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  A professional couple who cared perhaps a little too much for the facade of normality, Jester and Bethany Grellman built a pack of cards to reside in and placed baby Dorsal on the top floor. Jester was a futures broker doomed to constantly explain what he did to people who only heard the words ‘die, die, die’ when they looked at his large round face. Bethany fashioned intricate jewellery from the bleached ligaments and skulls of rodents which she sold from a market stall in Bermondsey. These weren’t real jobs, but they were a symptom of the world we have created and there was no will to discover a cure. Dorsal was permanently embraced, stowed in a papoose on his father’s back, wallowing in the shallow of his mother’s arms, he was their tiny vision.

  It was with a sense of unaccustomed clarity that one evening, over a glass of Chianti and some bratwurst, the Grellmans realised that their love for each other had been lost in the space between their own vacuous words. When the polarity was reversed in their marriage from attract to repel, the vortex created by the beating of their tiny insectile wings disappeared and there was nothing to prevent Dorsal from falling. He was falling still.

  Dorsal’s arms were outstretched but to his parents he had become a hazard to be navigated around. He learned that there was a poverty in love and a purity in hatred, that if he was to survive he must climb onto the shoulders of his victims to avoid becoming one himself. He had been placed in his aunt’s home for a month whilst his parents ‘found their feet’ and the month never came to an end. He had become an invisible giant with eyes that would never forgive and his parents quickly filed him under ‘ex-son’.

  *

  It was an autumnal Friday morning like any other. A starling opened the ailerons at the end of it’s wings and described a perfect parabola as it swooped down to catch a worm; a squirrel secreted a hazelnut in a flowerbed, stopped to smell its own arse, forgot where the hazelnut was, turned back to try to find it, froze because it mistook a nearby dog turd for a fox, smelt its arse again, tried to bury the hazelnut it no longer had, found the original hazelnut, ate it, smelt its arse again, patted down the area where the hazelnut had been and left, pleased with a job well done. At the same time, Dorsal Grellman aged five, sat between his parents, inside the headmaster’s study in the D’Oily Cart Academy waiting to be sold into slavery.

  Caldwell Bynes swept past into his office, his unnecessarily swooshy cape following behind him, grasped with flailing desperation by his redoubtable secretary Bennett as if she were the bridesmaid and the bride’s trailing gown was an unexploded World War 2 bomb coated in butter.

  ‘So how exactly does this work?’ asked Dorsal’s father, granting the conversation exactly sixty per cent of his attention whilst dividing up the balance between thinking about what to buy his girlfriend for her nineteenth birthday, whether or not they should eat at the Italian restaurant in the Fulham Road again and how he should say goodbye to his son when he had no intention of ever visiting him.

  ‘We will visit you of course,’ added his father, squeezing his son’s limp hand and messing his lank, unmanageable hair.

  ‘You sign here,’ said Caldwell, pushing a long, handwritten parchment across his unnecessarily sumptuous desk with the tip of his be-ringed little finger, causing a scraping sound akin to the death throes of a scarab beetle.

  ‘Is this even legal?’ asked Dorsal’s mother, somewhat belatedly, her flawless lipstick glinting in the same fulsome sunbeams that caused the tears on her son’s cheeks to glisten like uncut diamonds as they clung to his chin.

  ‘Legal?’ said Caldwell Bynes. ‘Fuck me no. Not even slightly. Any other questions, because I have a school to run and other parents to…’

  ‘What will he have to, well, you know, do?’ asked his mother.

  ‘Do?’ asked Caldwell Bynes. ‘If you are looking to me to assuage any guilt which might still be lurking in the far reaches of your consciences then you have come to the wrong place. He will have three square meals a day, he will have his own cell in the school dungeon which he can decorate as he pleases and he will be trained by some of the finest bullies this country has ever produced. He will be required to behave in an unreasonable and excessively punitive manner towards the pupils and staff of the school alike and when he reaches the age of eighteen he will be set free to practise the skills he has learned on an unsuspecting society.’

  ‘Have you any advice for us?’ asked Dorsal’s father.

  ‘Well, you might want to think about, you know, hiding.’

  ‘Why would we need to do that?’ asked Dorsal’s mother uneasily.

  ‘Revenge,’ replied Caldwell Bynes. ‘Our official school bullies do have a bit of a habit of hunting down their parents after they have been released from a life of misery and servitude and sort of, you know, executing them. Nothing at all to worry about, just make sure you change your identities and leave the country. A bit of plastic surgery wouldn’t do any harm.’

  As they stood to go, Dorsal’s parents turned to look at their son, to really look at him for the first time since they had begun their new lives in which he played no part. The tears had stopped falling, leaving room on his face for something else. It was not something that either of them had seen on the face of a child before and for the first time since they had grown to abhor each other they instinctively reached out and held hands.

  *

  Some three years later, when Daniel M first walked in through Dorsal Grellman’s school gate – for, through his love of the enterprise of school, Dorsal had become proprietorial, even jealous of this chocolate box of torture – he could not at first take in what he was seeing. This termite, in full school uniform, with a life vest strapped to its back, was the personification of defeat; his destruction would be an almost victimless crime. Dorsal sighed. Daniel did not merit the premiership-quality beating he was about to receive, but it was Dorsal’s duty to inflict it upon him all the same.

  Daniel picked through the detritus of the schoolyard – a nondescript condominium of mouldering vomit-coloured cubes, a dusting of random children toiling away at the act of being and in the middle of this picture and looming ever larger what appeared to be a brick wall. The brick wall was wearing a school tie and jacket and there was something strangely familiar about it – it was the eyes that teetered in a perfectly square brick head, they reminded Daniel of his father’s eyes, perhaps not in appearance but in intent. They wanted to kill him.

  ‘What are you?’ asked the giant of a boy who stood not just in front of him, but all around him. He blocked out the sun. He was the rain. Daniel had never been asked what he was before, and he pondered the question for a moment, sensing that his answer was extremely important.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘I’m…’ started Daniel.

  This was quite enough for Dorsal.

  The punch was delivered with animalistic precision and viscosity of movement. To Daniel it felt like a 1972 Vauxhall Viva with all-leather interior and walnut dashboard had fallen off the roof of a car park directly onto his head. His shoes were dispatched to opposite ends of the playground, his right trouser leg was separated from the left so comprehensively that it was never found again and his pants were turned inside out.

  His work done, Dorsal departed.

  Daniel tried to reassemble himself but he had literally been disembodied. He sensed more than saw that he was not alone in the uneven patch of mossy concrete he currently occupied; there was another schoolboy staring down at him. He appeared to be wearing two pairs of glasses and inhabited a body shaped like a walnut. Daniel was not entirely certain that this was not actually a walnut.

  ‘The force is strong in that one,’ said the boy, which was the kind of comment that made people want to kick him into the air so hard that he never came down again.

  He proffered a helping hand, causing his sleeve to ride up exposing three watches. Finally Daniel was able to focus on the boy’s face – he was indeed wearing two pairs of glasses and an expression which suggested that he was not well accu
stomed to being liked.

  ‘My name’s Ferris,’ he said, and sadly for Ferris, it was.

  ‘Daniel M,’ said Daniel, who felt like he was standing and falling over all at the same time.

  Ferris threw his pustulant arms around Daniel. ‘Are we friends now? Yes, I think we are friends. That means we can do everything together – Science Club and Film Club and Tree Club, well, there isn’t a Tree Club yet but we could start one and you could come to my home and watch me play with my Star Wars toys – you can’t touch them obviously – and you can learn to play Dungeons and Dragons, I am a very powerful warlord and you can be my slave and carry my armour and we can swap clothes and pretend to be each other in lessons and…’ Ferris was perspiring heavily and his head was bright red, it looked as if it might just implode.

  Daniel looked at Ferris, at the rabid edifice of the school and back at Ferris. He began to yearn for the simplicity of being punched in the face.

  *

  When Daniel returned home from school that evening, M did not look at Daniel, or what was left of Daniel after the beating meted out by Dorsal, but at his life vest.

  ‘We are going mountain climbing this weekend and you are going to thoroughly enjoy it,’ said M. ‘We haven’t done anything together since you had all that fun in the dinghy.’

  ‘Fun?’ asked Daniel, quizzically.

  ‘You can bring your life vest,’ said M.

  It occurred to Daniel that a life vest would be divested of many of its essential lifesaving qualities halfway up a mountain. Some might actually consider it a dangerous encumbrance.

  Chapter 12

  It was not the slap on the arse from the midwife that made baby Caldwell Bynes scream but the realisation that life had been inflicted upon him without his consent and could only, at its very best, be endured.

  An execrable childhood which he traversed as gracelessly as a one-legged turkey on a treadmill left Caldwell ill-prepared for the lonely travails of adult existence. Below the palisades which barely contained his virulent self-loathing lay the verdant fields in which he cultivated the true focus of his contempt for the human race – children. They were the flag bearers for the void in his life that he could never fill and as such, they had become the enemy. How unfortunate it was then for all concerned, that Caldwell should arrive at the end of a road of diverse career paths, which included bovine proctology, cat de-clawing and chemical deforestation, as head teacher of the largest and almost certainly the worst comprehensive school in North London.

  The D’Oily Cart Academy (or The Cart as it was known locally) scored so badly in the league table created by the Department for Education to measure academic achievement that they had to re-define the concept of failure. The only reason it was not closed after Caldwell’s first Ofsted assessment was the fear for the unsuspecting national education system upon which the massed hordes of the unwashed within would be unleashed. It became, thereafter, the scholastic equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall.

  Caldwell stared at his desk, an unloved carbuncle encrusted with the offal of a thousand microwaved lunches, and then at his at his hands which lay before him like dead weights. His fingers, long and slender but inelegant, crawled outwards like giant elongated maggots.

  A red light was flashing on what remained of his telephone. Having been smashed into submission with its handset repeatedly, it was functional only as a reflection of Caldwell’s own state of decrepitude and to indicate that his secretary, Bennett, who, like the telephone, maintained a dogged unwillingness to die, wanted to communicate with him.

  Bennett surfaced from her office that had once been a toilet cubicle, opened the door to the head teacher’s study imperceptibly, in anticipation of a barrage of abuse, and searched for the least provocative way to deliver what would be monumentally unwelcome news.

  ‘Head teacher, you have a child to see you.’

  Caldwell retreated briefly from his vale of tears and formed his mouth into a single syllable.

  ‘M?’

  ‘Yes, head teacher.’

  So it was Daniel M again.

  In the endless minutes of silence that followed, Bennett ushered Daniel, life vest and all, into the study. There was an empty chair opposite the headmaster’s desk but it was clearly not intended for sitting, so Daniel stood, legs all but buckling under the weight that lay upon his tiny shoulders.

  ‘My father is planning to kill me this weekend, head teacher.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes, head teacher, again.’

  ‘And yet you appear to be persistently alive, Daniel M.’ He pronounced Daniel’s surname as if exhaling a cough sweet that had been lodged deep in his oesophagus.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to do something about this sort of thing? What happens if one day he actually succeeds in killing me?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Do let me know if that happens.’

  Daniel searched the head teacher’s mucus-laden eyes for a sign that empathy might once at least have passed them by. He emerged empty-handed.

  ‘Dorsal Grellman is trying to decapitate me.’

  ‘I should hope so, it’s his job,’ replied Bynes.

  ‘His job?’

  ‘I am sorry, no, perhaps not his job, that is somewhat simplistic – it is his role.’

  ‘His role is to try to decapitate me?’ asked Daniel

  ‘His role is to build your character, yours is to have your character built – if he actually manages to decapitate you in the process then that is unfortunate, but I am sure that you would agree it is a necessary part of growing up.’

  Daniel had only one more card to play. His lips wavered; it certainly could not be characterised as an ace.

  ‘My grandmother killed Batman.’

  Caldwell stared at Daniel and then beyond him, far, far beyond him, into a future glutted with nothing but pain.

  ‘Have your parents ever explained to you what you are?’

  That question again.

  ‘You are a rabbit in the crosshairs, Daniel M, an atrocity in waiting, you are every victim and everything that is not you is your predator. So you had better learn to run and you had better learn to hide and now you had better learn to leave.’

  Daniel wanted to ask his head teacher, if not to advise, then at least to expand, but Caldwell was once again engrossed with his hands, each line a furrow ploughed with barren seed, at each intersection a poisoned well. The conversation, if that is what it had been, was at an end.

  Chapter 13

  The expressions on the faces of the Kentish Town girls’ Under 9s swimming team were a complex combination of fear, anguish, disbelief and fear (again). Elissa Wage, their coach, followed their tiny pinched mouths from left to right and back again until they became a single Munch-like scream.

  The woman, dressed in a tattered red one-piece swimming costume decorated with smiley faces, sat on the edge of a wooden bench, her wrecked hands covering her face, her body quaking as if she was receiving electro convulsive therapy. The changing room reverberated with the sound of silent tears crashing through grasping fingers on to tiled flooring and calloused toes. Elissa could see bloody fingerprints covering the half open locker above the woman’s head and on the upper parts of her naked arms as if she had, at one point, embraced herself. Turning to find the entire Under 9s class standing en masse behind her, she wordlessly gathered them into a bouquet and ushered them to the far side of the changing room.

  Returning, Elissa reached out a hand but then withdrew it; there was no part of this woman she could touch which would not somehow infringe her wordless rapture. A vocabulary limited in the main to aquatic terminology left Elissa at an immediate disadvantage when it came to assuaging this level of distress. She tried, ‘Can I help?’ Although she believed herself to be at least three hundred lengths of standard breaststroke away from being able to do so.

  ‘I am here for the 9am adults’ beginner’s class,’ the woman replied, through grey-blue fingers which masked her face like bloodied vin
e leaves.

  ‘Well, it’s 3pm now so you’ve missed it.’

  ‘I know I’ve missed it. I was here on time but then I wasn’t sure if I’d left my purse in the locker, so I opened the locker to look and there it was. So I closed the locker and then I thought, what if all my credit cards have expired, so I opened the locker and checked. Then I heard my mobile phone go off, so I had to go back to open the locker and check but then I remembered I don’t have a mobile phone. But when I looked in the locker again I remembered our dog and my son, sorry, my ex-son and ex-dog and the parking attendant and the police and I had a little cry. So then it occurred to me – what if I go swimming and my locker key falls off into the water and because I can’t swim, I can’t get it back and then I can’t open my locker so I would have no money and no clothes. So I put my locker key into my locker so I wouldn’t lose it. But then my locker key was locked in my locker. So then I didn’t have my locker key or my clothes or my credit cards because they were all in my locker and I thought – I’m fucked. So I had to get them all back. But these modern lockers are really difficult to open, I had to get my fingers into this little gap that isn’t big enough for fingers and it really, really hurt and at least two of my nails were just torn off – right off, but in the end I did it. Then I had my key back but of course no locker and no fingers – they were both kind of ruined.’

  The woman looked up at Elissa with eyes that had endured so much wretched honesty that they had become dispossessed. They were the eyes of the drowned.

  ‘Why don’t you have a cup of tea in my office and when I’m finished with the girls I’ll give you a swimming lesson on the house?’ suggested Elissa.

  The woman rose almost balletically and then sat down heavily as if punched in the solar plexus. She recognised the distant glint of generosity but had no means of reaching it.