Thank God for my little Emma. If it wasn’t for her I don’t know what I’d do. The whole fucked-up, shitty mess I’ve managed to get myself in wouldn’t be worth jack-all if it wasn’t for her. That night, I looked down on her while she was sleeping in her little bed and she looked so beautiful, sweet and peaceful that I wondered how anything so precious could ever have come from me.
Obviously I confronted Our young’un.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ We’d been arguing about it for a while now and he didn’t want to go over the details again but I wanted him to admit it. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked him for what felt like the umpteenth time and he finally gave in.
He gave an exasperated sigh, ‘Because she didn’t want you to know, man. At the end, she made me swear not to tell you. What was I supposed to do? Break a promise I’d made to my dying ma?’ Then he turned from exasperation to anger, ‘I told you not to. I said that nowt good would come of it! Didn’t I?’
We were alone in Cachet so nobody could hear us. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you did!’ In some dark recess of my brain that was still logical, I could understand why he hadn’t told me but I was hurting and too angry for that. ‘You still could have told me. You owed me that. I always took care of you Danny, always!’
‘And a lot of good it did me!’ he roared at me. ‘You taking care of me put me in this chair!’ and he gripped the sides of his wheelchair in frustration and shook it.
Somehow I managed to retain the sense not to push it any further because there was still a lot of unspoken shit between us about that and neither of us would profit from any of it coming out now. Danny had been a fuck-up for most of his adult life and I made it my job to save him. I was well intentioned but now he was paralysed because of his involvement with the firm and he thought that was my fault. If we said all that out loud there’d be no going back for either of us. Instead, I stormed out of that room.
I drove around for so long I lost track of time. When I finally got home Sarah was cooking a late dinner in the kitchen. Emma was asleep upstairs. I walked up behind Sarah and wrapped my arms around her.
‘I’ve always solved our problems haven’t I?’ I asked her, ‘whatever’s been thrown at us, I’ve always tried to protect you?’
‘Of course,’ she answered, ‘but I don’t need as much taking care of as you think. I’m a bit tougher than that Davey,’ and she turned to look at me and gave me a humourless smile, ‘it must be genetic.’
‘I know and I’m sorry if you’ve felt trapped with me sometimes, it’s just that I promised your dad and…’
‘What is it?’ she looked concerned then and I realised that, for once, I had failed to mask my feelings. They must have been written all over my face. I knew the stress of dealing with so many problems all at the same time was beginning to get to me. Sarah put her arms around me then, ‘What is it, Davey?’ she repeated.
I was reluctant to tell her, but knew I had to. ‘I think I have a problem that I can’t solve. I think there is something that’s beyond my control.’
‘Tell me,’ she urged, and there was a fire in her eyes that I found strangely comforting, ‘there’s nothing we can’t solve together. You always keep me on the outside, you don’t tell me things… I know why you do it, to protect me, but this time I want you to tell me. Do you think I don’t know when something is wrong? I can see it in your face every time you step out the door. I’m not stupid Davey. I love you. Let me help.’
‘I love you too,’ I told her, ‘you and Emma mean everything to me. I know there are times when I haven’t shown that and I’m sorry. I know you are strong Sarah but there’s no way you can help with this.’
I told her everything then. How I was trapped between a powerful man who would kill me if I didn’t do his bidding and a vengeful superpower that would never tolerate me helping him.
‘There must be something we can do,’ she said.
‘There isn’t,’ I told her, ‘and you and Emma won’t ever be safe while I’m still breathing.’ And I drew her tightly to me then so she couldn’t see the look on my face.
When I arrived at Cachet, Danny was talking to the DJ and a couple of our dancers. I hung back and let him see me but didn’t approach him. He seemed to take a bloody long while to say his piece to them, so I guessed he was keeping me waiting to punish me or he was stalling because he didn’t know what to say to me. Finally he was done and they walked away. He turned his chair towards me and came over. He was wearing his ‘What the fuck do you want?’ face.
‘We okay for tonight?’ I asked, meaning the club, something I never normally asked him about.
‘Yeah,’ he said, but that was all he said.
‘And the gala dinner,’ I reminded him, ‘do you need anything?’
‘No,’ he shook his head.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ and before I could say what was on my mind he started to back his chair away so he could turn it in an arc from me. ‘About yesterday,’ I said and he stopped, ‘I didn’t mean any of it. You of all people know that. I was upset so I took it out on you. I was a cunt.’ I was apologising in a manner that I thought Danny might understand.
‘It’s nae bother,’ he lied, ‘we were both upset and we were both talking shite man. Forget it.’ That last bit was an order. Danny meant he understood and accepted my apology and this was his way of saying sorry too. You just had to know Danny really well to understand that.
‘Got time for a pint?’ I asked.
‘Always,’ he said quietly.
‘I worked it out man,’ he told me when we were in a quiet corner with our drinks, ‘not at first like. I was still only a bairn when you came along. She told me she’d been away and seen me dad. He had a job down south but he couldn’t get back ’cos it was too far away but maybe one day he might come home for good. She said we’d have to be patient for a bit longer and see how things worked out. Then, later on, she told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. I was only young but I didn’t believe her about dad coming back, even then. I mean, it was shite, wasn’t it?’
‘When did you start to suspect?’
‘When I was a bit older. I can’t remember what was said but I overheard one of the nosey old bints in the street making some comment about me ma being “no better than she ought to be” or some such crap. I didn’t say anything about it but it got me thinking about why she might have said it.’
‘So you asked her about it?’
‘Not then, no. It was later,’ he admitted, ‘much later, when I got back.’ He meant from the Falklands. I guessed, after what he had seen there, it put our mother’s extra-marital affair into perspective. ‘Anyhow, it didn’t go well. She got very upset. I told her it didn’t matter to me but she was ashamed, I mean she was well embarrassed by it and she made me swear not to tell you. I think she thought you’d have been really upset.’
‘And she didn’t tell you who the father was?’
‘No bro, she didn’t. She wouldn’t let on to me, honest.’
‘And you had no idea?’
‘No, not really. I mean there were always men around but that was down to her job. She worked in Bobby Mahoney’s clubs and pubs, so I’d see her chatting away to the regulars and the guys in his crew but she never brought one home. Sometimes she’d get a lift off one of them but they wouldn’t come in.’
‘She got lifts off Jinky?’
‘I can’t remember,’ he said, but I guessed he was just being evasive, ‘maybe, yes, I reckon so, a couple of times, but like I said he never came in. Our ma wouldn’t allow that, you know what she was like, bit of an old prude really when it came down to it.’
Our young’un laughed. ‘Guess she wasn’t quite as big a prude as we thought.’
‘You and me though,’ I reminded him, ‘we look alike. I mean obviously I’m the young, handsome one and you’re the old, clapped-out version but there is a resemblance.’
He nodded, ‘We both look like ma though.’