The Cupid Touch

The Cupid Touch Chapter 12 - The Troubled Boy

**The other half of the chapter at last!! Sorry for the delay. I am going to crack straight on with Chapter 13, and you can have it tomorrow if you can all vote me back into the top 30... ;) So cheeky. Thanks a million for reading all of you. You rock. **

To Joe-Moe's credit, he told it quickly and well. The first part was while we were driving on that North-Westerly path through Cambridge; and the rest happened after we'd pulled into a parking lot and he'd switched the engine off. Not that I noticed that for quite a while. 

"I don't even know when it started," he said. "People tell you these stories when you're young, about bad people getting what they deserve. And then in every film, it happens too. I had an inbuilt belief that that was just how things worked. So when someone tripped me up and then they fell down some stairs; or when I got shoved in the cafeteria queue by some guy who just afterwards burned himself on something, it all made perfect sense."

It did make sense, even to me. Listening to him, I could remember vividly how it was when my Dad died. The main thing I kept asking myself, over and over, was what he'd done to deserve it. And when I couldn't find anything, I tried to figure out if Mom or I had been the ones at fault. I'd fixated for three weeks on how I'd been cruel to one of my school-mates until my Mom finally explained to me that it was nobody's fault; that people just died sometimes. I think it was the cruellest thing I've ever had to come to terms with. 

"I only started to realise that it didn't work like that," Joe-Moe went on, "when I talked to some of my friends. I'd say, all confidently, that yeah, it sucked how someone had been unkind to them or stolen off them, but they'd get what they deserved. It made some of them pretty angry with me after a while, because the big kid who was beating the crap out of them twice a week wasn't getting any kind of punishment. Gradually, I started realising that it was only when I got angry with them, and I could feel it happening when it did."

"What a messed-up thing to realise," I muttered.

He gave me a small smile. "I guess it's a little worse than realising you make people live happily ever after," he said. "Though at that point, I still just thought - well, it seemed like they deserved it all. So it was a good thing."

I started to feel uncomfortable again. I had a feeling he was about to tell me something that was a lot less good. But I wanted to know anyway. 

"What changed?"

"Mostly, it was my Dad," he said. And the way he said it was just loaded with emotion. It was like that one word had a whole life's-worth of pain and anger and guilt mixed up in it. And it probably wasn't so different from the way I said the word. "He had what started out as a small alcohol problem. But the thing I've learned is that no alcohol problem is ever small. As soon as it's got you, you start to slide. And he slid pretty quickly, until he lost his job. And then he got... vicious."

Despite all my reservations, I found myself putting my hand out, instinctively, to touch his shoulder. 

"We all took it about equally. I mean, I wasn't this size then. I was ten and a lot scrawnier. There wasn't a lot of money spare for food back then. I'd get angry, every time, and I thought if I used this thing I have then he'd start to feel sorry. Now I could tell you that a lot of his problems came from self-loathing, but at that point I just thought maybe he would learn what it felt like. So in small ways, I let him have it. He'd whack his head, or get pulled over by the cops for drink driving, or he'd get mugged and beaten up himself. After a year, he'd decided that the whole world was against him. It was paranoid, and he started to think we were all of us plotting to make him look stupid. He'd accuse us of doing these crazy things to ruin his life, and it was hardest for me to deny it, however crazy he sounded. Because I knew I was responsible. I was - I was terrified of him. And I couldn't seem to control the hatred, either."

It made me feel a little bit sick just hearing it. I couldn't imagine being that frightened all the time. 

"What happened?" I whispered, taking his hand and knotting my fingers back through it. 

"It actually looked like it might get better," he said. "He finally went too far for my Mom, who was so frightened of him that she felt she couldn't leave. She had no money, but she was still working at this restaurant, and there was a guy there who liked her. He offered to let us all move in with him, away from my Dad, and the manager there went and told my Dad. He was so angry that he went for my Mom like he was going to kill her, and then when my brother and I together tried to haul her off him, he dragged us out to the car and drove off with us. He was blind drunk and I thought we were going to die. But there was that anger there too, and I brought vengeance down on him. He smashed the car up on a bollard, which thankfully fell and didn't damage us too much, and got arrested. It was just the biggest relief when the cops listened to me and my brother, and explained everything. We thought he was going to end up in jail, and my Mom told us that was it. She was leaving him."

"But it didn't work out?"

He shook his head. "It turned out he'd got more money hidden away than he said. He posted bail, and while we were packing our things up, he let himself into the house. It wasn't his usual entrance, all angry and loud. He snuck in there, and before we knew it he had my Mom by the hair, with a knife at her neck. I didn't really have any time to think. I knew I had to use what I had, or he'd kill her."

My heart was thumping in my throat somewhere, and I wasn't the one living through it. He seemed so calm talking, it was surprising. But I guess he'd had time to get used to it. 

"He tripped on the stairs while he was trying to drag her down them. My brother had hold of my Mom's arm, and was screaming at her to let her go. So she didn't fall. It was just him. He grabbed at the wall with his knife hand to try and stop falling, but he fell anyway. I knew as he went that it was going to kill him, and just then, I didn't care."

There was a really long, long silence. I didn't feel like myself just then. Sarcastic, unemotional Helena wanted to cry for those poor kids and their Mom. And to hold onto him and tell him it wasn't his fault. 

"I wouldn't have cared either," I said quietly. 

"But I did it to him, Helena," he said, meeting my gaze. I saw that hurt running deep into him and I finally understood it. "I made him that person. He definitely had something in him that made him want to lash out, but if I'd held back, he wouldn't have ended up that way."

"He might have done," I argued. "He might have ended up just the same, only more slowly. No matter what hand life deals you, you have to be a pretty sick person to take it out on your family," I said. 

He gave me a slightly bright-eyed smile. "Who knew you could be genuinely kind?" 

"Just my Mom, I think," I said, and ruffled his hair. "I think I've kept it from everyone else pretty successfully."

There was another silence, but this one no longer tense. The air felt so clear in that car, I wondered how I'd been able to bear the fog of secrecy I'd been living in for most of my life. 

"So you stopped using it," I said, eventually. "You decided you had to control it."

"Yes," he said, "because I killed him, and no matter how angry I am at someone, I know in my heart that nobody deserves that."

I couldn't help kissing him then. I felt like I could see all the way into him, and that he was good all the way down. As well as a little bit messed up and tortured, which is always pretty sexy, in my experience. 

I let up after a passing kid rapped on the car window and laughed at us. I finally clocked where we were.

"Is this the observatory?" I asked him.

"Sure is," he said, flattening my hair where his hands had mussed it up. "So how about those stars, then?"