Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (16 page)

“It must cost an awful lot,” I said.

She waved her slim hand in the air. “Oh, Bernard sees to all that. He’s a devil for working. He’d work all the hours God gave and some more. He does all the overtime he can.” She took a long swig out of her cup and then appeared to address the coals. “He’ll do anything for me will Bernard. Anything.” A smile graced her still-beautiful lips. “I do think sometimes that all he’s really bothered about is that factory and bloody tractor machine parts. He couldn’t give a damn about me.”

She wasn’t serious. No man could possibly put machine parts before someone as striking as Connie. We sat in silence, the coals sighing and collapsing in on themselves in a puff of sparks. I felt my cheeks burning with the heat and the hot cup of tea. I came over quite drowsy with it all.

“Did I tell you my Max is a DJ for a hospital radio station in Newcastle?” she burst upon my reverie. “It helps him with his media studies, he says. A DJ, eh? Like Tony Blackburn! My Max!” She clapped her hands together in a joy only a mother might experience. I, of course, was experiencing none of it; in fact I admit to feeling more than a little envious. The sort of envy that is tainted with the malicious. I’d already toyed with the idea that I might have made a mistake in not going to college. But to admit that fully would be admitting that my parents and close relatives, in whom I put a great deal of trust, were also dreadfully wrong in steering me away from that particular path. It was something I found difficult to comprehend or accept at that stage. So I put my energy into hating Max. Not a lot, but enough to satisfy the need to lay blame. “I’m glad,” I mumbled.

“And Ruby?” she said, reigning in my attention like a galloping steed. “What’s she doing now?”

I was beginning to wish I hadn’t come here now. My personal demons were rising up one by one to take fleshy chunks out of me. “She’s a sort-of trainee personnel officer or something,” I replied quietly. Truth was I saw too little of her. And it used to eat away at my unoccupied and suspicious mind as to what exactly she did there at the mysterious company of Chudrow and Mason’s of whom I’d heard so much from Ruby. More to the point, with whom was she doing what? When we did meet of an evening, all too infrequently I add, she was invariably tired, and I’d go and spoil this precious time by my intimidating interrogation as to her movements from nine in the morning onwards – and especially during lunchtime. I was particularly hung up with which male friends she occupied these hours of idleness. It must have been pretty wearing for her. I was a swine. All in all I confess she put up with me very stoically. I even think she must have loved me quite a lot. Or was just a very understanding person, which is why, I suppose, she was going to be a personnel officer at Chudrow and Mason’s. And no doubt a good one at that.

“She’s a lovely young woman, Collie. Don’t let her slip away from you.”

This is precisely what I didn’t want to hear. “What did you do before you came up here, to the North?” I asked, quite out of the blue. I hadn’t meant to ask the question; it was just one of those thoughts that zips to your tongue like an electric current down a copper wire. It had been hovering around my skull ever since I first met Connie and Max. I guess it saw its opportunity to escape in an unguarded moment. She blinked at me, sucked at her lower lip. “Who was Max’s real dad?” I continued. Then I realised how insensitive it sounded and blurted out my apology. “I’m sorry, Connie, I didn’t mean to pry. I was only…”

She smiled sweetly, reached out and touched my arm softly. “It’s all right, Collie. You’d like to know about Max’s real dad, is that it?”

It had always intrigued me, I couldn’t deny that. I shrugged, neither a yes or a no, so she didn’t think I was being pushy. I waited expectantly, but she fidgeted uncertainty.

“How old are you now, Collie? Nineteen?” she asked seriously. I nodded. “Like Max,” she said, softness in her tone, a faint smile playing over her mouth. “I was only young, like you, you understand,” she said. “I was married at eighteen, and I was already pregnant with Max. It was a silly thing to do.” I didn’t know whether she meant getting pregnant or getting married. Or both. “But, you play with fire and you’re likely to get burnt. He seemed a nice enough bloke, did Kevin, and I was young and light-headed, thought I knew what I was doing, thought I was so grown up. We saw each other for a year or so, then I found out I was pregnant and so we decided it was only right to get married. Things were OK for a while; then he started to get jealous of Max, and he began staying out late and drinking with his mates, or whoever.” I saw her features harden. “I knew there were other women. You could smell them on his clothes – the same damn clothes I used to wash for him week in and week out.” When she lifted her cup to take a drink I noticed her hand shook a little.

“It’s OK, Connie. You don’t have to tell me. I get the picture…”

She waved it away. “I know it sounds like the same old story, but that’s how it was. He couldn’t hold his drink either. And if there was any trouble at work he’d come home and take it out on me. On both of us.” She wagged a finger at me with a steely expression I’d never before encountered in Connie. “Never –
never
– hit a woman or your kid, Collie,” she said, and I could tell from the venom in her words there was great deal of hurt lurking behind them. She bit down savagely on a piece of cake and chewed quickly, swallowing almost straight away. “Sure I’ve hit Max for doing wrong. Remember when he did that to your poor head, all those stitches?” I nodded. I remembered all too vividly. “He got it then, the little bugger. But that’s different. Kevin was a brute of a man with big arms like gateposts. When he threw his weight behind one of his punches it was murder, Collie, murder. He broke bones, Collie. He broke both mine and Max’s bones…”

Her fingers stroked her arm absently but meaningfully. I felt she was on the verge of crying and at any moment her voice would crack and she’d collapse, and I became afraid, because I didn’t quite know how to handle the situation. I didn’t know what words to use. I was helpless. “Connie…” I began uncertainly.

“I met another man, then,” she resumed. “Gavin, they called him. Gavin Miller.” And her countenance changed as if someone had taken a rag and wiped away the tortured image of her beating in one quick swipe. “A lovely man, he was. You remind me ever so much of Gavin, Collie. He had your eyes.” I was unnerved by the way she gazed at me. Unnerved and yet excited, for the look was laced with the ghost of desire. I looked at the smooth bare flesh of her hand, and had the urge to touch it, to stroke it. “It was like finding a lovely red apple in a bag of sour green cooking apples.” She shrugged. “He was sweet, anyway,” she said. “There was nothing physical between us; it wasn’t that kind of thing. He promised me he’d look after Max and me if I left my husband, and I was tempted. But Kevin found out and Gavin was beaten up badly. They could never prove it was Kevin and his mates, but it was him. I know it was. They nearly killed the poor lad.”

Again her lip trembled. But she fought back the urge to cry. I thought she was very brave.

“We moved house then. House and town and county. Kevin made me move. I never saw Gavin again.” she paused to eat and drink, pushing the remaining piece of cake into her mouth and chewing pensively. I thought that was it. End of story. Another piece?” she asked, and handed me the plate. I shook my head. “It started all over again, the beatings. Really it never ended. But Kevin got his comeuppance one night, the cruel bastard.” Her lips sucked the cream off her fingertip. There was a smile of satisfaction lingering there on those greasy velvet cushions. “He staggered out of a pub blind drunk and was hit by this bloke in a car. Hit-and-run, they say. Kevin was killed and they never caught the driver, but I say thank God, and I hope they never do. I’ve a lot to thank him for, whoever he was; he did Max and me a big favour. Kevin had a few of his own bones broken that night, I can tell you. When I saw him on the slab, all bloodied and bruised, I could have laughed out loud.”

She chuckled. I found myself chuckling with her, though I thought it faintly callous. “I didn’t know…” I began, and then trailed deliberately into silence. Max had had a lot to put up with. It went some way to explaining what made him tick.

“And no bloke will ever do the same to either Max or me ever again,” she said, her jaw muscles twitching, her eyes almost menacing in their intensity. For the first time I saw Max strongly reflected in them. “Do you want a cherry Bakewell tart?” she asked with a sudden and unexpected brightness. “We’ve got loads of the things. If you don’t like cherries, I’ll have yours. I absolutely adore cherries!”

*  *  *  *

Why had he started staring at me? Was that really a grey bloom of sadness or regret on his face? Or was I superimposing my own emotions upon him, the way one does with a dog or a cat?

I had a dog once, as a kid. I called him mine, but I guess he belonged to the family. A mongrel called Blackie. His coat was a glossy coal-black, and it was a totally unimaginative, uninspired name. When I was down I thought I saw depression on his slavering lips, too. When I was in buoyant mood, his tongue lolled from a grinning mouth, and his eyes were bright like brown, ripe grapes, swollen and about to burst with life. Blackie gave me all the empathy I needed. Had Wise become my surrogate Blackie? That was a queer thought; Wise was my guard dog.

I noticed it a while ago. Whereas before he simply saw right through me, paid me no particular attention, I caught him gazing at me like he was seeing me for the first time. There was no leer these days. The icy crust that normally frosted his lips and eyes had melted and revealed another, altogether warmer human countenance beneath. It unsettled me.

My life is a life of routine, of stunning similarity. Anything different jarred the senses in spite of my desire for difference. Food given to a starving man can kill him, I’d once read. I felt any sign of compassion on Wise’s hitherto compassionless face might have the same effect on me. I didn’t want to look at him. I was afraid to. Can you choke on compassion?

What worries me is that I’m so desperate for real human company beyond the confines of my prison, for the warmth of friendship, that I even detect it in Wise, which is clearly an impossible. I’m hallucinating. It is an emotional mirage. I have to be aware of these things and protect myself against them. It is just another rent in my armour through which they can poke their insidious knives.

*  *  *  *

Ruby and I were married, uneventfully, at a register office in September 1982.

The day I thought would never come, that I harried her towards week in, week out, came at last. We’d already planned to go ahead with the wedding the previous year, but at the beginning of April there seemed a fresh urgency in the air. There was idle gossip floating around that young men were sure to be called up for the war in the Falkland islands – which, at the outset of hostilities, my young and ignorant mind put somewhere north of Scotland; I was initially confused as to what the Argentineans could possibly want with our northern windswept, barren rocks pounded by savage gales and inhabited only by seabirds.  As I watched the war’s progression on the TV I hoped things would hold out until September and that my name wasn’t one of those on an advance list of recruits waiting to be ticked off and sent immediately out.

In my mind I wanted to be married at least a little while before donning khaki, my initial horror and nervousness gradually giving way to a sense of impending adventure in foreign climes. Never having been further than the east coast, the idea of fighting it out with the Argies over a desolate, sheep-strewn rock in the South Atlantic grew ever more appealing.

The road and pavements in our street had been swept of litter and dog shit, and there’d been an attempt at a dull street party in honour of the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer when they married in April, and I took this as an opportunity to bid a secret farewell to those around me.  Next time I came home, I thought, I’d be returning from battle, a hardened veteran, and the party would be honouring me. Or I’d be dead and this would be my wake. As I stood watching people eating and drinking, perfunctorily toasting the royal family under ragged, faded Union Jack bunting flapping in a hot breeze, I thought I would make a very noble corpse. They didn’t know I was leaving, or that I might never return. I said goodbye to each and every one of them, even the kids. In my head, of course. I imagined their tears as I said my heroic goodbyes, and that look of patient resolve carved into my firm features. “Look after my wife,” I said gravely, and they nodded seriously and looked at Ruby’s proud face, outwardly calm in spite of her churned feelings. “I must go now,” I said, waving briefly, not turning back, for I knew I’d only make them all cry. Ruby would make a proud widow, I mused.

As it turned out, the war was over by the middle of June, and I felt more than a little cheated when I wasn’t personally there to see the flag put up in Port Stanley.

It appears I was destined to be forever saying goodbye without actually ever leaving.

My best man was a gangly, spotty youth I met at work, and whom I never saw again once I left the small firm of Boulton’s Hardware where I stacked tins of paint, piled planks of wood against walls, or threaded packets of screws and nails onto plastic pegs and humped stinking sacks of fish, blood and bone fertiliser. I cannot even remember the young man’s name. But he was the next best thing to a friend I had at the time. I didn’t care. That was merely detail. I was getting married to the most beautiful young woman in the entire history of beautiful women. It is only now, as I glance back at the time, that I actually see the wedding ring I put on her finger for what it was: a nine-carat manacle that strapped her to my obsession with her. But back then we were both grateful to be offering ourselves up to each other. It was the happiest day of my young life thus far.

We took up immediate residence in rented rooms above a butcher’s shop not three hundred yards from the house I’d lived in since a child. The butcher was a Polish man, who spent the long minutes he wasn’t serving customers staring out of his shop window with icy blue eyes, watching out for the Russian army, which he thought was coming to get him some time or other. He rarely left the shop, his English wife running all the errands, and he avoided contact with other Poles, on the basis, I assumed, that the Russians would find it easier to round up a concentration of Poles than isolated individuals. He believed there was no safety in numbers, only safety in seclusion. Mr Radunski had lost his entire family in the war, and I wondered what hellish visions so haunted his thoughts that they caused him to hack away at the meat with such ferocity and strength unaccountable for in such a slight and wiry man.

But the Radunskis treated us as something special. On the night of our wedding Mrs Radunski brought a huge pot of steaming goulash with freshly baked bread up to our room, her husband supplying a huge bottle of vodka. Later in the evening, exhausted and ravenous by our lovemaking, Ruby and I set about the meal with alacrity, sitting naked in bed and laughing at the sight of us dipping the still-warm crusty bread into bowls filled to the brim with spicy goulash, our senses honed to a pitch as high as if we’d taken some exotic drug. We drank a little of the vodka and collapsed against each other with a fire we thought would never abate. And in the morning Mrs Radunski brought us up a cooked breakfast of liver, sausage, eggs, mushrooms and bacon, with more fresh bread smothered with rich yellow butter.

Ah, Ruby, I can still see your dazzling eyes even now. Though your face is a smear, your eyes are like twin beams of splendour penetrating a fog. How deliriously happy you were. I vowed I would always endeavour to keep it that way. I think I even promised you that as you lay back on the pillow and I kissed your greasy lips. At that moment I would have died to keep that promise.

“Where you go now, eh?” Mr Radunski always asked us with a wide grin as we left the shop for work, and as he accompanied us to the door we’d always tell him we were going out to work. He never once stepped over the threshold into the yard with us, perhaps afraid the sunlight might frazzle his emaciated limbs further. But he’d ask the same question again the following morning, and we’d politely give the same answer. Sometimes he’d catch us on our way up to our rooms and occasionally force a paper-wrapped package of sausages or ham or beef into our hands. If we were both together he’d invariably enquire, “When you ‘aving baby, eh?” his broken English thick with a northern accent, and we’d laugh.  He took me on one side once, his body reeking as always of freshly cut meat, his apron smeared with scarlet gashes of blood. “Your Ruby,” he said close to my ear, “she buddy beautiful. Bonny, Bonny!” he enthused, giving me a wink. “She like my sister in Lublin, before de war. Bonny, Bonny!” and he strode away shaking a head that looked far too heavy for such a scrawny neck to support. He went down the hallway and back to the shop. There I saw him sitting on a stool, shoulders slumped, gazing through the window at the world beyond the pork pies, the bacon, and the bloodied hares hanging from chrome hooks, his eyes flicking fretfully this way and that. Waiting for the Russians that never came.

We didn’t have much money between us, though Ruby’s wage far outstripped mine. The region was awash with unemployed and I wasn’t about to argue for a pay rise just yet. I realised I was fortunate to have what little I did, and glad to be rid of the dole queue. Anyhow, with our resources pooled together we managed reasonably well. I remember it as a time of warm bedcovers and hot, cooked meat, of evenings listening to the music on the radio or watching our small black and white portable television given to us by Mrs Radunski. There was little else we craved. This was tinsel enough to decorate our newly erected wedding Christmas tree. We gazed at each other and wondered how was it remotely possible that two people could be so happy together, so thoroughly satisfied. Our heady, emotional pilings kept us raised high above the raging torments of the outside world that ran like a frothy maelstrom somewhere beneath our feet.  We congratulated ourselves on our capacity for discovering the cure to life’s miseries, which the entire human race was hunting desperately for and as yet hadn’t found. It was here, Ruby and me, a huge bottle of it above a butcher’s shop, at the neck of which only our fortunate lips were able to sip.

The beginning of January brought snow. Lots of it. I rubbed away at a patch of condensation on our bedroom window, seeing all the cars parked along the roadside transformed overnight into icing sugar decorations framing the edge of a gargantuan birthday cake; the roads and pavements had become one, and the entire town was coated in a pristine, powdery white tablecloth of silk, as if it had been scrubbed fresh and clean by magical hands and brushes. The dirt and the squalor, the hopelessness and despair, all rinsed away to reveal the true town beneath.

I arose early and helped Mr Radunski clear a pathway from the back door before getting ready for work, the heavy shovelling of snow still very much a game for me. Mr Radunski’s face, however, remained grave throughout. “Don’t you like the snow, Mr Radunski?” I said. “I thought it would remind you of home.”

He grunted, knocked off a hardened lump of snow that had fastened itself to the rusted and pitted blade of his shovel. “I ‘ate de buddy stuff,” he growled, staring at the miniature replica of the Alps we’d just erected by the path.

We toiled at the snow for long, silent minutes before he straightened himself up, massaging the small of his back and turned to admire the clear path behind us. Wet concrete never looked so good. “We was in trucks,” he said, but didn’t look at me as he spoke. “Dis train take us to camp somewhere. Russian train.” He pointed with the flat of his hand across the undisturbed sheet of white to his outside toilet. “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack,” he said, his head wobbling lazily from side to side in time to his words. We in dis truck dey use for cows an’ pigs. Dey was a lot of us, ‘uddled togedder ‘cos it was buddy freezin’.” He attacked another glacier-like chunk of snow, sniffing the cold air. Then, as abruptly as he began, he halted, leaning on his shovel. “Siberia,” he said, looking across at me to see if I understood the significance of the word. I nodded as if I did, but its import was lost on me.

“We get dis metal an’ we break de lock, like so…Ah!” and he imitated the movement, my eyes following his to the empty ground as he looked at the imaginary broken lock sitting by his soaked boots. “I slide open de door. OH! Buddy freezin’! Buddy freezin’! Den I says we got to jump udderwise we all dead if we stay on dis train. But dey all shook ‘eads…’No, no, no!’ like dis, an’ I say we jump now. I tumped my friend; tumped ‘im ‘ard on de arm, but ‘ee shake ‘ead too. We get killed outside, ‘ee said, ‘an I jumped. I left dem silly buggers on de train.”

I waited, but he just stood there, silently studying the place at his feet where the imaginary lock fell. “What happened?” I nudged. “Did they catch you, Mr Radunski?”

His head darted to the side as if he’d heard a suspicious noise. The next time he spoke his voice was quieter, subdued. “I ended up in big snowdrift – high, high,” he gestured to a point some way above his head. “I wait till sound of train go away and den I dig out. It night, but der was a big Moon in der sky. Der snow looked like a big blue sea. I saw de train, way off in de distance, all dis white smoke comin’ out of its funnel. Puff, puff, puff! Like a big white bird fedder!”

I watched him intently as he resumed his digging, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was as if the talking had drained the last of his strength. “What happened to them, Mr Radunski?” I asked. “Those left behind on the train?”

He looked off into the distance at a trio of cooling towers that belched thick white clouds of steam into a monotonous grey sky, as if they were attempting to pull a ghostly pall over the entire land. “Dey all dead,” he said heavily. “If you ever on train, you jump. You don’t stay on wi’ de udders. Stay on, you die. You jump, you live.” His face was deadly serious. He looked suddenly uneasy. “Dat’s enough. We finish. Too buddy cold!” and he threw down his shovel onto the pile of dirty snow and hurried into the security of the house.

His words would come back to haunt me later.