Beyond the Rage (4 page)

7

Next morning, Kenny was up at his customary time. He
’d
never needed an alarm clock. Regardless of how late he went to bed, he was always fully alert at 6:30am. He ground some coffee, filled the espresso pot and left it to work its magic while he had a shower.

He sent off a quick text to Alexis:
You okay?
He didn’t expect an immediate reply, thinking she must still be sleeping, but every couple of minutes he looked at the screen just in case.

The gym was his next stop and some core work. Another shower and he was off to see the nearest thing he had to a family.

‘Aww, they’re lovely, son,’ Aunt Vi said as he handed her a bunch of flowers. There was no sign of any disappointment she might have felt at his no-show the previous evening. Her features were arranged in their usual set-up meant to convey warmth and welcome. This was a look she
’d
worked hard at, as if trying to compensate for the bulldog features of her husband.

‘
Didn’t think garages would have flowers at this time of the morning,’ Uncle Colin said, looking like he
’d
just read Nostradamus and he
’d
taken it that the world ending prophecy was meant for him alone.

‘Just as well I know a florist then, isn’t it?’ Kenny offered the older man a thousand-watt grin, knowing that a sign of that much pleasure would truly piss him off.

‘Och, it’s good to see you, son.’ Vi placed a hand on his arm. They were not a demonstrative family and this was as close as she came to showing affection. Kenny smiled in answer, feeling some surprise at how pleased he was to see her.

Sitting on the cream, leather three-seater sofa, Kenny looked around the room. Apart from a TV of biblical proportions, it hadn’t changed since he was last here. Still the lace coverings on every surface and a collection of porcelain dolls dotted here and there. He was desperate to ask about the letter, but he didn’t want his Aunt Vi to feel that it was the only reason he was here.

‘You’ll have had your breakfast?’ Uncle Colin said, lowering himself into his chair and reaching for the TV remote. Most people would turn the TV off, but as Kenny expected he changed channels and turned the volume up slightly. The TV flicked from news, to sport, back to news and then settled on a reality He’s-the-Father-of-My-Baby-and-He’s-Shagging-My-Mother show.

‘Colin,’ Vi said,
‘d
on’t be so rude. We have a guest.’

‘Guest? Where? All I can see is that great lump of a boy who ate us out of house and home.’ It was a familiar refrain and Kenny saw the mouth move but didn’t allow the words to register.

‘A wee cuppa, sweetheart, and then you can tell me everything you’ve been up to.’ Vi leaned forward, hands clasped together as if she was talking to a five-year-old.

‘That would be nice, thank you,’ said Kenny. To run from the room as if his jacket was on fire would have been his preferred action, but he sat back into the cushion of the chair. If nothing else, Vi was owed the courtesy.

‘You still ducking and diving?’ asked Uncle Colin, eyes fixed on the screen. ‘Made your first million yet?’ The words were conversational, but the tone suggested a serious lack of interest in the answer. He was playing the role his wife was looking for from him. If it was left to him, Kenny would still be standing at the door.

‘I’m keeping busy, Uncle Colin,’ Kenny said, fighting with the volume of the TV, which suddenly rose in pitch when a member of the audience ran up on stage and started punching the man who was shagging the mother. The rest of the audience were cheering him on, their faces brazen with the need to see someone pay. Lynch-mob TV, thought Kenny. Don’t you just love it?

Both men fell silent as the drama carried on. Guards rushed on to the stage and a man was huckled off it. Now the daughter was haranguing the mother and the presenter was standing between them, pretending to calm them down. His face had that smug I-Fucking-Love-My-Job look on it.

‘Right, son. Here you go.’ Vi walked in carrying a tray. ‘Still like your tea, son?’

‘You can’t beat a nice cup of tea,’ said Kenny, who
’d
barely drunk a sip of the stuff in the last two years.

‘I’ve got some croissants there as well, son. Just you tuck in and Colin,’ – her voice raised slightly and some steel came into its tone – ‘if you’re going to watch that crap, go and watch it somewhere else.’

‘This is my house and I’ll watch what I like, Violet,’

She just looked at him.

‘Right. Fine.’ He stood up. ‘Banished to my own kitchen,’ he moaned as he walked out of the room.

‘He’s a lovely man, really,’ Vi said as she took his seat, pointed the remote at the TV and turned the sound down. ‘Just hides it well.’

‘I heard that.’ A shout came from the kitchen.

Vi rolled her eyes and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He’ll be standing at the kitchen doorway listening to everything we say. Nosey old so-and-so.’ As she spoke her eyes were shaped with a mixture of long-suffering wife syndrome and not a little affection. An affection that always took Kenny by surprise. His uncle was a man who repelled that particular emotion in almost everyone else.

‘He never had the charm of your dad, Kenny, but he’s always been a good man to me. He’s never let me down.’ Vi settled into her chair and with a smile offered her usual defence of her husband’s behaviour. There was a time when his Uncle Colin’s words would have had Kenny running out the door and kicking it on the way past. But now he could make allowances.

‘I’m sorry about last night, Aunt Vi,’ said Kenny. ‘A friend of mine was...’

‘S’alright, son,’ she replied. ‘You’re a busy man...’

‘He’s a crook, Violet. A bigger crook than his father ever was. I don’t know why you let him in that door,’ Colin shouted from the kitchen. Vi rolled her eyes.

‘What about that nice boy you used to be friends with? The one who became a policeman?’ This was the only way that Aunt Vi ever commented on his career choice. She
’d
bring up Ray McBain and hope the fact that he was a decent member of society might shock him into an act of conscience and make him turn his back on a life of crime.

‘Yeah, Ray’s fine. He’s an Inspector now.’

‘Yeah, the friend becomes a detective,’ shouted Colin from the kitchen. ‘Our two become a junky and a thief.’

‘Excuse me, son,’ said Vi and walked to the door. From there she looked down the hallway and addressed her husband. ‘He is the child of my late sister and I love him like he’s my own. I don’t care if h
e
’
s...’ – she struggled for the worst possible crime – ‘...a paedophile, I’ll still love him. I’ve not seen him for two years and it’s all because of you and your petty mouth. So, if you want me to carry on cooking your food, laundering your clothes or any of the other hundred wee jobs I do for you, then you’ll keep your mouth shut, Colin Hunter.’

She turned to face Kenny, bit her bottom lip and looked to the side as if waiting for a reply. The silence surprised them both. She raised her eyebrows and flushed; embarrassed at losing control. She returned to her seat.

‘I meant that, son,’ she said, her eyes moist. ‘I’ve missed you... I understand why you don’t want to be in the same room... but it would be nice to hear from you now and again.’

Kenny accepted this most gentle and most effective of rebukes. He looked over his aunt and felt guilt sour his mouth at his neglect of her. She hadn’t changed much since he last saw her. Her hair was still shaped in a blonde bob that came down to her shoulders. She still wore her favourite wool twin-set and long skirt over her thick-set body. She
’d
be around sixty now, thought Kenny as he read the lines on her forehead and the loosening of her skin along the jawline. Never one for much make-up, her face was bare apart from a warm peach colour on her lips.

Kenny felt a rush of affection for her. Must be getting old, he thought.

‘Sorry, Aunt Vi. It was never deliberate and it was never you. I just...’

‘I know, son. You don’t owe me an explanation. I know you’ll always be there if I need you.’

She smiled and, reaching forward, patted his knee. Her smile was laced through with empathy, apology and regret. Then she breathed, displaying some nerves for the first time.

She swallowed, took another deep breath.

‘The letter.’

8

Now that the moment had come, Kenny was unsure that he wanted to know what the letter contained. He was a grown man. He had proved he could survive and flourish despite everything. What did it matter what it said?

But there were so many questions. What really happened that evening? He lost both parents at the same time. He remembered worrying that it was all his fault. He picked through every conversation he had with both his mum and dad in the weeks leading up to that night and found a hundred things he
’d
said that might have been the cause. His twelve-year-old mind sought importance in the banal and found it. He moaned so much about his bike, he had flunked school, and he had been ‘lifted’ by the police for throwing eggs at passing cars. All or any of this was to blame.

Then came the nights he would lie awake certain that suicide was catching, that he would find himself with a knife at his wrists ready to slash and nothing would stop the muscle from carrying out the action. He became obsessed with a nearby bridge; maybe he would find himself climbing over the wall, like waking up from a sleepwalk, and then jump into the dark, cold waters below.

‘When your mum died,’ – Aunt Vi cut through his thoughts – ‘I was so angry. She was my sister. Why didn’t she come to me and talk? Then there was the guilt. Why didn’t I go to her and talk? It was so confusing.’ She rubbed at her forehead, her eyes shaded with the hurt. She closed them and refocused. Showing that the pain had never gone away, it was there like an unwelcome relative. ‘I can only imagine what you went through.’

‘It was a formative experience,’ Kenny said with a weak smile.

‘And then some... I worried that I didn’t offer you enough support and then when the letter arrived...’ She shrugged and Kenny could read her trepidation.

‘I was eighteen and a tearaway. If you
’d
given me the letter, who knows what I would have done?’

‘God.’ She held a hand over her heart. ‘Every time a knock went at the door I was convinced it was the police to tell me you and Ian had been killed in a gang fight.’

‘If it wasn’t for Ian, I would have been,’ Kenny said, remembering dozens of fights he had started. And the times Ian had backed him up. He was nothing but energy and anger. He yearned for the connection of fist on bone. The satisfaction of letting go consumed him. The only time he felt alive was when he was trading blows with another boy. ‘I must have been a nightmare child.’

‘Still. You were here. You were my sister’s boy. I needed that connection, and it felt... that your acting out was my punishment for failing my sister.’

‘Complications of the human mind.’

‘Is that a book?’

‘It should be,’ he grinned.

‘What do you remember of your father?’

‘Some... bits and pieces...’ He tailed off. In truth, he remembered much more of his father than his mother and it felt like some sort of weakness. Both parents earned his anger. Both abandoned him. The method was different, but the effect was the same. Whenever he tried to recall his mother’s face he struggled, but his father’s sprang into his mind as if he had just seen him an hour earlier. Did he think the suicide was more of a betrayal, was that it?

He knew from a young age that his father’s primary source of income was illegal. This knowledge caused him shame at first, but then... His dad took risks, his dad was an important man, people were afraid of him. He earned respect the hard way. All of which was of course a bath-sized portion of bullshit, but to an impressionable child was electrifying.

He wanted nothing more than to grow up to be just like his dad.

Saturday afternoons were his favourite time. Dad would take him to Firhill to see his team, Partick Thistle. Dad thought it was too easy to support the big two – Celtic or Rangers – and thought it was a sign of a free-thinker to go for the less obvious. He remembered moving through the crowds, viewing a world of bobbing heads from his perch on his father’s shoulders and how people used to gravitate around him. It seemed everyone knew Peter O’Neill and everyone wanted to speak to him. It made Kenny feel important that his father was such a man. Kenny could see that the backslaps, the handshakes, were hesitant; born of fear rather than respect.

It was intoxicating.

‘Actually,’ said Aunt Vi, ‘it was more than one letter.’

‘What?’ Kenny sat straighter.

‘He sent one on your birthday, each year from your eighteenth. They stopped when you were twenty-one.’ Vi chewed on the inside of her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, son. You weren’t ready for... I’ll go and get them for you.’

She was gone for a couple of minutes. Kenny could hear her footsteps up the stairs and across the ceiling. His Uncle Ian stuck his head in the door.

‘Is she...?’

Kenny nodded.

His Uncle Colin looked at him, thought about speaking and then listened to his wife returning.

‘S’pose given where you came from it couldn’t be helped,’ he said, shrugged and then returned to his spot in the kitchen. What was that, thought Kenny. Understanding? Was he being excused? Or written off? Like he could give a shit.

Aunt Vi handed him a green shoebox with the legend
Clarks
on the outside. Her expression was unreadable.

Kenny accepted the box from her and resisted the urge to open it straightaway. He needed to be alone.

Aunt Vi walked to the front door, knowing exactly what was in Kenny’s thoughts. Gratefully, he followed. At the door she stretched up on tiptoes and grazed his cheek with a kiss.

‘Whatever you’re feeling is right, Kenny. Don’t doubt yourself, just process it.’

‘Christ on a bike,’ sounded from down the hall. ‘Somebody’s been watching too much Oprah.’

• • •

Kenny placed the box on the passenger seat, turned the key in the ignition. Before he drove off he had a look at the screen on his phone to see if Alexis had left a message. Nothing.

There was a knock on the car window and his Aunt Vi’s face loomed before him.

‘Sorry, son,’ she said when he rolled down the window. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure,’ said Kenny, wondering if this was something about his cousin.

‘Let’s drive.’ She opened the door, picked up the box and sat down. She offered him a smile in lieu of explanation. ‘My nosey old man will be at the window. He thinks I just popped in next door.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Wherever.’

Kenny put the car in gear and drove off. Minutes later a giant superstore hove into view and Vi gestured that they should go in there. Thinking that this was all a bit strange, Kenny did as she asked. He found a parking space close to the entrance and turned to her.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘I need to get something for tonight’s tea.’

‘Eh?’

She laughed. ‘Only joking, son.’ She tapped his shoulder with her fist. ‘You got to laugh, don’t you?’ She paused and looked out of the window. ‘Or you
’d
never stop crying.’

Kenny said nothing. She
’d
get to the point in her own good time. He looked down at the box she was cradling on her lap. He really needed to see inside.

He felt her hand on the side of his face.

‘You must laugh when you hear people say that childhood is the best years of our lives,’ Vi said softly. Kenny turned to face her and saw that her eyes were shaped with regret, apology and any number of unnamed emotions. He felt his throat tighten in response.

‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Aunt Vi.’ He heard the emotion in his voice and coughed. ‘You did your best.’ Mentally he gave himself a shake. Normally he had all the emotions of a breezeblock. What was happening to him?

‘You had so much anger in you, Kenny. I used to think that if I touched your skin I would get burned.’

Kenny smiled as memories of teenage tantrums filled his head. ‘God, I was a little shit. Don’t know how you put up with me. No wonder Uncle Colin was always threatening me with an orphanage.’

‘Over my dead body, son. Nobody was putting my sister’s child in a home,’ Vi said and patted his hand.

They settled into silence for a few moments. Kenny looked out of the window at shoppers going in and out of the superstore and wondered what dramas were being played out in each of these people’s lives.

‘This note arrived addressed to me. It was on the floor of the hall the morning of your birthday.’ She handed him a small piece of card. The front bore a painting of flowers in a vase. The colours were pastel, the arrangement generic. It was the kind of card old women would send each other, Kenny thought. He opened it up. Three words were typed in the middle.

Does he know?

Kenny read it. He held it up. ‘What the hell is this all about?’

‘I think it’s from your dad.’

‘Really?’ Kenny sat and stared at the card. ‘Know what?’

‘That your dad is still alive, is my guess.’

‘If he wants me to know that, why doesn’t he pay me a visit?’ Kenny was stung. ‘Fuck.’ He looked out of the window and everything he had been ignoring all these years crashed in on him like an articulated lorry.

Silence.

‘Do you remember much about that night, son?’ Vi asked eventually.

Kenny didn’t need any clarification. He knew instantly what night she was talking about.

‘I remember going to bed and then waking up when I heard my dad wailing. Then when I walked downstairs... there they were.’

‘Exactly where were they?’

‘I must’ve gone over this with you countless times over the years, Aunt Vi,’ Kenny said.

‘Bear with me, son.’

‘Right. Well...’ And Kenny explained how his father was on his knees at his mother’s feet and how she was collapsed over the table.

‘What were your impressions, Kenny? From an adult looking through the child’s eyes.’ She stared into his eyes, desperate to hear what he had to say.

‘They haven’t changed over the years, Aunt Vi. Mum was dead. The pills and the drink suggested how... and Dad sounded like he wanted to join her.’

‘Was he saying anything? Did he speak?’

‘It was mostly just an inarticulate noise. Or...’ – he reconsidered – ‘…a long “no”.’

‘Anything else, son? Think.’

Kenny looked at her face and saw for the first time what his mother’s suicide had done to her sister. All those years later and still she was haunted by it. Kenny was sure it would never leave her.

He cast his mind back. He was there in the room again. His heart was thundering against his ribs; his stomach twisting as realisation crept up on him. His twelve-year-old self was frightened more by the out-of-control grief from his father than the still shape of his mother. His father’s torment was present, an energy that caused a vacuum of thought around him. The shape of his mother was distressing but one where the full implications had yet to strike home.

Again, he could see his dad. The moment when their eyes met. His father’s expression formed an apology. It was like he was taking full responsibility. He mouthed a single word.

‘Sorry.’

There was no volume in the memory and that was how it presented itself to Kenny now. His father’s open mouth forming two syllables. The sound gone, sucked into the black hole of his grief.

‘It was like Dad was apologising to me,’ Kenny said, the sound of his voice sounding too gravelly in the confined space. ‘Do you think’ – Kenny turned to face Vi – ‘that, knowing what kids were like, he was trying to tell me not to blame myself?’

‘No,’ said Vi. ‘I think he was telling you he was blaming himself.’

‘What?’ Kenny looked at her. Where was she going with this?

‘I’ve been worrying at this for the last seventeen years, Kenny. I knew your mother better than she knew herself and if she was the type to commit suicide then my name is Shirley Temple.’

Kenny looked at the steering wheel. Examined the dashboard. Looked out of the window. Then he turned to her and spotted the tear that was sliding down her cheek. ‘Are you sure you’re not just looking for something else, Vi? Nobody ever completely knows someone else. Your sister, my mother, died and yes it was a tragedy.’ He gripped her knee. ‘Suicide is such a betrayal. The grieving process is never quite over. I know that better than anyone. ‘

Vi shook her head. ‘Your mother and I lived in each other’s shadows. We were closer than peas in a pod. Our dad used to call us The Twins. Here’s The Twins, he
’d
say, even though we were born three years apart. So don’t tell me I didn’t know my sister, Kenny. I knew her and what you’ve just told me has convinced me more than ever...’ She pulled a paper hankie from her handbag and dabbed at her cheek.

‘Your mother didn’t commit suicide, Kenny. She was murdered.’