Blood Ties: Part 2 of 3: Family is not always a place of safety

But this wasn’t the answer Irene wanted, and she wouldn’t let it go.

‘I’m his frigging mother!’ she’d screamed. ‘His mother! He wouldn’t have killed himself without leaving me a note. He just wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t! You have got to know something –’ She jabbed Kathleen painfully in the ribcage. ‘You were the last person to see my boy alive, so you’d better give me something! You’d better tell me what you said to him, or I’ll …’

‘What?’ Kathleen had retorted. ‘What? Or you’ll what? Well just do it! Do your worst! It’s not going to change anything, is it? It’s not going to bring him back!’

Which, of course, was the point at which her father had come upon them, and Irene, as was her way now, because she was all over the place, obviously, collapsed against a bar stool, sobbing like a baby, her fists beating out a tattoo on the bar.

Kathleen slipped back inside to start cleaning the main bar and tried to think how things might be made better. Time. That was her father’s line, and she supposed he knew what he was talking about. There was only one ‘cure’ for bereavement, and that was time. It was the only thing that could effectively blunt the pain. But this was Irene’s child – her favourite child, and that made such a difference. She had already figured that perhaps her dad was partly right – perhaps Monica’s frequent absences derived from always having known that; perhaps knowing her mother (had she ever been made to choose) might wish it had been her instead of Darren meant her sympathy now only stretched so far.

But there was also the nagging guilt that, in fact, Irene was right. She did know something Irene didn’t about what Darren had been up to and though her instinct was that his decision had been an act of sudden impulse, if he’d not had the gun, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. And no matter how much Terry had tried to convince her otherwise, she knew that even if he would have done it anyway, he wouldn’t have done it then, and not in that way.

The picture appeared before her eyes, just as it kept doing, all the time. She seemed powerless to stop it happening, and it seemed to have no pattern. Her thoughts would drift and then – bam – it was there right in front of her, the colours and textures, the whole revolting, unspeakable horror of it, all heightened to a grim glorious technicolour.

She shook her head to clear it and tried to think less dangerous thoughts. Thoughts of Terry. All those trips to the phone box she’d been making. He’d given her his work number (though not he hers yet; she couldn’t having him calling the pub and risking getting Irene) and she’d slipped away several times to the sanctuary of the red box on the corner of Park Avenue, and they’d talked and they’d talked and they’d talked. And twice more they’d met – she hugged herself mentally – the first time to his little two-up two-down on Louis Avenue. All this time, she’d thought, and he’d been living just a couple of streets away.

It was a neat house. A man’s house. It had little in the way of feminine touches, apart from a photograph of his dead wife, hung in a frame next to the fireplace; a pretty, dark-haired girl, with huge, expressive eyes. It had been professionally coloured. Done by a proper photographer. She wondered if he could really bear to look at it.

There was little furniture in the house, not that she could see. Not downstairs, anyway. Just a cellar-head kitchen – a tiny space at the foot of the stairs – and in the front room an oval coffee table, a TV stand and a small beige settee, with cushions that had hunting scenes on them, on which they’d sat to drink a brew and where he’d told her about how grim it had been having to move there after his house fire, and how it still didn’t feel quite like home since he was away so much of the time. Which he’d been happy with, he pointed out; always happy to take the really long jobs, rather than go home to a place that didn’t feel like a home. She didn’t say so, but she knew how he felt.

‘Might just opt for a few shorter ones now, though,’ he’d told her, and the shyness in his tone had made her heart swell.

Then she’d seen him again, albeit only briefly. He was leaving shortly to go to Europe, and after her lunchtime shift there was little time left, so they’d agreed to meet up at the café in John Street Market. They’d talked and talked – the time had just vanished – and when they left he took her hand, and continued to hold it all the way back to where he’d parked his car. He’d then dropped her outside St Luke’s – heaven forbid anyone saw them together and it got back to Irene – and before she got out of the car he’d leaned across and kissed her.

It had just been one kiss, that was all. Not even meant. He’d just pecked her cheek and then, somehow, they’d looked at one another, then rearranged their faces, and kissed each other properly.

It had stunned her and made her stomach churn and been everything she’d imagined it might be, but Kathleen wasn’t fanciful enough to start weaving romantic stories around it. Yes she was, she supposed, ‘seeing’ him, and he obviously liked her. But she wasn’t stupid, or soppy, or anything like that. She certainly wasn’t childish enough to do as Monica had a couple of years back, practising her married name – the name of a boy she’d hardly been out with half a dozen times, and who finished with her a couple of weeks later.

But she knew that what she felt for Terry had nothing of the breathless quality of the crushes and infatuations she’d had before this. There was nothing of the knight on white charger about him, or the jack-the-lad, either; he couldn’t be less like that – but perhaps because of that, she was drawn to him even more. That and the fact that they’d both lost someone dear to them? Perhaps. It didn’t matter anyway.

Lost in her thoughts, it was only the sound of a chair being stacked that made her realise her father was in the bar with her. She’d been emptying the ashtrays – one of those horrible jobs that always seemed to be her job – and she realised she’d no idea how long he’d been there. It made her start. What was he doing, creeping up on her like that?

‘Bloody hell, Dad,’ she ticked him off. ‘I nearly jumped out of my skin! What are you doing up at this time anyway? It’s not even quarter past seven!’

He was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown and, like Irene, looked like he’d aged a decade in a week. ‘Your mam’s just gone off, love,’ he said, nodding towards the ceiling. ‘Bloody wretched night, we’ve had.’

‘Then go to sleep as well,’ Kathleen told him. ‘God knows, you look like you need it!’

But her father shook his head. ‘I’ve got to go and have a bit of a sort-out in our Darren’s room …’

Kathleen raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’ Darren’s room had already become something of a shrine. No one was allowed across the threshold, let alone in to touch any of his possessions; well, bar the police, who she’d no choice but to let look around. Which they duly had, even after the funeral, because they needed to establish if there were any factors that might have had a bearing on things, but once it became clear that it was a straightforward suicide (which the extent of Darren’s debts clearly hinted at, on top of the forensics) they’d not been back, and probably wouldn’t. Since then, only Irene had ventured past the doorway, something she did at least three or four times a day, often sleeping there as well.

‘I just feel I need to see if I can get to the bottom of it, love. I know it won’t bring him back’ – Kathleen flinched slightly at the way he said that – ‘but if there’s any little thing. Anything that might give her a crumb of comfort …’

‘I can’t see how anything could do that,’ Kathleen said. ‘When people kill themselves, well … there’s not much that can be said, is there?’ She wanted to go on – to point out that there probably wouldn’t be. That, to her mind, it had been a completely spur of the moment thing. No, more to the point, would be to find out what was happening on the outside. Had someone been threatening to hurt him? To kill him, even? There were plenty bad enough and mad enough on Canterbury Estate. She wished she had more of an idea of what he’d wanted the gun for. To commit crime or in fear that it was about to be committed against him? But she decided to say nothing. Not to her dad. Not right now.

A thought occurred to her, out of the blue. ‘What will you do with his things, Dad?’ She asked him. ‘You know, when eventually, they have to be – well, you know, sorted out?’

‘What, his clothes and that? Go to charity most likely, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I doubt your mam would be happy to pass them on to anyone local – don’t think she’d cope well with seeing anyone prancing around in one of his fancy suits, do you?’

‘Your mam.’ It never rankled any less. Kathleen shook her head. Was that what had happened to her real mother’s things? That her dad couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anyone in them? She thought of the welfare shop down on Great Horton Road, and all the fuddy-duddy stuff they had hanging in the window. Dead people’s clothes? It wasn’t a nice thought. She thought about Terry then. Had he kept stuff? Was there anything left for him to hang on to, or had everything been burned in the fire? Or was he like her, cast adrift with only memories to hang on to?

She wished her father had kept something of her mum’s for her. Anything. Just a blouse, or a favourite cardigan or something that she could have sniffed.

‘D’you want me to help you?’ she asked him.

‘Would you?’ He seemed pleased that she’d offered. ‘Once our Monica’s up and gone. I gave your mam a couple of those pills the doctor prescribed for her. She’ll be out for a good while.’

‘I hope so,’ Kathleen said ruefully, managing the first smile to him in days. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if she finds us in there. She’d bloody murder us!’

Which wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to have said, but it at least raised a smile from him too.

They finished off the early morning chores together, John dealing with the back of the bar, while Kathleen, having taken Monica her tea and checked she was up for work, finished off the big room and went and dealt with the toilets.

Monica was back down in what seemed like no time, hair and make-up immaculate and only the grim set of her mouth giving any indication of how she was feeling. It was still very early, and Kathleen had the impression that getting out of the pub was her first priority every morning – only once she set off up the road could she breathe out and start her day. Oh, how she wished she could do just the same.

‘Mum’s spark out,’ she told her stepfather, not even glancing in Kathleen’s direction.

Kathleen’s dad nodded. ‘And will be for a good while, I’ll bet,’ he said, their nods of acknowledgement confirming that was much the best thing for everyone.

‘Anyway, I’m off,’ she said and now she did seem to acknowledge Kathleen’s presence. ‘Some of us have proper jobs to get to.’

It was her way, Kathleen decided, of excusing her disappearance. Point-making, to deflect any negative comments about how little she was currently around. So let her, she thought. I really don’t care.

Not so her dad. ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘Kathleen works every bit as hard as you do. Just get gone,’ he added mildly, ‘and less of the gob.’

It was the first cheering thing Kathleen had heard from him in days.

Less cheering was the business of entering Darren’s bedroom, which was dark – Irene had obviously decided to keep the curtains closed now – and smelt musty and stale.

The bed was all awry from where Irene had been climbing in and out of it, but apart from that, it looked as bare and neat and characterless as it always did. Darren had been as tidy in his personal habits as he’d been with his clothing. It was just such a tragedy that his personality had led him so inexorably to the chaotic world of the out-of-control gambler.

Now she was in here she really didn’t know what she could help with. Riffling through Darren’s personal papers was the last thing she felt like doing.

Her father, however, seemed to have no such concerns. Perhaps conscious of the clock ticking, he immediately went to the wonky old wardrobe, getting down on his knees to see what he could find in the bottom – the place where Darren apparently shoved his paperwork. Out of sight, out of mind? She studied her father’s back. He’d said little of his personal feelings, but he must have them. Darren had been his stepson for a long time, after all. And he’d liked him. They’d rubbed along fine.

She went to join him, aghast at just how much stuff was jumbled together at the bottom of the wardrobe – who knew so much was hidden behind the thin wooden doors? There were piles of boxes and files and she accepted a shoebox he’d handed her, and was soon lost in a thick sheaf of sundry documents. Many payslips, a bunch of bank statements, a bundle of handwritten letters that she recognised as being from a girl he’d been going with for a while a couple of years back, and betting slips – all of them old ones, for small, seemingly insignificant amounts, but which had still amounted to the seeds of his destruction.

It was difficult to know what to look for, she realised, and, again, her thoughts strayed back to the business of having to be here – like a pair of snoops, in a room they had no business being in, with the weight of its absent owner pressing down.

She could have sat there on the edge of Darren’s bed for hours, no doubt, she realised, but for a sound, through the wall. Was Irene stirring?

Her dad obviously heard it too, because his head jerked up, listening. She wasn’t sure what he’d been going through – he now seemed like an island in a sea of bits of paper – but he quickly closed the lid on the box he had in front of him, and gestured to her that she should do the same, and hand it back to him.

She did so, glad to leave, unsure what purpose could be served here, and was just heading out again, her dad close behind her, when she heard a rustle.

She turned. He seemed to be stuffing something into his dressing-gown pocket. ‘What’ve you found?’ she whispered.

‘What?’ he said, before putting a finger to his lips. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing.’