Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [84]
Preferably at Marvel.
When Jonas arrived, the residents of Sunset Lodge had just started to make their arduous journeys from the garden room to the dining room for supper.
Although it was dark already, the room was as hot as ever, and smelled of sweet decay under hairspray and talcum powder. After the bitter outdoors it was suffocating. He wondered if they ever opened the windows so people could breathe--
The memory hit him like a ghost train ...
He and Danny Marsh had bought maggots for fishing from Mr Jacoby's shop. In the late summer the stream behind the playing field had sticklebacks and the occasional brown trout, and there were schoolyard rumours of a pike that might - or might not - have eaten Annie Rossiter's missing cat, Wobbles. Jonas did not really buy the Wobbles theory, because why would a cat be in the stream in the first place? But he did fantasize about catching a pike. Or a trout.
A stickleback would do, to be honest.
So he and Danny had bought a pot of maggots. A little white polystyrene cup with a not-quite-clear plastic lid, which had to be lifted to see the fat white worms properly. Mr Jacoby took them from the fridge - from a shelf alongside the cans of Coke and Dandelion & Burdock, which Jonas could never quite make up his mind whether he liked or not.
Jonas was stunned that he could recall such details. He even remembered now that the maggots had cost 55p and that Danny had paid because he'd owed Jonas for a comic.
They'd only had one rod between them - Jonas's little starter rod which had come in a blister-pack last Christmas, with its fixed-spool reel already loaded with line and permanently attached between the cork grips, along with two red-and-white ball floats and a bag of small, unambitious hooks.
They'd fished for one long, hot day, eating cheese-and-pickle rolls and taking turns to hold the rod for when The Big One bit.
By the time dusk fell and they went home empty-handed, they had only used maybe twenty of the hundred or so maggots, most of which had simply wriggled off the hook and made a break for it, or had been discarded for becoming waterlogged, limp and - the boys agreed - unattractive to fish.
Probably because the rod was his, when they parted ways Jonas had taken the remaining maggots home with him and put them in the fridge for the next day.
They'd never gone fishing again.
Other stuff had happened.
The little white pot had first been hidden behind the jam and then pushed to the back of the fridge by yesterday's spaghetti Bolognese.
And it was only weeks later, when his mother complained that that fridge - which was only four years old - was making a strange buzzing noise, that Jonas had remembered ...
Through the cloudy lid of the pot, Jonas had seen that the pale maggots had been replaced by something amorphous, black and expansive, which now filled the pot so comprehensively that he could see darker patches under the plastic lid where things were actually pressing up against it. The whole pot vibrated in his nervous hand with a low, menacing buzz - and it was with a sick shock that Jonas realized that the small maggots had slowly turned to much bigger flies that were now squeezed together so tightly in the pot that they seemed to be one angry entity.
Angry at him.
He'd wanted to let them go. He was a good-hearted boy who loved animals. And flies were animals - of a sort. The thought of them inside the pot - packed so close that their wet wings could not even unfurl, while their neighbours ate them and vomited on them and ate them again - made him feel ill.
But they were angry at him. He could feel it in the vibrating fury running up his arm as he held the pot in his hand.
He had thrown it away without removing the lid. And until the bin men came three days later, Jonas could hear the angry thrum of the flies leading their short, trapped, nightmarish lives.
Jonas stopped thinking of it. He had to before it made him sick.
Standing at the threshold of the Sunset Lodge garden room, he wiped