As we stood looking at each other, a shadow appeared at her shoulder and a voice said, ‘What do you want? Has he sent you?’
Craig Jenkins, the huge child that had terrorised half the kids in school, had grown into a truly huge man. For the first time I felt the terror that the other kids had felt. As the brother of his best mate I’d been safe in the school yard, but I doubted that would be the case now. Craig would probably kick my head in just because I was Robert’s brother. It’s what I would have done if someone had treated my sister the way Robert had. If I couldn’t have got to the one who was responsible, I think I might have gone for the next best thing. I remember making a conscious decision that if he did decide to pummel me, I’d take the beating. I’d just let him get on with it. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that but it was good to have a plan.
‘Come in, Tom.’ Michelle stood to one side as she invited me in.
‘What are you doing, Michelle?’ Craig was whispering but he might as well have screamed at her, and his words couldn’t have been more menacing if he had.
There was defiance as well as sadness as she looked at her brother and that was enough for him to back down. Craig disappeared into the house and Michelle opened the door even further.
There was a light on in a room off the hallway but the rest of the house was in darkness.
‘Come in,’ Michelle said, leading the way to the back of the house. As I followed her I noticed her parents in the only lit room. I saw her dad stand up only to be pulled back down by his wife. I turned my head away quickly. Michelle had put the light on in the kitchen by then and was waiting for me. After she closed the door behind us she turned around slowly and crossed her arms over her chest. Her eyes were flitting around, looking at me and then away. Her lips were trembling.
‘Where is he?’ she asked. The tremble was in her voice as well as her lips and she sounded like she was going to burst into tears at any minute. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand it if she started crying.
‘I don’t know,’ I told her.
Obviously, that wasn’t what she had wanted to hear and it was enough to push her over the edge. She lost control of the composure she’d been trying to hang on to and started crying.
For the love of God, I thought to myself. What am I supposed to do now? I took a step towards her, though God only knew why, and I was grateful when she held her hand up to tell me to stay where I was. She pulled out a chair and fell onto it. I didn’t know what else to do so I pulled out the chair beside her and sat down. I watched her and waited for her to give me a clue as to what I should do.
She gave a hard sniff and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Where is he?’ she asked again.
As I looked at her all I could think was how could you do this to her, Robert? Surely he’d realised that she would react this way. But then, if he had he wouldn’t have left her like this... would he? That was when I gave myself a mental slap around the head because of course he would. I’ve told you how much I loved my brother, idolised him even, but that didn’t blind me to his faults.
Robert would have known fine well that this was how Michelle would react. What other way was there? She was twenty years old, pregnant, and deserted by a man she probably thought loved her. Of course she’d be bawling her eyes out and wondering where he was. But none of that would have mattered to him. These days Robert only did what was best for Robert.
‘Stop it,’ I told her. Either she hadn’t heard me or she was choosing to ignore me because she carried on crying.
‘Stop it,’ I said again, only louder this time, loud enough to get her to look at me. I stood up and grabbed a handful of tissues out of the box that sat on the bench. The box was almost empty and it occurred to me that if the box had been full earlier in the afternoon, she’d wasted a lot of tears. I offered her the tissues as I sat back down. She took them from me, separated one from the bunch and blew her nose.
‘He left me a note,’ she said with a sniff. She was looking down at the table as she spoke and gravity moved her tears down her cheeks and off the end of her chin. I realise it was a stupid thing that went through my head but I thought that my mother had looked cheerful by comparison. Finally, Michelle lifted her head. ‘Mum found it when she got home,’ she said before she sniffed again.
‘What time was that?’ I asked.
‘About twelve I think.’ She looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
I told her I was just curious but the reality was that I was trying to work out how long he had been gone. If he had left Michelle’s note some time before twelve, and assuming that he had gone straight away, that meant that he had been on the road for at least seven hours. But maybe he’d dropped her letter off first and then left from home. That would make a difference of, what, half an hour at most? My best guess was that he’d been gone at least six and a half hours. He could have got a long way in six and a half hours. It was a waste of time wondering about it really, because we would only know the actual sequence of events when Robert came back and explained everything. If he came back at all.
Michelle and I sat in silence for a few minutes. She was crying and she dabbed her eyes or her nose from time to time. I sat with my head down feeling like a spare part. After a while, Michelle reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the note Robert had left her. It was crumpled into a ball and she chucked it onto the table vaguely in my direction. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Did she want me to read it? I thought she must or why else would she have thrown it at me?
‘Can I?’ I asked, though I really didn’t want to. I’d already seen more than enough of my brother’s hand-writing that day. She nodded her head so I reluctantly picked it up and tried to straighten the paper out. I flattened it out on the table.
Like the others, that note is etched forever on my brain, like that speech from Richard III that Mrs Wilkinson made us all learn in English.
Chelle, it said, which made me even more uncomfortable if such a thing were possible. Obviously that was his pet name for her. How could he use her pet name when he was shitting all over her? Anyway, Chelle, it said, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. You’re better off without me. Bobby.
Bobby? Bobby? Who the hell called him Bobby? Well clearly Chelle did.
I didn’t doubt that she was better off without the selfish bastard but that still didn’t make it the right thing to do.
I handed the note back to her. She took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks to blow it out. ‘I’m going to have to tell them, aren’t I?’ she said.
Tell them? I thought, tell them what?
‘They think I’m just really upset because Robert’s packed me in,’ she explained and I noticed that she hadn’t called him Bobby. ‘My dad said that there are plenty more fish in the sea.’ She gave a tiny little laugh when she said that. ‘They have no idea.’ She didn’t laugh that time. There were just more tears rolling down her cheeks.
When I finally realised that she hadn’t told her family about the baby, I asked, ‘Do you want me to stay?’
I left about half an hour later. Michelle tried to smile at me when she saw me to the door but she wasn’t fooling anyone.
Mum and Dad were both in the living room when I got home. The television was on but neither of them was watching it. Mum was staring into space and Dad was pretending to read the paper.
Have you ever seen those nature programmes where a meerkat hears a noise and it becomes alert, looking around to see where the noise came from? Well Mum was like that when the phone rang. Her head turned towards the telephone and she started to push herself out of her chair. It was obvious who she hoped it would be but I thought she’d suffered enough that day so I put my hand on her shoulder and told her that I’d get it. I thought that the chances of it being Robert were almost nil.
I lifted the receiver to my ear and said, ‘Hello?’
‘Is he there?’ I recognised Michelle’s voice. I’d half expected it to be her and I wondered
what she would have done if anyone other than me had answered the phone. I couldn’t see her asking Mum that question.
I told her that he wasn’t.
‘Has he not come home yet?’ It was like she was begging me to say that he had.
‘I’m sorry, no.’ I apologised because I knew that I wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear.
‘I’m really going to have to tell them, aren’t I?’
I didn’t think it was a real question so I didn’t offer an answer. I just offered another apology. When I put the phone down I realised that Mum was standing behind me. I apologised to her too.
ROBERT
I didn’t have a destination in mind when I set off. You know, it wasn’t like I was thinking I’m going to go to such and such, I was just driving. Thank God traffic was light on the motorway because my mind wasn’t exactly on the road ahead.
Despite what you might think about me being a selfish prick it’s not like I didn’t give a second thought to those I’d left behind and what I’d left them with. But, do you know what? There’s no point lying about it; I might as well tell you exactly what I was thinking as I drove. I was wondering how far I could get before anyone realised I was gone. Michelle wouldn’t be home until after five, so she’d be in the dark for a while, and Tom wouldn’t get his note till just before then. Mum, on the other hand, would be home about three unless she went shopping. So who knew? I certainly didn’t. I didn’t have a bloody clue about anything.
I wondered how they’d react when they found their notes. I thought that Mum and Michelle would be upset but Tom probably wouldn’t give a toss. Would it have been easier for them if I’d told them in person rather than in a note? For them maybe, but not for me. Mum might have been OK, because I was always going to leave home sometime, but I doubted that Michelle hearing the words come out of my mouth would have softened the blow for her. And it would be a blow – I knew it would – but, the truth is, I just didn’t care enough to do things differently. I had a life to live and it didn’t involve being a father.
Don’t you think I knew that I was being selfish?
Anyway, I’m not going to apologise for what I was doing. I’d spent half the night worrying about it, I’d made a decision, and I was sticking to it. Simple as.
But that didn’t stop me thinking about it as I drove down the A1 going God knows where.
I misjudged pulling out in front of a white van at one point and nearly got wiped out. Only the sound of someone leaning on the horn made me aware of them. I quickly pulled back into the left-hand lane and, as the van passed, saw the driver waving in my direction. You didn’t need to be a lip reader to work out that he was effing and blinding at me. He even gave me the middle finger for good measure just in case I hadn’t got the message. I put my hand up in a pathetic attempt to apologise for nearly killing us both.
Not long after that I noticed the brake lights of the vehicles ahead of me lighting up as the traffic slowed and eventually stopped. I hadn’t noticed warning signs for road works so all I could assume was that there had been an accident. A girl driving a green Mini that was stopped in the lane beside me mouthed the words, ‘What’s going on?’ and I shrugged my shoulders. She smiled at me and on any other day I’d have been chuffed, but that day it was the last thing I wanted so I turned away and stared straight ahead.
Five or six minutes later I saw the blue lights of the emergency vehicles coming up behind me. The daylight was fading so as the police car and ambulance came down the hard shoulder their lights brightened up the inside of my car.
The contrast wasn’t lost on me. I’d thought I was having a bad day, but apparently there was someone having a much worse one than me. Mum always said ‘It doesn’t matter what happens there’s always someone worse off than you are,’ but, as I told her every time she quoted those words of wisdom, that doesn’t solve your problems does it? I was sorry for whoever was involved in whatever the police and ambulance were attending, and I hoped they’d be OK, but their having problems didn’t lessen mine.
We’d been there for a while before I even looked at the clock and we still hadn’t moved a good ten minutes after that. We were just there, stationary, for what felt like ages and I spent the time wondering how the hell I’d let myself get caught up in this mess.
With the light almost gone, I made a mental note to put the headlights on if we ever started moving again. Eventually we did start to move, and not before time: patience has never been my strong suit and sitting there not going anywhere was doing my head in. We inched along, which would normally have irritated the life out of me, but on that occasion it was fine because controlling the car’s movement using the clutch gave me something else to think about.
As I came to a bend in the road all I could see was traffic nose to tail. I looked at the petrol gauge and hoped that I wouldn’t run out of fuel. It showed just under a quarter of a tank and I didn’t relish the idea of paying motorway prices. And then I saw the sign for the next exit. It was a mile away and I finally knew where I was going.
I crawled forwards towards the slip road, along with everyone else, and when I was within half a mile of it I thought sod it, checked my mirrors and moved onto the hard shoulder. I was pretty sure that the police had more important things to worry about than me using the emergency lane, so I thought I’d get away with it. I had to suffer the glares of some of my fellow drivers but it was probably jealousy rather than anger and as I looked in the rear-view mirror I saw others follow where I had led.
At the top of the slip road I took the third exit at the roundabout and headed for the coast.
It was dark by the time I got there, but I knew that if it had still been light I would have been able to see the sea from where I was. We used to go there every July for two weeks and that spot at the top of the hill was where me and Tom would compete to be the first to see the sea.
I felt better than I had all day.
The good thing about a seaside town is that there are plenty of hotels and B&Bs to choose from, but it was only after I’d walked up and down the street that we had always stayed on that I realised that it was the off season and every window had a ‘Closed’ sign in it. Undeterred, I got back in the car and drove around the bay to what Tom and I had always thought of as the lively part of town.
It wasn’t lively that night though, which wasn’t surprising I suppose. There were a few people walking along the sea front on their way to somewhere but I could probably have counted them all on the fingers of one hand.
I parked the car, got out and leaned against the railings to listen to the sea. I could hear the waves lapping on the beach, though they sounded a distance away so I guessed that the tide was out. I thought about going onto the beach and walking. Not walking along the beach... walking into the sea. Would I have the bottle to keep going while the water came up around my ankles? My knees? Would I carry on walking, or would instinct take over and force me to swim? I’m a good swimmer, so what if I kept swimming? Just kept going further and further out into whatever sea it was – the North I think. Surely there’d come a point where I couldn’t swim any more and the sea would take me.
I thought about the car parked there: off season or not, I was sure that someone would notice it. I hadn’t looked, but there was more than likely a parking fee I should have paid. Would some eagle-eyed traffic warden put a ticket on it and then report it to the police when it hadn’t moved for a while? I imagined them checking the registration and turning up at my home address asking if I was there and had my car been stolen. My parents would come looking for me, I was sure of that. Well, Mum would anyway; she’d spend the rest of her life searching for me in this town, or at least until they found my body. If they found my body...
I stopped that train of thought right there because A: I didn’t want Mum walking around this town for the next thirty years like some deranged old woman from a Bronteë novel and B: I didn’t want to die. The reason that I hadn’t wanted to be tied down to Michel
le and some kid that she might be having was because I had too much living left to do.
I tried to focus. I needed a place to stay but if push came to shove, I could sleep in the car. I also needed to eat. I hadn’t had anything since the night before and I was starving.
I ate fish and chips sitting on a bench on the sea front. My dad had bought us fish and chips from that particular chip shop many times over the years but we’d always sat inside, eating the food off plates with knives and forks, and accompanied by bread and butter and cups of tea. That night I sat in the dark eating out of the paper with my fingers. The chips tasted as good as they always had, maybe even a bit better.
It was freezing by then and the only person to pass me was a man walking his dog. The dog made a bee-line for me and the man pulled him away saying, ‘Come away, Bob.’
For a split second I thought he was talking to me. I know that technically my dad was the ‘Bob’ of the family, but it threw me just the same. I’ve never understood why people give dogs human names.
Anyway, Bob was dragged off still looking towards me and sniffing the chips for as long as he could. Well he could bugger off because he wasn’t getting any. I was fully aware of the situation I was in and what it meant financially. I had a few quid in my pocket and a bank card that gave me access to some more but, now that I was out of work, I was going to have to make it last. These fish and chips might have to fill me for a few days, so Bob was getting nowt.
I threw the paper into a dustbin but only after I’d wiped every morsel up with my fingers and licked them clean: salt, vinegar, grease – the lot.
I walked around for a bit to clear my head. I thought about going for a pint in the pub at the end of the sea front but then thought I’d probably pay twice what I would at home – and one wouldn’t be enough: there was a good chance that if I went in I wouldn’t stop drinking until my pockets were empty and that wasn’t a luxury that I could afford.
I didn’t recognise myself; I’d become sensible overnight.
Not My Brother's Keeper Page 3