 Excerpt
from
The Fall of Fergal:
The First
Unlikely Exploit
Chapter One
The very last words young Fergal
McNally heard in his life were: "Don't lean out of that window!" The very last
sounds were probably the air whistling past his sticky-out ears as he fell the
fourteen stories, the honk of traffic horns below (getting nearer and nearer, of
course), and -- possibly -- the SP of the SPLAT! he himself
made as he hit the pavement. Fergal certainly wouldn't have heard more than the
SP, though, because by the time the LAT! part had followed he
would have been well and truly dead.
The person who'd shouted the
"don't lean out" warning, good and loud (but far too late), was Fergal's older
sister, Jackie. Jackie really was an older older sister. Some people
(twins, usually) have older sisters just minutes older than them. Lots of people
have older sisters a good few years older than them, but Fergal's sister Jackie
was old enough to be his mother, which was kind of handy, because he didn't have
a real mother. It had been down to Jackie to bring up the rest of them. You
know: feed them, clothe them, stop them from falling out of windows . . . that
kind of thing.
Of course, their father could have
brought them up, but he was a useless dad. He even went so far as to get a note
from his doctor saying that he was "excused parenting" and left everything for
poor old Jackie to do. He kept himself busy by collecting empty bottles. They
were full when he first got them but were certainly empty by the time he'd
finished with them. He very rarely spoke to anyone except that man in the bottle
shop and to shout at Jackie to tell her how useless she was at everything.
He would hide in what he called
"the back room," though it was more to the side than the back if you counted the
front bit of the apartment as being the part that faced the road. He even had
his meals in the back room, whilst Jackie fed her brothers and sister (once a
day) around a big circular table in the kitchen.
Rufus McNally -- that was their
father's name -- often liked to add to his empty-bottle collection during
mealtimes and would attract Jackie's attention, to bring him another full one,
by throwing something at the wall dividing the back room (which was really a
side room) from the kitchen. Sometimes it'd be a bottle he'd just emptied.
Sometimes it might be a boot. Once he picked up the cat, but Smoky was no fool
and, with a few swift strokes of the paw and claw, made it absolutely clear to
Captain Rufus that she was by no means a cat of the throwing-across-the-room
variety.
You see, Smoky was a working cat,
not a pet. She let the McNally children stroke her, and she let them love her,
but they didn't feed her. (It's not that they were mean; it's just that there
was barely enough food for themselves without feeding a cat as well.) Smoky ate
the mice and rats that were unwise enough to stop scuttling behind the baseboard
and make a break across an open floor.
Once Fergal's dad Rufus threw his
own wooden leg at the wall to attract Jackie's attention. He'd looked around for
something else to throw but couldn't find anything that wasn't furry and purry,
so he'd unscrewed his leg and chucked it with such force that it not only
cracked the plaster in the wall but also split the leg itself, right along the
grain. Thereafter, it always looked like an overripe fruit with a burst skin.
In the days before any of the
children (apart from Jackie) had been born, Rufus McNally had been not only a
brilliant sailor but also a war hero. He'd been a happy smiling fellow whom --
which is simply a who with an m on the end -- everyone had been
proud to know. He'd been awarded more gold medals for bravery than he had clean
shirts to pin the medals on -- and then he'd lost his leg.
He didn't lose his leg in the way
that people lose umbrellas at busy train stations. No, Captain Rufus McNally
lost his leg in such a way that he couldn't simply go to the lost and found and
collect it. He didn't lose his leg in an explosion, and he'd been in many of
those. He didn't lose it when he was clinging to wreckage in shark- infested
waters, and he'd found himself in that predicament on more than one occasion. He
lost his leg on the fourth occasion he found himself in a sinking ship. On the
previous three occasions he'd done heroic deeds to save others trapped as their
vessels went down. On this final occasion it was he who was trapped. His ship
had been torpedoed by an enemy submarine and was sinking fast, but he was going
nowhere because his leg was caught under a mass of twisted metal.
So Captain Rufus McNally did a
very brave thing. As the water poured into the cabin where he was trapped,
knowing that if he couldn't free himself he would definitely die, he decided to
cut off his own leg. Sorry, but there you are. I'd love to say that the solution
was to skip happily with fluffy bunnies with nice music in the background, but
this was war. And war is a 'orrible thing. If you don't want to know the
details, look away until I tell you that it's safe to carry on reading.
Rufus grabbed a razor-sharp piece
of twisted metal (that had once been part of a door frame to the boiler room, if
you must know) and cut through his leg -- and yes, he did have to hack through
his own bone -- as the rising water around him reddened with his own blood. At
the end of it, he fainted but he floated free and was rescued by some of his own
men who'd made it to a lifeboat. They stemmed the bleeding -- people never stop
the bleeding in war stories, they always "stem" it -- and, fortunately for
Rufus, help was close at hand and he survived.
The downside was that he was a
changed man. What Rufus McNally went through was unbelievably dreadful -- I'd be
a liar to tell you otherwise -- but other people have been through even worse
and somehow come out the other side as decent human beings. Rufus McNally,
however, became bitter, sick, and twisted -- in that order (he'd tried twisted,
bitter, and sick, but it didn't suit) -- and it was then that he started to
d-r-i-n-
Oh, hang on. I almost forgot:
IT'S OKAY TO START READING
AGAIN,
YOU SQUEAMISH ONES.
Copyright © 2004 Philip Ardagh
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