Silence. He wasn’t pretending; it was as though familiar people and places from his past had been wiped from his mind. Every time she tried to jog his memory an occasional, puzzled expression would flit across his eyes, only to disappear as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only blankness.
‘Glickman’s is still there, but Frances, Anne and Max are long gone.’ Her voice sounded very loud in the silence. Peter didn’t remember any of them, she could see that, but more than that, she realised, he didn’t want to remember them either. That’s when it hit her; it was called brainwashing. How many times had she heard that description and assumed she understood it? Only she hadn’t, not really, not till now. He had gone, Peter no longer existed, and with him had been banished all his memories of his family, except for Lily, because Kathy looked like her. The place where he grew up, his background, they had all been erased. He’d told her this, of course, he’d said he didn’t want anyone in this strange place to know of his background, because he had reinvented himself. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ll be going back to Scotland tomorrow night. Why don’t you meet me in LA in the morning or the afternoon, and we can have a proper chat?’ She took a piece of paper from her bag and wrote on it the address and telephone number of her hotel, then placed it on the table in front of him. Peter didn’t look at it or attempt to pick it up, nor did he make any reply. ‘I’ll wait for you to call me,’ she said brightly, but she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him.
On the long drive back from Gabriel’s Gateway she frantically tried to marshal her thoughts. It should have been the showdown of the century, her revenge, the outpouring of the anger that had been simmering against him all these years, about the way he had always treated her, about his non-appearance at Lily’s funeral and his total lack of concern afterwards. About being so bloody loved for no bloody reason! But there had been nothing there to fight against, it would’ve been like punching marshmallow. Whoever that weird, purple-clad creature was, and however much he resembled Con, he wasn’t her brother. She had seen only pictures of Rose before, and the woman she had met without exchanging a word was as dead as Peter. He would now be in his mid-fifties, which meant Rose herself was barely fifty, but they both looked much older, and Rose looked ill; she had the look of someone in the latter stages of a terminal disease, and maybe she was. Yet she and Peter also looked so alike, as if they were related by blood rather than marriage. She had an overpowering impression that they weren’t happy, but they were caught, trapped where they were and had been for many years, and there was no turning back. She knew that even if she’d said, ‘Peter, Rose, I can get you out of this place,’ neither one of them would’ve accepted; they had gone too far down the road they were on to turn back. She couldn’t believe it, the tragedy of it. Peter was always going to make it big, Peter, as Jessie had said, couldn’t wait to shake the dust of the East End off his shoes, he was going places, and yet he had ended up like this! It was such a waste, such a tragedy, somehow. Even now that she had seen him and talked to him, in a fashion, she still found it hard to believe; every now and then she’d stop and think ‘It can’t be!’ She thought back to her conversation with the pleasant chap from the organization that kept watch on cults. She had tried to explain what Peter was like, that it wasn’t possible for him to be a follower of anything but the Cult of Peter, and the chap had replied wearily, ‘Please don’t tell me he’s the last person you’d expect to join something like this. That’s what every relative in your position says. But the fact is that it’s the strong personalities who get caught up in these things. They’re the ones who have high expectations and ideals, that’s what leads them to look for something more than ordinary life.’ Well, he’d been spot-on with his analysis, even his ‘vulnerable moment’ prediction had proved to be true. But what could she do about it anyway? Sneak back through the golden gates at dead of night and rescue Brother Peter and Sister Rose? People did that, of course, kidnapped their brainwashed relatives from the clutches of cults and tried to remove the brainwashing then reprogram them back into normality, into who they had been. But she could see there was no possibility of that. Peter and Rose would never be able to live in the normal world again, they were stranded in this bizarre life that they had freely chosen, and they would never leave, could never leave.
When she got back to the hotel she immediately arranged her flight back for the following evening. If Peter called and they met again before she left, she would tell him about her life, about where she was and what she was doing now, she decided, let him know, as the nice chap had suggested, that the normal world was still out there. She felt like a child telling herself reassuring fairy tales. ‘And they all lived happily ever after?’ she asked herself wryly. That night she went over it all in her mind, trying to make whatever sense there was of it. All the things she had liked, he had hated. Her bad memories of the East End were to do with Con and his drinking, and the rest of her mixed-up family, too, of course, because, let’s face it, Old Aggie was hardly an asset. But she had never blamed the other people she grew up amongst for that, they couldn’t be held accountable for the sins of her family circumstances. It was hard to believe that Peter had found it all so disgusting. The familiar smell of the Barras that to her had meant safety and security, he had loathed, even the way the people struggled to survive marked them as almost degenerates in his eyes. To Kathy they had been heroic. She admired the fact that they never went under, that however hard it got they managed to get through it, to get their families through it. They didn’t have the time or the opportunity to ‘evolve’, that was a dream they had for the next generation. The women her mother worked with in Stern’s, most of them were doing it to support children through university. They had given up on the dream of a better education and a better life for themselves, but they knew it was there and it would happen for their children and their grandchildren. And they were still involved with each other, they all had the usual problems of working-class life, but they had time for each other too. She remembered the anger of the women at Stern’s when Nancy tried to pretend her handicapped granddaughter was ‘a wee bit slow’, and how they had felt her anguish so much that they’d occasionally attack her for deliberately fooling herself and prolonging the agony. What was that but fellow feeling for one of them in pain? She had known people like that all her life, had instinctively recognised their situations and their feelings; why hadn’t Peter seen it too? He had even held their poverty against them, condemning them for living through cold winters in poor housing as though they had caused it. How could you blame people for being poor? They were all good people, decent, hard-working, kind – well, OK, most of them were, you couldn’t include the usual suspects – yet he had been disgusted. How dare he! She had worked herself into a rage, almost ashamed of herself for not telling him all of this, telling him exactly what she thought of his pathetic, self-absorbed attitude. Then she thought of how he had looked and her anger evaporated. He had achieved his ideal life among ideal people, he said, higher beings just like himself, but there was no happiness there. She would go home tomorrow and she would never see him again, but the memory she would carry with her would be of his utter sadness. Inexplicably, great sobs broke from her throat and floods of tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Why dae you care?’ she demanded of herself angrily, blowing her nose and trying to stem the tears, and the truth was that she didn’t know why, just that she did care. He was Lily’s son, she reasoned, Lily would’ve wanted her to try to reach him, to make sure he was OK, and though he wasn’t, there was nothing she could do about it. And, of course, there was her natural instinct to finish things, to tie up the loose ends, but it was more than that. They were all that was left of Lily and Con, they had common beginnings, common memories, not many of them good, but still. She was feeling her way towards it. He had been unfinished business; somewhere in her mind, though she hadn’t consciously thought about him for decades, somehow she hadn’t really believed that she would never see him again. Unfinished bu
siness then, was that it? Maybe. They should – what? – know each other? No, it was more than that. It came to her, not with the flash of a thunderbolt, but with a slow, soft, sadness that gradually came into focus till she saw it clearly: she had wanted him to be her brother, that’s what it was. After all these years she had wanted his approval, to have him look at her and admit that he’d been wrong, that she was OK after all, that she’d made something of herself. Maybe she’d wanted a big argument, a clearing of the air, then for him to hug her and, what? – to love her? She laughed harshly and blew her nose again. ‘Ah think that’s takin’ things a bit far, Kathy!’ she scolded herself.
Just as she had expected, he didn’t call by the time she left the next day, and she knew with absolute certainty that she would never see him again. Now it was over, and yet he remained a loose end and always would. It went against the grain, but maybe growing up was accepting that sometimes you couldn’t tie off every one. She had spent her entire life doing just that, thinking each time that she would be able to get on with her life after the next one was dealt with, but the truth was that there was always one more, then another. That was a fact, and the only way to avoid that was to do as Peter had done, retire behind a big wall and never again talk to ‘outsiders’. She remembered the time he had accused her of having no interest in other people, well now she understood that he had in fact identified his own greatest fault. He had looked at his very similar sister and seen the greatest difference between them reflected in the mirror, only instead of facing up to it he had shifted the blame on to her. On the plane back to Heathrow she couldn’t stop thinking about their cold, emotionless meeting. There had been no great reunion, no resolution even of their old differences, no ‘Well, cheerio, mind and keep in touch,’ even if neither side meant it. All she had was confirmation of how things had been, how they were and how they always would be. Peter had gone from her life for ever; it was almost, as that nice chap had said, as though he was dead. But what was it about men, she wondered, that sent them scurrying off into fantasy if they didn’t like the reality they had? Con had retreated into drink and Irish martyrdom, her mad cousin, Harry, had taken to his insane, though highly lucrative, world of mystical forces, spiders and conjuring tricks with gusto, rarely visiting Planet Earth. Even the old Orangeman she’d never met needed his sash and his marching bands to get by, and Angus, much as she loved him, had run up the white flag as he and Bunty were approaching the ends of their lives, making sure he wouldn’t be the one left behind to cope alone. But Peter, poor Peter – now there was an odd concept! – was the saddest of all, condemned to spend what was left of his life among the waving palms of the tragic purple land of Oz. He, like all the others, had found the harsh realities of his true background and early existence so unbearable that he had abandoned Peter Kelly from Moncur Street, and become reborn as Brother Peter, and in the process of running away from the East End he’d become trapped in Never-Never Land. Yet the women coped no matter how hard life was, they had no option because the men were all escaping to their boltholes. Lily coped with Con, as Kathy had herself, she had even been there at the end, with bad grace, it was true, because she hadn’t wanted to be there. And Jamie Crawford, living in his nice semi in Moodiesburn in his fantasy respectable world, his one of each children, and his repressed wife sacrificing herself and her dreams to keep it together for him, because she had to, she was a female after all. Even horrible Old Aggie had been left with the forbidden fruits of Frank McCabe’s loins, raising his child and letting him get on, unscathed and unimpeded, with the strange life he wanted to live, keeping their secret till the end, or near enough. And poor old Jessie the whore, who Kathy had despised all those years. Well, she had made the best of the bad breaks life had dealt her after the men in her life escaped too. Big Eddie Harris had tried to live out his big-time gangster fantasy and been dispensed with for being a nuisance, leaving Jessie with his child. Then Sammy Nicholson had taken a header down his own stairs, and OK, maybe he was only stupid, but Jessie was still left to cope. Even thick Claire’s unknown father had walked off, scot-free, as had all the other men Jessie had had through her hands, not to mention other parts of her anatomy. She had provided them with a few hours of fantasy and, once the money had changed hands, they had walked back to better lives than she had ever had, doubtless underpinned by wives too busy to lead them around on all fours like dogs, telling them what naughty boys they were and occasionally slapping their arses. And now she lived in an obsessive, anxious world, terrified of germs, beset by rashes and weeping flesh, paying more than her customers ever did for the way she’d coped, for being a woman. Dear God, with all those men standing by in the wings, it had even been left to the diminutive Maggie to save the collapsed horse the day Frank McCabe wanted to murder it! Rory was the only man she had ever met who dealt with life as it was, but then, Rory was Rory, the fabled exception that always proved the rule.
She thought of Margery Nairn, sitting in her nice, neat Bearsden villa, waiting for Kathy to bring news of her missing daughter. What was she to tell Margery, who’d probably done no one any harm in her life? She’d tell her that Rose was indeed part of a cult, that she’d had a long talk with her and Peter and there was nothing anyone could do, because they were happy and content. That was it; she’d lie. Margery would be heartbroken enough with that, but she’d cope, because she was a woman, she had no choice. Then she thought of herself, of her secret dead child lying with Lily and the other Kelly women all these years in St Kentigern’s, and of her flight to the West Coast. Wasn’t she living in a fantasy world as well? No, she damned well wasn’t, she wasn’t the one who needed a high wall to protect her from being contaminated by the rest of humanity! She had found a life that suited her, but she hadn’t turned her back on the East End. She could’ve, of course, she could’ve told the doctors treating Con at the outset not to contact her again, that she wasn’t interested. But she hadn’t, she had kept in touch, interrupted her life, her real life, and gone back to Glasgow when she had to, and in those last three months she had nursed him. She’d hated it, she’d objected loudly and often, but she’d still done it. What had happened was that she had outgrown her background, she had moved on from the poverty and the pain of her childhood and found something better, but she had never been ashamed of the East End. She was, and always would be, ‘that Kathy Kelly’, and even if she’d walked away, she had always come back when necessary, just as she would when Jessie’s time came, though where they’d find a coffin antiseptic enough for her to lie down in was anybody’s guess. All the men she knew, on the other hand, had run away, and chosen to inhabit their individual fantasy worlds rather than reality. Peter had as much responsibility for their father as she had and, as everyone knew, had been worshipped and adored in return for his blatant negligence; Peter had cut and run without a thought. In his need not to be who he was, he had become someone else, a poor, sad, brainwashed, wannabe if wingless angel, exiled in a land he could never leave. She had always thought he was the survivor because he’d managed to travel far enough to stay out of reach of Con’s demands and needs, while she had struggled to stay afloat. But she had stayed afloat, that was the point, when the dust had settled she was the survivor, not Peter, Peter had sunk without trace. She felt tears welling up again; maybe growing up meant admitting to feelings for people who probably didn’t deserve them, she thought. ‘Next thing ye know, ye’ll be greetin’ for Con!’ she chided herself, then added, ‘Naw, ye’re takin’ things too far again, Kathy!’ She determinedly diverted her mind to going home. This time tomorrow she would be back in Drumsallie, sitting with Rory by the fire he’d set in the cottage, and Cat would be waiting to pounce on her and rake her with his claws again. It would be cold, there would be snow on the ground and she’d have to wrap up to keep warm, though it would never be as warm as it had been in the furnace of LA. Cold winter, numb toes, chapped lips, now there was something to look forward to, she thought happily. In a couple of months she would be ba
ck at work in Glenfinnan, spreading the word to the tourist hordes about Bonnie Prince Charlie, chancer that he was, watching them lift Rory Mark II’s kilt to see, as Mavis loved to say, if there was anything worn underneath. This winter her alter ego, Lillian, had done no work at all, she’d been placed in mothballs for the duration. Maybe this was an opportunity to try something new as Kathy Kelly, though of course she wouldn’t tell Rory, not till it was finished and she was satisfied with it. If she did it, that was. She wondered if there would be a letter waiting for Lillian from Ishbel Smith, and how her greatest fan would take it if Lillian disappeared and wrote no more of heroic Bruces.
The picture of Peter pushed its way into her mind again. As she’d left Gabriel’s Gateway she had turned to look at her brother for what she knew in her heart would be the last time. He was standing looking back at her with his dead eyes, looking, but probably not registering. She wondered what Lily’s reaction would’ve been had she lived to see her only son like that. Disbelief, sorrow and hurt, no doubt. Maybe there were some things, she thought, it was better for Lily not to have known about. What was it Lily used to say about them? ‘The same, but different,’ that was it, and Kathy used to protest ‘But a helluva lot different, well!’ And she’d been right, but she still felt unutterably sad. Kathy Kelly who always insisted on having the last word, even, as dear old Jessie had said, if it was a daft word, had had to accept that sometimes there is no last word, daft or sensible. Then she remembered the hideous outfit Peter had been wearing, the purple shirt with the stand-up mandarin collar, the thong sandals, and the baggy purple trousers. Even feeling as sorry for him as she did, she couldn’t help laughing. At the end of the day he was still arrogant, better-than-everyone-else Peter Kelly, wasn’t he? ‘What an arse he looked!’ she thought, chuckling to herself. ‘What an arse!’
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