Everything She Forgot (29 page)

George was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and already taller than his father, but he was thin: all ribs, kneecaps and joints, Adam's apple and cheekbone. He was six feet one already and a size thirteen shoe. George wondered if he would ever stop growing.

Yet with Brendan, George hunched, fearful of even physically looking down on his father, in case it was regarded as impudence. George always knew that however tall he grew (and he was already the tallest member of the McLaughlin family), he would never be as tall as his father.

His father's car was a long black Jaguar with dark windows. They sat in silence as they drove to a building site near Alexandra Parade. They could see out, but no one could see inside. The car felt like their family, with its secrets and its violence and its unwitnessed horror.

They were going to see Brian Coulston, a building contractor. He had a gambling problem and had gotten into debt while hoping to gamble himself out of it, but had only lost more money. Peter and Richard had called already with threats, and now it was time for consequences. George had eaten breakfast, egg and a slice of toast, before Brendan had required his company for the day, and the food now lay like cement in the pit of his stomach.

The car smelled of Brendan: leather and cigars and Old Spice aftershave. It was intoxicating and George felt almost unable to breathe.

A derelict area had been fenced off with wire mesh. It was an old demolition site, and before that high-rise flats, and the ground was a beach of exploded concrete and cinder block. They got out of the car and walked side by side toward the work trailer at the far end. There was no one working on the land, but diggers and cement mixers stood at the ready. Like volcanic ash, the rubble broke under their feet as they marched.

“What are you going to do?” said George to his father, when he saw him put on his leather gloves.

“I'm going to show you the power of the mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“What a man believes is what he manifests.”

George turned to his father, not understanding, but not having the courage to question. He curved his spine and hunched lower, as if wanting to hear more.

Brendan didn't knock at the trailer door, and George followed him inside. It was almost colder inside than it was out, and Brian jumped up from behind a desk, where he had been doing paperwork dressed in an anorak and scarf. He stood before them with hard heavy breaths that were visible in the small cold room.

“Brendan, I . . . I nearly have it . . . I only need . . .” Brendan smiled and clasped his gloved hands.

George stood just behind his father, his hands at his sides. They felt hot and heavy—as if they might be asked to perform a deed for which they were unwilling.

“Nearly, maybe, might . . .” said Brendan, smiling.

George glanced down at his father. There was a wicked smile on Brendan's face. He smiled that way at home sometimes. Once he had smiled just like that before he broke a bottle of wine across Richard's face, when he had agreed with their mother that there were fifty-four cards in a deck. His mother had also been beaten later, so the family all agreed that in fact there were only fifty-two cards. That was the way the McLaughlin house was run. Truth was imposed, not discovered. It was fundamentalism, and Brendan expected to be obeyed with religious observance. Black was white if he said so. The bottle had broken Richard's cheekbone, and given him a scar for life that he wore like a medal. His mother had been right all along, George discovered later: fifty-two cards and two jokers, and, as it only could have been, the joke was on her.

“Honestly, Mr. McLaughlin, I promise you that . . .”

“Promises, wishes, beliefs . . .” said Brendan, quietly as ever: sinister, silent, and slow as lava. “This here is my youngest son,” he said, tipping his head to George.

George's mouth felt dry as Brian stared at him, lips parted, spider veins on his cheeks and bloodshot eyes. Brian licked his lips and his eyes filled, so that he seemed desperate, grief-stricken. George felt his own eyes sting, but knew that Brendan would not allow tears—he never had—and George had learned early, from his father, from the nuns, how to control his own self-pity.

“My youngest son has instructions from me to pull out one of your teeth for every hundred pounds you owe me. Now . . . I don't know exactly how many teeth you have in that ugly head of yours, but I'm reckoning that we're going to run out. So after we've pulled them all out, we're going to have to extract that unpaid debt from elsewhere. You only have ten fingernails and toes, so we'll have to move on . . . your balls, your ears, your eyes, your tongue . . .”

George stood rooted to the spot, knowing that he would be unable to hurt Brian and aware that if he didn't his father would hurt them both. He was just a teenager and already he felt that he had seen enough. At night he dreamed of running away—going somewhere where nobody knew him and where he could live his life without the dark soup of fear in his stomach. But as long as Brendan McLaughlin was alive, there could be no escape.

“What's it to be?” said Brendan, slowly taking off his gloves and removing a pair of pliers from his pocket. “The easy way or the hard way.”

Tears spilled from Brian's eyes, fat, thick tears that fell
quickly over his full cheeks and off his chin. “I can get it. I can get it.”

“You said that last week, now it's time to pay. Now either we take our time and we see if you survive, if indeed that kind of life is worth living, or you do us all a favor and speed things along.”

“My business; I'll give it to you.”

“If memory serves, we looked at that. You're making a loss. What matters now is that you learn the consequences. I'm running a business too. I can't let the message get out that I'm a charity. Now decide—the quick or the slow way.”

“Quick,” said Brian, his eyes now dry, but the color gone from his face.

“Fine. There's a digger out there. You dig your own grave and then mix the cement.”

I
T WAS COLD
outside, but just as his father had told him, Brian got into the digger and began to make a hole in the rubble and dry, frozen earth. George watched him with his hands in his pockets, wondering what kind of hopelessness would cause such actions. It reminded him of the scrupulous way his mother cleaned up all her own blood after a beating, as if this had been her mess, her fault, her responsibility. The sound of metal breaking through the rocky earth seemed to scrape to the very core of George. He felt a dark, seething hatred inside him. It was as if all the ugliness in the world had a face, and it belonged to his father.

Brendan opened the boot of the Jaguar and took out a cricket bat.

“Well,” he said, smiling at George with his yellow teeth. “Are you ready to prove yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

Brendan handed George the bat. “I'll give you the nod and then you need to do the business. You'll be pleased to know it doesn't matter which way you hit him—with your left hand or your right.”

“I don't think I can . . .” said George, so quietly that the wind seemed louder than his words.

“I don't care what you think. You'll do it. You're useless at everything else, but anyone can swing a bat.”

Brendan turned and walked away from George, toward Brian in his digger, alone in the rubble; man and machine. The bat was heavy, the wood smooth as skin. It was a dead weight in George's sweaty hands as they walked back to Brian to find that the grave was dug and ready.

Brian turned off the engine and climbed out of the truck. He stood before Brendan, hands at his sides, shoulders down, so that he seemed less than a man, Neanderthal, base, awaiting his fate. Without being asked, Brian moved to the head of the pit he had just dug. The wind breathed coarse and chill through the exposed site, lifting up the fine hairs on Brian's scalp and causing Brendan to turn up the collar on his wool coat.

Brendan moved closer to Brian and took the back of his neck between forefinger and thumb. He forced him down onto his knees in the pit, climbing down into it with him. George watched from the lip of the grave, the cricket bat in his hands. He looked around, as if for help, but there was no one and nothing in this wasteland: no witnesses, no judge.

Still with his hand on Brian's neck, forcing it downward, Brendan looked up at George, commanding.

The smooth cricket bat was slick in George's hand. His
heart was beating so hard that it felt as if it might fall, pounding, out of his chest. All he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears.

“Are you ready, Brian?” Brendan whispered hoarsely. “Have you said your prayers?”

Brian was still hunched, bent over, his knuckles almost touching the rubble in the pit that he had dug.

“I'm ready,” he said.

Brendan turned and put a hand on the lip of the pit to help himself out.

Brian hunched, spun, and straightened, as if throwing the discus. He had a brick in his hand and smacked it into the side of Brendan's face. There was a dull thud as the brick made contact: flesh over bone. Brendan sank to his knees and stayed there, stunned, a hand to his face, then watching the blood on his palm.

Brian looked up at George. It was clear what was going to happen, but Brian had shown that he would go down fighting. The isolation of the yard crawled over George like cockroaches. It was a deed no one would witness. It would right a wrong. It would free him.

George refused to meet Brian's watery blue eyes. He swung the heavy bat, left-handed, driving it away from his body, then pulling it forward, true, athletic, murderous. It was a fluid, beautiful moment of perfect coordination and power.

There was a sound like an ax hacking into a tall tree. George drew the bat toward him and the tip was bright red with his father's blood. Brendan fell forward into the grave.

“Mother of God,” said Brian as he scrambled out.

Face-to-face, Brian and George looked at each other. Brian was a small man and had to raise his chin ninety degrees to
meet George's gaze. They were silent, looking each other in the eye, kindred in guilt.

George swung the bat again and Brian winced, but George merely tossed it into the pit on top of his father. “I suppose you know what to do now?” he said, looking down at his father, his hands in his pockets.

Brian said nothing but went to the cement mixer and began loading it up with cement, sand, and water, while George kicked in the rubble. When the cement was ready, Brian poured it into the hole.

The way that Brendan had fallen into the hole, his wrist and hand were in the air, as if to contest a point, raise a question. A full batch of cement covered Brendan's body, but not his questioning hand. Brian mixed another batch to cover the gray hand that rose from the grave, assertive, blaming.

As the second batch of cement was poured in, George slipped into the trailer and came out with Brian's half-smoked pack of Silk Cut in his hand.

They stood, side by side, each smoking a cigarette, silent over the grave, then let the butts fall into the slowly hardening cement.

“What happens now?” Brian asked.

“Nothing,” said George. “I'll say we warned you and left. My father went for a pint and I went home and we never heard from him again. Who'll be sorry?”

Brian's eyes were round, all the whites showing.

“The important thing is to say nothing. My brothers might come after you for the debt, but this . . .” George kicked a quarter brick over the grave. “This didn't happen.”

George drove the Jaguar into town, where he parked on the Shettleston Road, not far from the Portland Arms where his
father drank. He dropped the keys down a drain and then returned home, where his mother was making stovies.

The pot of boiling potatoes had made the kitchen windows steam up, and so George opened one as he ate. A breeze came into the kitchen and the frill of the tablecloth fluttered. His mother was smoking Woodbines by the fire, watching him.

“How did you get on?”

“It was fine.”

“Was there trouble?” she said, wincing at him, holding the smoke in her lungs.

“There was none. It was just warnings.”

“Did he say when he'd be back?”

“No, he went for a drink.”

His mother looked back at the fire.

George took another mouthful, but something flew at his head and he ducked, stabbing himself in the mouth with his fork. It was a sparrow. It darted around the kitchen, quick as a grenade, panicked, hitting off the mince pot and the stone sink before it found its way back to the window.

“Quick, George, help it.”

George threw open a second window, but the bird did not see it—could not determine glass from open window and continued to batter itself against the panes. With his large hands George tried to clasp it, but the bird only threw itself harder against the glass in panic, its small wings and beak now weapons of self-harm.

“Here, George, use this,” said his mother, handing him a tea towel.

George stood with the towel in two hands, as if waiting to receive a baby from its bath. He walked toward the window and tried to catch the bird, but it only became more fearful and
agitated. It flew a loop of the kitchen and then straight into the glass before falling dead on the floor.

It was smaller than a mouse. He held it, still warm in his hands, flecks of its blood marking the white tea towel.

“The poor mite,” said his mother. “The stupid wee thing.”

“Not so stupid,” said George. “Birds aren't used to being in kitchens.”

T
he page was covered in untidy letters, blue pen on ivory hotel paper. The bairn slumped into him and he pulled the traveling blanket over her.

“Are you sleepy?”

She was too tired to respond. The eyelid over one eye was closed, the other half open, watching him. The letters that he had written lay on his lap, a testament of what he could have become. Before he had been able to write his name he had killed a man: cracked his own father's skull. Now he was twenty-seven years old and trying to make a fresh start. The layers of his life were compacted already, as sand and silt turns into rock. He couldn't see clearly how to turn the violence, hurt, and corruption into love and truth. He wasn't sure he would be allowed. With her small, warm, soft body next to his he felt guilty, red-handed. For a moment in the warm twilight of the camper, he wondered if this was as far as he could go. He wondered if the dream would be forever out of reach.