Submersion

  She paused a second, wondering whether the licence bit needed explaining, I could tell. Deciding it didn’t, she commenced.

  ‘I spiked his drinks, Billy. Do you know what that means? I put alcohol in his drinks, got him drunk without him knowing. I intended to seduce him, to make him want me.’

  Mother’s faced flushed at this point, as if she hadn’t meant it to come out quite like that, quite so brash. She was talking to her ten-year-old son, after all. I was a little shocked myself, but did my best to keep it inside. I wanted her to continue and didn’t want my reaction to give her an excuse to cease. After another short gap, she commenced.

  ‘In any case, what actually happened was probably worse. He tried to drive home. Once he realised what I was up to, he was furious. Your aunt was pretty angry, too. And I realised something for the first time when she unleashed her fury at me, in front of all the other house guests – she was in love with Jessie, too. It wasn’t just me. In the midst of this row, Jessie announced he was leaving and took off in his car. He wasn’t very drunk, Billy, but he was a new driver. And young men are so very sure of themselves. They can be arrogant and they don’t listen. They don’t heed warnings.’

  This last sentence was less about Uncle Jessie and much more about me, I knew, but I guess that was part of the reason for sharing this story – so that I learned from it.

  ‘Luckily, Jessie didn’t get very far, and he didn’t take anyone with him. But, with a lethal mix of alcohol and anger swirling around inside him, he ended up causing a lot of damage – drove into a wall, wrecked his car and broke both of his legs and several ribs. I felt terrible, Billy. Felt very guilty. He was unconscious for three days. I remember thinking he might die. I remember your Aunt Agnes’ fury at me, too. It burnt into me, like fire. Everyone else kept reassuring me he would be alright, that my thoughtless prank was forgiven. But your aunt kept threatening me – if anything happens to him, she kept saying. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. In the end, after a few weeks in hospital, your Uncle Jessie came home, right as rain apart from his legs, still in plaster.

  ‘You might ask why this is relevant to your father. Well, Joe wasn’t on the scene at that point. He wasn’t part of our lives back then. I’d never met him, although I knew Jessie had a brother, a twin. It’s one reason both he and Agnes were close. You see, your aunt was one of a twin, but our brother was stillborn. That wasn’t quite the same for Jessie, obviously, but he and Joe had been apart for some years. Your father was taken away from his family at a young age. Like your cousins Ethan and Joshua. Like your Aunt Agnes, too, not that she ever mentions that.’

  My eyes widened at this point. My aunt had been taken too? Mother read the alarm in my face, and took steps to reassure me.

  ‘Agnes was returned after a short while, unharmed, barely affected. Not long after that the truth finally came out. The authorities initially claimed she’d run away, that she was making up stories. Just like they’d claimed in the past, going back years. But by then so many children had come out with these stories - so many apparent runaways, and so many that had simply gone missing without returning - that there was no more containing the secret. How they ever thought they could keep what they were doing under wraps is beyond me. I guess they were desperate people working in desperate times. And those that knew – people in authority – had kept silent for a long time. Had closed ranks. I guess it only took one of them to finally get a conscience and speak up. Then all those so-called stories the stolen children had been telling for years were verified. Still, I’m digressing – I need to get back to your father.’

  A few more sips of the oily-black coffee and Mother pulled her tale back on track.

  ‘It was the accident that brought Joe back into Jessie’s life. As I said, he’d been taken away as a child – put to work in laboratories, like your cousin Ethan. However, unlike Ethan or Joshua, he had eventually been sent back to his parents. But, your father came back damaged by the experienced, unsettled. And, as an older teenager, he got into trouble. Got in with the wrong crowd and was taken away again – this time to an institution for young offenders. You know what that is Billy?’

  I nodded. Outside the rain was plummeting at an alarming rate and Mother had to gradually raise her voice as she continued.

  ‘I met Joe at the hospital and decided instantly that he was going to be mine. Made a move on him for all the wrong reasons to start with – to annoy to Esther, to make Jessie jealous, and to infuriate my parents, too. Having been forgiven for my part in Jessie’s car crash, I was beginning to feel a little ignored and needed something to bring the focus back on me. I was a real attention seeker back then, Billy, and what better way to get even more than by hooking up with the local bad boy? And he was bad, my love. Much as I loved him, he was bad. He was in with the bad crowd, making money through criminal activities, I won’t keep that from you. But I didn’t care – because very quickly, I found myself falling in love with him. He with me, too. We got married, despite being very young – which was more than your aunt and Elinor’s father did – and once you were born, I thought that would be it. Thought that would be enough, that he’d settle. But he didn’t.’

  Something distracted Mother and she flinched, raised a hand to touch the top of her head.

  ‘Water,’ she said, a little alarmed, checking her wet fingers. Looking up, a slow drip was coming through the ceiling. ‘I’ll just get a bucket. We’ll need to get someone over later to sort that out. This damn weather!’

  Whilst she was gone, I mulled over what she had said, in particular something she’d said about Aunt Agnes and I had a question upon her return.

  ‘Is Uncle Jessie Elinor’s father?’

  The look on Mother’s face revealed she hadn’t meant to imply this in any way.

  ‘No,’ she said, continuing with the truth. ‘That was another man. Someone who left a long time ago, but that’s not my story to tell. Okay?’

  I agreed with a nod.

  Resting a steel bucket carefully on my bed in order to catch the drips from above, Mother then settled herself again and continued with her own story.

  ‘The bad crowd your father got in with were not an easy bunch to shake. You know Mr Harrison?’

  Monty Harrison – Mother’s secret boss.

  ‘Monty Harrison isn’t the nice man I’ve told you he is. He’s involved in some very bad things. He’s a criminal, Billy. A criminal who gets away with everything. And he got your father involved in something very dangerous. Do you remember we talked about the dogs?’

  She paused, checking me over, checking it was okay to continue. I could tell that her tale was about to get more serious.

  ‘Yes, killer dogs, so Tristan said.’

  ‘Tristan Jones and his horror stories,’ she tutted, but it was also an acknowledgement. ‘He’s right, though. They were terrifying creatures. Huge things that attacked people to feed or just to kill. The authorities killed them off when the cities and surrounding areas were flooded - by poisoning the water. Despite the terrible living conditions this left us with, those horrible creatures were extinct. Your father left just after the flooding, a time when we should have been safe from those beasts. But Monty Harrison was up to something. I don’t know exactly what, but it involved those creatures. In spite of the danger, he was somehow involved with them, and he tried to get your father involved, too.

  ‘He’d tried to get away from Monty on numerous occasions, to break from his group, but Monty wouldn’t let him. He made all sorts of threats – to your father, to me and even you. So, your father always stayed working for Monty, helping protect his criminal empire. But things went too far and one night your father came home to announce he was leaving Monty’s fold. He also brought something home with him.’

  Mother paused. Another sip of the coffee, which by then must have been cold. A plop in the steel bucket reminded us that the ceiling was still leaking.

  ‘What did he bring, Mother?’ I asked, breaking her interval.<
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  ‘A puppy,’ she said, her voice chilly, somehow making the room colder. ‘A tiny thing, it was. No bigger than his hand, wrapped up in some sacking. God knows what he thought he was going to do with it. Took it in a panic, I suppose. It terrified me. He didn’t tell me how he had got hold of it, but I knew it was to do with Monty. I knew he had taken it from Monty, rescued it, your father claimed. Rescued it. That was the most he said. And the terror I felt at the very sight of it had nothing to do with Monty Harrison. Monty I could deal with, I was certain. No, all I could think was that, at any moment, its pack would sniff it out - despite the poisoned water surrounding us - make its way to our house and do whatever damage it needed to do to get the creature back. So, I knew instinctively what we had to do.’

  She checked my face for signs of realisation.

  ‘Do you remember, Billy?’

  And suddenly I did. The coconut, cracked apart on the table, its white innards in contrast to a red cloth, covering our kitchen table. I nodded, thinking hard, trying to put my broken memory back together again.

  ‘I told you the tale about the coconut so many times that I even started to believe it myself. The coconut was Monty’s idea. He’s good like that, Monty. Good at coming up with very clever lies. He said young minds were very malleable, that boys believed everything their mother’s told them. So I told it to you again and again, until I couldn’t tell it anymore. Couldn’t even bear to talk about any of it in the end. Too painful, Billy. I had to tell you something, though, but I had to protect you, too. So it couldn’t be the truth.

  ‘You came across us, Billy. As your father took the puppy out of the sacking, you came into the room. We got you to leave, got you to go to your room, even though it got you all excited. Thought you were out the way, asleep, but you came back down again a little later. Do you remember?’

  I did. I remembered father sending me straight up to bed again. I also remembered coming down a further time, in the dead of night, and finding the shattered fruit bleeding all over the table. Finding Mother standing over it. Only it wasn’t fruit after all.

  ‘I instantly knew that we had to kill the thing, no matter how soft and innocent it looked. I knew what those things grew into, knew the damage they did to people’s lives. And it had a pack, Billy - a rabid, killer pack that couldn’t be far away. You know what they did to Papa Harold’s mother?’

  I did, yes.

  ‘And if the authorities knew we were harbouring a… Well… So, I got a knife from the kitchen Billy and I killed it instantly, not hesitating for a second.’

  Here Mother stalled, pained by the memory, tears swelling her eyes.

  ‘The noise it made, Billy. The cries. The shrieking. My god, it was so terrible. It was just a baby, after all. But if we had been caught… If the authorities had found us with it… If it’s bitch of a mother had come calling… It sealed our fate, though. Killing the puppy. And we had to make some quick choices thereafter.

  ‘We rowed, Billy. Rowed about what he’d done, what I’d done, what we should do next. You see, I can’t stress enough how dangerous Monty Harrison was, still is. You didn’t mess with him, even joke with him, Billy. You just did as he said. Always. Joe wanted us all to flee, but I knew that couldn’t happen. Monty would come after us. Track us down – so it had to all fall on your father. He had to disappear and Monty had to be convinced that he was not coming back.

  ‘It was the blood on the floor that inspired me, crude as that might sound. Your father had accidently dropped the corpse at the top of the stairs, whilst carrying it from the kitchen. It stained the hallway floor, almost instantly. There was no denying it but I also knew there was no way of identifying whose blood it was. At least, Monty didn’t have this capability. So, I played a clever game – put the ragged, limp body of the dog in the river road, hoped it would flush away and then I rang Monty Harrison myself and made a confession.

  ‘I knew this decision would tie me to the man forever, but I couldn’t think of another solution. I needed to save your father and still have Monty on side. And I needed to protect you above anything else. So I made my confession – swapping your father for the dog. Told him I’d lost my temper, stabbed your father and rolled his body into the river. Told him there was blood everywhere. That I needed his help. That I might need his protection too.

  ‘He didn’t doubt me for a moment, you know. I did have a bit of a temper – not violent, but what my mother would have called feisty. I stood up for myself, and I was certain Joe must have moaned about this to his colleagues, to Monty even. So, I guessed my violent outburst might not be so questionable. I also thought he might come over, check out my story, so I didn’t clean up the blood as well as I could. Despite the fact I knew you might notice, that you might ask questions, I left a bit of a stain, a bit of evidence, if you like. Yet Monty never came. He just took my word for it that I’d killed your father in a fit of rage. But I didn’t get away with it entirely; he did use his belief I’d killed your father to his advantage.

  ‘I’ll look after you, Esther, he told me a few days later. I’ll keep you and your boy safe, keep your secret safe, but you might have to look after me, too. Help me out a bit.

  ‘And so I did, Billy. I began working for Monty Harrison, using my very exclusive talent, as Monty likes to put it, to keep him safe.’

  ‘You clean for him?’ I said, stating the obvious, but the look on her face said there was more to it.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed, her tone heavy. ‘Whenever Mr Harrison or one of his boys make a mess – which is frequently – I go in and clean it up. Clean up every trace.’

  She didn’t elaborate any further, but I didn’t ask her, either. My interests lay elsewhere.

  ‘So where did he go?’ I asked, sitting up a little. ‘I thought he’d vanished, Mother. I heard the door that night. Remember I came down and Father sent me back upstairs. Told me to go back to bed.’

  ‘The last thing he said to you,’ she said, confirming she remembered the detail, too.

  ‘Yes. And then the door slammed, and he wasn’t in the street.’

  Mother looked puzzled.

  ‘I looked. From your bedroom. And he wasn’t there, he wasn’t in the street. I thought he’d left then. But he wasn’t there. I thought he’d vanished.’

  ‘Into thin air?’ Mother checked.

  ‘Yes. Like magic.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘We still had the puppy’s corpse when you came back down. It was too much of a risk that you might come down again, so we got rid of it. Opened the door and dropped it into the water. And we must have slammed the door after that, Billy.’

  So, there was another childhood mystery solved – my father’s enigmatic exit reduced to the disposal of a dead dog and a slammed door. No vanishing after all. Yet, it didn’t explain his disappearance. It didn’t explain that when I got up in the middle of the night and scouted quietly through the house, he was no longer there.

  The image of the shattered coconut on the red cloth flashed back in my mind.

  ‘Did you kill it in the kitchen? On the table?’

  Mother nodded, her brow creasing with an anxiety, as she feared what was coming next.

  ‘I got up after you’d gone to bed, went into the kitchen.’

  She nodded, acknowledging what I see could see in my head.

  ‘Oh Billy, it made such a mess… Such a terrible, terrible mess… I should have cleaned it all up straightaway, but I couldn’t face… I’m so sorry you saw that, so sorry, my love…’

  I managed to shrug my shoulders: it didn’t matter and I hadn’t been traumatised at the time, after all. Confused, yes, but the stories Mother had told me had kept me safe from the horror. Her lies had done me some good.

  ‘In my head it’s still coconut,’ I said and, through tears, mother found herself almost laughing.

  My original question still hadn’t been answered, so I went back to it.

  ‘So where did Father go?’ I asked again
.

  The immediate answer was simple.

  ‘Nowhere, Billy,’ she told me. Seeing my surprise, she elaborated. ‘Not for weeks, at least. Not for nearly two months, in fact. He stayed in the house, hidden.’

  ‘Hidden?’

  ‘Yes, hidden, in a special room under the house. A room we keep locked.’

  I knew instantly where she meant – there was the locked door in our kitchen, with a staircase behind it that led straight down to the cellar, bypassing the ground floor entirely. I wasn’t allowed in there and it was always locked. I’d assumed that Mother kept something secret or precious in there, but hadn’t imagined she kept a person in there.

  ‘He was here all that time?’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ Mother said, smiling a little. ‘So I got to keep him for a bit longer.’

  But her smile fell instantly, as she saw the look on my face. But I didn’t get to see him, it said. And, as I felt hot tears stream down my face, I saw them mirrored on hers.

  ‘It wasn’t safe, Billy. I couldn’t have risked you knowing. You were so young, so innocent. You’d never have been able to keep that secret, no matter what you might think. It would have just been too much to ask. Too much to expect. And I had to keep you safe, above everything else.’

  ‘What happened when he left?’

  ‘He just snuck away one night, when we felt it was safe enough.’

  But that hadn’t quite been what I meant.

  ‘No, since then,’ I stressed.

  ‘I don’t know, Billy,’ she said, sorrowfully, and I saw her full ache in her eyes. ‘I haven’t heard from him since.’

  Those six words drew a line under her story, made us both pause and think. I had so many questions to ask. About my father, about Monty Harrison, about my cousins Ethan and Joshua, too. It was hard to know where to start. What to ask first, and who to go to. But, if my father’s fictitious death had to remain as such, there wasn’t much digging I could reasonably do.