Shovel

2200 word novella intro

Shovel was hardly brighter than shoe polish, and he’d let you play darts on his belly if you got to know him. When he was thirteen, he pissed his pants during a rainy maths lesson. Said it was the lightning what made him, but we all knew it was the quadratic formula.

When the four of us, Shovel, Boner, Beefy, and myself, had all turned eighteen and felt for the first time like we were filling our boots, the only reasonable action was to celebrate. We asked out a couple hoors we knew from school, one Ms Lacy Winkler and her big-boobied friend, Layla Cheatle.

The six of us parked our ratted arses in Beefy’s basement, each of us kissing the glass lips of a bottle. Us lads, we’d convened before meeting the girleens and devised a sort of plan of action. Myself and Boner would have Layla, then Shovel and Beefy could share Lacy. Once all that drink was flowing in their systems, they’d been itching to give anything a go.

We were sat in the centre of the basement beneath a naked bulb, throwing its copper light across our faces. Layla and I squeezed onto an armchair that smelled like old shoes. Boner was sat on the arm, scratching his crotch and sniffing his fingers. He’d a hood thrown over his head, covering the bruised, tired-looking flesh around his eyes. Beefy and Lacy were lying on a blue bean bag that had scattered about its ripped skin black stars of mould. Her head rested on his lap and her pasty makeup left behind pale renditions of her face on the leg of his joggers. He played with her ear, rubbed it red. She burrowed her cheek into his crotch and giggled about something.

Shovel had spent the past fifteen minutes with his shirt off and the grotesque, pale eye of his outwards bellybutton in everyone’s face, counting on his stomach the ribbed pinprick scars from landed darts.

Tracks I didn’t recognise played on the radio. The lilt and ebb of soft song guided my eyes that felt like they were spinning on small wheels inside my skull; guided like a mother’s touch my sight across the room from the damp of old plaster to the bare ribs of the corrugated roof.

One second we were laughing—spouting shite about shite—then I’d Layla’s thick tongue like some wet sponge scooping the words out of my mouth. Her weight shifted across the armchair and her belly beneath her cropped shirt nuzzled into me. My cheeks flamed. Massive fucken headlights rubbed into my neck and chest. Boner was watching, his gaze hungry and desperate. But I was soft as a kitten.

Something had also been bothering me—Shovel wasn’t in the basement.

Rain pounded the slit windows. Thunder sounded far off and I knew lightning would be like white veins coursing through the dark sky. I was waiting for it. Muscles and mind, stiff.

That morning had seen enough rain to drown a child, hounding us all the way to the corner store where even inside we could feel the wind and sharp needles of wet lashing us, and driving us fast and away to Beefy’s place with bottles of cheap vodka and cans of cheaper lager. We’d kicked through the front door, startled the living shite out of the cat and sent it bolting into the kitchen, then we hunkered down in the basement.

Nobody was home but us.

Running through that storm, I was thinking of Shovel, how that day in Ms Dingley’s maths class his face had gone white. Like the blood in him froze. He always had a blank look on his face; mouth always open and letting in flies. But at that moment with him wedged between seat and desk, he managed to look even blanker, like someone had drawn a face out of chalk, then wiped it away leaving only traces behind. That smeared, sort of foggy blur of a forgotten thing. I wasn’t the only one to notice it. As lightning flashed through the windows and several of the girls yipped, Ms Dingley snapped her fingers at Shovel.

That was when he started to piss.

The lads, they laughed about it, but I’d seen it in his face, smelled it streaming down his right leg and into his shoe—what the lightning had made him do.

I pushed Layla off me. Her hair whipped back and the scent of concentrated perfume and fags went with it.

‘What you doing?’ she asked, screwing up her face.

‘Where’s Shovel?’ I said.

Boner was looking at me in disbelief while Beefy and Lacy didn’t seem to hear me over their lip smacking.

‘Who gives a fuck, mate,’ said Boner.

A shadow of a growing bulge nosed through his grey joggers. Layla mashed her hand between my legs, pinching with her sharp, red acrylics.

‘You’re limp,’ she said, ‘like a wet fucken chip.’

Boner clutched his belly, laughing.

I pretended not to hear them both and stood up off the armchair, mussed back my hair and looked through spinning eyes for a bottle with something in it. Layla asked if I liked boys, and I told her to fuck off. Boner, who moved quicker than a flick blade, pushed me square on the chest and sent me falling backwards.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Beefy. He’d torn his mouth away from Lacy. A rope of saliva hung trembling from his bottom lip, then broke and darkened the grey of her tight sports bra. He was scowling; his buzz-cut I could’ve sworn was bristling like a living thing.

‘Just having a laugh,’ said Boner. He didn’t even look at me.

‘Where’s Shovel?’ I asked, picking myself up off the sticky floor.

‘I don’t know.’ Beefy shrugged. ‘Said he was hungry.’

I rubbed my eyes. Fat bastard was always hungry.

Nobody seemed to care that I went upstairs. Had to use my elbows and knees to reach the basement landing. Below me as I listened came peals of laughter that I could’ve fallen asleep to. For a moment I closed my eyes and leaned against the hushed black walls. The weight of Layla’s hand on my cock still existed with dull heat.

When I opened the door, something stank so bad it made me retch. Could taste it on my tongue, like sucking a two-pence coin. Metal, lots of it. The lights were off in the living room but the streetlamps carried in enough of their fevered coral glows to see by. I pawed my way around a corner and saw leading into the kitchen a long, dark mark fanned across the tiled floor.

There was a shabby island fixed in the kitchen’s centre. The dark trail went to the other side of the island, out of sight. Then came that unforgettable sound, like a gentle lapping. Soft squelching. I didn’t say anything because I’d seen enough shit-scary films to know that was a mistake, but I hadn’t seen enough to kill my curiosity. I trod carefully around to the other side of the island.

Shovel was there with his t-shirt off. He was keeled over on hands and knees with his arse closest to me and his head thrown in the shadows, moving slowly backwards and forwards, lapping, squelching. The wide arch of his back glistened with small stars of sweat. A dark shape was sprawled around his face. It took me a moment to realise it was Beefy’s cat, Nimble.

Then it didn’t take long to realise Shovel was eating him.

There was hardly any time to process what happened before my foot slammed hard into Shovel’s arse. His body sort of unfolded like a jelly and his face nuzzled straight into the open cat. It screeched, too, the dying thing, like the last of its life had been squeezed out of it under Shovel’s weight. He turned and saw me, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘What the fuck,’ I said. A white flame of lightning paled into the kitchen and the shadows of dead things vanished and flashed back. ‘What are you doing?’

He crawled towards me and I stumbled away. Even in the darkness you could see the red dripping down his chin. He bared his teeth, revealing the clots and strings of meat and fur packed between them.

‘Help me,’ said Shovel.

There was blood and excrement—whatever the fuck it was—smeared all over the floor where the cat must’ve been dragged, dying. The room was no longer spinning. Shovel seized my ankle with a wet hand and I nearly fucken screamed, but then I remembered he was my mate and he was ill in ways you would never understand until you got to know him—know him like I did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Listen to me, you need to get the fuck out of here.’

‘What?’

‘Get up, grab the fucken cat, and run the fuck away. Do you understand?’ His trembling eyes shone darkly, and despite the blankness of his expression, he nodded. ‘Bury the cat and don’t let anyone see you.’

Shovel stood, then scooped up the limp cat, cradling it like a new child still dripping. His t-shirt was on the floor, a Led Zeppelin rag splattered blackly red. A scythe of light arced through the room.

‘Grab your shite and go!’

I opened the back door of the kitchen which led into an alleyway lined with overflowing bins and empty bottles. The rain was biblical; scum and muck spewed out of the drains. Shovel barged outdoors, bare-chested and red, the red diluting and running down over the ridges of his round flesh.

‘Don’t let anyone see you,’ I shouted after him.

He turned a corner and was gone.

I found drain cleaner in a cupboard under the sinks, and poured it over the darkened kitchen tiles, then grabbed a dry sponge sitting beside several stacked, dirty plates. On my knees and hands, scrubbing, drooling threads of saliva onto my wrist. My fingers stung from where I squeezed the sponge and the drain cleaner soaked into my skin. It smelled like cancer, scratched my eyes, made me cry.

The floor was still filth. Two entire kitchen rolls were used to soak up the pink, stinking fluid. I thought about the lads and hoors downstairs, their bodies unravelling, flesh sloughing off and into each other like messy puddles; the steam in the basement from their wicked bodies rising, laying dewy eggs of sweat onto the wall. My cock so soft and small like a child’s thumb.

I punched the floor, desperate to hurt something, and wouldn’t know until the next morning that I had fractured my hand.

I wondered how far Shovel had gotten. Had he made it home, and were his fingernails blackened by upturned soil? Or was he lying in the road, struck by lightning, with dead fur draped across him, water lapping over his milk skin.

More lightning flashed and my muscles tightened like they had one night a couple years ago with Shovel, Boner, and myself. A purple summer night on which we’d climbed through the skylight of an abandoned carpet shop, each of us carrying a pocketful of darts. In a dark, damp corner beside rolls of blackened bathmats, Shovel took off his t-shirt and hung it on a nail in the wall. He raised his arms and closed his eyes.

‘Stick me,’ he said.

We did so without thinking. Boner and I took turns throwing darts into the soft of Shovel’s gut. You had to throw them hard enough or they’d just bounce off. He’d wince when a good one stuck him, and he’d also hold his hand over his mouth to muffle a moan. But he could always handle it. After he plucked out the darts needled across his chest and gut, and their small red eyes wept thin trails, he handed them back to us and loosed his belt, shook down his trousers and took off his pants. He revealed his rattail cock which his stubby fingers made look like a stretched length of dough.

A warm rain fell that night, and when a spare blade of lightning cleaved through the room, it illuminated his cock. My body felt like it had ossified. His cock looked flat in that strange no-light, flat in a way that only wet litter could be.

‘Stick me in me prick.’

Boner’s hands were shaking. We’d only ever thrown darts at his stomach. Shovel looked over at us both with our dart-hands hanging tight at our sides. I was young then. Foolish. That was the first time I should’ve known to walk away. Shovel began to plead—began to emulsify that stiffness in our bodies with the dark sort of energy from his words. I did as he told me and threw my darts. Stuck one in his thigh and the other nosed right into his veined shaft.

His scream harped through the burnt-out shop. Almost gave it back some life.

Sometimes I still hear it. Even as I wiped circles on the tiled floor with a bloody sponge, that same animal cry of pleasure and pain catapulted through my mind.

I would never be short of Shovel, that’s what I realised. None of us would be.

And there, dog-arched on hands and knees, I realised that was the second time I should’ve walked away.

Over the downpour came footsteps from the basement. Someone was coming up the stairs.