Bequest

Chapter 13

Luke rang the doorbell, but his father did not answer. He tried knocking loudly. It was strange, as his father was always home on a Sunday morning. He had no place to be. Luke looked through the front window. The curtains weren't drawn, and he could see into the front dining room. He remembered when he was a kid, his father had always kept a spare key in a pot plant out the back. He let himself through the side gate and found the key in the terracotta geranium pot by the back door.

Returning to the front, he unlocked the door and stepped into the house he had grown up in. There was a strange smell, potent like blue vein cheese.

'Dad?' he called out. He turned right into his father's bedroom. The bed was made, with two brown teddy bears flopped over the pillows. He hated how juvenile that was; his father had never grown up. 'Dad?' he called again.

An uneasy feeling marched like worker ants into his stomach. He listened to his own footsteps on the floorboards in the hallway, no longer the innocent pitter-patter of a child's. It was the trepidation of an adult expecting the very worst.

Ice-cold shock froze through his body when he stepped into the kitchen. He took in the scene: the blood, the knife, his father's flayed-open stomach. He reconstructed in his mind what had happened the night before with the clues in front of him. He saw his father drunk on liquor and the conviction that he must save his skin. He'd sawed his own stomach open with a steak knife, rough and jagged, as clumsy as a cut in a cardboard box. He'd even managed to slice himself under the ribs, creating a small door around Mao on his abdomen.

His father's dead body lay like an island in a swamp of blood on the speckled linoleum floor. His eyes hung open in self-inflicted shock; his arms looked twisted, half his face drooped like he'd suffered from a stroke. Luke was angry. His father couldn't even die like a normal man, he'd had to construct a colourful narrative once again. Splashes of red, something vulgar, horrific, painfully heroic, but altogether quite useless.

Anger and sadness rotated within him on a water wheel, gathering memories—good and bad—the axle of his pain loud and cranky. Emotions drained through him, ending in a spurt so large and powerful he feared he didn't have the energy to keep on standing.

But something made him look closer at his father, despite the urge to run away. He scanned the body and noticed that his father had practiced his skinning successfully on his calf muscle. He'd cut out Darwin's moth. The removed piece of skin was sitting neatly on the kitchen bench, on a tea towel placed over two blue icepacks, the type they used to take camping with them. Once upon a time, those icepacks had kept their deli meat cold on the journey to Rosebud, but now they were chilling his father's flesh.

Luke couldn't remember the last time he'd done it, but he was suddenly overwhelmed with a need to touch his father. The body, there on the ground, covered in blood, was untouchable. But he walked over to that piece of skin on the bench and stroked the moth's wings with his fingertips. His father had not adapted to his environment, he'd changed himself, evolved into something quite different to his own species. He was neither Darwin's white moth nor the black moth, he was the multi-coloured moth inked by an artist's hand. He'd undergone a complete transformation of the flesh.

Yet, strangely enough, even though the life had gone out of his father, his skin was full of personality. Those historical totems on his body read like a roadmap of his great loves: powerful and intelligent men, Mao, Saint-Just, Darwin. He saw his father at the dinner table extolling some moment in history with bolognaise sauce around his mouth; he saw him standing outside the school gate saying, 'kisses', like no other father did; he saw him walking around the supermarket swinging his arms as though he was someone special. He certainly wasn't bland like other fathers.

His body was too far gone now, saturated in blood, starting to decompose already, but that scrap of flesh on the ice blocks could perhaps be saved. Before he called the police, or a funeral parlour, or Craig, or any other family or friends, Luke opened the Yellow Pages. He called three different taxidermists before he found one who could come straight