Birdkill Read online

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She nodded. The gag was removed from her mouth. She screamed at the top of her voice.

  ‘Sorry, love, but nobody can hear you up here.’ Warren looked down at her, a look of pity on his face.

  He grasped her arm and twisted it. She felt the tiny pain of a needle and then the dab of cotton wool and a whiff of medicinal alcohol. ‘What are you doing?’

  The feeling spreading across her was deeply unpleasant, a numbness that washed over her with remarkable speed. He reached in and undid the cloth binding her wrists, pulled her hands out onto her lap.

  ‘What are you doing?’ It was an effort to speak, her mouth felt packed with cotton wool. Her whole body was in stasis.

  Warren closed the door. ‘It’s called Suxamethonium.’

  He walked around the back of the car and she felt the passenger door open. She couldn’t turn her head. A glimpse of red plastic and she knew what it was, the stench of petrol reaching her. She moaned, her mouth incapable of speech, her eyes staring ahead of her at the green fields below the escarpment.

  He leaned in across her and knocked the gearbox into drive, flicking a blazing spill of paper into the footwell. She felt the car leave the road and the flames bloomed all around her, her nerveless body jerked against the inertia belt as the car bumped and smashed against rocks. The heat reached her, burned her and she tried to scream as the car gathered speed and the flames licked up her blackening clothes. She watched the edge approach in horror, her eyeballs licked by the horrific heat. The car became weightless, turning over in the air as it fell.

  Robyn shuffled upstairs to her bed. She had a bruise on the side of her face where she had fallen to the floor. She had ignored the doorbell twice and answered the third time. Archer’s face was a mask of concern. Her mouth seemed full of cotton wool, her speech slurred and slow. No, she was fine. Fine. Tired. Yes, sleep.

  She answered the mobile to Mariam. Sure, yes, fine.

  She kept seeing poor, dead Jenny and wondering who’d do something so awful, knowing in her heart of hearts what the answer was.

  She tried Paul Hass’ steps to calm and then gave up half way through because it didn’t matter, it none of it mattered. She sat by the dead fire and looked out of the window at the trees moving in the wind. She reached a state of not unpleasant catatonia, where no thought or dream bothered her. She folded in on herself, finding a place of restfulness there.

  Finally, she had realised it was dark outside and she had put on the lights, barely summoning up the energy to do that much.

  Lying in bed, she let her eyes close and gave herself up to the little death of sleep.

  She dreamed, she knew, because it was still fresh in her mind when she woke. She had dreamed about putting on her baggy trousers and Minnie t-shirt, pulling her dressing gown around her and walking out to the tower. Finding the door ajar, she walks in. It’s lit by a single bulb hanging on a long cord from the rafters above. There’s a white chair in the middle of the floor. She sits on it.

  She woke from the dream. She was sat on a white chair in the middle of the tower. The ivy leaves rustled, bowling around the wall, tumbling over each other as the wind caught them. The door closed behind him. She knew it would be him.

  ‘I can help you.’

  ‘You killed Jenny.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Odin killed Jenny.’

  ‘Who’s Odin.’

  ‘A Norse god.’

  There was a pressure on her, a probing sensation. ‘Get out of my head. You’re just a mutant. They messed with your mother.’

  He lashed out at her with his mind, but she was ready for him and rode the pain. ‘Where have you put her body?’

  ‘It has gone back to where it came from, to the ground.’

  ‘She deserved a decent burial.’

  ‘Your conventions don’t interest me. She was buried according to our decency.’

  Again the probing. ‘Get out.’

  ‘You’ve locked things away in there, Pandora. Let them out.’

  ‘They’re there for a reason.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You’re ignorant.’

  She shrugged. ‘You’re hardly going to beat me down with words, child.’

  ‘You’re not my mother.’

  She felt him inside her mind, fumbling. It was an invasion of her that nagged her, it had a familiarity about it. ‘Get out, Martin. Don’t meddle with things you don’t understand.’

  There was a look of triumph on his thin face for a moment. Uncertainty clouded him and then he threw a hand up to ward it off, fear drawing his face to a rictus. He staggered backwards under the pressure of the Void and she felt it wash across her, the blackness with its inchoate shapes and then with awful clarity the vision came back to her and she was there in the moment.

  Robyn remembered.

  The troops crashed into the classroom, roaring. Their guns and kit clanked their boots smashed on the floorboards. She stood up to them and was thrown back by a vicious elbow jab to her face. The children’s screams were joined by the crackle of automatic gunfire, flat reports all around her. The sickening twig-snaps of young bones and choked-off screams, moans of fear and terrified crying snuffed out. The stench of gun smoke and a rusty stink she realised was blood. A booted foot kicked her in the stomach and then a rough hand grabbed her and lifted her from the floor by her hair. The pain of it made her shriek.

  That’s when it started. She watched Martin’s face as he lived it, forcing her back into the memory of the thing she had managed to forget. She hated him for it as she hated them for what they had done.

  She lashed out, they laughed and punched her face, pulled at her and squeezed and twisted to hurt. She was strangled and used, taken again and again until she rocked and lolled under the pressure of their abusive hands and thrusting.

  One of them had a cigar. The burns. Dirty fingers shoved into her mouth. Worse. It had to stop, she invoked the darkness. She brought down the Void onto their heads and broke it on their backs. Violated eternally, she screamed her soul out and lunged to make it stop. She took the vile thing and beat it out of existence, all the force of her terror focused on the urge to escape the act she feared beyond all acts.

  She opened her eyes and she was still in the tower, on her knees. There was blood on her pale hands, smeared on her baggy trousers. Martin’s body lay in a pile of ivy leaves, his white face streaked with the blood from his ruined head where she had dashed it against the wall.

  The dry leaves blew in rustling circles, around and around.

  Thanks

  Birdkill was born out of the first short story I ever did write, which I sent over to Sarah sometime back in the late 1980s, back when we used to live 4,000 miles apart and write letters to each other all the time. Yes, letters.

  It was based on a very odd dream I had about a woman walking in Ashridge Forest and coming across some kids playing in a clearing. I found a copy of the original printout in an old file, tidying up after I finished writing A Decent Bomber. Being based on a very vivid dream indeed, it was natural that dreams should have so much of a role to play in the story of Birdkill. Thankfully, mine are usually more pleasant than Robyn’s.

  Six weeks later, that rediscovered old printout became a new book, written in a burst of elation at having finished A Decent Bomber, which itself had turned into a two-year project. My beta readers, overjoyed at having got rid of me for another year, suddenly found themselves with me on their doorsteps a few short weeks later, holding a big brown paper bundle wrapped up in twine and giving them the ‘would you read this one too please?’ big brown eyes.

  Peter Morin, Micheline Hazou, Mita Ray and Derek Kirkup were nevertheless willing enough guinea-pigs as was the LitFest’s Yvette Judge who delighted me with her pleased/horrified reaction to the book. Katie Stine proofed my read as she always does, with panache and grace. Although this time she sighed a little more than usual. Rachel Hamilton made improvements and contrived not to break or los
e anything, which is always a nice surprise with her.

  I always seem to get lucky with cover images and Birdkill was no exception. To Mary Jo Hoffman, whose luscious picture blog ‘The Still Blog’ is a constant delight, my thanks for my rather dead sparrow.

  It’s taken me years to do this; it’s all a rather long story, but Birdkill, finally, is my first book to find itself launching at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. The LitFest team has been generally all too kind to me, so it’s nice to eventually see a new book from li’l ole me debuting at that most internationally booky of events.

  Also by Alexander McNabb

  Olives – A Violent Romance

  Beirut – An Explosive Thriller

  Shemlan – A Deadly Tragedy

  A Decent Bomber

  Available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback from Amazon, Book Depository or from your local bookstore on order quoting the book’s ISBN.

  Also available as an ebook from iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other fine online retailers.

  Interviews, book club notes and more at www.alexandermcnabb.com

  @alexandermcnabb