* * *
Rob did not open the box when we got home, and a week later it was still sitting on the workbench in the garage.
‘I’m going to open the damned thing myself,’ Lucy said, one day. ‘It’s driving me insane.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘But maybedon’tdo that.’
‘Oh, I won’t really,’ Lucy said. ‘Though actually, I just might.’
I’d already inspected the box closely myself, trying to find a way to take a peep inside. I’d considered peeling back the old masking tape, but it was ancient and un-peelable, and putting on fresh new masking tape would be a giveaway.
While Lucy was intrigued about the contents, I in some weird way feared them. If I could just get a preview, I thought, then I could prepare myself. I could work out the best thing to say when the time came.
But then, one day, I went out to the garage to look for a screwdriver, and I realised the box had gone. It was about a month after our trip to Anglesey.
Lucy got home first that evening. She’d been working part time in a beauty salon in Broadstairs, a job Ange, Shelley’s sister, had fixed her up with.
‘You didn’t touch Dad’s box, did you?’ I asked.
‘No. Why?’ Lucy said. ‘What’s happened to it?’
‘It’s gone,’ I said. ‘So as long as that wasn’t you, it must have been your father.’
‘God,’ Lucy said. ‘He finally opened it, then?’
‘I’ll ask him about it later, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll wait for the right moment and I’ll find out.’
‘As long as you tell me,’ Lucy said. ‘As long as you tell me as soon as you know.’
But Lucy being Lucy, she couldn’t wait. Instead she asked Rob at dinner. ‘Mum says you opened your mystery box,’ she said. ‘So come on, Dad. What was in it?’
Rob, who was in the process of serving spaghetti sauce, didn’t flinch. ‘Nothing in the end,’ he said. ‘It was just junk. So I binned it.’
‘Junk?’ I repeated. ‘What kind of junk?’
Rob looked me in the eye and blew through his lips nonchalantly. ‘An old schoolbook of mine. An old teddy bear. One half of a pair of roller skates.Junk.’
‘God,’ Lucy said. ‘All that driving for nothing!’
‘Yeah,’ Rob said, resuming his dolloping of pasta sauce. ‘I know. Bummer, huh? Anyway, how was your day in Hairy Heaven?’
‘It’s Nail Nirvana, Dad, and you know it. And it was fine. I was just sweeping floors and shit.’
‘They have a lot of that in Hairy Heaven, do they?’ Rob asked, grinning lopsidedly. ‘Shit?’
By retracing my movements over the last few days I was able to work out that the box had still been in the garage on Tuesday. It had rained and I’d used the tumble-drier, so I would have noticed if the box had been gone.
As bin day was Monday, I still had forty-eight hours left to investigate. So, on Sunday, I sent Rob on a fake mission to buy caster sugar so that I could rummage through the contents of our wheelie bin.
Perhaps you guessed this already, but I found nothing. There was no box and nothing strange that could have been in the box. Whether it had not really been binned, or had been binned far from home to prevent anyone discovering the contents, I didn’t know.
On Sunday night I asked Rob again if he’d really just thrown it away.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I told you. It was rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Random stuff left over from their last move.’
‘All of it?’ I asked.
‘All of it,’ he said.
