Imagine There's No Heaven Read online

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  Guy held the letter tenderly, as though it were his mother’s hand and he a little boy once more.

  ‘Your father gave me that letter,’ said Roy. He sat silent for many minutes, giving Guy time to read over the letter, to consider what it meant for him personally. The chief reason for failure and unhappiness is sacrificing what we want most for what we want in the moment... grow up to know what love is, to know what duty is, to know how to act for more than yourself; for your family and for everything you love. That meant he was on the right path, didn’t it? He wasn’t just seeking the truth for his own sake, but for his mother, for his father, for Roy, even for people he didn’t know and would never meet. His heart beat hard in his chest as he realised his truth. He was fighting because the life and memory of each and every person was worth fighting for, no matter who he had to fight: his father, his government, whoever. A person’s life and memory were worth that much. We’re all the same, we fighters, the old security guard had said to him, and that was what Gina believed too. That was what he believed. He’d never seen it before, but that was it. They were all one. He was no different to other students, they no different to him; his mother, the security guard, he and his father, all one. That was his belief, the passion Gina had told him to find, and not only did it fill a hole in his heart but it empowered him in his fight. A cool tear fell from his eye and settled on his leg. It felt so alive, like the freshest fountain; it had pushed its way through the staled and dried young man he had been and presented itself to him as though to say: you are still alive, you are still young, and today is the day you move on and begin life anew.

  Seeing him cry, Roy bit his lip anxiously, lowered his head and said, ‘Your father didn’t want you to come across that letter one day by accident. He didn’t want to face what had happened.’

  The tears continued to fall from Guy’s eyes but he smiled and nodded his understanding. ‘That was his fight,’ Guy quietly whispered. Roy lifted his head and eyed his questioningly and with optimism. ‘His fight was to protect me,’ Guy now realised. ‘All this time he has been keeping his own truth to himself, fighting his own battle, for me.’ His face lit up and the tears came quicker and more easily. He had thought crying was a weakness. Now he saw it could be a terrific strength. He let a tear drop onto the tip of his forefinger, looked at it and felt it. He’d always tried to ignore the tears before. Now he embraced them, acknowledging the message they were giving him: that he was alive.

  ‘Let me get you another tea,’ Roy said, deciding to give Guy some time alone and to allow himself time to think.

  Guy ran over Roy’s story in his head. Lieutenant Daniels, maybe he knows more, he thought. Part of him wanted to tear Daniels a new asshole, whoever he was. It was for him that his mother had been lost, but another part wanted to shake the man’s hand, for no matter the consequence, he had fought the same battle his mother had fought and shared the same belief and passion. Where could he find him? He folded the letter up, put it in his pocket and stormed out of the room, through the hallway and out the house.

  ‘Guy. Guy,’ Roy called after him in a panic. He set the cups down and dashed over to the phone. Could he call Jerry? Would that be moving against Guy or for him? He set the phone back on the receiver. He tapped his fingers on his hips anxiously then darted over to the computer. He began typing an email frantically. He swallowed hard. He didn’t know what was right: to get involved in Guy’s business or not to. With his eyes closed, praying he had done what Imogen would deem to be the right thing, he clicked ‘Send.’

  Hunting the truth

  Guy had spent all afternoon looking online for the name Lieutenant Daniels. He had searched through reams of information on the war, on various people named Daniels, though never the right one, and on General Swanson, about whom he had learned much, but sadly the General had died three years ago, aged sixty-eight. There was nothing that could help. Finally, he had given up for the day, realising he needed a sounder strategy. He turned to his email, hoping to take his mind off his mother if only for a few hours, only to find a new message from Roy. His eyes ignited with excitement. He was so frantically darting for the Open button that he deleted the email by mistake. Thank God for recycle bins. He restored it and read.

  Guy; I don’t have a great deal of information on either General Swanson— that’s the man who briefed your mother— or Lieutenant Daniels, but I can tell you that the man who led the press conference that day was one General Heuer. He was a pretty big shot at the time. I’m sure you can dig up some information on him. No idea where he is now though, sorry. Oh, one more thing. You probably know this, but I haven’t told your dad a thing. It’s up to you whether or not you want to get him involved. That’s none of my business. I wish you the best of luck. And remember, I am always here for you, Guy.

  Take care.

  Roy.

  Guy burst into life. If General Heuer was a big name in the army at that time, there was bound to be information about him online. He ran for Google and typed ‘General Heuer’. There was an entire biography on him. Son of a politician and a psychologist, he had enlisted at age nineteen. His entire life had been about the army. Never married. Died at seventy-five— which would have been two years ago. There was a big entry on him on a website dedicated to listing the leaders of the forces. Then there was a smaller entry on a website writing about post traumatic stress disorder. How could he link this to his mother? How could he go from the name of a general to an account of the loss of his mother— if indeed she had been lost for good? He had no idea. He lit a cigarette and left his room and the house.

  Guy headed straight for the central library. It was like a whole world of books compared to the tiny corner that was his library at school. The central library was one of the city’s proudest landmarks. It had been built centuries ago; a huge domed building adorned with stone statues. The inside was like a great crypt of information. He hadn’t been in the central library before— he had hardly been in the school library. He wished he hadn’t just outright dismissed it as being too geeky for him. It was a beautiful building, not that that was of importance to Guy. What was of importance was the sense that somewhere in the thousands and thousands of books the library stored might be a single nugget of information that would lead him to discovering the truth about his mother. He headed for the information desk.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a frail looking old lady asked. She leant over her desk, pulled down her glasses and examined guy. He clearly wasn’t what she was used to.

  ‘Yeah, do you have a section on war?’

  The lady giggled in sympathy as she realised how lost a young man like Guy must have felt in the library. She smiled kindly. ‘We have rather a lot of books on war. Was it a specific period you were looking for?’

  ‘Yeah, fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Wow, that is rather specific,’ the lady said. ‘Follow me.’

  The librarian led Guy to the far side of the library. She fingered through the shelves knowingly, as though she had read every single book in the place several times over. ‘Here we are,’ she said, pointing to a shelf about halfway up. To Guy, it looked exactly the same as every other shelf in the building. He wondered how anyone was supposed to find anything. Or were they just supposed to have a schematic of the library logged in their mind when they entered?

  Guy spent several hours looking through the books in the library. Among them he found several interesting and rather disturbing subjects. One book dedicated hundreds of pages to detailed explanations of the treatment of prisoners of war in various countries. Guy had thought he was beyond shock, but the methods of torture shown in the book convinced him otherwise and he prayed to Christ that his mother had not met such a fate. Another book disgusted him yet further. It showed a picture of a crying girl beneath the title ‘Sexual Violence: An Invisible Crime.’ He couldn’t think that his mother might have been put through anything approaching that kind of treatment. Though images rose in hi
s head, he fought with all his strength to keep them out of mind and kept reading. He read for hours, through every book that seemed relevant; searching and searching and searching. The hours bled into one as his search carried onward, seemingly forever.

  Better Left Unheard