Dead Pretty by Roger Granelli

all he was good for, maybe Lena was just a dream, a device to trick him into thinking life might be better. They’d called him Psycho Eyes when he was a kid, sometimes he’d hated it, usually he’d liked it. It fitted his rages, and marked him out on the estate as someone not to mess with, but it was a title he always felt he had to live up to. To assume the role of the hardest kid on the block, to go about wasting his life while other kids, the ones who feared and even respected him, did better. Looking back, he could see that he’d only ever been a one-eyed king of a blind and useless kingdom.
    The kitchen was full of Lena. She’d often watched the small TV here, smoking the occasional cigarette, knowing that he hated it, but unable to stop completely. There were several photographs of her pinned on their notice board and one of them together. A night shot, the Eiffel Tower looming behind them, lit up like it was hung with stars. She’d liked images and collected a lot of them. Lena had always seemed dismayed there was so little visual stuff from his past. No baby shots, just a few badly composed kid mug shots his mother had taken, not much else. The police had the best ones, on file. He’d stolen lots of cameras from the houses he burgled but had always sold them on for peanuts. Even then, he sensed his life did not warrant much recording. There was one good photograph of Shane, which his mother had paid to have done. Mark took it from a drawer and looked at it now, at the two-year-old who looked so little like him. Blond, blue-eyed, falsely angelic, butter melting in his hair, but never his mouth. He’d been his mother’s new life at the time, someone to start again with, someone who would at least be hers in his early years. But he was quickly taken away, like all her transient pleasures, and his disappearance was never solved. The wound was still open, it always would be, and Mark felt it dig at him now. He put Shane’s photo alongside one of Lena’s and for a weak moment imagined Shane as their child. He wondered if they’d have got that far. They’d never talked about it, but he thought about it now. Danni cried out, as if sensing the strangeness in Mark, then she was gone, speeding through the cat-flap without a backwards glance. If she had any sense, Mark thought, she’d be gone for good, done with this place and the horror she’d seen.
    Mark thought of going down to see Julie, his mother. It had been a long time. They’d patched things up as much as they could after losing Shane, but it would be a visit at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. He could never unload Lena on her, it would take Julie further into hell. If she hadn’t stopped blaming him for Shane at least she had stopped thinking he had anything to do with it, but Lena would start it all up again. It would be another bloody tragedy coming from him. Julie had met Lena once, about a year ago. He had taken her down to the Welsh coast, at Lena’s insistence. Julie was living near Cardiff now, a housing association flat that seemed to suit her. She was anonymous there, her past had not travelled from the estate with her. Shane would always be part of that hill-top dwelling place and she’d never go back there. Mark hadn’t been back either. They’d both moved on, as much as they could. Julie had also done with men, as far as Mark knew. There’d been plenty in his childhood, his upbringing was bound with a chain of them, a succession of pathetic ‘uncles’ that had dropped in and out of his life. Mark doubted Julie would ever bother again, she could never take another chance, though she was still under fifty. It seemed like neither of them had ever been young, maybe there’d been no time for it in their lives. Grim survival did not do young very well.
    Julie was quite isolated now. She’d been distant from her parents as long as he could remember, which