2019-05-27 - 1995-03-04 - Kick 'Em While They're Down

Seddon Court, Linfield Road, Stoke-On-Trent

The view through the seventh-story corridor windows were that of tumultuous, dark, ragged clouds, the heavy rain running down the glass turning the pin-point lights of the town below into disjointed streaks.

Carver stood before the door to flat 83, the cigarette that hung from his bottom lip having burned to the filter hours ago. He'd not noticed. He'd been looking down at the watch in his hand, cracked face and dead hands. He empathized. Sarah had been a wake up call, and so he had naturally decided to deal with that by crawling into the sawmill and falling asleep. To say he was surprised to end up in this place would be a lie.

It made sense, in the veil's weird little way.

The veil usually made sense to him, really. He took a moment to wonder if that was because of his habits, spending enough time here that maybe he'd started to shift in the same way it did. He wondered this while his finger pressed against one of the non-working hands of his watch, gently goading it clockwise in circles as he watched his shadow against the door lengthen and disappear in a repetitive loop as the sun rose and set behind that rain-spattered glass.

When he stopped turning, it was late evening. A teenager surely no more than fifteen, with black hair, denim jeans and (Carver shuddered in regret) matching denim vest walked down the corridor. Head down, hands in pockets, rummaging for a key that he eventually found.

Carver pulled out a fresh cigarette as the kid unlocked the door. He could walk away. Head down the corridor, down the stairs, out on to the street and head to the newsagents on the corner. Probably pick up a chocolate bar that's not been in production for over twenty years. It'd be easy. Turn right. Go. He considered this as he lit the cigarette, watching the door open to reveal the flat where he'd spent a sizable portion of his childhood. The diamond patterned carpet in deep brown and yellow, a few strewn newspapers pushed up against the skirting. The walls, once beige, now yellowed through years of nicotine. The curtains that he'll swear to this day were re-purposed suede.

And the chair. That fucking leather arm chair. Brown. Torn in enough places that you could see the cheap yellow foam insulation. There was a large cut in the back of it, visible from the front door as it and the occupant faced the tube TV that had survived since the early seventies because it somehow still worked.

And the arm. The left arm that hung lazily from that chair, the silver watch catching the light as the television flashes blue and grey from the umpteenth rerun of the day.

“Neshkidda skiv’d work again.” Said the chair. Deep, scratchy. A voice worked by years of dust and smoke.

The teen pulled off his jacket without a word, and hung it on the low hook by the door. It was only as the boy rolled up one of his long shirtsleeves that Carver realised he had started to make the same motion, only stopped when his fingers touched the bundle of sleeve that forever seemed to sit around his elbows.

The teen, however, did not stop. Only when his sleeves were bundled up around his shoulder did he speak.

“Weren’t none. George said there were nothin’ goin’ today.” He lied.

“Raised a lump.” The chair decided. A foot appeared, and the tea table that normally sat directly in front was pulled around to one side.

The routine was as it ever was. The boy knelt, teenager in age only now, the arm strapped down to the table with a leather belt as two sets of eyes watched whatever was on the TV. If he was lucky, it would be something he could enjoy and use to distract himself. Even football would do. If he was unlucky, there’d be a darts tournament showing. Or a re-run of Bullseye.

Tonight, it was Bullseye.

Carver smoked in time with his father, and noted that this was not the episode that played that night. Nor was it even the correct show. But it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point, after all. Instead, he watched John Cooper, a contestant, talk about how he had the hobby of scuba diving, and even put forward a half-hearted chuckled when the host commented that land-surrounded pembrokeshire was the perfect place to practice it.

He ignored the grunts and the whimpers from the boy as the chair put out cigarette after cigarette on his shoulder.

He instead chose to focus on how John Cooper would be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, his appearance on this show being used as evidence.

Two hours later, Carver had raided the contents of the fridge, made himself three cups of tea, and was well and truly bored with listening to the boy cry in short, sniffled whimpers that would only result in the lighting of another cigarette from both adults in the room. Carver was starting to run low. His father never seemed to.

It was fifteen minutes and two cigarettes after that that the door exploded, and all three heads turned to see.

The boy looked surprised. The chair looked furious. Carver looked curious.

Melissa looked smug. It’s pretty easy to look smug when you’ve just exploded a door. She’d tip-ex’d ‘Fuck You’ on to the front of her dark, longsleeve tee, and the purple jacket she wore hemmed short around her ribs to help show off the lettering she’d spent a whole twenty minutes on. Of course those sleeves had thumb holes cut in to them.

The belt was next to go when her boots hit carpet. It snapped. The buckle, obviously by sheer chance, caught the father just below the right eye.

Carver stepped back, still curious. Still eating a pack of chocolate raisins he’d stolen from the larder.

The boy’s arm freed, he fell back, and then pushed himself away along the carpet with hasty kicks, seeking shelter by the girl who stalked forward, radiating to both of them with all the light she could muster. And so the boy had to shield his eyes when she walked past, taking up all of his vision as she ignored him completely.

The chair turned. Not the man. The chair. The man followed. The boy couldn’t see, but Carver could.

Carver saw her smile as the cuts began to open. Carver saw her teeth as the tongue that did nothing but insult and demean the boy, the tongue that blamed the boy., The tongue that hated the boy... tore.

Carver ate a raisin as the man gurgled. Carver chewed on a second as the girl turned, taking the boy by the wrist to lift him to his feet. Turn him. Embrace him in a way so he could only see what remained of the door. As she kissed him on the forehead, told him to grab his jacket and bag.

It was only when the two children had given the choking man one last look before they left forever that Carver began to move.

And when he stepped in front of that chair, the dark, watering eyes of the man that sat there saw him for the first time. And pleaded. He’d never seen the old man’s eyes go so wide in his life before. He’d never seen fear. Or desperation. He’d never seen the man deal with an inevitability that would mean something other than a bother.

Carver held up a finger. The one that burned earlier in the evening. He held it up, examined it for a moment, and then finally spoke.

“I know this wasn’t what happened. I remember that much.” He mused, as his eyes shifted from the tip of his finger to the fear of his father. “I guess someone reminded me a little of you tonight, huh?”

His tongue clicked.

His father’s didn’t.

“There’ll never be another you.” It took Carver a little while to settle on this thought. But he got there in the end. “I don’t know how I’ll make sure of that-” He shrugged and straightened. “But I will.”

His shoes padded across the carpet, crossing a wet patch that squelched where the boy cowered previously.

And then Carver stopped by the door. Or the lack of one, at least. It was a brief pause, only long enough to light the last cigarette in his pack. “I know this wasn’t what happened.” He repeated. Quieter, this time. Only to himself and the Teen who now stood beside him, hair artificially bright, eyes dark, smile solemn.

When they walked down the corridor, arm in arm, she leaned close to be heard over the desperate screams from his childhood home. Whispering close, breath on his ear. Smiling that soft smug smile that he learned from her in time. Her tone one of certainty that he never quite managed to mimic.

“But you’ll always wish it was, Allie.”