Berserk Read Free

looked he saw his son riding a tricycle, kicking a football, leaving home at seventeen to join the Army. There came a point when Tom wished he could go even a day without memories, but those were the times when loss hit him hardest. His anger, though rich and deep, was also useless. It would gain him nothing. And he knew that through it all, the most important thing was that he and Jo were there for each other.
    He had never forgotten, nor forgiven, but in a way he supposed he had given in. And eventually life moved on.
    They kept monsters.
    “Yes,” he said again, “I’d like to go. I think it would do us some good.” Jo lowered her head and looked down into her mug. “Jo? You all right?”
    She nodded, looked up at him with sad eyes. She rarely cried anymore. Somehow this look of wretchedness was worse. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s only an anniversary. Not really a day different to any other.”
    “No, no different.”
    “I think about him every day anyway. It’s just . . .” She trailed off, shook her head.
    “We should mark the day,” Tom said.
    “Yes.” Jo looked at him and smiled. “It’s like a birthday, except this is Steven’s deathday. Is that sick, Tom? Will people think we’re weird?”
    Tom grasped her hand across the table and felt the stickiness of butter and jam between her fingers. “You think I give a flying fuck what people think?” he asked.
    Jo laughed. He liked that sound. It reminded him that they still had a life together, and sometimes he reminding. needed
    “I’m going to work,” he said. “I’ll check out the Internet at lunchtime and see if I can find us a nice cottage somewhere nearby.”
    “I think just a weekend,” Jo said. “Any longer may not be very nice.”
    “Just a weekend,” Tom agreed. He stood and kissed his wife, hugged her, tickled her ear and stepped back as she aimed a slap at his arm. “See you later. Love you.”
    “Love you too,” she said, already standing to prepare for work. “I’ll be home a bit later tonight, I need to finish this design before the end of the week.”
    “I’ll cook tea,” Tom said. He smiled, and when Jo gave him a smile in return he saw the real, sad depth to her that no banter or play could ever hide.
     
    * * *
     
    That lunchtime at work, Tom booked a cottage on the edge of Salisbury Plain for the second weekend in October. It was a remote location, set just outside a little village, an old cottage with two bedrooms, a downstairs toilet, an open log fire and a cold-room beneath the kitchen where occupants had once stored their meat and other perishables. It was a ten-minute walk from the nearest pub and restaurant, and a half-hour drive from the military areas of Salisbury Plain. If Steven’s ghost haunted the Plain, Tom and Jo would be within shouting distance.
    Tom often wondered about ghosts. Steven is always with us, Jo said, but she meant as a memory, the reality of him retained by their never letting his moment in life fade away. But when they were dead and gone, what then? Would their son become nothing more than a number in an Army report, a photograph, an occasional thought for his surviving friends? And after that . . . nothing. How could someone so alive suddenly become so dead? Tom hated this way of thinking, yet he had always had a mind prone to exploring the more esoteric areas of life, and Steven’s death encouraged that rather than lessened it. Some nights, napping on the settee next to Jo, he found himself wandering the moors, drifting above those dark acres of fern and grass, skipping across marshland, passing through occasional small woods where animals lived from year to year without ever seeing a human being. And occasionally, in the darkest moments, he saw Steven roaming the Plain, confused at his sudden death, crying . . . crying for his mother and father . . . because he was far too young to die.
    Tom would open his eyes, stare at the familiar four walls of his home, and despair at