Ex chapter 21 - The story of the Mountains of Milton Keynes - part 2

It had stopped snowing for the first time in several days and the boys trailed a staccato centipede of footprints behind those of Chas as he stop-start-rested his way through the middle of the old village of Milton Keynes.

Chas paused outside the Swan Inn. “You see this tree” he gestured at a singularly vacant patch of earth void of anything remotely tree like. “It was said that when this ancient elm died, no more male children would be born in the village.”

Dorsal wondered whether he could punch Chas hard enough to cause him tremendous pain without actually killing him. Appraising his potential victim Dorsal concluded that since Chas’s skin appeared to have been constructed from strips tissue paper which had been poorly stuck together, anything more than a gentle pat on the back would have eviscerated him. He decided to try looming - it usually initiated a desire for compliance.

“Is this the way to the mountain?” Dorsal stood over Chas grimacing in a manner which would have intimidated a medium sized bengal tiger, but Chas had been taken to the brink of death by an enemy which did not countenance the continued existence of his species. This child, albeit a child which appeared to be about to dismantle him as if he were an unwanted airfix model, could not scare him - he no longer had the capacity for fear.

Chas cleared the snow off a bench which had clearly been positioned for people to admire the now non ex-tree and sat down with an exultant groan, his little legs swinging back and forth. “Why is this mountain so important to you?”

“My grandmother lives on the mountain -we were hoping she could offer some advice about my father’s problem.” Daniel sat down on the bench besides Chas and began swinging his legs in time with the old man and they were soon joined by Ferris. “For fucks sake” Dorsal hissed, joining them whilst at the same time hoping that someone truly homicidal would not come by at that very moment and witness him letting the side down.

“And what is your father’s problem?”

“My refusal to let him kill me.”

Chas stopped swinging his legs and looked at Daniel as if he had not seen him before. He had been a victim of truth in it’s every guise, it had crept up in the night and held a knife against his throat, held his head under water, beaten him until he could have reached out and shook death by the hand, he knew truth and this boy was glutted with it.

He roused his joints into movement against a chorus of protests. Every time he sat down he was skeptical that he would have the willpower to stand again yet willpower defined him. He would always stand and he would always move forwards putting distance between himself and the atrocities of the past.

“Is your grandmother someone with insight?”

“My grandmother made my father, helped make my father what he is - I hoped she might be able to suggest a way to stop him.”

“She killed Batman with her bare hands” barked Ferris excitedly “and pushed Darth Vader off beachy head.”

“She understands death” added Dorsal.

Chas began walking back towards the town centre, trailed by a phalanx of troubled youth “I understand death - it’s where I grew up.”

Dorsal caught up with Chas, his prodigious footprints devouring those of the old man as if they were so many plankton. He could have burst him there and then in the snow, like a used paper bag and yet, he felt the urge to trust him. But trust did not sit well with Dorsal, he had given it freely to adults once before and it had earned him abandonment, he had followed adults once before and it had left him beleaguered, hunched over against the ravages of childhood, anger his only refuge. He hungered for destruction, to destroy, it mattered not what nor whom and it had already been too long.

They arrived on the outskirts of the town, fists of bitter cold pressing hard against their chests old and young. An unfashionable district in an dystopian city in a country which could neither be shaken, nor stirred. Chas paused outside a butchers shop which clung desperately to the husks of neighboring buildings, long since divest of their occupants. As he began to enter Dorsal grabbed his upper arm - “this is no mountain.”

“I am in no position to ask you to believe in me or any adult ” Chas unpicked Dorsal’s hand finger by finger, “just indulge me for a few more seconds.”

The shop was an armageddon of severed limbs, blood spattered walls and sordid weaponry; it’s proprietor, a slight man with disproportionately huge hands, froze, with what appeared to be a cutlass raised over an unidentifiable lump of animalesque undercarriage.

“I’m here to show these boys your back yard Benny.”

The butcher’s eyes flicked towards the rear exit.

“It isn’t safe Chas - you know that” he lay down the cutlass and wiped the excess offal onto his apron. He knew that no matter how often he did this, he could never get the blood off his hands, it was too late for that, but it was a courtesy - for the children.

“Still, they need to see it. I won’t let them go too close.”

Chas shuffled over to rear exit and the boys followed him into a dank unlit storage area shutting the butcher’s shop away behind him. Blinks of sunshine licked between the cracks in the back door, saturating Chas’s face with diffused light. It was as if he had become as young as them, that there were now four children, hearts pounding, standing on the brink of an adult world that did not deserve them.

When the door opened the boys were unable to take in what lay before them - they had no frame of reference.

“When the Council built this city, there were the wisps and curls of other, smaller towns in the way of the bulldozers. The people were bought off quickly, they drank the Kool Aid and shut their eyes and when they had counted to ten, everything, the churchyards, the trees, the hedges, the rivers, the animals, everything was concrete and special and dead and now they are here - one on top of the other on top of the other.

Piled in the square at the rear of four giant, withered buildings, as high as the eye could see were thousands upon thousands of gravestones, some smashed, some illegible but many pristine, crypts - doors ajar, inverted angels, hands outstretched eyes imploring as if this was some new, unforeseen depravity, beyond the travesty of death itself, everything that was loss, never to be forgotten but forgotten still. It was the lie told on the deathbed, that goodbye might only mean adieu, the final cogent evidence of betrayal.

And at its peak, where the angels could not reach and where a plateau had formed when the gravestones had settled, someone had made their home in a garden shed and on that garden shed was a sign in large, blood red neon flashing on and off, on and off :

“fuck off (or die).”

Daniel had found his grandmother.