Pete Wisdom is saving the world...from itself. (mister_wisdom) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-06-17 17:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, pete wisdom |
"Seeing the things you see, the evils that men do?"
Who: Pete Wisdom
What: Narrative. Pete dreams of his fantastically loving home environment. Unfortunately, it's not exactly the same as what he remembers from this lifetime.
When: This morning, so it's set after Romany showed up. He'll blame it all on her, because that's convenient. Happened prior to these father's day e-mails between Pete and Romany.
Where: Behind his eyelids.
Rating: PG13 for happy family fun times. No physical violence contained within, though. Woo.
Status: Complete
Pete Winston Wisdom’s formative years were less than formative.
They were warped from the time he was born.
Over the course of his young life, even the evening meal was a ongoing trial, borderlining on survival of the fittest. Over the passing of the years, it was a downward slide. There was the usual hurling of accusations, the lobbing of yelled insults, the occasional thrown drink or flying food. The phrasing and wording always seemed to follow the same format. If everyone was lucky then it ended in a silent stalemate, with glaring from one end of the table to the other. It had always been this way. Always been the same, ever since he was old enough to remember his mother's bitterness and his dad's caustic but eccentric attitude to everything. His father was extremely old school, practically an institution unto himself, where police detectives were the guys with the permanently stiff upper lips that were about as synonymous to England as tea and biscuits were, or Big Ben and London Bridge were to tourists.
So by age twelve, Pete had learned to eat as quickly as possible, on those nights that he could stomach eating. The faster he shoveled down his food, the quicker he could leave the table. It had been at least three years before, that he'd given up asking if he could be excused. They never listened. It was hard to hear anything over the sound of their own bickering and name calling. He started leaving his plate there. They still didn't say anything.
It was like he didn't exist. Even when he was mentioned in an argument, they didn't address him. It kept going back and forth and back and forth, so on and so on, and so it goes.
That particular evening’s debate began with a phrase that they’d all heard before, about his father’s job.
"They've put me onto leave for a assessment, again."
"Whyever for? We can't keep doing this. It has to stop."
"Mental evaluation, that's all. Right when we were so close...to solving...oh, don't you give me that look, you cow!"
"I'll give you any look I'd like, you insufferable old tosser! Why can't you go about your job like normal people do!"
"Normal people don't catch killers!"
"But normal people pay their bloody bills, Harold! This is the second time this year. They'll have you institutionalized! You're the one who wanted to keep him, so how do you expect to feed him if you can't make ends meet? I'm not having it anymore!"
"Then don't have it anymore. See if I could give a flyin' rat's arse."
Tonight looked to be no different. Pete was trying to make good time, shoveling the food down. The argument sounded like the same old routine, the sort of thing he was now accustomed to ignoring like they ignored him, up until the point where he realized his mother was saying, "I'm tired of you and of all this. I'm going to stay with my sister in Bromley. When the divorce papers arrive, Harold, I expect you to sign them."
Harold grunted at her, sounding every bit the old, surly grouch. The grunt sounded like it was in the affirmative.
She didn't even say goodbye. She simply left the room and everything was very quiet, for a very long time. Seconds stretched out into minutes, and felt like hours.
That had never happened before. The argument usually tapered off, if it went on long enough, to a point where no one talked for the rest of the evening. She watched the telly and drank herself senseless until she passed out. He sat up in the spare room that had once belonged to Romany, before she left her college classes to go driving around to druidic sites with her nudist hippy friends. His father sat and stared at crime scene photos from cases in progress, pinning up newspaper clippings and odd symbols and biblical quotes, outlines of murder weapons and locations, and diagrams written with pencil on the walls. That went on, with copious mumbling and a whole lot of scotch, until Harold Wisdom passed out and woke up late for work, nearly every morning.
It apparently wasn't going on any longer. Not anymore.
With his chin tipped down, Pete stared down at the plate before him, like it had ceased to exist. It was hard to determine what he felt, beside the initial anger that she was dumping him off to an even greater extent, or abandoning them all. He felt angry that his sister hadn't been there to buffer the conversation like she used to when he was younger, with her odd facts and random blabbering on about useless subjects. Angry that his father just let her go like that, like he didn't care anymore about anything that wasn't criminal profiling. And then - to make matters worse - he felt his chin begin to quiver. Even his focus started to go blurry as his eyes burned, in their sockets as thought they were on fire. They weren’t. It started to look like everything was underwater, instead.
He sniffled. Only once.
"Don't you start," Harold Wisdom snapped at his son, to cut any of that behavior off at the pass. "Stiff upper lip. I'm not abandoning you, but you shouldn't trust women. They're fickle. They say nothing's wrong and it's always summat. Then they stab at you when you least expect it, with whatever they can get, t'stab at you with. Like that woman in Hounslow, killing her husbands and children with rat poisons in their food. Not a shred of remorse. Only person you can trust in this world, is your own bloody self."
His father began sawing a knife into Monday's leftover Sunday roast, with a vengeance. Mum's Sunday roast was always as dry as shoe leather. It was hard to chew. It was even harder to swallow.
Stiff upper lip was what was required, was it? Pete had sucked his lower lip into his mouth between his teeth, the minute his father had said that, forcing his chin to still itself. He bit down as he listened, until the taste of metal spread onto his tongue and he realized it was his own blood. After forcing himself to stop that before it was noticeable, he simply sucked the blood out slowly until he couldn't taste it any longer, fading away to a fat droplet that he let form at the tip of his tongue before sucking slowly at it all over again. His stomach felt hollow, but there was a sinking pressure in his chest that he hoped would drop down enough to fill the place that dinner would've ended up in, in five minutes or less.
"Look at me, Peter," his father was saying, but it was a long moment where Pete did not raise or turn his head. Instead, his eyes moved and stared over at the stern-faced man sitting at the head of the table. It was hard to tell if it was rage or hurt in those eyes, but it seemed like his father - who had the same blue eyes he did - stared back at him like a perfectly mirrored reflection.
"You're a bright boy, so I know you'll listen to the things I tell you," his father said, his voice a lot steadier and firmer than Pete could manage. He didn’t even trust himself to speak, so his father’s ability to even do that, reluctantly impressed him. "I'll be here, though things are going to change with your mum gone. Needs must, so we'll make due. You'll continue doing well in school, and do what your sister couldn't do with university. But I'll warn you, boy-o, don't ever go into criminal profiling. Seeing the things you see, the evils that men do? It rots yer soul. Do you hear me?"
Sullenly, Pete nodded. He didn't feel comforted much at all, by his father sticking around.
He had his reasons for feeling that way. His father stuck to himself. He barely remembered how to bathe, unless he was reminded. It was scotch and cigarettes. All day, every day. He mumbled at the walls and liked hanging signs up to keep the neighborhood kids off the lawn, or proclaiming that such and such celebrity or political figure wasn't really dead, but in hiding or would rise again. That had resulted in a lot of schoolyard fistfights and his mum getting phonecalls, but Pete was getting better and better at fending for himself with his own two fists. Even when it was a case of two against one. It was a good outlet for a whole lot of pent up anger.
It was also a wonder that mum hadn’t left sooner, but he started to believe she really liked verbally poking them all with sticks, in some sadistic sort of way. Simply to see if they all squirmed to her satisfaction. Maybe they simply stopped squirming the way she liked them to, so it was time for her to move on and share the proverbial wealth.
"Wotever else you do," Harold continued saying, around a mouthful of food, "don't you ever get married. Not unless it's to save the bloody country and thank your lucky stars that isn't going to happen. Marriages ruin things. You'll find that out someday, if you try it. Stop staring and eat your fucking dinner. Eat. Now. Or I'll eat it for you."
It was probably the slowest that Peter Winston Wisdom had ever eaten anything in his life, before or since.
Some things really were hard to swallow.
------
When Pete awoke that morning from that extremely realistic talking to his father had given him, he was pretty certain that some things didn't match up to the reality he knew. The dream ran parallel to it, but the specifics were slightly different than what he actually remembered.
There wasn't a single shred or glimmer of hope that he could nod off again, after that.
With it still gnawing on the edges of his thoughts, Pete decided to chalk it up to a bad father's day related dream or his sister hexing him, and tried to go about his morning routine.