If it hadn’t
been for his father working late, and if it wasn’t for his mother taking his
brother to hospital because, she suspected, he’d broken his stupid arm again,
then twelve year old Bobby Martin wouldn’t be stuck at home, alone, waiting for
someone to come and tend to his grandfathers dead body in the attic bedroom.
Hardly anyone was home these days. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed,
his mother frequently told him. And that was fine. Yes, that was just fine. It
was fine because Bobby Martin loved his own space. What was not fine however,
perhaps what would never be fine, was having to keep checking on the old man upstairs
and making sure he took his medication on time. He wasn’t a nurse, he wasn’t
even sure what some of the labels meant on the dozen or so small bottles stored
in the bathroom cabinet, and yet they positioned him as such. Only for a while
... an hour or two at best ... but a lot could happen in an hour or two.
Like now.
He supposed they hadn’t even
considered the negative sides, not properly, not like they should have. But he
was almost thirteen now, old enough, according to his father, to take on just a
little extra responsibility when it was needed.
Gramps had been seriously ill for a
while now (nobody had come right out and said this, Bobby just assumed it was
that way), but neither his mother nor father seemed to acknowledge this – especially
in front of the kids. Never in front of the kids. No, that particular tête-à-tête
was always held behind closed doors where delicate ears and tender minds would
never come to realise the terminal truth of the matter.
Bobby wasn’t dumb though.
Gramps had suffered what he’d once heard
his father refer to as the motherfucker
of all strokes, whatever that meant, the summer before last and developed a
heart condition the winter afterwards. Bobby knew it was bad despite their
silence (it had to be bad because his father, always a Christian and never a
heathen, never swore unless it was serious business), but not exactly how bad until gramps moved into the
attic bedroom.
His mother had despaired a lot and
his father (now seemingly once a Christian and now a heathen) had taken to whiling
away the evening hours with a moderate amount of after dinner drink simply to
help ease the – his – burden. Although
Bobby didn’t think drink helped matters at all. Knew it, actually.
Then, suddenly, Gramps had gotten worse.
He spent a whole summer in and out of hospital and tolerated a whole fleet of ladies
from home help even though his temper, which was frayed at the best of times,
would have been enough to drive a saint to slaughter.
Then his brother had broken his arm
at exactly the same time the brown stuff hit the fan.
Bobby heard the banging from the
living room, above Bon Jovi living on a
prayer, and assumed the clamour nothing more than another of Gramps infamous
tantrums. The old man liked to beat his stick on the floor even though he did
not need it because he seldom got out of bed without help or moved around without
a wheelchair. However, what Bobby did know was that sometimes Gramps did it simply
because he thought people had forgotten about him.
“Will you give it a rest?” Bobby had
shouted from the foot of the stairs. “I haven’t forgotten about you! I’ll be
there in a minute.”
But the banging never stopped. It
continued one thunderous beat after another until it became a necklace of sound
crashing and reverberating on the inside of Bobby’s skull.
Then, just like that, one aggravated
foot after another on the stairs, it stopped and silence descended.
“Gramps?” He said. “Gramps, are you
ok?”
Silence.
Bobby looked along the sweeping
curve of the stairwell, towards the close and unpainted, grey-wood, attic door.
“Gramps?”
Again, silence.
Bobby supposed he’d fallen asleep
and elected to check on him again in an hour ... right about the time Gramps
was due his medication.
The hour passed quickly and Bobby
didn’t hear another sound. He called up a few times but never got a reply, and
when he called again, perhaps for the tenth time, he finally heard something. A
knock; slight and distant, and the ominous sound of creaking boards beneath
unsteady feet.
“Gramps, are you ok? You’re not
doing anything silly are you?”
Once Bobby went into the attic, he
found Gramps hanging half in and half out of the bed, as dead as a door nail.
His face turned towards the ceiling, his mouth frozen open in a half turned snarl,
and his walking stick, cracked in the middle, frozen in his hand.
Bobby did what all good
thirteen-year-old boys must do in situations like this; he called the
paramedics. Shortly after that, he called his parents. Neither answered of
course, so he left a message on each of their respective answer phones.
So Bobby Martin sat to the kitchen table, his head cupped
tightly in his hand, his eyes scorched from so many uncontainable tears, and
waited.
Time ticked by slowly without the
promise of help close at hand, and in the silence which between the restless
tick-tock of the Westclox on the kitchen wall, he heard, or through he heard,
at least, the repeating creaking and groaning of unwilling boards trodden upon
above his head.
His heart stalled.
His pulse raced.
The sound swelled through the silence; crossing from one room
to another with effortless ease.
After a while, as a curtain of darkness descended over Crook
Street, he heard a shallow, croaky, voice cleave through the silence.
“Bobby?”
Uncertain, Bobby walked back to the sweeping stairwell and
peered up towards the wooden attic door. It was open.
His heart beat furiously and as the sound blood rushing
through his ears blotted out the deathly silence. And there, in the corner of
his eye, stood the pallid, gaunt, and twisted image of Gramps.
Bobby screamed, petrified, as Gramps steadily turned his
milky eyes and bitter maw towards him and began to amble down the stairs.
Bobby turned and ran.
He ran and ran and ran and found he couldn’t bring himself to
stop even though his lungs scorched and his legs threatened to fold beneath him.
The last thing Bobby Martin saw as he ran out of the house
and down the stone driveway was the jaundiced headlights of his mothers Ford as
she swept around the corner and ran him down.
Bobby Martin exploded beneath the Fords front tyres like a
bag of blood dropped out of a ten story window as they passed over him. And now
it was his mothers turn to scream, only this time there would be no plaster
cast to fix this, nor a trip to the emergency room that would miraculously make
everything better again. There would only be torment and suffering and
nightmares and tears.
By the time they finally recovered what was left of his body,
they found his head tilted back a little and his glassy, lifeless, eyes looking
back to the old attic window high on top of the house.
But, of course, there was nobody there.
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