The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

Booked into a room there and slept for a few hours. Took a shower. In the late afternoon, I wandered back down to their cabin. It was twilight and I could see their lights were on, including the hanging ambient lighting of the veranda. As I walked up the steps, it became clear someone was in the hot tub. It was Johnny. He was asleep, or smacked out of his head, once again, his chin lolling in the water. Then, as I got to the top of the steps, I saw what was nestled in his arms. Nearly underwater. It was the baby. It was Titus. He had sat down in the hot tub, high off his head, with a baby in his arms. He was dangerous. A sick psychopath.’

Matthew paused, his eyes wide at me. And at long last, something fell into place. That horribly cold sense of dread that had been growing within me was rising. My eyes met his. And then I knew what he had done. Knew where this was heading. Had I always suspected this to be the case? Had I known, deep down, that there was something troubling about the death of Titus’s father? Maybe. But that wasn’t what was burning within me, threatening to break out, to lash out, to make me tear down the house with rage. It was the fact he was only telling me now. That he’d let us build a life together, involved me so closely in the life of his adopted son, with this lie buried so deep into the fabric of our existence. In that moment, I wanted to scream. But I said nothing. I just waited, and before long, he took a deep breath and continued.

‘I walked over to the hot tub and immediately lifted Titus out of the water. Thank God I arrived when I did as his head could have been submerged any second. Johnny had had him wrapped in a towel, which was soaked through with water. I picked up Johnny’s discarded clothes on the floor and used them to dry the baby off, then I went inside, jiggling him in my arms, trying to stop him crying. Collette was asleep on the sofa. She stirred a bit when I came in and mumbled to shut the baby up. She may have thought I was Johnny. She had a massive joint in her right hand, which was resting up against the sofa. Considering they were living in a wooden cabin, the idea of them messing around with lit joints and flames terrified me. I took the joint from her fingers and crushed it out onto a plate on the coffee table. I put Titus down in his cot and he stopped crying after a minute or two. Then I went back out to the lounge. Collette had gone back to sleep and Johnny was still in the hot tub outside. Time sort of slows down for me from that point onwards. But I know quite clearly my thought processes as I watched what was happening. As I walked closer, I could see that Johnny’s limp, pale body was sliding off the ledge inside the tub. And he was slipping deeper into the water. I expected him to take a gasp as the waterline went past his mouth. I expected an instinctive attempt to cling onto life to kick in. But it didn’t. Then it crept past his nose as his head dropped forwards, submerging the rest of his face into the warm water. No thrashing. No wild attempts to save himself. He just slid under. And didn’t come back up.’

It was time for me to speak now. For if I didn’t, I feared I would scream. ‘You didn’t do anything to save him?’ I said the sentence quietly, but my clenched teeth betrayed my trembling emotion. Matthew noticed and he looked devastated by the question.

‘No. But … please … can’t you understand? Can’t you see why? He was destroying Collette’s life. He put me and my mother in an impossible situation. We would have been forced to involve the police, lawyers, potentially land her in prison. Social services. Custody battles. And not to mention what he…’ he stumbled, his voice quivering in a half sob, ‘what he did to me. I still dream of that night. A bolt of panic runs through me whenever I see a children’s animal mask. Have you ever wondered why sometimes I jerk awake in the early hours and struggle to get back to sleep? I’m haunted by it. Haunted by what he and his masked maniacs did to me.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’ I stopped myself from shouting, but I rose out of my seat and stood, in the centre of the lounge, unsure if I wanted to fly at him in rage or leave the room in protest, unable to cope with the depths of his secrets, the amount that had been unsaid between us. ‘You told me you weren’t there. You’ve always said… You’ve … lied to me all this time.’

‘Oh, come on, what good would it have done? That’s not something anyone wants to know. That their husband is guilty of, what … manslaughter? Maybe not even that. And besides, I prevented a death. The only reason Titus is alive upstairs now is because of me. Can’t you celebrate that? Can’t you cherish that one brilliant part of what happened?’

I was close to shouting at him that it was not enough, not enough to excuse the years of deception, but then something else struck me. I paused, then collapsed back down onto the sofa, my head in my hands, my fingers rubbing into my eyes. I allowed a few more seconds to tick on as I tried to make my heart slow down. Then I said, as calmly as I could, ‘I still don’t understand what the fuck this has to do with Rachel.’

Chapter Forty Rachel

Less than a week