Read Online A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton - Free Book Online Page A

experienced.
    The music of the period sometimes jolts him backwards in a vertiginous flush of synaptic connections. Something like the snap drum intro to Bowie's 'Young Americans' can take Koopman right back to 1975 and to Sharon and Stevie.
    Sharon had been a looker, not a doubt about that. Koop doesn't really remember the physical details of what she looked like, other than a vague recollection of blonde hair, flicked back Farrah Fawcett-style, but he remembers the feeling he got when he saw her. It could be summed up in one word.
    Sex.
    Sweet sixteen but Sharon had most definitely been kissed. Koop hadn't had any illusions that he was the first, but he was the first who'd managed to get Sharon Carroll pregnant. They'd been standing against the iron gates ofHillside High up on Breeze Hill when she told him. He still had pimples.
    'We'll get married,' he'd said, not knowing what else to say and not wanting to appear as he was: a scared-shitless teenager. 'I'm goin' in the police. It'll be alright.' It was an assertion, nothing more. Even as the words came out of his mouth Koop remembers thinking that things probably wouldn't be alright. Fucking pregnant! Jesus.
    If Sharon noticed his hesitation she didn't say anything. She'd agreed. It had felt like a plan. Grown up. It would be alright.
    'Alright,' she said. 'OK.'
    Sharon's family had other ideas.
    After a gut-churning scene between his and Sharon's parents one night in their cramped terraced house – an evening that still had the power to bring a blush to Koop's face – almost as soon as Stevie was born, the Carrolls had emigrated, seemingly overnight, to Australia; one of the last contingent of the ten-pound Poms.
    Koop had formed half-baked heroic ideas about following Sharon over there, of becoming an Australian, of making his new life with his woman and his baby. He'd even got as far as turning up at the Cunard Buildings to find out about applications.
    But he was seventeen. And at seventeen the pain had subsided shamefully quickly.
    A year after Stevie's birth Koop heard through a school friend, who'd also made the move down under, that Sharon was pregnant again and had married a local. She discouraged Koop's attempts to contact Stevie as he grew older and, in all honesty, Koop had been glad. He hadn't the heart to interfere. He hoped Sharon and Stevie were making a go of things and, once he'd started work as acadet, had begun sending money to Australia. The envelopes came back, scrawled 'return to sender' and, year after year, little by little, Koop's will lessened. Doing the right thing was complicated, slippery, and he'd never been sure he'd managed it, or even come close.
    It hadn't, in the end, been his to do. It was up to Sharon and Sharon's new family to decide, and what they'd decided was best was for Koop to fade from Stevie's life as if he'd never existed.
    Koop had supposed that Stevie might, if told, eventually show some interest in following up the trail of his real father, but it had never happened. Years became decades, the details of Stevie's life being drip-fed in ever-decreasing snippets of hard-won information, and although Koop tried to conjure up the appropriate feelings it had always felt false, as if he were feigning interest. He thought of Stevie frequently, often in idealised terms. And, ever since moving to Australia himself, had once or twice entertained fanciful notions of tracing him (it would be easy) and entering his life, a late flowering of filial affection.
    It had been Zoe who'd gently shown him how potentially destructive this could be, not just for Stevie but for Koop himself. Zoe who –
    'Mr Koopman?'
    It's Sullivan and Koop is back in his kitchen. He coughs and straightens his back.
    'Stevie?' he says, looking Sullivan in the eye. 'What's happened? Why are you guys here?'
    Sullivan licks his lips and flicks a glance in Zoe's direction. Koop knows what's coming isn't going to be any kind of good.
    'They found a body,' says Zoe.