Submersion (29 page)

11. Billy

If I was going to get the truth about my father’s whereabouts, I knew I was going to have to play it carefully. Ask the right questions at the right moment, without raising any suspicions. If I went snooping through drawers and cupboards, I’d need to ensure there were no traces of my ferreting. And I’d need to be clever. No one was going offer up anything voluntarily. I’d need to have a proper plan of action.

Tilly’s seven word question continued to worry me.

What if he didn’t leave the house?
she’d said, relegating my own theory that he’d simply vanished to a childish fantasy.
What if he didn’t leave the house?

The more I thought about this and the more I allowed myself to believe it, the worse the implications became for those around me. Mother, Aunt Agnes, Uncle Jessie. If Father had never left our house, something must have happened to him. Something horrible. And they all had to know about it, didn’t they? I kept thinking about that memory of Mother – washing the floorboards the morning after he’d gone. What was she scrubbing away so vigorously? There was an obvious answer, but I didn’t want to consider it. She couldn’t have done
that,
could she? Then there was the fact she’d started to work for Monty Harrison shortly after. Was he linked? Was it just coincidence; my single mother in need of income? And why did it have to be a secret? Why couldn’t anyone know that Mother worked for Monty Harrison?

Too many questions and too many answers to find and live in fear of. But I had to find out. And I had to start somewhere.

Mother was the most obvious place. As much as I knew any mention of my father would provoke a reaction – tears, anger, a forceful bout of cleaning – now I was suspicious of her, it would be worth any pain I suffered. It would give me the chance to view things differently, to look for something I’d previously not thought to.

‘Is Father ever coming back?’ I ventured two days after Uncle Jessie had supplied us with the gift of sausages. It was breakfast time, but we had returned to standard supplies: weak grey tea and toast, bit of jam if I was lucky.

Mother had glared up at me, her eyes burning into mine.

‘We don’t talk about him, remember?’ she had stressed, holding my gaze with her cold fury.

‘But that’s not fair,’ I’d continued, daring to push her. ‘He’s still my father. What if I want to see him one day?’

If she was surprised at my perseverance, it didn’t show. She just continued to stare at me with that still chill in her eyes.

‘He left, Billy, simple as that,’ she said, standing, finally breaking our optical stand-off. ‘And he didn’t tell me where he was going, so unless he appears out of nowhere, you aren’t going to see him again. The fact you might want to see him is neither here nor there.’

She picked up our breakfast things and took them to the sink, where she plunged them into soapy, warm water. The iciness that had just been in her eyes now filled the entire room.

In the past, I might have snuck off to cry in private. Maybe that’s what she did, too; let her guard down in solitude. But on this occasion – steeled by my resolve to find out the truth – I simply got up from the table, took a tea-towel from its hook on the wall and began to dry off our breakfast things as Mother pulled them out from the hot suds.

We did this in silence for a while, until nearly all the items were washed and dried. And then Mother did something – said something – she’d rarely done before.

‘I’m sorry, Billy,’ she said, her voice quivering ever so slightly. ‘I’m sorry you’ve missed out. Missed him. But there’s nothing I can do to change that. If I could, I would. And whilst I don’t show it, it’s hard for me, too.’

Wiping her wet hands on her apron, she held my cheeks in her palms and gazed at me again, this time softly. For a moment, I saw her pain and her love. Then, just as quickly, she switched it off, as if to say
that’s enough.

‘Right, must get on! And you need to finish getting ready for school!’

The moment between us surprised me. We’d never talked about him like that before, but then I’d never pushed it before.
‘We don’t talk about him, remember?’
would have ended the matter in the past. It made me wonder if I pushed a little more often, I might just get to the truth. And I wondered, seeing the softness and sadness in her eyes, whether the truth wasn’t quite as awful as I imagined.

But I overestimated my Mother’s own resolve. The next time I mentioned Father, she simply clammed up.

‘We won’t be talking about him, Billy,’ she’d scolded and, when I tried to push it, she simply raised the flat iron of her right palm as a sign to be silent.

So, thereon, I looked elsewhere for clues about my father.

If there were traces of his existence about our house, they had been eradicated over time. I found nothing in Mother’s drawers – not a photo, not a letter. I knew there were secret letters she received and replied to –
could they be from my father? –
but wherever she kept them, they were very safe. And, if my father hadn’t left our house, they wouldn’t be from him - they couldn’t be. But maybe they were about him? Needless, they didn’t turn up during my search through the house. So, I’d have to wait till another one came through the post. Next time they did, I resolved to sneak it away before Mother read it and find out exactly who my mother’s pen-pal was.

Giving up on finding clues at home, I moved on to extended family.

Aunt Agnes had little to say. She was more concerned that I might have upset Mother.
Just be careful, Billy. She loved him very much and he just up and left you both. There’s little else to say.
So, there was little chance of finding out much from her. Aunt Agnes did have one bit of good advice, though.
You could ask your Uncle Jessie. Whilst I know he hasn’t heard from him over the years, he will have his memories. So, you can get to know your father that way.
I thanked my aunt – she meant well, after all, but didn’t appreciate the extent of what I was after. I didn’t want to know
who
he was, just
where
he was,
and
what
had happened to him.

But I took her advice, all the same. And, following a simple shrug from Tristan when I asked him about Father – I took our small wooden boat and sailed it a little further than usual, to Uncle Jessie’s
dirty junk yard,
as Mother called it.

Uncle Jessie’s place was like a smaller version of Old Man Merlin’s, at least in the sense that it was full of intrigue and, I had to agree with Mother on this one, full of junk. Not that I considered Old Merlin’s treasure junk - quite the opposite. But Uncle Jessie’s house wasn’t really a house any more, more like a big, open-plan tool box, interspersed with furniture here and there. And even the furniture wasn’t quite standard – two old car seats sat in his living area, wooden crates did for tables and his bed was just a rolled up mattress he unravelled at night and threw some bedding over. I liked it though. It smelt of oil, a real man’s place and was appealingly opposite to what Mother created at home.

Uncle Jessie’s house had a different layout to ours and it only had two floors. The river road was much deeper down Jackson Way, so the ground floor and the garage attached to his house were more or less below the surface. He had constructed a platform out the front, which you stepped onto before entering his house. This was also where he moored his speedboat.

The fact I had an uncle who owned a speedboat got me a bit of positive attention at school, especially from the boys. But when I promised that Jessie would take us all to school in it and then that didn’t happen, some of them just didn’t believe me.
You’re making it up, Billy boy. You ain’t got no uncle, and he ain’t got no boat.
Still, whenever I saw it, I felt a real sense of pride and knew that my uncle was a bit cool. Cooler than having a father, in some ways.

Inside, as I’ve said, Uncle Jessie’s house was filled with tools and supplies for the work he did and you had to be careful not to trip over things.
What do you do, exactly?
I’d asked him on a few occasions and he always smiled and replied with:
a bit of this and a bit that.
Which, whilst it didn’t give me any specific details, did seem to sum it up. He and Tristan were often off on a job, repairing things. Anything from leaking roofs to crumbling walls, if something needed fixing or protecting from our environment, they could do the job.

Apart from the bathroom, all the doors had been taken down, so the rooms flowed into each other, his tools of the trade flowing freely between the once separated areas. Uncle Jessie didn’t mind me poking about –
Just watch out for sharp edges
– but once I’d got dirt that wouldn’t come out on a white shirt and Mother had threatened to stop me going there. So, I tended to watch what I touched and where I sat. Uncle Jessie reckoned he always had a bit of a tidy if he knew I was coming –
just to keep in her good books.
He meant Mother. But if he did spruce things up a bit for me, then I pitied the state things must have been in normally.

‘Let me cover that over,’ he said, on the day I went searching for answers. Noticing a dark stain on one of the car seats, he grabbed an old jumper –
it’s clean,
he said with his eyes – and lay this across it. ‘There, you’ll be alright now.’ I sat down. ‘So, what do I owe for this pleasure?’

You could tell Uncle Jessie wasn’t set up for having kids as guests. There was nothing to keep you entertained. Old Man Merlin had a whole floor of children’s things, and even Great Aunt Penny had a box of old games. Uncle Jessie got out his pack of battered playing cards if you were lucky, but usually he just sat down with you and talked a bit. I didn’t mind that. It made you feel a bit more grown up. And, the conversation I wanted to have involved being just that – grown up.

‘I want you to help me find my father,’ I announced, trying a different tact with him. The idea was to see if he reacted in any way, if there was a flicker or flinch in his features that gave something away.

‘You do, do you?’ was his initial response and I wasn’t sure how to take it. Was he laughing at me, or was he simply making double sure – is this what I really meant? ‘And what makes you think I can help with that?’

His tone became a little more serious, not grave, but enough to indicate he was taking me seriously.

‘He’s your brother, I thought you might have an idea where to look.’

He sighed deeply, leant slightly towards me and ran his hands through his longish hair. His muscles on his arms flexed as he did this and I recalled another reason why having an uncle was better than having a father. The kids at school who had seen him, the ones who believed me, thought he was a bit cool too, with his shoulder length hair and his big biceps; he looked a bit like a rebel. A bit like Tristan did. The snatches of memory I did have of Father involved him looking quite ordinary. And the bits I made up in my head reinforced that – I saw him in grey clothes, reading books and looking quite serious. I didn’t imagine him getting his hands dirty or riding a powerful machine across the water in any weather.

‘You know, I have tried to find him,’ he began, his sighing over, still leaning in on me, his chin resting on two clenched fists. ‘When he left, I looked in all his old haunts. Checked with his friends, his work, even old girlfriends from years back.’ He saw this last detail piqued my interest. He grinned. ‘He had a few before your mum, you know. Not too many, but enough.’

I found myself grinning too, and suddenly the memories I’d constructed of Father were a little less grey.

‘But I couldn’t find a trace of him. Not anywhere. No one had seen him. I felt bad, useless when reporting back to Esther. She was distraught. I know she doesn’t show it, that she puts on that front. That she hides behind her faith and her cleaning.’ Uncle Jessie stopped, checking my reaction. He was talking like an adult, as if to another adult – had he said something I wouldn’t like? Conceding he hadn’t, he continued. ‘She was so cut up. Couldn’t stop her crying for days. And then she just switched, got into a different mode.’

‘Cleaning mode?’ I suggested and it earned me a nod.

‘It’s how she copes, Billy. It’s what she does to keep her sane, however mad it might seem.’

We both smiled at this small joke.

‘But what did happen, Uncle Jessie?’

He looked at me as if the question was a puzzle.

‘What happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened is he walked out on you and your mother, and no matter how much I loved my twin brother, I can’t forgive that.’

I pushed a little further. He must know something; maybe he was reluctant to say.
It’s not my place
was a phrase I’d heard adults say when they thought something wasn’t their business. I wondered if I’d get that from Jessie.

‘But something must have? No one says he was a bad guy.’

‘No, no he wasn’t,’ Uncle Jessie admitted and I thought I saw a glimmer of something in his face. A pause as he thought, a doubt, a question – it was hard to say.

‘What?’ I asked, feeling brave and nervous.