Chapter Four Hard Landing
chapter FOUR
Hard Landing
Nathan shut the door and stood with his back to the wood, letting the cold seep through his T-shirt.
The air inside wasn’t any warmer. Not with the faint trace of stale tobacco and leftover gravy clinging to the wallpaper. He shivered, the kind that worked from the inside out, then pushed forward into the house.
The living room hadn’t changed. Not in the years he’d been gone.
Same cracked leather armchairs. Same floral curtains, yellowed with time.
The telly was a boxy relic that took five seconds to switch from one channel to the next, and the mantel still held the same dusty ceramic dog that had sat there since he was a kid.
Nothing sentimental. Nothing that spoke of his mum.
Only stillness, as if the house had gone into stasis the day she died and no one had dared wake it.
He stepped through the archway into the kitchen at the back, his leg giving him jip now the adrenaline had worn off. His dad stood at the fridge, pulling out a can of supermarket-brand lager.
“You want one?” Ron held the can up as if it was an olive branch. It probably was.
The question was, would Nathan take it?
He shook his head. “Going for a run down the seafront. Grab some chips on the way back.”
Ron glanced over his can. “Ain’t you limping?”
Nathan rubbed above the joint where the scar tissue always pulled tight in the cold. “Physio says I need to keep it active.”
Ron snorted. “Can’t have been that bad if you’re running for chips.”
Nathan offered the faintest smile. “S’pose it could’ve been worse. Could’ve been both legs.”
That shut Ron up.
Nathan didn’t bother to mention the desert. Or the blast. Or what it had taken to even walk again, let alone run. He didn’t talk about the scar tucked beneath the hem of his shorts, or the quiet fury that came every time he remembered why it happened.
He’d save that story for someone who might actually give a fuck .
Ron cracked the can open with a loud hiss.
“You gonna be alright?”
Ron took a swig, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve been here by myself for fifteen years. I’ll survive another night.”
Nathan folded his arms. “Sorta meant with Alfie.”
“I raised a teenage boy already. Think I can manage another one.”
“Alfie ain’t me.”
He wasn’t. Not even close.
Alfie pushed back at everything. Rules. Authority.
Expectations. He didn’t shrink to fit anyone’s mould.
He challenged. Snapped. Lit fires to watch them burn.
Where Nathan had once fallen in line, swallowed grief like medicine and turned himself into a machine who followed orders, Alfie was a storm with no leash.
A fuse already burning.
Nathan had spent his teenage years learning how to disappear in plain sight. And back then, the only person who ever really saw him had been Freddie.
Freddie .
He still remembered the way Freddie looked at him. How there was more to him than rules and obedience and trying not to cry.
Now here he was, trying to parent a boy who reminded him more of Freddie than he dared admit. Sharp-tongued, defiant, full of fire. And Nathan wasn’t sure if that made him feel closer to something he’d lost, or if it hurt more.
Either way, he wasn’t ready to talk about it.
Certainly not to Ron.
His dad sat down at the kitchen table, the wood creaking beneath him. “All teenage lads are the same. They want freedom, and they want to get laid. That’s it. And if he stopped pissing about with those crayons and used those hands for something useful, he might get both.”
“They’re not crayons, Dad. He likes art .”
“Art? Where the fuck is drawing gonna get him, eh? You need to be teaching him proper skills. Get him down the garage.”
Nathan stared at him for a beat, then looked away.
The kitchen walls were the same pale green they’d always been, patched in places with mismatched touch-ups.
The window over the sink fogged with grime, looking out onto the overgrown garden that had once been their football pitch.
He could still see his younger self out there, booting a ball around with Freddie until it disappeared into the hedges.
Before everything went wrong. Before his mum got sick and the house grew quiet and cold.
Coming back here had been a last resort. He’d told himself it was temporary. A few weeks. Until Alfie found his feet and Nathan figured out what the hell came next. But the walls were already closing in, pressing old memories back into his skin.
He glanced over at his dad. Older now, greyer, but still somehow the same. Solid. Unmoving. A wall he could scream at, yet it still wouldn’t echo back.
“Alfie’s been through stuff,” Nathan said, finding it easier to defend his son than himself. “The art is his way of dealing with that. He’s… not like us.”
Ron scoffed. “Everyone’s been through stuff . Doesn’t mean you go soft.”
Nathan bit back the first thing he wanted to say and nodded instead. It wasn’t worth it. It never was.
He pushed off from the counter. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
Ron raised the can in a lazy salute. “Don’t forget the pickled onion. ”
Nathan inhaled the demand, then made his way into the living room.
The telly was on some Sunday night antique show and Nathan glanced over to the narrow, carpeted staircase leading directly up from the back of the room.
Steep, familiar, and claustrophobic in that way only childhood homes could be.
He sighed. He hadn’t had much luck getting through to Alfie yet.
Conversations lasted a few sentences, and most of them ended with a door shutting in his face.
Still, he couldn’t walk out without trying again.
So he climbed the stairs, every step creaking beneath his weight.
They hadn’t used to. He’d added muscle and bulk while deployed.
No longer scrawny, he’d become the fighting machine his dad always wanted.
See, compliant. Unlike the kid behind the door he rapped his knuckles on.
This room used to be storage. Filled with dusty toolboxes, bags of old clothes, a broken vacuum cleaner that Ron swore he’d fix one day but never did.
Now it was Alfie’s room. Or at least, a version of one.
With a narrow fold-out bed shoved under the window, still creased from being sat on rather than slept in.
The rest of the space was crammed with boxes of Nathan’s childhood, of Ron’s life.
Old army kit bags, yellowing photo albums no one looked at anymore, and junk he should’ve binned a decade ago.
It was a space filled with ghosts and clutter, a constant reminder that nothing here ever really changed.
When Alfie didn’t answer, Nathan pushed the door open. The kid lay sprawled on the fold-out bed, hoodie up, earbuds in, phone in hand. A cliché in motion. His eyes were closed, foot tapping to a beat Nathan couldn’t hear, but could feel through the floorboards.
Nathan stepped inside, cleared his throat. No reaction.
So he nudged the side of the bed with his knee .
Alfie cracked one eye open and looked at him as if Nathan was some nuisance he’d learned to ignore.
“You fancy fish and chips?”
Alfie shook his head.
“You need to eat.”
No response.
Nathan tried again. “What do you usually go for then? Cod? Haddock? Sausage in batter? Saveloy?”
Alfie closed his eyes again.
Nathan clenched his jaw. Right then.
“Oi.” He kicked the base of the bed. Not hard, but enough to rattle it. “I’m talking to you.”
Alfie pulled out one earbud. But he didn’t say anything. Ron would call it disrespect. Nathan recognised it for what it really was. Apathy. Not rebellion. Not attitude. A kid who’d shut the world out because he’d learned it didn’t matter if he screamed or begged, no one was listening.
Nathan rubbed a hand over his buzzed scalp, the stubble rasping beneath his fingers. “Look, I know you don’t want to be here. Believe me, I get it. And I’m sorry that you are. But can we at least try for basic respect?”
“I already said no,” Alfie barked. “Ain’t hungry.”
“You’ve not eaten all day.”
“The feds gave me a sandwich when they stuck me in the cell.”
“Did you eat it?”
Alfie gave him a withering look. “It was tuna sweetcorn. Fucking hate tuna. And sweetcorn. Together, it’s vomit between bread.”
Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaled slowly through his teeth, and reminded himself, again , that this wasn’t basic training. This was a teenage boy. His teenage boy. And he had no idea how to reach him .
“Then I’ll pick you up some chips and watch you eat them while we talk about what happened today.”
Alfie rolled his eyes, put his earbuds in.
That was the best Nathan was going to get.
He left the room, went into his and changed into running shorts and a tee, then rushed down the stairs despite his stiff leg, shoving the front door open as if the air inside choked him.
The cold hit him instantly. Bitter and briny, rolling in off the sea.
He pulled in a deep breath, lungs burning with the bite of it.
But it was cleaner out here. Harsher, yes.
But honest. And he needed to run. Shake the shit off his shoulders.
Outrun the walls closing in every time Ron looked at him as if he was still a fuck up.
Escape the way this house, this town , shrunk him down to someone he didn’t recognise.
And if by chance his route took him past the street where a certain red Peugeot had been parked earlier…
Well. That was no one’s business but his.
But as he jogged past, the car was gone. Of course it was. He’d known it would be. Freddie wasn’t the type to hang around.