Around Full Circle

The pub was noisy, but to a level that wove a cocoon around the two friends. A log burner churned out a lazy heat, there was the promise of more from the dance show behind the glass, but that promise was breathless and lacklustre. Besides, Jake found the temperature suited him just fine. He’d undone his coat, but not bothered to take it off. Toby however, had shrugged his coat off like he was shedding skin, and now the coat lay around him on the bench. A marker, so no interloper would attempt to take his place. Not that the two of them would make any invasion easy. One of them guarded the table throughout. The other heading to the bar or the loo and where necessary, they would tag team so that they were both comfortable and refreshed throughout the evening.

“Do you remember the Summers when we were kids?” Toby asked his friend.

Jake shrugged and smiled. The question came from nowhere and was seemingly random. Standard pub fare. Reminiscing about times of legend. Better times that only existed in the edit. 

“Those were good days,” Jake responded, passing the ball into space for Toby. He didn’t know what the play was, only that he had to run with the ball and get it back to Toby.

“Hot and dry,” Toby said, “we’d head out after breakfast and wouldn’t come home until tea time.” He grinned across the table and scrunch his eyebrows up, “what did we eat?” he leant forward conspiratorially, “do you know? I can’t remember lunches on those days. Did we go to the corner shop? Or head to a mate’s house and make ham butties?”

Jake shrugged again, “those things are just details. We must’ve eaten. We’d remember if we’d starved.”

“Compared to kids these days, we did starve,” Toby swigged some of his pint, “and we were deprived. Cereal or toast for breakfast, butty for lunch and meat and two veg for tea. That was your lot.”

“Fish and chips on Friday,” Jake added.

“If you were lucky!” Toby scoffed.

“True,” Jake conceded.

Toby swigged another quarter of his pint down, “point is, the weather was dry and it was hot. Yet we’re experiencing global warming. When was the last time we had a decent Summer?!”

Jake cast his mind back, but his line remained slack. There were no fish in these waters. He vaguely understood why and it wasn’t restricted to the venue and the imbibement of ale. There was a trick here. Not a callous one, but a trick all the same. A restriction of options that made the conclusion all the more plausible. Still, it didn’t sit right with him. There had been good, hot and dry Summers since his childhood and the weather was generally hotter. It had been wet though. Wet for two years now and the constant damp was having an effect on them all. The almost constant grey shroud of clouds that had succumbed to gravity and could no longer fly was seeping into their souls.

That grey came to the fore now and the latter part of the evening slowed and quietened, Toby according with Jake’s morose rhythm, the alcohol bringing it down yet another octave. They stayed for two more pints in the hope that their spirits would lift, but that was never going to happen, and so they settled for the gentle companionship that always worked for them both.

Outside, they clapped each other on the upper arm, gave thanks for a good night and their ongoing friendship and looked forward to the next time. Theirs was an oasis of calm and sanity in a world gone increasingly mad. The pub was their church and their communing was a reassurance; it wasn’t just them.

But then it was just Jake, as Toby turned the corner that would lead him to his front door in less than a minute. Jake had much further to walk and as his friend deserted him, he felt a dread desolation that came from nowhere and had no business being here.

Jake shivered and nonsensically pulled his coat tighter around him. There was no comfort to be had, the shiver had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with a past that Toby had unwittingly resurrected. Shivering again, Jake returned to the recollections of halcyon Summers. Memories were strange devices. They were selective. Used to drive an agenda. Most were rehearsed and created retrospectively. Childhood memories were the worst for this fabrication. Parents covering up for their misdemeanours. Creating alibis so that the evidence of their failures would not stick.

As he left the border of the village, Jake stood for a moment and took in the faint outline of the horizon from the hill. His home was somewhere down there. Hidden behind the treeline. The location of his home was just one of a number of responses and coping mechanisms he’d developed over time. Cities, and even towns, gave him the creeps. Any concentration of people gave rise to undue risk. Groups and crowds of people were dumb and in that thick goop of idiocy was cover for monsters. 

The worst monsters wore the skin of men. Jake was well aware that they could take the form of women too, and he had a theory on that. He reckoned that the most highly adept monsters were almost invisible. That not only would you not see them coming, they would have cut your tendons and rendered you immobile before you had any scope to react, let alone respond. The only data available on monsters related to the ones that got caught. It stood to reason that there were those too clever to fall. Those that operated on a level beyond human understanding.

Instinct was a different matter though. Another of Jake’s theories was that in recent times, people had learnt to suppress their instincts to such a point that the monsters were now having a field day. Most of the suppression was an adaptation to the modern world. Old and outdated instincts designed to warn of a predator didn’t quite fit the roads of a city where it was more important to spot the runaway bin lorry. And so people were dull instruments. Made stupid by the trappings of civilisation. Worse still, they had tuned into an online reality and dropped out of the only reality that counted. The world was filled with shuffling slabs of meat. A buffet for dark beings with even darker appetites.

The quality of the night disturbed Jake. Something was off about it, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. Didn’t want to put his finger on it. All the same, he trudged down the hill, veering into the grass at the side of the road several times, but persevering with his night vision despite the cloud blotting out the moon and it’s cloak of stars.

“Shit!” 

Yet again, he was on the wet grass and clawing at thin air. This wasn’t like him. He knew where the road was, and he wasn’t even drunk. He was reminded of people who developed brain tumours. Their ability to navigate the world receding from them. An alien being invading their head and feeding upon them little by little and bit by bit.

Only it wasn’t a little. It was significant, and Jake didn’t like the direction his mind was wandering in. There was a warning in the midst of these mental meanderings, but the warning seemed glib. He felt as though her were being mocked and a frustration was building within him. An impotent rage that made him want to cry. Made him want to piss himself and run away in the shame of his powerlessness.

Shuffling to the comparative safety of the tarmac, he stood for a moment and tried to centre himself, but the feeling of unease had him in its jaws. He smelt its breath and felt its saliva coating his skin. Wiping non-existent tears from his eyes he began walking again, but now he was uncertain as to whether he wanted to go home.

Home was where they got you. If not your home, then another identikit home nearby. It was a dark game where a twisted creature tapped the polystyrene cup and found the pea, consuming it messily when they won the prize.

Jake lived here because he was scared. He’d run here in the hope that the odds of being caught were longer. Now this rationale of his was unravelling.

They always find you in the end.

Childhood Summers may have been hot, dry and full of fun and laughter, but when the sun was done and betrayed them, there was only the dark and a creeping misery. No one talked about the bad childhood memories. If they did, they had to pay a stranger with a degree and a certificate to prove they could professionally listen to offload the real memories and all the pain and torture associated with them.

Jake would never tell. He knew not to tell. Besides, there was another fear that kept him silent, and that fear was that he might be mad. The fear of his unhinged state had haunted him since childhood. A silent voice that was a constant threat, for it were ever to become audible, Jake knew that he was on a one way trip to insanity. He’d seen how that worked and it was just about as bad as it got. And so he’d grit his teeth and held it together. Only he didn’t feel at all together right now. He felt like he was slipping on ice and there was nothing to hold onto.

He had a terrible urge to scrunch his eyes shut. To close the cruel world down and withdraw. But he resisted it. All the same, he saw that face. He saw her face. And it was all he could do not to scream. He barely registered his quiet sobs as time drew him back to her and the world they had inhabited together.

Jake knew that his Mum was different. All children know that their parents are different. Parents are unique. No one will ever replace them. He saw how his Mum was, and he also saw how people were around her. Even with the protective intervention of his Dad, Jake saw that his Mum didn’t fit in. He could smell the confusion on her. She wasn’t made for this world and the world she was made for had ceased to exist. If it had ever existed at all.

Life hurt Jake’s Mum and he had a growing awareness that he also hurt her. His very being. The only person who wasn’t poisonous to his mother was his Dad. This was the redeeming aspect of Jake’s young life. He saw the way his Mum lit up in his Dad’s presence and in those moments of intense connection, he knew what love was. He saw it and he felt it. His mother only had eyes for his Dad and his Dad doted upon her. When it came to the two of them, they were perfect for each other, they really were.

But never mind a vacuum, Nature abhors perfection. The world is imperfectly perfect and perfection just does not belong. And so the winds of change blew and things went very badly wrong.

None of it made sense. Not even now. One day Dad was there. The next he was gone. His Mum told him that his Dad had gone on a trip, but when Jake asked where, she never answered. So he asked when he’d be back, and again, his mother never answered. Jake knew his Dad wasn’t coming back as soon as he confronted his absence. There was a solidity to it. A dreadful finality.

He couldn’t recollect when Uncle Jimmy came to stay. What he remembered was that it was too soon. Far too soon. Jake was aware that his Mum needed a man in order to feel safe and to feel like herself as far as that was possible. He also knew that Uncle Jimmy was not that man. This wasn’t sour grapes. This wasn’t because he missed his Dad so much that it physically hurt. It was because Uncle Jimmy was rotten. He was so rotten that Jake could taste the foulness of him in the air. And as he spent more time under their roof that foul stench ripened and in no time at all, it blossomed in his mother’s mind.

The horror of her corruption shocked Jake. It was made all the worse as he witnessed it helplessly from the side lines of his childhood. This should not be happening. It was so wrong. But he had no one to tell. The only person he could have talked to had disappeared. 

Even now as he carefully picked his way home, Jake wondered at what had happened to his Dad. He wouldn’t have left. That wasn’t in him. However hard things got with his Mum, his Dad would not have walked away. That was what Uncle Jimmy told him though. That and a whole heap of shit about how weak and pathetic his Dad was. Jimmy gloried in this denigration and Jake could see a different kind of madness in the man’s eyes. Suspected that Jimmy had had a hand in his Dad’s exile.

The winds of change are not localised. Even as he struggled with the cuckoo in his home, Jake heard things, and worse still, felt the change in the neighbourhood. The Charlton’s Labrador, a goofy, friendly thing, was found gutted in their back garden one evening. The horror of the discovery was matched by the sweetness of the victim.

“Who would do such a thing?” was the question on everyone’s lips. 

Other pets disappeared. Cats mostly. And all of a sudden, people were wary and they were scared. This made them mean and friendships were tested. Some ending in the confusion that was besetting the area.

When Mandy Waring disappeared, there was a dread certainty that she would not be found alive. She was the year below Jake at school. He remembered the assembly where the head teacher announced her disappearance. Huddles of girls crying. The boys looking at each other, not knowing how to react other than to stay quiet and not fidget. 

Jake returned home that afternoon and didn’t say a word about Mandy. He stuck to his routine, reluctantly making himself a cheese sandwich despite the swarms of flies in the kitchen. Over the last couple of weeks the number of flies had become nightmarish. He’d never experienced anything like it, not even in the height of Summer around the school bins. Today as he swiped at the flies so they wouldn’t land on his food, puke on it and stomp on their efforts, he understood that the flies were harbingers of doom. That they were here for a reason and that reason was Jimmy.

Nearing home now, Jake had a crystal clear image of Jimmy putting his finger to his lips. 

Don’t tell. 

Don’t ever tell.

Jake hadn’t. What would he have said? What could he have said?

Jake’s silence was damning. Jimmy was the rock, and his mother’s madness was the hard place, and Jake was trapped betwixt the two. He stood on a thin line of sanity and all around him was madness. Death and madness. That was the reality of his existence.

That he’d lasted this long was a miracle.

He was breathing heavily as he stood at the side door of his cottage. Key in hand, he hesitated. But where else did he have to go? This was his refuge. A sturdy house built not of straw or sticks, but of bricks.

Shaking his head at the absurdity of his fearful thoughts, he turned the key and stepped inside. Swiftly, he shut the door and locked it. Resting his back against the cool wood.

That was when he heard them. 

The buzzing sound came from a faraway place, and for a blessed moment he thought it was imagined. A throw back from the memory he had recently retrieved. But as he stepped into the kitchen he saw the murmuration of thousands of flies. As they swept this way and that his nostrils were assailed with a familiar foul stench.

“Hello, son.”

The voice was an assault from the past, but Jake couldn’t help but step forward to peer at the figure sitting in the armchair.

“Dad?” 

His voice was not his own. It had been once. When he was just a boy. The regression was both instant and appalling. He was revolted by it.

Jimmy grinned at him, but it landed as a lop-sided and broken leer. 

Jimmy.

The conspicuous madness was his mother’s. His father had been her rock. They were perfect for each other. Perfectly matched in their rejection of reality. Jake’s Dad had left that day, but he was always there. Always and forever.

Inside, Jake screamed. He screamed at a world that he hated with a vengeance. The flies pulsed in time with his silent rage. Never coming too close. The soundtrack to a life that ran counter to what everyone saw. 

Slumping in the only armchair in the room, Jake’s eyes grew wide and impossibly dark. As the buzzing of the flies became louder and louder her rocked back and forth. Grinding his teeth until blood and spittle trickled down his chin. Then the buzzing subsided, the flies settling upon a figure lying on the floor beside the armchair.

“I didn’t mean it,” he keened those words over and over. And they were true. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t care. Monsters didn’t have to care. He’d never be caught. Monsters like Jimmy never got caught. Even if one day Jake slipped up and made a mistake. Jake was expendable. Jimmy didn’t give a shit about Jake…