AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Amusement lit his eyes too and I had a thought.
I went into the liquor cabinet and gestured we take the Ikea rocking chairs positioned by the floor-to-ceiling windows. The solar lights outside would soon come on and I always liked to sit here at dusk, watch the owls come out, the stars start to twinkle, the foxes in the distance begin their nightly scavenger hunt.
“Tell about your mother,” I said in a German accent.
Eric couldn’t help a little laugh and it made me happy to see him actually smile for once.
Handing him a few fingers of neat whisky from Caelan’s top shelf collection, I watched as he drank a nip, then threw back the rest. We hadn’t drunk since we got here. We’d both been on high alert.
I would pump before bed and hope by morning my milk was ABV-free again.
I poured him some more and stuck to my two fingers, sipping slowly to savour the small dram I was allowing myself.
“You saw her,” he said, swirling his remaining liquor around the edge of the glass. “She’s a shell. She exists, that’s it.”
“And your siblings?” I asked.
He avoided my eye. “Caton lives in America. We don’t speak.”
“Why not?”
“He left us.”
“Ah, he’s the elder.”
Eric shrugged.
“There was a sister, in the pics?”
He stared daggers at the floor at any mention of her. “She died of an overdose.”
Rather than say, “I’m sorry, that must be hard for you,” or, “How do you cope with that?” I went to the window, pressed my nose against the glass and tried to push out memories that flashed before my eyes. No amount of squeezing my eyes shut worked.
White powder.
Dazed, naked men.
Schoolfriends on hospital beds.
Then me trying not to succumb, too.
“Caton was the strong one. If he’d just stayed…”
“Your father must be dead, I take it?”
“I don’t know. I could find out, but I don’t want to.”
I heard the raw pain in his voice. He’d wanted love, a relationship, but they hadn’t ever had one. I got the impression there was no chance of it now, so his father may as well have been dead already.
“That’s why she’s like she is, then? Your sister?”
He looked up, blinked, then stared into his glass. For the briefest second, he’d looked like he was thankful I could read the situation myself without him having to say much.
“She is a monster, she turned a blind eye to the abuse we all suffered, butyes. She was a victim, too. She shut down after Betsy died. There’s nothing left in her but shadows and lies. Lies she tells herself to survive.”
He was well-spoken for a South London boy. “Did you get a scholarship or something?”
He put an elbow on the arm of his chair and held his chin in his hand, a sign he was starting to relax. Maybe the whisky.
