In the bottom drawer of the desk in my childhood bedroom there is a curious ball shaped thing. Twisted, overlapped layers of fabric tape mummify the secrets within. My pens are dull and the ruler cannot cut quite like a saw. There is nothing for it but to pick, peel, and persevere. The sinister red glow of my alarm clock reads 5:51 a.m. Seven days to the minute that my Dad, Thomas Arthur Quinn III, let slip his final words:
‘Be good to yourself, Thomas.’
That moment has been looping on my mind ever since, but I cannot recall it exactly. I loom overhead as a spectre but cannot get close enough to peer over my own shoulder. I catch only glimpses; the thin whisper of his moustache, the soft circle contorted by his dry lips as he puffed a few agonising final breaths. Not unlike myself, swallowing a groan, suffocating a grunt as I burrow into the final layer. Beneath the tape there are plasters and under those is a small tin pencil case with rusted hinges which grind as I lift its lid. The inside is bare; a packet of alcohol-free wipes where just a lick of moisture remains, a single curling plaster, and Miss Harding’s Art dept. stencil knife no. 13 with the chewed grip.
I deposit the tins wrapping in the wastepaper basket and hold the blade close to the amber bulb of my desk lamp, entranced by its featherweight, its deftness of touch when used for its intended purpose. I have no intention on using it for said purpose. The tip is maroon and crusted with old, dried, flaking blood. I swipe the papers scattered across the desktop to one side and scratch the blood flakes with my crooked thumbnail then grasp the handle between my teeth and lay my arm flat across the edge of the desk, gently pulling up the long sleeves of my woollen jumper. The index and middle fingers of my right hand caress the carved ridges of my left wrist. They are the width of my forearm, white slivers like moonlight through the gaps of tall trees. The blade tip meets my skin; it is cold but not freezing, bites but does not yet pierce. It hesitates. I hesitate. And stop to listen to the birds chirping, my Mum snoring. My sister, Cassie, back in her old bed after so long, tosses, her mattress springs creak. She is the only one of us not alone.
The first prick holds the entire challenge, it shocks, always feels deeper than it actually is. A fresh line tears between old wounds, blood like cherry wine overflows. It isn’t inside of me anymore. It isn’t 5:51 any longer. As I lift my elbow, errant branches of blood collect into a single stream like a mighty current searching for the falls. It flattens tiny trees of forearm hairs as it swims downwards. I can dam it with a fingertip but cannot stop it from running into my palm. I hold it there where it is still and deep like a calm sea but the longer I stare into it the more it feels like a storm is brewing. Thunderclaps are footsteps. Lightning is the drawing of the cord on the hall lamp. The heavens erupt and cast open my bedroom door. I elbow the switch on my desk lamp and clench my fist to trap the ball of blood, turning onto my side, my back to the door.
Cassie yawns like a siren as her fingers plod in the darkness around the edges of the light switch. I pull the sleeve of my jumper down over the cut and press it tightly against my stomach, the wool itches like there are beetles crawling under my skin. I shuffle back, lifting my hips to squash the tin box, wrapping, and the stencil knife under my thigh. Cassie finds the light and almost blinds us both. I feign a groggy, What? I have managed to cover up the bleeding and associated paraphernalia under the covers, I peak over my shoulder, but she has not seen something I so obviously missed. The wrapping for the pencil case is in the wastepaper basket but that’s just rubbish, curious rubbish, but rubbish all the same. I’ve gotten away with it for now. She’ll be in to ask where Mum keeps the Jaffa Cakes. On her bedside cabinet, I could yawn and she might just leave me be.
She lumbers forth. Her shoulders hunch, knees buckle but she regains a modicum of posture. She clasps her hip with one hand whilst the other cradles her belly. There is barely room for one of us in this child’s bedroom, never mind three. She plods over the tattered rug to my side which is a city made for racing toy cars and reaches into the wastepaper basket, rummaging. She’s going to find the mummified dressings, and if I move too sharply the pencil case might leap out from under me. The stencil knife like a harpoon shot onto the floor, or worse, at Bumpy. Like a deer in headlights, I freeze. She pulls something out, unravels it and reads:
Thanks, Cassie. Now, I’m going to talk a little about…
And nothing lies underneath that cliffhanger.
Cassie sighs deeply, she knows I told Mum that it was finished. She sinks backwards against my legs onto the tiny bed. I turn to face her, carefully shifting my wares up and under the pillow. She has almost entirely disappeared over the far side of the bump.
‘You can’t just wing a eulogy, Tommy,’ she yawns.
‘Says her that got the easy bit.’
Cassie rubs the sleep back into her eyes.
‘Hour-and-a-bit long phone calls with Aunty Roisin about every time Dad skint his knee or ran over her big toe with his trike do not constitute easy,’ she says. ‘Five of those exercises in patience and restraint, I might add. I had to hang up on her one night. Ninety minutes she blethered on one story about him planting tadpoles in her wellies on a day trip to Aberfoyle before remembering that it was actually Uncle Peter.’ She rolls her eyes at that, but when her pupils settle again, they are piercing. Sharp and dark like little black bullets, they cast upon the limb glued to my stomach. I adjust my bad arm slightly, the tearing of the wool from the cut rips like Velcro. I press it even further into my stomach and grip my fingertips so hard into the heel of my palm that they fizz. Her hand reaches over, searching. I need to get her back on topic.
‘And in mine I’ll tell them that he married Mum, they had you, (realised what a colossal mistake that was), then they had me and peace and justice were restored to the universe,’ I tell her.
Dimples punctuate Cassies smile like quotation marks.
‘Then he got sick. And there are no anecdotes in that, Cass. There is nothing funny about a dying man.’
Cassie nods mournfully, needing a moment to accept that and receives it. She quits scrutinising my suspicious limb so closely. Her eyes fall onto her bump, and she wraps both arms around it.
‘Listen, save the biography for me. Just think back to when we were kids. Tell them about when he taught you to ride a bike or bait a hook or any of that wholesome Father/Son stuff. Nothing major, just a nice little story to tell. Cheer us all up a bit.’
If only the truth spilled as painlessly as blood.
‘I don’t remember that stuff, Cass,’ I tell her. And when she turns back towards me, her gaze is different now because she believes me. ‘I might only ever remember him the way he was in that bed in that sickly smelling ward for the rest of my life.’
Cassie bites her lip, tears at it, uses the pain to keep herself from welling up.
‘All of us who saw him in the past few months will only ever remember him like that. Weak and tired and all the things he never was before. And the ones who never visited or didn’t call, why should they be in the chapel to get cheered up in the first place?’
‘I wish it were just the three of us,’ Cassie admits.
‘Four,’ I remind her, prodding Bumpy. He/She/They/It will get a name one day but Bumpy has been fine for months. Cassie laughs at first as I am doing this then recoils. Cramp tears across her sides.
‘Cass?’
She pushes herself up, first from the mattress then my shoulders. I wince and can feel more blood spilling out.
‘Oh, the joys of the walking piñata,’ she says, finding her feet. ‘It won’t be just the three – four – of us. As much as I would like it to be. Mum wouldn’t have it. Aunts and Uncles and cousins and colleagues and friends and neighbours and, I think, the Evri man.’
‘Dad always said he saw him more than his children. Was that a dig?’
‘I’m not sure he was capable of such slights,’ Cassies reminds me, and she’s right. ‘So many people and I swear all that half of them will want to do is poke my belly, or even worse, rub it. Sometimes I wish he would just burst out of there like in Alien and nip their greedy little hands-’
Cassie stops.
Her head scans down.
There are blood splatters like chipped nail varnish on the underside of her feet. A massacre in Car City. She pulls up the legs of her pyjama bottoms. She didn’t look horrified until she realised the blood was not her own.
‘Tommy, you’re bleeding,’ there is a wailing in her voice.
‘I’m not, Cass, there is pure indignation in my own as I reply. ‘It’s late, you need to go back to bed.’
I thrust my bloodied arm further under the roll of my stomach and bend my back over it. The rush of air around my elbow as I fidget shows where the betrayal of the fabric took place. My favourite woolly jumper. Must have snagged it on something. Cassie digs her nails into my chest and drags me back. I can only hold my arm to my stomach so tightly. Sweat and blood loosen my feeble grip. My forearm is like a twig, and she is about to snap it.
‘Fuck off, Cassie!’ I yell. And we both stop at once.
Mum stirs but does not wake. It is in the heart of this ceasefire, with each of our eyes and ears trained on the doorway and down through the hall, that Cassie seizes upon her moment to strike. With one swift motion she yanks my whole body up and out of my single bed. The ball of blood in my hand sprays across the room; over posters of old Bond films, double page spreads ripped from Top Gear magazine, dotting across her pyjama top, cheek, and forehead. I’m too tired, frustrated, bored, angry, apathetic, useless, weak – I am too much of myself and everything I hate about being that – to stop her from taking captive my wrist and unrolling my bloodied sleeve.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ I plead.
If I could scream it might sound like I was weeping, but I can’t. No tears to shed, no stories to tell, or half-eulogies to write. All that pours from me is the blood for which I have no use. Like a robot fully charged with no task to operate. Cassie steps back just a little, just enough to let me scramble through the bedsheets to collect that last wipe and plaster. As I rub the wound, Cassie snatches the stencil knife poking out from under my hip.
‘I knew you shouldn’t have come back here,’ she says with a bite.
I sigh, and reach my dirtied, bloodied hand out to take the knife but she won’t let go. Her whole body is shaking as she makes her way to the door.
‘Tommy,’ she says with her hand hanging over the light switch. ‘Fuck you.’
She leaves me, alone and in the dark, bleeding still.
*
Thomas might have been the name he had given me, but he only ever called me by it a handful of times. At my graduation, when I wrote off my first car, the day that he died, and on one further occasion. He was Thomas, and I was Tommy. That name was his, after it had been his Fathers and his Father before him. A copy of a copy of a copy. There was a pointedness to it, he had to choose to say it, had to think about it before the word left his lips.
‘Thomas!’ he called. ‘Weren’t you going to help me with this?’ He was seldom ill-tempered, never blew a gasket, but he could get mightily frustrated before something had not even happened yet. It was a sweltering hot midweek morning in August.
‘His train leaves in twenty minutes, and we need five of those just to unload all of this,’ protested Mum. Sprawled across the near side of the car were suitcases, backpacks, boxes and gym bags. Far too much to take on the train but she would not drive on the motorway. Never has.
‘It’s a two-minute job,’ said Dad. Said Thomas III. There was a desperation running through him, and not just from the weight of the end of the bench in either hand. Rusted feet turning his palms bronze.
‘You surely do pick your moments,’ sighed Mum. She slotted her key in the driver’s side door and twisted it but stood.
He did not look up at her but took his eye off the far side of the bench rooted to the ground to scan the carousel of luggage.
‘It’s University he’s going to,’ Dad groaned as the feet dug deeper into his palms. ‘Not the Army.’ He let the end of the bench slam upon the driveway as punctuation to his point. He stepped back from it and into the shade of the garage door to the other end of the bench and took a hold of it, ‘Tommy!’
Another name, perhaps another person more likely to hang up his phone call to help him. I forget who had called me, what was said, but I remember hanging on after the conversation had come to its natural end to avoid this, admittedly rare, domestic.
He threw his hands in the air. Shook his head. Grasped the edge of the bench closest to him now and dragged it across the driveway towards the garage, ducking under the door which he would clear by a half a foot standing at his best height. The four feet scraped across the driveway toward the garage leaving stuttered snail trails of microscopic bronze flakes. Mum couldn’t handle the screeching.
‘Just- Tommy- Help him before I kill him,’ she pleaded. Palms clasped over her ears as she disappeared into the driver’s seat.
I made excuses though none were required, I recall that we were on about the weather in Aberdeen at the end of the call. I didn’t know anyone in Aberdeen then, couldn’t guess how it came up with whomever I was speaking. I stepped out of the dining room and dumped yet another backpack (where did I get them all from?) by the rear passenger door and lifted the bench by the seat and back rest. The underside of the peeling wood was coarse and made my palms feel scaled. Once Dad lifted his side of the seat and back, it seemed a hell of a lot heavier to him than it did to me. Mum had flattened the back seats but the game of Tetris that was everything I would ever need for Uni, and a hell of a lot I did not, was my next task.
‘Not the garage,’ he instructed, backing out from his original plan. Would be too much mess. ‘Straight to the garden.’
Through the garden gate, I headed for the firepit before he yanked me closer back to home. A bit of dithering on the exact spot to lay it down as he joked he would never move it again. He was right. For ten years he said he would put it back out the front, tomorrow.
When we set it down, just where he wanted it, on the back patio under the kitchen window, he set out on a violent coughing fit. He twisted away from me as I approached, reached for the handkerchief from his back pocket. Mum honked the horn, but I couldn’t move, he wouldn’t let me get near to him. To do what exactly, I still don’t know. There was blood on the handkerchief, a few spots like tiny red polka dots. He was crouched by the far side of the bench, one hand clutching its arm rest, the other rubbing the centre of its seat.
The car horn honked again, this time as though an anvil had been laid upon it.
‘See that?’ he coughed. I knelt down with him, but I couldn’t make out if he meant the handkerchief or the bench or Mum waking up half the street. He spat on the handkerchief and used an unbloodied corner to wipe at some kind of marking. When it was clear he had in fact meant the bench, he used my shoulder to push up and swing his hips into the seat. The coughing had stopped but I could still hear it. I never stopped hearing it. I sat beside him. Between us there were three lines like tally marks, the first was shorter than the second and third.
‘Your Great-Grandfather,’ he said, pointing to the first line. ‘Missed that when he was sanding the beams of the seat. Never said a harsh word towards anyone, but he had one or two reserved for himself when he noticed his error only after the final coat of varnish, so I was told.’ His index finger slid across to the second tally mark. ‘Before he left it to your Grandfather, he purposefully carved this line,’ he told me, as his finger slid to the third line. ‘Your Grandad did that for me, too,’ he said before reaching into the breast pocket of his work shirt. The blade of his Swiss army knife glinted, he held it up to the sunlight for a moment to admire it, then he dug into the side of that third line and made a fourth. It was ragged, but of a uniform height and width to the rest.
I wondered then and still do now why he chose that exact moment to immortalise my existence and his fatherhood, whilst the train got closer and the luggage still lay on the side the car. I didn’t know what to say, wouldn’t know if I could go back now. I watched him for a moment in fear of another coughing fit. Those had been frequent, but until now, never bloody. It never came.
‘Your Dad’s driving you!’ Mum yelled, as she strutted through the garden gate and slammed the back door.
‘Too much to take on the train, anyway,’ Dad said. I turned my head around to him to agree but he was looking dead ahead. The lawn was trimmed and neat, always was in summer. The fire pit had been an excellent addition; I was sad to have had such little use of it. At least got a few more nights out of it than Cassie had, though she has beaten me since. Flower beds along the fences were at their pinkest, most purple flourishing heights. There was much to be proud of, but nothing compared to his pride, never spoken but known, which swelled for the two maple trees perfectly centred at the far end before the garden fell off into the stream. They stood resolute like arrows aimed with perfect precision into a cloudless sky. Leaves swayed lightly but held firm atop sprawling unbent and unbroken branches. I never saw him go toward them other than to rake the leaves in Autumn, which would not be long now. But he held such a reverence for them that I have forever failed to understand. I never asked why he wanted the bench moved, but I was beginning to see why.
‘Better go make amends,’ he said, pushing off the seat and heading inside. ‘We’ll go when you’re ready.’
But I wasn’t. Not for a while after that. My fingertips were caressing the tally marks which meant Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, and Tommy. And I was staring at the trees. I remember how they looked that day, impossibly tall and two arm lengths wide each without even the furthest protrusions of their branches touching one another. Leaves a shade of yellow found nowhere else I had ever seen before or since. Amberish, goldish, lemony, somehow all at once.
I remember a lot from that day. I thought I would remember nothing better than watching the wind gently row each branch in a separate current from its neighbours. Or the struggle of unloading the car in an already packed car park outside of my halls of residence. Or Dad forgetting that he had left a box in that same car park and returning to find that same box stolen. I hope someone out there made good use of a binder filled with Pokémon cards and every odd season of The Sopranos on DVD. I didn’t even pack a DVD player. Never bought a television until my third year. Or sharing ridiculously discounted fourteen-inch pizzas with the other freshers on my floor; still have the dormant group chat lurking somewhere deep in my WhatsApp history, Holyrood Hoes. No, it would be none of that I would regrettably remember best about that day.
‘Text Mum,’ Dad said, as he slammed the car boot. ‘She worries.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I reassured him. ‘The drug dealers usually wait until all the Mums and Dads have driven off to pounce upon their new prey.’
He laughed then and pulled me in for a parting hug. But as I reached under his arms to find his back, the long sleeves of my hoody caught between his arms and his side. It was not the chill evening wind passing through which announced this to me, it was the look he gave me then. Lines of scars which were only just beginning to scab. He reached out to feel them, to ask if there had been some accident, it was on the tip of his tongue. But nothing leaves a mark like self-harm scars. Accidents are random and imprecise. It took just a glance for him to understand more about his son, more about me, Thomas/Tommy, than he ever had. If he told Mum, I would have known. That only made two people outside of myself in the entire world who knew.
*
The leaves are fallen now, made black and grey amongst the dirt and weeds. The tally marks, however, are almost shining. He had come home that day, likely still replaying that moment in his mind and set to work on the sanding and the varnishing late into the night. And it really did the trick. I figure here will be the safest place to hide until Cassie has finished her breakfast. Even if the air is Baltic. I check my watch; we will be leaving shortly but I am not exactly sure when. Cassie is driving, if she can reach over Bumpy. A chasm across my stomach tells me I am starving but I’ve ignored that plenty of times before. I push up from the bench to peer in through the kitchen window to see that Cassie has left her dishes in the sink. I slide open the patio doors, anything to make Mum’s life easier with the family coming over after the reception.
The handle of the tap is stiff between my freezing blue knuckles, but the water is warm over the backs of my hands. I twist it further and the water flushes faster and pulses hotter. The skin of my fingers could peel off under such intense heat, but the sensation is euphoric. I glide the pointed fingers of my right hand through the static posed ones on my left and they squeak like trainers on a freshly waxed gymnasium floor. My palms are taut and the water is boiling. The small blonde hairs on my wrist under my shirt and suit jacket and overcoat singe and burn but I cannot tear my hands away. I do not want to. I won’t. My skin is chalk white and then blistered and bloody red. Footsteps at my back hobble and then rush. Cassie wrenches the handle and the water quits, she pulls both of my palms to hang at my chest in the tight space between us. They are raw, pink, and fizzing. Steam leaps off of them as I try to tear away from her iron grip.
Her tensed brow and swollen eyes tell me that her parting shot at me in the middle of the night had been no slip of the tongue. She meant it. Fuck you, Tommy. Fuck you for coming back here. Fuck you for not writing your half of the eulogy. Fuck you for getting back into old and bad, bad habits the minute everything becomes too much.
‘Tommy,’ Mum’s call from the dining room drifts between us like smoke. ‘Tell me you remember this.’
I turn to leave but Cassie pulls me back and wraps both of my hands in a tea towel: Viking Longships of Largs. She says nothing, her expression is unchanging. She shakes her head and pulls her car keys out of her handbag before marching, wobbling, off and out the back door past the kitchen window and bench towards the garden gate and then the car.
Each of the dining room chairs are drawn and topped by photo boxes in descending levels of decay. The table is smothered under scatterings of polaroids, film reels, and newspaper cut-outs. Mum sniffles when she hands me the photograph. I had forgotten the feeling of a printed photograph; the surface sticks to my thumb. A fingerprint blots the memory of a sunny day on Blackpool beach. I am no bigger than a bag of spuds, no heavier than a handful, held up at the length of each arm by Mum on one side and Dad on the other. My feet kick against the ocean breeze over golden sands, the lights of a carousel swirl and blur into a crown over my bucket hat. Cassie weeps over a tumbled sandcastle in the background.
‘He tried to steal the camera,’ Mum says. ‘The man who took this picture. Your Dad had to chase him down the length of the beach in sandals. Past the camels! What a scene it was. You were howling, I was hysterical, Cassie was probably putting sand down her pants. But he did it. Comes striding back a few moments later, not a hair out of place, and hands my camera back to me. That was Thomas,’ she affirms. Mum smiles, reaches out, and her fingernails scratch the carboard bottom of the tissue box. ‘It wasn’t until we were showing the photos to your gran that I noticed what he had written on the back.’
I turn it over:
Maggie,
You can chase them next time.
Thomas x
The car horn honks and headlights illuminate every inch of the dining room, under the archway, and as far back as the rear wall of the kitchen. Mum pushes out from the table and offers her elbow for me to take. I shimmy to the other side of her and offer my unbandaged limb. She links up with me and I hold onto her lower arm. She drapes the tea towel over the back of her chair seeming not to notice the pearlescent blush of the skin on the back of my hands and rubs concentric circles over my palm. My fingers are numb.
Gravel crunches under our feet as we amble to the car. Cassie rushes over to Mum and helps her into the passenger seat then slams the door into her side. My door is locked.
‘Are you going to speak?’ she whispers over the roof of the car.
After I cleaned and bandaged the wound, I fell asleep and never thought about my half of the eulogy again. I tell her, ‘No.’
She rolls her eyes and hits the key fob to let me in before slinking into the driver’s seat.
Fuck you.
*
The firepit is deep and dark like a cauldron. Stones of black and dusky grey piled fifty centimetres high on four sides to form a square. Each side a metre and change in width. Lighter tiles once blanketed the top of these walls, but ash and damp and dirt have rendered them obsidian black. A sharpening wind stirs amber flames. Edges of timber crumble into dust over gold-nugget sized lumps of coal. The fire was just at the right height for warming hands, but far too close to sit on the tiles with your back turned. I’m sure Dad never had to google how much wood to add or how to keep it from singing off any eyebrows, but it paid to keep my head buried into my phone whilst the mourners were circling. They grazed like sheep across the buffet and bleated on endlessly though not much of it was about Dad. He was dead, that was old news. The Winter night’s drawing in ever closer, now that’s a story. It is late now but not late enough. Only the hardcore remain. The professional mourners. The ones who had to toss one or two funeral cards of old from the breast pockets of their blazers in the chapel car park to make room for Dad’s. Those who came for Mum and Gran and Aunty Roisin divvy up the dregs of dipping pots and dried out pakora in the kitchen. Uncle Peter lies collapsed across the couch, a can of lager balanced precariously over the bow of his heaving gut. I don’t know where Cassie is, I doubt that I am supposed to.
Had I written my half of the eulogy, I might have burned the papers here. I imagine that happening and the closure it might bring. The wound in my arm yawns as I stand and stretch to light a cigarette on the open flame. I take a draw and wander over to the bench. A spotting of ash falls between my knees when I am sat down again. Barely enough to rub between two fingers. The wind takes the ash, and an unseen hand takes my cigarette and stomps it cold and dead. The far end of the bench creaks and bows, Cassie leaves a wide berth between us and leans back and looks to me once before gazing unblinkingly upon the two trees, just like Dad.
‘Weeks ago,’ she croaks. I offer her a sip of my flat lager before realising. Bumpy wouldn’t approve. She continues, ‘We had the whole thing planned. It was after his third or second to last session. I was to meet him at Central Station then I would take him shopping and let him pick out some toys.’
She sighs and a shiver runs a circuit across the breadth of her shoulders and spine. I push up off the bench and lay my overcoat atop the arms and back of her blouse. She straightens it without turning to acknowledge me. I sit back down.
‘But you should have seen him, Tommy,’ Cassie sighs. ‘Grey as a seal, groggy and almost all the way dead, slumped on a chair under the departure boards. He perked up when he saw me, but you know yourself he had no poker face. He could barely stand. I told him it could wait. He tried to fight me, but he knew he wouldn’t win. He said he needed a drink of water before setting off, I got up but he told me he wasn’t dead yet and headed for WHSmith.’ She hasn’t taken her eyes off the trees yet. ‘Wednesday afternoon, so the station was noisy; loudspeaker announcements, charity box janglers, and folk generally blethering guff. Then you heard it, over the top of it all. Louder than a train engine, horn, or a bomb even.’
Cassie stops. I lean in. After a moment she clicks her fingers repeatedly, ‘What’s it called? That French chocolate shop Mum can’t pronounce. What does she call it?’
‘Hotel Chock-o-lotto,’ I remind her.
She nods, ‘It was coming from the piano across from that shop. You caught it instantly, the first few bars of Changes by David Bowie. And Dad was playing it.’
I study her face for a moment. Cheeks that were blue from the cold wind are flushing pink now in the afterglow of the fire. She is still but not entirely unmoving. Her lip faintly quivers. Her eyelids strain. She has no tell of a liar, but I cannot readily believe her.
‘I mean, when did you ever hear him mention the piano, playing music, or anything like that?’
She looks to me and I want to tell her that I had never heard it, but the words do not form on my tongue. They are not in me at all.
‘When I got back to him, he’d gone shy. He didn’t mention it so neither did I, no matter how desperately I wanted to. He was just so tired.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me at the time?’
She turns to me.
‘It was his secret, and I wanted to keep it for him,’ Cassie says. She looks back at the trees, ‘But you men aren’t made of much else.’
A loose patio tile wobbles when Cassie picks up her bag and rests it on her lap.
‘Did Dad know?’ she asks.
She almost pulls her hand out of her purse but stops herself. The warmth of the fire is extinguished from within my bones instantaneously. Cassie lays the stencil knife below the tally marks between our thighs. Her fingers tremble like the choice is not her own, as though there is an unbreakable inevitability at play. I lay my hand over hers. Hers is warm, mine is bitter with chill.
‘I won’t let you lie to me anymore,’ Cassie says, and lightly shakes my hand off. ‘If it was hard being back here, hard dealing with all of this, you could- you should have spoken to me before you started again.’
In a glance I tell her I know, and I am sorry.
‘To think we loved him without knowing every part of him,’ Cassie says, as she rubs her thumb over the carving. A tear escapes over the hill of her cheek.
After a moment, she rubs her belly but does not look down to it.
‘I don’t know him, maybe I never will. Not all of him,’ she says, more to Bumpy than me. ‘But I will make sure he can share every dark and beautiful side of himself freely.’
Cassie lifts the stencil knife and the blade’s edge meets with the wood of the seat and digs until the tip is submerged then scores a line across the dashes making a tally of five. Tears are stagnant on her cheeks as she turns back to the trees. I turn with her. Leaves like ashes are scattered. Branches contract and expand against the wind. The trees breathe as one.
I reach out for Miss Harding’s Art dept. stencil knife no. 13 with the chewed grip, and she rests it upon my palm. I do not take even once last glance at it before tossing it into the fire.
