Feeling bad, she looked into his brown sunken eyes and could see he wasn’t lying; he looked ill.
‘It’s cancer, stage four, nothing more they can do for me.’
‘I need a drink,’ Marie said
‘You still a Bacardi girl?’
‘No, more gin now, but whatever you have got.’
He pulled out a bottle of Bacardi like it had been sitting in the cupboard waiting for her to come round. They sat and drank and reminisced about the old days when he would come into the office. He was drunker than he should have been and had started slurring his words.
‘Do you remember that night when India was conceived.?’
‘Yeah, of course I do,’ she lied. She had flashbacks but nothing clear.
‘You were out of it but well up for it,’ he said. You had been gagging for it for weeks. So I saw my chance to satisfy your needs.’
‘You’re not seeing India.’
‘You try and stop me,’ he said, laughing.
‘We agreed, we wouldn’t tell her. India and I are finally talking again after I told her you was her father. Me bringing this up will fuck it all up again. I am not doing that to her again especially when she has her wedding in a couple of weeks. This should be a happy time. She knows now that you are her father so let’s leave it up to her.’
‘I don’t care, Mar. I’m dying. I want to see her before it’s too late. I’ve left everything in my will to her. She will inherit everything.’
Marie was about to leave as he wasn’t getting the message. He grabbed her arm tightly so she couldn’t move. ‘Please, I need to tell her how sorry I am.’
‘Get off me, you are hurting me,’ she replied.
‘No, not until you agree to speak to her.’
‘You will be waiting a long time, Malcolm’
He then grabbed her other arm and started shaking her. ‘You do not understand, Marie. I will see her one way or another.’
The look in his eyes scared her. She had only ever seen this look once before, then the night of her Christmas party in 1983 came flashing back to her. She had images of her being pushed down onto the floor of his dirty van while trying to turn her head, when he was trying to force himself on her. She tried to push him off as she kept saying it was wrong, she didn’t want it to happen like this, but he kept on going, pulling her knickers off and ramming his hard penis inside her until she passed out. She never said no, but didn’t consent either. Was it rape?
Two Weeks Before the Wedding
Turning on the television, not because I wanted to watch anything, I just wanted it on as background noise really, I just sat and scrolled through social media on my phone. Always the same pictures of people’s dinners or children. Someone moaning or telling you where they were at that precise moment great for a burglar I thought. So boring. I did wonder why I kept my account open, but it did have its uses and you did get to be nosy and spy on people too. Plus, what else would I use my phone for, just texting and calling? Back to the days of my Nokia 3210 when all you could do was play snake. My eyes were quickly torn away from a photo of someone’s breakfast of yet another avocado and egg on toast, when the news on in the background was talking about a murder in my local town where I grew up. I froze, dropping my phone, and did not even check to see if the screen was smashed. I walked closer to my fifty-inch television screen on the wall and the flashing images started to blur into my art deco inspired wallpaper as my eyes filled with water.
“Officers were called to Blackburn Road at nine p.m. yesterday evening where a man in his sixties was found brutally murdered in his property. Police are appealing for witnesses.” the newsreader said.
Grabbing the remote, I turned the volume up to make sure I did not miss anything. Photographs appeared on the screen and the road I used to live on as a child popped up. The camera then panned to a house surrounded by police tape and a policeman and women hovering outside, trying to look busy. I recognised the red door with its brass lion knocker, a little different to how it was twenty-five years before. The front garden, once gravelled and kept neat with terracotta plant pots filled with pansies, had been replaced with stinging nettles and overgrown weeds nearly as high as the bay window. The net curtains, once a brilliant bright white and all the rage, now grey and torn. I knew exactly who lived there: it was Malcolm.
As I closed my eyes, tears ran down my cheeks. I went back to being a child again and could feel his filthy callused hands all over me and smell his coffee breath on my neck when he used to sneak up behind me. He had the roughest hands that had ever touched my skin, could tell he was in the building trade and never heard of hand cream. Memories came flooding back to me like a thunderstorm.
I thought back to how lively the road once was, children playing together happily on their roller skates or bikes. Neighbours chatting to each other from their front gardens and saying hello to passers-by; a lot more community spirit back then.
I knew now that he would never pay for what he had done and wished I could go back and tell the police what really happened.
Do not get me wrong, I was glad he was dead. I did have a mental kill list and he was at the top. If I had
