Only the Dead by Ben Sanders Page B

to be a nightly occurrence .
    Sean doesn’t like the wife. She swears a lot. She doesn’t have a job. She has a yen for daytime TV. She ignores Sean when he’s around her, and criticises him when she thinks he can’t hear. Her favourite rhetoric, laden with contempt: ‘Why would you want to look after a kid that’s not even yours? He never says anything. I don’t even know if he can speak. He’s probably retarded or something. Why would you even want to look after a kid like that ?’
    Sean doesn’t know the answer to that last question. He doesn’t know why Derren would want to look after him. He also doesn’t know why the wife’s wellbeing worries him. Certainly, there’s no reciprocal concern. Regardless, he’s upstairs in his bedroom so he can hear what’s happening and make sure everything turns out okay. He doesn’t even know what they’re arguing about. He thinks maybe they don’t either. But this is the third night of shouting. The second night the wife’s been driven to tears and retreated to the bedroom. Derren isn’t one to offer any slack, though: he follows her in and slams the door and stays on the front foot. He cracks a fist on something hard to emphasise his position on the matter at hand .
    Sean sits on his bed and listens. There’s a pattern to the conflict. Snivelling mumbles followed by shouts, in quick, predictable rhythm. He hugs his knees and looks out his window. The house is a big old weatherboard place on a rectangular lot. A wooden fence borders the back yard. Derren keeps things air-force neat: the lawn’s mowed in precise alternating bands. All yard clutter is contained in a shed in the back corner. The bench and barbell Derren uses every day from six-thirty p.m. to seven prior to his run has been stowed indoors. The only sign anything was ever there is two parallel indentations stamped in the grass. Derren takes care to put the bench in a slightly different position every day, so the lawn has a chance to recover .
    The view from Sean’s window is a grid of side-by-side boundary fences, none of the yards as tidy as Derren’s, none of the indoor conversations as heated. Next door, a guy’s dumping a plastic bin liner in a metal trash can, ignorant of the nearby conflict. Sean wonders whether people really are clueless to others’ lives. Maybe the bin liner man is only pretending to know nothing of nearby troubles. Derren makes a hell of a racket, and the guy has actually visited a couple of times. He’s sat in the kitchen with Derren and drunk beer, legs stretched and crossed beneath the table, Lion Red perched atop his gut, laughing with the sudden harshness pull-tabs make when you rip them back suddenly. Sean knows the bin liner man likes to complain about his wife. He doubts Derren cares what the bin liner man does to his own wife, and in this respect it’s probably a two-way street. Beer and bloke-chat have forged the bond. Derren will get a free ride from the bin liner man .
    Sean gets off the bed and steps to the door. Acoustics are better here. The wife’s tears have ceased. Her volume’sbuilt. Derren’s has, too. Everything overlaps: verbal white noise. Sean’s worried. He knows when Derren gets wound up he can hit people. Sean found out the hard way when Derren found him snooping in his cupboard. Sean hadn’t found much. Some shoe boxes and some clothes, a light blue uniform on a hanger at one end. He’d thought Derren had been outside, mowing the lawn. He hadn’t noticed the motor stop. He hadn’t noticed Derren come up the stairs either. Derren grabbed him from behind by the neck, and he got a jolt that stole his breath. And Derren spun him round and got him face to face, and Sean could smell the rank, hot sweat on him, and see the dust and grime trapped in the perspiration on his neck. And Derren was so pissed off his lips curled inwards on his teeth, mouth just a tight horizontal gash. He pulled Sean close and whispered, ‘If I catch you in here