Steven Dunne - Deity

Brook closed his eyes in bitter confirmation. ‘You tried to commit suicide after your stepfather died.’

Terri’s eyes blazed suddenly. ‘His name was Tony, Dad. And he didn’t die. He was murdered, remember?’

‘Oh, I remember perfectly,’ retorted Brook. ‘There aren’t many Good News days in this job. That was one of them.’

‘How can you say that?’ Terri began to cry. ‘Whatever you think about him, he was still a human being.’

‘He betrayed your mother. He betrayed you.’

‘He didn’t betray me!’ she shouted. ‘I loved him and he loved me.’

‘He took advantage of you when you were fifteen years old. That makes him a rapist and a criminal in my book. How can you sit there and defend the way he preyed on you?’

‘I loved him, Dad. What can I say?’

‘Anything but that,’ snarled Brook.

‘It’s the truth. After my eighteenth we were going away together. Mum would’ve understood.’

‘Understood?’ Brook laughed. He could sit no longer. He scraped back his chair and paced to the front door, opening it to let out the smoke. ‘You were under-age, Terri. All she would’ve understood was that she’d married a pervert who’d stolen her daughter.’

‘He wasn’t a pervert.’

‘He broke the law.’

‘Love doesn’t obey laws.’

‘Don’t hand me the same claptrap you did five years ago. The law is there to protect you from yourself because you weren’t old enough to understand love!’ Brook took a deep breath and wrestled for control. ‘And clearly you still don’t or you wouldn’t sit there and justify what he did,’ he added quietly. ‘This is pointless.’

Terri laughed bitterly. ‘My exact words as I drew the Stanley knife across my wrists.’ Brook clenched a fist. He saw the sneering mask of certainty in her eyes give way to insecurity. She was too old to man the barricades of unswerving teenage conviction.

‘Funny.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I was okay for the first six months after he. .’ She took a quivering puff on her cigarette. ‘I had Mum to look after. I had my A-levels. Then one day it all fell in on me. The life we’d planned. The way it was taken from us. So I decided to take the easy way out.’

‘The easy way?’ Brook scoffed. ‘Young, beautiful, smart, plenty of money.’ He spat out the next words. ‘I mean, Christ, how much easier do you want it?’

‘Easy enough so the world will know my pain without me having to express it,’ she shouted back without flinching.

Brook turned away to breathe in the fresh summer air. A minute later, he turned back and found her eyes. ‘Even if I say I’m sorry, even if I accept the value you placed on your relationship with that man. .’ He hesitated.

‘What?’

‘What do you think? Terri, you’re educated, for God’s sake. You must have known, no matter how bad the pain became, that one day it would pass. But to try and kill yourself. .’

‘A permanent solution to a temporary problem?’ She smiled weakly at him. ‘I knew. But maybe I didn’t want it to pass. You see, I’d found my immortal love with Tony. No one could ever take him away from me. But if, one day, the pain stopped, then that love was lost. It is lost,’ she added sadly. She looked up at him. ‘How’s your pain these days, Dad? Living out here on your own with your jam jars. No one to talk to. No one to share.’

Brook turned back to the breeze blowing through the door. ‘We get by.’

‘And no doubt your education helps you make sense of it all,’ she mocked.

Brook took a final drag at his cigarette before flicking it out into the night. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a curse. It magnifies everything until it’s a hundred times worse. It disconnects me from so much, from so many people.’ He sighed. ‘I know what you’re thinking, how it must look. Here on my own, I don’t live, I exist. Is that what you want me to say? Okay, I admit it. I live out here in the back of beyond, with my jam jars and my empty fridge and my cigarettes.’

‘ My cigarettes,’ said Terri, able to smile now the air was clearer.

‘Your cigarettes,’ he conceded. ‘And yes, there’s not a day goes by when I don’t question. .’ He shook his head. ‘I know it’s the logical, educated thing to do when life becomes mere existence. But logic is cold and life is about passion.’

‘And is your life about passion, Dad?’

Brook turned a baleful eye on her. ‘It is tonight.’

‘So we’re supposed to just plod on even when we can see no point in living.’

‘No point? What could be more pointless than being dead forever, without the kernel of hope that somehow there’s something beyond, some afterlife? Education has robbed me of even that puerile vanity.’

‘But at least you can choose your time. You’re in control.’

‘Believe that if you want, Terri, but you don’t choose and you’re not in control. On the contrary, you’re a prisoner of your own weakness. Even at my age. But for a teenager it’s worse. You think people would see, you think they’d take you seriously. You’re wrong. All people would see is confusion and fragility, a failure of will. And your cowardice to face up to life.’

‘Maybe so, but they’d also see the pain, Dad. They’d see you were hurting and that they missed it, that they should try harder next time. See, you can improve people when you go, make the world a better place.’

‘By taking “the easy way out”.’

‘It’s not easy, Dad.’

‘It’s easier than what I have,’ he said quietly.

Terri blinked at the emptiness in her father’s voice. He took a breath and turned back to the soothing void of the night.

‘Then you do understand,’ said Terri finally.

‘Understand? Oh, sure I understand the narcissism, the sheer egotism of such an act. But I could never excuse it,’ he said, swivelling round to jab a finger at her. ‘Never. Don’t you get it? No matter what you achieved in your life, every second that you lived would be held up against your decision to destroy yourself, every setback you faced totted up in your own personal suicide column. The manner of your death would define you. That’s how you’d be judged.

‘Do you think if I killed myself tonight, people would admire me for taking a logical decision? No. They’d pity me because my mental illness got the better of me. Or my divorce tipped me into depression. Or my failure to catch a criminal had driven me to despair. Every good thing about my life would be invisible set against those personal demons.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘I look away — look out not in, Terri. Forget who you are and go outside, take a walk tomorrow and see for yourself. Walk down the river path and listen to the water. Climb to the top of a hill and just sit down and look around. Feel part of something — something big, something wonderful and, yes, sometimes hard and sometimes cruel, but still something.’

Terri took another sip of wine. ‘I know what I did was wrong, Dad. But you’ve forgotten what love can do to you.’

Brook lowered his eyes in defeat. She had him over a barrel. Affection, human contact — these concepts were strangers to him. ‘I wonder if I ever knew,’ he said to the night. ‘I’ve been so lonely at times. All I have left is the strength to endure.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘And you.’

‘Good job I didn’t die then,’ she joked. Brook allowed her a thin smile but it didn’t last and Terri looked away.

‘They’re dead, you know,’ she said softly, a moment later. ‘If not now, then soon. The website is the hook. It hits all the right buttons. First the violence — perhaps sex, tomorrow. Make sure everyone’s watching them, talking about them, analysing their pain. Like they probably analysed Miranda’s pain and the other girls who disappeared on Hanging Rock . That’s where they got the idea, isn’t it? That’s when they realised they didn’t have to continue suffering.’