Hemingway Man

CHAPTER I

Leonard Cohen had a dirty, under-his-guts voice.

I wanted to punch him in the throat to make him stop singing sometimes. All of his little jokes about being 'a singer with a golden voice' could go, but right now, I couldn't live without him.

I woke up on a Tuesday morning.

Maybe it was Tuesday.

I didn't care enough to flip open a calendar and see how many squares I'd lived through since I last checked. My arm was draped over my stereo, my prized possession. It was a cheap three disc changer that only changed discs two and three. Leonard was spinning on repeat in tray two.

Song six.

I Can't Forget.

My face was glued to the pillowcase by a mixture of tears, snot, and slobber. I peeled the pillow away from my face and got out of bed. My brother Connor and I had rooms at the end of the hallway directly facing each other. He'd just painted his room dark blue, and I thought it was really cool.

My room was a sick white.

The kind of white that made white people want to be called pink people.

I cracked Connor's door open and poked my head in. Somewhere underneath the knot of duvet and flannelette was my brother. This was the third time this week I'd found him like this, curled up in a little ball with the pillow over his head. I asked him about it, and he told me I was too loud when I was crying at night. He wasn't upset or mad at me about it. He just wanted to sleep.

I hadn't always cried myself to sleep. Before this week, I couldn't remember the last time I had cried at all.

I hated crying.

It hurt my face and was a real mess.

But I couldn't stop crying now. Every damn night I bellyached and wailed until my eyes were empty and I'd lost my voice.

My dad was dead.

"The funeral's at noon, Will," Mum said from somewhere upstairs.

Her voice was shaky.

If anyone had been crying more than me, it was her. Her eyes were always red. Bright, bloody and terrible red. The red that I used for making fire in my drawings as a kid. I went upstairs. I could hear Mum crying in her bathroom. She and Dad had an en-suite, which is fancy for 'private bathroom' or pretty obvious for 'stay out, kids.' It smelled of Old Spice and some weird powder my mum used. There used to always be steam in there, because my dad took really hot baths instead of showers.

Baths were disgusting.

I stopped taking baths when I turned 12, because I couldn't handle the idea of rolling around in a steadily more lukewarm soup of my own nasty juices. That was probably why Dad used so much Old Spice.

I didn't want to, God knew I didn't want to, but I knew that I had to go see how Mum was doing. Going back downstairs and playing Halo until my eyes exploded sounded way better, but she needed me more than the Master Chief did.

Her door was locked.

I jiggled the handle a couple of times, and heard muffled crying coming from somewhere inside the bathroom. It wasn't a very big room, so she was either sitting inside the tub like an insane person, or huddled on the toilet.

I knocked on the door.

"Don't come in here," she blubbed.

"I can't, Mum. You've locked the door."

The lock snicked open. I opened the door and saw her sitting on the toilet, the lid still down.

I said a quick thank you to whoever was watching out for me that I didn't have to see my mum crying and taking a dump at the same time.