(Originally published at http://www.journeymouse.net/ on 8th July 2007)
He poured himself a whiskey as the St James Infirmary Blues started and let the thick, heady scent of the spirit fill him. Upstairs, his wife and son waited. He had the sound low so that they would not be disturbed by his music, just as he did every time he played this cd. Emma called it his "black music" because of how he locked himself in here with it every time he was in a dark mood.
She always asked him how he could manage to listen to only the one song for hours on end. She did not understand the intricacies and the endless variety, the changes from one singer's version to the next. The song itself spoke to him of the pain of being left behind, reminding him of his childhood and soothing it away in the same moment. Each voice gave him a new interpretation of life and death, of the longing for love lost, of the need to follow.
His father had died of cancer, tearing the heart out of the woman left behind and abandoning a small boy. A boy who would always remember the pain. A boy who knew that anyone who doubted the importance of the father's role in a family had never lost their own.
As an adult, he knew that his father must have suffered before his end but his own suffering as a boy and of the broken, deserted woman who had raised him had made him terrified of being left behind again. As he had grown older, the idea that he could cause the same pain, that the same thing could happen again to his own wife and child, had grown to hold the same fear. So he had matured, avoiding family, friends and commitment, his mental eye always upon some imaginary deadline.
Until Emma.
Emma had been a surprise, a bright spear of possibility that had pierced his heart, lifting it from the course that he had set it upon and pinning it to another path. For Emma, he had set his doubts aside and laughed at his superstition that he would not outlive his father. Eventually they had had a child of their own: a beautiful boy who looked at his father with big eyes, who could paradoxically fill him with the lightness of love and the heaviness of anger at the same time.
His wife and son waited for him upstairs. They would not feel the pain of being left behind. Emma would not be broken by the loss of her soul-mate and the day to day struggle to raise their son alone. His son would not be abandoned, forced to suffer the same fears as he had.
It had been surprisingly easy to cover their faces with his pillow, to hold it down until their lives had stopped. Neither had been woken by his approach, nor had they struggled, so they must have remained asleep during their jerking last breaths. When he had removed the pillow from their faces, they had looked calm and almost beatific, unaffected by any violence in their passing. He had stood and looked at Will for a while, stroking his fine hair and admiring the delicacy of his fingers. Then he had turned for his study and the comfort of the St James Infirmary Blues.
For the last few days, since the doctor had given the feared diagnosis, he had been buying painkillers and stashing them in his desk. He had bought as many packs and as many different types as he could, only mildly frustrated by the laws that made it impossible to buy many in one transaction. He was not sure of the effects and dosage of each kind that he had bought but was sure that together they would provide his exit. So he swallowed them all with his whiskey and sat listening to his music as their effects crept over him, sure that he had cheated the tumour, that changeling child that grew within him, of its victims.
His eyes closed part way through the second rendition of the song. The last image that he saw was of the empty whiskey bottle and his glass on the desk, the last drops of the amber liquid making their slow progress down the sides. They seemed to glow in the dying light.
"She can search this world over, never find another man like me."