Lying Beside You (Cyrus Haven #3)(81)

He’s wearing a rumpled grey suit that he might have slept in. He once spent two days perched in a tree to get a photograph of a grieving child, so a night in a car would be a small imposition.

‘Do you remember me?’ he asks.

‘You’re the tree hugger.’

He smiles at the joke. ‘That was a long time ago.’

Poppy is sniffing at his shoes. Holiday tries to look past me into the house.

‘I’ve heard whispers that your brother has been released from Rampton. Is it true?’

‘No comment.’ I begin closing the door.

He shoves his foot into the gap. ‘I’ll take that as a yes. How does it feel having him out?’

‘Please get off my property.’

‘Have you forgiven him?’

‘He’s a schizophrenic. You don’t forgive a cancer patient for getting cancer or a disabled person for being disabled.’

‘Can I quote you on that?’

‘No. Fuck off!’

He is pushing at the door with his shoulder. ‘Is he home? Perhaps a photograph of the two of you together. Brotherly love.’

‘Get off my property.’

He holds up his phone and snaps a picture as the door shuts. From outside he yells, ‘Do your neighbours know? I wonder how they feel about it?’

I go to the library window and watch as Holiday takes a photograph of the house and then walks up the path to my neighbour’s place. Mr and Mrs Gibson. Brendan is a retired engineer who coordinates our local neighbourhood watch, liaising with the police to report any crimes. His wife, Julia, works for My Sight, a charity for the blind. They’re about the age my parents would be if they were still alive. Now I can picture them at the head of the mob, carrying pitchforks and flaming torches, threatening to burn us out if we didn’t leave town.

‘Who was that?’ asks Elias. He is standing on the landing, barefoot in pyjamas.

‘Nobody.’

‘It was definitely somebody.’

‘A courier.’

‘Where is the package?’

‘It was the wrong address.’

I’m glad it’s Elias and not Evie. She would have stopped me at the first lie.

‘Are you going for a run?’ asks Elias.

‘I changed my mind.’

He follows me to the kitchen where he opens a cupboard and takes out a plastic pill box. He swallows six tablets with a glass of water. He will take another six in exactly twelve hours. Without them he’ll lose his grip on reality.

‘Are you working today?’ he asks.

‘Later.’

‘I thought we might hang out. Go to the movies. Talk.’

‘We can talk.’

He sits at the table and asks, ‘Where are all the photographs? Grandma used to have dozens of them around the house – pictures of us as kids, growing up.’

‘I put them away. Dr Baillie thought they might be triggering.’

He nods.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Bored. I lie in bed. I listen to the radio. I watch TV. I stare out the window, counting birds on the telephone wire. I force my mind to go blank.’

‘Don’t you have assignments?’

‘They’ll never let me be a lawyer.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Yes, I do.’

He scratches the hair above his navel. ‘You’ve never asked me about that night.’

‘I was there.’

‘You probably remember more than I do. It felt like someone else was doing those things. That’s why it took me so long to acknowledge what happened. I wanted to blame everyone else – the doctors, Mum and Dad, the drugs. That’s what people do, isn’t it? Blame everybody else because you don’t want to deal with their guilt and their pain.’

‘Yes.’

‘For years I blocked it out. I pretended it was someone else – a different version of me. An alter ego, or a split personality.’

‘What changed?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was something in my mind. One day I had a sort of epiphany and started talking to people. Listening. Remembering. Forgiving.’

‘Who do you have to forgive?’

‘Myself.’

Elias must see the shock on my face.

‘If I don’t forgive myself, the remorse will consume me,’ he explains. ‘I was nineteen when it happened. I’ve had twenty years to learn that if you hold onto the pain and guilt it just keeps growing.’

He makes it sound so easy. For as long as I can remember, I have felt a vast weight resting on me, a sadness that has always been part of me yet doesn’t belong to me. That’s how I feel when I’m lying on the bench in the basement, holding the steel bar and weight plates off my chest so I can breathe.

Forgiveness and revenge are not opposing strategies or binary choices. Revenge can be empowering if the person who hurt you did so on purpose. But Elias didn’t understand what he was doing. If I can forgive him, I can cast aside the weight, just like he has.

The doorbell rings again. This time I check the spyhole. My neighbour, Mr Gibson, is on the doorstep.

‘Hello, Brendan. You’re up early.’

‘So are you,’ he says. ‘Going for a run?’