Chapter 5
On his arrival for work, Barry noticed a prominent sign on the front door of the corner
shop that troubled him deeply.
Closing down sale all items half price.
He stormed over to The Shop Manager who was at that time preoccupied with
meticulously arranging some tins of baked beans into a more orderly manner.
‘The Shop, it’s closing?’ asked Barry in a voice that mixed anger with worry
in equal parts.
‘Barry; yes it is. It looks like you won’t be able to deliver newspapers
anymore.’
The Manager didn’t even have the courtesy to look at Barry, preferring instead
to place the main bulk of his intellect onto the task of the baked bean tin arrangement.
‘So when does it actually close then?’
‘Oh.’ The Manager was startled, he hadn’t realised Barry was still standing
there. ‘Pretty soon I’m afraid, next Wednesday to be exact. The Cracker Jack Foods
Chain that owns The Shop decided it wasn’t making enough money.’
Well this is bloody brilliant, thought Barry. I rely on this job, what am I going
to do now— He put his hand to his head and began to gape like a fish out of water.
The Manager surprisingly noticed the look of distress on the paperboy’s face
and decided to completely disengage his brain from the shelf of tins. Barry
momentarily expected some kind of consolatory remark.
‘There there lad, you’re not the only one who’s been put out. I’ve been
relocated to another store. It’s going to add an extra ten minutes to my journey.’
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‘Gosh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Barry as sincerely as possible, all the while
wanting to pour boiling oil on the Manager’s fat face.
Performing his paper rounds in a confused state, Barry felt physically numb and
mentally detached from reality. His pathetic existence had already begun to resemble
an animal’s, and now he imagined how much worse and degrading it was going to
get: he saw his future self participating in highly dangerous, experimental drug tests,
and selling off parts of his body to the highest bidder for scientific research. He began
to sing:
Sunday Monday crappy days.
Tuesday Wednesday crappy days.
Thursday Friday crappy days.
I slit my wrists,
Watch them bleed,
Waiting to die.
These days are all,
Crappy and bleak. (Those crappy days)
These days are all,
End it with me. (yeah baby)
Goodbye blue sky, hello grey.
There’s nothing to save me when I slit you.
Feels so right, it can’t be wrong.
Lying on my deathbed; so long.
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Sunday Monday crappy days.
Tuesday Wednesday crappy days.
Thursday Friday crappy days.
Saturday, the worst day,
When’s the pain end?
These days are all,
Share a razor with me. (Those crappy days)
These days are all,
Crappy and bleak. (Oh baby)
These crappy days are yours and mine.
These crappy days are yours and my, crappy days.
After spontaneously breaking into song while still on his paper round, he had to walk
past a Very Big Tree that was in a perfect location to inflict maximum emotional
distress. If a situation to his problems didn’t present itself soon he knew there was
always that option…
The only person he could now turn to was Psycho, a man who’d managed to
survive in the Hickeys for years without having a single penny to his name.
After his days work Barry came back to his trusty car, took out a couple of tins of
food he had stored in the boot and began to cook them on his stove. He hoped the
smell would waft through the trees and attract the attentions of his only friend, and
with a bit of luck, his two-time saviour.
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‘Hello there,’ sounded Psycho’s voice.
‘I’m going to need your help and before you say get lost, remember that I’ve
been helping you by giving you food, so I think it’s your turn to help me now,’ said
Barry loftily, desiring to show that he was still very much the one who wore the
trousers in their relationship.
Psycho pointed to Barry’s still slightly chubby physique and then presented
his own half-starved one.
‘You haven’t exactly been feeding me that well have you, but I can see you’ve
certainly looked after yourself.’
Barry had nothing to say in defence to the accusation against his generosity,
realising he had not maybe given Psycho as much food as possible and had always
saved the best things for himself.
‘Look, are you going to help me or not?’
‘Well what’s the problem?’
‘I’m going to lose my job at The Shop and—’
‘Oh dear,’ interrupted Psycho. ‘What will you do?’
‘You’ve managed to survive in these woods; I need you to show me how
you’ve done it.’
‘I thought it was obvious how I’d been surviving.’
‘What?’
‘I’m a cannibal,’ answered Psycho as casually as if he had just said his
favourite breakfast cereal was cornflakes. ‘I’ve been killing people that foolishly walk
alone through the woods at night, women mostly, they’re so much easier to
overpower, and they scream more. I like it when they scream, makes it more fun.’
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He finished the conversation with his usual toothless grin, but what wasn’t
usual this time, was that it no longer only appeared moderately frightening because it
now emanated from a serial killer and a cannibal.
Sitting listening to this strange conversation, Barry didn’t feel as if he was
really in it, that instead he was listening in from very far away, that he had tuned a
radio into another topsy-turvy and peculiarly insane reality. It all gave him a funny
feeling in his guttiwutts, and rather than continue listening to this queer discussion,
Barry simply decided to tune his radio into something else by running away as fast as
he could.
It was a profound scene, the circle of life some might say: the little, sprightly,
wide-eyed rabbit, running for his pure and innocent life away from the wolf’s
salivating mouth. Everything seemed to slow down and it all appeared quite balletic.
Sadly the orchestra of expletives Barry screamed were a bit of a mood wrecker.
‘I WAS JOKING, I WAS JOKING,’ shouted Psycho.
Barry was in his car, the Volkswagen Golf, feebly attempting to get the long
deceased engine started. Turning the key the only reply that came back was a long
series of splutters. Psycho had now caught up with his friend and he was laughing.
Barry thought he was next on the menu.
‘I was joking,’ said Psycho again as he peered through the grimy glass. ‘I
don’t kill people and eat them—honest.’
Once Barry realised Psycho had been joking he was highly annoyed, but also
mightily relieved.
‘You have a sick sense of humour, you know that.’
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‘That happens when you live by yourself for too long. I didn’t mean to scare
you as much as I did. I find it difficult to read other people. I find it difficult to predict
how they’re going to react to stuff.’
‘I guess that’s what isolation does to you. So anyway, going back to what we
were originally discussing, are you going to help me or not?’
‘Yeah I’ll help you, but it’s not easy living like this.’
Psycho then began teaching Barry how to really ‘rough it’, surviving in the
woods armed with nothing more than good old human ingenuity. Barry was taught
how to set traps for squirrels, birds and other animals that dwelled in the forest,
although they never did seem to catch much. Psycho also informed his protégé which
wild berries and fungi could be consumed.
Barry’s faith in his companion’s survival knowledge did waver on occasions.
This was probably because the two woodsmen would often find themselves suffering
the effects of food poisoning, spending large quantities of their time vomiting
violently onto the woodland floor.
Despite all the animal traps and wild berry and fungi collections Barry would
do with Psycho, the Hickey Hills Visitor Centre would provide their main source of
sustenance. Their existence had reverted to as primitive as man had ever lived, but
strangely Barry adapted surprisingly well, displaying an intuitive ability to exist in
harmony with nature that we all possess but don’t realise.
Still he did miss his mod cons, and the mod con he missed most since first
starting his new life remained his refrigerator, particularly as he remembered it used
to be stocked full of food. The only mod con that he still owned and that served as a
connection to his past life was his dead Volkswagen Golf, which he continued to
sleep in at night.
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It was the middle of the night and Barry was sitting in his car thinking to himself, yet
again, how hungry he was. He felt glad he had left his beloved rabbit Bob with his
Mum because he thought what a great meal that rabbit would now make.
‘Yes Bob. How I would so like to bite into your succulent flesh. How I would
savour every morsel.’
A tapping on the window startled him. It was Psycho and he was rubbing his
stomach.
‘Are we going to rob the Visitor Centre now?’ asked Psycho impatiently.
‘Yeah okay,’ answered Barry.
Psycho led the way through the woods. Barry had done this many times
before, the first time it had been exhilarating but now the novelty had definitely worn
off; it had become a laborious task that unfortunately had to be undertaken on a
regular basis.
There were two reasons why they had to perform this task regularly: They
couldn’t steal too much or else the people running the Visitor Centre would realise
that the theft had occurred overnight and may install supplementary security
measures. Because they had no refrigerator, they had no way of storing food for a
lengthy period.
Breaking in was not at all easy: They couldn’t just stroll in through the front
door as it was always locked, but what they had found out was that they could get on
the roof by climbing a giant oak tree that stood next to the building. Once on the roof
there was a skylight that was never locked which allowed them access to the inside.
They would tie a rope around the tree, and then lower themselves down where they
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could then get their grubby mitts on the delicious bounty, gorging themselves on
sausage rolls, scotch eggs, sandwiches, chocolate bars and ice cream.
On the way back to their Den from the successful food raid, Barry noticed a
series of lights shining through the trees.
‘What are those? They’re not Park Rangers are they?’ he asked alarmed.
He was in constant fear of the Park Rangers discovering him and that they’d
find out he’d been stealing from the Visitor Centre.
‘Nah, those are the Visitors.’
‘What visitors at this time, it’s the middle of the night. What’re they doing
coming to the woods now?’
‘Not that kind of visitors—aliens. Those are the lights from their spaceships.’
‘What? Come on, get real.’
‘You wanna take a closer look? They come here all the time.’
‘Nah I think I’ll just go back to my car thanks.’
‘Wimp, come on, I’m going to take a look.’
Psycho then disappeared into the inky darkness of the night and Barry was left
with the two options of either follow him, or stand alone. Fear is always a powerful
and compelling force that can make a man do unusual things, and in this moment two
tugboats of fear pulled at Barry in different directions.
Since his job as a paperboy had finished he’d had no other human interaction
apart from with Psycho, and although Barry was repelled by his very relationship with
that wreck of a man, how in any way could he think of himself as better? Aside from
the time when he slept in his car the unlikely duo were inseparable. It felt to Barry
that their two fates were inexplicably intertwined, and however much Barry didn’t
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want to, he accepted he would follow Psycho into hell, or wherever else his
companion desired to go.
‘Wait,’ said Barry, powerless to take his own path. As the lights got closer he
begged Psycho to take him home, back to his car. ‘Come on that’s close enough, let’s
go.’
Barry thought he began to see the outline of a large spinning shape behind the
lights, but just as he brought it clearly into focus the spinning stopped…There then
descended this unexplainable silence onto the woods, as if something had strangled
the life out of it. It was strange as usually there was always something making a
sound, an owl, a fox slipping through the undergrowth, something. The silence was
disturbing, feeling like a prelude to some impending horror.
‘Touch it Barry, feel it,’ said Psycho.
A quivering hand reached out to feel the apparent spacecraft. The Unidentified
Grounded Object, or UGO, didn’t feel as Barry expected, feeling warm and bearing a
closer resemblance to skin than metal. He was fascinated and looked for a way to get
inside the ship, a door or window, but couldn’t see one.
‘Hey come over here and take a look at this. I can feel the inside throbbing…
like a pulse…’ said Barry.
The UGO’s deep low rumble of a heartbeat boomed through his chest cavity,
beating with an unbridled potential for power. Barry looked over his left shoulder
where Psycho had been standing but he wasn’t there anymore. In his state of
stupefaction and intrigue with the UGO Barry had forgotten his fear, it now quickly
washed back over him. Having become disorientated by the stunning magnificence of
the UGO, and being unfamiliar with this part of the Hickey Hills, he wasn’t sure of
the way back to the car.
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Sensing an abnormal presence while looking over his left shoulder to locate
Psycho, Barry slowly turned his neck the other way to look over his right one, it was a
decision he would regret. He now knew why Psycho had decided it would be best to
do a disappearing act: standing with its arms neatly folded, stood what looked like for
all intents and purposes the stereotypical alien that you might encounter on an episode
of The X-Files. The large pear-shaped head, deepest-black almond eyes, the grey skin,
the spindly limbs, the absence of a nose, it was all textbook.
The superior life form was looking directly at Barry’s hands, which just so
happened to be still firmly in contact with his spaceship. It didn’t take any other
worldly, telepathic communication to make Barry realise this being from the stars was
quite annoyed about him rubbing his hands all over his vehicle.
If you look at it from the alien’s point of view you would understand the
