Chapter 66 Charlie

66 CHARLIE

NOW

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” his dad is saying. “I’m just giving you the option.”

Charlie sits at the dining table in front of a blank piece of paper. His dad sets a pen beside it before heading back into the living room, where Dembe is sitting. Charlie knows why his dad is suggesting this—the family counselor mentioned at their last meeting that it might be good for Charlie to write to his mother.

He still can’t believe any of it is real. He feels numb. Dad takes Ben and Ed to visit her, but Charlie refuses to go. He looks at himself in the mirror sometimes in case he can see it—the part of him that’s like her. He doesn’t look like her, but 50 percent of his DNA comes from his mum. It terrifies him. He can think about nothing else. The other day he was at his grandparents’, sitting on the swing, and the neighbor’s cat came up to him, purring. It was a beautiful cat with blue eyes and white fur.

“That’s Snowball,” his grandma said. “I think he likes you. You want to stroke him?”

The cat arched its spine as his grandma ran her hand along its fluffy back. He reached out to stroke it, then froze. What if he harmed the cat and didn’t mean to?

Quickly, he got to his feet and dashed inside, racing all the way to the bathroom. There, he locked the door behind him and fell to his knees.

He hadn’t cried when his dad sat him down and gently told him that Mummy had been arrested in the Maldives. And even when the kids at school WhatsApped him screenshots of his mum’s murder charge, he didn’t break down. But in the bathroom, he cried so loudly that his grandma knocked on the door and called his father when he wouldn’t open it. And when they asked what was wrong, he was too terrified to bring the words to his lips: What if I’m a killer?

He looks down at the piece of paper. What would he write? That he still dreams about drowning? About the skeletons he found in the shed?

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have the words for what he feels.

He gets up and goes to his room, then comes down to the living room, where his father and Dembe are sitting.

“I want to send this,” he says, handing his dad an A4 sheet.

“What is it?” Dembe asks. “A certificate?”

“It is,” Jacob says, looking it over. It’s Charlie’s swimming club certificate, his name emblazoned there, STAGE 4 printed in heraldic red. It means he can swim eleven yards without a floating aid, even in the deep end. It took so much effort, so many tears, but he finally managed to get himself back in the water after that terrible day. And he learned to swim.

“Well played, son,” his dad is telling him. “Well bloody played.”