Don't be misled by the cute hedgehog picture below, this week's Friday Flash is as dark and disturbing as I get. It returns to a recurring motif in my fiction, evil children bullying. You don't have to be Freud to work out that I obviously have issues. I'll say a little more after the story, but viewers of a nervous disposition be warned... you might not like where this one takes you.
Funny story I always tell in a situation like this, how when I was a little kid, I had a hedgehog. Called him Hector, ‘cos I was eleven and originality wasn’t really a thing back then. He wasn’t a pet or nothing, but he lived in our garden and we built him a little hide and I fed him scraps after supper. He especially liked the crusts from my peanut butter sandwiches, it’s weird the things you remember, isn’t it?
So anyway, there’s this kid lives up our road called Tommy Mason, local bully, nasty piece of work. We all knew to keep away from him. He pushed my mate Adrian in the canal and snapped Walter Hinchliffe’s little finger so it bent all the way up the back of his hand. Had a thing for stealing underwear off washing lines too – fancy stuff, what they’d call ‘lingerie’ nowadays though we never had that word back then – and forcing lads to wear it in the playground. That was quite funny, I guess, on occasion, though not if you were the kid with a cross-your-heart brazier wrapped round your head like an Easter bonnet.
Anyway, like most bullies, when Tommy latched on to a new victim, he went all out to make that kid’s life a misery for as long as it took to break him… or until he lost interest and found someone new to plague. I’d done pretty well at keeping myself off Tommy’s radar, but I knew he’d get round to me eventually, and sure enough, one summer afternoon I’m on my way home from school when Tommy steps out of the bus shelter and puts himself in my way... and from that moment it was on. Problem was – Tommy’s problem, anyway – I was fast. Fastest kid in our year, proved it every Sports Day. And Tommy, well, he carried a bit of weight. You wouldn’t call him fat to his face, of course, but… well, he wasn’t ever going to catch me if I got to running, and as soon as I knew he was after me I ran pretty much everywhere. All the way to school in a morning, all the way home on a night. Even in between lessons – I lost count of the times I was caught by a teacher and made to “go back and walk”, but I was happy to walk if I knew a teacher was watching. If I knew I was safe. The rest of the time? I wasn’t giving Tommy no chances.
Thing about bullies, and maybe you understand this, they don’t like being denied. Sometimes I think maybe it’s easier just to give them what they want straight out. 'Cos the more you deny them, the more they want it. Maybe if I hadn’t run, maybe if I’d just let Tommy have his way, modelled some frilly pants for him in the yard and taken a few slaps, maybe he’d have moved on to somebody else. But all that denial, it built some kind of resentment in him, I guess. One way or another, he was gonna get me. And if he couldn’t catch me on foot, he could still follow me home and wait. And watch. And…
Which brings us to the bit of the story which isn’t all that pretty. Someone like you, you’ve probably been waiting for this part. Well, I hate to disappoint, but I’m gonna spare you the gory details. I’m sure you can fill them in yourself. Tommy followed me home, then he waited, and he watched. He saw me bringing scraps out to feed that little hedgehog, saw how happy I was in that moment, saw something that was missing from his own twisted life, and then he waited till I’d gone back in the house, and he took that from me.
I didn’t know anything about it till the next day at school when I opened up my locker and there was Hector… what was left of him.
You know that kid on The Simpsons? The bully that picks on Bart, with the obnoxious laugh? “Haw haw”? I don’t know whether this is one of those memories I added on retroactively, or whether Tommy really made that sound as I stood there with the locker door in my hand and tears rolling down my…
Tommy got his. Maybe he taught me something that day about watching and waiting, till the right moment comes. Till the afternoon he’s out by himself, walking past the old allotments, and he doesn’t see me coming up behind him with that cricket bat till it’s way too late, and the next thing he knows he’s waking up in that shed, hands tied behind his back with a pair of washing line knickers I’d dug out the pocket of his coat, staring at the tools I’d laid out on the little bench in front of him. Pruners and shears. One of them little garden forks, a trowel and a wire cutter. Secateurs.
“Why’d you do it, Tommy?”
The thing is, he couldn’t tell me. Oh, he came up with plenty of excuses and explanations – he hated the way I won all the races and did well at spelling and lived in a much fancier house than him and got to kiss Gemma Gibson twice in the school play – but we both knew they were bullshit.
“Why’d you do it, Tommy?”
I kept on asking, till there were bits of Tommy all over that shed, but he just couldn’t give me an answer I was satisfied with. Closest he came was, “I don’t know - all right, Dylan? I just don’t know!”
What happened that day set the course of my whole life, you know? It’s why I joined the force – why I worked my way up to detective. Wanting to know what motivates people to do the sick things they do… having to know. A lot of the times the answer is obvious. “He was sleeping with my wife.” “She was threatening to take away my kids.” “When he gets drunk, he hits me.” All perfectly good reasons, you ask me, and I’m happy to let the law deal with people like that.
Every now and then though, I come up against someone like you. Someone who, just like Tommy Mason, has no real justification. What you did to those girls, Peter, it’s no different to what Tommy Mason did to my hedgehog. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you actually will be able to give me an answer that’ll make some kind of sense. We’ll see. I’ve got all night. And lots of tools.
I don't like cruelty to animals. In fiction, I find it far more disturbing than cruelty to humans. You can kill, torture, maim and mutilate as many regular people as you like and I won't bat an eyelid, but harm a cute little bunny rabbit and I'll be up in arms. I didn't like what Tommy did to that hedgehog, I didn't even want to write it... yet not writing it might be even worse, depending on the reader's imagination. This story was unsettling for me, but I still had to do put it out there. Horror should be unsettling... the real world certainly is.
