The Younger Man
A Novel
Karina Halle
Metal Blonde Books
Copyright © 2019 by Karina Halle
First edition published by Metal Blonde Books
December 2019
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by: Hang Le Designs
Photograph by: Regina Wamba
Edited by: Kara Malinczak
Proofed by: Laura Helseth and Rebecca Barney
For my (six months) older man
I’ve got a lover, a love like religion
I’m such a fool for sacrifice
Halsey, “Coming Down”
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1. Thalia
2. Thalia
3. Thalia
4. Alejo
5. Thalia
6. Alejo
7. Thalia
8. Alejo
9. Thalia
10. Alejo
11. Thalia
12. Thalia
13. Thalia
14. Alejo
15. Thalia
16. Thalia
17. Alejo
18. Alejo
19. Thalia
20. Thalia
21. Alejo
22. Thalia
23. Thalia
24. Thalia
25. Thalia
26. Alejo
27. Thalia
28. Alejo
29. Thalia
30. Thalia
31. Alejo
32. Alejo
Epilogue
What to read after The Younger Man
Connect with the Author
Acknowledgments
Also by Karina Halle
About the Author
Foreword
While this is a complete work of fiction, I have tried to keep facts regarding Real Madrid and Valdebebas as accurate as possible (short of calling up Zidane and having a chat).
I’ve had a reader from Madrid (thank you, Belinda) correct my Spanish so that it is accurate for the region, but any errors in this book (including ones pertinent to the game of futbol) are mine alone.
One more thing: Thalia’s name is pronounced with a silent “H.”
Hala Madrid (or “Let’s go Madrid!”)
Prologue
Alejo
Nine Years Ago
Valencia, Spain
“He’s coming home! Grab your little brother and hide,” my mother hisses at me. She puts her frail hands at my back and pushes me toward Armando who is sitting on the couch and squinting at the fuzzy screen on the television.
Armando doesn’t pay me much attention. Even at age seven, he’s used to this nightly chaos.
On the best nights, Father doesn’t come home at all.
My mother has been spending most of the evening staring outside the window and watching down the street for my father. Normally he’d be out very late, until we’re in bed — though not asleep. We always hear him come in, the sound of thuds on the wall and his slurring, things breaking when there is nothing left in this house to break. Then the yelling. My mother yells at him, then he yells at her, and if things get really bad, he might come in our room and yell at us, his outline looking monstrous in my doorway.
Other times we don’t see him for days.
And every once in a while, he comes home for dinner smelling like alcohol but acting happy enough. I think those are the days he wins something from his gambling.
In a perfect world, he would win every day, so I could have the father that I really want.
“Come on, Armando,” I say to my brother, holding out my hand. “Let’s go in my room.”
“No,” my mother says hurriedly. “No, it’s best that you leave the house. Go out the back.”
I stare at her for a moment. There is no official way to get out the back. I sneak out the kitchen window sometimes to meet a girl or my friends and I always get in trouble for it. She’s highly superstitious and keeps a potted cactus on the back windowsill to ward off evil spirits, so she hates the idea of me accidently knocking it off. If she’s telling us to leave, to go out the back, maybe this is more serious than I thought.
“Alejo,” my mother says to me, lowering her voice and staring me right in the eye with the kind of intensity you can’t turn away from. “Your father lost his job today.”
I blink. “What?”
“He lost his job. Felix called me earlier. Your father is not going to be in a good mood, do you understand me? Now please, take Armando to the park and stay there for an hour.”
Only my mother would send her thirteen and seven-year-old children out at nine o’clock at night in one of the worst neighborhoods in Valencia.
“Come on,” I say again to Armando, and this time he abandons the couch and comes into the kitchen with me.
I push a chair to the window and open it, the hot night air smelling putrid, and I climb out, careful not to knock over the cactus, and into the alley behind the house. My feet step in something sticky, and I wince, trying to pull Armando out without him getting hurt.
Once he’s on the ground beside me, I glance through the window. I only see fear and sorrow in my mother’s eyes before she turns and heads out of the kitchen.
“Where are we going?” Armando asks me as I grab his hand and pull him down the dark street, the only light coming from a few windows of the neighboring houses. “Why couldn’t we have stayed in our rooms?”
“You heard Mama. Father lost his job. He’s going to be angry.”
“When isn’t he angry?” Armando mumbles. Then he looks at me with big eyes. “Can we go to the beach? Mama didn’t say we couldn’t.”
The beach was slightly safer than the park and the same distance, so we head down one of the busier streets where there are more people. They say Valencia doesn’t have a lot of crime, but even so, you never know in this neighborhood. I’ve seen tourists get robbed who’ve wandered too far from the beach. We have no money but there can be bad characters here.
We pass by Miguel, a homeless man who lives in a cardboard box complete with a curtain. Tonight, his curtain is closed. Normally if it’s open, he’ll give Armando a piece of candy even though my family can barely afford it, let alone him.
The thought makes my pulse quicken. My mother is always talking about how little money we have, how we are behind rent, how we can barely afford the tiny place we live in with no hot water. If my father really got fired, I don’t know how we’re going to survive. He works hard as a dockhand but he gambles too, and that’s where so much of the money already goes. My mother paints little bulls to sell to tourists when she can but that doesn’t bring in much. What doesn’t go to food, goes to my football equipment.
As if he can sense it, Armando squeezes my hand as we wait at a stop light and says, “I’m scared.”
I look around. “We’re okay. We go to the beach all the time.”
“Not at night. And I’m still scared. Of what will happen at home.”
“Nothing will happen. We will be fine.”
But I don’t believe that at all.
The beach is deserted at night except for some people in the middle of it having a bonfire. I don’t know if it’s the local homeless population (who aren’t as scary as they seem) or tourists, so we give them a wide berth.
Armando runs down across the sand to the crashing waves and I have to run after him, yelling at him to stay away from the water. He doesn’t know how t
o swim very well and he’s even more impulsive than I am.
I sit down on the sand a few feet away and watch him chase the surf, the faint light from the city bouncing off the crests of the dark waves. I wish I had brought my football with me but we had left in such a hurry. These days, it’s the only relief I get. I play for the school team, of course, but when I’m not doing that I’m trying to sneak in sessions in the park or wherever I can. When I was younger, maybe a bit older than Armando, my father wanted me to be a great football player so he put in the time with lessons and training. He said that I had a natural gift.
Maybe he’s right. It does come easy to me. It feels more natural than breathing. But back then I don’t remember being poor. I remember there being enough food and my parents were happy and football meant everything to all of us.
Now, I think it just means something to me.
A way out of this life.
If only I could get seen playing by the right person, I might have a shot at playing professionally, even at my age.
If only life worked that way.
My brother and I stay on the beach for an hour or so. I don’t have a phone and I lost my watch in a bet (on whether Isabella Santos would slap me if I kissed her — she didn’t), so I can’t be sure. But when Armando gets bored and tired of chasing the dark water, I suggest we go back. Surely any arguments my parents might be having would be over by now, and my father has either passed out drunk or gone off to do more drinking.
“Let’s go,” I tell Armando, holding my hand out for him. He takes it, and as we walk back to our home, I’m filled with a sense of unease and dread with every single step we take, like we’re walking through tar.
This isn’t good.
I don’t know why but I can tell that something is off.
It’s the purple shade of the night sky.
It’s the faint bird cry in the dark.
It’s the way people seem to stare, the way that horror seems to wait around every street corner, waiting to jump out and scare us.
“Why are we rushing?” Armando asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But we must.”
Something is so wrong.
My heart seems to heave with it.
We hurry through the streets until we’re a block away and we see lights flashing.
Oh no.
Oh no.
“What is it?” Armando asks.
“I don’t…” I try to say but I can’t because I know, I know, I know.
I hold his hand so tight he tells me that I’m hurting him, but I can’t help it.
We run to the main street and see people gathered, their faces etched with concern.
I see the police and an ambulance and firefighters.
All gathered outside our place.
I don’t see my father.
I don’t see my mother.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” I ask, trying to get past the people.
“It’s Alejo and Armando,” our neighbor Maria says, tears in her eyes. She tries to reach for us but only manages to grab Armando.
“What’s happening?” I cry out, trying to push past the police officers. “I live here. Where is my mother and father?”
“You need to relax,” an officer tells me. “We need to speak with you.”
He attempts to pull me away, but I don’t want to go away.
I need to go inside.
I tear out of his grip and start running.
I’m fast. Faster than anyone. Faster than the adults who are giving chase after me.
I run and turn on a dime to peel around the corner to the alley at the back of the house.
I leap up onto the kitchen window, swinging my legs over.
I knock the cactus off the sill and the pot shatters on the ground below.
I stare at it for a moment, thinking about how mad my mother will be.
But when I step into the kitchen, that thought isn’t in my head anymore.
There are hushed voices in the house.
My mother’s hysterical sobbing.
I creep forward on the linoleum floors, some substance sticking to my feet, maybe liquor, and see her sitting on the couch in the living room. There’s a blanket around her and she’s crying into her hands. People are all around her.
Consoling her.
For what?
Movement catches my eye, and I see someone go into my parents’ bedroom down the hall, just as an officer standing beside my mother looks at me.
“Hey,” he cries out. “You can’t be here.”
But I am here.
And I’m fast.
I run down the hall and into my parents’ room.
I come to a stop.
As everything inside me stops.
My father is hanging from the ceiling fan in the middle of the room.
A belt around his neck.
His face frozen in blue and purple pain.
A stack of books spilled over at his feet.
His shoes dangling.
A sliver of his socks showing.
Ratty, thin socks.
I know those socks.
I stare up at my father and the nightmare becomes real.
I scream.
I scream and I scream.
Chapter 1
Thalia
Manchester, England
I spent my fortieth birthday signing divorce papers.
In all of my forty years on earth, it’s probably the worst birthday I’ve ever had, and that says a lot, considering on my seventh birthday I fell off a pony (during a riding lesson that I had begged my parents for all year), split my lip, and broke my nose. There was also my thirteenth birthday party that my then best friend Susan Hawthorne threw for me, in which I wore white jeans and happened to get my period and bleed all over her parents’ white couch in front of all my friends and my then crush, Timothy.
It was even worse than my twenty-fourth birthday which I spent all alone in a hotel room in Des Moines, and my thirtieth birthday where I not only had food poisoning and spent it on the bathroom floor, but no one in my family even bothered to call me.
So, yeah, this birthday took the cake.
As if turning the big 4-0 couldn’t get any worse, I was brutally reminded that my marriage to someone I had thought was the love of my life collapsed in a very big and very messy way. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was obvious now that Stewart had never truly been the love of my life since he had the gall to send me the papers on my damn birthday.
Dick.
Thankfully, I signed them without shedding a single tear and got them out of the way before my friends and I all went out for dinner, which is a godsend because it meant I was able to knock back a few cocktails to lessen the pain.
I’m currently finishing my third dirty martini and I have to say I’m feeling pretty good, though I know that if I drink any more I’m going to start simultaneously throwing up in the bathroom and crying angrily over what a shitbag Stewart is. It’s been six months since he told me he wanted a divorce, and while the crying fits have subsided, they still crop up from time to time, usually at the worst moments, usually brought on by alcohol.
My best friend Helen can tell because when the waiter comes over to our boisterous table and asks if we want anything more to drink, Helen gives me a discerning look, which means I’ve had enough.
I take note.
“Just some Pellegrino, please,” I tell the waiter reluctantly.
“Oh, you’re no fun!” Kazzy exclaims from across the table, looking horrifically offended. “It’s your birthday, Thalia. Your fortieth!”
“You don’t need to remind me.”
“And you were served divorce papers today,” Liz points out. She gives the waiter a big smile. “On the plus side, that means she’s single.”
While the waiter is handsome in a James Franco kind of way and has been teetering the line between charming and sleazy (in that James Franco way), he’s got to be twenty years old. A damn
baby.
“Again, you don’t need to remind me,” I tell Liz, and then give the waiter an apologetic look. “You’ll have to ignore my friend,” I tell him.
His smile widens. “I would have never guessed that you’re forty.” He pauses. “Are you sure you’re fine with sparkling water?”
“She’s fine, now stop flirting with a customer and get on with it,” Helen says, flapping her hands at him to go, her bracelets clinking.
The waiter doesn’t seem to take any offense. I think he deals with a lot of women here, hence the permanent cocky expression on his face.
Nothing turns me off more than outright arrogance. Stewart had enough of that in spades.
“Thalia,” Kazzy whines, pouting over her purple gin concoction, “you need to let loose and have fun tonight. For a million different reasons.”
“No,” Helen says firmly. “The last thing Thalia needs is to wake up feeling like a complete arse when she’s forty and one day.”
“I guess you’re no fun then,” Kazzy says.
I shrug. “Helen has a point. I told myself that when I turned forty I would turn over a new leaf since the old leaf didn’t work so well. I’m going to try and be respectable.” Liz snorts into her drink. “Besides, I have some champagne back at the flat. I was saving it, but…”
“Saving it for what? What could be better than your birthday?” Kazzy asks.
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