A Line of Blood. Ben McPherson

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СКАЧАТЬ Millicent would say: it’s like people walking through your living room. You could hear them so clearly, all those bad kids and badder adults: the change in their pockets, the phlegm in their throats, the half-whispered street deals and the Coke-can football matches. It was all so unbearably close.

      But there was something else too, a dull, rhythmic tapping that I couldn’t place, couldn’t decipher. Max had located it, though. He pointed to the brown leather sofa. A dark stain was spreading out across the central cushion.

      I looked at Max. Max looked at me.

      ‘Water,’ said Max.

      Water dripping on to the leather sofa. Yes, that was the sound. Max looked up. I looked up. The plaster of the ceiling was bowing. No crack was visible, but at the lowest point water was gathering: gathering and falling in metronomic drops, beating out time on the wet leather below.

      Now I could see that cat. She was halfway up the staircase, watching the tracks of the water through the air.

      Max and I looked at each other. I could read nothing in my son’s expression beyond a certain patient expectancy.

      ‘Maybe you should shout up to him, Dad. Case he’s here.’

      Maybe I should. Maybe I should have shouted louder as I’d skulked by the back door, because standing here in his living room, looking up his stairs towards the first floor, it felt a little late to be alerting him to our presence.

      ‘Hello?’

      Nothing.

      ‘It’s Alex. From next door.’

      ‘And Max,’ said Max quietly. ‘And Foxxa.’

      ‘Alex and Max,’ I shouted up. ‘We’ve come to get our cat.’

      Nothing. Water falling against leather. Another street-dog. I looked again at Max.

      ‘You go first, Dad.’

      He was right. I couldn’t send him upstairs in front of me. I had always suspected overly tidy men of having dark secrets in the bedroom.

      ‘Maybe he left a tap on,’ I said quietly.

      ‘Maybe.’ Max wrinkled his nose.

      ‘All right. Stay there.’

      I saw the cat’s tail curl around a banister. I headed slowly up the stairs.

      A click, and the landing light came on. Max had found that switch too.

      Two rooms at the back, two at the front: just like ours. At the back the bathroom and the master bedroom, at the front the second bedroom and a tiny room that only estate agents called a bedroom. The cat was gone. The bathroom door was open.

      The neighbour was in the bathtub, on his back, his legs and arms thrown out at discordant angles, as if something in his body was broken and couldn’t be repaired. His mouth was open, his lips were pulled back.

      His eyes seemed held open by an unseen force; the left eye was shot through with blood. Blood was gathering around his nostrils too.

      I did not retch, or cover my eyes, or cry, or any of the thousand things you’re supposed to do. Instead, and I say this with some shame, I heard and felt myself laugh. Perhaps it was the indignity of the half-erection standing proud from his lifeless body; perhaps it was simply my confusion.

      I looked away from his penis, then back, and saw what prudishness had prevented me from seeing before. Lying calmly in the gap between the neighbour’s thighs was an iron. A Black and Decker iron. Fancy. Expensive. There were burn-marks around the top of his left thigh. The iron had been on when he had tipped it into the bath.

      Did people really do this? The electric iron? The bath? Wasn’t it a teenage myth? Surely, you would think, surely the fuse would save you? Surely a breaker would have tripped?

      Apparently not.

      The bath had cracked. The neighbour must have kicked out so hard that he’d broken it. Some sort of fancy plastic composite. The bath would have drained quickly after that, but not quickly enough to save the neighbour from electrocution. Poor man.

      ‘Dad.’

      Max. He was standing in the doorway, the cat in his arms. I hadn’t heard him climb the stairs. Oh please, no.

      ‘Is he dead?’

      ‘Out, Max.’ Surely this needs some sort of lie.

      ‘But Dad.’

      ‘Out. Downstairs. Now.’

      ‘But Dad. Dad.’

      I turned to look at him.

      ‘What, Max?’

      ‘Are you OK, Dad?’ said Max, stepping out on to the landing. I looked at him again, his thin shoulders, his floppy hair, that unreadable look in his eyes. You’re eleven, I thought. When did you get so old?

      ‘Dad. Dad? Are you going to call the police?’

      I nodded.

      ‘His phone’s downstairs in the living room.’

      He was taking charge. My eleven-year-old son was taking charge. This had to stop. This couldn’t be good.

      ‘No, Max,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘We’re going to go back to our place. I’ll call from there.’

      ‘OK.’ He turned and went downstairs.

      I took a last look at the neighbour and wondered just what Max had understood. The erection was subsiding now; the penis lay flaccid on his pale thigh.

      I heard Max open the front door. ‘You coming, Dad?’

      I went home and rang the police and told them what we had found. Then I rang Millicent, though I knew she would not pick up.

      Max and I sat at opposite sides of the table in our tired little kitchen, watching each other in silence.

      After I had called the police I had made cheese sandwiches with Branston pickle. Max had done what he always did, opening his sandwiches, picking up the cheese and thoughtfully sucking off the pickle, stacking the cheese on his plate and the bread beside it. He had then eaten the cheese, stuffing it into his mouth, chewing noisily and swallowing before he could possibly be ready to. Normally I would have said something, and Max would have ignored it, and I would have shouted at him. Then, if Millicent had been with us, she would have shot me a furious glance, refused to speak to me until Max had gone to bed, then said, simply, ‘Why pick that fight, Alex, honey? You never win it anyway. You’re just turning food into a thing. Food doesn’t have to be a thing.’

      Tonight I simply watched Max, wondering what to do, and what to tell Millicent when she came home.

      A father leads his son from the world of the boy into the world of the man. A father takes charge, and does not without careful preparation expose his son to the cold realities of death. A father СКАЧАТЬ