Human Conditioning (2 page)

“What did he do?” I whisper
warily, unsure as to whether I really want to know. We’ve already digressed from
my set of questions, but I feel for the man and am intrigued to know what
happened to him. I almost feel indignant towards his parents, yet I know little
about them.

His right hand meets his face and
he scratches the corner of his finely sculptured mouth with his index finger.
My eyes cannot help but follow it. He’s intoxicating. So much so, that he makes
me momentarily forget all the horrendous things he was found guilty of ten
years ago.

He regards me again, his eyes
narrowing a touch, and announces, “He beat me with his walking stick. He used
to keep it under his armchair. He passed out in that chair regularly,
complaining he couldn’t always make the stairs ’cos of his gammy leg, but we
knew better. It was
his
chair.” He raises his hand and points all his fingers
to a space in front of him. “Directly in front of the TV. No one, and I mean no
one, was allowed to sit in it.”

I feel my mouth pop open
again, but this time I rein in my astonishment and close it immediately. I
decide to respond with honesty. “I have no satisfactory response for what you
have just told me, but I thank you for your honesty.”

He seems to respect this
response, because I receive the most beautiful smile I have ever seen on a man.
His extraordinary ocean-blue eyes twinkle with pleasure and I wonder whether
he’s thinking ‘mission accomplished’: in less than ten minutes he’s managed to
shock the reporter.

I tear my eyes away from his and peer down at my notes
once more. I clear my throat. “You have a sister, Katherine Draper, married to
Mr Adam Draper?” I ask.

“Kate,” he says and his
expression is back to neutral, except for a small smile that immediately
persuades me to believe that he thinks fondly of his little sister.

“Kate,” I correct myself and
smile timidly, as if I’ve made another blunder.

“Or ‘Bone’...”

“Excuse me?”

“I used to call her ‘Bone’...
she was a really skinny child.” He beams suddenly with great affection but I
sense a melancholy behind his eyes. He obviously misses her. “Does your family
call you Kate?”

His unexpected question takes
me by surprise. “Oh, um, yes, some,” I stutter, my eyes lifting to his
momentarily before lowering back to my lap. I notice he’s cool as a cucumber
now, affable even; relaxing against the back of his chair, foot over knee,
elbows resting on arm rests, patiently awaiting my next question. “And you were
married?” I go on.

“I am still married, Miss
Daley,” he replies immediately, almost defensively, and the prickling tension
is back in an instant. He shows me his left hand and I see the golden band on
his finger next to his pinkie.

I shake my head. “Oh, sorry, I
was informed that you have no family visitors. I assumed...”

“She doesn’t visit,” he interrupts.

I stare at him for a long
moment, then my eyes are glued to my papers once more. I quickly move on. “And
you have a daughter, Amy...”

“I do.”

As my eyes frantically run
over the paper in my hands, I swear I can feel a renewed tension emanating from
this man as I talk of his immediate family. I dare to glance up and I am
captured anew by his intense stare. I am unsure whether he is vexed or just
waiting for me to continue, and I find myself asking, “Do you see your daughter?”
This isn’t on my list, but it’s my natural response to the revelation that his
wife never visits him.

“No,” he simply replies.

And I am enthralled once more by
the tragedies of this man’s life. “Never?” I whisper.

His eyes narrow, but I think
he’s intrigued by my compassion more than anything. “Never, Miss Daley. I
haven’t seen my daughter for ten years. My wife...” he tails off and shifts in
his chair. It’s the first time he’s looked uneasy, but he composes himself
almost immediately, running a hand over his face and giving me a polite, close-lipped
smile. “It’s complicated,” he adds and this gives me the cue to move on.

I am relieved to be getting
off the subject of wife and child, but I know there are more questions on this topic
on page six or seven of my notes. I take a breath. “There has been an influx of
council housing and benefit seekers over the past twenty years, and many of the
estates, such as the one you were brought up on, have a reputation for breeding
crime. How do you think your life was affected by where you grew up?”

He takes a deep breath and
looks intrigued, as though he’s really considering my question. He replies,
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that people like me are the black sheep of
society, Miss Daley. We are not bad people. We are not ill; we are not serial
killers. It is not insanity that drives us to do the things we do. It is
desperation.

“I’ve taken many lives and I’m
paying the price for that, but I am not an evil man. It’s a simple matter of
dog eat dog, fight or flight, win or lose. Except, in my world, if you lose,
you don’t get much of a chance of playing again. If you lose, you die, or at
least you may as well be dead. I got into the business I got into, Miss Daley,
because I didn’t want to live on the charity of others like my parents did. I
didn’t want to live off those privileged enough to go out and earn an honest
living. Where I’m from, the chances of honest living are extremely rare. You
either make money illegally or you seek benefits. I spent my whole life
watching my father take advantage of the system, reaping the benefits of other
people’s hard work, and I grew up to loathe it.”

I bravely interrupt. “Surely,
making money unlawfully is taking advantage of the system too, taking advantage
of our laws and our leaders and therefore our people?”

His face flushes slightly and
I get the impression that I’ve stoked his notorious temper. He glares at me and
replies, “I made money the only way that was available to me, the only way I
knew how. When I was established, I ensured, as much as I could, that I made my
fortune off those who could afford to pay their own way. What people do with
their own money is their business and if they want to do business with me, then
I’m happy to take it.

“And these leaders you speak
of, they had no time for kids like me. Opportunity only came where opportunity
could be exploited by your so-called leaders, Miss Daley. What would this country
want with the likes of me – a troublesome teenager with anger issues and an
acute self-loathing – when they could plough their money into moulding
level-headed middle-class intelligence and reap the rewards of guaranteed
success?”

His glare softens, but he continues
to regard me with an intensity I’ve never witnessed in anyone before. The
unusual and tantalising blue of his eyes makes me want to cower from his gaze.
I tear my own blue eyes away and take a sip of my tea. Inwardly, I will myself
to be strong, not to let this beautiful and powerful man intimidate me. He is
obviously experienced or maybe just well read, but I don’t agree with him
entirely. I come from a middle-class family and they certainly were not as
level-headed as he is suggesting.

I courageously reply, “Surely,
later in life, with all your association with those in the higher ranks of
society, you do not believe that the middle-classes are level-headed and
trustworthy enough to be the only successes in this country?”

He smiles his mega-watt smile.
“Of course not, but I know their determination to look after their own kind...
I know all their dirty little secrets.” He sits forward and adds, rather
poetically, “Their true nature is veiled by their class, Miss Daley. Whereas
my
class wrongly defines my true nature...”

“Are you bitter, Mr Foster,
because you didn’t have privileges like others had. Others like me, for
instance?” I ask, my eyebrows raised and the irony of my own sudden resentment is
not missed by either him or me.

He laughs and runs a hand
through his thick, dark hair. “No, love, I’m a realist,” he says and his
earlier belligerence is now replaced with bravado as he relaxes back in his
chair once more. “I, Aiden Foster, known to be associated with murder, sexual
exploitation and drug trafficking, gained respect from highly regarded men from
a middle-class background; those who worked in our councils and in our parliament,
and do you know why?”

“No,” I reply indignantly and
totally unprofessionally, my cheeks flushing with annoyance. I am totally
confounded by his tenacity.

“Because I had money, Miss
Daley. Because I wore the right clothes, talked the right talk and walked the
right fucking walk. If they’d seen me five years before, nicking fucking food
from the local shops for me lunch and breaking into cars, they would have had
me sent down in the blink of an eye. I was earning more money in a week than
they were in a year.
That’s
why they liked me,
that’s
why they
respected me, and that’s why they turned a blind eye to all my skulduggery and helped
me when I needed them.”     

“So, it all comes down to
money?” I ask. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the only way
the poor stand a chance is to become criminals? Sounds typically anti-establishment
to me...”

“It’s the way of the world,
Miss Daley,” he replies, shrugging his burly shoulders.

I feel the heat of
embarrassment in my cheeks at the realisation that this man is admonishing me –
that he probably sees me as some dim-witted young middle-class girl who knows
nothing about the way the world really works. I am also very conscious that
we’ve gone off topic once more. The interview is proving to be more difficult
than I first envisaged. He has great opinions and he’s certainly a commander in
all that he does, even down to the way the interview is developing.

I gulp and straighten my back,
attempting to convey some kind of control over my position. “So, your
environment
did
affect you?” I ask, and I’m well aware that I am showing
him that I can do self-righteous too.

His smug smile drops and his
lips press into a hard line and for the first time in the last ten minutes, he
is absolutely frank with me. “More than you know,” he says. 

Again, his honesty stuns me
into silence. He is captivating, yet erratic in his moods. He doesn’t like to
give much away, yet if you ask him the right questions, he’s willing to answer
them honestly. I idly wonder whether he suffers from some sort of psychological
disorder:
sociopathy or schizophrenia, maybe?
If he does, I wasn’t
warned before I came into this lion’s den.

I decide to move on. “You had
a guardian other than your parents... a Mr Grant O’Donoghue?”

He runs a hand over his face
again. I quickly realise this is a common gesture of his when he is under
stress or scrutiny. “He helped pay for things when Duggie couldn’t...” he
replies on a sigh of resignation.

“Yes, Douglas was predominantly
a bare-knuckle boxer in his young life, but he damaged his leg not long after
you were born and had to quit...”

“Grant was Duggie’s
manager...”

I smile. The air has cleared
once more. “I guess he was quite disappointed when your father got injured...”
I say. It’s not a question from my list.

He smirks. “I doubt it,
considering he was the one who injured him in the first place...”

“Oh!”

“It’s no secret in our world
that Duggie tried to fix a match in another man’s favour and Grant beat him to within
an inch of his life because of it. It
is
a family secret, however, that
the only reason why Grant didn’t finish Duggie off was because my mother begged
him not to.” I gawp and he adds, snidely, though not towards me, “Then Grant
became my mother’s personal bank account...”

“Out of guilt, do you think?”
I ask.

“Guilt, love, pity... I
dunno.” He shrugs and his large chest arches forward as he stretches his arms
backwards. I sense his sudden indignation. I have focused on a subject he does
not wish to discuss and so, in return, he wants to make me feel uncomfortable,
again.

I, however, advise myself to ignore
this and decide to continue as normal, quickly coming to the conclusion that I
am dealing with a man who has never quite grown out of petulant adolescence. In
a way, I’m glad. It’s not an attractive trait, and it allows me to concentrate
on why I’m here and not be distracted by his natural and all-consuming charm. Yet
even as I conclude this, I succumb to the mega-watt smile he is now flashing.

“What?” I ask impatiently and,
once again, utterly unprofessionally. He’s getting to me and I’m letting him.

“It’s good to talk,” he announces
rather genuinely, and his eyebrows furrow momentarily as if he regrets the fact
that he doesn’t talk more often, or maybe it’s the fact that he’s reliving
memories that he hasn’t allowed himself to dwell on for a long time. I don’t
know. 

I twist my lips, totally bemused
by his constantly changing mood. “Then shall we move on to your enterprises,
starting from the beginning?”

He immediately relaxes, giving
me the impression he’s happier talking business than he is talking personal, and
for the next three hours I listen intently as he tells me, in grotesque detail,
about the misdemeanours of his past.

July 1986

“You’re a lying cow, Gina!” Lily
Summers pointed a stiff finger at the girl who had been her best friend for the
past six years. Gina Watson stood confidently in the middle of the school car
park as Lily strode up to her and halted a good five metres away from her so
that they had to raise their voices to communicate. The sun was beaming down on
them, an unexpectedly warm summer’s day gracing their last ever day at school.

Lily and Gina had grown up
together. They had shared every important moment in their young lives from
first kisses to first boyfriends to trying cigarettes and underage drinking. They
had laughed and cried together and shared their dreams and fears with one
another since they were ten years old.