“Do you even care that your son has been kidnapped and chained up and made to marry an ogre?”
“Of course I do!” huffed Father, uncertain whether a huff was a good idea when Mother was quite so angry, but feeling rebellious enough to chance one anyway. There was only so far she would go when Philip was here to referee.
“Well do something about it, then!” she screamed at him. “Go round there, have it out with them!”
“No!” Philip leapt out of his seat, narrowly avoiding a tea-spilling incident of his own. “You can’t go round there. They’d kill you!”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Father assured him. “I’ve met the daughter, remember. She’s twice the size of me. And I was only joking about being chained up. I’m quite happy in the safety of my own house, thank you very much.”
“The Police, then,” insisted Mother. “You’re the man of the house since Philip moved out. You’ve got to do something!”
“No Police,” Philip insisted. “There could be hundreds of them out there. Arrest one of them, and who’s to say the others won’t come and get me? Matilda says they’ll leave me alone if I marry her. I’ve got no choice.”
“I thought she seemed quite nice, even if her Father does sound like a bit of a character,” Father interjected, still hoping to diffuse the situation. Again, he had misjudged the depth of his wife’s feelings about the matter. She had made one final attempt at sipping the now-cold tea from her cheap china cup, but her hand froze inches from her lip. She stared at Father with such umbrage that Philip was concerned that she might actually throw her tea in his face. Father visibly wilted.
“A bit of a character?” she repeated icily.
“I just meant-”
She exploded.
“That troll family kidnap your son, chain him up, and plan to do God knows what with him, and you describe him as a bit of a character!”
She slammed the tea-cup back down again, shrieking in furious grief as the cup shattered and deposited its contents on to her lovely cream carpet.
“My carpet!” she wailed inconsolably. “Look what you’ve done to my carpet!”
Father shrugged apologetically, knowing from many bitter years of experience that it would only make things worse if he pointed out that he had not actually done anything to her carpet at all.
Philip twisted uncomfortably in his seat. Witnessing your parents in conflict was always excruciating, but when it involved the demise of treasured household furnishings the incident seemed so very much worse.
Mother shouted a “C” word at Father that Philip hadn’t even realised she knew, and stomped furiously out the room. He had not since her this cross since she had become convinced that an immigration detention centre was opening up at the bottom of her road. She slammed the front door behind her as she flounced furiously out of the house.
Father shrugged in resignation, and fetched paper towels from the kitchen. He dropped to his hands and knees, and started spreading the towels on the offending stain on the carpet.
“It’s a storm in a tea-cup,” remarked Father, but even he did not smile at the joke.
A car engine started outside, and they heard the Audi disappearing down the drive. Father’s face creased in concern.
“That’s not good,” he remarked. “She hasn’t driven since 1987, and last time out she mowed down three keep-left signs and a lollipop lady named Janet.”
#
Matilda froze.
There was a hammering at the front door. Philip had given her specific instructions not to open it to anyone, not matter what. Not to anyone. A-N-Y-O-N-E.
She hid behind the sofa for a while, but it didn’t seem to help. If anything, the hammering just got louder.
It wasn’t Daddy. He only went out at night, and he didn’t “do” knocking anyway. It wasn’t Philip either, as he had a key. Maybe it was Mandy? If anyone was a hammerer, it was her.
“Come out here now!” a voice shouted from outside. “Don’t you dare keep me waiting out here on the doorstep!”
The voice was angry. She recognised it. It reminded her of flying crockery. It was Philip’s mother. She wanted to come in, and she would get angrier and angrier the longer she was locked out.
“Philip told me not to let anyone in,” Matilda called apologetically through the letter-box. “I’m sorry Mummy, but I can’t open the door to anyone. A-N-Y-O-N-E.”
“Don’t
you dare spell out “anyone” to me!” Mother screamed. “And if you call me Mummy
one more time I will personally rip your face off.”
Matilda was stunned. This was all wrong. Daddies were scary and Mummies were gentle. What sort of crazy mixed up world was this? Were there no rules here at all?
Matilda opened the door before Mother got even angrier. She was resigned to a beating, and the longer she put it off, the worse it would be. She knew about these things.
Mother stood on the door-step, her face purple with rage. Yet she made no effort to come in, after all the fuss she had made about Matilda opening the door for her. Mother looked her up and down with an expression of such disgust that Matilda hung her head in shame.
“How dare you?” quivered Mother. “How dare you?”
Matilda shrugged, uncertain what it was she had dared to do that Mummy wasn’t very keen on.
“You abduct my precious son, chain him to the floor like an animal, and then blackmail him into marrying you. What sort of a monster are you?”
“I love him,” Matilda replied, hoping that this might make a difference, but knowing deep down that it probably wouldn’t.
It didn’t. Mother stared at her in shock, as if she had slapped her round the face. She took a step forward and glared up at her, quivering with anger at this creature who was trying to steal her son away from the perfect daughter-in-law.
“Keep-away-from-my-son,” she warned, accompanying each word with a stiff-fingered jab to Matilda’s breast-bone. “Call off the wedding, and call off your God-forsaken family, or you’ll see just how far a mother is prepared to go to protect her child from harm.”
Mother held her gaze for a while long to bring her message home, and jabbed her a couple more times in the chest even though she had nothing more to say to her. It was strangely therapeutic. Then she turned on her heel and stalked back to her car. Reversing from the road-sign she had rammed down when parking, she drove away at speed, anxious to check upon the state of her carpet.
#
As he returned home, Philip’s heart sank when he saw the battered Renault Clio parked outside. Crow was back. And this time, he’d brought an older man who looked almost as battered as the car. The two of them stood on the pavement near his gate, smoking cigarettes; Crow short and skinny, the other larger with a lived-in face and a broken nose. Both had their “Blues Brothers” suits on.
As Philip approached, the older man dropped his cigarette on the pavement and ground it out with his shoe in what he clearly considered to be a “bad-cop-means-business” type way, but put Philip more in mind of Olivia Newton-John’s last dance routine in Grease.
“You’re back,” observed Philip without enthusiasm.
“This is my partner,” Crow replied, gesturing towards his crony. “Best you don’t know his name. Makes it harder for you to complain about brutality if you don’t know who he is.”
Philip vaulted over the garden wall and made a break for his front door. Crow tried to clamber over the wall after him, but his shorter legs were not up to the task and he struck his shin on the topmost layer of bricks, falling back down to the pavement. His partner had been around the block a few times, though, and knew the score. As Philip tried frantically to force his key into the lock, he strolled down the path and seized him by the neck. With surprising strength for someone who looked as if he was overdue for his pension, he forced Philip down into a kneeling position, holding him there until Crow joined them.
The diminutive agent had landed in dog-shit after falling to the ground. It was all over one leg of his smartly pressed trousers, and he had not taken this very philosophically.
“Look what you’ve done to me, Boy!” he barked. “I’ve got a shitty car; now I’ve got shitty trousers as well!”
Philip smirked. He knew it was a bad idea, but couldn’t help it. He stopped smirking when Crow kneed him hard in the face.
Pain exploded in his head. He was shocked. It was bad enough being assaulted by a crazed in-bred, but these people were supposed to be government fucking officials! On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and all that shite. He was paying their fucking wages from his taxes (or at least would have been if he hadn’t between jobs for the last few years). How dare they? How fucking dare they?
“You got a problem, Son?” Crow asked, as his partner hauled Philip back to his feet. “You’re not smirking now are you, you jumped up little runt?”
Crow punched him hard to the stomach, doubling Philip over, and followed it up with a right hook to his jaw. The man was a joke, but he knew how to punch. Philip dropped to his hands and knees, gasping in pain and fighting back the urge to vomit. The smell of dog-shit on the agent’s trousers tipped the balance, though, and he threw up on Crow’s shiny new brogues.
Crow went ballistic, kicking and punching him as his partner pinned him to the ground. He hadn’t the strength to fight back. All he could do was cover his head and fight to stay conscious.
The front door crashed open and Matilda flew out. She seized an agent in each paw, and lifted them off the ground. They kicked and thrashed about like convicted criminals on the scaffold, but her grip held firm.
“Leave my man alone!” she hissed, and brought their heads crashing together, face first, with such force as to knock the older agent unconscious and to fracture Crow’s nose. Both agents collapsed to the floor at Matilda’s feet.
“You broke my fucking nose!” Crow wailed astutely.
“Don’t swear,” she admonished him. “Or Daddy will come and find you, and he’s not as gentle as me.”
“You heard the lady,” said Philip, ecstatic now the tables had been turned. “Now get your shitty trousers off my land, and fuck off back to your crappy little car before we bury you both in the back garden.”
“How come he can swear and I can’t?” protested Crow, bridling at the injustice of it all. He had been a damn fine agent for thirty years, and now he was lying on the floor with dog mess on his trousers, being threatened by the Daughter of Family #3, and bad mouthed by her sorry-assed excuse for a boyfriend. It might be his mission in life to exterminate the remaining Families, every last one of the vicious bastards, but he did have a grudging respect for them. They had a Code of Honour; whenever he captured one, they never told him where the others were, no matter how badly he tortured them. But this Philip character, standing there with vomit down his face, hiding behind his girlfriend like some damn Nancy-Boy pervert (not that Nancy-Boys had girlfriends, but you get the drift). He had no honour at all.
“Fuck off!” shouted Philip, and kicked him in the ribs for good measure. For a second, he thought that Crow would retaliate, but the agent backed away when Matilda took a threatening step towards him.
He started pulling his still unconscious colleague back to the car.
“This isn’t over,” he told them.
Philip was reluctant to allow him the last word. He paused, carefully considering how best to respond.
“You smell of shit,” he announced. Hey, it didn’t rank alongside Oscar Wilde in the Top Ten Retorts of All Time, but it sure pissed off Crow, and that was the main thing.
#
Safely back inside the house, Philip retrieved his first-aid box and scouted around inside it for the correct-sized plasters for the cuts to his face. Matilda took them from him, and once he had explained how they worked she applied two or three to his face with surprising delicacy. He had bruises to his ribs and genitals too, but he assured her he could deal with those himself.
“Thank you,” he said. “They would’ve killed me.”
“It’s nothing,” she blushed. “Anyone else would’ve done the same.”
“Mandy wouldn’t, and she’s a better fighter than you!”
She shrugged, and stifled a little smile at being compared favourably to his ex-girlfriend. It was a small victory, but a sweet one.
“You shouldn’t have done it though. They know you’re here now. They’ll be back for you.”
“I know.”
“But you still rescued me anyway.”
“I love you,” she said.
For the first time, this didn’t make him feel physically sick. It was a start.
“Philip?”
“Yes?”
“Are we still getting married?”
He laughed. “Do I have a choice?”
“Not really. But I’d like you to do it because you want to, not because you have to.”
“Your daddy wants me to.”
She hung her head, and all of a sudden he realised that she’d been lying. Her father didn’t want them to marry at all. But did that really help him? If he called the wedding off, she would still go back home, and then they’d all know where he lived (if her brother hadn’t told them already).
Mother hated her. Father liked her though. Her heart was definitely in the right place. And she had now saved his life twice, once from the inbreds and once from Crow. Maybe, just maybe, it would work. She could protect him, and he could shelter her. As long as he never had to see her naked, he could live with it.
“And I want to marry you, too,” he told her, giving her a chaste peck on the cheek and an encouraging smile.
Her eyes lit up, those blue, blue eyes which deserved to be set in a much prettier face than hers. Happiness radiated from her, seeping into him as if by osmosis. He felt much more comfortable with his proposal than he had expected.
“You mean it?” she asked. “You’re not just saying that so Daddy won’t eat you?”
“I want to marry you,” he repeated. And just for a second, he really meant it.
#
Vincent came again that night. Mandy wasn’t home this time; she’d stropped off when she found out that the wedding was going ahead. Vincent must have known she was gone. Matilda doubted he’d have risked being spotted by her twice.
She fetched him food from the fridge. Raw chicken and the few remaining slices of wafer-thin ham. He looked weak already; someone his size needed a lot of calories to survive, and he’d clearly not been eating at all. How could he, without hands?
They sat on the lawn together, side by side, just a few feet from the bushes so he could make a quick getaway if necessary. It was the way he had been brought up; always in the shadows, always with an escape route planned. He had lost an uncle and a second cousin to the Outsiders (the latter to Crow, though he did not know this). If he was careless, he too would end up being dissected on an operating table, along with any other members of the Family his capture might compromise.
“Did she see me? Yesterday.”
“No,” Matilda lied. She was getting quite good at it by now. Why give him something else to worry about? She had done him enough harm already, without adding fear of capture to his list of woes.
She decided against mentioning Crow for the same reason. Everything was hopeless now. Today should have been the happiest day of her life. An Outsider had asked her to marry her of his own volition, not because she had threatened or blackmailed him. Not just any Outsider either; it was Philip, no less, the man of her dreams. But Crow knew where she was hiding now. It was only a matter of time before they came for her. She didn’t care about herself; as long as she made it to the wedding they could do what they liked with her. It couldn’t be any worse than what she could expect from Daddy anyway. But what would they do to Philip without her to protect him? And what would Vincent do when she was gone? Without her to feed him, he was as good as dead.
“Are you still going through with it?” he asked. “The wedding?”
“Yes,” she nodded unhappily. “We’re getting married on Saturday.”
“Saturday!”
“I wanted it soon. Before they come for me.”
“They?”
“Daddy, I mean,” she lied. It was becoming a habit. “Before Daddy finds me.” But it wasn’t Daddy she was most worried about now. It was Crow.
Vincent’s reply, however, made her reassess her evaluation as to which of the two posed the most immediate threat to her wedding plans.
“It won’t be long before they come after you. I’ve heard them whispering. They won’t tell me when; they don’t trust me anymore. But something’s being planned, I know it. I don’t thi