No Harm Can Come to a Good Man. James Smythe

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      ‘I’ll wake the kids,’ she tells him, and then he hears her go down the corridor and into the twins’ room. He hears them giggling. They’ve been waiting for her. Laurence gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. He looks at his face. He thinks about how old he looks and wonders how old he will look at the end of this, what sort of effect even running for the role will have on him. He pulls at gray hairs, and he examines the lines on his mouth and eyes, the slight jowl underneath his chin. He rubs at his temples, and the spots on his head where the hair will start to go. It’s in his family, or it was; and it feels like an inevitability to him. He’ll turn forty and his stress levels will be off the charts, and then he’ll just be clinging to whatever aspects of youth feel like letting him off the hook for the longest.

      Deanna reappears in the doorway. ‘Lane isn’t coming,’ she says. ‘I told her she can have lockdown here or there, but she chose here.’

      ‘Foolish girl.’

      ‘I’m going to call her every hour, check she’s not gone out.’

      ‘We can trust her,’ Laurence says.

      ‘I wouldn’t have trusted myself when I was her age,’ Deanna replies. ‘Anyway, the twins are getting dressed. What time are you on?’

      ‘Ten,’ he tells her. He goes to the wardrobe and pulls his suit out – the gray suit, the lemon-yellow tie – and as he dresses himself he hears her go downstairs and switch on the TV. He hears his name mentioned, and then the set goes quiet.

      ‘Can we go swimming?’ Sean asks.

      ‘Later,’ Deanna says. ‘Maybe we can go in later.’ She’s packed all the cleaning supplies and the toolkit, and she pulls them both out of the trunk of the car. She wants to start clearing the house out, getting rid of the crap that’s been left, making sure that there are no splinters. There is furniture in the house; wooden tables and chairs that match the walls and floors and make it feel like the set of a horror movie. She pulls up outside the front, driving as close to the house as she can. There’s no real space for the car, just the dirt and gravel ground. ‘Watch yourselves,’ she says. ‘No running, no picking up anything that looks as if you shouldn’t pick it up, okay?’ She looks at the twins. ‘And stick close,’ she says, ‘No idea what’s waiting to bite you in this place.’ She snaps her teeth at them, and they both laugh.

      The front door sticks and she has to shoulder it as hard as she can, really putting all of her weight into forcing it open. It finally swings, a hard arc that makes it smack into the wall and kick up clouds of dust. To Deanna’s eyes the house looks as if it’s barely holding itself up. It’s a building of pencil-drawn monochrome, the walls slightly askew, in need of a ruler. Rays of light hit the dust that seems to fill every part of the place, the light coming from not only the windows, but also through the cracks in the walls. There’s a smell inside that she struggles to recognize, that’s not totally unpleasant. It’s on that fine line, and it needs such a clean. They should have hired somebody, she thinks.

      ‘Right,’ she says, and she opens her bag, pulling out cloths and disinfectant sprays. ‘We need to get this place a little more habitable.’ She holds a cloth out for each of the kids. ‘Help me today, maybe we think about buying you guys a videogame later in the week. Deal?’ The kids snatch the cloths from her hands, and she shows them how to use the spray on the work surfaces in the kitchen, and how to wipe them down. She knows she’ll have to go over it again, but this is fun, the three of them working on this. She knows that when this is done, the place might feel like more of a home.

      There’s no water from the taps; she writes it into her phone as something for Laurence to sort out when he arrives.

      The delegates usher him onto the stage. ‘This is official,’ one of them says, ‘so treat it with some goddamn respect, you hear?’ He’s smiling while he talks, so Laurence smiles too; but it sounds, for a second, like an actual threat. ‘You do us proud,’ the man says. Not, ‘Do the party proud,’ Laurence notices. He takes Laurence’s hand, reaching for it and forcing the handshake.

      Laurence reaches the stage and the flashbulbs go, the cameras all pointing at him. He’s got a speech that was prepared for him and he uses it while he speaks, but only as a frame. Most of the time he tries to be as much himself as he can.

      They ask questions, and he poses for photographs. He checks his phone and his Twitter, his Facebook, his emails all scream alerts at him as people congratulate him. Amit takes the phone.

      ‘Clear your notifications,’ he says. ‘You won’t have time to read them.’ He pulls a schedule out.

      ‘No,’ Laurence says, ‘nothing else today. I’m going home. Family time.’

      ‘Bullshit,’ Amit says, laughing.

      ‘No,’ Laurence tells him. He asks for Amit to get him a car and he loosens his tie. He texts Deanna: I’m coming home.

      The house looks exactly as Laurence has been picturing it: the same ramshackle wooden walls; the same dock that stretches off out and over the water; the same view behind it, the mountain and the houses in the distant opposite, and the sun above them. The driver takes them along the dirt track that runs down the hill towards the shoreline and Laurence watches the house get closer, as if it is becoming more real, and it reveals itself to him in broken windows and splintered wood. He feels the peace washing over him, a sense that this is meant to be – at least for now. Barely ten minutes from their other house, yet it feels like a different place entirely. He winds the window down and smells the air, listens to the sound of the tires on the gravel.

      Laurence watches as the driver takes the car back up the hill, leaving him alone outside for a second. There’s just him. He can’t hear his family, not at that moment; and then he goes up to the front door, which is opened wide, and inside. He hears them upstairs, singing some song that he vaguely recognizes from the radio. Deanna is mostly humming the melody, but the kids know every word. He doesn’t shout to let them know that he’s here, not yet.

      He walks through the downstairs, which is open-plan, a living area with 1950s wood-framed sofas around a fireplace, then the kitchen behind and the table for four, the units that are the same wood as everything else. The man who owned this place must have been a carpenter, he thinks; maybe he did this all himself, and built the house with his own two hands. There are gun racks on the walls, empty slots of what was once there; and a hook with a dust outline shape of what was clearly a mounted animal head. Laurence stands by the window at the end of the house, looking out over the water.

      ‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks him. She’s at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t hear her come down.

      ‘Good,’ he says. ‘It went well.’

      ‘I love you,’ she says, and he smiles.

      ‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he tells her. ‘This is amazing.’ He’s transfixed, staring at some far-off point in the distance. There’s a thin layer of mist stopping him from seeing what’s actually over the other side of the lake, only the thin shapes of what have to be houses and trees, but that isn’t stopping him. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said that I had always dreamed of this,’ he tells her.

      ‘I know.’ She stands next to him while the twins run around behind her. ‘Thank god you’re here. There’s no running water.’

      ‘I’ll turn it on,’ he says. He doesn’t stop staring out at the lake.

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