Ben McPherson - A Line of Blood

‘Is he dead?’

‘Out, Max.’ Surely this needs some sort of lie.

‘But Dad.’

‘Out. Downstairs. Now.’

‘But Dad. Dad.’

I turned to look at him.

‘What, Max?’

‘Are you OK, Dad?’ said Max, stepping out on to the landing. I looked at him again, his thin shoulders, his floppy hair, that unreadable look in his eyes. You’re eleven, I thought. When did you get so old?

‘Dad. Dad? Are you going to call the police?’

I nodded.

‘His phone’s downstairs in the living room.’

He was taking charge. My eleven-year-old son was taking charge. This had to stop. This couldn’t be good.

‘No, Max,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘We’re going to go back to our place. I’ll call from there.’

‘OK.’ He turned and went downstairs.

I took a last look at the neighbour and wondered just what Max had understood. The erection was subsiding now; the penis lay flaccid on his pale thigh.

I heard Max open the front door. ‘You coming, Dad?’

I went home and rang the police and told them what we had found. Then I rang Millicent, though I knew she would not pick up.

Max and I sat at opposite sides of the table in our tired little kitchen, watching each other in silence.

After I had called the police I had made cheese sandwiches with Branston pickle. Max had done what he always did, opening his sandwiches, picking up the cheese and thoughtfully sucking off the pickle, stacking the cheese on his plate and the bread beside it. He had then eaten the cheese, stuffing it into his mouth, chewing noisily and swallowing before he could possibly be ready to. Normally I would have said something, and Max would have ignored it, and I would have shouted at him. Then, if Millicent had been with us, she would have shot me a furious glance, refused to speak to me until Max had gone to bed, then said, simply, ‘Why pick that fight, Alex, honey? You never win it anyway. You’re just turning food into a thing . Food doesn’t have to be a thing .’

Tonight I simply watched Max, wondering what to do, and what to tell Millicent when she came home.

A father leads his son from the world of the boy into the world of the man. A father takes charge, and does not without careful preparation expose his son to the cold realities of death. A father – more specifically – does not expose his son to the corpse of the next-door neighbour, and – most especially – not when that corpse displays an erection brought on by suicide through electrocution.

The tension in the limbs, that rictus smile, they were not easily erased. What did Max know about suicide? What could an eleven-year-old boy know about despair? I had to talk to him, but had no idea what to say. This was bad. Wasn’t this the stuff of full-blown trauma, of sexual dysfunction in the teenage years, and nervous breakdown in early adulthood? And though I hadn’t actively shown Max the neighbour, I had failed to prevent him from seeing him in all his semi-priapic squalor. What do you say? Maybe Millicent would know.

‘Can I have some more cheese, Dad?’

I said nothing.

Maybe I should ring Millicent again. The phone would go to voicemail, but there was comfort in hearing her voice.

Max went to the fridge and fetched a large block of cheddar, then took the bread knife from the breadboard. He sat back down at the table and looked directly at me, wondering perhaps why I’d done nothing to stop him. Then he cut off a large chunk. I noticed the bread knife cut into the surface of the table, but said nothing.

The cat was at the sink. She looked at Max, eyes large, then blinked.

Max went to the sink and turned on the tap. The cat drank, her tongue flicking in and out, curling around the stream of water.

‘Can I watch Netflix?’

I looked at my computer, at the light that pulsed gently on and off. No. Seventy hours of footage to watch, and a week to do it. I have to work . I really should say no.

‘Dad?’ said Max.

I nodded. Work seemed very distant now. Max stared.

‘I’m not taking a plate,’ he said at last.

‘OK.’

At eleven thirty I heard Millicent’s key in the lock. I was sitting where Max had left me at the kitchen table, my own sandwich untouched; the tap was still running.

I heard Millicent drop her bag at the foot of the stair. For the first time I noticed the sound of the programme on the computer: helicopters and gunfire; screaming and explosions. Millicent and Max exchanged soft words. The gunfire and the screaming stopped.

‘Night, Max.’

‘Night, Mum.’

The sound of Max going upstairs; the sound of Millicent dropping her shoes beside her bag.

‘So, Max is up kind of late.’ Millicent came into the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway for a moment, and I saw her notice Max’s plate, the stack of uneaten bread, the bread-knife cut in the table surface. She turned off the tap, then sat down opposite me. She made to say something, then frowned.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hey.’ Her voice drew out the word, all honey and smoke.

When Millicent first came to London it had felt like our word. The long Californian vowel, the gently falling cadence at the end, were for me, and for me alone. Hey. There was such warmth in her voice, such love. In time I realised hey was how she greeted friends, that she had no friends in London but me at the start; the first time she said hey to another man the betrayal stung me. Don’t laugh at me for this. I didn’t know.

‘So,’ said Millicent. ‘I didn’t stink.’

I don’t know what you mean.

‘In fact, I think I did OK. I mean, I guess I talked a little too much, but it went good for a first time. Look.’

A bag. A bottle and some flowers. There’s a dead man in the next-door house.

I looked up at a dark mark in the wall near the ceiling. Round, like a target. Draw a straight line from me through that mark, and you’d hit the neighbour. Seven metres, I guessed. Maybe less.

Millicent looked at me, then reached out and took my hand in hers, turning it over and unclenching my fist.

‘You are super-tense.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘You’re OK?’

No. I was as far from OK as I could imagine but the words I needed wouldn’t form. ‘Yes,’ I said at last.

‘You forgot.’ It took a lot to hurt Millicent, but I could feel the edge of disappointment in her voice. The interview, on the radio. Of course.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Radio.’ Why can’t I find the words?

‘OK,’ she said. She looked at me as if I had run over a deer. ‘But you didn’t listen to it. I mean, it’s also a download, so I get that maybe it’s not time-critical, but I guess I was kind of hoping, Alex …’

I breathed deep, trying to decide how to say what I had to say. From the look of Millicent, Max had told her nothing of what we’d seen. I wondered where the police were. Maybe bathroom suicides were a common event around here. What do you say?

‘What is it, Alex?’

From upstairs I heard Max flush the toilet. I thought of the bathroom in the house next door, of the bath five metres from where he was now.

‘Alex?’

‘OK.’ I took Millicent’s hand in mine, looked her in the eye. ‘OK.’

‘You’re scaring me a little, Alex. What’s going on?’

Three sentences, I thought. Anything can be said in three sentences. You need to find three sentences.

‘OK. This is what I need to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘The neighbour killed himself. I found him. Max saw.’ Nine words. Not bad.

‘No,’ she said. Very quiet, almost matter-of-fact, as if refuting a badly phrased proposition. ‘No, Alex, he isn’t. He can’t be.’