Bully (16 page)
Authors: A. J. Kirby
‘I need to know where my crutch is,’ I chanced. ‘I can’t see it anywhere.’
Burt smiled.
‘Such an obvious question, young man,’ he said. ‘It’s in the kitchenette. I couldn’t have you running out on me before I had chance to tell you what I needed to tell you… or remember what it was that I was supposed to give you…’
‘Why do you say that about us not having much time,’ interrupted Dick, sounding remarkably compos mentis for about the first time since he’d arrived.
Burt smiled again. This time it was a cruel, knowing smile. Not a shopkeeper’s smile at all, but the smile of a man who’s seen it all and who knows what’s coming.
‘If it wasn’t you that broke the window, lad, someone did,’ he said.
‘Who?’ shouted Dick.
‘You know very well…’
‘We need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘Get me the crutch, Dick.’
‘You’ve not asked what you need to ask yet,’ said Burt, slowly, calmly lighting up another cigarette from the butt of his last one. The ashtray was overflowing now. Surely a fire risk.
‘What is he on about?’ asked Dick, not making any move to get the crutch.
‘I’m
on
about guilt, boys. Guilt,’ said Burt. And suddenly we saw the light in his eyes once again. ‘I’m
on
about what you need to know about guilt and what it does to people in this town. We’re killing ourselves, aren’t we? Be it the smack or the booze or the fags or the jumping off bridges.’
‘He didn’t jump,’ muttered Dick.
‘That may well be,’ continued Burt, ‘but have you ever considered
why
so many people seem to be on a one-way ticket to hellsville in this town?’
‘Do you mean all the graveyards?’ I asked, remembering what my father had said in school that day. ‘The processing of the people…’
‘In the old days, it was the mills. Now it’s the drug dependency,’ said Burt. ‘But what drives people into this mess in the first place? Tell me, have you heard of a thing called the purpling?’
I felt my face blanch. I had heard of the purpling. Why, in this flat, I’d heard of the purpling… But I couldn’t answer Burt’s question.
‘It used to be that the purpling only came to certain people. A madness, it was. A death-wish so to speak. Where good folk feel that they have no other choice than to persecute themselves into living the lives that they don’t want to live.’
I nodded my head, tried not to look at Dick, whose mouth was wide-open, catching flies. We were under his spell, and despite the fact that we should have just run away, got as far away as we possibly could, we just kept listening.
‘But the more people came into Newton Mills – the more people that were poisoned by the town – the more it became like an epidemic. First at the mills, then in the schools where they taught you lack of ambition, and then when they let you drink and take drugs. Without ever caring what it did to you… I was younger than most when I began my purpling… At first I felt it as a… I don’t know… a desire to inflict pain on others. And then I started to turn that hatred in on myself. The purpling is a desire to bruise and cripple what is innermost about yourself until there is nothing left.’
‘How did you get away?’ I breathed. My good leg was drumming up and down, wanting away from the place, but somehow, I stayed rooted to the spot. And helpless.
‘I didn’t get away, son,’ said Burt, slowly. ‘I just left for a bit and came back. And the purpling had already taken Sheila – that’s my wife – in my place. I tried to take it back from her, but it took us both in the end.’
‘But you’re still alive,’ I said.
‘Am I?’ asked Burt, looking me straight in the heart. ‘Am I really?’
‘You sold us bastard cigarettes when we were twelve,’ said Dick, holding one finger up as though he were a case lawyer proving an incontrovertible point.
‘Lads,’ he said calmly. ‘Do you not realise? You were already taken! I could see it in you that you were gone. Lost. The purpling had started in you boys even earlier than it had with me… And the purpling had a very specific job that it needed you to do, didn’t it?’
We both drained our whiskies at the same time, Dick and I, unsure of the exact nature of the information that was being imparted to us, but both recognising, in our own fucked-up little ways that it was bad. Oh it was bad, and there was no escaping it.
‘You’ve had a shock, lads,’ said Burt. ‘I’d better get us another bottle of the good stuff so we can talk some more about this. There’s other things you need to know before you face what it is you need to face.’
He wrenched himself up from his armchair. I wanted to call him back; the whisky bottle on the table still had enough in it for at least three more shots. But the old man was determined, and we had to let him have his time. I turned round to speak to Dick, and all I saw written on his face was raw fear.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I lied. ‘It’ll all get sorted.’
Dick wouldn’t reply. Couldn’t reply.
We sat in silence and listened to Burt rummaging around in the cupboards again. Heard him cursing and panting and moaning. Suddenly, the old man called through to us. ‘I remember what it was I was supposed to give you now,’ he shouted.
And then he gave this little half-laugh, half whoop of joy, as though he’d discovered buried treasure. And in a way, he had; his own memories. We listened some more as he rattled around behind the fridge, this time with far more speed and purpose. And then we heard a terrible, massive thud. And then we heard nothing.
Dick and I both lurched into the kitchenette as quickly as we could. But our uncoordinated three-leg race had only one winner, and it wasn’t us. When we finally reached the sad little ante-room, we found Burt’s body twisted on the floor. A look of complete and utter terror was burned into his face. His eyes were bulging out of their sockets and there was a strong smell of shit. Worse; worse than any of this was the sight of his right hand which was battered and bruised, but still clutching the spear that had been sticking out of my chest in the C. U. M building. The spear that Tommy Peaker had pulled out.
So that was what Burt was going to give me; the spear. The warning.
‘Oh my God,’ breathed Dick. ‘He’s dead.’
‘We need to call the police,’ I whispered, trying to bend down, frantically trying to find a pulse. Guilt was already quickening on me.
‘We need to get out of here,’ said Dick, coldly. ‘Don’t you see what this will look like? The two of us – me one of Burt’s renowned smackheads – in his front room; him dead in the kitchen and a smashed window out front. Who are the filth going to believe?
What
are the filth going to believe?’
I crouched over the broken body of Burt. The man whose surname we’d never bothered to ask. The man who’d been trying to reach out to us. The man whose coffin nails helped the rot to set in. And I shed a single tear for him. I heard Dick moving away from me, back to the cupboards, where he started fumbling around, just as Burt had, only minutes before. I shot him a murderous look.
‘What?’ he pleaded. ‘We’re going to need money, aren’t we? Where we’re going?’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
Dick ignored me. Continued pulling out rusted tin cans and moth-eaten cereal packets. Finally closed his hands around the prize; an old money jar which contained a few old pound coins. He smashed the jar on the kitchen surface with a practiced ease and deposited the coins into the pocket of his tracksuit. And I swear in that one moment, Dick positively
glowed
purple. Like an aura or a fucked-up halo all around him.
Once a junkie, always a junkie,
was all I could think
.
We stepped along Dye Lane, keeping away from the glare of the streetlights. It seemed a pointless thing to do; Tommy could find us whenever he wanted, light or no light. But somehow it gave us comfort. Somehow, being on the move gave us comfort too. And we found a companiable stride in the half moon’s light; me struggling along on crutches and Dick staggering through drink and drugs.
We passed the old graveyard where we’d go to smoke the single cigarettes from Burt’s and I gave the place a two-fingered salute, just for good measure. In the moonlight, my fingers seemed to glow purple, just as Dick was back in the kitchenette. Quickly I pulled them down.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Dick.
‘I thought you had a plan… You said we’d need money where we were going?’
‘We’ll always need money,’ said Dick.
‘We should find Twinnie’ I said. ‘Tell him what we know. Find out what he knows…’
‘Twinnie’s gone bad… And anyway, how’d you reckon we find him? He’s off the radar…
‘Do you not have a mobile number for him or anything?’ I asked.
Dick started frantically tapping the side of his head. ‘Don’t have no mobile for anyone, mate. They’re just tracking devices so they know what we’re doing all the time. No. I don’t have no numbers for anyone. I just use my instincts.’
I tried not to sigh with impatience. Stepping back into Newton Mills really was like stepping back in time. The town boundary sign should have read:
Welcome to Newton Mills, twinned with Level Six, Hell. Please leave all accoutrements from the twentieth century in the basket provided. You will find no need – or reception – for mobile phones, satellite navigation systems, Channel Five on the TV and anything else you might pull out of your candy ass. You are welcome to hang on to your weapons, however.
‘Well what are your instincts telling you now?’ I asked.
‘That we’re in deep, deep shit,’ said Dick, stopping abruptly on the pavement. ‘I saw shadows in there, moving. Before we found him. Didn’t want to say anything ‘cos I thought you’d think I was mad… and I never smashed that window… Bully? What if it really is Tommy Peaker, like you said? Out to kill us all…’
‘Then we make ourselves ready for him,’ I said, pulling Dick along with me, despite the searing pain from my leg.
Chapter Eleven
“
The levee was dry”
How do you find someone that doesn’t want to be found? In Newton Mills, the general plan would be to check some of the ropier pubs; the Choke actually being one of the better ones. For there are places in Newton Mills in which any sane person should fear to tread. Places where, in the golden days, and perhaps even now, bare-knuckle boxing is live and immediately
in your face
; far more diverting than the bore-draw in the football, being beamed by satellite - or more likely from some crackly Norwegian channel - onto the massive screen in the corner.
Or you could try some of the drug dens. Rented flats above the shops in the high street whose naked light-bulbs burn brightly through the night; places where everyone’s welcome, providing there’s a few crisp notes – no questions asked – in your back burner.
If the person that you were searching for was young, you could check some of the old, crumbling mill buildings down in the gorge, where me and Dick and Lion and sometimes good old Tommy – rock on Tommy – would skive school and smoke someone’s mum’s fags, pilfered that day from their handbag on the kitchen table. If the person was old, you could, of course, try the old warehouses, up by the toffeeworks; places where you’d share your breakfast with a veritable army of rodents and otherwise empurpled townspeople.
Where you’d never look is outside the town boundaries. Newton Mills has a pull about it. It draws you back in; wraps its icy claws around your heart and won’t let go, no matter how much you kick and scream. Richard Featherstone told me that, and more on our lonely tramp along the early morning streets. He told me of how difficult he’d found it to make a life for himself and his children and for Laura. He told me about how he’d always
meant
to give up on the smack, but there was always a face in the pub that grinned and winked at you until you followed it, like a rat behind the pied-piper and found yourself in some squalid dive, squandering your kid’s inheritance on a few hours of escape from the mundanity of life in a small town.
‘It’s hopeless; we could try every place in this damned town and we still might miss him. There’s too many places to hide. Too many old buildings and
off the radar
places… Hell, the whole town’s set up to be
off the radar,
’ said Dick.
I simply nodded in assent. I already knew what needed to be done. I knew that the one man that might be able to tell me what I needed to know was my poor old dad. He would know, more than anyone else, where Twinnie would be. And although I’d not spoken to him for years – I’d cut all ties with everyone as soon as I left – I knew he’d hold no grudges. He, as much as anyone, knew what the town could drive a person to do.
I knew dad would still be living in the old house up on Hangman’s Row. I knew that inside, he’d still keep the memories of my mum, my brother and me burning. But it was only when we crossed Meat Street that Dick seemed to divine where we were headed.
‘Th- that’s the first place anyone would look for us – for you,’ he stammered, suddenly scared again. ‘As soon as I hear the sirens, I’m outta there, Bully. No matter how much you wanna see your old dad.’
I grimaced.
‘There won’t be any sirens, Dick. Nobody will know or care that the old bastard is dead on his floor. There won’t be any sirens.’
‘But Tommy… Tommy Peaker doesn’t come with any sirens on, does he?’
‘No. No he doesn’t, but he can find us anywhere. It doesn’t matter where we are. When he wants to find us, he’ll find us.’
‘Like he has a tracking device?’ asked Dick.