by Chris Ward
I was about to go back to bed, to sleep and dream of Mummy watching over me, when I saw a man standing down in the snow. It was Daddy. He had his cap on, and was holding his gun. He must have been out looking for foxes. They get the chickens sometimes.
8
When Matt came down the stairs into the kitchen, he found his father standing at the big twin stove, stirring some unidentifiable broth with a wooden ladle. He still wore the same clothes as before, even the waterproof trousers, though he had removed the boots and stood them in a corner, mud–caked, dripping on to a mat.
His father glanced back at him. ‘Feel better?’
Matt nodded. ‘Yeah, thanks.’
He did. The shower had warmed him, taken the bite out of the chill and the edge off his whiskey head. He had also had the opportunity to pick the grit out of his hands, elbows and cheeks. They still stung, but the wounds weren’t deep. They would heal in a couple of days.
‘You look pretty well, considering. Should have been a bit more careful in the dark. Could have really hurt yourself. The clothes fit all right?’
Matt looked down at himself. He wore a pair of jeans and a faded Reel Deal fishing T–shirt, clothes he hadn’t seen for fourteen years.
‘I can’t believe you kept all my old clothes.’
His father continued to stir. ‘There’s plenty of room. No reason to throw anything away. And I guess I never knew whether someday you might return.’ He stopped stirring, but didn’t turn round. ‘You can’t have grown that much since you were seventeen.’
‘Not much, I suppose.’
His father took a large, foot–long pepper grinder from amongst a clutter of utensils and began to grind into the broth. ‘So tell me. How have you been?’
‘Okay. Getting on with life.’
‘A woman answered the phone. Are you –’
‘Rachel. Her name’s Rachel. We’ve been married for ten years.’
‘Oh. Do you have –’
‘Two. One of each. Luke’s five, Sarah three. They’re great.’ Matt’s heart seemed to sigh. He wished he could tell them that. And Rachel, for that matter.
He remembered that familiar surge of power, that almost orgasmic feeling of strength, of dominance . . . could see his hand lifting to strike –
NO! Get out of my fucking head!
His father continued his metronomic stirring, churning the broth around and around. An aroma of cooking meats and spices had filled the kitchen. Matt took a seat on the opposite side of the room to his father, near to a radiator, one that hadn’t been there before, he remembered. The cold still lingered, despite the dry clothes.
‘I’m sure they’re little angels. Just like their mother.’
‘What?’
His father sighed. ‘Don’t get defensive. I just meant that she sounded lovely on the phone. It sounds like you’ve done well for yourself.’
‘I have.’ I have. Rachel, I love you. ‘Do you want to see them?’
Matt saw his father start. ‘Oh, yes, of course. There’s nothing I want more.’
‘I meant I have a photograph.’ Matt slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
‘Oh.’ Ian Cassidy sounded disappointed.
Matt pulled out the tiny pocket–sized photo of Rachel and the kids and took it over to his father. He had taken it himself a couple of years ago, on a family trip to Alton Towers. Rachel stood with a baby Sarah in her arms, while Luke, three, hung from her arm, a big grin on his face. The last time they had been out together, so far as Matt could remember. It had been a good day. He had got soaked on the boating lake when he had tried to show off in the little rower and fallen in.
Ian took the photo, stared at it for a while. He didn’t turn round. ‘They’re lovely, Matthew,’ he said at last. He handed the photo back without looking up.
Matthew sat back down. His father stirred on in silence for a few minutes, seemingly devoting all his concentration to the cooking pot, but Matt knew the stew was the last thing on his father’s mind. Like himself, Ian was struggling with a sudden wave of nostalgia, and Matt was glad his father didn’t turn round. He didn’t want Ian to see the dampness in his own eyes.
‘And your career?’ Ian said at last, to break the silence. ‘You write books, don’t you?’
‘Yes . . . how did you –’
His father shrugged. He glanced back at Matthew and smiled. ‘I don’t spend all my time in this crumbling old castle, you know. I do go out, go to bookshops sometimes. There can’t be that many Matthew Cassidys in this world, can there? Not so many with dark hair and eyes like yours. I recognised your pen picture immediately.’
He sprinkled some more herbs into the pan. ‘I enjoyed The Last Tears of Summer greatly. I thought Bessie Parker was a fine lead character. Very powerful, the way she handled losing her child.’
Matt was surprised at his father’s knowledge of his books, but he shrugged. ‘Thanks . . . I always thought she was a little cardboard. Her character lacked the strength throughout that I gave her near the end. I thought . . . I guess practice makes perfect.’
‘I suppose sometimes certain circumstances bring great things out of people.’
‘I guess so.’
His father covered over the pan and put the ladle down. He took a chair nearby and sat facing Matt across the room.
‘Another twenty minutes, that’s all. Need to tender up the pheasant meat a little. Tough old bird, but nice if you catch young ‘uns. Bit late in the season, but nothing a little boiling and some coriander won’t fix.’
They sat in an awkward silence for a few minutes. Matthew picked at a fingernail, while his father seemed more interested in checking his watch than making conversation. Finally, Ian said, ‘It’s good to see you again, son. I guess it’s been a while, eh? I suppose a lot of things have happened to you, but you haven’t changed all that much.’
‘Not that much.’ Oh, I have. I’ve changed a great deal, haven’t I?
‘Bethany would have liked to have seen you again.’
Matt felt a sudden surge of anger rising up from his stomach. ‘I doubt Bethany would have known who I was.’
‘I’m sure, in her way she would have, son. In her way.’
Matt looked away. ‘Whatever.’
‘I know a lot passed between us, but for her sake –’
‘I don’t want to go over this right now. Just leave it where it is. In the goddamn past!’
His father flinched as if stung, and his face seemed to wither, as though someone had attached a tube to him and drained out his remaining years. He looked back again, eyes sparkling beneath the kitchen lights.
‘I’d better get out of these clothes,’ he said, standing up. ‘Mind the stew for a minute, will you?’ Without waiting for an answer he stood up and went out through a door that led into a porch.
Matt stirred the stew, churned the chunks of meat and vegetables over and over, watching the excess water boiling off. He gazed down into the thick brown depths, wondering if they might clear and offer him a way out of this mess.
His father returned, wearing faded black jeans and an old green pullover, one Matt remembered from his childhood.
‘Let me take that,’ he said, moving in close to Matt, and for a moment their arms touched. Matt looked up into his father’s wizened face and almost managed to smile. Not quite, for his father drew back, nose wrinkling suddenly, eyes narrowing.
‘Started drinking, have we?’
Matt held his father’s gaze. ‘It helps, sometimes.’
His father scoffed. ‘A lot of things are supposed to help, son. Very few of them do.’
‘What would you know?’
‘More than you think, son. More than you think. I’ve tried most of them myself, from time to time. To help me get through . . . things. In the end, it’s all in your head. You can’t hide it. Either it goes away of its own accord, or it doesn’t.’
‘I don’t drink much.’
His father said nothing
, just set about ladling the stew out into bowls. ‘Get some bread from the pantry, son. There’s a fresh loaf out there.’
Matt went through a small door beside the stove, into a large walk–in larder. Food of all kinds adorned the shelves, from sides of smoked beef and pork to Heinz Baked Beans and Tesco’s tinned curries. Enough food to last one man a whole summer. He took a loaf of bread out of a small cupboard and carried it back through to the kitchen.
His father had put the lid back on the leftover stew and turned off the stove. Matt followed him up a set of stairs into a dining room which looked out on to the back garden of the house. Although now shrouded in darkness, Matt could still discern the patchwork of lawns and shrubbery on three or four different levels where he had played so contentedly as a small boy. Hundreds of times he had fought his way up through the outposts and stockades, a lone Indian renegade fighting against the might of the cowboy army, in an attempt to conquer the huge looming castle at the top of the lawn.
Happy, happy days. So contented, unaware of so much.
Beyond the furthest lawn, too dark to see but he could sense it out there, waiting, was the path that led to the chapel, and his mother.
They took seats on opposite sides of the dining table. Matt ripped the bread in two, and handed half to his father. For a while they ate in silence.
‘You still make a good stew, Dad,’ Matt said after a few minutes, speaking around a hunk of soggy bread.
‘Well, I thought you’d want proper food. No doubt you live off fast food and all that other crap city folk eat these days.’
‘Well, I don’t eat stew too often, no.’
‘Pheasant’s much nicer than chicken. Chicken’s far too dry. You have to soak it for hours, and it still comes out like rubber.’
‘I guess.’
They lapsed into silence again. Matt was starving and finished some time before his father, who seemed to deliberate on every bite. Matt looked around the room, at the old paintings of anonymous strangers on the walls, the chandeliers hung above them, the tall dresser near the door which displayed a set of crockery he didn’t think they had ever used. Not while he had lived here, at any rate.
So much time passed, so little changed.
‘Shall we go through to the lounge for a while?’ his father asked, finishing up the last of his stew. When Matt nodded, Ian said, ‘Okay, you go on. I’ll just take these to the kitchen.’ He piled up the empty bowls and carried them out.
Matt went through into the living room, a cavernous room with bookshelves along two walls and a wide hearth on the other. The grate was empty, he saw, and wondered why the house seemed so warm. Then he spotted another radiator sticking out from behind the sofa nearest the front wall. Matt smiled. His father must have had a system installed. So, some things changed after all.
He took a seat, and sat with hands on lap, patiently waiting for his father, feeling more like a visitor than he had ever thought he could.
A book lay next to him on the sofa, open about midway through and lain out cover up to keep the place. Matt stared in surprise.
Bodies of Life. A novel about a serial killer who murdered beautiful people because of taunts about his appearance at school. Matt’s first book. He had tried to make the central character, Sharman O’Hearn, a victim, tried to make his readers understand why his character had killed so many people out of sheer jealousy, which he considered the fault at the heart of so much of humanity. He had always thought he had done a good job, and for once had been pleased with himself.
The copy was a first edition. To the best of Matt’s knowledge, only about three hundred were ever printed. He must have about half of them himself, which made this book rare indeed.
‘I bought it some years back,’ his father said from the doorway, making Matt jump. ‘I’m afraid I’ve only just started to read it. Took me a while to get around to it. I started it Tuesday, in fact.’
The day of the phone call.
Matt turned the book over in his hands, and the front cover fell back. His hands froze, and he gulped in horror, almost dropping the book. He felt like someone had injected his blood with ice.
Written on the inside front cover, in Matt’s own hand:
To Ian,
best wishes,
Matt Cassidy.
‘It’s – it’s – it’s signed,’ he stammered. He looked accusingly at his father. ‘Where did you get this?’
His father smiled sadly. ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you again.’
Matt shivered. Someone had walked across his grave, their boots leaving deep imprints. Suddenly the walls had eyes, and the hum of the central heating was the whispering of ghosts, beneath him, behind him, all around him.
His father rubbed at one eye. From the distance between them across the sizable room, Matt was unable to tell if his father had wiped away a tear or not.
‘I doubt you remember. I had a beard at the time, kind of unkempt, and was wearing a hat. The queue must have been enormous. I expect we all looked the same after an hour or two of scribbling in books. Blackwells. Top of the High Street, Exeter. January, 1994.’
Matt remembered. Not his father, of course, but he remembered Exeter. Over two hundred people had turned up, by far the largest crowd he had ever seen. Book signings had been a relatively new experience for him, in fact he had only been part way through his first tour, and the number of people waiting in the cold to talk to Matt Cassidy: novelist had terrified him. Had he known his appeal would quickly dwindle with the publication of subsequent novels, he would have savored it more. As it was, on seeing the crowd, all he had thought to do was scribble his name down as fast as possible and get the hell out of there.
Or to the pub, he seemed to remember now.
‘I used “Ian” because I reckoned “Dad” was a bit of a giveaway,’ his father continued, flashing a wry smile. ‘I didn’t want to disrupt anything for you. We’ve not spoken in so long for a reason.’
Matt looked up at Ian Cassidy, his father, and frowned. For the first time since this whole sorry mess began, he didn’t feel anger, or fear, or hatred. Only a deep, bitter sadness.
His father went to a corner, flipped open a dresser cabinet. He pulled out two glasses and a bottle of Glenfiddich. ‘Drink?’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
He poured two generous measures, set them down on a coffee table and took a chair across from Matt: the old battered leather swing–back Matt remembered from childhood. Still, he saw, his father’s favorite. It groaned as his father sat down.
Matt clutched at his drink a little too eagerly, scooping it up and taking a deep swallow, feeling the burn of the liquid as it coursed down his throat.
His father frowned.
‘No hurry, son. Got plenty of bottles where that came from. Can drink all night, if that’s what you want.’
Matt’s eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t lecture me, Dad.’
His father scoffed and sipped his drink. ‘Not much chance of that. I seem to remember lecturing you before. Don’t you? Didn’t get me very far, did it?’
(Until you’re still, I’ll hit you until you’re still)
(NO!)
(the branch crashing down until it snapped)
(until it snapped)
Matt looked away, down into the golden depths of his glass.
‘I’m not asking you to apologize, son. I don’t think I deserve it. I didn’t prove much of a role model for you.’
‘Leave it in the past, Dad. I’m here for Bethany’s funeral. That’s all.’
Ian Cassidy sighed. ‘I know. But sometimes I wish –’
‘You’ll always be my father, Dad, whether I like it or not.’ He finished his whiskey. ‘And I’ll always be your son.’
Ian Cassidy chuckled. ‘I guess so.’
‘So let’s not get too sentimental.’ Matt tilted his glass, wondering if there were enough drips left for one final sip. His face had attained the comforting warmth of closeness to an open flame. He smiled vacantl
y, feeling the buzz growing in his head. ‘I could do with a refill, after all.’
His father ignored the veiled question. ‘You want to see her?’
Matt froze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Bethany. Would you like to see her? See what she looks like now?’
‘She’s here?’ A shiver rippled through him as though someone had left an outside door ajar and a winter draft had crept in. He felt drunk. The world swirled around him. His father’s face seemed to blur, loose distinction.
Ian nodded, smiling. ‘She’ll always be here, Matthew. Part of her will never leave. Sometimes I don’t like to think of her as dead. I like to think of her as just being upstairs, sleeping, perhaps.’
Matt was lost for words. Surely they didn’t have the body here, upstairs? That sort of thing was illegal, wasn’t it? It happened in his books, just as it had in Conan Doyle’s, Poe’s, even in Dickens’. It was allowed to happen in books. His head spun.
‘You don’t have to, I just thought, it’s been so long, you might want to know what your little sister looks like now, refresh your memories a little.’ He paused, then said: ‘You were gone a long time, after all.’
Matt felt tired, but forced a reply, forced himself to sit up in the chair. ‘Well, okay.’
He hadn’t told Rachel how Bethany had died. Couldn’t. He could only remember his sister as the shy, reclusive little girl who’d inhabited the rooms near to his, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the woods beyond. She had terrified him as a child, the pale, ghostly little thing he would sometimes find wandering about the house at night, or watching him from the window as he returned from school, her eyes like pools of Heaven waiting to absorb him. Pretty, angelic, as Mrs. Carter had said, though of course he had assumed that she meant now. However, even as a child Bethany had been something born of the woods and the hills, something natural, pure. With hair the copper brown of the tree boughs and skin the colour of pearls, she should have been beautiful. But somehow her disability made her hideous.
