A Cleansing of Souls Read Online Free Page B

feeling hit him in the stomach and almost wrenched the guts out of him. Shame. It's as good a place to start as any. Try it some time.
     
    So the train hissed and shook and stuttered to a halt, having delivered Tom Spanner to Big Town.
     
     
    Tom’s father sat at the kitchen table, both hands around a mug of coffee that he had no intention of drinking. The thin, aromatic steam drifted into the air and produced moist droplets on the distraught face that gazed into it. How could he tell her? How could he tell his wife that their son was gone?
     
    There had been no note, no goodbye. Tom’s clock radio had gone off at the usual time and , half an hour later, the fabulous DJ was still spewing out fabulous details of another fabulous competition. Tom would be late for work. His father had gone into wake him but he had not been there. Gone. And that was when he had noticed it. The guitar was missing too. No guitar. No Tom. The guitar never left the room. Tom always turned the clock radio off. He had intentionally tuned it to a radio station he despised in order to ensure he didn’t lie in bed listening to it.
     
    Perhaps he had just gone out for the day, had taken the day off, had gone to meet some friends? There was something in the air though, a finality, a strange emptiness. The father and the son were a part of each other, yet neither really knew it, not yet. You or I may have jumped to a different conclusion, but the father knew. It felt somehow inevitable. And that was it. Gone – a terrible, empty word.
     
    So here he sits, waiting for his wife to come downstairs and ask him why he has been crying.
     
    “Have you seen this, love?” came a voice from the hallway. “It’s a bill from the electric people. I thought we had sorted that one out. We did that one didn’t we?”
     
    Tom’s mother shuffles into the kitchen in her long pink dressing gown and the fluffy pig-shaped slippers her son had bought her last year for her birthday. She is holding a brown envelope lightly in her hand.
     
    “We did, didn’t we?” she asks again.
     
    “Did what?” replies her husband, his voice barely audible.
     
    “Pay it, the electric. The electric people.”
     
    He looks up at her now and sees how strong she looks yet he knows she is forever on the verge of breaking apart. And she sees his raw cheeks and the way his jaw just seems to hang so loose. And she is scared.
     
    “George, what is it, what’s happened?” Her words are quick, urgent. Her heart is thumping, thumping, punctuating the words.
     
    There is a pause, a terrible pause that lingers in the air.
     
    “George?”
     
    “I think Tom’s gone.”
     
    Freeze Frame.
    Bang.
     
    George moves his arm to reach for his wife but he is moving now in slow motion. The mug of coffee by his elbow rolls onto the linoleum floor with a clonk that rings out deep and solid like a church bell. And this is the cue that sets his wife moving. She turns and runs upstairs with a heart-breaking awkwardness, her slippers dragging her down, sticking to the stairs as if there were glue upon them.
     
    And, arriving in the bedroom, it is not just the absence of the guitar that hits her, but the missing photograph of Little Norman. She screams a loud, guttural scream that causes her husband to physically flinch downstairs in the kitchen where he sits, so terrified.
     
    They had both been through too much, what with Little Norman, and now this. Yet, deep in their hearts somewhere, there had always been lurking the knowledge that Tom would one day leave them too. And that was what really hurt. On this evidence alone, evidence based purely on love and instinct and despair, they had both arrived at the same conclusion, the right conclusion. Their son, Tom, was indeed gone.
     
    So as the coffee drip, drip, drips onto the faded tiles of the kitchen floor, George Spanner prays for the first time in his life. He just closes his eyes and prays. Sometimes it’s all you can