Vengeance is Mine

The sun beat down upon the scorched earth, earth that it had already scorched many times before this day. But the sun was bored and didn’t know what else to do with itself. That was the only explanation for its relentless scorching of the same patch of earth, and it didn’t look like it was going to give it up any time soon. 

The heat danced a taunting dance that took the moisture from a man’s mouth. The heat didn’t have the same effect on a woman’s mouth, but women weren’t about to reveal their secrets when it came to their avoidance of a parched and barren mouthspace.

It was hot. Too hot. That might have been why it happened, but the heat could only ever be a feeble excuse for the taking of a life. There was no reason for the senseless killing, but every reason for revenge.

Wayne knew in the instant that it was done.

He knew.

The world didn’t exactly stop turning in that moment, but the quality of its motion was temporarily affected. Dirt in the carb. A hiccup. A gaseous expulsion that smelled all wrong to Wayne. That stench was bad. It was the stench of death.

Gareth’s death.

“What did Gareth ever do!?” Wayne wailed this to the callous sky, and unsurprisingly, the sky ignored him. The sky was sulking. There were no clouds to play with today. The selfish sun had burned them all away, like a schoolboy killing ants under a magnifying glass.

Wayne was filled with a relentless energy. He went this way and he went that way, as he ranted, bemoaning his friend’s untimely death.

He stopped flitting back and forth. Violently twitching in his repose.

“Whoever did this, will pay!” Wayne was suddenly a ball of vengeful malice, “I will find them and I will wreak retribution on their sorry soul!”

He thrummed with volatile rage as he stormed from that place and out into a world lit alight by a relentlessly bored sun.

*

The heat wasn’t bothering Barry, and yet it very obviously was bothering him. His forehead glistened with what threatened to be a waterfall of sweat. The back of his shirt glued itself to his skin and pulled this way and that way as he moved, as though it was sending him messages, trying to prevent him from a foolhardy pursuit that would not end well.

He felt sick. He felt several kinds of sick, like one of the shots he’d been forced to drink during the raucous events of the previous evening. Each layer was sitting heavily on the other and there was an imminent threat of some serious curdling.

Barry had never felt nerves like this. There was a liquid feeling underlying the nausea, and panic swam randomly through it all. The panic was sending ridiculous messages all over his nervous system and all Barry wanted to do right now was go for a lie down. In the bath. He would lay two towels down to provide an improvised mattress, then he’d climb in, close his eyes and wait the rest of the day out. Tomorrow would be a better day. Tomorrow was a promise that was never fulfilled.

“Have you found the favours yet?!” the words drove into Barry’s head like ice cream. They shouldn’t have been a problem, but they really were.

Barry looked in the direction of Rita, the chief bridesmaid, or maiden head, or whatever she had insisted upon being called. Rita had attended the School of Officiousness. Given any semblance of power, she turned into an irritant. Rita was doing so well at being an irritant, Barry felt in need of some powerful ointment. His eyes strayed to the hotel bar. He’d been in two minds about the merits of a pint of Dog Hair, but now it seemed absolutely necessary.

“No,” he told Rita, “I’ll go and have another look.”

“You best had,” Rita told him, “and don’t go via the bar!” She shouted this last at Barry’s back.

Barry ignored her.

Doing everything in the same venue had seemed such a good idea at the time. All of it had seemed like a good idea. Ideas were one thing. The execution of those ideas were entirely another.

As Barry sipped tentatively at his first pint of the day, hoping against hope that there would be no trouble in the beer gaining admittance into his beleaguered body, his best friend and for today, best man, arrived at the bar next to him.

“Back on it, I see!” grinned Terry, “good man!”

“Too loud!” groaned Barry.

“Hurtin’ are we?” asked Terry, as though he had no clue as to the consequences of what he’d subjected his friend to the night before, “you should have yourself a Bloody Mary with extra vodka and a raw egg dropped into it!”

Barry retched, but managed to hold onto his beer and the toast he’d forced down for breakfast, “what happened last night?”

Terry winked at him, “what goes on tour, mate!”

Barry grabbed his friend’s forearm and in that instant, he became a study of both sobriety and focus, “tell me,” he commanded, “something bad happened didn’t it?”

Terry squirmed under Barry’s piercing gaze, “no mate… it…”

“I knew it!” Rita had found them, and her intrusion broke the spell. All the puff went out of Barry and Terry saw his chance. In fact, Terry saw several chances and grabbed greedily for the lot of them.

“Need a hand with the favours?” he asked Rita.

“Yes! Do you know where they are??” asked an exasperated Rita.

“In my car,” Terry said as he guided her from the bar.

“What are they doing there?” asked Rita, her voice softening.

“How else would I get you on the back seat of my motor, darlin’?!” Terry said, effecting a mockney accent.

The sound of Rita laughing should have been a balm to Barry. It was not.

“Bloody Mary, mate,” Barry said to the barman as he finished his pint.

“Is that her name…?” the barman replied as he watched Rita leaving the hotel.

“What?” Barry looked at the barman and where his eyes were focused, “no! She’s Rita! And I want a Bloody Mary!”

“Oh,” said the barman, not attaining any semblance of meaningful focus as he turned his head to face Barry, “what’s one of them?”

*

The bride’s mum, Marg, was crying. This was not because the truncation of her name made her sound like a cheap and tasteless alternative to butter, but she did resent her name all the same. Her parents had shortened it on her behalf at the point of her birth and it had stuck, like names have a habit of doing.

The bride’s mum was crying, but these were not tears of sadness. Not all of them anyway. She’d done her best to dispel her thoughts of foreboding and she’d kicked into touch, her feelings of pending doom. When she had thought about it, she wasn’t sure whether her only daughter, Tracy, was really throwing her life away on that waste of skin, Barry, or this unpalatable shadow was merely an echo of her own wasted life. The jury was out on whether Marg would have lived her life differently a second time around. The jury had taken one swift look at that proposition and nodded silently at one another, falling into complete and utter agreement. This one was best avoided, and as one, they had taken to their feet, then they had taken to their heels, hotfooting it to The Swan for an afternoon of pool, darts and philosophy.

The tears of the bride’s mum were bitter sweet as she laid eyes upon her daughter, Tracy. Tracy was dressed in all her finery and she looked seven hundred thousand dollars, eight hundred thousand at a push. She fell short of the million dollars, and this was to be the story of her life, and in life, there is no rounding up, there is only ever rounding down. Tracy should have looked radiant, but despite all the planning and the practice and the dreaming and the girly chats, Tracy had never attempted to be radiant in all of her life, and now she was finding that being radiant wasn’t something that just happened, it turned out that you had to make an effort to be radiant, you had to do something, and Tracy didn’t have a clue as to what was required. She wasn’t going to let on though. No one in the history of humankind has ever sought help in the attainment of radiance, unless you include the Dalai Lama, but that’s a different, much better and far more permanent form of radiance, and that sort of radiance doesn’t really work for brides.

“You look radiant!” lied Marg.

“Oh! Thanks Mum!” said Tracy, knowing that her Mum didn’t mean it. How could she? Tracy was scowling like she was chewing a mouthful of nettles. Nettles filled with drawing pins.

The order of radiant-bride business now taken care of, the women chattered away and moved the subject to safer ground. The familiar song of idle chatter placated and relaxed Tracy, putting her at her ease.

Outside, awaiting his relaxed, but never to be radiant bride, Barry shuffled around and fidgeted, all the while his shirt grabbed at him and added to his unease. Spotting this, and not wanting to be outdone, his underpants joined in and twisted themselves into a sweaty knot that clamped his undercarriage and made him shuffle and fidget all the more with the discomfort of it all.

“Where is she?!” he grizzled.

“You know how this bit goes, mate!” Terry replied far too cheerfully.

Barry scowled at his friend’s flushed face. Terry had taken his sweet time retrieving those favours from his car and Rita had been eerily quiet ever since. Barry hoped their respective partners didn’t find out how Terry had gone about distracting Rita, and if they did, he hoped they could at least wait until they’d cut the wedding cake and hidden the knife.

Barry wanted to tell Terry that no, he didn’t know how this bit went. Having never been married before, he hadn’t been through this tortuous wait. Worse still, he had never experienced heat like this before, certainly not whilst wearing a suit. He tugged at his tie for the umpteenth time and Terry dutifully straightened it again, pushing the knot to a point under his Adam’s apple that made it feel for all the world like a reverse hang man’s noose.

Eventually, Tracy deigned to turn up. Her face was a picture and the picture was that of swollen thunder. Barry was conflicted as Tracy’s step-dad lead his grumpy Valkyrie along the grassy aisle with the single intention of giving her away. And why not? No one could blame him for offloading the banshee currently clutching angrily to his arm. One half of Barry wondered what he’d done to earn that thunderous look of hers, the other half wanted to ask her where the hell she had been. Wisely, he opted for silence. This would be the default option for him through the remainder of his married life, a learnt response from his father, god rest his soul, wherever his soul may be. He’d popped out for milk and a paper over ten years ago and never been seen since. In the end, silence turned out not to be a successful coping strategy.

The ceremony was a traditional ceremony, insofar as the celebrant read out a bunch of words and asked the supposedly happy couple to repeat some of them. Barry just wanted to get it over with. He needed the loo and his ninja pants were attacking his loo going apparatus with a vengeance.

Then came that part in the proceedings that brought a hush to all those in attendance. The pivotal moment when the celebrant asks the world whether this should actually be happening in the first place.

…Speak now. Or forever hold your peace…

This was the exact moment that Wayne appeared. The fates had guided him to this time as well as this place. Sometimes, the fates are sticklers for alignment. It’s far more entertaining that way.

Wayne arrived upon what was supposed to be an idyllic scene of wedded bliss, but all he saw was a murderer. Wayne only had eyes for Gareth’s killer. 

Now there would be bloody retribution. Wayne would avenge his friend’s death and nothing and no one would stop him.

It all happened so quickly, and yet time danced around a little and played with the moment so that it felt like an age.

Wayne girded his loins, puffed out his chest and surged forth with vengeful intent. This was it. This was everything. There would be no stopping him now. He raced towards Barry, and the rest was history.

“Ow!” cried Barry.

There was a titter from the assembled. Barry had broken the tense silence that had followed the legendary words, speak now.

“It’s not funny!” Barry admonished the wedding guests as he clasped a hand desperately to his neck as though he was trying to keep something important on the skin side.

“What is it?” asked Tracy, flecks of concern adorning her words.

“Bloody wasp!” gasped Barry.

His voice didn’t sound right, and his face was going a very unhealthy shade of red.

“Barry?” now that word of Tracy’s was full of concern, “Barry!”

But Barry didn’t hear her. Instead, his eyes rolled into his head to watch the show going on in his brain – they wanted to watch Barry’s life replayed at lightening speed. All of it played so quickly that the closing credits were rolling as he hit the ground.

The End.

Barry hit the ground, and he was quite, quite dead.

*

Wayne did another pass of the stricken murderer.

That would do.

“For you Gareth,” he said as he peeled away, victorious in his act of vengeance.

*

“Got it!” Terry said triumphantly as he smashed the fleeing wasp with his wedding program.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” hissed Sandra, Terry’s wife.

“Why not?” asked Terry.

“The other wasps can sense when one of their mates is killed,” stated Sandra.

“How’d they do that?” asked Terry.

“Dunno. I suppose they smell it or something,” Sandra told him.

Terry shrugged. His shrug said that he didn’t believe that for one second. Sandra ignored the shrug. You didn’t stay married to a man like Terry for three long years if you couldn’t ignore those annoying shrugs of his.

*

Nearby, there was an anguished cry that none of the wedding party heard, their concerns were all centred upon the prone figure of the deceased groom.

“Wayne!” cried Gary, “no!!!!”

Gary threw himself against the branch of a tree in his newfound grief.

“I will avenge you, mate!” wailed Gary, “I will take an eye for an eye and I will raise hell for you, buddy! There will be blood! I will make them pay dearly for what they have done!”

And so it went, in that long, hot Summer. A relentless game of revenge tennis, with neither side showing any quarter, nor any sense. Eventually, the sun would slope off, and it would only be then that the hostilities would abate…