Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [50]
“Maybe she’s got stuff on her mind,” the man said. “Like why she can’t buy ice cream for little boys.”
“We always have ice cream when we come here,” I blurted. “Always.” We did, and as far as I was concerned it was most of the point of being away. I wasn’t just a greedy little boy; the ice cream stood for something in my mind which I was far too young to articulate. Twice a year we got a weekend away from my father—two days when he wasn’t around, forcing us to see the world the way he saw it, cramped and dark and cold. Demons lived in everything my father saw, presences beneath surfaces, evil in mind. He would have understood The Gap very well, but only after it had become strange—life as a mirage, wrapped round horror and preventing us from seeing the truth. Usually, the trips my mother and I took were time away from that. Today, however, it felt as if his shadow was still over us.
“Sometimes you can’t have everything you want,” the man said, a platitude which pushed all the wrong buttons in me.
“My dad send you?” I said tightly, and glared at him. His eyes opened wide at my tone, and he seemed to look at me in a new way. “I can’t have things because I’m’ a kid, and I stop being a kid when I don’t want them anymore?”
“Is that what he tells you?”
“Yeah. That and a whole lot more.” For a moment, I stood on the brink of telling the old man some things, of speaking for the first time about the way life was. I had no friends at the time, because we were kept moving by Father’s endless quest for work. We’d seen most of Virginia by then, and it wasn’t getting any better. My father wasn’t lazy, far from it. One of his most oft-repeated creeds was that a man without a job was fit for nothing but to be fed to animals. He was forever doing something, but to no purpose, with no joy, with nothing but slow-burning hatred of everything around him. Sometimes when he sat you could see his hands tremble, as if his whole body was vibrating with some need to destroy. If he got a job it generally lasted about a week before his fuse burned out and he got himself fired for brawling with someone or messing up because he was shit-faced. Time and again we held a small celebration when it looked like we might be in a town for more than a few days. My mother always tried to mark good moments in the belief that it might make them stay. She would cook a special dinner, and by each plate would be some small gift, carefully chosen from thrift stores. I hated these celebrations for the lies they always told, for the way they smeared her love for us with pointlessness and doom. Even as I unwrapped some new pencil, or small colored box, I would be thinking of the ones I’d had before. Mom would happily stake out the town and find out about local schools, and then within two weeks we’d be on our way somewhere else.
I knew other children for days, maybe a couple of weeks and then they were blown away on the wind and lost up in the mountains. My mother talked to me as if I was a child, because holding onto that belief was the only way she could carry on; and her parents, with whom we stayed at the coast, were not inclined to talk much to the son of their son-in-law.
But I didn’t say anything to the old man; I lapsed into tearful silence instead. The dam was already too strong. To let it break would have felt like a betrayal. I wanted to be happy, as everyone does, and I think I understood that if I started letting things out of the back of my mind they would sour the front forever.
“He’s wrong,” the old man said suddenly. “He’s wrong in a very bad way.” My heart lurched at hearing someone say that, at hearing a grown-up say the words that I believed in every corner of my heart. I wiped my eyes and kept silent.
“When you get older, some things won’t seem so important,” he continued, eyes calmly on the people down at the waterline. “Few years ago, I used to chase a lot of things. Now I don’t hardly even remember why. But then I’m old, and fit to die, so what difference