Mr. Nobody(68)

He holds my gaze, eyes crinkled around the edges. “No, it wouldn’t. And yes, I would.”

I pull on the socks he passes me and hobble off on tender Band-Aid-covered feet to the kitchen.

The evening passes in a blur of sensations. The hot flush of wine, his smiling eyes taking in my face, a burst of laughter, his hand resting on my thigh and its electric throb of possibility, and suddenly his warm mouth on mine. The feel of his hands all over me as we kiss, the desperate animal need of it.

    Later, I offer him the second bedroom but he says he’ll sleep on the sofa, he’s supposed to be on duty anyway, and I head upstairs to bed.

I lie there awake, thinking about what happened that night fourteen years ago.

I didn’t see my father do it, maybe that’s half the problem—or maybe it’s the silver lining?

I heard it, though. The crack of it in the night, like thunder, the rip of the double-barreled shotgun as it echoed up the thick carpet of our staircase, along a landing lined with our family pictures, and into my childhood bedroom.

But before the echo of the gunshot there was the helicopter. The sound of it circling in tight loops over the house was what woke me. I’d sat up in bed groggy, blinking into the shadows, as it rumbled over the house, my head throbbing. A headache and nausea from too much sugar and excitement at the fireworks that evening. After a moment Joe trundled into my room too, his silhouette in my doorway. “Helicopter,” he’d said croakily as the mechanical roar receded off into the night.

“Yeah,” I offered up into the growing quiet. The noise gone as quick as it came.

Joe disappears back to his room and I lie back down with a wave of dizziness and pull my duvet up to my chin. Safe. The sharp scent of spent fireworks in the air.

I think of the bonfire earlier that night, of nice things, of being cold and now being warm. Snapshots of memories. Dad’s concentrated face as he lit the sparklers. Mum’s smile. The crunch of teeth on burnt caramel. The rush of sugar through my body. Watching the giant pyre as flecks of gold and orange crackled and floated away into the darkness.

Caught half-awake, half-dreaming. A half-dream where I rise from bed, voices in the hallway; I come out onto the landing and see him. My father, pulling on his coat. He’s leaving. He sees me standing bleary at the top of the stairs. Where are you going, Dad? I ask. Nowhere, honey. Go back to bed, he tells me, smiling softly. But I don’t feel well, I tell him. It’s okay, baby. You’ll feel better in the morning, he reassures me, and he blows me a kiss. And I smile back for Daddy and I go to bed.

    I wake up when the helicopter roars overhead again. Louder this time. Lower. I sit bolt upright, a terror crystallizing in my adolescent brain: something is wrong.

Joe scrambles back into my room, skidding over to the bedroom window and disappearing behind the thick silk of the curtains, only his feet visible below.

“What is it, Joe?” I rasp, my throat dry. I really don’t feel well.

The rhythmic thud of helicopter blades thumps through the night air. No answer from my brother.

My curiosity piqued, I race into the gap between the curtains, to join him as the big machine hovers overhead a third time. I catch the flash of its floodlight as it sweeps low over our wet roof. Blinding light and sound, the word POLICE emblazoned across its underbelly.

Transfixed, my brother and I watch as it slowly lowers and touches down in our top field, the long grass around it whipping with the downforce of the blades.

We stare out the rain-speckled window as the helicopter doors burst open, and uniformed officers jump out and run toward our house.

And then it comes from downstairs. The noise.

CRACK.

A rip of sound. A gunshot, loud and horrifically distinct, cracking through the silent house. My breath catches in my throat and I drop straight to the floor as if somehow I’m the one who’s been shot. Terror coursing through me, pure animalistic fear.

Real gunshots aren’t like the ones on TV. You feel the sound in your body. It hits you. It’s a sound you’d recognize even if you hadn’t grown up around it. A sound and a meaning in one. An instant understanding of events.

    No further shots, just ringing silence through the house, and the knowledge of what that might mean.

Outside, we hear shouts getting closer to the house. I look across to Joe, crouched next to me on the carpet, his head buried, his pajamas and the floor around him wet with urine, his body quivering.

I make the first move. The animal instinct, to find my dad. I scrabble as fast as I can, low, on all fours across the bedroom floor and onto the thick carpet of the landing. A light on downstairs. Through the banisters I see Mum leaning on the study doorframe, her hand to her mouth. She is staring at something.

The burst of breaking glass from the front of the house, voices shouting.

I don’t know why but I run. I run to him, down the stairs, past Mum’s outstretched grasping hands, through a doorway I won’t ever be able to come back through.

And I find him there in his study. His face and the back of his skull gone. Or rather displaced, pieces of it, of him, stuck in the curtains, hot globules and bone chips on the window’s latticework, wet drips and chunks in and on his precious books. His whole life broken open across the upholstery. On his desk four cream envelopes, spattered. Thick watermarked paper—his letters to us inside. One addressed to Marty Fenshaw, Dad’s solicitor, one to Joe, one to Mum. And one to me. I don’t know why he wrote them. Guilt maybe.