A Winter Grave

Chapter Six

Earlier Brodie had turned on lights all over the flat, tearing it apart to look for more whisky. Finding, finally, a drawerful of miniatures collected from flights and hotel rooms.

Now he sat in the sad, harsh light of the front room working his way through them, one after the other, as he watched more images of the past slide across the screen above the fireplace.

In the early photographs, when Addie was just a baby, Mel had been happy and radiant, and he lingered over them. But the increasingly haunted face she presented to the world in later years made him scroll more quickly by. Somehow, when someone close to you loses weight, and sadness leaches the life from their eyes, you’re not always aware of it. Not at the time. It’s only later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that you see it. The before and the after. And it is shocking. Brodie was shocked now that he hadn’t seen it in the moment. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to. And couldn’t face the self-recrimination on top of his self-pity.

He focused instead on Addie. How easy it was in the digital age to take photographs and videos. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Most languishing on hard drives and SD cards, seldom viewed beyond the taking. But there could hardly have been a generation in history whose lives had been more visually chronicled than Addie’s.

Dozens and dozens of her as a baby. Newborn, crusty and wet, fresh from the womb. First nappies, first pram, first cot, first step. Every first of almost every day recorded for posterity.

Mel had told him the night they met that her mother had named her after one of the Spice Girls. Or maybe two of them. Mel herself had wanted to name their daughter after her favourite singer. Adele. In the early days she’d always had music playing. The sad, haunting, self-pitying songs of Adele had predominated, to the point where Brodie had come to hate them. Lyrics mirroring a generation obsessed with itself. Though he never said anything.

When Mel told him she wanted to name their daughter after the singer, he had bitten back an objection. There was not a single happiness he would have denied her. But right from the start, he had been unable to bring himself to call her Adele, shortening it instead to Addie. Which had stuck. All her life.

Now he watched through a haze of alcohol as his daughter grew up before his eyes. From laughing toddler, to the solemn-faced five-year-old in her brand-new uniform whose hand he had held as he walked her to the school gates for the very first time. He could remember, still, the sense of loss he’d experienced watching her passing through them and into her new life. The loss was one of innocence. He understood now that each chapter of our lives changes us irrevocably. That we grow and adapt to fit the new narrative. And that nothing is ever the same again.

But he had loved that little girl. And loved her again as he watched her once more grow towards womanhood. The video that Mel had taken of him teaching her to swim. Then the first wobbling turn of the wheels as she learned to ride a bike, screaming, ‘Don’t let go, Daddy, don’t let go,’ long after he had.

Now a toothy twelve-year-old with braces, arms wrapped around the astrological telescope he had bought for her birthday. She was almost unable to contain her glee. An obsession with the sky, an early indicator of where the future might lead her. Now she could see the stars that she had somehow always wanted to reach for.

Then came the succession of inappropriate boyfriends that punctuated her teen years, the knee-jerk rejection of parental advice as she very nearly drowned in a sea of adolescent hormones, almost unrecognisable from the little girl he had taken to school that first day.

And finally, the very last photograph he had of her. One she had taken herself. A defiant, accusatory selfie. Her anger at the world — and more specifically, her father — was evident in the curl of her lips, the fire in her eyes. He could barely bring himself to look at it. How had he even acquired it? He had no recollection now. Maybe she had sent it to him. A farewell gift. Of her hatred and contempt. The force of it had not diminished in all the years since.

He fumbled on the cushion next to him among the empty miniatures, in search of one with an unbroken seal. He found the last one. A bulbous, dented little bottle. Haig Dimple. He tore off the lid and sucked at the neck of it till it was empty. His breathing was stertorous in the still of the room. He closed his eyes and felt the world spinning away. Then opened them to find Addie still directing her hostility at him. He shut his eyes again to escape the pain of it. And made a decision.