Free Press Start to Play by Daniel H. Wilson, John Joseph Adams Page B

done.
    “Yeah, pretty much,” Sam said. “Now you can loaf around here all day
and
get your caff-buzz on again.”
    Jamie flicked two fingers in Sam’s direction, but Sam became distracted by an email on his phone. It was a response from Lorna. All it contained was an Internet link to a BBC news article. With Jamie still wittering away, he went upstairs to open it on his laptop.
    JOHN TAYLOR RETURNED TO PRISON
    The headline meant nothing to him, so he read the article. The first few paragraphs were equally confusing, the details of a drug bust in a rough part of Newcastle. It was only when he reached the fourth paragraph that he felt something close to understanding.
Taylor served a fifteen-year sentence after causing or allowing the death of his 3-year-old son Jeffrey. Taylor, along with his partner Amanda, was jailed following Jeffrey’s death in 1992. Jeffrey was found dead by Taylor after a self-confessed five-day “computer game and drug binge,” during which Jeffrey was locked in an upstairs bedroom unattended. Hospital staff alerted authorities when the condition of the child’s body showed signs of severe dehydration and malnutrition.
    It took a number of reads to process what Lorna Fry was trying to tell him; each time his brain filtered out more and more of the words around the phrase
computer game and drug binge
until that was all he could focus on.
    His limbs feeling heavy and weak, Sam searched online for anything more about the death of Jeffrey Taylor and found very little outside of John Taylor’s rearrest. After scrolling through pages and pages of articles from earlier in the year, he found an article dated 2002 from a local Manchester paper.
    AUNT URGES TOWN TO NEVER FORGET JEFFREY TAYLOR
    In an interview on the tenth anniversary of Jeffrey’s death, his aunt, the patron of a charity dedicated to helping families in inner-city areas, recalled her feelings about the case:
I think about him all the time. The horror of that room. They found a copy of a book,
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
, in with him. His favourite. They said he’d started eating the pages. I mean, it’s just unthinkable, how hungry he must have been. And how lonely, all that time wondering what he’d done wrong and wondering why no one was coming to help him. I still wonder that now, I mean, the bedroom was at the front of the house. How can no one have heard him? All that time? Why did no one help Jeffrey? He must have been so hungry.
    For a while, Sam stared at the wall beyond the flat screen television. Later, he found himself staring at the console cupboard.
    —
    Jamie clicked
Send
at the bottom of the online job application form with a practiced carefulness that came with owning large fingers in the digital age. When the screen confirmed the form had successfully sent, Jamie relieved his spine of his considerable weight by leaning back from the coffee table and collapsing onto the sofa.
    This would show Sam.
    Using the remote, Jamie brought up the television menu screen. It was nearly one a.m. It had taken an hour. Three down, one to go, he thought. But there was no way he’d get through another one without refreshment. With a groan he got to his feet and went to the kitchen. He switched on the light, took out the tea bags, then flicked on the kettle.
    Living with Sam had been all right at first. They’d had some good laughs, seen some decent movies, smoked some excellent herb. Sam had really helped him get his head straight about the divorce, and in return he felt he’d helped Sam deal with all the baggage left behind after Afshan. There had been a good balance and it had been like old times, before jobs and money and partners. It wasn’t the same now, though. Sam’s little comments had been growing more and more barbed of late, and Jamie knew he had to get out before he threw a punch at the bloke. That Sam would rather spend time playing a computer game where you walked about in an endless, empty desert for no real reason