“I’ll only be a couple of hours.”
“You’re never here,” she complained. “And even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”
It was a valid complaint, and he hadn’t argued. He’d just tied his boots and set out for the hills.
It was Sunday, a full week since he’d had the telephone call telling him Jim had killed himself. Joan knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, something he was bottling up. She knew it wasn’t just grief.
Reeve got to his feet. Looking down the steep hillside, he was momentarily afraid. Nothing to do with the “abyss” this time; it was just that he had no real plan, and without a plan there would be a temptation to rashness, there would be miscalculation. He needed proper planning and preparation. He’d been in the dark for a while, feeling his way. Now he thought he knew most of what Jim had known, but he was still stuck. He felt like a spider who has crawled its way along the pipes and into the bath, only to find it can’t scale the smooth, sheer sides. There was a bird of prey overhead, a kestrel probably. It glided on the air currents, its line straight, dipping its wings to maintain stability. From that height, it could probably still pick out the movements of a mouse in the tangle of grass and gorse. Reeve thought of the wings on the SAS cap badge. Wings and a dagger. The wings told you that Special Forces would travel anywhere at any notice. And the dagger… the dagger told an essential truth about the regiment: they were trained in close-combat situations. They favored stealth and the knife over distance and a sniper’s accuracy. Hand-to-hand fighting, that was their strength. Get close to your prey, close enough to slide a hand over its mouth and stab the dagger into its throat, and twist and twist, ripping the voice box. Maximum damage, minimum dying time.
Reeve felt the blood rush to his head and closed his eyes for a moment, clearing them of the fog. He checked his watch and found he’d been resting longer than he’d meant to. His legs had stiffened. It was time to start back down the hill and across the wide gully. It was time to go home.
“Jackie’s got this really good new game,” Allan said.
Reeve looked to Joan. “Jackie?”
“A girl in his class.”
He turned to his son. “Playing with the girls, eh? Not in her bedroom, I hope.”
Allan screwed up his face. “She’s not like a girl, Dad. She has all these games…”
“On her computer.”
“Yes.”
“And her computer is where in the house?”
“In her room.”
“Her bedroom?”
Allan’s ears had reddened. Reeve tried winking at Joan, but she wasn’t watching.
“It’s like Doom,” Allan said, ignoring his father, “but with more secret passages, and you don’t just pick up ammo and stuff, you can warp yourself into these amazing creatures with loads of new weapons and stuff. You can fry the bad guys’ eyeballs so they’re blind and then you-”
“Allan, enough,” his mother said.
“But I’m just telling Dad-”
“Enough.”
“But, Dad-”
“Enough!”
Allan looked down at his plate. He’d eaten all the fries and only had the cold ham and baked beans left. “But Dad wanted to know,” he said under his breath. Joan looked at her husband.
“Tell me later, pal, okay? Some things aren’t for the dinner table.” He watched Joan lift a sliver of ham to her mouth. “Especially fried alien eyeballs.”
Joan glared at him, but Allan and Gordon were laughing. The rest of the meal was carried off in peace.
Afterwards, Allan made instant coffee for his parents-one of his latest jobs around the house. Reeve wasn’t so sure of letting an eleven-year-old near a boiling kettle.
“But you don’t mind fried aliens, right?” Joan said.
“Aliens never hurt anyone,” Reeve said. “I’ve seen what scalding can do.”
“He’s got to learn.”
“Okay, okay.” They were in the living room. Reeve kept an ear attuned to sounds from the kitchen. The first clatter or shriek and he’d be in there. But Allan appeared with the two mugs. The coffee was strong.
“Is milk back on the ration books?” Reeve queried.
“What’s ration books?” Allan asked.
“Pray you never have to know.”
Allan wanted to watch TV, so the three of them sat on the long sofa, Reeve with his arm along the back, behind his wife’s neck but not touching her. She’d taken off her slippers and had tucked her feet up. Allan sat on the floor in front of her. Bakunin the cat was on Joan’s lap, glaring at Reeve like he was a complete stranger, which, considering he hadn’t fed her this past week, he was. Reeve thought of the real Bakunin, fighting on the Dresden barricades shoulder to shoulder with Nietzsche’s friend Wagner…
“A penny for them,” Joan asked.
“I was just thinking how nice it was to be back.”
Joan smiled thinly at the lie. She hadn’t asked much about the cremation, but she’d been interested to hear about the flat in London and the woman living there. Allan turned from the sitcom.
“So what’s it like in the USA, Dad?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Reeve had spent some time deciding on the story he’d tell Allan. He painted a picture of San Diego as a frontier town, exciting enough and strange enough to keep Allan listening.
“Did you see any shootings?” Allan asked.
“No, but I heard some police sirens.”
“Did you see a policeman?”
Reeve nodded.
“With a gun?”
Reeve nodded again.
Joan rubbed at her son’s hair, though she knew he hated it when she did that. “He’s growing up gun-crazy.”
“No, I’m not,” Allan stated.
“It’s all those computer games.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What are you playing just now?”
“That game I told you about. Jackie copied it for me.”
“I hope it hasn’t got a virus.”
“I’ve got a new virus checker.”
“Good.” At that time, Allan knew only a little more about computing than Reeve and Joan put together, but he was steadily pulling away from them.
“The game’s called Militia, and what you do is-”
“No fried eyeballs,” Joan demanded.
“What happened to the game Uncle Jim sent you?” Reeve asked.
Allan looked embarrassed. “I was stuck on screen five…”
“You’ve given it away?”
Allan shook his head vigorously. “No, it’s upstairs.”
“But you don’t play it anymore?”
“No,” he said quietly. Then: “Mum said Uncle Jim died.”
Reeve nodded. Joan said she’d had a couple of talks with Allan already. “People grow old and tired, Allan, and then they die. They make room for other younger people to come along…” Reeve felt awkward as he spoke.
“But Uncle Jim wasn’t old.”
“No, well some people just-”
“He wasn’t much older than you.”
“I’m not going to die,” Reeve told his son.
“How do you know?”
“Sometimes people get feelings. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to live to be a hundred.”
“And Mum?” Allan asked.
Reeve looked at her. She was staring at him, interested in the answer. “Same feeling,” he said.
Allan went back to watching television. A little later, Joan murmured, “Thanks,” put her slippers back on, and went through to the kitchen, followed closely by Bakunin, scouting for pro-visions. Reeve wasn’t sure what to read into her final utterance.
The telephone rang while he was watching the news. Allan had retreated to his room, having given his parents over an hour and a half of his precious time. Reeve let Joan get the phone. She was still in the kitchen, making a batch of bread. Later, when he went through to make the last cup of coffee of the night, he asked who had called.