by Mary Jaine
"Eat as much as you want, Bobby; we saw what's in the pantry. Poor you, I don't know how you survive on so little, I never knew things were so tough for you! You eat all you want, there's plenty for you, there always will be, I promise!"
Her eyes were brimming with tears, and I bridled; who the hell was she to come in here and start pitying me? I'd managed okay so far, and I didn't need some stranger patronising me! That was my father talking, of course, and even as the resentment flared inside me, I realised how barren it was, how that kind of thinking had left me here to slowly dwindle away. I told you, I was an uptight prick, and never more so in that instant, when I hotly, foolishly, resented the simple act of another human being reaching out to me.
I looked away in embarrassment, knowing that she'd somehow read every mean and angry nuance of my reaction to her, the embarrassment growing to encompass the knowledge that they knew I was so hard-up I was reduced to living on baked beans on toast and tomato soup. Shereen put her hand on my chin and turned me to face her.
"Bobby, you're my brother, you're Rick's big brother, and I won't ever leave you hungry or cold; when Rick brought us here it broke our hearts to see how little you have and how you have to live, alone and with no-one to care about you. We won't let that happen again; that's a promise, okay? You'll never be alone again, cross my heart!"
I was trying to take this all in; this girl, my...sister, was promising to take care of me, and all I could do was wonder why; I didn't know her, I had no connection to her, and I couldn't understand the deep connection she seemed to feel with me; was I so disconnected from people, so wrapped-up in my own struggle that I'd forgotten how to relate to others, how to be grateful? Had I ever really learned how to do that? With a rush of shame, I suddenly realised I'd never felt gratitude to another living soul, only an almost overpowering sense of entitlement. I'd never related to other people in any meaningful way because I knew I was better than them. Was that really the legacy my father had left me? To be a complete and total ass?
Rick leaned over and slapped me on the shoulder.
"Take it easy Bobby; it'll take a while to sink in, but it will, believe me! It took me a while, but you're smarter than me, you should be able to figure it out in jig-time! Just take my word for it, it's worth it, honest! Now eat up, we have a lot to tell you, and you're not going to like any of it, but you have to hear it; then perhaps you'll understand better what and who we are, and why everything happened the way it did."
When we'd finished, Rick and Yasmin cleared the table while Shereen led me into the sitting room, and I have to be honest, I was captivated by the sight of her bouncy little bottom twinkling in her skinny jeans as she walked ahead of me. I only had the ratty old couch and a battered prolapsed armchair I'd salvaged from a house being demolished, so I motioned her to the couch and pulled the chair a little closer so we could have that talk Rick had mentioned.
Rick and Yasmin came in just then, and plumped down on the couch, Rick in the middle of those two beautiful, exotic-looking girls. Rick was definitely uncomfortable, but he obviously wanted to tell me whatever it was that was so important, so I waited patiently.
"Bobby, you're not going to like this; I didn't, it still tears me up inside, and there's so much of it, so here goes; first off, Bobby, about Nicky..."
I rolled my eyes; the last thing I wanted to know about was that spoiled little mummy's boy. Rick looked annoyed at my impatience.
"No, Bobby, you've got it wrong about Nicky; we were both wrong, no Bobby!" as I tried to interject, "Just be quiet and listen, for once, just listen, please!"
I was the verge of walking out, but something stopped me; perhaps it was the look on his face, or the note in his voice...
"Bobby," he began, "We were wrong about Nicky, so wrong; he didn't desert us, or leave us in the lurch; dad beat him half to death, and Barbara got him out of here to save his life!"
I stared open-mouthed in shock; I was disinclined to believe him, then all those evasions and refusals by dad to give any real answers about where Nicky was, or why he'd left so suddenly re-surfaced; all dad had ever said was that he was a namby-pamby little mummy's boy, and good riddance; now perhaps I was about to get some answers.
"Nicky tried to stop dad beating Barbara up, and dad hurt him; he hurt him really badly. He boasted that Nicky was going to carry those scars 'til the day he died, that every day, when he saw those scars, he was going to remember who put them there; according to him, that was a father's true, lasting legacy; the last time dad saw him, Nicky was a blood-soaked ruin, and he was proud of what he'd done to him; Nicky didn't run; dad almost killed him, and left him nowhere to go; Barbara helped him escape before dad killed him, and he would have, God, he would have..."
He swallowed, then continued.
"You remember how dad always used to lay into Barbara, we'd listen, and just shut the door and ignore it? How we always said it was nothing to do with us? We should have tried, Bobby, maybe if we'd tried, maybe she'd still be here, maybe Nicky wouldn't have gotten so badly hurt! Just once would have been enough, Bobby, just once could have saved her!"
My head was spinning with this, and something he'd said came back into focus.
"Who did he boast this to; who was he telling all this to?"
Now Shereen spoke.
"He was telling this to mummy. We were there, he was drinking and pawing at mummy, and telling her all this stuff, boasting about it, like it was something to be proud of! We were there, but that didn't stop him groping and mauling her. He told her so much more; Rick?"
Rick took up the story once more.
"Bobby, I don't know how to tell you this; I wish to fuck I'd never found out, now I'm going out of my mind, and I don't know who can help me, or you!" He paused for so long I thought he'd said all he was going to say, but then I saw the tears start.
"Nicky wasn't Barbara's son, Bobby; dad snatched him from his first wife and brought him back to England from America. He's not Barbara's son; I am, and so are you; she was our mother, Bobby, Barbara was our mum, and he never told us, and he wouldn't let her tell us either. That son of a bitch stole us from our mother, and lied about her to us all our lives, he made us hate her, he made us into things that sat there and grinned while he beat her and hurt her, and I still don't know why, and now I know why she died; Shereen's mother told me the truth; he killed her, Bobby, he killed her just because she went through his papers, he thought she was trying to find something to give to the police, something to get him put away, so he strung her up and watched her die, and now he's never going to pay. Oh Bobby, what are we going to do?"
The tears were running down his face, and I couldn't do a thing about it; I was literally frozen in place as the whole, terrible, evil story unfolded. Yasmin was holding Rick as he cried like a small child, but all I could feel was cold rage that my whole life was being turned into a sham, a web of lies spun by a man I'd idolised. All I could do was shake my head in denial; this was a lie, it had to be, it was some weird nightmare, and any moment now I was going to wake up and it would be time to go back to my shit job for shit money and live out the shitty remains of my shitty life.
"Bobby...!"
I looked up to see Shereen standing next to me. She knelt down and leaned on the arm of the chair.
"Bobby, it's all true. Our father was a vile man, who did vile things because he could; he thought his money made him invulnerable; he hurt mummy so many times, and he'd just laugh and say that's what chilli-cracker whores were for. My mother was a brilliant businesswoman, a London Metropolitan University graduate in business and finance. She owned properties all over London, Robert Davies wanted those businesses and properties, so he sabotaged her arranged marriage to shake her loose from her family, and suddenly he's in her bed, and all her properties, all her businesses, all now belonged to him."
She was looking away into the distance now, seeing something I couldn't, her expression set and her voice flat.
"He'd turn up out of
the blue, drink Scotch until he was in the mood, then drag her off to bed, and in the morning she'd be covered in bruises, cuts and scratches, and usually a black eye or two. Sometimes he'd beat her up in front of us; we were small and he was our father but that never stopped him hurting her in front of us."
She stopped speaking to wipe her eyes with the heels of her hands,
"He used to tell us that when we were old enough, he had some friends who wanted to play with us, he used to call us little chilli-cracker sluts, half-breed whores, vile names from a vile man, our own father; he was a racist, but he saw nothing wrong in forcing an Indian woman into his bed, and promising the children he fathered on her to his friends, for a price. Our own father was going to whore us out to his friends, Bobby, he thought it was funny! can you even imagine what it feels like for your own father to tell you his friends were waiting to do to you what he did all the time to mummy? That's what he made us live with, that's the kind of man he is, Bobby."
Tears were running down her cheeks again, but she made no move to wipe them away this time.
"He used us to control her, he'd tell her what he'd do to us if she ever went to the police, and she knew he wasn't bluffing; he took everything she'd built Bobby, and left her with nothing except her house, and only because it was in a trust and he couldn't touch it, the clothes on her back, and us; he's hurt so many people, ruined so many lives, told so many lies, but I wouldn't lie to you."
"Our father nearly destroyed all of us, but at least where he is now he can't hurt anyone ever again; he did everything he was jailed for, believe me, and more, so maybe now he's being made to pay for what he did, maybe now he's learning what it's like to be powerless and at the mercy of people who don't give a fuck about you. Ricky told me you thought he'd been railroaded, but the system here never caught up to him; at least the Americans saw him for what he was, and stuffed him in a cage and threw away the key; now maybe he's getting some justice handed to him!"
I listened in horror; what Rick had told me was bad enough, and now this; my father was a psychopath, he had to be, to inflict such suffering with no flicker of remorse; we were his children, and he'd lied to, hurt us and stolen from us all our lives. And now I was remembering how Nicky had hinted time and again to us about Barbara; he must have known all along that she was our mother, and he'd tried to let us know, and we'd just snubbed and ignored him...
Maybe Barbara (and even now, after everything I'd been told, I still couldn't call her 'mum'!) was so beaten down, cowed and frightened she made him promise not to tell us; it made sense; the way Nicky was attached to her, he'd have done anything for her. I felt a deep stabbing pang of remorse and guilt for all the things I'd said or thought about both of them, and suddenly I missed my big brother, I wanted to see him again, and to beg his forgiveness for all those bitter, thoughtless words, all the unfounded hate and anger; I needed to know if he was alright, if he'd even survived that beating, if he'd managed to find his way back to his mother, if he had a family who took better care of him than we had, and if his life had somehow worked out.
There was one other thing I had to know, a glaring omission in Shereen's story.
"Shereen, where's your mother? Why didn't she come with you?"
Shereen looked at me levelly, fresh tears welling up in her beautiful eyes and spilling down her ivory cheek.
"She died, Bobby, three months ago. She had a massive brain haemorrhage, she just...went, like that; she didn't suffer, she didn't feel a thing; the coroner thought it was possibly connected to all the violence she'd been subjected to, but she'd taken so much punishment there was no one thing to blame her death on. Ricky helped us get past it; mummy liked and trusted him, loved him, even; she told him most of what you just heard, and made him promise to look after us if anything happened to her; it was almost like she knew what was coming..."
Rick was still crying softly and Yasmin was cradling him, but she had tears in her eyes too. I looked at my brother, my sisters, and all I could feel was a kind of hopeless, empty dread. Even now, with him in prison so far away, my father was still here, in this room, lying coiled up inside me; he'd made me what I was, and all I'd learned came from him; one day he was going to come out of me, and I couldn't allow that, not now, not after what I'd learned about him, and us. What use was I ever going to be, with that monstrous scab caked on my soul?
And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do to fix it; our father had put so many sharp bends in me, instilled so many hatreds, so many wrong ideas, it was all I knew, all that I was, so how could I ever hope to be normal?
The answer, of course, was staring me in the face; I couldn't; I was badly damaged goods. Maybe our mother had wanted him to catch her and do that to her, maybe she knew that there was no way to fix what Robert Davies had done, to her, to us, to all his children, and she'd used him to put her out of her misery.
Had she sacrificed herself for us, even though we felt nothing for her, sacrificed herself in the hope her death would set in motion the destruction of her husband and free his children?
That one question hammered at me, but it was too dreadful to contemplate, that someone could be so desperate that they could be driven to that, and now the full horror of what I was, what he'd made me into, hit hard; all I could ever do would be to follow in his footsteps, plough my way through other people like they were chaff in a field, because that was what he'd made me, and the only thing he'd ever taught me, the only thing I knew.
I couldn't change, I knew that; I was condemned to follow in his wake, and destroy everyone in my path; he'd seen to that.
Suddenly, it came to me with shocking clarity just how simple it really was; there was a way out for me, one that solved everything for everyone and shut this nightmare off for me forever.
Rick was still adaptable enough to change, the evidence was right there in front of me, the same for the girls; my father had somehow been unable to worm his way inside them, but me, I knew how damaged I was, how immersed I was in the ways and values of Robert Davies.
I'd felt at times that the only real cure for what ailed me, the only way out of this fucked-up travesty I called a life, was a bullet in the brain; perhaps that really was my best and most realistic way out of this hopeless nightmare. This whole series of revelations had shown me just how deeply Robert Davies had reached down into me, and what it had shown me with shocking clarity was that there was nothing inside me worth the having, nothing to save and no soul to speak of, just a whole lot of me, and it was fouled and slimed with him and his values, an irretrievably lost cause; all I'd ever accomplish would be to infect, damage, and destroy those around me.
Everyone at some time in their life has stood on a high place and felt the conflicting twin compulsions, to both jump and step back from the edge; for me the time to make that jump had suddenly arrived, in the first full moment of clarity I'd ever experienced. Authors and philosophers talk about a life worth living, how about a life so fouled and polluted that it should be discarded, for the good of those around you?
I had to go somewhere quiet, I had to think about what I'd just discovered about me, who and what I was, and where I belonged in this 'family' that had suddenly descended on me. I got up out of the chair and made for the door, Shereen watching me closely. As I reached for the door handle, she called out my name.
I turned to see her looking at me oddly.
"Bobby, where are you going?" she asked me.
"I have something I have to do," I answered truthfully, "Goodnight Shereen, I think Rick needs you; keep an eye on him please."
I closed the door firmly and walked up the stairs. Once in the bathroom, after locking the door, I picked up dad's old straight razor and sat down on the edge of the bathtub, idly watching the light play on the blade of the old razor, suddenly fascinated by the tiny points of light along the edge, the sign of a well-sharpened blade.
As I watched the light ripple on the old steel, I thought about what Ricky and Shereen had told me;
my father was a murderer, he'd killed my mother, and I was just like him, I was a chip off the old block in almost every way. If I stayed with those people downstairs, and somehow I still couldn't bring myself to think of them as 'family', because they weren't, somehow, in some way, I would be responsible for bringing them down, because that was my nature, that was how I was bred.
I realised my first impulse was the right one; the blade was my way of protecting them from me, the one thing I could do for them that would keep whatever was still coiled-up inside me away from them forever; this blade was their guarantee of a life free of my father and his influence.
Shereen must have seen something of my inner turmoil in my eyes, because just as I had decided to make that final, sweeping cut across my throat and end this whole miserable existence for me, the door burst open and suddenly Rick was holding my hand away from me in a grip I just couldn't break free of.
"Bobby, what the fuck are you doing, just give...me...that...!" I let the razor go as my hand opened involuntarily, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Shereen kick it out of reach under the bathtub.
"Bobby, what in the name of God are you doing, why would you want to...to...?" she asked, her eyes wide and frightened.
I was having trouble speaking, as Rick currently had his forearm in my throat as he held me flat against the wall.
"Why, Bobby?" she whispered, and I answered her as best I could while struggling to escape from Rick's hold on me.
"Don't you know what I am? I'm him, or I will be! I can't be one of you! I'll break it all up, I know I will, and you all deserve better than that! Please, please, if you really think anything of me, just turn around, close the door, let me finish this my way!" I pleaded with her, my heart sinking as she slowly shook her head, then glanced at Rick and nodded slightly.
