As he and Picker set out for Coll’s estate and the wretched house behind its grounds, he tried to think back to when he’d had nothing to do with this kind of life, back to when he’d been a scrawny bow-legged runt in Falar. Bizarrely, his own mental image of his ten-year-old face retained the damned moustache and he was pretty sure he’d yet to grow one, but memories were messy things. Unreli-able, maybe mostly lies, in fact. A scatter of images stitched together by invented shit, so that what had been in truth a time as chaotic as the present suddenly seemed like a narration, a story.
The mind in the present was ever eager to narrate its own past, each one its own historian, and since when were historians reliable on anything? Aye, look at Duiker. He spun a fine tale, that one about Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs. Heartbreaking, but then those were always the best kind, since they made a per-son feel- when so much of living was avoiding feeling anything. But was any of it real! Aye, Coltaine got killed for real. The army got shattered just like he said. But any of the rest? All those details?
No way of ever knowing. And it don’t really matter in the end, does it?
Just like our own tales. Who we were, what we did. The narration going on, until it stops. Sudden, like a caught breath that never again lets out.
End of story.
The child with the moustache was looking at him, there in his head. Scowling, suspicious, maybe disbelieving. ‘You think you know me, old man? Not a chance. You don’t know a thing and what you think you remember ain’t got nothing to do with me. With how I’m thinking. With what I’m feeling. You’re farther away than my own da, that miserable, bitter tyrant neither of us could ever figure out, not you, not me, not even him. Maybe he’s not us, but then he’s not him, either.
‘Old man, you’re as lost as I am and don’t pretend no different. Lost in life… till death finds you.’
Well, this was why he usually avoided thinking about his own past. Better left untouched, hidden away, locked up in a trunk and dropped over the side to sink down into the depths. Problem was, he was needing to dredge up some things all over again. Thinking like a soldier, for one. Finding that nasty edge again, the hard way of looking at things. The absence of hesitation.
Gallons of ale wasn’t helping. Just fed his despondency, his sense of feeling too old, too old for all of it, now.