by Kevin Brooks
She nods.
I glance at the TV. Creepshow 2 must have finished, or maybe Mum just got fed up with it, because now she's watching one of those police–camera–car-chase programmes. The sound's on mute. There's a car chase going on – night-vision, filmed from a helicopter, two white blobs speeding along through a blur of grey.
‘Did Taylor talk to you when she was down here?’ I ask Mum.
‘Hmm…?’ she murmurs, staring at the TV screen.
‘Taylor… the blonde girl. Did she come in here and talk to you?’
‘Taylor?’
‘Yeah. The blonde girl.’
Mum nods (then almost immediately shakes) her head. ‘Yeah, no… no, she didn't say very much. Just hello, you know… she seems all right. Said she liked the TV.’
‘The TV?’
‘Yeah, nice TV… that's what she said. Nice TV.’
‘Right…’ I pause for a moment or two, gazing absently at another car chase on the TV screen (this one filmed from inside the chasing police car), then I turn back to Mum and say, ‘She didn't ask you anything about Dad, did she?’
Mum goes still. ‘What about him?’
‘Nothing… it's just that Taylor was being really nosy, that's all. Asking all sorts of questions about Dad and stuff. I just wanted to make sure that she hadn't been bothering you.’
With some difficulty, Mum sits up straight and looks at me. ‘What kind of questions?’
I shrug. ‘Just questions, you know… like what he does, that kind of thing.’
‘What he does?’
‘It's nothing to worry about, Mum… it's just the kind of stuff people ask you about. You know – my dad works for so-and-so, what does your dad do?’
Mum frowns. ‘Who's so-and-so?’
‘Nobody. It's just… I'm just trying to explain what I mean.’ I put my hand on her shoulder and smile at her. ‘It's all right, Mum. Honestly… it doesn't matter. Just forget about it.’
She blinks at me, struggling to keep me in focus, and she tries to smile, but she's too drunk, too lost, too mixed up and sad. I lean down and kiss the top of her head. Her hair smells of cherries and smoke.
‘Come on,’ I tell her. ‘Let's get you to bed.’
inside me (3)
Two years is a long time. Two years is no time at all. It's time enough for the cave in your head to grow so small that your breath feels like stone in your throat, but it's nowhere near time enough for you to forget who you are.
(i've seen my time away)
The last time I saw my dad was on a snowy December morning just over two years ago.
(it's living inside me)
I'm in the front room wrapping up a Christmas present for Mum, and Jesus and Mary are sitting on the floor beside me, their eyes fixed intently on the box in my hand. Inside the box is one of those Cow-In-A-Can things. You know, it's like a little round tin with a perforated top, and when you turn it upside down it makes a mooing noise. Which Jesus and Mary find fascinating, and fascinating to them means worth chewing up, so I'm trying to wrap the Cow-In-A-Can without turning it upside down, so they don't hear the mooing.
Mum's out shopping somewhere.
And I can hear Dad coming down the stairs – cough cough, shuffle shuffle, cough cough – and now I can feel myself coming apart. There's two of me now. Me and me. Two selves. And while my heart beats faster and my throat tightens and my hands start shaking with fear, I can feel the other me cowering away in the safety of her cave.
My name is Dawn.
My belly hurts.
My name is Dawn.
I can't move.
All I can do is sit here listening to the sound of Dad's hungover footsteps coming down the stairs… the sound of his unsteady feet, his trembling hand holding on to the banister, his bloodshot eyes, his unshaven face, his soured breath, his hopelessness…
His terrible shame.
He won't talk to me any more.
He won't come in here and smile at me and ask me what I'm doing. His eyes won't light up when I show him the Cow-In-A-Can. He won't pick up Jesus in one hand and Mary in the other and lift them up to his face and blow raspberries at them. He won't even call out goodbye to me.
He won't do anything.
Not any more.
‘Dad!’ I call out, trying to get to my feet. ‘Dad!’
But my legs are dead from sitting on the floor for too long, and it takes me a while to get up without falling over, and by the time I've crossed the room and opened the door and gone out into the hallway, Dad's already halfway out the front door.
‘Dad!’ I yell again.
And just for a moment, he pauses.
Half a moment.
And in that fraction of a moment I see (for ever) a hunched and unwashed figure in a ragged old duffel coat. I see a gaunt head hidden in the folds of a hood, a glimpse of yellowed skin, a dark flash of desperate eyes, and then, without a word, he's gone.
Dad didn't come home that night, and he didn't come home the next night either. Mum wasn't too concerned. This wasn't the first time he'd gone missing for a couple of days, and he'd always come back before. He'd be out getting drunk somewhere, that was all. Getting drunk, sleeping it off, getting drunk again, sleeping it off…
He'd be back when he ran out of money.
But two days soon became three days.
And three days turned into four.
And that's when Mum started worrying.
She called all his friends (or his ‘so-called friends’, as she insists on calling them), but no one seemed to have seen him for a while. And because most of the people he knew were as messed up and constantly wrecked as he was, most of them couldn't remember when or where they'd last seen him either. And even if they could remember, they were so junkily paranoid about telling the truth it was barely worth asking them anything. I mean, if you ask people like that what day it is, they'll lie to you. And then there were the other people that Dad sometimes hung around with – the real bad guys: drug dealers, suppliers, thieves, gangsters, villains. The kind of people who won't tell you anything about anything.
Mum tried them all, but without any luck.
No one had seen Dad. No one knew where he was. No one knew anything.
Mum tried the hospital… nothing.
She went looking for him – traipsing around town, going to all the clubs and the pubs and the bars, showing people his photograph, talking to bar staff and bouncers and anyone else who'd listen…
Nothing.
A lot of them knew Dad – they knew who he was, they remembered seeing him around… but not recently. Not in the last week or so.
Dad, it seemed, had simply vanished.
And so eventually – and against all her instincts – Mum went to the police station and reported him missing. I went with her, of course, and I was surprised to find that the police actually took us quite seriously. They recorded all Dad's details on a special form, including a full physical description, any special circumstances leading up to his disappearance (none, according to Mum), and his current mental state (alcoholic). They also asked us for a recent photograph, which Mum had forgotten to bring. But they said not to worry, they'd get someone to pick it up later when they came round to search our house.
‘Search our house?’ Mum said, surprised. ‘Why do you want to search our house?’
‘It's just routine, Mrs Bundy,’ the police officer explained. ‘You'd be surprised how many so-called missing persons turn up safe and sound in their own homes.’
‘But he's not at home,’ Mum said. ‘I know he's not –’
‘I understand, Mrs Bundy,’ the officer said. ‘But, as I said, it's just routine.’
‘Right…’ Mum said hesitantly. ‘So when will you be doing that then?’
‘The sooner the better. How does first thing tomorrow morning sound?’
I've learned quite a lot since then. For example, I know that if you report a person missing, and that person is an adult, and if the police eventually find him
(or her), but he (or she) doesn't want their whereabouts known, the police have to respect those wishes – i.e. if you run away from home as a grown-up, no one can make you go back. I've also learned that although the police take every missing person report very seriously, there are some they take more seriously than others. Kids, of course, especially really young kids. Vulnerable people (whatever that means). Old people. Which is all fair enough. But it kind of means that if your dad goes missing, and he's not much to shout about – he's a drunk, an ex-junkie, he's got a prison record – well, the police aren't going to spend all that much time looking for him. I mean, they're not going to put Sherlock Holmes on the case, are they?
No.
They're not really going to do very much at all.
Another thing I've learned is that Mum knew a lot more about Dad's dodgy dealings than I imagined. Which is why she was so worried when she found out that the police were going to search our house. Because, basically, there was all kinds of stuff hidden away in the house that she didn't want the police to find – drugs, pills, smuggled booze and cigarettes, stolen iPods, mobile phones, credit cards, trainers, T-shirts…
And it was while she was scouring the house for all this stuff, trying to get rid of it all before the cops came round… that's when she found the holdall. It was hidden away beneath Mum and Dad's bed. A dark-green holdall.
‘What's that?’ I asked Mum as she pulled it out.
She shook her head, looking puzzled. ‘No idea. I've never seen it before.’
‘Is it Dad's?’
‘I don't know.’
She was kneeling on the floor beside the bed, and I was sitting on the bed looking down at her. She glanced at me for a moment, then turned back to the holdall and unzipped it.
‘Christ,’ she whispered.
‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning forward to peer into the bag.
Mum didn't answer, but she didn't have to. I could see what was inside the holdall now. It was money. Lots of it. Stacks and stacks of £20 notes and £50 notes. And nestling heavily on top of all the cash was a matt-black automatic pistol.
something's wrong (1)
We still don't know anything about the money. We still don't know where Dad got it from, or why he left it here. We still don't know if he left it here for us (which would mean that he knew he wasn't coming back), or if he just left it here for safe-keeping, to pick up sometime later…
We just don't know.
All we know is…
The money's ours now.
£183,480 in cash.
When we first found the holdall and counted the money, it totalled £222,560. But that was two years ago, and we've spent some since then. I mean, we haven't gone crazy with it or anything, but we've got ourselves what we want – TVs, PCs, laptops, etc. – and most of the time now we just use it to live on. If we didn't have it, we'd probably still get by. But getting by would mean living on Mum's (fraudulently claimed) Incapacity Benefit, and I think (rightly or wrongly) that we've both got enough to put up with without having to worry about counting pennies all the time.
And besides…
It's our money.
It might not make us feel any better about things, but it's a lot easier to feel bad about things with a big bunch of money under the floorboards than without.
Q. And the gun? Did you keep the gun?
A. Yes.
Q. Why?
A. No reason, really. It's just easier to keep it than get rid of it.
these days (1)
Every night, before I go to sleep, I write some words in a notebook. I don't know if these things I write are poems or not (and, to be honest, I don't really care). I just write them, whatever they are.
Tonight I write:
her chamber opens
and her eyes crawl out of her cave
and her eyes
crawl out through the tunnels that connect her head to the rest of the world
and
when it's dark
you can see yourself
deep one perfect morning (1)
OK, it's ten o'clock Wednesday morning now (the morning after Taylor and Mel came round) and I'm out in the back garden with Jesus and Mary. It's a really nice day – kind of cold and windy, but bright-skied too – and the dogs are making the most of it. They're both scurrying around in excited circles, snorting as they go, sniffing up the stories in the wind. And I'm just standing here with my head full of music, and I'm watching the dogs, smiling at them, wondering what they can smell, and if they know what it is, and if they even care… and I decide to join in with their sniffing. So I lift my head up to the sky and breathe in deeply through my nose, snorting in a great lungful of air… but I sniff too hard, and a bit of snot gets sucked into my throat, and then I'm doubled over, hands against the wall, coughing and retching and spitting out lumps of snot and goo…
And there on the path at my feet, right where I'm spitting, are three empty snail shells.
Three raggedy shells, lined up in a raggedy line.
Each of them painted with a faded fluorescent letter.
Left to right, they read: O, D, G.
(There's a hole in the D shell (probably pecked out by a thrush) and the bottom bit of the D is missing, so it's possible it could be a B… but I'm pretty sure it's not.)
‘Uh?’ I hear myself say.
I crouch down for a closer look. And, yes, they're definitely the snail shells I painted letters on last summer (I recognize the brushwork). And, yes, the D is definitely a D. And… uh? What are they doing here? How did they get here? Where have they been all this time? Why have they suddenly shown up today?
What the hell is going on?
ODG?
Is it a message?
Oh. Dee. Gee.
Who from?
Odigy.
I'm squatting down on the cracked concrete path now, with the cold wind chilling the back of my neck, and all I have inside my head are these three faded letters – ODG – and the six possible ways they can be combined: ODG, DGO, GDO, DOG, OGD and GOD.
The last one – GOD – is the scariest, of course. And I don't even want to think about that. I don't want to think that maybe God's sending me a message… that maybe he knows I'm trying to kill him, that maybe he's using his almighty powers to send me a Godly warning, a sign from above…
No, I don't want to think about that.
So I think about the other combinations of letters instead.
DGO, GDO and OGD (I think) don't mean anything to me at all.
ODG (I think) is the middle part of SplODGe, which could mean that he's been round here (when?) and spelled out his name with my painted snail shells (why and how?) and the S, P, L and E have somehow gone missing (how?)…
And DOG…?
I think about my dogs, wondering if the snail shells could be anything to do with them. I stand up, stiff-legged, and call out to them. ‘Come here, dogs! Hey! Jebus… Mary! HERE!’
They ignore me.
I cup my hands to my mouth and shout out again, a lot louder this time. ‘JEBUS! MARY! COME! HERE! NOW!’
That does the trick. They stop their wind-crazed running around and they both come scampering up to me, looking a bit wary – heads down, tails wagging sheepishly – but as soon as I speak to them again – ‘Good girl, good boy’ – their heads lift up and they know that I'm not angry.
‘What's this?’ I say breezily to them, crouching down again and pointing out the snail shells. ‘Come on, come and see…’
Jesus is braver than Mary, so he goes first – tiptoeing up to the snail shells, stretching out his neck, sniffing tentatively… and after a moment or two, when nothing has happened to him, Mary joins in with the sniffing. And I can tell by their cautiousness and their obvious lack of guilt that the snail shells are nothing to do with them. No, Jesus and Mary haven't dug out the shells (from some secret doggy hiding place) and laid them out on the path for me. They haven't tried to mess with my mind by misspelling the word DOG
on the path.
And I feel a bit shameful (and stupid) for even considering it.
So, to make myself feel better, I reach out to give Mary a scratch on the head, but she's so intent on sniffing the shells that the sudden touch of my hand on her head makes her jump. And as she skitters off to one side, she steps on one of the shells, crunching it into the concrete, and her back foot flicks into the other two shells and sends them tumbling across the path. So now there's only two shells left intact, and instead of reading ODG they read GO.
So that's what I do.
I don't really think that Splodge has got anything to do with the snail shells, but there's a part of me that needs to find out (and I was going out anyway, so it's not as if I have to make a special journey to go and see him or anything). As I head on down the street towards his house, with my iPod on and Jesus and Mary (both wearing their coats) at my feet, I see the blue van with Farthings Furniture written on the side pulling away from the pavement and motoring up towards Whipton Lane. The engine is coughing and spluttering, and plumes of black smoke are spewing out from the exhaust pipe. I watch it for a moment, remembering Splodge's curiosity about it yesterday, and for a paranoid second or two I find myself wondering if the van has got anything to do with anything else – i.e. the snail shells, the God stuff, the thing with Taylor and Mel…
Of course, I know in my heart that there's no connection between any of these things – that the blue van is just a blue van, that Taylor and Mel are just screwing me around, that the sudden appearance of the snail shells is just one of those totally random things… you know, one of those bizarrely random coincidences that seem so unbelievably improbable that it's incredibly easy to assume that they're not random, that they must mean something, that something (or someone) must be responsible for them. But, as someone once said (I can't remember who it was) – Yes, strange things happen. But it's a big world out there, there's a lot of stuff going on – it'd be strange if strange things didn't happen now and again.
And, anyway, I know that God's not putting the frighteners on me for trying to kill him. Because: