Read Crusher for Free Online Page A

looking, and was sitting there growing cold and stale. I decided to leave it for now. I had to clear my head somehow, figure out what I was going to do.
    *  *  *
    The late-morning air was damp and fresh in my mouth, and before long I could feel the familiar burn in the bottom of my lungs. I was heading up the Thames towpath at eighty per cent of my top speed. My favourite time to run was about four or five in the morning, when I could really let rip without any fear of colliding with dog walkers or joggers, but right now the towpath was quiet, apart from the odd cyclist. The ones coming towards me I dodged, the ones heading my way I liked to keep up with and overtake, partly for the challenge and partly because it really wound them up.
    At first the running had just been part of my fitness training for the boxing club that Dad took me to, then it became an end in itself. I liked boxing and I was good at it. Some wag nicknamed me Crusher Maguire, and after a year or so a lot of fighters in my weight range were starting to avoid me. Then Delroy got sick and the club closed temporarily and never reopened and I had to train by myself. Running was my favourite routine. Just me and the wind in my face and the burn in my chest and my breath in my ears. My dad had tried running with me for a while—he never asked me to do anything he wasn’t willing to try himself, he said—but before long he packed it in. He couldn’t keep up, and I didn’t want him to. I needed to push myself to the limit.
    It was the boxing club that straightened me out. The clarity of it, the focus. Being right in the moment. The tiniest lapse in concentration and you got clobbered. And you soon learned that no matter how big or hard you were there was always someone bigger and harder, and that taught you to think as well as fight. Taking me there was the brightest idea my dad had ever had.
    I came to the next bridge, wheeled round and headed back the way I came. A glance at my watch told me I was fifteen seconds outside my best time. I pushed myself harder.
    Dad had done all the courses he could afford and read every book in the library about firm parenting and tough love and all that fatuous horseshit. He knew I was angry, and knew I was off the rails, and he knew why, and he wanted to help. But he couldn’t help the way I felt any more than I could. I’d put him through purgatory—the fights in school, the truancy, the petty crime, the pathetic attempt at dealing. He’d always stuck by me, come to court, tried to persuade anyone who’d listen I was a good kid, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Somehow he’d always been on my side, even when I really was guilty as hell. He’d never blamed me. He’d never even blamed my mother for leaving either, though you didn’t have to be Freud to work out that’s when I started going wrong. The heart wants whatthe heart wants, he’d say, then snort. He never said, her heart hadn’t wanted him any more. Or me.
    Back to Kew Bridge, twenty seconds under. That was better. I stayed on the towpath till it petered out at the new riverside redevelopment, then headed back up across the High Road, heading for my street, trying to keep the pace up right until the last minute to override the pain from the build-up of lactic acid in my calf muscles.
    Dad tried to get me not to hate Mum, and he failed. I wanted him to hate her as much as I did, and I failed. He always loved her, even after she left us. I remembered hiding behind their bedroom door once, meaning to jump out and say “boo,” and I’d heard them together, heard him sing their favourite song, “Sweet Thames Flows Softly,” about two lovers whose affair flowers and fades on the river. I’d heard the joy and affection in his voice, and I’d snuck out without them seeing, and never let on I’d been listening. It must have reminded him of how he’d lost her, but Dad would still sing that song; he hummed it every time he switched on his