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      Fuse

      S. A. Partridge

      Human & Rousseau

      Firstly, thank you to the wonderful students of Jan Van Riebeeck High School for your support of my first novel, The Goblet Club:

      This one is dedicated to you guys.

      Thanks to Mark for the use of your name and for being such a great

      marketer both on- and offline; thanks to Dirk for being the guinea pig

      for this novel, and finally to Melissa for being so supportive.

      Prologue

      JUSTIN BRIAN MULLINS was born on 17 August 1993 to Gregory and Debbie Mullins. They couldn’t have been happier. He was the lovely, normal little boy they’d always wanted to complete their family. Gregory worked as an electrician at a small firm in Parow, and he and his cashier wife Debbie had been trying to have a baby for almost three years without success. Justin was the answer to their prayers.

      Justin was his father’s son in every respect and he emulated his father in everything he did. He loved cars, throwing balls and shouting across the room at Debbie – just like his dad did. Gregory and Debbie were the happiest they had been in a very long time. Life was perfect.

      When Justin was seven, Gregory decided it was time to teach his boy some values. He packed his family into the car, along with Justin’s favourite toys, and drove off to the children’s home on the fringe of town. It was a dismal institution with unpainted brick walls and grimy windows. Justin shuddered slightly when he saw the building and his mother looked grim, but Gregory didn’t notice. He made a speech about how lucky and privileged they were – a speech Justin had to hear over and over again, each time they visited. It became a regular ritual they all secretly dreaded – Justin because he was forced to hand over his favourite toys to the elderly matron; Debbie because of the distress it caused her son; and Gregory because it never quite seemed as satisfying to him as he believed it should be. Every visit, instead of making him feel like a better, righteous man, somehow made him feel a little more of a failure.

      When Gregory first made Justin hand over his toys, the boy would cry and perform, clutching at his action figures and comic books as if they were his last. But it never did any good. Even though the toys were not expensive, it felt as if little by little his soul was taken from him. He walked back to the car dejected and powerless. After a few visits he eventually gave up, just dropped the bag or box at the matron’s feet and walked away. It became a monthly torturous ritual that Justin despised more than anything, except perhaps the hatred he secretly began to harbour for his father.

      One day when the Mullins family visited the orphanage, they came back with a lot more than one sad child in the back seat of car. They came back with two.

      After Justin had delivered his payload of toys that morning, Gregory had stayed behind to talk to the matron. Justin had noticed this going on for a little while now, as well as hushed conversations between his parents that stopped abruptly as soon as he entered the room. He never asked about it, and they never told him anything.

      The first he knew about his parents fostering one of the boys was when a wide-eyed child climbed into the car beside him and stared straight ahead, unfocused into the middle distance. Justin looked at this sudden imposter. His mother turned around in her seat and started trying to explain, but he only heard every second or third word. My new brother? Brother … Fostering … Adoption … Process … Abuse … Poor child … He noticed how Gregory’s eyes filled with tears as she told Justin how the boy had been abused and abandoned as a toddler. Debbie said something about the boy being burned with an iron before Gregory stopped her with a warning look. Justin stared at the orphan sitting next to him to see if his mother’s unthinking remarks had affected him, but the boy merely peeked at Justin through his matted fringe and bit his lip, more curious about his new brother than anything else happening around him.

      So the orphan Kendall became the latest member of the Mullins family. Justin didn’t mind much, because he didn’t have to give his toys to the orphanage any more. In fact, the Mullins family never made the trip again – they had plenty to take care of at home. Justin now only had to share his toys with his new brother, which he didn’t think was such a bad trade-off at all. In fact, he came to rather like the idea of having a little brother. An ally in the battles he fought with his father while growing up.

      As the years passed, the picture of a perfect family – always fragile – began to fall apart. Quick to anger, Gregory lost his temper at the electrical firm once too often and was forced to resign. He was getting on in years and finding work was difficult, especially for someone as stubborn as Gregory. As his working hours grew shorter, so did his temper with his family, especially his sons.

      Gregory had always kept a tight rein on the Mullins household, but it became even worse when he lost his job. Never the wealthiest of families – Debbie knew a thousand ways to recycle leftovers into dishes of unpalatable brownish goo – the boys grew used to staying in their increasingly dilapidated front garden watching the other kids in the neighbourhood play hide and seek, their high-pitched shrieks of exhilaration piercing the air as both the chased and pursued would bolt down the tarmac in sheer unadulterated glee. Sometimes, they would gather across the street to throw gravel at the brothers or whisper and point at the Mullins house.

      Kendall and Justin would sit quietly on the front stoep in the thin yellow halo created by the garden light and its ringlet of fluttering moths as night descended, and play with their plastic green soldiers or pretend to be superheroes, ignoring the giggling children hiding in the bushes just metres away.

      Their father had forbidden them to play in the street after dark, because that was when the bad people came out and snatched children. Justin wanted to point out to his father that none of the neighbours’ children had ever been snatched, but it was no use arguing.

      Isolating the boys from the neighbourhood youngsters may have been the cause of what happened next. Or it could have been the inherent cruelty of children, but inevitably the teasing in the street outside their home turned into bullying at school. Justin, who was older and tall for his age, quickly learned to shrug off the teasing. So he was poor. So what? So he didn’t have the latest designer shoes. Tough. But Kendall, younger, smaller and living in his brother’s shadow, felt the taunts more deeply. They reminded him that he was adopted, that he had been unloved and unwanted.

      And different. Even from an early age, Kendall was different. There was a faraway look in his eyes that even Justin noticed sometimes, a look that was too old for him, in eyes that had seen too much.

      Some kids learn to rebel against their bullies and grow stronger, and Justin was one of them. But most are like Kendall, they get quieter and quieter, retreating to an inner world. Justin was growing up to be handsome and he excelled at sport – no one in the school handled a cricket bat like he did. He was popular with a group of girls who surrounded him, while Kendall preferred his own company. Justin thought that Kendall should learn to take care of himself – if he would only try harder, Justin thought, try to do stuff the other kids did. Just try to be more like them, less different. He tried to teach his brother to play cricket, but without success. He was fiercely protective of Kendall; he just wasn’t always sure how to show it.

      Eventually the other children stopped teasing Justin altogether and accepted him as one of their in-crowd. To his credit, he never teased or bullied another child in his entire school career. Kendall’s self-esteem, however, never recovered from those early years and his primary school career was followed by a nightmarish entrance into high school.

      By the time Kendall joined Justin at the local high school, Justin was firmly entrenched in the school’s A-list. The last thing his teenage ego needed was a little brother with too-long hair and his nose permanently buried in a book. With his cool friends to consider, Justin quietly withdrew from Kendall, only nodding briefly when he saw him in the corridors.

      “Isn’t that your brother?” his latest girlfriend would ask. Justin’s response was usually to shrug, sometimes to murmur, “Yeah, but he’s adopted.”

      And

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