The Rivers That Run Through Us
A powerful and atmospheric novel exploring violence, belonging, memory and redemption.
After a desperate escape from an evil monster leaves a woman drowned in a river, her two young sons search for redemption and their estranged older brothers in and around the disappearing world of East London’s Isle of Dogs in a twisting adventure beyond dreams and reality.
Henry, Jack, Paul, Ray and John Killerman lead messed up lives, each one dealing with the struggle of his own; all lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. The madness progresses to another level when their paths cross with the wildly enigmatic Sunny, unleashing a chain of events that defy belief.
Excerpt: Opening.
We are all at the mercy of the Universe.
She was sitting fully dressed on the toilet. Hiding there, from the Universe. There was a glass of wine on the side of the bath. She drank the wine and lay back against the cistern, waiting for the beating she knew would come soon. The landing light burned brightly and she heard a moth hitting the shadeless glass bulb, the sound of its kamikaze-like death flight almost hypnotic. Her two sons, Jack and Henry, were in their bedroom. She thought of them and closed her eyes. Will it always be like this?
A question that hangs in the space between our fears
and dreams; for those who hope for good things to last, and those who pray for bad things to end. The new couple in love, lying in the sun, lazing away an afternoon, where times appears to stand still, still drunk on the smell and taste of each other. Will it always be like this? The person with a broken heart, lying alone in the cold of the night, longing for sleep, but tormented by regret. Will it always be like this? For Jack Killerman, the oldest of her two remaining sons, the question had become less frequent, more subdued. No longer the passive recipient of abuse, the child had become a young man, a holder of rights and intent, the architect of dreams and a captain on a voyage of discovery that would take him far beyond this place of shadows.
Today was Friday. Wife beating night in the Killerman house. Jack, one week shy of seventeen, stood by the bedroom window watching the bad weather moving in. The rain clouds moved slowly, so slowly it was hard to tell they were moving at all. He turned, momentarily, and looked at his younger brother Henry, not quite twelve, who sat on the bed, duvet drawn up against his skinny body. Words failed them both.
They were late, the wife beaters. Late returning from their weekly ritual of slaughter. But eventually they came, a line of desperados, a straggling troop of men and dogs, and Ike Killerman among the foremost, for he was the leader, the most desperate of them. Over the desolate corn fields they marched, and then down toward the valley bottom, and the sprawl of the estate, the pit chimney and the pit-head winding gear showing above the rooftops like sullen old gods. But these were godless men that emerged from the killing fields at dusk, more savage than the dogs, their hearts as black and forsaken as the coal they used to mine.
They're coming, Jack shouted.
Ok my darling boy, his mother replied. She drank the rest of the wine in the glass, stood up, lifted her dress, pulled her knickers down and peed. Best stay in your room, both of you, she said.
The garden wall cast its shadow back over the house, and from the bedroom window Jack watched his father, half-breed black greyhound by his side, lead the ribald assemblage through the gate toward the house. Ike hung the token hare on the shed, as was his custom, and glanced up at his son. If there was any love in his heart, his dark, hooded eyes belied the fact. Jack heard his long suffering mother's footsteps descend the bare stairs, and the suffocating terror, that had lifted a few hours earlier, fell over the home and the inhabitants therein, and the beginning of another night was upon them. Will it always be like this?
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