Dead Scared

West Wales, twenty-three years earlier

‘HUMPTY DUMPTY SAT on a wall.’

The boy flopped down the stairs, scratching his head, his armpit, his arse, in the usual way of teenage boys fresh out of bed.

‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.’

His overlong jeans slapped on the polished wooden boards of the downstairs hall. The tall old clock by the front door told him it was somewhere between half past eleven and twenty to twelve in the morning. It couldn’t be relied upon any more accurately than that. He vaguely remembered Mum saying something about going on to campus for a meeting; Dad would be in his study. His three-year-old sister was somewhere close, if the warbling was anything to go by. She’d want him to play fairies again. The latest craze. To dance round the garden and build fairy dens under trees.

‘Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall.’

She hadn’t quite got it yet.

The boy stopped outside Dad’s study door and sniffed the air. Stale coffee? Normal. Well-done toast? Normal. The loo his sister had forgotten to flush? Normal. Gunpowder? No, not normal.

A year ago, when he was twelve, his father had started taking him out shooting and his mother always complained that they brought the harsh cordite smell indoors with them. Not cordite, Dad had corrected her, cordite hasn’t been used since the Second World War. Gunpowder is what we smell of.

But Dad hadn’t used his guns for six months now. ‘I don’t want your father taking you shooting until he feels better,’ Mum had said. And so the guns were locked away in a secure cabinet in the study and the boy had no idea where the key was kept. ‘Guns and teenage boys don’t mix,’ his mother reminded him regularly.

‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.’

His sister was in the study. The boy pushed open the door, stepped inside and saw what was left of his father.