The only undamaged item in my flat came as a surprise. I had a telephone and it was in one piece. During my searching I was so intent on finding money and drugs, I hadn't noticed it. It was a slightly depressing discovery. If I hadn't noticed this searching my flat then what else was slipping through my vision filter? I might be looking straight at my stash and not seeing it.
The telephone cable hadn't even been wrenched from the wall. This was the real surprise. I'd expected Harry's henchmen to prevent me from ringing anybody. Then I started to think perhaps the phone was connected with a purpose in mind. Had they tapped in another line and were listening in from one of the other flats? I was getting too paranoid for my own good. I knew they may be devious, but not that smart. I hoped!
I didn't discover my telephone, it discovered me. Startled by the loud ringing I threw myself to the floor and rolled over into a defensive position behind the sofa. Loud noise was now associated with Hartley Sparrow and the back of the settee offered some protection from Millicent's venom. I had a feeling it might be Vicky. Only one second later I was hoping it was her mother. I was wrong on both counts.
The voice on the telephone came as a surprise. It was my mother Iris. I don't know how long it had been since we'd talked. For all I knew we may have argued bitterly only days before, or not spoken in an age. I was totally unaware of the current dynamic. We might have baked cakes last week, laughing and joking happily together. What did I know?
I didn't have time to think let alone speak. She'd already started. “Peter, come quickly to the old farm cottage. Something terrible has happened to the aunties,”
“What is it, mum? What's wrong with the aunties?” I replied, thinking not much could possibly happen to those old harridans. They were made of stainless steel after all.
“Just come to the cottage now! Right now! Don't waste any time!” were the final words before she hung up. The whole conversation had taken less than twenty seconds giving me no chance to think of anything. What did this mean? The silence ringing in my ears was deafening to the point of leaving me dazed. I think I stood still for some seconds pondering my mother's words. I snapped into action.
Once on the move I didn't waste any time and was through the door towards the street before I had time to fret about Double-Barrelled Dave waiting in hiding for me. My car was a ruin, so I started running down the road and stuck my thumb out hoping against hope for a lift. I was running on adrenaline because my mother had sounded frantic.
For once during this grey miserable Sunday the rain had stopped, and to my knowledge I wasn't being watched. My luck improved further when I saw another minicab, a rather tatty Austin 1300 in a sort of vile dark green colour with a grey front wing replacing either rust or accident damage. Minicabs are not supposed to stop when hailed by the public, you ring up the office and arrange the pickup. This guy stopped at the merest hand gesture from me. The negotiation was quite abrupt. I asked him how much money he wanted to drive me out to the farm. He said normally it was whatever, but because he'd stopped illegally it was double. I paid him anyway.
I arrived at the farm in a matter of minutes, paid the man, didn't tip him, and was greeted at the main gate by Jane who was giving me a rather strange look. You'll start to understand when I tell you what happened next. Without any further ado we rushed up the path past the new farmhouse and down onto the old lane. This led us the extra quarter a mile to the old farm cottages which originally had housed three families, and after a conversion in the early part of the century one family in cramped conditions. Now after a second restoration it was a rather cosy lair for my two widowed aunties.
Tonight it was a fortress and not the cosy quiet little cottage I'd come to know and avoid as a boy. It was like an enchanted cottage in some Grimm fairytale. You couldn't approach it without being seen, and once seen the disgruntled dragon aunties would pounce with barbed criticism. There was no escape from the tongue lashing no matter how hard you tried. Innocence was tried, it failed, and cuteness was used by my sister, which failed. When an old relation died of influenza I wondered if we could buy some for the aunties. I was only four.
About one hundred yards from the cottage Jane and I were startled by my mother jumping out of the dense shrubbery that lined the drive approaching the cottage. She was waving both arms, grabbing at us, preventing us from going any further, and she looked very scared. “We can't go any nearer! The aunties have gone insane, quite mad, and violent!” My mother said.
“What?”
“Aunt Violet is dug in with a twelve-bore shotgun. She keeps taking pot-shots at anything that moves. I keep shouting it's me, but she seems to think Beatrix is holding me hostage, using me as bait to lure her out and make the kill. I think if the three of us talk to her we could persuade Violet to surrender.” I was baffled.
All three of us were hiding behind a thick rhododendron bush. This was far enough away and thick enough to stop the shotgun pellets, but also near enough to be heard. Each of us in turn tried to persuade Violet she was safe and we weren't trying to flush her out to murder her.
At first she was having none of this. Then we pointed out that Auntie Beatrix was nowhere near the cottage because everyone could hear sporadic bangs coming from down near the old copse. Violet began to believe she was no longer under threat. After four or five minutes of persuasion a white head appeared above the sofa wedged across an open front door, a floral patterned barricade and her firing position.
Auntie Violet, at my mother's request, laid her weapon on the settee, and came out of the house straight towards us. She was difficult to see in the darkness with her usual bleak, dark clothes. At that moment we didn't know the significance of the black clothes, but we were to discover for ourselves why Violet had been dug in behind the sofa. Beatrix had been blazing away with her favourite shotgun at her favourite ally in torture â her sister. It was quite inexplicable.
When Violet had settled down to a level where she was coherent, my mother ushered her off down the lane away from the gunshots towards the new farmhouse where sanctuary beckoned. My mother had retrieved the shotgun from the settee in the cottage, and I did notice she'd picked up all the spare cartridges. She wasn't going to be too cavalier with Beattie running around wild. Jane and I were left without any form of protection during our quest to discover what was eating into my large auntie. She wasn't going to be too hard to find firing both barrels in quick succession. As fast as any experienced hunter out looking for pheasant, her reloading was astonishing. The gun fired with two quick reports, only seconds passing before more shots.
We had secured flashlights from inside the cottage. The aunties always have them handy for the power cuts, though I can't remember there ever being one. They were still living in the World War II black out. We used the flashlight only when necessary for guidance. A beam of light would be an ideal target for Beatrix, but why Auntie Violet had been targeted we had no idea. Beattie was now paying attention to something else. My sister seemed to think I was responsible for this madness, and until the situation became clear I didn't understand why.
Jane had already glimpsed Beattie in action. She'd received the first emergency call from my mother, and I was only called later after this strange situation had spiralled out of control. It started when my mother received the hysterical phone call from Violet. At first she thought it was an exaggeration. After two large bangs the phone was dropped and background screaming persuaded her otherwise. She knew something strange and dangerous was happening.
As Jane and I arrived at the copse the clouds were breaking apart. It was almost a full moon, you could see quite clearly and there before us stood a sight no young man should ever be witness to. It was far worse than any werewolf movie, far worse than any other type of horror movie, and even Hollywood couldn't construct a monster so fearsome. This was my auntie out exploring free-form hunting!
She was, for all intents and purposes, trying to kill off every crow in the world. She hated crows, she had always hated crows. She found their sombre noises made in the winter depressing and loathed the amount of damage she claimed they did to the crops. I wasn't too sure they did much damage however Beatrix hated crows, black crows.
What she was doing was plain and simple. She was trying to kill them all with her shotgun. How she was attempting this was a sight for other people's sore eyes. She was dressed in wellingtons, and around her shoulder she wore an enormously proportioned canvas bag. At the beginning of this madness it had been crammed full of cartridges. The number of cartridges in her possession had diminished by a considerable amount. Judging by the rapidity of the shots she was now probably down to her last thirty. If we waited long enough she would run out of ammunition, but in the meantime the rest of her dress code begs to be explained.
Can you imagine a fully grown rhino in a wildlife documentary with all the pictures taken from behind, but in the case of this rhino it would be coloured pink, and be the fattest rhino you'd ever seen. Auntie Beattie was wearing what she was born in, but this suit of skin had grown blotchy, veined and to enormous proportions. She was shooting alfresco, naked apart from the bag and wellingtons.
Even more shocking was her language. Every single time she pulled the trigger, or thought she saw a bird, there would be swearing, always a four letter word or a derivative. So the hunting party was carried out with a soundtrack something like this: bang! “C..t”. Bang! “F..kers”. Bang! “C.. ts”, and so on. She was a one-man, or shall I say one-woman killing machine. It was perfect synergy between cordite and Tourette's syndrome.
I told my sister to go back to the cottage and get a large blanket. I knew she would eventually stop shooting. I thought she was crazy with drink. Too much sweet sherry had finally tipped her into alcohol-induced insanity. I was slightly off the mark with that one, wrong about the drink as events would prove. My sister had returned with two large blankets. My auntie remained in the copse blazing away into the darkness with her cordite-fuelled Tourette's at full steam.
I don't know if the shotgun was scary, or all those mottled acres of nakedness. If it hadn't been so insane the whole montage would have been quite amusing. My sister, to her later shame, started a fit of giggling. I felt like roaring with laughter, prudence being the better part of valour in this particular case. My auntie may have heard us and interpreted laughter as being taunted by more f..king crows! We may have died of belly laughs.
After about ten more minutes of wild anti-crow rage Beattie finally ran out of cartridges. She continued the fight by grabbing the barrel of the gun which must've been incredibly hot. It was hefted with both hands to be used as a wooden ended club. After a few fruitless swings she slung it up into a tree in a last attempt to kill one last black crow. The swearing was unabated throughout the shooting and into the club wielding phase. Now she was unarmed and impotent. She let out one last cry finishing with, “You're all fucking cunts! I'll see you all dead you cunts!”
Beatrix slumped to the floor as if somebody had pulled the air plug out of a blow-up figure. She visibly started to sag at the end of the ammunition, and with the gun now somewhere deep in the undergrowth of the copse she was in meltdown. That's what it looked like. First she was on her knees then she flopped forward onto the wet grass and proceeded to do what appeared to be the breaststroke. She was moving in a casual breaststroke style, looking around as if enjoying a swim in some warm and pleasant ocean.
We didn't dare to approach this strange apparition. We were starting to think she was in some kind of deep trance or sleepwalking. Waking her might be fatal. After stroking casually across this imagined bay for a few minutes she tired deciding to float for a while. Rolling onto her back with arms behind her head produced the most flagrant display of huge breasts and body hair I've ever witnessed in my life. It was an overt exhibition that would last the most voyeuristic lover of the flesh many lifetimes. It was the Eldorado of skin, the Fort Knox of mottled heavy flesh.
Later in my life I was once witness to a terrible accident, unfortunate enough to be the person to cover the body of the victim. He was completely mangled, a horrible grotesque mess.. Two of us covered him up. Both of us did this by looking out of the corner of our eyes, just on the edge of peripheral vision. Similar to when you see a squashed animal on the road, you don't look directly at it but steer round it using peripheral vision. It was this method Jane and I used with Auntie Beattie. We sidled up to her both looking the other way, so on the limit of our peripheral vision she was just a pink blob, a big pink blob, but a pink blob nevertheless! We finally had the prostrate auntie wrapped in a blanket. She didn't seem to have any violence left in her until she saw my sister who was wearing her leather jacket.
“My, you're big! You must be the king of the crows. Die!” Beattie said, lunging forward towards Jane hefting one of her large, very fleshy arms. Her fist contacted Jane's jaw with an amazing accuracy for a woman who had all the appearance of total exhaustion. She connected right in the sweet spot that boxers aimed for. Jane was lying stunned and semiconscious in the wet grass. My auntie, with a gleam in her eyes, shouted, “I've killed the king, I've killed the f.. king king!” Then she appeared to pass out. The night was very quiet at last.
I tended to my sister for a couple of minutes until she started to come round, rather dazed and angry in the extreme. Whether this was because she'd been caught by the punch or with me I wasn't sure. I wrapped my sister in a blanket, telling her not to move from the spot and to remain vigilant watching the sleeping Beattie. “Don't open your blanket to reveal what you're wearing underneath. She may rear up again like a cobra.” My auntie would never let sleeping dogs lie. She would use the last of her strength to make her point.