Free The Bones of You by Gary McMahon

that made me uneasy—no, it was more than that. I felt threatened, actually physically threatened, in a way that was alien to me. I was afraid of no one, but I was scared of this.
    “Hello…” I felt stupid for calling out like that, but something made me do it all the same. I wanted to announce myself; this had nothing to do with greeting someone who might be hidden. It was more about trying to break the spell, messing with the atmosphere of dread.
    “Fucking hell…this is absurd.”
    I counted to ten in Japanese. It didn’t help. I couldn’t focus on the pronunciation.
    “Fuck it.”
    I walked forward, going deeper into the underpass, heading toward the large rectangle of light that was the other side. I could hear the dull, thudding percussion of traffic across the top; the thick walls absorbed the shock, turning the sound into something unnatural.
    I read the graffiti as I walked, finding little humor in badly spelled obscenities, statements about the local female populace, and announcements of who had done what and to whom inside this weird concrete chamber.
    When I stepped out into the hazy sunlight at the other end, it felt as if I’d completed a monumental task, succeeded in a challenge, or fought a personal demon. I ran on for a while, and then turned back and retraced my steps through the underpass. This time it didn’t seem as intimidating, as if by walking through it once, I’d broken whatever hold it might have had over me. I hoped that I could carry this feeling into the rest of my life.
    I went home, showered, and put on some decent clothes—a pair of jeans that actually fit me, a T-shirt that wasn’t torn or stained, and a pair of boots I’d forgotten I had. I topped off the ensemble with a brown bomber jacket with a gray hood. It looked like it might be fashionable, and my eight-year-old daughter might just allow herself to be seen with me if I had it on.
    I drove away from town, out of the suburbs and toward the motorway. All the streets looked the same; each one was just like mine, and the thought made me feel bleak and hopeless, as if I’d joined some kind of club that would assimilate me and remove whatever it meant to be Adam Morris.
    The sun kept shining, and I pretended that it was because of where I was going, because I was seeing Jess today. That was how the world showed itself to her, by putting on its best face and smiling. Generally it reserved its worst face—the one with smeared makeup, bruised cheeks, and ragged lips—for me.
    My daughter meant everything to me. It had taken me quite some time to realize this was the case, but once I did, it began to seem like I’d come upon some great and eternal truth. She’d poured herself into my life, filling it like a broken container, cleaning it from the inside. There was still a lot of dirt on the external surfaces, but that would scrub off if I tried hard enough and used the right tools.
    What mattered was that my heart was now fresh and squeaky-clean, like new leather. She’d changed everything; she had saved me. And the best thing about this was that she didn’t even know what she’d done. She was an unintentional angel, a savior of the finest kind. I knew I’d spend the rest of my life thanking her, in as many ways as I could think up…because this was my self-appointed penance for being such a selfish, neglectful bastard in her early days.
    Holly didn’t want me going to the house, so we had an ongoing arrangement that I’d meet them in a little service station off the A1. She hadn’t gone as far as to seek out a restraining order, but my solicitor had suggested that it might be politic to abide by her wishes. The last time I’d gone there, it had ended badly. There were punches thrown; her junkie boyfriend, a man called William Pace, had to take a trip to the hospital, and Jess had witnessed a side of me that I wasn’t comfortable showing. Not to her.
    When I pulled into the car park, the place was busy but not