Next of Kin

by TL Dyer

  ‘Don’t you ever put a hand on me again,’ I say, close to his ear. But the man on the counter just lifts his head an inch and looks past me across the room.

  ‘Oh, hey, mate.’

  With a gasp, I let go and jump back, my head spinning towards the door where I expect to see Jake looking on in wide-eyed shock. But there’s no one there. The floorboards overhead creak where he’s still in his room, changing out of his kit as I’d asked him to.

  Darren rubs the blood back into his arm. ‘Good to see they train you women coppers as well as the men. A little uncalled for, granted, but I imagine jumpiness is an occupational hazard. Presumably that’s why you’re still single too. More worryingly, though, is the theme that’s revealing itself here. First your brother and now you. They say violence runs in families, don’t they? But at least I’m here now to balance things out with Jake, make sure if he carries the same aggression gene, that he finds a suitable outlet for it.’

  ‘Get out of my house,’ I say, tempering my voice as best I can. Because now he’s even taken away my right to be outraged. Manipulated it to his own means.

  Still rubbing at his arm, he pushes past me, but hesitates in the doorway and turns back. ‘I’ll call you,’ he says, calm and direct, as if we haven’t just had an altercation that threatens this already precarious relationship. ‘Jake should come to mine next. See his room.’

  The invisible band which has been tightening around my insides since I turned up at the school and Jake wasn’t there, grips harder now as Darren strides down the hallway. But it’s nothing like the way it crushes me when a moment later he pauses by the stairs long enough to call up, ‘Bye Jake,’ and in return footsteps trip across the landing, followed by a small voice shouting down over the banister: ‘Bye Dad.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘You miss him,’ Eliza says.

  I’m in the kitchen at Ty Bryn waiting for Lauren to get ready. Since turning eighteen we’ve been out every Friday and Saturday night, catching the bus to Newport and then a taxi back home after the pubs shut. Sometimes we meet college friends in town, other times it’s just the two of us, but with Lauren around we’re never alone for long. I’d say she attracts men, but it’s more that she goes after them, occasionally to a degree that makes me cringe. She sees their responses as positive attention; I see their crude gestures and cruel laughter when she’s not looking. I’d tell her to wind it in, but she’d accuse me of being a frigid prude and do it more just to show that she could. Some nights I wonder why I bother. But with Shaun gone, the atmosphere at home is grim. I’d rather be out than in, and if that means putting up with Lauren, then so be it.

  Eliza’s right, though. I miss Craig. It’s been more than a year since I saw him last. That was when he was still here, before he left to doss around Cardiff with his mates. Doss is the term Lauren uses. From what she says, they’ve seen him only a few times themselves. He seems to want to cut himself off from everyone. According to her, he’s not quite living the dream, unless the dream is sofa-surfing and getting wasted every other night. She says he’ll come home when he’s bored and has run out of money. I hope she’s right but, as with everything Lauren, I sense another agenda, almost as if she wants him to fail, or she wishes we’d all stop giving him the attention she craves for herself.

  ‘I miss him too,’ the twins’ mother says, moving away from the sink where she’s been washing dishes. She picks up a tea towel to dry her hands, long slim fingers graceful even in this mundane, everyday motion.

  Her smile is warm as she leaves the towel on the counter and comes to where I’m standing in front of the double doors to the back garden, watching the torrent of rain from the brief, heavy summer showers we’ve had all day. It pounds against the patio slabs, saturating the cement, and runs in hurried, chaotic rivulets over the plastic sheeting covering the garden furniture. The flowers in the pots are only part-sheltered by the wall they sit beside, bending under the weight of the downpour, their petals folding in on themselves for protection. Under such a battering, it’s hard to imagine these delicate things will ever stand upright in full bloom again. Eliza stares at them wistfully, her arms crossed over her peach silk blouse, one shoulder propped against the glass.

  ‘I miss the boy he was,’ she says, gaze softening as if it’s the young Craig she sees outside the window and not the driving rain. ‘So loving.’ She turns to me, her eyes shining a brilliant green at the memory. ‘Boys are so loving, Sacha. More than girls. Girls learn early on how to manipulate. They use their emotions and other people’s. Boys don’t do that. It doesn’t occur to them to do that, it’s not something that registers.’

  She tells me all this as if she’s teaching me a lesson I might one day need. But I’m not sure she has it exactly right. I think about Shaun, how lies and conflict and disloyalty are so out of sync with him, though I had always thought that a by-product of his Asperger’s more than his gender. But the reason he is where he is now is because of other boys who did exactly that, they manipulated. First they issued their threat using physical harm, then they twisted the events of that night to suit themselves and betray others – betray him, their friend. And what about Craig? What’s he doing if not making us all suffer?

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’ Eliza’s hand lands on the sleeve of my denim jacket with a touch so light I barely feel it. ‘How is he doing? And your family too, it must be tough.’

  I bite my tongue, turning my head so she won’t see the tears clouding my eyes. I never used to cry so easily, but lately it’s as if everything’s come apart and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t think I can. Her fingers squeeze my arm, and a soft sigh escapes her before she drops her hand away.

  ‘They’ll be alright, Sacha,’ she says, her words louder as they hit the glass and bounce back. ‘Our boys, they’ll be okay. Do you know why? Because they have us.’

  I shake my head and use my finger to blot the tears that haven’t yet fallen. ‘Craig doesn’t want to know me,’ I say, my voice breaking because this is the first time I’ve said this to anyone, and that it should be to her, the only person who could understand, makes it all the more difficult. ‘I don’t even know what I did wrong. But he’s punishing me for something.’

  ‘No, Sacha.’ Her voice rises, forcing me to look at her. The smile is gone, and without it her eyes, though bright and full of colour, are tainted by a sadness I’m only now realising has always been there. ‘He’s not punishing you. Or any of us. He’s punishing himself.’

  ‘For what? How do we stop him?’

  She tilts her head, eyebrows clashing, studying me in the same way she might a trapped animal she can’t do anything to save. ‘Only he knows why he’s doing it.’

  She breaks her gaze to look out at the garden where the rain is easing now, but the flowers still hang their heads and sway drunkenly in the aftermath of their assault.

  I watch her, looking for a sign that she knows what to do about this, how to make it right, but she swallows over the words she’s about to say, and it’s another moment before she speaks. When she does, it’s with a resignation I haven’t expected from her.

  ‘We can’t stop him, Sacha. He won’t let us. We have to wait until he does that for himself.’

  Her words leave me cold and empty. And of all the things I’ve felt about her over these last few years, never once has it been anger. Until now.

  For the rest of the night I carry around that irritation like it might eat me up. If it does, I’ll let it, what choice do I have? I go through the motions with Lauren. We visit the same pubs we always do, see the same faces, drink the same drinks, hear the same songs, though none of it holds my interest. I don’t want to be there, but I don’t want to be home either. So I do the only thing I can. I drink more and I drink fast to hurry along oblivion.

  Later, I remember only snapshots of that night. Lauren’s laughter and her encouragement, her delight at watching me make an idiot of myself. Throwing up outside The Lamb and Staff whil
e she was deep in a clinch with the boy from behind the bar, her hand on the crotch of his jeans as my vomit splashed on his Nike’s. Lauren swearing at a taxi driver who refused to let me in his car. Her calling her dad even though I begged her not to. Trying to sober myself in the time it took for him to get to us. And in the back seat of the BMW, my head tilted out of the window so he couldn’t catch sight of me in the rear-view mirror. The breeze hitting my face. Pinning my eyes open, praying I wouldn’t throw up. Stumbling out of the car and letting myself in, my cheeks on fire. Lights off in the living room but TV on, the sound muted. Dad again, refusing to sleep until he passes out and the decision is taken from him; if his son has to suffer, so will he. Creeping up the stairs and past Mam’s door, hoping she’s asleep so I won’t have to hear her cry. Curling into a ball on the hard floor because the movement of the mattress makes my head spin. Too drunk to think. Too numb to cry. Too ashamed to face the Isaacs ever again.

  Chapter 29

  ‘But he said I could call him Dad.’

  ‘We’ve been over this, Jake. It’s complicated.’ I tug on his hand, hurrying him towards the school gates. We’re the last ones, of my own doing again, only getting to sleep an hour before the alarm went off.

  ‘So what do I call him then?’

  I stop on hearing his voice rise in frustration. Crouching to his level, I stifle a sigh. ‘Just Darren. That’s what we said last night. Or nothing; you don’t need to call him anything.’

  His lips purse and he looks down to the floor. With every word I say, I’m making this worse. All I’ve given him so far is half an explanation and no honest answers. It feels like the deeper in I get, the more I’m losing him. Maybe not now, today. But one day in the future when he hits sixteen and he’s taller than I am, all of this will come back to bite me in the worst way possible.

  Brushing the hair from his forehead, I say softly, ‘It’s confusing, sweetheart, I know. And I promise we’ll talk it all out so that you understand. But there are things I need to get clear on myself, first, okay? Does that make sense?’

  Still looking at the floor, he tugs his bottom lip into his mouth and nods. I pull him to me to kiss him on the forehead. I want to tell him not to say anything in school about what Darren said, and absolutely not to tell Grampy. Don’t do this, don’t do that… A list of instructions will only upset him more, and that’s what I’m trying my hardest not to do.

  I mean what I say about clearing some things up, though. Before I speak to Dad and explain what’s going on, and before I sit down with Jake and have this conversation properly, I have to be certain about something. And being as Craig’s no longer here, and Eliza left Darren to return home to Ireland soon after his passing, there’s only one other person who can help me.

  Chapter 30

  Dad calls twice on the fifty-mile drive west along the dual carriage A-road to Swansea. I can only avoid him for so long before he’ll start to worry. It’s Wednesday now and I haven’t seen him since Sunday night when I dropped Jake at his. Haven’t seen Shaun either, since the conversation about Darren on Monday that culminated in my late-night visitor stumbling in through the door, his fire well and truly stoked. It still twists my stomach to think that if Shaun could do that to Darren, then what else might he be capable of? Darren certainly insinuated he knew a lot more than I did about the Cavendish incident. But that’s not a rabbit-hole I have the energy to go down, not when I have other more pressing concerns.

  I pull the car into a parking bay alongside the bypass and text a message to Dad. Keeping it light and cheery, I tell him I’m off until Friday night and that we’ll leave him alone to get on with his work in the meantime. When I hit send, it’s with a hollow spot in my chest that I wish my life was still as simple as all that. He replies with a thumbs up while I’m double checking where I need to go. It’s been years since I’ve been to Swansea, but I recall it as a network of one-way systems that can be disorienting if you don’t know where you’re going. And I don’t. The place I’m heading for is in the centre of the city, so the best I can do is stop in the first multi-storey car park I find and do the rest on foot.

  A glance in the rear-view mirror before I set off again is a bad idea. My eyes are pitted in my skull, a consequence of the restless nights and the worry pulling on them. I push my hair back from my face, tuck it behind my ears, but it makes little difference. The person I’m going to see will just have to take me as I am. Maybe if I don’t paper over the cracks, she won’t feel the need to do so either.

  *

  The Cariad Gallery is one of those trendy establishments secreted away within the narrow passageway of a quaint, glass-ceilinged arcade with flagstone flooring. Three sets of russet-coloured metal bistro chairs and tables line up in front of the large glass windows, while on the inside, wooden tables make up the cafe arm of the gallery’s business. The gallery itself is hinted at with the pictures hung in frames on the cafes walls, but its source is up the stairs in the room above, where their website explained there are also workstations for hire for those needing all the creative inspiration they can get.

  It’s early, not even eleven yet, but the tables inside are largely occupied, the coffee machine puffs out steam behind the counter, and I can already see that the person I’ve come to see is here. Her Facebook page said she would be. She was easy enough to find despite the name change, Lauren Walters now, her maiden name still attached to the account to make her easily discoverable.

  I’m still considering how best to approach her when her head comes up as she’s delivering an order to the table by the window and she looks directly at me. I had meant to make it appear as if my meeting her was a coincidence, but that’s not to be. And anyway, maybe she knows about Jake. Maybe her father’s already spilled all about the younger half brother she never knew she had.

  It’s hard to tell through the glass, but she seems pale and doesn’t smile, as if she sees a ghost. So much so that I glance around me, though there’s no one but me here. When I turn back, she’s disappearing through a door at the rear of the cafe, and I pull out one of the metal chairs, the one furthest from the door, picking up the laminated menu and trusting that at some point she or someone else will come out to serve me.

  When she emerges from the shop minutes later, I call upon all my people skills learned in the job not to show my surprise. She’s not the same Lauren I used to know. Her long thick hair that was once blonde is now dyed a dark brown, scraped into a ponytail with only a few lighter roots at her scalp remaining. The shirt she wears, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, is black cotton, as are the trousers, and over those a white apron is tied at the waist. Perhaps it’s this unflattering uniform, but any curves she might have once had are gone, her body shapeless and her face plain with only a little make-up.

  She lays the tray she’s brought on the metal table and sits opposite me, a dullness around her eyes I’ve seen many times before and it’s never usually good. She couldn’t look any less thrilled to see me, though perhaps she’s sensing I feel the same. Our friendship didn’t exactly end on an argument, but instead fizzled out when we grew tired of each other, and maybe eight years isn’t enough to shake that weariness. But it also makes me wonder, once again, if she knows what I’m here about.

  ‘Take it you still drink coffee,’ she says, pointing to the cups on the tray while eyeing me with cautious steel eyes. Her father’s eyes. ‘I don’t have long. We have a reading group in half an hour.’

  ‘Reading group?’ I say, taking the cup she’s offered and adding milk from the tiny jug.

  ‘There’s a small library upstairs. The old fogies have their weekly meeting there, but their money is as good as anyone’s, so…’ She shrugs one shoulder and glances in through the window, then back to me. ‘Heard you were a copper now. Didn’t see that coming. Thought you would end up an accountant or something.’

  ‘No one more surprised than me.’ The coffee’s hot and I burn the tip of my tongue, but disguise it by nodding towards the
gallery. ‘Looks like a nice place. Been here long?’

  Lauren blinks slowly and pouts her bottom lip. ‘Pays the bills. I worked here for a twelve-month after it opened, then I was on maternity leave. Back two months now.’

  ‘Congratulations. Boy or girl?’ I ask, as if I haven’t seen the details of her life proclaimed all over her Facebook page.

  ‘Girl. Kelly. She has an older sister too. Alicia. She’s three and a half.’

  ‘Got your hands full, then. That’s really great. I’m pleased for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t that difficult. All I had to do was sleep with their father. Well, that and the whole nine months and giving birth thing.’

  ‘Piece of cake.’ I smile at her dry humour. At least she hasn’t lost that. But what she has lost is the spark of mischief that once lit up her eyes. ‘I’m sorry about Craig, Lauren,’ I say, and for a second she only looks at me, unblinking, almost as if she’d forgotten all about that. But then she nods and peers towards the window again, either to check if she’s needed or to make it easier for her to come up with a response.

  ‘It was on the cards,’ she says to the glass, with the same tone of weary defeat her father had used when he spoke about him; the same as Eliza all those years ago, back when he was still here and we could have done something about his downward slide.

  ‘I should have come before now,’ I say. ‘I meant to, it’s just…’

  ‘Life stuff,’ she finishes for me, with another shrug of her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it. How’s your boy?’

  I nod as I swallow a mouthful of coffee. That answers one of my questions, at least, and I’m relieved. I didn’t want this to be a confrontation. Not here. And not yet. ‘He’s fine. Keeps me on my toes.’