Junction X Erastes (best motivational books of all time TXT) 📖

stupid detail like that stays with you when so much else drifts away.

“I…no. Of course not. If you’ll excuse me?”

“Of course, sir. You’ve been helpful.”

Questions I could never ask flooded in my mind as I sat and stared at him. Where? How? Why?

As if I’d spoken, the constable led me to the door. “Like I said, sir, it’s not too unusual. You told me he was a bright lad. Oxford, wasn’t it? Lots of pressure. It’s sometimes harder for a clever boy who’s not from the system, if you know what I mean. I’ve seen it before.” He shook his head and put his helmet on.

The door closed behind me, and I walked down the path and back to my house. I stood for a long minute in the driveway before I went in.

Mrs. Tudor was putting coats on the twins. Val was shutting a small case. “I phoned Mrs. Tudor. The twins will be better off there.” Her voice was acid-cold, like nothing I’d ever heard before. The last grains fell from under my feet and I was there with nothing to support me.

“Daddy?” Mary’s eyes were huge in the hall light. “Daddy?”

“It’s all right, sweetie.” My voice was husky. I couldn’t hide it any longer. Val knew. “It will only be for a little while. You’ll be back before you know it.”

“But the ambulance…?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Valerie took over. “Just an accident, next door. Don’t worry. It’ll all be all right. Mummy will come and get you tomorrow.” The door closed on them and I watched them drive away, Mary’s face flashing blue from the ambulance’s strobe as she pressed her face against the side window of Mrs. Tudor’s Morris Minor.

Waves of nausea hit me—like seasickness, and I clung to the sideboard to prevent myself falling. Alf had been crouched like an animal in pain, and I was him, then. I don’t remember time passing, just the silent flick-flick-flick of the ambulance light, cutting the night into slices.

I lost track of everything, time and space. Where Val was I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t even aware of her until she spoke. Her voice was like a knife. Blood red, cold. But almost too soft to be heard, and sounding dusty with disuse. It was like she’d been trying to speak but had forgotten how.

“Now it all makes sense.”

I turned to her and saw the look on her face, the one she’d been hiding from the children. She’d taken her mask off, and I can’t erase that memory or forgive myself for yet another crime. Her lips were livid in a face with no colour. No life. Finally, no hope. She looked, for a moment, like him.

“You aren’t even going to deny it, are you?”

When I didn’t move, not even to shake my head, she came at me, the rage pouring from her fists and nails. Words I’d never heard from her in our entire married life flooded from her mouth, vile, terrible words. All I could do was to hold her wrists until, limp and sobbing, she stopped and leaned against the other wall.

“Something,” she said, her breath ragged, “I knew there was something. Phil’s hints, you working all hours…I asked you. I asked you! I begged you to tell me.”

There was no need to be kind anymore, so I was unnecessarily vicious. Someone else had to suffer. “What did you want me to tell you? The truth?”

She gasped at that. Her eyes were saucers as she took it in. I guessed what she was imagining—all the pictures that were passing before her eyes.

 And what could I do? Tell her that the visions she was seeing were wrong? They weren’t. They were all true. There was nothing she could imagine that was false.

Her voice shook as badly as her hands. “You…he’s a child.” Phil had said the same. I had had no answer for him, either. “Of all the things I imagined—never, never this! Tell me, Ed—tell me! Why?”

It was if my mouth wasn’t working. My lips felt leaden, closed by virtue of their own weight, never to open again. What was there to say? Who was there to say it to? What difference would it make?

+ + +

I stood on the landing and watched the ambulance drive away, its siren silent. I was still there when Valerie came back up the stairs and touched my arm. I don’t know what I expected her to say or how I expected her to act, but it was as if someone had taken her from me, and the woman who handed me the suitcase was a stranger I’d once seen from a distance. Not an angry one, but just someone who couldn’t quite work out why I was in her house and was waiting for me to leave.

We’d said was all that needed to be said. There could be no retrenching, no hope of an armistice. I was just in the way.

The cold clutched my heart as she turned and the tiny tell-tale sign of her pregnancy showed, just for second, as the fabric flowed with her movement. A younger Edward would have caressed her stomach. But there was nothing of him left.

+ + +

And there we are. Left with a man on his own in a flat. A room that he can’t bear to look around to see the little remembrances here and there. A book, cast aside and never finished. Some pennies that had fallen out of his jeans and I found under the bed. Sweets and a jar of Vaseline. Three golden hairs which I’ve kept in my wallet. Not a lot to show for the whirlwind. No picture except the one I have when I close my eyes.

The phone rang when I first moved in here, but now it’s silent. I don’t even know whether it’s still connected. I walk in the twilight, out of the station and away from The Avenue. The pavements seem dangerous, like quicksand. And yet there’s nothing more