Sully (just) (theartisan) wrote in at_the_gates, @ 2012-11-24 22:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | ephraim sullivan |
Who: Ephraim Sullivan
What: The last six months
When: An aggregate
There's a damp taste in his mouth when he wakes - he's not sure if it's cheap red wine gone sour-acidic that he drank when he could turn the glass-stem in his fingers no more without notice, or the coffee he drank somewhere around three, when his eyes were sanded over with the need for sleep and too many things to push inside the day's skin, until it stretched translucent around them all. His head is pillowed on the thin cushion he's kept there, and Sully rolls onto his back, his suit rucked up and his bony ankles and his thin wrists exposed and folds a hand behind his head to think it over.
For there is a lot. Before (before is a neat way of tidying it all up, before is as blackened over and cracked as burned acrylic on a canvas. Before is a ruination, but he is in the after) Sully's days are thickly spread, are hazy-dozy days, light smearing itself around the thick curtains he's never taken down since Mum died. They're spent lost in the sharp-spirit smell of painting, of standing where the light gathers itself and working until his toes are cold and his stomach growling-empty and usually a knock at the door before overlong, the scrape of a borrowed key in the lock.
After, when they all sat around, stiff and uncomfortable and the will got read out (in a pub, because Liam was a sod even after all things were done) even Lily quiet and blond and still, her mother (he didn't know her then, wondered after her in that half-hearted way he thought of strangers on damp days in the street below) sharp and difficult. When the keys got handed over to her, that tiny woman with the face like a knife-blade and he'd sat drinking with the rest of them long after she'd gone -- and then gathered up all the spare keys, bits of rubber bands and string and even the odd keyring they were on, tied them together like a spiky bunch of balloons, and dropped them into his coat pocket for later.
After when he realized Tali wasn't coming back, not even for that. When he'd stood in a phone box, scuffing his shoes against the broken glass as he heard her clearly beyond the London roar and hum at his back, 'No, darling, I don't think I can'. He'd hung up on her long after the dial was a dim chime in his ear, clattering the phone fiercely against it's stand until it swayed and fell, dangled by a long metal strand, like a hangman's victim swinging on the rope.
He finds the crumpled scrap of letter - a letter implies an action taken, this is Liam, there's none at all - shoved inside a used envelope (he spends some time and care over the previous address, the scrawled-out sender, until he realises Liam left no clue to save them both) a list of people, of places. Traceries to put against the arterial map of London's Underground to find those tucked in the dark, put-away places who need things and help and hands. His aren't Liam's; they're bigger, thinner, less capable - they shake, the first time he knocks at a door he doesn't know, but the smile is unstinting, big and broad and nothing at all like Sully's himself. He sets a routine, sets rounds, regular as a postman and his footsteps on cold, early-morning London streets are to the rhythm of cursing Liam's name to ashes and dust.
They've not all forgotten him. Not all the old ones; they've shuffled sideways into the shadows because it's tiring enough being a helpmeet, too much to take on leader on his bony shoulders. He stands in the dark and he paints from pictures, with the blare of artificial light on his canvas because that's all he's got left and it's better than no paint at all. (He scrubs off the stains, with care and soap and turpentine, until the blue scuffs round his wrists fade away into nothing at all)
Em's a pause. A coda. She's a halo of hair and a dreamy smile, fingers twisting into a paper napkin at a diner where no one they know works anymore. He sits and he studies her the way he might have once read a book, wrapped an arm around her shoulders but Sully has been pared down to nothing, sharpened the way of taking blade to a pencil and he sees, instead. She doesn't say much, but she looks - when he drops by Haven, filling even that last little gap with the thin, water-substitute that is his own shoulders in the doorway and an excuse for supplies. He sees it play out, not a lot but a little and Sully shrugs.
(He goes to Gray, finally. They sit in a kitchen given over to Aga-warmth and thick, pleasant dark and their fingers slot together and if she cries, his face is buried in his arms at the time, and 'I can't' goes unheard or unsaid, it doesn't matter)
He falls out of step with some of them. They're used to Liam's sympathetic grin, the splay of his hands, the implication he might - he might (Sully used to laugh) - be theirs and theirs alone, to hold up the sky 'lest it fall. They don't want him and he stands on a doorstep and he breathes outside steel-banded vice, relief that someone doesn't. Doesn't need.
There's the flat. Standing on the outside and hearing the metallic rhythm of the locks and isn't that strange, weight leaning on a door that should, by rights, give way. He makes friends with the blond little thing first - Sully's way, not Liam's knowing, that leads them. He's solemn, until the woman behind is quiet, and he drops into her palm the splayed knot of other people's keys to her own door and walks away.
Em again, tides up on his doorstep like a dimming line of surf. Scuffed up, muddied over by something that looks less like love and life and more like something else. There's tea, she sits on the sofa and she says nothing at all as he puts blanket round her shoulders and sits with his toes showing through his socks and his book and an apple, and crunches away against the silence as if she were company and no one at all.
He goes back. He can't help himself, Liam is the knot around his throat, his own suit neat, his own overcoat immaculate and tailored (it was meant for a job once. The job never came off, never happened). He sees her sitting beside park lake, the little girl oblivious and feeding ducks and her mother a line in the sand, someone else who doesn't want him at all. But they both know more than most; he sits beside her on a bent park bench and he draws Lily until he's done, and until the broken-glass conversation starts and stops. Until she knows the history of the place itself, that when she goes home and locks all the doors, what she's shutting out.
It's three months til he's sat on the old couch - twisted, so that the light catches someone sitting on the far right corner. It only strikes him til he sees her sit, feet tucked up underneath her, palm tight around a steaming cup and the girl, playing in a corner, whispering to toys (or maybe ghosts). Til he's allowed to talk, to fill silences with the maljointed patter he's acquired -- until she slices, scalpel-through it, blunt and breaking and tells him he's not to try being Liam, not to her. Toby stands and the light paints her and the little girl white-bright, and maybe he can understand giving her this place, even if he'd thought Liam had nothing left of love to give.
Three weeks on from that and she lets him sleep, beyond the ink-haze of an early dawn, when Lily is up all night with something entirely mundane and her own eyes are hollowed beneath. When he tells her - not a lot, but a little - and she sits in the far right corner and he in the armchair he used to, sitting and scrape at the arm with his penknife, until the dawn dims down into morning and he's asleep and Lily warm, inquisitive weight on his knees as she pushes open his eyelids.
He goes back to his flat - of course he does, it's his and they're a connection forged from the smashing of another, nothing substantive as what's made all by itself. Em once again and this time he puts her to bed, closes curtains and door on the rest of the place and as she sleeps, he cleans - until when she wakes, it's lemon-sharp and tea put in her hands, until magic's retreated along with the grime.
He keeps on going. Of course he does - he can't not. But now and again (when he wakes, with the silt-taste on his tongue and the money weighted in his pockets and the list that only grows in his mind of what to do and how to do it) he wakes, sharp-minded and bleary-eyed in the dark hours before the dawn. And occasionally, he wonders why he let himself begin. Sully rolls up off the couch and the door slams on an empty flat and the easel folded up and stood down, blindly tucked behind the curtain and out of the way.