and I’ll be gone, I promise. And they won’t come here today. They think I’ve gone to London. I made it look like that at the station. For Christ’s sake I’m your son. Doesn’t that mean anything?’
She looked at him long and hard and then over at the brass clock ticking above the fireplace.
‘Ben works half days at the weekends, so you can stay until one o’clock,’ she said. ‘But not a minute later. And this stays in here until you go,’ she added, putting the gun in the top drawer of the old bureau in the corner where she kept her papers. ‘I’ll get you some clothes and make you something to eat.’
He sat at the table in the same place where he had watched his stepfather finishing his breakfast half an hour earlier. Ben Bishop’s oversized shirt and cardigan hung off him like a scarecrow, but at least they were an improvement on the torn, bloody shirt he’d had on up to now. And the breakfast was wonderful. It was hard not to eat too fast. David hadn’t realized just how hungry he was until he started putting the food in his mouth.
His mother stood in the doorway of the kitchen silently watching him as she smoked yet another cigarette. He remembered how she never seemed to sit down: it was as if she couldn’t allow herself to relax for one moment from the endless round of cooking and cleaning and washing that she’d devised for herself because otherwise… Otherwise what? The world would end? Well, that was probably going to happen anyway, David thought grimly, remembering the newspaper headlines he’d read earlier.
‘Thank you,’ he said when he was done. ‘That was the best meal I’ve ever had.’ He wasn’t exaggerating.
She ignored the compliment. He couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t seem frightened or angry any more, but there was a distance between them that he couldn’t seem to bridge.
He looked over at the mantelpiece, from which the photographs of his mother and father on their wedding day and of him as a boy of Max’s age had long since disappeared. Consigned to the bureau, he supposed, gathering dust.
‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘Dad. It’s like he was never here.’
‘No,’ she said, responding to the question but not the comment.
‘Why?’
‘Because he was like you: always full of ideas, never settling to anything. Ideas don’t pay the bills,’ she said with finality.
‘Not like Ben, though. I doubt he’s had an idea in his life.’
‘He’s solid,’ she said, not taking offence.
David nodded. He understood what his mother meant. It couldn’t have been easy for her all those years, worrying about debts and eviction notices, although it had to be said that the old man had done better toward the end, with his own one-man business and a second-hand white van with SPARKS ELECTRICS painted on the side to prove it. Much good it did him: the van was where he’d died — a heart attack on his way to a job in Abingdon. ‘Painless,’ the doctor had told them at the hospital, ‘but lucky he was stopped in traffic at the time, now wasn’t it?’
‘Have you got a cigarette?’ David asked. His mother handed him her packet and lit one herself too. The acrid smoke felt good in his lungs, and the shared cigarettes broke down the barrier between them for a moment so that they seemed almost like old comrades, free of the bonds of their failed mother-son relationship.
‘The old man’s ideas didn’t do me much good either, you know,’ said David reflectively. ‘All those crazy plans for my future like I was going to be a university professor or something. This is the last town he should have been living in. Those bloody dreaming spires went to his head.’
‘He wanted the best for you.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ said David bitterly. ‘He wanted to live his life again through me. That’s what he wanted. It’s why he spent his last penny and yours too sending me to that posh school — so I could learn to speak like the upper classes, be one of them. And you know what they called me there, Mum? Sparky! Maybe he should have thought twice about sending me to the same place where he changed the lightbulbs, but I expect they gave him a special rate — cut price fees for Sparky Swain’s son. I never stood a bloody chance in that place — that’s the truth.’
‘You did all right in your first lot of exams.’
‘Yes, to keep him happy. But what was the point in that if he was going to die? What was the point in any of it?’
‘I don’t know, David. I’m not God. Like I said, he wanted the best for you. You’re the one who chose to throw it all away. You could have made something of yourself if you’d wanted to.’
‘So it’s all my fault, is it?’ David asked angrily.
‘You make your bed, and you lie on it,’ said his mother. The finality of the platitude infuriated him, even more so because he couldn’t think of a cutting response.
‘Why didn’t you visit me in prison?’ he asked. It was the unspoken question that had been hanging in the air between them ever since he’d arrived.
‘Because I couldn’t,’ she said simply. ‘I wanted to, but Ben wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t want to go behind his back.’
And David knew she was telling no more or less than the truth. Honesty was his mother’s great redeeming quality, and, as had happened so often in the past, his anger bounced off it and evaporated.
‘You can sleep in your old room,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, getting up. And on impulse he bent over and kissed her on the cheek on his way to the door, and then left without waiting to see her reaction.
Upstairs, David washed in the tiny bathroom. Just like in the rest of the house there was not a speck of dirt anywhere — even the taps gleamed in sterile glory. David opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, looking for aspirin, and found some behind a bottle of men’s hair dye. He smiled, amused for a moment by the thought of his stepfather trying to keep his non-existent looks, and then caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. He looked awful — haggard, with great dark circles under his staring eyes, the living image of a man on the run, a convict on his last legs. He needed to sleep.
His old bedroom had become Max’s room, distinctively Max’s room. The bed and most of the furniture were still the same, but every surface was covered with careful arrangements of toy soldiers and Dinky cars and different species of furry animals. There was something oddly touching about this great assembly of disparate objects and creatures, and yet the room was still disturbing to David’s peace of mind. Here he’d played and read and slept, done his homework with his father, and been tended to by his mother when he had the measles. He’d had a family and a purpose and a life, and now he’d come back here a fugitive from justice, an outlaw like in those John Wayne movies he used to watch at the cinema when he was a kid. David closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. Outside a cacophony of Sunday-morning church bells pealed out, calling the faithful to worship, and he tossed and turned on the bed, tormented by the memory of Katya lying on her bed with a bloody hole in the middle of her pretty forehead and the gun shaking in his hand like it had a life of its own.
David opened his eyes and saw Max in the doorway. The boy looked worried, and his eyes behind his oversized spectacles seemed even larger than before.
‘You cried,’ he said, ‘like you were having a nightmare or something.’
‘I was,’ said David apologetically. ‘But it’s all right now. I like your room, Max.’
‘Do you?’ The boy seemed immoderately pleased, as if nobody had noticed the place before.
‘Yes, I do. All your things — it’s quite an arrangement you’ve got going. Which is your favourite?’
‘Toy or animal?’ asked Max seriously. He’d come into the room now and was standing beside the bed.
‘Both.’
‘Well, that’s easy. I like Fluff the most of the animals,’ he said, picking up a worse-for-wear black-and-white teddy bear from the top of the bookcase. ‘I like to sleep with him, but Dad says I need to stop because I’m growing up. And my best toy…’ — Max looked around the room, carefully weighing his decision — ‘is… my robot,’ he finished with a flourish, holding up a silver flat-faced, cone-headed android with an elaborate control panel in what would otherwise have been its stomach. Robbie the Robot was engraved on the back over the compartment for the batteries.
‘Yes, good choice. I think that’s the best one too,’ said David admiringly. ‘Is Robbie your favourite character?’
‘Yes, one of them.’ Max seemed distracted, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right
