly grounding the more concepts David hasn't quite got the expression for (leverage, rhetorical), in a plausible way that a nine year old might think of them. There were a couple of other tiny tiny things like the description early on that makes it seem as though the land is moving rather than the character ("He turns and pads onwards, the section of still leaves chafing at the edge of his vision until a heaped knot of green-black bramble saunters into the space between him and the river."), though in all honesty I think that's a small matter of personal taste rather than anything else, and it's more to do with the astonishing quality of the rest of the writing that such mediocre criticisms spring to mind on the extremely fleeting occasions when I wasn't thinking "This is sickeningly good".
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posted
I've just read the first of those posts and now I am actually pissed off that I can't read the rest because I have to go out.
Amazing. Ego shatteringly good stuff, Ben. I have to say the "unhatched egg of swivelling tics" stood out for me as the K.O. blow in a relentless stream of fantastic imagery which just beat the shit out of my own aspirations. There was a glimmer of hope on the second mention of the cartoonist frame; I felt the image was being pushed a little hard, then "THE UNMISTAKABLE STENCH OF DEATH! And in the next panel, a close-up: BUT WHO – OR WHAT – COULD HAVE DONE SUCH A THING?" and I thought, 'No, no Jonesy, you're so wrong. That totally fucking works.'
If this is what you've put on ice in favour of something that’s going really well then...wow.
It seems a shame to cast such quality pearls in front of the zombie swine that currently wallow in their own shit on this forum, but I'm glad you did. I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of it.
And in the nicest possible way, if this is what you've been doing with your energy then I'm glad your TMOutput is just a fraction of what it was in your heyday.
posted
Sorry Ben, but I am writing my own stuff at the moment and cannot risk having my momentum and tentative self-belief nuked by work that I know even from just a scrolling skim is crushingly good. [you can see the "quality" of my writing, hem-hem, from the sentence above]
I hope you'll understand and take this as a compliment. The last lines of your final post were enough to give me that feeling of fuck it, I shouldn't really bother writing because the bar is too high.
posted
Its rubbish. People won't be able to relate. You need more patios, lists and someone having a thirtieth birthday. Or a funny anecdote involving mental disableds?
posted
I'm a little lost on when it's set, the Tomahawk bike reference marks the piece (for me) as set around the mid 70's, however later in the piece the references to TV shows like The A team and Airwolf move the story to the mid 80's - A decade or so later feels like too much of a jump..
For all I know Tomahawks were still made and ridden in the 80's but for me personally they are as 70's as the Raleigh Chopper, maybe consider a switch to a scuffed BMX ? Mind I’d prefer it to be more 70’s so I’d switch the shows.
It’s dark and beautiful at the same time, like waking up from a bad dream and realizing that you’re really safe in bed and all the things you’ve seen will just fade away as you grow. There’s something in there you can relate to, not so much the actual content but more the feeling of an age you once were.
posted
Thanks for the kind comments - after months mauling the piece through various different drafts I'd more or less lost a sense of what anyone else might make of it. The over-writing Thorn picks out is the sort of thing I hope I'd excise when doing a full-scale re-write, though some of the things you've mentioned approvingly probably wouldn't have survived revision either - which kind of indicates how hard it had become for me to sift what was rot and what not, by the time I set the piece aside.
Darryn - I understand completely how the Tomahawk reference could throw you; we're now so saturated with nostalgia programmes that there's an automatic tendency to connect an item with a particular decade, even though such things remained in use well after that period. Tomahawks, Choppers and Grifters were what most kids in our village had, well into the second half of the 80s. Many, in fact, were second-hand and BMXs were regarded as exotic, even luxury items bought for kids whose parents were willing to shell out what seemed like an (at the time) astronomical amount for a bike. In the absence of a footnote or parenthesis making this point, though, I probably would have to tweak the reference to try and avoid the immediate associations that, as you say, would be made.
posted
Sorry Ben, but I couldn't get beyond the first turgid comma-filled paragraph. I'm not just being mean for the sake of it; it just didn't grip me at all.
Perhaps I should stick to the usual dry stuff.
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
posted
Ignore him. It was wonderful. Because I'm not a writer or skilled in any way with language, I can't really express what I loved about it clearly.
Thorn was right when he said it places you immediately in the head of a nine-year-old, with David's inherent self-absorption and egocentricity, the belief that his desires and mindwandering what-ifs are being made manifest for him by the universe. I liked the competitive jealousy of the older brother.
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quote:Originally posted by Samuelnorton: Sorry Ben, but I couldn't get beyond the first turgid comma-filled paragraph. I'm not just being mean for the sake of it; it just didn't grip me at all.
posted
Hello ben, it is quiet here and I have decided not to do any more work today, meaning I have had time to properly read your piece without fear of interruption.
I enjoyed it, obviously. The last time I properly did any "creative writing" (before I moved to London, so 4 years ago) was actually something remarkably similar- involving a boy walking his terrain the day after 5 November. So I was particularly interested in how you wrote the lad's train of thought and interpretation of his world.
The description of country summer evenings was very evocative. A point that randomly occurred to me was how the vegetation is properly named- despite growing up in a fairly rural setting, I'm not actually sure I could confidently identify elder and willow herb.
My only criticism would be that your strength-powerful physical descriptions- sometimes works against you slightly in this particular narrative. I found the transition between the scene-setting description and David's child thought process blurred by slightly over-written wordiness on occasion- most notably "His field of vision is overlaid by a spectral depiction of the scene coming into focus in the forequarters of his mind. An inked frame in the top left-hand corner of the page of a comic book: himself in profile, a crouching silhouette with a grim, reflective mien." I actually had to read that a couple of times to work out what you meant. And I really think "mien" is unnecessarily Will Self here.
Thanks for being brave enough to post it up.
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quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: slightly over-written wordiness on occasion- most notably
*winces*
lol@ 'slightly'. Chronic over-writing is a major weakness of mine - I've tried to overcome it in the current project by sticking to a target number of words each day, rather than spending hour upon hour overcooking individual sentences.
Alternatively, I suppose I could try reading aloud and listening out for whether it sounds like Self attempting to out-ponce Brian Sewell.
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posted
See, this is where being slightly thick places you at a distinct advantage. These days I rarely overwrite sentences because I can't think of enough words.
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Look, I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf at the time. Let's just leave it at that.
Also: that's quote's from history professor Mark Jenner - living proof, as they say, that a leaky sack of wet shit and medical waste can attain a prestigious position in the English university system.
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