Derek liked to feed the ducks at the local pond. In return, the ducks helped him plot revenge. One particularly blood-thirsty drake insisted Derek chop up the body of his love rival and throw it in the water. This seemed a bit extreme.
Nonetheless, his daily ritual of bread sacrfice took Derek’s mind off losing Mandy. It was his own fault really. He should have gone with her to Pilates when she asked. Now here he was, with his hand in a bag of Hovis getting Machiavellian advice from a group of mallards.
It hadn’t always been this way. Derek used to be a successful, upwardly mobile young executive at an accountancy firm, but as soon as he laid eyes on the new temp, he knew Mandy was the one for him. He had lost focus. That’s what Mr Jefferies had told him when he had let him go. Still, it was worth it – Derek was now dating Mandy and everything was going very well. He could get another job.
But he didn’t. Writing poetry for Mandy and creating collages of surreptitious snaps he’d taken of her was a time consuming enterprise. But worth it. Weeks turned into months, and while Derek and Mandy were happy on the face of things, Mandy seemed increasingly restless. They had tried going to clubs and activities together but nothing seemed to stick, and Derek – although he wasn’t proud of it – had become jealous when Mandy had spoken to other men.
Before too long, things came to a head. Mandy had started getting private Pilates sessions with the instructor, one on one, on an evening. She came home a lot more tired than the group classes made her.
Shortly after, Mandy stopped returning Derek’s phone calls. He was heartbroken. Derek was a romantic, but also a realist. He decided to pull himself together and stop going through Mandy’s bins. He uninstalled the app he had put on her phone to read her text messages. He was being reasonable about things.
That was the point he started hanging around with the ducks. At first he’d felt foolish telling them all about his problems, as they circled in the algae-choked water in front of him. But as he got to know the ducks, and they got to know him, they started to come to an understanding.
“Slit his throat,” quacked the larger of the two drakes.
“Yeah, fuck his shit up,” said the other drake, who did tend to agree with everything the other one said. Derek wasn’t sure if the myth of the Alpha Male actually rang true in ducks. But if it did, the large drake was it.
“Look,” said one of the females, who tended to be a bit more reasonable. “Why don’t you get this guy down here to the pond when it’s quiet. Give him a bit of a nudge, he’ll fall in here and we’ll do the rest.”
“Really?” said Derek, “I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.”
“Ahh don’t worry,” said the largest drake. “We kill people and eat them all the time, it’s no big deal.”
So the plot was set. Derek invented a scenario with Jonas (the Pilates instructor) whereby he wanted to meet to ‘clear the air’ about the whole Mandy situation. Luckily he’d saved his number from his previous aborted appointments. They would meet at the pond at 7am the following morning. Jonas got up early to meditate, so this wasn’t a problem for him.
Morning rolled around and Derek felt nauseous and unsure. After a final pep talk with the ducks the evening prior, he had felt buoyed, indestructible. But that’s ducks for you, they’re very persuasive. Now, in the literal cold light of day, Derek thought he was perhaps making a mistake. Murder. It was a big step. But the ducks… seemed so confident.
He could see Jonas coming over the hill towards him. He exhaled slowly. The ducks started to circle, excitedly, and it wasn’t because of the Warburtons in Derek’s pocket.
“Hey mate,” said Jonas, his hands stuffed in his tracksuit pockets. “Lovely spot this isn’t it?”
He was altogether too nice. Derek couldn’t take this young man’s life, it wasn’t right. He had just started to apologise to Jonas for wasting his time, when the Pilates instructor lunged at him, pushing Derek backwards towards the lake.
For what seemed like minutes, Derek windmilled his arms trying to regain his balance. But inevitably, gravity took him and he plunged into the cold green water. Beaks tore at his parka, then at his flesh, in a frenzy of quacking. As his head broke the surface over and over again as he struggled, he glimpsed the Alpha Duck standing next to Jonas on the bank, looking pleased with itself.
Water filled Derek’s ears as his blood mixed with the foaming algae, feathers and beaks forming a whirlpool around his disappearing consciousness.
“Same time next month?” Jonas asked the duck.
“Quack,” replied the duck, and smirked at Derek with his beak as everything went black.