But I don’t die.
I don’t know how long I’m out for, but when I come round, it’s to find that someone is pressing hard on my chest, trying to resuscitate me. I can hear shouting. Blurred silhouettes loom over me. The metal door keeps crashing against the wall as people rush in and out of my cell. The rope is gone from around my neck. I’m back on the bed.
I come back to life.
When I was released from prison, I got an apprenticeship at a car garage in The Valley. I saved up enough money to go into business with Fab5.
I never forgot Amy’s smile. It was the only little bit of happiness I felt in my sad, lonely world.
Amy was my heroine.
She was my breath of life.
She was the saving of me.
55
ME
The world is arsewards.
Sky, rain, branches, leaves, earth and stone, all whipped and colliding.
I stumble ahead in the woods, can only hear the howl of the wind in my ears. But my guts feel the bass roll of thunder. The storm’s returned. My nerves catch every shotgun crackle of lightning as it forks over the trees.
I keep moving forward, caught by brambles, lashed by branches backlit for split seconds. But they’re just blacker fissures in the darkness.
I get to Bishop’s camp. Everything here looks like a beaten dog waiting for its owner.
Neglected.
Tortured.
I pick up a stone, and holding one arm over my face, put a window in with it. I pray to whatever god is listening that Bishop’s here.
When he barrels out of the caravan, he looks like a man half beaten.
‘The hell are you doing, Shepherd? You gone mad?’
I spit, find a smoke in my pocket, light it, and only take one drag. I flick the fag butt to the ground, half-finished. It just doesn't taste good anymore. I watch the rain put it out.
I look up at the sky, willing myself to stop shaking. I don’t know if I can trust either God or my own legs in any of this. I’m in between minds if a god exists, but I say a prayer anyway.
‘I know you’re my father, Bishop.’
I can see the stubble on Bishop’s chin and the fine white hair on his head. He frowns, looks at me in desperation. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, kid. Who’s been lying to you? Christian?’
‘Quit lying. I’ve seen my mum’s film. I know it’s you — so cut the shit,’ I roar.
His frown turns to a scowl. He’s just comprehended the shit that is my life. ‘Your mother was a whore. She came on to me. You don’t know the full story, son. Don’t judge a man.’
Time slows.
I look around me. There’s a crow flying low over. What little light there is shimmers in the branches above.
Keep your head, Shepherd.
‘I’m. Not. Your. Son,’ I grit out. ‘I know she was thirteen when you took advantage over a poor, abused girl.’
‘What’re you gonna do?’ Bishop looks me up and down. I don’t like what I see on his face.
I see it now. All the darkness I inherited came from my father’s evil eyes.
‘There’s no good in drudging up the past,’ he says. ‘You’re the illegitimate child of an underage whore.’ His smooth voice makes me grit my teeth.
I lose my head and think of nothing.
I charge at him, smash his back against the caravan. I lower my face to his, teeth bared like a wolf foaming at the mouth. I squeeze his neck.
‘It’s over. The past is done,’ Bishop says, his eyes artic. ‘I didn’t want you then, don’t want you now.’
His voice is low and calm. He sounds just as he did when we sat alongside each other in his bar. It could be a joke Bishop’s telling me, or it could be something profound, about this being the end.
‘You think I’m looking for a father in a man like you?’ I spit out, eyes furious, limbs shaking, even angrier now than when I found out. I mash his neck harder under the force of my arm blade.
‘Your mother was a slut,’ Bishop spits. ‘She loved every fucking second of it. Begged me for it.”
Bishop knows his days are numbered. He wants me to give him the easy way out.
Kill him.
I want to kill him. I want to fucking torture him.
It’s like a sucker punch to the throat, a sharp white pain in the base of my spine. And I hang off at the edge of the world.
I see a vision of Amy walking to me, in her white shoes, with a twist of a smile, her soft green eyes sparkling. She’s perfect and lovely.
I know at once every detail of her. Her angelic voice, her sweet smile, the smell of her sunshine hair. I know her sudden temper and her slow soft tears and the way she moves, like a little ballerina.
Now, at the edge of the world, I remember everything. She holds out her hand. Smiles. Her face lit with love, like a bright rose in the darkness.
I focus my blurred eyes on Bishop, crushing the life out of him.
‘Go on — do it!’ he roars into the howling wind.
The world is wrong. So fucking wrong.
A man can change.
I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, again. I don’t even want to fucking be here. It makes me sick to realise what I’ve done in the past. The armed robbery, the gang fights, so much shit and nothing. It disgusts me. It makes me loathe myself to know I was capable of it and that I used to get off on it. Thinking it made me the ‘big man’.
There’s no power in that — no feeling of being alive.
