‘Do you swear on your mother’s life, you’re committed to the gang?’
‘I do’.
Harry just played along and said what was expected of him, it had all seemed like proper boy’s stuff until Adam pulled out his knife.
Harry’s lower lip started to tremble.
‘We won’t have any cry-babies,’ Adam stated as he used his penknife to initiate Harry into his gang.
Harry winced.
‘We’re blood brothers now, there’s no turning back,’ announced Adam.
Harry had thought that it would be fun to be accepted into a gang at his new school. Now, after seeing the pleasure that inflicting pain gave Adam, he was beginning to have some doubts.
“I mean,” she said, “clearly there’s something not quite right here, something’s missing.”
DI Jenkins sighed and bit down a sharp retort. Of course there was something missing. In fact, there were a few things – eyes, fingers, liver, lungs, kidneys, and, possibly most disturbingly, the victim’s trousers. His dentures had also been removed and were in the middle of a damp stain on the carpet.
He was just grateful that whoever had done this had stopped the mutilation there. After all, he already had one young constable throwing up in the back garden, and his sergeant was looking a bit queasy too.
Rose settled into her nest, another busy night, sighing as she turned to the others.
Lily poked her head up: ‘Hard night Rose. You wouldn’t believe it. I had to rummage under the bed to find the tooth, all those dust bunnies’ bits of food. It was disgusting’.
Marigold piped up: ‘Last time that happened to me there was a mouse there, eyeing me up.’ Gasps from the girls.
Lily shuddered: ‘What did you do?’
‘Chucked a bit of biscuit at it, grabbed the tooth and scarpered.’
Hyacinth joined in. ‘I had a fright not long ago when a dog came sniffing around sucked me halfway up his nostril. Thankfully it tickled his nose, he snorted and blew me across the room,’
I was on my way home at last, I’d been counting down the days to my return flight since I arrived. The ‘Call of the Wild’ was overexaggerated as far as I was concerned. I just could not wait for that blissful moment of sleeping in my own bed. As it turned out, Africa had different plans for me.
The airport tannoy crackled into life.
“The flight to Nairobi has been delayed.”
There was a groan from all the passengers.
“More information will follow.”
I looked down at my dust-encrusted attire, I really needed a shower; even I could smell how disgusting I was. I just hoped that we would be aboard the turbo prop soon.
As Harry waited by the bus stop, he gazed across the road at the crowd of hunchbacked goblins slumped in battered chairs, looking lost and bewildered.
Men in white coats walked amongst this sea of dithering heads, when one wrinkled nonagenarian cried out for her mummy. That soon set off the rest of those ancients, as they all wailed in incoherent distress.
A miracle; no other way to describe it. After the washing-up of Sunday lunch, she and Freddie had either taken a left out of the front gate and walked towards Mam’s parents, or turned right over the railway bridge to Dad’s. Attempted recall techniques had included a retracing on GoogleMaps of as much of the route as could be remembered by a failing 90 year old brain and cajoling her granddaughter to drive her on their weekly car trip along every exit of every roundabout in the town. Pris was giving up hope. There were over a hundred roundabouts and at least five hundred possible exits. Some she recognized; some not. Road realignments, estate clearances and the ripple-out expansion of shopping centres, had remodelled the once familiar. Every now and then something – the sight of an old industrial chimney, a stretch of stone wall, the metallic nose of rusting industrial archaeology blasting through the car’s air vents – promised to tug a distant memory chime, only to muffle, return into the unrecognisable and remain silent. Did she have 10 years?
The cardigan with the paint stain on the elbow that she could never wash off: why had she kept it so long? She remembered touching up the sitting-room door, brush in one hand, Sylvie in the other, when a blob of gloss had attached itself to her sleeve almost as firmly as her baby’s fingers.
The uncomfortable wooden armchair that guests sat on, or rather, hovered above as though it were a large hedgehog. The enormous ghetto-blaster like a plastic-armoured beetle squatting on the windowsill. Rachel’s drum: memories of a small child marching around the sitting room like an infant platoon, noisier than a massed military band. She ought to let all this stuff go.
Friday afternoon and Billy Thomas was daydreaming of all the things he and the gang had to do over the weekend. He was jerked back to reality by a piece of chalk hitting him squarely on the forehead. Mr. Jenkins was bellowing at him, ”Pay attention boy. ”
A knocking at the door and a head poked around. A groan rippled around the class. It was Nitty Nora who had come to look for nits; always bad news. No one wanted the pink note telling their parents they had nits.
One by one they trudged into the hall for inspection. Nearly all of the class had pink notes. Disaster! Nora came into class declaring an epidemic and sent them all home. The boys huddled together, scratching as they walked, knowing their plans would come to nothing, each knowing what the weekend held.
Two words sprang to mind. Fat Chance. What were the odds on a crime scene being this neat? The victim, a message written in his own blood, and the murder weapon all within a few yards of each other. My gut told me something was wrong.
The boys in blue were happy enough to sign off on it. Even though the accused had a cast iron alibi, but I smelt a rat.
I went over the evidence again. There was only one fatal blow to the victim’s head. He’d have been dead before he hit the floor. The baseball bat had been wiped clean. The question was how could a dead man write his killer’s name in his own blood?
“Follow the money”, my instincts shouted. “Who was set to gain by this murder?”
I stand, confused, as she presses an activation key into my right hand, then runs along the corridor towards my father and the mob pressing against the hangar’s blast doors.
*
We’ve been spacers all our lives, living on the margins of existence. Trading goods wherever we can make credits, salvaging wreckage, fighting off pirates and raiders. The Federal Planetary Government doesn’t hold much sway out in the void, even though they’re becoming more authoritarian and imperialistic on the inhabited worlds. Rebellious types from beat poets to guerrilla militias had been crushed mercilessly according to rumour, but Father had dismissed the hearsay with a wave of his hand.
“No matter to us, girlie,” he’d said. “Go help your mother with the hull repairs.”
Hubert was struggling. Progress on the Business Improvement Plan requested, rather mandated, by the Directors of News Wales Live Radio was tortuous. Analytics had diagnosed a 25% audience fall -off after the third quarter- hour. Perhaps change the bumper music. Done. Replace the liner front-selling the next guest…. possible. Could be a one hour programme was simply too long. Rearranging the playlist would address the former. The latter was frightening, heralding a possible cut to his hours and a corresponding reduction in salary. With the legally- enforceable encumbrances of 3 ex-partners and 7 children to support, a Bentley Meteor to maintain and fuel, plus his 10 tank collection of non-native reptiles and amphibians to feed, house and heat, Hubert had decisions to make. He compiled a list of friends and professional acquaintances and started.
Packing up his dad’s old kitbag, Billy excitedly rushed downstairs. The camping trip beckoned. The gang had finally persuaded their parents to let them sleep over at Devil’s Cave near their home.
Summer holidays had started. Most of the boys had jobs for the holidays but this weekend was a boy’s right of passage. His mother had laid out food for them, some bread, a bit of dripping, and some jam tarts. That was my contribution.
Gathering at the end of our road we set off. It was quite a climb to the cave but there was a stream bubbling away alongside the path, so we stopped to fill our pop bottles frequently.
Smayle’s concrete grey face was a Niagara of perspiration. War was ongoing with the slugs and snails. He had three large dustbins on his plot, where he mulched food waste into fertiliser. Little burrowing creatures got in there sometimes, and partook of dinner. Birds, butterflies, and he didn’t know what, slipped under the netting around some of his raised beds. But none of them had inflicted damage on his most prized growth: his pumpkins. His wheelbarrow bulged with them, fat, comfortable, like the heads of yellow turbaned oriental aristocracy.
None of the other allotment holders grew them in such volume Once fully grown these mighty plumped fellows were allowed access to his house, just yards from the allotment gate. Sometimes there were so many, he believed they could practically march down there in military columns.
After the speeches, people drifted away from the demonstration, some still wearing outfits representing the main focus of their complaint.
Having responsibly abandoned their placards, a group of five in search of food and drink settled themselves in the Hog’s Head and placed their orders.
These were veteran activists. They had witnessed mounted police moving through the crowds at the poll tax rebellions; they had collective memories of the ‘not in my name’ protests; they had stood with the miners during the long strike; two could even look back to the anti-apartheid rugby protests in 1969. Between them they had been kettled, abused, arrested and beaten.
As the children tumbled onto the coach chattering to each other, boys headed to the rear, jostling each other for the best seats. Off on a school trip to a zoo, most had never been before, each wanting to see the large animals they had only seen in books.
Singing all the way hymns and nursery rhymes, what a day it turned out to be. Billy and the boys had to stay with Mr. Jenkins, the headmaster, mouths agog at the size of the bears, and the temple monkeys racing around. Riding on the elephant, pretending to be hunting lions, what great fun; so too taking rides on the camels, for the younger children.
Lunch was on the lawn at the centre of the zoo, then off again to see the lions
The three hopeful finalists sat in the front row, -a young woman wringing her hands, a guy with pronounced musculature escaping a skinny vest and the staid, 50-something, balding Phil. They had been informed the elimination exercise would follow briefing presentations.
Phil surveyed the cavernous, somehow claustrophobic lecture hall. Wood panelled ceiling and walls reminded him of horror films that in an earlier career-phase he had scoured, researching replicable facial expressions to convey being entombed alive.
Work opportunities as a character actor were becoming sporadic; it was the right time to diversify, to move on. The once familiar minimalist sets of The Grand, – a laden bookcase stage right. a chair centre stage, French Doors with greenery and birdsong stage left, were distant memories since the Catastrophe. How he missed the multiple curtain-calls, the whooping and whistling of an appreciative audience, the after-play drinkies with sound and lighting crews, the informal advice sessions to aspiring drama school students! Commercial Crisis Acting had never been on the radar but what could he do? The mortgage had to be paid, and in order of priority, the dog, 3 children and a wife fed and clothed. That ranking was correct. Phil prided himself in being particularly self- aware.
My mission had been to submit my story by the deadline. I was failing fast.
I had to write something. My head was stuffed with a myriad of ideas, but none of them seemed to work. I sighed as I looked at the pile of screwed up papers overflowing the waste bin.
I reread all the other submissions for what seemed like the tenth time. What did they have that mine lacked? Even my analytic powers seemed to have deserted me.
I tried some displacement activities to look for inspiration elsewhere. My e-mails and You Tube displayed the same as when I had looked before. I came up with no fresh ideas for the story.
What struck Julian were the silvered eyebrows half-way down an oblong face. Most people’s eyebrows are a third of the way down. This displacement, together with a high hairline, left a disconcertingly blank expanse of forehead skin, broken only by a stray wisp of hair escaping diagonally from an oiled and groomed coif to gently caress the outer arch of the right brow.
They had met in Drawing Class five years previously. A common love of philately and the search for the missing, presumed stolen, “Inverted Jennies.” -so named because the stamps’ bi-planes had been printed upside-down, -had propelled an initial halting comradeship into friendship, to them sharing a flat together, then more.
Shane was ostensibly the more extrovert. A favourite entertainment for both was him regaling Julian with colourful yarns of adventures with his “alternative” friends; the “Famous Five” he called them. Sometimes, without warning, “You go out and enjoy yourself. Come back any time after 10.30pm.” Shane would say in his appeasing voice, letting Julian know he had to be out that evening and what time he was permitted to return. Shane would shower, apply aftershave, don his grey and pink checked, 3 piece suit, and complete the “look” so carefully cultivated with a fedora. Julian guessed these evening assignations were with the “Famous Five”, either singly or in various combinations. Him meeting any was out of the question. Not permitted.
Walking out of the courtroom, Zac turned to the couple who had fostered him for the last six years. His face lit up a huge grin on his face.
”I won, she is out of my life. I’m all yours, you can now adopt me.”
His birth mother stormed out, mouthing abuse at anyone in her path. Zac stood his ground his eyes blazing. Hesitating, his mother met his eyes, turned and stalked away.
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