Chapter 32 Damon
Damon
There is something about this place that’s both familiar and unfamiliar, if that makes any kind of sense. The colours of the rendering and front doors are different, but I know I’ve been here before. I direct my line of vision towards the fifth floor. That’s where I need to be.
The lift stops outside number twenty-three.
I saw my mum walking towards this flat with Callum Baird in my last recall.
It has a red-painted door and chrome letterbox, and there’s a cream-coloured net curtain draped across the windows.
Several porcelain wolf figurines stand on the windowsill, glaring at me as if on guard.
I press my face against the glass to peer inside, but the netting is too thick to see anything that might nudge free more memories.
This building must have played a large part in my childhood.
So why can’t I recall it? I review my memories of Mum and realise that most are set inside the flat, not outside it.
I try to recall playing with other friends out here or in the park below, but draw a blank.
There are more empty spaces from this period than I realised.
‘Can I help you?’ comes a voice to my side, all but ejecting me out of my skin. Only four days ago a man held me over the side of a car park railing and threatened to drop me to my death. You’d think I’d need no reminder to remain on guard at all times.
My paroxysm of terror triggers another coughing fit, so the elderly man who set this all off has to wait for my reply.
He’s wearing a navy-blue flat cap and pushing along a silver walking frame.
His stern expression is to be expected. He has no idea I’m searching for a trigger, not a flat to burgle.
‘I think I used to live here,’ I offer when at last I’m able. I take a step back and give him a disarming smile that most decidedly does not land.
‘Did you indeed?’ he says doubtfully. I detect a faint trace of stale alcohol on his breath. ‘And what, you can’t remember?’
‘It was a long time ago, when I was a kid.’
‘Well, you don’t live there now, so I suggest you move along.’
He clocks me spotting the cordless landline telephone in his cardigan pocket and raises it up to his shoulder to ensure I know he is ready to use it.
‘It’s okay, I’ll be off.’
When my second smile proves no more effective than the first, I start walking. Then I stop midway towards the lifts and look back at him.
‘I’m sorry, but could you tell me how long you’ve lived here?’
‘A good long time,’ he snaps. When that bit of ferocity doesn’t send me scurrying, he sighs. ‘Since the place was built,’ he offers up grudgingly. ‘In the mid-seventies.’
‘Then you must remember a boy called Callum Baird.’
His puffed-out chest deflates a little. ‘Course I do, we all do. Terrible business. Lovely kid. He lived in that flat you were paying so much attention to.’ His wrinkled brow knots further. ‘You a reporter or something?’
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘I think he and I were friends when we were children. But my memory isn’t so great, and I thought if I came back here, it might jog it.’
‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Damon Lister.’
His puffs out his cheeks with the speed of a finger snap. He props himself against the railings with one hand and raises the phone a second time. But this time it’s as if he’s ready to hurl it at me.
‘And you have the nerve to come back here, after . . . after what happened?’ he shouts. Spit flies from his mouth and there’s wildfire in his eyes. ‘Go on, get out of here. Fuck off!’
I’m taken aback by his change in temperament. I’m no threat to him, but I raise my hands to my chest in a gesture of surrender to make it clear.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I say.
‘Don’t play dumb with me,’ he hisses. ‘Bad apples never fall far from trees.’
‘Mate, calm down.’
‘I’m not your mate!’ he shouts, and he starts dialling three nines on the phone’s keypad.
His raised, greatly agitated voice is drawing an audience. Two front doors along this row have opened.
‘You alright, Jim?’ asks a heavy-set man in a vest that barely covers his midriff.
‘I’m leaving,’ I reply, and hurry past that onlooker and the next, baffled by how badly that went and the questions it has thrown up.
What did he mean by ‘what happened’? Was he referring to Callum’s murder?
And who is the bad apple, and who the tree?
Callum can’t be either, as he’s already referred to him as a lovely kid.
It seems clear that one of them is me, or at least might be.
When I turn to take one last look back at the flats, my heart fills with warmth when I catch sight of Mum stepping through one of the doors and closing it behind her.
Her halter top exposes portions of her back, and her skin is covered in horrendous burn marks.
In that moment it all comes flooding back and hits with me with the force of a speeding train.
I remember how Mum died.
No overdose of prescription medicine, no hanging from a light cord or hacking at her wrists in the bath. Her death isn’t the straightforward suicide I’ve spent so much of my life believing it to be.