Runt (6 page)

It would be good this world with no Arthur-ness in it. And that’s how it should be cos Arthur’s not from here anyway and doesn’t belong here with me and Arrn and Drunkle and even My Mam Bethan sometimes and he should go back to the place he came from which isn’t This World but might be somewhere
in
This World in a lake say or a cave but not here on the mountain that wears the sun. Not here where he can go about his face-scrapey business he should be in the ground with the worms and grubs that bastard Arthur whose wife Rhiannon smiled at me in a way she didn’t smile at any other and I didn’t know what that meant but did know it made me less scared of Arthur even with his bigness and the badness in me that he made grow.

People started to go off in groups. I saw lots of dogs and some guns. I heard lots of voices with a lot of laughing in those voices and the voices were big and high but they didn’t need to be. It was as if most of the people were not being themselves and were speaking loud on purpose so other people could hear them who they weren’t even talking at and I wondered why that should be.

I heard a whistle and looked round and saw Drunkle
by
the truck waving me over to him so I went over to him. I could see Arrn’s face behind the back window with his eyes all big and home to worryment.

—Arthur have a word with you, aye?

Yes I said. And his missis Rhiannon did give me a smile that made me hot but I didn’t tell that bit to Drunkle.

—I thought he would. You’re okay, tho, yeh?

Again I said yes and told him I wasn’t scared even tho I was but Rhiannon’s smile was still in me.

—Well, just be careful, that’s all. I’ll keep my eye on that bastard as well but I can’t
always
be around, y’know?

He gave me the tent rolled up in its bag and I put it on my back with my arms through the loops and it wasn’t heavy at all even tho it would be my home for a bit. I felt like a snail. Drunkle put the rucksack with the clanking pans on his back which went clank and then he put a bottle in each of his coat pockets which made a sort of clanky sound as well and then he put his gun over his shoulder and told me to let Arrn out of the truck and I asked him if I should put Arrn on his lead and Drunkle looked around the car park with no people in it any more and said no it’d be okay but that I should take it with me Just In Case.

I let Arrn out and he went mad, going jump and wag. Drunkle told him to Behave Himself in a voice that had a hardness in it and he stopped jumping and sat and didn’t look sad just kind of in a calmness and happy’d to be out and his face with all that in it made me laugh. Drunkle leaned against the truck and lit a
cigarette
and the smoke went up and then drifted away like a running cloud.

—We’re going over the ridge, he said, and made his cigarette point to a High Bit that I could see below the sun.—No, fuck that, we’re going
around
the ridge. Take a bit longer like but as long as we get to the stones by night. That’s the main thing.

Stones? There were a million stones on the mountain. The mountain itself was a giant stone. —What stones, Uncle?

—Them standing stones. By the spring. I’ve taken you there before, remember? Twlc y Filiast?

I remembered then and put a smile into the air cos I liked that name and Arrn wagged his tail a bit cos he liked that name as well cos it was
his
name in a way and he understood that and I understood him. Drunkle liked that place, Them Stones, and he had taken me there five times and Auntie Scantie went with us two times as well and I thought that going there again would make Drunkle sad and that made me wonder and I was going to ask Drunkle why we were going there but he rubbed my head which I liked and asked if I was ready and then went off and me and Arrn followed him. Them Questions again. Why is it that grown-up people always ask questions that they don’t care if you answer or not? They put a question at you and then just walk away or just carry on talking and I don’t know why they do that it puts a puzzlement in me and a wonderment and not like that wonderment the birds put in me or the mountains put in me it is a wonderment that makes me a bit not-nice-hot. Even Drunkle does it but he’s my Drunkle.

We walked out of the car park our little Army Of Three and through the village and down a lane and around an old house with nobody in it and over a bridge and over a fence and over a boggy bit that went squish. Arrn loved it, he did, snuffling and sniffing everything he could see and getting all dirty. He sniffed some reeds a bit far away from me and a whitey bird not small flew up screaming and started to swoop on him and Drunkle said it was a harrier probably with chicks and would most likely blind Arrn so he shouted him over and Arrn came with a worryment in his face which made me laugh and the not-small screaming swooping bird went back into the reeds. I liked that bird very much. I’d seen the type of him before but never up that close and I wondered if birds like that had babies like Charlesworth did not kittens of course but if one of their babies would be different to the others, a different colour and a different size and a different Way in it to the others in the nest with him. I hoped they did. I hoped everything did that in the world had babies, not millions of babies like frogs or fish but just a few like hedgehogs or foxes and that looked like their Mams and Dads when they came out of their Mams but maybe a bit different to them like a different size or shape or colour. I hoped all the babies in the world had a chance to be like that, I did, had a chance to come out of their Mams and be borned into the world like that, that’s what I hoped, yes.

The ground got more wet and squishsome so we crossed it me and Drunkle by jumping from Dry Hump to Dry Hump but Arrn just ran straight through it
and
got all mucksome. One big jump at last after loads of Dry Hump Jumps landed us on a path made by sheep and it was drier and better but Arrn didn’t seem to think so cos there weren’t as many sniffs for him to get all wag-happy’d about. That path took us up to a High Bit and made Drunkle breathe like the Devil’s Bridge train whuffwhuff, whuffwhuff and put a harderness in my breathing too and made Arrn’s tongue flop out the side of his mouth like raw meat and Drunkle sat down against a rock and I did too and Drunkle began to drink or carried on to drink cos he’d already started back at the pub and he gave me an apple to eat and Arrn a biscuit and I ate the lovely apple and a wind came up from this High Place and pulled my hair and slapped my face it was a NotDad wind and I hated it and wanted it gone. I heard high screamings and looked up and saw big big birds tiny high up in the sky and they made me feel better because I knew I could send them to claw out NotDad’s eyes if I wanted to but I didn’t want to cos I was better than him but I knew they would if I asked them to.

The High Places are quiet like nowhere else is. They’re quiet even tho they’re noisy with the wind-sounds and the high screamings of the high birds but still they are dead dead quiet. Across the boggy bit and over the village on the mountainside far away I could see tiny people moving sideways across the slopeyness of the mountain. Tiny tiny tiny from this very farawayness like the high screaming birds. I pointed to them and Dunkle made his eyes go all thin and squinty then nodded.

—Daft bastards. They’ll find bugger all. Beast be fucked. Daft as us, eh?

I asked him if he thought we’d find the thing that was killing all the sheep and he shook his head.

—No.

—Why?

—Cos it doesn’t even exist. It’s not there.

—But you said …

I didn’t remember what he said properly but I did remember thinking of lions and tigers roaring cos of his words and Drunkle said that he’d spoke about an escaped Exotic Pet or something
but
and when he said that ‘
but
’ I thought uh-oh cos I knew his speaking was going to go all funny again and he hadn’t even drunk very much. And he started then to make words about monsters and demons that are Made By Us and by the energies in our heads, they were the words he used. He said that once we were prey and not predators and that one time long long ago we were the rabbits and not the raptors and that our souls still remember that and keep the monsters at loose in the world and I didn’t know what to think or say about that so I asked him why again and he said:

—Cos if you repress a god, you get a demon. Try to fight a destructive power and you do nothing but nourish your own. We
need
monsters to remind us of who we are and our place in the world, to bolt the windows and doors against when it’s dark, to define ourselves by what we are not. And if the need to do that becomes so powerful, if we
let
it become so powerful, then …

He held his arms out and the bottle went slosh and he made a smile but not like Rhiannon did.

—Mutilated sheep in trees. Because you give it a
shape
, don’t you? The darkness, like. You allow it to take a form. We
want
to find sheep torn up in trees cos then we can take up our guns and play Hunt the Monster and do what we think we should be doing, what we think we were put on earth to do. What we
think
our lives should be all about. Doing this makes us feel important, a
part
of all this. We can no more stop ourselves from doing this than we can stop ourselves from going to the toilet when we need to. See what I mean?

He nodded at something and I made my eyes follow his nodding and they saw Arrn in the long grass doing a poo. Just his head sticking up over the long grass but I knew what he doing cos of his face.

—It’s all like just a big film, Drunkle carried on saying. —We all have assigned roles and we accept them eagerly only we’re too stupid to realise what they are and even if we did we wouldn’t care cos we need all this to feel alive. Need to be able to step outside our dull and daily lives and do things that make us feel important, that make our lives worth living. It’s like the MAFF men; in a way I can’t blame them cos they were just acting against the germ which had been turned into a monster and, really, that’s exactly what we’re all doing today out here on these mountains. Monsters don’t have to be the size of lions to be able to mutilate sheep. Sometimes the monsters are so small you can’t even see them. And names; what does it matter what they’re called? Can’t say MAFF men any more, they’re DEFRA men now. But they’re still the same thing;
still
the fuckers that shot our sheep. Still the fuckers that made Fay …

Arrn jumped out of the long grass then and came over to me going wag and I patted him and he jumped away to sniff some more things and he seemed all happy now that the poo was out of him.

Drunkle said: —Grief, for instance. Take grief.

Uh-oh, I thought. A great big UH-OH is what I thought right then.

—Most evil, most horrific monster of all and mainly because it’s
there
. We didn’t invent it. It’s there in the world and you can touch it and see it and we make things up to deal with it and mask it and turn it into something else but we’ll always fail because it’s too big and we’re too weak. We need certain things to make us happy and one of those things is other people but other people die. Grief is the price we pay for love. I saw Fay’s face with no life in it and saw the colour she’d gone and felt the weight of her after the life had left her and the space she has left in the world now has been filled only with my sadness. Cos I mean she’s fucking
gone
; if I could search every last cupful of space in the universe there would be absolutely nothing of her that I could see with these eyes or feel with these fingers.

He waggled the fingers of the hand that didn’t have the bottle in it and drank from the bottle as he waggled them. I didn’t really know what he was speaking only that his words were putting a big sad in me and that I wanted to see Auntie Scantie again and hear her laughing.

—See, her death means that there is no
now
. I mean,
I
can’t look at the clock any more and wonder where she is because she just
isn’t
. All there is for me is a past to look back on and at night sometimes I shout out for her to come back, come back to me even tho I
know
she can’t. And what she is now, if she is anything at all, is completely unimaginable to me. She is like God. And in the only life I
can
imagine, here on this soil …

He patted the mountain he was sitting on like I pat Arrn’s head only harder and it made a noise twice.

—… God hurts us more than we can bear. More than our worst fears, more than we could ever, ever imagine.

The bottle went glug glug and splish as he drank and his throatlump went up and down twice.

—So let God forgive God. Because
I
fucking can’t.

Drunkle’s words sent me strange then. He made more words, something about me being Special like he says to me quite a lot cos he’s my Drunkle but I wasn’t really listening to him I was looking at the grass and feeling myself small on the side of the mountain and wasn’t even looking out for Arrn. I was thinking about there being no future-times in front of me no times when Rhiannon would bring me soup or no times when My Mam Bethan and NotDad would Go Their Separate Ways and no times even when I would have My Times or even go back to Drunkle’s house and eat fried eggs for my tea or breakfast like little suns. Not all sad this because there would be no times when I would be older and no time when Arrn would die even tho I knew Arrn would never die really in a way cos he’d just leave this earth and
go
back to the place he came from which maybe all of us do, even Auntie Fay and that’s where she is now. But Drunkle said there was no
now
which meant that there would be no ending to anything which meant that everything would die again and again and again too many times to count, they would die every time a tree is blown over and starts to rot away and the platey fungussy stuff like that behind Drunkle’s toilet begins to grow and every time someone dies for the first or the millionth time it would be like every other time for everybody else which means that people will be sadded for millions of times more than they would be happy’d which means that the monster that Drunkle spoke about would always be the winner cos nothing would ever become something else.