Which Would You Rather?

Graeme Puckett

Description

A black comedy where the hero is an incompetent psychopath. Brian is a troubled and easily irritated man with flexible morals. Passionate about film, he sees film references in everything. As an artist, a surrealist, his love of art, and colour in particular, tend to guide his judgements and decisions. Many of Brian's challenges in life are a result of an inept social awareness and some fairly politically incorrect ways of thinking. Consequently, these challenges usually lead to even greater dilemmas involving an array of new crimes and misdemeanours for him. Killing three of his neighbours - albeit in record time, of which he is extremely proud - do nothing to help Brian's situation. Inclined to lie and cheat his way out of, and into, trouble, his options increase once he has become a killer and the murders have been committed. Now, in Brian's mind, any lesser crime has become acceptable and free to use in his bid to escape detection

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839525186
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published 2022
Copyright © Graeme Puckett 2022
The right of Graeme Puckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-517-9 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-518-6
Cover design by Graeme Puckett Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper

Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
About the Author
1
Friday 10 September 2021 – 5.32 p.m.
Brian Rayment turned the Honda Civic into the close and did a quick check to see how busy the road was. The road had an unusual arrangement but typical of the terraces built in the mid-1800s. The houses went from number 1 to number 38 up one side of the steep road and on the other side, each property had about 200 feet of land. Very quiet, just three other cars. Len and Rose, the old couple at number 21, had a far-too-big people carrier that their son Jonathan had given them and which they never used. A nondescript silver Euro hatchback with a wavy three-line scrape along the whole of the driver’s side, was parked, rather irritatingly, outside his own house as it had been all week. Nobody knew whose it was. The burgundy Renault Clio, highly polished and gleaming as always, belonged to Brian’s next-door neighbour Tony Bartlock. Tick one.
Tony spent a lot of time in his garage, not actually doing very much, other than not being with his soon-to-be-obese wife, Marlina. Tony and Marlina were a Donald McGill seaside postcard in the flesh, most of the flesh supplied by Marlina. He was downtrodden, skinny, with one of those for-God’s-sake-shave-it-off moustaches that was never quite even. At some point in his career as a carpet fitter, he’d somehow come into a seemingly inexhaustible supply of red lead paint. Tony painted his garage, his shed, the fencing and any wooden fittings or fixtures in the garden with the red lead paint. The garage, where he spent most of his spare time – just about all of Tony’s time was spare now that he’d retired – the garage had been painted twice in the last eighteen months. This was about average. Since the red lead paint made its inaugural appearance in the autumn of 1992, the garage had been painted forty-two times. Forty-one times in the red lead. Once, for a brief spell of five weeks during August/September 2012, it was green, the colour green that children paint grass, but it was soon back to its familiar red.
Marlina was fat and miserable. It was unclear whether she was miserable because she was fat or miserable despite being fat. It may have been that she was independently miserable. She was generous to a fault with her misery and made just about everyone she came into contact with miserable too. Her only pleasure in life appeared to be making Tony’s life miserable. Tony was miserable now and so he was in his garage. Tick two.
Six weeks ago, carrying a large monkey wrench and a small clean screw-top jar, Brian had walked into Tony’s open garage.
‘Hiya, Tone – you there?’
The garage was empty as Brian had expected. He’d been watching it for about twenty minutes under the pretence of tidying the boot of his car. There’d been no movement or sound coming from the garage and Brian had assumed Tony had gone indoors. Once Brian was in the garage he quickly unscrewed the jar and crouched to the floor, which was heavily repaired cracked concrete. That was typical of Tony and typical of the things that irritated Brian about Tony. Why did he keep pointing in the cracks with piddly bits of concrete that wouldn’t last the year, or using leftover mastic fillers and sealants? Why the hell didn’t he just do the job properly and resurface the whole floor?
Brian could feel the startings of irritation about the floor but mentally shook himself out of it and got on with the task. He set the open jar down and then with his right hand he brushed together some of the concrete dust. Closing his hand around the small mound, squeezing tight, he lifted it in his clenched fist and like a human hourglass let the dust trickle into the jar. He screwed the lid back on, stood up and put the jar back in his pocket just as Tony entered the garage.
‘What you doin’ in ’ere?’ asked Tony in his usual mumbled confrontational tone.
‘Hiya, Tone,’ said Brian brightly, ignoring the question. ‘Here’s that wrench I told you about. I’ve had it for years – got it at a boot sale – never needed it. You’re much more likely to get some use from it.’
Tony looked around. Almost as if he’s checking to see if I’ve nicked anything thought Brian. Cheeky git.
‘Yeah OK – oright – ta,’ Tony thanked him, somewhat reluctantly.
‘You’re welcome.’ I’ll be getting it back soon enough … miserable git , thought Brian.
‘Anyway just popped in to give it to you. Thought I heard you in here so had a look. I haven’t nicked anything too valuable.’ Brian caught the fleeting look cross Tony’s face that told him he’d been spot on about Tony sweeping the place for anything missing.
Turning and walking out of Tony’s garage, Brian called out, ‘Seeya, Tone,’ waving his hand above his head but not looking back.
He could feel in his trouser pocket the weight of the jar containing the floor dust.
2
Brian had been running through his three-point checklist for over five weeks. He usually ticked two points – often Tony in the garage and the jar of garage floor dust. Three times he’d ticked off only two other cars, but on each of those occasions Tony hadn’t been in the garage. One particularly frustrating day there were just three other cars, Tony was in his garage, but Brian was using his sister Sandie’s car and didn’t have the jar with him, as it was in the glove box of the Honda.
But today was the day – he had the jar with him.
Tick three.
As well as the screw-top jar of dust, Brian had brought a water vaporizer and a cast-iron waffle iron. The waffle iron had been the last item Brian had decided on. He’d played around with the idea of a brick – too awkward to hold in one hand; a cricket bat – too heavy and needs both hands; a piece of lead pipe and a hammer – both bad shapes that would leave tell-tale indentations. He needed a weighty, broad, flat surface with no distinguishing textures or marks, but also a means of holding or swinging it in one hand. The waffle iron was perfect. A heavy, square cast-iron slab on a slim steel shaft, with a comfortable wooden handle. The important thing with the waffle iron was making sure he knew which was the flat smooth back and which was the giveaway waffle-squared front.
Brian was fond of the cinema and films and television, the whole glamourous world of Hollywood and the movie business. He often imagined he was in a film and how he would be lit and from which angle he was being filmed. He pictured himself as the slightly tarnished hero of his life whom men would be fascinated and drawn to, and women would look at and desire from afar. He recalled the film The Day of the Jackal and the scene where the assassin is practising and adjusting the sights on his sniper’s rifle. Edward Fox – the Jackal – has suspended a large watermelon from a tree and is using it as his target. This whole scene resonated with Brian. He’d pictured himself as Edward Fox when he’d bought six large watermelons at a Sunday market several weeks ago.
That Sunday afternoon he drove into the countryside to a spot in the New Forest he remembered going to with his grandparents. He put the first of the watermelons in a large, net vegetable bag and suspended it from a branch of a tree that he remembered climbing as a boy. He estimated Tony’s height to be five feet six. The last time he’d spoken to Tony he spent the entire time working on and adjusting his estimate. He himself was five feet eight and if he looked square on at Tony he was looking straight at Tony’s eyebrows. Five feet six was close enough.
Using an expanding tape measure – a roll of inches as a neighbour, a car-mechanic, always called it – he spent the next quarter of an hour adjusting the swinging melon until the top of it was exactly sixty-six inches from the ground.
Sixty-six, world cup, 4-2, Geoff Hurst hat trick.
He warmed up with a few arm exercises, swinging and rotating each arm in turn. Then with the waffle iron. It felt good and comfortable in his hand. Without any further preamble or psyching-up, he swung the iron round and down as hard as he could into the watermelon. It destroyed it. The net, the melon, the whole lot lay on the grass in a red pulp. The thing that had surprised Brian was how quick it all was. One second the melon had been hanging, still, dead weight from the tree branch – in the next instant it was a still, dead weight ruined in the grass. One swing of his arm. He imagined Tony there. He could picture the slow dissolve shot from a close-up of the melon into Tony’s head and then a fast back zoom to see his whole body lying in the grass … and cut.
Over the next hour, Brian went through all the melons as he adjusted his technique, as Edward Fox would have done. By the third watermelon, he’d started working on a sideways smash in a so