Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (13 page)

“What’s it to you anyway?”

As she edged away, he could see there was no weapon in her hand after all. Only the blanket with its dirty pink stripes.

“My dad died, recently. I guess I know what it’s like to be alone. What about
your
family? Can’t you go to them?”

“They’re the ones who fucking threw me out in the first place, aren’t they? Just ’cause I had a girlfriend, and how sick is that? They threw me out in the street! They were supposed to—”

She seemed to realise she was yelling, her words rapid-fire and all but unintelligible with tears. Another step back and she breathed like a weight lifter, calming herself down.

“Come back to the boat,” Michael insisted gently, hurting for her, and scared. “We’ll pretend I don’t know you’re there. Or here’s a thought . . .” He could do this. If the alternative was letting her run off to London to get scooped off the streets by the next psycho, he damn well would live in the damn house if it killed him. “I have a narrowboat at the bottom of the garden. It’s dry and warm. There’s a proper bed and a shower. Somewhere to cook. Winter is going to be here soon, and you’ll die if you try to tough it out without shelter. Come and sleep in my narrowboat instead.”

She gave an ugly chuckle, her little heart-shaped face hard with grown-up cynicism. The big, star-grey eyes swept him up and down sullenly. He knew perfectly well what she saw—a harsh-faced, brutal-looking man three times her size wheedling with her to come back to his house? Yeah. He wouldn’t have bought that one either.

Fuck. Fuck being a man anyway; sometimes the guilt-by-association was paralysing. What could he do? If he lunged for her to try and get her by force, that would be the very end of any kind of trust between them, but if he let her run away . . . Well, Watkins wasn’t the only psycho out there.

“I only want to help you.”

“Yeah,” she said, and laughed again. “But the price of that is always too high.”

“Don’t—” He got up on one knee, arm outstretched, but it was too late. A flash of white from the soles of her sneakers, and she was gone. Driven out of another refuge by him.

So, that was the end of any possibility of sleep for the night. Feeling like he no longer deserved to seek out comfort for himself, Michael went back to the house and started on the deconstruction of the living room. The sofa . . . the sofa with the bloodstains down the arm of his mother’s seat. Yeah, that had had retribution a long time in coming. He got the sledgehammer out of the porch and went to town.

The heft of the heavy lump of metal pulled at his shoulders like a butcher’s hook as he laid into the wooden frame. Dull impacts thudded through his hands, down his back, made his head throb, and could not keep the memories away.

His mum had cut her arms to the bone and sat there bleeding. She’d sat there weeping, rocking to and fro, while the old bastard called her names. Called her a psycho bitch, a failure of a mother, a useless wife. Called her selfish, lazy, a waste of air and space.

Sweat made the sledgehammer slip in his grasp, but he only felt blood in his palm. He’d been eleven. He’d run to her side, kneeling there, her hand in his, her blood running over his fingers and his tears falling like salt into her wounds.

“I’m sorry,” she choked, as he tried to pry the knife from her hands. “I’m sorry, darling, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t.” And he knew exactly what she meant because he couldn’t either. But he had to.

The back of the sofa separated with a tearing crack, and he whaled into it like it was a body, the soft resistance satisfying now, so much like the softness of flesh, of ribs.

He never knew what made his father finish once the man had started. He’d just run out of steam eventually, rise and walk away, and with the predator out of the room the two of them could move again. Michael had torn up his sheets for bandages. Together he and his mother had staunched the blood and wept themselves dry and picked themselves up to carry on another day.

But neither had the energy or courage to insist on going to a doctor. His father did not approve of needing the doctor, didn’t approve of weakness or sickness. Even if they were too worthless to avoid illness altogether, they had both been trained for
years
not to let such a sin show. When the cuts swelled and reddened and began to seep, Michael had bought antiseptic cream from the chemist with his pocket money, and his mother had smilingly told him he was her angel, that everything was all right, that she was much better now, even as she began to stink.

There were stains from infection on the sofa too, because when she died of it, Michael had put the covers through a hot wash on the washing machine, not knowing that would fix the stain in and make it indelible.

Infection, and the blood poisoning that came with it, was a fucking awful way to go, and he didn’t understand—even now, thirty years later, he didn’t understand how his father could bear to sit on the fucking couch, in the same fucking house where she had been driven to do that to herself, and look at the bloodstains while he watched the TV.

Bastard. The bastard. The fucking, fucking bastard.

And he kind of resented her a little bit too, because she’d gone away and left him alone with it. But that was shit and unworthy of him, and he wished he could cut that feeling right out. Maybe with the same knife.

He choked in a strangled breath and stopped. The sofa lay dismembered about him, the room covered in fluff and horsehair. His hair and clothes were drenched with sweat and gritty with dust, and his limbs shook. Picking up the biggest of the pieces, he levered it through the doors and dumped it in the skip. When the whole thing was gone, he felt a little better. Calmer. Emptier.

Might as well follow it with everything else: the TV, the ornaments, the paintings, the hi-fi, the chairs, and the carpet.

By four in the morning he was ready to drop, but he stood in a reclaimed space, torn back to the bones. His hands and knees were like water. He fumbled whatever he tried to pick up. Opening the door, stumbling down the garden, finding his bed in the narrowboat felt like an unattainable goal. Kneeling in the bared room, he toppled slowly sideways, just to rest for a few moments while he got up the energy to move.

He awoke two hours later, stiff as hell and freezing, with a headache like a diamond drill boring its way through his skull above his right eye. He wanted a coffee and a shower and painkillers. Lots and lots of painkillers. But he still didn’t think he could face the journey down to the bottom of the garden to get them.

Necessity drove him upstairs to the bathroom, where he soaked for half an hour in a scalding bath before the cold was fully driven from his bones and some flexibility returned to his overexerted muscles. The bathroom wasn’t so bad. As the only room in the house with a lockable door, it had often been his refuge as a child, and it still carried echoes of safety. But he could hardly stay in here all day, and he wanted coffee.

Locating fresh clothes from a box in the hallway, he dressed and brewed coffee in the kitchen with a small feeling of satisfaction. It wasn’t much, but he’d conquered two rooms and spent some part of the night here. He could do this—reclaim this territory for himself, not have it reclaim him.

When the coffee and ibuprofen had eased the headache a little, he went back upstairs, put his hand on the handle of his parents’ bedroom and tried to turn it. He made it halfway before love and despair and hopeless bitterness lanced out from the metal and pierced his hand.

“Fuck.” He dropped it and backed away. Stood in the centre of the upstairs landing breathing hard and holding his clenched hand against his chest. “Damn it!” They were fucking memories, nothing more. Why was he so bloody pathetic? Such a waste of space and air?

Okay, okay. He unclenched his fist and used it to cover his face. So he wasn’t doing that today. There were other useful things he could do.

He tried to enumerate them as he fled downstairs, stuffing his feet in his shoes and his arms in his coat like he was being pursued. He could order wood and begin the process of laying out the new boat. He could buy paint and paint the narrowboat so it was a decent place to live. He could drive back to London and beg to be reinstated in his job.

Instead, he locked the front door behind him and, without thought, snapped there like a pole of a magnet to its opposite, he found himself knocking on the cephalopod knocker of Finn’s bookshop. The only thing moving on an early-morning street that hadn’t yet begun to wake.

No answer. But he wasn’t having that. He carried on knocking. He was going to carry on knocking until Finn came, because there simply wasn’t anything else to do.

Footsteps in the hall. “I fucking swear.” Finn’s voice made it through the door, sharp and flat with annoyance and something Michael might almost have called fear. “If that’s you two . . .”

Rattle of key in the lock and the door swung partially open, stopping at the taut end of a short security chain that Michael could have broken with one good push. He was going to have to say something to Finn about putting a spyhole in the door, particularly if the man was already having trouble of some sort.

They looked at one another through the gap. Finn in a pine-coloured dressing gown atop soft blue cotton pyjama trousers, with his asymmetric hair flattened by the pillow as if tiny aliens had been making crop circles in it. His face morphed out of threat and into greeting in a way that might have been funny had he not also been carrying a raised cricket bat as an obvious weapon.

“Hey,” said Michael gently, surprised to find that his voice sounded hoarser than normal, as though his throat was raw. “You having some kind of problem with the neighbours?”

“It’s these e-book retailers.” Finn closed the door briefly to slip off the chain, then opened it wide and made an elegant gesture suggesting he should come in. “Amazon, you know. They’re not joking when they say Amazon is driving small booksellers out of business. You should see some of the toughs they send around.”

Michael gave an uneasy smile and came in from the cold. He didn’t like being lied to, no matter how transparent and how harmless the lie was. But he also had nowhere else to go that could teach him how to be human again. He needed . . . He didn’t know what he needed, but he was pretty sure he would find it here.

“I’d ask what brings you here this early—” Finn tucked the bat under one arm and took Michael’s elbow with his other hand, leaning towards him in a strangely formal contact-free hug. “But I can see it’s urgent. Come on up, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

Abruptly, Michael was ashamed of himself for imposing. “I’m sorry,” he said, following Finn up the narrow stairs and into a large, bright kitchen lined with bookshelves. A country-style, scrubbed oak table in the centre of it held a tragic pile of glister, within which the morning sunlight was picking out feathers and hooves and the curls of a glassy mane.

“What happened?” Drawn to it as to a corpse, Michael recognised in the wrecked pieces the Pegasus statue he had admired in the bookshop’s biggest room.

Finn turned from putting beans in the coffeemaker, gave him an oblique look, his bottom lip nipped between his teeth. “My theory is he tried to fly. It’s tragic when one has a nature that doesn’t fit one’s form.”

“So.” Michael sat at the table amid the scatter of pieces and glue. “You don’t want to tell me anything.” He fitted two pieces of lower hind leg together, located the third at the base of a stack of notebooks. “Fair enough. But bear me in mind if you need any help.”

“You’re sweet.” Finn set velvet-black coffee down in front of him, with cream and croissants, butter, and jam. “And you’re good at that.” He examined the entire leg Michael had already reassembled. “Stick it together while I shower?”

“You got anything other than this yellow glue? Because this is going to show every crack like a road map.”

Finn smiled. “That’s the idea. It’s my take on
kintsukuroi
. There are flecks of gold in the glue. It will dry clear except for those, and all the cracks will become trails of golden stars.”

“
Kintsukuroi
?” Michael asked, trying to wrap his head around the idea that you would want the damage to show.

“The art of putting a broken thing back together in a way that makes it more beautiful than it was before. It’s a Japanese idea.” Finn’s face pinched for a moment, the encroachment of middle-age showing in the creases around his mouth. “Something I think that offers a little hope to us all.”

Michael caught his hand and pressed it. They stilled for a moment in silence before Finn pulled away to disappear up another flight of stairs. Michael drank his coffee and began to piece Pegasus back together. He had a whole wing done by the time Finn got back, pink from the shower, dressed in nautical style in navy flannels and a navy-piped white woollen jumper. His entrance perturbed the net curtains at the window and let a band of sunlight fall across the wing, showing the golden galaxies aswirl within the feathers.

The beauty of the thing brought out a disbelieving anguish in Michael’s chest. “It really is better.”