Killing God

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Kevin Brooks was born in Exeter, Devon, and he studied in Birmingham and London. He has worked in a crematorium, a zoo, a garage and a post office, before – happily – giving it all up to write books. Kevin is the award-winning author of eight novels and lives in North Yorkshire.

  ‘Kevin Brooks just gets better and better, and given that he started off brilliant, that leaves one scratching around for superlatives’

  – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘He's an original. And he writes one hell of a story’;

  – Meg Rosoff, author of How I Live Now

  ‘A masterly writer’;

  – Mail on Sunday

  Books by Kevin Brooks

  BEING

  Black Rabbit Summer

  CANDY

  KILLING GOD

  KISSING THE RAIN

  LUCAS

  MARTYN PIG

  THE ROAD OF THE DEAD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  penguin.com

  First published 2009

  1

  Text copyright © Kevin Brooks, 2009

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to include excerpts from the following copyrighted material: ‘About You’ words and music by Jim & William Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1987; ‘Darklands’ words and music by Jim & William Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1987; ‘Head’ words and music by Jim & William Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1985; ‘Her Way of Praying’ words and music by William Reid and James Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1989; ‘Inside Me’ words and music by Jim & William Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1985; ‘Nine Million Rainy Days’ words and music by Jim & William Reid copyright © Domino Publishing Company Limited, 1987.

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192250-8

  inside me (1)

  This is a story about me, that's all.

  (i take my time away

  and i see something

  and that's my story)

  This is me.

  head on

  OK, first thing – my name is Dawn Bundy.

  Second thing – I'm fifteen years (and seven days) old.

  Third thing – I live with my mum in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in an ordinary town in England.

  Fourth thing – I'm totally unattractive and I don't give a shit.

  Fifth thing – I also tend to exaggerate sometimes, and this is probably one of those times. Which probably means that I am unattractive, but I'm not totally unattractive (i.e. I'm not eye-burstingly hideous or anything). I'm just kind of non-delectable, if you know what I mean. I have no discernible shape. No womanly, curvy, magazine-girly shape. Basically, I'm just kind of round and plain and lumpyish. So, yes, of course, I do give a shit that I'm not delectable. I'd love to be delectable – Little Miss Pretty, Little Miss Hot, Little Miss Look-At-Me-And-I'll-Make-You-Quiver. Who wouldn't want to be like that? I mean, beauty isn't just skin deep, is it? Beauty (and non-beauty) is belly deep, heart deep… it's life-definingly deep.

  Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that I know I'm not beautiful, and that's all there is to it.

  Sixth thing – my mum's name is Sara and she's forty-nine years old.

  Seventh thing – my dad's name is John and he disappeared two years ago.

  And last thing – today is the first day of January, the start of a brand-new year. And tomorrow I'm going to start killing God.

  my little underground

  It doesn't mean anything, OK? Killing God – it doesn't mean anything. It's just a thing, that's all. Just an idea, something to do, something to keep me occupied. (And, no, it's not a New Year's Resolution either.) I just like doing things that keep my mind off the things I don't want to think about (or, to be more specific, the thing I don't want to think about). Last year, for example, towards the end of summer, I did this thing with painted snails. What it was, I was out in the back garden one night, picking up some dog poos (I'll tell you about my dogs later on), and it'd been raining all day, so everything was all wet and horrible, and I happened to notice that the garden path was covered in snails. There were loads of them – all sliming around on the rain-soaked concrete, snailing here and snailing there… and it got me thinking. I had no idea what I was thinking about, but I didn't really mind. I was happy enough just standing there in the rainy summer night, with a dog-poo bag in my hand, watching the slow-motion dance of the snails, just thinking, thinking, thinking… thinking about nothing in particular.

  And then it hit me.

  Letters.

  Letters, words, messages.

  Snail communication.

  What would happen, I wondered, if I collected a load of snails, painted letters on their shells, and then released them back into the garden? I mean, what would I find when I went out into the garden the next night? Would the snails know they had letters on their backs? Would they arrange themselves so that the letters spelled out snaily messages to me? HULLO DAWN. WE LUV U (I imagine that snails are very poor spellers). Or maybe the painted snails would slope off into the gardens next door and spell out messages to my neighbours. U BAD. WE KIL U.

  And so, with that in mind (and smiling to myself), I dropped the dog-poo bag into the bin, called my dogs, and went back inside to start working it all out. It didn't take long. All I needed was some fluorescent paint, a fine paintbrush, a cardboard box and some snails. The only tricky bit was trying to decide how many letters I should use to make it work – i.e. how many As, how many Bs, how many Cs, and so on. Like in Scrabble, you know? I mean, you don't just have equal numbers of every letter, do you? Because some letters get used a lot more than others. Anyway, after a lot of thinking, and a lot of counting up letters in books and stuff, I eventually realized (kind of dumbly) that it was just like Scrabble, so why not just copy the Scrabble letters (i.e. twelve Es, nine As, nine Is, 8 Ns, etc.) ? So that's what I did. (Except there are one hundred letters in a Scrabble set, which would have meant collecting one hundred snails. Which is a lot of snails. So I just more or less halved the Scrabble numbers instead.)

  Over the next two nights, I collected about
fifty snails and painted fluorescent letters on their shells (which took me most of another night), and then I released them all back into the garden. And, yes, I know this all sounds pretty dull, but it was actually quite exciting – waiting for the next night to come round, wondering what was going to happen when I went out into the garden with my torch, wondering if the snails had anything to say…

  Unfortunately, nothing much happened at all.

  And the reason that nothing much happened at all was mainly that the fluorescent paint I'd used turned out to be poisonous (Harmful if swallowed, inhaled, etc. May be fatal to aquatic organisms). I have no idea how the poisonousness got through the snails' shells into the snails themselves, but it did. And the end result of my snail-communication experiment was:

  a) four dead snails, their (still intact) shells spelling out – MNEH

  b) twelve dead snails, their slimily crushed shells unreadable

  c) thirty-four missing/presumed dead snails and d) two dead thrushes.

  Q. What's all this got to do with anything?

  A. Nothing.

  Like I said, I'm just trying to explain the kinds of things I do, that's all. The kinds of things I've been doing for the past two years to keep my mind off the other Dawn, the thirteen-year-old Dawn… the Dawn who lives in a cave inside my head. (The cave is small and cold and it has no sound and I try to make it soft like a pillow but most of the time it's hard like stone. It has to be hard to keep out the monsters.)

  Anyway, it's tomorrow now, and at this very moment I'm walking along through the covered walkways of the shopping precinct on my way to Waterstone's. (Some of the kids at school call the precinct ‘the mall’, like it's some kind of really cool place in Beverly Hills or somewhere. But it's not a mall, it's just a tunnel full of shops.) And here I am, walking along through the crowded walkways, with my head bowed down, my eyes fixed to the ground, my hands in my pockets, my dogs trotting along at my feet, and my iPod turned up loud enough to drown out the town-sound of passing voices and drifting muzak and hundreds and hundreds of shuffling feet…

  And no one can see me, no one at all.

  I'm completely invisible.

  You know why? I'll tell you why. Because I'm wearing my Invisible Coat, that's why. And that's also why the bookshop's probably going to be closed when I get there. Because if there's one thing that's guaranteed to make you late for something, it's trying to find your Invisible Coat before you go out. I spent almost an hour looking for mine this afternoon. I thought I'd found it after about fifteen minutes, and it wasn't until I'd put it on and said goodbye to Mum and was halfway down the street that I realized I'd made a mistake. It wasn't my Invisible Coat after all – it was my Nothing Coat.

  Mind you, it's an easy mistake to make.

  They're both coats, they're both invisible.

  The only real difference is that the invisibility of the Nothing Coat is entirely due to its not being there.

  This is all crap, of course. I don't have an Invisible Coat. Invisible Coats don't exist. I do have a Nothing Coat, but that goes without saying. Everyone has a Nothing Coat. More than one, in fact. You can have as many Nothing Coats as you like – millions, billions, infinitillions – because not only is everything in the world that isn't a coat a Nothing Coat, but so is everything in the world that isn't anything.

  And that's a lot of things.

  I have to shut up now. It's nearly four o'clock, and it's the second of January, which is probably some kind of Day-After-New-Year's-Day holiday or something, which means the shops probably close at four o'clock like they do on Bank Holidays and Sundays…

  Q. Why do shops close at four o'clock on a Sunday?

  A. God knows.

  I don't know much about God. I mean, I know all the basic stuff, the kind of stuff they teach you in Religious Studies… although, to be honest, I've never paid that much attention in Religious Studies. But I know the kind of stuff that everyone knows – the Bible stories, the miracles, the whole idea of God and the Devil and Jesus and faith and heaven and hell and angels and everything. It's impossible not to know about that kind of stuff. It's everywhere – at school, on TV, in books and films and newspapers, in magazines and on CDs, on the streets, on posters, on those signs outside churches that (inexplicably) advertise God (e.g. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU TOLD GOD YOU LOVED HIM? or TODAY IS A GIFT FROM GOD)… it's everywhere. You can't get away from it. So, yes, I know about all that kind of stuff, but I don't really know much else. You know, like what's the difference between Protestants and Catholics and Presbyterians and Methodists and Anglicans and Baptists and Quakers and Unitarians and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and all the other brands of Christianity? Are they all about the same God? Or do different brands worship different Gods? Or maybe it's all about the same God, but with slightly different packaging – a bit like the packets of cereal you get in supermarkets. You know, like there's the real Kellogg's Corn Flakes, but you can also get Tesco Cornflakes, Honey Corn Flakes, Tesco Value Cornflakes, Golden Flakes, Organic Cornflakes… and they're all pretty much the same – i.e. they're all kind of corny and flakey, and they're all sold in boxes – but each brand tastes ever so slightly different, and each one is sold in a slightly different box.

  I don't know…

  Maybe it's nothing like that at all.

  Not that it makes any difference, of course. Because, unlike Corn Flakes, there is no God. He doesn't exist. Which is why it's going to be kind of difficult to kill him.

  i love rock 'n' roll

  I'm in Waterstone's now, standing in front of the Bible section. I've got ‘I Love Rock 'n' Roll’ playing on my iPod, and it's raining outside (Waterstone's is in a little back street just outside the precinct), and it's almost dark, so I'm trying to be as quick as possible, because they don't let dogs in here, so I've had to leave mine outside, and they don't like the rain. Their names, by the way, are Jesus and Mary. And I promised I'd tell you about them later on, and I guess it's later on now. So here goes.

  They're dachshunds. More specifically, they're smooth-haired black-and-tan dachshunds. Brother and sister, they're three years old, and I've had them since they were puppies. My dad gave them to me when I was twelve. I'm not sure where he got them from, but I think they were probably a bit too young to be separated from their mother, because they were both really clingy and insecure when I got them, and I suppose I became their surrogate mother. Which is why we've always been really close. We go just about everywhere together. We sleep together, we go shopping together, we watch TV together. The only time we can't be together is when I'm at school. Which is one of the reasons I really hate going to school.

  Q. Why are they called Jesus and Mary?

  A. Well, actually, there are two answers to this one. The one I usually give is that I named them after my favourite band – The Jesus and Mary Chain. Although ‘favourite’ is probably the wrong word here. Because, as far as I'm concerned, The Jesus and Mary Chain are The Only Band In The World, The Best Band In The Universe, The Only Music Worth Listening To. Their songs are so dark and beautiful, so raw, so pure… it's the kind of music that makes you feel like you're sinking down into a big black nowhere.

  And I like that.

  I first heard them about four years ago when my dad brought home a CD called Darklands. He adored it, and for weeks and weeks it was the only thing he played, and the more he played it, the more I fell in love with it. And ever since then, The Jesus and Mary Chain have been THE only band for me. I've downloaded every song they've ever recorded, and I've got all their CDs – they're all I ever listen to – and I listen to them all the time. At home, on my PC, on my iPod, whenever and wherever… I listen to them so much that even when I'm not listening to them I'm hearing their songs in my head. Their music is the soundtrack to my life. Right now, for example, I've got ‘I Love Rock 'n' Roll’ on repeat (I play everything on repeat, usually for at least three or four times), and I'll probably keep listening to it until I get home.

 
So when people ask me why my dogs are called Jesus and Mary, that's what I tell them – they're named after my favourite band. And it's true. But it's also true that when I first got Jesus and Mary, we had some Christians living next door to us called Mr and Mrs Garth (I knew they were Christians because they had an I ♥ JESUS sticker in the back of their car), and they were really horrible people. I mean, they used to treat us like we were nothing, like we didn't exist, we were invisible, you know? We'd try being friendly with them, but they just didn't want to know. They'd simply ignore us. For no reason at all. And that really annoyed me. So I called my dogs Jesus and Mary because I knew it would annoy them. And it did. Especially at night, when it was nice and quiet, and I'd let my dogs out for a wee, and then I'd have to stand at the back door whistling and calling them in – JESUS! MARY! C'MON, JESUS! HURRY UP! Nope, Mr and Mrs Garth didn't like that at all. And they liked it even less when I started calling out Jebus instead of Jesus (I got the idea from an episode of The Simpsons). JEEEBUS! HEY, JEEEB-USS! For some reason, that really bothered the Garths. In fact, it bothered them so much that one night Mr Garth threw open his window and started yelling at me.

  ‘How dare you!’ he shouted (wimpishly). ‘How dare you take Our Lord's name in vain!’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said, looking innocently at him.

  ‘You're despicable. You really are. You stupid, pitiful little girl.’

  Mr and Mrs Garth have moved now.

  Thank God.

  Have you seen how many Bibles there are in Waterstone's? There's shelves and shelves of them, and they all have different names and different covers. Right now, for example, I can see the New King James Bible, the Authorized King James Bible, the New International Bible, the Holy Bible: Catholic Edition, the Youth Bible… there's even something called the Good News Bible. I mean, come on… I've got two wet dogs waiting outside – I don't have time for all this.