“Milo… I'm not really… It’s not just her fault. It’s… According to her, it’s been over for a while. It’s just taken me longer to see it.” Not that he was completely clear about it now, but…
“Longer than the six months she's been messing around behind your back?”
“Yeah.” Dalton moved into the sitting room. Milo following closely behind him, like he was a suspect about to run or something. “What did she tell you?”
“Just that she was moving out tonight. That you’d both talked about working it out, but she couldn’t see how it would be possible. She told me she’d met someone else, and apologised for it. Like I was the one she should apologise to.” Milo huffed as he took a seat, stretching his long legs out and loosening his jacket buttons. “She said things were complicated but not to jump to the wrong conclusion, and that you'd need me.”
“I don’t need anyone. She shouldn’t have bothered you at all.”
“Yeah, but…” Milo ran his long fingers through his dark, wavy hair as he glared at Dalton. “I'm here. I'm tired, hungry, fucked off with work, and I'm not in the mood to pussyfoot around your emotional instabilities. So, with all that in mind… I asked Danny and Samuel to come over and deal with all that shit while I eat.” Milo grinned at last. “Oh, come on! I'm shit at this. You know this about me. You need Danny.”
“Hmm.” Dalton closed his eyes.
It was all planned and too late to stop, so he should just pull on his big boy pants and deal with it. It was only one evening with friends. Let them do what made them feel better, and then Dalton could hide in bed after they left.
Chapter 7
Troy woke with a startled gasp, body rising from the bed as soon as his eyes sprung open, reaching for the bedside lamp but knocking it to the floor in his hurry. “Shit.” He tried to stop panicking and took a deep breath. It was just a dream, dickhead. Thirty and you still have the same childish nightmares you had when you were ten. How sad is that?
The door to his bedroom flew open, light spilling in from the landing blinding him as Liam stood there, breathing too fast and his face screwed up with worry.
“I'm okay. Turn the damn light off, you're blinding me.” Troy reached for the lamp on the floor, switching it on as Liam hit the light off in the hall.
“I heard a crash, wanted to check it out.”
“Just the lamp. I think I broke it.” Troy waggled it around, the stem now loose and the shade flopping from side to side.
“Yeah, I'd say so.” Liam chuckled as he leaned against the doorframe. “Nightmare?”
“Yeah, same old shit.” Troy laid back, kicking the sheet off him and staring at Liam yawning. “Go back to bed.”
“I'm not really tired.”
Troy laughed loudly. Liam’s words were yawned out and totally not believable at all. “Well, I'm putting the TV on. Come watch it with me.” He knew in five minutes Liam would be fast asleep, that’s what always happened, but the good thing was, he’d be right behind him.
“Don’t put one of those shitty subtitled Japanese films on. They do my head in.”
“They’re awesome.” Troy found one on a random channel and Liam groaned as he lay beside Troy, thumping his pillow into submission before he settled his head on it. “Oh hey, we watched this one a few years ago.” Troy laid back, thinking how little things had changed. He hated sleeping alone, probably one of the reasons he slipped from one relationship to another, or was cool in between letting Liam comfort him. “I’ve not had one in six months.”
“You were shouting again.” Liam glanced over, their eyes holding the look but neither speaking. Words didn’t really add anything to the moment. They knew each other too well, spoken about this hundreds of times. It changed nothing.
Troy pretended to watch the film, but really it was just something to rest his gaze on while he thought. Liam was chuckling at the dodgy subtitles, sprawled out with just his shorts on and the sheet wrapped around one leg. Troy did the same, staring up at the ceiling. The white colour and total lack of anything up there made his thoughts a little clearer. “He’s up for parole in six months. I got a letter about it.”
Liam stiffened next to him, grabbing the remote and dulling the overacting dubbing on the TV. “When did you find that out, and why didn’t you tell me?”
“Yesterday afternoon. You were late back from work and I hid in bed all night if you remember.”
“Oh yeah, well…” Liam rolled onto his side. “Do you get a chance to fight it?”
“I can speak to my solicitor and see what he suggests. I'm hoping I can, but they know everything he did, so all I can do is remind them of the long lasting effect what he did has on me.”
It was ten years ago when Troy had taken a rare weekend to visit his mum that everything went shit, and Troy really didn’t see things getting any worse when he was an adult. He thought he’d put the worst behind him as a child, but he’d been wrong. So wrong.
He’d grown up in Manchester, only thirty minutes from where he lived with Terry and Alice after they fostered him, and after he’d been taken away, his mum stayed local. They had a tough time reconnecting, and he didn’t see her for a long time, but when he turned eighteen, he received a letter from her and things slowly changed between them. Through the next year they moved on and eventually they had some sort of relationship, not mother and son, but they became friends at least.
His dad was a real piece of work who basically married his mum so he could move over to the UK. They met while she and her friends were on vacation in Turkey. Two months later, she’d gone back and they were married and he was on the plane back to England with her. A month after that and Troy was on the way.
He was five when he first remembered seeing his dad punch his mum in the face, six when she ran into his bedroom, cowering under the sheets with him as his dad pounded on the door, shouting at her to get outside. He held back from beating her in front of Troy at that stage, and his room was often the only safe place in the house for her.
Troy remembered being so scared his dad would come in and hurt him, he’d asked his mum to go outside. Thinking back with an adult’s mind, he could see he was just a child who was afraid, and who wanted his parents to stop arguing, not understanding what was going on. It was only with hindsight he put all the pieces together and knew just what he was sending his mum into.
At seven, he came home from school to find his dad’s hands wrapped around her throat, choking her in the hallway. Their eyes connected and he dropped his mum to the floor—coughing and gasping for air. By seven, Troy knew not all mums and dads lived like they did. Their mums weren’t covered in bruises, and they didn’t live in fear of doing something wrong.
The thing is, she couldn’t do anything right. It was like he changed the rules when he wanted, catching her out and punishing her for it. The house was never clean enough, even though it was pristine, not a single thing out of place. Troy learned from the age of two to clean up after himself, one toy out at a time, no messy fingerprints on anything. His mum would try to shield him from the most of it, but things were tough.
His dad was the funniest person you could ever want to meet. He was everyone’s friend, talked to anyone, made friends at the drop of a hat, always buying drinks and joining in the fun. He went to every school event, made a big show of playing happy families. To the rest of the world they were happy, behind closed doors, he changed like flicking a switch.
As soon as they were alone he would slam the door and just look at his mum. She’d worn the wrong dress, she looked like a slut, her hair wasn’t styled like he wanted. She spent too long talking to another man and made him look stupid. The way she laughed with the other women made her look like an idiot. It would go on and on.
Troy would stick up for her, say she’d been just like the other mums. As he got older, a quick slap to the back of the head would be delivered by his dad and Troy would be pushed up the stairs while the fighting continued.
At eighteen, he was waiting in the pub for her to turn up. After an hour, he got worried and walked past the flat she and his dad lived in. She’d never told his dad about their meetings, and Troy hadn't wanted to see him, so they’d always been careful, but something was bugging him.
From the information his mum told him, he knew his dad should be at work, so he made his way up to the second floor and found the front door opened an inch. As soon as he went to push it, his eyes fell on a red smear on it and he paused. It could have been anything, but Troy knew inside it was blood.
Troy found her in the kitchen. Pots and pans where everywhere, vegetables and other food strewn about the room, and there in the middle of the lino was his mum. He thought she was dead at first, but then a bubble of blood came from her lips and he knelt beside her, not knowing what had happened, just that it was bad. She was covered in blood from head to toe. It was pooled around her, leaking through his jeans as his hands hovered above her, not wanting to touch her in case it hurt. She looked into his eyes as she died. That was that. His last moments with a woman who he loved despite everything slipped away in the breeze, never to be found again.