Silas Read online

  After we leave the center of Brighton, we follow the coast road and the farther we drive the shabbier it gets. The area becomes less well lit, the houses smaller and dingier but still stupidly expensive, according to Sheena. She doesn’t talk a heap, but she’s asked me what I’m doing in Britain, so I told her about the Emma Turner memorial tour, and she’s been telling me where we are at each point of the journey.

  I can’t really imagine these tiny matchbox houses costing the amount of money she quotes, but I guess that’s the problem with finite space on an island. Mum always talked about how much she loved the amount of space she had in America and I’m starting to get the idea. Everything seems so crammed. Like a scaled down version of a real town. When I was eight, I didn’t really notice. I guess because I was still little myself and also because we spent that vacation mostly doing the tourist attractions. The Pavillion, Sealife Centre, rides on the pier, daytrips to the surrounding area. Castles. Cathedrals. The Bluebell Railway. At the time, it was just endless fun, now I understand that she was trying to give me a piece of her roots. As if that were even possible.

  Once we’ve passed a doll-size industrial harbor and a metal recycling plant on the side of the sea versus an estate of warehouses opposite, the scenery slowly improves again. There is a sailboat basin and a quaint little lighthouse and then more tiny houses but better kept. By the time we pull into a side street and drive into a pub’s parking lot, the rain has completely stopped. Sheena switches the engine off and smiles over at me wanly.

  “We’re here.”

  “You live in a pub?”

  That makes her chuckle.

  “No, the landlady is a friend. I can park here overnight if I come home this late. My house is opposite.”

  She jerks her head vaguely in the direction where I guess her house is, though all I can see from my vantage point is the brick wall we’re parked up against. She gets out of the car and I follow suit. It’s some kind of cool low chassis classic. A Ford, I think. It has no central locking, so she manually opens the trunk that my suitcase barely fits in. I lift it out and wait for her to put a big yellow steering wheel lock in place and then until she’s finished locking all the doors manually. It seems like a pain in the ass to me, but every action is carried out with the utmost care and gentleness. It doesn’t need much to figure out that this car is her pride and joy. It’s funny because looking at her you’d think she doesn’t care about anything that much. Shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I guess. When she’s finally finished, she gestures for me to follow her.

  We cross the road to a house with no frontage at all that opens straight onto the road. No front yard, no sidewalk, no nothing. She unlocks the red-painted wooden door, opens it and switches on the light in a tiny hallway, fitted with a threadbare blood-red carpet that also covers the staircase going up, which is situated to the left, about six feet in. Looking past the stairs to the end of the hallway, I catch a glimpse of a kitchen with black-and-white lino, like you find in a traditional diner. There are two shut pine doors to the right along the way. It’s the kind of house my mum grew up in, I guess, what she used to describe as a ‘two-up two-down’.

  “That’s it,” Sheena smiles at me. “The bathroom is at the top of the landing. Your room is the first on the left upstairs. If you go on up, I’ll find you some fresh linen to put on the bed and some towels. Silas is pretty tidy, so you should be fine going in there.”

  It is then that I realize I’m about to hijack some stranger’s bedroom who doesn’t even know I exist. I know zilch about this guy. I might be half delirious from being overly tired, but I still have a sense of invading somebody’s privacy. So I don’t make a move.

  “Are you alright, love?” Sheena asks me, already halfway down the hallway and opening the cupboard under the stairs, which I guess contains her linens because she appears to be selecting a sheet while she talks quietly. I guess she’s trying not to wake the Polish girl she was talking about. “Honestly, that boy is military grade pristine, you won’t find any socks or grotty undies lying about, I promise. I also happen to know he hoovered before he went out, so it’ll be fine.”

  “It’s just...” I hesitate. “He doesn’t even know there’s gonna be somebody in his room, does he?”

  “Well, no, not yet,” she answers while she keeps piling pillow and duvet covers onto the sheet. “Doesn’t have his phone on at work. But I’ll send him a text, and I’ll leave him a note. Don’t worry, it’s fine. We’ve done this before. The last one wasn’t as pretty as you, though.”

  She looks over at me with a bit of a wicked light in her eyes, and for a moment I can really see the beauty she must have been once.

  “If anything,” she carries on, “he’ll appreciate that you’re not a sixty-year-old salesman who looks like Danny de Vito and that guy from Willow had a love child. Don’t you fret now. Come on.”

  Having piled towels on top of the linen she is balancing expertly on her arm, she shuts the door to the cupboard with a well practiced nudge of her hip. She comes towards me, squeezes by me and starts climbing the stairs.

  “Come on, I’ll lead the way.”

  I lug my suitcase after her but stop halfway up when my eyes fall on a black-and-white framed photograph. I’m sure it’s a Newton and the signature proves me right.

  It’s a headshot of a young woman looking over her shoulder. Not one of his overly provocative ones, more of a natural portrait, but still with the typical dramatic Newtonesque feeling of film noir going on. It looks like one of his headshots of famous people, but I can’t place the face. Until Sheena stops at the landing and looks down at me.

  “Flagging already? Only a few more steps,” she says.

  I can tell by her tone that she knows full well what I’m looking at and that I just clicked. She sighs.

  “Yes. Me.”

  “In a Newton.”

  She carries on.

  “Yes, in a Newton.”

  I keep following.

  “Wow. Must be worth a bomb.”

  She laughs without mirth in it.

  “I wish. No such luck. You can buy me for $29.99 from eBay. I ain’t no Marilyn.”

  Her tone tells me the subject is closed, no matter how curious I might be. We make the rest of the way in silence and she leads me into the first bedroom on the left.

  As soon as I step through the door, I can smell him. Her son.

  Silas, I remind myself.

  The room smells of a person, a male, in the best possible way and it floors me.

  It’s wood smoke and soap and leather and pure man. And something else, something I can’t put my finger on, something salty.

  A warm feeling of arousal hits my belly like hot soup on a winter’s day. That mixture of coming home and that first spoonful of heat hitting your insides and warming up your core, sending happy ripples down into your nether regions.

  I look around wide-eyed and see that Sheena wasn’t lying. Whoever lives here is a neat freak. The queen bed is made as if drawn with a ruler. There is a wooden wardrobe with wrought iron fittings, a black desk housing a computer with two monitors and an office chair. The walls are off white, the carpet blue.

  On a pine bookshelf sit paperbacks, neatly arranged by author. Alphabetically, of course. Iain Banks, Julian Barnes, Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro, Irvine Welsh. All titles that my local bookshop would stock in the Contemporary British section, regardless of the fact most of them are so old they should really be classics already. Not a single author I’ve read but every single one I’ve heard of. Mostly because they’ve been made into movies. I’m not big on gritty. I like reading to escape, not to carry on thinking about what a shit deal life is and how much it hurts to be human.

  A lone succulent plant, of the kind that looks like a fleshy artichoke falling open, sits on the windowsill. Its leaves are shiny, and I’d bet my bottom dollar they get wiped daily with a damp cloth to clean them of dust.

  There really is no clutter.

  On
the wall opposite the bed hangs a single large grayscale art print. It’s a nude, a young man lying on his front, asleep on a bed, sheet crumpled between his legs. His hair is long enough to obscure the visible side of his face so that only the edge of a full, almost effeminate bottom lip peeks out from between the strands. The line of his jaw hints at a strong bone structure and at teeth set in anger. He doesn’t look relaxed, more like he’s on the verge of waking up, coiled to snatch the artist from their perch, flip them over and pin them to the bed.

  I clench at the idea and a shiver runs through me. A good shiver.

  His body is lithe but muscular with beautiful shoulders and arms and, hands down, the best buttocks I’ve ever seen. As soon as my eyes fall on them, I have an almost overwhelming urge to dig my nails into those glutes.

  Another whirl of arousal hits me in the gut. I’m getting slick. What is it with this room? I feel my cheeks starting to burn.

  Still, I can’t help but step closer, and I realize that the print is not a print at all. It’s a genuine pencil drawing, which explains why it seems so alive. I can barely suppress the impulse to run my fingertips over the glass, to somehow touch this man.

  I shake myself out of my trance and avert my eyes before I embarrass myself further.

  While I’ve stared at the drawing, Sheena has started changing the sheets on the bed for me. I stop idling and step up to help her, grabbing the duvet and taking the cover off it. The action releases another dose of that male scent into my nostrils, and I can barely refrain from sticking my nose right into the cover and taking a big lungful.

  The jetlag must be making my senses hypersensitive or something. This is getting silly.

  Sheena looks at me surprised.

  “That’s kind, ducky, but I got this. All part of the service,” she says, smiling encouragingly at the towels she’s put on the chair. “You grab yourself a shower while I do this. You look a bit flushed. I bet you can’t wait to get cleaned up.”

  About an hour ago she would have been right. But by now I just want to sink into that bed. It feels like I’ve been awake forever. I slept a little on the plane, but the woman next to me kept waking me up to go to the bathroom every half hour.

  It would be rude to stink up the fresh linen with my travel sweat, though. So I open my suitcase and root around for my wash bag, a long t-shirt and some yoga pants, grab a towel and make my way to the bathroom.

  Silas

  We shut shop at 5am sharp, and I’m on my bike by half past.

  That’s the pedal version.

  I used to have a motorbike, a CBR600, but that got sold in the first round of debt he left us with. Before we found out the true extent of the shit show he left us with. It stung, but I’ll have another one, one day. Wouldn’t be ideal to come to work on anyway. There are plenty of cunts who think it’s fun kicking over the motorbikes parked up at the seafront. Arlo rides and he’s on fairing number two in as many months. Not worth it.

  Right now, this second, I’m actually quite content pedalling through the grey mist of morning. It’s not exactly a beautiful dawn, but there is something about the air that isn’t all bad. It’s not too cold either and I look forward to my dip in the sea.

  When I get to the lighthouse, I can see that there are two dog walkers already out on the beach. Whatever. They can like it or fuck off. It’s not actually illegal to be nude in public in the UK. As long as you’re not doing it deliberately to upset anyone. I don’t know them, I couldn’t give a toss about them, so it would be hard for them to prove my impending nakedness was aimed in their direction. I just want to get out of my clothes and into the water.

  I get off the bike, push it onto the pebbles as close to the water edge as makes sense and drop it, then strip and lay my clothes onto the bike frame, so they don’t touch the wet stones. I scan around for the dogs because I’m about to run into the surf and I don’t want one of them chasing me, biting my dick off. Not that I use it much but I’m kind of attached to it.

  The off-the-lead collie in the far distance is focused on the ball launcher in the dog walker’s hand. The brown pit bull type closer at hand is on a lead and is out here pretty much every morning. The guy handling the pittie catches my eye and doesn’t bat an eyelid at my state of undress. He raises his hand in greeting and I salute back.

  Then I turn towards the sea and run.

  The trick is not to stop, not to think till you’re fully submerged. And then the best sensation in the world hits you. The ice-cold water numbs all of you, plunges your body into oblivion, so it feels like only your soul is left swimming.

  All the pain goes away.

  I hold still in this kind of suspended state of being as long as I can but then, without fail, there is that primeval moment when my survival instinct kicks in and I start crawling. Faster and faster, until my body begins heating up and I feel like I’m burning, like a fireball meteor slicing through the ocean.

  Grace

  I wake up from muffled voices below. Somebody, a female, not Sheena, is saying ‘Good morning’ and there is a male voice but it’s so low I can’t hear what it says. Not a lot, though. There are soft steps on the stairs, the sound of the bathroom lock and then the low rumble of the shower being turned on.

  I have no idea what time it is, but I can see the gray of morning through a gap in the curtains. They’re weird, those curtains. Total contrast to the rest of the room. Tie-dyed with a hippie moon/sun face in gold printed over both sides that joins where they meet. So not in line with the rest of the decor at all. That was the last thought that I had before I drifted off.

  I could check my cell for the time, but it’s all the way over on the desk. I didn’t have a charger that fits the British sockets, so I switched the computer on and plugged it into the USB port. Need to find a British charger. Need to ring my travel insurance to see if I can recoup my money from Travelbritisles. Need to sort somewhere else to stay...need to...

  I fall asleep again.

  Next time I wake, the sun is high up in the sky and the rays are creeping into the room around the curtains, like golden tentacles come to snatch me from sleep. I get out of bed and check my cell. It’s past midday. I listen out but the house is quiet.

  There is a piece of paper that’s been pushed under my door. When I spot it, my heart stops for a moment and I well up a bit. Stupid emotions. It’s the kind of thing Mum used to do. I never knew another kid whose mum would leave notes under their door. The others all had mothers who’d just barge in, tell them whatever they had to tell them and barge out again. Mine was very much of the conviction that you didn’t wake sleeping lions or sleeping children. Even if the child happened to be in her twenties already.

  I miss her.

  The pain steals my breath for a moment. I swallow it down and go to pick up the note.

  I read it while I walk to the bathroom.

  Ducky,

  It occurs to me that I never even told Sheena my name. She knows what I’m in Brighton for, but she has no idea who I am.

  Hope you slept well. I thought it best to let you rest. You looked exhausted. Had to go back to work but help yourself to anything you can find in the kitchen. (Then wash up!) I’ve rung around a few hotels in Shoreham but they are all booked solid until the festival is over. Also got in touch with the language school people but they are struggling to find host families for their students themselves, so nothing there. You’ll probably find it’s the same story in a 10 mile radius of Brighton for the rest of the month. Not sure what your plans are but I’ve left Silas a message telling him he might be kipping on the sofa again tomorrow to give you more time to sort yourself out. He won’t mind. No obligation on your part but I wanted you to know you’re not out on the street. Make yourself at home. I left a key to the front door on the kitchen table, so you can let yourself in and out of the house. Just be mindful of Silas. He’s asleep in the front room. He’ll be up by around 3pm. Kalina normally comes home at 6pm and I’ll be back at 9pm. Different shift tod
ay.

  Sheena

  I read the note a few more times while I go pee, wash and brush my teeth. I savor the flavor of the words, over and over. I think about the woman who wrote them as I examine my face in the mirror and squeeze a zit that’s threatening to break out on my chin. Happy traveling complexion. I look like shit. I run Sheena’s offer of another night through my head as I push into my skin until all the impurity is out, and I see that satisfying little blob of blood appear. Kindness pours from between her lines. Haven’t had that in a while. I blot at the blemish with a piece of toilet paper. I’m being treated like a child in all the best ways, but I don’t quite know how I feel about that.

  Part of me wants to grab my stuff and run.

  I’ve just got used to nobody giving a shit about me, with the exceptions of Vince, my manager at the Atlantis, and Cindy, pretty much my only friend left over from high school. I don’t think I can handle a stranger being nice, making me feel part of the planet.

  Another part would like to stay another day and take the breather Sheena is offering me.

  I think back to the moment when she examined me last night in the hotel lobby. I’m starting to wonder if what she saw was not an arrogant American in a power suit at all but a frightened young woman who had lost her only real family and who had no idea where to go from here. The woman who is staring back at me right now.

  I look at my messy hair and groan. I couldn’t find my brush last night, it’s buried somewhere in the depth of my suitcase, so I washed my hair without brushing it first and then slept on it. Big mistake. I’ll need to buy some detangler somewhere later.

  By the time I’m finished in the bathroom, I still haven’t made up my mind about staying another night or what the fuck else to do.

  I decide it might be worthwhile asking this Silas character if he actually doesn’t mind me occupying his room. See what his reaction is, then make a plan. With that in mind, I pick up my stuff and Sheena’s note, open the bathroom door ─ and walk straight into him.