Runt (2 page)

—Every last one of em, Drunkle said. He was drinking from a bottle with one hand and driving the wheel with the other. —Shot them all. Perfectly good animals, every last one. Me and Fay, we would’ve known if something was wrong and all’s they had to do was quarantine us for a bit, cut the road off, y’know … Foot-and-mouth virus can’t live moren a hundred yards outside of a host, did you know that?

Yes I did I said but I don’t think he heard me cos he just went on talking and driving and having a drink from his bottle. We passed some trees and the sunlight through them trees flashed and then FLASHED in the truck and I started to feel happy and going, that taken-away feeling and every tiny creature in these woods I knew, every animal from deers to things the size of a full stop and even smaller I knew by name and I knew their lives and what they did and what made them live and what would kill
them
but not whether they were good or bad cos every last single one of them was Good. Even the spiders and even the lice and the owls with their claws and the stoats with their jaws and moving ways like the oil that comes when Drunkle drains sumps and their murdering of the baby rabbits and the grown-up rabbits too and even them horrible orange flies that make their homes in poo, all of it all of Them was nothing but Good and I felt my eyes roll back to look at my mind and then Arrn licked the back of my ear cos I think he was a bit scaredy of Drunkle’s swervey driving and his tongue’s warm wetness brought me back into the truck and Drunkle’s talking and I was gladded and I reached back and stroked Arrn, happy’d by him for bringing me back cos I wasn’t really ready for My Times just then and I never really am. But I knew them all, I did then, every crawling flying jumping sliming spitting biting thing up here in this High Earth place.

—How could I have known, Drunkle said in questiony words altho they were not a question. —How could I have known …

His face was all of a wetness. I don’t think he was talking to me really but his bottle and his truck and the upness and mist around him that he drove us through to his house.

—Fucking compo. As if
anything
could make it better, as if
anything
could ever compensate. Having to take your own wife down from a tree. Not all the money in the world, mun, not every last penny in the entire fucking …

And then I got a bit of a shock cos in a sudden he
smiled
all big and grabbed and shook my knee in his hand all big too and lumpy like a turnip.

—Still got
you
, tho, eh? Still got my special nephew, isn’t it?

I gave the smiling back to him. —And Arrn.

—Oh and Arrn, aye, mustn’t forget old Arrn. Us three, we’ll get through it all together, won’t we? Us three, boy, we’re an army. Aren’t we? Nothing can touch us three, isn’t that right?

I nodded and said yes and I liked the feel of my knee in his hand but I liked it better when he put his hand back on the wheel cos then the truck wasn’t going All Over The Road any more with the big big drop beside. I liked as well very much the army of us three me and Drunkle and Arrn, our own little army in the world against people like bad bad Arthur and NotDad and them who would shoot a feller’s sheep or a lady’s sheep too and make that lady turn herself into fruit. I
liked
being in that army and I felt happy then even tho the sheep and Auntie Scantie were all Dead and Gone and My Mam had a bad egg eye cos of NotDad and I was still burning red hot at NotDad but I was happy too with Drunkle and Arrn in the truck, our army of three up here in the High Parts.

—Yur special, boy, you know that? Yur not like other boys. There is in you a peculiar place …
diff’rent
place …

Uh-oh, I thought; here we flippin go. Drunkle was starting to talk in that Strange Way he does when there is enough drink inside his belly to make his words go Strange and not like he normally speaks or not like anyone normally speaks. And being up here too with the world so far below sends his
speaking
strange and he makes words that I can never understand but sometimes they sound nice like when he calls me Special and things like that but his words do go all funny and he gets a kind of torch in his eyes as if he is seeing a world different to this one where everyone speaks like he does and it is not Strange to speak that way like him.

—A peculiar place that only you can go to and one other but that one other is everything. D’you understand me? There is a wound in you where He can enter. D’you understand what am saying?

I couldn’t hear the big ‘H’ that Drunkle put on his ‘He’ but it was like I could
see
it. Like a giant rugby goalpost standing out all of a whiteness on top of the green mountain with Drunkle’s little house below it that I could now see.

—Your wound is a doorway.

—I’m not cut, I told him. —He just grabbed me on the neck, he did. I’m okay. Don’t worry, Uncle.

He laughed. —You’re not cut in your skin, no. But see in here?

He thudded the bottle against his chest.

—And in here?

He clonked the bottle against his head.

—
That’s
where yur wounds are. Them Times you have, you know when you go away from everything? That’s your wound, that’s where you’re different to other people. It makes of you His favourite, His chosen vessel among the millions and why should you be so? Why should you have this burden put on you?

Them big H’s again. Two of them this time but
going
quick away cos we drove close up to Drunkle’s house then and the top of the mountain was now too steep to see.

—Cos yur a healer. Hear me? You were put here to help others in their pain. People like you have been around since we first started living in caves and realised that that orange flickery stuff the sun made in the dry grass could be all we needed in the world, the, this, the
physical
world. People like you, aye, but not
many
people like you. Because …

He stopped his speaking and I was glad because he was speaking things I didn’t know and didn’t want to know really cos I wanted to get out of the truck and into the house and Arrn did too, no rest in him on the back seat there with his claws click-clicking at the windows and his whining. Drunkle drank from his bottle and looked out at the mountain rising up in no noise except for the engine ticking as the truck fell asleep and then he looked at me and he grinned.

—Teatime, anyway, isn’t it? What d’you fancy?

Eggs I wanted, two of them fried like suns.

—Then eggs it is.

We went out of the truck and Arrn like a mad thing ran across the muddy yard and I went to go shouty at him to come back but Drunkle said no.

—Don’t bother, bach. He’s as happy to be away from that place as you are. And no more sheep for him to worry no more, is there?

That made me sad. No more sheep making their noises up here, none of them any more like little clouds on the sides of the mountains. No more lambs when
the
sun starts to come out for the year moving like springs in the fields with their eyes all big and ears all floppy.

—Will you get any more, Uncle?

—What, sheep?

Nod.

—Don’t know for sure, but probably not, no. Couldn’t, really, not with Fay being gone and all that. I mean, they were
her
sheep, really, all this was her idea. Her inheritance money that bought this place. City girl too, she was. Never thought all this could get in her blood, like, but … Suppose it must’ve done.

His face had gone wet again and he shook his wet face and then whistled for Arrn who came running to us with his feet and his face all dirty with bits of straw sticking up out of the muck on him like he had grown yellow spikes. I noticed then that it smelled a bit bad up here and it never used to smell bad and that it looked all dead untidy and it never used to do that either with bits of machines everywhere and empty barrels and stuff and plastic bags blowing across the yard in the breeze. It used to be clean up here and it wasn’t now was what I was thinking but I still loved being up there in the High Bits with my Drunkle and my dog and that NotDad bastard was far away in the Belowness. My Mam’s bad eggy eye was down there with him, far away.

Drunkle threw his empty bottle away into a pile of mud against the midden wall like a drifty bit of snow but black and smelly and it sank in and went squelch as it did. Then he opened the door to his house and
all
three of us like a great little army, me the soldier and Drunkle the general and Arrn the High King, all went inside.

—Do you know what it’s like?

Two fried eggs I ate from Drunkle’s own chickens like two little suns on my plate they were. Arrn got given a beef knuckle and he was chewing it and crunching on it for hours with bits of it everywhere but Drunkle’s house was such a bad mess anyway and it never used to be that way that more mess didn’t matter any more.

—Do you want to know what it’s like?

Drunkle was drinking from another bottle and that’s all he had for his tea, no food. And he was doing it again, again he was putting questions at me which I couldn’t make an answer to so he answered them himself.

—It is like fear. It is like being very, very scared. It is like being lost in a forest somewhere at night-time and something is stalking you through the trees. You can’t see it, so you don’t know what it is, but from the sounds it makes you know that it’s very, very big and could with ease and pleasure rip all your arms and legs off and you know that that’s
exactly
what it’s going to do
when
, not
if
, it finds you.

I didn’t like that. Big thing of evilment hunting me in the woods and me all alone then me with no arms or legs screaming and no help coming I did not like that no and I went to put my hands over my ears to keep out Drunkle’s words but I knew that he was needing me to listen to him and that he’d be made
sad
if I hid my ears with my hands. So I looked at Arrn instead but he was still bloody busy with his knuckle holding it tight in his mucky paws and bonebits like little spears all around him there on the dirty rug in front of the fireplace where a chair burned like
I
burned at the thinking of that Stalking Thing.

—It is the dread of death, and the terrible fear of my own aloneness. It cripples me utterly, being alive and alone, being without Fay. No man should
ever
have to cut the body of his suicided wife out of a tree. No one should
ever
have to suffer that. How can a man live, after doing that? How can he?

At it again with his questions he was.

—How could I have known … how could I have known …

At it again with Them Words he was and at it again he was with his eyes all melty like the springs in the High Parts when the winterness goes. And he was at it again too with his bottle-gulpy ways but he’s always been at
them
cos he’s my Drunkle.

—Everything’s gone to a mess. See the mess around here? Lonely people become first untidy then they become filthy cos cleanliness loses its point and we yearn for distractions and letting the shite build up is exactly that and d’you want to know why? Because then, see, then, you can
clean
everything up. Just got to hope that the urge to clean comes on you before you get buried in the muck, isn’t it?

He showed me his teeth in what looked a bit like a smile.

—That’s the race, boy, isn’t it? To beat the shite before it buries you. Cos that’s what it wants to do,
see
, it wants to creep up on you and suck you into it. Big mound of black stinking shite from the earth’s bowels and –

Drunkle then made a terrible sucky sound and I thought uh-oh ear-hiding time again but again I didn’t and Arrn had his tongue inside his bone now. His ears looked very bright red in the light from the little flames from the burning chair.

—I’m gunner have to get some stuff from your mother, aren’t I? You gunner be up here all summer and everything, you’re gunner need some medicine. You’re still on the lamotrigine? That sodium valproate?

I did not know the second name only the first one so I gave just one nod and then one shake of my head. Drunkle told me to hold my hand out so I did and he held it for a moment then sat back going ‘mmm’ like he thought he was Dr Llewellyn in the town who I once liked but hadn’t seen for ages not since NotDad came into my life which was when I stopped taking the pills too which didn’t really matter cos My Times just sick’d them back out anyway.

—No shaking. Have they put you on clonazepam?

Nor did I know that name as well so I shook my head. I wanted those names to stop.

—I’ll have to have a word with your mother.

Funny eyes in my Drunkle again there was then. Little fires in them from the burning chair or his burning brains I didn’t know but they turned his words again and there wasn’t much left in his bottle.

—See, my Drunkle said putting a looking at the flames. —There is no God in happiness. When yur happy, see, there are claims and demands made on you
and
these can seem to you like interruptions, like a distraction and an undermining of your contentment. They’re not wanted in laughter. When two people laugh together, they don’t need a third voice butting in because that weakens their unique togetherness. But, see, when yur in pain? Well, then you go to Him for comfort and all’s you find is an absence. The fucker’s not there. All there is is silence.

Like the bit of nice silence then that came into the room when Drunkle stopped his talking but I knew it wouldn’t be for very long only the pops of the chair in the fire and the crunching of Arrn at his bone. And a noise in my ears maybe my heart pushing the blood up into my head and I wanted that Quiet to go on I wanted to go up to look at Bala Lake on Drunkle’s screen and wait for the monster. I went to ask him if his screen was still showing Bala Lake but he carried on with his funny talk looking now down into the nearly empty bottle as if the little hole in the top of it was a little ear he was talking into. A little round glass ear.

—She speaks to me, y’know. As do all the dead to all of us. You’ve got to learn to listen to what the dead say because they have tales to relate and lessons to teach us. All the dead everywhere in the earth beneath your feet in the thin soil. Listen to what they’re saying.