A Small, Bad Thing

by Richard Joel Kay

He'd killed the kid and felt no guilt.

No, that was wrong.

He'd killed the kid and felt a slight pang. He liked Mr. and Mrs. Hubble - The Hubbles - and to kill little Seth had to mean he felt something, something for them if not the boy.

That something was a slight pang. Of regret.

But the kid had to die. There was nothing for it. Malin had lived with the Hubbles for six months and they had been happy months, exciting, dynamic months. And he'd liked Seth; you had to like Seth. That was important.

But in the end he began to get in the way. Malin needed Hubble-trouble and Seth was the manifest candidate. What better way to stir the cauldron, to spank the emotions of these woodentops than to execute the precious fruit of their loins?

He'd flirted - as you flirt - with murder. Child abduction, kiddie killing made for too good copy. It opened all kinds of places he didn't want to visit. It was bad enough you had to watch the obligatory press conference: the desk always inadequate, the police too caring, the deceased - without exception - the happiest, brightest, most popular, kiddiest kiddie in the whole damn bunch.

No. The Hubbles would have to appear on TV (Samantha would cry sensationally, mind, like an abandoned princess; Richard could do stoic, with the sartorial cachet of a sensible pullover). And drag Malin along. And dredge up words like guilt and horror and regret from the lexicon of human grief. The Big Book of Despair. One stuffed bear, an anonymous cascade of empathetic flowers too many.

(How spontaneous was that? How much Sun and Mirror staffers duelling over the extra distance to be just that bit more sympathetic?)

So he'd run Seth down.

It was like that Raymond Carver story he loved so much. The one where the kid gets hit by the car and gets home and just slides away in a coma as his desperate parents fend off the recalcitrant baker. The Bath, they said on Radio Four, but it was called something else in the book.

That was how it was.

Carver's driver didn't count. He (she?) wasn't there to be a character, and that was the role Malin cast for himself. It was the drama of Seth's death, not the accident itself, less still this suburban Tom Ripley white-knuckling the wheel.

He'd hit Seth, who'd got up, trundled off home, and slipped into the requisite unconscious with the good grace of a Sleeping Beauty in baseball boots. Samantha watched and held his piggy fingers and spoke griningly with the prepubescent voice of Mr. Razors, the boy's favoured, flatulently pink rabbit of dubious knitted parentage.

When they cut him open (one whole other dilemma for Richard!) the man in the sea-sick frock and shower-cap would find splintered bone, coiled organs spilling brackish poisons through artery walls. Massive internal injuries.

There would be the usual problems - telling the grandparents, the neighbours, the school.

The school.

Back when when was when it would've solicited playground gossip like a forest fire: Chinese Shouts. Like when he'd been in the juniors and a boy at the Big School tried unsuccessfully one Sunday night to replace a light-bulb while standing, starkers, in a bath-full of soapy water. Just like that. The stories of singed armpit hairs and charcoaled fingernails were issued at the gate as surely as a checkmark in the register. Popping eyeballs by break and into the metaphorical pants in time for dinner.

Now? Not now. Now they'd all be gathered together in the hall for the news. They'd ship in trauma counsellors by the bus-load - aural Prozac - and everyone would be expected to share their experiences. Group-hug.

Mention it in passing, maybe. Like the inquest ("He died from massive internal injuries sustained in collision with an unidentified, white motor vehicle") and let that be an end of it.

Or not mention it at all. After all, it wasn't the point.

Hubble-trouble. Hubble-trouble was the point, not Seth, not the (massive) injuries, and certainly not Mr. and Mrs. Trauma.

And that was it really. You could do it in the blink of an eye, three little words: Three months later...

Split the book into two parts: Before and After Seth. B.S. and A.S.

It was easy and it didn't hurt Seth. Seth was dead. It would hurt his parents and they were the ones needed hurting. Samantha (seldom Sam, never Sammy) stranded Mr. Razors beside the railings of the zebra where his master fell. He made for a great Sun splash. And the Mirror. And the Mail. Seth got to die on a slow news day; a dearth of stories to get righteous about. And what was there to get more righteous about than the willful hit and run of a kid?

Brave little soldier, Mr. Razors got wet, lost an ear, went the slightest shade of queasy grey but never left his post.

Three months later...

It was disappointing. Malin couldn't finish the book.

He'd found that far from the spur to action, Hubble-trouble was Valium to his system, precipitating nothing so much as literary treacle. Everything had gone swimmingly - Richard's pullovers, Seth's holiday, Samantha's affair with a geography teacher - but the boy's death had changed all that. Richard just moped (in a pullover). The affair ground to a bored, inconclusive end across an orange plastic table in McDonalds. Husband and wife were left to stare at game shows on TV (the only thing they found they could agree on) and eat Chinese take-out.

Everything suddenly seemed beset by an almost Thurmanic sense of redundancy.

The only thing to shine a dim light in the murky space between the words on the last fifty or so pages had been Richard's recitation of the platoon from Dad's Army in the order in which the attached thespians died. It became mantric, reported under his breath like a secular prayer to stave off further evils. No terrible thing shall come to pass.

The book atrophied and Malin found himself in front of the self-same game shows, spiced with the odd cookery demonstration, the BBC's new found empathy with nuts and sluts.

"I had my father's love-child." "I carried an alien's baby." "I love the man that raped me."

He missed it the first two times, he realised. Missed the significance, at least. He saw it.

First time, Esther was interviewing a man who had changed sex and fallen in love with his (her) own brother. It wasn't interesting, only freakish: "And what did your mother say when she saw you together like that?"

There was a blur of pink in back of the purring audience. Just there and not there.

And something similar two days later, just when the writer had decided something needed doing and was washing the last five days of mugs and plates in lukewarm water because he'd forgotten to switch the boiler on in time. The way the needle-strings of spaghetti floated there, too white, too fat, made him nauseous.

He glanced over during Top Of The Pops, just snatching at a blur that whisked between the too-short-skirted girls cutting an enthusiastic rug to something they called Boyzone. He liked the song. It was a good song.

Pink. Smear. Gone.

Having done the washing-up, having straightened the place. Having sorted the magazines on the floor into some semblance of an order in which he wouldn't read them. Emptied the bin. Even borrowed a hoover from next door and run it round the flat...time for a video.

The film he brought back wasn't what he wanted, even if wasn't sure what it was he wanted. He didn't want a comedy, unless it was Woody Allen:

"Would Allen what?"

"Woody. Woody Allen. Short. Glasses. Funny."

"Forrest Gump's good."

"No it isn't."

What he didn't want was romance. Or any one of a hundred other categories the place was thoughtfully subdivided into; a veritable Rolodex of world cinema. He ended up with Interview With The Vampire and only later did he begin to appreciate why the box carried enthusiastic quotes solely from Smash Hits and The News of the World. Obvious, he decided - Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt could cause undisclosed stirrings in any teeny libido, enough to cover-up for the fact that the latter did wooden like the New Forest.

And yet there it was. There he was.

It was a scene where the little girl-vampire (for Malin, best thing in the film) revealed a fetid corpse under the pile of dolls on her bed. As she threw them aside - creepy porcelain-faced things, lacy things - there was Mr. Razors.

Okay, so Malin had barely seen Mr. Razors. Mr. Razors existed next door under an assumed name. But he knew what Mr. Razors looked like at three miles per hour.

And he was looking at him right now.

He rewound the tape, no longer concerned with this tawdry tale of immortality, eternal melancholy and dodgy tresses. And there was the lop-sided countenance of Mr. Razors in the girl's hand.

Rewind.

Mr. Razors.

Rewind.

Mr. Razors.

He paused. Ran it back. Ran forward.

The tape beneath the heads would start to resemble the interview scene in a thousand copies of Basic Instinct if he persisted.

There was a clumsy clonk on his door and Malin let Mr. Razors in.

It made some sense. Serendipitous. When he opened the door, the knitted rabbit sat there almost apologetically, like a new neighbour enquiring after a cup of sugar. He heard a door down the hallway close with a corpsey gasp.

Why the twins chose his door as bunny-target, Malin could only guess. Were his neighbours all in receipt of their very own designated toy? Was wheeling the troublesome two down this corridor like a postman on his rounds? Usually their mother was picking Mr. Razors off the mat as he opened the door, arching her eyebrows in exasperation: "Sorry about this, Mr. Malin," she'd purr like a member of Boyzone.

Full complement of ears, eye-strainingly pink, Mr. Razors sat atop the TV where he was making his Hollywood debut. They were twins for the briefest of whiles until the video clacked itself off. Malin didn't look again because he knew the rabbit wouldn't be there again.

And besides, Seth was on the news.

As the vampires went to a late grave, there was a serious-tied Jeremy Paxman with late-breaking news. An internal passenger flight had crashed on take-off from Washington: coughing a few feet off the ground before planing through a crowded commuter bridge and plunging into the frozen river beyond. Three hundred passengers aboard, a handful pulled from the wreckage, Stilton-blue with the cold.

It was a live feed, the cameraman jerking the picture front and centre to hold the yellow-jacketed body of the small boy being heaved from beneath still waters. Malin thought he saw others - faces, desperate fists - pressed like a confused procession of window-shoppers to the underside of the ice. Nothing moved in the white silence.

The boy was dead.

Seth was dead.

He could hear cries against the train-rush of wind; a woman on the opposite bank. It was obviously a woman despite the fuzzing picture, the polar bear-ruff, searchlights refracting snowflakes off the lens. Her screams fell like huge building blocks.

But the boy was still Seth. No one knew Seth as well as Malin, not even his own parents. He was Malin's child if he was anyone's. Samantha and Richard were foster parents, his adopted parents. Malin was mother, father, executioner. He knew the boy - as close to a son as he was going to get - as he'd described him in the pages of the book. He knew the waxy yellow plastic of that jacket, the one he hated wearing with shorts because it made him look as though he'd forgotten his trousers and always imagined people laughed as he passed. Malin knew these things, things not in the book.

Malin wondered why they might show stuff like this on TV. There would be complaints - retired school teachers from Chelmsford, earnest young women in spectacles and Social Services. The Right To Reply phones would be ringing hot.

He turned over.

The prunic features of Barry Norman talked-up the tragedy that was the British film industry. Again. The only tragedy Malin saw was continuing to pretend that there was an indigenous film industry.

They were courting some fustid text for the cameras at a Buckinghamshire manor. An Emma Thompson frown and gown epic. Seth stood out like the proverbial in this dowdy heritage crowd.

Channel 4 was under siege from Camilla Paglia.

Malin had seen enough of seeing things, killed the TV and retired to the safety of his bed. He would have to start making decisions on his book if he was to stave off bankruptcy and his publisher. Now his mind was obviously intent on having its own say. Pleonasm. He could sing himself to sleep with the possibilities.

Despite the lethargy (or perhaps because of it) Malin's unconscious was anointed with a night's dreams in a concise fifty-seven minutes. Malin dreamed early and often, his mind never decelerating as efficiently as his body.

The rabbit had to go.

He couldn't rest with that thing crouching - a fat pink Golem - on his SONY. By nothing other than being he felt Mr. Razors' presence like CCTV in a shopping centre. He felt watched.

Malin stumbled into the other room stupid with sleep, seized the vulgar knick-knack and pitched it into the hall. Mr. Razors tumbled end over end, ears flattening over his eyes as though to postpone the inevitable collision. He hit the wall with a soft pink bomp.

The twins would find him in the morning. They had a sixth sense for that sort of thing, baby birds for their regurgitative Irish mother.

Malin found sleep came easy after, even if that sleep was peppered with pink rabbits and downed airliners; and the twins in a twiggy nest feathered by their anxious mother. Vivid snowflakes burnt off the newscamera of his unconscious with Arctic quiet.

The air crash had failed to make his copy of The Guardian next morning. Too late. Next day. Instead there was something about EC fishing quotas. The big important stories no one ever read, less actually understood.

There was a picture though. Tony Blair visiting a school, photo opportunities with kiddies, helping them with their maths, telling them how good their paintings were, then asking what exactly that puce and banana blob on the far left was.

Seth was in the background, but he was there. He looked bored. He would be bored. He was too old by at least two years. He'd outgrown these sums, this Daliesque artistry. If he was to paint his mother now (and wasn't that always a puce and banana mother?) then it would at least assume the semblance of humanity.

But then Seth was of an age where he wouldn't be painting his parents again for a long time.

Why had they let him keep the mac in class? Tell him to take the mac off.

He tore out the picture, set it aflame in the kitchen sink. The smokey-black troglodytic Rorschach it left would take weeks to scrub away.

He read on the next page about a concert in London, about deciding to travel to the North Pole and not being able to get there. Ten-miles from the airstrip...

The prize went to 16 year-old Seth Hubble from London. His program, randomly mapping the life cycle of a bee hive, was praised by the judges for its ingenuity, attention to detail, and above all, humour.

The first story.

The triple jump silver was awarded to newcomer Seth Hubble of the Greenwich Harriers, making his international debut.

That was on the sports pages, inevitably. Malin found it because he was looking. Ordinarily he would be pinned to a banyan tree with an assagai before he'd read sports pages.

In the tabloid section, sandwiched (unenviably) between A.S. Byatt and three new Tarantino biographies, he found an interview with the author called Seth Hubble. This balding head had written a novel about a woman who pens letters to angels and one day gets a reply.

For Malin (never yet interviewed by The Guardian) the author sounded pretentious - verisimilitude was one of those words you often read, seldom understood - or naive. Did he believe in angels?

It wasn't a matter of saying yes or no to a question like that; everything is a question of degree of belief.

Malin had to lay down after that one.

When he awoke he realised the electricity to the flat must have been off.

The clock beside the bed was blinking - ON/OFF. He must put another battery in it. It had lost time. Not some time, all time. Like when you switch on a new piece of electronics: 12:00 on/off.

He would have to take the vampires back some time soon.

Make a note. Perhaps he should finish it first? But he didn't fancy knowing more. He cared less about how it resolved.

These were not real people, their problems and foibles didn't exist.

And besides, a sequel was inevitable.

Malin wasn't sure he cared for fictional people any longer, which was an admission for a writer, he supposed.

The video blinked on/off in the other room. He ejected the cassette and replaced it in its ACE VIDEO clam-shell.

The PLEASE REWIND sticker glared at him, accusative. It said please, it was request not an order. What could they do, club him to death? Take it as a review of their picture.

He dropped the cassette on the table near the door. It would remind him.

The word processor hummed as rhythmically as a corpse. Malin was sure that with all that modern technology - if you could fire phallic probes through the pliant atmospheric flesh of Jupiter; if you could microwave a mini-pizza in less time than it took to assassinate a President - then you sure as hell could stop a fucking word processor humming.

The sentence he'd just typed was too long. He knew he was susceptible, but in the quiescent light of the room he used for an office he was glad to have entered anything even vaguely cognisant.

He'd spent all day fossicking around in the guts of his novel to bring Seth Hubble back to life. Like a beneficent Messiah, he would lay on hands and watch as little Seth rose from the ranks of the corpsists. He walks! He talks! "It was touch and go there for a while, Mrs. Hubble, but I think Seth is going to be alright."

In truth Malin felt less like Jesus. He was Frankenstein, bolting entrailing texts here, rewiring limbs severed off the back of old sentences there, dropping heavy adverbs and metaphors like so much make-up in the cracks on Barbara Cartland's face. But, in the end, job done, a final burst of electrical vim from his sizzling RAM and the patchwork boy lived!

Surrounded by the detritus of surgery he scented victory in his nostrils.

Samantha was just grateful, Richard half-way to the wool shop for a new pullover - JESUS SAVES! - before Malin blocked his way. He wasn't about to let anyone get religion.

It was almost dark outside when he punched a final save into the keyboard and powered down.

It wasn't great but it was good. He knew what his editor would say when she saw it, but it really had been touch and go, Mrs. Hubble. And by the skin of his teeth Malin had pulled back from the abyss. They could knock it into shape after, at the post mortem, when they weighed the disembodied brain. Hubble-trouble was the kid almost dying. Mr. Razors got to sit by his master's bed, monitoring machines that went ping more regularly than a Chinese telephone directory.

The horror brought Samantha back from her affair. And as if to underline the fact, Malin had had the geography teacher arrested for taking pictures of underage boys in the changing rooms at work.

Seth opened his eyes and asked for Mr. Razors. Not a dry eye in the house.

It was too late to take the video back. They'd charge him two night rental, regardless. They would delight in a two night rental. And besides, he felt better about fiction again. Fictional people could be good people. Even vampires. Even Tom Cruise. And no one made themselves up as surely as Mr. Kidman.

He cracked the eye-scorching yellow shell and slid the tape back inside the Lynchian-abdomen of the machine. The up-front clock angrily flashed 12:00.

"It's bust."

"It's not bust."

"It is."

"It's not bust. It's broken."

"You said it was bust."

"Well, that doesn't mean you should."

"But you said -"

"That's enough, Seth."

The canvas was black and white, that monochrome whose deep fringes betray it doesn't need to be. The three of them were silhouetted, one of the adults crouching, the boy standing at his shoulder. The bulb, the standard on its side, fizzed and cracked like a Flash Gordon rocket-ship. It strobed, the set radiating into the room beyond, ping-ponging off walls.

It reminded Malin of a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, all that isolated light making him nauseous.

"Who did it?" that was Seth's mother, that was Samantha.

"I don't know." Richard. "I just found it. Thought we'd had buglers or something. Odd buggers if all they do is knock over lamps. Seth was with me," he added quickly, as though to absolve his son before anyone even moved to suggest...

Seth said: "I know who it was,"

The trio turned en masse to face down their author, faces bleached in the strobing. Ghosts on/off in the murk. Eyes like...

Like? Malin couldn't think like what. Like...mines? black holes? piss holes in snow? Or just eyes?

"He did it. He does everything. Everything is what he does," Seth said, and pointed accusatively.

"Seth didn't knock the lamp over," his father said, face reddening now like his pullover. "Seth was in the car with me. I had to pick him up from the morgue. They buried him and all, and suddenly some YTS youth is on the phone telling you he's ready, like Chinese take-away."

"Or a new pullover."

"Or a new pullover, yes. And what is it with these, eh? Pullover, pullover, fucking pullover. Is that characterisation? That's not characterisation. It's a bloody disgrace, is what. Don't give anyone a personality when you can just stutter and tic."

Malin had never seen Richard as angry. Richard didn't do angry. He did stoic.

Seth just sat and grinned. A zephyr of resentment blew through. Malin was beginning to wish he's left him for dead. Left him on the slab. That he could get behind the wheel again and do the job properly.

"Fucking pullovers. Not even a jumper. No, a fucking pullover. Even a fucking tank-top'd be a change."

"Calm down. You'll have a heart attack. Blood pressure, don't forget. He gave it you, but you're one must be careful."

"That'd be about right."

"You're angry. We all are. I'm angry about Seth too. And about Tim."

Her husband's eyes flared, fixing his wife. "Tim? Who Tim?"

"I...we should..."

"You don't mean...No. Tim? Seth's Tim? The bloody teacher? Pervert Tim. What about him?"

Malin thought he heard the penny drop. It sounded long and deep.

"You were fucking him? You were fucking that bloody pervert weren't you? That's why you weren't here when Seth had his accident. He had you fucking that pervert, didn't he? Didn't you?"

His wife nodded regretfully.

"You really are a bastard."

Malin took time to realise he was being addressed from the screen.

"You really are a...was he doing that then? The pictures?"

"No...I just thought..."

"I bet he was. I bet you loved it. Would he get one of Seth with his pants down and off fuck the mother in the woods? Or did they get to do it here? In my bed? Was that your plot? Was it suspense? Shit me."

Samantha was crying; Richard raging.

This was all wrong. He couldn't have budgeted for this. It was the other way around, it had to be because he'd said it was. Richard was to slip back into his shell, like a tortoise inside his pullover. His wife would be the recalcitrant one. From her Malin would've expected something, something more ... gorgonic. Not this. Not tears, at least.

And Seth was between the two and he was laughing. Oh, he was laughing. Seth was a pleasant little boy, but a sullen little boy. One seldom given over to hysterics, and yet hysteria gripped him. And was laughing at Malin.

His parents just watched their son with neither understanding nor horror; just watched their newly revived son.

There was a bang on the door. Hard, pink sound.

This was the Mr. Razors of all those front-pages. This was the Mr. Razors that Malin had expected. He was missing an ear, and what was once soft pink wool given over to a sickly grey frosting, glimpses here and there of former glories about the glassy eyes, under arms.

Malin could see the eyes more clearly now. They were as big - bigger - than his own. He could look directly into them without stooping. Their inky hemispheres told him nothing about what remained inside, reflecting back Malin and the clawing paw. The author was reassured to see Seth's grasp on the nomenclature of stuffed toys had a pleasingly literal quality.

Author and freelance Richard Joel Kay was born in New York but has lived in the UK for the past 12 years. He writes for a variety of magazines on film and music and had his first collection of short stories - Cold Blue Afternoons - published in the UK and US by The Unveil Press in 1999. He is currently completing his debut novel - The Cockfighter - for publication in 2001.