A Patient Man

by S. Lynn Scott

  Dad was going back to Gary after the funeral. There had been a carer brought in for him, but it seemed that had not gone particularly well. I was to stay at the Barkers until…well, that was open-ended. Until I stretched their philanthropy to breaking point, or until Mrs. Barker found that I was a hindrance to her burgeoning social whirl, or until any one of a hundred other of life’s disappointments should decide that I was to be thrown aside once more. That was unfair of course but it was how I felt at the time. It should be stated here that I returned to the Barkers whenever I was free right throughout my youth and early manhood and still do. Mrs. Barker talks about me to other people as if I weren’t there and Mr. Barker always looks surprised to see me. All the generations of Afghans have ignored me, but over the years they have always kept one small mongrel dog in the pack.

  It appeared that, on the face of it, the Sword of Damocles had spared the innocent. Not that any of us were particularly innocent, just innocent of the act that had precipitated poor Peggy’s death.

  Vi’s son Ethan eventually pled guilty and was jailed for his part in the crime, but it had always been on the cards that he would be caught doing something sooner or later and, to the best of my knowledge he has spent most of his life since behind bars for one reason or another. He claimed to have been off his head on drugs for the whole of the ill-starred venture and probably was more of a liability than a help. He swore that his unnatural mother was the driving force and the plan was conceived and executed within one dreadful twenty-four hours when all three were emboldened, embittered and befuddled with alcohol. It made sense.

  Innocent Sarah, if you are interested, spent a lot of her money on losing weight and thereafter on remaining fashionably thin. To her credit she was not idle and bought herself a shop that sold things like lime green boob tubes and animal print leggings to women with lots of flesh and no taste and developed it into a small chain that sold lime green boob tubes and animal print leggings with a little bit of gold trim added to women with even less fashion sense and loads of money. She never married, mainly, I am convinced because, whilst she had terrible taste in men, she was acute enough to know that, attractive as tight jeans and flowing locks might be, they were not to be trusted with her money.

  Meanwhile Gary, after many months of dogged care from my father, unstintingly pursued even in the teeth of ferocious resistance, regained his health. He promptly climbed into a wheelchair, turned his back on my father and married a determined churchgoing girl who converted him to Christianity, domesticity and even fatherhood. He is now a fiery, God-fearing man who believes that on the day of judgment he is going to heaven and gives the impression that he will watch with immense satisfaction and a comfortable sense of superiority as the rest of us burn agonisingly in hell. Personally speaking, I preferred him before he found his own rather self-serving version of redemption.

  Dad returned to London. But not to his old life. One of his lady friends remained faithful and took him in. I don’t know what he did with whatever was left of the money, but I know he didn’t touch it. They ran a small corner shop in Streatham and I think they were…all right. Dad had always worshiped my mum and he was never going to get over that, but I believe that he eventually achieved some sort of peace and there is no one in this sad little story who deserved it more.

  I continued my education, with one or two inevitable interruptions. Boys are difficult enough in their formative years and I had some justification to feel that life had not treated me well, so my schooling was… chequered. Books were still my comfort and my escape, my educator and ultimately my salvation, but even they could not quell the bitterness that ate into my soul and demanded vengeance.

  I did not return to Canvey Island except just once when I was a very hormonally charged seventeen.

  And that was to kill Mr. Freeman.

  It was premeditated of course, and, to my confused and unhappy mind, it just had to be done.

  He was the man who had murdered my mother.

  I had been patient. I had bided my time, but he had already lived too long.

  I took a cricket bat with me. He opened the door and stepped back to let me in. He didn’t flinch once, even when he saw the bat in my hands, just gestured me into the small sitting room I knew so well and eased himself into his well-worn armchair, the one in which Bones had tended him all those many years ago. I tightened my grip on the handle of the bat until the cord that covered it bit into my palms and tensed myself in preparation. His own steady gaze on me wasn’t questioning or surprised in any way. I think he’d had enough too and, if I was going to take my revenge in payment for his, he was going to accept it as something that was just meant to be.

  I should have acted at once, but I had some confused idea that I wanted to see realisation and fear in his eyes. Perhaps I wanted him to plead for his life. Perhaps I would have felt pity, perhaps I would have felt contempt. As it was he gazed steadily at me and I, locked in his gaze, felt the seconds tick by into minutes and into eternity.

  “Do you play cricket then?” He broke the silence with mild enquiry as if growing bored with the lengthening tension, and, despite myself, my ingrained public-school courtesy commanded a polite reply,

  “Can’t stand it. Never could.”

  We continued staring at each other and I felt the tendrils of the hatred that I had nurtured over the years tighten around my heart for one instant. An instant that urged me to action, and then faded as I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. Not with fear though. I think that would have been his undoing. No. With humour.

  “Funny thing, life,” he chuckled. “It’s never what we think it is going to be, is it?”

  Looking back, I still can’t see quite what it was that he found funny, but at the time I was hit by a sudden cold realisation that what I was about to do was totally ridiculous and stupid.

  That I was ridiculous and stupid. Standing there in this old man’s living room, a callow boy with a weapon in my hand, holding on to a sort of tired vengeance that I had nurtured and revived time and again over the years. A vengeance that had come to define me in my own mind and would, if I tightened my fingers around the willow and advanced on the defenceless and helpless old man, define me forever.

  Perhaps I was a coward, perhaps my education was at war with the old Mikey, perhaps the old man’s will was stronger than mine, or perhaps, which seems more likely to me now, I glimpsed the futility of vengeance for the first time. All those years of fear and hatred when the answer had been right in front of me all the time. Break the circle.

  That this frail old man had made mistakes, that my father had too, that my mother had made the biggest mistakes of all. That I was young and would make many, many mistakes in the life that lay before me, but that this was one mistake that I might be spared. That I might spare myself.

  One immeasurably stupid act had precipitated a whirlwind of fear and hatred, had swallowed up and devoured a family and survived into years of bitter consequences. Another act of violence born out of muddled emotion would do no less.

  Enough.

  I let the weapon slip from my hands and with a gesture of defeat subsided into the chintz settee. The rosy flowers and entwined tendrils mocked me with their cosy domesticity. Peggy had triumphed. I had failed. Revenge would not be mine.

  I chose hope instead, and I left that neat little house a free man.