Martyn Pig by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

find out all that much because it’s one of those things that doesn’t really go anywhere because no one knows the answers. There aren’t any answers. All that happens is the further you look into it, the more confusing it gets. So I stopped.
    One thing that did stick in my mind, though, was something that Albert Einstein once said. I like him, Einstein. He’s the crazy-haired one who thought up relativity.
Everything is determined
, he said,
the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper
.
    I thought that was pretty good.
    The invisible piper on this occasion was the postman.
    It must have been about eight o’clock when the post rattled through the letter box. Bills, junk mail, catalogue stuff. Dad liked to order things from catalogues. Gardening equipment, tools, pens, radios, Elvis Presley clocks, shirts, hats, anything. When the stuff was delivered he’d hide upstairs so the delivery man would have to leave whatever it was round the back and Dad wouldn’t have to sign for it. Then he’d claim that he never received what he’d ordered and he’d sell the stuff down the pub. He even sold a computer once. Two computers, come to think of it. They sent a replacement for the one he said had never arrived and he sold that too.
    Amongst all the rubbish there was an envelope addressed to William Pig, Esq., that caught my eye. It looked official. Handwritten, that old-fashioned slopey kind of writing, with a fountain pen. I chucked the rest of the post in the bin and went back into the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened the letter.
    Dear Mr Pig, it began. Further to our meeting on 1st December, I write to confirm that, as requested, a cheque in the amount of £30,000 was paid into your account this morning, being full payment of the bequest made to yourself in the last will and testament of Miss Eileen Pig ...
    I put the letter down, blinked, and picked it up again.
    ... £30,000 ... being full payment of the bequest made to yourself in the last will and testament of Miss Eileen Pig ...
    A three followed by four zeros. Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand pounds. I read on.
    ... blah blah blah do not hesitate to contact us ... blah blah blah ... further advice ... blah blah blah ... Yours sincerely,
signed
M Squiggle, Malcolm G Elliott LL.B (Hons) Solicitor.
    Â£30,000.
    A three and four zeros.
    Thirty thousand pounds.
    I couldn’t believe it.
    Who the hell was Eileen Pig?
    Thirty thousand pounds? Dad had never mentioned
anything
. He must have known about this for ages. He wasn’t going to tell me.
    He wasn’t going to tell me.
    I stared at the letter again. It was dated Wednesday, 18th December. Yesterday. Thirty thousand pounds. Paid into his account. And he wasn’t going to tell me. I couldn’t believe it. Someone, some relative, leaves him thirty thousand pounds in her will – and he was going to keep it to himself. It was so sick it was funny.
    I went into the front room.
    â€˜Dad?’
    He didn’t answer.
    I held out the letter towards him. ‘What were you going to do with this? Leave me? Sod off somewhere on your own, drink yourself to death on a beach in the Bahamas and leave me to Aunty Jean?’
    He still didn’t answer.
    â€˜Why didn’t you
tell
me?’ I shouted.
    The sound of my voice, trembling, close to tears, rang out flat and dull in the dead air. I sat down in the armchair and sighed. The silence was true. Dad was never going to tell me anything. He was just a shape beneath a white shroud.
    I folded the letter into my pocket and went upstairs.
    Dad’s room was a heap. Curls of wallpaper peeled from the walls revealing old layers of sick-yellow paint. Magazines littered the floor, mostly girly mags and copies