Runt Read Free Page A

his house and all three of us like a great little army, me the soldier and Drunkle the general and Arrn the High King, all went inside.
    —Do you know what it’s like?
    Two fried eggs I ate from Drunkle’s own chickens like two little suns on my plate they were. Arrn got given a beef knuckle and he was chewing it and crunching on it for hours with bits of it everywhere but Drunkle’s house was such a bad mess anyway and it never used to be that way that more mess didn’t matter any more.
    —Do you want to know what it’s like?
    Drunkle was drinking from another bottle and that’s all he had for his tea, no food. And he was doing it again, again he was putting questions at me which I couldn’t make an answer to so he answered them himself.
    —It is like fear. It is like being very, very scared. It is like being lost in a forest somewhere at night-time and something is stalking you through the trees. You can’t see it, so you don’t know what it is, but from the sounds it makes you know that it’s very, very big and could with ease and pleasure rip all your arms and legs off and you know that that’s
exactly
what it’s going to do
when
, not
if
, it finds you.
    I didn’t like that. Big thing of evilment hunting me in the woods and me all alone then me with no arms or legs screaming and no help coming I did not like that no and I went to put my hands over my ears to keep out Drunkle’s words but I knew that he was needing me to listen to him and that he’d be made sad if I hid my ears with my hands. So I looked at Arrn instead but he was still bloody busy with his knuckle holding it tight in his mucky paws and bonebits like little spears all around him there on the dirty rug in front of the fireplace where a chair burned like
I
burned at the thinking of that Stalking Thing.
    —It is the dread of death, and the terrible fear of my own aloneness. It cripples me utterly, being alive and alone, being without Fay. No man should
ever
have to cut the body of his suicided wife out of a tree. No one should
ever
have to suffer that. How can a man live, after doing that? How can he?
    At it again with his questions he was.
    —How could I have known … how could I have known …
    At it again with Them Words he was and at it again he was with his eyes all melty like the springs in the High Parts when the winterness goes. And he was at it again too with his bottle-gulpy ways but he’s always been at
them
cos he’s my Drunkle.
    —Everything’s gone to a mess. See the mess around here? Lonely people become first untidy then they become filthy cos cleanliness loses its point and we yearn for distractions and letting the shite build up is exactly that and d’you want to know why? Because then, see, then, you can
clean
everything up. Just got to hope that the urge to clean comes on you before you get buried in the muck, isn’t it?
    He showed me his teeth in what looked a bit like a smile.
    —That’s the race, boy, isn’t it? To beat the shite before it buries you. Cos that’s what it wants to do, see , it wants to creep up on you and suck you into it. Big mound of black stinking shite from the earth’s bowels and –
    Drunkle then made a terrible sucky sound and I thought uh-oh ear-hiding time again but again I didn’t and Arrn had his tongue inside his bone now. His ears looked very bright red in the light from the little flames from the burning chair.
    —I’m gunner have to get some stuff from your mother, aren’t I? You gunner be up here all summer and everything, you’re gunner need some medicine. You’re still on the lamotrigine? That sodium valproate?
    I did not know the second name only the first one so I gave just one nod and then one shake of my head. Drunkle told me to hold my hand out so I did and he held it for a moment then sat back going ‘mmm’ like he thought he was Dr Llewellyn in the town who I once liked but hadn’t seen for ages not since NotDad came into my life which was when I stopped