The Wolves of London (3 page)

After a few moments Candice sighed and snuggled against me. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.

A good foot taller than my daughter, I leaned forward and kissed the top of her blonde head. ‘Christ, you don’t have to thank me. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.’

‘Yeah, I know, but…’

‘But what?’

‘Well, it can’t have been easy for you, can it, what with Glenn’s family here and everything?’

I grunted a laugh. ‘Into the lion’s den, you mean?’

‘Well… yeah, I suppose so, sort of.’

I gave her shoulder a squeeze, suddenly aware of how slight, almost frail, she was. ‘That’s all water under the bridge now,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Doesn’t mean you haven’t still got the scars to show for it, though.’

I laughed again. ‘They’re old scars. Old scars, old me. I’m not the cocky little yob I once was.’

She muttered something that I didn’t quite catch and I asked her to repeat it. After a moment she sighed and said, ‘I’m not sure Glenn’s changed that much.’

I frowned. ‘What do you mean? He doesn’t knock your mother about?’

‘No, nothing like that. It’s just… well, his attitude.’ She paused. ‘He’s like a big kid. Always going on about “students” and “getting a proper job instead of sponging off the government”.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘He does my head in. I reckon he’d be happier if I was working in fucking McDonalds. Sorry.’

Listening to her, I felt my stomach knot with long-standing contempt for the man who had married Michelle, Candice’s mother. But I also felt a surge of satisfaction that my daughter was confiding in me, viewing me as an ally against someone who I suppose had been more of a father to her over the years than I had.

Michelle and I had never actually
been
together as such. Candice had been conceived on Christmas Eve 1993, when I was sixteen. Back then Michelle had been a hard-edged punkette, her hair as red and spiky as her attitude, and on the night in question I had staggered out of The King’s Head, where I’d been drinking since mid-afternoon and was feeling the worse for wear after God knew how many pints of Special Brew, to witness a blazing row between Michelle and her long-term boyfriend, a steroid-popping skinhead called Glenn Dass. Once the fireworks were over and Glenn had stalked off after calling Michelle a ‘piss-ugly cunt’, I stumbled across and stupidly asked if she was okay.

Swiping away black lines of mascara that were trickling down her tearful face, she snapped, ‘What does it fucking look like?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, flinching as if I’d been stung. Sober, I might have walked away, but because I was pissed (and horny) I hovered a moment, peering at her through beer-blurred eyes.

‘Is there anything else?’ She spat out the words like bullets, her face scrunching aggressively.

‘Weren’t you in my year at school?’

‘So? What do you want – a fucking medal?’

‘No, I just…’ I shrugged and looked down at my feet, waiting for inspiration to seep into my drunken brain. Finally I asked, ‘What you doing now?’

‘Apart from freezing my tits off in a pub car park, you mean?’

I squinted at her, half-grinned. For a boy of sixteen, a girl mentioning her own tits, regardless of the context, was a big turn-on. ‘You don’t have to stay out here,’ I said. ‘We could go inside.’

‘Oh yeah, and do what?’

My grin widened. ‘I could buy you a drink.’

Her panda eyes, bloodshot from crying, narrowed to slits. ‘It’ll take more than that, you know. I’m not a fucking scrubber.’

‘I never said you were. Forget it if you’re not bothered.’

She stared at me sullenly for a moment, then gave an abrupt nod. ‘Go on then.’

I remember little about the rest of the evening, though I do know that an hour or so later Michelle and I were shagging in a cubicle in the women’s toilets. My abiding memory of that encounter was the wet floor, the stink of puke which clogged up one of the sinks, and having to constantly change position in the tiny cubicle because cold, sharp edges kept jabbing me in the buttocks, legs and back. Ultimately our desperate rutting became more a war of attrition than an expression of mutual desire, both of us wanting it to be over but determined to see it through to the bitter end. When it
was
over we went our separate ways, disheartened and battle-weary, neither of us expressing any inclination to see each other again.

Just over a week later, on New Year’s Day 1994, Glenn Dass and a couple of his mates jumped me outside the local chippy. I rolled into a ball as they kicked me repeatedly in the spine and stamped on my ribs and head, before rolling me, barely conscious, off the road and down a steep railway embankment choked with weeds and nettles. It was a bitterly cold night and I might well have died if an old geezer hadn’t walked past with a Jack Russell half an hour later. The dog sniffed me out and started barking, and the old boy phoned an ambulance. I was admitted to hospital with three broken ribs, a cracked vertebra, a fractured wrist and various head injuries. The worst part of the experience was not the beating itself, but waking up in a hospital bed a few hours later. Everything had swollen and stiffened up, and despite the heavy-duty painkillers I’d been prescribed, each tiny movement sent an eye-watering jolt of agony through me. Just blinking and breathing were bad enough, but when I tried to chew or swallow it felt as if rusty gears were grinding into life inside my body, each one connected to a cluster of exposed nerve endings. And as for moving my bowels… well, let’s just say it was probably the closest to the torment of childbirth that a man is ever likely to get.

There was never any possibility of Michelle and I getting married, not even when she burst into The King’s Head two months later – just after my seventeenth birthday – screaming the odds and telling me that I was ‘gonna fucking pay’ for getting her up the duff. I was in no mood for a row; the cuts and bruises were only just starting to fade, and I was still moving gingerly. But for the next month or so I refused to accept that the child was mine – until my appointment finally came through for a DNA test, which confirmed what I felt (at the time) was the awful truth.

Glenn was back on the scene by then, and to his credit he stuck by Michelle, despite the fact that she was carrying another man’s child. I think partly because he’d proved his physical dominance over me, and partly because I hadn’t grassed him up, which in his eyes was like me admitting that I’d been out of order and deserved the beating, it helped him come to terms with the fact that I’d violated his ‘property’. It even enabled him to put aside any resentment he might have felt towards Candice and, despite his limitations, become a pretty decent stepdad for her.

In the almost two decades since that New Year’s Day encounter, he and I had never seen eye to eye, though I suppose we’d tolerated each other well enough when we’d been thrown together in family situations. Even so, the fact that he’d once bested me, regardless that he’d caught me by surprise and had been backed up by his mates, was clearly still a big thing for him. It was almost instinctive the way he adopted a cocky, swaggering manner whenever we met, the way a slightly contemptuous arrogance would creep into his voice. Many times I’d felt the urge to tell him to grow the fuck up and move on, but I’d always managed to bite my tongue, and so keep the peace.

As for me and Michelle… well, I can’t pretend that it hadn’t been tricky between us over the years. We were like repelling magnets, always rubbing each other up the wrong way. The main problem was that we had different outlooks on life, which had led to a hell of a lot of resentment, at least on her part. Whereas Michelle had obstinately dug herself into a rut and refused to change her circumstances, even though (according to Candice) she was bitter and unhappy, I had pig-headedly rejected what it seemed at one time was the path laid out for me, and had done my best to turn negatives into positives – most obviously by viewing the misery of prison life as a watershed, an opportunity to motivate myself into crawling out of the sewer, shaking off the shit and moving on to better things.

I don’t mean that to sound smug. I’m not saying it to make you think that I consider myself superior to Michelle. It’s just the way things were, just an illustration of our different personalities. Maybe you have to fall a long way in life before it hits you what a fuck-up you’re making of it, and maybe Michelle had simply never had a jolt big enough to persuade her to change her situation. I don’t know. All I knew was that we were polar opposites, and that it had led at times to arguments over how we each thought Candice should be raised. My worry had been that Michelle and Glenn were holding her back, stifling her natural intelligence, whereas I knew Michelle had been obsessed with the idea that whenever Candice had been with me she’d been exposed to some kind of weird, academic, cultural life that might turn her into a snob, or make her want something that Michelle didn’t understand and couldn’t provide.

Despite all that, though, I think both of us were agreed that Candice had turned out all right – more than all right. She was bright, sensible, funny, tolerant, all the things that ought to make any parent proud. In spite of Glenn’s sneery attitude towards students, she had just started the second year of her A levels and wanted to do Hospitality and Event Management at Loughborough University. Everything was going brilliantly for her.

Or so I thought.

After her outburst about Glenn, I gave her another squeeze and asked, ‘What are you sorry for?’

‘Swearing,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ I said with a grin. ‘I was swearing like a trooper before I could walk. I think my first word was “bollocks”.’

An elderly woman with coiffured hair and expensive-looking jewellery turned to give me a disapproving glance as she tottered past, and both Candice and I burst out laughing. Her laughter died quickly, though, which prompted me to give her another reassuring squeeze.

‘Ignore what Glenn says,’ I told her, ‘and I’m not just saying that because of the history between us. You do what you’ve set your heart on, and don’t let anyone sway you. I know your mum’s proud of you, and so am I.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said, and sighed.

‘But?’ I asked.

‘But what?’

‘But that’s not the only thing that’s bothering you, is it? There’s something else.’

This time the sigh was big enough to make her shoulders slump as if the air was leaking out of her. ‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Well, maybe not to the untutored eye,’ I said, ‘but I’m a psychologist, remember. I’m trained to notice these things. I can always spot those little signs of discontent – the downturned mouth; the constant sighing; the tears running down the cheeks; the scribbling of the suicide note; the noose around the neck…’

‘All right, Sigmund Freud,’ she said, poking me in the ribs as a smile crept back on to her face, ‘you can shut up now.’

I took a long drag on my cigarette, giving her space to breathe, to think. Sure enough, after a few seconds, she said, ‘Can I talk to you about something?’

I spread my hands. ‘Talk away.’

‘Not here,’ she said, looking around. I couldn’t see who she thought might be listening – the rest of the smokers standing out in the cold with us were strangers – but her expression was furtive all the same. ‘Let’s go inside, get a drink and find a quiet corner in the downstairs bar.’

‘Lead the way,’ I said, taking a last drag on my cigarette before dropping the stub, stamping on it and following her back inside.

There was a little round table next to a group of fat, beardy blokes in T-shirts who were laughing a lot. Candice squeezed herself through to the built-in padded leather bench that ran the length of the wall while I queued at the bar for drinks. By the time I got back she was texting on her phone, a troubled expression on her face, her fingers tapping the tiny keyboard so swiftly they were almost a blur. The tink of our wine glasses on the wooden tabletop and the glassy scrape as I pushed hers towards her caused her face to bob up and produce a tired smile.

‘Cheers,’ I said, sitting down and raising my glass towards her, ‘and happy birthday again.’

‘Cheers,’ she responded, the Sauvignon Blanc catching the light in little darting shimmers as she lifted her glass and touched it to mine. As I took a gulp of my plummy Merlot she barely wet her top lip before putting her drink back down. She pressed her hands together, aligning her fingertips, and hunched her shoulders as if she was drawing herself in. Her eyes flickered downwards and her lips tightened, as though she’d spotted something unsavoury in the bottom of her glass.

‘Think a bit harder,’ I said. ‘My mind-reading powers aren’t what they were.’

This time my comment didn’t provoke even the twitch of a smile. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This isn’t easy.’

‘Why? Because it’s embarrassing? Because it’s complicated? Because you think I’ll be angry?’

She made a face, snatched at her glass and took a hefty swig. The beardy blokes on the next table burst out laughing, drawing her gaze for a moment. Then she said, ‘You know I’ve got this boyfriend, Dean?’

‘The one you’re hiding from us?’

‘I’m not hiding him.’

My comment was meant as a joke, but her reply was enough of a snap to make me raise my hands. ‘Sorry if I touched a nerve. You mean the one who couldn’t come to your party because he had to work a shift at Nando’s?’

‘Yeah… but that’s not the reason.’

‘Not what reason?’

‘The reason why he couldn’t come.’

I looked at her and frowned, but she purposely averted her gaze. ‘So what
is
the reason?’

It wasn’t only the expression on her face that told me she was in trouble; it was her body language too. She held herself stiffly, the tautly clenched muscles in her neck and exposed arms making me think of a rabbit or deer poised to flee at the slightest sign of danger. I felt a flutter of nerves in my stomach; it was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time, but it was instantly familiar nonetheless. It seemed to take an age before she said, ‘He’s scared.’

Even now I hoped I was reading the situation wrongly, that my sudden apprehension was misplaced. ‘Scared of meeting us all?’ I asked, but she shook her head.