Buried Memories

“Don’t get funny with me, boy...” My father’s eyes hardened in contempt, beady and menacing beneath the shadow of his hair.

I didn’t know what to say. It was a stupid thing to ask. Of course I couldn’t see her. Ella was in hospital. Or rather, she had been in hospital. She had died there, six years ago, on the day my father became dead to me.

“She’s dead,” I admitted.

“She is.”

And she was.

I remembered almost nothing of that day except the incident itself. Or rather, now that I thought about it, I didn’t really remember the incident at all. But I remembered it happening, and I remembered the aftermath all too clearly. I could recount the whole event down to the tiniest detail.

We had been children at the time. I was thirteen years old. Ella was ten. We had liked to play up in the shed then. For us it was a bizarre, alien world, full of junk and rusted machinery, strange oily, musty smells and piles of broken wood- our castles and the places we hid from my father.

That was where the accident had happened. I don’t remember seeing it, but I could tell you exactly what had taken place. My father had been drunk, as usual. He was violent and frightening when intoxicated- the ogre of all our childhood games. We hadn’t been allowed to stay indoors that day. And so, I had run. I ran over the hill, to my secret place, and Ella had been unable to keep up. I didn’t slow down for her- I didn’t want her to find my recluse, under the fallow apple trees, where the branches knitted together into a shady cavern. And so she must have gone to the castle instead. The castle was a massive pile of wood a short distance from the shed that had been growing for about a year. We had never had a castle before, but drunk and unapproachable, our father had refused to tell us what it was for.

Ella had been hiding in the pile, and it was bonfire season. Away in my undergrowth palace, I had no clue she was in danger until I caught the rancid smell of wood smoke on the air. Then I saw the ominous grey columns rising from the castle, and pelted down the hill, tripping over rocks, tumbling sticks and leaping the creek. I made it, but by then it was already too late. I ran to the house, screaming for father, but I couldn’t wake him. I tried to douse the flames with a bucket from the house, but still the pyre grew.

Nobody heard a thing- she had been sleeping. The wood was damp; it must have released fumes that drugged her as she burned alive. My drunken father had lit it, I knew. He had incinerated his own daughter.

The next thing I remember I was in hospital. I must have inhaled too many fumes. And yet, I could have sworn it was Ella, and not me, in that bed… It was all so long ago.

“It’s been six years,” I said aloud. My father looked so old. “They told me you were dead, or I believed it.”

He made a non-committal grunt. Then he turned his back on me, shuffling back into the dark doorway from which he had erupted. I took it that I was to follow.

The ruin of our former living room was cluttered with debris. Splinters from God-knows-what littered the floor, fanning out in dusty coronas from empty gin bottles and larger chunks of broken glass. Stumbling over the various hazards, my father made his way back to his armchair, as always. It was the only thing in the entire room that made it recognisable to me, and yet, it too was decaying beyond repair. All the padding had sunk, forced into submission after years of harbouring my father’s bulk. It groaned as he sank into it, sighing as though in pain. His eyes closed, and for a moment I thought he was about to fall asleep, until just then his wrinkled face turned up and acknowledged me for the first time since I had entered the room.

“Don’t play that game with me,” he said. “I told you, dunna come back here, never. That were ten years ago.”

“Ten?” I scrutinised the floor for any recent signs of heavy drinking.

“Ten.”

“But it was six!”

My father grumbled. He was starting to lose his patience. “Don’t play that game with me, I told ya. Yer twenty-three. Fer God's sake, act like it.”

Twenty-three? I hesitated. The years alone must have driven him insane. I would have to choose my words carefully…

“No,” I began. “I'm nineteen. Now, listen to me. I don’t know what brought me back here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come, but then, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that you were alive here all this time. I don’t know why. I’m beginning to question what I was ever sure of. But that doesn’t mean you have the right to tell me what isn’t true. Six years ago, you burned your daughter alive in the bonfire. They never found the evidence, but you are guilty as hell, even if you have been hiding up here all this time, refusing to come to terms with it!”

The reaction I got was entirely unexpected, and only confirmed my suspicion that he was mad, until I heard what he had to say. Sinking further into his decrepit chair, my father rolled back his hideous mane… and laughed. It was a derisive guffaw, of triumph, anger and disbelief.

“You think I killed her? Me? Ha! You little bastard…”

“I know you did. I saw it.”

The laugh rumbled again, and then subsided into seriousness. “How dare you! After all I did for you!”

That was the last straw. “After all you did for me?” I yelled. “You never did a thing for me!” But what did I know? I was beginning to question my own logic. I thought he was dead. I had believed it all this time. How could I explain that?

“They told me you were dead…” I protested.

“Who told you?”

“Them,” I muttered. “They did…” but even as I spoke it, I couldn’t be sure who I meant. The nurses at the hospital? The social workers who set me up with work and a place to stay? But wait… Work? I was thirteen, wasn’t I? I had never thought about it until now…

“Nobody ever told you I were dead, you little fuck,” He spat. “They kept you in a foster home for four years after that. But I gave you a fresh start. I saved your sorry, ungrateful skin. I never wanted to see yer again, after what yer did, but I did it anyway.”

“What?” I demanded. I was getting fed up with this.

“I could have let you rot,” he growled. “But I destroyed the evidence.”