A couple of lights shone from ground floor windows, but curtains were closed against the night.
Something – a dim light – suddenly flashed in one of the upper rooms, and Matthew jumped. Gone as quickly, probably an internal hall light being switched off, yet it still spooked him, sending a shiver down his whiskey–numbed spine.
The moon cleared momentarily, exposing a sleeping hulk parked on the gravel outside the garage, similar to the old open–backed truck his father had
owned before, but a newer model. He heard the sound of a dog barking a long way off, and he turned on his heels, looking nervously back across the courtyard as he made his way across to the house.
He didn’t give himself time to bottle out, stepping into the deep shadow beneath the arched recess and thumping hard on the heavy oak door.
Sometimes they come back. Well, Dad, here I am.
‘Dad
?
Dad
!’
No answer.
He reached out for the huge, brass door handle.
BOOM
!
Matt instinctively dropped to his knees as a gunshot echoed out across the courtyard, sen
ding sleeping birds skyward in a cacophony of shrieks and terrified calls. The dog began to bark again.
‘Fuck this,’ Matt muttered, picking himself up, and starting back across the courtyard.
I should never have come.
Fear gripped him and he began to run back across the courtyard, feet splashing through puddles left in the gravel by car tyres.
By the time a second gunshot sounded from somewhere deep in amongst the trees, Matt had lost all sense of reason and had begun sprinting for the head of the lane as fast as he could. He didn’t care that he would have been safer under the cover of his father’s porch, he just wanted to be away from that place.
He turned down between the trees, breathing hard, his shoes and the lower part of his tro
users soaked. Ahead of him he could see the lane entrance, illuminated by the churchyard street lamp. It looked so far away.
And then a figure stepped out of the trees, directly in front of him.
Matt cried out and tried to turn, but lost his footing on the loose gravel and instead sprawled forward, his face striking the rough ground and his hands landing in a puddle that slopped muddy water back over him. He shook his head, dazed from the fall, and started to rise, only to find the huge, bulky figure looming over him. Something was thrust towards Matt’s face, something long and metallic. He flinched.
A bright light blinded him.
He lifted a hand to cover his eyes and a second later the torchlight flicked off.
‘Huh. Well, I never . .
.’
The torchlight flicked on again, this time a little to the right so that it cast a glow bright enough to illuminate them both.
Matt lifted his head, saw first a pair of old, worn hiking boots, then dirty rainproof trousers and finally a long shotgun in the stranger’s other hand. He froze for a second, tried to raise his hands, then saw two dead pheasants hanging from the man’s belt.
Lines scored the man’s stoic, hardened face, and the hair beneath the cap had undoubtedly greyed.
But the eyes, a deep brown, still shone with a mixture of darkness and light which terrified Matt even more because he recognised them.
A hand reached out to pull him up.
‘A little wet, aren’t you?’
Mat brushed himself down, although it made
no difference. Soaked head to foot, his cheek and hands throbbed with a sore warmth.
He had prepared perhaps a hundred different introductions.
None of them came.
‘I –’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up. Just thought I’d get us something a little fresh for dinner, and I’ve always been rather fond of hunting by torchlight. You
were
staying for dinner, weren’t you?’
The torchlight flicked off.
In the darkness the man’s expression was unreadable. Then he gave a short chuckle. ‘How are you,
son
?’
‘A little wet, Dad.
And I think I’ve busted my lip.’
The man laughed, a thick, hearty sound like a roaring fire.
‘Let’s get inside, out of the rain. We’ll soon get you cleaned up.’
Matt let himself be steered back towards the house.
His father held his shoulder with one hand, supporting Matt until the courtyard came into view and the ground leveled out.
Matt’s sense of foreboding grew as they approached the house.
In the upper floor window, the rogue light flashed on then off again.
7
‘Of course he’s coming back, Luke.’
Rachel frowned, running a hand through her son’s hair. She forced a smile. ‘Don’t be so silly. Is that what’s been bothering you?’
Luke looked away from her,
his face puckering up in the way that children’s sometimes do, as though he had done something wrong and been found out.
‘It’s okay, sweetie, I’ll understand.’
‘All you and Daddy do is shouting.’ Luke began to pick at his fingernails, face red, tears imminent. ‘Like the other night –’
Oh God
. He hadn’t heard them, surely? She had been certain the children had been in bed, asleep.
The night Matt hit her.
The door had been closed; they couldn’t have seen.
‘Luke, honey –’
‘Mummy, do you and Daddy still love each other?’
Their house’s previous owners
– an elderly couple Rachel had only met once, on the day they had come for a viewing – had built the kitchen as an extension, and had knocked through the wall of the old kitchen to increase the size of the lounge, to cope with a horde of grandchildren, she had assumed. The old couple had left the old door attached, the old back door.
Matt and Rachel had never got around to replacing it, just stripped it down and given it a lick of paint.
The keyhole was still there.
‘Mummy, have you sent Daddy away?’
‘Luke, honey . . .’ She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him tight to her. ‘Daddy’s just gone to have a think for a while . . .’
She felt her son crying quietly into her arms, hiding his sobs,
even at such a young age embarrassed to cry in front of her. She stroked his hair, and after a moment realised she was crying too.
###
Bethany’s Diary
, November 28th, 1984
It snowed bad today, diary. Woohoo! I went out, made a snowman, gave him coals for eyes, a carrot for a nose and everything, just like in my fairystory books. He looked so nice. But then Matty came and kicked him down, stamped Ralph – that was his name, Ralph – all over the ground, until only his eyes were left, looking up at me, really sad. I think he wanted to speak but the gravel I got for his mouth was all over the snow, so he could only go ‘jobba jobba jobba!!’ which I couldn’t understand.
Mummy came again tonight.
I pretended to be asleep, but watched her from under the covers. She sat by my window, watching me back. She smiled, and it was beautiful. Mummy is soooo beautiful, like a princess in the picture book Daddy gave me. Then she got up real quick, and disappeared, and by the time I got to the window, she had gone.
I was about to go back to bed, to sleep and dream of Mummy watching over me, when I saw a man standing down in the snow.
It was Daddy. He had his cap on, and was holding his gun. He must have been out looking for foxes. They get the chickens sometimes.
8
When Matt came down the stairs into the kitchen, he found his father standing at the big twin stove, stirring some unidentifiable broth with a wooden ladle.
He still wore the same clothes as before, even the waterproof trousers, though he had removed the boots and stood them in a corner, mud–caked, dripping on to a mat.
His father glanced
back at him. ‘Feel better?’
Matt nodded.
‘Yeah, thanks.’
He did.
The shower had warmed him, taken the bite out of the chill and the edge off his whiskey head. He had also had the opportunity to pick the grit out of his hands, elbows and cheeks. They still stung, but the wounds weren’t deep. They would heal in a couple of days.
‘You look pretty well, considering.
Should have been a bit more careful in the dark. Could have really hurt yourself. The clothes fit all right?’
Matt looked down at himself.
He wore a pair of jeans and a faded
Reel Deal
fishing
T–shirt, clothes he hadn’t seen for fourteen years.
‘I can’t believe you kept all my old clothes.’
His father continued to stir. ‘There’s plenty of room. No reason to throw anything away. And I guess I never knew whether someday you might return.’ He stopped stirring, but didn’t turn round. ‘You can’t have grown that much since you were seventeen.’
‘Not much, I suppose.’
His father took a large, foot–long pepper grinder from amongst a clutter of utensils and began to grind into the broth. ‘So tell me. How have you been?’
‘Okay.
Getting on with life.’
‘A woman answered the phone.
Are you –’
‘Rachel.
Her name’s Rachel. We’ve been married for ten years.’
‘Oh.
Do you have –’
‘Two.
One of each. Luke’s five, Sarah three. They’re great.’ Matt’s heart seemed to sigh. He wished he could tell
them
that. And Rachel, for that matter.
He remembered that familiar surge of power, that almost orgasmic feeling of strength, of dominance
. . . could see his hand lifting to strike –
NO
! Get out of my fucking head!
His father continued his metronomic stirring, churning the broth around and around.
An aroma of cooking meats and spices had filled the kitchen. Matt took a seat on the opposite side of the room to his father, near to a radiator, one that hadn’t been there before, he remembered. The cold still lingered, despite the dry clothes.
‘I’m sure they’re little angels.
Just like their mother.’
‘What?’
His father sighed. ‘Don’t get defensive. I just meant that she sounded lovely on the phone. It sounds like you’ve done well for yourself.’
‘I have.’
I have. Rachel, I love you.
‘Do you want to see them?’
Matt saw his father start.
‘Oh, yes, of course. There’s nothing I want more.’
‘I meant I have a photograph.’
Matt slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
‘Oh.’
Ian Cassidy sounded disappointed.
Matt pulled out the tiny pocket–sized photo of Rachel and the kids and took it over to his father.
He had taken it himself a couple of years ago, on a family trip to Alton Towers. Rachel stood with a baby Sarah in her arms, while Luke, three, hung from her arm, a big grin on his face. The last time they had been out together, so far as Matt could remember. It had been a good day. He had got soaked on the boating lake when he had tried to show off in the little rower and fallen in.
Ian took the photo, stared at it for a while.
He didn’t turn round. ‘They’re lovely, Matthew,’ he said at last. He handed the photo back without looking up.
Matthew sat back down.
His father stirred on in silence for a few minutes, seemingly devoting all his concentration to the cooking pot, but Matt knew the stew was the last thing on his father’s mind. Like himself, Ian was struggling with a sudden wave of nostalgia, and Matt was glad his father didn’t turn round. He didn’t want Ian to see the dampness in his own eyes.
‘And your career?’ Ian said at last, to break the silence.
‘You write books, don’t you?’
‘Yes . . . how did you –’
His father shrugged. He glanced back at Matthew and smiled. ‘I don’t spend all my time in this crumbling old castle, you know. I do go out, go to bookshops sometimes. There can’t be that many Matthew Cassidys in this world, can there? Not so many with dark hair and eyes like yours. I recognised your pen picture immediately.’
He sprinkled some more herbs into the pan.
‘I enjoyed
The Last Tears of Summer
greatly. I thought Bessie Parker was a fine lead character. Very powerful, the way she handled losing her child.’
Matt was surprised at his father’s knowledge of his books, but he shrugged.
‘Thanks . . . I always thought she was a little cardboard. Her character lacked the strength throughout that I gave her near the end. I thought . . . I guess practice makes perfect.’