The Baytowers Block by Danny Coleiro

from the Candlewick Stories

Present Day.


Ralph Toogood came to a halt in front of the pet-shop door and muttered in frustration when he saw that it was closed. The sign on the door said that the place opened at nine. He glanced at his watch – it was past ten. He paused, uncertain of what to do next. He needed more rat poison before the little buggers completely took over his house.

“You can wait all you want, love”, said a voice behind him. “That shop ain’t gonna be opening anytime soon”.

Ralph swivelled on his feet and looked down at the sweet little old lady who was peering myopically up at him. She was wearing a floral pattern dress that looked as if it had been a tablecloth in a previous life, and in her hand she held a handbag of ridiculously immense proportions. She smiled at him toothlessly.

“Why’s that?” he asked politely.

“The owner used to live at the Baytowers Block”.

“Oh. You mean the place that…”

The old lady nodded so vigorously that Ralph began to worry that her head might fall off.

“Two weeks ago”, she said, with the kind of happy glee that seems exclusive to old people about to impart a tragedy in gruesome detail.

“Yes, I read about it”, Ralph interjected hurriedly, in a futile attempt to cut her short.

“Ka-booooom!” cried the sweet little old lady, flinging her arms skywards in an imitation of a large explosion and almost decapitating Ralph with her handbag.

“Yes”, agreed Ralph. “Ka-booooom”.



Two Weeks Ago.


Six storeys higher than any of the buildings that surrounded it, the Baytowers Block had loomed over the city of Candlewick for eighteen years, providing over three hundred families with a roof over their heads; a place to sleep, eat and be merry. Within the honeycomb of tiny yet affordable apartments concealed behind its grey façade, people mused on their yesterdays, lived their todays and planned their tomorrows.

Which was all very nice, except for one detail.

For the residents of the Baytowers Block, all their tomorrows ended today.



A Few Seconds Earlier.


Lindsey Overhill’s hand slipped as she attempted to fit the key into the lock, causing the key to leave a three inch scratch in the paintwork of the door. Muttering something unutterable in polite society under her breath, she used her other hand to steady herself on the jamb and tried again, squinting in concentration. It seemed like a simple enough equation - key + lock + twist of the wrist = open door – and yet for some reason, while the twist of the wrist bit appeared to be going smoothly, she seemed incapable of getting past the key + lock part. There was something wrong with her, and the tiny part of her brain which, up until a few minutes ago, had still been lucid enough to attempt a diagnosis, had put it down to stress.

She was stressed.

Stressed out. Stressed up. Stressed on. Dis-stressed. Hehehe.

So went the chain of Lindsey’s thoughts as that last lucid part of her brain called it a night and logged off.

The door-key suddenly decided to stop playing silly buggers and co-operate. It slid into the keyhole and clicked back the lock. The door swung open.

Lindsey toppled forward into the hallway of the third floor apartment of the Baytowers Block where she and her husband had spent the past three years of their fourteen years of married life. She staggered to her feet, using the hat stand for support.

Bloody hat stand. Neither of them owned a single hat.

She wasn’t feeling too good. Her legs felt wobbly, as if someone had surreptitiously snuck in and replaced each joint with silly putty when she wasn’t looking. Her stomach was lurching up and down, and surely her heart was beating much faster than a heartbeat was supposed to go. Worst of all, her sense of self-preservation seemed to have been kidnapped and replaced by an indifferent observer who just couldn’t give a shit one way or another. She paused, swaying, in the dimly-lit hall.

“Pete?” she called out to her husband. It came out as a croak.

Her nostrils suddenly filled with the nauseating odour of gas.

Warning bells which, at this point, should have began shrieking throughout her system, completely and utterly failed to do so.

“Pete, are you home?” she called down the hall, her hand fumbling for the light switch that she was almost certain was there somewhere. The indifferent observer who had taken up residence in her head sat up and showed a modicum of interest.

Her hand found the switch.

Um… said her inner voice, but a little too late.

She flicked the switch.

Which created a really, really tiny blue spark.



Earlier That Evening.


Pete Overhill closed the front door behind him gently, and crept down the hallway to his bedroom. Holding his breath, he carefully placed an ear against the closed door and listened carefully for sounds of extra-marital activity from within. Sounds of his wife grunting and moaning and passionately screaming ‘fuck me harder, big boy!’ completely failed to reach his ears.

Just to be sure, Pete yanked open the door and leapt into the room, screaming ‘ah-haa!’, accusing finger stabbing towards the bed like a dagger.

On the bed, Lindsey Overhill froze in mid-thrust and whipped her head around to face her husband, her eyes and mouth all forming wide ‘O’s of surprise, which, in conjunction with her short cropped brown hair, gave her the appearance of a startled coconut. Straddled beneath her, her lover struggled to sit up, almost dropping her to the floor as he propped himself up in his elbows and said, in a reasonable ‘we’re-all-adults-here-let’s-sort-this-out-like-adults’ kind of voice, “now look here…”

Only he didn’t really say anything, because he wasn’t actually there, and neither was Lindsey. The bed was empty.

Pete groaned and sagged in the doorway, rubbing his temples. This business was doing his head in. He knew she was cheating on him – he just knew it. Yesterday, to confirm what he already knew deep inside, he had bought a book called ‘The Ten Sure-Fire Telltale Signs’, and had spent a gloomy fifteen minutes at work ticking off the checklist on page four.

Is she fussing over her makeup a lot more than she used to? Yes.

Is she never at home / work when you call? Yes.

Does she seem indifferent towards sex lately? Yes yes fucking yes.

Pete had totalled up the score and turned to the relevant page, where the book had cheerfully informed him that ‘your partner is definitely sleeping around at every available opportunity’. He had leafed intently through the rest of the pages, looking desperately for advice on what to do. The book had suggested, on the penultimate page, that he ‘buy the second book in the Sure-Fire series – ‘Ten Sure-Fire Ways To Deal With Infidelity’.

Book Three in the series was rather worryingly titled ‘Ten Sure-Fire Ways To Deal With Divorce’. Pete had promptly binned the book.

Now, he gently closed the bedroom door and, still massaging his temples, made his way to the kitchen, where he absentmindedly switched on the hob and put a kettle on to boil. A nice cup of tea would help him to relax.

What to do? What to do? Should he confront her with his suspicions? Put them down to paranoia and ignore them? Or go out alone, get completely shit-faced and pick up the first anybody in a skirt that crossed his path?

Such a confused and tangled web were Pete’s thoughts, and so preoccupied with his predicament was he, that he may be forgiven for not realising that, although he had switched on the gas-ring under the kettle, he had completely forgotten to light it, and that it was now doing nothing more than spewing out gas into the tiny apartment.

Harder to forgive, perhaps, was Pete instantly forgetting he had put the kettle on in the first place, and slouching back to the bedroom where he lay tightly hugging his wife’s pillow before crying himself to sleep.

That was just pathetic.



Earlier That Afternoon.


Lindsey lay in bed, staring up unseeingly at the ceiling. She sighed – it was always the same. It seemed as if the feelings of guilt waited patiently for the energetic synchronised yo-yoing of their passionate love-making to reach an end before pouncing in a tangle of talons and teeth to pierce her heart.

Why am I doing this? she asked herself.

Because he fills holes in your life that Pete doesn’t, answered her inner voice.

Lindsey groaned. It was bad enough having an inner voice that held conversations with her, but she drew the line at bad double entendres.

Hehe, sniggered her inner voice, fills holes. Get it?

Lindsey swung her legs out of the bed and gathered up her clothes. Clutching them to her chest, she looked down at where her lover was snoring away with a sound not entirely dissimilar to a clogged drain.

“This has got to stop”, she whispered to him.

He farted in his sleep, muttered something incomprehensible and resumed snoring with newfound gusto.

Lindsey sighed again, and padded barefoot to the kitchen.

She flicked the switch on the kettle and chucked a teabag into a mug. Using a teaspoon retrieved from the sink, she spooned four sugars into the mug and waited for the kettle to boil. It didn’t take long.

Stirring milk into her tea, she took a sip and grimaced. Consumed with guilt as she was, even four teaspoonfuls of sugar left the tea tasting bitter. Downing it in four large gulps, she hurriedly got dressed and left the house, vowing never to return.

In the corner of the kitchen, a recently deceased rat lay on its back with its feet in the air.




Earlier That Morning.


Ralph peered at the label on the cardboard box in his hands. There was a small icon of a skull and crossbones in a black box at the top, and under this, in big bold letters, the words ‘Rat Poison’. Directly under this, and made necessary by a little old lady who had once bunged her pet dog into a microwave in order to dry him after a bath simply because the instructions had failed to warn her not to, were the words ‘contains strychnine - harmful if eaten – may cause DEATH! – so don’t eat it or you will DIE!’

The rest of the label told him to put some of the poison on a saucer and leave it where the rat would easily find it.

The instructions did not specifically say that Ralph should simply pour the poison directly from the box onto the saucer rather than grab a wet teaspoon from the kitchen sink and spoon it onto the plate before tossing the teaspoon back into the sink to wash later where an unsuspecting victim might come across it before he could do so and do something silly, like, for example, make a cup of tea with it.

So he didn’t.



The Day Before.


The bell above the door of Pete’s Pet Shop jingled and jangled in the annoying way that bells above pet shop doors do as Ralph pushed it open. He wound his way through aisles of gently bubbling fish tanks, stopped to say ‘pretty Polly’ to a large grey cockatoo - who winked at him from its perch and cheerfully told him to ‘eat shit and die, you wazzock’ - and finally came to a stop in front of the counter at the far end of the shop. Behind this counter, staring into space and apparently oblivious to the world around him, sat a portly man with the long mournful face of one who has not only just received news of his entire family being ripped to shreds by a combine harvester, but who was also the guy who suggested to them in the first place that spending some time in the countryside would be good for their health.

“Um, hello there!” said Ralph in what he hoped was an infectiously cheerful voice.

Pete blinked slowly, as if coming back from a thousand miles away, and slowly turned his head to look up into Ralph’s open and friendly face. Then, with tremendous effort and an incredible display of willpower, he got to his feet.

“Yes?” he asked. Even his voice was long and mournful, like the mooing of a depressed cow. Quite possibly the cow who was in the field adjacent to the one that contained the combine harvester.

Ralph Toogood opened his mouth.

“Do you sell rat poison?” said he.