Gas

Gas

When Joe’s parents had told him that he would be getting the attic room, he was overjoyed. Up that second flight of stairs he would have the whole level to himself, his own fortress of solitude. From his window he would be able to see the lights of the suburbs as they spread all the way out to Dun Laoghaire harbour, to the right of the vista were the red and white stripes of the chimneys at the Poolbeg power station, to the left Howth Head’s peak could be seen as it jutted above the rooftops. In the middle was an expanse of distant water and Joe would spend hours watching the tiny dots of pleasure boats and the hulking masses of ferries. Since starting secondary school, his attitude had quickly changed. Joe’s father insisted that he go to his room after dinner each evening to study.

“If your homework takes less than two hours, you’re not giving it enough effort. Then you revise for an hour. That’s what I did when I was your age,” he had said.

Now Joe’s fortress seemed more like a prison. He always felt so isolated as he sat for the mandatory three hours listening to the sounds he could dimly hear two floors below, his younger brother and sister arguing or playing, his mother talking on the phone, his father coming home from or leaving for work. Joe would do his homework, then read a book or just sit listening to what he could hear of the rest of the household. Occasionally, when he could scrounge some batteries, he would play Tetris on his battered old Game Boy. He would always leave his school books open in case anyone came upstairs to check on him.

One day Joe was sitting at his desk, looking out the window at the lights of other houses spreading out into the distance, when he heard adult footsteps coming up the first flight of stairs. His mother had gone to visit her sister that night, so Joe knew that it was his father on the stairs. He was probably just going to the bathroom, but Joe pulled his open copy book towards himself and picked up a pen, just in case. His instincts proved to be right as his father began to make his way up the second flight of stairs.

“Are you finished your study?” his father asked as he strode into the room. He was a tall and skinny man but Joe had always found him imposing nonetheless. Joe’s father had tested him like this before, asking if he was finished before the three hours were up. Any response in the affirmative would result in an extra half hour being added to his sentence for the rest of the week.

“No,” said Joe, “I still have to finish my maths.”

“We’re going for a drive, put on your coat and get your brother and sister into the car.”

Joe’s sister sat in the front seat beside their father, Joe sat in the back with his brother. Their father often decided to go for long drives, sometimes alone and sometimes with the family. That night, the drive seemed to go on forever.

“Where are we going?” asked Joe’s sister, Tara. It was obvious that she was annoyed. Usually her friend Allison would come over in the evenings and they would spend hours in Tara’s room, singing along to Backstreet Boys and Boyzone tracks that had been taped off the radio. She hated these monotonous drives, always the same, endlessly traversing the Wicklow Mountains or circling the inclines of Howth Head.

“Just for a drive,” their father replied. His eyes never shifted from the road.

Eventually they pulled up at a shop they had never been to before. They all climbed out of the car and went inside.

“Pick yourselves out a treat,” said their father.

Joe was delighted, they usually weren’t allowed sweets when they went to shops with their father. As they climbed back into the car, Joe’s dad opened the boot and put in a cylinder of gas.

“The Super Ser must need a refill,” Joe thought idly.

 On the way home, Joe relished his bar of chocolate while thinking of his Dad. He was usually scared of his Dad, he didn’t think that his father liked him very much, but sometimes he acted differently. Sometimes he would buy Joe or his siblings an unexpected present or just let them have a treat for no apparent reason. When they got home, Joe went into the sitting room with Tara and sat down to watch the television. Their brother was only four years old and in order to keep the peace they usually put on a tape that he would approve. Toy Story or The Wind in the Willows were the usual choices and though he had seen it a thousand times before, Joe was just happy to be downstairs as he slotted The Wind in the Willows into the VHS machine.

“Have you finished your study?”

“No, I’ll go do it now,” Joe replied, trying not to show his disappointment in case it should prompt a lecture or a punishment.

Joe sat down to his desk and looked at his watch. He would have to stay up here for an hour and fifteen minutes, maybe he could go back downstairs in an hour and his father wouldn’t notice. Joe sat down on the floor in front of his bookshelves, there was nothing here that he hadn’t read multiple times but maybe he would find something to entertain him for just one more hour. He pulled out his copy of The Carpet People and began to read. After some time he heard footsteps coming quickly up the stairs. He threw the book under his bed and leapt back to his desk as the footsteps alighted the second flight of stairs. It was Tara.

“I can’t find Dad,” there was something unusual in her voice. She sounded scared.

“What do you mean?” Joe asked.

“He went to put the car in the shed and didn’t come back in.”

Joe thought that was strange, their car was always parked at the front of the house, never in the shed.

“Then he’s in the shed, go out and see,” Joe said, irritably. Joe hated when she came up to his room during his study hours. He was certain that she did it on purpose sometimes, just to flaunt her freedom. Once she had caught him trying to conceal his Game Boy underneath his Science book and had run straight downstairs to tell their father.

“I don’t want to, there’s no light on in the shed,” Joe’s sister replied, her voice sounded very upset now.

Joe sighed and followed his sister down the two flights of stairs. He walked to the back door and peered out, there was no light on in the shed.

“Do you know where the torch is?” he asked.

“No.”

Joe didn’t like going down the garden at night time, he had never really been at ease in the dark and had only recently started sleeping without the hall light turned on. As he made his way down the garden, the clothes hanging on the washing line seemed to form a very real barrier between him and the possibility of retreat back into the house. Joe envisioned some sort of beast lurching towards him from the depths of the shadows ahead, he imagined himself turning to run, colliding with the washing line and thrashing about, becoming entangled in the clothes as the beast bore down on him. He glanced back between the limp, hanging forms which clung to the line like hideous bats. He could see his sister standing expectantly at the back door, silhouetted in the light of the kitchen. She seemed to be urging him wordlessly to go on. When he reached the shed he peered through the cracked window. It was caked in filth, covered with the tattered remnants of dried leaves which were woven through ancient, dusty, cobwebs. Through the dim light he could see that the car was in there but he couldn’t see anything else. He was getting more frightened now but he knew that the longer he stood there, the more frightened he would get. He decided to check quickly and get it over with.

He opened the shed door and strode purposefully inside. He reached into the darkness, groping for the light switch. Eventually he found it, flicked switch and took a deep agitated breath when nothing happened. That’s when he smelled the gas. The shed was thick with it. He stood for a moment in the darkness, not knowing whether he should hold his breath, or leave, or keep going. As his eyes adjusted he could just make out the form of his father sitting in the front seat of the car. It was only a few short steps away, he decided to go further into the shed.

The fear of the darkness which had been scaring him until then disappeared. Now there was an entirely different kind of fear which began to fill his veins with ice. Something very significant was happening that Joe didn’t quite understand, but he knew what he had to do. He tried the handle of the door, but it was locked from the inside.

“Dad?” Joe asked in a commanding voice, “Dad, get out of the car.”

He began to bang hard on the window, the smell of gas was so much stronger nearer to the car.

“Dad, there’s gas. Get out of the car.” Joe was shouting now.

He ran around the car and tried the other door, it was locked too. He remembered that sometimes the boot didn’t lock properly when the doors were locked. He ran to the back of the car and opened the boot. The cylinder of gas that his father had bought sat there with a nozzle attached to the top. It hissed angrily. Joe fumbled with the nozzle to release it from the canister and began to pull the cylinder out of the car. It was very heavy for Joe’s eleven year old frame but he wrestled the cylinder towards the door and out of the shed. Joe ran back to the car and climbed in through the boot. He climbed over the back seats and grabbed his father’s shoulders.

“Dad, wake up,” he demanded as he viciously shook the shoulders.

 His father’s head slumped forward onto his chest. Joe was beginning to lose the resolve which had driven him through the last couple of minutes. Panic was welling up inside him. He reached for the lock of the door and pulled it up. He turned and climbed his way back out through the boot. He ran to the door and pulled it open.

“Dad, please. There’s gas,” Joe intoned weakly.

He gripped his father’s forearm and began to pull him from the car but he was so much heavier than the cylinder of gas had been. His father’s limp body began to shift as it was pulled, eventually gaining momentum and tumbling awkwardly onto the floor of the shed. For a moment Joe stood silently, looking at the crumpled figure of the man that had been his Dad, then he screamed and ran from the shed, from his father. He knew that the man on the floor in there was dead.

Joe’s feet never seemed to hit the ground as he fled; he ducked and twisted as he reached the washing line, manoeuvring through it effortlessly. Tara was still standing in the doorway. Joe could tell that she was crying before he reached her. She already knew. They stood in the kitchen, holding each other tightly, sobbing into each other’s necks as they listened to the contented sounds of their brother drifting in from the sitting room as he laughed at the voices Ratty and Moley and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall.