Esther Chilton

If you’d like to be included in this slot, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great. All I ask is that there’s nothing offensive.

This week’s guest is writer who has a fantastic imagination. I never know what he’s going to come up with next. Please welcome Geoff Le Pard. He writes novels, memoirs, books, short stories, poems – is there nothing this man can’t write? Today he’s entertaining us with a short story:

Missing, Presumed Guilty

By

Geoff Le Pard

“Mr Jameson? This is…”

“I know who ‘this’ is.”

Colin Jameson didn’t need caller ID to tell him who was ringing. If the mucusy throat clearing wasn’t enough of a clue, then the syrupy voice was a give away. Of course, Colin knew he shouldn’t snap, he should be over it by now. But really, wasn’t Donald Morton, or Donald Moron as he thought of him, as fed up with Colin as Colin was with him?

‘Of course, Mr Jameson. And how are you? Are you well? And Mrs Jameson? And Rebecca? She was going to university, wasn’t she? How…?”

Colin blocked it out. Why did Moron Morton insist on this string of personal questions? Was it part of the training these days? On calling a client, start with a minute of redundant intimacy to put them at their ease… Put their teeth on edge, more like. Maybe the man should start with his own trigger warning: pillock alert, some listeners may resort to violence after this call.

“What do you want, Donald?”

Wait for it, thought Colin. One, two… there we are.

Donald’s involuntary giggle ended in a gulp. “Always straight to the point, Mr Jameson!”

To Colin’s slight surprise, this brief reply seemed to be it. The voice, which he had once suggested to his wife was like listening to the aural equivalent of going to Switzerland faded away, leaving some grating lift-Muzak playing in the background.

“Your father.”

Of course it was about his father. In no other parallel world would Colin have shared any airtime with Donald Moron, but for his father’s insistence that Sunnysides was the retirement home for him.

Colin did his best not to scream. Instead he resorted to his default defence: bitter sarcasm.  “You remember he died? A year ago? The sort of death you’d not forget quickly, I’d have thought. The swan diving down the stairs? The face plant?  All that bl…?”

“Yes, yes, tragic. We were all horrified. The thing is… I’m not sure how to put this…”

The latest throat clearing was almost too much. Colin had never resorted to violence but surely no jury would convict him of any action up to and including murder?

“It wasn’t your father.”

Colin heard the words and, while individually he knew the meaning of each one, in that combination at that moment, they might as well have been Serbo-Croat or Pidgin Mesopotamian for all the sense they made.

“It… I… he… you what?”

“Your father. He’s still alive.”

From a fug of utter discombobulation, Colin’s mind was now razor-sharp. “In what world is that possible? You don’t bury the wrong father. It doesn’t happen. Ever.” For the briefest of moments Colin wondered if this was some wind up, one of those Candid Camera thingies, though it was on the sicko end of that particular spectrum if it was. No, Donald was many things but a man with a sense of humour wasn’t one of them.

Colin slumped into a convenient seat and focused on the cobweb, swaying in an unfelt breeze from the ceiling. He was caught in some sort of web. Presumably, Kafka had taken over the scripting of his life.

Colin became aware that Donald was still speaking, though gabbling might be nearer the mark. “Donald, slow down. I didn’t get any of that.”

Donald took a deep breath. “We confused things, rather. Do you remember Leonard Palmster? He and your father were very close.”

Colin certainly remembered Leonard, or Leo. Always talking about planes he’d flown in the RAF, like Colin would know one from another. His father had liked him, though which was good enough for Colin, since it assuaged the guilt Colin felt if he skipped visits. After his mother died, his dad had found any personal connections hard until he’d discovered Leo, Colin thought. Including… especially familial connections.

Donald was still speaking. “We called them the Twins. You remember how alike they were.”

All very true, but… “Are you suggesting Leo… that’s he was who we buried?”

“Obviously we can’t be sure, but his son…”

“Leo had a son? I thought he had no relatives.” Colin was sure he’d been told that. One reason he and Colin’s father had got on. Colin’s father behaved as if he was bereft of relatives, once he’d moved into the home, even if Colin had done his best to keep up some level of connection.

The cogs in Colin’s brain were turning slowly. “You said dad is alive? At Sunnysides?”

“Just so.”

“Where’s he been, all this time?”

“Oh sorry I thought you understood. He has been impersonating Leonard. It’s all a bit of a mess.”

Like my brain, thought Colin. “Can we take this slowly? You’re saying the man who plummeted down your staircase, the,” a memory seemed to have been shaken loose by the unfolding horror of this call, “fact the man was wearing my father’s dressing gown…” He paused. Previously redundant details came bobbing back like small unwelcome stools in a poorly flushing toilet. “Dad’s slippers and pyjamas…”

“Not necessarily…”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what dad was wearing, or are you saying he was stark bollock naked and Leo had stolen his night time rig?” A simply ghastly idea that the two septuagenarians might have been consummating some previously well hidden homosexual inclinations flashed into Colin’s mind, which he managed to bat away.

Donald giggled again. Did that man only possess irritating verbal ticks? “They dressed alike. Completely. Even had the same hair cut and shave. Hence the Tw…”

“Yes, I remember.” Though did he? If he had it hadn’t really stuck. After all, he knew what his father looked like, didn’t he?

Colin didn’t seek to fill the silence as he thought about his trip to the undertakers, when they dressed him. They had placed some sort of gauze over his face, to hid the worst of the damage caused in the fall. He could see the outline and the hair of which his father was so proud, but not the features which he assumed the fall had rendered moot. Maybe it wasn’t him, but…

“How did you not realise? Surely the staff could tell?”

This time it was a rippling sigh. “Sadly the turnover of staff, post pandemic does mean a lack of, erm continuity. No one noticed.”

“No one noticed! You kidding me? And if no one noticed why’d you find out now?” Colin was beginning to think this was some pathetic attempt to get revenge. Oh sure, he’d not exactly raved on Trustpilot about the home nor about its director, one Donald Moron, but surely this was beyond even Donald’s…

“Jason… he’s the reason,” Donald blurted it out.

“Who’s Jason?”

“The son. Leo’s boy.”

“Where’s he been hiding?”

“Australia. Not that he’s been hiding. Not exactly. He’s some sort of mining engineer. Works in the middle of nowhere.”

“Dad never mentioned. He always said,” Colin winced as he heard his father’s sneery tone, before he forced himself to repeat the words.  “Leo’s got no family. Like me. None that care.” He’d said this while holding Colin’s gaze, knowing how much it would hurt.

Colin didn’t need to see Donald’s features to know what the import of his words would be on that plasticine face. Horror and then the worst of the worst pity. Colin had taken his father’s death hard, a real kick down life’s longest snake. But eventually he worked out that the mix of sadness and guilt stemmed from his inability to get his father to like him, to want him. And there was nothing Colin could do to change that. When the realisation hit it wasn’t about him – he was with his GP and having a wart removed with liquid nitrogen at the time which he took as an appropriate metaphor – it lifted a huge weight. The old sod was gone and so was the chain and padlock on his emotions.

And that was why this news was so hard to accept. Not because it was incredible, inconceivable but because it might be true.

“Jason paid the bills. I think it was some sort of way he tried to make up for never being around.” A papery scraping in the background suggested Donald was wringing his hands like a Dickensian villain.

“That still doesn’t explain how come you now think Leo is dad.”

“Something happened with Jason’s finances. He contacted us to say he can’t pay the bills any more. Just like that. We had to tell Leo… well, your dad. He won’t be able to stay and he clearly doesn’t want to go. That’s when he told us about the switch. He wants you to start paying again from his estate.”

Yes, Colin could believe that. Well, that wasn’t happening. “I don’t believe it. It’s Leo trying some game.”

“Which brings me to the point of this call. We think a DNA test might be appropriate and…”

“Why would I agree to that?”

The silence was, Colin had to admit, rather gratifying. He imagined Donald’s brain trying to compute the idea that anyone would pass up the opportunity to find out that their remaining parent was, in fact, alive. If that was the case, well he had misread the situation.

“The thing is, Leo, or your father…”

“Stick to Leo.”

“Yes, well he and Jason undertook a DNA test and they aren’t related.”

“So wh…”

Donald was on a roll apparently, “And he, Jason submitted Leo’s DNA to Ancestry…”

Now, when Colin would really rather like the clashing symbols of panic that filled his head to be drowned out by the Moron’s mindless chatter he fell silent. Mindy had signed them up a while ago, needing to track down some supposed cousin and had included him. He’d not wanted to be bothered, happy in the knowledge that all his known family were gone, but at that time he didn’t have a coherent objection. Not like now.

“Fuck.”

“Quite. You came back as a familial match but we did think a separate test might be more reassuring.”

Colin allowed a whimper to escape his lips which were going rather numb. “In what galaxy is any of this comforting?” He thought about Jason, the absent son. How was he taking this turn of events?

As if reading his mind, Donald continued, “Jason was very interested in the result. He’s keen to have a chat, sooner than later.”

“Mutual commiserations, is it?”

“I think it’s more about reparations.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth, but he says your father has been sponging off him since Leo died and since you took responsibility for his assets on his supposed death, he’s looking to you for recompense… Mr Jameson? Colin? Are you there?”

***

Geoff Le Pard started writing to entertain in 2006, having spent thirty odd years inducing sleep with his prose as a commercial lawyer. He learnt several hard lessons before an MA in creative writing in 2014 led to his first book. For the most part, he has been tethered to his keyboard since. When he frees himself from novels, he writes some maudlin self-indulgent poetry, short fiction, a memoir and blogs erratically at geofflepard.com. Away from his desk, he walks the dog, each seeking their own inspiration and most of his best ideas come out of these strolls. He also cooks with passion if not precision. He is happily married to a tenacious and imaginative artist, with whom he shares the joys and scars of two children and lives continually well lived. He follows his father’s sage advice: always be kind and confess your farts.