Number Thirty-Two by Cassie Steward

Author:Cassie Steward [Steward, Cassie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY SIX

Switzerland, 1983.

The Carmichaels limped towards Christmas seething like rats in a sack, fractious and divided, each turned with tunnelled vision towards the respective axes they were grinding.

Louie was becoming more erratic by the day. As though he’d gone out to a string of parties and left his soul at one of them, the very core of him had been lost. The sparkle in his eyes had been replaced with something duller and more calculating.

He had become wrathful and secretive, and each family member walked the precarious tightrope of his volatility whenever he was in residence, which was less and less. He offered up no explanation for his comings and goings, the family left in limbo for periods of time that increased in length and frequency.

Grayson and Ella had seemingly become united in some kind of coalition against Louie’s lifestyle choices. Father and daughter talked in hushed tones behind Ella’s bedroom door, which had become the unofficial enemy lines.

Numerous tactics had been trialled with little success, while Anna watched on as her husband veered clumsily between good cop and bad cop. A dichotomy of heart to hearts and attempts at the hard line of zero tolerance.

Anna, in turn, felt slighted and suspicious of what she perceived to be their plotting, the guilty silences that descended every time she walked into a room serving only to aggravate her further. She was in lioness mode, and must protect her cub from the knives being sharpened behind his back, regardless of his behaviour.

The frustration was blinding and all encompassing, her stubbornness isolating her. Maggie was her only port in this storm, her quiet wisdom the only thing that was even marginally able to pierce through her defences.

‘Of course he’s angry!’ she ranted in Maggie’s kitchen. ‘She just bloody stole away into the night without a word! With his child in her belly! No explanation, no nothing! How could she do that? She’s evil!’

‘Has he not spoken to her yet?’ Maggie asked gently.

‘No! God knows he’s tried! Grayson has been called over to Kensington countless times to go and pick him up from their front gates, they won’t even let him inside, never mind grace the poor boy with a face-to-face conversation! He’s broken Mags, he’s broken. And to top it off, it seems like everyone else is out to get him too!’

Louie had turned up, in various states of intoxication, over twelve times to the Bennett’s white stone villa. To the Bennett’s, he was simply a nuisance; a threat to their reputation and their place in the world. To Anna, he was a boy drowning in devastation, Bonnie’s fingernails hooked like cat claws into his schoolboy prey-heart.

The procedure played out each time in the same way: Louie arriving at the magic gates on the back end of some party or other, pendulum swinging between despairing sobs and screams of rage. The phone ringing at number thirty-two to inform the Carmichaels that if he wasn’t removed immediately, they would have him forcibly removed (how and by whom they never specified).

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