Pinprick (5 page)

Catherine laughed dryly.

“Not quite,” Catherine laughed dryly, “But the reporters have been doing the circuits again, trying to find out if you’re coming back or not and dredging up bad feelings.”

Before Shane knew it Catherine told the taxi driver to take the next left and they were at her house.

*

A car door slammed. Jack and Vic looked at each other and then made towards the door.

“He’s here dad,” called Vic’s daughter.

“Thank god – don’t come in here love. Stay by the door,” said Vic. He finished wiping his hands clean and thrust the old towel at Jack.

Jack forced himself to stop gagging and followed as he rubbed his hands the towel. Vic’s wife and daughter were standing by the cattle shed door, where the air was clean. They looked anxiously out at the farm yard.

The vet strode into the shed. Immediately, he slapped a hand over his mouth and nose. The smell was awful.

“What the– What’s going on?” he said.

Jack looked dishevelled as he hastily pulled up his filthy coveralls. His hair was plastered to his face with sweat.

“It’s another Aberdeen,” Vic threw up his hands in despair. “The third bloody one this year!”

The Aberdeen’s were beautiful Scottish highland cows with long ginger coats. They were the pride and joy of the farm and the biggest money makers.

Jack’s stomach churned nauseatingly when he looked in the cow’s stall. The huge animal lay on its side breathing rapidly; its golden hair was matted to its body like it had been through a carwash. Its stomach bulged unnaturally. The rear end of the cow was a mangled mess; covered in dark blood and excrement. A foul rotting smell filled the stall.

The vet was a skinny man who didn’t look capable of the job he was about to do but he had delivered hundreds of calves in the village over the last ten years.

“Come on then let’s do this,” Jack said as he led the vet into the stall.

The vet pulled on some thick rubber gloves and crouched at the cow’s hind quarters.

“Right,” he said in a baritone voice that didn’t suit him, “hold the head and her middle.”

Jack opted for the end furthest away from the rank shitty smell and got his arms around the animal’s neck. Vic slumped his weight over the cow’s chest and back. The cow’s eyes were level with Jack’s and he noticed a dull lifeless matt finish to them he had only seen in the dying. He didn’t fancy its chances, poor thing.

Hopefully we’ll save the calf
, he thought knowing that Vic was thinking about how much money he would lose and the subsequent consequences of that predicament. The sweat ran rivets down his shirt and clung to his back.

When the vet put his hand inside her, the cow cried out in pain and tried to stand. It took all of the two men’s strength just to keep the animal on the ground. The noise it made was like no other laboured noise any of them had heard before, at least, not from a cow. It sounded like some kind of wildcat, like a mountain lion or panther.

It’s going to die for certain
, Jack thought, as he gritted his teeth and held the animal tight.

He could hear the vet panting and struggling but felt lucky that he couldn’t see anything as Vic was in the way. A revolting tearing sound came from the cow’s rear end, followed by a sickening squelch. At once the smell intensified to such immensity that the three men hurled themselves backwards away from the cow. Jack fell to his knees and vomited onto the hay covered floor. Vic stood, one hand resting on the stall wall for support, violently retching. Jack saw the vet sat on his haunches, his face ashen grey. He was staring at the newly born calf.

The cow’s behind was a ragged bloody mess. Dark red arterial blood flowed freely from its gaping torn vagina and a thick disgusting pale green pus oozed and mixed with the shit and the blood. Lying on the ground was a gelatinous sack of black blood and pus. The vet came to his senses and leapt up to try and see if the calf was alive inside the amniotic sack. He prised apart the gloopy substance to uncover the calf.

“My God!” the vet exclaimed as the head of the calf flopped on to the hay. Its eye sockets were alive with maggots, its tongue half eaten and black with necrosis.

As the three men stared in horror, oblivious to the shrieks and wails from Vic’s wife and daughter, the mother cow lifted its head once then dropped it to the floor with a thud. Its shallow breathing stopped as it finally died.

“Jesus-fucking-Christ!” The vet screamed as the calf started moving. The black, half rotten thing twitched about on the floor and made a feeble attempt to get to its feet. It dragged itself towards its mother, mewling strangely from a half decomposed mouth. When it tried to suckle at its dead mother’s udder Jack puked himself empty. Vic ran to the door.

“Where are you going?” Jack spluttered.

Vic turned and looked at the abomination before him suckling dead milk and watching as it spilled from the calf’s semi-formed throat.

“To get my fucking gun!”

Chapter Four

Jennifer didn’t agree with her dad’s views on her uncle Shane. Why was everyone so horrible to him about something that happened twenty years ago, that wasn’t even his fault? Uncle Shane would never kill his friends, who would? She admired him for surviving this long with the social stigma. Especially seeing as he was famous. In his postcards, Uncle Shane called it, ‘being in the public eye’.

She rolled over on the bed and fished around in her bedside cabinet and pulled out a thick plastic purple folder. It was full of newspaper cuttings and a small stack of postcards from different exotic locations. Many of the postcards had been torn into several pieces and had been stuck together with now yellowing tape. She picked a postcard which had a colossal hotel shaped like a ship’s sail with Dubai printed in the corner. The photo was taken at night with a full moon set in a sky that ran from orange through to black.

The photographer’s viewpoint had captured the exact angle for the moon to appear like a giant golf ball on the hotel’s helipad. She flipped it over and read the faded writing. Uncle Shane always wrote in capital letters as if he knew his handwriting would be indecipherable to them. ‘To J&J…’ That was how he greeted her and her sister on everything he sent.

Her dad said it was because he forgot their names but she didn’t want to believe that. The man was famous for God sake; he needed some bloody privacy, who knows how many people read these things as they fly across the world? Why shouldn’t he make some feeble attempt at keeping his and their identities private? She scanned the few lines of standard postcard information, about what the weather was like and how shocking the price of the hotel was, nothing that gave much away. He always signed it Uncle S. Dad said that he never wrote the cards himself and that he had one of his floozy secretaries do it instead, but she didn’t believe that either.

One day, she’d been playing an epic game of hide and seek with Angela. She was fed up with being found within seconds, and so, even though it was forbidden, she had hid in the attic. She climbed up and managed to slide the hatch back in place before she realised someone else would have to let her out. It didn’t bother her; she’d just call out when Angela had had enough searching.

In the meantime, she shone her My Little Pony torch around the rafters and gazed in wonder at the only part of the house she’d never been in. It wasn’t very mysterious and there were no ancient valuable objects or secrets she could make out. Just a few boxes that had obviously been there years, some with her grandma’s writing on. As she pulled back the flaps, she saw crockery in one and china in another. She moved one aside when her eye caught a box that stood out from the others.

The design said it was made for some kind of spaceship toy. When she investigated and studied the box closer she read Return of the Jedi: Millennium Falcon. She knew of the films but had never really showed an interest in science fiction. She remembered her gran telling her that Uncle Shane had been into all that spacey Star Trek stuff so was excited at the prospect of discovering something of her uncle’s. The box, albeit covered in dust, was in immaculate condition so she opened it carefully. Inside wasn’t the grey biscuit-shaped spaceship of Han Solo’s but a stack of exercise books. The top book was blank except for the name of its owner ‘S. Colbert’. It was written in the same capital lettering that she would become familiar with. After testing the hardiness of a close by box, she sat down and opened the exercise book.

…I wish to Christ I knew what the fuck it meant but I haven’t the foggiest. No matter how hard I try I can’t bloody remember what happened. What if I am the guilty party, what if I’m the one who’s responsible? What then? The head fuckers want me to keep diaries of anything and everything since the accident, because they say something might show.

I’m a social pariah, the people in this redneck inbred cesspit of a village won’t be happy unless they see me prosecuted, exiled or publicly fucking flayed for the loss of their children. Don’t they realise I feel the loss too? My friends, my friends were my family; they were my brothers, my comrades, my co-conspirators. I miss them so much. I just wish I could turn back time and convince them to stay home that night, and that this constant whistling in my ears would shut the fuck up…

She closed the book, shocked at her find. She felt guilty for breaking the age old taboo of reading someone’s diary. She placed it back in the box on top of the others and shut the lid, hiding it from view, but it didn’t hide her excitement at finding them. What if they contained undiscovered clues as to what happened to his friends? What if she found a confessional? She imagined herself solving the mystery after all these years. Would the truth make things any easier on Shane and the families of those who had lost their loved ones? Or would it make things worse for everyone? Try as she might, she knew there was no way she could leave those books alone.

After a minute she opened the box again and this time she extracted another note book with ‘Finding Heaven’ scrawled on the front. She opened it and discovered that Uncle Shane had written his own novel. This was much safer than, and almost as interesting as, the diaries, so she decided to placate her nosiness with this instead.

Mankind had been exploring the Galaxy for over one and a half thousand years before they inadvertently found Heaven. For centuries the search had been to find another planet as habitable as Earth but to no success. When Gyrocor #43 came into the recently discovered planet they realised something was amiss…

Jennifer stopped reading when she heard her dad’s voice booming up the stairs. She knew she’d be in trouble if he found out where she was so she stayed silent. She stayed there for three hours while her family searched for her, reading Uncle Shane’s attempt at his own sci-fi story.

Finally, she heard the sound of her dad’s car start up. She put the novel back in the box with the diaries and vowed to retrieve them as soon as she could. Then by yelling and stomping her feet, she eventually managed to get the attention of Angela who came up let her out.

The hatch rattled and a beam of light shot into the dusty attic.

“You scared the life out of me.”

“What took you so long?” She peered down at the nervous face of her twin.

“I didn’t know where the banging was coming from, did I?” Angela replied defensively. “What’ve you been doing up here anyway?”

“Hiding.”

“For all that time? I don’t believe you.” Angela had her hand on hips as Jennifer climbed down.

“Well I was. So there,” She grinned and closed her bedroom door.

She packed away the papers into her purple folder and stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom thinking about Uncle Shane’s Star Wars box in the attic. She would’ve liked to talk to Angela about it but she looked up to their dad and took her opinions from him, especially where Uncle Shane was concerned. Jennifer thought that was stupid because they had only met Uncle Shane a handful of times since they were born.

She picked up a silver handled hairbrush and stood in front of the full-length mirror on her wardrobe. As she brushed her chestnut hair she thought about her gran. It didn’t seem possible she was gone. She’d been dead a week now and there were traces of her everywhere. It was as though she’d just gone out to the shops and would be back any moment. I wish Mum would pack her things up, she thought. Gran had used this brush when she’d been little and had told her and Angela about it almost every day for as long as she could remember.

Until last week that was, when Mum had found her in her bed; she just looked like she was asleep, peaceful like someone had just flipped a switch. The hospital said that it had been a stroke. Angela had taken it badly and at any point would burst into tears. Obviously she had been devastated too, but after the initial shock, Jennifer tried to be grateful that Gran didn’t have to suffer much or end up like Old Mrs Langston up the road.

When they were little Mrs Langston was always round the house at twelve o’clock sharp for tea and toast with Gran. She remembered the way she would take off her trademark navy raincoat and paisley headscarf. Underneath it all, Jennifer was always awed by just how pristine she was. Angela once told her that Mrs Langston was the Queen, or at least thought she was. Then one day she hadn’t turned up by one o’clock and Gran hastily threw her coat on and went to see what was wrong.

An hour later Gran had phoned Mum and said she’d gone to the hospital with her. She’d found Mrs Langston half naked and cold on the bathroom floor. It turned out she had had a stroke. She was in hospital for weeks and Jennifer only ever saw her once more after that.

Her granddaughter brought her round to see Gran; she was going to live with her as she couldn’t tend to herself. She had lost weight and was reduced to a poor wretched thing; she seemed to have shrunk in size and was saggy on one side of her face. All she could do to communicate was nod or shake her head. When she smiled it was horrible.

So Jennifer found consolation in the fact that her Gran didn’t have her independence and dignity taken from her. It would have made everyone’s suffering a lot worse if she’d been like Mrs Langston.

She pulled her hair back into a bunch up behind her head and, letting the short pieces fall around her face, she turned her face this way and that as she imagined what she might look like with short hair. She thought it would suit her. She and Angela had always had ridiculously long hair. She didn’t fancy her chances of getting it done before her gran’s funeral the next week, so she just let her hair fall back down and sighed deeply.

She was fed up with being the mirror image of her sister. So what if they were identical twins, it didn’t mean they had to dress the same or have their hair the same, did it? God knew they didn’t act the same. She craved some individuality.

*

Jennifer’s twin Angela squirted washing up liquid into the stream of running hot water and watched as the mixture gave birth to bubbles. She found washing the dishes therapeutic, the monotonous repetition gave her hands something to do and let her organise her thoughts.

She was actually quite surprised when she found out her infamous uncle Shane was going to be staying with them. For one thing she was surprised her father would allow it. Shane hardly ever had much contact with them anyway, and he hadn’t seen Gran for at least eighteen months before she died.

Thinking of her gran made her eyes swell with tears. She missed her so much and wished that she hadn’t died. Even if she had been paralyzed she would’ve helped her mum nurse her. There were so many people who survived strokes and eventually made a full recovery, why couldn’t have Gran?

And now her bastard uncle was going to be staying under the same roof as her; not that she really remembered him.

There had been a fair amount of scandal over the years involving her Uncle, like the not-so-secret secret liaisons with his secretary when he was engaged to that woman off of the telly. Angela didn’t recall her name but had seen the program she presented, something about selling posh properties to posh people. Leggy and blonde, she was quite pretty, but the thing that Angela did not get was that the secretary who he had a fling with looked pretty much identical. What’s the point in that? So a dirty, snobby, cheating, womaniser who was probably responsible in some way for the loss of his friends’ lives was going to be staying with them. Oh joy!

She scrubbed the last plate and left it on the draining board to dry. Then she wiped her hands on a red-checked teacloth, dried her eyes and stared out of the kitchen window at the blazing sunshine. It was a glorious day and she wondered what she should do to make the most of it. She was just about to go find her sister when she felt the familiar tingle run down the scar on her hip. It was like someone tracing a finger over the shiny scar tissue. She always experienced this sensation when Jenny was near. She spun round and sure enough her sister was behind her.

Jennifer yelped with surprise.

“You know it’s still freaky the way you do that!” she said.

Angela laughed and playfully punched her sister’s arm.

“It’s our twin telekinesis JenJen, it’s not my fault I use more of my brain thank you!”

“Yeah it’s just a pity you don’t put it to anything more useful than washing up!” Jennifer said raising an eyebrow.

Angela crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

“Very mature, I can see which part of your massive brain you used to do that.”

“The weather’s great, fancy a–” said Angela.

“Bike?” Jennifer butted in.

“Walk!” Angela finished.

“You changed your mind,” Jennifer laughed. “As long as you’re too tired to peddle after all your housework.”

“I just can’t be bothered to change,” she said, indicating her dress. She saw her dad walk past the kitchen window.

“Better tell Dad where we’re going.”

The twins walked side by side in silence. Any onlookers would be able to tell immediately they were twins. No matter how much Jennifer tried her best to rebel against her mirror image they would always be and look like twins. There was an unspoken, possibly psychic connection between them, they always seemed to be really good at telling what the other was thinking and even though they had different tastes in clothing, nine times out of ten they were dressed in sync colour wise. Jennifer had once seen a photograph of her mum with shocking pillar-box red hair wearing cool punk clothes. It was the coolest thing in the world and she found it hard to believe she had been like that. Once she was at college or uni and away from this place, the first thing she was going to do was dye her hair some mad garish colour. Maybe green.