Vivien Holmes
AN IMMORAL MAN COMES HOME
Titus hated Spain. It reminded him of being a virgin. Shit summers spent thinking about boys, drinking wine, and being bored. He stepped out of the airport and sweated. Fuck the sun. Mind you, he looked good (linen suit, tailored, fitted perfectly). Thankfully Edward had to stay behind, some last-minute interview thank god. The taxi driver was ugly. Titus glared and brought his bag (lamb leather) in tighter when he reached to put it in the boot.
Even through sunglasses (Gucci), the sunlight beaming onto the identical rows of bone-bleach houses was blinding. Here lay the second houses of hundreds of Brexiteer plumbers, with the occasional actual local working in a shop. A group of seventeen-year olds, achingly heterosexual, clutched crates of beer and laughed through the streets.
The villa was hideous, so American, and at this spot up the hills his phone signal had run out - unthinkable! The way up the drive for the first time in over a decade probably should have brought back some sort of memory or emotion, but it didn’t. Childhood trauma? What a joke. There was evidence of some attempting gardening but the weeds had clearly won. The car ground to a halt and Titus emerged. A falcon hovered silently in the air currents above. A good omen. He’d always considered himself a bird of prey at work, swooping in to catch the perfect deal at great speed. He knocked once on the door, scowling at the tacky cast-iron lion head. A familiar idiot figure opened it immediately.
“Hello father.”
“[REDACTED], you made it!”
“Titus.”
“I still see my little girl.” At this, Titus stepped forward, the lifts in his shoes giving him that crucial extra inch on the rapidly ageing man.
“Your little girl has a bigger dick and a better beard than you. You’re a shitty father and person and I intend to stay here as little as possible. In the interest of efficiency, I don’t really want to hear whatever little spiel you have. I know that you’re on the verge of bankruptcy, I know you’re trying to sell this house and I know that no-one wants to buy it because it’s obviously falling apart. I came here to tell you that I’m not going to look after you, I’m not going to help you keep paying that ugly maid, and I’m going to be very happy to hear of your untimely death of a supposed broken heart in a year or so because that’s easier than saying you had a heart attack following a severe fit of diarrhoea. Leave me alone you fat fuck.”
If there was one nice thing Titus could have said, the light was always pretty in the house, good big windows, even if a few of them were broken and boarded up. Here, it so elegantly framed the limpid discomfort and sorrow on his father’s face. He hadn’t had this much fun since his mother’s funeral (even if it was a shame to have ruined that suit).
“Well it seems you haven’t changed.” The master of the house sounded like a wet clown.
“Quite.”
“Come now [REDACTED], don't be so rude to your father.” said Titus’s mother.
“It’s. Fucking. Titus. You. Dead. Bitch.” The worst thing about undead family is that the joy of them dying isn’t maintained by the joy of not having to talk to them any more. “Jesus Piss in heaven! Whatever allowed you to escape the grips of Satan’s pubic desolation to haunt this tasteless, hideous dump astounds me! And you wonder why I don’t talk to you!”
There was a pause. They each looked sheepish, suspiciously so.
“So what do you actually want? I’m sure you didn’t call me here just for a beautiful family reunion.”
They continued to avoid his gaze.
“It’s… a little complicated love, and you’ve only just got here. Please, let’s have Manuela prepare some lunch, let you get unpacked after the flight. Your old room is exactly how you left it.”
He blinked, scowled, and marched upstairs. It would be easier to play along for now, then he could maybe get an evening flight back if everything went well. The room wasn’t ‘exactly as you left it’. The houseboy’s cumstains were missing. But otherwise, here was his whole estrogen-addled history peeling off the walls. Sleek popstar boys to fuck, sleek popstar boys to be. He had better cheekbones than all of them, and there was more money in the City than in music so he’d come out pretty well. He made his way to the sink and washed and examined his face, taking off the sunglasses for the first time. Eyes still a little bloodshot. There was dust behind the toilet. The call to lunch came from downstairs.
Manuela was undeniably a good cook, even if her employers refused anything with more flavour than half a clove of garlic. His mother, physically incapable of eating any more, still demanded a place set for her. The dead air in the dining room was delightful, and Titus made sure to eat as unceremoniously as he could.
“How is all your work going, love?”
“I’m a millionaire and a genius and my boyfriend’s an olympic diver with a huge cock. It’s going spectacularly. How’s the prospect of eternity trapped with the man you could never bring yourself to divorce?” She winced.
“Well I can tell you’re not going to make any good conversation, so we may as well get to the heart of it.”
“Excellent idea.” She sighed. Oh the joy of being disappointing.
“You might need to go to hell. Quite soon.”
He blinked.
“What.”
“Well you did sort of enquire as to how I managed to keep living here, and… I do love your father. You just never really understood our relationship, you just saw the problems. There was a… business deal that your father made a while ago, and while we got a lot of good out of it, we were asked for the soul of our first-born son. It sounded like a joke, and, even if not, it seemed we could get away with something as we weren’t planning on having any more children, and your father got that vasectomy but… given your recent choices, it may end up being more relevant.”
He was genuinely dumbstruck. The closest thing to acknowledgement he’d ever get from these dipshits and it came like this. He was meant to be the cool one and now his style-devoid parents were the devil worshippers. Fuck shit. Then, as if to be as irritating as possible, up piped his father.
“Well you have to look at it from our perspective.”
Titus thought about his father’s perspective seeing a baseball bat wielded by Titus coming to crack his skull open.
“The Dotcom Bubble had just burst, we were needed an opportunity. Nobody had even heard of this gender rubbish of yours back then.” Titus paused, then spoke softly.
“You two clearly have always been imbeciles, and have got much worse with age. I refuse to take this seriously. I’m going back to London immediately. Although clearly, I’m the idiot for opening your stupid fucking letter to start with.”
He reached for his phone, and realised he had left it on the bedside table, so stormed out (just like old times).
From the bedroom window, he noticed a second falcon seemed to have joined the first, swooping round overhead. This grounded him somewhat, until he remembered the lack of signal in this godforsaken place. His mother appeared at the door, continuing to plead.
“We’re very sorry E- love, we were young, and yes a little stupid. It is nice to see you after so long, even if you don’t feel the same way.”
“Fuck off, where’s your phone?”
“In your father’s study.”
He walked through her and marched to the study. How is it possible to have ugly interior design reach every last detail? The house phone was maroon and sticky, and did not work.
“WHAT KIND OF SICK FUCKING JOKE IS THIS?”
Wanker, bastard, asshole ghostmother lurked at the top of the stairs, all timid and meek as usual.
“Oh, I’m sure it was working but I don’t think we’ve had to phone anyone recently… Isn’t that right darling? Oh, or Manuela, maybe she’s used it I’ll ask.”
Titus, scrabbling at a telephone wire (plugged in, no obvious problems), couldn’t stand to hear another word of his shitdick parents. He leapt up, glared at the two of them, and turned on his heel towards the door. It wasn’t too far down to where there’d be some sort of signal.
“SEE YOU NEVER! FUCK OFF! HOPE YOU’RE MISERABLE FOREVER!”
The sun beat down harder now, it seemed colder and brighter all of a sudden. It felt like nothing. The grass and the weeds around the drive clambered over each other, and the drive stretched forever. Up above the falcons were multiplying, four, five, six, more each time he looked.
Eventually he reached the gate, and could see the town, where people would have a phone that actually fucking works. He turned onto the road and made his way down the mountainside, eyes fixed on the town below, which seemed to be covered in some pale haze.
His mouth felt dry but he knew that the time was almost there, the time of escape. The path kept on downhill, steeper than he remembered, but the town seemed further away the more he walked, and he had to sit down all of a sudden, exhausted, more than he’d ever been, and the light was brighter and brighter, but the temperature was dropping and he felt the air sting at his eyes. Was this it? Was this death?
All of a sudden, his vision was stained red, and there was a stinging sensation on his head. Blood dripped across his vision onto the road as the falcons dived down. Titus leapt up, ran down and through and away, but with each few seconds the falcons took another chunk of him. He looked round for somewhere to hide but the birds were fast and there wasn’t anything like cover. To the left there was a turning, where he hoped for some respite.
But he looked to the sides and saw the weeds, the haphazard garden lights, and finally that hideous growth of a house. Mr. and Mrs. Cunt were waiting at the door still, looking worried in a way that reminded him of coming back hungover from some shit local party…
“What do you pricks want? I can’t fucking leave. Is this your infernal lord claiming me?”
They paused, his father spoke up now with that stale flat politeness, even now when their only child was about to be eaten by the earth itself.
“I don’t know what’s happening [REDACTED], but you look awful. Come inside and let’s have a think.”
There wasn’t much else he could do. He stumbled in silently, too tired to say any of the many things they deserved. There was a plush white armchair, a little tacky, but at least approaching camp. He picked a feather out of his hair and collapsed. He sat, he waited, and he fell through the floor to the deep below.
Titus’s father walked to his child’s body and lightly closed his gaping eyes, avoiding his wife’s gaze. He sighed, and, with no fanfare, was dragged down into the earth after his first-born son.
The sun bore down heavily on the revenant Helen Hilderman as she wandered through her home. She knew she was trapped here, with nothing to do but haunt the halls and avoid the room that heaved with the remains of her husband and (she supposed) son. Manuela was gone. Everyone was gone, everyone but those two corpses. She could not leave the house walls, and so here she was, alone. She sat on the bottom stair, and wept forever more.