Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

whichever three-star hotel allows her not to have to come home. The girls stay with friends more often than not: coming home now and again for a change of clothes. When they are home they ignore him. He doesn’t take it personally. He remembers being a teenager. Adults are the enemy. Parents are uniformly sad, pathetic failures: killjoys and jailers. It doesn’t matter that he allows them to do what they want. Doesn’t matter that until they turned twelve they thought he was the coolest dad on the planet. Now, he’s a sad bastard. Now, he’s the guy who runs out of the house in yesterday’s clothes to slash the tyres of whichever bailiff has just turned up to impound his car.

He rolls his shoulders. Feels a twinge. Somebody had given him a good boot high on his back during the melee in the classroom. He feels quite proud of the injury. Hopes somebody will want to see the bruise. If he ever went on social media anymore he would definitely tell the world what has happened to him, but he hasn’t used any of the online platforms for an age. It all became too dispiriting. He allows himself a wry smile as the word occurs to him. Annabeth had really lost it when he spoke of feeling ‘dispirited’. He’d liked the way she turned on him. There was passion there. Fire. And she can write. She has a creative soul, he can tell. He can’t help wondering about the twists and turns her life has taken to lead her here. A prison officer at desperate, creaking HMP Holderness.

He looks across at where she dozes. Runs his eyes, soft as a fingertip, along her outline. Bare feet, soft, wrinkled soles, touching at the ankle. Fit, sturdy legs rising to a pleasing rump, then down to her waist and gradually sliding up over the curve of her shoulder and the pleasing messiness of her hair. Finds himself smiling. He considers waking her. Considers calling home. Calling Shonagh. Calling his agent just to see if they remember him. Thinks, briefly, about writing. He feels oddly inspired, though he doesn’t really know how to turn the vague electric charge that pulses in and around him into something with a beginning, middle or end. Can’t see a story. Perhaps the blur of a character, somewhere around the periphery of his imagination. Thinks of Suggs. Wonders if he could write such a man. Angry and bull-headed, indignant at the nearness of a nonce: the stirrings of a desire to write; to think different thoughts, to turn fury into words. Thinks of Callan. Grips at the fabric of the armchair as he pictures those cold, dark eyes – the way everybody did as they were told when he growled out the most monosyllabic of instructions. God how he would love to be respected like that. Sometimes he wishes he had spent his teenage years reading fewer works by Tolstoy and Thackeray, and devoted himself instead to learning how to kick the shit out of people. Perhaps he’s been wrong about everything since day one.

He feels a sudden urge to scribble his thoughts down. He can feel the scratchy prickling of an idea. Wants to let the idea unroll like a ball of string. An exploration of modern masculinity. Were we all mis-sold on the desirability of sensitivity? Are we still our base elements? Is might still more attractive a quality than empathy? He feels quite fizzy thinking about it. There’s a market for this stuff, he’s sure of it. Last time he was in a bookshop seeking out and failing to find any of his own work, he had noticed that the bestseller list was groaning under the weight of semi-academic ruminations about who we are, how we are; ways to be happy or to live within the bubble of misery. He could do something like that, he’s sure of it. He could talk to anthropologists; psychologists, scientists sifting through human genomes in search of that which connects us to ancestors and the animal kingdom. He could make it part memoir. Explain the miseries of being a poet; a sensitive empath with real feelings, real compassion, who listens and genuinely notices when a person has changed their hairstyle or done something different with their eye make-up. He’s been the right kind of man and yet now, at forty-eight, he’s less impressive to his wife than the great meat-headed debt collectors who bang on his door as if trying to enter Parliament. He needs a pen. Paper …

There’s a little cupboard at the side of the armchair: a key sticking out of the lock. It turns under his fingers and he squats down, trying to keep the idea at the front of his thoughts while he rummages around for something to write with. There are lever arch folders inside. Big black ones, neatly labelled. Alphabetical order. Dates. Nothing to write on. He tuts, irritated, and is about to scurry through to the kitchen to continue the search, when a second impulse stills him. He wants to know what’s in the folders.

He throws a look at Annabeth. Still asleep, breathing softly. Hears the creak of bedsprings overhead as her lad rolls over in his sleep. Realises he won’t get a better opportunity than now. Rufus doesn’t really have any moral compunction about going through her private things but he’d rather not be caught in the act. He pulls out the top folder. It’s heavy. Opens it up and is greeted by the cover of a cheap gossip magazine. He frowns, puzzled. He understands that Annabeth likes things to be ‘just so’, but to punch holes in magazines and inset them into ring-binders is bordering on the obsessive. He leafs through it. There are more magazines beneath. Publications with names like Closer, Life! and Pick Me Up. The top magazine is dated April 2016. The last is January, 2018. He skims through the pages: cheap paper, grainy photographs, lurid