Every Fox is a Rabid Fox Page 2

  Just then, on that hill, the sky lit up. Lightning torch with all its bolts – all five volts of them – splitting the calm of our hidden evening: ‘Boys, go back to bed.’

  It was our father.

  It was work in the morning.

  ‘What about the dog?’ I said quietly, in the few moments we had left.

  ‘He went inside after we left the story,’ said my brother, ‘and found his master propped up in a chair, stains all over the upholstery.’

  ‘What kind of stains?’

  ‘Don’t worry. He was just propped up in an armchair, bled dry, eyes closed, face white as a duvet cover.’

  ‘What duvet cover?’

  Another pause. Ears cocked for footfall on stairs. My brother lay rigid, silent.

  ‘Did it call the police?’ I asked. ‘The dog?’

  ‘No,’ said my brother. ‘He called the stranger’s wife.’

  ‘He had a wife?’ said our dead sister, giggling. ‘That’s embarrassing.’

  ‘How do you know the dog was a boy?’ I said.

  ‘I think the dog was a girl,’ said our sister. ‘Girls are smarter.’

  ‘No,’ said my brother, with some years left alive. ‘The dog was a boy. The frog was a girl. And she’d seen everything.’

  WHAT ABOUT THE KNIFE IN HIS DRAWER?

  Three barely existent children. Three barely distinguishable minutes since our father crashed feet through the ceiling and tore down our pillow fort and ordered us back through our bedroom door. We’d tried asking our father what Gentleman Jim’s real job was numerous times. We’d tried asking him in McDonald’s but he’d been too distracted because I couldn’t finish my fries. Too much milkshake. No answer. ‘That toy stinks of a deep fat fryer,’ in the car on the drive home.

  We’d tried asking him in the car on other occasions, and he’d sigh and rub his temples with both hands off the wheel and his eyes closed as though he was trying to play the Five Second Game with the two of us (my sister didn’t count because she was already dead). We weren’t scared. The Five Second Game hadn’t hurt anyone before. He was an adult, a man in control. And he was never that good at the game because he only managed to count up to three.

  When he opened his eyes again, he’d say something like, ‘You’ve asked me that before.’ Or he’d say something like, ‘You know that question’s boring.’ Or he’d say nothing with his mouth and say something with his hand like SMACK. Reaching round into the back to where either one of us would be sitting. It didn’t matter which one took it. We’d even fight between us to get the seat behind his because it offered a little more protection, but still his arm could reach.

  When it rained, the car wouldn’t start. Those were days of relief.

  In the morning my father ate cornflakes. Tired, having been kept up every night by his children.

  Tired.

  Cornflakes.

  ‘Dad?’

  It would usually be my brother, while our mother was packing our lunches in silence, daydreaming about divorce.

  ‘Dad?’

  Sip of instant coffee.

  ‘Dad?’

  While I dipped my soldiers.

  ‘Dad?’

  And the yolk was destroyed.

  Dad, who was preparing himself for the agony of leaving the house again.

  ‘Dad,’ said my brother, ‘what does Unc–’

  ‘He’s a debt collector,’ said our father. ‘He goes to people’s houses and takes money from them. And when they ask too many questions about why he does what he does, he gets tired and has to sit down. And where do you think he sits?’

  ‘On top of them?’

  ‘That’s right. He sits on their chest until their every last breath has gone.’

  Then there’d be a pause. An awkward ruffle of hair or a funny face. The oven door would slam to break it up and everyone would look at mother.

  ‘What about the knife in his drawer?’ I’d ask.

  ‘We don’t talk about that,’ said Mother, rubbing her arms.

  ‘Is it true it belonged to our grandfather? Is it true our grandfather got it from a dead Gurkha in North Africa? Is it–’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said our mother, who’d wanted a daughter so badly.

  IF YOU COULD KILL SOMEONE, HOW WOULD YOU DO IT?

  ‘If you could kill someone, how would you do it?’

  ‘Here we go,’ says Willow before sipping her vodka cranberry. Same colour as her hair. I was ten minutes early, bought it for her before she arrived. ‘Is that really what you want me to tell my housemates when I get home? That we talked about murdering people?’ The drink is still close to her mouth. She’s teasing a small piece of ice, shaking the glass so slightly she could be trembling. She’s not trembling. It’s Willow. ‘What will you tell them, then?’ I ask.

  ‘That I’m done dating men,’ she says.

  ‘This is a date?’

  She raises her eyes. Seems hours ago she was hugging me. Didn’t expect that. ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘I got here ten minutes early.’

  ‘Why’d you get here ten minutes early?

  ‘So I could buy you a drink and settle into my surroundings.’

  ‘Same old vodka cranberry.’

  ‘I got here early so I could take some cocaine in the toilet.’

  She wipes her left nostril with her thumb.

  ‘So, not that okay, then’ she says, looking at me like I’m a victim. ‘You don’t have to pretend with me. It’s not like we don’t know each other well.’

  I take a drink. Mine’s a lager.

  ‘I’d use a high-velocity rifle,’ I say. ‘A Lee-Enfield .303, maybe, or a Mauser Kar98K. Something with history. A proven track record. But it depends on who I was killing. Knives are personal; explosives cinematic. Out of the question. Anyway,’ pausing for a moment to drink again, ‘you said you’re a florist now?’

  ‘I am a florist,’ she says, shrugging. ‘So much for the English degree.’

  I laugh. That’s good. That means I don’t have to buy her flowers to say thanks for meeting me. Or it means I have to worry twice as much.

  ‘Japanese cherry blossom,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Before you freak out,’ she says. ‘Sit there in silence for two-and-a-half minutes trying to work out if my favourite flower is the same as when we were going out. And no, you don’t ever have to buy some for me. I still care about you. I want to make sure you know that you can talk to me.’

  ‘Isn’t that a tree?’

  ‘They’re all the same to me,’ she says. ‘As long as they’re pink.’

  ‘Like your hair?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘My hair is cranberry.’

  She crunches the ice.

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Do you need another drink?’ I ask.

  ‘I think I do,’ she says, hand in purse. Denim skirt. Sensible heels for a quick getaway. Thirty inch dark wood reclaimed table with a red glass candle holder between us. Wax on the surface. Wax on her fingers. Wax, bored, wax, waiting. Possible hand across the table, it’ll be alright, you’ll get through this.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I tell her. ‘I know the bartender.’ Walking to the bar carefully, little drunk having necked a 25ml whisky in the ten minutes I nervously waited, careful not to trip, checking flies not undone and dick not hanging out, no shit on shoes and, wiping nose, no residue.

  ‘Why are you here,’ I say to the bartender, tall, bob, who is also my dead little sister.

  ‘I thought you missed me,’ she says, ‘for a moment. What with my new hair and, well, age. Look,’ she says, holding her chest, ‘I’ve got boobs.’

  ‘Do you think this is a good idea?’

  ‘It’s the same thing I’ve been doing every night,’ she says, ‘since you found my body in the downstairs bathroom. Remember that?’

  I rub my head. ‘Pint of lager and a
vodka cranberry,’ I tell her.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, ‘but it’s not going to be free.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ asks Willow.

  ‘The bartender?’ I ask, putting down the vodka cranberry. ‘She’s my dead twin sister,’ sitting down with the lager for me.

  ‘I thought you killed her when you were both babies?’ she says. Her straw lies in a cranberry puddle next to the candle holder. I wipe my right nostril. ‘What did you use, a high-velocity rifle?’

  ‘Very funny,’ I say, looking back at the bartender who’d turned back into a stranger. ‘Actually, it was an elbow.’

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ says Willow.

  There’s a pause.

  ‘How is your mother, by the way? I can’t imagine what she’s–’

  ‘In shock, but she’ll be okay.’

  ‘I don’t think a parent can recover from a thing like that.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘And your uncle as well.’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, then doesn’t say anything for a few minutes.

  ‘If I was going to kill someone,’ she says, ‘you, for instance, I’d go on a date with you, to an overpriced bar which stinks of aftershave and ambition. I’d make you pay for all my drinks and an expensive meal, even if I wasn’t hungry. Then, when I’d decided it was over, I’d kiss you.’

  ‘Why would you kiss me if you’re done dating men?’

  ‘It’s not meant to be romantic. It’s business. Besides, I am dating someone.’

  ‘A man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Three months. I’m seeing him later, actually.’

  I nod. ‘How is it?’

  ‘Easy.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Well, we’re older now, aren’t we?’

  ‘I always thought we might try it again one day.’

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ she says. ‘If I wanted to kill you I’d kiss you. And you’d kiss me too, of course. But you’d do so without realising that there was poison in my lipstick. That my lips were toxic. It’d be sweet. You’d die comfortably in your sleep, hours after we’d parted. But you wouldn’t, ever, be sleeping beside me again.’

  ‘We tried that already.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ I say, ‘that’s so personal. And besides, you’re wrong.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You don’t know me anymore.’

  ‘And,’ she says, ‘that’s exactly how it should stay.’

  SAYS MY DEAD LITTLE SISTER

  Not little, because she was conceived at the same time as me. Technically older, actually, because she came out early, and dead. And that’s how she’d always be: like rubber. Like one of those fake newborn babies you see on TV. In films. Rubber. Limbs giggling like the tits her lips never sucked from.

  I’m already coming down.

  If you drop those limbs they bounce. If my parents dropped her when she was pulled out, dead, and placed into their arms, if they’d dropped her, just to see what dropping a baby felt like without doing any harm because its cream-egg-sized heart wasn’t beating, would she have bounced? I wonder.

  Boing.

  A bouncy ball bouncing off the walls.

  Did she even have bones?

  I could never grip and choke her like a twin brother is, play fighting, supposed to.

  Boing.

  Calcium melts at around 860 degrees. Bones do not melt like rubber. As a porous matrix of mineral crystals they fall apart, resembling billions of hands holding each other tight, then tenderly letting go. My brother’s porous matrix of mineral crystals disintegrated just like that. Decorated a puddle of rubber as though lemon zest on a cheesecake, while my sister and I were watching. Blood racing on adrenaline. And then everything slowed down. Blood vessels rubbernecking, like cars at the side of a motorway.

  Boing.

  Rubber melts at around 180 degrees. Cars bounce. ‘Can you feel that?’ says my sister.

  ‘Feel what?’ I ask.

  ‘The blood,’ she says, ‘pumping through your head.’

  ‘I think that’s all I can feel,’ I tell her, as I lie in my bed with my head between the mattress and the paralysing prospect of getting up.

  ‘Can you hear it?’ she says.

  ‘It sounds like a–’

  ‘It sounds like when you put your ear to a seashell. When you listen to the sea. Remember when we last went to the sea? In France? The last family holiday. The cottage in Brittany, the one with the locked door on the upstairs landing and the stuffed pygmy alligator?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think there were bodies behind that door?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Our dead brother trod on a weaver fish and had to soak his foot in hot water.’

  ‘It sounds like my–’

  ‘And our father left early on business. What is it you think he was doing? Do you think it concerned Gentleman Jim?’

  I’ve stopped listening.

  My sister tells me to breathe.

  My sister says, ‘Do you smell it?’

  Your heart keeps missing beats. And your temples are throbbing. Two tiny hands, a baby’s hands, are pulling them together from the inside to crush your brain, drip out of your nose and onto the bed sheet. My phone is ringing and I can’t even summon the strength to put it on silent. I just want–

  ‘What’s that?’ says my sister.

  ‘I want to–’

  ‘Hide in a fort made of pillows?’ she says. ‘Did you have a nice time with Willow, by the way? Did you reminisce?’

  They stood in silence outside the pub as he rolled another cigarette, she shivering in the wind, wiping her nose on her scarf. He moved deliberately slow, making her wait. When he eventually lit the cigarette and put the red lighter back in his jacket pocket she started to walk down the street. But he took her by the arm, stopping her, pulling her towards him. Then he kissed her. His cigarette between his fingers, his hand on her cheek.

  ‘Fuck me,’ says my sister, rolling her eyes. ‘I know you left her,’ she says, ‘feeling paranoid about death, brain haemorrhaging, after taking all that cocaine in the toilet and scaring her off, again, with all your talk of murdering.’

  ‘It’s not murder when you’re given permission.’

  ‘And now you can’t sleep, deeply uncertain as you are about what potential you have left for any future habitation on this earth. Head buried and buried further. Veins jerking so hard, working your jaw muscles so hard you can feel your–’

  Wait.

  ‘–temples swelling. Expanding. Contracting like metal rapidly cooling. Car chassis on an icy road. In flames. Rattling heart–’

  Let me count–

  ‘–beat, heartbeat, heart beating the bedsprings that shake. Waiting for the police to finally take you away. Do you think it’d fix anything, anyway, if you got back together? Go out for dinner? Italian? Go back to work? Make money while she decorates this tiny flat with flowers? Be normal again? Ignore me, again? You’re not at university anymore. You’re fully grown. It’s okay.’

  –to one.

  ‘It’s okay, feels okay, doesn’t it, when you’re surrounded by people who think you bring something to the table. It’s just–’

  Two.

  ‘–that it’s only when you’re alone again, that you see–’

  Three.

  ‘–just how bare the table is.’

  Four.

  ‘Its edges are cliffs. And spaghetti is a rope that stops halfway.’

  Five.

  DIGGING DIRT – PART ONE

  Digging dirt can refer to two things. Both involve literal dirt digging. And gravel. Neither involves uncovering harmful information with the intention of blackmailing someone close to you.

  No one blackmails Gentleman Jim.

  We spent so much time digging dirt as kids. This was before I killed my brother but aft
er I’d elbowed myself suitable space inside our mother, whose daughter came out early and bloody and dead.

  My father wanted to call me Romulus.

  An overstated baby.

  Digging dirt: the soundtrack shooting up your arm in a shiver. A sting. As though jumping into a freezing cold river during winter or taking a piss after having contracted a urinary tract infection. Digging dirt: our mother perched on a birthing chair after a sixteen-hour labour, aiming downwards into a large potty so that her remaining twin baby could eventually march out vertically, in combat boots, having already committed his first atrocity.

  I had a fringe.

  My sister wasn’t haunting me then like she does now. It didn’t take long, though. I’d fall over and scrape the skin off my nose at school, or get my dick caught in my fly or be unable to answer a question in maths. Usually that’d be attributed to her. The invisible cause. Or karma, of sorts. Grey and wet and buried. But never crying on the back seat on the way to school with dad’s unhappy, rough, tradesman’s hand smacking her knee. She was growing. She grew with me. I asked my mother, ‘Do you know who Remus was?’ at the dinner table one evening after a Year 4 introduction to Ancient Rome.

  My mother said, ‘He was a man with a vision,’ as she eyed my father, who was always doing something. Who was always inadvertently tearing down my mother’s walls with his tongue and trying hard to build new ones out of his sons.

  Digging dirt: my brother took our father’s rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges into the kitchen. They were an heirloom. Dug out from dirt of closets and understairs cupboards filled with familial ugliness. They, like the kukri knife that we would dream and dream and fantasise about sliding across the stranger’s throat in the night, belonged to our grandfather, long late from whatever cancer, possibly of the throat, if not the bruises he left on his eldest son’s skin with a belt; who hid his whisky behind curtains and broadened his gene pool horizons by establishing his family as a military institution that no one, actually, would join.

  His sons straight and narrow and his wife long suffering.