by James Damm
“But that makes little sense!” Juliet had exclaimed. “If you like cigars, you would buy the best cigars.”
“That, Juliet, is the power of perception,” her father had taught her. “Perception matters more to people than the reality. In your future career it is more important for your bosses to perceive you to be doing important work than carrying out the important work. In politics it is the party perceived as the most competent that gets elected, not the best party for the job. For Cuban cigars, it was the mystique of life behind an embargo, the taboo of smoking something illegal that ensured they could maintain the reputation. Actual cigar connoisseurs know that it is more of a brand than reality.”
“So where do your cigars come from, Dad?” Juliet had quizzed.
“Cuba,” her father laughed. “Sometimes it’s fun to play along with what makes an enjoyable story.”
The dinner ended, and the pair returned home. Before she fled upstairs, her father embraced in a rare hug. As he held her, told her how proud he was, he imagined his wife. Juliet looked like her, felt like her, and reminded him oh so much of her. Juliet was like a daily ghost to him, a haunting. And then the statement came. The one Juliet could never bury. I wish it had been you.
As the hug ended, her father had smiled and retreated to his room. Shocked and numb, Juliet had slowly done the same, questioning what she had heard inside his brain. A momentary lapse, an opinion never meant to be public. Yet for a moment it was real, and Juliet could never shake how often that feeling occurred inside him.
Over the next two years the relationship strained as drip by drip, she heard it all. A fragment here, a snatch of information there. Juliet had always known they never planned for her. Society had told a father in his mid-fifties and a mother in her forties they could never bear children, and that had been the end of any discussion regarding children. Yet a pregnancy did eventually happen. Doctors advised it was at substantial risk to her mother to continue with the birth. Stubbornness prevailed, her father believed it was against both God and nature to end a pregnancy when there was a family around to support one. So that was that, and nine months later Juliet emerged, a crying infant into the arms of parents who all her life would be mistaken as grandparents.
One day, near the end, there had been a hell of an argument and everything had all come out. Juliet revealed every dirty secret, every scornful nasty comment to a father shocked and pale. When the heat died down and the anger faded, Graham had done all he knew to do. He forced her to the doctors and after that, the police. Somehow the government cottoned on to investigate such a wild statement.
The pain Juliet felt as she looked into her father’s eyes was too much. No amount of love, pride or strength of the bond could wipe the knowledge regarding the cracks in it all. There were statements that could never be taken back, should never have been considered. And that was the case with her father. He withheld his opinions. Yet she heard them anyway.
Before her, the once-formidable figure sat dazed and faded. The nurses had taken care of him, his clothes washed and clean, his hair combed and neat. The room was spotless and his face showed that his diet was far better than in the months before they brought him into care. She loved him and he loved her too, somewhere still in there at least. Yet the pain was still all there, right alongside.
As Juliet welled up at the image before her, knowing that her father was one of her last ties to the past, she jolted as he spoke.
“Everyone I know is going,” he mumbled, his eyes momentarily wide. That’s when she saw it, in his face more than anything. One by one, the residents of the home were dying off and a void taking their place. In comfort they slept, ate and existed, but in each of them there were the same overwhelming thoughts. Fear. Genuine fear and terror of what was to come next and doubt whether there was anything at all. That was all that Graham could anchor himself too. The reality that united everyone, even John. Graham knew he was old, soon to die, and this would be the last real place he would ever go.
Chapter Fourteen
On the day Mike buried his youngest son, there were no dramatic showers of rain or spectacular lightning storms. No icy breeze or hollow wind. For weeks Mike mapped out how he expected the day to proceed. In his mind he pictured winter, yet when the funeral finally came, reality bypassed every crafted idea.
The sky overhead held no clouds, and most would describe the temperature as warm. Rather than in darkness, the day passed in golden sunshine. There were crowds of faces in the distance, far from the actual events of the day. They filled the roads and streets for miles, a collective day of national mourning. Far from being the silent father at the graveside, Mike mourned in a sea of faces.
The government had paid for everything. Two days of mourning up and down the country filled the news. Just like the day of the murder, what felt like the entire world paused for reflection – a minute’s silence for a lost hero. Wearing a black suit and tie, Mike pulled at the collar choking his neck. In the months to come, the discomfort remained his outstanding memory of the day.
The Bellington Church christened John and David at Maggie’s insistence. Religion important to neither parent, the opportunity to celebrate in one event with friends and family became the primary motivation. Welcomed into the church with a sermon and hymns, the boys would, aside from school, never knowingly step foot into a place of worship again. No Christmas carols, no communion, no Sunday service.
Mike had a bottle of rum in his jacket to help calm his nerves and allow the events of the funeral to pass him by. His attention skipped mostly around the people present, around a hundred on what was very much a private occasion. The selective invite list reflected the opposite of the eulogy that erupted into chaos.
Regarding the attendees, Mike recognised the Prime Minister, but most of them he didn’t. Some wept, the majority stood in stoic silence. The booze numbed Mike’s senses enough that no tear or cry could leave his steel frame. The Reverend questioned whether Mike wished to say any words. The imagined scene of speeches, hollow words and gazing eyes frightened Mike into silence. The Lord’s words would accompany the burial of his son. Words of meaning needed uttering a decade ago, their impact wasted now.
Mike felt like a watcher of another man’s actions. A Union Jack was draped over the coffin, the events unravelling before his eyes signified the closing of a chapter. All the energy, the stories and the adventure of his son’s life, existed as fragments in people’s heads now. It was the third time Mike witnessed one of his family lowered into the ground. In a cruel twist of fate, he had become last man standing.
Refocusing on the ceremony, the Reverend went over to the coffin for what looked to be the last moments of the funeral. “Give him, o Lord, your peace and let your eternal light shine upon him.”
“Amen,” the congregation called.
Facing the congregation, the Reverend continued. “Receive the Lord’s blessing. The Lord blesses you and watches over you. The Lord makes his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord looks kindly on you and gives you peace. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen.”
Time passed, and Mike stood alone in front of Maggie and David’s graves. All the slots filled beside them, John would rest further down the graveyard. The glass bottle now empty in his hand, memories washed back of both hollow days when the granite stones before Mike were fresh. Twice he had committed to maintaining the sites with flowers and company, twice the pain made it far easier to stay away. How many years had it been?
A figure emerged from somewhere behind him; Mike sensed it far before he ever bothered to look. Eyes fixed but not taking in the words on the tablet, he noted that he swayed before the stones.
“How did you swing an invitation?” Mike slurred as Juliet approached. “They meant for the event to be an exclusive list.”
“I said I wanted to come and apologise for the tone of the interview.”
“And do you?”
&
nbsp; “I am sorry for pressing you so hard.”
Mike nodded. The incident in the room flooded back as a distant scar. All of that misery felt like a lifetime ago. New scabs, humiliation and bitterness boiled near the surface.
How many times in the last few weeks had they hauled him out of one of the local pubs? Punters all too keen to buy the father of John Fitzgerald a pint soon came to regret such a decision when he stumbled over tables, vomited on floors and flew into drunken rages.
“Are these your wife and son?” Juliet quizzed, the awkwardness obvious even to Mike.
Again he nodded, words only wasted.
“Tell me about them.”
Mike’s eyes rose to meet Juliet’s. No trick or game hung in her expression.
“I met Maggie when she was sixteen, I was twenty. At the local she was one of my mates from down the pit’s sister. A mischievous smile and banter that stood its ground against working men years older than herself. Nobody cared back then about legal drinking ages; she was part of the community and the community looked after itself. Always the same place, same people, but after some time we sat together often. A pair, a couple or whatever else you wanted to call it. From that day and for the next twenty years, she never left my side. Stability to my temper, mischief to my madness, and a hell of a good mum to those boys. I thought we’d grow old and die together. Cancer doesn’t care about your plans.”
Mike’s eyes lingered onto the gravestone a second longer. “Loving wife, mother, and sister.” Words replicated a hundred times across the gravestones. A life condensed down to a generic sentence. The same size hole and same shaped box awaited them all. Once Maggie had been laughter, opinions and witty retorts. Now she existed as a fragment in the heads of those she had touched in a shortened life.
“David. David, to this day, is the strongest man I ever knew,” Mike said as the words caught in his throat. “I had the boy for sixteen years and never failed to marvel at his resilience. If he had joined the army, he would have led it. If he had become a boxer, he’d have a championship belt. Instead, he lost his mum and grew up with an incapable father. All that strength wasted on being the man I should have been. It would have been a privilege to see what he could be, and I wish I had been there more to help him.”
“How did he pass?”
“Suicide,” Mike confirmed. “John found him.”
The silence that followed allowed Mike’s thoughts to drift out of the moment. A light breeze in the trees, the emptiness and stillness of the surrounding graveyard. For a fraction of time, there was peace.
“I lost my mum when I was in my teenage years. She was the nicest, sweetest woman I’ve ever met, yet that didn’t account for anything. She still died while people who have treated others like shit and are shitty people themselves continue to live merry lives. I’ve been in enough people’s heads to know that karma doesn’t exist. No matter who you are or how you live your life, when your time comes that’s it, whether you’re young or old, rich or poor, good or bad.”
“I could have done better. Been a better father, a better husband, a better person. Maggie’s death was out of my control, but I made those years miserable for her. If I hadn’t pushed those boys so hard, maybe both would be alive now.”
“You can’t save everyone,” Juliet said, a hand squeezing his shoulder. “Whether that be a family member, spouse, or friend. Sometimes the darkness within wins out. There’s no amount of love, attention, affection, and support you can give that can save them from themselves. You could do everything in your power to help them and still fall short, because ultimately it’s not your battle to fight.”
“And yet I fell short,” Mike turned with tears in his eyes. “I was a young man once. I could look into the mirror and see a person with a hundred different options staring back. You blink and nineteen has turned into twenty-nine. Blink again, and suddenly the man staring back isn’t familiar at all. You’ve lost your youth. There’s blood in your piss, you know exactly which knee is the bad one and someone has spent all your youth. Squandered it. All these fucking years have passed and I have no way of turning back the clock and fixing my mistakes. What’s the point in it all if I’m already past the point where any decision I make matters?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” came Juliet’s measured response. “There isn’t a quote or a profound statement I can give you that will bring your family or the years back. All I can say is that my father has spent the last five years in a home, an empty shell of a person. Time keeps going by, whether or not you like it. At least you still have time to change some things. And the ability.”
Dull rage clawed at Mike’s insides as he stood before the gravestones a while longer. A light touch on his shoulder, a “sorry for your loss”, and Juliet left. “The military record is fake,” he called. Juliet stopped in his tracks and gazed at him.
“There was a letter. He went to Leeds and became a cleaner. I hope you can do something more with that than I can.”
Juliet hovered somewhere behind Mike, but his back turned to her as he once again he watched alone. Eventually she left. Not a rotten man, a murderer or a rapist. Not a hated man, although disliked by many who would care to remember him.
There was nothing special about Mike. So why was he still there? Better men and women lay in graves all over. If their God had a plan, why bother with Mike?
Chapter Fifteen
Sirens blared as the impatient convoy tore through the streets of London. On pavements bystanders watched the cars speed past, curious as to the events of the day. In one of the vehicles sat Juliet in the back seat. Intelligence gathered showed that a homemade bomb for a terrorist attack was being manufactured on the premises. Akin to nothing more than a sniffer dog, Juliet was to walk the property listening out for any clues or phrases in the heads of those arrested.
The action had already taken place, much more brashly as an armed team and bomb disposal unit swept the premises. Agents had found evidence of bomb manufacturing and there was a pressure to reach anybody in a further-reaching terrorist community before word got out of the arrests. Already chatter in both the media and on social networks was spilling out concerning the raid.
By the time Juliet reached the place of residence, she walked past a blue police ribbon and a destroyed door. She followed a trail of destruction from the trashed lounge where two annoyed young men sat rabbiting at the officers involved, guns pointed at their handcuffed, seated bodies did little to disrupt the flair the two displayed. Freedom, justice, patriotism flew through their minds with conviction.
Months had passed since John Fitzgerald’s murder, and though Juliet didn’t want to acknowledge it, she had sensed a change in her role already. Gone were the murder cases that had so often filled her workload, a shift happening in attention towards more domestic-based threats.
John Fitzgerald’s murder left Britain exposed. For years the government had cut police numbers, military equipment, and intelligence resources. Why were they needed when the country had an indestructible superhero? John’s murder had opened the box for buried rage to emerge.
Domestically, Britain had pulled up the drawbridge, as had its European allies, officially until a time where safety could be guaranteed again. The deferring of the Schengen zone had led to protests in Ireland at implementing border checks on goods and at the Northern Irish border. This hard border was a breach of the Good Friday Agreement, but all over the world tensions had emerged.
In the US, police had used excessive force to combat their own domestic disturbances, and widespread violence had consumed cities as protesters railed against the police as an establishment. In the South Seas, China had become embroiled in territorial disputes with many of its neighbours, while in more than one Middle Eastern country there had been anti-government protests that turned violent. Pent-up rage that had never boiled to the surface no longer had an individual to suppress the outcome. Had John Fitzgerald ever involved himself in the inner workings of internat
ional politics? No, but the threat had always been there.
Taking a moment, Juliet allowed her eyes to do a quick sweep of the place. Stripped bare, the architect for the terraced house had likely envisaged a family home. The fireplace gutted and the carpets long since removed, the house was a lab rather than an actual residence. Mattresses on the floor, cupboards bare of food. This was no place of home comforts.
“Garret,” Juliet said as she took a seat on the kitchen counter. The name had popped into both of the men’s heads in the last minute, and she quickly scribbled down the name. Out of sight of any suspect in the property while they were ‘processed’, Juliet had free rein to dive into their head in an environment full of stimuli.
The officers themselves kept their distance, enough to monitor the cuffed suspects while allowing them to stew nervously on their knees. Name after name, first and second names came forth and Juliet quickly amassed a list of people and what appeared to be street names. Soon the full weight of the British intelligence service would knock on more doors, arresting more suspects and killing the roots of the terrorist weed.
Satisfied with the volume of information Juliet possessed on her list, officers led the two suspects to their waiting transportation, and Juliet too. There had been trouble in London again last night and the route taken was an odd one, a backstreet here and diverting around an obstacle there. In the boroughs where there had been rioting, the evidence of trouble from the night before was clear. The odd charcoal skeleton of a burnt-out car, some spray paint and blown litter into the gutters. Police and military vehicles outnumbered everybody, and the driver did well to avoid the blockades, assisted by bare streets that the public were sensibly staying away from.
Juliet’s eyes swept over the urban streets. Snaking through the traffic, a car with a driver up top, the following days mapped out for her. Rioter after rioter, thug after thug, until the pool of current sin was drained. Then it would be onto the next one, maybe a rape or a murder followed by another and another. If Juliet was lucky, it would be a paedophile or a serial killer next. Anything to break the mould.
