A Wanted Man

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Jack's father goes missing but turns up dead in a warehouse at Manchester Airport. Shot. Who has access to firearms here in the UK? Farmers, the police, and organised crime. I can't picture an angry pig farmer losing his shit and heading to Manchester Airport to clip someone. Nor can I especially imagine a police officer doing the same thing, although stranger things have happened. And that leaves the last one. Organised crime.

A WANTED MAN

But... I feel a nagging. That familiar tug of duty. I carry it everywhere with me even now, bound by it, cajoled by my gratitude to Jack...

My problem is compounded by my brittle, unique moral compass. My idea of good and bad is very black and white, with great streaks of grey smeared straight across the borders between the two– the zone in which I have been known to take matters into my own hands. Those grey areas demand I owe Jack some assistance, even if it is outside of my self-imposed remit.

I whistle a little (surprised to find my ‘go to' whistling tune is Somewhere Over The Rainbow), and drop my pocket change noisily onto the dresser.

A Wanted Man

The curious obsessive-compulsive aspect of this guy, which, twinned with the seemingly bottomless battery of his energy, gives his personality an almost pathological slant.

His precise, measured way of speaking seems pulled from the pages of a book, exactly how you'd picture someone of his generation learning a foreign language.

I leave the motorway networks as the daylight fades and trundle through the bleak stone township of Glossop, as wild hills begin to sprout out either side of the settlement. I know where I am going, and follow the ‘V' in the horizon where two hills meet and a road carves through: Snake Pass. Suddenly, the buildings and pavements disappear, and I'm out in the open, rolling through a picture-book patchwork of varying landscapes: undulating rugged grasslands, steep canyon drop-offs, vast forests of tall firs, and a softly lapping reservoir. You could be lost out here, but still feel in touch with the gods. It's Lord of the Rings country, Tolkien's inspiration. It's Britain at its most beautiful, most powerful, most respectful.

I walk down the path to the scuffed, mucky pavement. The gum on the concrete beneath my shoes, some of it is undoubtedly mine. My DNA lies at my feet, inseparable from my town, my past. That DNA is now the only evidence I was ever here. Thirty years of love, life, family– all reduced to a dirty bit of gum on an old pavement.

This will steel me. Toughen me. It has to. Because this would, could, should break a lesser man.

A WANTED MAN

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