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?