Ever’s internal jousting stopped. He turned into himself. Did she see through him and his gestures of anger? Was he being honest? Could he ever be truly honest? Did he not recognise in himself there were other, or there was one other reason for this execution?

She wheeled herself back towards the bedroom, he asked for something to help him sleep. It seemed with a sadness she gave him a diazepam and a zolpidem.

‘My sweet, sweet dreams. It will be all right.’

She at that moment ceased to be just another human for him; he sensed that she was the first person to understand what it was he wanted to do for his father. Not to know the detail but to understand the depth of there being another reason kicking in his being.

The love he never knew if he had lost from his father.

A way to make it all up.

*

And with that plague in his head.

Wednesday turned into Thursday with the shopping channel and no volume accompanying Ever through his wakeful sleep. Never really sure, as always was the case, whether he was asleep or not.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Thursday was warmer.

The leaves from the pool had been cleared by the weekly spruce-up, and he decided, as Lomita was still in bed, to swim.

In his underpants, he had no swimming costume, that had never been in his plan, to end up in a pool. Unheated. It was March, and the desert night had instilled a chill in the pool: the cold wrapped itself around his brain and hurt a little. A little like a brain-freeze, and then he wished his brain would freeze. Just freeze over and not operate.

He swam under the water, the sounds all around him were silenced and he felt that if he could hold his breath forever – this is where he would like to be. Brain numbed into silence. Surrounded by pale blue tiles, some cracked; he found that a little disconcerting, the colour that is, not the cracking.

Was it possible to think the same thoughts while holding your breath? As his breath was running out underwater his thoughts went to instinct – the instinct to survive. He liked that, only one thought – survival. Yet he was preparing more agony for himself, underwater he stayed, thinking hard about his father who ended his life floating and bloating in water. The reason he had lost the will to live. Ever still had a will to live, because he wanted to come up for air.

He wondered then which happened first, his father’s decision not to fight for survival, or death without thought. The choice taken away. He would never know. He broke the surface, pulled in air; he felt the pool water and his tears combine.

The afternoon brought a request from Lomita, for him to push her round the block in her wheelchair. But Ever, as she was preparing for this event, was gone.

*