Breaking...

Leaning against a lamp post while he waits for a bus, Luke is lost in thought. Around him, the bustle of morning takes place. People are going to work, their clothes presenting a unifiedfront of conservatism to the world. There are few touches of personality. Nobody acknowledges the passing of anybody else. It suits Luke that way. He is lost in a revery, trying to put his finger on what has changed since his conversation with Josie - Josie's conversation with him, he concedes to himself as the dilapidated bus pulled up and the dark waiting hoard swarm for the doors. Luke pushes in behind the last of them, tilting forward from the heels to make sure the door doesn't close on him. An annoyed passenger glares at him silently until he returns to an upright position. Luke doesn't notice.

It's the little things he misses most, he realises in surprise. Waking up in the dark to the sound of her breathing beside him, slow and steady. The way she'd laugh with her whole body, doubled up, clutching his knee, his shoulder, any part of him she could reach, for support. The millions of unthinking ways they had connected each and every day. He'd never even noticed them until she was gone. And now he misses her. She had been his link with the world, the silence of the bus told him. He hadn't heard a voice since she had told him goodbye. There had been no interaction with the world.

With a jolt, he understands. Without Josie, he doesn't exist. He is invisible, just like everyone around him was invisible. 

He steps off the bus at his stop, walking on broken pavement towards the blank-faced building where he spends his work days. A door at ground level swallows the people walking ahead of him. He stops for a moment, an island in the flow of head-down pedestrians, and tilts his head back to look at the building. The windows are coated in grime making it hard to tell where the wall ends and the glass begins. He doesn't want to go into the half light he knows waits for him at his desk. As murky as it is outside, at least there is a chance of sunlight, he thinks as he lingers. 

With a sigh he walks forward again, head down. If it is hard going into this office, it is ten times easier than the one he goes to for his evening job, he tells himself. He hates having to go on to another office when he leaves here. It is too much work for one person to keep up, he knows, but it's better than starving. All the same, the tiredness is deep within him, settling in his bones. 

Breaking

As she looked across the table, he could see that she had something to tell him. Something in the way her hands were placed flat on the red and white check of the table cloth told him she was nervous, but trying to hide it. Her eyes darted around, looking everywhere but at him. He knew that, whatever it was she was about to say, she thought he was going to react badly to it. Finally, she opened her mouth and spoke.

‘I’m leaving.’

Josie sat back, as if waiting for his reaction. If she was, he disappointed her. Reactions would have to wait while her announcement sank in.

‘Did you hear me, Luke?’ she demanded. He nodded, silent.

‘I’m leaving you,’ she said again, her voice rising. ‘You and your bloody silences.’

The last comment was bitter. Josie spat it out in an attempt to provoke him into showing some emotion. But he could not react. Scream, cry, rant – in his head, yes, but none of it came to the surface anymore. He’d been hiding things for too long now, pushing his thoughts and feelings down deep inside where they wouldn’t get him into trouble. He’d always been told that they were dangerous. Now it was their absence that was causing him problems. When emotion was finally expected from him, he found that he had to struggle to let it out. The habit of locking himself away was almost too strong, the walls too high.

‘For god’s sake, doesn’t that mean anything to you? Have these three years been nothing?’

She stood up from the table and, suddenly, the eyes that had been so carefully averted before were focused on them. Now it was a scene, and they were allowed to watch. Luke sank down further and buried his head in his hands, trying to bring what was inside to the surface.

‘Yeah, that’s it,’ she said bitterly. ‘Hang your head, don’t say a word. That’s one way to deal with it. Maybe by the time you look up, it will be gone – but so will I. And you know that won’t be the end of it all. You know it.’

She leaned across the table and pried his hands away from his face, lifting his chin in a curiously gentle way after her harsh words. He felt something beginning to break inside.

‘You used to care,’ she said softly. ‘You cared so much I thought you’d die of a broken heart, one of these days. Now here we are and it’s my heart that’s broken and yours is dead. God, I sound like some trashy novel.’

She backed away from him and started to get her things together. Luke wanted to tell her not to go, but the words wouldn’t come. There was a lump in his throat that was blocking them.

‘Tell me, Luke. Was it all worth it? Is it worth selling your soul for peace of mind?’ She laughed, bitter again. ‘I don’t blame you, really. I can see how it would happen. But is that what you did? I just need to know that, and I’ll go away.’

He opened his eyes. He’d closed them when Josie asked if it was worth it. He’d been thrown by the changing line of attack, see-sawing between bitterness and kindness. It had been enough to shake the emotional wall that he hid himself behind; shaken him enough that he looked back over everything they’d done together, everything they’d said, and the enormity of her leaving came crashing home. She was already halfway to the door.

‘Josie,’ he barely managed to croak. She paused, turned to look over her shoulder. She was surprised by the tears welling in his eyes. She came back to the table for a moment.

‘Josie, don’t go.’

‘Is that all you can manage?’ she asked.

When he didn’t –couldn’t – say any more, she turned once more for the door.

‘Goodbye Luke.’

She was gone. She’d left him. Luke put his hands on the table where hers had been only minutes before. He could almost see the imprints her palms had left as she’d tried to get up the courage to tell him she was leaving. Despair gripped his stomach, and his world seemed that bit colder. Josie wasn’t in it anymore.

The crowd in the restaurant turned back to their meals. Some of them would report what had happened, but most would forget. It was just another argument between yet another couple who couldn’t stand the strain in a city full of others in the same situation.

A Beginning

Here comes the rain again
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again
Becoming who we are
-Green Day, Wake Me Up When September Ends



Luke stayed quiet when old Mr Hussein from next door disappeared, never said a word to the new people who moved into his house about the fact that he had seen them dragging the old man from his home and throwing him into the back of a black van. He pretended not to hear the cries for help that echoed up and down the street. Looking back, he figured he had made it easier for them to erase Mr Hussein’s existence from the world. Luke tried to block from his memory all the times Mr Hussein had given him a glass of fresh lemonade when he went to retrieve a ball from his backyard, all the stories about the wife and daughters who had died before he migrated back in the 90s. It was easier to make out that the man carefully tending his garden had been imagined. Life soon returned to normal and if Luke missed the long winding conversations with the old man, he was the only one to know it. Luke had long before accepted that he was only one voice and could therefore change nothing.

It was harder when the others went. The first he knew about the trouble was Andy shaking him awake one night.

‘Wake up Luke. Come on, wake up.’ Andy grew more energetic in his shaking of Luke’s shoulder. Luke groaned and started to sit up. It was only after rubbing the sleep from his eyes that he noticed it was still dark.

‘What the hell, Andy?’ He glanced at the alarm clock between their beds. ‘It’s 3:30, what do you want?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ hissed Andy. ‘Get up. Come on.’

Without waiting to see if his brother followed, Andy climbed out through the window of their bedroom. By now Luke had realised that something was up, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw when he followed Andy down the side of the house to get a view of the street. Andy had stopped at the corner, out of sight of the street and Luke had to lean around or over him to see. The sight took his breath away.

The house across the road was Pete’s house. The Li’s had always kept it immaculate, a gingerbread house in pastel colours with pretty lace curtains at the windows. Pete had to mow the lawn every weekend and Kim, his grandmother, spent most of her days tending the flower beds. It was one of those houses where everything was perfect and well-cared for, in stark contrast to Luke’s own house. That may have been part of what made it so disturbing to see men in black jumpsuits, helmets and goggles leaving the house. It was all Luke could do to keep himself from yelling at them to get off the flowerbeds.

Four of them stood guard, rifles at the ready. Another was by the driver’s door of a truck parked two houses down, outside the Ryans’. None of the five seemed to belong in the suburban street, but they looked more at home than the ten who came quietly out of the Li’s house. The moved quickly in pairs, each with a rifle slung over one shoulder. Supported between each pair was a member of the Li family; Pete, Kim, Georgie, Dave and Sue. None of the Li’s carried their own weight; they all seemed at best dazed and Kim’s head lolled on her shoulder like a broken doll’s.

One by one the Li's were tossed roughly into the back of the truck. Andy shuddered as they pushed Georgie in and Luke put a hand on his shoulder in a combination of reassurance and restraint. He pulled his brother back from the corner as the soldiers - because now he knew that that’s what they were - laughed quietly together and followed the Li's into the truck. By the time the boys had made it back to the window the truck had gone and Andy was sobbing.

‘The bastards. The stupid lying cheating bastards.’


The next morning, Luke staggered down to the kitchen still bleary with sleep. He’d left Andy fuming beside the house the night before, too exhausted to sit a vigil. He went to the fridge to get himself the makings of breakfast and poured himself a glass of juice from the carton, oblivious to the looks his parents are exchanging over Becca’s head as they got themselves ready for work.

Finally, his mother spoke.

“Lukie, where's your brother? He's going to be late for work. Hannah's already gone.” Her voice was tight with tension. Luke shrugged, oblivious.

“He's already up.”

“You mean he got up without being poked?” laughed his father. “Write that one down in the diary, then.” Luke shrugged again. His brother’s sleeping patterns were not interesting to him. Not when he was still half asleep himself.

“I don't know what happened, but he's not in bed.” The toast popped out of the toaster and he spread it with a smear of jam, knowing that more would earn him some comments from his parents about the cost of food.

“Go see if he's in the shower, would you, Lukie? I haven't seen him.” Luke looked a little closer at his mother before going from the room. The noises from the kitchen drifted through to Luke as he walked up the drab hallway.

“I've got to go now,” his father was saying, “or I'll be late. I can't wait for him if he hasn't already gone. He'll have to make his own way.”

The bathroom door was open with no sign of Andy. Some of his mother’s tension finally hit home to Luke and he was suddenly awake as he turned back into the room he shared with Andy. He opened Andy’s cupboard and saw the gaps in the clothing were bigger than they should be. The bag that normally rested on top of the cupboard was gone. Luke raced back to the kitchen.

“He's not there. His bag's gone, his clothes. He's gone.”

His mother spun from her place at the stove, a tea bag spraying brown liquid across the worn floor.

“What? How can he be gone?”

“Lukie, come on. This isn't a time to joke,” said his father, a serious expression on his face. Luke remembered again Andy’s words from the nights before.

“The stupid, lying, cheating bastard.”

He sat at the table and dropped his head into his hands, things clicking into place in ways that he doesn’t want them to. He sensed that his mother had come to stand over him and forced himself to speak.

“They took the Li's last night. The black vans. Andy saw.”

After another exchange of glances over the heads of their children before Amy Turner told her daughter, “Becca, go and get your bag for school or you'll be late. Go on now.”

She sat down at the table to wait for Becca to be out of hearing before she spoke again, this time very quietly. Her hands were playing with the string of the tea bag twisting and knotting it as a puddle of tea formed on the table top.

“Luke, tell me everything you know.”

Luke looked up at her, wondering what to say as he studied her careworn face, her crinkled eyes and the grey at her temples.

“He woke me up last night and we went outside. The black vans were there. They took the Li's. Andy was going to sit up for a bit. He was pretty upset.”

Amy looked across to where her husband was standing with his back to them, his hands holding the bench top in a white knuckle grip.

“He wouldn't do anything stupid, would he?” she pleaded.

Luke waited for his father’s response, hoping for some reassurance, some hint that the conclusions he was drawing were wrong. His father would not give him any comfort.

“We don't know what he's done. He might have just gone out to sort his head out. We know nothing for now. Let's not assume anything.”