Our Fathers

by Rebecca Wait

  “A strange thing,” Gavin said meditatively, and Fiona wondered briefly if she had him wrong, if it came to him too in moments alone, if he too felt winded by how much he had missed.

  She waited, but Gavin didn’t say anything more. Fiona said, to prompt him, “He loved those bairns so much.”

  But Gavin only shrugged at this, and she saw she would get nothing else from him.

  Their car had broken down, she remembered, hers and Gavin’s, about a year before the murders, and for a week while they were waiting for it to be fixed, John had driven round specially on the days he worked from home to pick Fiona up and take her to the shop so she could still work. She saw John’s kind face again, turning to ask her something from the driver’s seat. That nice car of his.

  So much of it was unfathomable, but what Fiona always came back to was the relentless simplicity of this question: how on earth could a man seem so normal, day after day, then suddenly get up from the table one evening, fetch a shotgun and murder his entire family, leaving one child alive only by accident? Fiona was no fool—she could see there were depths to that man that none of them had understood. Nobody could have predicted what would happen, she reminded herself. But it was unsettling for all of them, having Tommy back here. He was the spitting image of his father. Of course it stirred things up.

  12

  What on God’s earth could prompt a man to get up from the table one evening and murder his family?

  Some questions, Tom knew, had no answer, and weren’t really in the end even questions, but rather an exhaustion you carried with you everywhere, so deep it had sunk into your bones. Some mornings when he woke he felt as though his body was full of concrete and he simply could not move. Some days the heaviness was Nicky. Tom used to be glad that his brother so often came about with him, especially in the early years after he left the island, when he had felt so untethered from everything that he thought without the weight of Nicky he might drift up into the sky and vanish without a trace. But Tom was a grown man now and Nicky was still a child: they had less and less in common.

  The light coming in through the slats in the wardrobe, slicing the room into segments.

  He blinked it away.

  From the kitchen, Malcolm called, “Is fish pie O.K. for tea, Tommy?” and Tom, grateful for the distraction, called back, “Yes—great.” Then he got up from the sofa and went through to join his uncle.

  Malcolm was chopping vegetables at the counter. There was a newspaper on the table and Tom pulled a section towards himself at random—it turned out to be book reviews—and read for a while.

  After a few minutes’ silence, Malcolm said, his back to Tom, “You know, we wrote to you while you were living with Jill. Every fortnight. For a few years, anyway.”

  Tom was thrown by this comment. He had slept badly the night before, and had a headache. He wasn’t in the mood for a heart-to-heart with Malcolm. He said shortly, “Yes. Sorry I didn’t write back.”

  “It’s not that.” Malcolm half turned. “It’s . . . we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you.”

  Tom tried to give him a smile. “I imagine I was pretty hard to forget.”

  Malcolm didn’t seem to know how to reply to this. He said, “Well, I hope you were all right with Jill.”

  “Yes.” To her credit, Jill had always behaved in exactly the same way towards Tom as towards her own son Henry. But she was not the sort of person you could be close to. She had treated both boys more like valued young colleagues than close relatives. Perhaps that had made things easier for Tom, given the state he was in back then.

  Malcolm put the vegetables into a pan and switched on the heat. He said, “And do you talk to Henry much?”

  “Not really. He’s been in Canada for more than ten years and you know—you lose touch. We email occasionally.”

  Malcolm nodded.

  Tom went back to reading, but after a few moments Malcolm added, “And will you stay in touch with Caroline, do you think?”

  “It seems unlikely.” Malcolm didn’t seem to understand what it meant for a relationship to be over. Tom briefly considered explaining all the reasons it was unsalvageable, if only to prevent further questions, but decided he didn’t have the energy.

  “You’re running away,” Caroline had said as he packed his bag.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’ll help?”

  Tom had no reply to this. He didn’t think anything would help now.

  “You always knew I wanted children,” Caroline said. She was crying again.

  “Yes. But . . .” But what? He had really thought that when the time came it might be O.K.

  “You’ve wasted my time,” she said. “Four years. Wasted.”

  “I know.” He put out his hand to her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” she said, moving beyond his reach. “I love you. It wasn’t wasted.”

  This was the worst thing: that somebody like her could love him, and still he would find, when it came to it, that he could not feel as he ought to.

  He tried again. “I can’t do it. I thought I could, but . . .” Children of his own. He should have known it would be impossible. How stupid to have allowed himself to imagine otherwise, and to have allowed her to imagine.

  “So what is it then?” she said, and he could hear in her voice that she was looking for a way to hurt him. “You’re worried they’ll inherit—what? Some kind of family disorder?”

  “No, it isn’t that. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “You should be more worried they’ll inherit your dress sense.”

  Taken by surprise, Tom laughed unhappily. She’d never been easy to predict.

  “Tom,” Caroline said. “That place. Why go back there? Won’t it make things worse?”

  “I have to get away,” he said.

  “Well, go to Brighton for the weekend like a normal person. Go to fucking Magaluf if you really need a break. Don’t go back to that godforsaken island.”

  “I need to,” he said, not sure if this was true. He wasn’t sure of anything, except for the terrible heaviness in his body.

  “I’m worried,” Caroline said, “that you won’t be O.K. You don’t seem O.K.”

  Tom shook his head. He’d never been O.K.

  Sometimes Tom wondered if there were other people in the world who carried a burden like his, and if so, how it felt to them, how they could bear it. Some days he wished he was dead. Survival had never felt like a blessing.

  It wasn’t that he wished he had died at the time. Even now, the terror in his stomach felt like a living thing, making him want to run to the bathroom, to throw up, to shit himself, he wasn’t sure. His instinct, whenever he thought of it now, whenever he dreamed of it, remained the same: save your life. Animals are programmed to preserve themselves. As a child or an adult, Tom did not wish to be murdered. He did not wish to have his body blown apart by the explosion of lead-shot cartridges in his chest, his legs, his head. He did not want his blood and his brains all over the walls.

  So his survival then, he would not undo. But if he could only slip quietly away now, he thought, that would be O.K. Mostly it was a passive wish, a desire to disappear more than anything else, but he had toyed with the idea in the past of taking matters into his own hands. Pills and vodka. Even the brutal immediacy of a train. It made him feel tired. If he could be dead just by wishing it, without effort and without pain, without any action at all on his part, he thought he would choose it.

  He could not remember now exactly why Nicky had gone back downstairs that evening. He was almost sure it was because his brother had wanted to watch television, but it bothered Tom that he could not recall this for certain, nor think of what programme he might have been watching. So much was broken and blurred, but what remained clear was that Nicky and his mum were downstairs w
hen it started, and so was Beth because she’d woken up crying some time earlier, and Tommy was alone upstairs in the bedroom he shared with Nicky, reading an illustrated book about the Vikings.

  There had been shouting and several shots but he could not say afterwards what order these things happened in, or if they were all taking place at the same time. He could not say either how long he remained frozen, the book still in his hands. Then he was up and running along the landing, and the shouting got louder and he thought he remembered his father yelling, “You did this, you bitch,” (Tommy would later repeat this to the police) and the next moment he was in his parents’ bedroom, though he couldn’t have explained why this was the place he chose. He couldn’t have explained any of his actions after the shots began, could not even have said if he knew at the time what was happening, that downstairs everyone was dying. His body simply took over and there he was in the middle of his parents’ room. He had closed the door behind him and now his eyes were darting around in panic as he looked for a hiding place.

  Most of all afterwards he remembered the cold that had gone all the way through him and the way his heart seemed to have escaped from his chest and now was beating everywhere his body, in his legs and his arms and his head. It was so loud in his head that after a time he could not hear any more shots. He didn’t notice he had wet himself until much later, when his soaking pyjamas had gone cold and he started to shiver. It was a strange and rare knowledge, the discovery of what the human body does when it is in terror. He had felt fear before and since, but never like this. Mortal terror was something different. A hard thing, to find you are just an animal, in desperate fright, trying to save itself. He would not forget.

  There was a built-in wardrobe along the far wall of the room that his father had installed some years before. Tommy’s father was proud of this wardrobe. He said it was “modern”. It was made of light-coloured wood, with several different sections—two big ones in the middle, and two smaller ones on either side. Four wardrobes in one, Tommy’s father had boasted. Tommy chose—though there seemed no conscious choice in it—the narrow section on the far left, where old coats and some of his mother’s dresses hung. He crawled in and pulled the door closed behind him. The clothes smelled of his mother. He pushed himself as far back as he could. He wanted complete darkness, but there were slats in the door allowing slivers of light through, and allowing him to see thin slices of the room from where he was. For a time he screwed his eyes shut. He wasn’t thinking anything at all when the door of the bedroom was pushed open.

  Most people got to spend their whole lives never knowing whether they were good or bad. What beautiful safety there must be in that. Walking down the street in London, waiting to cross at traffic lights, sitting at his desk at work, Tom always knew the kind of person he was. Once you knew, you carried it with you forever. Other people might behave badly at times—lie or cheat or manipulate—and then they might feel guilty for a while, but mostly they would still think of themselves as good. Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly not bad, not at their core. It would be so peaceful, he thought, to be able to move through the world like that. Tom wasn’t sure how many other people were out there who had truly been tested, and who had truly failed; people who, in that crucial moment, had made a terribly wrong choice and then had to live with it afterwards, marked in a way that only they could see, haunted forever by their shame.

  13

  You know, we don’t have to go,” Malcolm added, when he told Tommy that Fiona had rung them to ask them round for a meal the following evening. He’d forgotten Gavin’s invitation until Fiona called, and found it hard to explain why he felt dismayed.

  Tommy’s face was, as so often, difficult to read. “It’s fine,” he said. “No reason not to go.”

  “She said she’s invited the MacDonalds, too. Kathy and Ed. You met Kathy again in the shop, you remember?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said.

  “And the Dougdales. Chris and Mary. They . . . well, they moved into your old house. Not long after you left for the mainland.” He stopped, suddenly unable to look at Tommy. It’ll be more fun for Tommy with more people, Fiona had said. Malcolm was not convinced.

  “Right,” Tommy said, his voice neutral.

  “They’re very nice,” Malcolm finished lamely.

  It was later than usual in the evening, but Tommy had yet to disappear upstairs. They were on the chamomile tea tonight; Tommy had asked Malcolm the morning before if he had any non-caffeinated tea to have in the evenings (he didn’t always sleep well, he said), and so Malcolm had picked up the herbal tea in the shop on his way back from helping Robert with the feed buckets. Chamomile was the only option. He was surprised, in truth, to observe that the tiny shop stocked anything other than normal tea, but he supposed herbal blends were becoming all the rage these days. Still tasted like ditchwater though.

  Kathy had raised her eyebrows as she rung up the purchase.

  “This is a new one for you, Malcolm.”

  “Aye,” he said, feeling it was too much effort to explain.

  Perplexingly, he’d opted for chamomile himself this evening, possibly out of a vague desire to be companionable. He wondered what Ross or Davey would make of this scene, Malcolm and Tommy sitting here in the kitchen at nine in the evening, quietly sipping their herbal tea. He tried to work out whether these long silent moments between him and his nephew were becoming more comfortable. Perhaps he was just getting used to the discomfort.

  “What time will we go to Fiona’s?” Tommy said.

  Malcolm realized then that he had half hoped Tommy would say no, that he would save them from having to go. The evening, he felt, would be hard work. More than that: he had an inexplicable sense of dread. But Tommy would never say no. That blankness seemed to have come over him again, expressed as a kind of distant amenability.

  “Seven.”

  “Do you go for dinner there often?” Tommy said. “Do you eat with your neighbours often?”

  “From time to time,” Malcolm said, wondering why he felt guarded.

  “You haven’t since I’ve been here,” Tommy said. He was looking into his tea.

  It’s only been nine days, Malcolm wanted to say.

  “I hope I’m not getting in your way,” Tommy added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Disrupting your life.”

  This again. “Tommy, I’m not the social butterfly you imagine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t have much of a life to disrupt.”

  Tommy laughed at this, and Malcolm thought that something in him seemed to shift. His nephew leaned forward and put his elbows on the table as he looked at Malcolm.

  “There used to be a ceilidh in the hall every month,” Tommy said. “Maybe even every fortnight. Does that still happen?”

  “Occasionally,” Malcolm said. “Every few months now. None of us are as young as we were. Nobody wants Ross dropping dead from a heart attack in our midst.”

  “No young people to replace you.”

  Malcolm shook his head, thinking this was rather a bleak thing to point out.

  “But it’s still a social place, right?” Tommy said. “It always used to be.”

  Tommy’s expression was more open now. Malcolm remembered what a chatterbox he had been as a child, how brightly and quickly he would talk when he got on to a favourite subject (dinosaurs, or was that Nicky? No, Tommy had liked history), how John would raise his eyebrows and adopt an air of forced patience, and how carefully Katrina would listen.

  He said, “I suppose it’s still fairly social. Tiny place like this, you can’t exactly avoid each other.”

  “Don’t you find it claustrophobic?”

  Malcolm considered. “Sometimes, I suppose. But I grew up here, remember. Never known anything else.”

  “You can’t do much here without other people noticing.”

  “You can’t do anyth
ing here without other people noticing.”

  “How long do you think I’d been on the island before every single person knew about it?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” Malcolm said, pretending to think about it. “Maybe all of three minutes.”

  “Three minutes of blissful anonymity,” Tommy said. “You’d find London strange. Caroline and I didn’t even know the names of the people living in the flats down the hall from us.”

  “Now that does seem unfriendly.”

  “I think I liked it. It was peaceful. But . . .” He paused a moment, then said, “I suppose it might be nice having people around you who know you. I remember when I was a kid, you and Heather came round all the time, didn’t you?”

  “Every few weeks or so,” Malcolm said cautiously. It had been once a fortnight, probably. He couldn’t quite admit this to Tommy.

  “Was my mother sociable?”

  “I’d say so,” Malcolm said. “She liked people.”

  “My father said she talked too much,” Tommy said. “I remember him saying that to her. Maybe more than once. I don’t remember when or why.”

  Malcolm took this in. At last, he said, “She was fairly quiet, your mother. On the whole. Perhaps he sometimes told her she was too quiet, as well. He wasn’t easily pleased.”

  “He thought she should always do what he wanted,” Tommy said.

  “He never knew what it was he wanted.”

  They were both silent. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, and Malcolm looked for a way to draw it back to safer territory while knowing he had no right to do that.

  He wondered how much Tommy knew, or had guessed, about the events leading up to the murders. But none of them had very much to go on. Katrina had been secretive in life, and she remained secretive in death. They’d received a letter from the procurator fiscal summarizing his findings after it was all over. Malcolm had wanted as much information as possible, though Heather had said this was foolish—morbid even—and he would only upset himself further. Heather had never even looked at the letter herself. The fiscal had warned Malcolm that it contained “distressing details” (You don’t say, Malcolm had wanted to reply), but in the end it hadn’t told him much he didn’t know already, despite running to five close-typed pages. It contained only the facts of the matter: a summary of the police investigation, with who died, and how, and where, and in what order. There was also a brief discussion of John’s debts.