The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope
19
Things are starting to unravel in my head because I’m getting tired. Control is slipping away but I clutch the gun tighter. I will not let go. I take in great big lungfuls of the stifling air coming in from outside and try to calm myself. I try to remember the plan that I had this morning, the plan to make her listen and understand. That’s what I need her to do, listen, understand and then acknowledge her part in all of this. Then we can move forward from there. But I’m not sure what forward would look like. Who will we be after today, the two of us, the four of us?
‘Why?’ she asks me, utter confusion in her voice. ‘Why are you doing this?’ She is cradling her wrist as it puffs up and her eyes scrunch with the effort of fighting the pain she is in.
I shove the gun into the waistband of my pants and clap my hands together, then wipe them on my jeans, getting rid of the sweat. It’s easier if I don’t look at her. I don’t want to see her pain because I know it will sway me. Even a monster has some feelings.
‘On with the story of my father dying,’ I say, and I see George watching me. He is too little to conceal his facial expressions and so his thoughts are obvious. He thinks that the gun is less accessible because it’s in the waistband of my pants. I reach behind me and pull it out and his little shoulders slump. ‘I’m not stupid,’ I tell him.
‘I didn’t say you were,’ he says, with more anger creeping into his tone than I like.
I take a step forwards and crouch down right in front of him, so close he can feel my breath. ‘I can hurt you like I hurt her, like I hurt Sophie and that stupid toy. I can, you know,’ I say, my voice low.
He wrinkles his nose and sits back further on the sofa, pushing his body into the cushions to get away from me. I can’t help the small thrill of power I feel. My father would have benefitted from believing I feared him, rather than that I found him ridiculous. Perhaps all fathers like to be feared instead of loved.
‘Tell me why you didn’t call the police when your father died,’ she says quickly, forcing my attention away from George.
I stand up and go back to the window. I don’t like the heat but the air in here is starting to get a stale smell. In fact, it stinks.
‘I came home from school and he wasn’t on the sofa, where he usually was. There was an empty bottle of whisky on the coffee table along with at least seven empty bottles of beer, but I didn’t think much about that.’ I can still see the label on the bottle of whisky, slightly torn at the corner. It was a cheap brand, even I knew that. I was grateful he wasn’t there. I thought he had gotten himself so drunk that he’d stumbled off to bed and I looked forward to having control of the television and being alone for the night. I moved the bottles aside and put my feet up on the ugly fake wood coffee table, something he hated me doing. I kept my shoes on.
‘I thought he was sleeping, just sleeping,’ I say.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she replies.
I shrug. ‘I could have checked on him, but I was so sick of his shit. I just left him to it and had myself a good night. I even opened one of his precious beers and drank it while I ate my two-minute noodles.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ she says.
‘Yeah, I don’t care what you have to say about it,’ I say mildly, and then I point the gun directly at her. ‘I think it would be best if you just shut up.’
She sags down and the children huddle closer to her.
‘Perhaps they can go and get something else to eat. It would be better if they didn’t hear this.’
‘Actually, it’s time they learned about the real world. This,’ I say, gesturing around the room with my gun, ‘is not the real world. This nice garden and the nice house and everything that goes with it isn’t the real world and they should know that. My childhood was the real world.’
‘Most children are not held hostage by someone who’s supposed to love them,’ she says, ‘by their—’
‘Just shut it,’ I say. If she understood anything at all about love, then I wouldn’t be doing this. I thought I understood love but it turns out that even when I think I understand it, I can’t have it. All I can have is heartbreak.
I wait in case she’s going to argue with me but she doesn’t. She’s hurt, that’s fine. I’ve been more hurt than any human being should be. Physical pain heals; it’s the mental shit that kills you.
‘I didn’t check on him the next morning. Just got up and went to school. It was only when I came home that afternoon that I thought something might be wrong. Do you want to know why I thought that?’
‘Why?’ she asks but she’s only asking to placate. I don’t think she really cares.
I laugh, a dry laugh. ‘Because there weren’t any more empty bottles on the coffee table. It was still the same ones from the day before, the same whisky bottle with the torn label and the same seven beer bottles. It was then that I thought to check on him and I went and opened his bedroom door and, man, the smell… well, I can tell you it was pretty bad. He’d lost control of himself in the moment he died.’
‘What does that mean?’ asks George.
‘It means he’d pooped in his pants, just like a baby,’ I say.
‘Don’t…’ she begins.
‘You know what the trouble with you is?’ I ask and then I answer my own question because I know the answer. ‘It’s that you think you have any control of this situation at all, Katherine, and you don’t, you really don’t.’
‘I know I don’t have control,’ she says. ‘You’re the one with the gun.’
‘I am,’ I agree.
I freaked out when I saw my father on his bed, where the sheets were crumpled and stale-smelling before his death, because he never thought to wash them. I don’t say this aloud but I did. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him and slapped his face and shouted, ‘Dad, Dad, wake up, Dad.’ I checked for a pulse. We’d been taught how to do that when we had a lifesaving class at school and I checked, holding my breath, hoping for something, anything, but his skin was cold and his eyes were glassy, his face grey. I knew he was dead. I would like to say I felt his spirit in the room, that there was a cold draught and I knew it was him saying goodbye or any of that other rubbish people say when someone they love dies. But I didn’t.
I sat on his bed, the smell not bothering me anymore, and cried for a long time. I think I was crying because there was no hope left. Before he killed himself, I’d had moments of believing that something would change one day, and he’d get himself together. Once, when we happened to watch a programme on addiction together, he said quietly, his voice slurring, ‘That’s probably me.’
‘You could get help,’ I said. ‘Those people got help.’ My heart fluttered at the possibility of things being different.
‘I may just do that,’ he agreed, but then he opened another beer.
His death meant that my life would only get worse. I understood that. Like every kid of divorced parents, I had been hoping that he would man up and get better and then somehow, she would take him back and we would get to be a family again. It’s ridiculous for a fifteen-year-old to think that way, but I’m pretty sure that most kids hold on to that small sliver of hope.
His death meant all hope was lost. It might have been hours that I sat there but then my tears stopped and I felt, as strongly as I would a punch to the stomach, a shutting down of part of me, a closing over. He wasn’t worth my tears or my time and all he had ever done was let me down. I went through his wallet, took what little cash he had and left. I started walking and I just kept walking. I wanted to call my mother. I knew that I should call her and the police but I didn’t do any of that. I bought myself dinner and I waited. It was spring and it was still cool in the evenings but I slept on a park bench that night, curling up small.
I shake my head as I think about this. ‘I felt like I had no one to turn to when he died,’ I say, ‘that’s why I waited.’
When I returned the next day, the smell had seeped out of his bedroom and into the flat and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer so I called the police. Once they arrived the whole thing was set into motion and by that night I was back with my mother, back in the last place I wanted to be, because it was all her fault and he’d said as much.
He left a note. I never told anyone but he did.
Dear son,
Sorry about this. I know you don’t want to hear anything I have to say anymore so I’ll leave you with one last thought. Don’t trust women. They’ll make you the happiest man in the world and then they’ll break you into pieces so you can’t imagine living through another day. Don’t ever trust them.
Dad
I should have listened to him on that one, and I did for a while. But then I met the woman I thought would be the love of my life, and I fell so hard and so fast that I didn’t stop to think about what would happen when she was tired of me.
And so here I am in this room. As I look at this woman, I realise that I hate her with such a visceral force it’s a wonder I haven’t killed her already.
‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore,’ I say, and I go back to looking out of the window, at the green grass in the perfect garden that doesn’t tell the whole story of who she is and what she’s done.