Brutes, p.17
Brutes, page 17
‘Is it your period?’ I say.
The others gather round to look, too.
Britney winces.
‘Ew,’ she says.
‘What should we do?’ says Christian.
‘Oh, fuck,’ says Sammy. She closes her eyes. Drops of sweat form on her forehead, mixing with the rain.
‘She’s not gonna die, is she?’ says Christian.
‘We shouldn’t have left her,’ I say.
‘That was your idea!’ says Britney.
‘No, it wasn’t!’ says Leila.
‘Does anyone have any water?’ says Isabel.
Hazel starts to cry again.
‘Shut up!’ screams Sammy, and we do, even Hazel.
Sammy jerks.
She reaches down and pulls off her pyjama shorts, and, in a sudden lurch, she springs out of the tent. Her skin cracks from burns as she moves. She sits down on the flattened grass with her knees raised. She rests her chin in the cove between them. She stares at me with a steady cool gaze that I have never forgotten.
‘You look,’ she says. ‘And don’t even think about telling me what it is.’
I do not want to look but I know I have to.
I squint into the tent hammock, into her pyjama shorts.
I expect to see a black and sticky bird, bald and beakless.
I expect the bird that flew into the air when Britney’s dad fell.
I expect it to tell me who the heads on the gate in my dreams are.
I expect it to pluck my heart free and show me the watery slug Leila coughed from the lake.
But it is not a bird.
It is a silly, tiny, baby stone.
It is a pebble.
It is misshapen, and smooth, and coated in blood.
There is nothing special about it.
It is not scary.
It makes me mad.
I spit on it roughly and wipe it with the tent until it is clean, but there is nothing more to say about it or to see.
‘How am I gonna get out of here?’ says Sammy.
I stare at the stone as if daring it to move. I go to put it in my pocket, but Britney stops me, puts it in hers. She fidgets slightly, and I stare at the outline of the stone against her leg, but no one says anything.
‘I don’t want anyone to know,’ says Sammy.
‘I have an idea,’ I say. ‘To distract them.’
I clean Sammy’s pyjama shorts as best as I can in the wet grass but she won’t wear them.
‘You can’t run away with no pants on,’ I say.
Sammy rolls her eyes.
‘I’m not wearing them,’ she says. ‘I’d rather be naked on the Greyhound. I’d rather lie down and die.’
Hazel surprises me by being the first to offer her own shorts.
Sammy watches her suspiciously, but pulls them on.
She does not thank her.
Hazel grimaces as she pulls on Sammy’s bloody ones. She stands with her legs wide apart, but I can see the watery slicks where her thighs rub.
A black snake with yellow hyphens on its back undulates around our feet.
I can hear wings in the grasses, and I think of wasps creeping out of giant ears.
I know we do not have much time.
I tell Hazel to run and bring another pair of our mother’s rhinestone flip-flops. I stuff some cash into Sammy’s hoodie pocket.
‘We’ll distract them,’ I say.
Christian stays with her, so she is not noticeable and alone.
The rest of us fight our way back through the grass.
I clutch the fence to give me a brief shock, and tumble back into the world. The rain has been pushed out from the sky by the sunset.
I run toward the white tent.
The construction site is full of mothers.
They look like women who have been reborn, their faces are bright and dry and smiling.
The air is cool and stunning.
The pink light falls and makes everyone look beautiful.
The walls of the white tent have been rolled up to allow all the women to sit. They ripple out across the boundaries of the tent, across the grass and beams of the construction site. They form a circle. More and more women keep appearing, from between the white walls, the apartments, the highway.
I run toward Sammy’s dad. I know he is the one I can lie to. I cannot look at her crying mother. I know I will tell her the truth if she asks.
He is humped over on the small stage, like a broken angel.
We whisper together in his ears, we fly our little fingers toward the water.
‘One at a time,’ he says, but I know it is best for us to speak together. He only needs to catch a few words.
‘Lake,’ Britney says.
‘Monster,’ Isabel says.
‘Gone swimming,’ I say.
He looks over across the sea of bent and praying heads, toward the bright lake and its huge pink belly.
He shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Please,’ he says.
‘We saw her,’ I say.
I think of Britney’s dad, the squawk of the bird and the blood on the bark.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. We scatter and disappear into the crowd.
I find my mother and lean against her hip.
She strokes my hair, kisses my head. She does not ask where I have been, she does not want to know. I forgive her. I do not want to know her either, not really.
I find the other girls and wait.
The boats arrive quickly. Men descend on the lake with their tools, fishing rods and long spikes baited with chicken carcasses.
The sheriff leads the way, looking proud and dismissive, his time, finally, to shine.
The sky seems to be trying to burn itself out.
Younger girls, little sisters and cousins, bring me offerings, coffee, slurps of beer, french fries. Their little faces are bright with hope, like they expect me to favour them.
I am bored.
I flick a lighter over the little girls’ fingers.
I smoke the cigarette stubs that are scattered round the show home steps and do not share them. I throw the final orange darts through the show home window where the sleeping couple lies dreaming, oblivious, roofless and exposed to the elements.
I resent their lack of shame.
The men in the boats dart and soar across the lake.
I imagine Sammy at the bus station, ascending the steps and disappearing to the back like she used to on the school bus.
I wonder what she sees in the roof.
I imagine the darkness streaming past her window, a distant city laid out before her like a smashed glass of light.
I have been chasing that feeling my whole life.
The beams of the men’s flashlights skate across the lake’s still surface.
The air blurs with the last of the day’s heat, the sun elegantly bowing beneath the lake. I can see every pink particle in the air. Sammy’s dad murmurs into his megaphone.
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
The women repeat his words, they sing it like a song, the words as meaningless as wind.
Britney screams.
We look at her. We gather around to hide her from the mothers. She whacks her thigh, wriggling and writhing. She pulls off her sticky shorts and struggles away from them up the grass, tugging down the hem of her polo shirt to cover herself.
The stone creeps out of her pocket like a slug.
I can see it has tiny teeth.
Britney slaps her thigh, at the round, black bruise blossoming there. I crawl over to her. We spit and swipe and swat at the mark to see if we can rub it off, but it only seems to get darker the more we touch it.
When I look back, the stone is gone, disappeared into the water.
One man on the lake whistles over the women’s where-is-she song.
The whistle is piercing, and it seems to poke holes in the song. I watch him carefully.
He zigzags across the lake, then stops near the shore, close enough that I can see all the details of him even though I do not want to.
He stops whistling.
He yells out to the other boats. Sammy’s dad lowers his megaphone.
The mothers creep closer, they touch our shoulders, stroke our hair. They are silent. Everyone is watching the man in the boat.
Sammy’s mother strides out into the water, her pink t-shirt puddling the surface. She clings to the lake as if she thinks she can hold onto it.
Sammy’s father drops the megaphone to the grass. He closes his eyes.
The whistling man’s arms turn taut.
The other men zoom toward him. They hop into his boat and grab the line. Together they pull up what it is that shakes the black water, that tugs the line and the boat down toward its still and dark room.
The men pull and pull.
I watch the monster rise out of the water, the lake falling from around its body.
It is no monster.
It is a small and oil-dark creature, with growths all along its skin that look like tumours. It looks dead.
‘Should we take the kids inside?’ a mother asks faintly. Mothers grab the littlest ones, cover their eyes and spin them roughly away from the water.
The creature is far too small to contain a girl, but the whistling man seems excited by the capture. He wraps the creature’s jaw in one hand. In the other, he holds a hunting knife up to the last glowing light, and he does not hesitate. He slices a deep cut through the creature’s white belly. A curtain of blood sweeps out into the boat.
‘Don’t look!’ cry the mothers.
The creature looks so small and so dead, but its eyes are still open, still yellow. Close your eyes! I think. Give up! But it stares and stares at the man with the knife.
The man seems to see the eyes, too, because even though the thing was obviously mostly dead when they hauled it out, he continues to stab it until blood runs out in all directions, like the creature is being drained.
The men around him creep quietly back to their boats.
The whistling man is alone with the creature and the knife.
He is covered in waxy blood.
He looks embarrassed, like he does not know what to do with the knife.
Eventually, he drops it.
The creature’s eyes turn the colour of milk.
‘Is it dead?’ asks a little sister.
‘Was that a gator?’ asks a little brother.
‘That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,’ says a sister.
‘Weirder than your face?’ says a brother.
‘That definitely didn’t have any girl in it,’ says a sister.
‘Maybe it had cancer,’ says a brother.
‘It was, like, deformed,’ says a sister.
‘That’s a mean word!’ says a brother.
‘Mommy, is it dead?’ asks the littlest girl again. She starts to cry.
Her mother swoops her up, holds her to her chest.
‘It’s just sleeping,’ her mother says.
Another little girl who is almost as large as me folds her arms.
‘That thing is not sleeping,’ she says.
Another mother threads two hands around the bigger girl’s neck. The girl’s neck is so thin that the mother’s fingers seem to touch at their tips.
‘No way is that thing sleeping,’ the girl says.
‘You hush,’ says the mother. ‘You’ll scare your sister.’
The boats make their way back to shore. Phones begin to ring everywhere. Sammy’s mom and dad fold themselves into the sheriff’s car and it screeches away.
The creature is tossed into the back of a truck bed and covered up with a tarp.
‘Let’s go home,’ say the mothers.
They grab the nearest girl, pulling us by the arms.
I do not move. I shake my arm free.
I stare at the surface of the lake.
‘Say good night,’ say the mothers.
My eyes are heavy but I prise them open with my hands.
‘It’s just sleeping,’ they say.
I watch the water move.
No one else seems to see.
The mothers retreat, the little girls and boys retreat.
They drift past me. They talk about dinner, drinks, sleep, babies, money.
I cannot stand it.
I cannot let them leave.
‘It isn’t sleeping!’ I scream.
And then the lake bursts into flame.
They all turn back to watch.
Curtains of fire rise from the mud that wraps around the lake’s edges. The smell of burning fertiliser is unbearable. We hold our shirts over our noses. No one speaks or screams or even breathes. The flames skate across the sticky surface of the lake. Smoke rises into the air and hovers above the water. It seems like it could blow in any direction, toward us or away, but I am not afraid of the lake anymore.
Sometimes the world deserves a burning.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Emmie Francis, Kendall Storey and everyone at Catapult and Faber for making this book a reality. Thank you to my agent, Harriet Moore, for believing in it since the beginning.
Thank you to Maura Dooley, Jack Underwood and everyone at Goldsmiths for the early support, and to Danny Denton and the Stinging Fly for the encouragement to keep writing. Thank you to the staff at the Fallow Deer, Llewelyn’s and Eat Vietnam, and to the students at Jewellery Quarter Academy. Thank you to Alex.
Thank you to my thirteen-year-old gang: Kelli, Alex, Raquel, Celeste, Carolyn, Carina and Justine. Thank you to Laura and Paige. Thank you to Jon, Livia, Charlie, Emily Rayfield, Emily Cooper, Amy, Molly, Helen, Oscar and Su.
Thanks to my family: Dani, Dom, Dex, Finn, Freya, Emme and Deacon. And thanks especially to my mum and dad.
About the Author
Dizz Tate was born in 1993 in London and grew up in Orlando, Florida. Her short stories have appeared in the Stinging Fly, Dazed, Five Dials and Granta, among others. She won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2018 and in 2020 she was longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Copyright
First published in 2023
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2023
All rights reserved
© Deschaney Tate, 2023
The right of Dizz Tate to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
An extract from ‘The Experiments Lasted Through the Winter’ by Sabrina Orah Marks, from The Babies (2004), is reprinted by kind permission of the publisher, Saturnalia Books
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously
Cover photograph © Lysandra Whitchurch-Bennett/Arcangel
Cover design by Anna Green at Siulen Design
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–37446–5
Dizz Tate, Brutes
