Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [82]
The rock had come home. After centuries it was once more in its rightful position.
The field crackled with the primal significance of the occasion.
And falling through the door of the pub, Kane felt it too, almost insensible with drink as he was.
He straightened up, leaning against the wall of the pub, and his eyes were huge and very afraid. Then he slid down the wall, his head nodding forward on his chest as the drink kicked in.
Just across the road Simon was on the point of climbing into his Jaguar, anxious to leave the setting of his grand humiliation a couple of evenings earlier. He would have gone sooner, but for his sister’s pleas for him to spend some time with her. Well, that particular (hollow) duty was fulfilled, and he could quit this shit at last. This village of no prospects, this Loserville. No wonder he was the only one to ever succeed - it was such a no-through-road of a place. Along with maths and English they taught you how to underachieve at the village school. Most of his wretched peers all had 0 levels in mediocrity and the odd A in ‘making the best of your lot’.Well, sod that. Making do had never been enough for him.
It was then he spotted Kane.
The symbol of everything this shitty village stood for: here he was, the personification of stagnation.
He closed the car door slowly, and crossed the street.
His smile grew as he walked up to his old enemy. It was a cruel smile, vicious and triumphant. It was the smile of a schoolyard bully who was into spite in a big way. As he stood over Kane he could feel the warmth of the midsummer sun on the back of his finely tailored jacket, and it could just as well have been burning 196
on the back of a school blazer worn by a vindictive boy who squatted astride his victim and reached for the crawling jar.
The crawling jar. God, he hadn’t thought of that in such a long time.
Years and years. And they could have been bloody days, because he felt exactly the same as he had back then; the same urge to humiliate totally, the same impulse to torture. He remembered Kane’s fourteen-year-old mouth bulging with squirming horrors, slime running from his soiled lips, mucus from his nose, tears from his eyes. He smirked. That was how to be a bully. Perhaps Simon should have given lessons in it at Cirbury Road To Nowhere Comprehensive school: at least the dropouts would have learned something.
Seventeen years on from that memorable victory, Simon kicked Kane as he sat slumped against the pub wall.
‘Scum!’ he spat. ‘Always knew you’d be nothing. You just had to go and prove me right, didn’t you? You dirty little drunk. You touched my sister, Kane. You fondled her, you disgusting creep.
You were never good enough for her, and I just wanted you to admit that. Remember the slugs, Kane? Remember the worms?
Dirt to dirt.’ He stepped back and swung his shoe into Kane’s kidneys. The drunk grunted and his head flopped to one side.
‘And the funny thing is, you never knew why I hated you, did you? Too thick to work it out.Just another local yokel, eh, Kane?
Just another bum, from a long line of bums... Except you weren’t, were you?’ And now the smile was gone from Simon’s face, and true paranoia leapt in his blue eyes. He staggered back a step as the extremity of his passions burned through him, leaving him flushed and sweaty and short of breath. Helplessly, he stared at his old enemy and felt, at last, that there was a reckoning between them. Kane was brought down to the ultimate state for which he had been destined, while Simon had scaled the peaks of achievement. Yet his mother’s words were as clear as the sobs of his victim on that summer’s day in the playing field seventeen years before.
197
‘He comes from a good family, not that you’d know it now. A very old