The Night Brother

by Rosie Garland

  ‘… only way,’ she says.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Listen. In a perfect world, this family should share half and half. But when things get unbalanced …’ She trails off, gazing at the boots in her lap as if they might provide inspiration.

  ‘What?’ I snarl. ‘Spit it out, why don’t you!’

  ‘I didn’t think Edie could. Or would be so selfish.’ She presses her lips together. ‘Say that one side – Edie for example – tips the scales. Once it starts, it’s as though the scales get used to it. Grain by grain, ounce by ounce, it takes a greater and greater effort to tip them back, until …’ She pauses.

  ‘Until what?’

  ‘Until you can’t get back. And it takes hell and high water to even things out. Your mother lets Arthur in once a month and he’s stuck with it. The longer Edie keeps you away …’

  My mind races. I could tear the mattress apart with my bare hands. It takes the effort of a circus strongman to hold back my rage. I must handle my grandmother more carefully. She’s got a right hook like a steam hammer. My mind seethes with visions of throttling Edie till her eyes pop. I need time to think, to lay plans. I force my mouth into a biddable smile.

  ‘Oh, Grandma,’ I bleat. ‘Edie’s been awfully selfish, hasn’t she?’

  ‘I shall have stern words with her.’

  I consider dropping my trousers and displaying the puncture wounds. Knowing her, she’ll think I’ve done it. Yet another thing for Edie to wriggle out of.

  ‘You do that,’ I murmur. ‘And while you’re at it, take a good look at her legs.’

  She looks at me sideways, opens her mouth; thinks better of it, slaps her thighs and stands. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this talk, Gnome. Now. Let’s get you downstairs and behind that bar. High time we had an extra pair of hands about the place.’

  ‘Of course,’ I coo, voice dusted with sugar. ‘Let me get dressed, first. Please.’

  I affect a little-boy-lost expression until she clomps away. I’m back and in the nick of time: cold with fear at my narrow escape; boiling with fury at how Edie snuffed me out all these years. The grasping, vindictive …

  As for Grandma’s baloney about balance: the stupid woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Half and half, my arse. I’ll be damned if I let Edie take another minute. She’ll rue the day she took my life away. How could I let myself be cowed so easily? I should’ve stood up to her. I was an idiot. A child. Not any longer.

  First things first. I’m going nowhere and doing nothing until I’ve cut this hair. I rifle through the dresser and turn up a pair of embroidery scissors. They’ll have to do. One by one the curls curve upon the rug, a limp reminder of what’s wrong with my world. As for helping out in The Comet, they’ve got another think coming. I thump downstairs and am halfway out of the door when Grandma grabs my shoulder and hauls me back.

  ‘Not so fast,’ she growls. ‘There’s work to be done.’

  Of all the whiskery, horse-faced, fat-bottomed frumps.

  ‘What, me? You can whistle for it.’

  ‘Some things don’t change. You’re still a lazy tyke.’

  ‘I’m not your slave. You’ll be making me empty the night-soil bucket next.’

  ‘If I will it, you’ll do it,’ she says, too cheerfully for my taste.

  ‘I bally well shall not. Mam wouldn’t make me.’

  She laughs. ‘You think so? Cissy!’ she yells.

  The woman in question sticks her head around the doorpost. I have the distinct feeling she’s been hiding there.

  ‘Don’t cheek your grandmother,’ she mutters, and pops back into her mouse-hole.

  I’ve never seen her so browbeaten. The worm turns, even here. Grandma folds her arms. They’re the size of boiled hams.

  ‘Got it? Good. Under this roof you’ll do as you’re told.’

  ‘So much for a welcome home. I can see why Edie was so quick to sling her hook.’

  The old sow’s face twists. I’ve struck a bull’s-eye.

  ‘You want bed and board? Earn it,’ she grunts. ‘Don’t think you’re going to lounge around with us running around after you.’

  The remainder of the day passes in toil. Mam opens the public door at lunchtime and in troop our customers: flat-footed, sour-breathed, slack-jawed dead-enders, every man jack of them. I work my fingers to the bone: fetch beer from the cellar; carry bottles back and forth; serve codgers I’d as soon kick along the street with my boot up their backsides. I lay it on with a trowel, laughing at their feeble pleasantries and affecting interest in their tedious anecdotes.

  If that wasn’t enough, the moment they’ve departed and the doors are bolted against them, Grandma thrusts a brush into my hand. I’m not made for this low sort of labour. It is beneath a sharp chap such as myself. Mam flits past carrying a tray of dirty glasses as I attack the floor.

  ‘Watch it,’ she says. ‘You’ll break the head off.’

  ‘I wish it was Edie’s ruddy head,’ I mutter, whacking the broom against the wall.

  ‘Tch,’ she chides affectionately. ‘Less of your impertinence.’

  I bat my eyelashes. ‘Oh Mam,’ I say. ‘It’s the homesickness talking. She took me away from you – my lovely mam – for five years. Are you surprised I’m so upset?’

  ‘No,’ she says cautiously.

  ‘Do you think she should get away with it scot-free?’

  She nibbles her lower lip. ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘She deserves …’

  I supply a notion. ‘… to be kicked into the coal cellar.’

  The corners of her mouth twitch. ‘Now, now.’

  ‘She’d come out blacker than your shoe.’

  Her eyes glint: chips of glass from a broken beer bottle. ‘That’s not very nice,’ she says.

  ‘Why not? You hate her as much as I do. How about I scatter marbles on the stairs?’

  Mam giggles. ‘Down she’ll tumble.’

  ‘And break her scraggy neck.’

  ‘Gnome!’ She tries for censure, but it comes out as complicity.

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Too quick by half. I’ll buy a penny dose of poison from the chemist. It’s for rats, I’ll say. No word of a lie, neither. I’ll sprinkle toffees with the stuff and leave them with a note: To Edie, from an admirer.’

  ‘That’ll tickle her vanity. Toffee-nosed madam.’

  I laugh wildly at the weak pun, hugging my ribs and rocking back and forth. We are having a whale of a time when Grandma pokes her head through the door.

  ‘Listen to you two idiots,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not like we’d do any of it,’ Mam mumbles. ‘It’s just talk.’

  ‘Nasty talk.’

  ‘She’s no daughter of mine, swanning off like that,’ says Mam.

  ‘Can you blame her for upping sticks? Not exactly dripping with the milk of human kindness, are you?’

  I wait for Mam to fight back, but she slinks away, tail between her legs.

  ‘Since when did Edie do us any favours?’ I say, chin up.

  ‘You’ve not got the brains you were born with,’ she sneers. ‘For heaven’s sake. Trip her down the stairs and it’s your nose gets broken.’

  ‘Don’t see why I shouldn’t try,’ I whisper. ‘After what she did.’

  ‘You can mutter all you want. It changes nothing. You’re stuck with her and she you.’

  ‘Then I’ll make her life such a misery she won’t want it any more!’

  ‘Herbert …’

  ‘Gnome!’ I scream. ‘I want my five years back! I’ll take them and all!’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that if you share, you both get a look-in?’

  ‘Never!’ I shriek. ‘I want vengeance. It’s mine by rights.’

  ‘Even if it’s the death of you?’

  The cat gets my tongue, but only for a second. ‘Don’t waste your breath on threats. I’m not a boy any more.’

  She opens her gob, reconsiders, and shuts it. Good. That’s how a woman’s mouth should be. B
uttoned. I barge past her and run upstairs, don the bowler hat and jacket. The sleeves have been let down and pressed. Mam or Grandma did this for me. Something soft knots in my gut, but I shove it down, hard.

  I slip through the scullery and stick my hand in the sugar bowl. I wonder if Mam’s acquired any grey matter since I’ve been gone but my fingers find coins, right where they’ve always been. I head into the city, jingling shillings.

  My head crams with violence. I pass a chemist and gaze longingly at the jars scrawled with mysterious letters: Tr. Chlorod., Oxymel Scillae, Tinct. Benz. Simp. Much as I hate to admit it, Grandma is right. If I poison Edie, I cough up blood. If I break her arm, my own is broken. I consider playing her at her own game and stabbing myself with a hat-pin. Knowing my blasted luck that would fail, not to mention my meddling Grandma sticking her oar in and putting paid to it. My dreams pop like soap bubbles. It’s not fair.

  Manchester has changed since I was here last. In particular, they seem to be knocking down half of it. If I had my way I’d sweep it all aside and good riddance to bad rubbish. Flatten the old city and build it anew. A man’s city, slick with tarmacadam and clean, straight streets. Give me tramlines, motor cars, steamships. Give me express trains to whisk me to London in the space of a few hours. Give me zeppelins and flying machines. Give me a way out of here. Up and far away, till I am the tiniest speck. Till I cannot be seen.

  Not that these pleasant imaginings bring me one step closer to a solution to my problem. I make my way up Mosley Street towards Piccadilly, my thoughts circling back to Edie like a dog returning to its vomit. I can’t poison her, strangle her, break so much as her little finger. I deal a pebble a hefty kick and stub my toe on the kerb. Damn it all to hell. She stole my life. Five long, wonderful years of it.

  She has a life.

  That’s what I can poison, without any injury to myself. That’s what I can take and stamp to pieces, bit by delicious bit. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. No more wage-earning, independent tomfoolery. Edie doesn’t deserve to stick her nose out of the front door, not after what she did to me. She can stay in and slave for Mam. It’s my turn to live.

  I mull over how to keep her kennelled. She imagines herself quite the modern woman, strolling the streets like she owns them. Modern or not, when a woman is terrified she stays indoors where she belongs. Simple. I’ll scare the living bejesus out of her. How she’ll cower, how she’ll scuttle. Hope soars afresh only to be doused immediately. There’s no point in me threatening her. She won’t believe anything I say.

  But she’ll believe other men. Unsavoury men. The kind who lie in wait, cracking their knuckles; who slide open windows and creep into bedrooms. Men who’ll do as I tell them. It’s perfect. No one has to harm a hair on her head. She just has to believe that someone will. I don’t want to consign her to nothingness. I want her to know what I’ve done to her. I want her to taste my revenge. Every bitter mouthful.

  I must work quickly before she sticks in that bloody pin of hers. I hasten towards Shudehill Market. It is heaving as always. A brace of small boys whizz past, one of them flourishing an orange. Judging by the shouts of the costermonger, one purloined rather than paid for. I am on the point of laughing when I’m visited by an unwelcome vision of myself: ancient, toothless and still here, night after night, guffawing at naughty lads. There must be more to my existence. There has to be, or—

  My mind sputters. Part of my life gone forever and this tatty market hall is all I have to show for it. I rack my brains for somewhere better to go when a familiar voice calls my name.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t my little Gnome.’ Jessie unglues herself from the wall and takes my arm. She looks a lot older than when I saw her last, jowls sagging and left eye drooping at the corner. ‘Nice hat.’

  I twirl the bowler in my fingers.

  ‘Quite the swell these days, aren’t you? Thought you’d forgotten your old friend Jessie.’

  ‘You? Never. Besides, you’re not old.’

  ‘You flatterer,’ she replies coquettishly, and fiddles with her hair. ‘Come. Walk with me. How about a bite?’ she adds, steering me towards the pie-stand. ‘You’ve got no meat on you, Gnome. What’ve you been doing with yourself: living off lettuce?’

  Daylight does her no favours and she knows it, for she suggests we move inside. We down our pies, elbows propped on the tabletop. She picks at the crust delicately as though she’s only eating to be polite. I gobble mine with a hunger I didn’t know I had.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ she coos. ‘Get some flesh on those bones. So. Tell me everything you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Bugger all. Biding my time, you might say,’ I grumble. ‘Five ruddy years and all.’

  She taps her nose. ‘A holiday in Strangeways, eh? You wicked fellow.’ She pats my wrists with a flirting gesture. ‘What have you been getting up to?’

  ‘I was set up,’ I say.

  ‘Tell me the old, old story,’ she sings happily.

  I suck gravy off my fingers and lean across the table. ‘Now I’m back, I need a job done,’ I mutter.

  ‘What sort of job?’

  ‘Never you mind what sort,’ I snap. ‘A score to settle. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘That’s a nice way to speak to a friend. If you want my advice, learn your lesson. Steer clear of trouble and it’ll steer clear of you.’

  ‘Don’t nag. I can handle myself perfectly well.’

  She laughs. ‘I dare say you can. But Strangeways is not the place for return visits if you can help it. There are unscrupulous fellows to be found.’

  ‘Precisely the sort I wish to meet. I’ll bet you come across plenty in your line of work.’

  ‘Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.’ She sighs. ‘What a shame you boys have to grow up so fast.’ She looks set to pat me on the cheek, so I turn my face away.

  ‘Will you help me or not? You’d not believe what she did.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she says. ‘You didn’t say anything about it being a woman.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘None to you, maybe. But it does to me.’

  ‘She’s the reason you haven’t seen me all this time!’

  ‘Count me out, Gnome. I’ll not conspire against a lady.’

  ‘Lady? That’s the last thing she is. You’d hate her too if you met her.’

  ‘Would I now?’

  ‘Come on, Jessie. I’ve seen you lot put each other’s eyes out over a glove. This is someone who’s made my life a misery. Don’t you care? I’m not asking for nasty business. Just a little fright.’

  She presses her lips together and pouts. It makes her look uncommonly like a duck. ‘Find someone else to do your dirty work.’

  I make cow’s eyes at her. ‘But I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I don’t want any part of it.’ She stands. ‘But if you hang around long enough the sort of men you’re looking for will come to you. Cash’ll grease the wheels, but there’s plenty will do it for the pleasure.’

  She flounces off, arse jiggling from side to side like a sack of potatoes. I don’t need her help. I order a mug of tea and start lamenting about the sad state the world is in, what with women making every decent man’s life a blasted misery.

  ‘They rule the roost and now they want to seize the reins of government. Where will it end, I ask you?’ I say to no one and everyone. ‘With our necks in a horse-collar, that’s where.’

  There is a grunt of general agreement; nothing more.

  ‘Women, always women,’ I continue. ‘Taking jobs a man should be doing. That’s it. Our wages, our pride, the bread out of our mouths.’

  A few heads turn.

  ‘It’s men that need freedom from their constant badgering,’ I continue. ‘Bleating how hard done by they are.’

  ‘Never bloody happy,’ says one fellow.

  ‘That’s not the half of it!’ I say, and stand him a cup of tea. ‘Scratch the surface of this world and there we are, wonderin
g where our share has gone and who has snatched it from us.’

  ‘Whining, always whining,’ he agrees, gulping the brew.

  Blow me if Jessie isn’t bang on the money. Within minutes I have the sympathy of a sizeable bunch of fellows, every one of them bemoaning the activities of females and holding out their mugs to be refilled.

  I let it be known that I have one particular tart in need of cutting down to size and most sidle off once they’ve guzzled the tea. Two likely specimens linger and I reason that if one doesn’t work out then the other will pick up the slack. The rat-thin man introduces himself as Mr Joseph. His companion, Mr Jack, is the canine type: stiff of leg and square of head. He displays a row of yellowing fangs when we shake hands.

  ‘Gnome,’ I say gruffly.

  ‘Gnome,’ opines Mr Joseph, rolling the word on his tongue. ‘There’s a funny name.’

  ‘Memorable,’ I parry.

  ‘There’s such a thing as too memorable,’ he retorts.

  I never thought of that. I shall consider that conundrum at my leisure. We sit in brotherly contemplation of the low females strutting past.

  ‘Women, eh?’ I grunt.

  ‘Egging us on,’ says Joseph in an unpleasant tone I warm to immediately. ‘Shaking their derrières in a manner designed to inflame the most celibate of monks.’

  ‘Hmm,’ grunts Jack.

  ‘Yet they raise merry hell when we take them up on their enticements,’ Joseph continues.

  ‘Where’s the justice in that?’ I agree.

  ‘I could tell some tales,’ Joseph replies. ‘But who’d believe me?’

  ‘Ha! Whole lot of them need taking down a peg or two,’ say I.

  ‘Or three,’ barks Jack.

  ‘There’s the rub,’ I sigh. ‘If only I had a friend to help me set my world to rights.’

  ‘That’d be a fine thing,’ agrees Joseph.

  ‘A peg or two. That’s all I ask. Why, if I could meet such a man, I’d pay good money, so I would.’ I gaze wistfully into my empty mug.

  ‘Would you now?’ he replies with an air of languid interest. He scratches his stomach with a fan of claws.