Chapter 5: Family Conference

“OK, JJ, what’s this ‘family conference’ all about?” asked Tom, as they gathered in the dining room early Sunday morning. “I’ve got a football match kicking off in an hour and I need to get ready.”

“Yeah, JJ,” piped up Tigger, “Why did I have to get up at this ungodly hour? What’s the bloody hurry?”

“Keep your voices down,” JJ hissed, “I wanted us to get together without Mum hearing what’s going on. You both disappeared pretty bloody smartish yesterday and I couldn’t get hold of you both together.”

“You got hold of me,” protested Tigger, “I was in the multiple-complex and forgot to turn my phone off, my bird was like well pissed off!”

“Your ‘bird’, sunshine! Was that Caroline Billings? What a cow she is,” scoffed Tom, “You won’t get nowhere there Bro, her arse is tighter than her sister’s-”

“Shush, the pair of you!” JJ’s voice was a sharp whisper, accompanied by a slap with each hand to both boys, knowing that Dad’s house rules were defined as “no hitting your sister”. It amazed even JJ herself that she normally allowed this rule to curb her own violent tendencies towards her siblings, but when matters were exceptional and there were dire circumstances, those gloves came off. This instance she considered was particularly dire, the future of her family as a cohesive unit appeared to be in desperate jeopardy.

“Do either of you have the vaguest idea what’s going on between Mum and Dad? And why Dad has been missing all this week?”

The two boys looked at one another, mystified.

“Dad’s been missing?” asked Tom.

“Yeah, what d’yer mean what’s going on between Mum and Dad?” added Tigger.

“You plebs are impossible!” JJ tried to keep her voice down but frustration had stretched her constraints to the utmost. “Sometimes I just want to shake both the pair of you to wake up your ideas.”

Tom and Tigger looked at each other. Even sitting at the table, either side of JJ, who was perched at the head, the two boys towered over their elfin sister. Tall, slim and blue-eyed the pair of them, Tom was blessed with long, straight blond hair, which he continually fussed over, while Tigger considered himself cursed with tightly curled reddish brown hair that he had to keep cropped short to prevent from looking wild and woolly. In comparison, JJ was petite with dark brown, almost black hair, so curly, tough and wiry that she used kept it cut quite short too. Her eyes were a dark green-flecked hazel, which were flashing contemptuously as she alternately directed their focus turn by turn on her idiot brothers.

“What’s going on then, JJ?” Tom asked meekly, “You called the meeting, you seem to have some handle on what’s going on here. I haven’t noticed anything differently, except maybe Mum’s being much nicer to me than usual.”

“Didn’t you think it strange on Sunday, when we got back from weekend camp, that we didn’t see Dad at all, all day?”

“No, he was on nights last week, which is why he couldn’t come with us. I guessed he was probably upstairs sleeping.” Tom suggested, Tigger nodded his agreement with his brother’s theory.

“Come off it!” JJ snorted, “It was the last shift of his set on Saturday night. Nothing would have kept him from meeting us off the bus at school. We know his pattern, he goes for a longer run on his first day off, gets home to shower, then has a couple of hours sleep before his lunch and maybe another snooze on the settee afterwards trying to watch catch-up TV. On Sunday it would’ve been the football that he would’ve watched. Being on nights, he hadn’t seen us all week, had he? So he’d deffo get up early and meet the school bus, help load up all our gear in the car. And he’d insist that we unpacked and stowed it all before dinner, watching over us to make sure that we did it all properly, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, he would” agreed the two boys, “Deffo,” added Tigger nodding.

“We didn’t get back until three in the afternoon, so Mum even delayed serving Sunday dinner until five,” JJ continued, “And we were all so wrapped up in ourselves, chatting on about what we did at camp that we didn’t even notice that Dad wasn’t eating with us. I didn’t even realise I hadn’t seen him at all since we got back until sometime on Monday night.”

Tom and Tigger looked askance at one another, “Shit!” Tom breathed, “What a selfish bunch we are, I never even missed Dad at all until you mentioned it just now. He’s just been a shadow around here for ages.”

“Me neither,” Tigger’s eyes were wide open, “What are we? Monsters?”

“No,” JJ said, amazing herself as she rested a hand on each of the boys’ hands. She only ever allowed herself to touch them using the occasional well-directed slap. “We are just normal teenagers. I think...” she hesitated a moment, “I think we need to accept though that Dad has finally had enough of Mum’s playing around.”

“You think Dad found out about Mum and ‘Wetshirt’?” stuttered Tigger. That was the school’s nickname for Mr Western, the sports master at their school.

“What!?” spluttered Tom, “How do you know about that?”

JJ added, “What DO you know, Tigger?”

“Hell guys, I only know what you know, I expect, I saw the pictures, too.”

“Damn! How long have you known?”

“A couple of years or so, I dunno, maybe something like that.”

“You were only 12 then,” JJ said quietly, “We didn’t think you knew about it or wanted to know.”

“I didn’t,” Tigger admitted, “I still wish I didn’t, or that I could forget it ... I can’t. One of my so-called schoolmates decided to show me, without warning me what I was going to see.”

“This is such a bloody mess,” sighed Tom, “What do we know for sure about Dad, then JJ?”

JJ cleared her throat, “I think Dad came home early on Sunday morning, probably really early, and he climbed in through the bathroom window.”

“What?” both Tom and Tigger exploded together.

“Shush!” JJ whispered, her hands held out palms downward, patting the air to quiet the boys down. She paused and tilted her head, listening to hear if her mother had heard their noise and reacted to the noise. Then she reached down under the table and pulled up a sports bag.

“That’s the bag Dad that takes to work?” Tigger suggested.

“Yeah, that’s right, it is Dad’s,” JJ confirmed, “So we know he came back and he left this on the garage roof having used the stepladder from the shed-”

“I wondered who put the step-ladder there,” Tom interrupted, “When I got my bike out of the shed last week.”

“It was Dad, he must’ve climbed in through the bathroom window,” continued JJ, “In this bag are a change of clothes, a towel, his mobile phone, a keyring with his identity pass for work and a locker key on the keyring with his pass, I think,” she pulled out the objects in turn as she spoke, “And, there was this arm sling ... Dad was injured at work and was sent home early. Too late to catch Mum still up, and he considered it was too early to wake Mum up, but not too late to catch her playing at home while we were all away.”

“Bloody hell, JJ,” Tom laughed, “Nancy-bloody-Drew’s got nothin’ on YOU, girl!”

“Where did you find this bag, again?” Tigger asked quietly, fingering one of the handles.

“On the garage roof, just underneath the bathroom window,” JJ answered. “I wanted to speak to Dad about something on Monday and Mum fobbed me off with some spiel about this so-called training course Dad was on.”

“Mum never said nothing to me about where Dad was,” Tig said, “When I wanted help with my homework. She just said that he wasn’t in and I accepted it without question.”

“He hasn’t been on any courses for years,” JJ continued, “The company has cut out all the training since the recession started. Mum’s so full of it and I just didn’t believe her. I rang Dad’s mobile number several times and it went to voicemail every time. I had left a couple of messages each day during the week without reply. I tried again on Friday afternoon, when Mum was indoors cooking and I didn’t want her to hear me. So I rang him from the garden and that’s when I heard Dad’s phone ringing. Took me ages to find it, though. I had to climb up the step ladder before I identified what direction the tone was coming from.”

“You up a ladder, JJ!” Tom observed with a laugh, “You hate heights.”

“Yeah, getting back down was the worst think, though. I didn’t want Mum to know I knew she’d been lying at that stage and had his work bag as evidence, so I had to be really quiet. I played back all Dad’s messages in my room, until the battery went flat. His charger must be in their bedroom, and no way I was going in there, eugh! There was one message on there from his supervisor at work, asking Dad if his arm was alright and to let him know if he wasn’t fit to come in on Saturday. That’s when his shifts restarted. No mention of any training course.”

“So Dad’s left us, left Mum and us-” Tigger wailed.

“Not so hasty,” JJ said, “If this was as sudden as it appears, then Dad hadn’t planned on doing this.”

“You think?” asked Tom.

“Sure. He needs time to sort things out,” JJ insisted, “He needs to find somewhere to live. A hotel room to start with until he can sort out what he can take out of their savings. Then perhaps he’d look into renting a small flat until this house was sold, splitting the proceeds between the pair of them, before he can buy something else on his own.”