Real Monsters Read online

  But Danny kept walking.

  I felt the breath crushed from my lungs. I glanced down. And lying right in front of me, amongst the squeezy condiment bottles and sticky coffee rings, was a crumpled, white napkin, on it a phone number scrawled in scratchy, child-like handwriting. ‘Call me, okay?’ Danny called as he reached the door. I fell back into my chair, carefully folding the napkin safely away. ‘Okay,’ I said, finally allowing myself a small, relieved smile, before I suddenly remembered something.

  ‘Good luck!’ I yelled after him.

  But he was already gone

  Over the next few weeks I met up with Danny almost every night, sometimes to drink coffee and sometimes to drink beer and sometimes just to sit in the passenger seat of his car while he drove in long, looping circles around the city, going nowhere in particular, pushing his old, beat-up coupé to the point where the engine started to scream and my teeth rattled in their gums. But wherever we were, it was always the same; I’d talk and Danny would listen. Every so often I’d try and get him to open up, to tell me about his family – about anything – but he would just shrug and mumble or change the subject. Which if I’m honest suited me just fine. I had plenty of conversation for the both of us. And hey – he was cheaper than a therapist. Anyway, he seemed happy enough with the arrangement and, without making any conscious decisions or even really discussing it out loud, we started going steady.

  In many ways Danny was the ideal boyfriend; he was clean, polite and kind. The sex – while not earth-shaking – was good. He was a considerate, efficient lover, though I sometimes got the sense he was holding something back from me. There seemed to be a distance between us, no matter how close our physical proximity. Still, I always came. He wasn’t pushy either, which made a nice difference from the overexcited, puppy-like boys I’d known at university. In fact if anything it always seemed to be me chasing after him, trying to pin him down. But maybe that was just the way he liked it. It was hard to tell with Danny.

  Once my exams were out the way (it’s fair to say they went badly, although not quite as badly as they might have), I decided to stay with Danny rather than moving back in with Mum, and as the months rolled by we found ourselves falling into a comfortable routine. We found a small apartment and I took a job at a local call centre to pay my share of the rent, Danny preferring instead to eat into his savings, spending his days working out in the gym. After my shifts he would pick me up and we’d go and watch a movie or have a drink before returning home.

  And even though my job was soul-destroyingly dull, and the war on the TV blazed ever more brutally, the journalists now teaching the nation an entirely new vocabulary – one filled with ‘friendly fire’ and ‘covert death squads’ – life was nevertheless pretty peachy for those few months. I even dared to start dreaming of a little long-term happiness, just like the song:

  Danny and Lorna sitting in a tree

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  First came love, then came marriage

  Then came…

  Then came a fucking great bombshell that ripped through the centre of everything, leaving my happy-ever-after a tattered, bloody mess.

  I had been in work for less than an hour, but already the morning shift was dragging painfully. I’d recently been transferred to outbound sales – cold calling through a list of random numbers and desperately trying to convince the hapless recipient of why they needed a certain financial product in their life – and I was finding it particularly tough. It wasn’t that I blamed people for being rude. It was just I found I could only take being invited to insert a low-interest credit card or tax-free savings scheme into my most intimate enclaves so many times a day before I became a little jaded. Anyway, for whatever reason that morning’s customers seemed particularly cantankerous and, as I sat there passively absorbing the howls of abuse, I allowed myself to indulge in my favourite office fantasy, that of tearing the headset from my ear and instigating a workers’ uprising, kicking over every filing cabinet and artificial pot plant as we marched on our way to freedom – or at least to the pub – when suddenly I looked up to find my line manager standing next to my desk.

  Looking very uncomfortable indeed.

  ‘Would you mind coming with me?’ he asked as I finished the call, steering me towards one of the small, suffocating interview rooms in the corner of the office. He turned on the light and told me to take a seat as he drew the blinds, even asking me if I’d like a glass of water.

  And then he told me my sister had called.

  Three hours later I was on a train back home. Mum had suffered a sudden and severe myocardial infarction – a heart attack – and was lying unconscious in intensive care. My sister was already by her side but her chances didn’t look good. Apparently she’d been unconscious for at least an hour before she was discovered.

  Guilt.

  Thick and sickly, it coated my tongue and trickled down my neck as I waited for a taxi to take me from the station to the hospital. My mummy was going to die and it was all my fault. Perhaps if I’d been a good daughter, if I’d stayed at home and looked after her she’d have clung on for another few years. But instead I’d run away to get drunk and high and chase after boys. I hated myself. But even more than that, I hated the Monsters – those sick green bastards who’d done this to her, who’d taken Daddy away and ruined our lives and broken her heart.

  I got there as fast as I could.

  But like always, I arrived a couple of minutes too late.

  I stayed at home with my sister and the girls for the next few weeks. For a city well versed in tragedy, there was still an extraordinary amount of legal hoopla for us to negotiate; a task made all the more difficult by the origami of paperwork Mum had left behind. Eventually though we managed to untangle it all, and once the funeral was over and every last dotted line was signed and countersigned, I allowed myself a couple of days of lying on the sofa, crying in a crumpled heap.

  And then I got back on a train.

  I was vaguely worried about seeing Danny again after everything that had happened. I hadn’t even told him I was leaving – I’d gone straight to the station from work in the clothes I was wearing – and with all the drama I’d barely had a chance to speak to him beyond a couple of vague, monosyllabic telephone calls. Now I was back, I was scared he might have moved on, perhaps even having found someone else; someone light and breezy. Someone fun. Someone who crucially didn’t have the stigma of a dead Mum to add to their ever expanding list of woes.

  Danny greeted me as I walked into the apartment and at first it seemed that my fears were well-founded. He looked serious, his face twisted into a brooding expression I’d never seen before. In his hand was a letter, and for a second I had a horrible vision of him handing me my notice:

  Sorry Lorna, I’m restructuring.

  Downsizing.

  Optimising.

  There’s really no easy way to say this:

  You’re out.

  But then the storm lifted and he smiled and held up the envelope so I could see the official stamp on the front. ‘I got it!’ he said. ‘I passed! Can you believe it? I start basic training two weeks from now – I’m going to be a soldier!’ I rushed to hug him, the relief that I was not being dumped drowning out all of my concerns about the practicalities of his new job – like the fact it would mean yet more time apart. Like the fact he could get killed. Or kill someone. Instead I told him how great he was, how he deserved it after all of the hard work he’d put in, how it was fucking excellent news. ‘There’s something else,’ he said, peeling me off him and holding me lightly by the wrists, his face suddenly serious again. My heart stopped. I’d been wrong about everything:

  He didn’t think it was working.

  It wasn’t me, it was him.

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘I think we should get married.’

  We started off a little before midday, packing anythin we thought might be useful for the journey. Food, water and weapons mainly. Plus my notebook
of course. The rest of it we left behind, neither havin the energy nor the stomach to wash the blood off of everythin else. Anyhow, there didn’t seem much point in weighin ourselves down for such a short journey. There was some debate about what to do with the bodies, whether we should bury ’em or burn ’em, but in the end we decided it would take too long and so we just draped them in what was left of the tents, securin the ragged canvas with rocks. We figured the army would be out here soon enough to collect ’em and ship ’em off to the families. Jim insisted we mumble a few words before we left, commending their poor souls to the mercy of God and what not, and then we were gone, spreadin out in a loose line as we settled into our own pace, me at the front and Doggie at the back, all of us thinkin: here we go again.

  Now you might think there ain’t much to look at in the desert, like when you get to the end of the story and all you’ve got left to flick through are those blank pages they stick in to make the book look bigger. But you’d be wrong. There’s plenty to see in the desert. In fact, I could probably fill a whole fuckin library describin all the things I’ve seen, from anthills higher than my head to the bloom of desert roses. I ain’t kiddin – simple things like the shifting patterns of the clouds or the different textures of rocks can be enough to keep you entertained for hours. Well, actually I don’t know if it’d keep you entertained. There’s not a screen or a flashin light in sight, ha. But it’s enough for me. And even when you get tired of lookin at everythin that’s out here, the desert’s a great place to spend time lookin at all the things that ain’t there.

  What I mean is you can use all that endless sand and sky as a canvas and paint a picture. A bit like you do with your crayons, only you gotta use your mind instead. For instance, if I want to see a steak dinner I just stare out and relax my eyes and BOOM! What d’ya know? I got me a nice juicy T-bone, pink in the middle jus’ the way I like it. Same if I wanna watch a ball game, or visit a girly bar, or anythin else ya can think of. I could even paint a picture of your mother if I wanted to. If I felt like makin myself sick that is ha. I used to do somethin similar when I was a kid, starin at the static between TV stations. I’d make up my own cartoons, better than any of the crappy shows that used to be on. I’d sit for hours and do it.

  Anyway, it’s the same here. Only thing I can’t seem to picture properly is you for some reason. It always clouds over and gets fuzzy whenever I try. I guess maybe ‘cos you’re always growin and stuff, changin. Maybe you could paint a picture of yourself for me and send it. Maybe that would help.

  As the day slowly wore on, midday becomin afternoon becomin evenin, it became clear we weren’t gonna make the strip before nightfall. None of us said anythin though. Nah. We just kept on marchin until it was pitch black and our feet hurt and our teeth were chatterin from it bein so freezin fuckin cold. Even then we just kept on goin. In the end it was Cal of all people who put into words what everyone was thinkin. ‘We’re fuckin lost.’ It wasn’t a question, and nobody argued. Instead we just stopped walkin and bunched together, everyone eyeballin me all of a sudden like they expected me to tell ’em what we should do next. I looked at Doggie and Cal, their teeth chatterin, their eyes wide with expectation. Christ, even Jett looked like he was open to suggestions. Finally I looked over at Jim and shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask the Staff Sergeant if he’s got any bright ideas?’

  In the end we figured it would be safer to bunk down for the night and wait until the mornin. Course we didn’t have any tents with us, and it was too late to start a fire, so we did the best we could. We dug a shallow trench to protect us from the wind and sat back to back, tryin to preserve our body heat. Some bed, huh? To tell the truth, it felt more like we was climbing into our own grave. Needless to say I didn’t sleep.

  We were up and walkin again before daybreak. Like I said, we’d finished the last of our rations the night before so breakfast consisted of a mouthful of warm water. We didn’t even have a fuckin toothbrush between us. Still, I was glad to be up and out of that pit. Doggie in particular had started to stink like a rancid ham and I wanted to put as much distance between him and me as possible. I was glad there was only another couple of hours left to go, and made up my mind that once we landed I’d never see any of these fuckers again. Even if they tried to give us a medal, I wouldn’t show up to the ceremony. I’d get ’em to post it. Anyway I’m guessin everyone was thinkin the same thing as for the rest of the day we walked in silence, one leg in font of the other, the landscape as empty as our bellies.

  You know, back in basic trainin we spent a full week learnin about foragin. A week! Shit, I could tell ya how to distinguish between edible and poisonous berries if ya happened to find yourself lost in a low-lying deciduous forest, or how to prepare a broth from seaweed with enough nutrients to keep a man alive for a coupla months. I can tell a rabbit’s tracks from a weasel’s, and show you how to catch and skin either. Or how to make a coarse flour by pounding acorns with a rock, or how to dig an evaporation trap to purify water if you don’t happen to have any iodine tablets handy.

  But what I was never shown how to do, what nobody ever thought to teach me, is how the fuck I’m supposed to survive when all there is around me is sand. I mean it, that’s literally all there is in this part of the country. No cactus to tap for water, no shrubs to harvest – shit it ain’t rained here in about a half a century. The best I could do was pick up a smooth flat pebble and jam it under my tongue. It’s an old sand-nigger trick I think. Supposed to stimulate your salivary glands or somethin. At the very least I guess it forces ya to breathe through your nose so you don’t dry out as quick. Now there’s a tip for ya son, should ya ever find ever yourself wanderin through the desert starvin and thirsty. Stick a rock in your mouth. You can pass that advice on to your mother too if you like. Might shut her up for once ha.

  Well you’ve probably guessed by now that the airstrip turned out to be more than two hours away and by early evenin we were still walkin, our hopes of ever makin it there fadin quicker than the light. As usual I was at the front of the pack, not thinkin ’bout much in particular, when out of nowhere I sensed movement to the left of me. Instictively I reached for my rifle, just in time to see Cal sprintin wildly past me, his limbs skitterin and scatterin all over the place like he’s havin some sort of a seizure.

  Naturally I presumed he’d lost the plot again, when I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Jett was runnin too, followed by Jim. Even Doggie had caught up from the back, coughin his lungs up as he pumped his arms and legs for all he was worth. I shot out an arm as he reached me, grabbin him roughly by the shoulder ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ I asked, glancing nervously behind him. I half expected to see a swarm of Monsters chasin after us, but when I looked back at Dog he was grinnin idiotically at me. I tightened my grip on him, pinchin a fat fold of flesh between my nails as I waited for an answer. He yowled as he shrugged me off, pointing in the direction Cal, Jett and Jim had disappeared. ‘Look…’

  I squinted, following his podgy finger until finally I saw it. I shook my head, amazed I hadn’t spotted it earlier, but before I could say anythin Doggie was gone, wobblin after the others and leavin me starin open mouthed after him. Because risin up in the distance, not more than a coupla kilometers away, was the unmistakable outline of clay huts, a dozen or so simple stone chimneys juttin out against the charcoal sky. It was a village.

  Now if this was a made-up story son, I would probably think about knockin it on the head right around here. Yup, I’d write you a nice warm fuzzy endin describin how we stumbled across a tribe of simple, peace lovin people who showered us with food and shelter before providin us with our exact coordinates and a secure phone line to contact our superior officers back at base. And then I’d sit back and collect my royalty cheque once Disney had decided to turn it into an animated movie, complete with a litter of talkin piglets who laughed and told jokes as they basted themselves in BBQ sauce and then hopped onto a spit.

  But of course this ain’t a story, and a quic
k tour of the village told me everythin I needed to know. It was a small settlement, maybe thirty separate buildins arranged in a spiral around what was presumably once a bustlin central square. Now though, the place was little more than a dusty pit, with large cracks runnin through the earth and a rash of ancient bullet holes pepperin the face of the crumblin houses. The place looked like it had been abandoned years ago – maybe even before the war. Either way, it didn’t look like there’d be any pigs around there, talkin or otherwise.

  ‘Hey – there’s nobody here!’

  I turned to see Doggie pokin his head out of a doorway, a look on his face like he’d just invented the atom bomb. ‘Really?’ I said, resistin the urge to go over there and tear out his windpipe. ‘Nah,’ he said, bumblin on obliviously. ‘Looks like everybody cleared out a while ago. I did find this little fella though.’ Doggie stooped down for a moment and then reappeared, a small bundle of rags clutched tightly to his chest. I stepped forward, squinting until finally I saw a scrawny, scared-lookin kitten, no bigger than a rat. ‘She was out the back here. I thought she was dead at first, poor thing. I’m gonna call her Lucky.’ ‘Very original,’ I shrugged. ‘Uh-huh. I think she’s hungry,’ Doggie said, pettin her clumsily with his enormous hands. ‘We’re all fuckin hungry,’ I snapped. ‘Tell her to join the back of the queue.’

  Jus’ then Jett came struttin out into the main square flanked by Cal. ‘Hey there Dog,’ he called out. ‘I didn’t think you liked pussy… ’ I have to admit it was pretty funny – at least for Jett – and we all laughed while Doggie stood there sulkin, cooin sweet nothins into the ear of his fuckin cat. ‘Ah relax,’ Jett said, once he’d got his breath back. ‘I’m jus’ fuckin with you. If anythin I’d say your new friend is a piece of luck. I mean, there must be water nearby for it to survive out here, wouldn’t ya say? Not that we found any. There’s a well round the back but it’s drier than Doggie’s mum’s fur burger.’ We all laughed again. ‘Okay, fuckin knock it off!’ Doggie growled, takin a step towards Jett. ‘Or what?’ Jett answered, ‘You gonna make me?’ I tried to decide who I thought would win out of the two of them in a brawl. Even though Jett was obviously taller and fitter, Doggie had more weight behind him. Looked like he’d throw one hell of a punch. Either way, it’d be somethin to watch.