Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (27 page)

With my attention fully occupied I failed to notice Mr Walton rushing out of his back door, a sturdy, varnished walking stick held aloft. It wasn’t until his familiar voice bellowed out thick with menace that I saw him, by which time he’d caught up to Max, who, attempting to escape, was stumbling through the sea of wallflowers which did their utmost to hold him back, and he looked like a rugby player headed for a try with the coconut planted firmly against his chest. It was at this point that a simple childhood prank turned into something far darker.

I had seen adults in the throes of anger. But I had never seen them crazed with it.

Mr Walton caught Max on the legs with the walking stick, tripping him up; the coconut made good its escape regardless and rolled away to a safe distance not far from me. Max lay sprawled in the flowerbed, and I heard him shriek in pain. But Walton’s temper was up. Blow followed blow in spite of Max wailing and screaming. I saw him scramble to his feet, trying to fend off the heavy stick, his hand going to his back where a particularly harsh blow landed. Briefly his eyes met mine, a silent pleading for my help. But I was frozen, locked to the spot by fear and uncertainty.

Walton’s face was contorted with a rage that appeared to boil beneath his skin, so that its entire surface bubbled with hatred, escaped his mouth in great expulsions of incomprehensible volcanic cursing. Perhaps he was remembering the verbal beating he took from Connie; perhaps he too had waited to enact revenge. But whatever was going through his mind it scared the hell out of me, for what stood over Max now was not a human being at all; it was a devil, and it was evil, and it fed on pain and misery. It continued to strike at Max, and I screamed something out at it, afraid for my friend, afraid for myself. And then there was the final blow, to Max’s head. I heard the crack, loud and sharp, a ball hitting a cricket bat. I can hear it now. I saw Max’s head appear to shiver, to vibrate, then loll onto his chest. From his hairline a stream of bright red blood gushed down into his wide, incredulous eyes. And he flopped down like a puppet whose strings had been severed. Right there, on the grass, a puddle of red beginning to form and stain the concrete path on which he fell.

“You’ve killed him!” I yelled. “You’ve killed him!”

Then the devil turned to face me, and its face displayed no remorse, only lingering hate. In my panic I snatched up the coconut and ran away, throwing it over the fence before launching myself after it. I did not stop till I reached Connie.

“Max’s dead!” I howled. “Mr Walton’s gone and murdered him!”

She was off at a shot. Mr Walton didn’t live far away, and she must have made the trip to his house in less than five minutes with me trailing breathlessly behind her, the coconut still in my hand. I did not think it possible I could witness an anger to equal that which had overtaken Mr Walton, but I hadn’t reckoned on Connie’s explosive reaction.

When we arrived at the yard Mr Walton was crouched over Max, one meaty hand under Max’s head, the other trying to staunch the flow of blood with a sodden handkerchief. Max’s eyes were still closed. I really did think he was dead and I began to cry out loud, finally tossing away the coconut in despair, vowing never to eat another Bounty bar.

“He’s been stealing,” Walton said as Connie came thundering towards him. “I don’t know what to do with him. He won’t open his eyes. I think he’s pretending.”

“Max! Max!” she yelled. “Oh, God, Max, speak to me! Speak to your mum!”

“And look at what he’s done to my birdhouse.”

“I saw him,” I said. “It was Mr Walton! He killed Max!”

“His head hit the concrete. He fell. Tripped,” Walton blustered.

“That’s not true!” I screamed: “I saw you kill him!” though I doubt the words came out quite as clear as that, smothered by emotion as they must have been.

Blood was smeared onto Connie’s arm like red gloss paint as she grabbed at her son. I heard the wail build up in her, almost like an air raid siren, growing in pitch and intensity till it erupted stridently and terrifyingly from her rounded mouth.

She flung herself onto Walton, her rage distorting her words, striking at him with her tiny fists, and he retreated from them, all the while his pitiful rain of excuses falling on deaf ears. If Walton’s face had metamorphosed into something demonic, then Connie’s twisted into something far ghastlier, the veins and tendons on her neck sticking out like rope, her beautiful face gone in an instant, her eyes no longer Connie’s but belonging to a saucer-eyed fiend. She picked up the walking stick that Walton had left on the ground beside Max and started to beat Walton with it, and Walton was powerless to stop her, the heavy stick whipping up and down with all the speed and blur Walton’s cane had done when he punished Max in the classroom.

But then fear crept into me again. Fear that Connie might actually kill Mr Walton. I ran to her, grabbing at her dress, tugging insistently but to no avail. I might well have been hanging onto the tail of a tiger. But I guess I must have acted like something of an anchor, because Walton made his getaway and ran into the house, Connie at last returning to Max, her eyes wet with anger and concern for her son. The walking stick clattered to the ground.

“Oh Max! Not the head again. Not the head.” She snapped her eyes on me. “We need an ambulance, Collie,” she said.

“Is he dead?”

“Wait here!” she returned, dashing away. “Watch him, Collie! Watch him!”

He wasn’t dead, of course, I could tell by his chest gently heaving. But apparently they were concerned about him for a while. He was out cold for nearly a full day. And he got his stitches, just like me. Eventually I put it down to some kind of divine retribution for what he did to me. An eye for an eye, a blow to the head for a blow to the head. It had poetic justice stamped all over it. But I was still concerned for him. It hadn’t been a particularly nice experience.

Which is why I found it odd that Max should be so eager to bring it up tonight, especially as we’d never once broached the subject since the day it happened. The savagery of the event was so horrific to contemplate afterwards that we allowed the memory of it to slip into a kind of limbo, knowing it happened but all the same not knowing, as if it became an unspoken rule that we’d look on it as our secret, and our secret alone, so much so that I hadn’t even told Ruby about it. And Connie, now I look back at it, never mentioned it again either. It ceased to be a memory. Till now.

“What coconut?” Ruby asked after a silence that lasted some minutes.

Max lifted his head, and again fingered that same patch of hair. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, winking at me.

She saw the gesture and looked across at me. I shrugged. “It’s nothing, really. A silly childhood game, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Max muttered, sinking his nose into his wine glass, “a game. A silly game.”  Then he did the most curious thing. He rose from the table and sniffed the air.

“What’s the matter?” Ruby asked.

He frowned, saying seriously, “Do you smell burning?” He looked us both over as we considered the question, and I glanced at the open fire with a bewildered expression on my face. “Joke!” he said, laughing.

*  *  *  *

He guessed, because he was rubbish at virtually everything else in life, as some compensation he’d been given the gift of seeing ghosts.

That’s what his granny called it. A gift. As if it came wrapped like a parcel. Here you are, Bernard, look what I’ve got you. One of those red jumpers you’ll never wear, or that book you’ll never read, or the ability to see what few others can: ghosts. Not that he ever wanted the damn thing. He’d much rather have been given a little bit more grey matter – something to make school a little easier, something that would have helped him slip the right words into his slow mouth, or the ability to at least soak up a few pages of knowledge and not have it trickle out like treacle from his skull till there was nothing left of it, as if it had never been there in the first place. And yeah, to be able to talk to women without sounding like a gurgling fool that’s got his mouth bunged up with cotton wool.   So like all the other stupid things he’d ever been given, this gift was the stupidest. What the hell do you do with it? What good is something you have to keep secretly locked away in your head? And what use is it having something that only makes you sound even dumber than they already think you are?

“It’s a gift, Bernard,” she’d said, and because he was young, because he thought her face, all screwed up like tea-stained tissue paper as it was, stood for age and age in its turn stood for wisdom, he believed his granny. Even when she said he had to rub a knob of butter into the egg that rose on his forehead when he ran it into a wall, or that a cloth soaked in vinegar would cure his fever, he believed her. He loved his granny.

Even now he couldn’t help but get choked up a little when he thought of her. He could almost feel the baby-soft touch of the back of her wrinkled hand that had been separated from babyhood by seventy years or more, holding his own, patting it reassuringly, as she’d done on countless occasions, calling him ‘Our Bernard’, pride in her voice that he belonged to them, as if he’d been the gift everyone had expected and had got, and not the gift nobody wanted, like his mum and dad never said but often implied. And he was sure she loved him right back. Sure of it. Our Bernard. My Bernard. My Special Bernard.

But in spite of all that he couldn’t bring himself to call it a gift, seeing ghosts, or whatever they were. And it sure as hell didn’t feel like a gift right now as he watched this particular apparition, that steadfastly watched him in return, standing silently and gauze-like by the toilet, as if wanting a pee but not quite sure what it’s supposed to do.

He took the flannel out of the steaming bathwater and squeezed it as dry as he could. He slapped it over his eyes and the figure was blotted out. The hot water lapped at his neck, the smell of soap and shampoo strong in his nostrils. So too the smell of his own whisky-soaked breath. Which is why he didn’t know whether the ghost was a real ghost (real?) or a by-product of a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s. A bottle and a half of Johnnie Walker’s to be exact. The thought of which caused him to lean over the side of the bath and grasp the neck of the bottle, which he drew swiftly and, he thought, with amazing accuracy, all things considered, to his lips. He glugged down another couple of searing mouthfuls. The flannel slipped down from his eyes, the light from the bathroom bulb far too bright and blasting his tired eyes, and revealed the figure, still unmoved from its station by the toilet. A huge rounded, balloon of a man, with a half coconut dangling from a piece of string in his hand.

“Leave me alone, you dumb bastard!” Bernard slurred heavily. But it didn’t leave him alone. And the coconut swung back and forth like a pendulum, or one of those things hypnotists used, he thought. Behave like a dog. Bark. Now a pig. That’s it, grunt. Squeal like a stuck pig. Laughter. Applause.

He heard voices from downstairs. And the sound of crying. So he sank his ears under the water so that he might muffle it, or even blot it out altogether, because he knew he’d caused the crying and the only thing he could think of doing was hiding from it. Now all he heard was the thub-thub-thub of his own blood pounding in his ears. He looked down at his body, distorted and white beneath the grey, sudsy water, at his wide hair-matted chest, his thick arms floating like pink, hairy logs.

It couldn’t be denied, he had looks. He had a body. Not much, but enough to fool someone until they came up close and he spoke to them. Then he’d spoil his chances good and proper when he opened his mouth. Or he’d walk, which was a dead giveaway, and no matter how he tried he couldn’t alter his shambling, heavy gait with the slumped shoulders and the dragging of legs that seemed to be too weighty for him, like he was hauling around twin tubes of lead.

“All things have a purpose,” his granny said the time he broke down and wept in front of her, and she didn’t bat an eyelid, took it as if it was the most natural thing in the world that a grown man of twenty-five might sob his eyes out like a blubbering kid, all snotty-nosed and flushed cheeks. Because he loved his granny and she loved him and it was OK to cry, to be who you were and how you felt. “There is a purpose for everyone in this world,” she said. “You just haven’t found yours yet, that’s all, Bernard. And don’t forget your gift…”

The first time he saw a ghost he was aged about ten. It was a dog, at the foot of his bed, all shaggy and gold and friendly-like. He woke from his sleep and there it was. At first he thought it might have been a present, because he’d desperately wanted a dog, but realisation soon dawned that it was neither his birthday nor Christmas – the only two annual occasions such a rare thing might be forthcoming. And the worst thing he could have done was rub his eyes, because it disappeared as soon as his fist was withdrawn from his lids. But he told his mum and dad, and they just looked at each other with that conspiratorial look that tells you they’re in on something you’re not. “We had a dog once, when you were young,” his mum said. “A golden retriever.” He looked to his dad for confirmation. “Must be a ghost,” his dad said, grinning from behind his mug of tea, like it was meant to scare him. But it didn’t. Not in the least. He waited for it again, the golden dog, but it never came back. His granny told him a few in the family had the Gift, and that he might be one of them. She didn’t mock him. “That makes you special,” she’d said, and Bernard had grinned.

When he was young he saw them when he awoke, at night. His granddad. His aunty. The old man who owned the sweetshop at the corner of High Street. And then his granny, six weeks after she’d died. But he saw her in the middle of the day, on a Sunday after he’d had a skinfull of ale; she was crossing over the road in front of his house with a carrier bag full of shopping. Mostly, these days, he’d see ghosts when he was drunk

He’d been good with his hands. These hands that stick ungainly from the white stumps of his thick arms. Fixed his dad’s petrol lawnmower when he was about eight or nine. Took it apart, put it back together and the thing sparked into life. “Well I nivver!” his dad said, brushing back his cap and scratching his forehead. “Well I nivver!” And he gave him a full penny to spend at the sweet shop on High Street as a reward. So he’d take anything apart that he could lay his eager hands on, even if they didn’t need repairing – a clock, a watch, a tin toy, a hairdryer – and sometimes they’d work and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes he’d get a penny and sometimes he’d get a clout round the ear. “Perhaps that’s your purpose, Bernard,” his granny had said. “Every man has a purpose in life.” And Bernard grinned.

Eventually he found a job working on tractors in a factory, and he’d thought he’d discovered his mechanical heaven. “Getting arms like fence posts, he is. A real man. Made my old lawnmower burst into life,” his dad had said to a friend at the factory, a drinking mate, and the job was more or less secured there and then over the swigging of a pint of bitter. But machines don’t give love or are soft to the touch or tell you you’re special in any way, and Bernard was lonely. And he asked his granny why people didn’t like him. Women people. “You’re kind and you’re honest,” she’d said. “One day she’ll come along. The right woman.” And she put her arm around his broad shoulder and patted him like he was a kid, and he let his tears soak into her perfumed cardigan like he was a kid.

But she was right all along. He met beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Connie Stone. She’d talked to him like he was a friend, and they’d laughed together like friends, and he’d asked her if she’d like to go out somewhere and she’d said yes. Then she’d kissed him, which was the first real kiss he’d ever had, a proper kiss soaked with affection and promise, and not many kisses later he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said yes as if she’d been waiting all along for him to ask it. And all things came together for him, and Bernard was the happiest man alive. He grinned more than he’d ever grinned before just so as people would know exactly how happy he was.

There was the stomping of feet on the stairs. Feet heavy with emotion, weighty with distress and hurt and all the bad things Bernard never thought he was capable of. But things had changed and his world had caved in on itself like a beach ball snagged on sharp rocks, just crumpled up all wrinkled, lying there, and no matter how he kicked at it the thing just wouldn’t go back to how it was before, complete, round, a thing of purpose.

“Bernard, look here, old man, I’ve got some news…” said his manager. His eyes looking away at the calendar on the wall where Miss June flashed her bare breasts over a knickerbocker glory. “Fact is, Bernard, some of us have got to go.” Some of us. Some of you, more like. Never us. “If we stay as we are then the entire ship will go down, you do understand, Bernard?” And Bernard simply bit at his lip with the vision of a ship being torpedoed and men flailing about in a heaving blue ocean while the sharks circled hungrily, patiently. “Fact is, you’re one of those we have to let go.” At first he didn’t comprehend. He’d been at the factory since leaving school. The spot on the shop floor had become an extension of him.

“What about my purpose?” Bernard blurted when it finally sank in, while the manager had looked blankly at him.

“You’ll get a tidy lump of redundancy, Bernard,” he said, and that was that. That was all there was to it.

So, finally cast adrift Bernard went to his granny’s grave, and he tugged out a couple of dandelions and smoothed over the wound with his tender fingers. He asked her silently what he should do now. She didn’t say anything. He lingered nearby on one of the benches, near a stinking bin overflowing with once beautiful flowers, but now all mushy and brown and dead. He waited for her to appear, because he had the Gift. But the Gift had abandoned him, for she refused to show herself.

He wanted to talk his redundancy over with Connie, yet somehow he could never find the strength to do it, to let her know how his head ached with it all. Because part of his purpose was to be a man, and Connie did so want a man, and a man had to work at the tractors otherwise he wasn’t a man no more. And what was a man when they took away from him what a man is? It was more than his tired brain could manage.

“A real man holds his drink,” his dad had said, laughing at him because he choked on a neat gin. Through tear-blurred eyes Bernard had laughed back, and then took what remained in the glass in one swift gulp. His dad had clapped loudly and patted him on the back. “He’s a real young man now!” he said to his cronies with a queer kind of pride ringing in his voice that made Bernard elated, and Bernard suddenly felt unique, the epicentre of a tepid and fuggy universe.

So he drank, because when they take away one thing that makes a man a man, he reaches instinctively for another thing that makes a man a man. And when that doesn’t work anymore, because through the swirling haze that ordinarily clouds and numbs the mind you can still see yourself for what you are, then a man resorts to what he has left, and he strikes out with the strength that makes him a man.

He struck out at Connie. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Connie. And how his heart was crushed by it. But that didn’t stop him striking out at her again, and again, when the blackness overwhelmed him.

And what’s more he didn’t like that Philip Calder kid – that Collie – hanging around like he did all the time. Didn’t like him at all. Came sniffing around Connie like a dog on heat, he did. Didn’t like him one little bit. There was something going on there, something he didn’t quite understand, something that nagged him, snagged his thoughts like briars.

The other night she gave him a parcel, a large one. Went into a cupboard and pulled it out, all wrapped up in brown paper like a present. Except it wasn’t a present, it was a sort of secret, because their voices had been hushed. Max hadn’t said anything, because Max never did. Dumb bastard. So when he’d gone with his parcel, he’d gone right in there and challenged her. But she put up a wall, like she does sometimes, and that made him all the angrier because he couldn’t broach it, so in a stupor flecked red with rage he’d done the next best thing and tried to smash bodily through it. She’d screamed. How that pained him. Yet he couldn’t stop once he started, not till he fell over exhausted and disorientated onto the sofa where he’d fallen fast asleep, the mystery parcel remaining just that.

He hated that Calder kid.

“You should never hate, Bernard, because to hate is the Devil inside you. You should accept them all for what they are and live and let live,” his granny said. “A real man knows how to hold himself back, not go flapping around in a rage like a ragged old chicken.”

But tonight had been different. Tonight he had been a chicken and not a man at all. Downstairs the television set was broken, and a bowl of fruit had been thrown against a wall; and when Max had risen to defend his mother Bernard had set about him, first with his fists, but then with an oak chair that had once belonged to his granny, and he broke that against the helpless dumb bastard. That’s when the screaming really began, like those sirens you hear in the movies when the German bombers were coming over to London during the war. It filled his head, filled the room, filled his miserable little beach ball of a world till his entire being was just one long shriek. He finally put his hands to his ears to blot it out and went upstairs and turned on the bath taps.