by Claire Askew
I remember it was a bright day, but on the turn. Even Pennywell Road looked smart in the sunshine. But out over the green-rusted skeleton of the gasometer, dark clouds were stacking up, coming in off the Forth.
The Gunner was a badly cladded concrete box – I’d never been there before. It looked like a dead tooth that had turned black. The E had dropped off the wall but you could still see the rawl plugs, and the ghost of the letter where the wall had stayed clean behind the sign.
Fenton made me walk by a couple of times, casing the place. He lit a Marlboro Red, took a long drag, then passed it to me. In spite of the weed, I never did smoke straights, and Reds especially felt lethal. But Fenton had done this before: he was psyching me up, getting the adrenalin spike built before we stepped inside.
‘I don’t know what he looks like,’ I realised.
Fenton squinted at me, sun in his eyes. ‘I’ll daunder in first,’ he said. ‘You jist follow me, all right?’
For a second, I wondered if this was all a big ruse: Fenton had been dispatched to come and kick seven shades out of some random anyway, so decided to pretend it was my da. Maybe he was sick of me getting maudlin over a bevvy and going on with all my should I/shouldn’t I crap. But the thought had come too late: I was here now, and Fenton was already crossing the street towards the Gunner’s double doors. I didn’t have much choice now but to pull up my hood, ditch the fag end, haul myself up straight and follow him.
Fuck, but it was grim. Middle of the day, so only the real pro drinkers in. I registered fast it was a Hibs bar: team photos. Signed shirts in frames. Hibs pin on the barmaid’s neckline as Fenton ambled over in his Rangers-blue trackies and ordered us a pint of Tennent’s each, with a double Famous Grouse chaser. Two of Scotland’s shitest exports. I hadn’t been imagining I’d drink . . . thought I’d have a clear head for what came next. But Fenton knew best, and I found as I picked up the whisky my hands were shaking. I tapped it on the bar and then sank it in one. Fenton winked at me.
He propped the bar up with one elbow and I did the same, following his gaze. He took about a quarter off the top of his Tennent’s in one long suck. Then he gestured with the drippy glass across the room, and said, ‘Yon’s yer da.’
I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t him.
This guy Fenton was pointing at looked about seventy years old. I’d never known what age he was, how much older than Maw he might have been, any of that; she never wanted to talk about him and beyond a couple of tantrums as a child, I’d never pushed her to tell me. I knew that this man had been powerful, had been violent, but looking at him now I found it hard to believe. He’d clearly been shrunk by years of the drink. His skin was a sort of dirty yellow-grey, and he was thin as a beanpole. Not thin like I’d been before I met Toad and Fenton, and got built. Not wiry. Just thin. The flesh on his face hung loose from his cheekbones, and under each of his eyes was a deep pulled V of bagged skin.
Seeing him was almost enough: seeing how abject he was. Gangsters don’t really believe in karma – or maybe we believe that we are karma, in human form, in action – but if this really was my da, then karma had whipped round and bitten him good and hard. I looked at Fenton, and it must all have shown on my face, because he laughed.
‘Yeah, sorry, Puppy boy,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid ye are indeed related.’ He took his elbow off the bar to nudge me. ‘Will we go an’ introduce ourselves?’ he said.
I think I hesitated, but not for long. I remembered Nella, aged maybe twenty, telling my teenage self what she’d seen that night in the bathroom. Then I was over to that table almost before Fenton was.
‘All right, Jimmy,’ Fenton said. He parked himself in the chair next to my da, slapped his pint down. He’d said it like they were mates of old, like they sat in the Gunner together every day.
I’d seen as I got closer that my da was watching a TV, bolted to the wall in an alcove across from him, and showing some horse race with the subtitles on. Flat racing, no jumps. When Fenton spoke to him he turned. He looked confused, and I could see him doing the mental arithmetic of figuring out where he might have seen this man before. He never had, of course, but my da was a drunk. That sort of thing probably happened to him a lot.
I was able to ease into the seat opposite him without him really clocking me.
Fenton was talking. ‘Jimmy Jamieson, Jimmy my man.’ Empty patter: giving me time to assess the situation. ‘How’s it going on the ponies the day, son? How’re ye keeping?’
I could see now that next to my da’s glass, tucked under one corner of the beer mat, there was a betting slip. I remember thinking he’d been given bad tips.
‘Aye, all right, pal,’ my da said. He couldn’t place Fenton, and his voice was just ever so wary. He had the watery voice of a day-drinker, and the quiver in his throat of a man turning elderly too soon.
He must have felt me studying him, because he looked me full in the face then. Nothing: a blank. No recognition of seeing a resemblance in me, though I’ve always been told I’m the absolute spit of Maw. He, meanwhile, looked like Nella – or rather, I saw Nella in him. It wasn’t like, wow, my sister is a chip off the old block; but there was something there. Something around the eyes.
‘Fuck,’ I said, still looking at his face but speaking to Fenton. ‘He is my da. This is actually my fucking da.’
He sort of squinted at me then, in a way that made me wonder if he had other kids by other women, if this had happened to him before. Maybe.
He nudged Fenton as if they were lifelong pals. As though Fenton would take his side in what he clearly didn’t realise was to come.
‘Who’s this cunt, then?’ he said, gesturing at me.
Fenton laughed, and made as though to answer. But I was on my feet, knuckles curled and pressed into the table: I’d leaned over so close to him that I couldn’t focus on his eyes any more, and the details swam.
‘My name’s Charlie Birch, fuckface.’ I said it as quiet as I could, a sort of hiss in the teeth. Not to be menacing, though I guess it had that effect too. But I was aware that folk might still remember. I’d been gone a while, but memories are long – especially in pubs like the Gunner.
It turned out my da’s memory was long, too, in spite of the decades of drink. He flinched backward a little, and I watched him give me a cursory look up and down. I saw him take in the bulk of me, the scar tissue patches where my knuckles had scabbed. Tattoos on my neck, on the backs of my hands. I saw him panic.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus, oh Mary Mother of . . .’
He made to stand up, but Fenton was quick. It looked effortless: he grabbed my da’s arm and I watched his fingers lock on and whiten. That alone, I knew, would leave a bruise. Fenton dragged him back into his seat, spilling my da’s pint. It cascaded over the table edge onto the old man’s legs.
‘Oh Jesus,’ my da was saying. ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus.’
‘Fucking spare me.’ I sat back down then, eyeballed him across the sticky table. Fenton was still gripping the old man’s arm. ‘Quit the God-bothering, yeah? It’s too late. You’re going to hell, Jimmy, and if you don’t play nice and do as I say, it’ll be me who fucking sends you there.’
Her brother was lying on his side, facing her, the duvet pulled tightly around him on all sides, and his feet tucked into the bottom. Birch stood on the landing, watching through the half-closed bedroom door as Charlie breathed his long, deep-sleep breaths. He’d always slept like that: rolled like a burrito in the bedding. The fact that he still did – now he was such a big hillside of a man – made her want to cry for all the ways she no longer knew him.
Phone it in, Helen, she thought. You only need know that a suspect ought to be questioned, at the very least. And you know a lot more than that. Birch closed her eyes. This voice – her own voice, yes, unmistakably her own – was right. Charlie had told her barely anything, but still, she could only guess at the potential depth and breadth of the criminal activity he’d been involv
ed in. To knowingly keep him in her house could be tantamount to becoming an accessory to those crimes herself. And yet . . . she wanted time. She wanted to find out more. Where had he been, what had he done, and why had he never come home? That was her right, wasn’t it, to know those things? After fourteen years: yes, she thought, I have a right. But how to do it? How to keep hold of Charlie, and keep hold of the job? Not just the job, she thought. My whole life.
Slowly, his eyes opened. They looked gummy, screwed up. Birch watched as he came to, not knowing where he was, and then remembered.
‘Nope,’ she said from the doorway, as he focused in on her. ‘It wasn’t a nightmare. You’re still stuck here with me.’
Charlie levered himself up onto one elbow, and rubbed his face.
‘How long was I asleep?’ His voice was thick, dehydrated.
‘A few hours,’ she said. ‘It’s around two.’
Charlie huffed out air. ‘Jesus.’ He moved into a sitting position, and the bed creaked. ‘I told you to wake me.’
She rolled her eyes. She could feel them falling back into their old sibling patterns, in spite of themselves.
‘I just did,’ she said, though she’d done nothing but stand, watching him. ‘And you needed the rest, don’t lie.’
Charlie rolled his eyes at her. ‘Yeah, resting me up for my eventual arrest, interrogation and trial.’
His words nettled. There had been that sort of thinking behind it: my bed’s a lot more comfy than the hard shelves in the custody suite.
‘Eventual, yeah.’ It was the only barb she could muster.
Downstairs, she ran him a large glass of water. While he’d slept, she’d opened her laptop and stared at, rather than read, her emails. A terse one from McLeod, acknowledging her phone message. Later, a well-intentioned one from Amy: Get well soon – goodness knows we need you here! The email made her feel guilty, but also gave her a stab of hope: had there been some development on the case? Keep me updated on anything that comes up, she wrote back. Anything at all. I want to stay briefed. She’d refreshed the screen a few times, hoping Amy might reply immediately, then when she didn’t, Birch forced herself to move away from the laptop. She’d attempted to clean the kitchen. She’d put the clothes Charlie had arrived in into the washing machine, and the machine’s noises had kept her company for a while. She’d felt anger at her brother pulsing around inside her, ebbing away at times, then returning.
‘You hungry?’ she shouted through to him now. He’d found his place on the sofa once again, dressed in an oversized T-shirt she usually used as a nightie, and a pair of her yoga pants. The shirt had a motif of a black cat with yellow eyes under a CND symbol, and the text along the bottom read Cats Against The Bomb!: a throwback to her student days.
‘Sure,’ he called back.
She was, she realised, ravenous: she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She fished out from the fridge some garlic, sweaty mushrooms, half an aubergine whose cut, dappled end she sliced away and binned. Some vine tomatoes in a tray, whose skins had begun to wrinkle. Charlie padded into the kitchen and snorted at her as the knife slithered around on the chopping board in her tired hands.
‘Still a vegetarian, then?’ he smirked.
‘Yes, and while you’re in this house, you will be, too.’
She expected him to stay and talk, but he shrugged off back to the living room. A moment later, she heard him turn on the TV, thumbing the volume down low so that, from the next room, all she could hear was a general white noise of voices.
Birch made pasta: plenty of it, because she remembered what Charlie’s appetite was like. She chucked into her boring tomato sauce the last of the red wine she and Anjan had failed to finish that weekend. She fancied she caught a drift of Anjan’s smell – his warm, aniseed cologne – as she lifted the bottle. But she knew this was ridiculous. And besides, she was trying not to think about Anjan.
Charlie had managed to find a can of lager somewhere in the back of Birch’s fridge. She was impressed, having had no idea it was there. After he ate what seemed like his own bodyweight in pasta-with-grilled-aubergine, he pulled the tab on the lager can and sat back on the sofa, stretching his limbs out every which way. He reminded Birch of a tomcat, in that moment.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you still winching that guy Dale?’
Birch was eating – munching slowly, and thinking – and she found herself near choking on her mouthful.
‘Dale Meadows?’ She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Jesus, Charlie.’
Her brother shrugged. ‘What? He was the guy you were dating when I saw you last.’
Birch cast her eyes downward, smiling. ‘God,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought about Dale Meadows in years. I wonder what he’s up to these days.’
‘Probably joined the criminal fraternity.’ Charlie waggled his eyebrows at her, and took a sip of his beer. ‘I hear that’s what all the cool kids are doing now.’
Birch rolled her eyes. ‘Dale Meadows was not a cool kid,’ she said. ‘I mean, what was I even thinking?’
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Charlie make a face.
‘What?’
He grinned at her. ‘Oh come on. You liked him ’cause he wrote sappy love poems about you, and got you that bouquet of roses that time.’
Birch’s mouth dropped open. ‘God, yes he did – Valentine’s Day one year, he did. How do you even remember that?’
Charlie smirked again. ‘Keeping an eye on him, wasn’t I? That’s a brother’s job. I didn’t like the look of that fucker. Didn’t trust him not to break my sister’s heart.’
Birch felt something inside her warm, then, and expand. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said.
‘All right, Nella – don’t get all soft.’
Charlie took another sip of his beer. Birch ate her last few bites of pasta, and set the fork in the bowl on the coffee table between them. The companionable silence settled again.
‘He didn’t break my heart,’ Birch said into it. ‘I broke his, in the end.’
Charlie snorted. ‘Good,’ he said.
For just a moment, it was like everything had gone away. Charlie had never gone missing, their mother hadn’t died, there were no crimes committed, no moral dilemma, no secrets, no fear. Charlie had nipped round for some late lunch and a beer. They were just siblings, and that was it . . . just for a moment. But then the moment was gone.
‘I need to ask you some things, Charlie.’
She was going to take him in. She was. But once she did, he’d be out of her grasp. The potential conflict of interest would be huge: she wouldn’t be allowed near him. She wouldn’t be allowed to sit in on his interviews, wouldn’t know what he was being asked or what was being said. They might have no contact for a good while. She couldn’t do it without knowing some more.
Charlie sighed. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I had a feeling.’
She watched him settle down a look of defiance crossing his face, just for a second. He was prepared to push back at her, she could see, if he didn’t like her questions.
‘How did you make money,’ she began, ‘all that time? What work did you do, for Solomon?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘All sorts,’ he said. ‘I was a bit of a dogsbody, really. Translation, of course. And I drove vans. Drove stuff around. Followed guys we needed to keep an eye on. Moved . . . people around the place.’
Birch crinkled her nose. ‘You were just a chauffeur? I don’t buy it.’
Her brother looked down at his hands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Other stuff, too. I beat some guys up sometimes. Guys who deserved it, Nella, I swear it. Guys who really deserved it.’
She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘GBH,’ she said. ‘Assault. Aggravated assault. Great.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Charlie said, ‘pile up the charges, why don’t you?’
‘Were you armed?’
She knew the answer.
‘Sometimes. Yeah, I was.’
‘So, assault with a deadly weapon.’
<
br /> Charlie flinched, held up one hand like he wanted to stop traffic. ‘Quit it. Just ask me what you want to know.’
‘Okay. What else did you do for money? For Solomon.’
Charlie looked down at his hands. ‘My main job,’ he said, ‘was running one of his saunas.’
Birch blinked, then sat quietly.
‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking brothel. But it wasn’t a brothel, it was a sauna. Saunas are licensed premises. We had all our paperwork and everything.’
‘Solomon,’ she said, her breath catching in her throat. ‘You’re telling me Solomon had legit paperwork.’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. Not him, I mean. We did. Me and . . .’ Charlie’s voice took on a tremor. ‘Vyshnya. The woman I worked with. The . . . mother hen, she called herself. We looked after the girls. Solomon has a huge business empire, Nella. It’s not like he’s there doing spot checks. Vyshnya’s name was on the licence, the punters paid in cash. We all took our cut, Solomon got the rest.’
Birch frowned. ‘The women there, were they—’
Charlie held his hands up, anticipating her question. ‘I don’t know where they were all from. Vyshnya told me that some had been brought there by Solomon. That they’d come a long way, had a hard time.’
‘They were trafficked.’
His hands were still in the air. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But not all of them. Hanna, the girl I went out with – she was putting herself through uni. There was a girl there, Karen, she was Scottish. She’d been a cam girl before. It was—’
‘But some of them were,’ Birch interrupted. ‘Or might have been.’
Charlie dropped his hands. Once again, he looked down. When he spoke, his voice was small. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know that was something Solomon did. Something he does.’
Birch bit her lip. ‘Trafficking in persons,’ she said. ‘Making you an accessory to trafficking in persons.’
Charlie looked up, his eyes sharp. ‘Nella, I said stop it.’
But Birch stiffened. She’d heard the creaky rattle of her front gate, and on the path outside, footsteps.
