Plague of Gulls by Stephen Gregory

Author:Stephen Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2021-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

‘No, not earache. I’m well and truly, one hundred per cent, literally pissed-­off with him.’

I bump into Brian in town a few days later and start to tell him about Kenny. The first thing he does, as though we’re in the caravan and he’s going to reach for his big old dictionary, he frowns and wags a schoolteacherly finger at me and he says, ‘No, David my boy, you can’t be literally pissed-­off with somebody. It couldn’t possibly make any sense at all. Metaphorically maybe, but not literally.’

So I put him right. We’re in Castle Square. He’s walked into the town centre from his flat on Victoria Dock, to pick up his pension from the post office. He can see straightaway that, despite the summer sunshine and the holiday atmosphere in the busy streets, I’m smouldering mad.

He buys me a burger from a market stall—he’s feeling rich, he says—and he sits me down on a bench. My hands are trembling. A squelch of tomato sauce drops onto the front of my shirt when I take my first bite.

‘Tell me everything,’ he says. ‘Messy boy.’

So I tell him. Last night, I’m asleep upstairs in my bedroom. Midnight, I hear Kenny come stumbling into the house and up to his room, so I know he’s been at the pub for a Friday lock-­in with his mates. I wait until the house is quiet again and I go back to sleep. When I wake again very suddenly and see the moon framed in the skylight right above my head, I know that somebody or something’s moving around in my room.

I hold my breath and listen. ‘Pumpkin?’ I whisper. I think maybe she’s slipped upstairs from her usual place on the living room sofa, to join me for a bit of company. I hear a movement across the room, as though she’s flopped down on the floor by the open window. ‘Pumpkin? You OK?’

Or maybe it’s the gull. The skylight’s open and the bird could’ve hopped from the town wall onto the roof and into the house. So it’s back. What’s it doing? Trying to open the wardrobe with its pesky inquisitive beak? The moonlight, reflected in the mirror, swings across the wall as the wardrobe door creaks open.

I sit up in bed and blink and rub my eyes. It’s Kenny.

I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. Dressed only in a black T-­shirt, his legs all white and skinny and hairy, he’s opened the wardrobe and he’s staring into it.

‘Kenny?’ I hiss at him. ‘What are you doing, Kenny?’

He ignores me. He stretches both arms lazily above his head so that the T-­shirt rides up and reveals his skinny white hairy bottom, and he starts to piss into the wardrobe.

A yellow arc of piss. Golden in the moonlight. A steamy rainbow.

I leap out of bed and lunge towards him. He’s pissing long and hard . . . not aiming, not using his hands at all, just stretching and smoothing back his hair with

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