Selling the Drama Read online

  Selling the Drama

  By Theresa Smith

  Copyright © 2015 Theresa Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Smashwords

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  For Stephanie

  A chance meeting

  A lasting friendship

  You look at me that way

  And say I must not love you

  Missing the point entirely with your pragmatic view of the world

  Your black is black and white is white with nothing ever in between

  Well I am grey

  I am the grey you cannot understand nor allow yourself to accept

  I am the grey that stole under your skin

  I am the grey that moved within your veins

  Breathed air into your lungs and set fire to your imagination

  I am the grey that taught you how to feel

  How to taste the sun

  And inhale the stars

  I am the grey that you reject because you cannot yield to my existence

  I fear for you my love

  I fear for your heart and the consequences of your denial

  I shall wrap my own heart up in grey

  Waiting for the day your black blends with your white

  I will wander through this barren landscape of your tangled ideals

  Clinging to the hope I have left enough of myself within you

  Enough to one day help you see

  That love

  Love is all I ever did to you

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgements

  Soundtrack

  Other titles by this author

  PART ONE

  Early '90s

  The Wonder Years

  CHAPTER ONE

  The stillness should have alerted him right from the outset. It was six o'clock; dinner hour. Evening news time. Pots banging and cutlery clinking; fat hissing in a pan. Lights blazing, downstairs at least, and given the unseasonably cold weather, smoke curling from the chimney. Instead, the house was dark, not just silent, but utterly still. The back step, second from the top, creaked under the weight of his foot, a sound so loud it was almost startling. He thought about turning around right then and there, pausing everything in that eerie moment that existed between what was about to become the new parameter of his life: the before, and the after.

  In the before, he was still a youth. Sixteen years old and already over six feet tall, handsome and smart, athletic and popular. And yes, somewhat naive, despite all that he had witnessed and endured already within his life.

  In the after, he was ruined. The very core of him violated; permanently altered. He aged, within that single moment, leaving his youth behind, its compression an inevitability he realised he had always been waiting for.

  With one foot in the room and one still out, he listened, for any sound at all, a breath, a creaking board overhead; but there was nothing. Just that cloying, heavy stillness and the beat of his own heart. No movement whatsoever from his mother lying twisted on the kitchen floor, her head in a pool of what was undoubtedly her own blood.

  Years of reading the signs, knowing exactly what precipitated his father's rage, he'd slipped out the back door earlier in the evening, intent on disappearing for a few hours. Like a coward. The word fell into a rhythm identical to the pounding of his heart. It taunted him, shouted at him, sneered at him, slapped at him. Knowing the signs, understanding the repercussions; he had still left her to him.

  Once, about a year earlier, he had stood up for her, but she had shouted him down and begged him later to never do it again. To leave well enough alone.

  The wood of the door frame bit into his hands as he gripped it tighter; breathing rapidly becoming a struggle he had to fight to maintain. Panic reigned as a tide of sickness rose within him, such a familiar and unwanted urge, the only thing strong enough to force him to turn away. Stumbling outside, the railing became the only reason he remained standing as the vomit spilled forth. With pain invading every part of his body, the heaving did not let up even long after there was nothing left to hurl. Boneless, a shaking and sweating mess, he sank to the porch floor, resting his head on his knees. Just breathe. In. Out. Repeat. A method of coping he had long ago perfected. Fists clenched to still his trembling hands.

  Leave well enough alone.

  The sounds of the night surrounded him. He needed to get up. Go inside. He urged himself on, rising weakly to his feet, placing one foot forward, then the next. Over and over. Crouching down beside his mother, the instinct to touch her left him. What had that bastard hit her with? Her face; her poor face. Anger and sorrow combined, renewing his focus. That necklace, lying against her bruised throat; it needed to go. Pushing it deep into his pocket, he methodically stripped her of all the offending pieces of compensation she regularly adorned herself with. Each item of jewellery had a story attached to it, and Toby could recite them all. He would not allow her, in these final moments, to be bound to that bastard. What had weighed her down in life would not weigh her down in death. Rising to his feet, the anger within took over, so intense it made his head spin. Whirling around, the closest chair bore the brunt of his rage as he hurled it across the room, the sound of it clattering against the wall silencing even the crickets outside momentarily.

  Leave well enough alone.

  Crossing over to the discarded chair, he wrenched out one of the broken legs and stalked purposefully out of the kitchen. With the piece of wood gripped tightly in hand, he went from room to room, seeking his father, anticipating him lying drunk, determined to find him, willing to stand before him without fear.

  Without mercy.

  He would never again leave well enough alone.

  But the house was empty.

  "Do you have any idea where your father is?"

  "No." Toby stared at the police officer, deliberately keeping his gaze steady.

  "You're certain he is responsible for this?"

  "Yes. I am quite certain." He cast his eyes away from the sympathy so evident before him.

  "I'm sorry. This is a terrible thing that's happened to you."

  He nodded. And they both left it at that.

  It was reported, in the days that followed, as a crime of passion. "The Worst Crime this small community has EVER seen." And that was just the start of the media tags. They quickly moved on to: "Teenage boy survives Massacre", as though his father had gone and taken out half the town in his own kitchen. And the one that made Toby's skin feel tight each time he s
aw it: "Darkness descends over a teenage boy's future," complete with his most recent school picture below it.

  Then they found his father.

  The police were leaning towards suicide, applying the theory that his father had driven his car into that big old tree deliberately, ending his own life out of guilt, perhaps even a sliver of remorse. But Toby knew his father well enough to understand that it was more likely accident than design. That bastard had been too much of a coward to kill himself. And as for guilt and remorse? Toby doubted he even knew the meaning of those states of being. More likely, he'd been panicking, focused only on escape, not paying attention, speeding in an effort to put some distance between himself and the town, when karma had stepped in and taken over. Toby kept these thoughts to himself though, preferring to watch it all unfold rather than actively participate. His personal thoughts mattered little in the end; the result was the same, and he couldn't say that he was sorry for it.

  There was a macabre celebrity status bestowed upon him in the early stages of emergence from the tragedy. Everyone was full of offers for him to stay with them. Sympathetic hugs, pats on the back, food parcels; these gestures of support and goodwill were all pressed upon him by shocked members of the community. And they were shocked, because it was shocking, in a totally shocked out way that made your jaw drop. Who in the world would ever have picked Doc Harrison as a wife beater? It just didn't seem plausible. He wasn't the type! He was a professional; charming and philanthropic, such a pillar of the community. Everyone knew that men who beat their wives were the ones who had nothing going for them; the ones who were unemployed, drug addicted, and alcoholic - those so frustrated within their own existence upon the fringe of society, that they felt it was their due to inflict their encumbered circumstances onto their families in the form of unrestricted violence. Perhaps, it begged to be considered, that Doc Harrison had been set up? Surely, there was more to this story, another explanation, a possibility that this was all a terrible misunderstanding. While these well-wishers sought absolution for their hero, they unwittingly set about justifying the death of an innocent woman to the face of the son who had been left behind.

  In the wake of their disillusion, Toby found their consequent expressions of sympathy disingenuous, and increasingly hard to accept. His mother had been killed by a narcissistic predator within the sanctuary of her own home. There was no misunderstanding, nor was there any justification. With the clarity of hindsight, Toby was able to see the limitations that had been put upon his mother within the confines of such a small community. In her bid to maintain her dignity, she had fooled everyone and trapped herself, consequently assisting in the elevation of a monster to a status of which he had no right to occupy. Toby hated every one of them; every person who shook their head sadly in his direction, clucked their tongue in sympathy, and had the audacity to think a fucking pie could make up for the fact that he no longer had a mother.

  A temporary refuge was offered by the police officer who had been the first to arrive at the house on that grim evening. His name was Ian. He was a young man, married, with two small children. Toby felt safer with this option, less likely to be questioned by the curious, and overwhelmed by the sympathetic. He found that while there was sympathy for him within this house, it was kept in check and subsequently less contrived than that of the general community. He could accept what was being given to him by Ian and his wife; it didn't enrage him or make him sick. It merely made life a little easier.

  "Toby, there's an item in the paper today about your family." Ian had the offending rag rolled up in his hand, tapping it against his leg with a nervous beat.

  Toby shrugged. "What day has there not been something since this happened?" He no longer read the stories. His entire life had been one long stretch of watching his father beat his mother until she was broken, only to then spend an inordinate amount of time piecing her back together with his medical attentions so that he could break her apart all over again once she was healed. Over and over. Toby had no interest in reading a jaded and inaccurate version of his own life. Living it was enough.

  Ian looked uncomfortable though as he took a seat across from Toby at the table. He smoothed the paper out, nudging it forward.

  "It's just sensationalism, Toby. Because of who your family is. Rubbish. It's all rubbish." Rachael, Ian's wife, banged the frying pan into the sink, her anger at the media being taken out on the kitchenware. "Just throw the stupid paper away, Ian!" Her back was stiff as she ran the hot water over the pan, her arms jerking with fury.

  Toby sighed, long and hard. "So, what is it about this time?"

  Ian opened the paper, spreading it out in front of Toby. A double page, with colour photos. Because of who his family were. Because of what they represented. How the mighty can fall. Toby stared at the headline, glanced at the pictures. He didn't need to read it. This was his life and he was intimately familiar with its history, in the way that all heirs to a dynasty know who and what they are. Looking up at Ian, he met the sympathetic gaze being levelled at him with a shrug.

  "There's a theory about this sort of thing," Toby said, sitting back with an ease he did not feel, pushing the paper away with his fingertips. "Glorying in the fall of others. Especially in the fall of people who are perceived as having more. More money, more brains, more beauty. You cut them down to size. Teach them a lesson for getting ahead of themselves." He shook his head and looked away. He saw Rachael, out of the corner of his eye, shaking her head also. "All of this," he gestured to the paper, "is public information. Anyone can look up the history of my family in the library. This is not news. I don't care what it says."

  Ian tapped the paper, dropping his gaze back down to the table. "Sure enough. It goes through the history of your grandfather's business dealings, the fortune he made, his brilliance-"

  "The shady deals? Illegal property acquisitions? My grandmother? Does it mention her? It must do. It would be no story without all those gory details." That the media would seek to drag his maternal family through the mud at this time should come as no surprise. His grandfather's business had long been open to speculation, the regurgitation of such a topic a mere indication of how thin on the ground for news they must really be. What angered him most about a story such as this was the insensitivity of rehashing his grandmother's suicide in the name of selling papers. He had read enough about it over the course of his life in the archived articles in his grandfather's library. He did not need to read about it once more. It was a story that had no place in this current tragedy, yet here it was, linked and overshadowing, shifting the focus from his father's crime, transferring the guilt to his family, and subsequently diminishing what had been done to his mother. It was so wrong. So incredibly wrong.

  Full of anger, Toby turned his rage outward. "Tell me one thing. Does the article mention how my father attached himself to my mother like a leech, sucking her dry over the years until she was nothing but a shell of what she could have been? Does the article mention anything at all about my mother in any way other than to refer to her as someone's daughter or wife? Does the article give her any credit at all for having been alive?! She was my mother! Does that article condemn my father for taking her away from me?" Toby stood abruptly, the chair skidding back behind him, the noise loud and abrupt, giving Rachael cause to jump. Breathing heavily, he covered his face with his hands, trying desperately to ground away the tears that were threatening to drown him. It was mortifying to feel so overcome. He was too old to cry.

  Rachael whirled at the sink and faced them both. "I told you to throw it away!" She pointed at Ian, accusingly, her voice shrill as she continued to rail at him. "He's been through enough! He doesn't need to read a bloody hyped up saga about his own family." She shook her head, anger still evident as she trembled before them.

  "I'm sorry." Ian was contrite, closing the paper as he made to stand.

  Toby swallowed deeply, removing his hands, feeling a measure of emotional control once more. Picking the chair up
from where he'd knocked it over, he slid it into place, resting his hands onto the back of it. The loss and confusion swirling within him had never been so overwhelming as it was in this moment. Even forming words had become a struggle. Keeping his eyes downcast, he spoke with a heavy tone, breaking over the words as he attempted to convey his fear. "I don't know what's going to happen to me. My only aunt lives in England and I have no interest in moving over there - not that she would probably offer. She and my father hated each other. I've hardly ever heard from her." He paused, overcome once again by the hopelessness of his situation. While he had the financial means to support himself, at sixteen, he was still too young to be declared as an adult. "I don't want to end up in a group home in the city."

  "It won't come to that. I'm sure something will come up. There are foster families-"

  "Who want teenagers? From a violent home?" Toby interjected.

  Ian sagged a little at those words and Rachael turned back to face the sink.

  "I tried to get her to leave." Toby's words pierced the tension within the kitchen. "The money was all hers, the house was hers, all of it. But she just wouldn't do it."

  Rachael pressed the tea towel to her face.

  "She loved him," he stated. The emptiness of that filled him. The waste. It was more than he could bear.

  Ian tossed the paper directly into the bin. Before he could make any reply, Toby spoke once more.

  "Everyone loved him." He stared out of the window past Ian's shoulder. There was rain streaming down the outside of the glass, a fog forming on the inside from the warmth of the kitchen. Toby caught Ian's gaze and held it. "He never fooled me."

  "I don't think many people could."

  When a neatly dressed woman showed up at the police station claiming to be his godmother, she was greeted with so much enthusiasm it was a wonder she didn't turn on her heel and flee at the first opportunity. Toby had never seen her in his life, but given that their last meeting had apparently been when he was six weeks old, his lack of memory of the encounter was probably understandable. She had photographs, of herself with his mother, an unfolding of years that depicted a longstanding friendship, one that appeared to have started quite early on in their lives, lasting up until this much celebrated christening of his. She even had a couple of photos of herself holding Toby at his christening, her young face pretty and beaming as she held him close, her own belly swollen with pregnancy. The deal breaker? She had a certificate, signed by a priest declaring her as his godmother.