Minette Walters: Fox Evil

Mr. Harris is less optimistic. "If it doesn't, my farm will be in the middle of a war zone," he said. "There aren't enough policemen in Dorset to shift this lot. They'll have to bring in the army."

BARTON EDGE-AUGUST

BANK HOLIDAY, 2001

Ten-year-old Wolfie pumped up his courage to confront his father. His mother had seen that others were leaving and she was frightened of attracting unwelcome attention. "If we stay too long," she told the child, wrapping her thin arms around his shoulder and keening against his cheek, "the do-gooders will come in to check for bruises, and when they find them they'll take you away." She had had her first child removed years before and had imbued her two remaining children with an undying terror of the police and social workers. Bruises were minor inconveniences in comparison.

Wolfie climbed onto the front bumper of the bus and peered through the windscreen. If Fox was asleep, there was no way he was going inside. The geezer was a devil if you woke him. One time he'd slashed Wolfie's hand with the cutthroat razor he kept under his pillow when Wolfie had touched his shoulder by mistake. Most of the time he and Cub, his little brother, sat under the bus while their dad slept and their mum cried. Even when it was cold and raining, neither of them dared go inside unless Fox was out.

Wolfie thought Fox was a good name for his father. He hunted at night under cover of darkness, slipping invisibly from shadow to shadow. Sometimes Wolfie's mother sent him after Fox to see what he was doing, but Wolfie was too afraid of the razor to follow far. He'd seen Fox use it on animals, heard the death rattle of a deer as he slowly slit its throat and the gurgling squeal of a rabbit. He never killed quickly. Wolfie didn't know why-but instinct told him that Fox enjoyed fear.

Instinct told him a lot about his father, but he kept it bottled inside his head along with strange, flimsy memories of other men and times when Fox hadn't been there. None of them was substantial enough to persuade him they were true. Truth for Wolfie was the terrifying reality of Fox and the gnawing pangs of permanent hunger that were assuaged only in sleep. Whatever thoughts might be in his head, he had learned to keep a still tongue. Break any of Fox's rules and you tasted the razor, and the strongest rule of all was "never talk to anyone about the family."

His father wasn't in the bed, so with wildly beating heart Wolfie mustered his nerve and climbed in through the open front door. He had learned over time that the best way to approach this man was to play an equal- "never show how afraid you are," his mother always said -so he dropped into a John Wayne swagger and sauntered up what had once been the aisle between the seats. He could hear splashing water and guessed his father was behind the curtain that gave privacy to the washing area.

"Hey, Fox, what ya doing, mate?" he said, pausing outside.

The splashing stopped immediately. "Why do you want to know?"

"It don't matter."

The curtain rattled aside, revealing his father stripped to the waist with beads of water dripping down his hairy arms from immersion in the old tin bowl that served as bath and basin. "Doesn't." he snapped. "It doesn't matter. How many times do I have to tell you?"

The child flinched but stood his ground. Most of his confusion about life came from the illogical disparity between his father's behavior and the way he spoke. To Wolfie's ear, Fox sounded like an actor who knew stuff that no one else knew, but the anger that drove him was nothing like Wolfie had ever seen in the movies. Except, maybe, Commodus in Gladiator or the bog-eyed priest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom who ripped people's hearts out. In Wolfie's dreams, Fox was always one or other of them, which was why his surname was Evil. "It doesn't matter," he repeated solemnly.

His father reached for his razor. "Then why ask what I'm doing if you're not interested in the answer?"

"It's just a way of saying hi. They do it in the movies. Hey, mate, what's happening, what ya doing?" He raised his hand to reflect in the mirror by Fox's shoulder, palm showing, fingers spread. "Then you do a high five."

"You watch too many damn films. You're beginning to sound like a Yank. Where do you see them?"

Wolfie picked the least alarming explanation. "There was this boy me and Cub made friends with at the last place. He lived in a house… let us watch his mum's videos when she was at work." It was true… up to a point. The boy had taken them into his house until his mother found out and sent them packing. Most of the time Wolfie filched money from the tin box under his parents' bed when Fox was out, and used it to buy cinema tickets when they were near towns. He didn't know where the money came from, or why there was so much of it, but Fox never seemed to notice when it went.

Fox gave a grunt of disapproval as he used the tip of the razor to scrape at the shaven tracks on his close-cropped crown. "What was the bitch doing? Was she there, too?"

Wolfie was used to his mother being called "bitch." He even called her "bitch" himself sometimes. "It was when she was sick." He never understood why his father didn't cut himself with the razor. It wasn't natural to drag a sharp point down your scalp and never once draw blood. Fox didn't even use soap to make it easier. Sometimes he wondered why Fox didn't just shave off all his hair instead of turning the bald patches into irregular tracks and letting the bits at the back and sides hang down below his shoulders in dreadlocks that got more and more straggly as the hair dropped out. He guessed that going bald really worried Fox, though Wolfie couldn't account for it. Hard guys in the movies often shaved their heads. Bruce Willis did.

He met Fox's eyes in the mirror. "What are you staring at?" the man growled. "What do you want?"

"You gonna be bald as a coot if this keeps up," the child said, pointing to the strands of black hair that were floating on the surface of the water. "You should go to a doctor. It ain't normal to have your hair fall out every time you shake your head."

"How would you know? Maybe it's in my genes. Maybe it'll happen to you."

Wolfie stared at his own blond reflection. "No chance," he said, emboldened by the man's willingness to talk. "I don't look nuffink like you. I reckon I'm like Ma, and she ain't going bald." He shouldn't have said it. He knew it was a mistake even as the words came out and he saw the narrowing of his father's eyes.

He tried to duck but Fox clamped a massive hand around his neck and snicked the soft flesh under his chin with the razor. "Who's your dad?"

"You is," the boy wailed, tears smarting in his eyes. "You is, Fox."

"Jesus Christ!" he flung the child aside. "You can't remember a fucking thing, can you? It's are … you are … he is … I am . What's the word for that, Wolfie?" He went back to scraping at his hair.

"G-g-grammar?"

"Conjugation, you ignorant little shit. It's a verb."

The boy stepped back, making damping motions with his hands. "There ain't no call to get cross, Fox," he said, desperate to prove he wasn't as stupid as his father thought him. "Mum and me looked the hair thing up on the Net the last time we went to the library. I reckon it's called-" he'd memorized the word phonetically-"all-oh-peck-ya. There's loads on it… and there's things you can do."

The man's eyes narrowed again. "Alopecia, you idiot. It's Greek for fox-mange. You're so fucking uneducated. Doesn't that bitch teach you anything? Why do you think I'm called Fox Evil?"

Wolfie had his own ideas. In his child's mind, Fox denoted cleverness and Evil denoted cruelty. It was a name that suited this man. His eyes filled with tears again. "I was only trying to help. There's loads of guys go bald. It's no big deal. Most times-" he took his best stab at the sound he'd heard-"aypeesha goes away and the hair grows back. Maybe that'll happen with you. You don't wanna be nervous-they reckon it's worrying that can make hair fall out."