by Linda Coles
“What have you got?” Julie asked, her feet now up on their father’s old desk, pins kicked off. Even the underneath of her pale pink feet looked neat, Chrissy noted. She ruffled through another volume, stopped randomly at a page with handwriting on it and read it to herself.
“I think it’s Dad’s diaries. Look, listen to this:”
I hate it when we fall out but sometimes there’s no reasoning with her. Everything needs to be about her. When will she learn?
“Mother, do you think?” Julie asked.
“I guess so.” She replaced the book where she’d taken it from and pulled out another. She picked another random page with handwriting on it.
So far, so good. Maybe I’m on to something? I can’t believe it’s this easy.
She replaced it and picked out another random volume. Chrissy looked at the inside cover for a date—2015. There were only three more stacked after it. Placing it back in line, she retrieved what she assumed was the latest one and flipped it open. Turning to the last entry, she surmised it was. The last entry read: My two girls are the best thing I’ve ever done in my life … but Chrissy was interrupted from reading any further.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” Their mother stood in the doorway, hands on hips, like she had done so many times in the past when either girl had upset or annoyed her for some reason. Julie’s legs swung straight back down to the floor, feet finding their pins. Chrissy dropped the book she was holding as her mother’s sudden and obviously stricken words assaulted her ears. She bent to pick it up.
“Leave it there!” her mother bellowed. Chrissy didn’t think she’d ever heard her mother shout so loudly. So much for looking small and frail. Standing there with her face growing redder, Sandra Baker looked like could have taken on Tyson in the ring. Suddenly, Chrissy was a small girl again.
“Sorry, Mum,” she said in a low voice. “We thought we’d better make a start on his things.”
“Not in here, you don’t!” Their mother’s voice was high pitched, not at all like it usually sounded. A moment passed where nobody said a word. When she finally spoke again, at a volume like her normal self, she suggested, “If you want to help, why don’t you start in the garden shed?” Her tone was conciliatory. The two sisters took the hint, scurrying off back down the hall and leaving their mother standing in the stuffy room.
Richard peered over his glasses from the lounge doorway as they hurried past. It seemed everyone was now fully awake.
Chapter Thirteen
Richard retreated back behind the closed door in the lounge, and Julie and Chrissy, chastised, retreated to the garden shed. At least it was warm outside. Julie brushed dirt off the seat of a director’s chair, curling her nose up at the dust, before sitting her tiny backside down. Chrissy still carried the roll of black bin liners she’d hastily grabbed off the desk in passing, and she too pulled out a director’s chair. They were now sat at the bottom of the manicured lawn by Dad’s old shed.
Out of the way.
“I didn’t think Dad was the type to have a shed,” Julie stated, pulling her sunglasses down from atop her head to cover her eyes.
“He wasn’t. Mum was, a bit. I think this place is more for the hired help gardener to hang his hoe than anything else. She really wanted us out of the way.”
“Hang his hoe?” Julie enquired, raising her sunglasses and looking across at Chrissy at the same time. “Isn’t hoe a spiteful name for someone who sleeps around?”
“My god, Julie. You really have been reading too much trashy stuff. Hoe, as in garden hoe, as in tool to till the soil with. Hoe. To hang one’s hoe. Nothing to do with anything else but digging and weeding. No pun intended.”
Digging?
Weeding?
Julie sat back and turned her face towards the sun. Chrissy shook her head at her sister in despair but added nothing further on the subject. Instead, she announced she was going to start sorting the shed out or else she may as well head home for all the good they were doing.
“You sit there and work on your tan. I’ll have a sort-out, though there won’t be much in here to get rid of. Mum only wanted us out of the house. Odd, I thought, since we are here to help her sort stuff out. It was like we were twelve years old again, didn’t you think?”
“Hmm,” Julie said sleepily. Her eyes were closed behind her shades, no doubt. She wasn’t paying any attention now.
With one last tut, Chrissy headed inside the shed and glanced around at the debris and garden utensils dotted around. Except for one big old once-comfy chair in the corner by the little window, there didn’t appear to be a great deal else. The chair was covered in an equally ancient candlewick throw that Chrissy remembered being her bedspread when she was a youngster. She smiled to herself at the memory of a spilled glass of Ribena and the stain it had made. And the bother she’d got into. And the reason for the bedspread ending up in the shed. Faint pink was visible at one corner; the rest of the fabric was grubby from years of being used as a dust sheet. She grabbed a corner, gathered the cloth up into a wad with the years of dirt tucked inside it and placed it on the floor, then plunked herself down in the old chair. A stray spring nudged her buttock and she readjusted herself around it.
Through the small, grimy window, she could see the house; the back door was only slightly visible but most of the garden path was in full view. If you were hiding out in the shed, you’d certainly have privacy and be notified early on if someone approached. Maybe Dad had a secret stash of booze nearby, a bottle of sherry like Trevor did in No Place Like Home when he was escaping Vera. But Dad would never have drunk sherry; single malt was his tipple. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help glancing around for a hiding place. The shelves were empty save for half-full packs of fertiliser and odd plant pots, but a set of drawers at the rear of the shed caught her eye. An old tablecloth partially covered the top, its once-bright large pink and yellow checks as faded as the stain on the candlewick. A wooden knob was missing on the lower of the three drawers.
Chrissy was feeling inquisitive now: maybe there’d be a drop in the bottom. She pulled open the top drawer but was disappointed to find it empty, unless you counted the spider. The middle drawer contained some folded old yellowing newspapers. She checked the date on the top one; it was almost ten years old. She picked it up and opened it out. It was the Financial Times. She scanned the headlines quickly, but the content was as appealing to her as a gardening book would be to Julie. Another spider crawled down the page and she put the paper back in the drawer and closed it again. The lower drawer only had one knob, so as she pulled it open, it stuck slightly on an angle. She tugged again; there was the dry scrape of wood groaning on wood.
“Damn it,” she cursed, and bent to her hands and knees. If the drawer was going to come out, she’d have to ease it out with her hand from underneath. Getting in position, she pulled the knob with one hand and with her other, gently eased the drawer forward from underneath. When it had moved forward a couple of inches, she pulled the whole drawer open with her fingers.
Hello, darling. Chrissy smiled at the three-quarter-full bottle of golden liquid and picked it up. It was an 18-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich, one of her father’s favourites. She unscrewed the top and sniffed. There was a hint of sherry, she thought, and sniffed again, the strong vapours hitting the back of her nose in a pleasant way. She wiped the top on her T-shirt and raised the bottle to her pursed lips, allowing a tiny drop to seep into her mouth. It burned as pleasantly as the smell had a moment ago. She took another, much larger mouthful and played with it in her mouth, swishing it around like an expensive mouthwash before letting it warm the inside of her throat as it went to her stomach.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said quietly to herself and took another mouthful, smaller this time, and savoured the taste. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, looking more like sailor in a bar than a woman in her father’s shed. She screwed the top back on and put the bottle on top of the set of drawers; there was no sense
in putting it away.
The only other item in the drawer was an old biscuit tin. She pulled it out. “Huntley & Palmers Christmas Biscuits,” she read. It had a picture of a boy with a snowball in his hand, hiding behind an old-style red post box, no doubt hiding from an incoming snowball thrown by a friend. It looked many years old, though there was no date on it that she could see. She shook the tin gently and felt something inside it move. Whatever it was, it didn’t weigh much; the tin was light. She removed the lid.
Inside were a handful of photographs, in colour, but old and faded nonetheless. She sifted through them. They appeared to be old school pictures, each one of a young boy, and she estimated they were all in their early teens, maybe fourteen or so. There were seven of them. Picking out one randomly, she turned it over to check the back, but nothing was written, only the date it had been printed—June 1987. She checked each one in turn, but nothing was written on them either, only the mechanical printed date of developing. Chrissy shuffled through the pictures again, each of a young man smiling for the camera, each in what appeared to be school uniform, shirt and tie neatly done up. Chrissy stood for some time in the dusty shed and gazed out of the window, looking towards the house as though the answer would come marching down the path to her. When nothing happened, she looked at the photos in her hand again. On top was a fair-headed boy in thick-rimmed glasses looking back at her. He was smiling, as the others were.
“What on earth are your pictures doing in an old biscuit tin in Dad’s shed?” she asked the empty space. “And more to the point, who are you?”
There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Fourteen
They’d filled precisely one rubbish bag with their Dad’s things to take to the charity shop. While Julie had alternated between a shady spot and dappled sunshine, Chrissy had taken a liking to the bottle of single malt she’d found, and after polishing off almost half of it, had ended up nodding off in the other director’s chair at the bottom of the garden. Chrissy hadn’t said a word to her sister about the photographs, though she wasn’t entirely sure why not. Something inside her had told her to keep it to herself for now.
It was nearly 4 PM when she eventually woke up with her mouth feeling like the bottom of a bird’s cage. She tried to moisten her mouth with her tongue as she came to, but it was a far cry from a much-needed glass of cold water. Instinctively, her hand went to her brow then to her cheek. Her skin felt hot and she hoped she hadn’t got sunburn. Opening both eyes fully and orienting herself, she realised she was sat all alone. Julie had gone.
Gone entirely, ‘gone home’ gone? With Richard?
How would I know?
Go and have a look then.
The garden was peaceful as her mind wandered, the only sound a petrol-powered lawn mower chugging nearby. She stood, picked up the almost-empty whiskey bottle and made her way up the path towards the house. The photos were back in their tin and safely tucked away in the broken drawer with one knob. To take them out again now would only draw attention to them, she told herself, and since her father had obviously hidden them, they were better off left where they were. For now.
She was halfway back to the house when she had second thoughts.
“Sod it,” she said under her breath and marched purposefully back to the shed. Knowing exactly what she was doing, she took the tin out of the drawer again and, using her phone, took a photo of each image individually as well as the date stamped on the back. When she had a copy of each of them, she put the whole lot back and closed the drawer yet again. The charity shop wouldn’t be interested in a tin of faces, and she doubted her mother would be either.
But her inquisitive mind, the mind of a former intelligence officer, told her they were hidden for a reason. Her father must never have intended them to be found. Until she figured out what to do with them, the originals could stay put in their hiding place, out of harm’s way. For now.
When Chrissy entered the cool house again, it was eerily quiet, as though she were all alone. But that was silly. Her mother would be inside somewhere, even if Julie and Richard had left while she’d slept. Chrissy hadn’t realised she was so tired, but then she wasn’t used to drinking hard spirits just after lunch. Not in the quantity she’d consumed today, anyway. She stopped in the kitchen and filled a glass with water, then drank the whole thing down greedily. She caught her breath with a gasp, then refilled the glass and carried it with her through to the front of the house to find her mother. Unless she’d gone back to sleep herself, of course.
She blushed as she remembered her mother’s reaction to finding her and Julie going through Dad’s cupboard full of notebooks. Maybe they had unwittingly intruded into something sacred? Everyone was entitled to their own privacy, and while neither she nor Julie had even thought their father had diarised his life, she asked herself if she would she have been as intrigued if it been her mother’s diaries. Her mind was over-reacting, surely; Dad had simply never seemed the type, and perhaps the unexpectedness of it was what made it interesting. Maybe she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did. A small voice startled her as she passed the bottom of the staircase.
“I thought you’d left hours ago,” her mother said, back to being tiny and frail again. Tyson had left the building.
“It seems I fell asleep in the garden. Julie must have let me be. You?” she enquired in a level voice. She didn’t appreciate being treated like a twelve-year-old by anybody, including her mother. She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake.
“I napped, on and off.”
She caught her mother’s gaze; she was looking at Chrissy’s hand. The remains of the whiskey.
“Oh—I found it in the shed. It’s more than likely the reason I fell asleep. I had a couple of mouthfuls.”
More than a couple—more like a third of a bottle.
“In the shed? Really?”
“Would you like some?” Chrissy offered, holding the bottle out. Her mother hadn’t moved from her step halfway up but managed to nod yes. “Maybe come down. I’ll get you a glass,” Chrissy carried on.
As Chrissy turned back towards the kitchen, she heard her mother pad lightly down the hallway towards her as she selected a small tumbler and poured a couple of fingers in. Her mother seemed to have shrunk a foot since her outburst in the front room earlier and seemed a little sheepish.
When she’d taken a couple of sips, and presumably consumed enough courage, her mother apologised. “I think it’s simply too soon. I’m sorry. Will you tell Julie?’
“I will if you want me to. It might be better if you did it yourself, though.” There was a pause as Chrissy let her advice sink in, then she went on. “May I ask, did you know about the diaries, or the contents? I never really put Dad down as sentimental.”
“Oh, he wasn’t sentimental. Not sentimental at all. I expect there’s all manner of private things in them, not for your eyes nor mine. And yes, I did know about them, though I only found out about them a few years ago, actually. They go all the way back to before we first met.” She seemed sad suddenly, almost as though she had left the room, in spirit rather than body.
Chrissy felt the shift. “What was in them?”
“Nothing to concern you.” Her mother tossed back the remaining whiskey and slammed the glass down on the drainer, making Chrissy jump in alarm.
Something was giving her mother dual persona: feisty one minute then decrepit the next. And it had to do with Dad, given her reaction to the diaries. Chrissy wondered if she knew about the photos too.
Diaries, secret tins of photos? Her naturally inquisitive mind chugged into motion like a grand old steam train starting out down a track.
Chapter Fifteen
The office of Banks & Crowley sat in Abbot Kinney, a neighbourhood not far from Santa Monica. With small professional office blocks and trendy boutiques, Abbot Kinney was the hip place to be. Some called it the coolest block in America. Only a couple of miles down the road, though, was Venice Beach, considered h
ip by some and a dump by others. It was popular with those living on the streets. Since LA had an almost perfect climate for living rough, many homeless people found their way to the sands of Venice Beach and neighbouring towns to make their ‘home.’ Come Friday evening, its white sandy boardwalks would be filled with men and women panhandling. By Saturday morning, the same men and women would lie sprawled, fast asleep, sleeping off the booze.
Early-morning dog walkers and joggers would be treated to the acrid smell of vomit and urine; those who had the luxury of delaying their outings until after 9 AM would miss the mess. By then, the streets and boardwalk would be clean again and smelling of disinfectant, and the homeless would have drifted away to day programmes or the downtown.
Philip Banks lived nearby. As a keen runner, he knew the route down to Santa Monica Pier and back like the back of his hand. It was, after all, a straight run—literally. Bladers and cyclists moved in one clearly marked lane, runners and walkers in another, which kept traffic moving safely.
He was never alone on his run, even though he set out on his own. Even at six in the morning there were plenty of people doing exactly the same as he was. After all, this was LA, the land of the perfect body, the perfect tan, and pristine white teeth.
