by Marrs, John
But now he knew what a stupid old fool he’d been. Because what he had never considered in all that time they were apart was that he might have got it wrong. And in the end, it was he who had been hurt by the truth just as much as her.
Eventually he found the charcoal grey, granite headstone he had been searching for. The sandblasted lettering on the epitaph was as brief as that written on his mother’s marker.
‘Simon Nicholson – loving father, gone but never far.’
It was an ambiguous memoriam and open to interpretation, but only he, Catherine and Shirley knew that.
He inched his aching limbs towards the ground and knelt. With few burial spaces remaining in the three hundred year old churchyard, he wondered if another corpse lay beneath where his should have been. It seemed apt, he thought, as wherever he roamed, a dead body was never that far away.
He removed the silver hipflask Luciana had given him for his fiftieth birthday from his jacket pocket. He frequently topped it up with Jim Beam to take away the bitterness of his medication. It also helped to relax him on the days confusion made him feel like a tightly balled fist.
He took out both packets of pills. He knew the ones designed to slow the pace of his advancing Alzheimer’s were no longer powerful enough and he’d barely touched the anti-depressants. But he hoped there were enough of them combined to put him out of his misery. One by one, he popped them from their blister packs into his bloodied palm and then to his mouth. After each four or five, he took a swig from his hipflask and swallowed hard.
Then he sat motionless, numb to everything but the sensation of the tablets as they slipped down his throat and settled into his empty stomach.
Nobody in this world had understood him like Luciana, and if God were willing to show him just one act of mercy, he would soon be with her. But he knew it was a lot to ask considering all he’d said of the Lord and the torment he’d inflicted on the undeserved.
Finally he accepted it hadn’t been God, Doreen, Kenneth, Billy, Dougie or Catherine who had caused his suffering, but himself. He’d been so hasty to blame everyone else for not living up to the perfection he’d expected from them, yet he was the least perfect of them all. He’d been the architect of his own misery.
He began to think about his death and how it could create complications for those he loved. Luca and Sofia would be financially secure for the rest of their lives. But when they were to learn of his passing, they would surely have questions only Kitty could answer. He hoped that when they finally traced her, she might respond to their confusion and grief with kindness.
As for his other children, well, keeping his return a secret would be too tall an order for her. His body, less than a mile from her home, would be impossible to conceal. He hoped they wouldn’t hate their mother for lying to them for most of their lives.
He was conscious there was nowhere left for him to hide and wished he’d hung himself from the tree in the woods when he’d had the opportunity to, all those years ago.
‘You know what to do,’ came the voice that only appeared when his options were few and far between. ‘This is the place. Right here, right now.’
“I do,” he said out loud. It was a solution that would help everyone. He could bury himself where no one would think to find him - in the ready-made grave below. If he could disappear once, then he could do it again.
So he lifted his aching head and began to dig.
As he clawed his way through the sharp turquoise gravel chips, he failed to notice the blood that dripped from his cracked fingertips and temple was making the soil underneath syrupy. He tried to ignore the numbness of his broken wrist and that made digging much harder.
He just needed to scrape a little deeper, he imagined, and then heap the earth back upon himself, and nobody would be any the wiser.
“Focus, focus, focus,” he repeated, determined not to be defeated by an aging body that wanted to admit defeat. But his arms smarted and his knees grew weaker.
He began to topple forwards until he steadied himself and then made one last frantic attempt to scoop away the broken earth and push it to one side. But it was no use; he no longer had the strength to support his weight.
‘I’ll rest for a minute then continue,’ he reasoned, and with all his remaining strength, he pushed himself onto his back and lay on a blanket of grass. He watched carefully as the burnt orange sky gradually faded to a darkening twilight.
And with a final anxious sigh, he closed his eyes and wondered if God would listen when he apologised for all he had done.
The End
