Page 173 of Into the Dark
“Fred, let’s not fuck about. I’m exactly that. You made me exactly that,” I growl, angry now. If I’m not that, then how come I had to crawl my way out of our pile of shit by my fingernails? How come I only made it out by the skin of my teeth? How come I can still fucking smell it everywhere I go? I have to live every single day knowing she can see right down into me at who I am and what I’ve done. Because I am that. I don’t deserve her. Will never deserve her, because deep down I’m coated in shit, and it’s the sort of shit that never wipes clean.
“Nah, you weren’t.” Fred sighs. It’s not an impatient sigh, but the kind that says, ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed.’ “Don’t think you even wanted to be. Talked a good game, made everyone believe you were, but deep down, you weren’t. That girl of yours saw right through the bullshit, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, well, that’s because she sees what she wants to see…” I mutter quietly, looking down at my hands again.
“Don’t we all?” he says heavily. When I look up at him, he’s watching me hard, peeling away the layers of lies and shit and pretense like he’s always done. Like Alex has always done.
Fred and Alex are very alike in how they choose to look at me.
“Anyway,”—another sigh, another stroke of a weathered hand across his new beard—“what that piece of pikey scum did—tried to do to that girl, pregnant as well—well, that was uncalled for. You should have stopped that—you fucking know that, right?” he informs me. “Your fault, Jay. That shit’s on you, son, no one else. Told you to get rid of him.”
“For something he didn’t do,” I point out, but Fred just eyes me hard. “Yeah, I know…” I’ll always fucking know it was my fault. That I almost lost her. Almost killed her. “Now what the fuck am I doing here? What do you want with me? To tell me this isn’t done? To warn me not to stop looking over my shoulder—over my family’s shoulder? If that’s it, then just fucking say it, yeah, because I got places to be.” I hate being away from them for any length of time, and this is just making me edgy.
“What about Susan?” he asks, a sad little quirk to his mouth.
“What about her?” I bite.
I called her, told her not to contact Alex again. Then I told her to get someone to let me know when she was dead. I took Jon’s contact details too, but I’ve done fuck all with them yet.
“This isn’t what you brought me here for, Fred—now cut the shit and spit it out, yeah?”
He says nothing, just sits there looking relaxed as ever, watching me unravel.
With an impatient sigh, I lean forward a little. “I gave them everything. They promised me a life in the sun for you, and I took it, no questions fucking asked.”
After what Kev did to Alex, all bets were off. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing. I almost lost her for being loyal, for letting Kev walk, for warning him Fred wanted him dead, and I still almost lost her. By Alex’s bedside, while she fought for her own and our baby’s life, I told Mark I’d give him anything he fucking wanted. Provided he could get us both out of the country.
“You aren’t going to see the light of day for years, and that’s down to me. You’re going to be taking Italian lessons and painting fruit on fucking canvas and looking out of a letterbox window in a door for the rest of your fucking life, Fred, and it’s down to me. So fucking say it already. Just say it. Because like I said, I got a lot of shit on, mate.” I’m aware I’m sitting exactly like the moody teenage girl two tables away: slouched back, head down, eyes filled with doubt as my father explains how it’s all going to go from here on out.
Fred stares at me for a long time. Calculating, planning, contemplating. Maybe he’s imagining all the ways he’ll kill me. Hurt Alex. Hurt the pink bundle of soft bones that is my baby daughter. My fists curl. My spine stiffens with rage. My muscles flood with blood and power. Never going to happen. Never again. Two days and we’re out of here. I’ll look back. I’ll always look back now, but with the ocean on one side it’s going to be a whole lot easier to protect them from what I can see coming.
“I wanted to tell you that we’re done,” he says finally.
“What you on about? I know we’re done.” I frown, confused.
A flash of annoyance lights up his face. “No one knows what people are prepared to give up until it all comes right down to it. When there ain’t nothing else clouding nothing else. One thing, that’s all it takes.”
“I have no clue what you’re on about.” My head hurts, and there’s a pounding behind my eyes that only Alex’s hands can help get rid of now. She’ll press deep circles on my temples, over my forehead, on the top of my head. The pads of her thumbs on my sinuses. Soft but firm. Like molding clay.
“She was your one thing,” Fred says. “Not your mother. Or your brother. Or Cale. Her. Should have known that…I did know it. Just never saw it coming.”
Never saw it coming, he says. Well, I never saw Alex coming either.
“Yeah, she is. We done then?” I move to stand.
“Sit the fuck down,” he growls quietly, fist banging slightly on the table.
Again, chained by years of obedience, I do what he tells me to and lower my body back into the chair.
“I tried to make you something,” he says after a moment of staring dead into my eyes. “Fuck knows you never had much of a chance, did you? Sometimes we’re given a life we don’t want, don’t know what to do with, don’t deserve—know what I mean?” He sounds pissed now. Fred only speaks like this, deep and meaningful what-it’s-all-about shit, when he’s knee-deep in single malt.
What life don’t I deserve? Alex? I know I don’t deserve Alex. That what he’s getting at? I drop my eyes from his, focusing on a scratch in the grainy plastic table. It reminds me of the kind found in a greasy spoon place off Bromley High Street.
When I don’t answer him, he lets out a breath and shakes his head. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jay, you really gonna make me say it?”
“You’re gonna have to, Fred, because I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”
He rolls his eyes and looks about as if he can’t fucking believe I’m this dense. Then he looks me right in the eye once more. “I forgive you, all right?”