***
Kim Cutbush was not an early riser.
His little Sister awoke at around 6am every day, spending her the time before anyone else rose creating worlds and universes in the space beneath the pine kitchen table; populated by Sylvanian badgers and rabbits, several My Little Ponies and an assortment of realistic looking jungle animals.
His Dad was normally next up. Reading the next paper on his iPad with a coffee brewed in a small beige topped cafetiere as his sister played at his feet.
Today as he passed he heard something new.
An argument appeared to have broken out between his Dad and Mrs Hitchcock; something about fallen leaves on Mrs Hitchcock’s path, she was saying they came from the trees in their garden, and Kim heard him telling her to "chuck the damn things back over if they bother you".
Laying in his bed, Kim heard a noise like something being water being emptied or a vacuum being filled and shot out of his bed, a horrible thought occurring to him as he clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen to find his sister alone under the table conducting a conversation between a mountain lion and a squirrel.
His Dad’s iPad laying alone on the table but no trace of him. No empty coffee cup.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked Alice frantically, but she just pulled a face at her big brother being weird again, and he ran into the garden to find Mrs Hitchcock staring over the fence triumphantly, ignoring her as he felt a sob growing in the pit of his stomach and tears seeping uncontrollably from his eyes.
“Boy,” she called to him, but he ignored her, would go nowhere near her, “you need to learn some manners boy.”
Within an hour all trace of Dad had disappeared; his study redecorated, family photos airbrushed or absent, as his existence was stitched out of time, leaving the boy distraught.
“Please dear, don’t talk like that about your father,” said his Mother, a wistful look on her face, as the boy begged her to recall his father, “you know I don’t like to think about it. He was just a man I knew briefly, before you were born, I don’t really remember him.”
“But Mum, I knew him, he's my Daddy, I want my Daddy!” Kim shouted, tears in his eyes, even though he knew it was futile, “and he’s gone, and I miss him. I want him.”
For a week, he took to his bed weeping, inconsolable, whilst his mother went from initial irritation and befuddlement, to growing concern and panic, and in no time at all he’d been booked in to see a counsellor, a head shrinker, who didn’t actually do anything to his head, and just showed him lots of funny drawings and asked him all these questions about what he thought he knew; read out all these words to him and asked what they meant.
Later he heard his Mum telling Johnny the counsellor had told her he was a “deeply troubled boy,” and how she was really worried, even though she'd "done her best with him."
He was deeply troubled; just not by what Mum thought.
The lady next door had knocked off half the village and no-one seemed to have noticed.
Again he recalled how Rab told him a person was only truly dead when there was no-one left who remembered them.
Only he remembered Dad now. Only he remembered all of them.
He crouched down behind the hydrangea and stared at her through the crack in the fence and cursed his Mum’s reasoning. It wasn’t that he’d never known Dad. He'd been stolen from him. From all of them, and he stewed about it.
The only person who half believed him was his little sister, Alice, but she more or less believed everything that anyone told her, so this didn’t help him at all, except in that it kept her relatively safe.