Restless Dead (Harry Grimm Book 5) by David Gatward (english reading book TXT) 📗

‘Here,’ she said, sitting down eventually and passing her dad a mug of tea. ‘Biscuit?’

James shook his head and for the next couple of minutes, the two of them just sat there, staring at their drinks, lost to their own emptiness.

‘The light, it was so bloody bright,’ James said eventually. ‘She couldn’t see. Neither of us could. It was blinding.’

‘It can be like that,’ Ruth said. ‘The headlights on some cars, they’re dangerous.’

‘Maybe, though, if I’d been driving . . .’

‘No, now don’t go down that road,’ Ruth said, although inside she was thinking the same. ‘What-ifs won’t help anyone, will they?’

‘It was her first time driving that car, though, wasn’t it?’ James said.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, Dad,’ Ruth said, though she noticed then, as the words fell from her like tasteless scraps of food, that a darkness inside her had her wondering. It was a new vehicle after all. Big, too. Why hadn’t her dad been driving? Why had he not just let her have a few drinks instead of himself? She shook her head then, to dislodge the thought, but it didn’t work. ‘Don’t start trying to blame yourself in this,’ she continued, hoping her voice would drown out her unhealthy thoughts. ‘You can’t. It wasn’t your fault. At all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was an accident. A terrible, awful, horrible accident.’

James sipped his tea, Ruth did the same, but she noticed no taste to it, as though the loss of her mum had now tainted everything around her, turned even water to dust and ash. Nothing would be the same ever again, would it? she thought. Colours would never sing to her as they once had, not even the rich and endlessly varied greens of the dales, which had always managed to breathe life into her, even on the darkest of days. But no day had ever been as dark as this.

‘Do you think there’s an afterlife?’

The question took Ruth by surprise and she choked a little on her drink.

‘Pardon?’

‘Heaven,’ James said. ‘You know, some place where we all go to after we die. Do you think there is one, up there, or wherever?’

Ruth stared at her father as he raised his eyes a little as though looking heavenward.

‘I really don’t know,’ she said, a little taken aback to be asked such a deeply personal question about belief and spirituality by a person she’d known to never hold much truck with anything spiritual beyond a good measure of whisky. ‘Can’t say I’ve thought about it much, to be honest.’

‘But do you think there is?’ James asked pressing for an answer. ‘Or could be? Do you think your mother’s there now, looking down on us?’

Ruth took another sip, to give her time to think of a reply that wouldn’t be trite.

‘Well, I don’t see how we can just end,’ she said finally. ‘That just doesn’t seem right, really. Impossible almost. And I’d like to think that we go on, somehow. It seems only fair, doesn’t it? Otherwise, what’s the point?’

James nodded, sipped his tea. ‘What’s the point indeed,’ he said.

Silence descended again, but James didn’t let it last too long this time. ‘I prayed, you know?’ he said, his voice quiet and soft. ‘After the crash, in the field, holding your mum in my arms, I prayed. I begged for God to help, to save her, to save Helen, and to take me instead, but he didn’t.’

‘She was gone, Dad,’ Ruth said. ‘There was nothing anyone could do.’

‘Not even God?’ James replied. ‘Then what’s the point of being God if you can’t even do what I asked, what I prayed for, with all my heart and soul?’

Ruth shrugged, because she had nothing that she could say that would help and was worried that anything she managed to say would only make things worse. And talking about whether God would kill her dad to save her mum was, she was fairly sure, something that would only make things worse.

‘Anyway, I don’t think she can be gone, not completely,’ James said. ‘Because I can feel her, inside me still, in this house, everywhere.’

‘Me too,’ Ruth said.

‘So, you don’t think it sounds weird, then?’

‘No, not at all,’ Ruth said, and she genuinely meant it. ‘She loved this house. She poured her heart and soul into turning it into a home, didn’t she?’

‘I’ve tried to talk to her,’ James continued, his voice quieter now, Ruth noticed, almost conspiratorial. ‘Just to ask if she’s okay, if she’s in pain, or if everything’s okay. And I’ve told her that I love her as well.’

‘That’s nice, Dad,’ Ruth said with a gentle nod and soft smile. ‘And I’m sure that if she’s out there, somewhere, then she’s smiling down on you, on all of us actually, asking us to not be too sad, to remember how wonderful she was, and what a great life she had.’

‘It was cut short though, Ruthy,’ James said, the words a hammer slamming down on an anvil.

‘I know it was,’ Ruth replied, her mind whispering, and it wouldn’t have been if you’d been driving, would it, Dad? And the sound of those dark thoughts frightened her more than a little, because she knew that they were wrong, that it wasn’t her dad’s fault, but they were so hard to dislodge, like they were strangers who had pushed themselves in through the cracks opened up by the darkness now inside her where her mum had once been.

‘I’ve asked for proof actually,’ James said. ‘That she’s out there. From her, I mean, from Helen.’

At this, Ruth couldn’t help keeping the shock from her voice. ‘You’ve what?’

‘Because if she is,’ James continued, almost as though he hadn’t heard Ruth’s interruption, ‘then she has to be able to show me, don’t you think? I mean, I know I’ve not seen the ghost that supposedly haunts this old house, none of us have, but others have, right? Previous owners? So, why shouldn’t I be able to see Helen?