No … No! This was wrong! They’d only left him for a minute.
A broken gravelled voice cut through Alex’s fragmented thoughts.
‘Where were you?’
It didn’t sound like her dad. It didn’t look like him either. Ted’s features were contorted in a way that made his face almost foreign; laughter lines suddenly gnarled and hostile. Alex opened her mouth to speak, but there was nothing.
‘Where the hell were you?’ her father demanded, taking in the state of Alex’s nettle-stung arms and legs. Alex watched him look accusingly at Finn’s lower body, Finn’s matching affliction where the stingers had got him too. Finn’s shirt was inside out. Ted was piecing it together, Alex could see the furious disbelief growing in her father’s eyes and waited uselessly for him to turn that look on her. When he did, it came like a hot iron through her chest, his voice broken and deformed.
‘YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE WATCHING MY SON!’
Not everything can be damned-well helped! Sometimes, all you can hope for is time and if you’re goddamned lucky … distance.
Alex was buttering her way through another loaf of bread with enough vigour that the bulbous handle of the butter knife had indented her fingers. She stopped herself before tearing through another slice of extra value wholemeal and shook the words from her head. There had been other words too, following her down the years like a long shadow. But these were the only words she could do anything with – all she had to offer her family as pitiful recompense for the damage that could never be undone. Time and distance.
Alex pushed her father from her thoughts and reacquainted herself with the view through the kitchen hatch. The twins were still eating their lunch, too busy devouring their own meals to notice their dad, stealthily enveloping his jacket potato inside one of the flimsy serviettes. Alex bulk bought them from the wholesaler’s every other Wednesday along with the rest of the food bank’s sundries. The 2-ply napkins weren’t really built for doggy-bagging, enshrouding food like a precious treasure to be hidden in the earth for safekeeping, but the father quietly sitting across the dining room wasn’t deterred, already slipping the wrapped jacket potato into the rucksack at his feet. Alex felt something inside her ache for him the way it had ached for Bob Cratchit when her dad had taken her and Jem to see A Christmas Carol at the Tower House Theatre. It had been a treat for being such good big sisters to their new baby brother, but Alex hadn’t been able to eat her ice-cream at the interval, she’d been so worried for poor Mr Cratchit. Alex remembered how her dad had gently patted her back through every scene, his broad hand ready with fatherly reassurance. Back when he could still look at her.
‘Three more soups please, Alex my love,’ Dan smiled, blustering into the community centre’s kitchen so quickly that his flop of black hair looked windswept. He began promptly dispensing a flurry of fresh cups of tea from the urn while Alex’s attention returned to the family out in the dining room. There was something voyeuristic about watching a grown adult hiding food for his children. Something akin to slowing down for a better look at a car accident. But then this was what it was all about, wasn’t it? This life she’d chosen. To play her small part, do good – as if a person could even up the tally of all the right and wrong they’d been party to somehow. One of the twin boys glanced up and caught Alex staring. She looked away too suddenly and immediately felt as if she’d short-changed the kid a smile. Alex hated starers. She remembered the staring as they’d all been sat in St Cuthbert’s chapel saying their goodbyes to Dill in front of all of those people. All those eyes. Tragedy and rubber-necking were old friends, her father had said with the arrival of weeping relatives to the church. Wailing like banshees, despite having never sent Dill so much as a birthday card when he was alive. Alex tried to recall their faces now, those obscure weeping relatives who’d come to support the four of them with their lingering embraces and heavy knowing looks, but her memory had clung to very little of that day beyond the desolation in her mother’s features and the stiffness in her father’s back.
‘Bugger me, Alex! How many sarnies are you making? What are you going for … edible Jenga?’
Another slice of bread gave under the rigours of clumsy buttering. Alex took stock of the bread mountain and grimaced. ‘Sorry. I was just …’
‘Away with the fairies?’ Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you OK today? You look tired. A bit spun-out.’
Alex had told Dan, once. The very brief version. Peppered with a few hazy justifications for not visiting her hometown much any more. Busy lives. Long car journeys. A troublesome allergy to her mum’s beloved dogs. ‘No, I’m good, thanks. I didn’t sleep much last night. Bloody car alarm outside the flats,’ she groaned.
‘Yeah, I really hate that.’ Dan looked justly sceptical, but of course he wouldn’t realise what today meant. Few people would, not even the banshees. Would they be thinking of Dill today? Would they remember to imagine him turning nineteen, handsome and strong, towering over his mother and sisters? It was official. As of today, there had been more birthdays spent lighting a candle for Dill than watching him blow one out. Nine years with; ten years without. His short life seemed to get shorter each year.
‘Sure you didn’t just have a hedonistic weekend, Foster? Been out larging it with Mr Right, maybe? About time he turned up.’
Alex smiled. Her weekend had consisted largely of a thousand variations of Dill’s imagined adult life. Drinking in The Cavern with their dad. Globetrotting with a girlfriend. Teaching his kids to ride their bikes. The fantasies were endless, but they always ended the same way – a warm summer’s evening back in Eilidh Falls, a family gathered again, laughter, children with Dill’s quirky dimple or other features of his, running around the same gardens they’d all played in as children.
‘You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Mr Right? If he’d turned up and rocked your world?’
Alex took a deep breath and centred herself. ‘Sorry. I guess a lady never tells.’
‘Blimey, twins.’ Dan exclaimed pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Can’t be easy. How old are they, seven? Eight maybe?’
The children out in the dining area were finishing the last of their bangers and mash almost simultaneously. They were at that threshold between little boys and young lads; a few adult teeth peeping from lips unapologetically slathered in gravy. The age of mischief, her mum had called it. Dill had taught them all a lot about mischief.
Alex watched those two boys and swallowed against an unexpected snag in her throat. ‘They’re seven. Dad’s first time. He’s just squirrelled.’
‘Ah,’ Dan acknowledged, his head furrowing beneath his flop of hair. ‘Well no wonder I couldn’t tempt him with the soup. He wasn’t gonna slip that into his backpack for later. Spud was it?’
‘I probably should’ve made the situation clearer,’ Alex replied. But she hated it. Walking bemused newcomers through the procedure, hitting them with the spiel on support workers and benefits entitlement before they could sit down and enjoy a meal in peace. The twins’ father had wandered in to the Trust’s lunchtime session more wide-eyed and bewildered than the kids; that familiar mixed heavy look of desperation and gratitude nearly always held together by a debilitating undercurrent of this is not my life! Alex got it. This wasn’t really her life either, at least not the one she’d once envisaged.
Dan sighed, retrieving a replacement jacket potato from