S Darts chap 17

Chapter 17

It was the first night in the boat. It was late and it was dark
outside. It had started to rain. The sound was loud on the fibreglass
roof above our heads.

Pitapatapitapatapitapatapitapata, it went, on and on. On and on. Like
little tiny feet.

We were all together, sitting around the table that soon would be made
into a bed, steaming cups of tea in front of us. It was nice sitting
there all together like that. Very nice.

"You know what?" said The Poet.

"No," said 16. "What?"

"Tonight," said The Poet, "would be a perfect night for a horror
story."

"You're right," I said. And then I turned to Seven. He was sitting
next to me and our thighs were touching. "You never did tell me about
your sisters, did you?" I said.

To be honest, I don't know why I said that then. I don't know why I
linked Seven's sisters to a horror story. I guess it was the way he
never talked about them. Instinctively I felt that they were a big dark
secret in his life. As it turned out I was exactly right. Almost.

"Go on," said 16 to Seven. "Tell us about your sisters. I've got one
sister and she's quite a small horror story in herself. But seven.
Phew! That's scary."

Seven took a deep breath and then he looked at each of us in turn.
Outside the rain still came down. Inside the light was dim, one
fluorescent strip light buzzing quietly above our heads.

"OK," said Seven, "I'll tell you, but anything I say must go no
further than these walls."

"Do boat's have walls?" said 16.

"I'm serious," said Seven.

"So am I," said 16. He looked at The Poet. "Is 'walls' the right term?
You can't go around calling something a wall if it's not."

I kicked 16 under the table. I wasn't discreet about it, everyone
knew.

"Carry on Seven," I said.

"Ow," said 16.

Seven cleared his throat. From somewhere there was an explosion of
thunder. I guessed it was from the sky outside, but I had no proof. It
could have been 16, more angry than I thought about the kick. I'd heard
him thunder once before.

"You remember how I told you about the darts competition between me
and my brothers?" said Seven.

"To see who would catch the farts?" said 16.

Seven nodded his head. "That's right. Well, at the same time as we
were having our darts competition, my sisters were doing something of
their own."

"What?" interjected 16.

"I'm going to tell you," said Seven, "that's the horror story."

"Sorry," said 16 and he grew slightly smaller and he didn't make any
more interruptions. At least, not for a while.

"The darts competition," said Seven, continuing his story, "was held
at the same time every day and in the same place. Everyone in the
village knew that at four pm each evening all seven of us brothers
would be in the barn behind our house. Everyone in the village knew and
my seven sisters knew as well. That allowed them to do what they did.
Remember that, that's the first important fact."

I gave 16 a hard stare. I knew he was going to interrupt. I knew it
was important for Seven to tell his story without interruption.

"It was my mother's fault really," said Seven. "When I think about it
now, I blame her. She was always talking to my sisters about marriage.
She would sit on their bed at night while me and my brothers were
farting in our bed and she would tell them how important it was to make
a good marriage. She said that she herself had had a BAD marriage, but
they should have GOOD marriages. She said that kind of thing all the
time. It was like a mantra. No, it was a mantra. There was a religious
intensity to her words.

"Then one night, in between her GOOD marriage BAD marriage speech, my
mother started to read Great Expectations to my sisters. Each night she
read a single chapter. And each chapter was another nail in the coffin,
the coffin that was my brother's future, the coffin that forms the
story that I am telling you.

"You see," said Seven, shaking his head sadly, "after that story my
sisters envisaged themselves ending up like Miss Haversham from the
book, eternally stood up, living in a house of cobwebs and dust,
forever wearing the wedding dress that symbolised the wedding that
never took place. They decided they had to do something about it. And
do something about it they did."

Seven paused and took a sip of his tea. I shifted closer to him. Our
thighs were touching more closely.

"It was sister A who started it," said Seven, "but in the end I think
you'll agree they were all equally to blame. You see, sister A was a
witch and always had been ever since she was born. It was one of those
things. She wasn't a white witch or a black witch, that's all nonsense
and there is no such thing. She was just a witch and like all witches
she had a spell book. She kept it under her bed in a very large shoe
box."

"Is that true?" I said.

"It sure is," said Seven.

"This is a true story?" I said.

"Absolutely," said Seven.

"I thought you said no interruptions," said 16.

"Shhhhhh," said Captain Vegas. "I'm listening. I like this
story."

"It was," said Seven, "after one particularly bad night in which all
the sisters had had the same dream, a dream in which they were all Miss
Haversham and all unmarried, eternally, that sisters B to G begged
sister A to help them. They said she had to use her magic powers to
help get them husbands. As sister A had had the same dream she didn't
take much convincing. She agreed straight away. She said that she would
do it."

Seven took a deep breath. Outside it was dark. Inside the light
flickered. It was still raining. Patapitapatapitapatapita. On and on.
On and on.

"I can only put down what happened next to a kind of collective
hysteria," said Seven, "to the pressure of society on women to conform,
to my mother going on about GOOD marriages and BAD marriages, to that
writer Charles Dickens. You see, what the sisters decided was that as
there were seven of them and as there was seven of us, ie, seven
sisters and seven brothers, then it made perfect sense that we should
marry each other, one brother for each sister. They decided that A
should use her magic powers to make it so."

"Oh my God," said The Poet.

"Blimey," said 16.

"It makes me ashamed to be straight," said Captain Vegas.

"Tell us what happened," I said. "I want to know how the story
ends."

"So each night now," said Seven, giving my knee a squeeze, "as me and
my brothers were having our darts competition our sisters would sneak
into our room and collect things for their spell."

"What do you mean things?" said 16 gowing suddenly huge. I didn't say
anything to him. I wanted to know too.

"For example," said Seven, "the hairs off our pillows, the smells from
under the duvet, the skidmarks off our underpants."

"Shit!" said Captain Vegas, trying to leap up but unable to because he
was jammed between the table and the seat. "Shit!" he said again.

"Exactly," said Seven. "Exactly."

Outside there was another clap of thunder. The boat rocked on its
moorings. 16's eyes opened wider. We all leaned closer over the top of
the table.

"It was One we noticed the change in first," said Seven. "At night he
couldn't sleep, he would just toss and turn and burble strange words.
He wasn't his usual self at all. We were used to him tossing, but the
turning was quite out of the blue.

"Well, this went on for a couple of weeks. Then he started to wander
off. It would happen at all hours of the day. We'd ask him were he'd
been but he'd just shake his head sadly and say that he didn't know, he
really didn't know. Of course, at that time we didn't believe him, we
thought he was up to something. He was, but not what any of us could
have imagined."

The boat rocked again on its moorings. Outside the rain was getting
heavier. The light flickered off, then back on again.

"The next thing that happened," said Seven, speaking faster, now
apparently unable to stop, caught up in the drama of the story, "was
that G said she was pregnant. She announced it at breakfast one morning
over a round of toast. Mum said that was wonderful news and dad just
grunted. Mum asked who the father was but G wouldn't say. She said that
in good time it would be obvious. She passed the butter to C. C passed
the butter to F. All the sisters smiled. We carried on with
breakfast.

"Then that evening, the evening after G had announced her pregnancy,
One said he wasn't coming to the darts competition. He said there was
no point as he wouldn't be farting in our bed anymore. He said that he
was moving into the sisters' room. He said that now G was pregnant he
said it was the right thing to do. It was right that he should stay and
look after her.

"Even then we weren't suspicious. One and G had always been close. We
thought he just wanted to look after her. We didn't know. We really
didn't know."

Seven put his head in his hands.

"It's OK," I said.

"It wasn't your fault," said The Poet.

"Finish the story," said 16. "I want to know."

Seven looked up. His face looked like one of those American presidents
carved into Mount Rushmore, serious and made of stone.

"You can guess what happened next," he said.

"Finish the story," said 16. "Please."

"After One it was Two," said Seven. "It was the same pattern, the lack
of sleep, the burbling, the wandering off. Then F was pregnant. Two
moved into the sisters' room. There was now five in our bed and nine in
the sisters' bed. And F and G were growing all the time, the babies
were growing in their stomachs. Getting bigger and bigger.

"What can I say?" said Seven. "I should have done something. I should
have guessed, worked out what was going on. It was inexorable.
Inexorable. On and on it went. Three and E, Four and D, Five and C. One
day there was only me and Six left. There was plenty of space in our
bed and hardly any farts at all. Then things came to a head.

"'Something's up,' I said to Six as we sat in the barn forlornly
tossing the darts towards the board in the competition that wasn't
important any more.

'You're right,' said Six. 'We have to do something.'

I had been closer to Six than any of the other brothers for a number
of years. He was the one nearest in age to me and we had a lot of the
same interests. Tossing, not turning for example.

'It's that witch G,' I said. 'I think she's put a spell on us.'

'I think you're right,' said Six. 'We have to do something.'

'I'm gay,' I said, 'I don't want to have sex with my sister for any
money.'

'Me neither,' said Six. 'I'm not gay but I don't want to sleep with my
sister either. It would be too much like incest. We have to do
something.'

So that night we did. We did something."

"What?" said The Poet.

"What?" said AkiMat.

"WHAT?" said Captain Vegas. "WHY IS IT ALWAYS ME? WHY AM I ALWAYS LEFT
DANGLING LIKE A CARROT IN FRONT OF THE NOSE OF A DONKEY?"

"Finish your story Seven," I said.

"It just so happened," said Seven, sizing up like he was going to
finish the story, and then, in fact, doing it, "that that night was the
night that G's baby was due. That meant that all the brothers and all
the sisters had gone to the hospital. That meant that the house was
empty. That meant we had a chance. I told Six to keep watch by the door
and I snuck into the sisters' room.

"The scene there was like something from a nightmare. There were baby
things everywhere; baby clothes, baby toys, nappies, bottles, tins of
baby food. There was enough stuff for a whole army of babies. The
feeling of dread that I already felt grew and grew. Because suddenly I
realised that's exactly what we were going to have, an army of
babies.

"Taking a deep breath I ignored all of the baby stuff and went
straight over to the bed. G was proud of being a witch and I knew
exactly where she kept her spell book, she had told us often enough. I
knelt down and pulled out the large shoe box. Slowly I opened
it."

"What did you see?" said 16.

"I'm going to tell you," said Seven.

"GO ON THEN," said Captain Vegas. "I CAN'T STAND ANY MORE. AS YOUR
CAPTAIN I COMMAND YOU TO FINISH THE STORY."

"Inside the box," said Seven, looking first at Seven and then around
at all of us, "resting on top of the spell book were strands of our
hair, skidmarks off our underpants and a phial of our sweat. But that
wasn't the worst of it. No. Next to all this was a neat set of wedding
invitations. With shaking hands I pulled one out and read it. It went
something like this:

'You are cordially invited to the wedding of A &; Seven, B &;
Six, C &; Five, D &; Four, E &; Three, F &; Two, G &;
One. R.S.V.P.'

They were going to marry us all. This was the lengths they would go to
just so they wouldn't be like Miss Haversham. It would be the family
wedding to end all family weddings.

Quickly I leapt up. I ran to the door and I showed Six what I had
found.

'What are we going to do?' he said.

'We have to burn it,' I said. 'If we burn it then we will break the
spell.'

So, glancing nervously at the clock, wondering just when our brothers
and sisters would be back we took the whole box outside to the
barbecue. It was with great joy that I watched the whole thing first
catch alight and then burn away. To ash. To cinders."

"So you did it," I said.

"Thank God for that," said The Poet.

"What about your sisters?" said 16. "I have a feeling that that's not
the end of the story."

"Yes," I said, "what about the sisters?"

"It was as the final embers were dying down that we saw them on the
horizon," said Seven. "Six and I stood and watched as they got closer
and closer. The seven sisters and five brothers. It seemed to take them
forever. But then at last they were there. I could see at once that my
brothers were back to their normal selves. Their eyes were clear and
they were no longer burbling. One asked me to go and get the dart-board
ready. He said that it was nearly time for our nightly competition. He
said he felt sorry for the person who had to catch the farts that
night. He said he was full of farts. It was as if the whole thing had
never happened. Me and Six had really done it."

"But what about the baby?" said The Poet. "What about the baby?"

"Yes," said Captain Vegas, "what about the baby? I want to know about
the baby."

"Oh," said Seven, "well there's a funny thing. On my way to set up the
dart-board I stopped off by my sisters to see the latest arrival. G had
a tightly wrapped bundle in her arms and I thought that's it, that's
the baby. So I edged closer, pulled back a side of the blanket and had
a look."

"Yes?" said The Poet.

"Go on," said 16.

"What did you see?" said Captain Vegas. "I don't think I can stand any
more of this. I really think this will be the end of me."

"Well," said Seven, "it wasn't a baby at all. It was a monkey."

"A MONKEY?" said Captain Vegas. He leapt up. "A MONKEY?"

"Yes," said Seven. "A monkey. One by one over the next few months each
of my pregnant sisters gave birth to a monkey. They were very nice
monkeys and my sisters loved them dearly and they never worried about
having a BAD marriage again. So in the end it all worked out well. It
was a horror story with a happy end." Suddenly Seven stopped. He put
his hand up to his ear. "What's that?" he said.

"What's what?" said 16.

"Listen," said Seven.

And we all listened. There was the sound of the wind. There was the
sound of the rain. But beneath that there was something else. There was
a rhythmical tapping and it was getting louder. And louder.

Then 16 screamed.

"What is it?" I said.

"There's a face," said 16. "There's a face looking in at the window.
Look."