| Writer :
Christa L Joyce |
| Contact
Writer at : christajoyce@yahoo.com |
| Location :
London, UK |
| Received :
21/04/2002 |
The Accident...
The boy’s hair was sticking up at angles
from his head.
‘That’s not right’ Sean said ‘he wouldn’t go out with his hair
looking like that’
That was a year ago. A whole year had passed since Sean and Diane had
stood stiffly side by side in a hospital basement, miles from home and
nodded their identification. A year later and all Sean could remember was
the way Callum’s hair had stood up, sticking out all over the place,
dirty and matted with blood and brains.
They had called it suicide.
There was to be an enquiry they told him. An inquest and then an enquiry.
They gave him forms to sign, forms that gave them permission to take his
son and cut up what was left of him ...just so they could make a judgment.
He signed anyway, hating himself for needing to know...
That was a year ago and a year was a long time... Not long enough to heal,
but just long enough for the raw wounds to scab over... in time for them
to be picked off again by a public enquiry. An enquiry where the curious
could come to listen, to watch, to sit in judgement over a poor dead boy
who couldn’t speak for himself.
Sean didn’t know how they had survived in the twelve months since it
happened? Oh they went through the motions, picked themselves up and
‘got on with it’. He dulled the pain with chemicals, usually liquid,
but anything that would make it bearable, but it didn’t matter. Nothing
worked. And Diane? She shopped and cleaned and baked with a vigour she’d
never possessed before that day. Callum was their first born. He was
special. Sean knew you weren’t supposed to have favourites, but the
first born...
They had two other children, a boy and a girl. Over the past twelve months
he had watched them tear themselves apart trying to be good. Eight and
twelve and the best kids in the whole street, too damn good. He knew he
had failed them, was failing them still...but he had to do this first.
Before he could go back to being anyone’s dad, he needed answers to the
questions that had plagued him from the moment the phone had started to
ring in the middle of the night, twelve long months ago...
And in the middle of every night since, he
had woken with a start at the sound of gunfire, sat bolt-upright, dripping
in sweat, unable to breathe... the question ringing out in his ears Why?
His boy, his first born....Callum had been so proud when he had been
accepted, The Army was all he had dreamed of throughout his school years.
‘I was born to be a soldier, dad’ he would say ‘I’ll be a hero one
day and make you all proud, you’ll see’
And now... No hero’s grave for soldier boy Callum O’Neill, no glorious
epitaph. A simple lawn grave and a black marble stone bearing his name and
the dates 14.6.1980 - 18.9.1997. Just seventeen, what a waste. And the
enquiry came and went, giving up no answers, no clues as to what really
happened that day. Insufficient evidence, they said, to prove conclusively
that it had been suicide. Couldn’t possibly have been murder...
‘Let the record show a verdict of accidental death’ the coroner
said...
He had always known it wasn’t suicide. How the hell could it have been
suicide? How could a seventeen-year-old boy manage to strangle himself...
whilst shooting himself in the back of the head?
Twice.Of course, it had to be an accident.
Didn’t it?
|
Got any feedback
on this work? Click here
and quote reference number 110 |
|
