Missing presumed Dead

Now that I am nearing my end, it is finally time to tell the truth of what really happened.

I was born in 1960. My childhood was happy until 1965, the year my mother died giving birth to the sister I never got to meet. My father had never recovered. He surrendered to the bottle, lost his job, and eventually turned his grief into violence. After that, the kitchen table and any other flat surface held nothing but green glass bottles and a layer of grey ash. By the age of ten, I had learned the geography of fear. If I weren’t through the front door by 3:40 p.m.—exactly ten minutes after the school bell, he would be waiting with his belt, the buckle clinking against the floorboards as he wrapped the leather around his fist.

In 1970, shortly after my tenth birthday, I began keeping a diary. We had no money for notebooks, so I used only paper available: the slick backs of old bills, rough junk mail, and thin scraps of advertisements. I recorded every blow, every insult, and every bruise.

One memory stays as sharp as broken glass. In the winter of 1972, I turned twelve; this particular evening, the coal ran out. I was sitting in four inches of lukewarm water, using harsh washing-up liquid that stung my skin because we couldn’t afford the good stuff. On the edge of the tub sat my mother’s old portable radio, its plastic casing yellowed by tobacco smoke. I was listening to Kenny Everett, his voice crackling through the static, taking me away from the torment of being here. Kenny said something funny.

I laughed. Just once.

The door didn't open; it split against the frame, splinters of wood flying in every direction. The sound of my joy snapped something inside my father. He lunged into the bathroom, smelling heavily of stale beer and cigarettes. He grabbed the radio and smashed it against the wall. The music died in a crunch of plastic and metal.

For the first time in my life, I found my voice. I stood up, holding my hand in front of my private parts, the soapy water splashing over the rim. "I hate you, I wish you were dead," I whispered.

The flat of his hand caught me across the cheekbone. The world tilted ninety degrees, and then I spun around, cracking my head against the cold tiles. As warm blood began to pump from the wound, I grabbed a rough towel to stem the flow. He turned and walked away, leaving the copper smell of blood dripping into the bath. I looked down as the grey water slowly turned red.

That was the moment I began to hatch my plan.

By January 1976, I was fifteen years, eleven months, and two weeks old. I was ready. For years, I had been skimming coins from the kitchen jar and taking crumpled pound notes from his wallet while he lay drunk on Friday nights. I had more than two hundred pounds hidden in an old rucksack in the shed, along with some extra clothing. It didn’t smell that good, but it was clean.

The day before I vanished, I began "decorating" the house. I planted breadcrumbs of a sinister fate: blood-stained t-shirts tucked into dark crevices, and pages of my scrap-paper diary left where they would eventually catch the light. I hid the old towel, the one crusted with my dark, dried blood from the night of the radio—under the bath, knowing it would be discovered.

Thursday, 21st of June 1976, the day before the school closed for the summer break, I placed the final entry of my diary under a loose floorboard in my bedroom, where the dust lay thick. Written on the back of a gas bill from March '75, I penned in a jagged, trembling hand: “He says he’ll kill me if I scream again.” It was a lie, or perhaps just the truth he hadn’t gotten around to saying yet. I knew the police would believe it once they saw the state of the house.

On Friday, 22nd July, when the final school bell rang, I didn’t turn toward home. I walked straight to the bus station, breathing in the thick diesel fumes, and bought a ticket to Carlisle. It was the first leg of a journey that would take me to Scotland, then Fort William, and finally to the Isle of Skye.

I chose Skye because of Auntie Julie. She wasn’t a blood relative, but my mother’s best friend, and the only person who had ever made me feel wanted. She lived on a smallholding that smelled of wet peat, woodsmoke, and damp wool. I knew I could disappear amidst the bleating of free-running sheep and the clucking of hens, and the miles, and miles of nothing.

As the coach pulled away, I imagined my father waiting behind the door at 3:41 p.m.; his belt already unbuckled for the daily ritual. He would find only silence. Then, he would find the clues. I had tipped over a tin of red lead paint; it was the stuff mum used to paint the front step with. It was all over the cellar floor, looking like a bloodstain. Then I sprinkled bleach all over. I had also left one of my shoes floating in the village pond, and tucked the other behind his car’s spare wheel, buried in the grease and grime.

Thirty years later, still living with Julie on Skye. And after several visits to the Hospital on the mainland, the doctor diagnosed what I had as terminal. That evening, we settled down with a pizza and a night by the Telly to watch a true-crime documentary. Suddenly, my old village appeared on the screen. Holding my breath, I looked at the grainy image of our old house. My rusty bike still leaning against the fence, the washing line still strung across the garden, these images gave way to archival shots of my school. The sound of a bell rang out; children poured through the gates, cheering, waving their hands in the air, and I exhaled as I recognised the faces of my old classmates, then came a tear and a lump in my throat. Julie held my hand.

The narrator was telling my story. She explained that my father had been arrested three weeks after I disappeared. Faced with the blood-crusted towel, the diary entries, and the evidence planted in his car, the jury didn’t need a body. They saw a monster, and they were not wrong, even if he was imprisoned for a crime; he did not actually commit.

According to the program, my father breathed his last behind iron bars in 2006, clutching a hollow plea of innocence until the very end. He finally spoke the truth to a prison chaplain about the beatings and the abuse. But it was too late, and there was no one left to forgive him.

My time is running out. Days, maybe weeks, are all I have left. The doctor gave me six months, and I've fought past that deadline, but I can feel the end closing in. More than anything, I am clinging to the hope that there is something after this, that we will find each other again. I just desperately need to see my father. There is so much left unsaid, and so many questions still tearing at my heart.