Bully (23 page)

Mrs. Peaker still turned up at the police station, but now she was pretty much turfed out as soon as she made it through the doors. And no lift home was offered now either. Instead she lurked like a ghost in the dark pockets of pubs ready to shriek at anyone that would listen about her darling son Tommy and did they know what had happened to him? And wouldn’t they kindly buy her a drink?

The Peaker family home, if anything, got into a worse state of disrepair. One day a window simply fell out of its frame, nearly decapitating a poor paper boy that was simply minding his own business, trying to skirt around the pack of baying dogs that had gathered in the front yard. Apparently, the damp inside the house had got so bad that everything was simply rotting away or breaking or fusing or collapsing into dust and mould.

Some on the estate, the more house proud amongst them, started to feel like the Peaker home was an eyesore. A slight on all the hard work they’d put into their herbaceous borders and scissor-trimmed metre-square lawns. Committee meetings were held in local pubs – the ones that Mrs. Peaker was already barred from – and it was decided that a letter should be drafted to the council. They wanted her removed, they claimed, or else rent would not be paid.
We may only be tenants, but we have rights too, you know.

At school, Tommy’s name passed from being mentioned in whispers to being used as the butt of sick jokes within weeks. His legendary wanking and his fishy smell and his too-short school-kecks were all valid subjects for a dig. But then, eventually, the teachers stopped bothering to read his name out at all in registration. They blanked him out, just as we had.

And us boys got on with doing what we did best; making everyone else’s lives a misery. We found other hangers-on to coerce into doing our dirty work for us; other willing boys that would steal from the tuck-shop and then pass on their ill-gotten gains hand-over-fist; other boys that would steal Mr. Sharp’s hubcaps; other boys that would daub blood-red graffiti all over the headmaster’s office door, informing him that he was a ‘right cunt.’

Of course, they didn’t ask Twinnie or Dick or Lion to bother coming back for the exams. They advised them to go out looking for jobs. They were always looking out for fresh blood up at the toffee works, dontchaknow? But none of them listened; Twinnie carried on the small-scale drug-dealing business he’d started at school. And his best customer kept coming a-knocking on a daily basis. Yeah, even at that stage, Dick was too fucked-up all the time to get himself a job. Lion did a bit of manual labouring at a local building site, but his poor time-keeping – he never was any good at getting out of bed before midday – soon caught up with him. As did the site foreman once he found out that the four of us were using the little portacabin on site as our temporary – and I was tempted to say ‘clubhouse’ here, but that wasn’t what it was at all – fallout shelter.

We’d go in there and play cards and have a couple of trips or a wrap of speed or a bottle or two of Ice Dragon. But already things were starting to change between us all. I could sense it;
I
had changed. I’d stayed on at school for some reason. Probably because I couldn’t be arsed arguing with dad about it. And anyway, I took my medicine. I numbly slipped into my seat in that exam hall – the dining hall, actually, just made over a little bit – and blankly filled out their forms. Got reasonable grades too, believe it or not. Then slipped numbly into college and more exams and met Jane.

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.