Episode 14

Previously…


My darling boy is in a coma so I’ve got nothing more to lose. I don’t even care about you and Samuel anymore. I used to. And that’s how you could get under my skin. But not anymore. You can have him for all the good he does around here. The two of you are welcome to each other. Evil twins that’s for sure. Go ahead and do your worst. I don’t give a shit. Animals, both of you. Rutting animals.”

Alice purposely didn’t deny that, a point not lost on Clara.

“And speaking of which, you can take that slobbering dog with you….in case Samuel doesn’t feel up to it, you got something to fall back on.”

“Oh my. You really do have the hump.”

Clara struck out with all her bottled-up fury. The side of her little hand connected high up on Alice’s cheekbone and knocked her flying into the wall.

“And don’t you ever talk to me like that again. If you are anything less than polite to me I will make sure that no man ever looks at you again.”

Alice bit down the automatic retort on its way to her lips. Clara was the bigger woman, and she had righteous fury on her side. Alice felt like she’d been hit by a brick. She also knew she had a mammoth black-eye on the way.

In the silence there bloomed a new-found respect for Clara. ‘The woman had balls after all,’ thought Alice.

And now...

‘How could things go so wrong? Was God punishing him, like his mother had promised? Was he not worthy of a happy life? A life? Just any life?’ Samuel traced the pattern on the kitchen tablecloth with his finger. Clara had just gone off to the hospital in a huff, leaving him with several standing ultimatums. It seemed he was just making things worse for her, and he felt very sorry for that. But what could he do? How had this all happened? He had tried the best he could to make a home for them. Provide for them. They never had to go without. And what did he get for all his troubles? Everyone shouting at him as if he was to blame. Alright they had their reasons…but he was human too. He also keenly felt Joshua's collapse. Even felt a little guilty for shouting at him…but it wasn't really fair to blame him for the whole thing. He was just doing his best.

Samuel was the kind of man that could bear most things…and although he was a bit rough and ready, he was a constant rock of support in all weathers. But he couldn't bear them if he didn't have Clara’s support. She was his guiding light. Nothing seemed worthwhile if she wasn't there. With her turning against him so rabidly he felt like there was a huge hole in his life: a huge hole where his future should have been. Now there was nothing. This was a new and horrible feeling to him, whose life had been so ordinary and predictable. To try and shake it off, he got up and walked around…looking around at their house. He loved the kitchen. It was warm and friendly. That was why every one congregated there. And it smelt like baked bread…although Clara had never baked any in her life. He went into the hall but caught a glimpse of Alice in the lounge, obviously waiting for him, so he headed upstairs and found himself opening the door to Joshua's bedroom.

Samuel sat down on Joshua’s bed and thought about the boy. He’d never meant to be cruel to him. He was just doing what he thought a father should do. He looked around the room. It was all neat and tidy. Clara had seen to that. Comics on his homework table…next to his school satchel. Samuel smiled at that. It’s true though, he and Joshua hadn’t spent much time together lately. The boy had become very quiet and withdrawn…which in its turn had made Samuel more loud and on his case. In hindsight he could see that didn’t work. He’d have to find another way of making friends with him…if he ever woke. What a heartache that was. His own boy. His life. He felt so powerless…that something like this could strike them all down. It just ripped the family apart.

And then there was Alice. Disaster number two. Alice’s arrival had just made things worse…driven Clara further away and provided Beulah with a co-conspirator against him. Those two seemed forever to be whispering in some corner or another. To make matters worse he daren’t turn to her for support. Alice was a tricky business. There was no way out of those quicksands once he stepped in them.

There was a soft knock at the door…so soft he almost didn’t hear it. He looked up.

“Hi Sam.” She was the only one that called him that; the only one who referred to him affectionately.

“Hi,” he said with a tired smile. “Come in.”

She was such a singular sight, but he accepted her for who she was. That he had succumbed to conventionality did not bother her either. That was Sam. They seemed to form a perfect yin and yang. They were the opposites in every respect, that balanced each other and made them a harmonious whole, this incongruous pair.

“You alright?

“Sure.”

Alice sat down on the bed next to him and pretended to look interestedly around her. She picked up a photo of Clara on the bedside table.

“She doesn’t understand about us, does she?”

Samuel watched her as she ran her thumb over the photo. He wasn’t sure he understood about ‘us’. He was an old fashioned man with old fashioned values, a man with a will of iron. But he had his Achilles heel like everyone, and his Achilles heel was Alice.

He was fond of Alice, loved her even, but what frightened him was that she excited him. She excited him when she was near…like electricity…chemistry. His body seemed to perk up of its own accord. The trouble was, that when she was away he forgot about that and only remembered it too late, when he had already invited her into the house. Now he had to deal with that as well.

She sighed, put the photograph down, and turned to him. He felt the cloud of her perfume envelope him as she did so. She lifted her hand and lovingly touched his hair…setting it right. He tried to push her hand away, but she slapped him down, taking sisterly liberties with him.

“Behave. I’m not going to eat you. There that looks better.”

“Alice, I…” but he just couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her he wanted to be alone, to wallow in his gloom for a while. He stared down into his lap.

Alice looked at his hangdog expression for a while, then stuck her finger under his nose.

“Wanna smell?”

He laughed and pushed her hand away.

“Stop it.” It was obviously an old joke between them.

Alice licked her finger and stuck it in his mouth.

“Gimme a kiss,” she teased him, only half in jest as they roughhoused on the bed.

“Alice. For Christ’s sake,” he said trying to feign seriousness.

“Sorry,” she said poutingly. “I was only trying to cheer you up. Make you forget for a bit. That’s not a crime you know.”

“Sorry. No. I suppose not.”

Silence.

“God I’m so worried.” He hung his head and began to cry.

Gently she put her arms around him and pulled him to her, her little boy again, and let him cry until his sobs subsided.

Gently she kissed the top of his head.

“It’s alright,” he said, drying his eyes and pulling away. “I worry about Clara. She’s taken this very hard.”

“I know.”

There was a long pause.

“I missed you,” said Alice.

When she said things like that it made him feel like he was standing on the edge of a precipice. But she always made him feel alive.

“Are you…” she started, but changed her mind. “You know there’s never been anyone else.”

“Alice look…” She put her finger on his mouth to shoosh him

“I miss you Sam. I don’t want anything from you…you know that…but I get lonely sometimes.”

“Alice, I’m not…”

“No, don’t speak. I know all that. You’ve already said it all. It’s just that I have tried, but I can’t seem to forget – to put it aside as easily as you have,” she said, looking into his eyes to see if the barb had gone home. It had.

“I couldn’t just close the door on you.”

“People grow up Alice. Those were just children’s games.”

“Not to me. To me they were real. I was in love with you.”

“And I with you. I still love you.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“But we grew up,” he carried on regardless. How many times had he said this? “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“Sam,” she said, taking his hand gently. His instinct was to pull it away but he didn’t want to be cruel. Sam in all conscience couldn’t deny her. He knew he should. He knew she had no real hold over him – except that he loved her – and that after their parents had died, he was all she had – and she knew that and played it for all she was worth. After all, she was the one with nothing, but she was also the one with nothing to lose.

“I thought it was forever. Didn’t I give you everything?”

“I was just a kid.”

“Stop saying that. How can you say that it mattered then and that it doesn’t matter now? Tell me truthfully. Haven’t you ever wanted it back? Weren’t those the happiest days of your life? Tell me honestly.”

“We’ve been through this before.”

“Yes, but say it again.”

“Stop it Alice.”

“Tell me then that you don’t love me. That you don’t want…”

“You know I love you. I love you…”

“Tell me you don’t want it again. Tell me and I’ll leave you alone…forever. Go on. Tell me.”

Gazing into his eyes lovingly, she lifted his hand up to her breast and Beulah walked in.

All credit to Alice that she didn’t panic and rip her hand away guiltily. Somehow she managed to make it seem like she was innocently holding her brothers hand in a comforting, sisterly kind of way.

Beulah saw the transition but she was not sophisticated enough yet to pin it down. She almost believed her eyes, but Alice’s sleight of hand fooled her. Alice was a seasoned snake who could change her skin right in front of your eyes and you wouldn’t even notice. This was how she kept Samuel in thrall.

“How you doing?” she said to Beulah, casually letting go of Samuel’s hand.

“The dog has shat in the kitchen,” blurted out Beulah.

“Dammit, I forgot about him”

Samuel got up swiftly, thankful for an excuse to leave the room.

Alice followed him. Beulah followed them both, her tight jeans exaggerating every curve of her plump adolescent thighs and baby-fat bum.

Those jeans were a work of art. Two hours earlier she had been lying flat on the floor next door in her bedroom, struggling to pull on the more than skin-tight jeans, easing them on, centimetre by centimetre over her hips until she was finally squashed in like a sausage in a skin. She had spent another five minutes trying to zip them up and nearly tearing off her fingernails, and another minute or two trying to get up off the floor without splitting them at the seams.

Normally this was a job that her mother or Joshua would have helped her with, so it had taken her longer than usual. But it made her feel more like an adult woman, doing it all by herself. And indeed, this was serious business. This time she was stepping out into the grown-up world. This was her first real, tentative step outside the home. She stood as it were for the moment in between two worlds…between the hell of her childhood...and the heaven of unbridled adulthood. Her heart beat with unusual excitement and trepidation at the thought.

But there was only one problem. Joshua. He hung over her parade like a dark cloud. She found it very difficult to get the picture of him lying in the hospital bed out of her head. Everything was confusing. Beulah was still, like the rest of her family, in a state of shock. She couldn’t get her head around what had happened. It was too big for her; she was too young to understand all the implications. All she could do was focus her mind on the ordinary things just to keep going, but she was having a hard time coming to terms with how callous it was that she could dismiss him so easily.

But she’d had this guilty feeling for a long time now, because Beulah, unlike Alice who had stayed loyal and loving to her brother when she hit puberty, Beulah had dumped her immature brother for boys who were more in line with her new and urgent needs. She was no longer his friend, or playmate. She was too grown up and he embarrassed her. She had become an adult, leaving Joshua all alone down there in the valley of childhood. But the devil drives where needs must, and Jack wasn’t going to wait forever. She and Jack had come to a crucial stage in their relationship…a defining moment. She couldn’t use Joshua as an excuse to delay him yet once again, because Jack wasn’t obliged to be that interested in her life yet. He didn’t even know that she had a brother. He didn’t, truth be told, even know what her last name was. They weren't ‘a couple’ as yet. But tonight was a status-changing kind of night. If she missed this she wouldn’t get another chance. Jack had more than just hinted at that. She just hoped Joshua would understand. She was starting to get miserable thinking about it all so she pinched herself painfully in the soft part of her inner arm and sharpened the focus on her beautifications. After all, it wasn’t as if he was dead…or badly injured. He could just wake up at any moment…or never, but she couldn’t put her life on hold forever.

Beulah surveyed the result of her recent exertions in the mirror and was immensely satisfied with her buxom profile. Tonight was the big night, and if that didn't pull him in, nothing would. But she was by no means making it easy for Jack. A more efficient chastity belt than these jeans was hard to find. She wanted him to take his time unwrapping the package, appreciating and admiring the view as he went. She wanted it to be special…..the first time, and tonight was the night. She'd strung him out as far as possible, but she didn't want him to lose interest because there were queues of girls waiting in line to take her place if she got boring.

The next hour was dedicated to her hair and makeup. Finally she took a long critical look in the mirror. Yes. She looked like a million dollars. And so she should. Her beauty products were the most expensive on the market. It was a pity though that she had been caught shoplifting when she had been a newbie. Her dad had never lived that one down, having to spring his own daughter from the local police station where he used to work. With great embarrassment he had watched his old colleagues smirk behind their hands. He never forgave Beulah, and he never let her forget…always watching her suspiciously.

Since then she'd learnt the ropes. Together with her two best friends they had worked out a constantly evolving system of distraction and extraction. Two girls misdirected the store assistants while the other collected a carefully prepared shopping list. They didn't steal just any old rubbish.

There. She was ready. Two and a half hours of preparation, primping and plumping…..and it showed. She was fast becoming a contender for the best looking girl in the school, and tonight, with a bit of luck, she was going to snag the prize bull.

Jack, in her eyes, was the alpha male. He had the plumage and the pose – that nonchalant couldn't-give-a-fuck attitude. That he was an absolute moron when it came to schoolwork only added to his allure. His disdain for academia she took as a sign of his superiority to the vulgar mundane. He knew everything…..without knowing anything. All balls and no brain.

But his brutish bravado (and his ten second attention span) was merely a compensation for a childhood insecurity that had been carefully nursed into fruition by his botanically ignorant parents. With his father’s clouts ringing in one ear, and his mother's nagging, whining voice in the other, he unknowingly had much in common with Beulah, and in fairness to her, was probably one of the things that attracted her to him unconsciously. So they tried to escape into each others arms, blissfully unaware of the other’s baggage…so lovingly packed by their parents.

With a last look in the mirror, Beulah hid her high heel shoes in her handbag and stood for a moment at her bedroom door, listening for any signs of movement outside the trench. She snuck out and was just going past Joshua's door when she heard voices within. Perhaps she thought it was Joshua. Perhaps she thought it was Alice with a boy in her room, but to tell the truth she didn't really think at all. She simply turned the handle and went in.

Then came the shock of seeing two people who shouldn't have been there. The dog shit story just fell out of her mouth before her father had time to get a good look at her, thank god. He was out of the room with Alice and Beulah in tight tow, winding their way down the stairs. He peeled off into the kitchen and Beulah peeled off out the front door and disappeared into the night. Samuel didn’t even hear the door close.