by JJ Marsh
If the fire hadn’t continued crackling and the music carried on, I would have said that time stopped. Everyone froze, each expression incredulous or shocked or confused.
After a moment, Mika spoke. “Is that why you’ve been trying to scare us, Gael? To provoke us into some kind of confession because you believe we actively wanted Dhan dead?” He shook his head, his eyes glinting. “After twenty years of spending every other year together, you suspect the rest of us are guilty of murder?” He gave a short cough-laugh, sat back and lifted his face to the ceiling, blinking with wide eyes.
Lovisa opened a hand as if to invite an explanation but Simone drew it back. “Over the years, you have said some horrible, damaging things to me, including this evening. But to accuse us of killing Dhan is completely unforgivable. You have crossed a line, Gael, and you will regret that for the rest of your life.”
My head was muddled and I reached for the wine bottle to top up my glass.
Clark withdrew the bottle and pushed a jug of water towards me. “Two things. One. Sober up and stop talking bullshit. Two. You have never been the outsider and I resent you taking that line. Don’t you dare try the Irish working-class horseshit. Just don’t. Yes, Lovisa, Mika and Simone have always had a sense of European aristocracy, but let me tell you something. You and Dhan were even worse. British humour, British culture, British innate sense of superiority, you were painfully smug. Trust me, I am familiar with being patronised by my friends and you are guilty of the clique mentality as much as anyone else.”
“Clark! Listen, I ...”
“I’m not done. You booked this place, you had access and time the rest of us did not. Look me in the eye, Gael. For whatever reason, are you trying to freak us out?”
I shook my head. “No! None of this weird stuff is down to me, I swear. My theory about twenty years ago is one thing, but even if I wanted answers, I wouldn’t try to spook them out of you. My emotions got the better of me tonight, and I apologise for that.”
I sat down, hot and confused. Clark passed me the wine bottle and I filled my glass.
After a few moments of silence, Lovisa spoke. “My head tells me to wait for the morning. My heart wants to know now. Do you really, honestly believe we were responsible for Dhan’s death? Not in a series of accidents sense, but out of malevolence?”
I rubbed my face with my hands and took another slug of wine. “I don’t know. What I can say is that something was very wrong that night. But the reason I don’t know is because I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t there,” echoed Simone. “You were lucky. The rest of us must carry a responsibility which haunts me every day of my life. I wake up at night panicking, reliving every single moment and trying to change the story. It never changes and it never will. Gael, drop your conspiracy theory. We didn’t kill Dhan. If anything, he killed himself.” Her voice cracked a little and Lovisa rested a hand on her shoulder.
We had reached the end of the line. I’d accused my friends of murder, attacked their characters and taken a machete to the bonds of friendship. Perhaps I should just go to bed.
The music player changed from Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ to Prince’s ‘1999’. We stared at one another in disbelief and Clark pushed back his chair to deal with the device. He switched it off and in the silence, we heard three loud knocks, the iron ring banging on wood. My skin chilled as we all turned to stare at the front door.
Chapter 23: Gael, now
Seconds passed and no one seemed able to move. Once again, three heavy knocks sounded on the wood, each sending a jolt through my bones. Five of us sat frozen, staring at that huge oak door. Mika got to his feet and jerked his head at Clark. They stood shoulder to shoulder as Mika switched on the outdoor lights and Clark checked the spy hole. We got up from our seats to stand behind them. Clark turned to us, shaking his head with a shrug. Mika threw back the bolts and turned the key. The door creaked open, icy air rushing inwards as we braced ourselves.
Several paces off the porch, out of view of the spy hole, stood a hooded figure, carrying a sack. Unlike the Grim Reaper, this figure was short and rotund, more like a monk or an Ewok. It approached, bowing its head.
A gloved left hand pushed back the cloak to reveal a face we hadn’t seen for twenty years.
Dhan.
“Happy New Year, my friends!”
His grin was sheepish as he repeated his eyebrow trick and pulled out a small black lump from his pocket. “If the first person over the threshold is a dark-haired man carrying coal, it’s good luck. Can I come in?”
Unconsciously, we all followed the same pattern. Each of us recoiled from something we did not understand. Simone and Lovisa clutched one another and backed away towards the stairs. Mika reversed as far as the fireplace, shaking his head and making a low hum. Clark and I stood beside the front door, tense and ready to throw this apparition out into the snow.
I was the first to move. My eyes fixed on his; I took one pace after another and reached out a hand. Not to shake or caress, more to prod, as if to check he was flesh and blood. I poked his shoulder and he laughed.
“In my day, it used to be three kisses. Now it’s a prod on the shoulder? I’ve got some cultural assimilation to do, that much is obvious.”
We all stared, speechless. It looked like Dhan, albeit twenty years older, with grey temples and flecks of white in his beard. It sounded like Dhan, with all the same cadences of speech.
My mind processed every kind of possibility, real and imagined, in around ninety seconds. Hallucination, twin brother, artificially intelligent replicant, prank played by one of Mika’s AI team, nightmare or hologram, but the evidence rebutted me at every attempt to flee reality. After we’d spent twenty years coming to terms with his death, Dhan was not dead.
He was right here in front of us, wearing what looked like a cloak straight out of Star Wars.
Lovisa swept her stare around each of us and settled on the newcomer. “It’s gone midnight. Come and join us, stranger.”
“Thank you. I brought champagne,” said Dhan. “Bottle of top fizz in my Santa sack. I got gifts for all of you. The champagne is chilled because I’ve been outside for a while, but it’s definitely not frozen.” He grinned at us like some kind of TV game show host and hoisted his sack onto the coffee table.
The moment shrank away from me, or maybe it was the other way around. I was there, watching Dhan unpack presents from his sack and I was not. I was at a distance, surveying the five statues and the one animated individual who should not have been there.
Lovisa’s voice broke the moment. “Mika, could we get another glass?”
As if he were a zombie, Mika obeyed and took another glass from the sideboard, placing it on the table. Dhan – Dhan! – uncorked a bottle of Cristal. Like feral kittens drawn to a saucer of milk, Lovisa, Clark and Simone peeled away from the shadows and stepped nervously closer to the table, Mika’s expression hard to read as his back was to the fire.
Lovisa distributed the flutes of fizz, her eyes wide. “I have no idea how to propose a toast,” she said. “Tonight was supposed to be an anniversary, a tribute to a friend we had lost. I’m a little confused because out of the blue, he is found.”
We stood there, holding glasses, dazed and unable to process current events.
Dhan lifted his glass, his cloak falling to the floor. “To 2020! To our futures! Happy New Year!”
We lifted our flutes and mumbled ‘Happy New Year’ as if we were programmed. The bubbles slipped down easily and a smile lifted my face. The last twenty years had been a dream. Dhan was alive. Dhan was here, grinning at all of us, knocking his flute against my, Lovisa’s, Simone’s and Mika’s glasses. Only when he got to Clark did he falter.
Clark burst the bubble, snatching his glass away, spilling the contents on his sleeve and snarled. “Happy New Year? Where the fuck have you been for the last twenty?”
Dhan bowed his head and looked up under his eyelashes. From a swell of joy, anger ove
rtook me and right then, I wanted to punch him in the jaw. Twenty years of grief and disruption and he pulls a Lady Diana?
“I know I owe you all an explanation. But before we rake over the past, can we please celebrate the fact we have a future? Come on, Clark, don’t let the side down.”
Clark didn’t move, his champagne glass drawn back towards his right shoulder.
The impasse was broken by Lovisa. “Let’s sit down. There will be many questions and I hope, many answers.” The table was set for five, so Mika fetched another chair from the kitchen and set it at the end of the table. Lovisa as Queen, Dhan as King, the rest of us merely courtiers.
The silence dragged on as we sipped our champagne and attempted to formulate the myriad questions we needed to ask. No one seemed keen to go first. We tried not to stare, but time after time I sneaked a glance at this face, this body, this person we had missed so very much.
My mind was in such a state of confusion I could not begin to describe the emotions I felt, and I trusted each of them even less. Time and again, I opened my mouth to speak and reined myself in. Lovisa rested her gaze on Mika’s face and I understood. The onus was on him. One more time, he was Dad.
Mika cleared his throat. “Dhan, I would like to say that I’m happy to see you. Perhaps when this evening is over, I will be able to do just that. At this moment, I’m fighting with shock, disbelief, uncertainty and if I’m honest, anger. To paraphrase Clark, where the hell have you been for the last twenty years?”
Dhan nodded, as if in sympathy, but his know-it-all grin spread across his face like a shark’s smile. “You lot are bound to have a tonne of questions. I would, in your shoes. I’m going to explain what I did, why I did it and apologise for your troubles. I missed you all, believe me. It’s really good to see you again. So, as this is a long story, what are the chances of something to eat?”
No one moved, so I brought another plate from the kitchen. Lovisa and I, apparently the only people who had possession of their motor faculties, pushed the half-eaten curries, dhals and parathas towards him.
He ladled spoon after spoon onto his plate, exclaiming at both quantity and quality. “Been practising your Indian cooking, that much I can see. How cool that you made a banquet tonight with all the …”
I interrupted, my voice tight and furious. “We made an Indian banquet to mark twenty years since your death. Except you’re not dead. Now I’m fine with you stuffing your face with our food after wrecking our lives for twenty bloody years, but I think you have some explaining to do.”
Dhan held up his hands and hunched his shoulders in a defensive gesture. “OK, fair point. I knew some of you might get freaked out by this. Sorry, I really am.”
He didn’t look it as he picked up his fork and scooped up some vegetable korma. He ate several mouthfuls, nodding his appreciation and took a swallow of champagne. “Twenty years. Seems crazy long. I wanted to make contact ten years after, but the time wasn’t right. I had some weird shit going on.”
“So did we,” said Clark. “We had spent those years grieving for a lost friend.”
Dhan tore off a piece of paratha and dabbed it in his curry. “Oh man, I wish I could have told you. But way back then it was impossible. I had no choice but to disappear.” He chewed on his bread and met each pair of eyes around the room, nodding as if that gesture alone could make us understand.
My right leg had begun to tremble and tense, jerking up and down as if it wanted to run away without me. “And how exactly did you disappear? We spent all night, all week, and Mika spent an entire year searching for you. Where did you go?”
In my peripheral vision, I saw Clark turn to his left, watching Simone. He removed the champagne glass from her clenched fist and set it on the table. He placed his right hand around her claw and pressed his uninjured shoulder against hers. It was a good move. The pressure building inside that woman was volcanic. Her eyes burned black as pig iron in the furnace.
I looked to Lovisa, who met my eyes with a fearful uncertainty. Simone’s attention was 100% on Dhan. She stared at him, her nostrils flaring as if she were a young racehorse about to bolt. The tension in the room cranked up to a low hum and I sensed we only had minutes before someone popped their cork.
Dhan was still eating. “Twenty years ago, our man, is not really the right place to start if we want to tell the story right.”
A fist smashed onto the table, startling everyone, shaking glasses and wobbling crockery. I was surprised to see that fist was Mika’s. He hissed through his teeth. “Dhan! What happened that night?”
He put down his fork and looked around the table, meeting each pair of eyes with an attempt at regret and sincerity. “I’ve tried so many times in my head to explain this to you all. More than anything in the world, I want you to understand why I did what I did. You need to know that I suffered immense regret over what I put you through. Until I faced you in person and gave you an explanation, I knew I would never feel at peace. That is why I came here tonight. New decade, new slate. I’ve missed you guys.”
Clark and Simone, clenched together like siblings at a graveside, stared at him with a cold incomprehension. Mika pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, flicking his gaze from tablecloth to Dhan to tablecloth again. Lovisa was massaging her own temples, her eyes closed.
I inhaled a long calming breath and allowed my shoulders to drop on the exhale. I fixed Dhan with an intense stare and repeated, “What happened?”
“What happened? I can give you the ‘what’, that’s easy. The ‘why’ might take longer. The short story is I jumped in the lake, dived under the ice and swam to the jetty. I got out and wrapped myself in heat blankets, then crept away to hide in the laundry room. I stayed there for a couple of hours, until I had dried off and warmed up. When the police quit for the night, I got dressed in full ski gear and walked parallel to the lane through the forest until I reached the main road. That was where I hitched a lift to Prague and yeah, well, went underground.”
Mika’s head swung from side to side, each sinew in his neck creaking like a tree trunk. “That is impossible. You could never have swum out of the lake. In those temperatures? Even if you had managed to get out, you’d have frozen to death. It was -11°! Look at who you’re talking to. That was my lake!”
Dhan spread his palms and shrugged once again. He didn’t need to say a word. He was here, in the flesh, right in front of everyone’s eyes.
“You arrogant arsehole,” spat Clark. “You actually sit there patting yourself on the back for faking your own death? You have no clue what impact that had on the rest of us. How dare you walk in here and say sorry for inflicting twenty years of grief on your friends?”
Mika’s stare began to unnerve me. He didn’t take his eyes off Dhan. Opposite me came the slight puffing sound of Simone suppressing tears. Lovisa put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. I noticed Dhan couldn’t meet Mika’s eyes. For several minutes no one spoke. The fire was getting low but to leave my place at that table was unthinkable. All I could manage was to identify wave after wave of intense emotion. Fury, confusion, sympathy, disbelief, exasperation, weariness, and one more time and enraged resentment at twenty wasted years.
“Your family, your friends ... why?” I stopped, unable to trust my voice. I took several huge breaths, swallowing to release the constriction in my throat. I would not cry. If Simone could manage not to weep, then so could I.
Dhan pushed his plate away. “My family, my friends were part of the reason why. That’s the hard bit to explain. I’m going to try, with you guys at least. The day after tomorrow, I’m travelling back to Britain. I’ve already accepted that I will never make my family understand, so I’m going to tell them I had amnesia. There’s no way they will ever understand the truth.”
Lovisa’s voice was soft. “Your mother and father worshipped you. Their son was their sun and their moon. You broke their hearts. How could you? How can you reappear after twenty years and make up for all that time?
”
Dhan shook his head, his expression sorrowful. “My dad died six months ago and my mother only lasted two months without him. All that’s left now are my sisters and the distribution of the family business. That’s one of the many reasons I needed to come out of the shadows.”
Not one of us spoke, processing the implications of what he had just said.
Dhan looked around the table, at each face in turn. “What I want you to understand is that in my early twenties I screwed everything up. Nothing had gone the way I wanted. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. To my mind, I had to start again and not make so many mistakes this time. My life had got ... entangled and I couldn’t see a way out. In the end, I made up my mind to just disappear. It was a drastic solution, I know, but the only route to a clean break. The lake gave me the perfect opportunity and I took it.”
“What do you mean by ‘entangled’?” Lovisa’s voice was steady and neutral but I knew her too well. I recognised that chilly sliver hinting at the iceberg beneath.
Dhan wagged his head from side to side, an evasive gesture. “Everyone wanted something from me and I couldn’t deliver. Simone was pregnant ...”
“You knew?” Simone’s mouth dropped open.
“I suspected. The thing is, I couldn’t become a father. No way was I responsible enough for myself, leave alone any dependants. Not only that, but my parents had promised me as the groom to another family’s daughter. It was all arranged.” He shot a quick glance at me. I continued staring at him, expressionless.
“So that was one problem. Another was that I owed Mika an explanation. The new business I’d asked you to fund had already folded and the money was gone. I just didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. “It was completely my fault.”
“You owed me more than an explanation,” said Mika. “You owed me thirty thousand Euros.” His flat delivery showed how tightly he was holding on to his temper.
“Which I didn’t have. But you’ve done OK out of the idea, right? I keep an eye on your company and it’s flying, mate.” He grinned at Mika who didn’t move a single muscle in his face.