Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [104]
‘Mummy said you get angry when you have beer.’
‘Did she now?’
Gemma stands and stamps her feet. ‘And you had beer!’ She is screaming.
Jim is afraid that even at this distance the mother and son might hear. He picks up the opened can. ‘What does that say?’ He points at the label.
‘Beer!’
‘Good girl. And what does this word say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sound it out. G. I. N.’
‘Gin … ginger.’
‘Ginger beer.’
‘It’s still beer.’
‘Not the kind that makes me angry.’
‘I want Mummy.’
‘Come here, sweetie. Come on. Give me a cuddle.’
She thinks about this for a moment, a two-second protest. Then she rushes into his arms. ‘Sorry, Daddy.’
‘That’s OK, sweetie. You’ll see Mummy in a few hours.’
She pulls back to look her father in the eye, the soul-deep gaze of a child, piercing the facade of adult, police officer. ‘Daddy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Anna my new mummy?’
‘Mummy is your mummy. For ever and ever. Anna is just Daddy’s new girlfriend.’
‘I don’t want a new mummy. Or daddy.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Now, you remember last month, when Mummy said I had to go away, because I was looking for somebody?’
‘Like hide and seek.’
‘Kind of. Well, the man you saw on the step, he was the one hiding.’
‘So you won! You found him.’
‘But he never even hid.’
‘He cheated!’
‘I don’t think he really played. He just left the game.’
‘That’s silly. He’s a silly billy.’
Jim laughs. He does not tell his daughter that was his name. That he faked his own death to hide from who he had become, shed his skin like a chrysalis after reading the journal of Naqarase Baba, to return to his mother. Because he could. Because his mother was alive and kicking, not like Naqarase’s, a whole country, a religion.
Or like Cal’s, a stranger of his own blood waiting in a shopping centre.
Or like Jim’s, a plot in a cemetery.
He thinks about what they all share. Naqarase, Cal, Billy K and himself. Abandoned. He looks again at his daughter, and considers the fate of dying alone in the outback, stabbed in a guest house on a foreign shore, vanishing from one life to start over again. Then he leans over and kisses his daughter. He knows he is lucky, and tells Gemma that he loves her.
‘I know you do, Daddy.’
‘That’s beautiful. How do you know, sweetie?’
‘Because you came all the way back from the other side of the world to see me. Did you fly on an aeroplane?’
He tells her he did.
He does not tell her that he had thoughts about running from his own life, his failures. And what a fool he would have been if he had. Running from a woman who loves him. His beautiful daughter.
He does not tell her that officers cornered Ricky Wise in a restaurant at Heathrow, booked on a flight to the Cayman Islands with a suitcase filled with dollars and offshore bank accounts.
Or that a dog walker found Chief Superintendant Roberts in a New Forest car park, sitting up straight in his immaculate uniform, a hosepipe running from the exhaust through the passenger window.
‘Daddy, can we go and say hello?’
‘They want to be alone.’
‘Maybe they have cake?’
‘Maybe they want to eat it themselves. Anyway, we have some chocolate biscuits. Finish your sandwich first.’
She lifts the top from the lunch box, and then lifts the tops from the sandwiches. She discards a ham and tomato, then finds a cheese and pickle. Jim studies her eating, the concentration of her bites avoiding the crust. He can see himself in her, yes, in her teeth and hair. And in her features he can see where he came from, his own mother.
Gemma drops the second crust on to the plate. ‘Can I look again, Daddy? Please.’
‘Come here.’
He picks her up and turns her around. He gives her the binoculars and sits behind her, angling the lenses on to the house.
‘The lady’s gone!’
‘That’s his mummy. Is he still outside?’
‘There he is! On the step again!’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s playing the guitar!’
‘Can you hear?’
‘Not from this far! Can we go closer, please.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Above the house and field, the trickling brook and swaying trees, puffs of cloud sail on the breeze.
‘Daddy.’
‘Yes.’
‘He