Caught in the Web Emmy Ellis (best ereader for textbooks txt) 📖

“Oh, but you can leave this son now?”

William moved away—ready to walk back to the glass building?

“Don’t you dare turn your back on me again,” she said.

“Go away, Emily.”

It was strange to hear her name when only Gran usually used it. Men called her ‘bitch’ or that word beginning with C, which was a really bad word, so Gran had told him. She’d asked him where he’d heard it, but he hadn’t said. That would be naughty to do that.

“Go away?” she shouted at William’s back. “Go a-fucking-way? It’s you who needs to go away, you bastard.”

William walked off, head up, neck straight, nothing like the flowers in Beautiful Lady’s garden. She picked up one of the longer planks of wood then swung it at William’s head. The end smacked into William’s temple, the strength of the hit sending him sailing sideways. William staggered—“What the fuck?” he screamed—hands out to maybe stop him damaging himself further if he fell, then she whacked him again, grunting with the effort.

That grunt was the sound she made when he got a beating, and the noise of it hurt his tummy, knots curdling inside him. William was on the ground, blood dripping and forming little balls after it landed beside his head. His shoes weren’t the only thing ruined now. The lovely suit was freckled with dust, too, the end of his tie dangling in it, and his face didn’t look the same anymore, all red like that. Mushy on one side.

William was asleep. She approached him and landed the plank on his face this time, then she walked around so she could pummel the top of William’s head with it. It wasn’t very nice, what she was doing to him, the man’s hair a darker brown as more blood seeped from a gash in his skull. Speckles of blood landed on her dark jeans while she lashed out, but she didn’t seem bothered and wasn’t crying.

Why am I crying and she isn’t?

That was another perplexing thing.

She drew her sleeves over her hands, dug into William’s pocket, took out a wallet, then extracted a wad of money. She tossed the wallet down and left William then, strutting away still carrying the plank, the clean end of the thing tucked under her arm. She stuffed the cash into her pocket. “Come on, you. Don’t say I didn’t try to give you a better life.”

He followed, and she took him past the farthest warehouse where a canal rippled along. She threw the plank into it. Ducks and swans scattered, squawking out their objection at being disturbed.

“We need to get some shopping in,” she said, rubbing blood into her clothes so it disappeared.

Resigned to another traipse through the streets, he tagged behind her, keeping his distance so she didn’t hold his hand and hurt his fingers again. A long walk later, they arrived at a row of shops. She shoved him down an alley between a launderette and a grocer’s, rubbish bags lining one wall. It was smelly down there, and the ground was covered in rectangular stones cemented together.

She stopped walking halfway down and turned to face him, gripping his shoulders. Fingernails digging in.

The signal.

“You didn’t see anything I did, d’you hear me? Anything at all. We didn’t go to those offices. We didn’t meet your dad and go behind those warehouses. None of it happened.”

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“Good. The problem I have now is that I’m stuck with you. Gran wants you, but she can go and fuck herself. There’s no way I’m giving her the satisfaction of taking you. She said I’d do that eventually, send you to her, but I won’t.”

He wanted to live with Gran so badly it hurt more than any smack he’d been given from her. He imagined hitting her with the plank and leaving her to die here in the alley. It was what she deserved, being left on the paved stones amongst the rubbish. Because she was rubbish.

And she smelt just like it.

Chapter Eighteen

Half of him was still happy from the euphoria of Anita’s death. It swam, a free and easy fish, jumping out of the water only to dive back in then repeat the process all over again. But the mess of The Man Point Two’s demise left his other half soured. It seemed his body was in two parts, a strict line down the middle, and each set of feelings resided left and right. This really needed to be fixed immediately so he could be at peace for a few years again. The feelings in his left, the ones produced by Anita, had to pass over the line and fill the bad section.

When darkness came, he’d make things better.

He strode with new purpose to the kitchen, where he remembered he’d slapped at a moth the other night and it had fallen dead onto the draining board. The spider, the moth…

It was a shame no one would get the significance, why he’d chosen those.

But I know.

Scooping the common-or-garden moth up with a Tupperware lid then placing it into the matching box, he studied its broken wings and likened them to his own, if he had any. All of him had been broken at some point, but he could fix it all, couldn’t he? Make himself new. Untainted. Gorgeous inside and out.

He made a quick coffee and tried to think whether any of the other tramps he’d seen while making friends with The Man Point Two had long straggly hair. They had the straggles but not the length. An idea crept into his head then, and even though the hair he had in mind would be fake, it would do the job of tricking him into thinking he was killing The Man again, wouldn’t it?

He’d have to give it