“Maybe you should go join him.”
Nat chuckled. “I will when you’ve stopped nonanswering me down the garden path.”
“What does that even mean?”
Silence.
Marc sighed. “What do you want to know? That I’m not bleeding to death in this big old house? Because you can rest easy on that front: everything went fine, and I’m home safe.”
“Yeah? And what next? You can’t live in your place indefinitely while it’s full of your ma’s junk.”
Marc had been intending on doing exactly that. He’d inherited his mother’s house while he’d still been in Iraq and had yet to find the time or inclination to clear it out entirely. “There’s plenty of space for me.”
“Only if you live in the kitchen.”
“Not true. I cleared the living room and the downstairs bathroom over the summer. I don’t need anything else.”
“Sell up, then. What good is that big house to you if you only use three rooms?”
“I can’t sell it with all this shit in— Jesus, Nat. What do you care about the state of my dead mother’s house?”
“I don’t. I just don’t want you to bounce around in a mansion full of junk because you won’t admit that you can’t fix it up all by yourself. Why won’t you let me and Connor help you?”
“Because you live a hundred miles away and have a life of your own.”
“So pay someone else to help you. Get a house-clearance company in.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Marc knocked his fist against his forehead.Damn it, Nat.They’d been through this a million times. Marc’s mother had been dead four and a half years, and he had little emotional connection to the huge house, or the rooms and rooms of clutter she’d hoarded over her lifetime, but something wouldn’t let him condemn it all to a soulless clearance firm. “I haven’t got time to deal with it right now.”
“You never have time for anything that’s good for you.”
“Says you.”
“Fucking right, not that it matters. You never listen to me anyway.”And that’s what got you into this mess.
Nat didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. Marc recalled their conversation of nine years ago like it had occurred only yesterday.“Don’t go back. You’ll get yourself killed.”
The prophecy had proved only half-correct, but when Nat had come to Marc’s bedside six years later, his simmering anger had been clear to see. Wasstillclear to see whenever he caught sight of Marc’s gleaming prosthesis, along with the bucket load of guilt Nat wore like a second skin. The bloke was addicted to tragic responsibility, and in that he and Marc were the same.
“Listen,” Marc said wearily, “I’ll put an ad in the paper, okay? Get some old retired bird to come and help me.”
“You’re gonna get an old dorris to carry all that crap down those stairs?”
“Okay, maybe not an old dear, but someone local who wants to earn a few quid. I’ll get the place cleared and then get shot of it. Then I can fuck off somewhere else and get out of your hair.”
“You’re not in my hair. Never have been. I just want you to have a home, like the rest of us who are too decrepit to run with the big boys these days. You can’t hide from normality forever.”
“I know.”
“How’s the hip, by the way?”
“Fuckoff.”
Four