Fall of Hope (Book 1): Real Heroes Don't Wear Capes Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn't away at
college, or visiting Australia like he dreamed of doing. He was gone
and never coming back.
    There
was no restrain keeping his father from guzzling pint after pint on
Sundays. Following his brother's death, he would stay out from
mid-day into the early hours of the next day. He wolfed down the
beef, roast potatoes, mash and stuffing just to get away quicker. He
slid the vegetables around the plate with his fork for five minutes
to pretend he wanted to be with them in the early days, but that
pretense is no more. His mother once left the vegetables off his
plate because she was sick of him playing with them. She received a
slap for her trouble.
    Bobby
and his mum are now like those vegetables—the leftovers of his
life which he barely acknowledges, but wants to keep around all the
same.
    Benjamin
Ames, his older brother, would be twenty-one this September. The
accident hadn't been his fault, and that knowledge is still difficult
to bare. It always will be.
    He
pushes away the image of that fateful night—the paramedics
turning up and Benji still being alive at the scene. No matter how
many times he replays the event, they can do nothing.
    “ Like
I told you before, I'm not going in there. If world peace depended on
me stepping foot in Benji's room, then it looks like there will be
one major world war.”
    Gage
Denied—as he introduced himself all those years ago—cocks
his head. He regards him from beneath the hood with a smile creeping
over his lips. Not a smile that suggests he may crack into a happy
sing-song, but an unstable one full of desperation.
    He
has been telling Bobby to go in there since the month leading up to
the exams, so Bobby can only guess he must be splitting on the inside
from the wait.
    His
eyes are bloodshot for the first five minutes of coming here with
dried blood trailing over his cheeks. Then, they turn into gleaming
white orbs. He never tells Bobby why that is, or what he gets up to,
so Bobby has given up asking. But judging by the wear in his
non-label apparel and his shoes that have split to reveal his toes,
it must be exhausting.
    “ You
know, I saw a pair like that go for twenty quid on Ebay the
other week. You should look into that.”
    Gage
lays back on the grey and black quilt with his hands raised behind
his head for support. He is humming a familiar song from his trips
with the family on Sunday mornings to the car boot sales. It sounds
like The Christians , 'Ideal World'.
    Logging
in, Bobby skim checks the notifications and friend requests. At least
one new request pops up each time he logs in, usually from a friend
of a friend wanting to read his poetry.
    He
is an amateur poet, but writes nothing special that will ever get him
published in e-zines, or out in the real world. He isn't even sure of
the “rules” of poetry, or sometimes even the message he
is trying to get across. But that doesn't matter to him.
    His
primary school teacher, Mr Powers, told him, “when dealing with
art, why let the rules restrict creativity?” That may have been
nine years in the past now, but he holds onto those words because
they made an impression.
    Besides,
it is not an occupation but a hobby, or sometimes more like therapy.
Sometimes he works with structures and rhyme, but mostly his poems
spew from his subconscious, driven by a hand he has no control over.
Sometimes he swears he even blacks out completely during the process.
    Many
underground poets are online. Most are eccentric, drifting by like
lost souls living for the pen with nowhere to go. Then, there are
those more well-established poets who like to stick to the rules.
Those, he dare say, are boring and he likes the least.
    The
greatest treasures are those that transport him, not to another time
or place, but inside himself. The words that make him feel every
touch and every taste are the best. The poems that have desires,
however ghastly, and make him believe the dreams.
    Sometimes
his eyes will glisten when reading other