“In the absence of leadership, a group organises around its least flexible member”

We had beer and rain. Rain so hard that it felt like it would smash us into the grass on the hill. We were hunting rabbit. Dapper Dale and me, we had rifles, good ones too. Craig and Danny had crossbows; nasty things in my mind. We all had knives. Those knives were big enough for rabbits and cutting a bit of undergrowth and killing your fellow person.

Like I said, it was raining hard. It was horrible. The night before when we’d set out from the farmhouse and headed in-country we’d had no warning of this wild, delaying downpour. We were already full of unsweetened porridge and drenching in summer rain.

Still, moaning about it was not going to get what had to be done, done. No amount of complaining would have dried us or made us clean. In three hours, rain and shine, we had to be back inside the house with the job done and all our hunting stories wide and straight. 

I thought about Kathleen as the rain drove diagonally into my face. Going up the hill, the rising warmth was behind us. I was going to marry Dale’s daughter Kathleen later in the month. She was a beautiful girl on the outside and not plain in the head either. I had been promised.

I needed to rest but asking for a rest with this crew was not in play, not even if both your legs had been broken at different times over the years and had been set badly. No, you were not going to ask for a rest unless you wanted hours worth of hard banter.

That’s how we all were back then. Life was just that way. That’s how it worked. It could be painful if you stepped out of line; if you got above yourself. Weakness was out. And good forbid you showed cleverness because that meant you were putting someone else down.

Unless it was called for by Dale.

But once you knew the rules, not only could you avoid the pain, you could even come up smiling.

Don’t think I’m lying about this either. I was in a bar where a bloke, whose wife of 40 years had been buried about a month before, was being brought back down to earth. His mates, my mates, were tickling his ribs with some chat, like it was an act of kindness for the bloke.

One fella had his arm around the drunken widower’s shoulders. “At least you can get some takeaway later, Jim. Lovely meal for one. Anything you want. Lovely.”

“Cos’ she won’t be there to cook it for him, thank gawd”, guffawed another mate of his ramming home the point in case Jim had missed it.

“Lucky bloke, her cooking was worse than his aim!” yelled someone from the bar.

The widower tried a smile, and said, ”You bastards. You fucking lot! We’re still here though. Us we’re still here! Altogether. All the boys!” 

I happened to know that he loved his Joan very much. He was broken by her death. But he knew the rules and he kept drinking. That was it for him though, he just kept drinking. He sold his house in the end. Took his pension, bought a little bungalow up north. I meant to visit him.

I wasn’t going to ask for a break at any time soon on this hunt.

The three others kept walking, eyes front, striding, not walking pardon me. We all knew the ground even after the rain had changed it. We’d made this slog loads of times before. It was a 12-mile round-trip from the bay, enough for an early start, a rabbit hunt and back in time for dinner, a dinner starting at around two and going on until late into the night.

There was a chance of boar maybe. That would be excellent. It would add time. Craig and Danny would scoot back for the truck and meet me and Dale half way. That’d be really good because even now, only five miles in, I was over it. 

Kathleen and me had been up late talking. She talked about babies and I talked, through a bit of beer, about getting away, going abroad before babies. Getting away. She said her dad had better not hear me talking like that because there were plenty of other people who would love my job and would take it for less than he was paying me. That meant she’d already had that conversation with Dale. 

He wasn’t one for changing his mind, not on his daughter. Not on any subject, not even if he was wrong. Especially not if he was wrong. I once saw him inflate the price of a car he was buying. He’d assumed it was older than it was, and a different model number. He’d got them both wrong but none of the family was going to correct him. Seriously, he told the fella he was buying from, that he wasn’t going to spend such small beans for a car so slick. He would pay a fair and reasonable price or be damned for it.

The other fella, a straight-up sort we’d all known for years, was almost pleading that the car was not worth the money being shoved at him. He knew what might happen later in the year or even decade or a day or the next minute. Everybody else knew too. Craig piped up, ”Come on Daddy, Ted wouldn’t lead you wrong”. 

Dale wouldn’t walk away, if anything he pushed his face closer into Ted’s. People gathered around because of the noise and, I swear to God, because of the static and the smell. You would have thought that Dale, not a big man but forceful, was going to lay the other, bigger, fella out flat on the concrete forecourt. Dale was angry. He wasn’t going to let it go.

Ted’s son brought out the papers from the office and showed them to Dale.

“Look, here, in black and white. Check the engine block number. It’s all here”, he said as calmly as he could.

”Fuck off with your paperwork you little clerk. We’re men. We make men’s bargains”, he took the papers and buried them in the pocket of his overalls. He threw the money on the floor in front of Ted. 

”See, my car now. All legal”, he said. 

You could tell just by a slight movement, a sag of the shoulder, that he knew he was wrong about the deal. He also knew that he wasn’t wrong about ensuring his reputation for never taking a step back on a made decision. He held his huge right hand out for the keys.

”We are still mates, Ted. Me and you. Solid. You must come to the house soon, Ted. You must come.”

Ted went white as a shroud, and Ted sold him the car at the price Dale wanted. He sold it because he knew the rules. Even in the face of rank fucking stupidity, people respect you if you don’t back down.

Two nights later, Dale and Ted were in the pub, up the back, telling each other how they were the best buddies, the greatest mates ever. When Dale got up and went to take a piss though, I could see the other man breathe out a long sigh of relief. His hands were shaking. Dale stood him drinks for the rest of the night.

Those were my thoughts as we pushed up the hill with the rain lashing us and the heat building up, and those were my thoughts just moments before I felt a slap across my shoulders. 

“You’re taking your fucking time. Still, if you want to shuffle along like an old lady, well…” It was Dale. The punch line was coming. Just not now, not this time.

He stalked off, his muscle mass as he delighted in calling it, driving his thick frame up and on, up and on. His thick middle finger prodding the rain near his usually deliberately deaf left ear indicating something of tremendous importance that I could not understand.

I saw him catching up with the other blokes, pounding past them. I saw them trying to match his pace and failing. He slowed down. He stopped. He never stopped. I thought he was having a heart attack or, given the earlier indication, a brain haemorrhage. I stopped. I wasn’t going to have to kill the bastard at all.

The others, heads down against the liquid bullets, kept walking, talking to each other, apparently unaware that Dale had stopped. They disappeared into the rain and over the hill.

I began to plan what I would say at Dale’s funeral. I kept walking. It kept me walking. I had seen brain bombs before thought, so you couldn’t be sure. A friend’s girlfriend, her aneurysms, they should have killed her. Everybody including the doctors had said as much.

”She just fell down there right in front of me, she went down like a sack of potatoes, bang!” he said, accepting another free, commiseratory drink.

He illustrated the point by slamming an empty shot glass down on the bar and looking at me for some kind of response.

”She’s 24 years old,” he reminded me. ”You don’t expect it. You just don’t expect it is all I can tell you.”

What he did expect, however, was that she wouldn’t last out the week.

He’d known her for eighteen months, figured he was in love and obviously she was in love with him. After all he was tall, slender, dark haired and not even slightly unhealthy.

She was, or at least she appeared to be, in good overall shape. Plus they had a lot in common. They liked music, movies, walking along the beach at sunset (they were going to do that soon) and dogs.

“Doctors say she’s got maybe a week if she survives the operation. Bang!”. He drank another shot. I bought him another shot.

I was a little shocked he’d tell me something like that in the bar. Sure, he’d been through some stuff. But still, it was private. What did he expect me to do with it?

Anyway, as it turns out, a week later she’d had some surgery, she woke up, she said a few words, and he was back in the bar celebrating like he was the fucking surgeon.

A month after she came home he was in the bar again. He explained to everybody that they must definitely not get him wrong, he was happy about that and all that, but that she’d changed a lot. 

Before she’d been feisty but reasonable she was now angry and loud and full of weird ideas. She wanted to travel for a start. He took another swallow of hooch and breathed out so we could all hear and appreciate his confusion.

She was, he told us, physically weak, fragile even and this was not a good look. Actually he wanted to tell us about how much she had changed and about his fear but instead he talked about his hope. Hope was as acceptable to us to hear as it was for him to say. The fact of the matter though, was that he was no longer in love. 

The more the night wore on, the more he drank and talked and the more no one stopped him, the more positive and hopeful he sounded. But everything he hoped for became like a candy wrapper wrapped tightly around a broken bone.

It was as we were staggering and swaying to the taxi rank by the town hall in the rain that he finally admitted that he hoped that, “She would change back because she’s changed beyond recognition, even her mum says so”.

If Dale changed beyond recognition on that hill with this rain, I didn’t ever want the fucker to change back. I was terrified of him and his ability to do exactly what he wanted to and to have other folk follow along with no apparent care for themselves.

Of course that’s not entirely true. Folks, me included, did follow along with a care for themselves. Some, me included, because they did not care to be bullied with words and threatened with physical violence. 

Some followed along because they thought that Dale was mightily cleverer than they were and that his ideas and motivations must also be bigger and smarter than theirs. So, they must benefit.

I just wanted him dead.

Others got behind him because they were lazy as cats and thought they were cleverer than Dale. These people were the ones who egged him on, pushed him forward and applauded his bullying: “Dale stands up for honest folks” or “Dale keeps things simple”. 

These were also the people, a couple of doctors, a local politician or three, a volunteer policeman, the chairman of the local team, who stood by Dale “through thick and thin”, most specifically through the death of the nurse in Dale’s house at a Dale Open House party. 

There was a lot of confusion and statements that contradicted other statements about the death. One thing was never in doubt though, she died in a pretty brutal way and she put up a long fight.

Dale was arrested but denied everything. He did help the police by pointing his stubby, powerful, blunt fingers in various lower division directions. He had a pal who had a pal who worked on a ‘National’. Dale got his story out first. When he was finally exonerated of all charges, he made sure that everybody involved was bought a drink very publicly.

A weasel of a guy called Bradshaw who had a bad record of violence against women when he was unmedicated admitted to the charges and got 25 years, out in ten.

Bradshaw had been working for Dale up at the farm for a few years. He had replaced a bloke called Minter who had committed suicide. Having owned up to the unmedicated murder of the nurse, and having gone into a secure unit, Bradshaw was replaced by a bloke called Grimmond who was educationally behind.

Dale always had one fella on his staff who was less than the full deck.

Dale always had parties too. Dale loved to throw the farm house and some of its grounds open to anybody who could get up the hill, onto the plain and into the grounds, no invitation required. 

“The more the merrier,” said Dale.

These “Open Days and Nights” were where favours and deals were made. Everybody had fun, that was one of the house rules. Sometimes things got a little, to use Dale’s word, “funky”, a bit out of the hand. That was fine but God help you if you were found in the vicinity of any damaged property. If you were found actually damaging something (without permission) then not even Jesus Christ and Buddah riding shotgun were going to be able to save you from one of two fates. 

Either you were going to be falling over something or you were going to be owing Dale. Not always Dale himself but certainly one of Dale’s pals. You would get invited back, in fact you would be one of the selected group with a permanent invitation to Dale’s. More a command in fact. 

Definitely a command.

I’d been going to Dale’s open houses since I was very young, four or five years old. In that time I had only ever been in the vicinity of one damaged piece of property. I was twelve at the time, a small, dark, permanently worried twelve year old who could climb trees but could not catch a thrown ball or a fallen lampshade to save his life.

I looked down as the tennis ball that my dad had thrown to me in the courtyard rolled away. I looked as the glass lampshade fell onto the stone floor. I looked on as dad ran, and I looked up at Dale who had marched around the corner, one of his daughters close by. Dale was smiling at me broadly. 

“Now then young man,” he said. “There is some damage, there is some damage”. As you might expect his emphasis was on that second “is” and my emphasis was on understanding what he meant. He seemed pleased rather than angry. 

“Look what you did, young man. Look at this mess, this damage.”

What he said was true, there was some damage. What he meant was not true. Or maybe, I thought, maybe it was. After all, without me being there, Dad would not have thrown the ball.

I have often wondered where Dad found that ball. That ball that did for his dignity. My Dad worked for Dale, in the used car lot.

I told Dale that I was sorry but that it was not my fault.

“Then whose fault is it?”

“Not mine “, I said.

“Then why say sorry?”

He was so big. He was so right. Why would I say sorry? Because if I didn’t then it was going to be my dad’s fault. I was not about to land my Dad in it. 

Dale knew the answer to his question. He always did or he’d never ask it.

“Who do you think broke my lamp?” 

I shrugged and tried to look brave and innocent.

“Someone did. Look at it. Look at what’s left of it”, he said, softly.

He was right. It was broken. 

“Go away now love”. His daughter danced off his arm, patted me on my head, moved on to learn about being a nurse.

I really wanted my Dad to respect me back then. Not love me, that would have been soft.

Dale turned to my dad and beckoned him over with a look. My dad shook his head. Dale nodded his. There were five paces between them. He told my dad, he said, “You broke my lamp. I loved that lamp”.

“Then why was it in the yard?” I wanted to ask.

My dad started to shake. Dale shouted at me, “Come over here now you!” 

I started to walk on my stickman legs. My dad said, “Stop”. He took a step towards Dapper Dale. He took another and another and another until he was standing within arm’s reach. Dale took him by the shoulder and pushed him into the house and slammed the door.

That was the last time I saw my dad. I saw a man who looked like my dad walk out of the house an hour or so later. I’d cleaned up the broken glass by then with a dustpan and brush I’d found in a shed. I’d tidied up the mess. Then I’d just sat on a trestle table in the yard waiting and promising myself I’d do for Dale one day.

After we got home from that party I never wanted my dad to respect me because I didn’t respect him. Over the years before his death from a quick and easy heart attack he became smaller and quieter. He’d disappear for days at a time on business for Dale. When he came back he’d drink rum and make model kits of military vehicles on the table in the kitchen. Mum left.

My rifle was ready in case I needed to put Dapper Dale out of his misery. I felt I could do it. I even felt a jury would understand. That’s mad. That’s how much Dale filled my life. I felt he must fill everybody else’s too. They must all know what an animal he was. They’d understand that you put animals out of their and everybody else’s misery. I felt that. All I was doing was feeling.

I reached Dale. He was on his knees. His head was down. His hands were in the earth digging into the mud. Clawing at it.

“Look at this! Look at this! Fucking hell young man! Look!” 

Dale didn’t die on the hill. Dale was eternal. And I have married into his eternity. 

Dapper Dale had discovered a golden pendant. Not golden, gold. Solid gold, engraved, a thousand years old. The heavy, endless, pounding rain had washed away the earth to reveal it. He’d noticed a glint as he walked up the hill. The pendant had revealed itself to him. 

He stood up and laughed and hugged me.

“Fucking hell young man! You’re my good luck charm!” He shook my hand, he hugged me again.

“Go and get my boys!” he yelled.

I’d never seen him hug anybody before. He’d never shaken my hand. It felt good. It felt amazing. It still does.

So here I am. Looking at my son, drinking rum and waiting for Dale to call. There’s a party tonight.