‘Promise you won’t peek.’
‘I won’t peek’. My God, he thought, she’s certainly making a production number out of this. ‘Hurry up.’
He glanced back towards the car. Ian was sitting in the back, still reading, engrossed in some cheap heroics, his face set as he stared into the adventure. The boy was so serious: the occasional half-smile was all Ron could ever win from him. It wasn’t a put-on, it wasn’t a fake air of mystery. He seemed content to leave all the performing to his sister.
Behind the hedge Debbie pulled down her Sunday knickers and squatted, but after all the fuss her pee wouldn’t come. She concentrated but that just made it worse.
Ron looked up the field towards the horizon. There were gulls up there, squabbling over a tit-bit. He watched them awhile, impatience growing.
‘Come on love,’ he said.
He looked back at the car, and Ian was watching him now, his face slack with boredom; or something like it. Was there something else there: a deep resignation? Ron thought. The boy
looked back to his comic book ‘Utopia’ without acknowledging his father’s gaze.
Then Debbie screamed: an ear-piercing shriek.
‘Christ!’ Ron was clambering over the gate in an instant, and Maggie wasn’t far behind him.
‘Debbie!’
Ron found her standing against the hedge, staring at the ground, blubbering, face red. ‘What’s wrong, for God’s sake?’
She was yabbering incoherently. Ron followed her eye.
‘What’s happened?’ Maggie was having difficulty getting over the gate.
‘It’s all right. . . it’s all right.’
There was a dead mole almost buried in the tangle at the edge of the field, its eyes pecked out, its rotting hide crawling with flies.
‘Oh God, Ron.’ Maggie looked at him accusingly, as though he’d put the damn thing there with malice aforethought.
‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ she said, elbowing past her husband and wrapping Debbie up in her arms.
Her sobs quietened a bit. City kids, thought Ron. They’re going to have to get used to that sort of thing if they’re going to live in the country. No road-sweepers here to brush up the run-over cats every morning. Maggie was rocking her, and the worst of the tears were apparently over.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Ron said.
‘Of course she will, won’t you, darling?’ Maggie helped her pull up her knickers. She was still snivelling, her need for privacy forgotten in her unhappiness.
In the back of the car Ian listened to his sister’s caterwauling and tried to concentrate on his comic. Anything for attention, he thought. Well, she’s welcome.
Suddenly, it went dark.
He looked up from the page, his heart loud. At his shoulder, six inches away from him, something stooped to peer into the car, its face like Hell. He couldn’t scream, his tongue refused to move. All he could do was flood the seat and kick uselessly as the long, scarred arms reached through the window towards him. The nails of the beast gouged his ankles, tore his sock. One of his new shoes fell off in the struggle. Now it had his foot and he was being dragged across the wet seat towards the window. He found his voice. Not quite to voice, it was a pathetic, a silly-sounding
voice, not the equal of the mortal terror he felt. And all too late anyway; it was dragging his legs through the window, and his bottom was almost through now. He looked through the back window as it hauled his torso into the open air and in a dream he saw Daddy at the gate, his face looking so, so ridiculous. He was climbing the gate, coming to help, coming to save him but he was far too slow. Ian knew he was beyond salvation from the beginning, because he’d died this way in his sleep on a hundred occasions and Daddy never got there in time. The mouth was wider even than he’d dreamed it, a hole which he was being delivered into, head first. It smelt like the dustbins at the back of the school canteen, times a million. He was sick down its throat, as it bit the top of his head off.