Page 24 of The Family Across the Street
‘Where would you get a gun?’ I asked. I had a smile on my face but I was listening for the answer. I wanted to know. I really wanted to know.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘I know this guy who knows someone…’
I don’t know what Derrick would say if he knew that I used that information to actually get a gun, nor do I know what he would say about what I’m doing now. He and I stopped talking a while ago. ‘You’ve changed,’ he told me, which was code for, ‘You bore me now.’ I didn’t care then. I preferred being home. Home sweet home. Funny how quickly that changes.
Yesterday I knocked on a door in Kings Cross. It was in a nice building, and on my way in a man taking his dog out for a walk greeted me like I had every right to be there. I assume he has no idea what is going on in his building. I knocked on the door, paid my money and left with something that can end lives. The man who handed me the gun barely even looked at me. He could have been handing me a cup of coffee.
But lives end every day and people just go on living. That’s what I felt when she told me we were done – that my life was over. It felt like a death.
My life was supposed to be different to my father’s life. I was not going to follow in his footsteps and end up on a sofa with a drink in my hand. It has to be different. The idea that our relationship is over is not something I can accept. I didn’t accept it. I don’t accept it but I can’t see a way back to what I had. Not anymore.
The gun is heavy in my hand, the metal cool against my warm skin, and it is the very essence of fear itself. I believe if I didn’t have it, she would have tried to get away already. She would have sent her two little angels out of the house without question. But the gun changes things. She doesn’t know how quickly I could use it to hurt, to wound, to kill.
They are all watching my every move.
I can see her thinking, plotting. She has tried reasoning with me, begging me, appealing to my humanity, but she won’t get through. It’s too late for that. I had a plan for my life and, after everything I went through, I deserved to have it work out the way I wanted it to. I was in love – whatever that is. It felt like love. She was in love too once, but now she claims she’s not and it’s not fair.
My father was right about some things. He was right about women and control.
But I’m not going to be controlled, and if I cannot have the life I wanted, then no one gets to have a life. I check myself for feelings about this thought but there’s nothing. I could be reading a newspaper article that has nothing to do with me or looking at a row of numbers. I have taken my grief and anger and locked them away. It’s better this way.
‘Can they get their iPads?’ she asks, so politely, so carefully that I acquiesce. I’m being generous and kind.
You are generous and kind to those you love. I think she would say she has treated me kindly, that she’s been generous with me. I used to see her love for me in her eyes. I should have taken note of when that changed. I know now that when someone stops loving you, it doesn’t happen quickly. It’s a pulling away, a distancing, a creating of space between you and them, and then one day you realise that the love of your life no longer thinks you’re the love of her life.
‘The love of my life,’ I mutter.
‘What?’ she asks but I don’t repeat myself. I take myself back to an earlier time, a better time.
I met her on a cool autumn day when the wind whistled through the city. I was walking to work, my head down, my eyes streaming from the gale, and I bumped into her, just like that.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I said and I took a step back.
‘It’s all right,’ she smiled, ‘no need to cry.’
‘Oh, I’m not, the wind… it’s…’ I stuttered because she was so pretty and I wanted to touch her brown hair where the weak autumn sun was catching thin streaks of gold. She laughed at me then because I hadn’t seen the joke. And then I laughed with her.
‘Have coffee with me and I’ll feel better,’ I said, and she said yes. I couldn’t quite believe she’d agreed. The coffee shop was right there and there was a table inside, out of the wind. The air tasted of sugar and the coffee machine roared and clanked. We sat opposite each other for a few moments after ordering our drinks, just looking at each other, smiling as we became aware that the attraction was mutual.
‘I should get back to work,’ she said.
‘Where do you work?’ I asked, but she shook her head. She wasn’t ready to tell me yet and I understood. You never know what’s going on in a stranger’s head. She’s known me for a long time now, but she still has no idea – or at least she had no real idea. She knows now.
After that first half-date, I remember walking out of the coffee shop and looking up at the sky and sending a silent prayer of thanks because it felt like this was what I had been waiting for through all the painful years of my life. Here, finally, was the reward I deserved. I was certain she would be different to every other woman I had ever known. Absolutely certain and, of course, completely wrong.
And so here I am and the gun seems to be getting heavier as the hours pass. I am becoming a little unsure about my plan but I can’t do anything about that now.
‘Be like a shark, son,’ my father told me. ‘Never stop moving forward or you die.’
He was really good at giving idiomatic advice. Pretty crap at listening to it.
After my father lost his job when I was fifteen years old, he used the time available during the day to drink and hate my mother – and, by extension, me.
That sounds simple and it seems like it would have had a simple solution. I could have moved back in with her, but he was a drowning man and every time he did something that made me threaten to leave, he would hold up his hands and cling to me as he cried about how badly his life had turned out.
By then I had been living with him for over a year and I didn’t want to go back to rules and regulations. I didn’t tell her the extent of what was happening with my father. ‘She will love the fact that I’ve lost my job. It will make her so happy to see me suffer,’ he told me, his green eyes droopy with fatigue and alcohol, his hair greasy because there was no reason to shower if he didn’t have work.
‘I won’t tell her.’
