The Dying Place

You try. You really do. But it’s never enough. Sixteen hours working in a supermarket, a few hours doing cleaning. Bits of crap here and there. Never enough.

No one believes you.

Your kids get older. Get in trouble. Bizzies knocking on your door at two in the morning, hand on the back of your fifteen-year-old son.

He’s had too much to drink. Could have got himself into a lot more trouble. Should keep an eye on him more, love.

That judgement again. Always there, surrounding you.

You try and explain. Tell them he’d said he was staying at his mate’s, or staying at his uncle’s house. With his cousins.

Get that look back.

I’ve heard it all before, love.

You want to scream. You want to pull the little bastard into the house by his stupid frigging head and beat the shit out of him. Like your dad would do to your brothers if they ever got caught doing stupid shit.

You try your best. Every day. It’s never enough. The crap wages you get for working two, three, different jobs barely matches what you were getting on benefits. So you think, what’s the point? You’re tired. You want to be lazy. Exhausted by the sheer weight of being alive. Everyone else around you seems to be doing sod all. You want to do that for a while.

The kids get worse. All boys, so the house is either deathly quiet whilst they’re all out, getting up to God knows what. Or, it’s a cacophony of noise. The moaning, the groaning. The smells of teenagers on the cusp of manhood, burning into your nostrils, hanging in the air.

No one believes you.

When one of them doesn’t come home for days, you shout and scream as much as you possibly can, but no one cares.

They think he’s just done a bunk. Gone to see a girl. Gone to get pissed, stoned, off his face somewhere. He’ll turn up eventually. They always do.

Your kind always does.

You try and tell them it’s different. That your lads have always been good at letting you know where they are, or if they’re going to be away for any time at all. That they wouldn’t just leave without saying anything.

They give you that look.

I’ve heard it all before, love.

You try and get people interested, but no one cares. The papers aren’t interested. Thousands of people go missing every year. No one cares about your eighteen-year-old son, missing for weeks … months.

You believe he’s okay. You make yourself believe it.

You know though. As a parent, you know.

Something has happened to him.

It’s not until you’re watching his coffin go behind the curtain – fire destroying everything that made him your son and turning it into ash – that they start to believe you.

It’s too late now, of course.

Sorry, love.

Before (#ulink_92398b20-33ed-5b96-a1d4-10fbe21011ac)

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

The plan hadn’t been for him to be in this position. Not yet, anyway. He was supposed to be there to see it through. It was his idea, his design. None of them would have thought of doing it without him. He was the catalyst, the spark that brought them all together.

That’s the problem with making plans … the master in the sky laughs.

Flat on his back in the street outside his own home, a ghost of a smile playing across his face. Clutching his chest as his heart threatened to beat its way out, his vision going blurry. Not being able to see if there really was an elephant sitting on him, which was how it felt – crushing weight bearing down, strangling him, cutting off his breath.

He should have known he was too old for it. Not that it would have made a difference. As soon as they’d come around to his plan, he wasn’t going to hide away whilst all the fun went down without him. He should have just stayed inside with a small whisky and some shite on the TV. Relaxed. Then maybe he would have had a few more years.

They’d come back again. Laughter and voices penetrating the walls from outside. No respect for people’s private property. Just sitting on the wall outside his house, throwing their empty cans into his little front garden.

He’d checked the time on the clock that took pride of place on his mantelpiece, a beautiful old-fashioned gold carriage clock which had been a retirement gift from a client.

Half past midnight. Way past his usual turning-in time. Early to bed, early to rise. An old motto, but one he stuck to usually.

Something that lot out there wouldn’t have a clue about.

He had noticed the area changing around him for a while. What used to be a nice area of West Derby was being overrun with those yobs. Complete with their strange bastardisation of the Scouse accent. Couldn’t understand them most of the time, which was probably just as well. Couldn’t imagine they’d have anything of value to say.

Back in his day, if you left school with no qualifications – as was the norm, to be fair – you took whatever job you could get, and got on with it. He’d left school at fourteen and went straight to work, doing odd jobs here and there. Joined the army a few years later, ended up in Korea. Got back home and worked for over forty years painting and decorating. Set himself up with a nice little business with enough customers to always have a bit of work on the go. Put a bit of money aside for the retirement years with the missus. They could have lived quite well for a good while.

And then he was alone.

Those lads wouldn’t know the meaning of work. Not employed, in education or training, as they say. A million of them apparently now, according to the papers. No jobs, you see. Whole world has gone the same way. It seemed like he’d blinked and the next minute everyone was saying it was better to live in China than anywhere else. Who’d have thought that would ever happen?

She was ten days off sixty-five when they got to her. Walking back from the post office. Doctors told him it was probably a coincidence. Didn’t matter that she was left in the street for dead, she could have gone at any moment. He never believed them.

He would go for a walk every day, tried to keep fit. Walked up to the village, into the county park. Past the red church sign he always stopped to read.

Church of England

St Mary The Virgin

West Derby

St Mary the Virgin. Odd name to give to a church. But then, he found most things about churches odd.

He’d walk up the lane which ran alongside it, trees crowding in on each side. He’d find his bench, have a nice sit down and watch the world go by. Chat to people every now and again. Most people just walking on by, or smiling politely whilst thinking about their quickest escape route.

The first time they’d showed up outside his house, he thought a quick word would do the trick. Not a chance. He’d given them an hour, until the shouting had become too much. So loud he couldn’t even hear the TV properly. Just a quiet word, he thought, let them know someone lived here, that he wasn’t going to let them take over his front. As soon as he’d walked out he could tell it wasn’t going to have any effect. The attitude of them … Christ. They hadn’t listened to a word he’d said. Just laughed at each other, whispering and turning their backs to him. He’d given up with a shrug of his shoulders and a hope that they wouldn’t be back anytime soon. That they’d find someone else to bother.

He’d been wrong.

The plan was supposed to change that.

Forty years he’d worked. Up and down ladders nine hours a day. Hard work, but going home to Nancy and the kids made it worthwhile. He’d met Nancy when he was getting into his mid-thirties, her fifteen years younger. The mother-in-law had hated him from the start. Taking her little girl away. They’d had the last laugh on that one. Happily married for almost fifty years. Three children, two of them boys. When they grew up and had their own, they would have some of the grandkids over for tea once a week. Then they grew up as well.