Escaping from Him

  Liam Livings

  Escaping From Him

  Manifold Press

  Smashwords Edition

  Published by Manifold Press

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  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 book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN: 978-1-908312-28-0

  Text: © Liam Livings 2015

  Cover image: © gyn9038 | iStockphoto.com

  Ebook format: © Manifold Press 2015

  For further details of titles both in print and forthcoming see manifoldpress.co.uk

  Proof-reading and line-editing:

  Zee of Two Marshmallows twomarshmallows.net

  and W.S. Pugh

  Editor: Fiona Pickles

  Characters and situations described in this book are fictional and not intended to portray real persons or situations whatsoever; any resemblances to living persons are purely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  I’d like to thank Fiona Pickles and Julie Bozza from Manifold Press for reading my story, giving me such kind and enthusiastic feedback and agreeing to publish it. Thanks again to Fiona Pickles for the helpful guidance during edits and working on the cover – I am pleased with how it’s all turned out.

  Thanks as ever to my boyfriend for letting me sneak off and write a few hundred more words, avoiding the washing up or other chores. He has been, as always, very supportive.

  Thanks to Sue Brown, who was a wonderful beta reader and who made helpful suggestions to improve the story, as well as pointing out a certain phrase I’d used at least seven times over its pages. As with all my author friends, I am very lucky to have had Sue’s help and kindness.

  Finally, most importantly, thanks to you, the reader who’ve bought this book, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. The characters in this story sort of came to me, one by one, and before I knew it I had a whole cast of people. I hope you enjoy entering their world.

  Thanks,

  Liam Livings xx

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  Spring, Glasgow

  I was crouching under the kitchen table in the shared student house in Glasgow. I knew he was due back any moment and wanted to surprise him; to make him smile. I'd checked the bucket of change on my bedroom floor and knew it would be toast again for dinner. I looked at the bits of cereal from my house-mates' breakfasts, and balls of dust and hair, and then brushed my trousers down, slightly regretting my decision to wear cream chinos.

  I heard the front door close and he shouted my name up the stairs in his deep Scottish accent. He walked into the kitchen and said, "Ford, hello Ford, where are you?"

  I suppressed a giggle.

  Once in the kitchen, he carried on shouting my name. He looked under the table and our eyes met. His bright green eyes crinkled at the edges as he smiled. "What sort of a wally are you? Hiding here, again?" He knelt on the floor and shuffled next to me under the table. "I'm going to miss this, when I move out."

  "Me too." I put my hand on his knee. "How was your day?"

  He leant forward and kissed me, lingering a bit with his tongue.

  I felt his smooth face on mine. "What was that for?" I smiled, holding his pale hand as it rested on my knee.

  "For being you. For letting me stay here. For being here, under the table, again. For making me smile at the end of a long day. For being silly. For being a wally. All these things."

  I shrugged. "Oh, right." I became intensely interested in a corn flake next to my shoe.

  "I love you."

  That was the first time he'd said those words to me, but it felt so normal, natural, right, easy. It was hardly a Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant rom-com setting, under the table with the mud and cereal, but those three words meant so much to me. Those three words were in such stark contrast to when I'd heard them the whole time I'd spent in that little flat in north London. "I love you more." I smiled to myself, still avoiding eye contact.

  "Now that, I doubt." He smiled the familiar grin I knew meant one thing. "What you thinking?" He pulled my face up towards his, away from the dirty lino I'd been staring at.

  I shrugged. "It’s toast again tonight. That alright?"

  He nodded, his tight ginger curls swinging. "All you have to know is that I love you."

  "Whenever I see a black bin bag, I think about what I did."

  "I know what you did, and I know why you did it. But you're not him any more. You're Ford, the new you, and I love you." He leant forward and hugged me tight.

  I looked at the black bin bag in the far corner of the kitchen then closed my eyes.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The previous summer, London, August,

  35 degrees Celsius

  I threw his stuff into some black bin bags: clothes, CDs, DVDs, toiletries, books; all mixed together. All things from different 'zones' of the flat, where normally they wouldn't mix - according to Chris's rules - all mixed into the bags. I kicked the bags down the stairs; they landed by the front door of the block of flats.

  But this didn't just come from nowhere. This is not the sort of thing I normally do. I am not that person. But on that day, I found myself doing it, because I had no choice. All the events prior to that moment had led me to that point of standing at the top of the stairs, kicking his stuff down in a bag.

  I looked around the flat - I still didn't feel I could describe it as 'our flat' since I couldn't see any of my stuff anywhere. I shook that thought from my mind. I noticed the evenly distributed coasters on the coffee table in the middle of the room. The evenly fanned magazines he always insisted on keeping, which I wasn't really allowed to move: "Or it messes them up, babe," Chris had said.

  In the corner, the air conditioning unit - I'd named it Dave - buzzed and whirred, trying to combat the thick air filling the flat. I walked to the window over-looking the car park. I tried to open it to let in fresh air, rather than the recycled manufactured stale air Dave was spitting out.

  Locked.

  Chris had locked the windows. "No point having the air conditioning if we have the windows open, babe."

  But where were the keys? I felt my contact lenses starting to peel off my pupils in the dryness of the air conditioned room. Sweat poured from my armpits and left a cold feeling on my T-shirt.

  I returned to the sofa - just a plain old sofa it was. I'd wanted a sofa bed when we'd bought it from Ikea doing the smug-couple conga one Saturday a few years ago. We'd just moved into the flat and I wanted it all to be perfect. Chris had just run around the place, throwing things into the trolley without asking me what I thought. He'd looked back, "That's okay isn't it, babe? It's just, I've … " And it hung there, like a bad smell. The 'I've done this before, so I can do it with my eyes closed' comment. For me, it was my first time living with someone. I was only sixteen, four years
ago. We'd bumped into each other in a club in London and he'd taken me home.

  The second week of living in London and I got a shag, stayed away from home, and a boyfriend, all in one night. I thought I'd made it when he asked me to move in to his flat shortly after. Stuck in the care system since I was a teenager due to my birth mum not being able to cope with looking after me as well as herself, I'd ended up in a long term foster home in Bath, but the fact they hadn't wanted to adopt me permanently had stung. So as I got through the later stroppier teenaged years, I stayed out more and more, pushing them to reject me, because really if they loved me that much they'd have adopted me wouldn't they? Until shortly after my sixteenth birthday I ran away to London, staying in a backpackers' hostel in Earl's Court for a few nights until I'd met Chris.

  In Ikea, I'd wanted to do the whole couple-y thing: choosing soft furnishings together, walking around looking adoringly at cushions and bedspreads to see if they matched with the new curtains we'd picked out. Chris had continued to throw it all into the trolley, with a passing glance at me. "You didn't want to hang about here long did you, babe? I thought we'd do this, then get something to eat in the restaurant. They do meatballs and chips. You'll love them. That's okay, babe isn't it?"

  At the mention of meatballs and chips, I was sold. He always knew I would be. I've always been someone ruled by my stomach, despite being, "Eight stone, dripping wet in my boots," as Chris had always said.

  "What about a sofa bed," I said, as we stood next to a nice blue one, which would have gone with our curtains.

  "What do we need that for? How many guests are we going to have?"

  My friends from back home had all said they wanted to stay at ours, "Once you're settled in the new place." A weekend in London was too much to resist for anyone who'd grown up in the outskirts of Bath.

  Chris pulled it from sofa to bed and it stuck half way. "It's not very good. Cheap crap. Best off getting a good sofa and a blow up mattress, babe. Trust me. I've made this mistake before." And he smiled, squeezed my hand and grabbed the label for the sofa he wanted and put it in our trolley.

  Before - yes, before me, he had done it before. He'd told me about The Ex he'd lived with, in their little flat where I'd first stayed. I'd put up with living there for a while, but when I knew we were staying together, I said I didn't want to stay there. "Not in the bed you've shared with him." I pouted, putting my hands on my hips, looking at the bed he lay in and doing my best little boy lost impression.

  He'd patted the side of the bed, kissed me, told me we'd move somewhere new, somewhere new for both of us, all while he gently peeled off my clothes before climbing on top of me so I could feel his weight and lifting my legs as he pushed into me. Exactly how he knew I liked it.

  Now, I looked at the sofa. Fucking useless sofa. We never did get the air mattress. "Too much clutter," Chris had said. "Where would we put it, babe. They can sleep on the sofa if they stay."

  So only a few of my Bath friends had come and stayed. Even in your late teens, kipping on other people's sofas lost some of its shine.

  Now, I blinked my eyes and both my lenses threatened to jump off my eyeballs and land on the coffee table. I could feel them slowly peeling away from me with every blink.

  I walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water from the all-singing, all-dancing, American-style fridge freezer with a water dispenser. The water was cold and refreshing, but not two thousand pounds of cold and refreshing. "Let's go to the Maldives," I'd said.

  "But we need a new fridge," he'd said.

  I showed him a normal white box in the corner fridge freezer for a few hundred quid. "Plenty left for the holiday."

  In the end, we agreed that we'd already been away a lot that year, and if you buy cheap you buy twice, so we got the all singing all dancing fridge freezer, and I'd got my usual return of SAD that winter. And Chris had taken us out for dinner to cheer me up with his latest sales target related bonus from the estate agents where he worked.

  Now, I leant over the sink and tried to open the kitchen window. It was unlocked, but had a restricting thingy stopping it opening more than two inches. I climbed onto the sink and took a great lung full of the air.

  I finished the water and left the glass on the side, next to my dirty dishes from breakfast.

  I did promise myself I'd clean them up after seeing Lena for lunch. And that was, strictly speaking, a couple of hours ago. And Chris would be back from work in - I looked at the clock in the kitchen - less than an hour.

  I heard Dave suddenly changing up a gear - or down a gear, I was never sure since Chris always drove us everywhere, despite me getting my licence at seventeen. Anyway, Dave was changing something, and he was making more noise than before. I walked into the living room, and Dave was emitting a high pitched whistling and a banging every ten seconds or so. The air he spat out was still cool but not cold any longer.

  I remembered something Lena had said over lunch. "Sweden has one of the highest suicide rate in Europe." She had said this in her Swedish accent, perfectly enunciating every syllable, just like she was telling me it would rain tomorrow.

  I sat up and put down the fork of roll mop she'd bought on her last trip to Ikea. "Really?"

  She nodded. "It is the darkness. These people, they go through the winter - it is six months of dark, and then they just think - fuck this I can't do that again another year, and they jump off a bridge, or something." She shrugged and chewed her roll mop. "Ready for the meatballs and chips yet, the oven has gone beep, I think?"

  I nodded. "So what are you saying? Why are you telling me this? I'm not in Sweden, neither are you any more, actually? It was too depressing for you, so you escaped."

  She was over by the kitchen dishing up chips and meatballs onto our plates. "I did not escape actually. I came here to study and then I have stayed for work."

  "Funny how there's not so many international photography studios in Sweden as in London isn't it?" I smiled and brought my empty starter plate to the kitchen.

  Lena slapped my shoulder. "You can fuck off, too. I can throw this out of the window and you will go hungry. All these Swedish people throwing their lives away, but at least they make a decision to actually throw it away. Some people live their life, by half living it, and they are not happy. So which is the worst, ending it, or carry on live it and not live it right?"

  I smiled at her slightly broken English, but I got her point. Her carefully enunciated words put my West Country burr to shame.

  "Darryl, I love you. You know this. But every time it is the same thing. Chris this, Chris that. And every time I ask you why you do stay with this man? And you tell me you love him. But me, I do not think you do."

  I hadn't replied to that one. I'd taken my plate of meatballs and chips, drenched it in the special gravy she'd made, and added a generous helping of the special lingonberry jam they serve and I'd chewed slowly, staring out of the window across her perfect kitchen, which was exactly as she wanted it: a bit messy with lots of yellow and blue accessories - the colours of the Swedish flag.

  Now, I rubbed my eyes slowly to prevent my contact lenses falling out, walked to the storage cupboard housing the washing machine (not a washer dryer, I'd won that argument, eventually) picked up Chris's tool box and returned to the corner where Dave sat making an even louder noise than before. Now the whistling and banging were joined by a grinding sound of metal against metal, getting louder and louder.

  I opened the tool box and searched for a cross head screwdriver to match Dave's external casing. At the bottom of the tool box, I saw a large metal headed hammer. Its head glistened silver, twice the size of the other hammers lying next to it. It was the hammer of hammers, it was a size queen in the hammer world. I picked it up and was shocked by its weight.

  I played with it in my hands, feeling its weight and cold metal head and blinked as my lenses again threatened to leave my eyes. I held it above my head and brought it down in the middle of Dave's casing, causing a deep dent. The s
ound of Dave's metal against metal intensified. I smashed the hammer again, this time slightly to the right of the previous blow. I was enjoying this now. The third blow was along to the left of the first. The three dents formed a neat line along its casing. Chris would be pleased with the neatness - if I hadn't just broken his prized air con unit. One side of the unit had fallen off, revealing Dave’s insides as they spilled onto the floor: nuts, bolts, a little circuit board, some copper wires, a fan, some piping oozed some sort of liquid onto the floor.

  Dave was silent. The cool breeze had stopped blowing into my eyes. I put the hammer back into the tool box and sat on the floor panting.

  Fuck! Where did that come from?

  Was it the heat of the summer's day? Was it the bloody air conditioning unit? What had Dave really done to me? He was a perfectly innocent air conditioning unit, puffing out cold air, and I'd killed him. Dead. Just like that. Was it my lunch with Lena and her little pep talks she always dropped in amongst the Swedish delicacies?

  I looked around the room and searched for my things - items which had my choice stamped on them. In the whole of the living room, there was only a DVD box left out from this morning when I'd been killing time before seeing Lena. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert - one of my favourite films, and I'd only just found time to watch it on my own. "It's not for me," Chris had said the first time I suggested we watch it. "Too gay." And that was the end of that conversation. I'd enjoyed watching it alone in the flat earlier that summer's day.

  I looked into the kitchen, the pile of dirty plates still on the side.

  I'll clear up the broken Dave bits later. I'm definitely going a bit stir crazy here. I'll jump on the Tube and go to Camden for a bit.