Read Online Fallout by Sadie Jones - Free Book Online

clapped his hands together and rubbed them.
    ‘Right, then. That’s that. We’d best get back anyway.’
    ‘We could try Rousham’s . . .’ said Luke. ‘But it’s dear.’
    ‘We should go. Leigh?’
    Leigh felt panic. Luke felt it too, seeing that it was over; they wouldn’t be staying or talking more about theatre to him, telling him where they had come from and what they knew.
    ‘I could . . .’
    What could he do? Invite them back to his for a vodka with his dad? Rustle up a roast dinner and seduce them both into staying in Seston for ever? Show them his collection of theatre programmes, his records, the four-foot glass crucifix in his bedroom, now complete and completely sodding mental-looking?
    ‘I’ll tell you the way,’ he finished. ‘It’s easy to get out of Seston.’
    Now that was just a flat-out lie.
     
    They said goodbye on the pavement in front of the curved Parker’s Pies glass-front, all three feeling there ought to be some reason to meet again, knowing there wasn’t. They shook hands, awkwardly, getting wet with standing there. Luke opened the car door for Leigh and she got in without looking up.
    ‘Thanks,’ she said.
    ‘We’ll give you a lift back to yours, if you like,’ said Paul.
    Luke shook his head. ‘I’ll walk.’
    ‘If you see Joe Furst, tell him he can give me a ring if he likes,’ said Paul.
    ‘What if I see Joe last?’ said Luke, for something to say.
    ‘Yeah, funny.’
    ‘Where’ll you be?’ asked Luke, too sharp, too keen. ‘Where do you stay?’
    ‘I’ll be back in London. I’m in the book.’ And he got into the car.
    Leigh’s door was still open with the rain falling onto the steering wheel and her legs. She was shivering.
    ‘Bye, then,’ said Luke.
    ‘Bye.’
    And she slammed the car door on the whole wet ugly street, and him, and all of it.
     
    In the weeks that followed his meeting with Paul Driscoll and the girl, Luke cast round for something to fix on about them that had meant so much to him. Back and forth from work, to home, to the asylum, he thought about that night, and all the things he did not do. He pulled out his books of plays, programmes from Sheffield and Manchester, London and the Playhouse – everything he was missing, the things he had not seen, and was angry with himself. Paul was right, it was a matter of an hour, less, there were buses, trains, there were ways. People did these things. It wasn’t as if he needed to make his world so bound, so closed, so idiotically, frenziedly, obsessively, monomaniacally – face it, he told himself, so insanely closed as he did. He had made himself a prison.
    Leaving work in the spring twilight, thoughts spinning in his head, he found he was unable to turn into the streets that would take him home and was walking around in small circles on the corner near the closed-down Chinese restaurant. He made himself stop. And breathe. And think. The silent town lay stagnant around him and Luke Kanowski realised that his life was harming him.
     
    The next morning he did not go into work.
    Stepping off the bus onto the lumpy verge outside the asylum the grass was frozen and the mud beneath as stiff as toffee. The sound of the bus and the burnt diesel smell disappeared. He was alone. He climbed the fence and started across the grounds, around the side of the chapel, past the mortuary, and then the long wall of Rose Ward to the front door. He had often wondered, had often asked his father, which of the wards he had slept in when he was billeted there but – These places were not called Rose or Hazel when I was there , Tomasz would answer so Luke had long since stopped asking.
    The patients had just finished their breakfast. The smell of it was in the air, toast and the hot-metal of the urns. Luke walked through the familiar corridors and waited in the dayroom as people began to come in. Nearly all of them were known to him, some saying hello, others not. He rehearsed sentences, forgot them – pacing