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When Stephen was a little kid, too young to have pulled up an Excel spreadsheet of the world around him yet, he’d suffered from tinnitus. It hadn’t really clicked yet that that wasn’t something which kept six-year-olds up at night, the high-pitched whine of You’ve fucked up again which accompanied the burning shame of a conversational misstep or an ill-timed laugh. He was just used to the shitty melody which played every time he went wrong, or he had to make a decision, or basically anything involving other human beings happened.
The tinnitus went away, eventually; or it didn’t, and he learnt how to live with the world’s worst soundtrack of a pounding heart and screeching ears, an off-key tune for a kid ill-suited for life.
But it came back now, intermittently: it was there as the bull approached Bunny, and then everything was silent; it was there as the bull turned on Bunny, and then it was gone again; it was there as the bull hit Bunny—no it wasn’t—yes it was—it went into overdrive at the sight of blood trickling out of the corners of Bunny’s mouth, like somebody had taken the remote control that made him work, badly, and ratcheted the volume up, way up, until it was unbearably loud. He ran into the midst of whatever the hell was happening in front of him with his mind going haywire, and the static didn’t cease for a moment, not until Bunny had fallen back for the very last time in his life, like he was flopping back onto Stephen’s bed, except without any way to get up this time, and he dragged Bunny out of the bull’s way.
At that point, everything went silent.
He’d never known proper silence until that point. He’d met something close, in hospital, when his dad’s heart flatlined; but they gave you warnings for that, gave you time, didn’t just throw it at you, utterly left field, and anyway the silence had been fractional, quite literally only a heartbeat; after that everything had started beeping again, with his mum sobbing and his uncle pretending he wasn’t doing exactly the same, and with Andrew clinging to little Sammy like he was the toddler and not the other way round.
The world didn’t start up again, this time.
The silence must’ve been just his faulty mind playing its old tricks again, like one of those half-broken headphone jacks where you had to hold it right against the phone or the iPod or whatever, or else it would buzz in your ears non-stop (Stephen had a whole drawer full of the buggers, and whenever Bunny lost his headphones he would borrow one of them and then complain that they didn’t fucking work and why did he even keep them, every time, without fail), because the trees in the background were still rustling in the wind, and that goddamn bull was still huffing on the other side of the field.
He tried not to think about the fact that its horns were all gored up with Bunny’s insides, which was a stupid mistake, because once you pointed out a pink elephant it was impossible to hide, and once he remembered that that bull was wandering around with bits of Bunny decorating its head it was as if Bunny were dying in front of him all over again, guts and viscera and things which should never leave a body very much leaving his body, all over Bunny, all over the ground, probably all over his own clothes. It reminded him of those stupid horror movies Bunny always cajoled him into watching, where he’d commit the classic crime of thinking that maybe this time, he wouldn’t throw up at the barest hint of utterly fake red syrup: except this time it was real, and he couldn’t vomit over Bunny’s kitchen floor in a failed attempt to reach the nearest sink, because they weren’t in the debatable safety of Bunny’s tiny, shitty flat with all its broken hinges and uncleaned dishes, because they were in the middle of fuckoff nowhere, Spain, and most importantly because Bunny didn’t have a damn kitchen to throw up in anymore, didn’t have dishes to avoid cleaning, because he was dead as hell, and Stephen hadn’t stopped him.
Stephen had never stopped Bunny. He didn’t have the heart, not to mention the mind or the upper body strength. Bunny was a six-feet-probably-more out-of-control mess with no one to rein him in except a neurotic bastard intimidated by the mere glimpse of a horse. Match made in hell, right there. And yet somehow they’d stuck together, from the day Stephen had stumbled into Bunny drunk and crying over a pigeon that’d been hit by a car, and promptly broken down himself, to now, him paralysed by his own uselessness and Bunny incapacitated by having had his abdomen mauled to shreds.
See? Even with Bunny dead by his side, there was nothing he could do to stop him. And so he’d gone along with the crazy bets, with the impromptu visits at two in the fucking morning (seriously, why had that been their only constant?), with the probably-stolen CDs for birthday presents and the going over the speed limits to get to some wedding Bunny had forgotten about until literally the day it was supposed to happen. Bunny made him do anything—or maybe it was more like, he would’ve done anything for Bunny.
Except protect him, apparently. That one very simple thing—making sure Bunny didn’t get fucking killed, which as with knocking on the teacher’s office door and striking a match should not have been so hopelessly out of his grasp—was beyond him.
He was ineffectual, useless, a waste of space. Probably he should’ve been terrified every time he stepped out of his own house, if this was how things ended when he, as Bunny so nicely put it, let yourself go for once, man.
He could almost hear that in Bunny’s voice: Bunny’s stupid, no-good, beautiful voice, with its calming cadence and absolutely batshit suggestions. Except not quite, because he couldn’t memorise voices: the sound of Bunny was slipping away from him.
The sound of Bunny was slipping away from him, as surely as the sun was rising: everything about Bunny was falling away, his wacky grins, the sound of his footsteps, the way he laughed, all those little things that he hadn’t realised had stolen his heart until they were gone, and it tore his heart right out of his chest, and he couldn’t even do anything; he just sat there and stared at the rising sun, which was supposed to be hopeful, but didn’t feel at all fucking hopeful when Bunny was dead on the grass next to him and Stephen’s hand was stained with his blood and he still hadn’t got up, not at all, not now that he rightfully should have.
He didn’t even cry. He was so pathetic that he couldn’t even shed a tear, not properly; not like Bunny, who despite impressions knew how to cry for all he was worth, knew how to fucking bawl, knew how to actually feel things and not live eternally trying to distance himself from all his emotions because they were too overwhelming to feel in the moment. He hadn’t cried in years; he hadn’t cried since he was twenty-three and his ailing cat had finally died, or maybe that hadn’t been proper tears shed, and he hadn’t cried since he was sixteen, and he’d failed his chemistry exam, despite all that revision on the nights where sleep had never come, or maybe that wasn’t really it either, and he hadn’t cried since he was twelve, and he’d accidentally hit Ben Smith with a cricket ball, and all the girls had asked him if he was okay, which had only made things worse, and he’d silently vowed that he wouldn’t be caught crying again, because it hurt, and it wasn’t how teenage boys acted, because, you know, boys didn’t cry, and all that crap.
So the sun rose over Spain, casting Bunny’s body in a beautiful golden light: it seemed wrong, somehow, that he could lie there looking so peaceful, his face still stretched out in a grinning death mask, when he’d been fucking mauled, when if you looked down below the neck he was a horror film made real. And it all seemed so distant and strange that Stephen couldn’t move: he sat there as the seconds turned to minutes, and then as the minutes turned to hours, and he felt the sweat on his face and the blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten his tongue dry out, and then he felt the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, in his eyes, and he heard only the silence in his ears, probably just in his mind, and he did nothing, which was somehow worse than useless.
And he didn’t cry.
He didn’t cry.