Daddy Dearest by Paul Southern Read Free Book Online

search for him. For days they combed the emerald waters of the Ionian, hoping he’d make it back. But each sunrise, the sea had thrown up nothing but pebbles. He must have guessed what I was thinking at this point because he put his hand on my arm and ushered me to hear him out.
    ‘A fortnight later, the boy turned up, right out of the blue.’
    I stared at him, confused. ‘Out of the sea?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was the thing. He’d never gone.’
    ‘I thought…’
    ‘So did they. But they were wrong. All of them. He’d gone to see his uncle on the far side of the island. They were looking in the wrong places.’ His face was wreathed in a laurel smile, his eyes twinkling. ‘So you see. You never give up. Things always turn up.’ He patted my arm comfortingly. ‘If you need anything, you let me know, okay?’
    I told him I would but I was thinking about the boy in the water and how the villagers must have reacted when he came home. Were they cross with him for messing them around, or were they just glad to have him back? The fat Greek pinched an olive at the door (I was still holding the plate) and told me I must try them. They were good for my heart.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    My heart has never been my most loyal companion. Most of the trouble in my life has been because of it. I don’t owe it anything. Rather, it owes me big time. As I stood with my back against the door and thought about what the fat Greek had said, I could hear it pounding in my chest, floundering like a drowning man, looking for the film of sky above the glassy sea. I stared at the plate of olives and took one in my hand. It shone like a black pearl. I brought it to my lips but it stuck there, fast. I remembered something: beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I took the plate to the bin and emptied the lot. The olives rolled over the side into the white, plastic abyss. I think I could hear them screaming.

9
     
    That afternoon I had to go to the police station to make a formal statement. For the first time in my life, I looked at the world from the criminal’s point of view. They were milling around, just like the scallies and smackheads who pissed on the Sears building, the people I had spent my whole life avoiding. I could smell their guilt and desperation as they could undoubtedly smell my fear. The police officers who joked with them knew them by name, and listened to their braggadocio with grunts of recognition. It struck me that they were cut from the same cloth. But for the uniforms, they were indistinguishable.
    Only once have I had dealings with the police, and that happened a long time ago. It had been a habit of mine to have long walks round the city, down by the canals and waterways in the most salubrious parts of town. I had a friend who used to come with me. She’s long gone now, at least out of my life, but I can picture her like I can yesterday. She had straight, long, brown hair and wore a red, polka dot dress that was the height of fashion. It must have been the seventies, although heaven knows how it’s possible I was alive then; like the dress, it feels like yesterday, too. She had two prominent front teeth and everyone used to call her Bunny, which she took really well, but which I, at the time, chose to avoid - me being her boyfriend and all. When her mouth was closed, everything was fine; the trouble was when she opened it. It could have been that I was just rubbish at kissing - which is something that had crossed my mind, and probably hers - but neither of us was at the stage when we felt comfortable slagging off each other’s performances. We were still at the point where ‘I’ve never met anyone like you’ and ‘You’re the best’ had real coinage, though in the post-decimalisation period they definitely didn’t have the value we thought. I remember looking at her hair and her eyes and seeing what must have been love in there - and she obviously seeing the same in mine - when her teeth would emerge from