Baggage
By: Heidi Colthup
Tags: Plectrum, Short Story, 206, The Weekly Knob, Grief And Loss

“Come in, come in. It arrived this morning and I haven’t opened it yet, I’ve been waiting for you to get here. I’ll get the kettle on and then we’ll have the big reveal!”

My dad was standing at the front door of my childhood home where he’s been living alone since my mum died six months ago, and I still popped round each day after finishing work. We said it was so I could pick up any post for me, but I moved out seven years ago. Dad was bored since he retired and now hadn’t got Mum to care for anymore, so he’d taken up buying lost luggage from an online auction site and then he and I tried to find the original owners. Dad’s job in the tax office gave him a bit of a taste for investigating and now he thought he was Sherlock Holmes,

“More like Barratt Homes, I think, Shaz!”

Indeed.

So, there we were, my widowed wannabe detective dad, and me, a single thirty-something who worked in a dead-end job in a firm of accountants. We were a proper knockout team and we had managed to reunite a grand total of zero suitcases with their original owners, but if ever I decided to head to Ibiza for a week of debauchery, I was sorted for a very nice Samsonite hard-topped case and matching laptop bag.

“Do you want to open it, then, or shall I?” Dad nodded towards the medium sized black suitcase in front of us on the kitchen table. He loved the grand reveal — he watched DIY shows just to see the before and after — he couldn’t stand the presenters, but knew exactly how much it costs to do up a dull semi in Dudley and flip it as a rental property in under three months. I handed him the Suitcase Screwdriver — Dad bought it specially when Mum got ill and he needed to turn his shed into a storage space for medical equipment, so he got new floral handled tools that Mum would let him keep in the house as they were ‘tasteful’. He only started using them when we began this suitcase lark, so they became the Suitcase Tools, and the shed was full of unsolved cases, quite literally.

“A light brown linen suit, three pairs of socks, underpants, four linen shirts, a wash-bag, what looks like a travel timetable, and a small heart-shaped bit of wood. Not much to go on here, Dad. What do you think?”

Dad leaned back on the kitchen unit where the coffee mugs waited alongside a plate of chocolate HobNobs. “Well, that tells us a lot, Sharon. We know this man was probably coming back from an academic conference in Southern Europe, so he should be fairly easy to find.”

“Wait, what? How did you get all that, from this stuff?”

He smiled, smugly, and counted off his points on his fingers, “First, there’s only enough clothing for a few days, and there’s a suit, but it’s linen, so it must have been somewhere hot, but he needed to be smart and professional, hence the suit. That means he must have only gone within Europe, and it’s only Southern Europe that gets really hot enough to warrant a linen suit. Secondly, we know he was coming back from it because otherwise the suitcase would be wherever the conference was, and not back here in the UK”

“You already looked in the suitcase before I got here, didn’t you? How else would you know all that?”

Dad didn’t even do me the courtesy of looking ashamed. “Well, Sharon, the clothes are all from UK High Street brands, Marks and Spencers, mainly, so that means he’s middle class and a gentleman of a certain age. The “timetable”, as you put it, is the travel schedule to get to an academic conference on Place and Sound. I think our man is a music professor. Should be very easy to find.” Dad picked up his mug of coffee and took a sip. “Well, what are you waiting for, get the Google going.” He nodded towards my laptop bag.

There was no conference on Place and Sound.

“So what now, Dad? Shall we look at the dates on the travel schedule and see what else this man might have been returning from?”

“It’ll have been a classical concert, I should think. Music professors like opera — have a look and see what was on at La Scala. Or El Real. It’s no problem, Shaz, we’ll just search online for music professors, then we can email them and they’ll know who it is. Academia is a very small world you know.”

“The royal ‘we’, Dad? I’ll get on it, shall I?”

Dad had been watching reruns of Changing Rooms with Lawrence Flouncy Byron, as Dad called him, when I arrived, and he was currently wearing his best dressing gown (a dark blue paisley number in silk) over a formal white shirt with double cuffs and old tracksuit bottoms. I raised my eyebrows at his outfit, Dad shrugged and returned his attention to a bland beige room that had become a black and red gothic nightmare with enough MDF to frighten Dracula himself.

After I’d made Dad some lunch and put a wash on for him he started looking through the suitcase again. “What do think about this bit of wood, Sharon? It was in the case. Heart-shaped with a drawing of a guitar on it. I suspect our music professor played Spanish guitar, you know, it’s a plectrum. It makes sense — that’s why he was going to the concert. That’ll help narrow your search.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Do you know anything about Spanish guitar playing?”

“Well, I know it’s unexpected. Ha!”

“I thought that was the Inquisition?”

“Precisely! You didn’t expect that, did you? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Dad chuckled to himself, he’d always been a huge Monty Python fan and any excuse to talk about recently deceased Amazonian birds or the Spanish Inquisition was never to be passed by.

“No one expects….I didn’t…expect…” Dad had started crying. He was still holding the wooden heart-shaped plectrum in his hand.

I expected this would finally help him to remember Mum and forgive himself.

Grief can do strange things to your head; Dad had just carried on as if she’d popped out to the shops and would be back soon, and he’d completely blocked from his memory the time around her death. The weekend she finally passed away at the hospice Dad had gone to a concert in Madrid. Mum had bought him the ticket and made me arrange it for him as his 70th birthday present. I think she knew she was near the end and she wanted him to have a happy memory for his birthday, not one of her death. She’d even insisted I put the little plectrum into his washbag so he’d know she was still with him — it was a joke between the two of them, the guitar — a play on words — my mum’s name was Gita.