DEATH BY TIGER
Malcolm Dixon

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

At least that’s what my English teacher had said to us one day right before the summer holidays. Then, he told us this really funny story about how in the last century some woman was killed by an escaped tiger in a quiet English country lane. There she was, picking black-berries, minding her own business and everything, then wallop—death by tiger. He said you could read all about it here in the Boy’s Book of Interesting Facts, which I was trying to do. Unsuccessfully.

Needless to say, nothing like that ever happened around here.

I put the book down and looked over at my Old Man. He was reading his book, too. Some western, as usual. Bang, bang. Still, at least he had a glass of whiskey going on the Q.T., to take the edge off. Every so often he’d take a sip all innocent, like it was coke or lemonade. There were hours to kill yet before he could legitimately clear off down the pub.

Some stupid musical was playing on the telly. Two twats on a giant stairway to heaven singing You’ll never walk alone. Jesus God Almighty.

All this because old Mrs Buchanan had finally made good her promise to knife my Bobby Moore football if it ever came in her garden. She hated us playing football against the four garages behind her house. She even got the Council to put a sign up that said, “No Ball Games Allowed By Order” which we made good use of as target practice. Hard to hit.

That oversized twat, Big Davy Cliffo, in an insane last-ditch tackle on my mate, Cuey, as he bore down on me in goal, had hoofed the ball over the fence only the night before. In the by then near dark we all peered though the tall wooden slats in the fence to look for it, but the grass was so long you could have lost an entire team in there, let alone a ball.

“Think she ever cuts this?” Cuey said.

I looked at him as if to say, what do you think?

“Sorry,” he said, blushing slightly.

“Is that it, there?” Butch said.

“I’m going home,” Big Davy Cliffo said. “You’ve fucking lost that.”

“Cheers, mate,” I said. “I knew I could depend on you.” Then, quietly adding when he was out of earshot, “Shithouse.”

“There, look,” Butch said. “There.”

“Give us a bunk up,” I said to Cuey. The fence was five foot high, at least. He hesitated. Because old Mrs Buchanan was a pensioner, we knew she was deranged by age and capable of anything. She frequently threatened to knife anyone and anything that came in her garden.

“It’s our last ball,” I said, “and I got it for Christmas.”

He cupped his hands, then bent his knees. I stepped in and he hoisted me up. I felt Butch pushing me, too. I swung my legs over the top and jumped down, but no sooner had I landed than there came this mad knocking on her window—loud enough to smash it almost—and there she was, Mother Theresa’s ugly sister, looking right at me, and me back at her. Straightaway then, she was tearing like a mad thing at her backdoor with the keys.

The boys were shouting. I quickly looked left and right for the ball, but couldn’t see it in the jungle. Luckily she had about fifty locks to get through. Then, as her door burst open I turned, ran, jumped at the fence, pulling myself up, scrambling over. I even felt her grab at my foot. I landed hard with a crash—but on my feet—on the other side. Sensibly, Cuey and Butch had backed off a little way.

“You frigging little gets,” she was hissing through the fence like a tormented cat, eyes all wild. “I’m not your bloody soft mothers! Go on, clear off!”

I backed off, too, just a few yards. In the open she could never catch me. “You, I know where you live,” she was saying. “I know you, hard-clock. I know your mother, I bloody well do, too!”

“I was only after my ball, there, Mrs Buchanan,” I said. “Nothing else, honest. Can we have it back?”

“Ball? I’ll ball you. I’m sick of your bloody ball. Yes, I’ll find your ball, laddie, and I’ll stick a knife in it when I do.” She raised a bony wrist in demonstration of her capabilities. “And in you or anyone else who dares set foot in this garden ever again, do you hear me, the lot of yous?”

“Aren’t you ashamed of this?” Cuey said to her.

But she wasn’t even listening, the mad old sow. She was already looking in the grass for my ball so she could stab it to death, muttering away all the time—more to herself than to us. “You don’t give me any peace with your bang, bang, bang all night long. Bloody ball night after night. No, I’ll find your ball all right, laddie, you can count on that. I’ll find it.”

“We have to play somewhere, don’t we?” Butch said.

No answer. We waited there a while longer, watching like fools, then began to drift away. Hopeless, and we knew it.

This morning, on the way to school, I went past her garden, just in case, and she’d thrown the ball back over the fence, slashed good and proper, all deflated like an old, burst balloon, lifeless. Dead. Bang, Bang.

~

Bang. You’ll never walk a-bloody-lone. Now, our last ball knifed, I was reduced to sitting in with my Old Man, reading books and watching musicals instead of slamming tackles. He caught me eyeing him while he took another secret shot of red-eye, and paused, giving me a long look over his book.

“Why don’t you go and play out,” he said, “instead of sitting there with your miserable face in a book?”

“No ball,” I said, pretending to read with even greater interest. “Mrs Buchanan stabbed it to death.”

He stared at me for a moment longer, then gave it up.

Just about then, there was this mad knock at the front door, much louder than was generally customary. My Old Man looked at me in puzzlement, and me back at him the same. Neither of us got up. We heard my Ma’s super-efficient swish as she went down the hallway and opened the front door, then her crying out, “In the name of Jesus God, what’s that bloody thing! Oh, no, don’t you think you’re bringing that in here! No, no, no!” My Old Man leapt up and opened the living room door, with me right behind him. There, in the doorway stood my Ma’s cousins, the Trouble Twins, Uncles Freddy and Eddie, flanking a wheelbarrow that carried a substantially sized, er, pig.

The pig, on closer inspection, was dead. Happily.

Let me stress, this was a far from usual occurrence. They may just as well have turned up with the baby Jesus on a stick, it couldn’t have been less expected. An urban boy, unused to dead animal carcasses in the hallway, I was truly gob-smacked. Uncles Freddy and Eddie were grinning madly either side of the barrow, like a pair of deranged animal undertakers making an unexpected delivery. Strangely, undertaking was the one business they never went into together. I reached out a hand in the direction of the deceased.

“What is it?” I said, knowing full well it was a pig.

“We’ve bought out Cleggy’s butcher’s shop on the Lane,” Uncle Freddy said, still grinning, “and we want Les to teach us the cuts.”

“You want to butcher a pig in my kitchen?” my Ma said.

No one said anything, and I knew it would happen. The Trouble Twins were her family, not my Old Man’s, so she had less of a case for holding out.

“Oh, come on, our Mo,” said Uncle Eddie.

“I’m having nothing to do with it,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron with disdain. “And don’t think I’m cleaning up after you, all the mess, because I’m bloody well not. You,” she said to me, “come with me.”

“I want to watch, “ I said. “Can’t I watch?”

“You’d only have nightmares for a week, soft lad—so, no.”

I sulked. The wheelbarrow was lifted up the step and wheeled in. There was a sweetish smell you couldn’t quite pin down. My Old Man was already off up the stairs in search of his fancy knives. He’d been a chef on the Cunard Line—all the big liners—before TB had just about killed him and put him out of a job. Although the Twins were my Ma’s cousins they were close to my Old Man because he’d looked out for them when they first went to sea. Now a job like this, they’d see he was all right, even if it was only in whiskey.

“Mo, Mo, Mo,” Uncle Eddie was saying, his palms raised halfway towards her in a fearful, abortive hug, “there’ll be some chops in it for you, Mo, you know that. Maybe a leg, if you’re lucky.”

“I’ll chop you, Eddie,” she said without smiling. She’d never forgiven their Eddie for trying to pimp her to American GIs during the war, when he was all of fourteen. We still heard the story regularly, which made him a war hero, of sorts.

I watched them go through the hallway into the kitchen and tried to follow.

“Oi, you,” my Ma said, nodding to the living room, “in here.”

“Do I have to, Ma?” I said. My Old Man was trotting back down the stairs with his case of knives. He was actually smiling. “I’m going to miss it all.”

“In here—now,” she repeated. I dragged myself into the living room and she closed the door behind us. On the telly, several people were floating round on fluffy white clouds, singing. It was more than I could take, and I threw myself down on my Boy’s Book of Interesting Facts.

“I can’t believe I’m going to miss it all,” I said. “I can’t stand it.”

“Look, you can either stay in here with me,” she said, “or play out. It’s up to you.”

I huffed, sulked, but she had that look. Through the door I could hear what sounded like one of my uncles going outside and, after a moment, coming back in again—carrying something that made a clanging noise in the hall. This was followed by more comings and goings, then it went quiet for a while. I made a pretence of looking for another interesting fact, but I was really thinking all the time about how I might get out of the room. My Ma was perched on the edge of her chair. All her life she never ever learned how to sit back in a chair and relax. She wasn’t really watching the telly, just gazing in its general direction.

“How do you think it died,” I said, “the pig?”

She stared at me blankly, like I was a fly buzzing.

“Bad company,” she said at last, “bad end.”

Right then, as if on cue, the living room door opened slightly and the pig’s head, with what turned out to be Uncle Eddie’s hands underneath and on top, nosed supernaturally into the room.

“Hello, our Mo,” he was saying in a deep, deep voice, wiggling the head up and down. “How about a nice cup of tea, then, for your guest? I’m really parched, you know. You could sunbathe in my mouth, Mo, love, it’s so dry.”

The door swung slowly open further to reveal Uncle Eddie, laughing at his own joke, the head floating before him. Before I could even take in what was happening, my Ma exploded out of her chair and was hitting, pushing Eddie out of the room. “Get that dirty filthy thing out of here,” she was saying while he retreated, a look of genuine alarm on his face at her fury.

“All right, our Mo,” he was saying, “calm down. It was just a joke.”

“You’re the pig, Eddie McKenna, and you always were. You disgust me. Is that my tea towel?”

They were out in the hallway. I took my chance and made a beeline for the downstairs toilet. Neither of them even noticed me in the commotion. I shut the door and stayed quiet. Raised voices followed from the kitchen, mostly my Ma’s, but they soon died down. I stayed put, expecting her to call for me any second but she didn’t. Maybe she thought I’d gone out, I reckoned, or in the excitement she’d forgotten about me. Either way was fine.

So, I waited for what felt like ages before opening the door, just a little at first, looking out and then tiptoeing across the hallway. Through the crack of the kitchen door I could see the three of them around the table, my Old Man moving about while the Trouble Twins watched what he was doing. Then I saw the carcass of the pig split open on the table, gutted, bloody, spread out on this huge plastic sheet. Newspaper covered the floor; some buckets of guts or whatever stood off to one side. When I caught sight of the head, not far inside the door, discarded on a red-stained tea towel, I didn’t hesitate. Without even thinking I reached in, grabbed the head, turned back down the hallway and, in a matter of seconds, was out of the front door. Just like when we were out on the rob in the big shops in town—do it and get out fast. My Ma saved up old plastic carrier bags in the bin-shed and I took one of those—Kwik Save ~ No Frills Shopping—to stash it in. Then, I was off, free, with a decapitated pig’s head slopping in a carrier bag.

To say I was pleased with myself and my trophy would be an understatement. Walking though the estate, I felt as though I had an extraordinarily special secret, but one that I was generously willing to share with all comers. Every now and then I would stop and look at it in the bag. This may be daft or strange, but what I felt most was how realistic it seemed. And the detail! When I’d grabbed it, it had just felt like a cold, fleshy thing, but there was a lot of small, fine, blond—almost white—hair all over, but especially on the ears. The snout was wrinkled, in ridges like a knuckle. Then I would notice the half-open dead eyes staring back at me and realise once again what it was.

I was heading for Cuey’s. At the pyramid in the square behind his house, some little kids were playing on the climbing frame. I couldn’t resist shouting over to them that I had a pig’s head in this bag, holding it up to indicate that I did indeed mean this very bag in my hand. They just watched me blankly though as I went by—until, that is, when I was almost inside the tunnel by Cuey’s house, one of them called out, Liar. I shrugged and kept going. I skipped over the front garden fence and knocked on the door. After a few seconds it opened, just a little bit, and his face appeared cautiously in the gap. He sniffed, but said nothing.

“Come out,” I said, raising the bag.

He looked interested. “You got a new ball?”

“Nah, well better.” I opened the bag towards him and he peered in.

“Fuck me,” he said, impressed. He glanced backwards, then pulled the door shut behind him. He looked in the bag again. “What the fuck’s that?”

“That’s a pig’s head, in my book, mate.”

Smiling, he stared at me incredulously, as if for an explanation.

“See, these mad uncles of mine brought this dead pig round for my Old Man to butcher, like, didn’t they? So, I nicked the head.”

We both stepped over the fence and went into the tunnel. The little kids were coming towards us. There was a bigger kid lounging on a bike, too, probably a big brother.

“What’s that in the bag, then?” he asked.

“Pig’s head,” I said.

“Fuck off,” he said. “Let’s see it.”

I held the bag for him to look inside. “That’s not real,” he said.

“His Old Man’s a butcher.” Cuey said. “Their house, it’s practically like one of them abattoir places.”

The kid looked in the bag again. “Can I touch it?”

“Okay,” Cuey said, “but only if you give us a go on your bike.”

Reluctantly the kid got off his bike and Cuey climbed on. He was off around the square.

“Five minutes is your lot, you,” the kid called after him. He reached into the bag and started poking around. “Where did you get it?” he asked.

“Like he said just then, my Old Man’s a butcher, isn’t he? You should see his knives.”

When the kid brought out his hand, it was covered in some of the gore.

“It really is a pig’s head,” he said, studying the blood on his fingers.

“Is it dead?” one of the little kids asked. They all crowded round for a look. To my surprise, one of them—a girl—started to cry. Cuey screeched up on the bike, testing the breaks to destruction.

“Let’s go,” I said to him. Another of the future bingo players was looking all scared and blubbery. He jumped off the bike and we began a hasty exit march across the square. By the time we reached the corner, at least three of them were blubbing, for God only knows what reason.

“Jesus,” I said, looking back.

“Fucking kids today,” Cuey said. “I blame the fucking parents, me.”

I laughed.

“No, really. You’d think it was a human’s fucking head, like, or a fucking big monster thing or something like that, the way they’re fucking carrying on.”

I stopped, looked at him. He’d given me a fantastic idea, genius. When I told him what it was, he nearly pissed his kecks right there and then in the street. We set right off, but hadn’t gone far when we heard the sound of running behind us. I turned back to see Big Davy Cliffo legging it towards us at top speed. He ran like an animal, a wildebeest caught in a stampede, the big twat. He came right up to us, all out of breath.

“What’s going on back there?” he said, between big breaths. He was really puffing for tugs. “All these kids back there, like, are saying you’ve got this head, or something, in a bag?” He was eyeing the bag. “Is that it, there?”

“That’s right,” Cuey said. “It’s a human’s head. We found it on the tip in a Kwik Save bag.”

He was still catching his breath, staring at us. “Bollocks,” he said.

“If it’s bollocks, stick your hand in the bag, then,” I said, holding it open. “No looking, mate, just shove your fucking hand right in there, if it’s bollocks.”

He hesitated, and I knew he wouldn’t do it. The shithouse.

“We’re off down the cop shop with it now,” Cuey said, starting to walk off. “Come with us, Cliffo, mate, if you want.”

I closed the bag and went to catch up to Cuey, leaving Big Davy Cliffo the Hard Knock floundering like a fish on the pavement behind us.

“Could be anything in that bag, couldn’t it though?” he said when we were about ten yards away. I shrugged again. Cuey smiled at me, and we kept going. “Hey, Cliffo,” I shouted, a bit further on. “You want to pack those cigs in, mate, too, the way you were puffing for tugs. Or this could be you next.”

I held the bag up. He didn’t even follow us, the big wanker.

When we reached the garages, Cuey climbed up first and I passed the bag up to him. Then I ran, jumped and pulled myself up. A red milk crate was up there already, and some half-set bricks. But we just lay down flat on our backs in the middle, so people passing really close by wouldn’t see us. The sky was a bit twilighty, the end of summer. The new school year was just around the corner. I’d be going to the Catholic Boys Grammar; Cuey to St Tommy’s, the factory school. We knew even then this was the end. Next year he’d be throwing bangers at me when I went past in my bright blue blazer, a legitimate target. Still, we lay there together waiting for the sky to darken and then we climbed down. I took the pig’s head out of the bag and threw it over the tall fence into Mrs Buchanan’s jungle back-garden. Then we ran around the front and knocked on her door. After what seemed like years, she appeared all shadowy-like behind the frosted glass.

“Who is it?” she said, but didn’t open the door.

“Can we have our ball back from your garden, please, Mrs Buchanan?” I said through the glass, and provoked the expected reaction.

“I’ll bloody ball you,” she said, and her shadowy figure disappeared.

We ran around the back, quickly scrambled up on the garages and edged forward on our stomachs, so we could watch her thrashing about. She hadn’t yet got her back door open, but she came out muttering to herself when she did. It was getting quite dark; she wasn’t at all aware of us spying on her as she slashed her way backwards and forwards through the undergrowth. Suddenly, she stopped, bent down and came back up holding the pig’s head by an ear, looking at it through her thick glasses with a look of absolute horror and disbelief on her face. Then, she screamed.

© Malcolm Dixon

Malcolm Dixon (malcolm@dixoncoyte.fsnet.co.uk) is originally from Liverpool. His fiction has appeared in print recently in Wind Magazine, the Briar Cliff Review, Cranky, and online at Literary Salt and Ascent. In 2003 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He now lives north of Canterbury, on the Kent coast.

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