The Family Lie

by P L Kane

  Then he spotted some people, a handful of figures all dressed the same in strange, cream-coloured smocks and loose-fitting trousers walking down towards the road. Had they come from that place? he wondered, as they watched him pass.

  He couldn’t help shivering at that and made a mental note to ask about the place when he got to the village. Which was about five to ten minutes later: hitting the white-washed cottages with thatched roofs on the outskirts first, complete with scarecrows in the gardens that were a familiar sight over the summer, along with well-dressings, ribbons, and the like. Splashes of colour everywhere celebrating the time of year.

  Then he was in Green Acres proper, easing up on the speed. Passing the park where he’d whiled away so many hours as a child himself, its slide, swings, and roundabout still present, with benches around so that parents could look on. The small corner shop-cum-post office was next, which served the whole of the village, and the local pub The Plough which he’d been in many times – even though he hadn’t been legally allowed to drink back when he lived here (that hadn’t stopped him having a pint or several). It was a family pub, but then the proprietors of establishments like this tended to think the rules didn’t really apply to them all the way out here anyway. Who was going to know, and seeing as police officers from the region were regulars at the lock-ins, they were hardly going to complain.

  Then came the village hall, which doubled as a community centre, a meeting place for the parish council and just a general ‘fulfil any need’ building. It was within spitting distance of the tiny dilapidated and deserted church with its graveyard at the rear. He’d only seen a few more people dotted about here and there since he entered, but was beginning to remember that was par for the course around here. He had obviously just become used to the denser populations of cities like Downstone.

  Mitch hadn’t been able to help himself, he’d ridden around the village square – where there was an obelisk-like monument to those who had fallen in all the wars, planted slap bang in the middle of a patch of grass – just so he could check out the state of his dad’s house. Part of him had been expecting a smoking hole in the ground, but no. There it was, intact and untouched, brown upon brown – roof and walls – with only ivy climbing the sides to break up the monotony. He let out a relieved sigh inside his helmet, glad that he didn’t have to deal with the loss of his family home as well as his one remaining parent. Then the thought stuck him once more: if his dad hadn’t died in a house fire, then what the hell had happened? It made him all the more determined to find out.

  Continuing on, he turned up a side street and made for the much smaller building that his aunty and uncle had lived in ever since he could remember. They hadn’t had any children themselves, so didn’t need a vast amount of space. Something they were probably glad of now they were getting on in years and had both retired.

  He’d tried ringing them up to find out more, his Aunty Helen and Uncle Vince, but the line had been so bad he’d given up on his third attempt. Thought it best to talk to them in person anyway, which was what he was on his way to do now, parking up the Honda outside putting down the kickstand.

  Mitch strode up to the front door, taking off his helmet and tucking it under his arm, before giving a quick rap on the wood. When nobody answered after a few minutes, he knocked again. Perhaps they weren’t in? He knew that sometimes they went for walks in the afternoon, keeping up the fitness regime Helen had insisted on when she’d been the GP here. And they hadn’t known he was coming today, had they? Weren’t expecting him at all.

  He caught a glimpse of someone peering out through the front window then, so somebody was home. Mitch frowned at the caution, but then he had rocked up in his leathers looking like a Terminator, so … He backed up, leaning slightly so they could see who he was. Would they even recognize his face? He hadn’t changed that much since the last time they’d seen him, surely?

  The clicking of the locks and latches on the door made him start. Sounded like Fort Knox inside there. And yes, even as the door opened a gold chain was still attached. Then a balding head appeared in the gap.

  ‘Hell-Hello?’ said a tentative voice.

  ‘Vince?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Uncle Vince?’ Mitch tried again.

  A look of understanding suddenly dawned on the older man’s face. ‘Mitchel? Young Mitch, is that you?’

  He nodded. ‘Hi there.’

  The head disappeared for a second, and he heard Vince shouting excitedly to his wife. ‘Helen. Helen, it’s young Mitch!’ The chain was swiftly removed, and the door flung open. ‘My,’ said his uncle. ‘Young Mitch, as I live and breathe!’

  Mitch couldn’t help smiling at that. It had been a while since anyone had called him young. Nowadays you were over the hill if you were past twenty-five, which wasn’t that much of a distant memory, but then he supposed he was still young to his Uncle Vince.

  ‘Mitch,’ came a female voice from inside, then a short woman in a green dress with a grey bowl cut appeared next to her husband. ‘Oh Mitch, it’s so good to see you!’

  ‘You too. Both of you,’ he added.

  ‘How long has it been now?’ Vince wondered aloud.

  ‘Never mind about that, let the lad in, Vincent!’ his wife instructed. She’d always worn the trousers in this particular relationship, Mitch recalled.

  ‘I did try to get through on the phone a few times, but—’

  ‘They’re doing work on the lines here. Again! Oh,’ she said then, looking past him to his bike, ‘you’d better bring that round the back first, where it’ll be safe.’

  Mitch frowned again. Safe? It was the same thing as the locks; since when had you needed to do that in Green Acres? Then again, the bike did have all his stuff on the back so it probably wasn’t a terrible idea. ‘I’ll go and open the side gate,’ his uncle told him, disappearing from sight.

  It was only now, with Vince gone, that Helen opened her arms wide and moved forwards. Mitch had to stoop to meet her embrace, but the hug was so strong she almost broke his back. ‘Oh lad, it’s so good to see you,’ she said again. ‘I wish it was under better circumstances, but anyway, welcome back …

  ‘Welcome home.’

  ***

  It wasn’t long before he was sitting in the living room, being eaten alive by an enormous floral comfy chair and supplied with his body weight in tea and biscuits.

  He didn’t want to ask straight off the bat, in spite of the fact both these people knew exactly why he was here, so Mitch started by asking about the security stuff. The locks and the concern about his motorcycle.

  ‘There’s been a number of break-ins lately,’ explained his uncle, who he could see – now that he was sitting on a more sturdy chair for his back – was wearing a shirt, cardigan, and trousers, regardless of the heat in that room. Mitch was glad they’d taken his jacket and hung it by the door. ‘Thefts, that sort of thing. Better to be safe than sorry. I blame the number of newcomers around.’

  ‘I spotted a few new buildings on the way in,’ Mitch said, taking a bite of his Hobnob and a drink of tea. ‘Some weird men and women in smocks or something?’

  His uncle scrunched up his face. ‘The Commune,’ he stated, then paused before continuing. ‘They claim they want to go back to nature but, well, I don’t trust ’em. Things haven’t been the same around this place since they began worming their way in here; no respect for boundaries, that lot. Then there’s all that talk about property development. It never used to be like this, when I first moved to Green Acres.’

  ‘Right.’ Mitch had been told the story on many occasions, how his mother’s sister had come to meet this man when she was about his age: a therapist by trade, they’d bonded over lectures at a medical seminar and been stuck to each other like glue ever since. She’d brought him back with her and he’d taken to life here like a duck to that water at Lake Iris. When they got going they could talk shop for England, his dad used to say. Which brought him back to thinking
about his father. He shook his head, not willing to wait any longer. ‘I’m sorry, I have to ask. You were here. What happened with Dad?’

  Helen and Vince exchanged glances, neither of them willing to talk about it apparently. They weren’t the only ones, however, and he told them so. ‘Have … So, nobody’s spoken to you about what actually happened?’ queried his aunty.

  Mitch shook his head. ‘Only that he died in a fire. I thought perhaps his house, but that seems okay. I rode past it on my way here.’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s fine. We’ve been popping in and keeping an eye on things there, trying to keep the place …’ Helen looked down sadly, then back up again. ‘You really had no idea how bad things had got with him?’

  ‘How bad …?’ Mitch didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about.

  ‘The confusion, the …’ Vince looked at his wife, as if asking permission to say the next bit, which he got with an almost imperceptible tip of the head. ‘All right, I’ll go ahead and say it then: the dementia.’

  ‘Dementia? You mean like Alzheimer’s?’

  Vince nodded. ‘He had good days and bad days, did Tommy. The bad ones weren’t all that often, but when they happened, they were very bad indeed.’

  ‘Why didn’t …’ Mitch shook his head again. ‘You should have let me know.’

  ‘What could you have done, love? You had your job, your life elsewhere,’ said Helen. The first wasn’t a problem anymore, not since he’d been canned, but yes, Mitch had to admit he did have a life in Downstone with Lucy. At least he hoped he still did. How would hearing about his father’s illness have impacted on that? Probably not well. It was a selfish thought, and he’d never know now, sadly.

  ‘You still should have told me. I could have—’

  ‘You have to understand, he made us promise not to. Your dad never was one for a fuss.’

  ‘A fuss?’ Mitch couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but tried to keep his temper in check. He was as mad at himself as much as anyone. He’d suspected, hadn’t he? The vagueness, it wasn’t anything new. But he’d just thought … Old people do get a little like that, don’t they? Maybe if he’d visited more often, or even at all. ‘Okay, so has that got something to do with what happened to him?’

  A silence descended that neither of them wanted to break again, it seemed.

  ‘Please,’ Mitch prodded. ‘I need to know what happened. It’s one of the reasons why I’m here. That and to make whatever arrangements need to be made.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘We know.’ So she told him. About how his dad had been found out in the woods, had scared the life out of a couple of young campers.

  ‘Nasty business,’ Vince added.

  ‘Dad was wandering about in the woods then?’ Mitch asked, trying and failing to sit forwards in his chair and put his cup and saucer down. His aunty had taken this as a signal he wanted more tea and grabbed the pot, topping him up and placing a couple more biscuits on his saucer. ‘But I don’t understand. Why would they tell me there had been a fire?’

  Another awkward silence.

  ‘He was in a fire, they said. And—’

  Uncle Vince shook his head. ‘No, son. He was on fire.’

  ‘What?’ Mitch looked over at his aunty for confirmation, and she just nodded once. ‘But I mean … what? How?’

  ‘To be honest,’ Vince carried on, ‘nobody seems to be able to tell us what occurred. Not really.’

  ‘So he … I mean, I just don’t understand how—’ Mitch rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Of all the things he’d been imagining since the phone call, and on the way here, this hadn’t been one of them. His father. On fire. In the woods.

  Absolutely crazy.

  ‘We can only assume … I mean, he must have done it to himself,’ Helen said then.

  Mitch took his hand away and looked at her. ‘To himself? You’re suggesting he … Is that even a thing? Do people suffering from dementia do things like that?’

  They both shrugged almost as one. ‘The mind’s a strange thing,’ said Vince. ‘Trust me. Who knows what he might have been seeing, or hearing at the time.’

  ‘Is it possible he walked through a fire accidentally, those campers—’

  ‘It was the middle of the night, their fire was totally out, Mitchel.’

  ‘But maybe—’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s a hard thing to take in. Maybe that’s why nobody wanted to bring it up over the phone.’ Vince let out a long breath. ‘But I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you much more than they’ve told us, especially in your line of work and everything. All we do know is that the couple did their best to put him out. They were just too late. His burns were too severe.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mitch.

  ‘Language,’ Helen admonished. He’d forgotten what a stickler for all that kind of stuff she was, religion and everything. Swearing. Mitch apologized, immediately feeling like a little boy who’d done something naughty.

  Eventually, he spoke again. ‘Okay, so let me ask you this, because like I said, you were here. You’ve been around him all this time. Do you guys think he did it to himself? Even in his state, do you think he could have done something like that? Do you think he even wanted to?’

  And for a final time, neither of them spoke.

  It told Mitch all he really needed to know.

  Chapter 5

  They’d polished the visit off – once he’d been able to detach himself from that chair – with another bone-crunching hug from Helen, a firm handshake from Vince, who’d said, ‘Again, we’re so sorry you had to be here under such circumstances. And with your birthday not far away.’

  ‘Yeah,’ was all Mitch could muster. It would hardly be a cause for celebration now, would it?

  Then Vince put something in his hand, the key to his dad’s place.

  ‘Seems daft paying for somewhere while you’re here,’ Helen said to him. ‘We’d love to have you stay, but there really isn’t the space. We converted the spare room into a bit of a study, you know how it is.’

  Mitch really didn’t, he’d never been one for studies – didn’t have that many books, had never written anything more complicated than an email or an incident report. But he could see how this couple would have one, same as his father. A games room with a pool table and dart board would probably be more his speed, which showed just how different he was to his remaining relatives.

  Apart from Bella, of course.

  ‘How is your sister?’ Helen had asked at one point during the mammoth tea and biscuit session.

  ‘She’s … Yeah, Bella’s good,’ he’d replied. As far as he knew, she was.

  ‘Still doing the whole … you know what?’ asked his aunty, like she couldn’t bring herself to say the words psychic or medium. As if she was on the game or something. Mitch had nodded. ‘Stuff and nonsense, the lot of it!’ But then he wouldn’t have expected anything less from a woman of science. Except there was that whole religious aspect to Helen, wasn’t there? A staunch believer. She’d explain that away, of course, by saying medicine came from a higher power, not human beings. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to believe in Bella’s skills. Not that Mitch could talk.

  ‘Just a different form of therapy,’ Vince chipped in, coming to Bella’s defence. ‘People deal with their grief in different ways, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Helen had agreed. ‘And it would be nice to see her again. It’s been an age.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mitch said. ‘Definitely.’

  It made him wonder, as he was wheeling the bike back round to the front, his aunty’s words still ringing in his ears about ‘leaving him to settle in’ and knowing ‘where we are if you need us’, exactly how Bella was dealing with her own grief over this. Perhaps she wasn’t. Her refusal to return would seem to back that up, but … He should give her another call, if he could get through to her, that was. Golden Sands and Green Acres had that in common anyway, both black holes where communication was concerned. Not even th
e landlines were working properly here, so he was surprised when he got outside and found he had a message on his mobile from Lucy.

  ‘Hope all ok,’ with a couple of kisses, it said. He sent a quick one back to say he’d arrived, how he’d spent the afternoon and where he was going next, kicking himself that she’d had to be the one to get in touch first.

  As he put on his helmet and got on the bike again to travel the short distance back to his dad’s place, he couldn’t help thinking that generally speaking he really didn’t know where he was going. He’d come here for answers, but instead his head was filled with even more questions that he couldn’t answer. About his father, about what had happened to him.

  ‘Do you think he could have done something like that? Do you think he even wanted to?’

  Thomas Prescott wasn’t the sort of man who’d ever contemplate suicide, he was far too stubborn for that, regardless of any diagnosis – which he probably didn’t trust anyway. Not even when he’d lost his wife had he thought about calling it a day, even at his lowest ebb. Sure, he drank a lot more than usual – but as Vince had pointed out, people handle grief in their own way. There had definitely been no talk of razor blades or sticking heads in ovens – that Mitch knew about anyway. Then again, he had been very young; he’d have been shielded from it all if there had been. No, Bella would have said something to him about it afterwards, when he was older. Would have needed to talk about it, if he knew her, and only with someone close.

  So, the dementia. Something that could make you set fire to yourself? Mitch didn’t – couldn’t – buy it. Admittedly, he had a limited amount of experience where this kind of thing was concerned. But wasn’t there an in-built survival instinct in human beings, to prevent this sort of thing? He’d read somewhere in a magazine article, probably while he was at the dentists or somewhere, that the instinct to jump when you’re looking down in a high place is your mind wanting to take the next step – literally. Carry on moving forward, even if it meant you splattered all over the pavement. But setting yourself on fire? One of the most horrific things you could do to yourself. Come on! Even animals steered clear of fire, that’s why cavemen had lit fires at the dawn of time, hadn’t they? His aunty and uncle had more experience of the disease Thomas apparently had, but the fact they’d remained silent when he asked them if it was possible his father had done this to himself spoke volumes.