MRS McSORLEY AIN’T SIX FEET UNDER
By Richard Kerr
Copyright 2011 Richard Kerr
Smashwords Edition
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Discover other works by the author on Smashwords.com
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Mrs McSorley Ain’t Six Feet Under
I was in the supermarket with my flatmate. We were having a party at our place that night and we had to stock up on tortilla chips, hummus and all that crap. We were just wondering about whether to buy guacamole or to bother making it because ready-made was so expensive. I’d known my flatmate since we were kids.
“I saw Laura Barnacle the other day,” he said. “Haven’t seen her since we were so high! Remember her from all those years ago? I always thought she was a bit of a lezzer but she’s married with kids. Not bad looking either.”
“She was a tomboy.” I wanted the subject to change.
“Remember all that shit with you and her and… and what was his name? Tom McSorley! Did he really dig up his mother?”
That was the official version of the story. It ought to have ended there but we were standing near some supermarket guy stacking the shelves. He looked up.
“You knew a Tom McSorley?”
“I’m sure there’s more than one in the world,” I said politely.
“Yeah, but the one I knew also said something weird about his mother.”
This guy was clearly an ex-con. For some reason they stick out from amongst the ranks of other shelf stackers. I always feel really dumb asking these guys for help when I can’t find something. It’s probably because the things that are hard to find are those middle class foods they wouldn’t have had in prison, like balsamic vinegar. I feel such a posh twat asking, “Excuse me, but could you tell me where the rice cakes are?” Worried that I was becoming a snob I actually tried to break down a few barriers and I did, indeed, ask one for the location of rice cakes. To my horror he actually walked with me to find them. He brought me to the rice. It turns out that rice cakes are with the crackers, as any employee ought to know. I didn’t want rice. Yet there he was being helpful and decent. In the free world, outside the big house, if you’re nice to someone they’re nice back to you. I was not going to shatter that illusion so I put some rice into my basket. I could have said, “rice cakes,” and he would probably be picking my teeth out of his knuckles.
My flatmate lacked these subtleties. “The Tom McSorley we knew probably ended up in prison.”
“Yeah,” said the supermarket guy. “He did.”
Suddenly, and completely unwanted, I was thinking of Laura and me as kids.
“Here, come-on. Let’s go get an ice-cream,” she’d say hanging around my front door.
“Ah, I’m meant do be doing my homework.”
“Homework can wait, the ice-cream man won’t. Com’on.”
Or she’d say. “I’ve got my dad’s spade. We’ll go to the field and dig some holes.”
“Why do you want to dig holes?”
“Cause it’s fun. Get your coat.”
I have a vivid memory of her daring me to stick a twig up a dead cat’s ass. I had to do it. She gave me no choice.
On a dry day she’d tell me to get my bike because we were going to ride through the forest. This was good thing to do and I didn’t feel I was being hassled taking her up on the idea. She could, if she told you to do something you actually liked, make it sound she was your best friend doing you a favour. I heard someone, recently; say she’d more life in her than all the boys in the neighbourhood put together. She was bossy, but not a bully. She probably just couldn’t stand wishy-washy people. In my own defence I have to say that I knew her around that age when girls are, for a few years, taller than boys and had just as many muscles.
One time Laura and I were cycling through the forest. There were many hilly, uneven paths through the trees. Some took you to dark, quiet bits. Some took you along the river. Some led to the car park and picnic site. Some led to pretty dank and marshy bits. That’s the route Laura chose today. We ground our tyres into the dirt in the effort to get up the hills. We free-wheeled downhill, over roots and stones, with our legs sticking out. We hollered to break the stillness and whooped to frighten the birds out of the trees. And sometimes we skidded and crashed or, as in this case, ended up with a front tyre stuck in some marsh. I managed to hit the breaks in time. The ground was soft muck but the long grass gave me a base to plant my feet. Still in the saddle, and on tip-toes, I back-tracked on to the path. Laura had already made it to the top of the next rise but when she realised I was in trouble she turned back to help. She wasn’t always thoughtless.
I stood my bike upside down to clean grass and twigs from front axle and spokes. I was too absorbed to notice what Laura was doing. Then I heard her say, in a low voice, “What... the... frig...” That was the worst swear word we knew. I looked up and saw Laura had stepped a few feet onto the muck. She’d carefully chosen tufts of grass to stand on. Beyond the grass was a marshy pond covered in duck-weed. There was something else, and Laura was staring at it. I left my bike and carefully made my way to stand beside her.
I saw, in the pond, a woman staring face up. She was dressed in good Sunday clothes and her pearl necklace was floating and waving in the water. It was Mrs McSorley. She’d died about a week ago and had been buried a few days later. She wasn’t a person we saw often but it was definitely her. Tom McSorley was in our class. He was broad, strong and angry. He was the typical stupid school bully in every way. Outside of school he did things which we’d never heard anyone else do; like start fires and steal motorbikes. The teachers seemed to give him some leeway since his mother was always seriously ill. He had no dad and was mostly brought up by his two, much older, brothers. Both of them, at some point, had done a small stretch in prison.
I remember my mother gossiping with her friend about Mrs McSorley. “I think this’ll be her last time in hospital,” she’d said, shaking her head. Sure enough, within a few days, Tom McSorley was taken out of class by the headmaster. We hadn’t seen him since. That was a week ago and I know she’d been buried because my mother saw a notice in the back of the local paper and mentioned it to my dad. My dad, who I now know was a weak and cynical man, just wondered who’d bother to show up at the funeral. That started an ugly conversation so that’s why I clearly remember she had a funeral.
“What’s she doing here?” I asked.
“Nothing much by the looks of it,” said Laura, displaying no imagination.
“We have to tell the police.”
“Why?” Laura demanded.
“Because we have too.”
“And tell them what? Let’s get back.” She trod back to the bikes.
We cycled slowly, side by side. Laura conjured up scenarios where I was telling my parents about what we’d seen.
“... then your dad would say, ‘Don’t be stupid’. And, ‘Stop telling lies.’”
I tried to imagine parents taking me seriously but Laura kept on at me.
“‘The poor woman is six foot under the earth. Don’t tell such mean, nasty stories’, they’d say.”
“But what if,” I protested, “we just say we saw a body.”
“What if we can’t find it again? We’re going to look really stupid.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I’m thinking on that one.”
After we had left the woods and hit civilisation again I had nothing more to say. The way back was quiet. I don’t know what Laura did the rest of the day.
My parents were even wondering why I wasn’t speaking at dinner. My little brother was, as always, being a pest. He had decided today that carrots were puke. No amount of considered logic made any impact. Obvious statements like, “But you ate them all just three nights ago,” were like water off a duck’s back. I was glad, for once, that he was getting all the attention. I just let his yammering flow around me. But even this was picked upon.
“Are you feeling well?” my mother asked. Which just goes to show - you can’t win against your parents. If I’d told my brother to shut up I’d have gotten it in the ear for arguing. Yet, when I let it slide, I get it for not saying anything.
“I’m fine. I just don’t want to be a part of this. See, I’m eating all my carrots.”
“Well,” my father said, unsure. “That’s very grown up of you.”
“Were you out today with Laura?” mum asked.
I nodded.
“Where did you go?”
“Just around on the bikes.”
“You didn’t set fire to anything?”
“Anne!” my dad protested. “What kind of question is that?”
“Well sometimes I don’t think that girl is all there.”
“She’s my friend,” I said, surly.
“Honey,” my mum began in that patronising voice that all parents fail to see as phoney and annoying. “Perhaps you should play with boys more often.”
“Yeah,” dad agreed, smirking. “They’re safer.”
“I do play with boys,” I replied, quietly.
My little brother had been so rapt in our argument he’d eaten half his carrots without realising.
I was watching TV after dinner when I saw Laura coming up the drive. Remembering my mother’s low opinions I rushed to the front door before Laura could ring the bell. I met her outside and pulled the door closed behind me.
“I’ve worked out what we should do,” she said, dispensing with any hello. “The problem is that no-one will believe us because we don’t have any proof.”
“We had a dead body.”
“Of who? She’s meant to be a dead body. She’s not going to be on the missing person’s list.”
“Okay, what sort of proof do we need?”
Laura groaned like she was talking to a moron. “That’s what we have to find out. How do we know what the proof looks like before we see it, huh?”
“What do we do?”
“I thought we could go round to Tom McSorley’s house...”
I don’t think the colour drained from my face, but something in it made Laura stop. She began again,
“I didn’t say we should jump off a cliff. We’re not walking into a wasp’s nest.”
Again I was clearly not in control of my features and they seemed to be leading my part of the conversation.
“They mightn’t even be home,” Laura persisted. “All we’re going to do is have a look around outside.” After another pause she made a further concession. “We’ll just walk past a few times and look down their drive.”
“Walk? We’re not taking the bikes?”
“How can you sneak on a bike?”
“Well... okay. When do you want to try?”
“Now, of course! Com’on.”
I can remember shutting the door behind me. Why I didn’t tell my parents I was going out I don’t know. I suppose in those days all the kids in the street played with each other and you were expected to be outside. I also think, to be honest, I knew I was doing something wrong. At that age it was always preferable to try something wrong and get found out instead of never trying. Yet, these days, you hear of kids who quietly leave the house to meet someone they’ve met on the internet only to come to a sad end. I suppose things never change.
We shared the same school as Tom McSorley but he came from the ‘other side’ of town. It was quite a walk and dusk had settled in by the time we’d reached his street. We knew which was his house because at some point everyone in our class had ridden past it and said, in a low voice, “That’s McSorley’s house.” That ritual had been going on for years in the reign of Tom’s two, much older, brothers.
We walked past nonchalantly. There really was nothing to distinguish it from the other houses in the street. It was, like the others, small and tight. It had a little front garden that had been mown a couple of weeks ago. But there was no other sign of neglect or dereliction. We always took it for granted that Mrs McSorley was a bad mother and the whole family were slobs. Yet how to explain the neat paintwork and the tidy garden? Maybe Mrs McSorley, now lying in that pond, had put her big sons to work looking after her little home. Perhaps they would have done anything for their mother. The only odd thing was that all the curtains were open and no lights were on. Dark windows stared out, blankly.
“There’s no one home,” whispered Laura.
“Good,” I whispered back, relieved.
“Yes, it means we can get a better look.”
No, it didn’t mean that. “What?”
But Laura wasn’t listening. She went through the gate. She had adopted a walk that was meant to be casual and stealthy. It was neither. She may have been brave or insane but she was not graceful.
“Come back,” I hissed. In the end, typically, I crept after her.
We went down the side of the house and the street lighting ended abruptly. We stopped to get used to the dark.
The McSorley’s back yard was a mess. There were several broken motorbikes, probably stolen, in bits. The clothes line had snapped. One end was tied around a tree. It fell down like a thin worm and snaked its way through the long grass. We carefully made our way past the broken steps that led down from the back door. No lights were on and, like the front, all the curtains were open. Then we saw through the back window into the living room. It was empty apart from a chair, a plain kitchen chair, which stood in the middle of the room and faced the window. The whole room was pale grey. From memory it seemed to glow from the moonlight, but I don’t recall any moon. We were drawn closer to the glass and when we were right up to the window we saw everything was covered in dust. I don’t mean it needed a duster; I’m talking inches of dust. It was as though the whole room had been blanketed in subterranean volcanic powder. The dust was piled up along the bottom of the window along the inside sill. There were things in the dust: little creatures. I peered down to see what they looked like. I thought they were sea creatures - they had the same translucence and luminocity. Up close I could see their features so clearly. I felt like a giant watching an oblivious, perverted little world. Each creature was wrong. One had the body of an ant but the head of a horse: a perfect little horse’s head. One seemed like a normal rooster though it had six legs. Another was a snake whose body had split and had two cat’s heads. One looked liked a crab or scorpion. There were thousands of these freaks in the dust, all different, always moving. They were crawling on the dust, stumbling through it or burrowing into it. Presumably there were millions of them throughout the whole room. What were they?
Laura’s elbow dug into my ribs. I looked up. Tom McSorley had come into the room. He stood still and stared. He too was grey and the eyes that looked out at us were near death. His face was slack and his arms hung limp. He had spent his active school days threatening to put my face through the back of my head. Standing there, half alive, he terrified me. We took a step back from the window. One of his big brothers came into the room. He was just as grey and his eyes were as sunken. However he had his wits about him. He saw us and jumped back out of the room. Suddenly the other brother rushed out of the back door. We weren’t quick enough - I wasn’t quick enough.
Laura, however, ran.
The big lad easily caught me. My child’s arms were useless against his gormless, wiry strength. The first brother came out and grabbed my legs. I was dragged into the McSorley house.
I was carried into the living room - (the irony of that name) - and shoved in the chair. I could see their faces up close as they tied my arms behind my back. The three brothers were saturated in the dust and the abominable creatures were crawling all over them. There were fine lines of blood scratched all over their faces as though they’d carved ancient or magical symbols over themselves. It didn’t look as the marks were made by a blade or razor. It seemed more that their skin had torn or erupted into patterns. One of the big brothers, they were both the same really, thumped me round the temple. I blacked out.
The next part of the story I heard second-hand. It was all about me yet, oddly, I really wasn’t there. I woke up in my bed. My mother was sitting on it and she started crying. How long had I been out? But my mother could only tell me I was awake: oh joy, oh thank the lord, oh those awful, awful boys. I learnt nothing that. My dad was able to tell me I was out for three days. I had to assume I was rescued. He had nothing to say about that. He clearly hadn’t been part of it. My mother spent the afternoon on the phone telling every aunt and uncle the good news. I don’t know what version of the story she was telling them.
At some point in the afternoon Laura crept into my room. The back door was normally open and, what with mum being tied up on the phone, she just must have wandered in. I thought it odd she didn’t even attempt to say hello to my mum. I guess she knew she was in the bad books and didn’t want to chance getting chucked out. She sat on the bed just as my mother had done.
“I hope the cuts on your chest heal up,” were her first words.
“What cuts?”
I looked down at my body and unbuttoned my pyjamas. There, forming some archaic symbol, were cracked, fine lines where my skin had broken apart.
“Do you remember them doing it?”
They weren’t cuts. No one ‘did it’. It was done to me but not by a human hand. I tugged my pyjamas over my chest.
“You ran,” I said.
“I went to get help,” replied Laura, almost indignant. “If it wasn’t for me you’d be dead.”
I just let this wash over me and lay back to give Laura the room she needed to tell me all about herself. This was her version of the story and she played the main part in it. She had run to the first house that had lights on and hammered on the door. Some man, disturbed from this TV, answered. At first he didn’t get what Laura was saying. It was because he was stupid. Eventually his wife came to the door.
“The McSorley brothers! They’ve got my friend! They’re going to beat him up.” Laura had cried with all her heart.
The woman went to phone the police. The man went and got his friend from next door.
“They were so slow, honestly,” sighed Laura. “I had to do everything just to get them to hurry up.”
Laura led them to the back of the McSorley’s house. They saw me, through the window, tied to the chair with my head hanging. My t-shirt had been taken off. The two big brothers were slumped against the wall with no idea on what to do next. They looked dead, until they saw the rescue party. As before they ran out of the room, through their kitchen, and into the garden. The neighbours had come unarmed.
“I don’t think they had really believed me,” said Laura, rolling her eyes at the world’s incompetence. It didn’t seem to bother Laura that she’d dragged two innocents into her fight and they stood their ground at least for a while. The woman who’d called the police and the other guy’s wife showed up. They joined; in picking up bits of motorbike and started chucking them at the brothers. This went on until the police arrived.
And where was young Tom McSorley? Laura saw his white face staring impassively out of a bedroom window. When he realised he was being watched he stepped back and faded from view. That was the last time anyone from our school saw the class bully.
I never got the chance to ask Laura who untied me and carried me home. Had it been herself she would have certainly let me know. She took my hand in what was meant to be a sincere gesture. It could have been genuine but I seeing the world through jaundice-tinted glasses and it seemed phoney to me. I didn’t want to be Laura’s friend any more.
My mother came into the room. One glance at her face and it was clear Laura was not welcome.
“I’m just going. Just checking to make sure he was alright.”
“Thank you,” said my mother without any politeness. “But what he really needs is rest. I’m sure you’ll see him in school next week.”
Laura got up and left.
My mother sat down on the bed - I have a chair in my room - “I’m sorry I had to send her away.”
I didn’t reply. It didn’t matter.
So here I am in the supermarket and the ex-con staff has just asked if I know Tom McSorley.
“He talked some crap,” joked the guy. “Even said he tried to raise his mother from the dead.”
And with those words, years later, I’m now back at the beginning of the story and there’s no one around to tell it. It was the bit that began before I entered. But from that one comment I could see it all. I saw those big, hulking boys waiting for their mother to die. She was the woman they cleaned up the house for. The rest of the world made no sense. Somehow they had gotten the idea of trying to cheat death. Maybe they’d seen it in a movie and it seemed just a likely as reality. And they did it. Perhaps they got their hands on a book. Or paid someone to do the deed for them. They made their preparations as Mrs McSorley lay in hospital. They would have told her that everything was going to be alright. But it wasn’t. The day of her funeral they performed the ritual. They sat in that night and waited for their mother to return home. What they had gotten into, or what they had given up, I don’t know. How long had their home succumbed to the dust and the warped creatures?
Sure enough Mrs McSorley did come home to her sons; in the very same clothes she was buried in. She probably came through the back door. But it wasn’t her. It was a thing. I can see the boys crowding round her, desperate to make her feel at home. Could it speak? Did it recognise them? Did they frighten it? At some point the thing had gone berserk. What unearthly wailing and moaning did it make? This was worse than death. How far over their heads did they get? What was it like to see this mindless thing that was once their mother, in her good clothes, going on a rampage? She must have run through hedges and down alleyways. She had entered the forest and kept going until she fell and stopped in the pond where Laura and I saw her. The big sons mustn’t have followed. They must have been broken. How do I know all this? I saw it in the dust, the bloody symbols and the dead eyes of Tom McSorley.
I’m sure now that my part in this story is over.
If I ever see Laura again, after all these years, I don’t think she will mention any of this. I won’t either.
THE END
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