Cracks

As the plane descends, the memory becomes more and more vivid. I’m reliving it, moment by moment, in unprecedented detail.

It was morning, a week or two after my ninth birthday, and I was playing in the backyard when Mr Dodd, my elderly neighbor, poked his head above the fence and called me over. This wasn’t in itself memorable; I’d known Mr Dodd for as long as I could remember, and it wasn’t unusual for us to chat to each other whenever we were both outside at the same time. He’d always been a jovial man, but on this occasion his old, worn face was devoid of its usual cheerfulness. He looked anxious. It’s unnerving to a child to see an adult appear so unsure of themselves, and I approached the fence tentatively.

“Would you mind coming around to my place?” Mr Dodd asked. This too was unusual: although we spoke regularly, I’d never actually been inside his house. I was slow to respond, and noticing this, he added, “It’s quite important. And it will only take a moment.”

I hesitated, then replied, “Can I jump the fence?”

“Of course you can.”

And so I did. Mr Dodd was heading toward the back door before I’d even landed. I jogged to catch up, wondering what it was that was making him move with such uncharacteristic urgency. He held the door open and then entered the house behind me. The house was, in many ways, exactly how I expected it to be: neat and conservative and suffused with that heavy but not unpleasant smell that I’ve always associated with old people. Wasting no time, Mr Dodd led me to his bedroom. The curtains were drawn open, letting in a prism of sunlight that fell across a neatly made bed that struck me as larger than necessary for a man of Mr Dodd’s stature. There was a little table on either side of the bed, and atop one of them was an antique analog clock.

“Give me a moment,” Mr Dodd said, and went over to the bedside table with the clock. He knelt down and started searching through its bottom drawer. I surveyed the room while he looked for whatever it was that he was looking for. I made eye contact with myself in the mirror above his dresser, then turned my attention to the arrangement of framed photographs on the dresser’s surface. The same woman appeared in all of them. She had short, dark hair and a huge smile. A younger version of Mr Dodd was beside her in most of the photos, looking equally as cheerful.

“You never met her,” Mr Dodd said, from behind me. I quickly turned around, wondering whether I ought to feel guilty for snooping, but Mr Dodd didn’t seem to mind. “She died less than a year before you were born. I wish you’d had the chance to meet each other. She would’ve adored you, I’m sure.” He paused, then added, “The timing — the coincidence of her death and your birth — was quite special to me. I pondered it deeply at the time. As one life left this world, another arrived. That thought gave me quite a bit of comfort.”

I nodded, unsure of what to say. My nine-year-old mind was struggling to make sense of the situation. Mr Dodd’s watery eyes lingered on the photographs for a moment; then he turned his attention back to me and held out his right hand. I realized that he was holding the object that he’d some kind of gold necklace. I accepted it instinctively. It was heavier than it looked, and dangling from its delicate chain was a small heart-shaped locket.

“It was hers,” Mr Dodd said. “I gave it to her as a gift on our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

I mumbled some kind of praise for the jewelry, even though I wasn’t exactly awestruck by it. It was nice, but it didn’t gleam and sparkle like some of the stuff that mum wore.

Mr Dodd took me gently by the wrist and closed his hand around mine, sealing the locket inside my palm. When I looked up his face was only inches away from mine. Barely above a whisper, he said, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take this locket and keep it safe. I want you to keep it safe until you’re a grown man — and then, if you ever get the chance, and if it’s safe to do so, I want you to deliver it to my daughter. Her name is Rebecca Dillon. She lives in Australia, in a city called Newcastle.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved a little scrap of paper on which he’d written this information by hand. “You may never get the chance, Thomas. I understand that. But if ever you do … well, it would mean a lot to me.”

He wedged the note into my palm, beside the locket, but kept hold of my wrist. “It would be better if you didn’t tell anyone about this,” he said, his voice still low. “You might get yourself into trouble if people know you’ve spent time with me.”

I recall being unnerved by the mention of ‘trouble’. Now knowing what that meant, but knowing that I wanted to avoid it, I assured him that I’d keep the secret. Mr Dodd smiled faintly. “Good boy. That means an awful lot to me, Thomas. An awful lot.”

I don’t remember hanging around after that. I jumped the fence and went inside and buried the locket at the bottom of my sock drawer, and I kept my promise. When mum came across it twelve months later, I lied and said that it was given to me by a girl at school.

I brought the locket with me when we moved house in 2034, and again when I moved away from my parents in 2039 — and now, thirteen years after that encounter with Mr Dodd, and six months after the fall of the Party, I’ve brought it with me on this flight to Australia.

I don’t know whether I’ll find Rebecca Dillon — don’t even know whether she’s still alive. As the plane descends, I begin to wonder whether she even knows what happened to her father. His fate is known to people in our country because of the news reports, but those reports don’t always make it out to the rest of the world. It might fall to me to deliver the horrible truth: that Mr Dodd was dragged from his house the day after he gave me the locket, and a week later executed for the crime of having criticized the regime ten years prior, in the twilight of his career as a journalist.

But the truth is the truth, and now that the Party is dead and its leaders are on the trial, the truth is gushing out through the cracks in our broken country.

The runway is in sight now, and with it, resolution.