thinking, Did I do this?
“’Snot your fault,” Bob breathed into my face at the door. He stank of drink.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
“No!” he grunted, and he sort of shouldered open the door at the same time. There was something in the way of it (coats, piles of coats and blankets on the floor) and we had to squeeze through because it would only open a little way.
The flat was trashed. It looked like Bob had emptied every cupboard and drawer and shelf on to the floor and made a pile of stuff and then rolled around in it.
“Bob, what have you done in here?” I said. “Christ!”
“I was looking for something,” he said with his eyes screwed shut, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t find it.”
“What were you looking for, somewhere to sit?” I asked, because that’s what I was doing.
“Oh, sit on the floor, sit where you are!” Bob waved his hands around, annoyed, so I did, shoeing aside a typewriter lid, a flyblown banana and some pants. But then I got up again because the floor was wet.
“Why’re you drinking Bob?” I said. “What’s happened in here?”
Then I stopped because I saw something familiar by the window – a box spewing out papers; a washing up liquid box that I’d seen Mum take out of her car and chuck on the dump. I looked around the room then, turning slowly, taking it all in. There were other things, other boxes, mostly unpacked, stacks of notebooks and magazines and stuff.
Dad’s things.
Not everything we dumped, not even close, but quite a lot of it.
Bob was searching my dad’s stuff for something.
“Bob, what the …?”
“I just couldn’t find it,” he said, and he was crying, shaking his head and crying, his face collapsing into his beard. “I made five trips to that godforsaken place, on foot, carrying the stuff back and forth and I couldn’t bloody find it.”
I asked him what it was he couldn’t find, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him. He was just sobbing and shaking his head, standing in the middle of his trashed flat, like things had gone way beyond what it was he could or couldn’t find.
Then Bob poured two massive glasses and thrust one at me.
“Keep drinking,” he said. “Keep drinking,” and I didn’t want to, but Bob drank his straight down and poured another.
Then he stared at me with his eyes all glazed over and he said, “You’re nothing like your dad,” and I asked him what he meant by that.
“Pete was my best friend and I loved him, but he was a bad man,” Bob said, and it just hung there between us, this “bad man” thing, and neither of us liked that he’d said it, even though we both had our reasons for thinking it was true.
“Will you tell me what you were looking for?” I said.
Bob said he didn’t want to tell me anything. He said, “I’ve hated knowing it all this time.”
“Do you know where he is?” I said. That would be my worst, if he’d known all along where my dad was and never told me.
“God no!” Bob said. “Do you think I could have kept that from you?”
“I don’t know, Bob,” I said, and I was starting to get angry. “What are you keeping from me?”
Bob looked through me for a minute. He drained his glass again and poured another. Then he said, “I know something about your dad. Something he did.”
“Something he did?” I said, like a brainless echo. I hate it when people do that.
“Yeah,” Bob said. “We had a fight about it.”
“What did he do?” I said.
“He said he didn’t do it but he lied,” Bob said.
“What was this thing he did?” I said.
“It was Violet.”
I thought I was going to throw up.
“Violet?”
Bob nodded. “Violet Park. The lady in the urn you stashed here without asking.”
I said I was sorry. Bob looked at me and said, “So was it really her in there?”
“Yes,” I said, and then I had to ask. “Was she dead or alive when you had this fight about her?”
“She’d been dead for three days,” Bob said. “Your dad found her.”
The hairs on my arms prickled. My stomach lifted and then dropped again. My dad found her. That kind of put him at the scene of the crime.
“Found her? How?”
Bob shrugged. “At home. Dead at home.”
“Jesus!” I said. “How did Violet die? Was it old age?”
Bob looked as if he was standing on the edge of a canyon about to jump in.
“Overdose,” he said, staring at the floor.
I’m not sure exactly what happens when you get a surge of adrenaline in your body. Your heart bangs inside you, I know that, and it feels like all the blood in your body drains away from other places like your brain and your eyes and your fingers.
“So she killed herself?” I said.
Bob shrugged. Then he shook his head. He wouldn’t look at me.
“The thing is,” he said, his voice thick with tears, “your dad lied to me.”
“Lied how?” I said. “What about?”
“He said he was home looking after you. You had chickenpox. But Nicky was raging because he hadn’t been back, she hadn’t seen him and …”
“I remember having chickenpox,” I said.
I remember Mum putting baking powder on them to stop the itching and I remember still having scabs when I found out I didn’t have a dad any more.
“How do you know?” I said. “How do you know Dad was there? How do you know he wasn’t looking after me?”
“Oh come on, Lucas,” Bob said, and I knew what he meant. My dad never spent more than five minutes watching over me when I was sick. Anyone who knew him would know it was a crap alibi.
There were several things I could have said. But I didn’t.
Bob said, “Violet Park changed her will and left your dad everything.”
“Did he know that?” I said. “Maybe he didn’t.”
“He knew it,” Bob said. “We talked about it. He told me.”
“And what did he say?” I asked.
“When the old girl goes I’ll be rich as sin,” Bob said, and stared at me hard.
I shut my eyes and tried to think.
“Did you accuse him of killing her?” I said, kind of amazed at Bob’s nerve.
“Lucas, I saw Violet the day she died and she was happy.”
“So?” I said. “Maybe she was happy because she’d decided to die that day.”
Bob stared at me. “That’s exactly what your dad said.”
I stared at the reflection of the room in the window. I traced the pattern of the carpet. I didn’t want to look at Bob at all. What if he hadn’t done that, if he’d kept his mouth shut? Would my dad still be here?
“I knew Violet,” he said. “She wouldn’t