Page 38 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Why?”

Field stares at him for a few seconds.

Then he takes another deep breath.

“Because of what the man told me would happen next.”

Eleven

Night was beginning to fall as I parked in the driveway outside my father’s house. When I turned off the engine, the car ticked gently in the silence.

I’d spent the journey back from Darren Field’s house going over the conversation I’d had with the man’s wife. The more I thought about what she’d told me, the more they formed a chain that held firm. My father had found the body of a murdered woman, and a photograph had been taken of him at the scene, seemingly designed to point him in the direction of Darren Field. He had gone to Field’s house and spoken to him.

And then Darren Field had disappeared.

I locked the car and entered the house, then headed upstairs to my father’s room. I looked around. The bed, neatly made; the careful filing system in the shelves above his desk.

The computer I couldn’t fucking open.

Finally, my gaze settled on the punch bag, hanging on its chain in the center of the room.

The boxing gloves on the floor there.

When I was fourteen, my father bought me my own pair. This was after I came home with a split lip and the beginnings of a black eye. There had been an incident after school on the recreation ground I walked through on my way home. Liam Fleming and a couple of his friendswere picking on a boy in the year below me. They had him pinned to the ground, one arm up high behind his back, and he was shouting out in pain. There had been a moment when he looked directly at me, scared and helpless, and the expression on his face had stopped me from walking past.

And so I got the shit beaten out of me.

Who did this?my father asked.

I didn’t say, of course. That wasn’t how things worked.

Did you start it?

No, I told him. I had been sticking up for someone evenlesscapable of looking after themselves than I was. I didn’t tell him why; maybe I didn’t need to. But maybe I’d at least expected some kind of recognition for it: some kind of approval for having tried to do the right thing. But there had been a blank expression on his face, as though he was disappointed in me.

It was a few days later when he bought me the gloves.

“Here,” he said.

Then he tried to teach me to box. And I tried to learn. Over the days that followed, I punched the bag the way he showed me, this way and that, over and over.Get angry, he told me when he thought I was being too timid.Keep going, he said when I was tired. A part of me wanted to impress him, but all it did was reinforce that feeling of shame—that sense that I was worthless and weak—and his attempts at training me hadn’t lasted long.

But I still remembered the sadness and depression that had filled my father back then. The black moods. The thuds of the punch bag echoing through the house. The closed doors and the silences.

The anger.

I visualized him standing behind me now, and then attempted to get back into his head. I willed my subconscious to give him a voice that might provide me with some answers.

Did you hurt him, Dad?

You know I wouldn’t do that.

Do I?

I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I was only imagining him saying that becauseit was what I wanted to believe. The truth was that, for years now, I had seen my father a handful of times a year, and spoken to him on the phone only occasionally in between. That wasn’t enough contact to know someone. People can hide things away from you in the spaces between seconds, never mind weeks and months.

When I imagined him speaking again now, he sounded angry.

You know I wouldn’t do what you’re thinking.

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