excerpt
Pauline has gone up to the bathroom, to clear the blocked sink he’s forgotten
about. She’s always found it best to work through a traumatic matter by
doing more work. If only Lucas would do the same. He’s very quiet, no
thermo-nuclear reaction. She regrets the crudity of her statement. But it’s
safer for everyone if Lucas accepts that version of the situation. The monster
sleeps, it is reasonably quiet, its dreams must not be triggered by well-meant
tamperings. She can’t face any more retro-visions, or visitations. Her fragile
peace is hard-earned.
Lucas listens to the splatter of the rain as his mother creaks around upstairs.
So he’s a complete waste of space-time, superfluous to all social requirements,
so his sex doesn’t fit anyone (Katie didn’t even want to talk about it), so he fills
the dead blank spaces with wrong words, so he’s the non-existent child of an
un-person, Son of Nowhere Man.
He’s gripped the remote control so hard that the tape, muted, has started to
fast-forward again—Pauline’s mouth, extreme close-up/Pauline
talks/talks/talks/Nick cakewalks around supported by male nurses/his eyes are
pools of blackness/Pauline talks/he’s trapped in oversized trousers/Doctor
points at fat handful of tablets/stabs finger in palm/Pauline talks/CLOSED
sign over the Great British Time Machine/Pauline talks /the presenter wags
his head/this scratch mix almost over, rolling credits . . .
He’s going to rewind and review. Until Pauline physically stops him, if necessary.
But can he really face an ongoing war of attrition?
Then he stands up, and switches off the box. The solution is obvious, he’s
been lost in this video twilight, when the simple actuality is out there, in the
raw world.
“I’m going out,” he shouts up the stairwell as he grabs his jacket.
“Where on earth are you going?” She starts down the stairs, bewildered.
She’d expected him to hole up in his room for hours, blasting the house with
his portable (robot house, metallic grindcore, digitised lunacy) but she’s lived
through these ambient moods before. There’s nothing for him out there. It’s
not as if they were back at Chesterton Crescent, where he could just huff off to
some all nighter, like he did every night after he split up with that soppy Katie.
There’s only one mock-Tudor pub in Abbotsburton, he won’t like it there,
and he’s going to be saturated by the freak weather . . .
“Out. O.U.T. The Outer Limits. OK?” He laces up his DMs, looks in the
hallway mirror at his thin peaky face under a wedge of glossy black hair. Bite
the lip, don’t give anything away. The Oakhill Clinic can’t be more than ten
miles. He thinks he remembers the route. After all, the visits used to be part of
his summer routine. He’ll walk all the way, if need be. Never mind the
bollocking thunder.
Libros Libertad 