His Favourite Graves by Cleave Paul

Author:Cleave, Paul [Cleave, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-Five

They have dinner – pizza, which is par for the course. Ever since it’s just been the two of them, dinner has consisted mostly of takeout, with his dad on occasion still cooking – but when his dad does cook, it’s hotdogs, or hamburgers, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Lucas has no idea why they don’t weigh a ton, combined. Perhaps the alcohol keeps the weight away in his dad’s case, and in his case it’s simply a matter of time – that one day soon it will all catch up with him.

There’s another explanation too for why he hasn’t put on weight – the worms. Thinking about it makes him scratch at his hand. He’d tear the bandage away and scratch deep at the cut if the nurse hadn’t put the fear of an infection into him. An infection is a breeding ground for the kind of parasites that can survive nuclear bombs.

They watch the news while they eat, but it offers nothing more than he already knows – Simon Grove is somewhere out in the wild, or maybe he’s in town, or possibly neither of those two things, which can be summed up by saying that maybe the police will catch him, maybe they won’t.

‘I can’t believe they still don’t have him,’ his dad says, finishing his second beer since they started dinner.

Lucas can believe it. The world is a crazy place.

‘I’m gonna grab a water,’ Lucas says. ‘Want me to get you another beer?’

He dad weighs it up for a few seconds, which seems unlike him these days, but he course-corrects and says, ‘That’d be good.’

While his dad works away at the beer, Lucas returns to his room. He sits on the bed staring out the window. Twenty minutes later he hears his dad going to the fridge for his fourth beer. He stays on the bed and watches the sun melt into the horizon, and after a while the clicking keyboard from his dad’s office goes quiet. A few years ago his dad put a couch in there. This was before the drinking, when his parents were still playing happy families. The couch was so his dad could relax with a book while taking a break from writing, but over time has become a place for him to relax with a drink while not writing. He thinks it’s a pretty safe bet his dad is on that couch now, asleep.

The bedroom window is open and Lucas can hear Mr and Mrs Courtney’s dog barking, a puppy they got to replace the one they said ran away. Sometimes the puppy will poke its nose through the gate when he’s passing on the way home from school, and Lucas will give it a pat or a scratch, the dog smiling and acting like the world is made up of two different types of days – great days, and even greater days. Mrs Courtney calls out to it now, and then it goes quiet, probably put inside for the night.

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