Beast of Burden

My brother was a suicide risk.

That's what the dumpy nurse told me, her specialist subject the totally fucking obvious. This rough voice on the phone, rattling out the rules, told me that if he wasn't awake when I arrived, I couldn't see him. No exceptions. And thanks to an overhead line fault at Dunbar, I didn't get to the hospital until well after visiting hours.

She stood her ground while she couldn't see me. When I showed up in person, she softened a little. And when I opened my mouth to speak, that was it. She had no choice but to show me to my brother.

“We don't normally do this,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Declan was sparked out with the light on, which meant they'd dosed him. Usually, my brother needed it pitch black to sleep. A Louis L'Amour paperback sat on the bed, its cracked spine pointing up. One of my dad's —
The Strong Shall Live.
I remembered him trying to press it on us when we were younger. It was the kind of stuff he loved, inspirational reading for those with a western bent, a bunch of short stories about plucky homesteaders triumphing over adversity. There was a heroic cowboy on the front cover, his rifle pointed to the ground, his gaze set on the vast Wyoming landscape.

Weird that my dad liked this stuff.

I picked up the book, dog-eared the page, and put it on the bedside table. Then I eased myself onto the chair by Declan's bed.

Uncle Kenny told me the suicide attempt was a cry for help. I didn't think so. I thought the cry for help came on an answering machine message Declan left me a week before he did it. I got Paulo to wipe it without listening, had enough of my own shite to deal with at the time, and I was under the impression his call was the usual monthly catch-up. In fact, the only reason I knew it was a cry for help was because Declan took the next logical step. He went out, hooked up with an old dealer, bought enough smack to fell a horse, and shot the lot.

He would've topped himself if it wasn't for his girlfriend. She was an ex-smackhead herself — they'd met through that Outreach group he kept going on about — so she didn't need any help to work out what had happened when she saw Declan turning blue in the bedroom.

Two or three years ago, I wouldn't have been surprised. That was the Declan who was too mashed to pick his brother up from outside the 'Ways on release day. It was that Declan who'd promised me then he was off the smack. Showed me his arms to prove it. But didn't hide the works, didn't hide the foil. The same Declan, had his arse handed to him by his younger brother because he was a lying junkie cunt. And afterwards, he'd sat there, his back to the wall with his knees up, snot, tears and blood on his face. One hand in his longish hair, as he showed me teeth but couldn't meet my gaze.

He dabbed at the blood on his top lip, fresh tears coming to his eyes.

He said he needed help. Then he said it again.

I put him on the next train to Waverley.

Then there was the Outreach, the girlfriend, the long road to recovery. The monthly phone calls that hammered the point home — he was doing okay, he was trying hard, he wasn't going to disappoint anyone who'd had faith in him, not this time. And every time he mentioned his life, it threw mine into stark relief. Like some born-again, he asked after my health. Like a full-blown addict, I lied through my teeth.

He was strong when he was clean. But only then.

I was glad he was asleep. I didn't want him to see me, not like this. A stroke victim with a walking stick, not thirty yet and already shuffling through the world like a fucking pensioner.

I sat with him for fifteen minutes. Watched him sleep. Then I left.

On the way out, I phoned my uncle.

“I saw him,” I said. “He was asleep.”

“That's alright,” said Kenny. “There's always tomorrow.”

Shook my head, even though Kenny couldn't see it. “I'm heading back. Tell him I came.”

Kenny made some noises, tried to persuade me to stay a wee while longer. I killed the call, caught a cab back to the station and snatched the last train south.

A week out of the hospital, Declan had another shot at it. Locked the bathroom door, opened one arm from wrist to elbow, chased the pain with a thick shot to the thigh, then tried to open his other arm.

By the time paramedics got the door down, he was dead.

No longer a risk.

INNES

Mo Tiernan is dead.

And that's why I'm here right now. I'm not supposed to know, much less have something to do with it, so I play it dumb, which isn't too difficult. The past few months have given me time to get good at that particular game.

I'm sat in the lounge bar of the Wheatsheaf, the wall-hung wood-panelled juke playing Donovan, the music punctuated by the odd beep from the original Space Invaders machine in the corner.

Opposite me, Morris Tiernan. The Uncle himself. He appears to be staring out the window, but his eyes are too glazed to be looking anywhere but inwards.

“He's
missing
,” he says, turning to me finally.

I nod.

“Couple of months. At least.” He shakes his head. “You heard?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I just noticed,” I say.

“So he
is
missing.”

Tiernan doesn't need a reply to that. It's just something to say, a repeated lie told to divert his mind from the darker, more likely outcome. We both know that Mo couldn't disappear totally for one month, let alone two. The most you could hope for was a week out of circulation and even then he'd make his presence known when he returned. He'd be loud about being back in the game, scoring and selling, maybe glass some unfortunate bastard to cement his rep as a pin-pupil psycho. Silence is a weakness for Mo Tiernan. Every time he makes some noise, it's a fuck-you to the father who kicked him out of the family.

But right now, it's too quiet.

“So,” I say.

Tiernan moves his head. Regards the pristine pint of Guinness on the table in front of him. He pushes his fingers across the tabletop. Normally he'd be smoking — ban be fucked — but there's no ashtray on the table, and now the music's stopped, I'm sure I can hear a ticking sound coming from the centre of Tiernan's chest. He breathes in slowly, then exhales as if he's taken a long drag from an imaginary cigarette. The tension leaves him along with the breath in his lungs.

“You find him for me.”

I shake my head.

“Yeah, you can.”

I look at him with a bland expression on my face. He can interpret it however he wants.

He wraps his hand around the bottom of the pint glass, but doesn't move it. “The other thing,” he says. “You handled that well enough.”

I cough. He takes it as sarcastic. Glances up at me.

“You got her back,” he says. “That's all that matters.” One finger taps the side of the glass; there's something brown under one fingernail that could be dried blood. “And you were discreet about it. I appreciated that.”

I look at the table. Don't say anything.

“Didn't use what you learned about our family against us. Someone else, they'd come across information like that, they'd think they had some dirt, something they could use to their advantage.” He bunches his lips, stares into his pint. “You were bright enough to realise you didn't have nowt. Nowt you could think about using, anyway.”

“I know.”

“And that's why you're here.”

“Because I'm bright?”

“Because you're loyal.”

I stare at him. He's building up to something, but there's still that barrier. Maybe it's because he hasn't seen me in a while and now he has, there are doubts. Like maybe I can't be trusted to follow through on this, or maybe I'm not physically capable of doing the job.

Because he's heard what happened to me. But it's different seeing the results in the flesh.

His eyes twitch half-closed. He's obviously reached some sort of decision.

“Fuck it,” he says.

Fuck it?

That deep breath again, reminding me of the rumours flying about that Mo's disappearance has put Morris Senior on his guard, that maybe the Uncle's starting to fray around the edges, can't handle the pressure the way he used to. Right enough, put me in a room and it doesn't exactly turn into a spa-like atmosphere, but Morris Tiernan's still not the kind to get jittery around the likes of me. Still, I credited him with a strong enough gut to look me in the face, and that hasn't happened yet.

So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I do make him uncomfortable.

Good.

He waves his free hand. “This … Whatever this is …”

I wait for him.

“If this is what we think it might be, then it's possible it could be personal.”

“Personal,” I say, as if I know exactly what he's talking about.

“With Mo.”

And now I
do
know exactly what he's talking about.

Never occurred to me that this would be the reason Morris Tiernan called me in. He reckons that if his son's got himself so fucked up that he's missing or worse, it's got something to do with him. That someone's using Mo to get to him in some way, because that person didn't get the fucking circular telling everyone that Mo wasn't an official Tiernan anymore. Even if that's
not
the case, I get the idea that Tiernan thinks this thing with Mo is going to bite him on the arse the minute his back is turned. And for the first time since I met him, it looks like the Uncle's actually worried.

But it's not for Mo. Can't be. He made his feelings about his son pretty clear just under a year ago.

“Nobody's been in touch,” he says, running a hand over his chin. “Could be something, could be nothing. I don't know who's playing the game these days, never mind who's winning it. Don't need to know. Could be, Mo's playing funny buggers somewhere, could be he's jumped on a Dutch deal. It's happened before, but Mo's never had the ambition to piss off anyone serious.” He pauses, pitches a sigh. “Either way, it wouldn't do me any good to be seen asking questions.”

No, it wouldn't, given their relationship or lack thereof. Man like Morris Tiernan, he asks after his son, it'll look like a U-turn on the exile. If Mo's out, Mo's out. Supposed to be as good as dead, end of story, and Tiernan can't be seen as a man who changes his mind at the first sniff of shit. He made his rep on being a mulish bastard, devoid of sentimentality and violent enough to make might equal right.

“Which is where you come in,” says Tiernan. “You know his mates.”

I don't say anything. Don't move my head either. Watch him look at that pint. He reminds me of Paulo after the fire, has that air of an alkie gasping for a taste. Waiting for me to agree, but I'm not saying one fucking word until he looks up at me. I want him to know who he's seeing, who he's been talking to, because I get this sinking feeling that he reckons he's talking to the Callum Michael Innes who just got out of prison, the one scared of the family name and hungry for paying work. That very same bloke who was asked to track down ten grand and a runaway daughter last year, ended up the six-foot pile of shite that I am now.

So Tiernan needs to see my lop-sided face, the sink of my right-hand side. He needs to see me move with my walking stick. He needs to listen closely when I speak, see my spastic lips and tongue try to form words my brain knows but my mouth has forgotten. He needs to drink all this in, and then he needs to understand that it was him and his fucked up family that did this to me.

But he doesn't. When he raises his head to look at me, there's a flicker of disgust, but not much more.

Certainly no guilt.

“You know what I heard?” he says.