Read Online The Evil Inside by Philip Taffs - Free Book Online Page B

however long you and Mia need.’
    ‘Thanks, mate.’ The beer tasted like sludge. I slugged it back anyway.
    Anthony handed me a set of keys.
    ‘What’s this?’
    ‘North Fuck. The shack. Go up there for a week. It’ll do ya good.’
    ‘I don’t know what to say, mate. You’ve been too good—’
    ‘Enough,’ Anthony held up his palm. ‘The keys to the Passport are on there as well. Just take care of yourself and your family and we’ll worry about work later.’
    He handed me a piece of layout paper, folded over. ‘Oh, and this is from Bill.’
    On it, my art director had drawn a cartoon version of me lying on a sun lounger in bathing trunks, sipping a cocktail under a red-and-white striped Bacardi beach umbrella. On the other side of the page, he’d drawn himself sweating buckets at his desk under a speech bubble that said
Hang loose, Bro – I’ll take care of everything here
.
    Tears stung my eyes.
    ‘Oh, and this,’ Anthony reached into his suit jacket, ‘is from Lucy.’ He gave me a slightly searching look. It was a beautiful and obviously very expensive condolence card. She’d signed it
Love Lucille
.
    Anthony burped uncomfortably – he really wasn’t much of a drinker these days. ‘Well, I better get myself a packet of mints and get going. Give Susanna a call and she’ll give you the gen on the holiday shack. Call me if you need anything else or if you just want to talk.’
    For the first time in years, I bought a pack of Stuyvesants.
    Mia wasn’t talking much. Not to me anyhow.
    But once she returned to the Olcott, she had long, tearful phone conversations with her mother. And with Jane. And a series of longer conversations with Susanna. Both her mother and Jane offered to fly out to be with her. But Mia’s mum was really too old to fly and Jane had two teenage kids of her own. So they were more gestures than serious offers. In any case, I hoped that they – and the anti-depressants – were able to help Mia in some way. Because I sure as hell couldn’t at the moment.
    As if he shared Mia’s crushing despair, Callum had also grown disconcertingly quiet. Although the night that Mia came home from the hospital, he’d looked up from his
Balto
video with the saddest little face I’d ever seen and declared apropos of nothing, ‘Maybe Balto could have saved Bubby?’
    But Balto was a one-off: when I thought about it, Callum hadn’t really been very interested in his movies or stories for the past couple of weeks. And he didn’t want to go to the park. He’d just sit quietly on his bed or on the sofa holding his Buzz. Or play quiet, emotionless games of Uno with Esmeralda.
    And like Mia, he was now sleeping a lot.
    If we weren’t so fucked-up ourselves, I’m sure we would both have been a lot more worried about him.
    Anthony kept the Honda Passport in a parking garage down near Union Square. By the time I got back early afternoon, Mia had miraculously managed to become her practical old self for half an hour and had packed all our clothes for the trip. She and Callum were sitting quietly at the end of our bed like two frozen models from the Gap winter catalogue.
    And then it was time to go. Suitcase in hand, she looked across at Susanna’s beautiful bouquet of pale-pink tulips on the table.
    But neither of us could bring ourselves to throw them out.
    We left them wrinkling in the vase.
    *
    I read the opening blurb of the visitors’ book on the cold kitchen bench top.
    ‘Manhattan’ – in the Algonquin language – meant ‘the High Hills Island’. It was the summer home of the Carnasie people. But in the winter, they always returned to the place they called ‘Metoaca’ or ‘the Long Island’.
    The Johnsons’ holiday home was only two hours’ drive – although once we got there, it could have been a million miles away.
    Halfway between Kingsville and Cutchogue on the northern tine of the Long Island fork, the area was known locally as Arcadia, after the name of the high-end