Human Remains

time, love. You sure you don’t want us to keep an eye on things next door?’
    ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get the post redirected anyway.’ I wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible when a person was deceased, but I didn’t want him looking for an excuse to get back inside the house.
    ‘You sure you want to do that? I mean, we can always…’
    ‘No, Len. Honestly, you’ve done enough. Thanks.’
    I turned and started to head down the path, back to the car. It was dark, and cold, and I wanted to get home now, shut the door and be on my own where nobody could see me.

Colin
     
     
    Work today was distracting, and monumentally dull. I feel as though I am beyond all this now, as though I have a more entrancing destiny before me than dealing with council finances.
    Patience is one of my strongest virtues, I’ve always thought. In the year following my father’s death, I found it difficult to engage at school. It all felt so hideously pointless. I got into trouble regularly, although I was never disruptive. If the subject failed to interest me, I sat in the class and stared straight ahead, relentlessly patient and tirelessly disconsolate, regardless of what the rest of the class was tasked with doing.
    ‘Friedland,’ the master would say, ‘are you not going to make an attempt?’
    ‘No,’ I’d say, if I replied at all.
    ‘No,
sir
.’
    I would stare back with what they must have thought of as insolence. To me it was indifference.
    ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough. You shall go to the headmaster’s office.’
    This happened on an almost daily basis. I was caned. These were the days when caning was not only allowed but, in the British public school system, a tradition. I didn’t even feel the pain, not in any way that mattered. I didn’t feel the humiliation. The punishments had no effect on me at all. The headmaster knew I wasn’t stupid. At first, he was even sympathetic – having lost his own father at a young age – but his patience only lasted for a short while.
    Stiff upper lip, that was the ticket. Putting the needs of your
compadres
ahead of yourself. Playing the game.
    And I wasn’t playing.
    In the end he almost expected me; if I wasn’t in his office before lunch he started to wonder where I was. My mother was called in. It was suggested that I might like to transfer to a different school, that I might be better suited elsewhere. A fresh start. My mother stared vacantly ahead, numbed by whichever benzodiazepine they were trying her on this month, while I stood behind her in the headmaster’s office, hands sullenly in my pockets even though I’d been caned for just such insouciance the day before.
    ‘She doesn’t care,’ I said.
    ‘Friedland,’ the headmaster said, ‘you are present only at your mother’s request. You are expected to hold your silence here.’
    ‘I do care,’ she said, though the tone of her voice suggested otherwise. ‘I just don’t know what to do about it.’
    The money to send me to the school had been my father’s. She had his pension, and a payout, but she was not used to having to deal with matters such as this. She had never worked, never had to pay a bill, never had to speak to anybody about anything more taxing than what to have for dinner and where to go on holiday.
    The headmaster dismissed us both shortly afterwards, recognising another brick wall behind all the others I’d constructed in the past few weeks.
    In the end, I made everything much easier for him. Two days after the meeting with Mother, a sixth form boy passed some comment on my father and my behaviour as our paths crossed in the corridor. Later in the evening I found him alone, took him into one of the empty classrooms and punched him until he was unconscious and bleeding.
    The effort of finding another school willing to take me was beyond my mother. Additionally, as she told me on more than one occasion, since she had no intention of getting a job, she needed to save what was left of Father’s life insurance payout for her living expenses.
    And so I was enrolled into the nearest comprehensive for the remainder of my school years.
     
     
    At lunchtime Vaughn called to invite me to the Red Lion. It was the first time we’ve been in contact since the dinner party, although I did send him a text thanking him for a super evening. Maybe he interpreted it as sarcastic.
    We sat with our pints in front of us. The television bolted precariously over the corner of the