Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,4

I want to say. ‘What happened to your hands?’

Doherty already told me Mason had been fighting. I want to hear him admit it.

Mason unfolds his arms and shoves his hands into his pockets. ‘Slammed them under a car bonnet at the workshop. No big deal.’

He steps out of the room and tugs the door shut behind him. Crouching next to the shrivelled plant by the doorstep, he tips the terracotta pot on an angle and places the key underneath.

‘Mason,’ I say.

He straightens and starts walking across the forecourt, diverting around a crumbling pothole in the concrete.

‘Mason!’

He ignores the office window as he passes, keeping his head down and pace steady. It’s only when he disappears at the end of the driveway that I realise his last few words couldn’t be more wrong.

It is a big deal.

Mason Weaver just lied to my face.

And it’s not the first time he’s done it.

Fourteen weeks before the storm

Mason curled his hands into fists, keeping his gaze trained on a gouge in the countertop. His mother was slumped in a chair at the other end of the kitchen where the sunlight didn’t quite reach. She stared into her glass cabinet full of Wedgwood plates propped on tiny display stands. She owned dozens of them, all the same colour blue with white, leafy borders like whipped cream from a can. She’d inherited her mother’s collection and had been adding to it every year, each one with a different picture in the middle, some fancy building or member of the royal family. Mason accidentally chipped Princess Diana when he was seven and his mother didn’t speak to him for a week.

‘Ivy?’ he said now, irritation creeping into his voice. It hadn’t been his idea to call her by her first name. She’d never liked Mum. She said it made her feel trapped.

His mother dragged her attention away from the cabinet and narrowed her eyes like a sulky kid being hassled. A strand of straw-coloured hair curled down one side of her face, her complexion as pallid as wax.

Jesus Christ, he hated how she did this. The way she agreed to things when she was drunk and then ripped them all away when she was hungover. She’d been doing it since he was a little kid, back when it was just the two of them, when she’d hug him too tight and whisper into his ear, desperate and fumy, ‘We don’t need anyone else. You’re never going to leave me.’

Back then it was all wheedling and begging and promises as empty as the whisky bottles she stashed in the back of kitchen cupboards. And Mason would agree to everything because he was a little kid whose hope hadn’t yet been crushed by years of her not delivering. She’d hidden it better in public when he was younger, and things only really fell apart behind closed doors. But his mother’s drinking went through phases, and Mason never knew what the tipping point would be for another downward spiral.

This last year had been one of the worst he could remember. She wasn’t even trying to cut back anymore. He didn’t know whether she’d started hitting the bottle again because she’d lost her job, or if the drinking was the reason she’d been sacked. Her moods were darker, her outbursts more frequent. She was trying less and less to hide her behaviour around town, and the tuts and whispers were growing louder.

‘You can wipe that look off your face,’ she said now. ‘You hear me, Mason? You’re not getting a job. You need to be here.’

‘We talked about it a couple of days ago.’ He kept his tone measured, knowing better than to raise his voice. Nothing shut his mother down faster than ‘goddamn disrespect’. ‘Mr Macleod says seventeen’s the perfect age for an apprenticesh—’

‘O-ohhh.’ She stubbed her cigarette out on the corner of her breakfast plate, ignoring the glass ashtray Mason had emptied and placed by her elbow. ‘And I suppose Stu Macleod’s offering to clean and mend things around here too, is he?’

You could get off your pickled backside and do it yourself, he thought. ‘I can do both. Nothing has to change.’

‘Bull.’ She scrabbled for another cigarette with crimson fingernails, upturning gossip magazines and hardware catalogues in her search for a disposable lighter. Mason found them all over the house like discarded shards of rainbow, their bright colours impossibly cheerful in this wood-panelled prison. ‘You think you’re some kind of big man? Got something to prove?’

‘It’s just a