Digging dirt can refer to two things. Both involve literal dirt digging. And gravel. Neither involves uncovering harmful information with the intention of blackmailing someone close to you.
No one blackmails Gentleman Jim.
We spent so much time digging dirt as kids. This was before I killed my brother but after I’d elbowed myself suitable space inside our mother, whose daughter came out early and bloody and dead.
My father wanted to call me Romulus.
An overstated baby.
Digging dirt: the soundtrack shooting up your arm in a shiver. A sting. As though jumping into a freezing cold river during winter or taking a piss after having contracted a urinary tract infection. Digging dirt: our mother perched on a birthing chair after a sixteen-hour labour, aiming downwards into a large potty so that her remaining twin baby could eventually march out vertically, in combat boots, having already committed his first atrocity.
I had a fringe.
My sister wasn’t haunting me then like she does now. It didn’t take long, though. I’d fall over and scrape the skin off my nose at school, or get my dick caught in my fly or be unable to answer a question in maths. Usually that’d be attributed to her. The invisible cause. Or karma, of sorts. Grey and wet and buried. But never crying on the back seat on the way to school with dad’s unhappy, rough, tradesman’s hand smacking her knee. She was growing. She grew with me. I asked my mother, ‘Do you know who Remus was?’ at the dinner table one evening after a Year 4 introduction to Ancient Rome.
My mother said, ‘He was a man with a vision,’ as she eyed my father, who was always doing something. Who was always inadvertently tearing down my mother’s walls with his tongue and trying hard to build new ones out of his sons.
Digging dirt: my brother took our father’s rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges into the kitchen. They were an heirloom. Dug out from dirt of closets and understairs cupboards filled with familial ugliness. They, like the kukri knife that we would dream and dream and fantasise about sliding across the stranger’s throat in the night, belonged to our grandfather, long late from whatever cancer, possibly of the throat, if not the bruises he left on his eldest son’s skin with a belt; who hid his whisky behind curtains and broadened his gene pool horizons by establishing his family as a military institution that no one, actually, would join.
His sons straight and narrow and his wife long suffering.
‘He’d stand at the fence round our garden,’ my father told us often, ‘when we were stationed abroad with his regiment, in various countries suffering varying degrees of unrest. During riots and guerrillas and fighting for independence, he’d stand with his shotgun, in case anyone broke into our compound. And when the stone-throwing subsided and the yelling subsided and the shadows in the evening creeping along the perimeter garden fence subsided he’d come inside for the whisky he’d hidden earlier on behind every curtain in the house–’
Gulp.
‘–and he’d–’
‘Yes?’ said my brother.
‘Tell us about the gun?’ asked my dead sister.
‘–he’d–’
‘What, Dad?’
As if we were there, on the veranda.
SMACK!
‘Was it something Jim did?’
Never.
A little later, when I and my brother and spectral dead sister were teenagers, we’d ask our father, feeling the clarity of some years behind us, ‘What did Jim ever do to make our grandfather hi–’
‘Not right now.’
‘But what about the letters in the attic? The possible love affairs he could have had?’
‘Boys,’ from our mother, always open ear through the kitchen door from where she could hear us polishing guns, ‘don’t bother your father,’ pushing herself into a corner, stirring the mixing bowl. Preparing dessert. ‘Another bin cake?’ our father would blurt out. To deride her. To keep his whisky not behind the curtain but inside of her. ‘My favourite. How many have you chucked away this time?’
‘They’re too young,’ her eyes would tell him, from some corner of the kitchen or while stoking the fire or when administering the terrier’s insulin injection.
‘Psst,’ Dad whispering so she couldn’t hear, ‘he used to hit him because he fancied bo–.’
‘Stop!’
Somewhere, a cough.
‘Your mother’s baking a cake, boys,’ our father would say loudly instead. ‘You can have some after lunch.’
‘Bit ironic,’ said my brother, still thinking about Jim, ‘given that he’d sent you and Jim to boarding school.’
‘Never mind that now,’ said our father. ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I found a machine gun washed up on a beach?’ In fact, he did. It was mangled. ‘I’d always wanted to find a gold doubloon,’ said our father, who cleaned his shotgun with the same fingers he used to touch our mother.
‘Youngs 303,’ he’d say. ‘That’s what it needs,’ wielding a shoulder stock and foregrip. ‘Give it a good clean.’
Smells like pheasant, death and family.
Again, digging dirt: my brother went into the understairs cupboard, to where the big metal gun cabinet is still fastened with rawl bolts to the outside wall, facing away from the cupboard door, behind some camouflage jackets, and took five rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges out of a damp cardboard box and into the kitchen.
Our parents were at church in the village: Mother flirting with evening mass, Father ringing the bells.
My brother placed the rusting 12 bore cartridges onto the kitchen table next to a chopping board. It was the garlic and onion chopping board. It was the ace-of-spades-shaped chopping board. My brother placed one cartridge onto the chopping board then covered it with a tea towel. He said, ‘Hand me a large, sharp kitchen knife.’ And I handed him a large, sharp kitchen knife. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to do this in Dad’s shed?’ I said.
‘No,’ said my not-yet-dead brother.
‘Do it in Dad’s shed,’ said our sister, dead, who whispered in my ear: ‘He’ll know that you went in there. That you used his tools. His workbench and vice and his hacksaw. He’ll catch you and smack you, just like he does in the car.’
‘The only way to get away with using dad’s tools,’ said my not-yet-but-possibly-soon-because-he’s-cutting-open-a-shotgun-cartridge-dead brother, ‘is if we do this wrong and set the rusting percussion cap off, igniting the powder, propelling the shot, blowing our hands off and bleeding to death. That way he couldn’t punish us.’ My brother paused, thought, then said, ‘Actually, I think he still would.’
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said our sister. ‘Not like you killed me. Maybe take off some digits, a hand or three? You have four between you. Just remember.’
‘What?’ I asked her.
‘Remember–’
‘Who’re you talking to?’ said my brother.
‘–to turn your head away.’
I turned my head away and said, ‘It’d be better to empty the shot out first.’ My brother concurred. With one hand he held the tea towel over the percussion cap, as if all the stains of our mother’s cooking could protect him from an explosion. With the other he cut the crimp off the end of the cartridge, emptied the metal ball bearings into a dirty coffee mug by the sink, removed the wad and emptied the explosive charge into a clean tea cup on the dresser. Each time he cut, pressing down carefully with the kitchen knife, he turned his head towards me, so that at least I’d see the look in his eye if, somehow, the powder (smokeless, so you can see the fall of your bird) ignited, expanded, exploded outward and took off however much of his thirteen-year-old body was in the way.
I’d see it again.
Soon.
In the silence that followed my still-alive brother took a hammer and a nail. They were our father’s hammer and nail. They came from his quick access hammer and nail drawer in the dresser. There was also a light bulb drawer and a battery drawer and a ‘Do not go in there’ drawer, but that one was in the bathroom and belonged exclusively to our mother.
He hammered the nail, gently, into one of the disconnected percussion caps–
Tap.
–rendering it useless.
Then he repeated the procedure on the four remaining rusting 12 bore shotgun cartridges until there were five empty cartridges with five deactivated percussion caps in front of us, five lots of ball-bearing shot sitting in a coffee mug, five discarded wads and a great huge pile of smokeless explosive charge plopped in a clean tea cup he then placed on the ace-of-spades-shaped chopping board. The powder (smokeless) wasn’t really powder, more a lot of very thin paper-like squares, similar to cheap lino tiles or acid tabs.
‘Smells weird,’ I said.
‘Like garlic and onion,’ said my brother, who then took the clean tea cup and emptied the tabs into one deactivated cartridge. He tamped the tabs down with the back of a ballpoint pen, then added some more.
‘Go and get your tin,’ he told me.
So I went and got my tin.
I kept my tin under my bed.
No one was supposed to know about my tin.
It was an ammunition tin (200 rounds). It had 1942 stamped on the side, and it opened with a clasp. ‘How’d you know about my tin?’ I asked.
‘We share a bedroom, idiot.’
My brother opened my tin and took out a French banger. The last one left over from the family holiday we’d all dragged ourselves through a year previously.
‘I don’t want him having those,’ our mother had said to our father, who’d given me the money. ‘He’s a growing boy,’ my father said back at her. ‘He should be allowed to destroy things.’
My brother took out the banger, pulled out the green fuse (waterproof) and put it on the chopping board. Then he snapped the banger in two with his fingers, emptied the powder inside it (this time it really was powder) into the decommissioned shotgun cartridge. Then he took some kitchen roll and stuffed it into the top, covered it with a lot of electrical tape, poked a hole through the tape with the nail, inserted the fuse through the hole until the end of it touched the explosive, put the whole thing back down on the table, smiled and said, ‘Now we have a grenade.’