A Season For Everything - Matthew Fairman (pocket ebook reader .TXT) 📗

A season for everything.

A letter sent to her mother, dated January 12.

Dear Mum

I hope this letter finds you well. We have been doing a little island hopping and have finally arrived safely back in Bangkok. The weather? Well the weather is nothing like back home which is good enough for me. Up in the eighties most of the time and as humid as hell. The boys are having a blast. I didn’t know they would take to travelling so easily. They are not so adventurous with their choices in food however. I have never seen them eat so many omelettes in all my life. We have two weeks left and plan to make the most of this tropical paradise. It has been great to spend so much time with the boys. I know that I had been neglecting them with work and everything.

Being away has given me a lot of time to think. Something I tend to do after the fact. I was thinking today about dad. I was really missing him. I remember I had this argument with him one time. I don’t know exactly what the cause of it was but it must have been over something dumb I had done. You know the kind of stupid stuff we used to argue about. Well anyway, he had called me out on it and I took the bait. I told him that if he didn’t like the way I acted then ‘tough’. He had help raised me up and half of me was him and so it stood to reason that he was part to blame. Dad said that the way I went about my business was my choice and had nothing at all to do with him or you. Whether I was just being dog headed and trying to rial him or if that was what I truly believed, i’m not quite sure now. I carried that idea around for a hell of a long time, especially after he died. I felt guilty for saying that. He was right enough though. People are their own people. I know that now. I guess I always did. Seeing the boys grow up, seeing how different each is from the other and both not a bit like me. I can’t say that I see much of their father in them either, thank God. Seems with some people, it doesn’t matter what you do, you could try and help them in a million different ways and they would still end out the same. It’s like we somehow latch onto our destiny, nothing can shake us off from fulfilling it. You can dam up a river for so long but it will always run its course eventually. It’s like a planet spinning round and round, but even though it doesn’t look like it, it’s heading straight for that red hot sun thats going to burn it up. I see it all the time at work with the junkies and domestics.

I still get bad dreams, more often than not. Last night I woke Leo and Greg up with my screaming. Thats why I thought maybe if I wrote this down it might help some. Stop it playing on my mind so much. I can’t get the image of his eyes from out of my head. Such a cold stare, I knew what he was meaning to do, just from his eyes. He said it had to be done, that there was no way round it. Like he didn’t have a choice or anything about it. He talked in court about his 'ugly spirit'. Seems that theres a lot of that spirit floating around these days. I never really thought too much about God before, but I just can’t see rationalise what happened to that poor family. How could any God just let that slip by on his watch.

Right now I’m just going to enjoying being with the boys. I’ll start to worry about what I’m gonna do next when we get back. We all miss you and it won’t be long before we’re home again. I can’t thank you enough for lending me the money, you were right as usual. A holiday is just what we needed.

All our love,

Hollie, Greg and Leo.

Chapter I,

Monday 19th of December

If asked by those who knew him, Beaton Earnest was what many people would describe as a happy and contented man but on a closer inspection it would appear that he went about his daily life as would an automaton. Performing his daily tasks over and over again without a thought as to whether or not it was really what he wanted from this life. It was his willingness to accept his situation that meant he must surely be happy. Why wouldn't he be, he lived comfortably and had good health, a steady and reliable job. All the trappings of a modern life. Every morning Beaton caught the six twenty four train into the city and every night he would return by the six fifteen. At weekends he studied all the newspapers at the local library and did his weekly shop and paid his bills. The truth was, he felt so removed from the world he had created and his surroundings that he never quite knew for how long he could maintain the pretence of his contentment. Still the days rolled in and out like the waves on a shore and the weeks, like the tides, rose and fell away from the calendar without anything truly interesting ever happening.

Then, like a house of cards, the precarious structure that he had erected for himself, came crashing to the floor. A weak lintel amongst the many strong, unable to support his burdens any longer. A fault line, a corrosion from within. The busted valve that brought everything to a grinding stop. Four weeks to the day, before his court sentence, the train that Beaton Arnold Earnest was travelling on became stuck in a tunnel. Beaton sat in the dark and listened to the hushed whispers and panicked breath of his fellow passengers and felt the slight alien tingle of excitement from somewhere deep inside. He imagined all the reasons why the train could be stuck, a multitude of scenarios and terrors clamouring for space inside of his screaming mind.

'What if another train should collide with us?’ he marvelled. 'All that twisted metal and smoke, a blinding white flash and nothing more or Better still, what if a bomb goes off?’

He sat and fantasised of all the things that could happen in such Darkness A dark twitch, the uncoiling of a sour black worm inside Beaton’s brain. He reached out as if to to rest his palm on the person next to him. Somebody had stepped on his foot and the corner of a suitcase had found the temple of his head. A crush of bodies and muttered curses and apologies. Further down the train a child started to cry and very soon the darkness ceased to be a source of excitement. He was glad at last when the lights returned to the carriage and the driver announced that the journey would shortly be commencing. It was a minor incident but it was the tiny spark that touched the tinder, the wind that fanned the flame.

When Beaton went to bed that evening, the ghost of his feelings that day returned to him in the night time of his room. He couldn't sleep and he lay awake and imagined that he was still in the tunnel, with all the other passengers, waiting. He began a train of thought in which he likened the Town to the broken down carriage. Everyone in the night time of the Town waiting in the shadows for the lights to come back on and for the world to wake up and start moving again. In his fantasy he roamed the night like a phantom, hovering over the townsfolk, drinking in their fear like a bat with a humming birds beak. Noiselessly beating his wings as he fluttered from house to house. He was the shadow caught in the corner of the eye, the devil waiting at the foot of the bed. He wished he was death. Beaton felt something snap inside of him and sunk beneath the weight of his loneliness. He was gripped by a terrible fear that he had hitherto never felt before. It was the fear of obscurity, of never being realised. A fear that tomorrow will be just the same as yesterday was and that nothing would ever change for. On and on it would go, like the waves on the shore. Turning him over like a stone, rolling and wearing him down into nothing. He heard once again the terrible scream of a frightened child but it was merely the cry of the foxes in the garden. Beaton wished that somebody would step on his foot to shake him from this waking dream. He knocked his head with his fists and the hot fat tears rolled down his face but the lights stayed out and he sobbed like he was a child, there was no driver here to start this train again.

Tuesday 20th

His alarm had not woken him, he was sure he had set it. He felt for his watch on the side cabinet. He ran his thumb over its shattered face. Rough slices marred its smooth glass surface.

'It must have happened in the crush of people on the train.’ He stretched the gold metal wrist band over his hand. His arm would always felt naked without his watch. He looked out the window at the dead leaves and the sodden lawn. The bare trees, like biology textbook drawings of capillary systems, were stamped onto a skyline of cheap red brick houses. The cold steel frames of the gas works rising on the horizon above the empty sports field and the humped ramparts made by the railway tracks. Clouds of white steam from next doors boiler drifted past his window and melted into the grey sky. The scene outside gave him no clues as to what time of day it was. He realised that this place did not know him at this time of day at this point in the week. He should have been at work.

'I could still call in, they would understand', he picked up the receiver but placed it back down immediately. 'I seem to spend most of my times financing these empty rooms and I'm hardly ever even here at all.’ Standing stock still he listened carefully, straining his ears. The rattle of the boiler, the ticking of a clock on the mantle, a cooing of a pigeon perched on the chimney above, the sound of hammering off in the distance. This house didn't need him, it didn't even want him here, it ran perfectly well all by itself. He fixed himself some breakfast of coffee, two slices of toast, butter and marmalade. He munched on his breakfast whilst listening to the radio. The weatherman warned of record breaking snowfall in the coming days.

Beaton walked past the dismal rows of terraced houses that were common to that part of his town. Their pebble dashed facades streaked with years of black grime from burst gutters and hoppers clogged with moss and leaves. There was little sign of life on the weekday street. A man working on a roof was doing something to a chimney stack. The postman with his bicycle receded from view then reappeared as he played out his daily dance down the road from door to door. A cat blinked from a sitting room window. The few shops and businesses on the estate had long since closed down or moved away. Beaton tried to