Wronged Sons, The by John Marrs

went to bed early and turned off the lights, hoping the wine would knock me out quickly. It didn’t. My stomach rumbled but I couldn’t be bothered to even make myself a sandwich.
    I’d long ceased closing the curtains so that I could stare out of the window during my frequent bouts of insomnia. The moon was brighter than I’d ever seen it and lit up the bedroom. I stared at the lumps and bumps of the Artex on the ceiling and tried to put them together to form your face.
    It wasn’t anything in particular that set me off, but I’d spent most of the day in a new low. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding the hand of a loved one as the death rattle slowly dissolves into a rasp; or if Roger or one of his colleagues turns up on your doorstep to tell you there’s been an accident. No matter how death happens, the pain is hideous.
    Some people build barriers to hide from themselves or those who share their pain. Some shut down completely and others dedicate the rest of their lives to mourning. The brave ones simply get on with it but I couldn’t do any of that. I was the exception. Because when someone simply disappears into thin air when there is no reason, no explanation and no closure, all you’re left with is an interminable void. A gaping, aching, chasm that can’t be filled with the love, sympathy or the strength of others.
    Nobody knew my heart was now a black hole, swirling with the debris of unanswerable questions. Until physical proof of your death came along, I would never, ever, truly be able to let you go.
    I had no funeral to arrange; no body to bury; no-one to blame; no autopsy to offer a medical answer or suicide note to explain a reason; no nothing. Just months of absolute nothingness.
    And as everyone else’s lives carried on beyond our garden gate, I was stuck in purgatory and feeling so very, very alone.
     
    ***
     
    Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, Twenty-Five Years Earlier
    July 14, 3.15pm
    There was emptiness in my belly that needed to be fed. My imagination was hungry and I craved a project to sink my teeth into. Even as a boy I had an urge to construct. Bird houses, dens, rabbit hutches, dams in streams… it didn’t matter as long as it was a tangible object I could build from scratch and be proud of.
    My life in France was content and free of stress. But while I’d shaken most of the trappings of my past, living in a hostel that was once so splendid and now cried out for help made my desire to design and actualize impossible to ignore. It was what I did. I made things. I created things. I restored things.
    And the more time I spent under its roof, the more familiar I’d become with its personality. I knew which floorboards creaked and which had barely enough strength to support my weight. I knew the windows to keep closed or risk the rotting frames disintegrating. I knew on which side of the attic the mice preferred to nest. I knew the rooms to avoid in a heavy downpour and the places to find maximum sunlight for Bradley’s indoor garden of cannabis plants to thrive.
    I’d fallen in love with its every delight and failing. I’d accepted its flaws in a way I couldn’t do with a person. I also knew that papering over the cracks of something couldn’t disguise its deeper issues. I longed to transform the Routard International back into the Hotel Pres De La Cote.
    Local folklore revealed the hotel seemed to appear from nowhere in the mid-1920s. It had been designed by a promising Bordeaux architect who’d only ever made two visits to his project – once as they broke ground, and again when the doors were declared open to paying guests. Nobody could remember his name.
    He’d been commissioned to design it for a wealthy Jewish German family who, after the First World War, feared their country might implode again. So they fortuitously made their property investments abroad. But when Germany crumbled for a second time, their hotel remained while they disappeared from the face of the earth. Their