‘Why?’
I wait for him to tell me to drop it, or that he wants to go home, but he doesn’t.
‘Because it felt like a rejection all over again.’
His voice is thick with emotion.
‘I’m so sorry, Mark.’
His energy has changed. A tightly controlled emotion is breaking free, and the words are about to spill out. All he needs is someone to listen.
‘How was he?’
He scratches his forehead like he’s trying to summon the memory.
‘Giovanni Marino is a changed man. A pillar of the fucking community, if you can believe it.’ He laughs bitterly. ‘Coaches football to blind orphans. Or something.’
‘Did you tell him you were coming?’
‘No, because I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. He seemed surprised to see me but not overly moved. He acted like I was an old work colleague – vaguely interested to know what I was up to, but only asking superficial questions.’
‘Was he not like you remembered?’
‘He was smaller, thinner, slower. He was just … a nobody, a nothing. And yet he terrorised us all those years.’
‘Bullies only pick on people weaker than them. And that’s not you any more.’
He nods. ‘Were we really so hard to love? Because he seems to do okay with his new family. If he’d been a lonely old man, raging into a bottle of Johnnie Walker, I could have laughed at him. But his new wife doesn’t look haunted, and he doesn’t have that ticking time bomb behind his eyes, none of us knowing when the fucking thing would go off.’ He pauses. ‘On the way home, I kept asking myself the same question. Was it me? DidIbring it out in him?’
I feel his pain like a knife in my side. I take his hand and squeeze it tightly.
‘No, you didn’t.’
I hate the idea that he might think he’s not enough – that he’s responsible for what his father did.
I turn so I can see his eyes; I need to know that he hears me. ‘An abuser doesn’t get to say, “Look what you made me do.”’
His chest rises on a slow inward breath, and he nods. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Most of the time.’
‘You’ll get there.’
The sun catches the sparks of gold in his eyes. There’s a shadow of vulnerability in them, but the longer I hold his gaze, the more it ebbs away, replaced by something else. Something fierce. Something that makes my heart beat faster.
I look away, finding the intensity too much, then half-smile to break the awkwardness. ‘Sorry, I’m being a therapist.’
‘You’re being a friend,’ he says softly. ‘To someone who doesn’t deserve your friendship.’
There was a time when I would have agreed with him. That he didn’t deserve any sympathy from me, but after last night, I’m not sure I feel that way any longer.
‘That’s not true,’ I tell him.
‘You’re one of the kindest people I know. I’ve done some shitty things in my life. You were at the receiving end of one of the worst.’
Everything inside me stills. The sounds of chattering children fade, the circling gulls are muted, and it’s just him and me and my thudding heart.
This isn’t the time for recriminations. After the terror of last night and what Mark’s just confessed to me, I can’t summon any righteous anger for his grief-stricken outburst outside a church fifteen years ago.
‘Let’s not dredge up the past,’ I tell him. ‘It’s all ancient history.’
