Chapter 51
The morning after the failed stake-out, I drove out to Buxton. There was something I needed to do.
The road was wide and flat. On my way, I passed a few cars, but mostly just speed-limit signs and the lines of indistinguishable houses: dull wooden faces with shadowed windows, set back behind their fences.
When the breeze picked up, dust billowed across the tarmac.
The sky ahead was featureless: a single, implacable shade of grey.
When I reached the house – one I hadn’t returned to for twenty years, or at least not physically – it was obvious.
Not only from the indistinct but shivery familiarity I felt at the sight of it, but because it stood out from all the others I’d passed.
As ramshackle as its neighbours might have been, at least those buildings were habitable, even if only barely, but this house was clearly derelict.
I parked up outside. When I killed the engine, there was no sound at all, not even birdsong.
I stared at the worn facade of the house. The red paint had long since flecked away. The windows had no glass, giving oblique views of the peeling wallpaper in the dank rooms within.
A family had lived here once.
There was a man and his wife and their two sons.
By all accounts, they were innocuous. Nobody who knew them had anything bad to say about them; nobody would have marked this particular family down as having something wrong with it.
They wouldn’t have suspected there was a seed of violence nestled at its heart, waiting for the right time to bloom.
The man was former military, retired through injury, and clearly a little rough and bitter. He drank. The woman was cowed and nervous in a fidgety kind of way. None of that was enough to differentiate them from other families in these parts.
The two boys, though …
With hindsight, some people did say they’d appeared haunted: too quiet, both of them. It was as though they were making an effort to keep silent about something. As though there was something they wanted to say but wouldn’t, or couldn’t. When they looked at people, they didn’t seem to see them.
And with hindsight, those same people probably wondered if they should have recognised that something was wrong with that family. If they might have done a little more, even though doing something is not what people do, and especially not back then.
But that was all a long time ago.
As far as I knew, nobody had lived here since what happened. Not in the ordinary sense anyway.
Finally, I got out of the car.
My brother was two years older than me, but he was always smaller and weaker.
It really was as though we had different fathers, although I don’t believe for one second that’s true.
It was just that John took after him, while I carried more of my mother’s genes.
Although perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Regardless, my brother always felt the need to protect me, because he was older.
Even though he wasn’t physically capable of doing so, somewhere deep inside him he felt like he should, and his failure to do so ate at him.
The more he hated our father, the more he also hated himself for being unable to stand up to him.
When our father mocked him for being weak and ineffectual, it stung, because he believed it was true.
And yet, despite his hatred, John had still taken on board our father’s ideas about what it meant to be a man.
He’d absorbed the idea that one way to deal with the frustrations of your life is by using violence against others to make yourself feel bigger.
That wasn’t the whole story of why he did what he did that night, but it was a part of it.
On the night my father died, I told the policeman who interviewed me – Franklin – that I’d stayed in our bedroom: that John had gone downstairs and unlocked the gun cabinet by himself, dragged the shotgun upstairs alone, and that I hadn’t seen what happened in my parents’ bedroom shortly afterwards.
Of course, that was a lie.
The gun cabinet was gone now – everything was.
The downstairs room, like the rest of the house, had been stripped bare.
The floorboards were exposed, broken in one corner, and the walls were pale, with permanent shadows of mould cast on the plaster.
The remains of the fireplace formed a broken black mouth in the pale wall, the floor in front speckled with flecks of wallpaper and wood, as though the house had begun eating and spitting itself out.
But standing there and looking through the lounge doorway, I could still remember where everything had been.
Memory added fixtures and fittings to this empty space; it superimposed furniture and colours onto the grey shell.
A ghost of an old life, flitting – briefly – across the world.
A room seen through a window, passed by at speed.
I shook my head and moved back into the hall.
It smelled of mildew and earth. Bubbles of moisture had formed on the walls and hardened like pearls.
An empty doorway revealed the corpse of a kitchen, recognisable as such only from the square stains where cupboards had once clung to the walls.
Behind me, daylight leaned in through the open front door, but didn’t reach the staircase I was looking up.
The landing above was dark, and somehow both empty and full; the wooden stairs themselves looked precarious and soft.
I tested each step, all the way to the first floor.
With the far window exposed, the corridor up here was like a dark, weathered tunnel. Doorways led off at various points down the hallway, the first to what had once been a bathroom, the second to the bedroom I had shared with John, the third to what had been my parents’ bedroom.
There was no heartbeat here, not like in my dream, but the air had a pressure that might have been mainly inside my head. I hesitated. Then I walked all the way along to the last doorway.
Just as I had that night, all those years ago.
I’d gone downstairs with my brother.
I’d been there with him when he lifted the shotgun from the rack.
He’d carried it himself – that much was true – because he didn’t want my fingerprints on it.
He kept telling me to go back into our dark bedroom, but I wouldn’t, and it annoyed him.
Perhaps he thought I was undermining him – that this was his action, one he should be doing alone – and there was me, trailing him like an equal partner.
Saying nothing, because I hated our father and I wanted him to do it.
And yes, I followed him into our parents’ bedroom.
The door creaked slightly, but neither of them woke.
Our father was snoring softly, lying on his back with one beefy arm thrown above his head.
Even in the gloom, I could tell his mouth was wide open, slack.
Our mother was curled up on her side of the bed, her back to him and her legs drawn up, as though she was trying to get as far away from him as possible.
It happened quickly. I think John was scared that he wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he faltered, or perhaps that our father might sense us there and wake up.
If he had, I doubt John would have done it.
Our father would have taken the gun off him, and God only knew what would have happened next.
John lofted the shotgun awkwardly, and somehow got it pointing at an angle down into our father’s face. He paused, for what felt like minutes.
Do it, I whispered.
Do it, John.
And then he pulled the trigger. The room immediately transformed into a judder of noise and smoke and vibration.
The impact lifted the barrel vertical and knocked my brother backwards with the force.
Below us, my father’s face and head had been replaced with nothing.
The rest of him didn’t even move; he died instantly where he lay, his arm remaining where it was.
Our mother jerked awake with a screech and nearly fell out of bed, blood spattered all over her bare back.
That’s all I really remember. I was back in my bedroom, sitting alone, when the police arrived.
Looking back, I suspect Franklin had known I was present at the murder, but both John and I stuck to our stories closely enough for him never to be able to prove it.
Why did I lie? I’ll never be sure, but I think I did it for him – for John – because he so desperately wanted to have done it by himself, without my help.
He had wanted to protect me, and I, in turn, had played the role required of me.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I was below the age of criminal responsibility.
So John was charged and sent to a remand centre for eight years; I was fostered.
Due to press interest at the time, both of us received new and separate identities.
Regardless, I’ve never forgotten that look on Franklin’s face.
An expression that said that when he looked at me, he saw it in me – something evil, malformed and wrong.
Not just an abused, scared little boy, but something worse.
Something of my father in me. And although I got away without any official sanction, I’ve lived with the implications of that look ever since.
I’ve lived with telling myself, over and over, that it couldn’t be true. That I wasn’t like my father. That everything has a human explanation. That there is no evil.
Standing in the doorway to my parents’ bedroom now, I looked at the dim wine-stain of blood that remained soaked into the back wall.
And then I moved back down the hallway towards the second doorway along: to my old bedroom.
I hesitated at the frame, a part of me not wanting to peer in, but then I did.
The first thing that struck me was how small it was.
Could two boys have ever slept comfortably in here?
It seemed impossible to imagine now. Even without the furniture, it was little bigger than a cupboard: a dark, windowless cell.
But we had slept in here, and it was in here that we had woken up that night, and the rest of my life had begun to unfold.
Despite my best efforts, a part of me had remained here ever since, and in that interview room with Franklin.
I’d never quite believed the things I’d told myself; I’d protested too much.
But now … that could change, couldn’t it?
Franklin hadn’t recognised me as an adult.
And this room, in reality, was empty. There were no ghosts here.
No pale children huddled, shivering, where a bed used to stand.
No sobbing, black and white woman to come screeching at me for failing to save them.
It was a space to be filled, as and how I saw fit.
So I thought: I’m not evil.
I won’t necessarily be a bad father.
I won’t necessarily have a bad son.
I stood there for a few more moments, filling that nothing, and then I left.
As I walked the rest of the way back along the hall, carefully down the stairs and out into the dull grey daylight, I thought about Rachel – about the list of characteristics on her dating profile that had first attracted me, which I’d talked about in the therapy session.
There had been something else on that list that I had not mentioned.
Two details she’d given that, at the time, had been the most important ones of all.
Children, she’d written: No.
Want children: Never.
I’d always had that safeguard in place. Until she changed her mind so vehemently last year, that is, and I’d been forced to make a choice: confronting my fears of becoming a father and what that might mean, or losing the woman I loved and needed more than I could ever explain.
I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of either thing, and balancing them had been pulling me apart ever since. Pulling us apart.
It’s like there’s something he wants to say and won’t.
Yes. It had been like that.
But maybe soon, that could change.