Trap Door

by Dreda Say Mitchell

  Room number one is locked, as is the next. The third is a patient’s room where the bed has been stripped bare. There’s a pungent unpleasant tang. I swallow because I suspect that someone recently died in here. The memory of Keats so still slugs me in the gut. I snap the door shut. Then wish I hadn’t because the sound may alert a member of staff to what I’m up to. I check room after room. Nothing. In fact no people present at all.

  I come to the second-to-last room, the logical me insisting this is a plain waste of time. I don’t listen. This room’s door is partially opened. My fingertips gently push a touch so I can see inside. It’s empty but lived in. I push the door shut after me. It’s modern and tastefully thought through. Rich cream walls, a two-seater couch with a curved back that welcomes you into its soft embrace, a hip-high cabinet that contains books and old-style CDs. And a bed that has enough room for two people with fluffed overlapping pillows sitting on top of a stark white cover. Near it sits a table connected to the floor by wheels set at an angle with an opened laptop on top.

  Furtively I check the door over my shoulder and then stride to the mobile computer. I twist it to face me.

  On the screen is… I deliberately shake my head, hard, because truth is I can’t believe the evidence of my eyes. What I see hasn’t gone away. It’s Philip’s face. A replica of the photo once stuck on the wall of the storeroom. On the computer his face sits on the front cover of the funeral programme. The bomb drops. I’ve found the person creating his funeral programme. My finger flicks urgently across the screen. A strange strangled noise drives from my mouth at the display of the inside of the programme. Two of the missing photos in my copy are included in this version.

  The images force me to drop on the edge of the bed. The first shows Philip as a toddler. What a cutie in his loveheart-stamped jim-jams. His hair was so black then. He’s holding the strong hand of a man whose body and face remain out of shot. I can guess who it is though; Danny, Michael’s father. The other photo makes me hurt deep inside. It’s Philip sitting, holding his guitar on his knee, one hand draped over it with a tenderness reserved for a life partner I hope he found to love. I have to glance away. It’s so so very painful. All that energetic and lively youth snatched away. I remind myself, sombrely, that it may have been Philip doing the snatching recently in Switzerland.

  Then I find another family photo that flips my shaky world upside down. No. This can’t be. Can’t… A shroud of such lethargic despair covers me that I want to fall back. Lie on the bed. Shut my eyes tight and make the rest of the world go away. I don’t want to believe what I’ve just seen. I inhale and stare back at the screen. But it’s true, it hasn’t gone away.

  A quote at the bottom grabs my eye. It’s Goethe. Gurta, I remember how it should be said aloud. A quote from Faust:

  Yet death is never a wholly welcome guest.

  It grabs me by the throat and chokes me back into the past.

  Forty-Four

  That summer

  Ray made it impossible for Rachel to make a quick escape from Danny’s house on her bike. When he realised that Rachel was leaving Philip behind, Ray made increasingly desperate attempts to get out of her jacket and run back. Every few yards, she had to pull over and gently force him back into the lining.

  She grabbed him by his collar, pulling him close and hissed, ‘Don’t mess things up, Ray. Don’t make me go back. Please. This is Philip’s crazy idea. I don’t want to do this. I wanted to stay and call the police. So please behave.’

  For a moment, Ray seemed to understand. When Rachel set off again, pedalling down the drive towards the main road that led back to her dad’s, Ray seemed to settle down. When she placed both hands firmly on the handlebar to turn, he took his chance and jumped out onto the road before turning, barking with triumph and heading back up the drive to where they’d left Philip.

  Cursing, Rachel turned her bike. ‘Come back!’

  She set off in pursuit, the effort and focus helping to clear her head after everything that had happened. As she bore down on Ray, he dodged off the drive onto the grass and zigzagged to avoid her. Rachel leaned over and scooped him up with one hand while the bike wobbled, trembled and finally tipped Ray and Rachel over. She held him tight and stared into his disappointed face.

  ‘Help me out, Ray.’ But as she unbuckled his lead to tie his body to hers, a blue and orange flash crossed her eye line, followed by the boom-bang of an explosion. Stunned, Rachel urgently looked over to the garage where a thick noxious plume of smoke was rising hundreds of feet into the air.

  Philip.

  ‘No! No!’

  Ray slipped though her slack fingers and raced off. Rachel climbed on her bike and headed to the garage, consumed in billowing smoke and flames.

  ‘Philip! God, Philip! Speak to me.’

  No answer. Rachel roughly discarded her bike and pulled her jacket over her head and went in through the doors that were blasted off. If he was in there, he was dead. So why go in? Acrid thick smoke enveloped her, making her cough and cough. Cinders from above showered down and there was the unmistakable sound of the roof groaning. It was only a matter of time before it caved in.

  She called out Philip’s name one last time but more as a lament than an attempt to summon a response. She was only a few feet inside but her bearings were gone and overwhelmed in the black smoke and panic. There was hardly any light, leaving her feeling as if there was no air. She was going to die too.

  She stumbled forward, falling over a piece of debris. Then she saw the debris had a hand. A few yards away to her left, she could hear a dog barking. She grabbed the arm, followed the barks and pulled with all her might until she emerged from the smoke and flames.

  As she did so, the roof collapsed and shortly after that the walls caved inwards.

  She’d been seconds from being buried alive in flames and rubble.

  Philip’s body lay on the grass but it was a body transformed from that of a handsome young man. Scorched, blackened, singed and burnt. But he was still conscious. He raised his arm in an unearthly way and whispered, ‘Go away, Rachel. They’ll be here in a minute. Say nothing to anyone.’

  In the distance, sirens disturbed the air. Ray was howling and keening by the body. When Rachel tried to grab him, he bit her hand in anger. Philip tried to laugh but groaned instead. ‘Leave Ray with me. Just go.’

  It took Rachel hours to travel the five miles home. She walked her bike, stopping every few hundred yards to shake and cry uncontrollably. How can I have run away and left Philip? she asked herself over and over again. When she arrived, her father wasn’t there. That spared her having to explain her smoke-damaged clothes and hair. She sat inert in a bath and got out again and went downstairs to find her father coming through the door.

  He looked at her curiously. ‘Where have you been, Rachel? I’ve been calling you. Why weren’t you at Danny’s today?’

  She told her first lie on Philip’s behalf. ‘I skipped work and went and saw some friends.’

  ‘Just as well. I’ve bad news, I’m afraid. There was a fire at Danny’s. He’s dead. Not only him but that young lad who worked for him.’

  Her voice was a whisper. ‘Philip’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Frank’s gaze narrowed. ‘Did you know this Philip well?’

  Rachel shook her head, for a second incapable of speaking. ‘Not really but I liked him. He worked in the garden so I never saw much of him. But will you try to find out how he is?’

  ‘Of course.’ Her father looked puzzled. ‘Strange thing though. The paramedics found him on the grass, away from the fire with a dog having a nervous breakdown. They couldn’t understand how he got out, given his injuries. If you weren’t up there, that only leaves Danny and the kid. There was no-one else there apparently. And it certainly wasn’t Danny who got him out.’

  She couldn’t lie a second time for Philip. ‘Perhaps someone who loved him pulled him from the flames.’

  Her father was even more puzzled. ‘So
meone who loved him?’

  Rachel realised she’d said too much. ‘I’m going to have a lie down.’

  Without waiting for his response, she left him, her face crumpling when she was on her own.

  A few days later when her dad gave her the devastating news that Philip had died, that evening was the first night Rachel slept with a bucket of water by her bed.

  Forty-Five

  A noise jerks me back from the life-changing horror of the past, away from the funeral programme on the laptop. Away from that damning photo. It’s the hospital room’s door opening. I stand up, staunch and ready. Ready to meet the person who has been planning Philip’s funeral, playing with my mind. It’s the wheels I see first. Then I see the wheelchair. I don’t notice the porter who pushes it, only the person sitting in it has my utmost attention.

  My head’s trembling with such an intensity I don’t know how it stays connected to my neck. There’s a terrible roaring in my ears. My legs give way and I drop heavily onto the bed.

  ‘Philip?’

  This is what happens when you take one too many shots of cannabis oil and pop BBs like they’re Smarties, you end up seeing things. That’s what my blown mind is telling me.

  ‘Rachel.’

  Oh God, he’s real.

  I’m consumed by such an intense ballooning of elation that it threatens to split me apart. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Whether to reach out towards him or hug my fingertips to my lips. My hands don’t have the will to do either. They’re frozen to the blanket on the bed. I watch as the porter wheels him over and then leaves us. Now he – Philip – is less than an arm’s length from me. A wave of other emotions crashed down, drenching me. Horror. Disbelief. Complete, total incomprehension. But joy shoves them all out of the way and wins through again.

  I’m laughing like I don’t have an internal stop button. ‘Philip… Philip… Philip.’

  His grin is a twisted history of scars, burns and grafts. His poor, poor beautiful face. ‘Hello, Rachel.’ He speaks as if the last time he saw me was yesterday not ten years ago. ‘This is a nice surprise, although perhaps it shouldn’t be—’

  I interrupt, voice scraping across my vocal cords. ‘I don’t understand. Why did you let me think that you died all those years ago after the fire?’ There’s a bitter taste on the tip of my tongue. ‘I blamed myself for it all. For running away. Leaving you. I thought I’d let you down.’

  His eyes lower to his bony hands and that’s when I realise how emaciated he is. His head shoots up. ‘Look at me. I’m not a pretty sight, am I. And I don’t mean that as a statement of vanity. It’s simply a truth. At the beginning I was in hospital for such a long time, and it wasn’t only my body trying to heal. Inside my mind was damaged. It took me such a long time to put myself back together and it felt wrong to drag you into it all over again. I wanted you to find peace.’

  If only he knew that I’d found anything but. I touch a palm to my heart. ‘I’m filled with such happiness seeing you alive.’

  His face isn’t anywhere near as mobile as it was, but there’s a tiny lift of one brow. ‘Nearly everyone has paid me a visit today. Your friend Keats dropped by, my dad, my mum and my brother Michael. I suppose you’re the last person left who hasn’t. It’s been a whole series of tender deathbed scenes,’ he laughs too but then winces with pain, ‘of one sort or another.’

  I get off the bed to hug him but he raises a hand covered in a white glove that resembles an oven mitt. ‘Best not. There aren’t many parts of my body that don’t burn again when they’re touched. We can virtual hug if you like. Everything is virtual for me these days.’

  Then the penny drops with horror. ‘Deathbed scenes?’

  He’s still trying to grin. ‘Yes, I’m going, I’m afraid. The doctors will tell you different, my mum can’t accept it but it’ll be lights out for me shortly.’ He taps his chest lightly with his white glove. ‘My lungs were severely damaged in the fire. The miracle isn’t that I’m alive but that I’ve lasted this long. I’ve been given a few months at the most before my lungs shut down. I’m not sorry either. Enough is enough for me really; I’ve been as good as dead for years anyway.’ He points to the laptop. ‘That’s why I’m making those arrangements for my own funeral—’

  ‘You’re the person behind it.’

  His expression lights up. ‘Imagine having the opportunity to put the things you really want to be remembered for in your funeral service instead of what your family try to guess what you wanted. I want to be remembered my way not somebody else’s. Although I had to be careful. If Mummy had worked out what I was writing, she’d have deleted the lot.’ His good hand flashes around. ‘Plus, it keeps me amused while I’m waiting for the grim reaper and a couple of hospital porters to show up and wheel me off to the morgue.’

  I’m gutted. Philip’s alive but he’s going to die all over again. What a wicked trick for life to play on me. In that moment the sorrow on his face is a burden that needs to be shared but I can’t touch him because how can I burden him with my heartbreak as well?

  He asks, ‘Did Keats tell you what’s been going on? She’s an interesting lady.’

  For the past few minutes, Keats has slipped my mind. Now her accident takes me by the throat. I don’t want to tell Philip what’s happened, in case he blames himself for that too. ‘No, no, not yet…’

  His body shifts as he settles more deeply into his chair. ‘Best start at the beginning. My mother and brother, Michael, blamed your father and you for what happened to Uncle Danny.’

  Woah! I didn’t see that one coming and it shows in my face. ‘Danny Hall was your uncle?’

  He nods slowly. ‘He was mummy’s younger brother. She was very protective of him, including his memory. When Mummy discovered your father had fallen out with Uncle Danny over some business thing, that you were working there, and then Uncle Danny was killed and I was injured in a suspicious fire – well, they blamed you and your father for it. Obviously, I told Mummy and Michael that was nonsense afterwards but I couldn’t tell them the truth, could I? That was impossible. Hey – are you all right, Rachel?’

  I’m not. I’m shattered. He obviously doesn’t realise that I’ve seen the picture. I turn the laptop in his direction and, with a shaking finger, point to it. ‘Why is my dad in this photo with you, Joanie and Michael?’

  I expect him to turn away from me. He doesn’t. His hot stare drives into me. ‘My mother was his long-time lover and Michael and I are his sons. Because he’s our dad too.’

  The blow doesn’t fall because I was expecting this. I think back to all those years when Dad was away for days, sometimes weeks, ‘on business’. He was probably with his second family. Is that what crushed Mum’s spirit because she found out? Then it hits me what I confided in Keats about my relationship with Philip:

  ‘He’s like the brother I never knew I had.’ It was all true. Philip is my brother, my half-brother.

  He must be reading my mind because Philip chokes, ‘Surely you must have known that, Rachel? Someone must have told you? How could you not have known?’ He cries, tears soaking down his wounded face in crazy patterns over the scars. ‘Oh Rachel…’

  I feel the walls of my tears crumbling inside. We cry together, for the mess that has been made of our lives. For two eighteen-year-olds who had just gone through the gateway of adulthood on the journey to find their dreams but instead found a hellish nightmare awaiting them.

  Philip has his big-gloved hand around my shoulder and kisses my cheek with his broken lips.

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing; everything’s going to be okay. Keats told me what’s been going on. I’ve laid it on the line for Mummy, our dad and Michael today. All this nonsense has got to stop. Don’t be too harsh on my mum and Michael. They were only trying to get revenge for what they imagined happened to Uncle Danny and me. I told them from the beginning that it wasn’t your fault but when they discovered I’m dying that was obviously the trigger that must have started them off
with all the bogus company and gas lighting. They just wanted you to suffer the way I did. Don’t be too hard on them. Revenge has been going on for ever; it’s a natural human instinct to right wrongs.’

  My voice has no tone. It’s broken, the same way that I’m broken. ‘Why didn’t you tell Joanie and Michael the truth about what happened at Danny’s?’

  Philip laughs grimly, though I can see how painful this is for him. ‘How could I do that? Tell my mother that her beloved baby brother was a rapist and couldn’t keep his filthy hands to himself? That’s why I couldn’t call the police then, I didn’t want her anywhere near that mess or finding out who her brother really was. How do you think she’d have reacted when she found out that I killed him? That I burned his body to cover up the evidence, and was the cause of my own injuries? I couldn’t do that, Rachel.’

  The grip of the gloved hand on my shoulder gets tighter, although the pain on his face shows what it’s costing him. ‘The thing is this, I’ve spoken to my mum and Michael and told them this has to stop. They’re going back tomorrow to clear out their fake business. Shut it down.’

  He pauses, considering his next words. ‘But what you have to remember is that under no circumstances must you let our dad know what you know. He’s obsessed with his reputation.’ It comes back to me what Keats told me about how my father crushes his business opponents, uses the courts to protect his reputation.

  Philip ominously adds, ‘And if he finds out you know what he’s done…’

  My confusion shows on my face. ‘I don’t understand. Having a secret family isn’t exactly the crime of the century.’ My expression changes. ‘He’s done something else, hasn’t he? What aren’t you telling me?’

  Philip’s eyes jerk away. ‘I’ve told you everything. But heed this – Frank Jordan’s capable of anything. He’s a psychopath, Rachel. He’s been coming to see me every week since I’ve been in here. I think he enjoys it. He thinks I deserve to be like this because I was stupid. Seriously, that’s what he thinks.’ His gaze turns back to me now. ‘You’re his little Rachel. If he thinks you know everything, you’re in serious danger. You’re the only one he really cares about. See? He doesn’t care about me, my mum, your mum or Michael. Only you.’