Short Story: Kathy Never Came Home...

Short Story: Kathy Never Came Home...

‘And then I wake up to find it was all a dream…’

I know it sounds like a terrible cliche but that was the fantasy I would feed my eleven year old self every night as I climbed into bed. I would lay curled up in my brushed cotton nightdress, screw my eyes up tight, clasp my hands together and pray that tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow Kathy would be home, slamming doors and arguing over nothing and our lives would be back to normal.

Unbelievably almost forty years have slipped away since I was that frightened little girl and I am uncomfortably aware that I still sleep in that same room having never ventured further than a hundred miles from our front door. For literally decades I have failed to find the courage to leave, to strike out, to grasp independence and make a life of my own...and now it is too late. There is no husband, no child to show for my existence and I find myself reluctantly responsible for little more than ending the sad journey that was my parent's lives. I am left clearing out a lifetime’s detritus, searching for anything new or of value, any clue that will help me understand my mother’s final words.

I tip out yet another crammed drawer and inwardly curse her obsessive habit of clinging on to every minute scrap of the past but I have had to try and accept why she has done this. Acceptance does not make understanding more bearable of course, it does not stop the feelings of unreasonable envy and jealously that pulse selfishly through my veins. Everything here is in some way connected to Kathy. Every tatty scrap has some link, although often tenuous and to me unfathomable. This motley collection is all she had to remember her eldest daughter by. The bedroom is the worst, untouched and pristine, a shrine, the one room I still can’t face, even after all this time.

Jammed under the sideboard are yet more shoeboxes full of old photographs. There is one in particular I don’t want to see but I am sickeningly drawn to it. There is a macabre inevitability to my desire to seek it out. It was the last snap dad took before everything changed forever. I can recall my emotion that night with vivid intensity. The tension and suspense was almost palpable, heavy with an underlying but unspoken fear that something was already amiss.

From where I stood in the doorway I could see Dad scrutinising his new Kodak pocket instamatic camera. He was reading the instruction manual and rubbing the lens with the cuff of his shirt sleeve whilst getting ready to take a photograph of mum who was in the kitchen.

She was looking with equal admiration into the new freezer which dominated our tiny kitchen. Her expression was one of pure rapture as she lovingly stroked the shiny avocado coloured door.

‘This will change my life you know, having this freezer.’ She beamed. ‘No more traipsing down to the butcher every day. I’ll be able to get everything from the supermarket on a Friday and stick it all in here.’

Dad grunted and adjusted the flash. He knew she was trying to twist the conversation and refused to get drawn in. Some of his friend’s wives were applying for jobs at the new supermarket and he knew mum would as well given half a chance. I felt a rare pang of sympathy for dad then. It couldn't be easy living in a house with three females, my sister and I growing older and him finding himself increasingly undermined as the balance of power shifted. There was talk of redundancy at his works and the thought of mum as a bread winner was crippling, simply not to be entertained.

‘You know the power will be off any minute!’ Dad barked ignoring mum's rapture. ‘Shut the bloody door woman before it all defrosts.’

Mum glared at him, determined not to let him spoil the excitement of being the first in our street to have a separate freezer compartment. Watching them then, young though I was, I realised just how little we had. This brand new freezer and state of the art camera were the most expensive things to have entered our cramped three bed terrace and were the result of mum’s recent bingo winnings. Despite dad’s initial embarrassment about where the money came from I could tell he was proud of what they had bought.

'Do you want chicken for tea tomorrow?' mum persisted ignoring his plea and peering into one of the compartments, ‘or mince?’

'I want you to close that bloody door!' Dad shouted back, really angry now, 'do you know how much it costs standing there with it wide open?'

He eventually took his snap and rubbed furiously at the lens again. I knew that when the film was developed it would all look normal enough but it wasn’t really. It wasn’t a cosy domestic scene at all.

We were waiting for my fifteen year old sister to get back from the cinema. She'd gone with Sid from number 62. He lived next door to Mrs Ramsey, mum’s bingo partner, with his Nan. Last time she went with him she came back with a button missing off her new cardigan. The row went on for days.

That evening dragged on and Mum and I sat huddled under blankets trying to keep warm as the coal we had rationed steadily diminished. This was only the first power strike and the novelty had already worn off. I missed the comfort of the lamp and the chatter of the telly. Dad kept looking up at the mantel clock but mum and I didn’t comment. We knew better.

I thought about Kathy's blousy departure, the way she had swaggered passed dad, the sleeve of her miniscule dress brushing his trouser leg as she passed him at the bottom of the stairs. Dad shook his head, resigned to the fact that he had lost his favoured little girl forever. No longer would she smile for him. Gone were the times when she would proudly show him her school work and the prizes she had won at Sunday school. Rumour had it she excelled at other things now, things that did not win prizes at Sunday school, things that no father wanted to think about...

‘What’s the film she’s seeing?’ dad eventually asked drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair, unable to bear the silence a second longer.

Mum tried her best to sound blasé and answered without looking up.

‘She never said. Some American thing I think. She prefers the American ones.’

‘But how can they show a film if there’s no power?’ I piped up without thinking.

‘You keep quiet you,’ mum hissed slapping my hand.

‘Leave her Sandra! She’s right for once isn’t she? How can the bloody cinema show a film in the middle of a power cut?’ He jumped up. ‘I’m not having this. I’m going to find them.’

…and off he went, slamming the door behind him so hard the windows rattled.

It was almost a year before the police took dad to look at a body that he identified as belonging to Kathy. They wouldn’t actually let him see what was left of her but they had the necklace she had been wearing in a little plastic bag. It was rusty and caked in mud but quite obviously, dad said, the locket they had bought her for her thirteenth birthday. The mud came from the field the farmer had been ploughing when he dragged up her broken body from its shallow makeshift grave.

A few days later I slipped out and bought a newspaper to find out what had happened to her. Mum and dad wouldn’t tell me anything, they wouldn’t let me switch the television on, answer the door or the constantly ringing phone so I bought a red top, hid down a side alley at the back of the garages and discovered the gory details for myself.

There, smiling up at me from the smudged print was Kathy, my sister, radiant in her high school uniform and so unbearably young. Tim McNulty, the paper’s chief crime reporter informed me, in sensational detail, that Kathy was the latest victim of a travelling salesman who was responsible according to police sources for the abduction, rape and murder of a least four young girls scattered around the country. I tried not to dwell on the intimate details he had been privy to but at night, with the darkness pressing in, I could think of little else and so I took to repeating my mantra over and over again until it lulled me to sleep, a sleep that was plagued with all manner of nightmares.

The fact that Sid was innocent, that his story about leaving Kathy to walk home alone because the cinema was shut whilst he went to the pub was true, offered us no comfort. Even the shocking discovery that the salesman had managed to hang himself in his cell before he even came to trial didn’t penetrate our grief. Nothing could touch us.

My parents never recovered from the shock. Dad lost his job before he was made redundant and succeeded in drinking himself into the grave next to Kathy’s within three years and mum, instead of being released from the grip of his brooding anger, merely continued to exist. For all those years she went about her daily routine, breathing in and out, putting her best foot forward and her bravest face on. To the rest of the world she looked like she was coping, managing, but to me, the person closest, she was already dead, her heart nothing more than a shrivelled husk. I knew early on that I would never be able to leave her.

‘When I’m gone,’ she told me the day she died, ‘look carefully through everything again won't you?’

I shook her pillows and looked around the bedroom at the stacks of yellowed newspapers and boxes stuffed full of clippings and notes, the litter that had crowded my life as well as hers. I had been secretly mustering the courage to light a belching bonfire in the back garden, hoping the act would lead to some release, some longed for freedom. She read my thoughts with startling clarity.

‘I know it still doesn’t look like anything much,’ she pressed on following my gaze and grasping at my hand, ‘but I know there is something.’ She sank back into the pillows exhausted from the effort of speaking, her breathe rattling horribly in her chest. ‘Something I have missed...you’ll see…’

‘I doubt it.’ I smiled stroking her hand. ‘We’ve looked through it all before. We know most of it off by heart.'

‘We missed something,’ she gasped. ‘Something I could not face...' Her words trailed off.

She died that night. Slipped peacefully away in her sleep and left me to face the unthinkable.

A few weeks have passed since her funeral and I have finally begun the painfully slow process of clearing the house. I have tried to be ruthless, ignore my guilt and plough on, but it is hard. I feel as though I am throwing away a little piece of Kathy with every scrap I part with.

The men arrived today to take some of the furniture and they asked if I’d been through the sheds. I hadn’t of course, hadn’t even given them a thought. They are still dad’s domain, practically untouched. I take the bunch of keys from the hook behind the kitchen door.

‘Take a look if you have time.’ I tell them. ‘Let me know if there’s anything worth your while.’

It is a bitterly cold day, steely grey with a biting wind and I have gratefully closed the door and returned to the comfort of the fire.

‘There’s a tin here love that we thought you might want!’ One of them shouts through the back door as they are getting ready to leave. ‘It was shoved down the back of one of the work benches. Fell down when we pulled it out. There’s no key for it. Maybe you’ve got one?’

‘No.’ I reluctantly answer taking the tin with a less than steady hand. ‘I’ve never seen it before.’ My heart skips and thrashes in my chest, my breath catches in my throat.

‘You never know it might be full of money or the family jewels!'

I barely smile, I can't.

'Sorry love,' he stammers, 'just sign this and we’ll be off. Leave you to it.’

I scribble my name on his outstretched docket and watch him walk back down the path into the gathering darkness.

Quietly I close the door and carefully place the box on the kitchen table. I stare at it for some minutes before reaching for a knife and picking away at the lock. The passing of time and the layers of flaky orange rust have weakened it and miraculously it yields. I hold my breath and slowly lift the lid… I take a deep breath before looking down. There, on a folded white handkerchief with ‘K’ embroidered in the corner is the locket mum and dad bought Kathy for her thirteenth birthday.