The pounding stopped. Muffled voices and heavy footfalls moved above. A door opened and snapped shut. Then an unshaven man appeared on the landing. “Oh, hey. She’ll pro’ly need a minute.” He chuckled, skipping down the stairs two at a time, then dashing out the door, reeking of sweat and chemicals.
Jack took the stairs. “Mum?”
A stench hit him the moment he reached the second floor. Sharp and sour, layered with the sweetness of decay. A mix of rotting food, unwashed sheets, and the acrid odor of her medicine that always clung to the back of his throat.
“Mum?” Floorboards creaked under years of dust.
The flat was freezing.
He pushed open the door to her room and stilled at the threshold.
“Jackie? Is that you?” Her voice was sand and glue.
Reaching for the dark bottle on the nightstand, she took a long swig and coughed. Then she fished a half-smoked cigarette from the overflowing amber ashtray brimming with butts and trash. “I wasn’t expecting you. I would have cleaned up.”
A lie.
“The chancellor’s going away on business.”
Her eyes, when they found his, were tinged with yellow. The eyes of a stranger. She took his measure as the cherry of her cigarette glowed in the shadows, blowing out a long stream of smoke.
“I haven’t been feeling well.”
Another excuse.
Her hair hung in lank strings around her gaunt face. She’d always been thin, but now she looked skeletal, hollowed out, as if something had reached inside her and scooped out everything that mattered.
“Is that a new jacket?” she asked, like an accountant reviewing some sort of ledger. “You were gone a while this time. I’m owed some money.”
Disgust kept him from responding.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she snapped, taking another long drag from her cigarette. “Like you’re better than me.”
He glanced at the dresser. Burnt spoons, glass pipes, discarded needles… “How can you live like this?”
A wet, ugly laugh escaped with a puff of smoke, only to devolve into a fit of coughing.
“This shit is making you sick.”
“Jackie—”
“Don’t.” The word cracked through the smoky air like a whip. “Don’t call me that anymore.”
“It’s your name.”
“I go by Jack.” Only one person still called him Jackie, and he hated that person with every ounce of his soul.
“I’m sorry this isn’t the luxury you’re used to. Things have been hard.”
“Hard?” He laughed without humor, jaw clenching, but his fury only flared. “Hard?!” He swept his hand across her dresser in one violent motion. Glass shattered. Powder scattered. A pipe rolled beneath the bed, disappearing into the dusty shadows. “You have no idea what hard is!”
“Jackie!”
“Eight years!” he shouted, the anger tearing out of him like shrapnel. “Eight years, I’ve been in that house. Eight years of…of…” He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t name it. But the shape of it hung between them, vast and obscene. “You sold me! You knew what he was, what he would do, and you sold me anyway. And for what?” He shoved the dresser, and it crashed to the floor.
His mother screamed and scrambled to the wall. “Stop it!”
“Eight years, for what?! For this? For—” He kicked at the debris on the floor. “For drugs?”
