Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

Before he could say anything, she was crawling off the bed, bum in the air and one sock hanging off, and climbing into the front seat where she had her satchel. She pulled out her school exercise book, but also the stationery that she had taken from the hotel in York. She had taken all of it – even the envelopes. She crawled back on to the bed beside him, took the edge of the rug and used it to cover her knees and then his, and spread the paper on the top.

  ‘We’ll need something to lean on,’ he said, reaching for one of the placemats they had used, wiping a spot of tomato sauce off it with the heel of his hand.

  She started up where she had left off – marching him through the alphabet from a to z, drawing each letter for him carefully then asking him to copy it. It had been years since George had tried to write. He found that now, couried in the back of the van with the bairn, he was able to learn from her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, close to his face with sweet tomato sauce breath, when he tried to write my name is George. ‘You don’t have to write it straight. When I write it goes uphill, but you write downhill. That’s OK.’

  ‘It’s easier with your left hand after all.’

  ‘That’s because we’re left-handed,’ she said, grinning at him. ‘See if you can write my name.’

  ‘I can write your name better than my own,’ he said, unbuttoning his shirt to look again at the red calligraphy on his chest, the skin scarred with dye and his own blood.

  The pen was still cumbersome in his hand, and he felt the strain if he held it for some time, but he wrote Moll + George.

  ‘You should write and properly,’ she said, printing the letters for him to copy, so he wrote the sentence again.

  ‘I know!’ she said, jumping up to kneel beside him. ‘I’ll draw pictures of things and you can write what they are underneath.’ Her eyes were wide with excitement.

  She drew a house, and George began with an h but was then uncertain. She showed him how. She drew a cat and a dog and then a van like their own, and George found that he could remember how to write those words, but she had to help him with others: tree, flower, sausage, bread.

  She wrote down a list of numbers and asked him to write the words. He got most of these wrong, but she spent time with him, patiently writing the words out for him and asking him to copy.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘I used to get twenty wrong too, but now I think it’s easy. Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll remember. We should try some sentences now.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe let’s stick with the words first.’

  ‘But words make up sentences. Words on their own are boring. We can start with an easy one.’

  George sighed his assent.

  ‘You should be able to write “My name is George and I am…”’ She stopped and opened her eyes wide as she looked into his face. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘That’s quite old,’ she said, pushing the paper towards him, ‘but not as old as my other daddy. My other daddy is forty-one. That’s very old.’

  George looked at her, unsure what to say.

  ‘Write down “My name is George and I am twenty-six years old.”’

  George did as she asked and found that he was able. He looked at their handwriting – his and hers side by side.

  ‘Well done,’ she said.

  ‘Och, my letters are ugly next to yours.’

  ‘They’re not ugly,’ she said, her young face suddenly solemn, and George recalled the night by the forest when he had told her she was beautiful. ‘You’re just learning and they’re already a lot nicer than the letters you did when we were in the hotel.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, kissing her ear.

  ‘Your face is scratchy.’

  ‘I need to shave.’

  They worked for hours and George learned hungrily from her, without shame. Sometimes it felt as if he had been raised on shame, the way some other children were raised on love. He wanted to learn from her, so that he could be the kind of father he wanted to be. He would love her the way he had never been loved.

  ‘If you’re too stupid for school, then you can go to work with me,’ said Brendan, sitting down to lace up his steel-capped boots. Since he was very small, it had been George’s chore to polish the family’s shoes. Brendan’s boots often had rusty splatters, which came off easily apart from where they had seeped into the stitching. George had always known this was blood and he could never look at the boots without imagining his father kicking someone, the way he had seen him kick his mother.

  There was no point in arguing. George knew what happened to people who contradicted his father.

  ‘It’ll toughen you up.’

  George nodded and slipped his boots on, then followed his father out to the car. All he wanted was a life where he had peace to listen to music and the freedom to be himself. He didn’t want to get tougher; knew he couldn’t. The horrors he had seen so far had only made him feel sadder and more vulnerable. He had become somewhat accustomed to pain, but he found he could not get used to the suffering of others.

  He was the baby, his mother’s baby, and liked to spend as little time as possible with his father. He would have been happy with no father. Brendan had many enemies and all of them wished him dead, but, secretly, no one wished him dead more than his youngest son.

  George was fifteen, nearly sixteen and already taller than his father, but he was thin: all ribs, kneecaps and joints, Adam’s apple and cheekbone. He was six foot one already and a size thirteen shoe. George wondered if he would ever stop growing.

  Yet with Brendan, George hunched, fearful of even physically looking down on his father, in case it was regarded as impudence. George always knew that however tall he grew (and he was already the tallest member of the McLaughlin family) he would never be as tall as his father.

  His father’s car was a long black Jaguar with dark windows. They sat in silence as they drove to a building site near Alexandra Parade. They could see out, but no one could see inside. The car felt like their family, with its secrets and its violence and its unwitnessed horror.

  They were going to see Brian Coulston, a building contractor. He had a gambling problem and had got into debt while hoping to gamble himself out of it, but had only lost more money. Peter and Richard had called already with threats, and now it was time for consequences. George had eaten breakfast, egg and a slice of toast, before Brendan had required his company for the day and the food now lay like cement in the pit of his stomach.

  The car smelled of Brendan: leather and cigars and Old Spice aftershave. It was intoxicating and George felt almost unable to breathe.

  A derelict area had been fenced off with wire mesh. It was an old demolition site, and before that high-rise flats, and the ground was a beach of exploded concrete and cinder block. They got out of the car and walked side by side towards the Portakabin at the far end. There was no one working on the land, but diggers and cement mixers stood at the ready. Like volcanic ash, the rubble broke under their feet as they marched.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ said George to his father, when he saw him put on his leather gloves.

  ‘I’m going to show you the power of the mind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What a man believes is what he manifests.’

  George turned to his father, not understanding, but not having the courage to question. He curved his spine and hunched lower, as if wanting to hear more.

  Brendan didn’t knock at the cabin door, and George followed him inside. It was almost colder inside than it was out, and Brian jumped up from behind a desk, where he had been doing paperwork dressed in an anorak and scarf. He stood before them with hard heavy breaths that were visible in the small cold room.

  ‘Brendan, I… I nearly have it… I only need…’

  Brendan smiled and clasped his gloved hands.

  George stood just behind his father, his hands at his sides. They felt hot and heavy – as if they might be
asked to perform a deed for which they were unwilling.

  ‘Nearly, maybe, might…’ said Brendan, smiling.

  George glanced down at his father. There was a wicked smile on Brendan’s face. He smiled that way at home sometimes. Once he had smiled just like that before he broke a bottle of wine across Richard’s face, when he had agreed with their mother that there were fifty-four cards in a deck. His mother had also been beaten later, so the family all agreed that in fact there were only fifty-two cards. That was the way the McLaughlin house was run. Truth was imposed, not discovered. It was fundamentalism and Brendan expected to be obeyed with religious observance. Black was white if he said so. The bottle had broken Richard’s cheekbone, and given him a scar for life that he wore like a medal. His mother had been right all along, George discovered later: fifty-two cards and two jokers, and, as it only could have been, the joke was on her.

  ‘Honestly, Mr McLaughlin, I promise you that…’

  ‘Promises, wishes, beliefs…’ said Brendan, quietly as ever: sinister, silent and slow as lava. ‘This here is my youngest son,’ he said, tipping his head to George.

  George’s mouth felt dry as Brian stared at him, lips parted, spider veins on his cheeks and bloodshot eyes. Brian licked his lips and his eyes filled, so that he seemed desperate, grief-stricken. George felt his own eyes sting, but knew that Brendan would not allow tears – he never had – and George had learned early, from his father, from the nuns, how to control his own self-pity.

  ‘My youngest son has instructions from me to pull out one of your teeth for every hundred pounds you owe me. Now… I don’t know exactly how many teeth you have in that ugly head of yours, but I’m reckoning that we’re going to run out. So after we’ve pulled them all out, we’re going to have to extract that unpaid debt from elsewhere. You only have ten fingernails and toes, so we’ll have to move on… your balls, your ears, your eyes, your tongue…’

  George stood rooted to the spot, knowing that he would be unable to hurt Brian and aware that if he didn’t his father would hurt them both. He was nearly sixteen years old and already he felt that he had seen enough. At night he dreamed of running away – going somewhere where nobody knew him and where he could live his life without the dark soup of fear in his stomach. But as long as Brendan McLaughlin was alive, there could be no escape.

  ‘What’s it to be?’ said Brendan, slowly taking off his gloves and removing a pair of pliers from his pocket. ‘The easy way or the hard way.’

  Tears spilled from Brian’s eyes, fat, thick tears that fell quickly over his full cheeks and off his chin. ‘I can get it. I can get it.’

  ‘You said that last week, now it’s time to pay. Now either we take our time and we see if you survive, if indeed that kind of life is worth living, or you do us all a favour and speed things along.’

  ‘My business; I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘If memory serves we looked at that. You’re making a loss. What matters now is that you learn the consequences. I’m running a business too. I can’t let the message get out that I’m a charity. Now decide – the quick or the slow way.’

  ‘Quick,’ said Brian, his eyes now dry, but the colour gone from his face.

  ‘Fine. There’s a digger out there. You dig your own grave and then mix the cement.’

  It was cold outside, but just as his father had told him, Brian got into the digger and began to make a hole in the rubble and dry, frozen earth. George watched him with his hands in his pockets, wondering what kind of hopelessness would cause such actions. It reminded him of the scrupulous way his mother cleaned up all her own blood after a beating, as if this had been her mess, her fault, her responsibility. The sound of metal breaking through the rocky earth seemed to scrape to the very core of George. He felt a dark, seething hatred inside him. It was as if all the ugliness in the world had a face, and it belonged to his father.

  Brendan opened the boot of the Jaguar and took out a cricket bat.

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling at George with his yellow teeth. ‘Are you ready to prove yourself?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Brendan handed George the bat. ‘I’ll give you the nod and then you need to do the business. You’ll be pleased to know it doesn’t matter which way you hit him – with your left hand or your right.’

  ‘I don’t think I can…’ said George, so quietly that the wind seemed louder than his words.

  ‘I don’t care what you think. You’ll do it. You’re useless at everything else, but anyone can swing a bat.’

  Brendan turned and walked away from George, towards Brian in his digger, alone in the rubble; man and machine. The bat was heavy, the wood smooth as skin. It was a dead weight in George’s sweaty hands as they walked back to Brian to find that the grave was dug and ready.

  Brian turned off the engine and climbed out of the truck. He stood before Brendan, hands at his sides, shoulders down, so that he seemed less than a man, Neanderthal, base, awaiting his fate. Without being asked, Brian moved to the head of the pit he had just dug. The wind breathed coarse and chill through the exposed site, lifting up the fine hairs on Brian’s scalp and causing Brendan to turn up the collar on his wool coat.

  Brendan moved closer to Brian and took the back of his neck between forefinger and thumb. He forced him down on to his knees in the pit, climbing down into it with him. George watched from the lip of the grave, the cricket bat in his hands. He looked around, as if for help, but there was no one and nothing in this wasteland: no witnesses, no judge.

  Still with his hand on Brian’s neck, forcing it downwards, Brendan looked up at George, commanding.

  The smooth cricket bat was slick in George’s hand. His heart was beating so hard that it felt as if it might fall, pounding, out of his chest. All he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears.

  ‘Are you ready, Brian?’ Brendan whispered hoarsely. ‘Have you said your prayers?’

  Brian was still hunched, bent over, his knuckles almost touching the rubble in the pit that he had dug.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  Brendan turned and put a hand on the lip of the pit to help himself out.

  Brian hunched, spun and straightened, as if throwing the discus. He had a brick in his hand and smacked it into the side of Brendan’s face. There was a dull thud as the brick made contact: flesh over bone. Brendan sank to his knees and stayed there, stunned, a hand to his face and then watching the blood on his palm.

  Brian looked up at George. It was clear what was going to happen, but Brian had shown that he would go down fighting. The isolation of the yard crawled over George like cockroaches. It was a deed no one would witness. It would right a wrong. It would free him.

  George refused to meet Brian’s watery blue eyes. He swung the heavy bat, left-handed, driving it away from his body, then pulling it forward, true, athletic, murderous. It was a fluid, beautiful moment of perfect coordination and power.

  There was a sound like an axe hacking into a tall tree. George drew the bat towards him and the tip was bright red with his father’s blood. Brendan fell forward into the grave.

  ‘Mother of God,’ said Brian as he scrambled out.

  Face to face, Brian and George looked at each other. Brian was a small man and had to raise his chin ninety degrees to meet George’s gaze. George was a boy, not even sixteen years old. They were silent, looking each other in the eye, kindred in guilt.

  George swung the bat again and Brian winced, but George merely tossed it into the pit on top of his father. ‘I suppose you know what to do now?’ he said, looking down at his father, his hands in his pockets.

  Brian said nothing but went to the cement mixer and began loading it up with cement, sand and water, while George kicked in the rubble. When the cement was ready, Brian poured it into the hole.