‘That’s just what I got from his description of things.’
‘I... didn’t know he felt like that,’ he says, before pausing while his eyes drift to his feet. He seems so troubled. ‘I care for that kid a lot.’
‘I believe you were there at his birth. The baby and the brandy?’
Felix snorts.
‘That old legend. People talk about it, misty-eyed and rose-tinted. They hear the story and like the romance of it all. The doomed love, the elation of new life when all seemed lost. It’s the story that, in a lot of ways, has everything. Nobody ever gives a second thought to how terrible it was. The blood, the hopelessness... The sheer scale of what was at stake. Seeing someone who means so much to you, struggle so fatally when doing something that should be such a simple natural act.’
‘I know the main points of the story, but... what happened?’
‘Something that doesn’t happen anymore. It was the 80’s - it was the era of excess. Good men were whipped up into a frenzy of proving themselves, buoyed by what I can only suppose was a liberation and a descent. A liberation of sensibilities, and a descent into entitlement. Men wanted it all, and they wanted it then and there. Sarah - Jack’s mother - was a collateral casualty of that greed.’
I want to ask who’s greed was the catalyst - Felix’s, Royston’s, Sarah’s or someone else entirely, but the man is on a roll, and I’ll leave him to it. He’s surprisingly easy to talk to, and even easier to listen to.
‘She was just 19,’ Felix continues. ‘A baby having a baby. None of us ever got over that.’
A question pops into my head, the answer to which will tell me exactly the power and ruthlessness of the man who sits next to me, and how much I am to fear him perhaps.
‘Did the person who did it get away with it?’
Felix looks me straight in the eye, and I worry I’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t intended to be a challenge, but it may have come out that way.
‘We never knew,’ he replies eventually. ‘Maybe. Royston was too preoccupied with losing his wife and gaining a son to concern himself with it. We are many things, Ben, but cold killers is not one of them. I never wanted Jack to go to that damn restaurant, I didn’t want bloodshed to come from the death of my dear friend.’
‘You and Royston were good friends?’ I ask.
‘It’s an oft-trotted cliche but he was more like family,’ he replies, putting his own mug on the table and cleaning his glasses. It’s a theatrical gesture, that suggests a resignation, an acceptance of the situation and circumstances. ‘It was in the late 1950’s when I realized that my career progression was gravitating towards a different path, one that was on the other side of what you may call legal. It was in the early eighties when a young mover and shaker was moving and shaking in my eye line. That was Royston, and he courted my attention like a suitor. He had designs on an employment path that wasn’t being fulfilled in other avenues, and he forced me to take note of him. I had no interest in working with a young man, but he was persistent. I gave him a chance, and grew to love the boy like my own. One Christmas, he asked if he could spend it with me and my family, as opposed to his own.’
He keeps mentioning work casually like he may have an office job. I’d love to know what work is for him. It might explain a great deal, and fill in the blanks somewhat.
‘Royston’s death will herald change for us all. But I know that he died because of his association with myself, and even though he was a grown man, who made his own decisions a long time ago, I can feel the uneasy spill of blood on my hands.’
It is strange to watch a man I’ve never met before, reveal himself so candidly and intimately, his doubts, fears and sadnesses creeping around the edges of his character and presenting themselves for me, a complete stranger. He’s inviting my judgement, it is almost his confession, taking the opportunity to clear his conscience of the things that dog him the most. Despite myself, I find my voice.
‘We all are forced to make choices. There are those that accept what comes from those choices, who will always sleep the best because of that. It’s those who go one further, and learn from the consequences of those choices... In the fullness of time, they are the ones that resonate as good and worthy men.’
Am I right in counseling this man? I don’t know him at all, aside from the hint of a legend regaled to me less than a day earlier. When I got up this morning, I hadn’t heard of him, and now I’m sipping a late night winter-warmer in his home, talking about the things that keep him awake long into the night and philosophizing cack-handedly about the errant nature of man and his foibles.
‘I’m just an old man, Ben. An old man who was better suited to the fifties. You knew where you were back then.’
‘Forgive me for saying, but you don’t seem to be doing too badly.’
That elicits a slight smile. He leans back into his chair, as if exhaustion finally catches up with him, and his weary engine is running on fumes.
‘Please stay here tonight. The spare room is made up. It’s far too late to head back out into town, and it’s the least I can do after how much you looked after our Jack. You kept him alive, and I won’t forget it.’
Suddenly tiredness sweeps over me, too. The fresh, opulent setting in which I sit presently suggests there is a huge kingsize double bed somewhere upstairs with my name on it. I can only think of sinking into it and wallowing in the luxury. I don’t know what to make of what is happening, and frankly I am too tired to make sense of it tonight. This is surely a dangerous offer to accept, but I just don’t sense any immediate threat from the old man. We seem completely alone, and he seems to have placed his trust in me. If he wanted me dead, he would have had his associates make sure I never got out of the freezing river, let alone drag me out of it, if that is indeed what happened. I think of my predilection for good intel, and it’s gathering, and I comfort myself in the thought that if I want to learn about Felix, here will undoubtedly be the best place to do it.
‘If that isn’t too much trouble, I’d be happy to,’ I say.
‘Excellent,’ says Felix, rising carefully. ‘Follow me.’
I do just that, tottering after the little old criminal mastermind, ready to spend a night under his wing. As the saying goes, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. But confusion, tiredness and disorientation is allowing me to lie closer than I’m normally comfortable with, with curiosity my mischievous guide.
14
I wake up ferociously, my skin cold and clammy, and my brow burning. I feel skewed, nauseous and disorientated, my breathing rushed. The surroundings are unfamiliar, but waking in unfamiliar places doesn’t usually bother me, since I do it often enough. My subconscious has been deeply active during my sleep, and has whipped me into such a frenzy it has woken me with a start.
The fever I am blighted is surely from my narrow brush with hypothermia, and my body fighting back whilst trying to achieve an equilibrium. But my mind nags and claws, and it is a feeling which is familiar. It floods back, the doubts and depressions, a relic of a period in my life I try hard daily to leave behind. I am being pushed back in time, shoved against my weak will by circumstances, dragged there by repressed feelings reappearing from the mental abyss I had banished them to.
I’m on dangerous ground, mentally and physically. There is an eerie similarity to this scenario, and my last brush with organized crime. I had become too easily seduced, and was badly burned, the reasons for my seduction unclear to me. Every now and then, something in me looks for acceptance and camaraderie from the very people that I have been at odds with. I don’t understand it, and here, now, today, I can feel myself making the same mistakes. What was it I said to Felix just before? It’s those that learn from the consequences of their choices that become worthy. What a hypocrite I’m turning out to be.
But why do I do it? Where is my usual gut instinct? I have absolute faith in my instincts, but every now and then, my instincts abandon me, and I flirt with trouble in a way that astonishe
s me and would pity anyone else for.
It was that bastard, Terry ‘The Turn-Up’ Masters. He made me angry, made me make mistakes. I was on the run, looking for a problem to solve. He appeared on TV, looking like a repulsive caricature of criminal entitlement, standing outside a court laughing after his trial for armed robbery fell through. His attitude was inflammatory - his treatment of a female reporter sickening. I made a detour to London, to sort him out. Only I didn’t sort him out. I went in half-cocked, with a false sense of invincibility. And when I got close to him, I was seduced by his easy patter, kindness and friendliness. That is, until he set his pitbulls on me, leaving me in a ghastly, bloody survival scrap between man and beast. I had won that round, but he shot my knee out and forced me into a one-armed knife fight against his own son, who had wronged him with his own stupidity. He decided to teach us both a lesson. An accident happened, and his son ended up with a knife in his heart, while I ended up in handcuffs with a murder charge. All because I was careless, and fell victim to his charms.
But what charms? What am I not learning from? I’m open-minded enough to look at myself and know that it’s not physical or romantic attractions that make me do this. Why do I find myself falling under the spell of these older dangerous men? It’s not like -
Shit. That’s it. Pathetic.
The answer is so obvious, so Freudian. It’s about my father.
Ten years ago, I had left these shores and their comforts for the front line, ready to do whatever was necessary to represent my country abroad. As my progression through the ranks blossomed and more and more standing and responsibility was afforded me, I was the toast of my family, a hero in my village, and a source of pride for this country in itself. My father, who I had always had a decent relationship with, was full of that simultaneous worry and pride that soldiers’ parents are forced to carry with them every day, but he knew my viewpoint and that my mind could not be changed. I felt I had found my calling. I was good at it, and if I devoted a couple of decades of my life to it, I would emerge at the other end enriched, happy and fulfilled.
That was a pipe-dream, an ideal that I would never find realized. Duty-bound combat was something that changed me in a way that is indescribable to anyone that has not experienced it. You spend your life in readiness for the use of force, so much so that you live a life in wait. You know a life-changing event is coming, but you don’t know when. It’s a grim eventuality. At some point, you are going to have to do something that you will never be able to take back. You are prepared in so many ways, but none of the ways that matter.
I was an insular soul at the best of times, and had many peaks and troughs in my early army years. I suffered a bleak loss, just before my deployment, and it wrecked me, transforming me from a determined but happy youth into a bitter, churning shell. It was a loss that I have never really come to terms with, and push to the farthest cerebral recesses I can find. One day I hope for another chance at what it was I lost, but, like a lot of things, you never forget the first time.
I went away a mess, and whenever I came home, I was visibly different, augmented a little more every time by the horrors, tensions and stresses I was witnessing on my stints abroad. I was performing well, but grimness was my fuel. I was obsessive, meticulous and organized, with a cold, determined execution - the recipe for the perfect soldier. Hence my progression.
My father tried to council me, in his own way, whenever we were together on my trips home. He was a stoney, stubborn Yorkshireman, but he was not without cracks of caring. I was an only child, the only reason for which being physical complications in my poor mother. After myself, she found she could not carry any more children. I never asked fully about it, knowing that the answers probably haunt my mother more than I could understand, and would not wish to push her any further into sadness. It’s something I understand now, the specter of lost children. My parents would dearly have loved more children, and I would have to do.
I spent much time with my father, in my childhood, playing football and fishing, timeless father-son activities. It gave us something in common, and instead of him trying to engage in idle chit chat with an infant, we could embark on bonding by instruction. I relied on him, and I think in many ways he relied on me.
We lived in Rotherham, near Sheffield. I think my parents are still there now. Sheffield is known historically as the city of steel, thanks to it’s domineering and prolific steel factories throughout the twentieth century. Dad worked in one, then another, then another. He progressed himself to a more managerial role, as he deteriorated physically thanks to years of hard labour, until the economic crash of the late noughties. In 2008, he was offered a redundancy package, and was forced to take it, the resonance of Lehman Brothers’ actions across the Atlantic echoing as intravenously at a little known steel works in the north of England. He was not far from retirement, but not quite ready yet, and it took some serious adjustment.
I knew that during this period, as he tried to realign his day-to-day into something that would give him the same routines and satisfactions as the life that was just taken from him, I was a great source of comfort to him. In his mind, he had spent his life building this country, then created this wonderful son who was giving everything to defend it. I was a mental crutch, and as long as I was doing my job, earning medals and advancing through the army, I was something in his inverted world he could rely on.
Then of course, I was jettisoned from the army spectacularly. I had made a choice that both my head and heart agreed with, but my superiors did not. It was a choice that used to rip and claw at me every day, fraying my subconscious to ribbons until I was angrier and sadder than I had ever been. I was consumed by hate, and resentment, at the shitty hand I had been dealt. And worse of all, I will never know if the decision I made was the right one, even though now I have promised myself to belief wholeheartedly that it was. If I don’t, and the doubts resurface, Pandora’s Box will surely reopen, and my spiral will recommence.
The effect of my dismissal clattered my father in every conceivable way, as everything he felt he knew was snatched from him yet again. He was devastated. I was court-martialed. My medals were wiped from my roll of honor, my title of captain removed from my records, and in their place was a big DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED stamp and a return to a society that would view me with hate if they knew the truth. None of this can change what I have given - the missions I have participated in, the lives I saved, the lives I have taken, the time in harm’s way, the orders I have executed without question, the orders I have given with the best intentions in mind. I always pictured that after my time, I’d be respected, not hated.
When I came home in disgrace, I’d gone back to my mum and dad’s over in our little village in Rotherham, Rawmarsh. The changes were obvious on my arrival. Mum hugged me, destined to love the one child she could have despite his abhorrent actions. Dad was distant from the start, and I knew that our relationship was on shaky ground. When I got in our little house, the pictures of me as a kid were all still there, but anything and everything featuring myself in a uniform were gone. All those dress events that my parents had been so proud and delighted to attend, the images of them smiling with their dutiful, perfect son - gone. It was like the house had been reset to a time when I was still in my childhood. A time when I hadn’t caused them the pain I had so obviously wrought on them.
I only lasted a couple of days, in a horrid bubble of near silence. Dad seemed so unhappy, and even in his rollercoaster years as we sailed through his employment issues and his sub-alcoholic tendencies, I had never seen him like this. I could always rely on him to go for a beer with me, but this didn’t even work. The amount of hours I’d spent of my youth in working men’s pubs, playing with an old Thundercat doll, making friends with various pub dogs and eating salt and vinegar crisps out of dusty ash trays - and now, he wouldn’t even go for a beer with me. Worse still, his excuses were stubborn, ridiculous and hurtful, not that he knew it. In his mind he was doing the right th
ing, shutting me out like this.
I decided quickly that I’d had enough. They were ashamed and didn’t want me. I felt like they wished I’d never made it home at all. I was desperate to tell them what happened and why, and fill them in on the reasons behind my descent. But I couldn’t, their minds long since made up. I left, and said goodbye. I expected at least a mild protest, at least out of politeness. Dad said nothing. Mum asked if I was sure. That was it. I felt my decision to leave sadly vindicated.
The next time I saw them was at my murder sentencing. I had taken a guilty plea, to keep the prosecution from digging too far into my past, where they would surely find more nails with which to fasten my coffin. They barely looked at me, crippled, I assume, by what I had become - but I detected something else there too. Guilt. I thought they looked as guilty as me, only it was I in the dock. By the time of the trial, in their eyes I was beyond saving, but earlier, before I became just another statistic, when I had come home from war and needed their guidance as a son, they turned their back on me. When I needed them the most, they abandoned me. Our family was fractured, and the prodigal son was jailed for 17 years.
It’s the absence of my family, my father especially, that has caused my current predicament, completely from the perspective that I miss him. We had a far from perfect relationship, but it was our relationship, and in those strict parameters it furnished us both with exactly what we both needed to prosper as a unit. And I feel a chasm in my life where a father figure used to be.
My subconscious had attached to Terry Masters as someone who might fill a role in my life, despite him being both far from suitable and everything I loathe. And here, the same has happened again. I have, without meaning, aligned myself with a senior figure, whose company I have enjoyed. Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just a big bout of latent homosexuality and it just so happens older men are my thing. That might even be simpler to deal with than being an ex-con with a daddy issue.
The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) Page 10