Serious People

by Shea, James A.

  “I’m not really that type of guy. I'm more of a thinker,” John replied.

  “Oh,” Emma said, suddenly looking disappointed. “I was hoping you were more of a lover...” she added, with a wink, and started to walk back up the stairs.

  John hurried after her.

  An hour later, John was carefully getting out of bed. He was doing his best not to wake Emma as he started to pick up his clothes that were now littered around the bedroom.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Emma said from the bed.

  He jumped, thinking she was asleep. He had hoped to avoid this conversation through the type of silent steps the career he was leaving behind had been built on.

  “I thought you were still asleep.”

  “Really?” Emma said, now sitting up. “Well. I think it’s important for you to note that I’ve only let you move in on very strict criteria.”

  “Babe, seriously I’ve got things to do,” John pleaded.

  “You’re telling me,” Emma replied. “You’ve got to get back to bed.”

  “I should get back to the bar. The guys are probably wondering what’s happened to me,” John added, as he checked himself in the bedside mirror.

  “Your brothers! I thought you were moving on from them!” Emma said, burying her head under the duvet.

  John looked at the door momentarily, then back towards his girlfriend and sat down on the bed again.

  “They’re my brothers. I can’t just move on from them.” John said, uncovering Emma.

  “John that is exactly what you promised you were going to do. You told my father. You were going to take that job at the bank.”

  “I am. But I can’t walk out on my family. I need to break it to them gently. I mean Auntie Mary’s only just met you,” John said.

  “Auntie bloody Mary!” Emma said, sitting back up. “She’s mental! John you’ve got to understand. These types of people; they put their hooks into you. The only way to get away from them is to just walk away!”

  “It’s not just her, but my brothers...” John pleaded.

  He could hear the determination in Emma’s voice and wasn’t sure himself why he was arguing with her. He knew she was right. His family was nothing good—to him or to anyone else.

  “Oh your brothers, of course. Who could forget? Here babe, this is my brother Billy. He's spent most of his life in a young offenders’ prison. What? What for? Oh he just got himself in a few scraps. You know, stabbed a few people... A couple of teachers at school! Oh nice to meet you Billy...” Emma jumped up and mimed shaking hands with John’s brother.

  “Oh and hello Nick. What? You don’t talk? You’re just some kind of mute psychopath? However, you would like to show me that big bloody knife that you carry with you everywhere. Wow! That is normal. These truly are the type of brothers who are really difficult to leave behind. I mean they’re just like the Waltons when you think about it!”

  Emma looked at him, watching for a reaction; John looked away. She was right, as always. There was nothing he could say. What he wanted to say was he needed to go back to finish it with them, finish it for good. To seal the door behind them. What he couldn’t tell her was how her description of his two brothers was actually just the tip of the iceberg; they were far worse than even she imagined. And if he didn’t end it with them the right way, then everything could go wrong. He could imagine Nick slipping in through the bedroom window with a knife in his mouth, ready to slit Emma’s throat. This would all be on Billy’s say so; this would be his plan to bring their elder brother back home to them, to where he belonged.

  So he had to go back and make them understand. To get them to understand how he and Emma felt about each other, that they had to move on—for good—and start their new life together.

  “I’m sorry John, but your family has some serious issues.” Her voice seemed calmer now. “It's a miracle you’re so normal.”

  “That’s exactly why I can’t just walk out on them.”

  Emma stared back at her boyfriend.

  “They know I’m going to be moving on. I've been talking to Uncle Roy, and he understands. He knows I’ve got to live my own life,” John said in an apologetic tone. “Even my brothers are behaving differently; we haven’t been out doing any of that money collection stuff for weeks. I think they’re turning a corner.”

  John hoped Emma believed this statement more than he did. He wasn’t sure why Billy and Nick hadn’t been carrying out Charlie O’Neil’s money collections of late, especially as Billy had treated it as such a coup when they’d got the gig in the first place, talking about how they were now part of the O’Neil firm. It had been more than a little weird when he had recently decided to stop doing the collections. John had no idea what had caused this but was fairly sure it was not down to a new need to go straight.

  But Emma wanted to believe her boyfriend. “Really?” she said, unable to hide the hope in her voice.

  “Really,” John replied, trying to convince himself. “I think my moving out the bar has kicked them into looking at their own lives. Even so, I can’t just up and leave right now. They need me to steer them back to a better path, and then I can start my own life.”

  Emma managed a smile. “I had to find myself a Saint didn’t I?”

  “Emma, I owe them. I am walking away, but it needs to be at the right pace,” John said, putting his jacket on. “I love you.”

  “Good,” Emma said going back under the duvet. “I expect you back for dinner. I don’t care what your bloody aunt might say.”

  John smiled and walked out of the bedroom.

  Blake’s Bar was situated on one of Hammersmith’s more run down streets. It had a vacant shop on one side and a Chinese take-away on the other, and was well away from any footfall that would have given the establishment any kind of drop in business. Though it did stand out at a distance owing to its murky green painted fascia.

  Above the bar, was the two-floor apartment that John and his family had used for over forty years as both a home and a base for the family business and his Ma’s previous—this being a brothel.

  John saw a familiar sight as he walked through the front doors; his Uncle Roy was behind the bar and there was no sign of any patrons. Roy was conducting his favourite task, polishing glasses, one that he took great pride in. The irony of this cleaning job was it made the poor cleanliness of the rest of the bar even more obvious.

  Roy looked up from polishing a whiskey glass and shook his head with disappointment as John approached. “John, what are you doing back here?”

  “Oh hello to you too Uncle,” John said, taking a stool and sitting in front of the bar.

  “You’ve just this day moved in with that lovely girlie of yours and you’re back here already—on the very same day?” Roy said, looking almost angry.

  “Uncle Roy, I was hardly never coming back,” John replied.

  Roy’s face grew sterner as he put down the polished glass. This was the normal sign, John knew, that there was a lecture coming from the old man.

  “Now John, you need to listen to me,” Roy said, prodding his nephew in the chest. “You have an opportunity to get out. You've a lovely girl, a job offer from her father. Your future’s out that door.”

  John knew his uncle was right but put this to the back of his mind. “Uncle, that's as may be; but I’m still needed here. Billy and Nick need me…”

  “Need you! Your brothers need no one! They’ll be out murdering and robbing with or without the benefit of your assistance! And it doesn’t need to be like that for you, get out that door now and don’t ever look back!” Roy said pointing to the door.

  John turned almost instinctively toward the door, but just for a moment. “Uncle Roy. It doesn’t need to be like it for them either.”

  “Oh John…” Roy started shaking his head.

  “No Uncle, you’re wrong. I was talking to the guys a couple of nights ago, about me moving on. And they were listening. I could see they were starting to look at their
own lives,” John said, trying to convince himself.

  Roy made as if to speak but seemed to think better of it.

  “For instance, take the work for Charlie O’Neil; we haven’t been out on any of his collections for three weeks! Three weeks—that’s a good as a resignation! I’m telling you Uncle, my brothers are turning a corner!”

  Before Roy could respond, he was distracted by the sound of footsteps and loud voices coming from the stairwell behind the bar.

  “There goes your chance,” Uncle Roy said solemnly, picking up another glass to polish.

  “…You’ve now left it just long enough to make your point,” Aunt Mary said, stepping into the bar. She was talking to someone behind her.

  “You think so?” Billy Blake replied. The elder of John’s two younger brothers entered the bar behind her.

  Aunt Mary stopped. Her eyes focused on John.

  “Kicked you out already. I knew it…”

  “No Auntie Mary, I’ve just popped back in for a few drinks and to see my family,” John said firmly.

  “I’m just saying; your brothers are feeling a little overlooked and forgotten,” Mary said. Then started to wipe down some of the bar stools.

  “Auntie Mary, I only left this morning,” John protested, trying to shield the hurt as he looked back at his Aunt, who was now ignoring him.

  “I’m pleased you’ve found time in your busy diary to come back here for five minutes brother,” Billy said.

  John turned to look back at Billy. To John, Billy’s eyes somehow always looked darker than they should. They were blue in colour but, to his older brother, the dark rings underneath absorbed the entire colour from them.

  Billy’s look was further hardened by a long scar that stretched the length of the right-hand side of his face. He had sported it like a trophy from his youth, which in the most part had been spent in and out of youth offender’s prisons. Apart from this, he was an average looking man. He was just under six feet tall and sported the same trademark crew cut hairstyle as did all the Blakes—courtesy of Auntie Mary.

  This was until John had let his hair grow out a bit, to an almost shaggy look. Emma had said that was the way she preferred it. But John had known it was a mistake to offer this as the reason, as soon as he had let the words leave his lips. If Auntie Mary had needed an excuse to dislike his girlfriend, this had become it. From that moment on she had not missed an opportunity to say how this new little woman was driving a wedge through their family and how things would never be the same.

  “Hey Billy, how’s it going?” John smiled.

  “A lot better now I know I can call off the search party. I was getting worried about yah,” Billy said, making himself a mug of coffee at the bar.

  Billy was two years younger than John but had always acted as the elder brother, much to John’s embarrassment when he thought back to his school days. His younger brother had always been his protector against bigger kids in his year. This, of course, in the days when Billy was there and not at some young offenders’ institute.

  Billy Blake had a fearsome reputation at school. It wasn’t like he was ever gifted with a large frame; but what he lacked for in physique, he more than made up for in terms of aggression and the sheer violence he was always happy to display. And even when he was young, he was lethal. John could never forget the day he had kicked the crap out of an older kid named Fattie Jones.

  Jones, who had a reputation of his own for irrational violence when the mood took him, had walked up to Billy and John in the playground and called their Ma a dirty whore. He said that she was best off dead, so she couldn’t give the whole world AIDS.

  On hearing this Billy had at first just smiled at the kid. He seemed pleased. And this was the most horrible part. He was pleased that he now had the opportunity to test himself against one of the school’s biggest bullies. Just at the moment when Jones had finished laughing and was turning to walk away, Billy leapt on top of him. Then, as if it had all been planned, Billy quickly straddled the large boy and took a pencil from his pocket, holding it aloft for a moment.

  Billy held the pencil in the air for a few seconds, giving Fattie Jones just enough time to guess his fate. Then, before Jones had a chance to knock him off him, John’s brother gave a wicked smile and thrust the pencil into Fattie’s right eye.

  It was horrific—there was blood everywhere. John could still hear Fattie’s screams now; they were akin to those of a dying animal, who screamed both from pain and also from terror at their bleak future.

  Jones lost the eye completely, through the injury, and Billy lost his freedom. He was put into Feltham Youth Offenders for his first stint. It lasted eighteen months.

  Billy leant on the bar sipping his coffee. “You’re back just in time bro.”

  “In time for what?” John said, hoping to disguise the dread in his voice.

  “Our collections run ya knob, have you forgotten all about our fucking job?” Billy said, gulping his coffee.

  “But I thought we’d given up all that?” John replied, now not hiding his dread.

  “Given it up? Are you fucking mental?” Billy said.

  Roy looked up from his glass polishing. “Billy,” he said, “maybe now John’s settling down…”

  “Shut your mouth!” interrupted Mary, almost spitting with aggression at her husband. "This is Blake’s business, Bailey!”

  John hated how Auntie Mary called Roy by his surname, despite their twenty-six year relationship. It was one of the more overt ways in which the old woman displayed who had the power between them in the home. John had been eleven years old when Roy got together with Mary, and the man had been like a father figure to him ever since. However, his placid nature was always being torn apart by Auntie Mary. This had worsened over the years and Billy had picked up the trait from his aunt, speaking to the older man with the same disdain.

  “Honestly, you say hardly anything all week and when you do it’s a load of shit!” Mary sneered, glaring at Roy, who was now polishing the glasses with a new found dedication. It was as if he had left this plain and was now in a world where only he and the glass existed.

  Billy looked at the old couple and grinned. “Look at all the shit you’ve been missing.”

  John tried to smile, “I thought we’d given that stuff up. I mean it’s been weeks since we’ve done anything for Charlie?”

  “Ah ya see. This was all part of Auntie Mary’s plan,” Billy said winking at Mary, who smiled back with pride.

  John was not sure who had the more vindictive evil running through the blood in their veins, Mary or Billy. He had long wondered if Billy had been infected down the years by Mary’s spite, or if there was something hereditary about the evil in their family.

  “Plan?” John almost spat the words out.

  “Yeah, Charlie O’Neil knows we’re too good for shit jobs like this. I mean. He had to give it to us—to bring us into the business. He knows that we’re like he was, that we’re part of the same brethren. But we’re ready to move on now and this will send out that message,” Billy said, putting his now empty mug in front of Roy to clear up.

  “Either that or it will just piss O’Neil off,” John said, unable to mask his horror on hearing the plan. “He’s probably killed people for doing less than this.”

  “Now let me tell you this, John Blake! Your Ma and I were on the same boat from Ireland as Charlie’s father, and he won’t forget that,” Auntie Mary said, practically jumping off her feet in agitation. “He’s got plans for you boys, mark my words.”

  John looked down to his feet, not having the confidence to face his brother for a moment. “Billy, I said to Emma…”

  But Billy was not listening—except to his Aunt. “God! Enough of this. Are you coming or what?” he said, his eyes darkening in the way that they always did when his mind was drifting to even darker places.

  John looked back at his brother, wishing he had the strength to challenge him. He’d spent most his life trying to work how bes
t to confront his younger brother; he’d tried everything, from gentle persuasion to direct disagreement. But direct challenges always led to a physical confrontation between them; this would always mean John taking a beating of some sort. It was not down to Billy’s physical prowess over him but merely that he couldn’t bring himself to strike his brother. Billy did not have the same disability.

  “Sure.” John heard himself say.

  Chapter Four - Robert Payne

  Charlie gently closed the door to his wife’s room behind him. Robert watched as his old friend stopped, facing the door for a moment, not moving. He was not sure whether Charlie was uttering a silent prayer for Jackie or if he was simply trying to summon the strength to walk away. Either way, Robert found it tough to watch.

  Robert had always lived life by three rules. First, you have only one life and it was down to you to maximise it. Second, there’s no excuse for nothing. Third, failure’s only a reason to go again. These rules reflected his raw determination to put every ounce of his energy into his working life and had resulted in giving both he and Charlie the very considerable financial wealth they both enjoyed.

  Charlie had always been the name, of course. He was prepared to do anything to anyone or anything, but he did it with some form of charm which added to his reputation on the street. Maybe it was his good looks or the slight Irish accent, both of which he had inherited from his parents, which when he chose to, he could give a lighter touch to his words no matter how venomous. This had long been a point of humour between the two friends and colleagues. If you were stood over someone—about to end them in some way—you might say something like “any last words,” which translated to “you’re fucked,” if say Mickey was to say it. But whenever it was Charlie who made such an enquiry, those ominous words would be said in such a way the person who heard them would actually believe that Charlie would—after doing the dreadful deed—then leave the scene and ensure that, whoever the words were intended for, would actually receive them.

  It was amusing because Charlie was actually more vicious than any man Robert had ever met. Nicknames in London were largely a thing of the past, as most people in this trade didn’t last long enough to have them thought up. One exception of that was of course Mickey the Bag. But another was the name which some of the northern based firms had given Charlie; the Devil in London. Robert understood that Charlie had earned this nickname.