Hunter’s Heart

1

Thwack!

The stone from Simon’s catapult hits the rabbit between its ears. A perfect aim!

He crouches back on his heels, heart thudding. At last! He’s done it! But there’s something wrong. Why hasn’t it just keeled over, dead? He watches, horrified, as the rabbit starts to twitch and jerk its body around, and scream: a high, shrill squeal like a stuck pig might make. The noise is a shock. Rabbits are silent, aren’t they? Pet ones in hutches, they never make a sound, however miserable they are, noses pushed up against the wire mesh. He’s never heard a sound like this. You must be able to hear it for miles.

This rabbit is badly hurt, but not badly enough. It’s writhing in agony, and Simon knows he’s going to have to do it: go up close and kill it properly. He looks about for a heavy stick, or a rock or something, but the field is perfectly bare – a hayfield, recently mown.

He glances over his shoulder, as if someone might be there suddenly. Someone who could take over. It’s not that he doesn’t know what to do – he’s read it often enough in the survival handbook: The way to dispatch a rabbit humanely and certainly. It’s just that it’s different now, here. For real. And of course there isn’t anyone around to help. No one for miles. Just him and the wounded rabbit on the grass.

He could run home, the sound of the rabbit’s cry ringing in his ears. A fox would find it soon enough, wouldn’t it? With that racket.

The rabbit’s looking at him. Dark pained eyes boring into his own. Why won’t it die? He takes a step forward, crouches over the rabbit, reaches out his hand. The terrified animal trembles violently, tries to run, can’t. Simon grabs it, one hand round its neck, the other round the hind legs. A smart, firm, stretching action. He breaks its neck. Feels it crunch.

Now the rabbit is silent, limp, a small grey-brown strip of fur, unbearably soft. Its eyes have glazed over. His throat tightens, aches. No, not here, not now. Ridiculous to feel like this. Dry sobs rise in Simon’s throat but he won’t let them out, even though no one is watching, no one could possibly know. He swallows and swallows until they’ve gone.

He’s killed his first rabbit. He’s a hunter, a survivor. He picks it up by its feet and starts to walk back across the hayfield to the stile and the lane. It feels so light, swinging as he walks, the soft fur brushing the bare skin of his leg. He starts to shape the story in his mind, the story of the day he caught his first rabbit, ready to tell to Johnny and Pike and Dan.

Friday 10 July.

He won’t forget this day.

He doesn’t know it now, but later he’ll look back and realize that this was how it all started. The death of the rabbit was the first thing. It marked the beginning of a summer that changed everything.

It’s one thing telling his mates. It’ll be different at home. He braces himself as he pushes open the back door.

‘Hi, Mum. I’m back!’ he calls out.

‘Good,’ she calls. ‘Supper’s almost ready. Ellie’s been asking for you; it’s her bedtime. Go up, will you?’

Simon dumps the bag on the scullery floor, lays the dead rabbit carefully on the draining board, washes his hands unasked. Then he thuds upstairs.

Ellie’s calling him. He stands in the doorway to her room. She’s sitting in bed, in stupid spotty dalmation pyjamas, sucking her thumb. Ellie’s only six.

She’s in tears.

‘What?’ he asks her, irritated.

‘I saw,’ Ellie sobs. ‘In your hand. When you were coming up the garden.’

‘What?’

‘The baby rabbit,’ Ellie wails. ‘How could you do that?’

‘It’s just the same as the meat you eat,’ Simon says. ‘You eat chicken, don’t you? And sausages? What’s the difference?’

‘It is different, it is. It’s not the same. You are so horrible. I hate you!’

Simon pulls a face. He turns to go downstairs.

‘Get Mum. I want her to come and tuck me up,’ Ellie whines after him.

He clatters noisily down the bare wooden stairs. They haven’t got a carpet yet. He waits in the scullery until he’s heard Mum go up to Ellie. He scoops up the rabbit and takes it into the kitchen. Now he needs the survival book, to check what you do next.

Mum reappears. She stands in the doorway, staring at him.

‘I didn’t think I’d hit it, but when I did I thought it was better to bring it home and eat it.’ He doesn’t look at her directly. The small furry animal is now lying on the kitchen table, too near the salad.

‘You deal with it, then,’ she hisses between clenched teeth, ‘while I sort out Ellie.’

What’s all the fuss about? She knows about the catapult; he showed it to her in the catalogue before he sent off the money, and she didn’t stop him. She’s already said no to the BB gun, and the crossbow, and the air rifle.

It isn’t fair. No one else has a mother like her. Or if they do, they have a father to water it down. Mostly, the dads like the idea of air rifles and catapults. Johnny’s does, anyway. He had stuff like that when he was a kid. He knows how to make arrowheads and all sorts. Johnny’s dad has got an air rifle of his own and sometimes he lets them have a turn when they go round there after school.

Still, he wore her down with arguing eventually, and she said he could have the catapult if he paid for it with his own money, but he must never ever aim it at a person blah blah blah. He hadn’t listened to the rest. And he didn’t tell her what the catapult could do. It’s made of stainless steel and rubber and leather. With a large enough stone as shot and a perfect aim, you could kill a person.

For a moment, Simon catches the image of the rabbit again, twitching and jerking about in agony, and he pushes and pulls the picture till it becomes a person, a sort of soldier, covered in blood and mud and aiming a gun at Simon’s head so he just has to shoot in self-defence…

The rabbit’s fur is so soft. The way it’s lying on the table, it could just be sleeping. It’s not very big, hardly enough for a meal for one. Just a baby really.

He could just bundle the whole thing into a plastic bag and tip it in the bin. He hates the way she just gives him that look, without saying anything. But he really wants to see the whole thing through. If you don’t eat it, then there’s no point. You’re just some sort of evil person, killing stuff for no reason. Like the boys down the park, cycling over frogs and laughing when their insides spurt out. That’s just sick.

Simon pushes the salad bowl to one side and leans The SAS Survival Guide up against it, turned to the page about skinning and jointing a rabbit. If he does it step by step, like a sort of operation, just looking at one bit at a time, he can stop himself thinking about it being a baby rabbit. The first cut is the worst.

Once the skin’s finally off, it’s just a lump of meat. Pale pink. He puts it in a glass casserole dish in the oven to cook. It looks too small, so he takes it out again and adds some onions and a carrot, a sprinkle of basil leaves from the pot on the window sill and some water. He quite likes cooking because it’s science really. When they did a survey way back in primary school, about sixty per cent of the boys said they wanted to be chefs when they grew up. The teacher said it was because of Jamie Oliver and all those other TV celebrity chefs. The real reason was, they’d all copied Rick Singleton, the richest, coolest kid in class, who’d only written it down for a laugh.

That’s one of the good things about moving to this new house: it’s much further away from Rick Singleton’s house. Rick goes to a different secondary school now too; a private one. It’s a relief not having to watch over your shoulder on the walk home in case Rick’s lurking behind a wall ready to get you. He gets you with words, not fists or stones, or broken glass. The words, though, are sharp enough to tear you up inside. He’s got it in for Simon for some reason. Or maybe no reason.

Sometimes, his new catapult in his pocket, he still thinks about Rick Singleton in his navy-blue uniform with a crest on the blazer pocket.

Simon hears his mother’s footsteps padding downstairs. She stands for a moment in the doorway, surveying the scene. What’s she thinking?

‘Clear that mess off the table. Now. Supper will be ruined.’

Upset and angry, then.

Simon puts the knives and the chopping board into the sink, wipes the table with the cloth on the draining board, rinses it half-heartedly.

She won’t come into the kitchen until it’s all completely cleared away.

‘And open the window. The smell makes me feel sick.’

He can tell she’s almost ready to cry, but he won’t let it get to him. He hums the theme music from The Great Escape under his breath, just to show her how relaxed and happy he is. It’s just natural, catching your own food. It’s total hypocrisy, eating meat and making such a fuss about the killing of it. Even if the fuss is a silent one.

She’s looking at him as if he’s a stranger. Not her son. She keeps telling him how different he is these days. Sometimes when you’re upstairs talking to Ellie, I think for a moment there’s a strange man up there.

And it’s not just his voice.

Fourteen! You’re growing up, Si. You’re almost taller than me.

‘Pasta and sauce?’ she asks him once she’s back in the kitchen. She’s thrown the cloth in the bin, run boiling water over the bloodied knife.

‘Nah. I’ll wait for the rabbit to cook.’

‘As you like.’

He’s vaguely aware of her serving herself a small bowl, hardly eating anything.

‘Ellie cried and cried,’ she says, as if it’s all his fault.

Why does she have to go on? It’s what she always does. As if crying about things makes you morally right or something. He goes out of the kitchen, turns the television on in the front room. Friday night. Comedy night. He flips the channels. Fragments of news blast out into the quiet room:

‘… Warplanes, guided by special forces soldiers on the ground, began an intense bombardment… pockets of strong resistance…

‘… A second suicide bomb exploded in a busy restaurant in the centre of the city…

‘… Aeroplane officials are considering the introduction of anti-missile protection for all planes…

‘… A youth involved in a death crash was jailed today…’

He flips channels again. There’s a preview of some Scottish stand-up comedian telling jokes about men and sex. He won’t be watching that later, unless Mum’s already in bed. It doesn’t get dark till really late. It’s partly because it’s midsummer – well, July – and also because of being so far west. He read somewhere that real local time is twenty minutes later than Greenwich Mean Time.

He can hear owls outside in the trees. It’s one of the things he likes about the house. He likes his room too, and the garden, and the fact that although their road is at the top of the town, it’s also really close to the fields. You are never more than about three miles from the sea wherever you are. It’s almost like living on an island.

Mum goes to bed early. He eats the rabbit stew in front of the telly. It tastes good. Like chicken, but with more small bones. He watches one programme after another, the comedian, and then a film, and by the time he drags himself up to bed his mind’s just a fuzz, a blur.

Whooo. Whoooo. The owls again. They will be hunting over the garden, swooping silently over the fields. He goes to sleep thinking about the soft wings, and the sharp beak, and the claws.

2

He’s slept in late. He can tell from the angle of the sun on the wall and the sounds from outside: cars, voices, people parking here for free and making their way down to the town or the beach, loaded with picnics and windbreaks and surfboards. He lies with his arms behind his head, adjusting to the idea of being awake. His head’s been full of weird dreams, of knives and blood, and hunting dogs with slavering jaws coming after him all night. And then he was somewhere dark and terrifying, deep underground, and he couldn’t find the way out.

He blinks. The room is shockingly bright. They painted the walls blue, but there aren’t any curtains yet. The first morning they were here, back in May, he was standing at the window in just his boxers and there was this girl in the house opposite standing at her window, staring right in. She’s about sixteen. She’s done her GCSE exams already; hangs about all the time, doing nothing. Mum has got her eye on her as a potential babysitter for Ellie. She’s given up on him, thank goodness. It’s just that he never knows whether he’s going to be in or not. He doesn’t plan ahead. And it’s not fair, anyway. Why can’t she just watch the telly and put herself to bed?

He knows why really. She’s scared of the dark. She’s only six.

Simon pulls on jeans and a T-shirt, keeping well back from the window. He ought to fix something up, a sheet or something, until Mum gets the curtains done. She says she’s too busy at the moment; he’ll have to wait till the holidays. Only ten more days. They’re not going anywhere this summer because of just moving. In any case, this is a holiday place itself. People come from all over. But everyone else will be going away, Johnny and Dan and Pike and – well, they’re the only people who count, really, from school. They’ll be going off with their families. Exciting places like the Picos de Europa (Johnny) and South of France (Dan). Pike will be sailing somewhere with his dad and his million brothers and sisters (well, five).

But they’re planning to go off camping by themselves first, just the four of them: him, Johnny, Pike, Dan. He hasn’t told Mum yet. Nina, not Mum. He’s trying to remember to call her that. It doesn’t sound so… so childish.

Without meaning to, Simon finds himself standing at the bare window. The girl’s there, leaning against the gate. Her hair flops down over her face as she swings with one foot on the half-open gate. Fair hair, past her shoulders. She’s wearing one of those short tops that shows off your stomach. As usual. You can’t help noticing the smooth tanned flesh, the way it shadows towards the hip bone. Simon flushes, looks away.

Johnny, Dan, Pike and him aren’t interested in girls. That is, they never talk about them. And the girls in Year Nine (their year) just ignore them. That’s just how it is. For now.

Mum/Nina yells up the stairs, ‘Are you getting up at all today?’

Simon bangs open his door, stands at the top of the stairs, gives her his cool, calculated look.

‘Been up for hours.’

‘Oh yes? Well then, you can go down the town for me and get some shopping. Take Ellie with you. And there’s washing-up to do.’

He spends a long time in the bathroom, mostly looking at his face in the mirror above the basin. Two spots. His hair looks weird.

Sunlight is flooding through the open back door. Ellie’s sitting on the step, making something with glitter and stones and an old wine bottle, while Mum writes out a list of shopping.

‘Look!’ Ellie holds out her creation.

‘What is it?’ He tries not to sound sarcastic. Ellie looks at him, expecting something more enthusiastic.

He swings his rucksack over one shoulder and picks up the list.

‘Have some breakfast first,’ Nina says.

‘Not hungry. Still full of rabbit stew.’

Ellie looks up; should she cry or not? Not.

He studies the list. Nothing too embarrassing. But he’s not taking Ellie.

‘Please, Si. Then I can get on with things.’

‘No way. She can’t walk fast enough. It takes too long. She moans all the way back up the hill.’

Nina sighs.

He almost relents, but then he imagines what it will be like if he bumps into someone from school, and that does it.

‘I’m going on my bike, anyway.’

‘Don’t forget your helmet!’ Nina yells after him as he disappears out to the shed.

Simon grins to himself. It’s not that he deliberately winds her up, pretending he’s reckless and foolhardy, but she does go on.

The girl from the house opposite watches him get on to his bike, fasten his helmet, freewheel down the hill.

The town’s packed with shoppers, cars bumper to bumper in the narrow streets. Simon weaves in and out, bumps up on to the pavement for a bit, but it’s even more congested. People stop suddenly and unexpectedly to look at things in windows, or to talk to someone. It’s as if I’m invisible, he thinks. They just don’t see me. He ends up pushing the last bit down the cobbled street that leads to the small supermarket where he can get most of the stuff. There’s a girl he recognizes from school at one till, so he goes to the other.

He might as well go all the way down to the sea, since he’s here. He swings the rucksack back over one shoulder, heavy and lumpy with shopping now, and scoots through the series of narrow alleyways and cobbled streets that lead down to the town beach. Already, families are parked with windbreaks and picnics all along the dry sand at the top near the wall; an ice-cream van is dealing out cheap whipped white stuff in cones. There’s a queue at the chippy, and a crowd of boys hanging round the front of the amusement arcade, hands in pockets, hair slicked up. One of them looks a bit like Rick Singleton. Simon gives them a wide berth, scoots further along next to the sea wall, finds a place to lean the bike.

The sea’s sparkling. No big surfing waves, just small ripples lapping on to the sand. Two dogs race in circles through puddles left by the retreating tide, even though this is a No-Dogs-May-to-October beach. They’re chasing seagulls and barking, though the sound is whipped away by the wind. Offshore today. You have to be careful with an offshore wind. That’s the one that whisks you out in your small inflatable: the child’s dolphin boat or the small boy on a bodyboard, and before you know it you’re way out of the bay. Every year there are drownings.

‘Six people last season,’ the fish-shop man said as he wrapped their chips the first weekend after they moved. ‘And mostly strangers, tourists. They don’t respect the sea. They think you can come here and do what you like, but she’s a terrible one, she is. No mercy in her. There was a lad and his father down on the rocks, fishing, and the first wave came and washed the lad off, and the next one got the father. They didn’t think, see.’ Simon wanted to hear the whole story in detail. Nina hustled him out before he could ask about the other four deaths. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re obsessed,’ she hissed at him.

You’d never imagine it, looking at that tame sea out there now. It’s easier to believe if you walk up along the cliff path for a bit, the way it crashes in on the rocks at high tide. It’s way below, but the spray gets you even in summer. They arrived in May; it’s July now. There haven’t been any big storms yet. He can’t wait!

‘Still soft in the head, eggbrain?’ The words whisper into his skull from close range. A long shiver rattles his backbone.

‘Thought you’d escaped, didn’t you, Simple Simon?’

Simon doesn’t need to turn round to see whose shadow it is that’s fallen over his propped-up bike. He puts one hand on the handlebars to steady himself, waiting for what’s coming next. But Rick’s moving on, hands in pockets, swaggering after the bunch of lads sauntering down the pavement towards the boy who collects money for the deckchairs. Simon doesn’t hang around. He shifts the rucksack on to both shoulders ready for the steep ride home. Sweat trickles down his neck.

He’s red as a beetroot by the time he reaches his house. The girl opposite is still hanging out at the front of her house. She straightens up when she sees him, watches him dismount and wheel the bike to the shed. I’m hot because of the bike ride, he wants to explain. But he doesn’t say a word, of course.

Simon humps the heavy bag on to the kitchen table. A sack of onions rolls out on to the floor, but he leaves them there. Ellie and Nina are nowhere to be seen. He thumps upstairs to the bathroom and pours cold water over his head. Most of it drips over the floor. The sun has moved round; his room is in shadow now. He lies on the unmade bed for a while, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. He imagines himself swimming out into the bay, the feel of the waves slapping over his head.

Then he thinks of Rick, sauntering along the top of the town beach. He can’t swim there, can he? But there’s another place. If he can remember how to get there. Some bloke from one of the farms told Nina about it, when they were out walking: ‘I’ve swum there since I was a boy. You have to watch the tide. It’s only safe at a low spring tide. You know, the extra low ones at full moon. We don’t tell many people about it.’ He winked at Simon and his mother.

Simon checks his catapult’s safe in his pocket. He retrieves his knife from the kitchen window sill. The blade’s clean and shiny and sharp. He leaves the back door on the latch, like they do these days. Back at the old house, they always kept doors locked. Even windows. Since they’ve been here they’ve let all that go. No one locks doors round here.

The girl opposite has disappeared.

It’s so hot the tarmac is melting. It sticks to his boots. The road’s gone quiet, like it often does in the early afternoon on a summer Saturday. He turns left along a small shady lane towards the fields. From there he can cut across to the coast path.

The grass is stubbly and scratchy from where it’s been cut. He watched them last week, cutting the hay and then binding it into rolls and trailering them behind the tractor, back to the farm. The field was covered in crows. He liked the feeling, as he watched, that it all belonged to him now. Not literally, but just because this is where he hangs out, now they live so close. He’s left behind the built-up town where they used to live. The traffic and the concrete, and all the crap: shops and car parks and people crowded like rats into shopping malls and pedestrian precincts. He hates all that. Even the words are ugly.

When he’s older, he’s going to live somewhere really wild. Alone. He’ll build himself a house in the middle of a forest or a wilderness of some kind, and live off the land. Hunting, fishing. That sort of thing. He doesn’t tell anyone this. Not even Dan or Johnny or Pike.

He can see the sea now, a wide blue expanse of the bay, as far as the lighthouse one way, and thinning to nothing the other. It feels like the edge of the world. The air changes as you get closer to the cliff. There are hundreds of gulls. He climbs over a gate on to the footpath and starts walking westwards.

Hunter’s Heart

Acknowledgements

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