His mother was still alive, though.

Next time.

Eh?

*

He was telling this story to Lomita.

He was pushing her around the indefectibly groomed sidewalks of Beverly Hills, where the grass seemed to know that it is not allowed to grow over onto the sidewalk and where women, mostly women, walked with sun-visors at a quick pace wearing trainers and tracksuits. This was the activity of the streets, the prolonging of life through the speed walk. He wanted so much to unload the burden of his Oedipal experience on Lomita but felt that it threw an obvious question mark over their relationship.

Although he didn’t think in any way he was looking for a relationship with a mother figure. Lomita was more intent on discussing how they, or how Ever, was going to deal with the showing of his father’s paintings on Wednesday. How would he deal with whatever they revealed themselves to be?

*

The Good the Bad or the Ugly.

Even the Mediocre. Which would it be?

Lomita was thinking this through; she couldn’t believe that she was being pushed through these empty streets by a man who was contemplating murder. On every other level he was a sensitive, caring human being but this madness had blocked his life and she was surmising, being pushed, that this wasn’t the whole story: the whole reason for seeking this retribution for his father.

And now there was the complication of revelation in her life.

Did she also have the desire before, before Ever, to know the truth about herself, to analyse what she had lived through?

Is this what these two people recognised in each other: the desire to unload the truth?

To find it. To be honest, to unburden; did it not make the world they lived in start on an unfair level every day? Did the accumulation of these events in their lives cause a twist and a discomfiture in the brain that built up and made it an impossible place to inhabit?

Is this what bonded them without them knowing?

She could see the help that she could give to ease the accumulation of pain that builds through wrongdoing. The difference between them was that he had the misconception that by the destruction of a life and the destruction of his own, he could right whatever he felt was wrong. And she had holed up, and was now extending a hand, as a lifeline to care for someone, after a life of hiding her own pain and lying to all around, including herself, that everything was all right.

Would it help if she showed him what she had been through?

Lomita had interpreted the attempt at matricide without any judgement; the random behaviour of a bored, early-teenaged boy.

Ever had not included the bits about when he had actually lit the fuse.

And did he shout?

Chapter Thirty-one

The day came.