removed his cloth cap and held it his hands. The bald head underneath was a map of scar tissue from many a year of altercations. He approached the fur-coated man. The boy considered that this is what Satan would possibly look like had he decided to walk the earth in a man’s skin. All dressed in black with mean sharp features from the shadow of the top hat.
“Mr Cutlass,” his father said all of a sudden in a soft tone.
“Go away; I’m busy,” Cutlass replied. His voice sounded like a razor blade wetting a throat. The woman came to the door, shouting. She was not well to do but had money. Her red dress and blouse looked like lace and her dark hair was well kept in a tight bun. But her make-up was running and covered in soot. Her voice was a faux accent of what she considered proper English. “You, sir, owe me a new chimney.”
Cutlass waved at her in a dismissive stroke of air. The boy’s father blocked his path.
“Mr Cutlass.”
“What?? What??” he shouted.
“I’ve brought my boy here; he wants to be a sweep.”
“He does? I doubt it. None of those bastards crawl up that fireplace and into the dust willingly,” Cutlass noted as he eyed the boy. “It just so happens I have an opening now; we’ve had to dig a dead one out.”
From the doorway the woman was screaming about her destroyed chimney, while a large thug carried a young boy in his arms. They were both black as coal, but the boy flopped lifelessly in the big man’s arms.
Despite his size, his father appeared deflated as the dead urchin was brought from the house. “Let’s go home, son,” he said. From that day on he never asked anything from the boy or his mother again. The boy did not lose the memory for a time. He slept and would open his eyes and find himself in the black-dust stone of a chimney stack. He couldn’t move no matter how he shook; his arms were pinned by his side and numb. The only feeling in him was fear, squeezing his nerves in its skeletal grip. When he tried to scream his mouth filled with the dust, drying his saliva so he couldn’t spit before it filled his throat.
“Don’t worry,” a sweet voice said. “You are not alone. You will never be alone here.”
And the boy looked up the stack to see the dead boy hanging there, neck broken and eyes white as milk. Naturally he would wake at this point, never wanting to sleep again.
At the edge of the river, on the stone cobble bank, the mother managed, slowly and with great effort, to crouch in front and level with her son.
As she smiled her thin smile, the river lapped behind her.
“My angel,” she said. “You are the most wonderful thing I have ever done in my life. My angel, there are no words for how much I love you. You are so strong and brave. You need to be strong and brave.” Tears ran from her bloodshot eyes and turned to dust on her cheeks. Such was the strength of The Consumption.
“Now close your eyes,” she said as she stroked his hair and without hesitation he did. Her hand trembled over his cheek and the boy breathed the happiest sigh in the world, as he inhaled her never-ending scent and beauty.
When he opened them again his mother was gone and somewhere there was screaming and crowding and shouting and he was knocked to the stone as people ran to the edge of the water…
A smack to the back of the boy’s head from his father’s hand brought the boy back to the here and now.
“Pay attention, boy,” his father rumbled as the force of the blow staggered the boy forwards and rattled his skull. Despite the pain and the viciousness of his father, the boy refused to cry. He would not give his father the satisfaction and instead held the pain inside, stored and ready to be unleashed with the other inflictions upon him. One day he would see his father cry. Until that day he would have to accept his father’s ways. After all he was now eight twelve years old and a scrawny thing whereas his father was a huge bull of a man, bald and thickly round. The pair stood on Dark Wood Hill just on the outskirts of the treeline. Despite the sun being high in a clear grey sky, father and son were almost invisible against the shadow of the trees. Below the hill the town, although huge and stretched as far as the eye could see, seemed like a tiny vision of Hell as it steamed in the sun. The boy could see that cursed river slicing through the streets. The same river that took his mother.
But the father hadn’t brought him here for the view. He brought him for the cemetery.
“Look, boy, what do you see?” he asked his son.
Fearing another thump, the boy concentrated upon the sight before him. The cemetery cut itself into the hillside; it surrounded itself with a high black iron fence. Inside the boundary, a church in the centre of the field of headstones, rang a melancholy chime into the air from the steeple. Each ring of the bell reached up to God and possibly saddened the almighty. When the ringing paused, the boy could hear the creak of the iron gates as they opened for the procession that had crawled its way up the hill like a centipede.
They were led by a huge black horse with red and white feathers protruding from its mane. It pulled behind it an ornate glass cart, in turn holding a wooden casket. Behind this were the mourners. Dressed in black garb they shuffled together, dark beetles in the insect march. They were sombre and writhed deep in their sadness. A top-hatted gentleman walked with his arm around a little blonde girl. They walked directly behind the casket. The blonde girl caught the boy y in his eyes. Whether she could see the boy in the distance, he knew naught. He did however recognise the look on her face. It was one of profound loss and sadness mixed with disbelief that would never go away.
“It’s a funeral, Dad, just a funeral.”
“Not just a funeral,” snorted his father, “that’s an opportunity. See how well dressed they are. That’s velvet and silk not these stained wool suits we wear, boy. Whoever is in that coffin is going be wearing all kinds of fine jewels.”
“But the dead, Dad, won’t they mind?”
“The dead will welcome us, son. When they have been in the ground long enough and the flesh leaves them, they all smile, boy; the dead all smile.”
When the night arrived and the light bled from the world, the two made their way to the cemetery under a sky of purple and silver. Father brought tools, which he had hidden in a sack,buried under leaves in the outskirts of the woods. A rusted pickaxe and a dull yet effective spade. They arrived at the iron fence, gasping mist into the air. The boy wondered if his white breath was from fear rather than the evening cold. His heart was thumping so hard he feared his ribs would surely crack. Immediately his father knelt down and shovelled great clumps of dirt from under the railings.
“Keep a look out, boy,” his dad ordered.
The boy couldn’t take his eyes from the cemetery. He could see the gravestones peering from the dark like ships lost on a fog sea. Gas lamps shone tiny yellow lights in the otherwise cold, unforgiving black of the cemetery.
“Done,” said the father.
There was a space dug from under the fence, big enough for the two to crawl through.
“After you, boy.”
The boy hesitated, which made his father scowl. “Move it or would you prefer
