By Jonothan Pickering
Uncle Jon sat in the corner of the room cradling a big fuck-off shotgun, said he’d stay up all night to make sure I didn’t close my eyes and that nothing got in the house. I kept glancing out the window anyway, the shape of a cat slinking behind the neighbour’s wheelie bin unspooling into goblinoid shadow. I hadn’t slept in three days. Jon wasn’t really my uncle, just one of them family friends who used to pick me up from school with his daughter when we were bairns, used to clip me round the ear when he found out we’d been nicking milk off the neighbours’ doorsteps and that. His daughter ran away when we were fifteen. I used to call her my cousin, but I wasn’t allowed to talk about her anymore.
I sat at my mam’s old bureau, one of them flimsy wooden things with the fold-down desks that’s meant for keeping papers and old inkpots in. When I was a kid I used to sit at it pretending to be the ruler of some New World penal colony, writing letters to the wives of imaginary prisoners who’d stole loaves of bread or tried to bomb the queen. All Mam did was store her books of pressed flowers in it. I could still smell the lavender and honeysuckle wafting out the pinewood even all this time after, like the scent had seeped into the wood and made a home there long after the flowers themselves had went stale and dried out and Mam was deep in the ground.
“Open them peepers up, you little shit,” Uncle Jon said when my lids began to droop. He jabbed me in the side with the barrel of the gun and I instinctively jerked out my seat to snatch at it, but he just shoved me back down. They called him ‘Big Jon’ round the estate, ‘cause he weighed something like eighteen stone; could sink twenty odd pints down the labour club on a Friday night and still be up at the crack o’ dawn on Saturday for his morning paper and twenty pack of snouts.
“No need for that, man,” I said. But my tone was listless, no passion in my voice. Nothing I said or did had any passion anymore. I turned back to the book of flowers on the bureau desk. It was a nice book like. Probably meant to be a diary, bound in soft brown leather with a canny little gold clasp to keep out prying eyes. ‘Fool’s gold’ my mam used to call it, but I looked that up in an encyclopedia at school when I was twelve year old and fool’s gold was something proper, a proper mineral with a proper scientific name—pyrite, the entry said. The stuff on the clasp was just some cheap imitation metal—common tin or some kind of toxic lead that’d probably give me cancer later in life ‘cause the government hadn’t regulated it properly. The leather was probably fake, too. I never understood that, surely there’s enough cows get bolt-gunned every day to make all the proper cow skin diaries we’d ever need. Instead, they probably sucked more oil from deep out the ground and made it out of that, refined it in one of them big fractional distillation machines like how they do with plastic. I never understood that neither, but sometimes I liked to think about all the oil-smoke poison in the air and how it was slowly killing me. I still thought the book was nice though. It was made of petrochemicals, and I liked the taste of that word.
Jon laughed that minging, hacking laugh he had that always degenerated into a violent coughing fit. He hocked back a big glob of phlegm and swallowed it.
“You ought to be counting your lucky stars I’m entertaining this shit at all, you ungrateful sod. I was meant to be meeting some bird off that website tonight, but here I am, babysitting you instead.” He sighed. “She sounded like a right dirty cow n’all.”
He was full of shit. What he really had planned was eating cheese spread straight out the tube and pulling his cock off to that weathergirl he always leered at after the ten o’clock news. His third wife had died from some kind of carcinoma a few months ago. He used to stay up all night making her cups of tea (“four sugars please Jon”) and making sure she didn’t die from asphyxiation by rolling on her back and her lungs giving out, so truth was he had nowt to do anymore seeing as he couldn’t sleep. He’d started having night terrors and waking up soaked in his own piss. He hadn’t said owt to me, the old cunt was too proud for that, but more than once I’d heard the screams and snuck across the landing to find him stripping his sheets at three in the morning, that sharp ammonia smell stinging my eyes. I googled ‘smelly ammonia piss’ and it said pungent urine was a sign of kidney dysfunction or diabetes.
I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes and groaned.
“I know I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “Fuck.”
Always thought that was a daft phrase, ‘heels of your hands’…
“Nee bother kid,” Jon said. “Jimmy’s just got back from Turkey, you can buy me a big box of tabs off him tomorrow, as a thank you like. Unless you get shredded up in the middle of the night by this mad fucking goblin or whatever the fuck.” He laughed again, coughed, and swallowed more phlegm.
“This isn’t a fucking joke, Jon!” I was up out of the chair again, squaring up to him now.
The smile dropped off his face like it was never there. He rose from his seat.
“Back off kid. I’m only going to say it once.”
He’d never hit me, not properly. Except for the time with the milk, but I’d deserved that, and the time I’d walked in on him with my cousin. He said that was her fault and if I ever told anyone he’d give me a good fucking hiding. He gave me one anyway, but I still never told anyone. I’d heard stories about Big Jon, the things he’d done for the people who came to the house sometimes. Severed brake lines. Machetes. The knuckle dusters he kept on a special wooden stand next to his bed.
The shotgun he still held loosely in one hand.
I swallowed, but I didn’t back down. I don’t know why.
The silence went really fucking long. Neither of us moved, we just stared at each other while it felt like my ribs had snapped open and were trying to eat my heart alive. Then, the sound of pots and pans clattering about downstairs in the kitchen.
Jon looked at the closed bedroom door, then back at me.
“Don’t go down there,” I said, the words barely audible behind my choked-up larynx.
He started moving toward the door.
“Don’t go down there!” I screamed it now, pleading and trying to block his path. “We can stay here and if I keep looking at the flowers, it won’t be able to do anything and we’ll be safe, please Jon please don’t go down there, please Uncle Jon I’m sorry.” I was crying, I didn’t know what I was sorry for, I didn’t want him to leave me please don’t leave me Uncle Jon.
He shoved me onto the bed, flung the bedroom door open and stepped out onto the landing. The clattering downstairs stopped. I buried myself under the quilt, and the world went dark. The door swung closed, but I could still hear the creaking of the floorboards as Jon slowly made his way down the staircase, step by step. I pictured him in my head, shotgun raised to his shoulder, pointing it down over the banister at the thing in our house. Did he even know how to use it? Someone at work once told me their da shot birds and a woman from the government had to come and inspect his house, so he was allowed to keep a gun, but it had to be locked in a special glass case and he had to prove he could use the fucker properly. I’d laughed and asked if he’d ever thought about breaking the case open and shooting his whole family up. We didn’t speak again much after that.
The creaking had stopped. Another silence, and then I heard Uncle Jon’s phlegmy voice.
“What the fu–”
The most hideous sound I ever heard, like if shattered glass could shriek and claw out my eardrums.
Uncle Jon screamed, too. He screamed and he screamed. It went on for a long time. I quivered beneath the covers and thought back to this time I’d found an old tape in the bargain bin of a charity shop. I listened to it one day driving to the beach while Mam was wasting away in her hospital bed, sick and yellow and lying in her own shit. It was about the five stages of grief, and I thought about that tape as I listened to Jon scream.
“No! No!” His voice sounded different. Maybe the phlegm had got into his lungs. Then he started insulting the thing in between his screams, calling it a ‘cocksucker’ and insisting he’d ‘tear its fucking face off.’ I wondered if it had a face. He did the bargaining eventually. I’d never heard Uncle Jon cry, and I liked listening to the sound of him beg. The shame of that made me retch, and the taste of my own stomach acid was unbearable. I needed air but if I stayed under the blanket, I might be safe and all I’d ever wanted was to feel safe. I never could remember the fourth stage of grief and Jon didn’t get round to the fifth one before the pleading stopped, he just went quiet, and I heard the sound of shuffling on the stairs.
Eventually I peeked my head out from under the quilt to find the lights had gone out. The sound of heavy breathing and that awful shuffling sound seeped in from the other side of the door. I lay in the dark and thought about the scent of honeysuckle and the penal colonies and how it would feel to bomb the queen. Did they have honeysuckle in the Thirteen Colonies or in Van Diemen’s Land? Maybe they called it something different back then. I watched a documentary once about the Battle of Hastings and how before the Normans made us speak French, English people basically spoke a different language. What did they call honeysuckle?
My phone was nearly dead, but I looked it up anyway.
Hunigsuge.
I said it out loud.
“Hunigsuge.”
I said it again and again, imagining noble Duke William astride his mighty horse, cutting down brave Saxon warriors in fields of fragrant honeysuckle.
I wept into my pillow, and it muffled my voice.
“Hunigsuge.”
I had a diary buried somewhere deep in this house where I’d once wrote about a girl I fancied when I was nine year old. It wasn’t my cousin; I think it was the girl who did the paper round back when Jon was on his first wife and Mam was still around to rush me to A&E when I drank weed killer and had to get my stomach pumped. I never learned her name, but she had curly brown hair and eyes like deep aureate wells that made me feel drunk before I knew what drunk was, unbalanced like I was about to plunge deep into another world made of molten bars of hot bubbling gold. In my head I called her Vertigony.
The shuffling and the breathing continued for hours on the other side of the door, before gradually fading as I waited for the sun to come up, its deep hues finally bathing the artex daubed across the ceiling in an ethereal glow. I stared at those crumbling whorls and thought of better days.
“Hunigsuge…”
A final clattering in the kitchen before the back door slammed and the house went silent again.
Lie down, quiet and scared. Vertigony is beautiful, and she loves you.
I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of bureau pine.
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Jonothan is a sometimes writer from Durham, UK. He edits a magazine and is probably playing Stellaris.
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