Praise for Paul Cleave

‘Riveting and all too realistic. Cleave is a writer to watch.’

Tess Gerritsen

‘Cleave leads us on a tantalizing, mouth-watering spectre of horror, never knowing what will be revealed around the next corner, or turning of a page.’

Suspense Magazine

‘Dark, bloody, and gripping, Blood Men is classic noir fiction. In Paul Cleave, Jim Thompson has another worthy heir to his throne.’

John Connolly

‘An intense and bloody noir thriller, one often descending into a violent abyss reminiscent of Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Anyone who likes their crime fiction on the black and bloody side should move Paul Cleave straight to the top of their must-read list.’

Mark Billingham

‘A pulse-pounding serial killer thriller … The city of Christ-church becomes a modern equivalent of James Ellroy’s Los Angeles of the 1950s.’

Publishers Weekly (starred)

‘Paul Cleave writes the kind of dark, intense thrillers that I never want to end. Do yourself a favour and check him out.’

Simon Kernick

‘Gripping and darkly funny.’

Globe and Mail

‘An intense adrenalin rush from start to finish, I read The Laughter-house in one sitting. It’ll have you up all night. Fantastic!’

S.J. Watson

ALSO BY PAUL CLEAVE

The Cleaner

The Killing Hour

Cemetery Lake

Blood Men

Collecting Cooper

The Laughterhouse

Joe Victim

Five Minutes Alone

Trust No One

A Killer Harvest

www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Mulholland Books

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Paul Cleave 2006

The right of Paul Cleave to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 473 66459 3

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

To Quinn
We all still miss you, buddy.

CHAPTER ONE

I pull the car into the driveway. Sit back. Try to relax. The day, I swear to God, has to be at least ninety-five degrees. Christchurch heat. Schizophrenic weather. Sweat is dripping from my body. My fingers are wet-rubber damp. I lean forward and twist the keys in the ignition, grab my briefcase, and climb out of the car. Out here, the air-conditioning actually works. I reach the front door and fumble with the lock. I breathe a sigh of relief when I step inside.

I stroll through to the kitchen. Angela, I can hear, is in the shower upstairs. I’ll disturb her later. For now, I need a drink. I walk to the fridge. It has a stainless-steel door in which my reflection looks like a ghost. I open the door and squat down in front of it for close to a minute, making friends with the cool air. The fridge offers me both beer and Coke. I take a beer, twist off the cap, and sit down at the table. I’m no heavy drinker, but I knock this bottle back in maybe twenty seconds. The fridge offers up another bottle. Who am I to say no? I lean back in the chair. Put my feet up on the table. Consider taking off my shoes. You know that feeling? A hot day at work. Stress for eight hours. Then sitting down, feet in the air, beer in hand, and you take your shoes off.

Pure bliss.

Listening to the shower upstairs, I casually sip at my second beer of the year. Takes me five minutes to finish this one, and now I’m hungry. Back at the fridge and to the slice of cold pizza I spied on my first trip. I shrug. Why not? It isn’t as though I need to watch my weight.

I sit back at the table. Feet in the air. The same thing works for pizza as it does for beer once you get those shoes off. Right now, though, I don’t have the time. I wolf down the pizza, pick up my briefcase, and make my way upstairs. The stereo in the bedroom is pumping out a song I recognize, but can’t name. Same goes for the artist. Nevertheless, I find myself humming along as I lay my briefcase on the bed, knowing the tune will be stuck in my mind for hours. I sit down next to the briefcase. Open it. Take the newspaper out. The first page offers up the sort of news that makes newspapers sell. Often I wonder if the media makes half this stuff up, just to inflate sales. There’s definitely a market for it.

I hear the shower turn off but ignore it, preferring to read the paper. It’s an article about some guy who’s been terrorizing the city. Killing women. Torture. Rape. Homicide. The stuff movies are made of. A couple of minutes go by and I’m still sitting here reading when Angela, wiping her hair with a towel, steps out of the bathroom surrounded by white steam and the smell of skin lotion.

I lower the newspaper and smile.

She looks over at me.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asks.

CHAPTER TWO

The sun is heading toward the horizon with only a few hours of life left today, it’s blinding her, making beads of sweat run down the inside of her dress and dampening the material. It glints off the polished granite gravestone, making her squint, but she refuses to look away from the letters that have been scripted across it for the last five years. The bright light is making her eyes water—not that it matters; her eyes always water when she comes here.

She should have worn sunglasses. She should have worn a lighter dress. She should have done more to prevent him from dying.

Sally clutches the crucifix hanging around her neck, the four ends of it digging hard into her palm. She can’t remember the last time she took it off, and she fears that if she did she would roll up into a small ball and just cry forever, spending the rest of her days unable to function.

She had it when the doctors at the hospital gave her family the news. She held it tightly as they sat her down, and with their somber faces told her what they had told countless other families who knew their loved ones were dying but who still held out hope. It was hanging over her heart when she drove her parents to the funeral home, sat down with the funeral director, and, over tea and coffee that nobody touched, shopped through coffin brochures, turning the glossy pages and trying to pick out something her dead brother would look good in. They had to do the same for the suit. Even death was fashion conscious. The suits in the catalogs were photographed hanging on mannequins; it would have been in bad taste to have had them on happy-go-lucky people smiling and trying to look sexy.

She has had the crucifix every day since, using it for guidance, using it to remind herself that Martin is in a better place now, that life isn’t as bad as it seems.

She has been staring at the grave for the last forty minutes, unable to move. Fifty feet away a set of oak trees form a partial barrier between her and a small lake which she guesses must almost be right in the middle of the cemetery. A few months ago some bodies were found in that lake. Every now and then the nor’wester will snap one of the growing acorns from the branches and throw it onto a gravestone, the clicking sound like that of a breaking finger. The cemetery is an expanse of lush lawn broken up with cement markers and, at the moment, mostly deserted, except for a handful of people standing in front of gravestones, all of them with tragedies of their own. She wonders whether more show up during the day, whether the graveyard has peak-hour traffic. She hopes it does. She doesn’t like the idea of people dying and other people forgetting. The grass is longer than usual, and messy around the gravestones and trees. Even the gardens are overgrown. There used to be a caretaker out here who would regularly steer his riding lawn mower like a racing car through the rows of graves, but then he retired or died, she can’t quite remember which, and in the following months nature has been reclaiming the land.

She doesn’t even know why she’s thinking such things. Caretakers dying, peak-hour traffic, people forgetting the dead. She’s always like this when she comes here. Morbid, all messed up, as if somebody has put her thoughts into a cocktail shaker and shaken the hell out of it. She likes to come here at least once a month, if likes is an appropriate word. She always, absolutely always, makes it here on the anniversary of Martin’s death, which is what today is. Tomorrow would have been his birthday. Or still is. She isn’t sure whether it counts once you’re in the ground. For some reason she can’t explain, she never comes here on his birthday. She’s sure it would induce the same result as if she were to take off her crucifix. Her parents made it out here earlier in the afternoon, she can tell by the fresh flowers next to her own. She never comes here with them. That is something else she can’t explain, not even to herself.

She briefly closes her eyes. Whenever she comes here, she always ends up dwelling on what she can’t figure out. The moment she leaves, things will be better again. She crouches down, caresses the flowers sitting in front of the gravestone, then runs her fingers over the lettering. Her brother was fifteen when he died. One day away from sixteen. One day’s difference between a birthday and a death-day. Probably not even that. Probably only a matter of half a day. How can it make sense that he should die at fifteen, almost sixteen? The other people planted in this location average sixty-two years old. She knows that because she added them all up. She walked from grave to grave, plotting in the numbers on a calculator and then dividing them up. She was curious. Curious as to how many years Martin was cheated of. His fifteen—sixteen years on this earth were special, and the fact he was mentally handicapped actually was a blessing. He enriched her life, and her parents’ lives. He knew he was different, he knew he was challenged, but he never understood what the problem was. For him, life was all about having fun. What could possibly be wrong with that?

She has never found any answers to her questions, not here, not even once she has walked away. In that, nothing will ever change.

After an hour, she turns away from the grave. She wants to tell her dead brother about the man she works with, who in many ways reminds her of Martin. He has a pure heart and a childlike innocence that is identical to Martin’s. She wants to tell her brother about this, but leaves without saying a word.

She heads out of the graveyard thinking of Martin. Even before she reaches her car, the crucifix starts to take away her pain.

CHAPTER THREE

The newspaper no longer holds any interest for me. Why read the news, when I’m the one making it? So I fold it in half and lay it on the bed next to me. I have newspaper ink on my fingers. I wipe them on the bedspread as I study Angela. She has this look on her face as if she’s trying to digest some really bad news, like her father has just been hit by a car or she’s all out of perfume. I’m watching her towel. It’s sagging down her body. She looks pretty damn good standing there almost naked.

“Name’s Joe,” I say, reaching toward my briefcase. I select the second-to-biggest knife I have clipped in there. A blade with a fine Swiss design. I hold it up. We can both see it. It looks bigger to her, even though I’m closer. It’s a perspective thing.

“Maybe you’ve read about me. I’m front-page news.”

Angela is a tall woman with legs that go all the way up. Blond hair, obviously natural, that comes down to meet them. She has a good figure with all the right shapes and curves that have brought me here. An attractive face that could be in magazines marketing contact lenses or lipstick. Blue eyes full of life and, at the moment, full of fear. The fear in her eyes excites me. The fear in her eyes suggests that yes, she has read about me, probably even heard about me on the radio and seen the stories about me on TV.

She begins shaking her head, as if answering no to a whole lot of questions I haven’t even got to yet. Drops of water fly left and right, like it’s raining inside and horizontally. Her hair swishes behind her, the wet ends striking the walls and the doorframe. It flicks around onto the front of her face and sticks there. She’s walking backward too, like she’s got somewhere better to be.

“What, w … what do you want?” she asks. All the confident anger from her first question of who I was left around the same time she saw the knife.

I shrug. I can think of several things I want. A nice house. A nice car. Her stereo is still playing that same song—our song now. Yeah. A nice stereo I wouldn’t say no to.

But she can’t provide me with any of that. I wish she could, but life isn’t that simple. I decide to keep this to myself for now. There will be time for conversation later.

“Please, please. Just. Leave.”

I’ve heard this so many times I almost yawn, but I don’t, because I’m a polite guy. “You’re being a poor host,” I say, politely.

“You lunatic. I’m calling the … umm … the police.”

Is she really this stupid? Does she think I’m going to stand here while she picks up the phone and dials for help? Maybe I’ll sit back on the bed, do the crossword in my newspaper while they arrive to arrest me. I start shaking my head, like she was before, only with dry hair. “You could go ahead and try,” I say, “if the phone was on the hook.” Which it isn’t. I took it off while I was eating my pizza. Her pizza.

She turns and makes a run for the bathroom at the same time I move toward her. She’s quick. I’m quick. I throw the knife. Blade over hilt, hilt over blade. The trick to throwing a knife is all in the balance … if you’re a professional. If you’re not, it all comes down to luck. We’re both hoping for a bit of that at the moment. The blade brushes off the side of her arm and clatters off the wall onto the ground as she rounds the bathroom door. She slams it shut and locks it, but I don’t slow down, I just barge sideways into it. It barely rattles in its frame.

I take a few paces back. I can always go home. Pack up my gear. Close the briefcase. Take off my latex gloves. And leave. But I can’t. I have an attachment to both my knife and my anonymity. That means I have to stay. Plus I’m an optimist at heart—I’m not one to give up on myself.

She starts screaming for help. But the neighbors aren’t going to hear her. I know this because I did my homework before arriving. The house is far back on the lot and backs onto a field, we’re on the top story, and none of her nearby neighbors is home. It’s all about homework. To be successful, with anything in life, you need to do your homework. It just can’t be stressed enough.

I stroll across the bedroom and select another knife. This one is the biggest. I’m about to head back to the bathroom when a cat walks into the room. Damn thing is friendly too. I bend down and pat it. It nudges my hand and starts purring. I pick it up.

Back at the bathroom door I call out to her. “Come out or I’ll break your cat’s neck.”

“Please, please don’t hurt her.”

“The choice is yours.”

So now I’m waiting. Like all men do when women are in the bathroom. At least she’s not screaming. I scratch Fluffy beneath her floppy neck. She isn’t purring anymore.

“Please, what do you want?”

My mother, God rest her soul, always told me to be honest. Sometimes it simply isn’t the right approach. “Just to talk,” I lie.

“Are you going to kill me?”

I shake my head in disbelief. Women, huh? “No.”

The lock makes a definite twang as it disengages on the bathroom door. She’s actually going to take her chances with me rather than have her cat killed. Maybe it’s expensive.

Slowly the door begins to open. I’m motionless, too amazed at her stupidity, which is increasing by the second, to actually move. When the door opens enough, I dump Fluffy on the ground. She lands in a pile of clumped fur, her head twisted sideways and her legs sticking out in every direction, trying to point to the reason why. Angela sees the cat but doesn’t get the chance to scream. I shove my body against the door, and she isn’t strong enough to hold me out. The door goes slack as she loses balance. She falls against the shower, and her towel falls from her hands.

I step into the bathroom. The mirror is still fogged over with steam. The shower curtain has pictures of a few dozen rubber ducks all smiling at me. They point in the same direction and are uniform, as if they’re swimming off to war. Angela starts back with the screaming routine, which hasn’t done her any good so far and doesn’t do her any good this time. I drag her back into the bedroom, and I have to hit her a couple of times to get her to go along with the plan. She tries to stop me, but I have more experience at subduing women than she has at self-defense. Her eyes roll upward and she has the audacity to pass out on me.

The stereo is still going. Maybe when all this is over I’ll take it home with me. I pick her up and dump her on the bed, then roll her onto her back. I move around the bedroom, taking down the photographs of her family from the walls, and turning down the others that rest on windowsills and shelves. The last one I look at is a picture of her husband and two kids. I guess he’s about to be granted full custody.

The next step I take toward romance is placing my Glock automatic nine-millimeter pistol on the bedside table so it’s within easy reach. Nice piece. Bought it four years ago when I started work. Three thousand dollars it cost me. Black-market guns are always more expensive, but anonymous. I stole the money from my mother, who blamed neighborhood kids. She’s one of those crazy women who are afraid of using banks because she’s suspicious of bank managers. The gun is in case the husband comes home early. Or if a neighbor comes over. Maybe she’s having an affair. Maybe her lover is pulling into the street right now.

My Glock is like a magic pill—it will cure all possibilities.

I pull the phone from the wall. Tear the cord from the end of it. Use it to secure her hands. I don’t want her thrashing about too much. I tie her hands to the headboard.

I’m just finishing tying her feet with her underwear when she wakes up. She notices three things at once. The first is I’m still here and this is no dream. The second is she’s naked. The third is she’s tied to the bed spread-eagled. I can see her checking these things off in her mind on this big mental list she has. One. Two. Three.

From there she’s noticing things that haven’t happened yet. Four. Five. And six. I can see her imagination running wild. The muscles are pulling in her face as she considers asking me a question. Her eyes are darting back and forth as she struggles to work out which part of me to focus on. Her forehead is shiny with sweat. I can see her gripping at levers in her mind, searching for the one to pull that will show her options. I watch her pull all of them, but the levers are just coming off in her hands.

I show her my knife again. Her eyes come to a stop on the blade. “See this?”

She nods. Yeah, she sees it. She’s crying too.

I place the tip of the blade on her cheek and ask her to open her mouth. She becomes eager to help out when the blade starts to scratch her. Then, reaching over to my briefcase, I pull out an egg and slip it into her mouth. Cooperation comes easy once they find acceptance. The egg is nothing abnormal, just a standard unboiled egg. The thing about eggs is they’re high in protein. They also make great gags. “If you’ve got a problem with this,” I say, “just let me know.”

She says nothing. No problems, obviously.

I head into the bathroom, find her towel, bring it back out, and cover her face with it. I take my clothes off and climb onto the bed. She hardly moves, doesn’t complain, just keeps on crying until she can cry no more. When we’re done and I climb off, I find that at some point the egg has slipped to the back of her mouth, at which point it proceeded to choke her, successfully. This explains the gagging I heard and, at the time, mistook for something else. Oops.

I shower, dress, and pack my gear together. The faces on the photographs lining the staircase watch me as I walk downstairs. I keep expecting them to say something to me or, at the very least, complain about something I’ve done here. When I get outside and away from them, I’m washed over by a warm flood of relief.

The relief is short-lived, and within a few seconds I start to feel rotten. I cast my eyes down and watch my feet as I walk. Yep. Feeling bad. Feeling blue. Things didn’t go as they should have, and I ended up taking a life. I pause on the lawn and pluck a flower from a rosebush. I hold it to my nose and smell the petals, but it can’t bring a smile to my face. A thorn pricks my finger and I put the wound into my mouth. The taste of blood begins to replace the taste of Angela.

I put the flower in my pocket and make my way to her car. The sun is still out, but lower now, shining directly into my eyes. The day has cooled so maybe the heat I feel isn’t from the sun, but is inside me. I want to smile. I want to enjoy the remaining day, but I can’t.

I have taken a life.

Poor Fluffy.

Poor pussycat.

Sometimes animals have to be used as tools. It’s not my place in this crazy, mixed-up universe to question that. Still, I can’t help but feel sick for breaking the little cat’s neck.

I climb into Angela’s car and have to drive over the front lawn to avoid the stolen car in the driveway. It’s a nice ride—a couple of years old at the most. I wish I could keep it. The picture-perfect home that represents a picture-perfect family life grows smaller in my rearview mirror. The manicured lawn I can no longer smell looks like a miniature-golf course as I glance back at it. The rose from that lawn is warm in my pocket. I pass three or four parked cars. People are walking up driveways and arriving home. Two old women talk over a low fence about whatever it is old women face in life. Another old woman on her knees painting her mailbox. A young boy delivering the community paper. People are at home here, and they are at peace. They don’t know me and pay no attention as I drive past their windows and out of their lives.

Technically we’re approaching the middle stages of autumn, but nobody has told Mother Nature, so we’re all still experiencing the heat of summer. It hasn’t rained in over a month. None of the trees are getting ready for the winter and losing their leaves. Some of those leaves right now are rustling above me in a light breeze, attached to a line of birch trees that grow from the sides of the road and make an arch overhead where fingerlike branches interlock. Birds are at play up there. In the distance, I can hear lawn mowers closing out the afternoon and starting the evening. This is going to be a beautiful night. It’s going to be the type of night that makes me glad to be alive. The type of night New Zealand summers are famous for. Just not normally in April.

Finally I begin to relax. I turn on the car stereo and hear the same damn song that was playing in Angela’s house. What are the chances? I hum along, singing my way into the evening. My thoughts turn from Fluffy to Angela, and only then does the smile come back to my face.

CHAPTER FOUR

I live in an apartment complex that would be worth more if sold as scrap. Because of its location, it will never be torn down and replaced because a new apartment complex isn’t going to fetch any more rent. It isn’t exactly the worst part of town, according to those who live here, but it is according to everybody else. It’s barely habitable, but it’s cheap, so that’s the trade-off. The complex is four stories high, covers the best part of a block, and I live on the top, giving me the best part of a very poor view. In total I think there are maybe thirty apartments.

I see none of my neighbors as I make my way upstairs, but this is neither bad nor uncommon. I find myself dwelling on poor Fluffy as I unlock the door and walk inside. My apartment has two rooms. One of these is a bathroom, and the other a combined everything else. The fridge and stove look so old I doubt carbon dating would identify an age. The floors are bare and I have to wear shoes all the time to avoid splinters. The walls have cheap, dark gray wallpaper so dry that it crumbles a little bit more every time I open my door and create a draft. Several edges of it have peeled away and hang like flat tongues. A set of windows runs along one wall where my view consists of power lines and burned-out cars. I have an old washing machine with a noisy spin cycle, and hanging on the wall above it is a dryer that’s just as loud. Along the window is a line where I hang my washing during the summer. Currently nothing is hanging on it.

I own a single bed, a small TV, a DVD player, and some basic furniture that’s sold in a box with assembly instructions in six different languages. None of it sits straight, but I don’t know anybody who would visit to complain. Select romance paperbacks that I’ve read are dumped on my sofa. The covers are full of strong-looking men and weak-looking women. I throw my briefcase on top of them before checking my answering machine. The light is blinking, so I push play. It’s my mother. She’s left a message telling me about her powers of deduction. She believes that since I’m not home, and not at her place, it means I have to be on the way to her place.

I said earlier, “God rest her soul.” I didn’t mean she’s dead. She soon will be, though. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a bad guy or anything, I would never do anything to harm her, and I’m disgusted at anyone who would think otherwise. It’s just that she’s old. Old people die. Some sooner than others. Thank God.

I glance at my watch. It’s already six thirty. It’s starting to get dark. I make room on the sofa, stretch my arms out behind me, and try to relax. Think about what’s best for me. If I don’t go to my mother’s for dinner the results will be disastrous. She will ring me every day. Nag me for hours on end. She is unaware I have a life. I have responsibilities, hobbies, places I want to go, people I want to do, but she doesn’t see it. She thinks I live just to sit around my apartment waiting for her to call.

I change into some more respectable clothes. Nothing too flashy, but slightly better than casual. Don’t want Mom insisting on buying my clothes for me like she used to. She went through a stage, a year ago, of buying my shirts, my underwear, my socks. Sometimes I remind her I’m more than thirty years old and can do this myself, but sometimes she does it anyway.

On the small coffee table in my small living room, in front of the small sofa that looks like it belongs in some hippie recording studio, sits a large goldfish bowl with my two best friends inside: Pickle and Jehovah. My goldfish don’t complain. Goldfish have memories of five seconds, so you can really piss them off and they won’t remember. You can forget to feed them, and they’ll forget they’re hungry. You can pull them from the water and throw them on the floor, and they’ll flap around and forget they’re suffocating. Pickle is my favorite; I got him first—two years ago. He is an albino goldfish from China, with a white body and red fins, and is slightly bigger than the width of my palm. Jehovah is a little smaller, but she’s gold. Goldfish can live up to forty years, and I hope to get at least that out of mine. I don’t know what they get up to when I’m not watching them, but so far no little goldfish have appeared.

I sprinkle in some food, watch them rise to the surface of the bowl, and watch them eat. I love them dearly, yet at the same time I feel like God. No matter who I am, no matter what I do, my goldfish look up to me. The way they live, the conditions they live in, when they get dinner—these things are all up to me. I like having that responsibility.

I talk to them while they eat. A few minutes go by. I have talked enough. The pain of killing Fluffy is nearly gone now.

I head outside. The sun has completely gone now and the streetlights are on. A few of them on my street are busted. Tomorrow it will get darker earlier by a minute, and the same every day after that until we break through winter. Or perhaps winter won’t come this year. I walk to the nearest bus stop. I wait for maybe five minutes in the warm evening air before a bus finally comes along.

Mom lives in South Brighton near the beach. No green lawn out here. Like the plants, it matches the shade of rust that visits every metal surface exposed to the salt air. Grow a rosebush and the entire block goes up in value. Most of the homes are sixty-year-old bungalows that are struggling to hold on to their character as the paint flakes away and the weatherboards slowly rot.

All the windows are clouded over with salt. Wooden joinery is stained with dead pine needles and sand. Patches of sealant and plaster block up holes and keep the insides dry. Even crime out here has its downside—when you weigh in the cost of gas it takes to get here against the value of anything you might find in any of these dumps, it’s hardly worth breaking into somebody’s house.

It takes thirty minutes for the bus to get to Mom’s house. When I get out, I can hear the waves crashing against the shore. The sound is relaxing. This is the only benefit to South Brighton. It is a minute’s walk to the beach from here, and if I still lived in this suburb, I would walk that extra minute and just keep on swimming. At the moment it feels like I’m standing in a ghost town. Few houses have their lights on. Every fourth or fifth streetlight is busted. Nobody around.

I suck in a deep breath of salty air while standing at the gate. My clothes already stink of rotten seaweed. Mom’s house is in as much disrepair as any other house in this neighborhood. If I came around here and painted it, her neighbors would probably kick her out. If I mowed the dry lawns, I’d have to mow everybody’s. Her house is a single-story weatherboard dwelling. White paint, now the color of smog, falls from the warped boards and settles in the yard alongside the dusting of rust from the iron roof. The windows are held in place with both cracking joint compound and luck. A real-estate agent would call Mum’s house a great investment for the handyman.

I walk up to the door. Knock. And wait. A minute goes by before she finally ambles to it. It sticks in the frame and she has to pull it hard. It shudders open and the hinges squeak.

“Joe, do you know what time it is?”

I nod. It’s nearly seven thirty. “Yeah, Mom, I know.”

She closes the door, I hear the rattle of a chain guard, and then the door swings back open. I step inside.

Mom will be sixty-four this year, but looks a good ten years older. Or a bad five. She’s only five feet two, and has curves in all the wrong places. Some of those curves stretch out over others, some are heavy enough to tighten the wrinkles in her neck. Her gray hair, she keeps pulled back into a tight bun, but at the moment she’s wearing something over it—one of those old hairnets with curlers tied into it that for some reason makes me think of black-and-white movies and women smoking cigarettes. She has blue eyes so pale they are nearly gray, covered by a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that may, with a lot of luck, one day come into style. On her face are three moles, each of them with a dark hair that she won’t cut. Her upper lip is cultivating a soft line of fuzz. She looks like she belongs in a nursing home as the head matron.

“You’re late,” she says, blocking the doorway while adjusting one of the curlers in her hair. “I got worried. I nearly called the police. Nearly called the hospitals.”

“I was busy, Mom, with work and everything,” I say, relieved she didn’t file a missing person report.

“Too busy to call your mother? Too busy to worry yourself about my breaking heart?”

I’m all she has left. My dad died a few years ago, and I’ve always considered him to be the lucky one. It seems the only thing Mom has to live for is talking. And complaining. Luckily the two go hand in hand for her.

“I said I’m sorry, Mom.”

She clips me around the ear. Not hard, but enough to show me her disappointment. Then she hugs me. “I made meatloaf, Joe. Meatloaf. Your favorite.”

I hand her the rose I picked from Angela’s garden. It’s slightly crushed, but Mom’s expression is priceless when I hand over the red flower.

“Oh, you’re so thoughtful, Joe,” she says, taking it to her nose to smell.

I shrug. “Just wanted to make you happy,” I say, and even for an optimist like me that’s always been a pretty ambitious goal. Her smile is making me smile.

“Ow,” she says, pricking her finger on one of the thorns. “You give me a rose with thorns? What sort of son are you, Joe?”

Obviously a bad one. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“You don’t think enough, Joe. That’s always been your problem. Along with always being late. I’ll put it in water,” she says, and steps aside. “You might as well come in.”

She closes the door behind me and I follow her down the hallway to the kitchen, passing photographs of my dead dad, a cactus that has looked dead from the day she got it, and a seascape painting of a place my mother would maybe like to visit. The Formica-top table has been set for two.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks, putting the rose into a glass.

“I’m fine,” I say, tightening my jacket. It’s always cold in this house.

“The supermarket has Coke on special.”

“I’m fine.”

“Three dollars for a six pack,” she says. “Here, I’ll find you the receipt.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I said I’m fine.”

“It’s no hassle.”

She wanders off, leaving me alone. There’s no way to say it nicely, but my mother is getting crazier by the day. I believe her that Coke is on special, yet she still feels the need to show me the receipt. A few minutes go by where all I can do is look at the oven and microwave, so I spend the time figuring just how awkward it would be to fit an entire person into either one of them. When she comes back, she has also found the supermarket flyer advertising the Coke.

I nod. “Three dollars, huh? Amazing.”

“So you’ll have one then?”

“Sure.” It’s the easiest option.

She serves dinner. We sit down and begin eating. The dining room connects to the kitchen, and the only view I have is either of my mother or the wall behind her, so I watch the wall. Some of these appliances here went out of date when electricity was invented, and the rest not long after. The linoleum floor looks like it was made from Kermit the Frog after he was hunted down and skinned. The dining table is the color of bananas. The legs are cold metal. The chairs are padded and wobble slightly when I move. Mom’s has been reinforced.

“How was your day?” she asks. A tiny piece of carrot is stuck on her chin. One of the moles there looks as though it’s trying to skewer it.

“Good.”

“I haven’t heard from you all week.”

The meatloaf is a little dry, but I don’t dare add any more gravy to it in case my mother thinks I’m unhappy with it. “I’ve been busy with homework.”

“The job?”

“The job.”

“Your cousin Gregory is getting married. Did you know?”

I do now. “Really?”

“When are you going to find yourself a wife, Joe?”

I’ve noticed that old people always chew with their mouths open, so you get to hear the food slopping against the roof of their mouth. It’s because they’re always about to say something.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“You’re not gay, are you, son?”

She says this while still chewing. Like it’s no big deal. Like she just said, “That shirt looks good on you,” or “Nice weather we’re having.”

“I’m not gay, Mom.”

In fact, it isn’t that big a deal. I have nothing against gay people. Nothing at all. They are, after all, just people. Like anybody else. Now it’s people I have something against.

“Huh,” she huffs.

I pause with a forkful of meatloaf inches from my mouth. “What?”

“Nothing.”

The meatloaf goes back onto the plate. “What, Mom?”

“I’m just wondering why you don’t ever bring a girl around.”

I shrug.

“Men shouldn’t be gay, Joe. It’s not …” she searches for the word, “fair.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She seems happy to let the subject go, and I’m happy to let her. We eat in silence for a minute, which is all my mother can handle before talking again. “I started a jigsaw puzzle today.”

I’m not brave enough to tell her I’ll alert the media. Instead I go with, “Uh huh.”

“It was on special. Down from thirty dollars to twelve.”

“Bargain.”

“Here, I’ll find you the receipt.”

I add more gravy to my dinner and try to eat quicker while she’s gone, knowing that eating quickly doesn’t necessarily mean a quick escape, but also knowing it’s worth a shot. I watch the clocks on the microwave and the oven, and I race them against the clock hanging on the wall, but they all drag along at the same pace. It doesn’t take Mom long to find the receipt so I figure she must have kept it aside to show me. She waddles over with the advertising flyer as well. I do my best to calm my excitement.

“See? Twelve dollars.”

“Yeah, I see.” The flyer has Chockablock with Entertainment written across it. I wonder what the person was thinking when they wrote that. Or what they were on.

“That’s eighteen dollars. Well, actually it was twenty-nine ninety-five down to twelve dollars, so that’s eighteen dollars and ninety-five cents.”

I do the arithmetic as she talks to me, and quickly see she’s off by a dollar. Best not to say anything. I’m figuring if she realizes she saved eighteen dollars and not nineteen, she’s going to take it back. Even after she’s done the puzzle.

“It’s of the Titanic, Joe,” she says, even though the picture in the flyer is of a large boat with the word Titanic stenciled across its helm. “You know, the boat?”

“Oh, that Titanic.”

“A real tragedy.”

“The movie?”

“The boat.”

“I hear it sank.”

“Are you sure you’re not gay, Joe?”

“I’d know, wouldn’t I?”

After dinner, I offer to clean up, even though I know what she’s going to say.

“You think I want you around here to be my maid? Sit down, Joe. I’ll clean up. What sort of mother won’t take care of her son? I’ll tell you what sort—a bad mother, that’s who.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I don’t want you to do it. Now go and wait in the living room.”

I sit down in the living room and stare at the TV. There’s a news bulletin on. Something about a dead body. Home invasion. I change channels. Finally Mom comes through to the living room carrying a cup of tea for herself and nothing for me.

“It seems my whole life was spent cleaning up after your father, and now I’m spending the rest of it cleaning up after you.”

“I offered to help, Mom,” I say, standing up.

“Well, it’s too late now. It’s done,” she snaps. “You should learn to appreciate your mother, Joe. I’m all you have.”

I know this speech, and have apologized as many times as I’ve heard it. I say I’m sorry once again, and it seems offering apologies to my mother makes up fifty percent of my conversations with her. She sits down and we watch some TV—some English drama about people who say nuffink instead of nothing, and I don’t even know what in the hell bollocks really means.

Mom watches it as if she can’t already predict that Fay is sleeping with Edgar for his inheritance, and Karen is pregnant from Stewart—the town drunk and her long-lost brother. When the commercials come on, she fills me in on what the characters have been up to, as if they’re part of the family. At least she isn’t offering to cook them meatloaf. I listen and nod and forget what she says within seconds. Like a goldfish. When it comes back on, I end up watching the carpet, finding more entertainment in the brown, symmetrical patterns that were all the rage back in the fifties—proving that everybody was completely mad back then.

The drama ends and the highly depressing theme music starts to play. As sad as the tune is, I’m feeling in high spirits because that music means it’s time for me to go. Before I leave, Mom tells me more about my cousin Gregory. He has a car. A BMW.

“Why don’t you have a BMW, Joe?”

I’ve never stolen a BMW. “Because I’m not gay.”

I’m the only person on the bus. The driver is old, and his hands shake as I give him the exact change. As we drive along, I start to wonder what would happen if he sneezed. Would his heart explode? Would we career into other traffic? I feel like giving him a dollar tip when he gets me safely to my stop, but I figure the excitement will finish off what the Grim Reaper started years ago. He wishes me a good night as I leave the bus, but I don’t know if he really means it. I don’t wish him anything back. I’m not looking to make any friends. Especially old ones.

When I get home I step into the shower and spend an hour washing away my mother. When I climb out, I spend some time with Pickle and Jehovah. They look happy to see me. A few minutes later and it’s lights out. I slip into bed. I don’t ever dream, and tonight is going to be no exception.

I think of Angela and Fluffy, and finally I think of nothing.