Free Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) by Gary McMahon Page B

that way, right up to the day that they both died. He couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t looked exhausted.
    He recalled the day he’d lost his parents as if it were only yesterday: the memory was imprinted on his brain, too perfect, as if it had been put there by someone else.
    He’d been in the car with them, strapped into the back seat and reading a comic – Superman , of all things. The car had skidded on the wet road. It had been nobody’s fault, just one of those fluke accidents that happen every now and then, as if God was getting a bit bored and needed some entertainment, so he decided to wipe out somebody’s folks in the rain.
    His mother had been driving, and when the wheels locked she didn’t know what to do. The car had moved slowly, as if it was on a conveyor belt, edging sideways towards the edge of the road and the sheer drop into a farmer’s field below. He remembered looking out of the side window and watching the drop approach, and then glancing into the front to see his parents holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Again, this memory was more like a movie than something that had actually happened. It was simultaneously distant and up-close, as if he were separated from the image by a sheet of glass.
    Still, they could have survived the crash. That’s what everyone told him, even now. It was a fluke, a crazy accident. The car had tilted and the outcropping branch of a tree had smashed through the passenger side window, almost taking off his mother’s head, tearing away her chin and smashing her teeth, causing her to choke to death on fragments of her own skull. His father had been turned to face her at the time, and the branch had slowly sheared off his face as he screamed his life away.
    Marc’s mother had died comparatively quickly – the collapsed red ruin of her head was proof of that. But it had taken his father a long time to go because the car was falling so slowly... Marc had seen it all, and he still saw it now, whenever he dreamed. His mother’s sunken, partially crushed head, his father’s red-screaming skull... another film; a succession of images that played out on a mental screen whenever he closed his eyes.
    At first he didn’t like to dream. For a long time, he’d taken drugs to stop the dreams from coming. Then, when they stopped working, he simply accepted them, imagining them his penance for surviving the accident. He almost welcomed them now, and it scared him that he did this so willingly.
    They hadn’t been very good parents, not particularly. But they’d been the only ones he had, and after that he had none. He was left with no one, except a distant uncle who at first had treated him like a lodger who rented a room in his home rather than an orphaned family member. After a while – as he developed into a young man – Uncle Mike’s attitude had softened. He’d started to show affection. They became a small, weird family unit for a short while, at least until Marc was old enough to leave and go to University. After that, he’d lost touch with Uncle Mike, until he’d received a call one Saturday afternoon telling him that the man was dead.
    He took another drink and sat down on the sofa, trying to clear his mind. Images of his dead parents mingled with those of Abby’s naked body, and the effect made him feel dirty and ashamed. Her bony body; his father’s fists; her tiny breasts; his mother’s smile; blood and semen; love and hate; sex and death. He blinked, rubbed at his temples, and leaned back against the sofa, allowing the cushions to grasp him. He leaned forward again to pick up his glass and then back again to try and relax. He felt like he was being pushed and pulled in every direction but the one he wanted to move in. He always felt like that; his life was a series of manoeuvres designed to shove him one way and then the next, without taking into consideration his desires. He was always dodging something – the past, the present,