Ex Chapter 22 - the story of the policeman, the head teacher and the gun

Caldwell Bynes - the head teacher of D’oily Cart Academy and a man who accepted sole responsibility for the abject lack of educational prowess of generations of North London children, shifted uncomfortably in his exquisitely sumptuous chair behind his insanely expensive antique desk. Wherever he looked, the horizon was filled to the brim with the deluge of adipose tissue and porcine corpulence that constituted M - Daniel’s father.

“Will you stop gesticulating with that gun, you’re making me nervous.”

“I want to know where my son is.”

“He has become friends with Grellman and the odd child who wears two pairs of glasses and three watches.”

“Don’t you know the other child’s name?”

“I try not to know names - they just get in the way of really enjoying the day to day infliction of misery.”

“I thought Grellman was unable to make friends - I thought his sole purpose was dispensing senseless and arbitrary violence?”

“So did I but it appears that your son and the other child inadvertently saved his life. I am sure it will all work out for the best and he will rip them limb from limb - it’s what he does best. Anyway the three of them have gone on a quest.”

“What do you mean quest - they aren’t Jason and the fucking argonauts they are three 8 year old boys.”

“Well Grellman told me to close the school so they could go out for the day so I didn’t really have any any choice. I may be the manager of the zoo but I can’t control what the residents of the insect house get up to.”

“Daniel is not an insect - he’s my son.”

“That is a matter of perception. Daniel believes you intend to kill him M, he’s telling anyone who will listen which is in truth, not many people.” He studied the 34 stone policeman who was occupying both of the guest chairs in his office, his shirt was stuck to his tumescent gut by a mixture of acrid sweat and blood, the left arm of his uniform had been almost completely ripped off and he appeared to have used a bottle of human intestines as shampoo. “Anyway what does it matter to you where Daniel is - the whole trying to murder him repeatedly thing would not suggest a high degree of parental empathy.”

M moved with feline grace and lowered his cataclysmic stomach onto Bynes’ desk. The desk made a sound not unlike the plaintiff scream of a drone bee during the act of copulation, shortly after its penis has snapped off. It was not a sound that Bynes ever wanted to hear again.

M leaned over and placed his gloved hand around Bynes’ throat.

My 12th birthday present from my father was a gun. I did consider shooting my mother who had been killing people for fun for some years but I decided no - she may be a mass murderer but she’s my mass murderer. My father on the other hand was the bitterest, most unremittingly poisonous fucker that had ever been vomited out onto this shitforsaken cesspit of a planet so I put a bullet through his head at point blank range. It seems that the bullet missed his cerebral cortex but my mother decided it was better to dump me into foster care believing I had executed him. It wasn’t until a few months ago when the old bastard turned up on my front door that I realized he wasn’t dead. It transpired that shooting him in the face had impacted on the quality of our relationship quite significantly.”

He dragged Bynes from his chair by his neck as if he were the weight of a glove puppet. Bynes found himself standing on his tip toes with a gore soaked gun waving like a metronome back and forth millimeters from his eyes.

“So don’t lecture me about parental empathy you cunt.” As he spat out this final word, aspirated blood sprayed from M’s nose into Byrne’s face.

“Are you familiar with the story of Cassandra?” croaked Bynes “her ears were licked clean by snakes enabling her to hear the future but she was cursed by Zeus so that no-one ever believed her predictions. She was shouting into a void like you M - no-one is listening. All these fucking children swarming around my feet like so many cockroaches and their parents, bleating because Johnny’s can’t fucking spell or Johnny can’t fucking speak, Johnny won’t die when I try to kill him. You’re just like the rest of them, symptoms of the human disease - I hate the fucking lot of you.”

M released Bynes’ throat from his grip and shifted around the desk, planting his foot between Bynes’ legs “I intend to defenistrate you.”

Bynes stole a glance at his office window, painted closed, offering views of a playground occupied sporadically by children who experienced education as provocation, school as a battlefield, text books as graveyards.

“Well that’s an interesting proposition M, however you would be hard pressed to throw a child out of that window and god knows I’ve tried, let alone a fully grown adult”

“That presupposes that you are in one piece when I do it - wouldn’t you agree?” M pressed the nozzle of the gun into Bynes’ nose, distending it.

“The more you threaten me the more I laugh at you.”

M burrowed the gun into Bynes’s left nostril until his septum flayed and split.

Bynes could tell this meeting was not going especially well.

“You are a sociopath M.”

“I’m a fucking hero Bynes, I’m what’s stopping the swollen hordes of the unwashed who are massing outside the city gates with their torches and their boiling peat, from smashing down the walls and murdering you and everyone like you while you are quivering under your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle quilts; I am the grim reaper and the tooth fairy; I am beauty and the beast; I am what England sees when it looks in the mirror.”

Bynes’ fingers tip toed into his desk draw and caressed a letter opener into his grasp. He pulled away from M and swung his arm in an arc, plunging the blade into M’s stomach. Both men looked down at the blade hanging out of M’s gut. A blood bubble bloomed at the site of the wound and grew impossibly large before bursting, showering his shirt with a fine spray of carnage.

“I wish people would stop making holes in me” said M, closing his hand over Bynes’ nose and mouth without taking his eyes away from the wound. Bynes struggled, but his carousel pulled into the tunnel of love, never to emerge.

M began to laugh “I look like a pepperoni pizza” which reminded him that he had not eaten for nearly 20 minutes. He decided to return home, order in a Chinese takeaway banquet, put on a Tom Jones cd and then he and his gun would sit and wait for Daniel.