“Friday, what’s Friday?”
“Jamie’s birthday. Drinks, remember?”
“Can’t afford it,” I said quickly, seizing a true excuse.
“Don’t be boring, Ben.”
“We’ll pay,” from Jamie. “I will,” sensing a movement in Laura, a quiet I can’t afford it either.
So instead of that handy excuse, “I thought you didn’t want me,” I said, moved to cruelty.
“I never said that,” she flashed back.
And true enough, thinking back, she hadn’t. Quite. I made a gesture of acquiescence, and she nodded, taking it for an apology.
“All right, then. We’ll do it. You two,” she said, “need to talk.”
And she was right, we did, we both knew it. We needed to talk about her.
o0o
More than that, though — if there could be anything more than that — we needed to talk about what was happening to the family, what was happening to us. And couldn’t do it that night, because Uncle James stultified any meaningful discussion simply by being there. He was more outraged than grieving, more insulted than concerned; the sheer weight of his offended gravitas crushed us into silence when he came back to the car.
He used his mobile phone to summon reinforcements, the muscle that would remove Tommy’s remains; but we didn’t wait to see that. No one was going to touch Tommy in the meantime. He gestured to Laura and she put the car silently in gear and drove away, your obedient servant, Mr Macallan. But then, he would have expected nothing less.
No talking on the drive, not even about what mattered. I’d anticipated an interrogation, and didn’t get it. The rat Jamie had snaffled the front seat before I could claim it; displaced again, I sat in the back with Uncle James and he addressed not a word to me until Laura surprised him, I think, by turning off the main road west and bringing me to the door of my flat.
I suppose he’d expected her to take us all back to his place. She was dead right, though, I didn’t want to go. I’d held my cousin’s death in my arms, I’d seen my girl in Jamie’s; it was enough, for one night. Enough of family, enough of grief and horror. I wanted the familiar darkness of my own bed and the dark familiarity of my own mind’s dreaming, and never mind if nightmares came.
Uncle James looked at me and nodded, as if he could read all that on my face. He couldn’t, not he; but whatever it was he thought he saw, it persuaded him.
“Tomorrow, then,” he said, and it was my turn to nod. I’d have to answer their questions sometime. Might as well be tomorrow. One thing for sure, I wasn’t going into college.
Letting myself into the flat, I remembered there was half a bottle of Famous Grouse in the cupboard, that Jacko had brought home from some gig or other and we hadn’t got around to drinking yet. Now might just be the right time to do that...
Except that it would be more bravado than need, look how grown-up I am, I drink whisky when I want to go to sleep. And it would take a while, maybe most of that half-bottle before I could be sure of its sliding me off into unconsciousness; and I couldn’t think of anything else to do while I was drinking, and the last thing I wanted was to sit around staring at walls, painting pictures in my head. Reliving and reliving this night, both terrible sides of it, the one cousin with his life stolen from him, the other too busy stealing mine...
So I left the whisky where it was, thanked God that Jacko was in bed — if not exactly sleeping yet: there was an extra bike in the hall, murmur of voices, occasional squeal of knackered bedsprings from his room — and made myself a secretive mug of cocoa to go to bed with, another inescapable legacy from my childhood, still and always a guaranteed sleeping-potion in times of crisis.
o0o
I slept long and late, too shaken perhaps to want to come back to the world. When I did there was a boy, not Jacko, in our kitchen: wearing Jacko’s decrepit bathrobe, crunching toast one-handed while he drifted round making coffee with the other.
He grinned at me, his lips freckled with crumbs, his eyes still flecked with sleep.
“’Morning. You’re Benedict, right?” And then, when I hesitated, “Jonathan. Jonathan Hayes.”
“Jonathan. Right. Hi...” But had we met before, was that a reminder, or was it an introduction? I wasn’t certain, couldn’t figure out a polite way to discover. It was a problem I’d faced before, though, distinguishing Jacko’s boyfriends, and in the long run it never seemed to matter. They none of them actually got that long a run. Bed could never triumph over music; and as far as I could remember, for whatever private reason of his own, he’d never brought a musician home.
We shared an amicable breakfast. At first I thought Jonathan’s constant easy chatter was going to drive me up the wall, but far from it. Whether driven by sensitivity on his part, or else by shyness, or simply his habit in the mornings, I didn’t know and didn’t care. Left alone I’d have been sullen and moody, I might very possibly have worked myself up to being scared; a steady wash of talk that kept a light finger-hold on my attention turned out to be just what I needed.
I didn’t contribute much myself, but I did ask where Jacko was, whether he was still sleeping. Jonathan shook his head.
“He’s a good boy,” around a mouthful, “he’s gone to lectures.”
“Not you, though?”
“I’m not a student. I’m not anything really,” but he was easy with it, grinning again, quite unembarrassed. “I windle a bit, do odd jobs for people, bit of gardening, bit of decorating, stuff like that. And sign on between.”
“Windle?”
“Window-cleaning. My dad’s got a business. I help out, but only sometimes. There’s not enough work, really.”
“Right.”
“Tom said I didn’t have to hurry off...”
Took me a second, but Tom was Jacko. “No, sure, that’s fine. Stick around till he gets back, if you like. Doesn’t bother me.” To tell truth, I’d be glad of his company in the flat. Not to talk to, nor even to listen to, particularly: just the consciousness of someone else being around while I waited for my uncle, someone to keep me centred, to remind me that there was still another world and I had a place in it.
“I said I’d meet him tonight, at the Duke. There’s a session there. But, well, you know, I live down the river, and there’s nothing to do at home anyway...”
“So stick around. I said. Not much to do here either, mind.”
“I’ll think of something.”
o0o
When my uncle finally came, it wasn’t James, but Allan.
And Hazel came too, they arrived together.
Good news, bad news, all in one interesting package.
Squeezing past the bikes they followed me through into the living-room, Uncle Allan staring about him with fascination, learning how I lived now. I saw him politely suppress a shudder at the carpets, so I politely suppressed my amused grin also.
“Have a seat,” I suggested, waving a hospitable arm. “That one’s the most comfortable, Uncle, but it’s also the hardest to get out of, after...”
He smiled, “I’ll risk it, thank you, Benedict,” and lowered himself cautiously into my favourite chair. Hazel shook her head in a single denying jerk, and went to stand fidgeting by the window, glancing out as often as she glanced at us. Bodyguard duties, I diagnosed; self-appointed, for sure. Uncle Allan needed no protection. Certainly none that she was capable of giving, unless perhaps her unrestful presence could serve as a reminder that even Macallans were apparently vulnerable now, and he should keep alert for danger.
Not a position he was used to, certainly. He was probably as uncomfortable with that as he was in the chair, perched awkwardly forward where the only proper attitude was to sprawl. But with two cousins dead, I honestly didn’t think he’d need reminding. Hazel had just forced herself on him, at a guess, bullying him as successfully as she bullied everyone else. No one should be going round alone, she would have said, not even you, Uncle Allan. Especially not you, we can’t afford to lose you. I’l
l come with you, watch your back...
Fat lot of help she’d be to him in a crisis, fat lot he’d need her; but it did her good, I could see that. Which was maybe why he’d allowed it, in the last analysis. Times like this, a family could fragment; but the welfare of each contributed to the whole, and Allan always had the family’s welfare most at heart.
Anyway, she was there, and he was. He declined my offer of a coffee, wise old uncle that he was — a Blue Mountain man at heart, he’d have had trouble swallowing Best Value Instant, an anonymous brown powder that came in kilo tubs — and said, “Tell me about last night, Benedict. Everything you remember.”
“There’s not much. Truly. I was too late, that’s all,” and that’s what would haunt me for a long time to come, if not forever. Never mind that I’d have been useless anyway, however promptly I came to the rescue. I had no rescue in me, I didn’t have the equipment; but that wasn’t the point. Not to have been there at Tommy’s most need: it was everybody’s failure, but mine most of all simply because I’d been closest.
“Well. Tell me anyway.”
So I did. I explained about the driving, though he knew already; and then I explained about the screaming, though I really hadn’t wanted to do that and he hadn’t wanted to hear it either by the look of him, the way he tightened up around the mouth.
“I didn’t know who it was,” I said, “till I saw the nightfire. But then it had to be one of us...” And even after I’d found him it had taken me a while to work out who it was, but I wasn’t telling Allan that. Some things he was entitled not to know.
“Describe what you saw,” he said. “Exactly.”
I described the courtyard and the flats, and how the car had been burning, with Tommy lying in its guttering shadow. And then, at his prompting, I described everything I’d done, everything I’d seen and heard all the time I was there, until Uncle James’ car arrived. I told him about the filth of Tommy’s death because he’d know about that already, he would have seen the corpse; I told him about the shower and the clean clothes and phoning Aunt Jess, though that of course he knew about also. I told him about the teenagers spying from the balcony when it was quiet, when it seemed safe; and that nearly raised a grin in him as it nearly had in me.
All this time Hazel was restlessly doing her bodyguard bit at the window; but then she stopped, and went to the door. Gestured impatiently to me, to be quiet; and hissed, “There’s someone else in the flat. Who’s here?”
Took me a moment to remember, but then I heard what she’d heard, the chink of dishes in the kitchen.
“Oh, that’s Jonathan. Friend of Jacko’s. Relax, will you?”
She jerked her head in a hard denial. Relaxing, it seemed, was not on the agenda today. Nor could I blame her for that, in all honesty. Not if she’d seen the body; and she would have done. Even in my family, no one had ever managed to keep Hazel out of anywhere she wanted to get into.
“Who is he, then? Friend, what sort of friend?”
“Just a boy, that’s all. Eighteen, nineteen, something like that. Jacko likes boys.”
Hazel made a grimace of distaste. If my sister had a sex-life at all, it would be strictly hetero, strictly conformist, except that she would insist on dominating in bed as she did out of it. But if she did have a sex-life, I’d never heard of it.
Like sister, like brother, I thought wryly. I’d had one once, but no more.
She wasn’t finished with Jonathan yet. “Has he been listening?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Why would he? Don’t get paranoid. He’s just a boy.”
“Someone is killing our people, Benedict. They’re not supposed to be able to do that. It’s not paranoid to be suspicious, it’s just common sense. It could be any of them,” and her gesture contained the whole town and the world beyond, “we just don’t know; so we can’t trust anyone. Right?”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
“And you shouldn’t be so bloody blasé about it, either. You’re not labouring under the illusion that you’re safe, are you? Think about it, for God’s sake. Marty, Tommy — they were neither of them heavyweights, when it came to talent. Whoever’s doing this is picking off the weakest, one by one. Who’s the weakest, Benedict?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t seen it that way at all. And damn it all, I’d disinvested...
But I took a breath, gave her a smile as unconcerned as I could make it, and said, “You and me, pet.”
“You, Benedict. You,” fiercely. “Don’t think they won’t remember you. You can’t hide from us, and you can’t hide from them either.”
She had a point, though I wasn’t going to admit it.
“I’m not hiding,” I said. “I’d be in the phone-book, if we could only afford a phone. And who’s ‘them’, anyway? Don’t postulate ahead of your facts, it’s a recipe for trouble.”
She just glared at me. “We’ve got two cousins dead, Benedict. Those are facts. What the hell more do you want?”
Allan made pacific gestures with his hands, as he always had: with some success when we were children, less later on, none at all now.
But he was looking at me a little anxiously, a little unworldly, something troubling him outside our spatting or the family’s major trauma.
“Benedict,” he said, patting his pockets, feeling for something and then finding it, drawing out a chequebook, “do you need money?”
God, for a brilliant man, he was bloody slow sometimes.
“No,” I said venomously. “Not yours, anyway. Put it away.”
o0o
Later — after they’d gone, unsatisfied but finally accepting that I had nothing more to give them, no information worth the having — Jonathan put his head around the door.
“Haven’t got a bucket, have you?”
“Somewhere, yeah. Why?”
“I saw that ladder in the yard there, thought maybe I’d go around and windle a bit. Get some cash together, for tonight.”
The ladder was the landlord’s, left over from the last time he tried to save money by fixing the roof himself. Afterwards the rain had still leaked into our upstairs neighbours’ flat, and from theirs on down into ours; so we clubbed together, paid to have the job done properly, and deducted it from the next month’s rent. He wasn’t happy, but he still hadn’t come back for his ladder.
I laughed, and went to find the bucket.
“What about you,” he said, “you coming down the Duke?”
“No money.” Absolutely no money, I’d left all I had with my unwilling hosts last night.
“Well, me neither. That’s why...”
And we looked at each other with a wild surmise; and so I spent all afternoon up and down ladders, begging buckets of hot water from cynical housewives and scraping long-dried birdshit off window glass for a handful of coins.
Nine: Never Gentle on my Mind
In the evening, we went to the Duke.
The Duke of Northumberland — colloquially known as Percy’s Piss-Pot, but only to those who had personally met the current Duke, we had a strict rule about that — was a pub down at the river’s edge, once surrounded by factories and housing both, thriving on the trade. Now it was surrounded by nothing, just a rubble wasteland, ‘scheduled for redevelopment’ as soon as they could locate some investors stupid enough to put themselves willingly into my family’s capacious pocket.
The Duke throve no longer. At least, not on its former clientèle. The brewery that had owned it sold up, the company that had taken it over went bust, a new landlord had bought it on a bank-loan with nothing left over for refurbishment. Bare boards and tobacco-stained walls, no juke and no video, no local trade: what he’d needed more than anything was a new customer base, and he’d found it at the university. Getting some real ales in and selling the Duke as an authentic, unreconstructed pub — making a feature, making a virtue of necessity — he’d made the place as popular with us as any drinking-hole in town, five nights a week.
Thursdays and
Sundays were different. Thursdays and Sundays, the folkies took over in the back room. Musicians lined the walls and filled the tables, handing instruments around, singing and smoking and playing, playing, endlessly playing. Those few who had no gift for music and were there only to listen squeezed in where they could, rarely finding a seat and often giving it up unasked to a musician. The hierarchy was absolute.
This particular Thursday, anything that could move me faster or further from the night before was welcome; riding on jigs and alcohol fitted the bill quite neatly.
o0o
Jonathan and I arrived at about nine, the best of buddies, bonded by hard work equally shared. Our bellies were heavy with fish and chips, my classic veggie compromise, and our pockets were heavy with cash.
The back room didn’t have a bar, only a hatch in the wall. Jonathan squeezed into the queue, after a quick consultation; I scanned the room, checking out who was there.
Jacko, of course, ensconced in a corner he’d probably established as his own way back at opening time. And Colin was with him, his elbow-cradling fiddle technique showing to advantage in these crowded quarters, where very likely it had been developed. Carol was there too but the other side of the room, on Squeezebox Bench with another piano-accordionist, an older woman with wicked fingers. True Irish, she was, and a fixture here.
For once, Carol didn’t have Nicky in tow. I had seen him at a session here a couple of times, but I thought perhaps the landlord had had a quiet word. Babies were welcome, babies and dogs; teenagers were tolerated, so long as they sat quiet and at least made a pretence at drinking Coke until they were legal; but an eight-year-old was neither one thing nor the other, and certain trouble if authority poked its suspicious head around the door.
There were a dozen other familiar faces, but I started running out of names quite fast. I waved, smiled, nodded around, then found a narrow section of wall to lean against and thought I’d better decide that this was comfortable, because chances were I’d be there till closing. As usual there were too many people, not enough chairs.
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