CHAPTER 1.27 - RETURN TO HIGHBARROW: HUGO
Hugo is almost glad he’s paralysed. Filthstink was already weighing on him, proof positive that he was the weakest link in the group’s chain. And painted so vividly that the others can’t have missed it. He feels like every move he’s made has been tainted, foolish. He immediately judged the goblins as monsters. They were ugly, wretched, filthy little people, but people they surely were. Then pratfall after pratfall, starting with trying to hide when his cover was already blown. His stomach knots again; he thinks due to whatever poison that hideous bug injected into him. Thae just scooped him up, so he can see the welts growing on his hand and arm. He remains stuck in pose, a pantomime tribute to his most recent mistake.
Peak irony, his certainty the goblin’s ring would make him more useful to the group. He feels Three shift under his armour, relieved that the little guy’s okay.
He feels tears pressing, wishes he could blink. His eyes have dried to the point of stabbing pain, but he’d rather be blind than stare at the furious woman following them through the forest. Another total failure on his part, one that particularly frustrates him. Normally, people are his forte. Women especially. And yet any time he tries to broker the slightest…not even connection, he thinks, but thawing of Anuk, she doubles down on her fury and contempt. And he is too keen a read of people to miss that he’s the only one making zero progress with her. Eyes biting, he corrects himself. Negative progress.
He’s spotted something like affection in her interactions with Thae. But of course. Thae projects trust and concern and a total lack of agenda. But he’d feel less bruised if there were any evidence of friction between his friend’s worshipful life and this woman. This woman as stripped of sophistry as anyone he’s ever encountered. Her seeming trust of Rian makes some sense as well. The man doesn’t exactly exude confidence, he thinks ruefully. But he approaches the tangled, dangerous forest in a manner Hugo would a trip to the shops. Perhaps it all comes down to successes, victories for the team. He used to attain those so easily, but here and now he feels utterly incapable. Or perhaps undeserving?
Smarting, he tries to rationalise why he feels so spun, so out of control. Fucking “Prince of the Gnomes”? Where did that come from? He tracks back, wishing he could find the spoor, the map to the empty patch he feels inside himself. In the place, he suspects, where others have a solid sense of themselves.
Of course, this propels his thoughts to X. The basis of his life, he thinks, betrayed by the sentiment. He always knew X wasn’t his father, even before he stopped growing at the man’s waist height. Besides, X is about as white a man as Hugo’s ever seen. Never seemed to matter though. Hugo was surrounded by people without their own people. Orphans, runaways…and so many kids whose parents found themselves in prison…so that didn’t make him feel out of place.
Secretly, Hugo always feared that he was tainted from birth. He winces, eyes agony, recalling the story X told him. Of the criminal’s trajectory being diverted, deflected by a baby.
-x-
It was obviously an X 30 years younger in the tale. The modern version wouldn’t be a second-storey man, a lithe burglar dependent on his agility to earn a crust. And obviously a version of X without his current power, doing his own thieving. But unquestionably an X with the same remorseless self-belief.
Breaking into a mansion in the early evening, pretty blasé. With the owners at home? Barely believable. But gaining access through the half-opened window of the couple’s nursery, child in crib? Having known the man his entire life, Hugo knows that it fits.
Way X tells it, baby Hugo wasn’t asleep when the black-clad figure pushed through the window. Used to milk the moment for laughs, the increasingly bulky man pantomiming exaggerated sneaking then freezing, staring down at the imagined child. A mocking, exaggerated terror face from the man renowned for fearing nothing as he confronts a baby he expects to burst into tears.
But Hugo hadn’t. According to X, the child stared silently into his eyes, wobbling on pudgy legs, dimpled hands gripping the bars of the cot. Seeming like he was about to tumble backwards as he reached up towards the imposter. Another shot of pain through his eyes as Hugo recalls the number of times he had to play his part, the adoring son praising his rescuer. X had grabbed him, worried the kid would crack his skull, and that was where Hugo received the nickname, in place of a family name. Hughold.
Hug-hold, for the tightness with which he clung onto the home invader. But it’s a perfect name for a crook, really. Without any guidance, people will pronounce the name all sorts of ways. Some ‘Hue-gold’, a pronunciation he encourages among wealthier marks. Makes them feel like he is one of their own. Sometimes he’s ‘Huggled’, ‘Hue-old’, even ‘Hewled’. Fits whatever Hugo needs to be that day.
So, stop me if you’ve heard this one, right? A robber is standing in a mansion, holding the young master of the house in his arms. You’ll never believe the punchline; I tell you what. Because that involves murder. Most foul.
X is standing holding young Hugo, certain that he’ll have trouble getting the boy back into his crib, when he hears a woman scream. Like, right outside the door of the nursery. Freaks that the baby’ll start crying, but it’s – he is – just staring with the same silent saucer eyes towards the noise. X has larger concerns anyway, thinking he’s spotted, makes a silent dash towards the nursery door. Risks a stealthy look into the hall to see a “tiny wee” man and woman struggling. And then the madman, Hugo’s father, plunges a dagger into the woman’s chest. They’re dressed resplendently, moreso the more X had to drink before the telling. In recent years, Hugo reflects, his birth parents would be in lavish gowns and silks, king and queen of Goldville.
His eyelids twitch slightly, but somehow this arcs more pain across his parched eyeballs. He feels a tear squeeze out of his right eye like a shard of glass. For a second he can feel some relief before the drop is propelled onto his eyelashes. Thae is still sprinting him away from his folly.
The tear isn’t for the woman, this victim of this drama of whom he himself has no memory. Nor for the apparent madness of his father. As X darted away from the door, he said, the tiny man was retrieving his blade from the heart of his wife. Eyeing the nursery door with malice aforethought. X was “down the ladder, babe in arms, before [his] brain got a vote.” And of course, he’d get a round of laughs when he gestured at Hugo, ruefully saying “This, in exchange for my best ladder.” Raised the roof when he’d append it with: “Some days I really miss that ladder.”
Too much truth in that joke. X was never what one would call father material, particularly to a silent, watchful child. Another comedy goldfield, the kid who was silent until he was three. “When he started talking, it was like he’d been saving it all up. Little bastard still ‘asn’t stopped.”
And that was part of it. Even from his earliest memories, Hugo felt he had had to earn it. ‘It’ being anything, really. X was far from the status in the city he had since become. Was having to fight tooth and nail for everything he had, and toddlers took a lot of looking after. X burned up a lot of favours and money over the first few years of Hugo’s life. He has vague memories of being bounced on a variety of women’s knees. Realised much later that X had spent currency to have the child looked after by whores. Either material currency or favours. Maybe intimidation or blackmail, given Hugo’s later insight into X’s true business practices. Still, he thinks fondly of those times. The ladies demanded nothing much of him and lavished affection upon the quiet boy. Maybe, as was the habit in their working hours, the affection was an act, but to Hugo it felt warm.
Under the care of the man he grew to think of as his father, that warmth wasn’t absent. But it was fleeting, had to be earned, and was contrasted by sharp anger should Hugo disappoint. And hence that empty spot. When you depend on the audience’s grace to keep roof over head and food in your mouth, you learn to perform. Why be the little black kid, littler still as his peers hit their growth spurts and towered over him? Why be the outcast who doesn’t fit in even among the dispossessed in whose circles he moved? Why be the intelligent, eloquent smartarse inside a brutal world where there are never enough scraps to go around? And where fighting for them was routine?
So, Hugo grew to be a keen judge of others’ emotions, a glutton for the hidden triggers that made others laugh or cry. And he was good at it. Truth of fact, the gluttony didn’t die at all. He just re-purposed the eloquent smartarse to make him fit cleanly rather than stand out. He could be just as intelligent without making those around him feel stupid. Moreso, in his experience. By learning to stoop to others’ levels semantically, he could persuade them of better ideas, cleverer plans. And people were twice as keen to adopt strategies they were convinced were their own.
But of course, the smart kid had to understand that his ‘dad’ had taken a tremendous risk in keeping him alive. But then, by the time he could shave, Hugo’s ideas had spared X a great deal of trouble. And granted him a chunk of status. The riches were of secondary importance, although there were plenty of those. And X surely had a taste for them. X’s calculations must sometimes have considered that Hugo might be safer dead and buried somewhere in the forest. There was a look that the man sometimes gave him. Usually when X was in his peripheral vision and considered Hugo to be absorbed in something. The anxieties Hugo carried always kept some portion of him alert, so he had recognised this scrutiny long before he understood it. In his hopeful heart, the boy had taken the look as some muted expression of love. But in his later understanding of X, he corrected this to the man understanding how differently, but less profitably, his life would have gone without Hugo’s subtle influence.
He never knew why he asked. Even the conclusion that he was simply more use than risk to the crook had felt like affection to the starved Hugo. Why risk upsetting things by acknowledging that? But there went his busy, ceaseless mind. His gods-fucked need for a theory of everything. He had picked his time, ridiculously so. Had held the question for decades, until three years ago. The night of his 30th birthday.
By this point, both of that particular night and of his life in general, X was in his cups. Deeply so. The man was oddly pensive, distant at the question. Then again, with Hugo’s event he was looking back over more than half of his life. Hugo felt safe, as he would have been unable to speak with as much alcohol as X had in his system. Still, his blood had frozen, thinking he had pushed too hard. Seconds of silence convincing him he had made a mistake that demanded immediate rectification.
But then.
“Couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.” Messy words delivered sloppily. “Expected the law to be huntin’ for the missing rich kid. Couldn’t do nuffink but keep yer hidden. Days, it went, no news of it. Silence made me nervous I was done. But then when the rumours started up a week, two weeks later?” A look of puzzlement. “Was all stories of some ‘alfling killing his wife an’ son. Couldn’t fakkin’ believe it!”
-x-
Hugo blinks his eyes, tears streaming, realises he’s no longer frozen. Seems he can move freely, albeit with pins-and-needles across his entire body. Feels Thae deposit him gently on his feet as his three companions stop to catch their breath. The kids have apparently been roused by the recent burst of speed, however as he rubs sensation into his agonising, blotched forearm, they shift in Rian’s sheltering succour and drop off again.
He clears his throat, voice rough, crackling as he mutters a “Sorry.” Rian, focused on the children, gives him a distracted nod that Hugo still reads as genuine. Thae looks soulfully, pleasantly into his eyes, immediately quizzes him on whether he is injured. Apparently has no time for recriminations.
Hugo feels twice as emotional about his friend’s reaction as he takes in Anuk’s frozen scowl, her look of contempt delivered personally to him.
Still, he thinks, at least she’s open about her anger. With X, he had thought he was in the clear.
