Patchwork Man (24 page)

I got up to go. The room was swathed in shadow, only the occasional beam of passing headlights illuminating it and us. My movement cast a silhouette that travelled across the room like a shadow puppet, playing out a scene from a tragedy. She said it quietly to my back – in retreat – as if in her own defence.

It was criminal, Lawrence.’ At least she was braver than me in naming it. I hadn’t manage to formally attach the label yet, even though I knew perfectly well what it was.

‘It was a mistake, Kat.’ She stared at me and the whites of her eyes shone in the dark. They reminded me of a wild animal, afraid of the hunter. I was the hunter – the destroyer of worlds. She was afraid of me, and the damage I could do to her world as well as my own. I was on my own then.

‘I’ll go,’ I repeated, and her reply was the same; nothing. What did I expect? The sanguine survivor in me had cautioned against sharing confidences, but I’d ignored it in my rush of enthusiasm to share the burden. I’d mingled the two separate lives. They should have stayed in their two separate boxes, as Lennox had advised. That way at least one of them might have endured. How could anything as fragile as the tentative tendrils of a brand new relationship survive the blunt instrument that the truth represented here?
You should have known that, even with your pig-ignorance of people
, the inner me said. But I’d fallen in love – or infatuation. Yes; that could have its formal label too – and love makes you blind.

Heather was right. I had been walking around with my eyes shut. All the literature and homilies I’d ever read or heard quoted had made the concept quite clear and yet I’d wilfully ignored it and insisted on telling the woman I’d fallen for something she wouldn’t want to hear about me. There’s no such thing as pragmatism or objectivity where emotion is concerned. And whereas in the past my problem had been the lack of emotion with Margaret, excess of it was my problem now. I had reached half a century without understanding people at all. The patchwork that was me was still incomplete.

‘I agree it’s not appropriate for me to remain on this case now, but I can’t just leave it all in abeyance. It’s my life this affects as well as the boy’s. I’ll continue with my research until I reach a conclusion and then I’ll turn it all over to you. You can do what you want with it in order to defend the boy. Just please leave me out of the rest of it.’

‘Leave you out of it. That’s what you wanted right from the start, wasn’t it?’ She was bitter.

‘Yes, at the start that’s what I wanted. I wanted something different now.’ I waited but the passing headlights flickered across the room and died as we too died a little death. I thought I heard her call my name as I shut the door, but it was probably just imagination. For my own sanity, life should return to its recognisable pre-case format. I plainly wasn’t cut out for the roller-coaster of emotional investment. Complete Margaret’s obsequies, put my affairs in order and await the death blow professionally. If it included naming
my
original patron then it really would be a death blow. Thirty or so years of ‘loan’ to repay plus compound interest when the terms of the ‘loan’ in the will were breached would wipe me out. I wondered where I would go then, but at the moment it didn’t really seem to matter. I drove slowly home and parked the car in its allocated spot. The cobbles of the mews shone ghostly in the moonlight. I could almost imagine Margaret walking across them, taunting me over my stupidity. The lure of the brandy was my first inclination, but something else in me kicked out at that.

I pocketed the keys and walked instead, along the narrow streets of Chelsea and past the glamorous boutiques Heather would be likely to frequent, chic and extortionately expensive monstrosities bedecking the giraffe-necked mannequins in the windows. I didn’t care where I was walking. It just seemed to help with the hum of facts and questions circling in my head. The night was still and breathless – that promise of impending summer storm, not quite yet ready to break. Even the air smelt angry. I passed at least three pubs without going in, despite the still insistent lure of alcohol to numb the pain. The sweetish smell of beer and fag ash burst on me whenever a customer left, reeling gently into the night, or another solace-seeker entered. The comfort of anonymity and oblivion beckoned from them, but I declined. My solitary life was best spent alone and sober until I’d figured out what to do about all of this.

I ended up on a small side-road in Battersea after crossing the Thames via Battersea Bridge Road, lingering fleetingly to watch the reflection of the moon wallowing in its murky waters and wondering what it would feel like to jump into them and sink down, down into the depths. I soon shook that notion from my head. The last thing I wanted to be was dead. I was a survivor and that was what I had been battling to be ever since landing up in the children’s home. What was the point of abandoning that now, even though things looked bad? They’d been worse. It was purely self-pity that had made me consider it.

The road was Binnie’s. Whether subconsciously or not I had headed for it. The lights were still on in the front. It was about eleven thirty. A completely inappropriate time for anyone to visit, let alone a long-lost brother. Yet I did. The devil was in me since the confession to Kat and I felt a general animosity towards all my fellow men – or women – particularly any linked to my past, whether innocent or guilty. It was where all the trouble had stemmed from and a hitherto unknown belligerence in me wanted to settle with it once and for all. Kill the past, dead – before it killed me.

I marched up to the door and rapped on it. Its glossy yellow paint shone like fluorescence in the moonlight and a faint smell of curry lingered in the air. Must have been tea. It mingled incongruously with the perfume from the honeysuckle growing up the front wall of the house, and around the door. Surreal like my life. Lights went on in the hall and an indistinct figure loomed behind the glass half of the door. There was a sound of locks being pulled back and a chain being slid on. The door opened fractionally, chain barring full passage. The face behind the chain was a big bruiser of a man, head shaven, jowls giving him a British bulldog look without the British. He was about sixty but could probably still pack a fair punch. He looked suspicious.

‘Yeah?’

‘Is Binnie home?’

‘Why? Do we know you?’

‘Binnie does. I’m her brother.’ He looked unconvinced, but called over his shoulder anyway, heavy cockney accent mangling the words.

‘Binn? Someone here says he’s your brother.’ The middle-aged woman I’d seen in the photo Win had shown me appeared behind him, frowning.

‘Win? At this time?’ She saw me and gasped. ‘Kenny? My God!’ Then more belligerently, ‘What you doing here?’

‘I thought that maybe you might have been expecting me – or at least that was what Win led me to assume.’

‘He ain’t coming in here,’ the bruiser said pointedly to Binnie. She shook her head.

‘It’s not Win, it’s the other one.’ To me, ‘What you up to with Win?’

‘I assumed you’d know.’ I was beginning to regret the spontaneous decision to surprise her. It was showing as many of the hallmarks of backfiring on me as the confession to Kat had. ‘Danny and Kimberley.’

‘Oh.’ Yes, she did know. She looked me over in an unfriendly way. ‘You’d better come in, I s’pose.’ The bouncer on the door looked at her for instruction and she nodded at him. ‘It’s OK Len, he’s me
little
bruvver – you know, the one ...’

‘Ah,’ he scrutinised me. ‘’
im
.’ He shut the door and the chain rattled. The door re-opened a few seconds later and he ushered me in. The curry smell was stronger in the hallway and the honeysuckle scent was banished to the night. Old flock wallpaper covered the walls, yellowed and probably as old as the house itself. ‘Only as far as here, though – get it?’ he said to me. A small dog scurried out to greet me and scampered around my ankles, covering my dark trousers in spiky white hairs. ‘Buster – git!’ The man, Len, kicked out at him, but not unkindly. The dog attacked his ankles but followed him along the hallway and into the kitchen anyway. I decided it must be the kitchen because it was the source of the curry smell. Binnie and I remained in the hall.

‘So,’ she said coolly, ‘you decided to just pop by after all these years – and at gone eleven at night? Funny way to do things, ain’t it – or is this what you swanky bleeders do?’

‘I didn’t know where you were before so I could hardly have popped by sooner.’ The welcome here was decidedly frosty – completely unlike Sarah’s. I was surprised at the disparity between their two responses. ‘I’m sorry it’s so late though. I’ll come back tomorrow if you prefer.’

‘Nah, get it over with – and you can’t have exactly tried before neither,’ she responded tartly. ‘So what you come for now?’

‘I told you, Win suggested I should talk to you about the family. He gave me your address.’

‘Win? And why would he do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘We don’t see eye to eye, Win and me, that’s why.’ Her lips compressed and the dimple showed more in its repression. ‘And you ain’t been around to know why.’

‘Well, neither do we, so that’s something at least we have in common.’

She studied me. ‘What d’you not see eye to eye over?’

‘Probably everything – it goes a long way back.’

‘To the children’s home?’

‘Yes, that would be about it.’ The silence lengthened. It was like breaking through a wall of ice that was being steadily reformed on the other side as soon as I chipped a fragment from mine. ‘Binnie,’ I sighed, ‘I can see you don’t regard me particularly highly, but you are my older sister and Sarah said families stick together.’ At Sarah’s name her expression changed.

‘You been to see Sarah too?’

‘Yes, a few days ago.’

‘How was she?’ I wasn’t sure how to answer. Sarah had said the others didn’t know how ill she was. Should I betray her request for my silence or enlist support for her. Binnie pre-empted my response. ‘Oh, like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Bad.’ Her face reflected knowledge she wasn’t supposed to have.

‘Do you know?’

‘Course I know. Obvious ain’t it?’

‘Well, to me it was, but she said she hadn’t told any of you.’ I cringed at the implication of my comment. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ was too embarrassingly apparent in it – and the suggestion of superiority on my part. It was the second time tonight I’d said something I hadn’t intended to come out that way – or maybe I had. I’d had to admit to Kat I’d intended hurting when I’d implied she was able to manipulate the same as Margaret had purely because of her gender. The insulting objectification of womanhood into sexual brokerage had helped soften my own sense of rejection. It wasn’t true. Kat could manipulate me – if she’d wanted to – purely because of my feelings, nothing to do with sex or gender or abuse of femininity. But she didn’t – and hadn’t. The division between myself and my family was also true. I wasn’t one of ‘them’ no matter how much I might play on ‘family’ to extract some truth from the morass of misinformation I was being fed by everyone else. Binnie didn’t seem to register the insult though. She was too taken up with how Sarah was.

‘She hides it pretty well most of the time if she knows we’re coming,’ she explained. ‘She wouldn’t have bothered to cover it up for you.’

‘Why not?’ I was genuinely interested. I deserved the put down I got back.

‘You don’t matter, Kenny. You ain’t mattered to us for a long time – ever since you changed your name and pretended we didn’t exist. Takes two, you know.’ And she was right. Why would I matter to any of them? I’d assumed abandonment by Ma, so I’d abandoned all the rest of them, starting with Win. I’d abandoned real roots in favour of manufactured ones. Family stick together, but I was no longer really part of their family. I’d voluntarily removed myself from it.

‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry. Sarah seemed pleased to see me, but maybe that was her way of making peace with me.’

‘Maybe.’ She sighed heavily. ‘You’re here now so why did you really come?’

‘I don’t know, Binnie. I suppose to find something out – to ask about something, but I don’t think I need to ask the question anymore. The answer is obvious.’

‘Maybe you’re wrong there. Was it to ask if I’d say anything about Danny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t. The lad’s had enough bad luck. I wouldn’t add to it by tarring him as anything other than what he is – just a kid. If you can help him, then do it. If you can’t – if it’s only for your own conscience, then leave it be and let him live his life his way. He’s got enough to contend with as it is – with Kimmy for a mother, and poorly an all.’

‘Poorly?’

‘You’ve saw him, haven’t you? Sickly kid; always in the wars. Scrapes and bumps and sores. Mine never had so many of them. I’m not saying it’s all Kimmy – nah, I don’t think she’s that bad. Just don’t bother enough.’

‘He seemed reasonably healthy when I saw him.’

‘Well, he’s in care now, ain’t he? Bound to look after him. He’s gonna be up in court. Got to look OK for that. Don’t fancy his chances in clink though – or wherever they send ’em now, poor little sod.’

‘Youth custody.’ It was automatic, the barrister reacting before the man, but she was right. Danny wouldn’t be much of a match for it, whatever they chose to call it now. The hard outer would crack as easily as candy coating. It wasn’t paternal in any sense, but my heart contracted for him, the small boy desperately trying to fend off the world as I had. ‘I’ll do all I can for him, Binnie – whatever the past.’ I hadn’t realised until then that I meant it. Duty, responsibility, conscience – they all played a part, but the thin pinched face I remembered splitting into a grin and making the sun shine was what convinced me. I wouldn’t let history repeat itself with him.

‘Good.’ She smiled suddenly and the dimple resurrected itself. I couldn’t help but look at it.

‘You’ve still got your dimple.’

She laughed. ‘Some things don’t change, Kenny.’ She visibly softened. ‘I’m sorry about your wife, by the way. She were nice.’ Jesus! Margaret had been here as well?