Blood Ties: Family is not always a place of safety

‘No, it’s fine, Dad. I don’t mind. You know what Mam’s like. I’ll go and help Mary, or she’ll be hollering for you instead, won’t she?’

Kathleen picked up four empties in her free hand, and then pushed through the door, back into the foyer. Terry was still there, now watching the reels of the bandit spinning. He stopped when he saw her and reached to pull the taproom door open for her.

‘Here,’ he said, taking the empties. ‘Let me carry those for you.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she told him. ‘Honest.’ But it was to no effect, since he already had them anyway.

‘Nice to see you down here on a weekend,’ he said, smiling back at her as she followed him to the bar itself. ‘You don’t normally work on a Saturday night, do you?’

No, but I’m glad I’m down tonight, she thought but didn’t tell him. ‘I’m not really working as such,’ she said. ‘It’s just that my mate’s ill and I’m at a loose end, and –’

His eyes widened. They were dark-lashed but pale. An unusual greeny grey. ‘Ah, so that means you could maybe have a drink with me then, doesn’t it? If you’d like to,’ he added, turning to look at her as he plonked the empty pint glasses down on the bar.

She thought she’d like that a great deal. And not just because she was keen to talk to him about Darren. But Mary was getting busy. And there’d be fat chance, if she did go and sit down with Terry, of Irene not ordering her to go and help out anyway – or at least, given it was Kathleen’s night off, and she had no business doing so, making an enormous ‘thing’ out of her sitting down with Terry.

But you never knew. In a bit she might be teetering on her usual brink – either too pissed to care, immersed in stirring the cauldron with her cronies, or too pissed to stand, in which case she’d disappear off to bed.

‘That would be nice,’ Kathleen said, and hoped he could tell that she meant it. ‘But I really should give Mary a hand first. Just for a bit … I’m coming, Mary,’ she called across.

But it seemed Mary didn’t want or need her help. Or perhaps there was something more. She certainly glanced behind Kathleen, towards Terry, as she approached.

‘Thanks, love,’ she said, her tea-towel-covered hand moving rhythmically around the inside of a pint glass. ‘But I’m fine at the moment, honest. Why don’t you pull yourself a drink and then go have a sit down with Terry. I can always shout you if I need you, can’t I?’

‘Good idea,’ Terry said. ‘You’re hardly ever out from behind that bar, Kathy. Come on. Come sit with me a bit. Rest your feet.’

‘You make me sound like a little old lady,’ she said indignantly, as she pulled herself a half and topped it up with lime cordial. ‘I can rest my feet when I’m dead, thanks.’

‘Alright. So we’ll stand up, then.’

‘Now you’re just taking the mick.’

‘No, seriously. I spend that much time on my backside … Still, now we’re here.’ He gestured to an empty table he’d found, on the far side of the pool table, miles from Irene. ‘Unless you want to challenge me …’

‘I could too.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Seriously, I’m good.’

‘Seriously, I’ll bet you are,’ he said again, smiling at her over the rim of his glass. ‘So we’ll have to make that a date, won’t we? Anyway, pour tu, mademoiselle,’ he said, pulling one of the chairs out and gesturing to it theatrically, while she tried her best to relax and to not keep thinking date, he said date …

And she did relax. Almost immediately, too, even though she knew Irene was sneering across at her. Even though she knew they’d be gossiping about her. Let them, she thought. Let them say what they want. She didn’t care. Pour tu, he’d said. French. The familiar form of it. She remembered that from her French lessons in school. Terry and her Uncle Ronnie went to France quite a lot, she knew, driving all the way down south and taking their enormous lorries onto the ferries. It sounded so glamorous, even though Terry had more than once told her it wasn’t. That she’d have to take a look inside one of his lorry cabs some time. That it was probably about as glamorous as keeping pigs.

He was chatting about it now, about a recent trip to Paris – him and Ronnie; some anecdote about a missing wallet, or was it pallet, or something, at any rate – and she was perfectly content just to listen. To listen and, in fairness, to drift a little, too. What she wouldn’t give, she thought, to wake up every morning and not know where in the country – or even the world – you were going to end up. In a lorry cab. With him.

‘It sounds magical,’ she told him. ‘Paris! How could Paris not be magical?’

‘As wondered by a girl who has clearly never had the good fortune of spending three hours going the wrong way round the Périphérique!’

Périphérique. Even the word sounded magical.

He stopped speaking then, and rolled his empty glass between his palms. ‘I’m rabbiting on a bit, aren’t I?’ he said, looking suddenly sheepish, disarming her. ‘Nine to the dozen. Sorry. I’ve a tendency to do that when I … well.’ He coughed. ‘How about another half?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. And, no. This’ll do me for a bit. But you go and get yourself one. And I’ll put some music on, shall I?’ she added, the silence between them suddenly so loud. Though hopefully not as obvious as the blush she could feel already inching up her chest to her neck.

‘Good idea,’ he said, and headed off, then seemed to check himself and turned around again. He was wearing a loose shirt, a checked one, with the sleeves folded back. Terry never looked like he cared much what he wore – Irene had once commented on it, in her usual negative fashion – but far from thinking him a ‘scarecrow’, which was obviously how she saw him, Kathleen found it attractive. She liked the way he didn’t care. That he didn’t spend time dandifying himself all the time. She loved how her dad was always so smart, but he was older. Terry dressed young. He was young. Perfectly young enough for her. Their eyes met. Had he noticed the way she’d been looking at him? ‘Here,’ he said, fishing in his jeans pocket for change. ‘For the music.’

He placed it in her hand and as he did so, she felt it. Just the touch was enough. Just that almost imperceptible tremor that told her he was nervous too. Which told her something even better. That perhaps her thinking hadn’t been quite so wishful after all.

It was the thought in her mind as she went to the jukebox. The thought in her mind as she scrolled through the choices. The thought in her mind as she chose ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ by The Who, which seemed so perfect. The thought still in her mind as she scanned the bar for Terry – and quickly found him – and at the point when the air in the bar seemed to be rent in two. Not by an explosion of laughter from Irene’s table. But an explosion of sound that was unlike any other. A sharp crack. A boom. Then a thump against the ceiling.

The sound of a gun going off upstairs.

Chapter 6 (#u73595e65-dd51-52c3-b66d-19de06eedf6d)

The silence that followed was like a living, breathing thing. It mushroomed around her like a rising, rushing tide, pushing up – pushing eyes up – pushing everything above it, snatching half-spoken sentences from mouths that hung open, as everyone’s heads seem to tip, almost as one; tipping back as they looked to the ceiling above them and then, to a new sound – which again, came from nowhere – a keening sound, a half-scream, from where Irene had been sitting. But now wasn’t. She was rising to her feet, trying to push through the crush, scrabbling at backs, shouting ‘Please! Let me through! Let me through!’ Then the sound of the glass Kathleen had picked up hitting the table, then falling, with a thunk, onto the carpet.

She moved forward, stepping on the glass, feeling the dull crack of it breaking, seeing her dad – a suited blur – and all the shocked, confused faces, moving forwards, and then, suddenly, a hand on her arm.

‘Stay here.’ It was Terry. ‘Stay here, Kathy. Let them go …’

But she couldn’t. It was a gun. It had been a gun going off. She shook her arm free. ‘I’ve got to …’ she began. ‘Darren – Darren’s up there!’ Still he stopped her. ‘I must!’ she said again, shaking him off. Stepping forward. Barging through now, aware, as she did so, of a way being made for her. Opening up, like a flower. Through the bar. Round the back – Mary, cloth in hand, white-faced – to the stairs, thundering up them, two at once, to the landing, to the doorway to the living room – the room she’d just come down from – to see Irene, almost as if her entire body had become liquid, fold up into a writhing, screaming heap on the carpet, and her dad, trying to stop her, almost folding up with her, but just checking himself enough, with a lurch to the side, to allow her to see what her stepmother had just seen, which was Darren, on the floor, by the armchair he’d been asleep in, asleep now – curled up, curiously foetally, like a baby – his boyish features blank in repose, one of the beer bottles on its side, by his face.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Her dad’s voice. ‘Jesus Christ!’ His voice rising. And a smell. A powerful smell of burning. And then seeing it, a mere half a dozen inches from him. The gun.

The beer, the beer, the beer, leaving the bottle, foaming, soaking into the carpet. It held her gaze. Had to. It must. Almost in fascination. It must have been an almost full bottle he’d knocked over, she decided, because it wasn’t flowing so much as spewing, coming in malty-smelling gouts. Slow, rhythmic hiccups of foam.

She tried to focus, while her stepmother screamed and writhed and screamed. Not on the hole in Darren’s temple, which was so small – so incredibly, stupidly, impossibly small – and ringed with a perfect starburst of tiny brown flecks. Concentrate. Concentrate. On anything but that. Entry wound, her brain told her, even though she tried so hard to stop it. Entry wound. She remembered it from something she’d seen on TV. And where there was an entry, there must be an exit … and little by little, that too revealed herself to her. Not so obviously, not at first, just in the strangeness of his position. In the fact that it seemed that he’d fallen so precisely – just so, face towards her – but strangely, oddly canted. As if the back of his head – all that hair, all those ropes of curly hair – nestling in what must be a hole in the floor. But there was no hole. No dip. No gap in the floorboards, under the paisley patterned carpet. There was no dip. Darren’s head wasn’t nestled in anything. It looked strange because half of it was no longer there.

The beer, she thought. The beer. Look away. Look at the beer. Look at the beer bottle. But her eyes wouldn’t listen. Now her brain had worked it out, all she could see, bar the bloom of blood darkening the carpet, was the half-missing head and the gore. The unspeakable gore.

She felt an arm on her. Terry’s? No, a different arm. Mary’s. She felt sick rising in her throat. Realised she could smell it as well. Irene, on the floor in front of her, now was arch-backed and heaving, the hot liquid spurting, rat-a-tat, on the carpet, flecks of it hitting Darren’s dead, outstretched hand.

‘Jesus Christ!’ her father shouted. ‘Someone call the police!’

‘My boy!’ Irene screamed now. ‘My boy! Help him, John!’ She was clutching handfuls of her hair now, as if to drag them from their roots. ‘My boy, my boy, my boy!’ she screamed. ‘Oh help him, oh help him!’ She was pawing at his legs now, and Kathleen’s father rushed to stop her. Pulled her back. Pinned her arms. Wrapped his own tightly around her.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said softly. ‘Mary, ring the police, please.’ He glanced back at Kathleen. Mary had already gone. ‘And an ambulance, love. Okay? Tell her an ambulance. Tell her to fetch an ambulance.’

Though the look in his eyes confirmed he knew what she knew. That the time for an ambulance was long gone.

Chapter 7 (#u73595e65-dd51-52c3-b66d-19de06eedf6d)

It was 1 September. Just a few days before the kids went back to school, and the long summer holidays were over. It was also the day that Darren Dooley, aged just twenty, was laid to rest.

Like all unnatural deaths, his had been the talk of the whole estate, and like all unnatural deaths, it had had to be investigated. So passed a week – maybe ten days – in a fog of comings and goings. An ambulance coming for the body, everyone interviewed, separately. The endless questions, both spoken and unspoken, the chores undone, the room abandoned. All to a backing track of awful, animal crying.

But somehow, unimaginably, they had pulled it all together. Kathleen wasn’t sure how it had happened, but somehow they’d done it. Given her stepbrother, to use the parlance, the funeral he deserved.