Somewhere East of Life

Burnell follows. Little option but to follow. Head hanging, shoulders slumped. No idea what’s going on.

Bishops Linctus street lighting stops where the road begins to curve upwards. Somewhere beyond the lighting stands a line of council houses, back from the road, with cars and lorries parked in front of them. The young man heads for the nearest house, where a light burns in the uncurtained front room.

They push in through a recalcitrant back door, into a passage obstructed by a mountain bike. A sound of firing fills the house. The TV is on in the front room, from which emerges a woman shrieking, ‘Larry, Larry, you back?’

‘What’s it look like?’ he replies.

In close-up – she bringing a plump face close to Burnell’s – Larry’s mother is a well-cushioned little person in her early fifties, her lower quarters stuffed into jeans. The shriek was a protective device; the voice sinks back to a lower key when her son brushes past her and switches off the TV programme.

The woman immediately takes charge of Burnell, giving him the kitchen towel to dry himself on, and a pair of worker’s cords and shirt to wear. While he removes his wet clothes and dries himself as in a trance, she prepares him a cup of instant coffee, chattering all the while. As he drinks the coffee, she prepares him a slice of white bread, buttered and spread with thick honey. He eats it with gratitude, and is so choked with emotion he can only squeeze her hand.

‘Don’t worry, love. We know all about the bloody police in this house. Knock you about, did they?’

The picture keeps going out of focus.

Perhaps he has passed out from fatigue. Rousing, he finds he is sitting on the grubby kitchen floor. He looks up at a poster advertising a can of something called ‘Vectan Poudres de Tir, Highly Flammable’. He looks down at ten red-painted toenails protruding from gold sandals. A hand comes within his line of sight. A voice says, ‘Oops, dear, you OK? It’s the drink, is it? Terrible stuff. I don’t know what God was thinking of.’

‘Leave him alone, Ma!’ roars Larry from the passage.

As he is helped up, Burnell thinks he hears a bird singing.

‘Take no notice,’ says Ma, almost whispering. ‘It’s just his manner. He’s a very nice quiet boy really.’

Shock shot. Larry appears suddenly into the kitchen doorway, in a gunman’s crouch, both hands together in a shootist position, clasping an imaginary gun. ‘Bang, bang. Got you both.’

Ma laughs, says to Burnell, ‘He’s daft.’ Burnell wonders if events are registering on him, or whether he might still be running across an endless plain. A bird twitters in his head.

He steadies himself against the sink, which is crammed with the remains of Indian take-aways. He cannot speak.

Larry unlocks the door of the room at the rear of the house. A large notice on the door, painted in red paint, says ‘My Room. Keep Out. DANGER.’ On it is a poster of Marilyn Monroe with a pencilled-in moustache and teeth blackened, and a large photograph of howitzers firing in World War I.

‘You need a good night’s sleep, that’s what you need,’ Ma tells him, looking concerned. She gives him a toffee. As Burnell chews the toffee, Larry sticks his head round the door of His Room and calls Burnell in. He locks the door from the inside.

‘Sleep here. It’s OK. Don’t listen to her. She’s nuts.’

Burnell says nothing, chewing on the toffee. The sporting gun previously tucked under Larry’s arm keeps company with a large six-shooter on a box by the window. However, when Larry pulls a rug and cushion off his bed, throwing them on the floor, a semi-automatic rifle is revealed, snuggled among the blankets.

A slow panning shot reveals the narrow room to be full of magazines about guns. They are piled up in corners and spill out of a half-closed cupboard. They are stacked under the bed among cartridge boxes. Used targets are wedged behind a strip of mirror: black outlines of men in bowler hats, their hearts shot out, macabre Magrittes.

‘Are you a gamekeeper?’ Jaws automatically munching as he forms the question.

‘Work on Thorne’s farm. Sometimes I’m a brickie, aren’t I? Out of work. You can doss down there, right?’

Doubtfully, Burnell settles on the floor. He knows nothing and feels miserable. He cannot remember if he met Larry before. He hopes that if so they are not related. Cousins. Anything.

Something hard he recognizes as the muzzle of a gun is thrust into his ear. He laughs nervously. Looks up.

‘Any monkey business in the night and you get it, right?’ Larry withdraws the weapon and shows the pistol to his guest, innocent in his grimy hand. ‘Look at this little beauty. You know what this is?’

Larry kneels on the edge of his bed, glaring down at Burnell, who makes a feeble reply. Larry is not a great listener. He goes on without pausing for answers. ‘It’s a sweet little performer. I bet you never saw one like it. It’s a Makarov PSM. A Makarov PSM, illegal in this country, a KGB pistol, a Makarov PSM.’ He pronounces the name like a lamb voicing its mother tongue. He removes the magazine from the gun to demonstrate eight rounds of a gleaming bottle-neck appearance. He makes a curious noise in the back of his throat. ‘See them rounds? Under an inch long. Know what they can do? Bust through body armour, OK? Good as .44 Magnum bullets. Blow a man’s guts out through his arse. Old KGB knew what it was doing. No kidding.’

Suddenly the pistol is gone from his hand. ‘Concealment weapon, see. That’s why it’s so little. KGB knew what it was about, right?’

Smiling weakly, Burnell says, ‘I have to sleep now, Larry.’ The toffee has gone.

A second later he is staring down the barrel of Larry’s semi-automatic, which Larry, kneeling up, cradles in a professional way under his right arm. It is a cold steely piece of goods he is aiming.

‘You try anything funny in the night, you get a dose of this. Get it?’ His little face withers. ‘This is my big baby.’

Reaction shot of Burnell, sitting up, alarmed. ‘No, no, I just want to sleep.’

Larry asks him challengingly if he’s a bloody lunatic, and Burnell says he thinks he must have banged his head.

Loud banging on the door. Larry swings the semi-automatic in that direction. Ma yells from the passage, ‘Go to sleep. You got to go to Swindon tomorrer.’ He makes shooting noises in his throat, raking her with imaginary gunfire before turning back to Burnell.

‘You try anything funny, you get a dose of this, right?’ Relenting slightly, he explains that this impressive weapon, his big baby, is an American .50 calibre Barrett M90, weighing only twenty-two pounds. He assures Burnell he could hold off an army with it.

‘I hope you aren’t expecting an army.’

‘Muslims, Blacks, Police – let ’em all come. See what they get.’ There is a tense silence. Burnell feels unwell.

‘What Muslims do you mean?’

‘My dad comes back here, he’s going to be in trouble.’ As he settles down, Larry says with a sob, ‘That bastard.’ He cradles the Barrett in his arms. He reaches out and switches off the light.

Sitting huddled nervously on the floor, Burnell hears an intermittent sob. Or perhaps Larry is just sniffing.

Longing to go to sleep but afraid to lie down, Burnell says in a small voice that he appreciates Larry’s kindness.

He half expects to have the muzzle of the Barrett back in his ear. Larry merely says, ‘I like helping people, Roy.’ Gentle as a dove.

Burnell is comforted. He murmurs those decent words to himself like a mantra; ‘I like helping people …’

He falls back in a troubled cataleptic sleep. Rats gnaw in the depths of the cathedral. He wakes to find it is the sound of Larry scratching his acned cheeks in his sleep. So the movie ends. But Burnell is for real and his troubles are becoming more real as dawn sneaks in to dozy Bishops Linctus.

Morning was hardly a spectacular affair: old and grey and broken, like an overworked carthorse out to grass, to find its way by accident into the back yards of the council houses.

Larry had left the room when Burnell emerged from the entanglements of his rug. What roused him from limbo was the sound of Ma shouting at her son. Encouragement and admonition, carrot and stick. He sat up, aching all over. His predicament rushed back and took him by the throat. But he was undeniably feeling a little better.

Leaning back against a distempered wall, he fished about in his brain for an identity.

Larry entered the room, carrying a mug with no handle. ‘Thought you’d like some char, mate, OK?’

The unrivalled powers of hot sweet tea served to clear Burnell’s head. He rose and sat on the side of the bed. From there, he stood up and went into the kitchen, where he sluiced his face under the cold tap. The debris of the take-away had gone. Instead, pairs of socks were soaking sludgily in the sink. He no longer felt so dissociated from himself, and smiled at Ma as he wiped his face on a grimy towel.

‘You’re a bit more perky this morning, I see,’ Ma said. ‘The washing machine’s gone on the blink again. Of course he’s not much use round the house. The black bloke next door will fix it for me. Have you said hello to Kevin?’

A yellow canary sat in a cage on top of the fridge. It cocked its head on one side, looking at Burnell while trying out a few notes.