The Evil Inside by Philip Taffs Read Free Book Online Page A

he was the “scuzzball of all scuzzballs”. She looked like she was gonna start beating him with her handbag!’ Mia yawned and headed for the bedroom.
    ‘Really?’ I stood up with the plates. ‘Well, see how you feel tomorrow. Just don’t overdo it. OK?’
    ‘OK.’
    After she’d gone to bed, I planned on going through Mia’s handbag and grabbing one of the names off the ‘Shrink List’ that Susanna had also kindly provided in case Mia felt like talking ‘to someone professional’.
    I stepped into the kitchen and turned on the taps.
    The same awful memory I’d tried to submerge in the Brave Face kitchen rose back up again to the surface like soap scum:
    How I hate that voice.
    That cunty, carping, wheedling, needling, emasculating, enervating, never-ending voice.
    ‘Guuu-yyyy!’ she screams.
    ‘Guy! Bring me my towel will ya, you little shit!’
    She often forgets to take her towel with her into the bathroom when she’s been drinking. Which isn’t uncommon.
    ‘It’s hanging on the chair in the yard!’ she calls.
    On the way home from school, I’ve actually been thinking about Hamlet’s mother:
    Mother, for love of grace,
    Lay not that flattering unction to your soul …
    ‘I’m not mad, it’s
you
that’s bad,’ I’ve written in the margin of my book.
    I like Shakespeare; I like the sound of the words, even when I don’t know exactly what they mean.
    But I always make notes and find out later.
    And I’m still debating whether Polonius was stupid, unlucky or both.
    I wonder the same about my mother now as I retrieve her towel from the back yard and re-enter the house.
    I hear water beginning to gurgle down our often-blocked drain.
    I walk into the bathroom and try not to look at her as she stands up in the bath.
    ‘What have you been doin’ out there?
    ‘You’re a disgrace.
    ‘You’ll never be anything.
    ‘You’re useless.
    ‘I can’t stand you.’
    But today Mr Punch has a surprise: I step right up close, holding her towel out to her with a great big smile.
    And for once Judy is lost for words.

The little bed on the wheels
    Leave Monday afternoon, back Tuesday afternoon: Anthony was right – San Francisco was a blitz.
    A long wagon train of clouds plodded past my little oval window. A yellow tear across one of them made me feel anxious, as though something ungodly was oozing from the heavens.
    I flicked distractedly through the
Red Herring
,
Industry Standard
and
Wired
magazines I’d bought at the airport newsstand. I was nervous. This was my first test at Brave Face. I wanted to repay Anthony’s faith and investment in me. I also wanted some sort of divine affirmation that making the trip to the States had been the right decision, not just some crazy whim. Winning a new piece of business within just a few weeks of arriving would be a very reassuring pat on the head from above.
    Anthony, by contrast, was the epitome of confidence. He made phone calls and wrote strategies for other forthcoming pitches. And he drank endless cups of the dreadful black aircraft oil that masqueraded as coffee.
    By the time we checked into the Hotel Powell in downtown San Fran, it was already 7.30 p.m. – so 10.30 p.m. back in New York.
    I phoned home. ‘Were you asleep?’
    ‘Not yet,’ Mia yawned. ‘Just checking out some more apartments on the net.’
    ‘How’s my boy?’
    ‘He’s good. We just watched a great doco on Discovery Channel about panthers and pumas – did you know they’re actually the same animal? And today Esmeralda took him to the Natural History Museum and he really got off on the dinosaurs. I thought he might have been scared, but he loved them. He misses you.’
    ‘At least someone does.’
    There was a long pause before she yawned again.
    ‘Anyway, I’m just exhausted. Good night. And good luck tomorrow.’
    Polite. Perfunctory. Not at all like the old Mia I knew and loved.
    ‘I’ll call you afterwards,’ I told the cold-sounding woman now impersonating my