Innocence (17 page)

“No,” he says vehemently. “I left because she asked me to, because she blamed me, and I didn’t know what else to do. And yes, I felt guilty, but whatever you think about me, I was willing to face it. I would have faced your dad, anything. But she hated me.”

“Why did you never come back, why did you never
try
?” But even as I say the words, I’m not really there. In my head I’m running. I’m already gone.

“I did. But she had left by then. The guilt had destroyed her. One of her beautiful boys was broken, and that broke her.”

“The burns didn’t break him.
She
broke him by leaving him!” My voice is hoarse. Maybe I’m crying. I just don’t care.
He is beautiful…. He’ll always be beautiful. How could she be so selfish?

Malachi looks torn apart. A visible tremor runs down his arms. He wants a drink, and after this, I bet he’ll have one.

“It was here, wasn’t it?” I say. “We were in Arlow.”

He nods.

I stare at him—he never left. Did he think she would come back? I feel light-headed. I want to scream.

He loved her.

I can tell he wants to talk more, now he’s opened up a little, he seems unable to stop, but I need to get out of here.

“Take me home,” I say. Though it’s not really my home anymore. “If you don’t drive, I’ll walk. I don’t care either way,” I add as he sits there, paralyzed in his own little grief.

“Christopher….”

“Don’t call me that.” Don’t call me anything.

He starts the car.

In my head, my bags are packed, Jay is with me, and we are gone. It’s the only solution.

I’m too far ahead of myself to see my world has already fallen apart around me.

M
ALACHI
STOPS
outside the Tavern, and I stumble out of the car without saying a word.

When I get back to the boat, I find Jay in the galley with a half-empty two-liter bottle of cheap cider and the bankbook Dad gave me. He’s drunk. His reactions are slow when I snatch both things out of his hands and shove him off the couch.

I stare at him, breathing hard, feeling as though I am the center of a hurricane. “What the hell are you doing?” I ask angrily.

“When were you going to tell me?” he slurs, pulling himself up. “You fucking lied to me. You had enough money all along, and you fucking lied to stay so you could be around that bastard.”

His fist catches me unawares, glancing off my jaw so hard I stumble backwards into the table.

I’d never hit Jay, but I’ve already been pushed too far by what Malachi told me, I launch myself at him, sending us both sprawling along the rough galley flooring. The boat rocks with the force of it.

Pinning his arms above his head, I hold him down until he stops struggling.

“Please, Jay,” I sob, feeling weak. “Don’t fight me. Please.”

As I release his arms, I let my head fall against his shoulder. If he wants to take out his anger on me, I’m not going to stop him. I can’t. I have nothing left. But he doesn’t fight. He winds his arms round my back, pulling me tight against him, pulling me closer, his breathing ragged and upset.

“We need to pack,” I tell him, gathering myself together enough to get up.

I go into the bedroom.

After I pull on dry clothes, I grab the drawstring wash bag hung in the wardrobe and fill it with everything I have worth taking. Jay’s clothes hang next to mine, but I can’t put them in the bag for him. I don’t know what to do. In my head I’m running, so far, so fast.

“What are you doing?” Jay asks from behind me, a note of panic in his voice.

I glance round to see him standing, disheveled, in the doorway. He blinks, then rubs at his eyes, trying to sober up, but the alcohol is still in his system, and I know he wants nothing more than to curl up in bed.

“Dad wants me gone by tomorrow,” I reply shakily.

“Dad? He’s chucking you out?” He steps forward, his hand out to touch me, his expression shocked.

The thought of leaving here without Jay makes me feel powerless and weak. I just can’t do it without him. I need him with me, but he needs to want to come with me.

“I’ve got to go,” I say, backing away.

“What about me?” His voice is breathless.

I throw the bag at his feet.

“Pack,” I say more desperately than I need to, before I go into the galley in search of the cider.

“W
HY
DIDN
’
T
you tell me about the money?”

We sit across the table from each other as I screw up yet another letter to Dad. I need to be gone before he gets back, but I want him to know how I feel. I want him to know I’m angry and hurt and, fuck, I want to tell him what Malachi told me about Mum, so he can feel the pain I’m feeling, but every time I try to write it out, I just see the beautiful kid in the photograph—I just see Malachi’s face. And my feelings for Malachi make me so frustrated I want to smash my fist through the table.

I think about ripping his photograph into a million tiny shreds, but I just can’t.

I put down the pen and pour myself another cup of cider, downing it in one to avoid the bitter taste. The drunker I get, the less I care how close I am to losing it, how close I am to the precipice. Jay grabs the bottle off me and pours himself a cup. I no longer even try to stop him.

“Just because,” I say, meeting his gaze and realizing, when my brain takes twice as long to catch up with my vision, that I’m perhaps drunker than I thought. “We’re just leaving. We’re not going to look for her, and I didn’t want to argue with you about it.”

I can’t even say Mum anymore. She’s not my mother. I don’t have a mother.

Slowly Jay puts down the cup without drinking. His face is slack, mouth open. “Why not?”

If I didn’t know better, I could swear I hear his heart beating, blood roaring through his veins just as it roars through mine.

“Because… because she’s a fucking bitch, alright! She’s not our fucking mother anymore. She has no fucking right to second chances. You’re a million times a better person than she is, and she doesn’t deserve to see you ever again.” I’m not handling this well at all, I’m angry and drunk, and as soon as I say all that, I regret it. I should keep my mouth shut.

Jay stares at me unblinking.

Even as I look away, he keeps staring.

I think about the photograph of the three of us sat out in the summer field. I think about how much he’d want to see it, but I can’t show him. It would be cruel.

“You don’t mean that,” he says tremulously.

“Jay, she left us. She abandoned us. She left you when you needed her most.”

“We’ve moved round, maybe she couldn’t find us again.”

His eyes fill, and tears splash down onto the worn wood of the table.

“You
promised
me,” he gasps.

Fuck.
How could I have underestimated his faith in her—his faith that she’s a good person, that unforeseen events took her away from us? How could I have underestimated his love for her when he has loved her all these years?

I don’t want to hurt him, but sometimes the need to destroy something is greater than any other.

“The day of your accident she left us alone to go fuck a kid barely older than you are now. She didn’t just pop to the shop for half an hour to buy groceries. She left us alone because she couldn’t keep her fucking knickers on. And then, when she couldn’t handle the guilt of what she’d done, she left us completely.”

“You’re lying!” he spits, but I can see in his eyes that he knows I’m not. He trusts me. He just doesn’t want to believe it. “How do you know all this? Does Dad know? Who told you?
Who told you
?”

His face is red, his fists clenched in his lap. I’ve never seen him this angry. A deeply real fear clutches at me through my drunken fog—I’ve pushed him too far.

“Jay,” I say as softly as I can, standing up and quickly stuffing all the screwed-up letters in my pocket. “Come on, we’ll go now. I’ll buy you something to eat.”

He doesn’t move. And then with one fluid sweep, he shoves the table aside. It catches me in the thigh, throwing me off balance, and I stagger backwards, unable to stop him as he runs through the galley and up off the boat.

I lurch after him, shouting his name, dread spooling out of my guts like a length of razor wire.

But by the time I haul myself up onto the towpath, Jay is gone.

I
WAS
only seconds behind him. Jay can’t have gone far, but I have no clue which direction he took off in. Calling out, with my hands anxiously locked together on my head, I look over at the Tavern, then the towpath, then the road. The rain has all but petered out into a thin gray mist, the whole world insubstantial and lost.

I tell myself he’ll come back in a minute, that he just needs to calm down a bit and sort his head out, but I’m scared, perhaps more scared than I’ve ever been—scared he’s not thinking straight, scared he’ll do something stupid.

This is my nightmare, however irrational it is to feel this way in the pale light of day. Losing Jay is what I fear the most.

And this is
my fault
.

Hoarsely I call for him again and again. When I look towards the Tavern, I catch Lorne at an upstairs window, a worried look on her face. With a keen desperation, I plead for him to come back. I can’t stand the thought of him dealing alone with what I’ve told him. But I don’t know what to do, so I stand in the seeping rain, too paralyzed to move.

When a hand lightly touches my arm, I reel away in shock.

“Is… is everything okay?”

It’s Lorne. She has her slippers on in the rain, a small see-through umbrella over her head.

“It’s my fault,” I whisper, gasping back a sob.

Desperately I scan the towpath again.

It’s her hand. If she’d only move her hand from my arm I wouldn’t feel so weak, so hardly able to stand.

“Why don’t you come and sit down inside for a bit?” she says gently.

She uses her hand to guide my elbow, drawing me forward towards the Tavern. But I can’t leave. If I leave, he’ll never come back. I need to stand here and keep calling out.

“Jay!” I shout, but my throat is so sore, my voice is barely there.

She holds the umbrella over my head and takes my hand. But I won’t go with her. After a while she goes away and comes back with a coat. It must be her father’s. It smells of him, of smoke and time…. I’m drowning…. I can’t….

I’m inside the Tavern. A man sits me down. He hands me a hot drink. It smells like coffee.

“Where does your father work, son?” he asks gently.

I stare at him. He has a beard, and cloudy gray eyes like Lorne’s.

“I don’t know.” The words come from some place I’m not in control of.

Lorne looks pale. I stare out the window behind her.

“I need to find my brother.”

The man nods, a resigned look on his face.

I have no strength, my limbs weighted down with dread. If I move, the pain inside me is worse, so I sit still and try not to breathe.

The sky gets darker. At five Dad is home. I hear his voice outside the Tavern talking to Lorne’s father. Lorne watches me as I get up and walk across the bar to the door that leads out onto the road.

I walk into town. I barely know what I’m doing. I still have the coat on. But I wouldn’t know hot from cold, wet from dry.

Shop shutters descend like dominos.

All at once it is night.

There are kids on the bridge in the center of town, hooting and calling. Drawn by the dark water, they come with their cans and a never sated need to prove themselves. But what is the point?

What is the point in anything?

I walk back to the boat. Jay has not returned. I know even before I see Dad sat in the wheelhouse.

I lie down beside the wall, hidden by the undergrowth, and let the pain come. Wishing I felt nothing, I let the sobs rack my body.

At first when I hear the shouting, I think it is part of my dream, some cold climax to a nightmare.

But it’s not. The concrete is cold and wet beneath me. I’m shaking.

A fight has started outside the Tavern. Glass breaks. I get up, watch as a crowd gathers and then parts for an ambulance. Keeping to the shadows, I walk towards the boat—the galley light glows onto the towpath, and Dad is sat in front of the window. Then I walk away, into town again, drawn by some force outside myself, a moth to a flame.

It’s midnight.

I sit on the bridge, sharing a bottle of bitter alcohol with someone whose face I won’t remember, but whose spit I share for half a night. We light a fire in a bin, and I cry as I watch the flames. I realize I would do anything to take back this afternoon, not to know the things that I do, to have it all not happen. Anything.

At around 2:00 a.m. there is a tale going round of a kid who fell off the bridge and into the dark water below and was dragged limp and drowned onto the bank a hundred meters downriver, covered in burns.

They say it as though some freak natural accident occurred under the water, and they peer down expecting flames. But the water is black and still.

The boy wasn’t breathing, but the ambulance still took him, lights flashing, to the hospital to figure out what happened.

It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not really listening. I’m not really into their stupid drunken stories. I have enough of my own.

I lie on my back on the bridge wall and drunkenly wonder aloud how many people have died here, how many people have jumped in and never come out.

“Including the boy today?” my acquaintance with the bottle replies.

“What?” I gasp, rolling off the wall, trying to work out why his answer stops my heart. “What boy today?”

“The boy with the burns,” he slurs.

Palms down on the concrete, I throw up, alcohol stinging my throat.
No.
No. I can’t even let myself think it. My pockets are already full of stones. Someone is making a heart-wrenching, anguished sound, and I need them to stop. The sound is fracturing me.