The Hour of Bad Decisions Read Online Free

had been said about him in the news? His house had been empty, at least until some relative could be identified to come in and strip it out, to clean it up enough that it could be put on the market. Social Services had seen to that. It looked like a smart buy, in that mercenary way, the way the ’80s real estate speculators used to talk about it: you know, buy a distressed property or one on a rundown street, then move on when the neighbourhood gets fancied up.
    He was, the stories said, unfit to care for himself, surrounded by rubbish and old newspapers. They took him away when they found he hadn’t washed in weeks. Turner, one of the reporters from the newspaper where I worked, said there was a circle of fine dirt around every pore on his hands, so that the backs of his hands looked patterned, almost camouflaged. That his hands looked speckled, like fish skins. Connor didn’t agree, and it was news for a while – that the authorities would come in and take a seventy-year-old man from his home. But when you found out more about how he was living – when Turner talked about the scores of cats and the piled, filthy dishes and the garbage simply thrown out the back into the yard, you were less sympathetic. When the neighbours talked about rats strolling the tops of their fences like tight rope walkers, well, some of the magic of renegade individualism faded.
    But then, for no reason, they let Brendan come back. They let him come back, or they ran out ofreasons to hold him. Or else he simply left and they didn’t come looking. It’s hard to know – sometimes people just manage to walk away, and it’s more than the system can do to find them again. Too much paper passed through too many hands, no one directly responsible for anything, too many people with full caseloads and more important problems to solve.
    I saw him at the front door with a great big handful of keys, muttering and looking for the right one. Right after I moved in, while the books were all still in boxes. And by then, Turner had told me even more about what the house was like: half-empty cans of ravioli perched on chairs, on the stairs, pretty much anywhere he had left them when he’d stopped eating and set them down. That he had piles of newspaper three and four feet high, scattered through the house, years of newsprint, yellowing and crumbling wherever it lay. An upstairs room filled with coils of green garden hose and milk crates of either rusty or greasy bicycle parts. And, by the end of the last spring, no electricity, maybe because he didn’t want to pay the bills, maybe because the envelopes were just never opened. Crusted pots and pans all around a white-gas camp stove on the kitchen table.
    Turner said he made his way around at night with candles, except in the summer, when he mostly slept with the dark and got up as soon as it was light, four o’clock or earlier.
    When I met him, shuffling around his yard in stained, dark-grey suit pants and suspenders, his flyhalf-down, he called me “Charley,” for no reason I could understand. My name is Stephen.
    Sorry – that’s right – I should have told you. My name is Stephen, Stephen Morris, and I sell classified ads for a newspaper. Pretty much all day on the telephone or at the front counter, and then home. You can’t really put much romance into it, except if you tell someone in a bar that you’re a newspaperman. It’s a lie, sure, but a harmless one. I’m forty and single, now, and I’ll try and avoid the shorthand that this would all be if I were writing my own “personals” ad in the paper. You know the kind, “swm, tidy, quiet, seeks… etc.” I’m more “articles for sale” material: “For sale – dryer in working condition, two sets wooden shelves, bicycle, wedding dress size ten, never worn.”
    I’m old enough to have hair sprouting out of the backs