Finally, when he reached the graveyard, he could breathe again. He scrambled as best his shaking legs would allow from grave to grave, hunting for the plot that housed the unhinged soul so many had thought they’d known. But they’d never understood it had abandoned his body long before he’d left them.
His eyes prickled from the tears of regret he shed for lives lived, lives wasted and lives taken. And he cried for the forgiveness he had no right to expect and would never receive.
Catherine had deserved the truth no matter how much it had hurt her. He’d wanted her to apologise for what she’d done and for her to understand why he’d allowed Billy to die. Before he left Italy, he’d convinced himself that when she learned she was equally to blame, then she would understand. Then he would return home to his children Sofia and Luca and await the day he could take Luciana once again in his arms.
But now he knew what a stupid old fool he’d been. Because he had never considered in all that time they were apart that he might have got it wrong. And in the end, he had been savaged by the truth just as much as her.
Eventually he found the charcoal-grey granite headstone he was searching for. The sandblasted lettering on the epitaph was as brief as that written on his mother’s marker.
Simon Nicholson – loving father, gone but never far.
It was an ambiguous tribute and open to interpretation, but only he and Catherine knew that. Oh, and Shirley of all people, thanks to Catherine taking her into her confidence. Whatever her considerable faults, his stepmother wasn’t one to blab for blabbing’s sake.
He inched his aching limbs towards the ground and knelt. With few burial spaces remaining in the three-hundred-year-old churchyard, he wondered if another corpse lay beneath where his should have been. It would’ve been apt if so, he thought, as wherever he roamed, a dead body was never that far away.
He removed the silver hip flask Luciana had given him for his fiftieth birthday from his jacket pocket. He frequently topped it up with Jim Beam to take away the bitterness of his medication. It also helped to relax him on the days confusion made him feel like a tightly balled fist.
He took out both packets of pills. He knew the ones designed to slow the pace of his advancing Alzheimer’s were no longer powerful enough, and he’d barely touched the antidepressants. But he hoped there were enough of them combined to put him out of his misery. One by one, he popped them from their blister packs into his bloodied palm and then to his mouth. After each four or five, he took a swig from his hip flask and swallowed hard.
Then he sat motionless, numb to everything but the sensation of the tablets as they slipped down his throat and settled in his empty stomach.
Nobody in this world had understood him like Luciana, and if God were willing to show him just one act of mercy, he would soon be with her. But he knew it was a lot to ask, considering all he’d said of the Lord and the torment he’d inflicted on the undeserved.
Finally he accepted it hadn’t been God, Doreen, Kenneth, Billy, Dougie or Catherine who had caused his suffering, but himself. He’d been so hasty to blame everyone else for not living up to the perfection he’d expected from them, yet he was the least perfect of them all. He’d been the architect of his own misery.
He began to think about his death and the complications it would create for those he loved. Luca and Sofia would be financially secure for the rest of their lives. But when they were to learn of his passing, they would surely have questions only Kitty could answer. He hoped that when they finally traced her, she might respond to their confusion and grief with kindness.
As for his other children – well, keeping his return a secret would be too tall an order for her. His body, less than a mile from her home, would be impossible to conceal. He hoped they wouldn’t hate their mother for lying to them for most of their lives.
Conscious there was nowhere left for him to hide, he wished he’d hanged himself from the tree in the woods when he’d had the opportunity, all those years ago.
‘You know what to do,’ came the voice that only appeared when his options were few and far between. ‘This is the place. Right here, right now.’
‘I do,’ he said out loud. It was a solution that would help everyone. He could bury himself where no one would think to find him – in the ready-made grave below. If he could disappear once, then he could do it again.
So he lifted his aching head and began to dig.
As he clawed his way through the sharp turquoise gravel chips, he failed to notice the blood that dripped from his cracked fingertips and temple was making the soil underneath syrupy. He tried to ignore the numbness of his broken wrist and that made digging much harder.
He just needed to scrape a little deeper, he imagined, and then heap the earth back upon himself, and nobody would be any the wiser.
‘Focus, focus, focus,’ he repeated, determined not to be defeated by an ageing body that ached to admit defeat. But his arms smarted and his knees grew weaker.
He began to topple forwards until he steadied himself and then made one last frantic attempt to scoop away the broken earth and push it to one side. But it was no use: he no longer had the strength to support his weight.
I’ll rest for a minute then continue, he reasoned, and with all his remaining strength, he pushed himself onto his back and lay on a blanket of grass. He watched carefully as the burnt-orange sky gradually faded to a darkening twilight.
And with a final anxious sigh, he closed his eyes and wondered if God would listen when he apologised for all he had done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer my heartfelt gratitude to those friends who read early versions of this story and were then subjected to a barrage of questioning.
Thanks to my mum, Pamela Marrs, the biggest reader I know and who inspired my love of books. Thank you to Tracy Fenton from Facebook’s THE Book Club for discovering this story and helping it to take on a life of its own. And in alphabetical order, thank you to my early readers Katie Begley, Lorna Fitch, Fiona Goodman, Jenny Goodman, Stuart Goodman, Sam Kelly, Kath Middleton, Jules Osmany, Sheila Stevens and Carole Watson. Also thanks to John Russell for his constant encouragement and Oscar, my four-legged friend, for sacrificing walks around the park for this book.
My gratitude also goes to Jane Snelgrove who found this story, out of the millions and millions of books out there, and started a whole new chapter in my career. Thanks also to my editor David Downing for his eagle eye, superb suggestions and advice on tongue biting.
Finally, thank you to the woman who inspired this novel. I don’t know your name, where you are from or if you will ever know that this story was inspired by you and the struggles you faced. I’ll always be grateful to have read your story and I will never forget you.