Angling with a gun
From the novel TICKET OUT

The River Idle, as its name suggested, was a slow flowing tributary of the Trent, and many rats lived in its banks. A steep grassy incline sloped down to the water, divided from the pasture by a fence of thin wire strung on wooden stakes. Fritz was at my heel, and as we turned around a bend in the path he began to bark furiously. A heavyset youth was sitting on the slope, with a rifle by his side.

I stopped, wondering what the boy was doing here, angling with a gun.

"Shut that fucking dog up will you, he'll frighten the fish!!"

"Quiet Fritzy, here, heel, sit!"

Tony Winter was the older brother of a boy in my class. He had stopped going to school after a fight with one of the teachers. A dangerous kind of boy. He was the son of the farm laborers who lived next door to the slaughterhouse, so he knew my brother Rodney, which meant he knew Jake was my brother too, so I was safe.

"What kind of gun is that? An air gun?"

"Fuck off, run along, you ask too many questions you do. Derek Glasby told me you read books all the time. Course it's not a fucking air gun, it's a 22. It's me dad's varmint rifle, but he give it to me…Here, watch this." he motioned me to sit down, so I obeyed.

We sat watching the water.

"I don't just read books. I play football too, I'm captain of the school Under Thirteens this year."

"Yeah, they're all fucking sissies at that grammar school, how did you get in theah anyway?"

"I don't know." I didn't say anything else.

After a short time two fishing floats appeared, twitching and bobbing in the current. They were carved from balsa wood, painted green with bright red tips, vivid against the murky water. The unwitting fishermen were further upstream, out of sight around another bend in the river. Tony sighted carefully down the barrel of the small rifle and squeezed off a shot. There was a popping sound, and one of the bobbers disappeared. He quickly sighted on the next one and shot that too. When the anglers reeled back their lines, they would discover only a shattered remnant of the float and the bait still intact on the hook.

"Them stupid fuckers'll never work out what happened."

He quickly reloaded. "Oh, look at the birdie."

A sparrow had perched on the wire of the fence. Pursing his thick lips in concentration, Tony aimed and fired. There was a small disturbance in the feathers on the tiny chest. The bird seemed to sway for a few seconds, and then tumbled to the ground. The .22 bullet had gone right through its body.

"Do you want a shot?"

"No, it's OK," I didn't want to get too involved with this boy..

"What's up? Are yer scared? Why don't yer mek yer dog jump!"

"Hey, that's our Jake's dog," I lied, "I wouldn't want to hurt him."

Tony laid the gun down on the grassy bank.

His eyes were slits. Along with the pug nose and the thick lips these elements constituted a very unpleasant face.

"Do you want to see summat else?"

I nodded. He was too big to argue with. The dog sat by my side. Winter unbuttoned his thick serge farmer's trousers, and fished out what seemed to be a very large penis. This was interesting, but dangerous. The fishermen might come around the bend looking for their floats and find a boy with his privates exposed. They might think I was involved. Was he going to pee into the river from his reclining position? Instead he began to rub his hand up and down the length of it while looking in my direction.

"Yer want to try this?"

"Er no, not really."

"Nah, yer probably never had a wank. Feels fucking good, though."

The appendage seemed to grow in his hand. He kept at this task for a few minutes, his right hand a blur, his face glazed by an idiot's dreamy smile. After a while I didn't want to see any more, but I was too scared to get up and leave. I wanted to go ratting with my dog and get away from here, but the way he killed the bird had invested Tony with some strange power. His hands were grimy, the nails bitten down to the quick. Dirt was ingrained on his neck, the collar of his shirt was filthy. A smelly type of boy, unhygienic. My mum would never let me get away with being so dirty. She examined my neck each morning to make sure it was clean, that my white school shirts had no ring around the collar.

Winter was grunting now as he worked, determined to come to some kind of conclusion. Fritz began barking as he thrashed away, but I quickly hushed him. Winter in his dim ignorance might have shot Fritzy too. After a few more long minutes he turned to one side, directing the nozzle of his organ at the grassy bank, and then a milky substance spurted from the end, jetting into the grass…he groaned in a satisfied way, wiped his hand on the grass and quickly put his tackle back in his pants.

"Don't tell nobody what I just did, or I'll fuckin' 'urt yer." He licked his lips in a dog-like way.

"No, I won't tell anybody, why would I tell anybody?"

"Aye, nobody would believe a little twat like you anyway."

"I better go, me mam wants me to run some errands..."

As I walked carefully away I wondered if he might shoot me with his .22, the small bullet passing through me as it had penetrated the bird, with no visible outward disturbance except that slight ruffling of the chest feathers. How simply its lights went out, life went out of the tiny body, the sky fell down. I walked slowly until I got around the curve in the bank and out of his line of sight. And then I slipped through the fence and ran. And ran.