Free Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins

Paddy tells them such things but they are not in agreement. Having it as their fault gives them at least a starting point. They are almost always guilty and ashamed. He understands the mechanism. To accede to visiting someone like him is a defeat for them. Deep down they do not believe in me, he thought. That speech shouldhave a therapy seems bogus. They’ve read the Internet forums denouncing my sort, my science. They come armed. Deep down, it sometimes seems, they do not believe in their child, and he hardly blamed them.
    ‘Did you know,’ Paddy said, aiming softer now with the boy, speaking to the far wall, ‘we all get lock-ups in the building?’ He told Sam how there wasn’t much room in theirs and that when they moved into the apartment last year they were combining two households in effect—Helena’s and his. And Helena had a daughter, older than Sam—in her early twenties—but still connected, still with her stuff that her mother lugged around. Paddy paused. Did the boy even know who Helena was? They’d never met. Would he even be bothered to guess? And Dora, here was another name that meant nothing to him. ‘You collect a lot of junk in a life,’ said Paddy. ‘You keep things you have no use for. You give this stuff importance it doesn’t really have.’ He was speaking for the sake of it, to keep himself company. The boy could make you feel sudden bitter jolts of loneliness, unworthiness almost, as if his decision not to talk was a criticism of everyone else’s failure at self-control. The mute were superior and judgemental figures, ungiving watchers of the charade. With Sam, Paddy missed all the people in his life, perhaps even Dora. He thought of the small argument he’d had with Helena when they’d moved in and then he found he was talking about it to Sam Covenay. The kid was right, he had lost self-control. ‘Helena has her daughter’s schoolbooks, her primary school artwork. She hangs on to it. Okay, I get that. But she keeps her toys too. Her dolls and games, everything. I’m not sure why. So she, the daughter, can hand them on to her daughter? Then maybe you make a selection, right? Keep the best items, not everything. Anyway, it all sits down there, behind a steel door. In the dark,’ he said. ‘Like visiting the morgue. That’s where my bike will be. If I can face it.’
    The argument with Helena had had almost no heat in it, coming at the end of their moving day when they’d gone past any snappiness. They were automatons, wandering aroundwith boxes. He wasn’t seriously pressing for a cull of Dora’s old things, and she’d admitted it was probably excessive to travel from place to place so loaded up. But, she said. What? Well, he’d never had to decide anything in this context. Meaning he was childless. Not any more, he told her. It took her a moment to understand he meant Dora. That’s true! She kissed him. You know what they say, he said. A problem shared. She turned away, as if looking for something she’d misplaced, and he understood the joke had flopped. Proceed with caution, oaf.
    And of course the lock-up wasn’t like a morgue. It wasn’t dark. You turned on the lights and the place was ordinary, well maintained, an expanse of smooth concrete, dotted with spots of car oil. But morgues, they were for boys, weren’t they? It was an exciting concept, the dead filed away in drawers, like papers or huge dolls. Skulls and snakes. Heavy metal dreams.
    Sam Covenay saw through this easily, or heard none of it. Impressively, nothing came from him. No sound, no motion, no smell—the last perhaps, for the adolescent male, his greatest achievement. In Paddy’s presence he’d managed to slow his metabolism down to such a rate his body presented with no outward sign of activity. He was inert. A person entering the room might look for his coat on that chair and be surprised to find something animal.
    The boy sat with his mouth full of metal.
    Well, get this, Paddy himself had had