Captives

    He grunted.

    Love. What the fuck did he know about love?

    His father had told him that many times.

    His father…

    He pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind and wandered through into the sitting room, switching off the cassette first. He drank his tea then decided to have a shower before retiring. He was tired and his body ached; he wouldn't need much coaxing to sleep but he felt as if he needed to cleanse himself.

    He passed through the sitting room, through another door past his own bedroom. Past the other bedroom.

    The one he kept locked now.

    The one where his father…

    Fuck it.

    The memories were there; they always would be. No amount of time was going to make them disappear. Perhaps the years would make them less potent but they would not easily be excised from his consciousness. He paused by the door to his father's room, or what had once been his father's room. Then he twisted the key and walked in.

    It was bare, completely empty but for the single bed, now stripped, which stood beneath the window. His father had lived with him for three years prior to his death ten months ago. A stroke and then a gradual decline into senility, followed by a second devastating brain haemorrhage, had seen the old man off. It was the time after the first stroke that Scott had found so trying. His father, then seventy-two, had been rendered more or less helpless, housebound and unable to do anything but sit and stare at the television or out of the window all day. Scott's mother had left home when he was fourteen; he had no brothers or sisters to help him care for his father. The burden had fallen squarely on his shoulders. At first it hadn't been too bad. The old man could feed himself at least, but then he began to suspect that Scott was trying to poison him. He refused to eat. His weight dropped from twelve to seven stone. Scott had felt pity for him but, as the old man refused to eat, pity had given way to anger and then to hatred. He had seen his father wasting away but Scott had known that it could have been avoided. He lowered his head as he thought of the hatred he had felt for the man sometimes.

    Was this shame?

    Scott had brought him food only to see it hurled across the kitchen.

    More than once he'd come close to hitting the old man.

    Old bastard.

    Now, now; he couldn't help himself.

    Scott had wanted to believe that but it didn't alleviate the frustration he felt.

    Don't you mean hatred?

    At times it had become almost impossible for him to distirfguish where he drew the line between his loathing of his father or his hatred of the illness that had transformed him.

    'You bloody fool,' his father would repeat, glaring at him venomously. 'I can't eat that.' Then the tray or the plate would be hurled across the kitchen once again.

    Just die, you old fucker. Do us both a favour and fucking die.

    How easy it would have been to place the Beretta against the old man's head and blast what was left of his brains all over the wall.

    And when the second stroke had taken him Scott had felt something akin to relief, until he visited him in hospital only hours before he died. He had walked into the room at the side of the ward and found his father's shrivelled form in an oxygen tent, tubes attached to his arms and nose. Scott had sat beside him, his mind blank, as if he had no pity, no hatred, no emotion of any kind left inside him. It was unsettling. His own indifference towards his father's impending death was infinitely more disturbing than any emotional outburst he may have been prone to.

    Should have been prone to?

    The hospital staff had told him it was just a matter of time; all he could do now was wait for the end. He might as well sit outside. But Scott had remained at the bedside, watching his father's sunken features, still unable to feel anything, still frightened by his own lack of emotion.

    Why hang on? Just let go.

    The father Scott had known and (had he loved him? Truly loved him, ever?) lived with for so many years had been dead long before this second stroke. The man he had (loved?) known had ceased to exist after the first haemorrhage. The soul was gone, he was watching the decay of the husk now. Scott had been preparing to leave when his father's eyes had flickered open and, instead of a glassy stare, Scott had seen recognition. It had shocked him, brought all his feelings flooding back. In a moment of horrible clarity, it was as if his father knew and understood that he was going to die, and in his eyes that realisation was reflected. He knew he was going to die and he wept at the inevitability of it.

    Then, just as quickly, the glazed look had returned and he had slipped back into coma and then beyond to death.

    Scott stepped back and slammed the door, as if shutting out the sight of the room would close away the memories.

    It didn't.

    He couldn't sleep.

    Scott had lain awake for over an hour listening to the wind whistling outside the window. Thinking.

    He thought about his father.

    He thought about Carol.

    Finally he swung himself out of bed and crossed to the window.

    Rain spattered against it like wind-blown tears.

    He felt very alone and he didn't like the feeling. Not much frightened him but loneliness scared the hell out of him.

    I don't want to die alone.

    He thought of Carol.

    His hope. His salvation.

    She would be with him; he wouldn't be alone.

    He glanced at the phone beside the bed, thought about calling her. He just wanted to hear her voice.

    Maybe in a little while.

    The wind continued to howl.

FOURTEEN

3 APRIL 1977

    The man came hurtling across the room, mouth open, arms outstretched, his eyes bulging wide with rage.

    Dr Robert Dexter took a step back from the observation slit in the door, relieved that three inches of solid steel separated him from the patient beyond. Inside the room, the man continued to fling himself at the door, banging his head against the metal partition, finally spitting on the glass of the observation window, the thick mucus obscuring Dexter's view of him.

    'Increase his medication,' Dexter said, glancing down at the clipboard the held.

    'He's on 50mg of Thorazine twice a day already,' Andrew Colston told him.

    'Well, it doesn't seem to be working, does it? Up the dosage.'

    Their footsteps echoed through the high ceilinged corridor as they approached the next door. Dexter slid back the observation panel and looked in.