Free Winterton Blue by Trezza Azzopardi Page B

you turns it over. I’m Wayne on the front and retard on the back.
    Lewis flipped the plate: in large capitals, the word epileptic was etched. In the kitchen, his mother was firing the spark gun repeatedly at the gas ring, talking to herself.
    You does your best . . . I don’t know. I asked the man about it down the market, and he said a bracelet was the thing, yeah, because they checks the pulse first? And they knows to look? But he—she gestured with her head to theother room—He won’t have it, will he? I can’t take it back now it’s been engraved. What am I gonna do with him, babes?
    She had her back to him, she hadn’t even taken her coat off. Lewis didn’t want to hug her, or speak to her, even. He wanted to say, What about me, like a petulant child, What did you get me? Anything? Did you get me a
single thing
? But instead, he hung the bracelet on his wrist and waited for her to turn round to face him.
    It’s a bit loose on me, even, he said, not looking at her, Say you takes these links out, makes it a bit tighter so the name don’t flip over, like . . . ?
    His mother called Wayne, who dragged himself into the kitchen like a deep-sea diver emerging from the depths.
    What?
    Your brother’s had an idea, she said, About the bracelet. We’ll make it tighter, see, so only you’ll know what’s on the back.
    I’m not wearing no bracelet, he said, his face purple with shame.
    It’s called a
chain,
said Lewis, That’s what Mr. T calls them; he calls them his slave chains. Says they’re to remind him of his ancestors, and what they had to go through.
    Yeah, but who’s my slave? muttered Wayne, fingering the chain despite himself.
    I am, said his mother, I’m shackled to the pair of you. Now. Is it sausages or burgers, my masters?

    The memory is so close he can taste it. He would’ve liked a ring with a skull’s head on it, like the ones in the window of the Oriental shop. He would have been content with a cross and chain, even if it wasn’t silver or gold. In the end, he was happy to have nothing, because the bracelet was only to keep Wayne safe; and in the end, he was unhappy that he got the chain, after all. He got his very own slave chain.
    Through the jumble of thoughts in his head, another emerges, sudden and hot as chip-fat: the therapist had suggested that what he wanted was to be invisible. She said he wanted to be invisible and empty. Lewis had bought the theory, until now: if that was the case, he argued, then he’d got quite far on empty. The new knowledge comes like a wash of light inside him: No, she was wrong. He doesn’t want to be empty, that’s just how he
feels.
That’s the very thing he doesn’t want. He isn’t running away from anything, now—he’s running to. He’s running to wherever Carl is headed, and he’ll get his brother’s chain back, with interest.
    Thick as proverbials, said Manny. The edge of the world, he said, Over east. Doing a
fun run.
    Lewis gets up from the wall and walks. He’ll go over east, then, and he’ll find Carl. And this time, when he gets hold of the slippery little bastard, he’ll bait him, and land him, and gut him like a fish.

NINE
    Anna doesn’t know what to take. Brendan keeps reminding her that Yarmouth is only a couple of hours away, and she has calculated the mileage for herself in the road atlas spread out on the kitchen table. It just feels to Anna like a very distant world. She senses that she ought to take everything. So far, she’s packed a couple of boxes with bits of work she has to finish, her camera, a pile of unread books taken from a larger pile of unread books—the remainder of which she kicked under the bed—and a hot water bottle. She runs her hands over her collection of glass in the dining-room. It’s a motley group: two large jagged cuts that look like pieces of an iceberg, a row of