Home for Truths by Alan Agnew

Author:Alan Agnew [Agnew, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Imperial Press
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One – 13 days after

I lie awake, much like the other nights. My conscience fights for attention against my memory. There’s a pungent smell of smoke on my hands, on my clothes, and now on the bedsheets. My eyes so dry. The guilt is suffocating. The image of the shed burned to the ground already haunting me. The flames, only the width of the scaffolding away from the house, and Donald lying on the floor. He must have thought I had gone mad.

I shut these images down, only for Donald’s parting shots to echo in my head. The ‘need to look closer to home’ and how I was ‘too young to understand Jimmy’ and ‘never knew who my dad was.’ The last statement is the hardest. I don’t know if he meant figuratively or literally. Was he not my dad at all? It would explain the distance he put between us after mum and I left, I was the child in the relationship, yet I could count on one hand how many times he came to visit, and I repaid this apathetic attitude in my later life. If he was not my dad, then what about Jimmy? I always thought we were similar, same interests and all, but maybe I was intentionally following in his footsteps by way of a tribute. I wander around the house, lost in my own life, drowning in doubt.

I was 11 years old when he died. Of course I did not understand him, but then neither did my parents, and if they did, they gave nothing away. Regardless, Donald knew my dad was hiding something, something so great it had something to do with Jimmy’s suicide and maybe mum leaving him. I believed him when he said he would never hurt Jimmy, I saw it in the whites of his eyes.

What if Jimmy wasn’t escaping Donald’s hold on him? What if he was escaping the holiday with us, the holiday with dad? In my mind, I keep going back to my childhood, wanting to dismiss this. Examining scene by scene, remembering it, turning it over, and looking for clues. My memory is blurred, photographs and stories I heard is all I have.

I stare at the window although I do not have to open the curtain to see the charcoaled remains of the shed and burnt sheet scrawled across the lawn. The mud covering the bottom of my jeans prompts the memory of me hiding in the woods last night after running from the scene. I crouched behind a tree, like an animal for hours, expecting to see a line of torches and sniffer dogs hunting down me down. I sheepishly snuck back to the house in the early hours, only when I was sure it was completely void of life.

I can hear voices outside, a car door closing igniting my speeding heartbeat. I prepare myself for the sight of a police car and officers walking to my door. I have no answers. I pull the curtain and breathe a sigh of relief as I watch the builders next door.

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