Dead of Light (41 page)

“See you.”

Came to the window, didn't want to look around at all; but some things you have to do if you can, so I gripped the frame for strength and turned my head, and saw how he was resting his cheek on his pillow as he smiled a farewell, and saw how sick he really was though he'd worked hard to disguise it, saw his own mortality deep-printed in his flesh, and—

o0o

Reader, I martyred him.

Doesn't matter how many questions you ask, how many are answered. There are always more come burning, bubbling into your head like bad blood, keep you awake, keep you jumpy and unsettled in your life.

Plus ça change
, right?

o0o

So, questions. Carol was a question in her own right, but she answered herself obliquely. Already had, really:
I need to be alone. And with my son, I need that too. To remember what's important. All right?

Sure, fine. Thanks, Carol. As long as we've got that straight...

Ach, I could sicken myself sometimes. Morbid self-pity a speciality.

Jamie, what would Jamie do? Jamie, I thought, would stick close to his dad for a while yet. For a wee bit. The comfort of what's familiar, he'd fall back on that. Only I thought he'd find it not so familiar now, he'd find it changed and his father also; and Laura, I thought, would change him if they stayed together.

If. That was another question, that was a big one. What hope for those two now — and what did I hope for there, and was it the same thing at all, at all?

Actually, what I hoped for most was to stop thinking about it, and that was a different question also, that was
when?
and that at least I could do something about, in an indirect way.

The full question was longer, it was
Things have changed unbearably; when will they change again?
and it carried its own answer along with it, at least for me.

When you make them change, I told myself. Unless you just want to wait, and let it happen by erosion?

And no, I didn't just want to wait.

o0o

Packed a rucksack, packed the panniers on the bike; took me half an hour and I was off, I was out of there.

Call it running away, why not? My speciality. Or call it moving on, it doesn't matter. Either way, I maintained my reputation; I did what no Macallan lad before me had ever truly managed. I hit the road, crossed the scarred tarmac that demarked the city limits, headed for the wide blue yonder carrying nothing much in my pockets and nothing I wanted in my mind.

Finally and at last, I left home.

Dead of Light

First Publication Information

Copyright © 1995
Chaz Brenchley
Hodder & Stoughton

oOo

Published  by Book View Café
April 2010
www.
bookviewcafe
.com

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Cover art courtesy
C E Murphy
www.cemurphy.net

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