Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

Danny looked calm.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  His fingers slipped, whether through sweat-soaking from the effort he’d already expended, or whether because Danny had let go, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that in the space of a heartbeat he went from straining every muscle in his body to stop his friend being sucked inside this impossible vortex in a terraced street, to landing with a wet, muddy whump on his hole and then his back, skidding along the length of the garden.

  By the time he’d collected his thoughts, scrambled back to the ridge of the hole, he already had a terrible suspicion about what would await him.

  The hole was empty. Danny was nowhere to be seen.

  Steve’s jaw set. He glanced around, saw the spade his friend had been using, and scooped it up into his hands before leaping down into the hole. It was less than six feet deep, and its bottom was smooth and unbroken; somehow, whatever had consumed Danny had in the space of the last few seconds closed over above his head. That was impossible, but he couldn’t deal with that at the moment. His friend was trapped down there, unable to breathe, dying-

  He attacked the earth with the spade, with no trace of style or finesse, simply raw urgency and desperation. Hold on Danny he kept repeating; whether it was to himself or for anyone’s benefit was debatable, but he blocked the outside world out as his arms and legs moved mechanically and the soil began to arc in great clods over his shoulders as he worked, worked, dug and dug, until his shoulders began to burn and pain began to spread across his lower back.

  “Son.”

  He wasn’t so engrossed that he didn’t hear her; the pain had seen to that, had slowed his work already. His shoulders were on fire now and his hands trembled, but he knew to stop digging would be to admit that he had just seen his best mate swallowed by a terraced house’s garden, gobbled up as if by a hungry landshark, and he simply wasn’t prepared for that. The memory of the fight that had gone on only moments before kept bubbling to the surface in his mind.

  “Son,” she tried again, speaking gently. “He’s gone. You can stop.”

  “You didn’t help! You just fuckin…you just stood there and you just fuckin watched me! You didn’t help and now he’s…he’s gone…!”

  “Of course he’s gone,” she replied evenly. “What do you think he was digging in this garden for, son? Why’d you think he told ya to let him go? This was what he wanted.”

  He couldn’t go on. He was weak, he was unfit and he was a bastard. Defeated, he sagged and sucked in huge whooping breaths and tried not to simply collapse, as his nerveless fingers allowed the spade to slip from between them and fall silently to the earthen floor of the pitiful little hole he’d dug, he found the strength to raise his head and glare poison as this oul witch who spoke to him, peering down from the edge of the hole.

  “What he wanted? He wanted to…commit suicide?” he retorted, knowing even as he spat the words that there was something wrong with that conclusion.

  That hadn’t escaped her either. “He’s not dead, son,” she replied, and then a thought crossed her face and she was forced to add, “well…not from being dragged underground and buried alive. Beyond that like…” and she shrugged.

  Another face appeared at the edge of the hole, one Steve didn’t recognise at all.

  “What was all that shoutin about? What the fuck is goin on?” Casey thundered as he looked down in utter disbelief. “Jesus holy Christ! How deep does fuckin landscape gardenin research have to fuckin BE?!!!

  “Landscape what?” Steve said, and then dismissed it. “Mate, ring the fire brigade! There’s been an accident!”

  “Who the fuck is this? Where’s the other one?” Casey demanded.

  Steve gestured to the soil underfoot. “That’s what I’m tryin to tell ye!” he said, gesticulating wildly. “He was fuckin sucked underground! There must be…” he floundered, and then found a likely word from somewhere in his general knowledge, “…subsidence! Aye! A sinkhole!”

  Casey seemed dubious, but the subsidence and sucked underground parts made him hesitate as they sounded disconcertingly expensive to fix. He jumped down into the hole Steve was occupying and picked up the spade, looking up at Bee. “Get inside the house and get the fire brigade rung!” he told her, before (to Steve’s eternal relief) putting his considerable bulk to use in the task of digging.

  Bee shrugged. “I’ll get another cuppa going while I’m at it,” she said as she walked away.

  “Thanks mate…” Steve said, seeing Casey making short work of the job of deepening the hole he’d already dug. “There must be like an air pocket or someth-”

  Thunk.

  Casey brought up his spade. He frowned, and brought it down again. Same result. Thunk. Casting a quick look at Steve, he got on his knees and shoved the thin layer of soil away with his hand to reveal a hard surface.

  “What is it?” Steve asked, feeling fear grip him. His mind reared back to the stone tablet he’d seen in the hole just before Danny had been in the throes of being pulled downward. The same stone tablet that had vanished completely when Danny had gone.

  Casey nailed him with a look. “It’s the fuckin foundations is what it is. This is as deep as the garden goes.”

  It was true. This was no tablet. Steve shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, mate, it can’t be. My-my friend was fuckin…he was just…” he trailed off. “He was pulled. Sucked down. He disappeared.”

  “Is that right? Through a concrete foundation?”

  At this point Steve noticed three very important things. One was Casey’s expression and the general size of the man. The second was that the spade which had previously been wielded to such good effect was now no longer pointed groundward.

  The third, directly related to the first two, was that he was trapped in a hole with him.

  “What is this,” Casey growled, advancing on Steve. Given the size of the hole, there wasn‘t a lot of advancing that was possible, but he was managing it brilliantly. “Fuckin Rag Week? Eh? Come along to some dopey fucker’s garden and spin him some shite about doin research, wreck his garden, tell him an accident’s happened so he gets fuckin filthy himself,” and Steve had to admit, thanks to his sterling work digging Casey was absolutely encrusted, “and then film the silly bastard as the penny drops? Have yis got a wee camera set up or somethin, aye? Where’s yer mate? Is he the fuckin cameraman? Well, let‘s give him some good footage, eh?”

  Faced with the riddle of the disappearing best mate, the mysterious garden hole and the irate burly householder advancing with heavy spade, Steve decided that there was only so much a man could take before he had to take decisive action, and taking decisive action was his speciality.

  “Oh please mate, Jesus Christ I swear I didn’t have anything to do with any of this - please don’t fuckin smack me with that big spade. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do - I swear - I fuckin swear - oh holy fuckin Jesus please don’t hit me…”

  Casey’s murderous glint died in his eyes to be replaced with an expression of disgust. He turned away from Steve and with a muscular heave lifted himself out of the hole.

  “Get. The fuck. Outta my garden. Now.”

  “Okay, okay,” Steve nodded. There was a short pause as he looked at the hole and made a half-hearted attempt to scale it. He looked up at Casey. “Am…could ya give me a hand up?”

  Casey’s grip was more than a little tighter than it needed to be, but given the circumstances, Steve considered himself not too hardly done by. He was shoved to his freedom once he was free of the hole’s clutches. “And tell yer mate if I see him I’m gonna fuckin murder him!” came the shout as he stumbled for the garden’s exit.

  Seconds later, an old woman was unceremoniously ejected from the house, again at Casey’s hand.

  “…last fuckin cuppa tea you’re getting in here you oul fuckwit!”

  Slam.

  Bee looked down at the half-full cuppa still clutched in her hand. She shrugged, downed it, and posted it back th
rough the letterbox. There was the smash of breaking china from the other side and hearing this, the old lady turned tail and waddled as fast as her eighty-plus year old legs would carry her, catching up with Steve just around the corner from the house and its massacred front garden, currently resembling a post-napalm strike battlefield.

  She didn’t have much trouble catching up to him. Steve was walking the walk of the trauma-afflicted, empty-eyed. She put a comforting hand on his arm and he jerked it away reflexively, not entirely to her surprise.

  “What’s going on,” he said very quietly. “I just wanna know what’s going on.”

  “I know, son, I know,” Bee said soothingly, as they stopped outside a house further up the street. She opened the gate. “Come on in,” she told him. “If you wanna help your wee mate son…maybe you can.”

  He should have pulled away, should have insisted he either went back and made sure the fire brigade came out - he had a sneaking suspicion Casey was going to cancel the callout - or went home to Ellie and Aaron.

  He did neither, did nothing to stop Bee taking him inside her house and setting him down on her big comfortable leather settee, the kind that old people seemed to love, huge and ornate. It was so well polished that when you sat in it you had to grip the sides to stop your arse sliding completely off and you ending up slamming into the carpet tailbone-first.

  Of course, there in the corner of the room was the obligatory huge clock, think-thunking time away with a shuddering and teeth-jarring finality every second. He knew for a cold, hard fact that if they turned on the TV, it’d be set to ITV3 and be showing nothing but repeats of Poirot.

  She perched herself on the armchair facing him, head tilted as she examined him with eyes remarkably keen for someone who was clearly about a hundred and twenty. She looked like a wee bird.

  “Well I’ll get right into it,” she said simply. “What your mate, what Danny, told you about himself and you and Ellie and the wee baby is true.”

  Danny’s garbled nonsense about parallel universes came back to him. He had dismissed it then out of hand. But that had been before he’d watched his friend disappear down the proverbial fuckin rabbit hole. Suddenly it wasn’t so easily to dismiss, but that didn’t mean he was going to sit here and swallow everything this oul doll threw at him.

  “How’s that even possible?” he asked. “Why don’t I remember any of it?”

  Her head flicked to the other side like a pendulum, but her eyes never left his own, never dimmed that inquisitive expression.

  “Are ye absolutely sure you don’t?” was all she said. “All of this with the wee one - does it seem right to you? Changin nappies and gettin up durin the night and stayin indoors all the time? How’re ya likin it all, son?”

  He squirmed. “Part and parcel innit?” he said defensively. “It’s what ya sign up for.”

  “But you didn’t sign up for it,” she said softly. “Danny’s gone. He was the one they changed the world for, and he’s not in the world any more. So you just watch it as it changes right back. Think, son. Think. Did ye sign up for it? What about Ellie? How were things with her?”

  “Great,” he whoppered.

  She smiled thinly. “Is that right? No fights ner nothin…?”

  He flushed hotly, unable to prevent himself from doing so. “Well I didn’t say no fights…” he mumbled, recalling earlier, before Danny and Maggie had arrived.

  “What do you want me to do? I held him and I shushed him and he just kept cryin. I know you could quieten him down so I thought it was best to ask you to do it.”

  “And that’s it? That’s the end of it? You just say ‘fuck it’ and throw him to me and come in here and play that fuckin thing? AGAIN? Oh wow, did ye finish the third level? Clap clap fuckin clap - can’t tell ye how helpful that is. Your son’s SO proud of his Daddy for masterin that A plus B attack combo. Dinner’s on by the way, so if I am gonna be with Aaron once AGAIN you can fuckin well help out with that - unless you think you can’t stop the oven from cryin either?”

  And he had roared at her and she had roared back at him and an almighty silence had followed, before Aaron’s crying, renewed at the sound of them two going at it, had broken the peace and sent her off again with one final poisonous look in his direction. So he had sat there, his gamepad in his hand, the tears not coming because unknown to Ellie, they had already come; they had come freely the first time he’d come through here after handing the baby over to her and had dried by the time she stormed in.

  He was not a father. He could remember things, but they seemed wrong to him and more heartbreakingly, they seemed wrong to the baby he’d tried to console so many times and failed.

  It came out of him in a rush; emotion and disbelief and relief, a fair dollop of relief, because incredible as this all was it meant that there was an explanation for the state his life was currently in beyond the more mundane one that was that he was simply a shitty Da.

  Bee took it slowly, told him as much as she knew, told him how things should be and who should be with whom. And hearing it, to his astonishment, although none of it brought a second set of memories rushing back to confirm her words, everything she said seemed so right that he found himself unable to dismiss the fantastical story she spun. Slowly himself, hesitatingly, he told her of his difficulties with little Aaron, and saw her nod in understanding.

  “Wee babbies know,” she nodded. “They’re not so easy to fool as us,” and she snorted derisively, “grown ups…hah! Heads up our holes if you ask me, son. That wee man only quietened down when his Mummy had him, eh?”

  He thought about it. The answer to that question ought to have been yes, he knew. “Um…” he said, “…well…” and he remembered all the times over the last few days when little Aaron had screamed, simply screamed, “…actually, not so much. Ellie’s not even been able to calm him down most of the time.”

  Think-thunk. Think-thunk.

  “What…?” he asked, not liking her expression and the speed in which her face had drained of all colour. For a horrible moment he thought she was in the midst of a stroke and he would be responsible for administering mouth-to-mouth.

  But no. She wasn’t having a stroke. Standing up, she spoke, and when she did so said one word that sent this already crazy night down another rabbit hole.

  “Changeling.”

  **

  He had kissed her. She couldn’t get over the fuckin cheek of it.

  If he wanted to re-establish contact with Steve out of some sense of long overdue guilt at abandoning his friend at the first whiff of adulthood scenting the air like a particularly unwelcome fart, well fine. She’d thought that inviting him and that skinny self-satisfied little dingbat of a girlfriend of his to their house and showing them that parenthood actually didn’t equal leprosy.

  If he wanted to come to this dinner in the middle of some nervous breakdown, which judging from his behaviour the entire night, he’d been going through some sort of mental car-crash; who knows, maybe he’d finally woken up and realised Maggie wasn’t the one for him, maybe he’d realised he was gay, maybe he was thinking of embracing Scientology - whatever.

  She didn’t care.

  If Danny Morrigan wanted to flip out and have a meltdown during the dinner she’d fuckin slaved over for the last three and a half hours and walk out of the house leaving them all paralysed with shock, let him.

  She. Didn’t. Care.

  That he had kissed her…

  “Prick,” she muttered, scrubbing the last of the dinner plates with unnecessary venom, not even sure which prick she was referring to - oh, most likely Danny, obviously, but her own darling Steve was an equally strong candidate. After his oh-so-smart quip when Danny had frigged off to Christ knew where, her beloved had singularly and spectacularly failed to stand up for her even one iota when Maggie had turned on her…

  “What the fuck was that about?” she had demanded of Ellie, the door still ringing from Danny’s exit, her eyes wide with rage. She was so rea
dy to jump to conclusions she was practically constructing a conclusion-poline.

  “I-I don’t know!” Ellie spluttered, matching Maggie’s movements by rising from her seat.

  “Oh sure you fuckin don’t!” Maggie howled, throwing her hands up in a can you believe this way. “How long’s it been goin on?”

  “How long’s what been goin on?” Ellie had tried again.

  “Slut!”

  “Steve!”

  And he’d looked at her and spoken very quietly. “Maybe you’d better answer the question.”

  “WHAT?” Ellie roared.

  “You couldn’t handle it, could ye?” Maggie was saying, standing very close to her now. Ellie wondered if her once-best friend was going to hit her, and wondered what her reaction would be if she did.

  “Couldn’t handle-?”

  “That I got him.”

  “That you got him? Don’t be ridiculous!” Ellie burst out. “We only dated for a few weeks…!”

  “You couldn’t handle the fact,” Maggie went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “that you ended up with this,” and with one sweeping motion, she indicated the house around her…which would have been okay, maybe, perhaps…if the sweeping hand hadn’t also taken in the sleeping baby lying on the blankets.

  That was a mistake.

  Ellie hadn’t hit anyone since she was seven and she and Lucy Thompson had gotten into a vicious playground fight over which boyband member they were going to marry as big girls. By God, though, she made up for lost time by landing a complete beauty of a right hook on Maggie’s pert little chin. Maggie went down like a hooker on a submarine.

  Steve was there. Not with Ellie. Not defending her. He was helping Maggie to her feet.

  “You…you bitch,” Maggie hissed as she got to her feet, throwing off Steve’s assistance and rushing past them toward the front door, coming within a whisker of physically pushing past Ellie to do so, but seeming to retreat from it at the last second.

  She had her coat on in a matter of seconds, her pretty little face flushing in humiliation and anger, her lip trembling. Ellie just stood there and watched, a hundred things to say running through her mind, but she rejected each one of them, knowing in her heart that none of them would help in the slightest.