Bully (14 page)

Chapter Nine

“
Moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone”

I propped up the bar like my grandfather had done before me, mangled leg well hidden by my pack. Occasionally, some regular or other would try to engage me in conversation, but soon took my grunted responses as a sure-fire sign that I didn’t want to talk. I had more pressing matters to take care of. Like pouring enough lager and whisky down my gullet that I could numb the pain.

Only the wheezing, chain-smoking old man managed to even get me to stop staring at my reflection in the dirty mirror behind the Choke’s bar.

‘Guilt does funny things to a feller,’ he wheezed to me while waiting for his next half of bitter.

‘What?’ I asked, swinging round on my bar stool to meet his eyes, bristling with indignation. His face was as stained as the wallpaper and his eyes were rheumy and weak. I could hear the death’s rattle of his lungs when he breathed, but his chin jutted out with something resembling pride.

‘Whoah there, feller. Just saying: guilt does funny things to folk,’ he more or less repeated, before undertaking some emergency repair work on his dentures with his tongue. In an instant, I knew without doubt who the old man was. It was Burt, the man that used to run the old sweet shop where we used to buy our single cigarettes. Where we’d have to brush off the dog hairs before smoking them. God, the man must have been in his eighties now, surely. How had he managed to survive so long in this rotten town?

‘I can see you been in the forces, son. Been away from here for a while, no doubt,’ he continued. ‘And those that are left behind may feel slighted by your going away. Like your pal that left a while back. But don’t let them get to you, son…’

Burt had been in the forces himself, I recalled, but now his face resembled more of a retired shop-keeper’s face than that of a soldier. It was round and jowly, and kinda loose-fitted. But deep down, underneath the wrinkles and the jaundice, it was definitely the same man that had often shouted at us boys in his shop.

‘Do you remember me?’ I gasped.

Burt tried to smile. Old gravestone teeth collapsed in his mouth.

‘I’m sorry, son. Got no recollection of nobody these days,’ he said. But something about the new light in his eyes told me that he knew more than he was letting on.

‘I had to come back,’ I told him, without quite knowing why.

‘I know, son,’ he said. ‘Everybody does. There’s a pull about this place that you can’t quite put your finger on, isn’t there?’

I nodded. Spun my tot of whisky around the bottom of my glass. Watched how the liquid seemed to cling to the sides. Like it was hoping to escape.

‘I was in the forces myself,’ continued Burt. ‘Way back when. But after the war, when my wife got ill, we just found ourselves stuck here. Couldn’t go nowhere. Can’t remember I left the town boundary last nowadays. But you can make something of a life for yourself.’

I must have grunted my disbelief then for Burt leaned in closer. I could smell the drink off him and also the stink of death. Time wasn’t long for him now. And from somewhere deep inside me, I got the funny feeling that the only reason Burt was alive at all was so he could impart this advice to me in the Choke.

‘Just don’t listen to the voices,’ he breathed. ‘Keep your head down and your nose out of trouble and you’ll be okay.’

But I knew I wasn’t going to be okay. I knew that I was about as far from okay as I could get without passing go and collecting two hundred pounds. I lowered my head onto the bar and felt the weight of the world and of Tommy Peaker on my shoulders. Thing was; the voices Burt was referring to… Well, they were
my
voices, weren’t they, if what Dick had said were true. I’d brought it on myself, this guilt, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, to nobody in particular.

And then I heard everything as a mumble of indistinguishable voices. Someone, probably the young barman shouted something angry. Burt tried to pick me up off the stool and I heard his pained whistling burning a hole in my ears. Someone else was laughing. It could have been Old Tommy Peaker. Somewhere else, a stool collapsed. The sound of rushing feet. A scream as rough hands grabbed me under the arms just like in the C.U.M building way back when. And then it was all darkness as the black hole enveloped me again. Head loss.

Within the black hole, we were young again. I felt strength in my arms and even in my leg. I felt a kinda craziness in my head, like everything was being fast-forwarded. We were sat at the back of the dinner hall at school. On tables which had the chairs affixed to them so they couldn’t be thrown, like in prison. Us slouching and posturing. A handful of girls looking-on with lusty eyes. Dinner ladies trying
not
to look.

Tommy Peaker was pinned into a corner, unable to go anywhere. To one side there was the big dinner hall window, to the other, Twinnie. Behind him was the wall, and facing him down was yours truly. Lion and Dick were kinda leaning across the tables, using their school bags like pillows. Trying to block the view from the other side of the hall.

‘Why’s your mam such a slag, then Tommy?’ someone sneered. Painfully, the realisation came to me that it was me; it was me conducting this interrogation.

‘Are you fucking her now, twatty? Is that why you don’t want to say anything? Are you trying to
protect
her?’

The gaggle of girls screeched in mock alarm. One of them turned her face away but the others had that same blood lust on them as we did. Unfortunately, their scream alerted a teacher, and Mr. Swann swans up to our table with a busybody policeman’s
what’s going on here then?

How could he have missed the agony which was etched across little Peaker’s face? How could he have missed the fact that the four of us lads had him, Tommy, trapped in a corner like a wounded animal? But miss it he did. With a tut, he span on his heels and made for the opposite end of the dining hall, where his presence would have more chance of controlling the raggedy, half-wild children that made up our school. He was probably counting down the seconds until he could quietly slip out and have a crafty cigarette in his car.

We didn’t listen to his moaning. He was last seen backing away, probably going to re-join the queue for Swiss Roll, which was always his favourite pudding.

Dick tutted.

Tommy started whimpering as he unzipped his too-small trousers. Twinnie pulled them down for him. The girls screeched with laughter. Dick clapped his hand on the table with excitement.

A little Pooh-stick of an erection poked out of Tommy Peaker’s boxer shorts. A nice n’ spicy Nik Nak of a nobbled little cock straining for the light.

‘You fucking can,’ I shouted, wheeling my school bag like some medieval weapon around my head and then cracking it into one of his sticky-out ears. Swiftly, we all vacated the back table and made for the exit.

Within the black hole, there was the me from then and the me from now looking on as we strolled past the big dinner hall window, laughing and gesturing at the slumped figure of Tommy Peaker in the corner of the room, still with his pants around his ankles. The me from now wanted to run to him and tell him that we didn’t mean it. We just had nothing better to do and we were sorry.

The me from back then decided to inform one of the dinner ladies of the state of Tommy. That he’d been flashing the girls in the dinner hall… He was last seen being marched to the headmaster’s office in tears. His trousers were ruined. But we knew he wouldn’t tell.

I tried to shout to him.

‘I’m sorry!’ I tried to yell. But all that came out of my pig-ignorant young mouth was further abuse.

I came to, feeling gnarled old hands touching my cheek.

‘What are you sorry about, son?’ asked a soothing voice.

I tried to open my eyes. Anything to dilute the poison that they’d just seen.

‘You’re in a bad way, lad,’ continued the voice. ‘But you’ll be reet.’

Burt, I thought. Burt touching my cheek. Back in the day, the very idea would have caused the rest of the gang no end of amusement. But back in the day, we were amused by anything that caused misery for anybody else.

I opened my eyes. Saw his face almost too close to mine. Almost flinched backwards but managed to stop myself. For in his own eyes was written concern rather than malice. He looked as though he wanted to help.

‘Where am I?’ I managed to gasp.

Really, I should have already known the answer. Really, the relentless smell of off-meat which permeated the place should have told me that I was in one of the upstairs rooms above where Burt’s shop used to be… and where the butcher’s shop of my dad’s history books once was.

Burt creaked himself up to a half-standing position and shuffled away to a moth-bitten armchair by the curtained window. My eyes followed him and took in the room. Like the Royal Choke, it was stuck in a time-warp. Old prints of horses in the fields on the walls; the floral print on the three piece suite; the bare patches on the carpet. As well as the lingering smell of meat, there was also the sharp smell of a million cigarettes smoked over the years in this room. Burt lit up a cigarette now, struggling through a rack of coughing to get the damn thing lit.

‘I’m above the shop,’ I said eventually, answering my own question when it appeared likely that Burt’s coughing fit wasn’t going to cease in the near future.

He managed to nod his assent, before clicking on a radio – more a wireless actually such was its age – in order to muffle the sound. Finally, he managed to regain control of himself.

‘These things,’ he winced, holding up the Dorchester and Grey and regarding it as though he’d never seen the like of it before. ‘These things put me in such a state that the only way I get to feel any better is just by lighting up once more.’

I nodded.

‘And there hasn’t been a shop down there in years,’ he continued. ‘Trouble with the school, and the parents of the kids from the school. They
advised
me that it would be better to close down than face whatever penalties they had in store for me. How’s your leg doing now, lad?’

In truth it itched, just as Do-Nowt had said it would back in the British hospital. It itched to kick a football or to run or to dance. Not that I’d ever danced in my life, but you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve no sympathy for me whatsoever, after what I’d done. Even Burt, the old sly trickster, might have a few things to say if he knew. And I’m not sure if the word ‘rehabilitation’ would enter into any of it.

‘Wrecks,’ I said finally. I tried to shift it on Burt’s sofa, using both of my arms to lift it up like the whole thing was dead and never coming back, and not just my foot.

‘Know the feeling, lad,’ smiled Burt. ‘There’s some wounds you can’t hide, aren’t there?’

And there it was again; that mysterious gleam in his eyes which told me that everything was not exactly as it seemed.

‘Do you honestly not remember me?’ I asked.

‘Nope,’ said Burt.

I fished around in my wallet for a while before producing my old army ID card which I slid across the coffee table towards him, avoiding unknowable spillages and stains along the way. Burt strained and grunted as he reached over. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to make it, but a sharp draw on his cigarette – like Popeye with his spinach – gave him the strength for that final push, and red-faced, he clawed the ID badge.

‘Lance Corporal Gary Bull; Third Infantry,’ he read. ‘Gary Bull… the name sounds familiar…’

‘I’ve heard it all before,’ I replied. ‘
Terry-bull.
’

Burt shook his head.

‘No… I’ve heard the name recently. Since all that happened with the shop and everything. Just give me a minute and it’ll come to me…’

Burt stared wistfully through the curling smoke from his cigarette. I saw him counting through the years and faces and names that he’d long since forgotten. Saw him trying to wire up the old connections up there again. Then, suddenly, he ground out his cigarette and slapped his hand on his thigh.

‘Gary Bull, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment’ he read. ‘Now I remember. I have something I need to give to you.’

He made no move to get out of his seat. For a moment, I thought he was going to start ordering me around to find whatever it was in his own flat.

‘Now where did I put it?’ he mused.