He was in his home, but not his home. The same colour walls as his boyhood bedroom. Pale green and yet the floor reaching between them was larger, much larger. There was no bed. He walked a vast expanse of pine on barefoot.
This was warm wood. It felt real to him – something like a floor of forest – he could feel the earth anchoring him down. But nothing stuck between his toes, no moss and no leaves and no slivers of insect – nothing living making its millilegged way around his ankles. This was real and it was soft and polished, clean. And it was his.
A woman in the kitchen was not his mother, although she was a mother, or something like it. He saw a curve of back, a hip, a flickering curve of bright, auburn hair. Standing in the place as if she belonged there, as if it were hers.
In a moment she would call him. In a minute. In a moment. Any minute.
‘Samhain!’
The call, softly, through a fog of sleep.
‘Samhain – you up?’
He came to, taking in the things close to him. Overturned waste bin, working as a bedside cabinet. Dead digital alarm clock, blank screen, no back. A pile of his mother’s clothes in a wardrobe with no door.
So here he was. Mouth fuzzy with the taste of experimental, heathery homebrew. ‘Yeah,’ he called.
‘I found these.’ Flores pushed the door open, holding a set of faded floral curtains. ‘Remember these? From the living room? I thought you might want them for your new place.’
Things returned to him from the previous night. Bottles of beer with lilac labels, which she said had been made by a friend. The taste of it had made him think of a coarse, sludgy brown, a colour that tasted of gorse, the ground beneath your feet. She had been glassy-eyed early; he thought she must have been drinking before he’d got there.
‘You’re still my little bug,’ she’d kept on saying, despite everything they’d talked about. ‘You’re still my little bug.’
Flores didn’t have a television, but she did have a battered CD player, upon which she’d kept on repeating a short CD of protest songs by a girl with a guitar and a sincere, annoying voice. She had started smoking in the house, he noticed. Everything smelled of it. The sofa, the wall hangings. The few cushions she had.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said.
‘You know, I was thinking.’ She, swaying slightly, grabbed the doorway, her fingers gripping white as though it were helping her stand. ‘We did ok, didn’t we? Me and my little bug. You know – you could have turned out much worse.’ She let go of the door and stumbled into the room, the bed, where she sat down. ‘Fields might technically have been your dad, but he was nowhere near being your actual dad. Panzo was much more of a father to you than he ever was.’
‘I know, Mum.’ He had so many questions. He wanted to know: what was he like when you met him? Was he like me? Do I look like him? Sound like him?
‘Maybe I didn’t get everything right.’ Flores’ eyes slipped, half-closing; she rocked slightly on the coverlet. She smelled strongly of last night. ‘I should have told you much sooner. Maybe when you were younger. But...’ she waved an arm around: ‘When would it have been a good time?’
He wasn’t sure whether she was asking him, or herself.
‘When we came to live here? When you were a bit older? A teenager?’
‘You said all this last night.’
‘Did I?’ Flores had put the curtains down. She reached into a sagging pocket for a roll-up which, when she found it, had already been half-smoked. ‘Well, I still don’t know what I should have done. When do you think I should have told you?’ Hot strings of tobacco flared in red filaments, falling dangerously onto the carpet.
This was doubt; he remembered times, as a child, when she had fallen into it. Pits of doubt that had seemed larger than them both, and which had kept her in bed for weeks, while Panzo came around and cared for him.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘If you find him,’ she said, ‘don’t bring him here. I never want to see him or hear from him again.’
‘You couldn’t anyway. He died last year.’
‘Good. I hope whatever killed him was painful.’
‘Flores...’
‘Sorry.’
‘No. Listen. He also had... I’ve got a brother. Well, two half-brothers. One a year older than me, the other a couple of years younger.’
She half-laughed, holding the dead cigarette between thumb and finger. It was a bitter thing, pinching her lips closed. ‘I don’t know what to say to that,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, Flores,’ he said.
‘Like you say.’ Looking around at the floor, her clothes, brushing bits of dry tobacco from her leggings onto the carpet. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She made to get up.
This, he recognised. Her saying things didn’t matter, when to her clearly they did: things that could gain strength in numbers, like union members in a movement, and clip themselves together in her mind, weighty, immovable, until there was little room for anything else. ‘It was years ago,’ she said.
At the doorway, her back was a question. Asking: was he going to leave her for this new family he’d discovered, a family he’d never known he had?
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘They’re not my family. Not the way you are.’
‘Huh.’ She stopped, pulling at something on her tongue with curious, tapping fingers. ‘That tobacco’s very dry.’
‘You’ve probably been carrying that roll-up around for months.’
‘I doubt it.’ Now she turned to face him fully, and he saw a cautious happiness. ‘No roll-up lasts any longer than five minutes in one of my pockets.’
‘One of them’s in the police.’
A dry laugh. ‘Figures.’
‘I went to see him.’
‘Why?’
Samhain started to get up. Kicking legs free, reaching for yesterday’s trousers. ‘I don’t know. Curiosity, I guess. Wouldn’t you have done the same?’
‘No. I wouldn’t, and I don’t know why you’d want to, either.’
‘I...’ he was standing now, his full height. Everything in this house looked so much smaller than it had. The bed, the wardrobe, the window – everything half-sized, as though he’d remembered it wrongly. ‘It’s difficult to explain.’
‘Then don’t bother.’ She was already half-way down the stairs.
‘He was a dickhead,’ he called. ‘I didn’t like him, and I won’t be seeing him again.’
‘Really?’
She paused, on a stair half-widthed by books. There was something on every surface in this house. The steps were part shoe-rack, part-shelf. You had to mind your step whichever way you were going. He didn’t know why she kept on doing it: gathering things, magpie style, when there was nobody left in the house but her.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Get this. Graeme Stokes had fed him this bullshit story about us being cousins, and he believed it.’
‘Christ.’ Flores was laughing, really laughing, the way she did when Badger came round. Full peals, belly laugh, a sound that echoed around the walls. ‘That’s really funny.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘Awful, though. He’s lied to them, same way he lied to us.’
‘Not our problem,’ he said.
‘True.’ She started to make her way down again, lurching, leaning heavily against the rail. Two pairs of shoes lay in a crazy pile, and she went by without touching either.
‘You know Mum, you could tidy up a bit.’
‘No way. I’ve got better things to do.’
‘You could take a few things to the charity shop.’
‘Salvation Army?’ Flores stumbled the last few steps, and turned to look at him, in the light coming through the front door. ‘Don’t be stupid. Listen. I’ll worry about tidying the house the day I start eating at McDonald’s.’
‘You won’t lose me, Flores,’ he said.
‘I know, little bug.’
‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘I’m just focusing on the future.’
‘That’s right. Your baby.’ She turned to the book spines, poring through them. ‘Speaking of tidying up. How about you take a few of these?’
Children’s books. Cardboard-hard covers, with pictures of elves and princesses. Their pictures illustrated and painted by hand.
‘Great, Mum,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
There wasn’t much where Flores lived. It was a grey, tiny place. All so much smaller than he remembered. The corner shop had shrunk to the size of a box, and the house – he worked out that the downstairs footprint had less floor space than his bedroom at the Boundary Hotel.
His feet had taken him the wrong way, past the park gates and over the motorway bridge; he was crossing the underpass and walking out of town, walking towards the bus station.
Arms weighted by the bags she’d given him. Curtains and old sheets and a huge bag of books.
‘When you get everything sorted,’ she said, ‘can I come and see her?’
Flores had always liked Charley, and now, it seemed, she was taken with the idea of being a granny. It was the perfect excuse to start knitting again, she’d said.
‘Yes, Mum,’ he’d said. ‘Why not.’
He hadn’t liked to tell her that he was some way off seeing her himself.