Practice

A Musical Tale





Music:
Messiah- Handel ("But who my abide"/"He was despised"- Countertenor- Russel Oberlin)
Auf Dem Kirchhofe- Brahms
The Lamb- Tavener (The Sixteen)
Take Me to Church- Hozier






Content Warning:
Violence, threat

Transcript

Practice

It was very rainy that Friday lunchtime, and Fred and Tony had no desire to pass the time between the announcing and concluding bells unsheltered from the inclement elements. Very often, if the cafeteria menu did not appeal, or the pudding queue was too long, or there were no pupils from the younger years about to irk and bully, they frequented the music department in the hope of finding an empty room, with a good piano. Fred was a singer, Tony a pianist. If ever the desire to make music seized them both like a shared fever and they were beaten to the best piano or relegated to an inferior practice room, they had both been known to become extremely angry.  

            The music department was a crumbling block of building. It maintained a quaint and intact antique beauty beneath its external agedness, but for the most part it was well sullied with the passage of time and the considerable financial neglect of successive administrative regimes. Fred and Tony loved it, its three floors and their three disparate dedications (private lessons, academic lessons, ensemble rehearsals), the green carpets and claret curtains, the musted library of old scores, the old busts, and the traces of Hellenism in various places, the odd Grecian column or nude, boyish statuette bearing a water bowl.

            They came, Fredrick and Anthony, giggling both, around a bend of wet rhododendron bushes which in the downpour were shaking noisily. Fred was carrying a book-satchel filled with scores by its upper handle; Tony’s hands were unburdened. Both unhooded, raincoat-less, and lacking umbrellas, they each glistened with rain, and blotches of wet weightily bruised their blazers. Tony’s hair was shaved quite short all over. At The Grove, the back and sides of the male head were well policed: on this front, Tony was never in any danger of castigation but Fred’s hair was far wilder and his thick, hazel shock could not be more than a few days shy of contravention, though his ears remained visible. Neither of them resented the rain, nor much minded their becoming wet.     

Their twinned, raucous approach disturbed a magpie from his perch, and he swooped with a shriek right in front of them, from one foliate side of the winding, pretty path to the other.  From a birch, the most adorned bough spread like a hand over their heads, all its leaves rattling with rain. A jay lurched forward with a start and winged away. The avenue behind the chapel, the one which led to the music block and whose length they were presently trudging, was clipped and kempt, pleached in places like the walls of a maze. In the memorial garden- bathed in the memory of the fallen, the fenced and matted rear of which they passed on their way to the music department, a figure in a raincoat was stood quite still, looking downward, eying the main monument and the little flowered plot in which it sat. He was anonymous, masked from behind by an open umbrella, its green so dark that it seemed black, its handle resting against his right shoulder.

            Tony and Fred seized avidly upon the music department. A back in a lilac pullover, whose owner Fred believed he recognised, moved about in the ground-level window. Fred, in particular was twitching with excitement. For all his faults, he was sincere, and unafraid of declaring it. But as they made for the music department’s door of entrance, Fred striding avidly in front, Tony’s head was presently turned by footsteps and a quick cry of his name. He was annoyed- but not furious like Fred was- to discover who it was. A classmate, a clingy peer, a regular absentee, Dylan. Tony knew Dylan better than Fred, from previous classes, previous forms. 

            “Hello, you two,” Dylan greeted, cheerfully, bearing an umbrella. 

            Tony acknowledged a subtle and concealed eyeroll from Fred. Dylan was one of those rare pupils to whom special status had been granted, and general privileges extended. His mother had recently died. The cause was undiscussed but breast cancer seemed fairly likely. There had been a special announcement made by the pastoral deputy one registration, explaining Dylan’s situation, and the reason for his regular absences from lessons. Fred resented Dylan’s martyrdom; the special allowances made for him, the attention he received, and the unconditional expectation that he be treated with approval and courtesy at all times. His plight followed him around like a cloud of impregnability, and elevated him above all the usual abuses, character assassinations, and innuendi that the male grammar school student is more typically expected to withstand from his fellow student.

            Dylan was a plump, apparently phlegmatic character who strode everywhere he went with great fluidity. He sometimes appeared in spectacles but was most often without. On this occasion he had on his glasses. They had migrated to the end of his nose, where they clung by their nasal clips with wonted precarity. Dylan habitually addressed people over the top of his lenses, his eyes peering over the top of the frames with an insufferably studious look. His hair was blond, but not as blonde as it had been only quite recently, and it curled considerably. From Fred’s point of view, Dylan was too heavy-set and unemotional-seeming to have been a victim of anything. No-one so unfragile-looking could ever find themselves bereft, Fred thought. But curiously, though Fred found Dylan’s appearance and manner- in all its general pomposity- insufferable at the best of times, it was the new detail of the partnering umbrella that Fred found himself able to despise most enthusiastically. It animated him with hatred, the umbrella raised in act of dainty shelter over Dylan’s curled, blonde hair, unmarked and unmarred by the rainfall. For a few moments, the three of them conversed idly and stiffly. 

            Before the looming façade of the music block was a little, anterior courtyard. To the left of this, greenly rounding the building’s western side, there lay a trimmed lawn. In the centre of this lawn, like a belly button, sat a great squat stump, all that remained of the magnificent oak tree that had been felled three years before. The oak tree had lost one of its limbs in a storm and the vengeance exacted upon it by the site staff had been ruthless and entire. In autumn, giant mushrooms, great flat ears of mustard-coloured foam and saucers of carbuncular saffron, started from the soil, and with amazing immediacy, surrounded the stump. In spring, the season it presently (supposedly) was, daffodils stood up and bowed.   

            “I saw a badger here yesterday,” Dylan said, indicating with his free right hand in the direction of the big oak stump. His left curled snugly about the brolly-handle. By the originating stump of the oak alone, one could tell how huge the tree that used to sprout from it once was, the magnificence and scale it possessed while it stood, the shadow it might have cast over the building by which it was planted, centuries ago. Beside the man-made decrepitude of the music department building, the oak’s assertion of regenerative greenness and permanence had been almost mortifying. Until man had struck violently back with his tools and his machines.

            It was true. Badgers, nocturnal and bashful, did sometimes venture out at crepuscular times of day when the sky was orange and the shadows long on the ground, and nose around in the powdery earth. But they were very rarely seen. The noises of the neighbourhood, the steady drone of traffic just the other side of the border bush, and the racket of schoolchildren, spooking and constant every evening (weekends excluded) from about three thirty to six PM, generally stymied the tentative emergence of such shy things as badgers. 

            “Bullshit,” Fred glumly grunted in reply to Dylan’s news. 

            “It’s true. Right on the stump there. He looked right at me.” Dylan assured. Though prone to exaggeration, in this case he was not lying.

            The stump sat there, a deserted, wooded podium, lonely in the rain. The rain chittered upon it, and the circle of guarding daffodils danced in gay spasms. Another secret eye-roll passed like a facial flame from Fred to Tony. Though Tony was in some ways more brazen and mischievous than his companion, he wasn’t as cruel. Sometimes Fred’s cruelty chilled Tony. And yet other times, it invigorated him. At the pounding forefront of Fred’s mind, practically lying wet and succulent upon his lips so close was he to saying it, was the three-syllabled imperative: “Go away!” He wanted to scream it in Dylan’s ear, deafen him with its saying. And yet he couldn’t. It was the one thing he couldn’t say. His thoughts were simmering with anger, as the three of them crossed the department threshold. Leave us alone… his thoughts came truculently and abruptly to a boil, as Dylan shook out his umbrella in the near confines of the corridor. A lightbulb, hanging overhead, stammered with a faint buzz. A few bullets of rain ricochetted from wall to wall as Dylan shook his umbrella out, one even caught Fred upon the nose. It felt like a pin-prick, an almost exhilarating jet of fury pooled inwardly out from the entering wound and filled him. In a nearby room, dextrous digits pattered on the manual of the harpsichord. A metallic accompaniment tinkled nasally beneath a strange warbling, the piercing phrases of the school’s only countertenor, Lenny. Lenny was a minor enemy of Fred’s, an eminent member of the school’s cutthroat choral world. He had been correctly recognised by his lilac pullover.   

            “Bollockless sounds well today,” Tony quipped. Lenny’s decision to dwell in such extremes of the male tessitura could not help but lead to the accusation of his being a castrato. “Bollockless” was the tender epithet that had taken hold. 

            From behind the closed door, muffled, sounded:

For he is like a refi-i-i-i-iiii-i-i-i-iiiii-i-i-i-iiii-ner’s fire,

And who shall stand when he appeareth?

            The melisma visited upon the middle “i” of the word “refiner” elongated it to almost impossible length.

            “You joining us, Dylan?” Tony said, a little ironically. 

Tony was fairly emotionally opaque, and so he kept his opinions of people a little secret. He didn’t waste his energies on the heat of hatred, nor was it really within him to gush with approval or affection. He was conscientious enough to feel and offer Dylan sympathies for the loss of his mother, but he wasn’t very warm with him. In general Tony emitted an air of weary toleration. Even towards Fred his attitude was mostly quite cool. He accompanied his companion’s crooning, blusterous renditions of German art songs for the most part very willingly. But sometimes an air of reluctance, just a little more than a trace of it, entered Tony’s attitude and sterilised his playing. Fred was most alive when he made music, he always made for the music department rooms with a kind of hunger and haste, a needy avidity which Tony did not share. Fred loved nothing more than to stand beside the baby grand- the one of the department whose tone they had jointly identified as the most pleasing- his right hand resting affectedly upon the gleaming rim, his left pressed reverently to his heart, his eyes misty and moonlit with melancholy, his mouth wide open with the capacious yawn of Schubert or the black gape of Brahms.

            The head of music came moistly bustling in behind them, and three equally tardy members of the chamber choir in his wake. They all went clumping quickly up the nearest set of stairs, disappearing promptly. At the end of the front passage-way, an open door beckoned to Fred. The room seemed unoccupied. Fred went striding enthusiastically forward, peering gingerly within. His inspection revealed an empty interior, and he gleefully recognised the room’s vacated peace. It was the good practice-room, with the good piano. Still the rain chided upon the panes of the one ground-level window, and the caught drops cried and cried. To Fred, a seductive shimmer immediately called, a quick whisper like the sound of a ghostly, hardly human hand tracing a middle octave or two upon the plectrums within the body of the baby grand. Fred excitedly slapped his music bag upon the taut-cushioned seat of the piano stool. From within it he swiftly elicited a paper copy of “Auf dem Kirchhofe” by Brahms and laid it in the stand. Behind, Dylan and Tony came, more slowly and lingeringly. Making sure tempestuous Fred could not hear, Tony sent Dylan a mocking whisper out of the righthand corner of his lips:

            “He gets a bit overexcited sometimes. Look at him, he loves this bit…”

            With apprehensive glee, Fred sang out a few arpeggiated figures. He couldn’t wait to sing, he couldn’t wait to show off in front of Dylan. No, he could wait…he wasn’t happy, in fact he was furious, that Dylan was here at all. He would take no pleasure in singing for him. Why did he not just tell Dylan to get lost, to piss right off. He rehearsed the request in his head: Sorry, Dylan, we actually need to be left alone if you don’t mind, we’ve got some essential work we need to do. Why could he not do it? Was he so dainty, so genteel that he couldn’t exclude a boy, excommunicate a fellow just because he’d lost his mother? He decided not to think about any of it. He would simply pretend that Dylan did not exist, that he was an invisible third party in the room. Fred hurried Tony over to the piano, ushering him there with a hand upon his shoulder. Then, curiously, hardly aware of the course of action he was taking even as he elected it, Fred locked the practice room door. He shut the door and, just below the handle, turned the dial one revolution to the right, with a squeak. Dylan seated himself in a vacant chair. His fat, tightly trousered behind spilled over the sides of the narrow seat. From the left of his two surprisingly slender wrists, the umbrella hung by the perfect, polished curl of its handle, and swung in little swings like a pendulum. 

            Fred finished escorting Tony over to the piano. Fred’s palms perspired with anticipation and glistened dewily with tension of a kind. He was in a rush, a frenzy. His ears went red and sizzled with heat, within him there was an excess of something. Tony seated himself at the piano, and surveyed the ivories spread before him like a universe. Fred watched the wheels turn in his companion’s mind… as Tony’s brain hummed with the potentiality of the musical notes flawlessly blotted upon the staved pages before him, and his spartan profile, manly, noble, and pensive in the solid brightness of the rain-filled afternoon, furrowed at its brow, poetical, pondering, and music-capable. The blackly stubbled cheek, rough with a layer of facial hair more developed than Fred’s, was scented with deep beautiful notes of aftershave that Fred could not help but notice and drink deeply through his nose. Fred was touched briefly by the feeling of muscular pianism in Tony’s hand and arms, and for a second he even curtly knew the trick and throb of his beating pulse.

            They wasted no time in commencing. Marred only by the tiniest hesitation in the first bar, and a small inaccuracy in the third, Tony let up the opening wrathful ripples of the song.

“Der Tag ging regenschwer!”

            Fred began, with perhaps a little too much bombast. Within two beats he had quieted himself, his own passions aptly quelled. As the song’s meandering measures were sung, and the piano punctuated the sombre scene portrayed by the singer’s words with deep, sharp thuds, Dylan watched intently all the while, his face fat and flushed. He sat, listening, with an odd, bothered expression, peering in the usual, vexatious way over the top of his spectacles. In the heart of the wet and precipitating afternoon, there was a humidity about the room, and its three inhabitants glimmered just a little. Still the hiss of the rain was constant and the sky sunless.

“Wie sturmestot die Särge schlummerten—

Auf allen Gräbern taute still: Genesen.”

            At last, spiritual sunlight entered the song’s dismal scene, the dark cemetery of graves, the churchyard wet with rain, a place of stones all rattling with storms. “The coffins slumbered in the earth, oblivious and safe were all deceased. Unbothered in their silent sleep, one word those sleepers all did cry: Released”. The final chord boomed and then faded like a memory.

            Fred was pleased with his performance. Tony, also, played well. Fred felt hurt by the expression on Dylan’s face. He was interested but unmoved. Mentally, Fred conversed with the cool countenance before whose apathy he had just sung. Was I good? Good, yes, but not good enough. Why are you not more moved? My mother is dead, nothing moves me anymore. Breaking the after-silence, puncturing the quiet with the spirited pipe of his voice, Dylan said something which Fred did not hear.

            “What?” Fred said.

            “I want to play something,” Dylan said.

            Fred and Tony looked at each other, slowly turning their heads in one another’s favour until their eyes were tightly fixed, one upon the other’s. Fred was pale with disbelief; Tony bore a look of half-bemused, half-shocked knowing: he knew Fred wasn’t going to like that suggestion of Dylan’s, not at all. He knew Fred to be strange and difficult, that to know him was to tread on eggshells. And yet the volatility, and the expectation of sensitivity to this volatility that devolved upon all that moved within Fred’s precincts, thrilled Tony in a way he couldn’t admit. And it amused him too.

            “Are you asking or telling?” Fred snapped. Dylan was remarkably impervious: he was somehow shielded from conflict. Any pugnacity or cruelty in tone, (let alone in choice of words), could do nothing to derail or upset him.

            “I want to play something,” Dylan said again, his way of saying it unchanged.

            Loudly and heartily, from the top storey of the building, Fred was able to hear the chamber choir. They were making their ascent, in strong unison, of a major scale, to the phrase “Unique New York, Unique New York”. 

            “Are you telling or are you asking?” Fred cross-examined, less equivocally this time.

            “He was des-pis-ed!” Lenny cried from the nearby, ground-level room. Dylan, meanwhile, had placed the umbrella handle upon his right-hand index finger. The entire wrapped length of the umbrella, its skirts a handsome shade of green as deep as ivy, hung from the finger and swung, at Dylan’s manipulation, more turbulently than it had been able to swing before when it was on its owner’s wrist. 

            Dylan got up with a small grunt of effort and made for the piano. Tony looked around rather helplessly, with frightened eyes. He made his appeal to Fred who sternly fixed him, as though by effort of telepathy, to the black seat of the piano stool. Not leaving it behind, the umbrella swung with the swing of Dylan’s walk as he approached, a narrow, phallic, pendular partner. Somehow its capacity for shelter had been modulated into a capacity for harm, it had become a sinister instrument, a torturing truncheon, a weapon of discipline. The rain still rained but not with the same torrential intensity of before: the wet windows and hissing greenery remained, in their respective states, mostly unchanged, but Fred was able to register just the hint of a subtle cessation.   

            “It’s my turn,” Dylan said, with a sly smile.

            “We’ve only just started, Dylan. Would you mind waiting until we…” Tony wasn’t permitted to finish. Fred was silent, unmoving and stiff with wrath. Dylan’s interruption was brittle and unapologetic:    

            “I wasn’t asking,” he slowly said. He was suddenly really frightening, this tall, plump, glistening, motherless figure, with curled locks, and the umbrella, no longer swinging, but resting horizontal upon the palm of his open left hand, the curl of the handle tightly locked in the digits of his right. Like a rolling pin, or a bludgeon, he slapped the flat of his left hand with umbrella’s end.         

“And a-quaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain-ted  with grief,” Lenny concluded from behind the closed door of his nearby room, a fat shaking trill emphasising the closing cadence with generous slowness.

            Tony got up from the piano stool and retired to the chair that Dylan had recently occupied. Fred continued to linger by the piano, as if keeping watchful guard by its gleaming body.   

            “I’m not a classical guy,” Dylan said, with flagrantly false bonhomie and deprecation, standing the umbrella against the left side of the piano stool. He affectedly wrang his hands and then began, with amazing, undawdling haste, to stiltedly, quite approximately accompany himself, in inexpert one-handed chords. He sang in a tense, passional tenor, taxed by the song’s registral peaks, but generally in tune with the chorded pulsing he laid underneath it. Coming to the chorus, he swelled… the increase in volume and the upward leap of the melody’s contour caused his voice to briefly crack. It had only been broken for three years, not even quite three years. It was still new to him, and not quite settled. Wishing to revel with his friend in Dylan’s awkward error, Fred sought Tony’s eyes. But he found no mocking laughter, not even a glint. His companion was sedately serious, and still. 

“Take me to church

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies,

I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife”.

            The rain began to cease, the skyey source that fed it to deplete; and the crackle it made on the earth began to quieten. A jackdaw shrilled, unseen. Lenny had ceased for a while, the accompanying harpsichord too. The chamber choir beatifically went “Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry! Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry,” clambering down the rungs of a major scale, its precisely gradated length not unlike a ladder.

            It seemed to take a long time, but at last Dylan’s song ended. Dylan breathed a sigh of sweaty relief, and shot Tony an obsequious look, a look that meant something like didn’t I do well. Then he got up, resolved to no longer remain sedentary at the keyboard, remembering not to forget his umbrella as he went. The rain had just about ceased. By some shifting in the clouds’ grey, copious array, a shaft of new sunlight was allowed to penetrate. The ground level window glowed full of a light and the body of the piano gleamed all the more.

            Peering over his glasses, Dylan indicated to the empty stool, offering it to Tony. Fred gruffly encouraged him back to it, eager to restore the room to its correct composition: Tony in the pianist’s seat, he singing German songs to Tony’s accompaniment, Dylan watching, listening, or- ideally- hardly there at all. Fred picked up his book-satchel and fished about for his copy of Schumann’s Dichterliebe.  

            Crash! Tony let up a sudden, strangled cry, and there was a terrific boom of piano notes. The dissonance of that terrible panoply vibrated on the air and took an aural eternity to expire. Fred looked up from his music bag and was startled horribly by what he saw. Dylan was stood over Tony, casting over his horizontal, face-down form a daunting shadow, and peering shrewdly and wryly over his spectacles. The umbrella swung from an evilly erect finger on his right hand. His lips curled slowly into a smile. Splashed on the keys, its red shocking against the numerous, huddling whites, there lay an ugly stain of blood, the shape irregular like a scratch. Tony seemed languid and disorientated. 

            “What did you do!?” Fred exclaimed, dropping his copy of Dichterliebe. It fluttered to the floor with a feeling of wilted irrelevance.  

            It wasn’t obvious at first, but, surveying the geography of the scene, it didn’t take him long to answer his own question. Dylan had pulled the piano stool back just as Tony was about to sit in it. Mid-fall, Dylan had shoved Tony forward so that, as he descended, he hit his face against the keyboard. The shock briefly paralysed him and kept him from reacting. Before he was even able to begin an effort to stand, Dylan had raised the umbrella over his head, an awful ivy-green baton. He brought it down with a dull, fat thud on Tony’s head. Fred was too stunned to utter a syllable, let alone intervene as Dylan repeated the action again and again and again. The umbrella-end (the opposite end to the handle-end) was compact and weighty, and it was tipped with a stout but sharp oaken bead, almost exactly the shape of an erect teat. This tip barbed the assaults that Dylan made with the umbrella and caused the implement to penetrate, drawing blood, and bringing about unconsciousness with surprising ease. In his hard, iron clasp, each successive blow heavied more and more by the great squelch of strength in his big arms, the umbrella was a weapon of surprising excellence. There was no pleasure, no passional heat to his strikes. His smile gradually waned like a moon. Quickly it became a pleasureless, blank, robotic task. Rage might have humanised the violence. So unprovoked and deadpan in its execution, the act was all the more fearful, eerily senseless, wanton. When it was completed to Dylan’s satisfaction and Tony lay still, slumped, and sullied on the ground before him, he shone with perspiration and wheezed with the strain of his own heavy and effortful ventilation. 

            “Little la-amb, who-o made thee?” A hum, less readily intelligible than the raucously scalic “Unique New York” and “Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry” tremored in the building like a voice from the firmament. If a body were tranced by a voice from heaven, the chamber choir two levels above sounded to Fred just as that voice might have sounded if he lay cowering in that body’s liver, or its womb. He had the sense of inhabiting a trembling womb of feeling. There was a tremendous slowing. Sustained, there came, from the upper room:

“Gave thee such a tender voice

Making all the vales rejoice!”

             Dylan unloosened Tony’s belt and pulled down his trousers and underpants, revealing his bare buttocks. Fred had never felt so alienated from an experience, so absent though he stood no more than two feet away from the strange and sordid spectacle. Dylan spanked Tony’s bottom, many more times than he bludgeoned his head. He smacked and spanked and admonished with the umbrella until the hand by which he held the curled handle was aching and bruised, and he was moaning with weepy pleasure, and odd, reptilian tears were falling from his eyes onto the reddened behind. Gradually the redness purpled, until it was a constellation of blotches, various ailed shades of violet. Then they darkened, dark as bruises. At last, the profane and sacrilegious purple of the blotches became so dark that you could not tell they were not black. 

            “I saw you locked the door,” Dylan breathlessly said.

            Fred remembered. He shot the shut door a quick glance. He remembered turning the locking dial.

            “Kiss him,” Dylan said. 

            “What?” Fred was hardly able to utter.

            “Kiss him,” Dylan said, in manner unchanged. “Kiss his arse…” 

            Fred looked at his friend, the undignified, mooning crumple of him. A melancholic revulsion rose in him like a noxious wave, a climbing whelm of nausea and poison. Dylan calmly drew the curtains. From the crook of his right arm, the bloodied umbrella dangled, swished. The outer light in the big ground level window was obscured in the ruffled symmetry of a hanging pair of purple cloths.       

            “I can’t,” Fred uttered, with pitiful littleness.

            “Kiss me then,” Dylan said. His big, glistening, bloated face came quickly at Fred.

Darkly and incomprehensibly beguiled, weeping, Fred took the great lips against his lips.

“Snip, snip…” Dylan hissed. The umbrella was in his left hand. 

Fred didn’t understand.

“Snip snip,” he said again. “Your hair is not regulation…you naughty boy…” A teasing little pincer edged toward Fred’s ears. With the index and middle fingers of his right hand, Dylan made a small scissor-sign and portentously pretended to shorten Fred’s tousled sides. With his little pink scythe of fingers, he even mimed snipping off a section of Fred’s ear. Fred was chilled to the bone by the inconsequential and fearful motions of those fat, theatrical fingers.       

“Little Lamb God bless thee

Little Lamb God bless thee”

…these were the last notes of music, the last syllables lifted and developed by melody and harmony, that Fred heard before he was directed to bundle up his friend into a ball, and place him in the practice room’s capacious score-cupboard.

Fred and Dylan left the building, Fred marching in front, slowly and impersonally back the way he had come, back towards the main closes beyond the chapel, at the far end of the winding path. He began on the wet and verdant way, walking tranced, held hypnotically in the spell of the umbrella that swung with the swing of his captor’s walk. The sunlight was folded away into obscurity again, and it recommenced to rain. Dylan, walking with grandeur and solemnity behind Fred, was quick to erect the shelter of his umbrella. Only heaven could see the blood splattered on the upper webbing of that deep-green disc, and heaven washed it away in a torrent of rain. Then Dylan saw something.  

“Look!” Dylan exclaimed.

Fred stopped, and turned. Dylan was pointing, a weird wrist- amplified with an accusing index finger, craned towards the lawn.   

“The badger!” he cried, ebulliently. 

At first, Fred couldn’t tell what he was looking at, as if he found his own faculty of vision untrustworthy. But in the soft rain, surrounded on all sides by a sinister hiss and shush, there indeed stood a badger, in squat quadruped stance, upon the oak stump. He had crept onto the stump of the old felled oak: and from his podium, in the falling rain, he was carefully watching those who passed him with large, suspicious, death-like eyes in his chess-coloured face.