MY LIFE IN HORROR “We Will Bury You” Part 3

MY LIFE IN HORROR: WE WILL BURY YOU PART 3

14/8/2018

BY KIT POWER

My Life In Horror

Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago.

This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.

This is my life in horror.

“We Will Bury You” Part 3

So, then.

It’s late Autumn, 1999. The confrontation between Loz and I happened over the summer, and things have been quiet since. I still mainly work the Public Bar, though at weekends I’m back in the Saloon, and much as I still hate the place… no, actually, there’s no turn happening at the end of that statement - I still hate the place.

And a couple of nights before, I met Ben.

I’ve changed names throughout this trilogy to protect the guilty, but in Ben’s case, I can’t remember his name, so for all I know, he really is called Ben. Anyhow, if you’ve read my novella Lifeline (currently available as part of my novella collection, Breaking Point ) , you already know what Ben looks like - he’s a white skinhead, early to mid twenties, slightly above average height, slightly above average pitched voice, single silver hoop earring, black puffer jacket, combats, army trousers.

He was related to one of the regulars - one of the few decent ones, a painter named Tom. Tom was his uncle.

Anyway.

He’d made his first appearance in the public bar earlier that week, and he put me on edge almost immediately. He was loud. He was, on the surface, gregarious, but there was a performative strutt that was unsettling. It was an old man boozer, with old and well respected hierarchies, and he sauntered in like he owned the place. We were regaled with graphic details of a recent sexual encounter where he’d performed oral sex on a woman (something he talked about doing a lot, for some reason) before having sex with her, only to later find a soiled tampon on the floor that she had removed just before the act. “I fucked it, I went down on it, it seemed alright to me!” was the grinning punchline. In fairness to the old boys, they didn’t seem terribly impressed.

It’s like that old gag about how you think someone is Satan, then the real deal turns up, and you realise the guy you were so scared of was just the guy who goes down to the corner shop to buy Satan a pack of cigarettes. Within about 5 seconds of meeting this guy, Loz was relegated in my mind instantly to annoyance.

This was threat.

He took an instant dislike to me. - as he would shortly make explicit, mostly on the basis of how I looked. That, and refusing to gamble with him for a pint over a hand of… see, I can’t remember the name of the card game, only that you were dealt 13 cards and had to make 3 card brag hands and play them in descending order of strength. I actually already knew how to play, but had feigned ignorance because I didn't want to - which meant he’d felt obliged to teach me. We’d ended up splitting the hand, two tricks each. I’d felt the need to loudly proclaim as we started that there was no wager on it - partly because I wanted witnesses in case he won and cut up rough, partly just because of the intensity he brought to creating his hands just plain made me nervous.

He started in on my personal appearance not long after. The hair, obviously. The earring too - and again, credit where it’s due, the regulars wern’t standing for it. When he said, of my earring ‘Bit faffy, innit? Want more a plain hoop around this manor, right?’ I can clearly remember one of them calmly replying ‘not really - it’s all a matter of personal style, innit?’

I remember smiling at that. Which may have been a mistake.

He made immediate friends with Loz and Trev. Obviously. And I’m pretty sure what followed was on Day 3 of Trev’s Epic Bender - the same one that led to him signing for his purchase and cashback with an x, and me meekly handing his money over.

It’s cold and dark outside the pub. One of the many shitty things about working in a pub in London in 1999 is that by the time the kicking out hs all been kicked, and the glasses cleaned and drip trays polished and stored, the busses had stopped, and the taxis were rammed. And if, like me, you have a shitty boss who lives on the premises and wants to go to bed as soon as the last ashtray is wiped clean, you find yourself sat outside a locked up, lights-out pub, in the cold, waiting for a cab that could take anything from 30 minutes to an hour to arrive.

And this evening, the door has hardly shut behind me, and I’ve barely had time to settle on one of the outside benches, zipping up my coat and plunging my hands into my pockets for warmth, when Ben comes around the corner, arm in arm with a girl.

I smile a greeting, but my stomach is already tightening. It goes into freefall as he opens with “What’s all this about complaining about me behind my back to my family?”
It’s a perplexing opening gambit, and I stumble partway through a reply when he cuts me off with “Don’t give me that! My uncle’s been giving me earache about calling you a poof! I don’t even remember calling you a poof!”

“I don’t, either…”

“..then why is he saying you did? Are you calling him a liar?”

“No…”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Of course not…”

“Then why did you say it?”

“I didn’t…”

“Look I don’t even remember saying it, right? I don’t even remember calling you a poof, right? But I’ll say it now, yeah? You’re a poof! Allright?”

I shrug, honestly perplexed, as well as miserable. I do know it’s supposed to be an insult, but it just… isn’t, for me. Probably just as well, in retrospect.

“He ain’t a poof” His lady friend pipes up, looking me up and down with sleepy eyes and smiling.

“He turns to her, eyes rolling, “No, I know he ain’t…”

“You can tell. Tell just by looking at him!” (and I have to admit to the fact that, in the moment, with all the terror I was starting to feel, I found that assertion curiously gratifying, though with a gun to my head I couldn’t pick apart why, exactly).

“I know he ain’t, but I’m just sayin’... look, don’t worry about it…” He turns back to me “Are you gonna be here for a bit?”

“I mean, I’m waiting for my cab…” which can turn up any second now, really, I think, frantically but with no real hope.

“I’m just gonna…” he points at the girl, and mimes wanking - I can’t tell if she sees or not, cares or not - “...we’ll finish this after, okay?”

“Sure,” I say, with as little sincerity as I think I’ve ever felt.

“Good.”

And then he’s gone.

And in retrospect, so should I have been, but here’s the thing; no mobile phone. Limited funds. The nearest bus stop is a ten minute walk, and if I have missed the last one of the evening, it’s more like 30 minutes to get to the high street, and again, no phone, so no cab, and it’s fucking cold, and here, now, I know someone is coming to find me - I imagine being out walking the street when he sees me again, chasing me down…

So I sit and I wait and I smoke and I hope that a vehicle is going to pull in. And eventually, one does.

Trev’s white van.

He’s sat behind the wheel, and as the door opens, the dome light hits his face, and he looks like a corpse. I don’t really have time to absorb this, though, because as the door slams shut again and the light goes out, Ben is striding across the carpark towards me, yelling “I’ve just had a fucking ‘nother one come up to me!” and it’s obviously pure bullshit, and worse, he knows I know it and doesn’t fucking care, and there’s something about his eyes and demeanor that tells me he’s wired on something but I don’t have enough experience to know what, but I know there’s shit out there that’ll make you angry and pain immune, and he’s clearly a well skilled scrapper in any case, no Loz, this is the real deal, and I think about what I know about self defence, and I look at this guy, and I realize I am probably good and fucked.

I buckle in. Try and go cold. It’s an effort.

He stands over me, leaning forward, telling me he can’t ‘ave it, all these relatives, why go behind his back, I’ll call you a poof now, to your face, what you gonna do about it?

I offer him a cigarette. I say I will do nothing.

He tells me he wants to hurt me.

To beat me. He delights in describing ‘smashing my skull into pieces’ and his voice distorts with emotion before he can finish saying it. What colour were his eyes? I can’t remember, I want to say brown, but… I can’t remember. I do remember looking up at the van, straight into Trev’s corpse face. No help there. Back to Ben’s angry scowl, angry eyes. Getting angrier. I remember dropping my cigarette butt and grinding it out with my boot, making sure that my knee is ideally placed for a groin shot, but I look again at his frame, his fluid, easy motions, and his something-not-right eyes, and with a tired, sinking dismay, I realize that such a shot is very unlikely to work.

See, there’s something worse than bullies. That’s what I learned that night. Bullies are horrible, of course, and they inflict misery, but most bullies, fundamentally, don’t actually want a fight - they want to deliver a beating, exert dominance. I’m not saying that wasn’t also the case with Ben - it transparently was, he sweated insecure, need-to-prove alpha - but there was also, underneath, a bass feverish love of violence for its own sake.

He stared me down and smoked my smoke, and I stared back because I knew if he was going to go, his eyes would tell me at least a little before he went, or his shoulders would, which were in my peripheral vision. His repetition loops were getting shorter, more angry - he had me trapped rhetorically, between calling either him or his family a liar, or admitting to talking behind his back, and he’d made it clear either conclusion would lead to violence, and I remember an awful drowsiness starting to settle, a distance, a numbness. I knew it was happening, could feel it - like being hypnotised by the world’s angriest man - but I could do nothing about it. Everything was draining away, including my basic focus, and as some point, mid rant, I groaned and said ‘What do you want from me?’.

His nostrils flared at that, and he leaned closer, scowling. “The fuck you talkin’ bout? I don’t want nothin’ from you, man! Nothin’! I’m just tellin’ you, I’m gonig to break your fuckin’ skull in to pieces! Talkin’ about me to my family like that!” He leaned forward, slapping my jacket with the back of his hand, and I was too numb to flinch, as the final barrier began to crumble, “You may be able to handle yourself, I dunno… nah, you might,” he said as I laughed a hollow laugh “...but I promise you, I will fucking break you!”

I didn’t say, I don’t want to fight you. I didn’t say, I’m not going to fight you. I thought both, but said neither, thinking them dangerous. He leaned forward again, tapped me again, a little harder, said something else, I could feel him winding up, the spring inside now lethaly tight, my whole sense of self pulling away and away…

The headlights from the cab almost blinded me as it pulled in. I jumped, grabbed my shoulder bag, mumbled ‘that’s my cab’, and not-quite ran. My last image of him was turning away from me, face half light in brightness, the other in black shadow, furious, and then his back as he strode towards Trev’s van. I told the cab driver my destination, leaned back in my seat, and waited for the shakes to come.

I didn’t have to wait for long.

KP

27/3/18

Postscript: I went back the next day and worked the 12 - 6pm shift. It feels crazy to write that, but it’s the truth. I phoned in and - again, I can’t believe it, and I did it, but - asked the asshole landlord if I should stay home, and he insisted I shouldn’t, and I believed him, as though he ever for one second had my best interests at heart.

And Loz and Trev were apologetic, in their own ways, and uncle Tom told me if it ever happened again, to tell Ben that Uncle Tom Said No - as though something similar hadn’t caused the whole fucking mess in the first place.

I never saw Ben again. Not awake, anyway.

And autumn turned to winter, and I kept working, and the public bar got emptier and emptier on the 12 - 6 shift.

And one day I’m dealing with a toothache, and there’s no painkillers of mine in the house, and my flatmate lends me asperin, which I am unused to. I take them, fall back to sleep, and end up late, so I skip breakfast and haul arse. My bus hits the stop with 5 minutes to shift, and I run as hard as I can to get to the bar for 12. I make it, and I open up. It’s cold enough that I light the gas fire. I’m sat by it, and all of a sudden the world goes weird again. Suddenly, my head feels swollen and my body is coated with sweat and my heart is pounding and a strange synth tune is playing from the jukebox, a million miles away, and a high male voice is singing about conflict, and I stand up on legs that feel too high and too thin, and I fucking wade to the toilet through the song Russians, and as someone says ‘we will bury you’ I throw up and instantly feel better, just aspirin and a brisk run on an empty stomach, but Loz sees me and asks if I’m all right, or if I am on something, and I say no, and he says okay but it looked like I was, and if I was, I should stop, and I say that I’m fine, and I am, but for a second there, I really, really wasn’t, and I’ve never forgotten it, and I never will.