Read Online Winterton Blue by Trezza Azzopardi - Free Book Online Page B

about his real father; he was too busy coping with
    D AD #2:
    Errol was Lewis’s uncle-dad. Lots of their friends had them, even the boys who had real fathers at home had uncledadslurking around. Errol was self-employed, which meant he was on the dole, and spent a lot of time lying on the couch. Lying in Wait, he called it, for the Right Moment. Lewis’s mother once made a comment, picking his socks up off the carpet, that it was more like lying in state. You only had to say the wrong thing once to Errol to not make the same mistake again. It was a lesson the whole family learned.
    Errol claimed he was in the SAS. He had to make himself available at all times, he said, but the closest he ever came to the SAS was watching
The Dirty Dozen
at Christmas, lying on the couch with a box of liqueurs in his lap. He’d be chewing at the sides of his moustache and shouting, You don’t do it like that! And, Never in a million years, Telly-boy! Only Lee Marvin made him happy. There’s a real man, he’d say, You wouldn’t mess with him.
    It was messing with a real man that got them into trouble. That’s what his mother had said, when they were packing their bags in the middle of the night. She was leaving Errol for a real man, only Errol mustn’t find out, ever, and no one must know their business because he’d come after them. They were going to make a fresh start, in a house she’d found across town. She tried to make it sound like a thrilling adventure. Wayne was happy enough that they were leaving, but Lewis remembered the first time his mother had mentioned Errol: he’d been a
real
man too, in those days. Lewis was beginning to distrust real men, and anything that was made to sound like an adventure; he knew they weren’t at all thrilling, and he knew that there was nowhere, really, to run.
    Errol found them on the second day in their new house. Lewis and Wayne were putting up posters on their bedroom wall, arguing about who was going to have the top bunk. Lewis knew he would get his way; he was the oldest, and bigger, but Wayne was good at putting his case; he was more agile on the ladder, he would suit the top bunk. Lewis was, he reasoned, always restless at night, and occasionally sleep-walked.
    Wandering about on that top bunk, it could be hazardous.Better all round—Wayne was saying, when he stopped mid-sentence. It was just the one scream. The boys stared at each other. Standing at either end of the bunk-bed, they felt, through the floor, a thud.
    Downstairs, Errol was lying on the carpet, streaked with blood. There was blood on the wall above him and on the door-frame. Lewis knew it wasn’t Errol’s blood. It was a facility he had, for seeing things precisely, as if someone had showed him a film still. What Lewis saw, then, was someone else’s blood, and Errol in a faint: what Wayne saw was murder. He stood over Errol with an air of thrilled satisfaction.
    Quit ya jibba jabba! he cried, raising his fist to the ceiling, and in a mock-American accent added, I pity you, fool!
    Lewis carried on through to the kitchen. His mother was bending over the fridge, so at first he didn’t understand what had happened. He’d already taken in the strings of blood in a trail over the floor and the worktop, and a zing in the air, like an electrical charge; it was the smell of panic. His mother had one hand wrapped in a tea-towel and the other gripping a pack of frozen peas. She was biting it open, pulling at the plastic with her teeth. She looked at him and passed the packet across the worktop.
    Open that for us, babes, she said, in a calm voice, the one she used when she was doing something ordinary, like cooking their tea.
    And then run down and fetch Manny. Tell him it’s Della, she said, Tell him it’s an emergency.
    Behind Lewis, Wayne was over his euphoria; Errol was coming round. They could hear him groaning.
    What’s he done to you? Wayne shouted, his