Read Online Hero by Paul Butler - Free Book Online

crumpled before her, accepting pity where I had once commanded respect. I was like a man tumbling into a bottomless pit; I watched the changing bands of rock as the atmosphere heated and the sulphurous fumes rose to meet me.
    A floor creaks somewhere and I suspect my father’s cautious tread. He is wondering, perhaps, whether to try and secure the shed door, but he is afraid. He doesn’t want to encounter me in the pantry with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, or find me passed out upon the living room sofa. He is afraid of Mrs. Cooper’s judgment also. His eyes told me this much during and after our strange and mainly silent dinner together; each time his housekeeper entered the room, he would glance at the whisky glass in my hand.
    The floorboards are silent again. He has decided not to move.
    When I left the house at ten o’clock it was without a word. My father’s head jerked towards me as I drained my glass and stood. He was about to speak. But he, like I, had discovered that words have lost all currency. They are weightless objects now, without meaning or use. They merely draw attention to the emptiness around them. His eyes met mine for a moment as I touched the door and opened it, then his gaze fell away.
    Like a badger in search of food I crept outside and stood in the patch of scrub between our garden and the Baxters’ and watched Sarah’s house—only that at first. I had no plans, and it was getting too late to call. I watched the sturdy brick wall with the shimmering ivy and tried to imagine how it would be when we met. I thought of the slow, agonizing stages of disillusionment that would inevitably follow as I failed to act the noble warrior. How long, I wondered, would it take before they lost patience and interest? The question was deeply troubling, as I knew the Baxters would not easily give up on me.
    A light suddenly went off—Mrs. Baxter’s room if my memory of the layout was correct—and the house, viewed from the side, seemed suddenly like a stage backdrop, lacking all relief and contour. It was Mrs. Baxter who scared me most. When I passed by the house in the car, I could not look for fear of catching her face in the window. When I imagined myself sometime in the not-too-distant future blurting the horrendous truth over dinner, it was her horrified expression, rather than Sarah’s, that I saw in the flickering candlelight.
    Now that it seemed likely she was in bed, I found myself stirring from the undergrowth. I could strike now, I thought. I could precipitate my fall from grace rapidly, and in lurid colour. I could save the days, weeks, and months of frustrated kindness and attention. I tried to conceive some pointless act of vandalism, taking a kitchen knife to their most treasured family portraits, perhaps, or throwing their hearth rug onto the fire.
    A dancing twig prodded my leg as I passed and quite unexpectedly visions of Sarah scattered into my thoughts like brightly coloured playing cards fumbled during a hasty shuffle.
    All the worry and sorrow of years, the pain of being parted from Sarah, came upon me in a rush, until—the gravel of the driveway now under my feet—I was almost choking with it.
    My crime was all but stripped away. Suddenly, the manner of Charles’s death was an aberration, a detail of no sense or importance that the whole world had, in any case, conspired to bury. Why had the world conspired to bury it? As my fingers took the bell and hesitated, skin against cold metal, the thought came to me that perhaps it had not happened after all.
    The idea quickly took root. Assuming some cosmic record existed of human action, how would Charles’s death be footnoted? Surely as a tragic accident; the question of whose blade entered his flesh was one of no consequence. It was war and by definition a bloody, noisy mess of confusion and mistakes. I asked myself why this misstep should matter more than all the others.
    Something churned