Free Like it Matters by David Cornwell

like this, Ed. You know what it’s like to be young, and
feel
fucked up? And everyone else wants to get older but you’re going home to your dad and he’s losing the fucking plot right in front of your eyes, and all you can wonder is
how old—
how old till that happens to me?”
    Jesus
, I thought.
    We’re like the same person.
    “Hey, don’t cry,” I said.
    She was playing with the bracelet on my wrist. “It’s so sad though.”
    “What?”
    “
This
, man, these photos, that room in there.
This
, what happened to us when she left.”
    “Ja, it is,” I said. “But what’s sadder? For thirteen years of my life, my dad and I didn’t have a photo album in the house. Then one night we had visitors and they made us feel bad about it, so we got one and we got a camera and we went out of town two weekends in a row to try do something that was worth taking pictures of. Then we had to wait two weeks till we could afford to print the film and then when the photos came out, Jesus, we were both so disappointed I don’t think we ever touched the camera or spoke about the album again. Went back to never going anywhere on the weekends.”
    “What happened to
your
mom?”
    “Charlotte,” I said. “This is the point. The point is I’m not scared of you.”
    “What if you should be?”
    “I promise,” I said, and just then I felt a bit like crying as well, “me on my own, Charlotte,
that’s
scary. The other night, I couldn’t sleep and you know what I was thinking? I can’t even remember how I got there but I was fucking
begging
fate, god, whatever, fucking begging life to contrive it so I’d catch a bullet that was meant for a child or a nurse or a teacher or something. I’ve been weird, Charlotte. This last little while’s been weird, I’m …” I looked at her square on. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like I need something.”
    “If I …”
    “Ja?” I said.
    Our faces were close together, we were talking softly all of a sudden.
    “If I pack a bag, can I come home with you?”
    “I’ll get my jeans out the tumble dryer while you’re busy.”
    She smiled. “They might still be a bit wet.”
    “Ag,” I said, “I can deal with itchy thighs. That’s not a problem.”
    She leaned in even closer, put her forehead against mine
    Almost whispered to me, “I’ll scratch them for you when we get home, I promise.”

M AY

    Y OU SHOULD ’ VE SEEN HER WITH THE CAROUSEL , she was amazing.
    Duade was delighted that she came to work with me. He kept winking at me when she wasn’t looking and giving me thumbs-ups behind her back, and then later, when he saw how good she was at drawing—while I was busy putting some scrawls on the sign so it’d say MAINTENANCE instead of MAINTINANCE —he sidled over and told me to marry her, no queshtion.
    The first time I moved out of Phil’s place, back when I was still fresh in Cape Town, I lived in a house with some people in Pinelands for a while, and one of them was this girl with dread-locks who played guitar and wrote her own songs. But besides her, even though I’d always wanted to, I’d never really hung out much with artists. Closest I got was selling them drugs.
    But you just had to watch Charlotte there at the carousel and you knew that’s what she was—she was an artist. She was wearing dungarees and she sat on her haunches in the long grass, you could see the dew creeping up the denim, all the way over her knees, but she had her sketch pad in her lap and her eyes just went between that and the model horse in front of her—
    Staring at it like the rest of the world was on mute, and the horse was singing just to her—the softest, most beautiful song.
    It only took her a couple of hours to finish all the sketches. She did ten different designs for the twenty horses. She showed me how she’d already planned out what colours they were going to be, and how some of them were going to be patchworks and some were going to have patterns—I had two