Junk (31 page)

“Shhh, it’s still early. Half seven.” Lewis hadn’t requested a particular wake-up time, that Jasper could recall. Or had he just forgotten during the stresses of yesterday?

Oh God. Had he really told Lewis his secret? He waited for the fear to kick in, but there was a strange wash of peace over his thoughts. What was that about, then? He could almost believe he hadn’t told Lewis in the end, that it had all been a stress dream. After all, the man was still here. He hadn’t run away in disgust or turned him in to the police.

“I need to get going.” Jasper attempted to hide his confusion by getting out of bed and rooting around in his wardrobe. Buggeration. No clean clothes. He’d put that wash on last night but then left it in the machine so it would still be damp. Was he going to have to buy a new outfit on the way in? No, he’d just wear some of the older stuff. The musty smell would wear off during the day, hopefully.

“Going where?” Lewis pushed himself up, revealing a splendid pillow print on his face. “Thought you, me and Carroll were sorting in the warehouse today.”

“Work called. They need me to help out. It’s an emergency.” Because God forbid a university library was short-staffed for one day during the summer break. “Okay, maybe not an emergency, but my boss asked so nicely. Well…that’s not exactly true. She kind of expected me to cover. It was hard to say no.”

Lewis stared at him like he was a madman. “You have a job to do today. We’ve still got a couple of rooms up here to clear.”

“Could you do it without me?”

“You’d let me? Really?”

“Yes. Just leave Mama’s room alone. I’m going to deal with that one myself.”

A look passed over Lewis’s face. Haunted… Disturbed? Jasper couldn’t quite place it, but he knew exactly why it was there. “I told you what happened?”

“That you, er, assisted her suicide?”

“Assisted her suicide?” Jasper choked back the bitter laughter those innocuous words called up. How could they explain the truth of what he’d done? “I murdered her. She drove me mad, and I murdered her.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t like that. There were mitigating circumstances.” But Lewis didn’t sound so sure. More like he was clutching at straws.

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Not yet. But you can share it with me. I won’t tell anyone else, I promise.”

Jasper glanced at his watch. “I don’t have time now. I’ll be finished at three, though.” And then back to the warehouse with Carroll there too. No, that wouldn’t work. “Could you come and meet me from work? We could go somewhere quiet to talk.” A public place, where he wouldn’t end up breaking down in tears or getting angry. Somewhere the both of them would be forced to be on best behaviour. Not that he could imagine Lewis ever shouting at anyone, but you never knew what stress would do to people.

“Yeah. I suppose. Me and Carroll will probably be finished by then.”

“Thanks.” Jasper started to give directions to the library, then rethought it. He’d have to introduce Lewis to everyone, and he wasn’t sure he could take the sly teasing that was bound to ensue—especially if things didn’t work out between them. “Hang on, how about the museum? It’s close to work and it’ll be cool in there.”

Lewis nodded slowly. “Haven’t been there in years. Used to love it.”

“You’ll love it even more now. They’ve improved things, but they haven’t messed with any of the good stuff.”

“They’ve still got all the stuffed animals?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Count me in, then.” Lewis gave a sleepy smile that made Jasper want to jump back into bed and ravish him.

Instead, he pulled on a khaki T-shirt and searched for the pair of cut-offs he was sure he’d owned once upon a time. He gave Lewis a quick kiss before leaving, but the man was already slipping back to the Land of Nod.

Later that afternoon, Jasper waited in the museum lobby, staring up at the aeroplane hanging above them. He’d been fascinated by it when he was younger, asking Mama how they’d managed to get it inside the building. Had they taken the roof off, he’d demanded to know, or had they just built the whole museum around it? She’d told him that must be how they’d done it, then dragged him into the Egyptian display.

Of course, eventually he’d figured out for himself that an old biplane like that could easily be dismantled to fit through the doors then rebuilt inside, but it didn’t make it any the less magical for knowing how it had been done.

He felt a presence by his side and caught the scent of Lewis’s now familiar aftershave.

“I used to love going up to the top galleries and waving at the pilot,” Lewis said. “He looks so cheerful. Told the folks I was going to be a pilot when I grew up, right up until the point I realised how bloody precise and methodical you have to be.”

“Nothing wrong with being precise and methodical. I have to be that all the time in my job.” Jasper let his gaze run over the ornate ceiling and vaulted windows, evidence of other workmen with the same ethics.

“I’m better off with the imprecision of dealing with real people. Keeps me on my toes.”

“You must love working with me, then,” Jasper murmured.

“I do. I just wish we’d met under other circumstances. Ones where you weren’t my client,” Lewis amended when Jasper turned to stare at him. He had a shifty, guilty expression on his face.

Oh God, not that again. Just his pigging luck.

“I could stop being your client,” Jasper offered. “Now the house is clear, I reckon I can probably cope with putting it back together by myself.”

Lewis sighed deeply. “How about we discuss all that another time? You want to tell me about your mother, don’t you?”

“Want is probably the wrong word. I think I need to, though. I owe you an explanation for what I said last night.”

“Jasper, you don’t have to tell me anything. I’m not going to judge you for it.”

“I need you to understand,” Jasper said doggedly.

“Okay. I hear you. Just, let’s take it somewhere more private, yeah?”

“The Egyptian exhibit?” It would be dark, anyway, as they kept the lights low to protect all the antiquities. Lewis agreed, so Jasper led the way between the guardian statues on either side of the entrance.

Private wasn’t really the right word for one of the museum’s most popular attractions during the school holidays. Children were everywhere, breathing on the glass cases and enthusing about the gory details of mummification.

Death. Touch the screen to find out
more,
suggested one of the information points Jasper passed. How appropriate. He stared through the glass of the adjoining case at an intricately decorated sarcophagus.

“The ancients really knew how to do death properly, didn’t they?” Lewis asked him.

Was the man a mind reader? “How do you mean?”

“All the ceremony. The grave goods. They might have believed it would help them on the other side, but I think it was more helpful to those left grieving. They could talk about death openly. Celebrate it, even. We can’t do that anymore. It’s all closed off behind funeral home doors.”

Jasper rested his forehead against the glass and smiled bitterly. Yes. Clearly Lewis could read his mind. Or perhaps it was just all that therapist training he’d had. “Do you think it would help if we talked more about death?” Whether he was talking about the two of them or society as a whole, he had no idea.

“Absolutely. It’s the only certainty in life, and it binds us all together. Better to make peace with it while you’re alive than live in fear.”

“I’m not afraid of dying.”

“But you’re afraid of living, and that amounts to the same thing.”

Did it? “Mama had to live with so much pain. She couldn’t stand the morphine they had her on at the end. Said it made her head fuzzy, and she refused to take a full dose. Then she got this crazy idea in her head that she’d feel better on heroin. She used to beg me to go out and score her some.”

Lewis gave the group nearest them a furtive glance, and Jasper realised belatedly that perhaps that wasn’t the best topic for a room full of children. When Lewis suggested they move it upstairs to a quieter gallery, Jasper readily agreed.

There weren’t many places to sit in the museum, but up in the deserted nineteenth-century French artists gallery they found a bench opposite a few lesser known Impressionist landscapes. Pretty enough, but not the ones that turned up plastered all over the calendars and tea towels his Mama had loved. Jasper studied the Pissarro garden while waiting for Lewis to speak. Perhaps Mama had modelled the planting scheme at the lower end of the garden on it, as there was the same preponderance of purple flowers. He’d never thought to ask, and now it was too late to ever find out.

“So? Did you score any heroin?” Lewis whispered.

“Of course not. Can you imagine me going out trying to buy drugs? I’d probably end up getting mugged for my trouble.”

“I can just imagine you trying to speak street to a dealer.” Lewis smiled then, lifting the gathering gloom for just a moment.

“Quite. It would be a bloody disaster. I don’t know any of the proper slang, and I’m not sure I want to either. I’d have come home with the wrong thing entirely. Probably a bag of icing sugar, knowing my luck.”

“Actually, H is usually brown.”

“See what I mean? A disaster. Anyway, after a few months of begging for that, she changed her tune. Started asking me to help her end it all. Can you imagine what that’s like? Someone you’re caring for and giving your life up for, just begging you to kill them pretty much every time they open their mouth?”

He felt Lewis shudder beside him. “It’s a good case for legalising euthanasia.”

“Yes, well, I did look into a trip to Switzerland, but she wouldn’t hear of travelling.” If only she’d been willing. It could have saved him some of the burden of guilt, and everything would have been so much cleaner and quicker. Instead, it had dragged on for the best part of a year. “She kept on asking, though. She even asked her doctor, but he refused to have anything to do with it.”

“So what happened to change your mind?”

“Just a long, slow war of attrition, I think. In the end, it was easier to give in than to resist.” He shrugged. “I’m a weak person, when push comes to shove.”

Now Lewis squeezed his hand. “You’re one of the kindest, gentlest men I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks, but isn’t that another way of saying weak?”

“Not at all. It takes real strength to care for someone like you did. And the way you’re starting to let go of your hoard. It takes guts and courage. Might not be the kind of strength the rest of the world recognises, but don’t you go letting anyone tell you you’re weak.”

Lewis was so very earnest, it made Jasper smile despite himself. “Feels good to have someone on my side.”

Another visitor to the gallery curtailed their conversation for a few minutes, but luckily she clip-clopped around the paintings with only a very brief pause to look before moving to the next. When she left for the modern art exhibition, Jasper exhaled noisily. “You want to know how I did it?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“I do. I need to tell someone.” Jasper kept his gaze fixed on the Pissarro as he spoke, because looking in Lewis’s eyes would have made him feel too raw. Too exposed. “Her doctor took me aside one day and said on no account was I to accidentally double up her dose as that would be very dangerous and probably fatal. There was something about the way he said it, though. He kept nodding and fixing me with this stare, like he really needed me to understand something he wasn’t saying, but I couldn’t figure out what. I think I must have exasperated him in the end. When he was leaving, he said that of course it was highly unlikely in the event of her death that they’d bother with a post mortem as funds were tight and she was terminal anyway. So long as there were no obvious suspicious circumstances, he’d be happy to sign a death certificate citing natural causes.”

“So he gave you permission?”

“A get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“And so you did it? What he suggested?”

“Not straight away. Took me another few weeks to talk myself around. And then one day I realised that she couldn’t enjoy anything anymore. It was a lovely September day. Warm and breezy. I’d opened her windows and picked a big bunch of her favourite flowers, but all she could do was complain about how she didn’t want to live through another winter. And I got to thinking that maybe I was being cruel, denying her the peace she was after. And so I fetched her meds, and she must have known what I was up to, because she’d already had her dose that afternoon.” He fell silent, remembering the way she’d looked up at him, the surprised expression that morphed into the first smile he’d seen from her in months.

“How did you feel, at the time?”

“Strangely peaceful. I sat and read
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
to her, and it was just like she was falling asleep. Nothing so very unusual except for the fact she wasn’t grumbling at me. Afterwards…after I’d checked and knew she was gone… Well, I sat there for hours.” He could remember that afternoon with clinical precision. The way she’d been smiling. The light slanting into the room. The bee buzzing around trying to find his way back out of the window. It was the last time he ever remembered feeling true peace. “Evening fell, and then I knew I had to ring the doctor or it was going to start looking suspicious. That’s when the guilt kicked in.”