Free Cross Country Murder Song by Philip Wilding Page B

screams in the half-light. He missed his father regardless, he missed him even when he was around, he’d hear him walking about in the rooms above his and his mother was always out of sight, still and watchful in the shadows somewhere. He drifted from room to room in their cavernous house, a figure pinned as a silhouette in the tall windows looking out over the gardens. The kitchen was always full of voices, his father’s friends’ laughter louder and more prolonged as they stretched into the night.
    He slept fitfully in his motel room that night as his father walked his dreams as he once had the upper storeys of his house, silently pacing through room after room but never meeting his son’s eye. He was getting ice from the end of the corridor early the next afternoon when he saw the man exiting the room opposite his. As the door opened a woman smiled coyly and placed her hand on the man’s forearm and drew him briefly back in, they both laughed and then she let him go and even before she’d fully closed the door he saw the man’s face, now turned towards him, change from glassy happiness to gloomy indifference. His look of resignation was almost profound.
    The driver waited by his door, listening to the toing and froing outside, the cleaner’s cart and the dislocated voices and steps retreating down the hall, and when he heard the woman leave the room opposite his he quickly let himself out and caught up with her at the elevator. He studied her on their descent and then matched her hurried stride across the reception, just beating her to the door that he held open with a flourish. Once they were outside, he asked her about her affair, but he was gentle about it. Her lover’s stony face had rattled him and he felt the shadow of his mother’s sadness pass over him. She bristled though, no matter his tone, she couldn’t understand that he was trying to reach out and help her. He tried to tell her about his father’s affairs, about his mother’s drinking and how eventually when his mother died how his father had taken to drinking with the same bleak enthusiasm.
    Ironic, he said. She was mute though, untrusting. He could see that she wanted to be left alone to unscramble the guilt and lust strangling her thinking. He left her standing in the car park and sat in his car and watched her drive slowly past and away. Her face was rigid with thought and he watched her until she disappeared into the traffic that was pulling onto the highway. He sat for ten minutes while the tears gathered in dark blue blotches on his jeans like ink soaking into blotting paper and then he drove sharply off, cutting across a car that was trying to pull in to the motel. The sound of screeching tyres and someone shouting was all he heard as he pulled away and a headache built behind his eyes.

Song 4: Plastic
    The day he came to tell her he couldn’t continue the affair, builders were drilling and hammering at the building opposite and she couldn’t catch his words. He was gesticulating at her, mouthing his goodbyes, when she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the cool light and quiet of the kitchen where he broke her heart. Even though he was standing very close, she was trying not to listen so that the words would deflect from her and wouldn’t count, that they wouldn’t have enough weight to drag their relationship down. She stared hard at the pots and pans hanging in an uneven line and tried to address the inverted, ballooning scenario developing in the gleaming reflection of the biggest pot closest to her. She couldn’t hear him, but she could see that he was pointing at her and then she realised that he was gone from the pot, from the kitchen and from her.
    Her name was Nancy. He was called Kory and he was married to her sister and had been for three years. She hadn’t been his first affair, he’d admitted that to her the second time they’d slept together, as she was