Read Online Winterton Blue by Trezza Azzopardi - Free Book Online

stopped in and bought a sausage roll and a red canister, which he filledwith petrol at the pump. Back in the flat, he put the apples and the bread from the freezer in his kitbag, stored the beans in one side pocket, and put his book of poems in the other. The remainder of the milk he poured down the sink. The keys to the van were in his pocket. Lewis dragged the sofa through the door and out into the yard, and piled some of the chairs on top of it. He arranged the other chairs in a pattern around the sofa, the backrests facing inwards, the legs kicking the air. Then he reversed the van up to the gate, offloaded the stale trays of food, throwing them onto the pyre he had created. When he finished, he drove back up the hill to the council building, got out and leaned against the bonnet. He took the sausage roll and ate it in two bites. Felt it burn.
    Lewis told the therapist about it, start to finish. He was precise, and exact, kept his voice plain. He omitted to mention the blaze, or stopping at the edge of the ring-road to call the fire brigade. Nor did he tell her about stealing the van, having decided that the less she knew, the less she’d be able to tell the police if they came calling. It was their last session, but she wasn’t to know that, either. Immediately, Katy jumped to conclusions, fixing on the canister and the council building. She asked him, in an indirect, meandering way, whether as a child he’d had issues with authority: his father, for instance, or his mother’s subsequent boyfriends. It was something she did; always trying to interpret the information he gave her as a key to his past life.
    I just wanted to burn it all down, said Lewis, attempting to bypass the scatter of language which would get them to the point of the session, All of it. The sofa and the chairs—even the building that spoilt the view. Every single thing. Normally, I don’t get to do what I want.
    It was then the discussion turned to things he wanted. That was how it went with her, one minute you’d be talking about a bad feeling you had, sitting on a hill, eating a sausage roll, and the next you’d be listing all the things you ever desiredin your life. You’d be giving yourself away. Katy was good at that; so good, so slippery, it felt like it was
his
idea to go and find his mother.
    If you wanted to, she’d said, You could certainly put that wish into practice. It would be a form of
exposure,
of course. You couldn’t be empty any more; and you’d be making yourself quite
visible.
But perhaps there’s something preventing you? Perhaps there are some things you feel the need to run away from? He could have said, You might feel the need to run away, too, if you knew my mother. But after twenty years, Lewis reckoned he didn’t know her either; how could seeing her again make matters any worse?
    He had driven to Cardiff with a strange feeling of weightlessness, as if he had shed his earth-bound skin. Everything that pinned him down was at last behind him—London and Viv and the bedsit near the station and the sofa in the flat in Wandsworth, Katy and her talk—all that would be ancient history. He would reconnect—he repeated the word aloud, as Katy had suggested—with himself. He would find his mother; he would make his peace. But then he found Manny instead. He’d trusted him. That was his first mistake: right from the off, Manny knew more than he chose to let on.

SEVEN
    The van was parked half on, half off the pavement. Manny eyed the rust on the bonnet and over the wheel arches, and the numerous dents in the bodywork. While Lewis made a pretence of unlocking it, Manny made a pretence of not noticing, folding and unfolding the slip of paper in his hand.
    Why don’t we try the phone book first? Manny suggested, Give her a ring? She might have moved again. She always was a bit of a wanderer, your mam.
    Lewis could hear the caginess in the old man’s voice.