Suffer the Children Read Free

the floor. Somebody laughs. A bully’s laugh.
    Karl wants to curl up and let the dark come, for it all to be over, but he forces himself to look up. He sees a hand on the key to the door. He reaches into his pocket for the syringe but a searing pain jags up and down along his arm. He looks at the leg of the person who clubbed him and bites into his own lip, forcing his hand into his pocket. He can feel the syringe and takes a grip, eases his hand out of the pocket. He breathes in as much air as he can and sizes up the leg. You can kill someone by sliding air into their blood. But just as he pulls his arm back to stab into the leg, it shifts and he feels a vast thud to his balls. It forces all the air out of him and now the dark comes for him.

     
    When he comes round, Karl is looking at the ceiling of his bedroom . He can’t move and there’s something metal in his mouth. He can’t move his jaw or tongue and his insides feel raw. He tastes blood. Someone in a white mask, with black eyes and blood-red lips, holds a whisky bottle aloft.
    As they get closer, the blood-red lips make the shape of a smile. He strains to close his mouth but all he can do, as the whisky is poured and poured, is shut his eyes tight, feel the liquid burn him all the way down into his stomach.
    With each swallow, he cries another soundless sob, drowned by the spirit. He suddenly feels rough hands on his midriff, down the waistband of his jeans. They tug them down, rip his shirt open.
    The person in the mask shows him the bottle with one hand. In the other, a long, thin, glinting sharp blade. Karl’s bowels subside as he feels the cold steel on him, hears someone say: ‘This is from the children.’
    Karl fears that this is not the moment he will die. He fears the last breaths will be long and drawn out. As the white-hot line is drawn around his balls, he sees one last thing – a silver gleam, getting bigger and bigger in his sight. He tries to close his eyes, but fingers force one eye open and the blade comes impossibly big until it obscures all the light and touches him. As he waits for the pain he knows his heart does not beat when it should. You don’t hear it until it is gone. The blood inside him runs up against itself and a choir bellows out. He prays for it to cease.
    *******
     
    Staffe looks across at Josie and smiles. They are in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn that he has just finished renovating.
    ‘You’re not eating,’ she says, putting her knife and fork together on the empty plate.
    ‘I’d rather cook than eat.’
    ‘You’re a people pleaser,’ she laughs. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
    ‘Try telling that to Jadus Golding.’
    ‘Not pleasing our Jadus doesn’t make you a bad person.’
    Staffe spears a scallop with his fork and runs it through the beurre blanc sauce.
    She stops eating and takes a slug of wine, watching him. ‘You’ve got big hands,’ she says. ‘Big fingers.’
    ‘My fingers are too big and I’m too old,’ he says.
    ‘I like your fingers, Staffe.’
    ‘Do you want some more wine,’ he says, picking up the bottle , offering to pour.
    ‘I think I’ve had enough.’ She leans across and picks up her car keys from the middle of the table, spins them round on her index finger like a gunslinger with a revolver.
    ‘You can stay,’ he says. ‘It’s only early.’
    ‘You don’t mean that, and anyway…’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Just have a good holiday.’ She has a soft, smudged smile. ‘Sir.’
    Staffe scrapes the plates into the bin, rinses them and when he hears the front door slam he goes through to the living room. He watches Josie skip down the steps and make her way towards the gap in the beech trees. Somehow, she must know he’s watching her go because she twiddles a wave with her fingers without looking, fixing her tights with the other hand, then slams the gate shut as she shouts at the kids to stop playing kerbie in the road.
    *******
     
    Tanya Ford can’t get out of the house