The Square (Shape of Love Book 2)

by JA Huss

  “Yessir.”

  “What type of noise?”

  He looks down toward the ground, sheepishly, adjusts the rifle that hangs at his side, twists his neck back and forth a bit. “Sir… it just…”

  “Liam, man, even though I do, in fact, have all day and am clearly not going anywhere, I still hate to fokken wait.”

  “It just—and I could be wrong, of course! But it sounded a bit like… like crying. Sir.”

  Under the pretense of scratching my cheek, I reach to feel if any teardrops seem to have moistened my skin. No. Feels dry, so far as I can tell.

  “Does it look as though I’ve been weeping, man?”

  He studies my face for a moment. “No, sir.”

  “Right then,” I say, tossing the sheets off myself onto the mattress of the four-poster bed and sliding my legs over the side. I pop my feet into the lippers that wait for me on the floor and stand. “What’s for breakfast, Liam?”

  “Whatever you like, Mr. van den Berg. Is there anything special you’d like to have?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost noon, sir.”

  I nod, considering. I scratch at the stubble on my chin that is now approaching proper beard status. Someone else shaved me while I was unconscious, but when I awoke initially, it still hurt to lift my arm. And then I just grew lazy and decided to not care. It’s the first time in my life I’ve had anything resembling a beard. I think I hate it.

  “Erm,” I mumble, “let’s have pap and wors, yeah? Do we have Rhodes gravy?”

  “I believe we do, sir.”

  “All right.” I nod and Liam withdraws his head and begins closing the door. “Liam?” I say, just as it’s almost shut.

  “Sir?” he says, poking his head back in.

  “How the fok did I get here, man?”

  This is a script we play out every day. Every day I ask the same question and every day he gives a variation of a non-answer. Today’s version is…

  “Pap and wors with gravy, sir. It’ll be just a few minutes.” And he goes.

  I take a breath. Let it out. Allow my hand to drift down the post of the bed next to which I’m standing. It’s been two years since I was here with Eliza. But then again, I was with her here just moments ago.

  I’ve had the same dream every night now for the past few nights. Or possibly the past few weeks. It’s become impossible to tell. Or perhaps I’ve been here for all of eternity. Perhaps nothing is real and I am simply a figment of the universe’s imagination.

  Whether I am or not, the pinch in my ribs feels real to me and I suppose that’s all that really fokken matters.

  How, though, am I here? Here in the manor I purchased after my last time here with Eliza? After my last time with Eliza at all? The last time I saw her. The last time…

  Is she the reason I’m here? Did she somehow save me and bring me to this place as some sentimental homage to our time together?

  No. The simple answer is no. That’s the most absurd fokken thing imaginable. But, then again, my life has become fokken absurd. So I’m not ruling out any theory, no matter how ludicrous.

  Perhaps I didn’t deny Death this last time, after all. Perhaps this is what Death is. For me. Stuck in the last spot I ever visited before it all came unglued. Life. Quietly and without my awareness, but unglued nonetheless.

  Sartre mused that “Hell is other people.” I might suggest in return that Hell is actually their absence.

  Fok, man. All this convalescing is causing me to become soft and ruminative. And that ain’t no good for nobody.

  I shuffle over to the window and look out on the estate I own, the former haven that has become my unexpected prison for reasons passing understanding. A light mist has begun falling outside. The smell of pap cooking on the stovetop is starting to waft throughout. And the awareness that I’m being held here—by someone—as a virtual prisoner; the awareness that somewhere in the world right now, my business is not being run by me; the awareness that I have no clue what’s become of Christine and Danny; the awareness that… fokken hell, man… that I’ve become soft, and ruminative, and have begun making noises in my sleep that sound to Liam as if I’m goddamn crying… bring me to a probably overdue decision.

  I ain’t staying here much longer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - DANNY

  “Listen,” Christine says, hand up, palm out. “Before you slam the door in my face I just wanna say we’ve got mutual business and I’m not taking no for an answer, so just get off your high horse for one second and hear me out.”

  Which seems like a lot of preemptive protest from Christine seeing as Eliza hasn’t made a move to either slam the door in our faces or reject us outright.

  But then I look down at the little, pig-tailed girl, who is staring up at me making a ‘come here’ gesture with one tiny forefinger, and decide—yeah. There’s a lot I don’t know about this fucking situation.

  “Business you say?” That’s Eliza.

  “Pssst,” the little girl says, still beckoning me to bend down to her like she’s got some secret to share. Which is stupid because I’m fairly sure people this tiny can’t possibly talk. “Pssst,” she says again.

  “It’s Alec,” Christine says. “So…” And then she loses a bit of her steam and just shrugs.

  Eliza sighs. Long. Loudly. And then directs her eyes to mine. “Danny.”

  “Uh, hey, Eliza. How’s things?”

  “Things are perfect, mate. Quite literally.” But then she redirects her gaze to Christine and adds, “Or at least they were.”

  “High horse,” Christine reminds her.

  “What do you want?” Eliza snaps. Because… yeah. I think I’m getting this now.

  “Pssst,” the tiny one says again, still making that little ‘come down here’ motion to me.

  “We want…” And then Christine starts getting into details. They spill out of her mouth like a runaway train. Like she can’t talk fast enough.

  The little one is tugging on my pant leg now. I look down, then up again, where Eliza is making that what the fuck are you going on about face as Christine gets to the part about the waterfall, conveniently skipping over the reason Alec and Lars went over the damn thing in the first place—which is Christine—and then ends the whole thing with… “And he’s been missing ever since.”

  “Oh. Well. Bloke is dead,” Eliza deadpans.

  “No,” Christine protests. “He’s not. He’s here in England, in fact. Which is why I’m here in England, knocking on your goddamned door.” Then Christine winces, looks down at the tiny one, and is suddenly unsure if she just fucked up the whole thing by swearing in front of the child.

  We both stare at Eliza, waiting for a proclamation. And when none comes, Christine continues.

  “Pssst,” the insistent tiny thing says again. Still tugging on my pant leg.

  So I bend down, but keep my gaze trained on Eliza as Christine goes on about how she left me in the Cook Islands to “recover” and went looking for answers about Alec’s fate after that tumble, and how she went to the local authorities back home—which has me momentarily distracted because that was a stupid move on her part. Fucking Brasil is there and she could’ve been captured, or tortured, or raped or any of the other dozen nasty things that are always running through my mind about how people can hurt Christine—but I snap out of it just as Christine gets to the part where she says she came to England several weeks back, just doing a cursory check of all known safehouses once she realized no dead bodies turned up after the “incident”, and found him—

  “What?” Eliza gasps.

  “Yeah,” Christine continues. “He’s here. At that goddamned estate.”

  By now I’m face to face with the tiny one, but still looking up at Christine and Eliza. So, the little person pats my scruffy cheek to make me focus.

  “What?” I ask her. Which is absurd, because as I’ve mentioned, people this tiny can’t talk.

  “I’m Alecandra,” she says. “Come
play with me.”

  She’s got a weird accent. So I’m not sure if I heard her right, but then again, I’m pretty sure I heard her right.

  I don’t get to the part where I say no, I’m not going to play with her. Because I stand up and look at Eliza. “She’s—”

  “Yes,” is the answer, but it comes from Christine.

  Which makes me turn to look at her. Then back at Eliza. Then down at the tiny person who is still very busy tugging on my pant leg and spouting off a whole litany of things we’re going to do when we stop this all this nonsense grown-up stuff.

  She talks quite well, even though for some reason she sounds like a life-long Brooklyn-er with her weird tiny-person speech patterns. Because she says things like ‘have tea and biscuits,’ and ‘play hopscotch and jacks.’ Which comes with a disclaimer that she’s not good at jacks but she can hopscotch well. And do I know how to hopscotch?

  I picture myself hopscotching. I know what it is but never in my life have I given it a try, and so, just to shut her up, I say, “Sure,” but then look at Christine and say, “This is why?”

  And she knows the question I’m asking, even though I haven’t asked it. Because she nods, but in the same moment, she shakes her head no, too, like there’s more to this story that isn’t self-evident, and gives me one of those later looks.

  And then Eliza says, “That’s not her name. She just can’t say it right yet. It’s Alexandria. But we just call her Andra.”

  Because of course they do. “And who is we?” I ask.

  “Everyone calls me Andra,” Andra says. “Even my Uncle Theo, but he sometimes calls me ‘pigtails.’”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “So listen, Eliza. I get that this is unexpected and whatnot. And I didn’t know we were coming here—hell, I haven’t even thought about you in years—but I have been in touch with Russell and—”

  “When?” Christine interrupts.

  “Hilo,” I say. “And I’ve already made a deal with him for help anyway. So if you could just put all of this”—I make an all-encompassing motion with outstretched arms—“aside and let us in so we can discuss a plan of action—”

  Which is when she cuts me off with a very loud laugh. “I don’t give two shits what deal you have with Russell, I’m not getting involved with saving Alec van den Berg. He can rot in bloody Hell for all I care.”

  At which point Christine must decide swearing is not forbidden in front of the tiny one and says, “You fucking owe me,” in the meanest, most serious, I-will-kill-you-where-you-stand voice she can muster.

  Which is pretty good, I think. Because my heart skips a beat in the wake of her threat and the tiny one even stops her tugging.

  Eliza leans back on her heels. Not in a taken-aback way either. But in a I-bloody-dare-you-to-try way, complete with wide, incredulous eyes and a smirking grin.

  And here we are.

  The impasse.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - ALEC

  I was with a woman from the American South once. Long, long ago. Mississippi, I believe. Or South Caro-Bama or some fokken place. I remember her now, as I eat in my luxurious prison quarters, because I recall that she insisted on calling pap “grits.” I explained to her that the dish I enjoyed that she referred to as “grits” is, in fact, called pap. She thought “pap” sounded disgusting. I thought “grits” sounded disgusting. I was right. She was wrong.

  I threw her over the railing of a bridge.

  Not because of the grits thing. I’m not a lunatic.

  It’s because she got quite hysterical on me, threatening to tell her “daddy” that it was I, the oke who was seeing his daughter, who stole the necklace he kept in the safe in his study. The family heirloom that dated back to the eighteenth century. I don’t know why I told her I took it. I was a teenager. Teenagers do stupid things.

  I have always had complicated feelings about her accident. The necklace had actually been stolen by slave traders from an African village that was plundered sometime in the seventeen-hundreds. Through a long and circuitous turn of events that involved a Xhosa oke I was friends with and a story that had been passed along through the generations about some appropriated jewels, I found myself in the right place at the right time to make something resembling reparations to a greatly appreciative tribal chief.

  I mean, I must be honest, I’m no great philanthropist or humanitarian. I had arranged for an appropriate finder’s fee, but still… stealing from the descendant of a slaver and throwing his daughter off a bridge feels like it’s doing God’s good work.

  But that’s not why I did it either.

  I did it because in the heat of her hysteria and threats, she turned to the backseat of the car I was driving at the time, where Christine and Danny were sitting, and called Christine a whore. In her piercing Ala-Tucky accent (or whatever the fok it was), she yelped at me, “Fuck you, you African piece a’ shit! And fuck this low-rent fuck boy and dirty little street whore you hang around with too!” She then leaped into the rear of the car and began striking violently at them both. She wasn’t even drunk. Or high. Just… herself.

  I had not known Danny and Christine long at that point. We had only just begun our adventures together. So it was confusing to me that I found Misty’s particular verbal assault so personally offensive. But I did.

  I always knew what Danny and Christine are to me. Always.

  Now, in fairness to her—and I strive to be fair—Misty had just found out that I had no intention of bringing her along with us on our next departure and was quite emotional. So, the more mature, more patient Alec van den Berg that I am today might only have dragged her back into the front seat and, I don’t know, smashed her head into the dashboard or something equally non-lethal.

  But being the hotheaded young Alec that I was at the time, I pulled the car over to the side of the road, got out, and dragged her from the passenger side. And—and even though through the gauzy haze of memory one can romanticize one’s recollections, I don’t believe I am—I honestly had no intention of harming her. I really did not. I had planned to just sort of abandon her there and then flee the country as swiftly as possible, assuming that there would be other ways to avoid ever dealing with her again.

  But, unfortunately, Christine had not taken kindly to being struck and called a whore, and she got out of the car as well. Sweet, little, equally-hotheaded and unintimidated Christine who, though smaller and arguably cuter than Misty, was about five times stronger and more vicious. She went after the poor girl with a horrifying vengeance. Like the legendary Biloko—a dwarf-like creature that attacks the unfortunate and unsuspecting soul who passes by their lair in a hollow tree—Christine was on her.

  And in the process of separating them, I wrenched them apart and lofted the dear girl over the guard rail of the bridge we were on at three in the morning.

  We watched her fall into the river below, all three of us a bit stunned at the turn of events. The water washed her away and she struggled to stay afloat. But, truthfully, I didn’t even consider her for more than half a second before I had my hands on Christine’s shoulders, asking her if she was OK. She nodded, then started crying, and Danny and I sandwiched her between us, telling her it would be all right.

  I wonder if, when I went over the falls, Danny held her in his arms in the same way and told her, once again, that it would all be OK.

  No way to know, I suppose.

  Misty managed to survive as well, it turns out. In my opinion, it’s less impressive than what I survived. She hadn’t also fought her way free from capture by a small army and then been shot by one of only two people in the world she believed she could trust, but still, I’m glad she made it.

  Some years later, I believe I read that she and her entire immediate family were sent to prison for insider trading. Or something equally banal. Shame.

  In any case, this bowl of pap and wors I’m finishing right now actually isn’t half bad.

  I’m about to call for Liam to come take the dirty dish away when I
look out the window again. The weather is clearing, and the sun is creating shadows across the great lawn outside. And there, from the corner of my eye, I see something that looks like… that looks like… that looks like people I know.

  It isn’t.

  Upon closer examination, I can see that it’s just some trees casting Christine- and Danny-shaped illusions onto the earth. But for a moment, it felt as if they were here. Or at least close.

  I’ve been thinking about them more. Not more than any specific time. More than at any other time I’ve ever thought about them in my life, since knowing they were people whose feet trod the same earth as mine. It don’t seem fair, man. It don’t seem fair that Christine and I worked through all the struggle with Eliza only to discover that we hadn’t. That she was harboring a hatred close to her heart that I didn’t know about.

  It don’t seem fair that Danny was back in both of our lives for less than a proper twenty-four hours before I was ripped away from him again. I wonder if he’s indeed with Christine. I wonder if they’re happy. I’d like that, I think. I’d like it if through me, they found their way back to each other. That would make me happy.

  It don’t seem fair that I’m here in these silk pyjamas, enjoying a perfectly serviceable bowl of pap and wors while my baby brother is very likely dead at the bottom of a waterfall. Or, more likely, washed away somewhere, never to be seen again. If only he had found it in himself to talk with me, maybe… maybe… fok. At least maybe I could’ve killed him myself. That would feel just and right somehow. Better than the way it all went down, I reckon.

  Eish, man. But when has anything ever been fair? Come along now, van den Berg. You’re starting to sound like other people.

  All right. Enough of this kak. Time to go. I can’t claim to know what about today in particular is causing me to decide that I cannot stay here any longer, but something in the air—or more probably, something in me—is pulling me toward an exit strategy.

  The time that I was at this estate before, it was so that I could rest after a near-death scrape. Somebody who knows me knows that. That’s why I’m here again, I have to assume. It’s some perverted commentary on my life that whoever has chosen to keep me alive has chosen this place to hold me hostage. It’s a fokken allegory. Or metaphor. Or some cocksucking thing. Whatever it is, it ain’t cute, and I’m done.