‘There’s a police dog pissing on your legs,’ said Thorn, returning his eye to the rifle sight.
‘Fucking little, fuck…’ screamed Moses and as he did so, his head shot upwards, smashing into the armoured vehicle and then down, directly into a pool of dog piss.
‘Awe inspiring,’ muttered Thorn.
*
In the house, M had emptied a bladder so capacious that it would have given a water buffalo an inferiority complex and was just leaving the bathroom when he caught sight of movement under one of the cars parked in front of the house. He immediately recognised it as an unmarked armoured police vehicle, pulled back from the window as if he had been slapped in the face and glimpsed his face in the bathroom mirror – it was contorted into a silent scream.
‘Fuck, fuck fuck fuck.’ M pulled the gun out of his pocket, put the barrel in his mouth, pulled the safety off and shut his eyes. He pulled it out, looked at his face again, his watermelon head rolling about on his shoulders as if it was no longer attached and pushed the gun back in again, breaking off one of his front teeth in the process. He tried to pull the trigger but it was as if his fingers were made of sponge. He spat out the gun, threw it on the floor and stared at his anguished, tormented expression in the mirror. He wailed his first name, ‘shit-fuck-bastard,’ before smashing his face into the glass.
*
Moses was still trying to shake the dog piss out of his ears when his radio began spewing out static-laden words. It was Crown, who was the leader of his B team and had been instructed to cover the other side of M’s house.
‘In place, Sir. We have the building in lockdown.’
‘Excellent work, Crown. Can you see any movement?’
‘Nothing really, Sir, just a cat having a crap in the garden.’
‘Funny that,’ pondered Moses, ‘there’s a white cat having a crap in the garden in front of us as well.’
A thought buzzed around Moses’ head, he tried to swat it away but it was doggedly persistent. It was not a thought he liked.
‘What else can you see, Crown?’
‘Well, Sir…’
Moses turned to his left to find Crown lying on the ground under a second armoured response vehicle about ten metres away.
‘I can see you, Sir.’
Moses scrambled to his feet and ensuring he trod mightily on Crown’s groin, sprinted towards the side road which led to the back garden of M’s house.
*
When M heard the back door open he assumed it was the police tactical response team and tore down the stairs holding the gun in front of him, fully prepared for a final deadly confrontation. He was surprised to find Daniel standing in the kitchen with a small boy who wore two pairs of glasses and a rictus grin, an elderly man who was dressed like a commando and a child who appeared to be the size of a small elephant.
M raised the gun, removed the safety and pointed it at Daniel. In response, Dorsal pointed the grenade launcher at M, Ferris raised the huge double pointed axe over his head and Chas pointed what looked like a vacuum cleaner hose pipe at M.
M was not at his best, pieces of glass hung from his shredded face where he had smashed it into the mirror, his upper torso was covered in gore-soaked pornographic magazines which had been gaffer taped in place and blood was running down both of his legs and pooling onto the ground around his feet.
‘Hi, Dad, I’m home,’ murmured Daniel.
‘Nice to meet you, Mr M,’ chirped Ferris, his arms shaking under the tremendous weight of the axe.
‘Anyone fancy a glass of cola or some crisps?’ enquired M. His left hand was developing an involuntary twitch and he knew that sooner rather than later this was going to spread to his right hand and more specifically his trigger finger. He felt faint and nauseous and yet everything in the room was pin sharp.
‘Not for me thanks, Mr M,’ said Dorsal, who had aimed the grenade launcher at M’s head and armed it to fire.
‘Surely I can offer you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit?’ M nodded towards Chas without taking his eyes off Daniel.
‘Nice of you to offer but aren’t you a little busy?’ asked Chas.
‘Oh, it’s no trouble, I’ll pop the kettle on then, shall I?’ replied M, fumbling behind himself whilst still fixed on Daniel and flicking on the plug socket, leaving a bloody fingerprint on the wall in the process. ‘I just need to kill my son first if you don’t mind.’
Dorsal pressed the trigger of the grenade launcher and nothing happened. He turned it round to reread the instructions on the side when the weapon engaged and sent a fully armed grenade smashing through the kitchen window where it continued happily on its way before exploding some distant and presumably innocent subject.
Ferris tried to wield the axe at M but in his efforts to hold it above his head, his pipe cleaner-thin arms dropped down and he could no longer find the strength to lift it more than an inch off the ground.
M smiled as his finger closed on the trigger, until Chas smacked the vacuum cleaner hose pipe directly into his nose, causing M to fling the gun across the kitchen.
There was a moment of perturbed stillness during which both men felt like they were under water and as M followed the scuttering trajectory of the gun, he was surprised to see it come to rest besides a woman’s patent leather shoe.
‘Leave my son alone, you fat fuck pig,’ hissed Daniel’s mother, who had emerged from the walk-in larder seconds before with a familiar spade which was already arcing towards M’s skull.
Chapter 43
Moses had just entered M’s back garden when the kitchen window exploded and a rocket-launched grenade whistled gracefully towards his face.
‘Fucking my old boots,’ shrieked Moses, eloquently summarising his situation and managing to duck just sufficiently for the grenade’s trajectory to take it not between his eyes but down his centre parting.
Turning as if inebriated, Moses watched the grenade hit a letterbox, which shot up into the stratosphere like a missile until plummeting down again into the back of a milk float.
Moses was standing transfixed in a snowstorm of milky glass when Stables and Thorn arrived. Stables looked from the milk float to M’s kitchen window and then back at Moses. ‘Your hair is on fire, Sir,’ proffered Stables. ‘I know,’ replied Moses, ‘I know.’
*
M managed to block and hold the shank of the shovel before his wife was able to stove his head in with it. There was a brief period of grappling before Daniel’s mother let go of the shovel, partly because M was too strong for her and partly because Daniel, who was now holding the gun, had placed it against her stomach.
‘What are you doing, Daniel?’ she asked.
‘I’m bringing this to an end,’ replied Daniel, walking over to his father and handing the gun back to him.
‘I don’t understand,’ said his mother, who was hugging herself and shuffling from the light to the dark kitchen tiles and back again in a one woman waltz.
‘You haven’t earned the right to understand, Mum. Good or bad – at least M has been a father to me. You, you just faded away.’
M was examining the gun as if he had never seen it before. ‘This changes nothing,’ he said to no one in particular, raising the gun once again like an automaton.
‘Would you mind standing aside while I blow your father to pieces?’ asked Dorsal patiently. He had reloaded the grenade launcher and was keen to try it out again. He was definitely going to use this in the playground – a weapon like this would raise his credibility as a bully to hitherto unimaginable levels.
Daniel stood directly in front of his father.
‘Not until I have the answers to some questions,’ replied Daniel.
‘Well, if it’s answers you want,’ said M, grabbing Daniel and planting the barrel of the gun diagonally into the top of his head, ‘then ask away before I decorate this room with your central nervous system. But bear in mind that this will be a conversation which ends with the “b” in bang.’
*
Moses, Thorn and Stables had advanced to the bush at the end of M’s garden. Moses had extinguished his hair and Stables and Thorn had trained their rifles on the kitchen.
‘I have a kill shot, Sir,’ said Thorn, ‘do I have your permission to take it?’
‘Is it a clean shot, Thorn – is his son clear?’ Moses asked.
‘I thought the child was the target, Sir, I distinctly read that in the briefing note that….Not kill the child. Really?’
Moses inhaled so much air that his lungs were on the point of exploding and turned to Stables. There was neither hope nor expectation in his voice when he spoke.
‘What about you?’
‘I can’t get a clean shot of M, Sir, there are too many people in the way.’ He paused. ‘We could just shoot everyone.’
*
‘So why kill me, kill your surviving son, what will that achieve?’ asked Daniel.
‘This was never about you, Daniel. It was about failure – it was about holding your brother’s body in my arms and being unable to make him be alive again, no matter how tightly I held him, how hard I begged and begged him to breathe. It was about kissing each one of his tiny fingers one last time and knowing that when I let go, someone was going to take him away from me and bury him in the ground. More than anything, it was about losing his smile, the smile he gave as a gift to me and only me. It was a smile that lit me up and losing it extinguished a flame that could never, ever be reignited.’
‘And your solution was violence?’ asked Daniel.
‘Violence is an elegant language punctuated by fear. It was the way I communicated after they took your brother from me.’
Daniel’s mother was touching the top of the kettle now in sets of five, five was important, five made her laugh and cry and scream and vomit but it had to be repeated and repeated. ‘I drove through a supermarket and killed your son, blame me. If you are going to kill someone then kill me.’
‘How can I kill you when you died in that accident?’ asked M. ‘I can’t see you, can’t feel you, you don’t exist.’
*
Moses could see that the situation in the kitchen was rather tricky, that the wrong decision would result in devastation on a biblical scale. He threw himself against the wall to the side of the kitchen door and lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth.
‘Is your attack team in place, Crown?’
There was a brief static hiatus.
‘All in place, Sir,’ whispered Crown. ‘We will smash in the front door, enter the house through the hallway and take out M in the kitchen. Ready to go on your mark.’
‘All in place outside the front door of number 22?’ enquired Moses.
More static. Moses could just make out the word ‘bollocks.’
*
‘How is any of this Daniel’s fault?’ asked Daniel’s mother, who was now frenziedly touching the kettle with alternate hands and her forehead. A line of drool leached from the corner of her mouth.
‘From the first moment I saw him I knew he wasn’t his brother, could never replace his brother,’ said M. ‘I hated him for that, will always hate him for it. His face is not quite his brother’s, his voice is not quite his brother’s voice and when I held his hand for the first time…’
Daniel looked up at his father, turned, wrapped his arms around his father’s wretched bloody waist and hugged him. He hugged him and he cried because he couldn’t be brave any more. And as he cried so did Dorsal, for the mother and father that had betrayed him. And as Dorsal cried so Ferris cried for the father he had lost until the end of his days. And as Ferris cried, Chas cried for the brutal loss of his innocence and the child he still remained, finding himself once again fighting with the dogs for survival.
Just as Moses kicked in the kitchen door and raised his weapon to fire on M, Daniel’s mother swung the kettle into M’s head with such deadly force it felled him like a mighty oak that would never rise again.
And before he fell, just for a few seconds, Daniel had felt M hug him back.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people:
My wonderful wife Catherine who has supported me unquestioningly every step of the way as she always does. The incredible Tony Cook, the creator and driving force behind ABCtales, without whose encouragement and support, very simply, this book would not exist. Matthew Marland for the first edit of the book. Luke Neima who is not only the nicest man on the planet but who re-edited and inspired and nursed this book towards its final form. Everyone at ABCtales but in particular Peter Hitchen (Scratch), Claudine Lazar, Richard Penny, Jolono for constantly encouraging me to continue writing and laughing at all the right bits of the story. My family and friends including my sisters Simone and Jackie, the sublime Fiona and Candice back at the office and in particular Sam my nephew and Marsha my cousin who harassed everyone they had ever known to pledge on a daily basis and who were there for me whenever I flagged. Isobel and the wonderful team at Unbound whose professionalism and high standards ensure that Unbound is synonymous with quality.
Finally, in the process of raising money for Shooting Star Children’s Hospice as part of the pledging process I came find out a little more about this unique resource for life-limited children. Please look at their website and donate.
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