by Nancy Adams
Copyright
Lies Are The Coward's Coin
Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Adams.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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JOSH
How different it was to awaken cast in the sunshine of serenity for once, without the sickly talons of doubt clutching at my heart and stomach, the veil of night upon me. To awaken in light, rather than among its jaded shadow, tasted so sweet. After so many years spent scribbling blank phrases onto the pages of my life, I was now picking up my pen with a newfound determination, beginning an evergreen and exciting new chapter. Its title: Sarah Dillinger. It was her green eyes that now stained the ethereal windows of my mind upon awaking. Not Heather’s or my mother’s, but her’s.
The glowering emeralds having faded, I found myself in my nice big comfortable bed, so gratified to be away from the hard mattresses of the Peaks. The things there were always so tough, beaten out of shape by the countless bodies that had previously lied upon them. Most nights I’d wake up numb down one half of my body, having spent too long on that particular side. But this, back at my father’s inner-city two-story apartment, encased in silk and Egyptian cotton, the kiss of a soft Memorex mattress, this was heaven compared to the battle-hardened beds of the Peaks. It was like being held in the warm, fluffy arms of a polar bear, minus, of course, the inevitable animal attack that would invariably accompany the hug, with its disemboweling claws at the ends of those fluffy, soft arms!
Feeling like a child on Christmas morning, I awoke to an exalted sense of joy, of wanting to spring out of my slumber, throw open the windows, and greet the world. It was eight a.m., and I was getting up of my own accord without a single hint of a hangover resonating within me. I’d been clean for over six weeks now and hadn’t once thought about drinking my spirit dry or calling my coke connection. Two weeks previous, Holman had picked me up from the Peaks, healthy and eager to please, and I’d been a very good boy ever since. I’d studied hard and read every day in order to prepare for my return to college in two and a half months. Plus, I was staying away from former associates such as Terry, Kane, and Amy. The college work still bored the shit out of me, I won’t lie about that, but a special resoluteness currently ran through my veins and impelled me to force through, even when confronted with a wall of utter lassitude. Sarah, for all her honest brilliance, had stayed true to her word. She’d loyally stuck by my side, and we’d seen each other at least every other day since my return. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I was so joyful this very morning was because I was due to see her later on.
Back in bed, I gently opened my eyes. A crisp blade of sunlight was glinting through a gap in the curtains and lit the white-tiled floor in a golden streak. Watching the dust twinkle in the column of light, I felt like I was watching a miniature cosmos of celestial stars, and something about it struck me as profound, even though it was only a trivial thing in itself. I continued to stare at the indiscriminate light for several minutes and felt my mind wandering inward down a grove of myself, Sarah’s hand entwined within my own as I skipped along. I began thinking about her in abstract ways, not about anything concrete. There were no actions, no specific scenes to tell you about, no kissing or lovemaking or anything so detailed. I was just thinking about her in herself—Sarah for Sarah’s sake. While my eyes concentrated on the floating particles sparkling in their firmament of light, I began to realize that I was happier now than I could ever remember. Had my life really been so desolate until Sarah’s blade of light had entered?
Sure I’d felt happiness before. But it had always had the fang of trepidation stuck in it, contained the angst-ridden feeling that it was destined to disappear, be swiped from my hand the moment my fingers closed around it. I don’t doubt that it was actual happiness, just happiness tinged with anxiety. After Mom died I was too young to really grieve her; I’d only been three, and all I remember is her being there and then not—an object, then a space. It was only later on, when I sensed the void she’d left behind—the Mom-shaped hole—that I really felt any grief at being denied the natural right of a mother’s love. And it wasn’t only the love of one parent that I appeared to be denied. In general, there was always a coldness to my childhood, and this was chiefly perpetrated by my father. As a man who is suspicious of things such as “compassion,” “goodwill,” “empathy,” and “benevolence,” he’d insisted that my nannies didn’t show me much warmth, were harsh and indifferent, and he, himself, stuck to this cruel dogma—a cold man bringing up cold boy. This had led to an inevitable lack of truly happy moments during my youth—a youth which had often felt more like a military drill on discipline than actual childhood. Wasn’t someone so strong willed as me always going to rebel later on?
Then with Heather it was always as if the happiness I felt during those moments with her—when we’d lie in bed all day watching movies, the way we’d hold each other’s naked bodies, fingers stroking melodically over bare skin—was destined to fall from my hands and smash upon the hard ground of reality. It was a hollow happiness with her, a fruitless husk. Because even within the dreamlike essence of those harmonious moments, I always sensed some crisis was on its way, that something would happen, that she’d orchestrate some catastrophe for us, sending us crashing to the floor.
But this happiness I felt now, this almost complete contentment as I rose from bed, was so different. It felt that it would last this time—that the sweet flesh of fruit still lay at its center. I was more certain than I had been for a long time that with Sarah it would truly endure. Even that simple blade of light attracted my attention like never before and appeared so very beautiful to me then. I began to wonder how many other twinkling blades of light I’d ignored in my life because I was too busy feeling miserable to notice their delicate beauty.
A knock at the door broke my reverie.
“Come in,” I called out.
The door immediately opened and in came Holmes, basically the butler. He walked in wearing his typical severe look across his stout face, and his little insectoid eyes began, as always, to scrutinize everything in the room, noting it all down for future use—for his reports to high command: my father. He never smiled, Holmes, never once, and this was the result of a particular necessity in my father’s house staff—that they should all wear emotionless expressions at all times. As for his physical appearance, he wasn’t that tall and was slightly rotun
d, with pinkish flesh that reminded me of cheap canned ham. Ever since I’d been a child, something in him had called to my imagination a beetle—the way he scuttled silently about with insect-like precision—and this childish appraisal of him had stuck. I even called him “B,” and I guess he gathered it meant “butler” and not “beetle” because he never pulled me up on it.
“Hey, B,” I said as he came in holding a silver tray with my breakfast on it, alongside a copy of the City Times.
“Your breakfast at 8:15 sharp as requested, Master Kelly,” he said in a snooty deadpan voice as he came around the bed.
“Very good, B,” I replied, sitting up so that he could lay the tray across my welcoming lap.
Once he had, I looked down at my scrambled eggs, toast, croissant, jams, coffee, watermelon, and juice, rubbing my hands together in a gleeful manner. I took the copy of the Times and placed it on the bed beside me.
“I half expected to find sir still asleep,” Holmes remarked as he collected my laundry from off the floor where I’d dropped it the moment it had been removed.
“Ha!” I laughed at his hardly guarded insolence, something that made him less beetle-like in my eyes and earned him a slither of respect. “You half expected wrong, then. And knock the sir shit off, B.”
“It’s your father’s insistence.”
“Then he pays you too much, because it would have to be a huge amount of dough to make me call someone sir—especially someone as underserving of the title as my father—or me for that matter.”
“Your father is an extremely successful man,” B put back, as always sticking up for master. “I would think that someone so powerful in the world could be afforded any title he liked.”
“Well, can you at least refrain from calling me sir when he’s not around?”
“I’ll try to, sir.”
He made me grin again.
Having finished collecting my scattered clothing, and now holding the pile, he made his way to the door, while I opened out the paper and began reading as I ate. When he reached the door, he stopped, turned to me one last time, and informed me that my father wished to see me in twenty minutes once I’d finished breakfast. He would be upstairs in his study.
“What does he want?” I asked nervously.
“I wouldn’t know. I was only told to tell you.”
With that, he left. My breakfast became unappealing suddenly, losing all its vigor and shriveling before my stomach’s eyes. A knot of anxiety formed, wounding slightly my earlier delight.
JOSH
Twenty minutes later I was standing at the open doorway of Dad’s study. He was busy with something at his desk, but, observing my shadow, he looked up and smiled. It made me shudder, like a deer spotting the glint of the moon reflecting off the razor teeth of a wolf. I took this as my cue to enter and seated myself in a leather-bound chair opposite him.
“First thing I wanna say,” he began in a surprisingly jolly tone the moment my ass squeaked on the leather, “is that I’m real happy with you, kid. Real happy. There was me thinking that you were a lost cause, and now you’re beginning to prove me wrong. But only beginning, of course.”
At this last sentence, he narrowed his eyes and peered into me rather than at.
“I just wanna get back to college and finish what I should have finished over four years ago,” I replied to him in my best effort at sounding solemn.
“That’s all good, but what makes it real this time?”
“Because, for once, I’m not bullshitting you.”
“You’re right in a way,” he said slowly, giving me a dubious look at the same time, and placing stress on the words “in a way.” “You have been much better. Usually you make a point of displaying to me that you’re working hard. Whereas this time, it’s as though you couldn’t care less if I thought you were improving or not.”
“And you still think something’s up—that I’m still bullshitting?”
“I’m not sure,” was his answer. “You’re a smart kid. Perhaps you’ve learned a new tactic to fool us. You’ve learnt not to overplay the role and have become subtle in your act—refined your art, so to speak.”
I couldn’t help grinning at him. Usually when he accused me of insincerity, I’d be incensed, see it as an affront to my good name. But all those other times I hadn’t really meant it—I was bullshitting—and my anger was more a result of him having been right in his assumptions than any slight to my image. This time, however, I did mean it, and his suspicion only amused me.
“Why are you smiling like a Cheshire cat?” he asked, his facial features screwing into a slight scowl.
“Because I really do mean it all, and it doesn’t bother me that you’re doubtful about it. It’s only natural for you to be suspicious in light of my former conduct.”
“But why this time, Josh? Why the actual change rather than the deceitful one? Is it because of the crash, helping all those people? Surely not. That wouldn’t be enough to make you see sense in things. I actually thought you were lost on this occasion, your time in the Peaks nothing but a prelude to your end. But now even Holman sees a difference in you. ‘The kid’s actually changed,’ he says. And I usually trust Holman’s judgment in most things. But you’re a Kelly, and Kellys are devious swines.”
“Maybe you should give up on your wariness and listen to Holman.”
“Tell me, then,” he snapped. “I’ve only speculated so far—why this time?”
“Maybe it was the crash, or maybe it started long before that. I don’t really know myself. But something is happening inside of me.”
He gazed at me for a second or two with his dagger eyes.
“I also notice you’re seeing some girl,” he put, surprising me a little as I hadn’t said a word to him about it myself. “I heard you the other day on the phone with her—or at least I hope it was a her, what with all those sweet words you said. Plus, I’ve noticed that you’re disappearing a lot. And not in your old fashion, either. This time you return sober with a smile on your face and on time for curfew.”
I was relieved that he appeared to know very little, and that he only knew that from overhearing a telephone conversation, not from some spy’s report. However, I decided to play with it.
“Have you had me followed?” I accused him half-heartedly, grinning and leaning back in my chair. “Because that’s usually what you do.”
“No, not yet. You haven’t disappeared for days on end or come home any later than eleven so far. Your behavior doesn’t warrant it.”
“I can tell you where I’ve been if you want?”
“No no. You deserve a little privacy. I only get involved when things get out of hand. I just want you to reassure me that it won’t do so this time—won’t get out of hand. Can you do that?” And he appeared to ask this with a note of pleading in his tone. Only a light one, mind you, one hidden in the mist of his harsh voice, a ship’s horn within a hurricane.
“Of course,” I replied, returning his gaze. “I need this change and want this change. I don’t want to feel shitty anymore.”
“And the company? Can you see yourself side by side with your father running things?”
That same faint whiff of entreaty was in his voice, and I felt impelled to answer confidently that I would.
“Good.” He gently smiled with genuine warmth.
Once that was out of the way, I was allowed to go, and I got the impression that my father was—like he said—actually pleased with me. I strolled back to the bedroom with my joy returned to me, then showered and changed into a tailor-made suit I’d purchased some years ago from St. Johns of Savile Row, London. It was made from Harris Tweed, the material much thinner on the trousers so that they accentuated my brawny thighs, the cloth a faint shading upon my muscled flesh. On the lapelled jacket, the tweed was thicker, bringing out my already broad shoulders, and was worn over a thin cotton shirt that I buttoned up to the collar without a tie. On my feet, a pair of brown, Italian, handmade loafers with a slig
htly pointed end, their color underlining the slightly mustard shading of the tweed, a pair of Pringle white cotton ankle socks elegantly giving away a peek of my ankles, a few inches of tanned flesh between trouser cuff and shoe.
I looked myself up and down in the tall mirror and winked. “God damn, you’re beautiful,” I let out, paying especial attention to my perfect hair, parted to the side and displaying an impeccable quiff that folded back upon itself in rolling wavelike fashion, crashing into the shore of my crown. Another wink and I shot out of the room, making my way to the elevator. As I reached it, I shouted out “goodbye” for anyone that could be bothered to care, and jumped into the mirrored box, pressing the button for the basement parking lot. Less than a minute later, I was flying out the parting doors and toward my cloud-gray BMW 5 Series. As I skipped across the lot, I found Holman waiting for me at the car.
“And how are you this fine morning?” I asked brightly as I got to him.
He simply grinned, obviously amused by my jovial air.
“Not as cheery as you,” he said gruffly. “But then I’m not the one with the new dame.”
“You’ve plenty of life left in you yet to get yourself a dame, Holman. What’re you… eighty? No, don’t tell me. Ninety?”
“Cheeky little bastard,” he put, still grinning.
“Ah! That’s so much better than those fucking robots back in there.” I pointed back to the elevator doors. “At least you don’t treat me like some prince.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s one of the joys of my position. Anyway, back on the subject of dames. What’s happening between you and this Sarah chick?”
I cocked an eyebrow at him and gave a slightly bemused expression.
“Is this gonna be all fatherly?” I asked. “You gonna ask me about condoms and safe sex?”
“Nothing like that. I was just wondering where it was going.”
“It’s going okay.”
