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In the next dream I had I was sitting with Anthony in the studio of his house. It made sense, the studio was the heart of our relationship, a representation of everything that brought us together. All around us the house was on fire. Flames licked the walls and shimmered around all his equipment, slowly eating away at the mixing desks and the guitars. One of his eyes was swollen shut and his face was bent and disfigured from being beaten, just like it had been the last time I had seen him.
“This is the end,” I said
“I know,” he said. “But this is how it was supposed to happen.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
“We were like stars,” he said. “We burned so brightly that we burned out.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore without you,” I said.
“You were someone before me,” he said.
“I was someone I didn’t want to be. I don’t want to remember you like this. You’re all broken. Why is your face like that?”
“Because this is how you left me,” he said.
The flames crackled and got closer so I could feel the heat from them searing my arms and legs.
“I can’t let you go,” I said. “I don’t want to wake up. Can I just go to sleep? Can I just sleep here next to you forever?”
I reached out to touch him but the flames sprung up between us creating a wall that I could just barely see him through. I tried to look away as the flames crawled over his hair and face and ate away the flesh that made up his features but I was fixed to the spot, eyes glued to the skeleton that was slowly appearing before me as everything that made Anthony, Anthony disappeared. I opened my mouth to scream and found myself jolted back to consciousness in my hospital bed.
When I opened my eyes there was a man standing in my room. He had his back to me but I could see that he was tall and built like a rugby player. He was yellow-blonde and dressed in the uniform of the upper-middle class, tailored blue jeans, Paul Smith striped shirt with matching pastel jumper and loafers.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked him.
Oh, you’re awake,” he said, turning to face me.
I was getting sick of people’s shocked exclamations at my state of awareness, like I had woke up from a ten year long coma.
As he faced me, it felt like I had been smacked in the face all over again. His face was painfully familiar; the hint of a curl in his fair hair, his wide-set baby blue eyes, the fullness of his cheeks, leading to a slight point in his chin.
“I’m Ross Bathurst,” he said. “I’m Kayla’s father.”
“Kayla doesn’t have a father,” I said.
“We’ve done DNA tests,” he said. “I am, without any doubt, Kayla’s biological father.”
It was hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Do you honestly believe that forgetting to wear a condom when you fucked my junkie mother six years ago makes you anything to Kayla? Do you know how to get her to sleep at night? Do you know what she’s afraid of or what music she likes or how she got the scar on her left knee?”
“I understand that you’re upset and angry, Eric,” said Ross.
“You understand absolutely nothing about me,” I said. “And even less about Kayla.”
“I know that you lost your… partner in the attack.”
“Don’t,” I said. “You don’t get to say his name. There’s only one other thing you get to tell me and that is where exactly my sister is.”
“She’s with my wife and our little girl. We’re all staying in a hotel a couple of blocks away.”
“As soon as they let me out of here, I’ll come and pick her up,” I said.
Ross sighed. “I’ll bring her to come and see you,” he said. “But I want to tell you some stuff first. There are things I need to explain.”
“You really don’t,” I said.
“I can see that this is too much for you right now,” said Ross. “I’ll come back when visiting hours open again this afternoon. Good-bye, Eric.”
I turned over with an immense amount of effort as my ribs screamed in protest and faced the wall so I didn’t have to look at him.
The truth was now that I had seen Ross Bathurst, he looked familiar. I remember him coming to the flat a couple of times with my mother. She had never introduced him to me, I had just passed him in the hallway occasionally as I got ready to go to school. I remember knowing he was there because he would leave his briefcase on the kitchen table, in fact I was pretty sure I had rifled through it on a couple of occasions and liberated some of his change from the pockets. He was the businessman who had completely broken my mother’s heart. I wondered if she had felt at that moment the way I felt right now. I wondered if she had felt like someone had ripped out her heart and told her that she should learn to carry on living without it, moving like some kind of ghost-shell in amongst the living but not one of them.
She was the lucky one. I think I could have bourn it if Anthony left me. If he had turned around one day and told me that he didn’t love me or that he had fallen in love with someone else and he didn’t want me anymore I would have been angry. I would have been crushed. I would have wished just as hard as I wished now that I could wake up and discover that I had imagined the whole thing. But I could have survived. Knowing that he was alive somewhere under the same stars that I was, breathing the same air would have been enough reason for me to keep bothering to exist. I could have spent my time imagining what he was doing and hoping that whoever was holding him made him smile wide enough to make that dimple pop out next to his mouth. And I could have held alive a dream that one day, some day that he would come back to me and forgive me and love me again or even that he might just ring me and let me hear his voice. It would have been enough. This existence where he had vanished, where I knew that he would never utter another word again or smile another smile or ever let me earn his forgiveness for what I had done, made it feel like there was nothing beneath my feet and if I took a single step I would fall through the universe.
