Chapter 51 Damon
Damon
In the blink of an eye, the past my dad thought he could hide from has returned to haunt him.
‘Damon,’ he says, unnerved.
‘So you remember me,’ I reply rhetorically.
He looks me up and down before regaining his composure, clearing his throat and glancing around quickly to check no one is close enough to overhear us. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘You should never have been released from prison. A hundred years behind bars can’t make up for what you did.’
‘I’m getting on with my life.’
‘I’d like to do the same, but I keep seeing your victims.’ I tap my temple with my index finger. ‘They’re stuck in here.’
He doesn’t understand. And why should he?
I must sound insane. But he doesn’t ask me to expand either.
Instead, Dad turns on his heel and begins to walk away towards the mess I’ve made further down the aisle, which only serves to rile me further.
I grab another tin of paint from the shelf, my cracked and bruised ribs screaming as I do so, and launch a second five-litre can of emulsion after him.
It lands to one side of him and, as with my first salvo, the lid flies off when it strikes the floor.
This one doesn’t spray us much, though. Instead, its contents shoot free and flow down the aisle beside him like white-water rapids.
I watch his fists clench at his sides, and I half expect him to come racing towards me like the thug he is. Instead, he walks on, stops when he reaches his trolley, and removes a large brown bag.
‘What do you want from me, Damon?’ he asks gruffly.
Then he walks back my way a few steps, opens the bag and scatters sawdust over the paint.
He’s close enough to me that I spot my name tattooed across the knuckles of his left hand, and for a second, this catches me off guard.
The letters are dark blue, blurred, barely legible.
It suggests he must have cared about me enough to put my name on his skin.
On the knuckles of his other hand, I can make out a ‘b’ and an ‘o’. Bobbi, I assume. My mum’s name.
He’s now on his knees, gloves on hands, mixing the sawdust with the paint like he’s kneading dough.
‘I died recently,’ I continue, and he turns sharply to stare up at me. ‘I drowned in an accident.’
I don’t know him well enough to recognise concern or confusion.
‘Chunks of my life that I didn’t know I was missing flashed before me,’ I continue. ‘And now I hallucinate. I see Daisy, two other kids, and Mum. They follow me, they watch me, sometimes they scream at me. And I can’t get rid of them.’
He stares at me, lost for words. He doesn’t know what to process first: death, hallucinations or the children. He finally chooses the latter.
‘Who were the other kids?’ he asks in a hushed voice.
‘Daisy Barber is one, but you already know that, then there’s Callum Baird, another familiar name, and the other is a kid no more than a few months old, who’s always carrying a blue chequered blanket.’
He drops his gaze and his lips part ever so slightly, then close again as if he’s had second thoughts about what he was planning to say.
Instead, he takes two pieces of cardboard and begins to scoop up the paint and sawdust and drops it into a second, empty bag.
I remain standing, arms folded, casting a shadow over him as I await his explanation.
I want him to attempt to justify what he did, to give me something to hit back against. But he says nothing.
‘What?’ I say eventually. ‘Is that it? Aren’t you even going to try and defend yourself?’
Again, his fists briefly clench and I know he is forcing himself not to react. But I want him to. I want to meet the real him. ‘I don’t know what you’ve come here expecting from me,’ he says. ‘But whatever it is, I can’t give it to you.’
I am not a violent man – at least, that’s what I thought before I ran over and killed someone – but at this moment I’m so consumed with rage, it scares me.
It takes all my strength to stop myself from stepping back for another of those paint tins and staving in his face like he did Daisy’s.
But I possess enough self-control to know that would make me no better than him.
I may have taken a life, but it doesn’t mean I will do it again.
I am not my father, I remind myself. I am not my father.
Tears begin to form and I curse myself for showing weakness.
‘If there’s only a shred of decency left inside you,’ I say, ‘if you ever cared for me at all, you’ll help me to fill in the blanks. Tell me why you hurt those kids.’
Still on his knees, he holds his head down, and I wonder if, like me, he is pushing his tongue against the back of his front teeth as he formulates a response. He looks up at me again.
‘You need to leave,’ he says firmly.
It’s not the answer I wanted. My anger surges and I return for another can and hurl it into the space between us. The tin bursts open, spinning as it does so, splashing us both, this time with red paint.
This gets me what I’m after. He rises to his feet like a grizzly bear, under threat and unfolding. His eyes are blazing and his jaw is tight as he tosses his bag of sawdust to one side, raises both fists and marches towards me. Instinctively, I take several steps back.
‘Ralf?’
The man’s voice comes from behind him. Dad stops in his tracks and turns to look. A badge on his white shirt reads ‘Deputy Manager’. ‘What’s going on?’ the man asks, surveying the mess.
Dad can’t say anything more to his boss than that he’s sorry and it was an accident.
‘So,’ I shout, ‘you can apologise for some spilled fucking paint, but not for what you’ve done?’
His manager steps in between us. ‘I don’t know what this is about, mate,’ he says, ‘but we have a zero-tolerance policy for customers who abuse our staff.’ He speaks into a walkie-talkie and asks for urgent assistance in aisle 23b.
‘Do you know who he is?’ I ask, pointing to Dad. ‘Do you know what he did? He’s a child killer, and you’ve given him a job.’
The man attempts to hide that this is news to him. ‘Our parent company is part of the government’s Right to Work programme,’ he manages, ‘and our head office decides who is suitable—’
‘I don’t care!’ I bark at him. But before I can continue, a burly woman wearing a black-and-orange security jacket approaches us, assessing the situation with admirable cool. The deputy manager orders her to eject me from the store.
‘He’s the one you should be kicking out,’ I say, glaring at Dad.
The manager gives me one last chance to exit of my own accord. Realising I’m not going to accomplish anything else here, I make my way along the aisle and towards the sliding entrance doors.
I turn to take one more look at my dad, now back on his hands and knees, scrubbing the crimson-and-white concrete. I can see myself in how pathetic he looks and it’s deeply unsettling. I rub my damp fingers together and see splashes of red paint on them.
We both have blood on our hands.