Blame

By Paul Read

A young man must confront his traumatic childhood when his estranged father dies under suspicious circumstances in this “raw, startlingly honest novel” (Matthew Norman).

Lucas is just a boy in the summer of 1989, when he witnesses an event that will tear his family apart. Over a decade later, Lucas learns that his estranged father has succumbed to a heart attack—news that leaves him oddly cold. Confused by his own lack of grief, Lucas escapes to New York with his lovely colleague Mariana. But a dark secret from his past threatens to destroy their burgeoning relationship before it has even begun.

When something suspicious about his father’s death comes to light, Lucas begins looking for clues to what really happened. But his search draws him back into his own traumatic childhood. As the startling truth is revealed, Lucas must confront the fact that father and son may not have been so different after all. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785079207

Paul Read

Born restless in the very centre of London, England, Paul Read now fidgets his way back and forth between the Uk and Spain in search of good coffee, good conversation and fresh vegetables. In the absence of finding any of these, he writes, schemes and plans for global domination but generally settles for a series of podcasts, books, and online teaching courses: All freshly brewed and 100% guru-free.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The three of us trudge to the summit with heads bowed, the north wind twisting the long grass flat under our feet. Our midday sun is a ghost behind clouds pregnant with snow, and nothing in this beautiful, hostile place has a shadow.

Mum holds the box. It’s made of thick purple cardboard, about the same shape and size as a child’s shoebox, and is bound by an unpretentious elastic band. Suddenly, she slows.

‘Here. This is the place.’

The view – all jutting piers, undulating shores and wind-lashed hawthorns – rises to meet us as we scale the crown, and fifty unspoilt miles of the south coast unfurl before us. At the horizon, the sky becomes the land becomes the sea. My eyes smart with the cold.

‘He loved this place,’ Mum affirms for the hundredth time, this recently retired woman who used to dress for any occasion but today wears tired jeans and a shapeless brown jumper. The weather has made an unruly thatch of her hair.

She slides the lid off and the three of us peer inside.

My brother’s reaction is as I’d expected, but I take no pleasure from the vaguely harrowed expression he wears. He’s not a man of science and had been expecting the grey ashes of television drama. What he sees instead is an exercise in simple physics: the pulverised dry bone fragments from a cremulator risen, via convection, through the lighter granules after ten years of sitting in the corner of Mum’s bedroom.

‘It looks like…’ he begins.

‘I know,’ Mum says.

A middle-aged man approaches from a path below, his waterproofs vacuum-sealed against his torso by the swirling wind. A black Labrador leads the way, sniffing at the sparse hedgerows. I look to the others.

‘Shall we wait?’

They both nod. We’ve waited a decade; another two minutes won’t hurt.

‘We should turn our backs,’ my brother suggests, pointing across the green-grey, ‘so he’s taken across the Downs, that way.’

He’s.

We turn away from the wind, though it seems to make little difference.

The approaching man quickens, as if he knows we’re waiting for him. His eyes are apologetic. In his wake, clouds break and snow begins to spiral in small flakes, black against the white sky. They settle on the frozen ground.

So, this is the day it has to happen. My brother’s right: those fragile, shell-like bone particles are him. This is more than a gesture. This is goodbye.

We have arrived at an ending.

Mum begins to pour as she walks along the brow of the hill, leaving a little trail of fragments behind her. As the larger granules run out, the smaller particles are released, catch the wind and disperse in a thousand different directions. My brother reels, having caught some in the eye. We laugh. My mother hands the box to me and I empty a little more. The ash diffuses through the wind in a spectral curtain of swirls and eddies. I can taste it on my teeth. Mum stands back at some distance, lost in thought. I hand the box to my brother and he shakes out the remainder, his eyes red from the cold and the ash.

Then, it is over.

We stand there, cinders in our mouths, our hair, upon our coats, watching the snow mingle with the dust, float back down to Earth a part of it, and with every blink I see a fresh tableau within the churning sky. Candlelit lovers caught unaware through a thin gap in a door. A coffin-shaped Nokia ringing to announce a murder. The beginning of love above New York as a semi-naked silhouette hurries back to bed. Blood leading to the closed doors of an ambulance. All times are here and now and one and the same, condensed, with this moment, into a single journey. And it all seems like yesterday.

We fall into a group hug and stare out over the whitening view. I’m the first to speak.

‘Bye Dad.’

Time travel. It’s an easy, forgiving process. It takes nothing to go back, to rewrite.

It’s often said that history is scripted by the winners. Personally, I think ‘survivors’ would be a better word. I’ve been several people in my time, and my return visits to those others’ pasts are unreliable at best and complete fabrications at worst. I have survived myself, but only just.

Don’t believe a word I tell you. Take it from me.

We return to the car park, our shoes creaking across the compacting snow.

I can see my wife reading a book in the back of the Cherokee. Our son is upright in his car seat beside her, in a sleep which could, and does, survive fireworks and thunderstorms but cannot cope with the imperceptible tread of a parent’s footstep. Sure enough, he stirs, then turns a slow, accusatory head towards me. This extrasensory perception alerts his mother to my presence. She checks her smile immediately, assuming it’s inappropriate. I beam back, but this only serves to make her uneasy. She knows the full range of my smiles, and this one didn’t fool her at all.

She stuffs her book out of sight and winds the window down. Her eyes, pink and watery, focus on the empty box Mum carries.

We all get in without another word. My brother in the back. My mother next to me. I know it’s just my imagination, but the snow slowing the wipers seems grittier than usual. The analogue clock mounted to the Jeep’s dashboard shows it’s much later than I realised. Once again, time ran away from us.

Mum asks if the snow will cause problems for the car. I reassure her that it won’t.

On the way to the restaurant, I attempt to close my mind around the memories and feelings we’ve just thrown into the air. I can’t rationalise or order those lonely fragments of time. All I can do, as the chatter around me grows in its geniality and my son steals the conversation away from the darkness, is watch the narrow roads unlace in the rear-view mirror, my thoughts whirling with the bone particles, hunting for answers, for chronology, trying to get back, right back, to a beginning of sorts.

And then I hit the ice. The Jeep bucks, jolts out of my control. I try to do as you’re told to do in the circumstances and steer into the skid but the steering locks beneath my hands and we glide, in slow motion yet at thirty miles an hour, into an oncoming van, its driver’s horrified face nothing but an open mouth screaming towards us.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

My father died today, around mid-afternoon I’m told.

I hadn’t seen much of him during his latter years, his years of letters, though I’d heard from plenty of his bank managers. So strained had our relationship become we could only communicate through financiers, like a divorcing couple. To tell the truth, I didn’t mind bailing him out from time to time; it kept his literary ambitions ticking, it kept him busy. And it kept him the hell away from me.

‘Was your father a religious man?’ she asks, blonde, one gene shy of albino, a figure at odds with the mahogany and brass splendour of the rest of Kirkby Funeral Consultants. She’s about thirty, not unattractive, and sports no wedding ring on the petite hand fondling a St. Christopher against a salient, chenille-clad bosom.

‘Religion wasn’t a big part of his life. At least, it never used to be.’

She ticks a box with an exaggerated flourish. ‘Okay. Did he make any arrangements himself about how he’d have liked things to go from here?’

It takes me a few seconds to comprehend the essence of this question. ‘A Will hasn’t been found yet. It was… sudden. I only heard he died a couple of hours ago.’

The pencil hovers, snatches at another box.

I practise my shrug in response to queries about coroners and death certificates and my apathy is taken as the cue to broach the issue of prices. A white hand passes me a pamphlet of funeral options while the other gestures towards a vinyl-smooth headstone, the word ‘exemplar’ carved into its marble.

‘Anything that suits?’ A patient voice, traipsing through the routine. I picture her at customs, in stiff blue polyester: Did you pack these bags yourself, sir?

‘Perhaps.’ I’m still directing my breath away from her. My ‘family circumstances’ granted me early leave of work and, though this is debatably not a joyful occasion, it was happy hour at The King’s Arms.

‘Forgive me for asking… You weren’t particularly close to your father, were you, Mr Marr?’

When I shake my head, tiny lines of tension around her eyes relax. Grief, it seems, puts even funeral arrangers off.

‘Please call me Lucas. Sorry, what was your name again?’

‘Anna,’ she says, or perhaps ‘Tanya,’ standing and crossing the room to unearth another brochure from a cabinet by the window. Outside, London’s summer sky has bruised and the sun cuts like a hole punch through the fumes.

I realise too late that I’m staring at her reflection. A smile sputters briefly in the crescent dimples of her cheeks as she hands over a booklet entitled When Someone Dies. Our fingers graze.

‘Will your father’s service be a local one?’

‘He lived on the south coast. My mother’s dealing with most of the immediate formalities, but she asked me to find out some details.’

‘Not a problem. Kirkby Funeral Consultants have branches all over the country. We can liaise with our people down there.’ She taps at the keyboard on her desk and a printout eases from the LaserJet behind her. I’m passed the sheet, which breaks down the costs of several funeral alternatives, and my eyes are drawn to the date in the top right corner. Thursday, 30 June, 2005. Forever consigned to history as the day my father died.

Collecting my modest pile of leaflets together, I rise. She lingers by the desk, silent and somewhat expectant, refusing to offer her hand.

‘He can’t have been very old, your father. After all, you’re not… Well, you’re quite…’

‘You’re kind of young to be doing this gig yourself.’

She announces it’s only her second week without supervision. Before this she was a PA for a minor Tory MP. There’s probably a joke here somewhere. After a while, I realise I’m no longer listening to a word she’s saying. Executor. Indemnity. Disbursement. Out of habit, I lean in for the flirt, drop my eyes and gaze at the plump, yielding aperture of her mouth for a deliberately uncomfortable amount of time. Testator. Crematoria. Probate. She begins to lose the thread of her sentences, stumbles over words.

‘You do realise your company’s acronym is KFC, don’t you?’

She finds this far funnier than she ought to.

‘I better be off,’ I announce. ‘It’s gone six and I’m probably making you late for something, aren’t I?’

Her eyes don’t leave mine. ‘There’s no real hurry.’

‘In that case… what would you say if I asked you out for a quick drink?’

Those modest dimples betray the choking of her smile, a moment’s hesitation, perhaps calculation. ‘I’d probably say, That would be nice, thank you, but I guess you won’t know until you ask.’

‘Would you like a quick drink?’

‘Wait here. I won’t be long.’ She disappears behind a blue velveteen curtain, into the main part of the parlour.

I take the opportunity to siphon a cup of water from the gurgling cooler by her desk, then prowl the reception area to stomp some feeling back into my legs. It must be a depressing place to work. Pictures of white doves and lilies adorn the walls, John Donne poems, haloed cherubs. Bored of waiting, I poke my head through the back curtain and find a low-lit corridor, half a dozen doors leading off it. She’s in a cramped, untidy office to the right, her back to me, applying make-up by use of a small handheld mirror. I’m spotted in its reflective surface and she spins round, surprised.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was looking for the… bathroom.’

She acknowledges the creaking euphemism with a cute smirk, then nods down the corridor.

I push open the door to ‘The Chapel of Rest’. At the rear of the room an open bible rests on a low lectern, flanked by candelabra and a gold-framed painting of a mournful Virgin Mary. Ornate floral displays bloom pinks and yellows from all four corners and in the centre stand two mahogany trestles, presumably the catafalque on which coffins are to rest. A broad, wooden crucifix hangs over all.

I discern a light sighing. Anna-or-Tanya’s behind me, her eyes painted that little bit darker, her mouth showing a touch more rouge. The jumper has gone, replaced by a flimsy yellow vest.

That tangled liaison between sex and death – a promise of immortality on the stroke of la petit mort – spares her decision to beautify herself, renders it no less appropriate than my present grubby fantasies. Ejaculation and expiration are bedfellows, for sure, but here, in this room, the notion is so… temptingly wrong. The bible, splayed on its lectern, petitions us with notions of resurrection through incorruption yet the blunt fact is that modern humans have lasted two hundred thousand years thanks to back-alley quickies and after-hours congress in boardrooms. In order to eschew mortality, I must be haunted by desire.

I take the step that separates us and kiss her. My heel strikes a trestle and we sink to the carpet, against the lectern. The bible falls, Deuteronomy-side up, as I slide off her vest to reveal the soft pout of her belly, a constellation of tiny moles.

And then she stops, holds up her hands.

We sit avoiding each other’s eyes. ‘This is… Your poor father…’

From the depths of some hitherto uncharted realm of patience comes, ‘You’re right. You’re quite right. I’m sorry.’

‘No, no. It’s my fault. I don’t know what I was thinking…’

Firm avowals to meet up for a drink at a later date follow, but we now speak to each other in the voices of amateur dramatic performers and both know I’ll head straight to another funeral directors’ in the morning.

Once passion’s gone, guilt revisits the scene of the crime. Did I lead her on? Misread the situation? Only when my eyes rest on the picture of the Virgin behind her do I recall the cross which hung like a razorblade round Anna-or-Tanya’s neck, now discarded under her crumpled vest. She desperately wanted to live for the moment but eternal life got the better of her.

A bell tinkles.

‘Bloody hell, I never locked the door.’ Panic laces her voice and a look of infinite culpability spoils her face, as though she’s about to cry.

I gather my clothes. ‘I better go.’

In the reception, a middle-aged man of repentant demeanour is waiting, grasping the hand of a young boy. The man’s sorrowful jowls and drooping eyes give the impression he’s suffered terribly at the hands of gravity.

‘Hello?’ he calls. ‘Are you still open?’

I brush past and escape into the early evening. Behind me, a flushed and backwards-vested Anna-or-Tanya greets the visitors. She’s not even looking as I press a fist to my ear, with pinkie and thumb extended in an approximation of a telephone, and mouth ‘I’ll call you,’ through the glass.

CHAPTER TWO

‘And did you?’

My right shoulder presses the mobile phone to my ear while both hands refocus the microscope. An image hardens into clarity through the eyepieces: a yellowish nebula swimming with insect-like hieroglyphs which I translate into the relevant column in my notebook. I unclip the Petri slide and insert another.

‘Sorry. Did I what?’

‘Call her?’ Aaron repeats.

I only mentioned yesterday evening’s shameful encounter to Aaron, I think, in an attempt to harvest a degree of comedy, but somewhere along the line I can’t help but feel my anecdote veered towards bragging.

‘No chance.’

‘Bit grim, if you ask me. At the funeral parlour.’

‘It wasn’t like we did it on a coffin,’ I tell him, pandering to the unspoken assumption that I slept with… whatever her name was. Machismo fills in the dots, the implications.

But I’ve misjudged the tone. I can hear it in my old friend’s voice. ‘So, anyway. Um, point of the call: are we still up for later?’

‘Sure. I’ll see you at eight.’

‘Cool. And, Lucas, you’re… y’know… okay, yeah?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

I end the call, put the phone down and bend my eyes to the next slide. Through the eyepieces, the clustering of enzymes resembles the drifting continents of foam atop a pint of bitter. At least, when I’m able to focus properly they do; tiredness increases the depth of field to a point where reality smudges and several times I zoom the lens in to find it’s my own eyes that fail me. Twice my phone hops and burrs on the polished slate of the bench. It’s a hometown dialling code. I let it ring.

‘Come in!’ I shout, in response to a firm, familiar knock on the lab door.

A slender woman, about thirty, enters and clomps in the direction of my PC with a flat-footed gait. She wears a grey pullover, blue jeans, and in the light from the window her dancing brown hair sports a dash of red. There’s a touch of fire in those dark eyes, too.

‘Afternoon, honey,’ Mariana says, before pulling up a stool and opening a bag of vinegar-doused chips. Sterility, hygiene, contamination: these words mean little to our IT department.

She stabs a sausage towards my computer. ‘What’s the problem with it this time?’

‘It’s slow, and I don’t trust the rattlesnake noises it makes when I turn it on.’

‘Syngestia must’ve given you the worst computer in the building, Lucas. I’ve been working here six months and I reckon you’ve called on me every week.’

I shrug. ‘What can I say? A man gets lonely dabbling in Pharmacogenomics all day.’

After she’s checked the connections, Mariana wriggles herself into a comfortable position on the stool then starts clicking through a list of on-screen protocols. ‘So what’s Pharmo-kacko-thingamabob when it’s at home?’ she asks in her not-quite-American, not-quite-English accent, the drawl of a New York émigré.

‘It’s the study of genetic inheritance, essentially. It’s possible, one day, that medicine will be tailor-made to each person’s own makeup. Imagine that. Personalised drugs will be safer and more efficient than today’s catch-all remedies, with their side effects and…’

I distinguish the lack of interest in her eyes. The top lip sheathes her large front teeth in a mocking semi-pout. Heaven knows why I’m so attracted to these oversized incisors.

‘…It’s not the most interesting research I’ve ever done, I admit. At the moment, I’m looking for DNA variations that occur when a single nucleotide in the genetic sequence is altered, every 100 to 300 bases along the 3-billion-base human genome.’

Mariana licks a finger, wipes her hand down the outer thigh of her jeans. ‘Wow,’ she intones, then informs me the IT department’s rebooting all servers for an hour at around five o’clock, and that I’ll need a new firewall. We’ll never fully understand each other’s sciences.

Perhaps sensing my ignorance, she changes the subject. ‘Doing anything exciting tonight?’

‘Just meeting someone for a drink.’

She splays unpainted fingertips against her heart. ‘Not another woman, Lucas?’

God, she’s wonderful.

‘An old friend,’ I tell her. We’re meeting in the West End. What you up to?’

‘Not much.’

Maybe it’s time I took a chance with Mariana. For all I know there are others at Syngestia who ring the IT office on a weekly basis to announce they’ve virused their laptops to death. Maybe, given time, one of them will capitalise on their mutual flirting and innuendo. The building’s hardly overburdened with women under forty, let alone attractive brunettes with the physiognomy of Colgate models.

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ I ask. ‘We’re just having a few at The Phoenix. Bring a friend if you like.’

I perceive a momentary flicker of surprise