AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Do I? Am I the one that can’t give trust here? I take a large gulp of my drink, and fizz shoots up my nose I try and inhale, making it worse, and bend over my knees as my throat closes. Liss thumps me on the back, and I wave my hand at her.
“Handsome charming men are the worst,” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice.
I start to wheeze-laugh.
Liss squeezes my arm. “Talk to him, Kate.” She leans against the back of the couch, and I turn my head to look at her turning her glass around in her hand. “He was prepared to change his life radically to fit around having a child. He gave up a lot of what held him together. It all matters so much to him;youmatter so much to him. I think he’s allowed a little meltdown over this, don’t you?”
I can still see the joy on his face when I told him I was pregnant … I can replay the conversation about moving from the apartment he’s lived in ever since he came to New York.
“I lost Josh too. Aren’t I allowed a meltdown too?” I say defiantly.
“Maybe you are; maybe that’s what he’s trying to say to you. Maybe he wants you to lean on him a little, to let go a little with him.”
I stare into my now empty glass. I’m not used to sharing my feelings with other people, but maybe he isn’t either. Ugh. It’s just so hard to break the tendency to guard myself, even a little.
Tomorrow. I’ll let him sleep it all off and talk to him tomorrow.
37
Fabian
When I come to, I’m lying on some dirty worn-out mattress in an old building. I blink up at the holes in the ceiling: I remember some girl offering me a bottle of vodka and staggering along a street supported on someone’s shoulder. I turn my head on the mattress, and right enough there’s a body buried in a sleeping bag.Nothing happened. I’m fully clothed, cold seeping in through the holes in the windows, rubble on the floor, plaster and wood and graffiti everywhere.A squat. I sit up on the edge of the mattress How did I get here? How many days have gone by? An image of a lifeless tiny body pops into my head, and I groan. Is this how the slide down into oblivion happens, one awful incident that sends you down a track of no return? Is this what happened to Zach? Looking for something, anything that would help him cope with things he kept seeing in his head? Probably our father. My chest aches.
Josh seems to live in my bones. This past week all I could hear from the park across the road were the shrieks and laughter of children playing, and I wanted to lean out of the window and shout at them to shut the fuck up.
I don’t think I’ve seen Kate for days, and I scrabble in my pockets for my phone, but come up empty. Fuck, maybe I didn’t bring it out with me. But that’s a good thing: People will steal it in a second if you’re out of it. Every day I see the pain etched in Kate’s face, grooves around her mouth getting deeper, and I don’t know what to do about it, how to help. Will she implode eventually if she can’t let it all out?
The need to pee pulls at me, and I drag myself up as the room swims. God, when did I last eat? I stumble over the rubble and past a guy curled on another mattress out into what passes as a corridor. I can see down through holes in the floor, and even though I do parkour I don’t like the feel of this two-storey building. The wood creaks as I head down the stairs. Where the fuck am I? Images of last night flip through my head. I think I fell over at some point, and I rub my temple and the pain that shoots through my head takes me by surprise. An image of Kate bent over me suddenly pops up, and I stop walking. Kate was here? I stare at the decaying brickwork.
My bladder aches, and I pull my cock out and pee out of a window that’s missing on the stairwell. The relief makes me light-headed, and I steady myself with my hand against the frame.
“Hey! No urinating in the building!” a voice shouts, and I freeze, tucking myself away then looking around. Where did that come from?
I move down the stairs, and through a gap in the wall, a guy with a thick neck and colorful tattoos is sitting by a drum with a kettle over a fire. “There’s a bucket in each room, your responsibility to empty it into the outhouse over there.” He gestures toward a ramshackle hut standing on an area of muddy ground.
Fuck. I don’t want to rub the long-termers up the wrong way. “No problem, sorry about that.” He inclines his head, and I look around, trying to get my bearings, Brooklyn I think, then look back at the guy poking the fire under the kettle. “How long have you lived here?” I ask.
“About ten years.” He jerks his chin up.
And I examine his face. “Have we met before? I had a brother, Zach …” I wave my arm around. “I don’t remember him here but …”
He raises his eyebrows. “I remember Zach. Crazy guy he was. Bad addict. Stole shit like they all do. He talked about a brother. You were in a circus, yeah?”
I laugh. “Only if he was high. Parkour maybe?”
He nods. “Parkour.” He looks off out over the water. “I remember some crazy fucking videos,” he mutters, eyes roaming over my face intently.
And I examine him back. My God, he looks beaten down. How much does this kind of life leave a toll? It’s not freedom, it’s attrition, it’s years and years of fighting against the system. And for better or for worse, I think of my warm apartment: I know I’m part of the system, not part of the community trying to fight for a space to live in.
“You want a coffee?”
I grin at him. “That would be amazing.”
He disappears into his phone, and I sink down onto an old camping chair. A couple of guys appear, and I chat to them as we share coffee and a packet of Oreos. One of them is young—I suspect a runaway who shouldn’t be here—but he talks about how he’s an alternative artist and musician and his enthusiasm to show me his art burns away some of my cynicism. The other young guy is quiet, nervous, and I wonder what his story is, how long he’s been here.
And the reality of their life bites into me more as they talk. I’ve moved on from this, in fact, so long ago. It feels like I’ve hung around the fringes forever with my experimenting and my hacking, but I know deep down that I don’t belong here and that I have the ability with Kate to let it go forever, to step into a warmer, securer place, to stop messing up my money and living on the fringes.
Eventually, I get up and give them a wave. “I need to be off,” I say. “Thanks for the coffee,” and I head off over the waste ground toward a road I hope leads down into Brooklyn.
