Don't Come Looking by AJ Campbell (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

a success of getting people into that sweaty, smelly place, including her?

That is, until recently.

‘Can you even spare one minute to look at me?’

No.

‘Luke!’

I huff and puff and turn to her. Come on, Luke. Keep your crap together. There’s not long to go now. My raised eyebrows ask her, what now?

‘I’ve bought some cold meats and salad from Marks and Spencer. Please go and prepare them and lay the table and get drinks ready while I take a quick shower.’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Luke!’

‘Why can’t Dad do it?’

‘He’s not coming home until later. Just get down there, will you?’

She flounces out of the room, asking God to give her strength. I snigger. Oh, what fun it is to ride on the wave of her indignation.

It’s called getting my own back.

I toggle back to my video creation, save the latest files and head downstairs – no use in riling her at this late stage.

What I still can’t fathom is how she still doesn’t know I know. Neither does Dad. All these years of bragging to everyone who will listen about how highly intelligent their only child is, and they still think they can keep their dirty collection of secrets hidden from me.

It’s getting on for two years now since I started to guess. One Saturday, when Dad and I were out with Marc and Harry celebrating our GCSE results. Even I was chuffed with my clean sweep of grades.

The four of us took a trip up to town, starting at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho. Purely for my benefit, although, to their credit, Marc and Harry did try and show some interest. Dad wandered around, nodding and commenting, “Impressive, impressive” even to the exhibits that didn’t deserve such adulation. I remember watching him and thinking, what a knob, how can he not see the difference? It was so transparent to me.

There was an exhibition on that day titled Divided Self by Tom Butler. An artist’s work has never intrigued me as much – how he manages to manipulate images to create such distorted and disturbing scenarios. While I viewed the exhibition a second time, Harry, Marc and Dad went to the café for coffee. They had to drag me out after their second cup.

Lunch followed in some pizza restaurant near London Bridge that makes their own dough with fresh seawater from the Mediterranean. The minerals make it lighter, apparently. Everyone else stuffed theirs down, but I couldn’t eat. Why can’t people learn to eat properly? It’s not hard. One bite made me gag as I watched Dad gorge a slice of pizza down his thick neck.

We visited the Clink Prison Museum afterwards, England’s oldest prison. I’d never heard of it – that was Harry’s choice. He’s always been interested in history, and it’s the only subject in which he managed to achieve top marks in his GCSEs. The three of them enjoyed it far more than the gallery. I thought it more akin to a haunted house at a funfair.

It was while Dad was browsing around the reproduction torture devices, the metal mask and thumbscrew in particular, that it occurred to me how different he is to me. We don’t look alike, we don’t sound alike, and we certainly don’t think alike. He was laughing with Marc. ‘Don’t you wish that sometimes you could get hold of some of these contraptions to use on the missus?’ His maniacal laugh unnerved me the most. As if he had once been an inmate in that prison. I’d never noticed it before. He creeped me out more than the gruesome artefacts.

It was at that moment I knew.

There is more to him than he allows the world to view.

It disturbed me for many months – nineteen to be precise. Until April this year when, as part of her annual ritual, Mum asked me to help with her yearly clearing-out stocktake. She sorts all unsold items she doesn’t think she has a chance of shifting in a sale, and I load them onto eBay. It marks the start of the school Easter holidays. From opening to closing, I hide in her stockroom at the back of the shop and list all the shite for auction. I scribe a short paragraph on each, price them up by researching how much similar items are selling for, before uploading them to her selling page. The following week entails packing and posting all the items that sell – which is pretty much all of them. It’s tedious and boring, but the upside is I get to bank twenty per cent of the sale price.

This year, I finished by mid-afternoon on the Thursday. I must have got quicker because there was roughly the same number of items as in previous years. Mum was busy with a couple of customers who had come in to try on the new lines she had displayed on the dummies in the shop window. I didn’t want to go out while they were umming and ahing about which colour best complemented their skin tone. So, I sat at her small desk, in the corner of the stockroom, nosing through her annual tax return spread out on top of a cluster of fashion magazines. I did the maths. It wasn’t hard, and it didn’t take long. I’m no accountant, but even I could see there was no way that shitty business of hers made that much annual profit. No way at all.

What was she up to?

I opened the drawer to the filing cabinet next to the desk and pried through the drop file marked TAX AFFAIRS to find six plastic wallets. Each one contained a tax return. Trying to be quick, before the stupid women out the front made up their fickle minds whether to purchase which stupid whatever, I scanned the contents of each file. While flicking through all the paperwork, my jaw dropped further and further as it became evident this wasn’t the first year she had paid out an extortionate sum of tax for her underperforming little