The Devil's Playground by Stav Sherez

cared.
    Yes, he’d inherited that at least. His father’s anger which
    had shaken his world with all the power of any monster or
    demon that he could have imagined. And now it was inside
    him, this anger, breathing through him, as if in some tangible
    way his father’s soul had migrated into his, corrupting it with
    its bile and hatred. He would flare up like a struck match
    sometimes and say things, things that no longer came out in
    his voice, but that of his father’s. He hated how he could
    trace his most hidden prejudices and gripes directly to him.
    It scared him how strong the influence was, how biological,
     
    how inescapable.
    ‘My father gave up on me when the magazine folded. I
    think in some way he thought I’d failed him.’ He felt the
    need to say it, to make at least this clear. ‘He thought I was
    being too sensitive. Didn’t see any place for that.’
    ‘Sounds very much like my father,’ Jake replied and they
    both laughed, releasing the tension in the room, feeling
    closer, at least in Jon’s mind, than since the wet handshake
    on that first day.
    ‘What was your father like?‘Jon asked after a few minutes
    of silence had elapsed punctuated only by the hiss of slowly
    burning tobacco. Now that Jake had begun, he didn’t want
    him to stop. And he wanted to know who this person
    was. Sleeping in his flat. Making strange sounds at night.
    Accepting everything with a weary shrug.
    ‘One monster father is pretty much the same as another.
    Your comments were very familiar.‘Jake smiled and it was a
    smile of revelation and conspiracy. Jon found it vaguely
    threatening.
    “You see,’ Jake continued, ‘the interesting story about my
    father takes place only after he’s dead.’
    Jon poured the last of the scotch into Jake’s glass and
    went to the kitchen to fetch some more. It felt good to be
    making drinks for someone else, good to have to ask them,
    how many sugars do you take, how strong do you want it?
    All the little inanities that he’d thought he could live without.
    Stupidly thought that until, in an empty flat, one night, he .
    realized that it was those very things that made life worth
    living.
    In the next room, Jake put on a CD and Jon heard the
    first notes of Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ squawk their way out of
    his speakers. The room filled with a dense, tight-knit caterwaul,
    seven or eight instruments screaming and wailing simultaneously,
    circling around an empty chord, a missing centre,
    like a flock of lost birds, frenzied and furious, smashing into
    each other in the massive sky.
    ‘My father had a lot of money. He’d worked in food
    importation, made his fortune, floated the company and
    retired to the country.’ Jake’s voice settled, the terse clip of
    his phrasing evened out. Jon leaned forward on the sofa,
    wanting to show his attention, even in this most obvious and
    empty of gestures, but he also felt the need to at least try to
    close the physical space between them, the gulf of carpet
    and air.
    ‘He died of stomach cancer last spring. I can’t say I was
    sad. I’d lost my mother many years before. I hadn’t seen him
    in years. We were not close nor had we ever been. I got a call
    from the family solicitor. I was the director of a consultancy
    company. What sum my father might have left me was of
    no concern but the lawyer said that the main part of my
    father’s testament consisted of a letter. That intrigued me. It
    wasn’t like him to put things in writing. He always believed
    the spoken word superior, more trustworthy than that which
    was written.
    ‘I went to see the lawyer. This was about six months ago.
    He handed me an undistinguished brown envelope, said it
    was my father’s last wish that I should have it. I thanked him
    and left, not knowing that what I carried under my arm that
    day would turn my life upside down. I didn’t even read it
    until the next morning.’
    ‘What was in it?’ Jon asked, caught up in the old man’s
    tale, the