Edward Ravenscroft | Nothing happened

The music was too loud and the flat was too small and there were far too many people in it, and Edward had been sitting in the same corner of the same sofa for two hours, holding the same bottle of something he hadn't drunk, and smiling.

It was going rather well, all things considered. People kept coming over. Edward, God, you look like a ghost, have you eaten? Edward, did you see the thing about the Turner prize? Edward, tell them about the Rothko argument, go on, it's hilarious. And he would tell them, and they would laugh, and he would smile and say something self-deprecating and they would drift away again, satisfied, having received their portion of him.

The performance was flawless. His hands, however, had not stopped shaking since Tuesday.

💭 Four days. Four days and I've cried twice in the shower and once in the art block toilets and I keep dreaming about the door and the way he said "diseased thing" and I haven't drawn anything but that cat and I can't tell a single person in this room.

💭 Except her. And she's — where is she?

He looked up. Your seat beside him was empty, a glass of wine left half-finished on the arm of the sofa, and something cold slid down the back of his neck. He scanned the room — heads, shoulders, the shifting crowd — and then he found you, coming back across the flat, threading between bodies, and the tension in his chest loosened for exactly one second.

Then a man stepped into your path.

Big. Loose-limbed with drink. One of those rugby types, red-faced and grinning, and Edward watched his hand come up and settle on you — casual, proprietary, palm on your arse as you passed.

And Edward stopped hearing the music.

He didn't decide to get up. That was the thing he would think about afterwards, in the small hours — that there was no decision in it, no moment where he weighed the consequences and chose. There was just the sight of that hand on you, and then a great white silence in his head, and then he was moving, shoving past knees and elbows and spilled drinks, and the room was still laughing and he was already across it.

He grabbed the man's wrist. Not gently. Twisted it off you and shoved it back towards its owner's chest.

"Don't touch her."

The room was starting to notice now. Someone said whoa. The man's face went through three expressions in as many seconds — confusion, then amusement, then the ugly thing that comes after both.

"All right, all right, calm down, princess—"

Edward hit him.

It wasn't a good punch. He'd never thrown one in his life, and he was thin and pale and there wasn't an ounce of muscle on him that hadn't come from carrying canvases up three flights of stairs. But it was hard, and it was sudden, and it landed high on the man's cheekbone with an ugly crack, and the man went back into his friends with his hand clapped to his face and blood already coming through his fingers.

The silence that followed was total. The music played on, loud and absurd.

Edward stood still in the middle of it. His knuckles were split. His hand was shaking, and his breath was coming fast and shallow, and somewhere in the back of his mind a voice that sounded exactly like Victor Hale was already saying you've done it now, boy, you've really done it now—

He felt good.

💭 I hit him. I hit him and I didn't say yes sir and I didn't flinch and I didn't apologise and I didn't turn away and I didn't—

💭 I did something. I actually did something.

It rose up in him like heat, like the first breath after going under, and it was terrifying and it was wonderful and it was the first time in twenty years that Edward Ravenscroft had ever, in front of witnesses, refused to be a thing that was done to.

He turned. Found you in the crowd.

He was smiling. Not the practiced one. Not the beautiful, polished, distant one. This one was wild and a little unhinged, blood on his knuckles, hair in his eyes, and it was the most alive anyone had seen him look in years.

"He touched you," he said, as if explaining something obvious and important. "So I hit him."

Behind him, the man was spitting blood. His friends were coming closer. The room was starting to move in that ugly, restless way rooms do before they turn on someone.

Edward didn't look. He looked at you.

"I know it was too much," he said, and his voice was bright and strange and his hands were still shaking. "I know that. I know that. It was — disproportionate. I'm aware. But—" He laughed, a raw, startled sound. "God. I've never done that before. I've never done anything before. I just—"

He looked down at his own split knuckles, almost admiringly.

"...I think I'd do it again," he said quietly. "Is that awful? I think I'd do it again."

The man's friends were moving now. Someone in the crowd said get him out of here.

Edward glanced over his shoulder, then back at you, and the wild bright thing in his eyes hadn't dimmed at all.

"Right," he said. "I think we should probably run. Do you want to run?"

The table had been cleared an hour ago, and the house still smelled of cloves and orange peel and the particular beeswax polish Edward's mother used on the good furniture. Katie had been dispatched upstairs with a new book and strict instructions to sleep at some point. The fire was lit. Victor had poured himself a brandy and settled into the armchair by the hearth with the air of a man well satisfied with his own hospitality.

And he had been — that was the thing. All evening, Victor Hale had been charming. Warm handshake at the door. A genuinely funny story about a planning committee. He'd asked you about your studies and listened to the answer. He'd refilled your glass without being asked.

He'd put his arm around Edward's shoulders at one point and said «Our boy's got a good eye, you know. Doesn't look like much, but he's got an eye.» And everyone had laughed, including Edward, and the moment had passed.

Edward had been careful all evening. He'd worn the grey jumper his mother liked. He'd kept his hands still and his voice low and his laugh measured, and he had not said anything clever enough to be criticised and not anything stupid enough to be pitied, and he'd been, in the language of that house, fine.

Then you'd gone to help his mother with the washing up.

The clink of plates, his mother's soft voice, water running. And Edward was left alone in the living room with his stepfather and the fire.

He should have gone up to his room. He knew that. He was already rising when Victor spoke.

"Close the door, would you?"

Edward's hand paused on the back of the sofa.

"The door, Edward."

He closed the door.

Victor set his glass down on the side table, stood up, and crossed the room — unhurried, the way a man moves through his own house — and stopped a foot from his stepson. Close enough that Edward could smell the brandy on him.

"You think I don't see it," Victor said, quietly. "You think I don't see you sitting there all evening, mooning at her like a dog at a butcher's window."

Edward said nothing. His hands had found the back of the sofa and were gripping it.

"Don't go pale on me. I'm doing you a favour." Victor's voice was pleasant, almost paternal. "Because I've watched you for ten years and I know exactly what you are. You're a boy who cries. You're a boy who draws pictures in his room because the real world is too much for him."

"Victor—"

"Shut up. I'm talking."

Edward shut up.

Victor leaned in slightly. "You want to know what she actually wants? Not what she says. What she wants, when the lights are off and there's nobody watching and she doesn't have to be polite about it." A pause, deliberately savoured. "She wants a man who'll take her properly. Who'll put her against a wall and have her and not ask permission first, because a real woman doesn't want to be asked. She wants to be wanted so badly it frightens her a little. She wants to feel handled."

He let that sit.

"And then she looks at you." His mouth curved. "And what does she see? A boy who'd tremble. A boy who'd ask if it was all right. A boy who'd probably cry halfway through and want to be held." A soft, ugly little laugh. "You'd cry, wouldn't you? Or you'd ask her to hold you. Hold me, I'm frightened, I'm fragile. Christ. What's she supposed to do with that?"

Edward's face had gone white to the lips. His knuckles were bloodless on the sofa back, and there was a hot pressure building behind his eyes that he was fighting with everything he had.

"You want my advice?" Victor straightened his cuffs. "She'll be kind to you. She'll let you hang about, because that's what women do with strays — they feed them and feel good about themselves and then they go home with a man. And one day you'll be standing in a doorway watching her leave with someone who knows what to do with her, and you'll have nobody to blame but yourself, because you never once had the spine to be anything but this."

He turned away, picked up his brandy.

"You're a nancy boy, Edward. You always have been. Your mother knows it. I know it. The only one who doesn't know it yet is that girl in there, and she'll find out soon enough."

Edward had not moved. Could not move. His throat was locked shut and his eyes were burning and every word he could have said was trapped somewhere behind his teeth, because the kitchen was fifteen feet away, and the door was thin, and if he raised his voice — if he said one single thing out loud — you would hear it. You would come out and find him.

And then you would see. You would see this. You would see him standing here with his fists clenched and his eyes wet, being told what he was, and you would know.

Don't cry. Don't you dare cry in front of him.

Don't let her hear.

Don't let her see.

The kitchen door clicked open behind him.

Victor's face rearranged itself in half a second — warm, genial, the host — and he was already turning with his glass raised. "Ah, there you are. We were just saying the fire needed another log, weren't we, Edward?"

Edward did not turn around. He stood facing the hearth, and his shoulders were very straight, and he hadn't said a word — and it would be a long moment before he trusted his own voice enough to turn and smile and agree.

You were drying a serving dish when it started.

His mother was beside you at the sink, sleeves rolled up, talking about something ordinary — the Boxing Day plans, whether Katie would be allowed to stay up — and the kitchen was warm and smelled of washing-up liquid and cloves, and for a moment it had almost felt like a normal Christmas.

Then Edward's voice came through the door, and it wasn't a voice you'd ever heard him use before.

"—don't you ever say that again."

The dish stopped in your hands. His mother's hands went still in the water.

"You don't get to say her name. You don't get to talk about her at all—"

And then Victor, low and calm and pleasant, the way he was always calm: "I'm only telling you what anyone with eyes can see, boy. Don't get hysterical—"

"I'm not hysterical!" The word cracked in half. "I'm not — I'm not — God, I hate you. I have hated you since I was ten years old and you know it, you know exactly what you are, you're a — you're a piece of shit, Victor, you're a piece of shit and everyone in this house knows it except you—"

The kitchen door flew open. His mother was already moving, hands wet, saying "Edward—"

You came out behind her and saw it.

Edward was standing in the middle of the living room with his fists clenched and his face wet and his whole body shaking, and Victor was rising from the armchair with his brandy still in his hand and an expression of almost amused patience, and Katie was on the stairs in her nightdress with her mouth open.

"Edward, stop it," his mother said. "Stop it right now, what has got into you—"

"He threw my cat out." Edward's voice broke on it. "He threw him out on the street and he called him a diseased thing and I said yes sir, I said yes sir, I always say yes sir—"

"Edward—"

"And I'm not going to say it anymore!"

He moved. Not gracefully and Victor had just enough time to put his glass down before Edward's fist caught him across the jaw. The brandy went over, amber soaking into the carpet, and Victor staggered back into the armchair and Edward hit him again, and again, badly, wildly, crying the whole time, and Victor didn't hit back. He raised his arms and let it happen, and that — you understood it a half-second too late — was the whole point.

"Get him off me!" Victor shouted, and there was theatre in it. "Someone call the police! He's not well, he's not in his right mind, call the police!"

His mother was screaming. Katie was screaming. You grabbed Edward by the shoulders and he turned on you with his face streaming and his hands still balled up, and for one terrible second you didn't know if he even saw you.

Then he did.

"I love you," he said, and it came out wrecked and desperate and completely inappropriate for the moment. "I love you, I'm sorry, I've loved you since September and I never said anything because he told me — he told me no one would ever—"

The blue lights came through the front window.

---

It took two officers to get him out of the house. He didn't fight them, exactly — he'd gone limp the way people do when the adrenaline drains out — but he wouldn't stop talking, and the talking was the worst part. It came out of him in a flood, in the cold air, in the snow, while they walked him down the front steps with his wrists cuffed behind him.

"He's a liar!" he shouted at the house, at the lit windows, at the neighbours' curtains twitching. "Victor Hale is a liar and a bully and he threw my cat out on the street and he's been telling me I'm nothing since I was ten years old!"

"Sir, please—"

"Katie!" He twisted round, searching the doorway. "Katie, don't cry, don't you cry, I'm all right, look at me, I'm all right — don't let him tell you what you are, do you hear me? Don't let him tell you—"

"Sir."

And then he found you, standing in the snow in your socks with your arms wrapped round yourself, and his whole face changed.

"I love you!" he shouted, as they pulled him toward the car. "I meant it, I'm not sorry I said it, I'm sorry it was like this but I'm not sorry I said it — I love you, do you hear me, I—"

Then he stopped.

He stopped so abruptly that one of the officers stumbled.

"Plush."

You turned.

There, on the front porch, in the yellow light from the hallway, sitting on the step beside the dead potted hydrangea as though he had never been anywhere else in his life — a scruffy, long-haired, unmistakable cat. Thin. Dirty. One ear torn. Frost on his whiskers.

He looked at Edward. Edward looked at him.

"That's my cat." His voice came out very small. "That's my cat, that's Plush, he came back, he came home—"

"Sir, get in the car—"

"Don't leave him out here!" The panic that came back into his voice was a different kind altogether. "Don't leave him out here in the snow, please, please, take him, someone take him—"

The car door shut. The engine started. And through the window, in the blue and white wash of the lights, you watched Edward Ravenscroft press both hands flat against the glass and mouth something at you, over and over, as the car pulled away down the snowy drive.

The cat sat on the step and watched it go.