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Blogs by Richard G Stevens
THE SOURCE OF MY NIGHTMARES 5/6/2018 11:36:17 PM
Extract from my new novel, Sea of Duplicity, due for release soon I found my Christmas presents three years ago on the recessed top of my dad’s wardrobe, but the next Christmas, when I was coming up eight and growing taller, they’d decided to use the similar wardrobe in my mum’s bedroom. By the way, I had always taken their separate rooms as normal until I visited my school friends’ homes where games of ‘sardines’ or hide and seek revealed most parents shared a bedroom.
I asked mum why she had her own room and she said dad snored too much; this was true...he sometimes woke me in the next room even with both doors between us closed, so although their choice of separate rooms appeared innocent, it certainly added to my strange sense of being an unwelcome child in a broken family, but I questioned it no more. Anyway, mum’s wardrobe was wider and stood far higher than dad’s so even though they’d told me off many times for trampolining on her bed, they must have thought that I wouldn’t be able to see the growing cache.
Once I’d spotted a sizeable collection, I only had to risk getting caught once when building a platform out of chairs, bedside tables and boxes to get my hands on the stockpile and so carry out my half hour’s scientific assessment. But the next year my presents had been on neither wardrobe, so when they were out I extended my search and became diverted from my quest when I found a black metal box inside my dad’s wardrobe, beneath his row of suits.
It was largish, but far too small to be the new hideaway for my presents, so as I’d stumbled on it, like buried treasure its contents cried out to be assessed. I lifted it onto the foot of dad’s bed and realised this was a real challenge, the mystery container was locked. So I set out to find the key.
It turned out that dad hadn’t given me, or a burglar for that matter, any real test because I soon found the little key in his sock drawer and bingo, his box of secrets was laid open before me. It was full of paper, none of which at first glance seemed of interest to an inquisitive almost nine year-old, but I had to be sure.
There were all sorts of official-looking letters and forms, but the topmost caught my eye; it was my 1968 birth certificate and the next in the pile was my father’s 1922 birth certificate and then my mother Grace’s for 1920. Hers didn’t seem quite right because her parents’ names were the same as those on my father’s certificate, so how could she be married to my dad?
Digging deeper I unearthed an envelope inside which was a marriage certificate dated August 1967 with my dad’s name on it, showing the name of his wife not as Grace, but someone with a weird foreign name who, it seemed, worked as a spinster in the Embassy of Greece.
