Animal Kingdom by Stephen Sewell Read Free Book Online Page A

out across the rows of cars, he suddenly had a vision of the way most people lived, and it wasn’t the way he sometimes thought about it, when he thought about it at all: sheepish slavery in little boxes, the way the song used to say. Little boxes, little boxes, all made of ticky tacky . It wasn’t like that at all. It was of quiet dignity and courage in the face of pointlessness. That wasn’t a word that came often to Baz’s mind, but it did just now as he looked across the parking lot. Instead of evoking despair, the way it sometimes does when you’re thinking late at night on your own, it made him feel proud to be a human being. The glint of sunlight on the chrome, the young mothers with their kids going quietly about their business: the ordinary, modest things that fill our lives and give them a touch of brilliance.
    Baz was just about to start the car when he noticed the same plainclothes guys from outside his house threading their way through the car park towards him. Oh, fuck. Here we go , he thought, hoping Pope had got away. Winding the window down as they stepped up, Baz called, ‘Oh, shit, guys, you just missed him.’
    The copper he’d offered the flowers to outside his house just smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, raising his rifle to head height, ‘I like you better.’
    Baz realised he was looking straight down the barrel to hell.
    The cop behind shouted a warning. ‘He’s got a gun!’
    But he didn’t. He didn’t have a gun at all. They threw one in the car afterwards.
    The blast sprayed Baz’s brains across the cabin.
    He was gone.
    People glanced about, not sure what the sound had been. Maybe a backfire. Those who saw quickly turned and hurried away, not wanting to get involved. A kid gawked until his mother yanked him into the four-wheel and took off.
    A car alarm wailed in mournful solitude.
    On the other side of the car park, Pope turned at the sound of the blast. The inside of Baz’s car was red with blood, and you didn’t have to be any closer to see that he wasn’t walking away.
    The cops were standing around chatting like it was just another day.
    And it was. Just another day. Just another day in the inferno. And another mate blown to pieces.

FIVE
    â€˜You spoken to Cath?’ Craig yelped to Smurf as he lurched down the hallway, smashing insensibly into the walls, the news blowing his brain apart.
    Smurf was on the phone, talking to someone else about it, but, seeing the state he was in, she stood, saying, ‘I gotto go, hon …’ Hanging up, she opened her arms to her distraught son. She’d seen it before, the bloodings, but he hadn’t, or had been too young to remember it. The deaths, the terrible deaths that had pockmarked their childhoods. Death is only a phase, Smurf knew—the end of one journey and the beginning of another—but Craig was too young to understand that. If he had seen what she’d seen, and knew what she knew, he’d have been able to handle it better.
    Because she’d seen a lot. Bitter deaths, hard deaths. The deaths of friends, family, innocent kids caught in the crossfire. Deaths brought down on them like fire from above, and others chosen wilfully, sometimes even freely and with courage, the kinds of deaths that men seek.
    And she’d seen beyond death, too. The ghosts who’d visited her, not always in her dreams. There were people she’d sent to hell who’d curse her to her face in the middle of the day, in the middle of a shopping centre, but they didn’t scare her, because she knew her life was justified. And her life was her family. That was her strength, and if Craig had understood that, and heard the Celt in him that said no-one truly dies as long as the family survives, he would have been strong, too.
    All we are are faces of that thing, that spirit, that genius , she’d heard it once described by a fortune teller, that