Daddy's Return 2

The knock came again. Louder, more insistent. At the other side of the door a throat cleared.
Before anyone could speak an engine revved in the avenue. Mammy. He descended the stairs at speed. Granny and Kai both listened. Kai listened so hard he heard the static moving in the air. The backdoor rattled. He held Granny’s hand, the skin dry as an autumn leaf. Voices rumbled and gurgled below like air in a locked radiator. Granny and Kai sat in silence. Shadows lengthened across the room. The lights were not switched on, the curtains were not drawn. Kai’s neck was stiff from sitting; he was bursting for the toilet. Granny’s breathing became rhythmic and deep. He heard a grunt, she had fallen asleep. The thing that Kai had been waiting for didn’t happen. Instead the backdoor banged and rattled. An engine ignited and gravel crunched as a car pulled away.
Kai snuck with his back hunched to the window. He didn’t drown. He forgot to. He watched as Daddy’s car disappeared down the drive. He watched until its taillights were extinguished by distance, until the lane was black again. He waited. There was no noise from downstairs, just Granny’s breathing and the tick-tocking of the clock. It was dark except for the light of the Sacred Heart which shines perpetually.
In the bathroom he relieved himself in a steady stream that seemed to last forever. Downstairs was darkness too. The kitchen range fired. Kai jumped. He went about turning on lights and pulling the curtains closed the way that things were supposed to be. Mammy was gone. He looked in all the rooms. There was no note. He walked about the house, then he ran about the house. He opened all the doors; the wardrobes and under the stairs. She wasn’t there. He made a terrible racket. No one gave out. When he had looked everywhere, the shed and in the yard, he sat in the Daddy’s imprint on the armchair by the range. There was room enough for two of him. He swung his legs and imagined he was back from driving a lorry on the continent. He cleared his throat and tried to hock the phlegm up. He dropped his voice and said ‘Well Kai,’ from as a deep in his chest as he could manage.
His voice was an echoey embarrassment to the empty kitchen. He examined the contents of the ashtray on the range top. There were eight roll-up fag ends in it. He picked one up and put it to his mouth to take a drag. He spat. One had lipstick wrapped around it. She was back smoking. He tore apart the roll-up with his fingers to see how it was made. He didn’t like to sit on his own in the sitting room without the fire on. The hands of the kitchen clock dragged stubbornly across its face. Mam-my, Mam-my, Mam-my, Mam-my....
 He’d never made the dinner before. Toasted cheese sandwiches and milk. One for him and one for Granny. He turned on the grill. It hummed. Gently. Not like the phone when he’d picked up the receiver to practice calling the guards. A fast and steady beeeeeeeeeeeep, he’d dropped it down again. The guards were Plan B. He only burnt the top corners of the sandwiches.
He scraped the burnt bits into the sink. He carried Granny’s up the stairs to leave on the locker by the bed. He made a lot of noise but she didn’t wake up.
He whispered ‘Granny’ but she didn’t wake up. He went right up to her ear and he hissed ‘Granny’ into it. She didn’t stir. He tipped her arm but he didn’t shake it. The house was very lonely. He turned all the lights back out. Except the outside lights on the back and front doors so Mammy could find her way in. He double checked the grill was off. Fully clothed, he lay on his bed. He wanted to be ready in case. For what he wasn’t sure. He looked out the window for cars approaching the house. He saw cars driving far away on the road and he used all the power of his mind to will them onto the lane with Mammy.
Kai liked to read. Tonight he could read as much as he wanted. There was no one to put the light out. The print moved, he blinked, the words swarmed together on the page like insects. The sentences wouldn’t make sense. They were jumbled up and stupid. The book was stupid. He was stupid. He slammed it shut and threw it across the room. He crawled under the blankets. He wasn’t going to bed. It was cold. He wasn’t going to sleep. He was waiting up for Mammy. He was closing his eyes a minute. He wasn’t going to sleep. He was resting his eyes. He wasn’t going to sleep. He fell asleep. The waiting was exhausting. When he went downstairs in the morning Daddy was eating his breakfast. ‘Well Kai,’ he said.

'Well Daddy,' said Kai.

Daddy's Return 1

It wasn’t a new car or a posh car, it was beat up and rusty and when he looked in the window he saw the ashtray was full of stubbed-out roll-up ends. His stomach flipped like a fish at the end of a line. His thoughts were woolly. There was nowhere else to go but into house. He went to the back door with dragging steps and a heart that clanged.
 Slowly he raised the latch and cocked a shy head into the kitchen.
‘Well Kai,’ said Daddy.
‘Well,’ said Kai.
He shuffled inside. He stood stock-still for a second before slinging the bag off his shoulders. It landed with a thud on the floor. No thud had ever been as loud. He froze. Two bright balls of colour burnt up his cheeks. It was difficult to look or not to look at Daddy.
‘You’ve grown a couple of foot since I seen you last,’ he said.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, neither made a move towards the other. Kai examined the patch of floor at his feet. Daddy whistled; his eyes roved the kitchen. Kai glanced up, he saw the grey in Daddy’s hair, the stooping of his shoulders and the wrinkles that had deepened around the mouth that drew on roll-up ends.
‘The old place hasn’t changed much,’ said Daddy, catching his eye.
Kai blinked. ‘Where’s Granny?’ he asked.
‘Sure sit down and have a chat with your old man.’
‘I better go and let her know I’m home.’
Before he could instruct them, his legs hurried him past Daddy through to the dining room. Granny wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the hall or the sitting room either. He didn’t want to call out. He didn’t trust his voice. He thumped up the stairs.
 ‘Granny?’
 He opened her bedroom door softly, fearful of the surprises that lurked around each corner. She was in the bed. Her hands fidgeted smoothing invisible creases in the cover. They went to her head, distractedly patting the tufts of hair. They waved through the air disturbing it for the sake of disturbing it. Her thin shoulders rose and fell visible through the transparent material of the nightgown. Her fret was working itself towards a fever.
‘That man.’ ‘That man,’ she said and she could hardly hack out her indignation as a cough wheezed and barrelled through her.
  Kai poured her a glass of water from the jug on the bedside locker and her hands shook as she lifted it to her mouth so he placed a hand on hers to steady it.
‘That man showed up today and he hasn’t been heard from in years.’
She had breath enough to get the words out. Her eyelids drooped. The eyes were pink and tired. He could feel her bird bones through her paper skin. In her nightgown, short sleeved, she was withered and defenceless.
‘Does Mammy know?’ he asked, part croak, part in a whisper.
‘I tried calling her in the shop but he wouldn’t hear of it. Told me I’d be upsetting her with her having to work the rest of the day through. I suppose he had a point. She’ll find out soon enough. If the shock doesn’t kill her,’ said Granny and she made the sign of the cross.
Kai didn’t want to leave Granny. He sat beside her on the bed. Their whole world was this room. The bed was an island. The carpet around the bed was an ocean. No one could cross from the door to the island bed without a boat or else they would drown. He and Granny were safe on the island. The drawers opening and closing downstairs, the footsteps pacing the kitchen, the sound of a throat clearing and the radio switching on were far away things, like things that happen in space. Where stars explode all the time but no one on earth can feel it.
Granny’s tablets were on the dresser beside the bed. That was another continent but one he could reach at a stretch. There were lots of tablets. Orange and yellow capsules in a brown container, bright pink ones in a foil packet, chalky looking blue ones that were too big to swallow. ‘One to be taken two times daily’ He spilled them onto the white bedspread and organised them into her pill boxes – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Granny told him what each and every tablet was for and how often she had to take them. They were all to make her better. Her heart, her chest, her shaky hand.
The stool in front of the dresser would be a boat if they had to escape across the ocean. Out the window, not down the stairs, they couldn’t risk passing the kitchen. Kai knew the tablets were not sweets, he’d heard it often enough. He could taste the chemical zing in his throat, they were colour coated poisons. He looked from them, to Granny, to the Sacred Heart above the bed. He sighed, Granny would never make it out the window and down the side of the house to escape even if their boat didn’t capsize.
The clock beside the bed ticked towards the time Mammy was due home. He wanted to warn her. But he didn’t know how to do it. He hadn’t started his homework. He thought of his schoolbag abandoned on the kitchen floor. She was going to be cross with him. There was a strange man in the house. The ghost of Daddy.
His tummy was rumbling but he wasn’t starving. Besides, there was no dinner. The wood on the stairs signed softly like someone was coming up them who didn’t want to be heard. There was a quiet knocking on the bedroom door. Granny’s eyes met Kai’s. Both sets turned to the lock. There was a key in it but it had not been turned.



What happens next?