Page 2 of Antihero
"Yes. I was too attached to the idea of what the relationship was, rather than what it actually was."
"And how long do you think it will take you to get over this ‘breakup’? How long will you stay?"
I shrug. "A year, maybe two?"
"Then what? Will you move back to Tregam?"
I don't like it when she asks questions I don't know the answer to. I don't answer.
Charlotte sighs and considers me, tilting her head so that her straight blonde hair, just too long to be a bob, sways towards one narrow shoulder. "Are you happy?"
"Happy?" I ask, surprised by the idea for some reason.
"Yes."
"No. But I don't need to be."
"You don't need to be, or you don't want to be?"
I tap the wooden arm of my chair. This room is painted in a dark, calming blue, the chairs unholstered in velvet green. I wonder what this room used to be, back when the whole place was a madhouse.
Charlotte, figuring that I'm not going to answer, uncrosses her knees. Our hour is drawing to it's end. "John," she says it like she knows that's not really my name. I wonder how many false names she speaks in a day. "You feel you don't deserve happiness, that you deserve nothing."
I'm silent, but the muscle in my jaw twitches. The clock ticks to the hour. I stand. "Thank you, doctor."
The corridor is the antithesis of the dim, quiet health room. The lights are florescent, and retrofitted skylights illuminate the wide hall, and the tiled floor reflects both. A security guard isalways on patrol, doing circuits that take them down this entire stretch of the western wing, around the corner to the south wall, then dipping down into the courtyard, and back up via the north stairs. Over and over again. A separate guard patrols the east wing. He's passing as I step out, and he nods to me as he goes.
I nod in return, watching his wide back recede down the hall before turning for my room.
Chapter two
John
Sometimes, I run in the dark.
When sleep evades me even into the early hours, and I can't bear to watch the moonlight track slowly across the bare wall of my room any longer, the night air beckons. So, I run. If I were to take a wrong turn and step out over the invisible edge, well, I wouldn't be the first on White Rock Island to do that.
Working out is one of the few things that clears my mind. The only outlet that lets me have blissful blankness for just a while. The path forks off after cutting inland away from the western promontory, one way meandering down through rolling moors and into the village, the other jutting downwards in a series ofrough-hewn stone steps and sharp turns. Since I do still have a survival instinct, I usually take the former; especially in the dark.
I pass Kidswal, jogging up to the bluff and taking the long way into town, instead. The sun is rising; cresting the jutting headland where it reaches into the sea and provides the bay with calmer waters. The ground slopes away from my feet, sinking into a pebbly beach which stretches back to the docks that the low village has been built around.
As I reach Kidswal's main street—a stretch of unlined black tarmac, with shops on one side and dock warehousing on the other—the town is as busy as it ever gets. The fishermen are bringing in their first catch, and the morning market is going up along the front of the warehouses.
A few spare me a glance—I must look strange in only a sweat-soaked singlet and sweats, steam puffing from my mouth as I catch my breath, while they’re bundled up in their jackets and hoods against the chill. I don't let myself stop long enough to get cold.
This place is like stepping back into the dark ages. Many of the women opt for heavy woollen skirts and a kind of hat-bonnet to weather against the wind. The people have a mistrustful eye, which is fair enough given what presides over the western side of their island. Eternal Light might be a respectable establishment now, but any paying customer, like me, can come and stay as long as they have the means. No questions asked. People are there for everything from rehabilitation, avoidance, or mere hermitage. Or something darker. Whichever we are, the townsfolk tar us all as though we are that something darker.
Which, again, is fair enough.
How can I afford to stay? Well, it would surprise many, myself included, to find that crime of my typedidpay. In gifts, and in the help I’d received after Crennick burned. Well-off familymembers of the lost mainly, who felt I'd brought them justice where the law failed.
I should have been too proud to accept their gifts. I didn't want to take their jewels, their gold and bundles of cash. But, after Crennick burned, after… everything, there was little that I did think about.
I'd killed my sister, but that was considered just another of my kindnesses. Who to talk to in order to reach me was an open secret in the following two years. A network built for me, one I was largely unaware of it; the broken man that I was.
Was. I'm still a broken man now. I'm under no illusion about that. Tregam was cleaning itself up. Plants growing in dirt thought to be toxic for decades, purified by fire. But I wasn't purified. I tried to co-exist, quiet and unknown. I’d retired anyway, or so I've been telling myself. The urge for final, and usually easy, solutions to people who don't deserve to be alive, has embedded itself in me.
So, I took these plied gifts, and came here. A place where there’s no temptation. Where few heard enough about Needler to remember the grainy photos of the man who came before him, the man I haven’t been for a very long time. Any photos taken after my arrest haven’t seen the light of day. I can only assume I've got Eleanor to thank for that. Knowing her, she probably set my mugshot on fire and called it an accident.
