The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

Author:Magnus Mills [Mills, Magnus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, Azizex666, Humour
ISBN: 9780684865119
Amazon: B000F6Z78Y
Goodreads: 323208
Publisher: Touchstone Books
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

∨ The Restraint of Beasts ∧

Nine

I turned towards the newcomer. “Pardon?”

“I said what’s going on?” The man’s face, I noticed, was pink. His voice seemed familiar.

“Mr Perkins?”

“You know it’s Mr Perkins!” He appeared to be very angry about something.

“Anything wrong?” I asked.

“Don’t give me that!” he said. “You’re supposed to be working on my hill! I’ve just been up there and you’ve abandoned the job! It’s like the Retreat from Moscow!”

“Well,” I said. “It’s not quite like that.”

“Don’t tell me what it’s not quite like!!” he bellowed, taking a step towards me.

At that moment a post came flying over the hedge and struck him on the back of the head. He made a further step forward and fell into my arms. At the same time another post, and then another, came hurtling over.

“Who threw that?” I shouted.

“Me, Rich!” came the reply.

“Well, you’d better stop! You’ve just hit Mr Perkins!”

The posts stopped coming over. I looked at Mr Perkins. He’d gone very quiet. In fact, he wasn’t just quiet, he was dead. I leaned him upright against the hedge, and he sank slowly back into the foliage. After a while Tam and Richie appeared, both carrying pointed posts on their shoulders.

“We thought it would be quicker to throw them over,” said Tam.

“It probably is,” I replied. “But you should be more careful. Look what Rich’s done.”

Neither Tam nor Richie seemed to have noticed Mr Perkins standing in the hedgerow. When I nodded towards him they put down their posts and had a closer look.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” said Richie.

“I know you didn’t,” I said.

“What was he doing here?”

“He’d come to complain about something.”

All four of us stood there for a few moments.

“What are we going to do with him?” asked Tam.

“We’ll have to bury him, I suppose.”

“But on his own land, not here,” suggested Richie.

“Good point,” I replied. “We could put him under one of the new gateposts by the hill.” (Strictly speaking, we weren’t quite ready to hang any gates yet, but under the circumstances it was probably worth bringing the work forward.)

“I could collect my hammer at the same time,” said Richie.

We decided to sit Mr Perkins in the front of the truck between me and Richie, with Tam riding in the back. However, when we came to move him we found he wouldn’t bend into the correct position. So we put him in the back and drove him round to the bottom of the hill. All the proposed gateways had been marked out when Donald originally surveyed the job, so we chose the one we thought would be the most suitable for Mr Perkins and dug the post holes. After a short discussion we all agreed it was best to put him under the slamming post, rather than the hanging post, although none of us could come up with a particular reason why this should be so. Mr Perkins’s gateway looked quite nice when it was finished, even though it wouldn’t actually lead anywhere until the surrounding fences were complete.

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