Birmingham University 1985
A Naked Billy Goat
It was 2 a.m. and Warren was busy burgling the research laboratories of Birmingham University. He was looking for drugs, amphetamines preferably, and he’d already filled three carrier bags with stuff: powders, capsules, pills; anything that looked promising in the orange flare of his fag lighter. He’d never burgled a university laboratory before. He’d burgled everywhere else — chemists, doctor and dentist’s surgeries, the houses of fat ladies who he knew were prescribed amphetamine for slimming purposes. But this was his first laboratory — and it was full of chemicals. Thousands of them.
But he hadn’t expected a billy goat, let alone a naked one. And yet there it was, standing alone in a pen made of plywood and chicken wire. Naked. Nude. Bare-beamed and obscenely starkers.
In the ordinary course of things the word naked isn’t one you associate with billy goats. They’re always naked, aren’t they? Except for the ones that dress up as mascots for marching bands. But few words could better describe the billy goat that Warren Clackett observed.
Warren screamed.
It was a proper scream too: almost prepubescent in its shrillness. He hadn't screamed that way since the day he saw his pet pit-bull, Panzer, lose a fight with a squirrel. His assumptions about how the universe works were undermined that day and it was happening again.
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