Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,61

kitsch ornaments, a few pieces of furniture that are too damaged for the shop floor. A small AM/FM radio is playing that eighties song about the rains in Africa.

‘Don’t judge,’ Sabeen says. ‘It always looks worse before it gets better.’

‘What on earth are you doing down here?’

Sabeen moves a stack of yellowed newspapers from a footstool and invites me to sit down. ‘Hunting for important legal documents, mostly,’ she says. ‘Tom’s been searching everywhere for stuff Uncle Bernie’s misplaced. I’m also trying to figure out what needs to go to the tip.’

There are no windows down here, and a cold mustiness lingers. The bare lightbulbs cast severe shadows across the walls. I’d get claustrophobic if I had to stay down here too long.

‘I’m going to jump straight in and show you,’ Sabeen says, wringing her hands. She treads carefully through the maze of semi-organised piles to a large object wedged between a pedestal fan and the wall. It’s covered in a dark green tarp.

‘I was trying to move some things around,’ she says, ‘and I found this.’

She reaches for a corner of the tarp and tugs, letting it drift to the floor.

Henry’s red mountain bike is leaning against the wall.

* * *

We sit side by side, staring at the bike. The tarp is abandoned at our feet.

‘I thought the police might still have it,’ I say. ‘Or they’d returned it to the Weavers. Why is it here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think Ivy donated it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Why is Bernie keeping it hidden?’

Sabeen shifts uncomfortably, staring down at her hands. I now realise the bike is only part of what she wants to share. She has something else to show me.

‘Sabeen?’

She glances over her shoulder towards the stairs, then reaches for a cardboard archive box sitting on the floor. She lifts the lid, revealing a row of suspension files, each one bulging with paperwork.

‘I swear, I would never normally go through someone’s personal items,’ she says. ‘It’s only because I’m trying to help Tom find bank statements and legal documents.’ She seems distressed, pressing a hand to her forehead. ‘They were in a white envelope, so I assumed it was paperwork …’

‘It’s okay,’ I say, although I have no idea what I’m reassuring her about.

She pulls a large paper envelope out of the box and hands it to me quickly, like she’s happy to be rid of it. She glances towards the stairs again before resettling on the wooden chair beside my footstool.

I tip the contents of the envelope into my hand. It’s a small stack of photos taken with a polaroid camera.

‘These are Bernie’s?’ I ask. Tom bought him a polaroid camera last Christmas because he couldn’t figure out how to take photos on his phone.

Sabeen nods. Her quiet demeanour is unnerving me; she’s usually so boisterous. She seems torn between wanting to study the polaroids as I flick through them, and looking anywhere else at all.

The first few are photos of a small painted kitchenette, the date and the words Work in Progress scribbled inside the white border. It takes me a moment to realise these pictures were taken inside Bernie’s caravan. In December, according to the handwritten caption. I glance at Sabeen. I don’t really understand why she’s showing me these or why she seems so upset. She twirls her finger, gesturing for me to keep flicking through them.

The next photo is of Henry. He has no shirt on.

I glance at Sabeen and she seems uneasy. ‘There are more,’ she says.

Flicking through each photo, I feel a heavy weight settling inside my chest. There are seven of Henry in total, his cheeks flushed pink, smiling and laughing with a paintbrush in his hand. His naked torso has been photographed from a few different angles. One shot even has Henry’s head partially out of frame, the focus on his lower back and the top of his shorts. As with most polaroids, the skin tone is somewhat flat and overexposed, although there’s enough detail for them to seem gratuitous. The focus is not on Henry painting the caravan, but on Henry himself.

I’m not sure what to say. ‘These are …’

Sabeen winces. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

‘It’s Uncle Bernie, though. He’s like a grandfather to us.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘What are we supposed to do with them?’

I think of how Henry always talked about Bernie this and Bernie that. The old Westerns they watched together. The long summer days Henry spent helping Bernie renovate the caravan. None of that is making me feel any