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  ‘We have to insert and turn at the same time. That will target and launch the peace device,’ explained Grobe eagerly.

  ‘The peace device?’ asked Fleeertch.

  ‘The weapons grade, plutonium-tipped, nuclear warhead-equipped attack torpedo,’ replied Grobe, his perfectly cuboid head swivelling back and forth on his anglepoise neck. ‘It’s the only way to protect London from the threat posed by this,’ he pointed at the potato-shaped blip on the radar from which emanated smaller, sheep-shaped blips, at regular intervals.

  ‘I hope you will forgive me for asking, Sir,’ asked Fleeertch, sure that he would not, ‘but won’t the devastating conflagration resulting from the explosion of a nuclear warhead, albeit a peaceful one, in the middle of the Thames, have a more negative effect on London than a few combustible sheep?’

  ‘What can you see on this radar, Fleeertch?’ asked Grobe, pointing at the landmass on either side of river.

  ‘Woolwich, Sir?’ asked Fleeertch.

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Grobe, his well-furnished eyebrows scuttling back and forwards across his forehead like rabid caterpillars. ‘I doubt anyone will notice it’s gone.’

  *

  Unable to rain barbarity down upon the heads of his siblings, as he would have done in most normal social situations, M had begun to form an exit plan, when he noticed a very un-flood-barrier-like protuberance had emerged and was now pointing directly at them.

  ‘They are going to fuck us up,’ said M.

  ‘Thoughts drain down through your skull and are filtered through your harrowing world vision until everything that you see, everything you touch, is clogged with horror,’ said Clive. ‘Violence doesn’t define everyone as it does you.’

  M grabbed his brother by the shoulders and swivelled him 180 degrees so that he was precluded from loading any more sheep into the catapult and forced to look at the barrier.

  ‘For a man who was emotionally vanquished by a tyrant as a child and has lived by a creed of sadistic self indulgence, you are insufferably proud. It is the kind of pride, however, that does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. That,’ M pointed at the huge gun barrel which was now surrounded by red and green flashing lights, ‘that is about to bring about a small but not insignificant revision to your plan to sail to the other side of the world. So I suggest you and I and our sister get the fuck out of Dodge.’

  ‘What makes you think we want to leave?’ asked Bathsheba with previously uncharted clarity.

  The gun barrel began to reverberate expectantly. All but two of the lights surrounding it were now green.

  ‘Surely this… boat is about aspiration, not evisceration?’ asked M. ‘Despite everything, all the unspeakable things we three saw, the things that bastard made us endure when we were too young to fit suffering on that scale into our hearts, even after all that, you cannot want this to be your coda.’

  ‘You see this hand?’ asked Bathsheba, waving her fisted fingers under M’s nose. ‘One day, it might as well have been a Tuesday, when I was five years old, our father took me to Kew Gardens. Even then I had realised that the good times were the worst, that the periods of respite from his awful revelry only allowed him to gather strength before defiling us still more. He took me into the tropical house and over to the bougainvillea, which soared up above my head in an incalculable rocket tail of crimson bound for the heavens, and he made me reach out this hand. As I touched a diaphanous flower head he closed his fingers around mine until each petal seared as if it were made from the embers of coal. He forced me to grasp until my little hand was smashed. This hand.’ Tremulously she unpicked the fingers of her clenched fist one at a time with her good hand, breaking each one as she did so. Inside, hidden for thirty-six years, were the almost imperceptible remnants of a bougainvillea flower.

  *

  ‘Insert and turn the key,’ snapped Grobe from the other side of the toilet cubicle.

  ‘It isn’t right, Sir,’ replied Fleeertch.

  ‘Right and wrong, they’re such relative terms,’ replied Grobe.

  ‘Mr Grobe, Percival, when I was having ultrasound treatment for my kidney stone, I noticed that the nurse operating the sound wave device had turned the dial up to 5 and I asked her whether turning it up to 10 would get rid of my kidney stone. She said yes it would but that would be because my kidney would have exploded.’

  ‘What point are you trying to make?’ snarled Grobe.

  ‘My point is – why do this? They have to run out of sheep eventually.’

  ‘Have you ever seen one of these?’ asked Grobe, removing a Ruger LCP 380 Ultra Compact Pistol from his pocket and sticking the nozzle so deeply into Fleeertch’s left ear that it was within a whisker of his brain. ‘This is a small calibre hand gun and this,’ he pointed towards the key in Fleeertch’s hand, which was doing the watusi, ‘operates a very big gun. They both kill people just as dead. So what’s it to be – head blown to tiny little brave pieces or key-turning cowardice?’

  With one hand vaguely stemming the flow of blood from his ear, Fleeertch used the other to insert and turn the key.

  ‘Bang bang you’re dead,’ said Grobe.

  *

  All of the lights around the barrel of the gun had turned green and it had stopped moving.

  ‘We have to abandon this potato right now,’ shouted M, grabbing his brother and sister by their wrists.

  ‘Why protect us?’ asked Clive.

  ‘Leave us to Poseidon,’ said Bathsheba, pulling loose.

  ‘When he came home and dad wanted something to hit, something to blame, some temporary poultice to assuage the terror that this was all his life could be, I stood up and I took it for all of us,’ said M.

  ‘Why?’ asked Clive.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said M, turning and grabbing for his sister again.

  ‘It wasn’t enough,’ said Clive, who had picked up a length of wood and planted it with no little force in the centre of M’s lavishly presented forehead.

  *

  M half woke to find himself sharing a life raft with three sheep. He didn’t like the expressions on the faces of the sheep but he could not say exactly why. He felt as if his head had been masticated by the blunt, conical, nipple-like teeth of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Floating all around the dinghy was the burnt out wreckage of a boat. A quickly scribbled note had been shoved into his hand – it read, ‘be a better man than your father’.

  Chapter 5

  But M was not a better man than his father. It was both a serious failing and a seriously difficult thing to fail at, since his father, Jonah, was an unfathomably embittered, peerlessly vicious, festering, child-hating, world-class cuntaclysm of a man.

  Jonah was completely bald except for the patch of hair which grew from a huge scar on the left side of his temple. Everyone who saw the scar thought it was shaped like a penis. No one who saw the scar ever told Jonah that it was shaped like a penis but everyone thought that it was. You couldn’t help it.

  Jonah had inherited a cafe when his uncle died. The roof of the cafe was very low and Jonah was a very tall man. A very tall man. He could not have the ceiling raised because the cafe was built in a railway arch and it was a condition of his uncle’s estate that he wasn’t permitted to sell it.

  Try as he might, Jonah was always cutting the top of his head on the ceiling and often wore two plasters, one crossed over the other. Eventually the plasters became a permanent fixture.

  A large vein ran from just below his left eye up over his skull, under the plasters that covered the cut on his head and through the scar that was shaped like a penis, and when he was angry, the vein throbbed.

  Jonah was an angry man – if you met him you knew.

  It was not long after M attempted to murder Daniel for the first time that M told him he had killed Jonah with a single bullet to his brain with a gun given to him as a twelfth birthday present by his mother. They were sitting at a dining table having tea and, although they were a considerable dist
ance away from anything that could be deemed a drowning hazard by even the most liberal construction, Daniel was wearing his life vest.

  Daniel was prodding suspiciously at an egg sandwich, which might, he suspected, have been laced with some deadly bacterial agent by his father. Daniel’s mother had left home a year before and only returned once a week to cut the crusts off their sandwiches and iron his underwear. When she stopped doing even this she faded away altogether like a painting that has been left in the sunshine for too long.

  On this particular afternoon, M was momentarily distracted from his usual Sunday pastimes of frowning at Daniel’s life vest, frowning at Daniel, frowning at the sandwiches his wife had castrated and relighting his pipe, by the burning desire to tell his son that he had offed his grandfather Mafia-style even though his grandfather was not exactly dead and was running a cafe in Hackney at the time. (It is worth noting that being dead and running a cafe in Hackney are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

  Daniel did not know what motivated M to shoot his grandfather and M would no more have confided his feelings to a bowl of cornflakes.

  The whole murderous father absent mother dynamic did not provide Daniel with what could be characterised as the ideal springboard into adulthood but went some way to explain the prodigious storm cloud of shite that hung above his head for the rest of his life. A storm cloud that rained and rained.

  Chapter 6

  There are fissures at the heart of every relationship. At night if you listen carefully you can hear the sides of them groaning and grinding against each other like mighty icebergs, just above the sound of your partner snoring. You want to go back to before, when everything was new and perfect and intact but there is no before. Only after.

  Even worse than Daniel’s relationship with his father, and his father’s relationship with his respective father, was his parents’ relationship with one another, characterised as it was by the vicious carping of a psychopath and the retaliatory sniping of a woman so deluded that she had convinced herself that she was both amphibian and immortal. They had suffered more damage than most, even before his mother decided she was a mermaid and his father tried to drown him, but the cause of the first significant rupture was the boating pond incident.

  You can care too much for a child. When M pushed Saul, Daniel’s ex-brother, in his pram, he exuded an air of murderous propriety. Strangers were left under no misapprehension – any attempt to approach this child, no matter how cute he was, would be met with sudden and deadly justice.

  Daniel’s mother was little better. Entrusted with the responsibility of caring for a child whose birth had caused her to lose all equilibrium, she constructed a web of daily ticks, repetitions and habits around him which was quite impenetrable. M had witnessed the full majesty of his wife’s insanity unfurl gradually like a peacock’s tail. Shortly after they returned home with Saul from the maternity ward, he had found her in the attic, taking all the tiles off their roof and placing them in piles of five. Anti-psychotic medication, M discovered, was only effective when his wife actually took it.

  An agreed visit to the boating pond on Hampstead Heath that Sunday was the glace cherry glistening atop a week of desperate custard. When they arrived, M took two-year-old Saul and his new radio-controlled boat to the water’s edge for a maiden voyage and Daniel’s mother found a park bench to observe them from. She tried to concentrate on the tottering joy of her young son but she viewed the world through eyes which appeared to have been positioned atop a tower made of jelly.

  A swan and a duck approached her for food, or so she presumed, and she shooed them away.

  ‘Do you want it?’ asked the swan.

  Daniel’s mother looked around her. No one else appeared to have heard these avian words and yet they had been delivered with clarity.

  ‘Do I want what?’ asked Daniel’s mother.

  ‘Did she bring it?’ asked the duck.

  ‘She brought it and she wants it,’ replied the swan, advancing on her.

  ‘Look I don’t know what you think I have brought but you had better leave me alone,’ said Daniel’s mother, shifting uncomfortably on the park bench, her eyes begging the rest the world for support it was not equipped to offer.

  ‘I’m going to fuck you up,’ said the swan.

  ‘Fuck her up,’ said the duck.

  ‘I’m going to,’ said the swan.

  *

  At the side of the boating pond, M held Saul by the waist as he placed his shiny red radio-controlled boat, with silken green and blue sails, into the water. The sun kissed the blue corrugated surface of the pond leaving mellifluous lipstick streaks of light, but a cloud had fallen across Saul’s eyes – his little boat was being assailed from every direction by larger, more mobile vessels. M attempted to manoeuvre it into the middle of the pond, but this brought it into the path of a particularly large galleon which, rather than deviate, hit Saul’s boat amidships. For a moment the little vessel bobbed in the stuttering wake of the galleon and then capsized and sank.

  Saul was seized by seismic shocks of grief and jagged sobs, each one of which pained M more than the last. If he had a heart, then following the tracks of his son’s tears would have been the only reliable way to locate it.

  M gathered Saul up into his arms and walked him towards the car, throwing the remote control for his boat in a bin. It looked like defeat, but in M’s case, that was never the end of the story.

  M found the spade in his car boot where he left it for various digging related activities. Holding his son in one arm and the spade in the other, he returned to the pond but did not stop at the water’s edge. He waded directly out to the galleon and although its pace was impressive in comparison to other model boats it was no match for a thirty-two stone man wielding a garden implement. The ship was cleaved in two with one single blow at which point M stopped and waited for protests from its owner. Silence and inertia had fallen upon those gathered around the boating pond in the way it did when a herd of wildebeest observe one of their number savaged and consumed by a lion. In silence there was anonymity and in anonymity there was invisibility.

  M wielded the spade, smashing boat after boat into oblivion and with each blow Saul laughed and the clouds dispersed.

  Chapter 7

  It was exactly 7 years and 135 days after Saul had died, just after M had polished off his second roast chicken and was starting on a third, on what had become a somewhat typical Sunday afternoon in front of the TV, when M’s wife told him that she was a mermaid.

  The news that his wife was a mythical, sea-dwelling, water-breathing, sailor snaring, twenty-four carat, all singing, all dancing, denizen of the deep had been greeted with a level of sarcasm from M that was so Herculean it had reduced their already fragile relationship to weekly sandwich crust removal and underwear ironing. When she angrily demanded to know why he could not simply accept her for what she was, M had pointed out that:

  (a) She had not been a mermaid for the first fifteen years of their marriage and that this Damascene revelation had only occurred after a particularly heated altercation with a parking attendant in Swanage;

  (b) She had two legs rather than a fish’s tail;

  (c) She could not swim;

  (d) Neither of her parents had been, to his knowledge, mythical aquatic creatures (although he was forced to accept that they did both lack certain basic human characteristics); and

  (e) She resided in a semi-detached house in Kentish Town which, whilst raining and sodden on occasions, could not be described in any sense as a mystical underwater kingdom.

  Be all that as it may, she responded, she was a mermaid and if he did not like it he could fuck off.

  Their marriage had become as irretrievable and ethereal as the dreams of a battery hen. M saw the woman he had loved lose all connection with what is popularly thought of as reality, abandoning him to the parenthood of one son and the stubborn memory of a second. Their children – one for whom life had been as tenuous as the fainte
st touch of a cloud on a parachutist’s cheek and one who refused to die.

  *

  Day to day suburban life was becoming increasingly challenging for Daniel’s mother. Her waking thoughts were coloured by a longing for the sound and texture of the sea but as much as this thrilled her it also perplexed and petrified her. She knew that hitting a parking attendant with a spade would not normally inspire a life aquatic but that is what had occurred. In the instant that the metal connected with his head with a resonant twang she had understood what had been wrong with the picture. Existence, her existence, in the car, in the supermarket, in traditional salsa lessons, in bed with M, with every costly breath taken, was drowning her.

  She had driven to the sea a week later – to the sea at night, with its blue-black roar and lumbering grace. She had taken her shoes and socks off and stood in the October tide, her toes thrilled and frozen and looked out at its impossible shape with blind eyes. The sea could not parallel park, the sea did not eat five dinners every night, nor did it mock her poor dress sense. But the sea could be, was, magnificent, it took her breath away with every salt-filled swathe and in that moment, for her, she knew it was more of a husband to her than M could ever be.

  Chapter 8

  Along with a tendency towards the occasional homicide, the coupling of awe-inspiringly unstable individuals was another popular feature of M’s family. On the night that Jonah, Daniel’s grandfather, married Bernice, after the reception had ended (and the kerfuffle caused when Jonah had murdered his best man with a Corby Trouser Press had died down) but before the light switch of reality was flicked on again, they agreed to make lists of ‘what if names’ – names of people who burned so brightly that if you met them, your world would be shaken like a snow globe and for ever more disturbed. For Jonah, these people, glimpsed on a cinema screen as a child and thereafter craved like an addict yearning to recreate their first high, were intangible and magnificently obtrusive. For Bernice, the list was like the contents of a tidal pool, perfect until touched and then glacial and distorted.