George stayed in bed all the next morning. Warren rolled out of his blankets and tugged one of his brother’s legs, which was dangling over the side of the top bunk.
“Off,” George mumbled into his pillow.
“About what happened last night–”
“Eh?”
“About the Land Laid Waste–”
“There isn’t such a thing as a Land of Waste, War.”
“But…”
They were interrupted by Iain Dyfed entering the room. Warren fell quiet. George didn’t say anything.
“George, you’ve got literally ten minutes to get dressed, get breakfast, and claw arse to school,” their father said. “What’s keeping you?”
“Don’t feel good.”
“I thought I heard a commotion in the early hours of the morning.” Iain reached out a hand to feel George’s temperature, but George rolled to face the wall.
“Right. Well, I’ll be in town most of the day, picking up some things,” their father sighed, pasting a kind of smile onto his mouth. “Need a new spade, and so on. Take care of him, War. If he starts, I dunno, foaming at the chops, call the RSPCA.”
“That’s not funny.” George drew his leg back under the blankets and folded his arms.
The sound of Iain’s boots clomping down the stairs, the soft click of the door opening and closing. Silence.
“He was trying to make you laugh,” Warren said after a while.
“I don’t feel very ‘laughy’ today.”
“Are you really ill?”
Short hesitation. “I must be. I had a temperature last night.”
“George, that stuff you saw and everything, it really happ–”
“No. It didn’t.”
Warren remembered a time days after their old dog, Dree was taken to the vet’s and left there, after the bite and the madness she had fallen into. George was nine then, unafraid of showing what he felt, yet still with the same outbursts of temper if something provoked him, though his tempers were rarer before his voice dropped. They had disembarked from the battered white van their parents used to own. George said nothing for the entire half-hour drive, and the first thing he did when his foot touched home dirt was to stalk off to the stable and come back holding a hoe.
“What are you doing?” His mother’s voice was a distant feminine memory, now.
George had still not spoken. He ran into the field where Dree had last been herself and attacked the hedgerow with the hoe, hunting for the creature that gave her rabies, intent on mashing it to death.
Their mother had tried to intervene, and George ignored her. Even now, that memory made Warren angry. It would have saved her a lot of stress if George hadn’t been such a pig.
Something in the branches and leaves squealed, echoing his brother’s anger – or was it George who screamed? – and George dropped the hoe, clutching his hand. It had teeth-marks. It bled.
“Inside, now,” Iain said. That afternoon culminated in a trip to the town hospital and a couple of large injections for George, one in the arm and one in the stomach. He didn’t get rabies, but if only he’d listened, if only he’d been calmer.
IN OTHER NEWS:
My poem “Terminal” has been published in Abridged journal (The Terminus issue) alongside a charming photo of a little cosmonaut on a bus. The journal is a gorgeous piece of work with thought-provoking and unusual poems and photography, I highly recommend it.
Nightwalks 