The Business

by Martina Cole

  In fact, he had not even tried. She had sussed early on that it was nothing personal, it wasn’t because he was still mourning his best mate, or because he was planning his next move, it was because he didn’t have a fucking inkling about any of it. He was coasting, he was playing it all by ear. She had been saddened by his actions, but not really surprised; after all, her husband had confided in her many times over the years, had even respected her advice.

  So, she was now the brains of the outfit, and she had to get her head around that fact. It was hard, it was soul-destroying, but it was a fact of life. She had bills to pay and a family to look after. Two huge sons who had good hearts but no initiative, they were nothing more than employees and, as much as she loved them, that was something she had to accept. She had to give Jackie Martin the benefit of the doubt and see that he carried on the business in her husband’s name. She could only try her best. She had always been a realist, and she had always been the power behind her husband’s throne. She’d long been convinced that her husband’s business had not been as difficult as he had made it out to be.

  At the moment everything was going their way. As long as they all kept stumm, they were in with a chance. Her daughter, however, was dying to open that big trap of hers, and she knew it was taking all her willpower not to. In the last few months her daughter had gravitated from quiet submission, caused by her guilt, to her usual obstreperous self fighting to break out once more. Imelda had never had what might be termed a long-term outlook on life. She lived for the moment, and that was something that would never change. She was selfish, one of the most selfish people Mary had ever come across. And Imelda being Imelda, it seemed her naturally antagonistic personality was taking over once again. She felt that she had suffered enough, after all, in Imelda’s world, everything was about her, never anyone else. As far as Imelda was concerned, her father was dead, as was her baby’s father, and there was nothing anyone could do to bring them all back to life. Her attitude now was ‘Get over it.’

  She had grieved briefly, then it was a matter of keeping the act up for a while. And she’d played her part to a T. In fact, Mary had been more than pleased with her daughter because she had helped with the police and the press. None of them had ever said that she had been raped, it had never been said out loud, but the inference was there all the same. Even the Filth had seen fit to understand how something of that magnitude might cause murders, literally.

  Mary sighed in despair. Men were strange like that, even the most amenable of men was seen as a titan where their daughters were concerned. The mildest of men would be forgiven a murderous act if he was faced with a similar dilemma. Men, whether they liked it or not, were a bunch of fucking hypocrites. They would shag a table leg, fuck a hunchback if the fancy took them, then laugh about it with their mates. Forgetting, of course, that the girl involved was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. Indeed, in a lot of cases, someone’s mother. Men just saw it all from a man’s point of view, and that meant that even though the majority knew that Imelda had been around the turf more times than a prize-winning greyhound, they still admired and understood Gerald Dooley’s reason for doing what he had. He was now a hero in many respects and, even though he was dead, and his family was destroyed beyond repair, even though everyone who knew him felt deep down in their boots that he was a fool, a mug, he had still done what he had done for the right reasons. Ergo, to all the men, bent and straight, he was now an urban hero. After all, Imelda was his baby and, no matter what the truth of it all might be, he had been murdered in the pursuit of his daughter’s rapist.

  Everyone had given him a free ride because crimes against women were on the increase, in fact, all crime was on the up. It was a dangerous society now, and the advent of punk rock, and high unemployment was not helping matters. The Irish Catholics from the six northern Irish states had brought their grievances to mainland Britain and were determined to be heard and, amid all this chaos and political propaganda, Gerald Dooley had been given a swerve. Suddenly here was a man who was guilty of nothing more than trying to right his daughter’s wrong. If he had not died at Jason Parks’s hand, had not been stabbed through the heart, Gerry would have been put away for the foreseeable future, most people in the know were aware of that. But as the priest had pointed out to her, Gerald was dead, and dead men couldn’t talk. Gerald was suddenly a working-class hero. Amid the complete mayhem that constituted most of the lower-working-classes’ lives, Gerald Dooley was a man who had tried to take the law into his own hands. A man who had tried to right a terrible wrong. Most of the people in Britain had no real redress where the courts were concerned, and they knew it. People were fitted up at a whim by the police.

  It didn’t matter how many times people watched rubbish like The Sweeney, the average person understood that, just because someone was a bit of a scallywag, that did not countenance fitting them up for a crime they had no hand in. If the Filth couldn’t gather enough evidence against a person they felt was guilty of a crime, then that was their fucking lookout. Fitting people up, like any other scam, had left the judicial system open to all kinds of illicit dealings. Bent Filth were nothing new, but bent Filth who were working the scams themselves were an entirely new entity. The Flying Squad, the Serious Crime Squad, and the average plod were suddenly seen in a new light. All that bad press, coupled with a government who did no more than pay lip-service to the problems that they had caused, didn’t help matters. Public morale was at an all-time low: it seemed that everyone was on the grab in some way.

  So Gerald Dooley had only been doing what the police should have done: he had been taking care of his own, taking care of family business, and no one was shocked that he had not seen fit to bring the police into it. That he had taken the law into his own hands was not something people questioned. All they had to do was read the papers: every day, it seemed, the world they lived in, believed in, was shrinking beyond recognition. No one would badmouth Gerald Dooley and for that much, Mary would be eternally grateful. Because, like her husband before her, what people thought was of tantamount importance to her. As always, the East End had closed ranks, and the Old Bill had nothing to really go on and, on top of that, they had no real inclination to make this unfortunate set of circumstances more public than it already was. In short, they knew what had gone down and they couldn’t do anything about it.

  Mary was also aware that her daughter was a scheming whore who, if she didn’t watch over her day and night, was capable of blowing the whole fucking shebang. That hardfaced bitch was already champing at the bit, was sick of having to play the victim. She was sick of being pregnant and was fed up with the police and their questions.

  Mary knew that though Imelda was wary of her simmering anger, she was not going to keep her equilibrium for much longer. She knew that her daughter’s attention span was not something any of them could bank on.

  Imelda was bored. She liked things dramatic and passionate and over with as quickly as possible. This was all going on too long for her, and she was now conveniently forgetting why this was happening in the first place.

  Mary watched as her daughter bit her bottom lip, saw the bump that was her child, the child she had never once referred to off her own bat. Mary knew, as she looked at her daughter, that she was a strikingly beautiful girl, and that was not just the opinion of a mother, because all mothers were biased, it was no more than a fact. Imelda was a real beauty, and it was that beauty that had enabled her daughter to get away with so much for the best part of her life. She could lie to anyone about anything: she would look into their eyes and tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. And the first few times she did it, they would believe her, because they wanted to believe her and because she was a real beauty, and beautiful people had the edge. But eventually they would be forced to see her for what she was, because Imelda never learnt from her mistakes. She would lie and lie and lie until her lies were discovered. Till she was found out.

  Then the teachers, or her friends,
or whoever she was scamming at that particular time, would realise how she had played them, would realise that they had been had over, and that they had believed her fabrications without any kind of proof. Her good looks and her natural acting ability had, as always, given her the edge.

  Unfortunately, Imelda had never learnt when to step back, had not understood that her lies would eventually be found out. That was her Achilles heel.

  But Mary was determined to make her daughter take responsibility for her actions, at least once in her life. She was worried about the baby her daughter was carrying, a grandchild that she herself wanted so desperately, and yet she knew her daughter had no interest in whatsoever. She knew that all the time she was pregnant with the baby, Imelda could just about be controlled. It was after the child’s birth that the trouble would start.

  At the moment Mary wanted to get her husband’s funeral out of the way, then she could start running his business properly. She had Jackie Martin and her boys to use as fronts. But whatever happened, she was determined that she was not going to lose her livelihood.

  It occurred to her that she actively disliked her daughter now and, even after all that had happened, that realisation saddened her.

  The funeral of Gerald Dooley was much more than his wife had hoped for. It was massive, there were literally hundreds of people in attendance. It was so big that the traffic had to be diverted, and all the radio stations mentioned it in their traffic bulletins. It was a real send-off as far as everyone was concerned.

  Cripps Funeral Parlour had done a spectacular job as always. The plumed horses that were pulling the carriage were groomed within an inch of their lives and people lined the roads, their hats removed in reverence.

  It was a funeral the likes of which had not been seen for many a year. Young Faces abounded, all thrilled to be there, excited to become a little part of East End folklore. All pleased to have this story for the years to come. They happily mixed with the older Faces, the real criminals. Men who were not inclined to show their faces in public unless they had to. Men who were the movers and shakers of their world, but who had come out of their self-inflicted exiles to pay their respects to one of their own.

  Mary watched them: she knew each and every one of them, and their mothers and their wives. She knew that she was respected, knew that she was seen as a good woman. She also knew that the majority of the men there were aware that she was now the main earner for her family. She also knew that, even though they didn’t really like that fact, as long as Jackie Martin pretended that he was now the dog’s gonads, they would be happy to overlook the truth. Her boys were big lumps, and they could collect a good wedge with the minimum of aggravation, and she knew that was all they would ever do. They were never going to expand of their own volition, between them they were not capable of thinking up even a half-decent scam, or even working out how to improve on an old one, bring it up to date.

  Even at her husband’s funeral, Mary knew she couldn’t grieve properly because she knew better than anybody that this day was the only chance she was going to get to push forward her case. She knew that today she had the centre stage because she was burying her husband and, because of that, she was guaranteed an audience with anyone she wanted. She had one chance to prove that she was capable of carrying on her husband’s business, to prove that she could be as ruthless as her husband had been, to try and convince the powers-that-be that she had been running the show from the off. She knew she had the sympathy vote, and she also knew that, providing she brought in the money, she would be left alone.

  But what Mary really wanted today was not their fucking permission to carry on the earn from her husband; what she wanted, and she was determined to get, was more of their goodwill. More money. And she was astute enough to know that today she was liable to get what she asked for.

  As they approached the church, Mary looked around the funeral car. She saw her sons in the expensive black suits that she had bought and paid for, their sad faces. The defeated slump of their shoulders and their complete apathy caused her to punch them both angrily in their chests and, as they looked helplessly at her, she whispered with a quiet desperation, ‘Will you two stop looking so fucking sorry for yourselves? Get a grip. If nothing else, make your father proud of you both. Act like fucking men, real men. Pull your shoulders back, walk like men. Act like he would have done, but stop acting so fucking weak.’

  She was sorry for them, knew that they were hurting, but she also knew that if they didn’t grow up, eventually they would be outed. They would end up as someone’s gofer. It was on the cards, and she was not going to let that happen to any of them.

  Mary looked at her daughter then, saw the arrogance on her face as she looked at her older brothers. She knew that, like herself, Imelda saw them as dead weights, saw them for what they really were.

  It grieved her that this daughter of hers had been blessed with not only a serious beauty, but also with all the brains, and it broke her heart that her boys had been blessed with nothing more than their father’s brawn. They didn’t even have the personality that was required to make them use their strength for their own ends. She had been forced to do to them what Gerry had done: threaten them and bully them into submission.

  But she had done that, she had done whatever she felt was needed to keep her family going. She had nearly collapsed in on herself, had nearly let herself succumb to her grief and her sorrow. But in doing that she would have been in danger of abandoning her family in their hour of need. So she had picked herself up, and she had used her grief and her anger, and she had channelled it into something constructive. Women were always the ones who had to make sense of the world around them. Women were always the ones who were left to make the big decisions about the family, the children, the home where they would all reside together in harmony, and from where the children would one day leave without a backward glance as they established their own homes. Women decided what their family ate, what they wore, who they mixed with. Women picked up the pieces, mended their children’s broken hearts and broken dreams. And with sons they also sat holding them tightly while they were stitched up or their bones were plastered. Women were the reason for most of the good things in the world. And yet women were classed as beneath men because they were forced by society and nature to depend on men for their money, for their name, for their protection. Well, Mary Dooley had found out the truth of that at long last.

  Women were there for their men, they listened to them and they fed them, and they cajoled them when necessary. Women made their men’s lives easier, even though a lot of the time it made their own lives harder. Men had no real concept of pain, of love, of loyalty. Why would they, these things were given to them without a second’s thought throughout their lives?

  It was only now, when Mary was left alone, trying to keep her family together, that it occurred to her just how little her husband had actually mattered in her family’s day-to-day life. He had left her alone, and she had found that he was easily replaced. She could replace him, and she had replaced him. So, what was it all about? What was her life really about? She had married, she had given birth to her children, and she had done everything that had been expected from her. And for what?

  Mary had held her emotions inside, she had made a point of overlooking all the gossip about her daughter, had made it her mission in life to make sure that no one around them would ever know the real truth. But this daughter of hers, she was a loose cannon, she was not someone to be trusted. At least with the boys Mary knew she had a modicum of control over them. With this one she knew in her heart that she would not be able to control her for long, there was always going to be a conflict of some kind.

  As the Dooley family walked into the church, they gave the impression of a tight-knit, strong family. But Mary Dooley knew it was all an act; she was disappointed in her children and she was disappointed with the way her life had turned out.

  When they walked up the aisle of the church and genuflected before t
he cross of Christ, Mary and Imelda both saw the forlorn figure of Jason Parks’s mother; she was to the right of them, kneeling beneath a statue of the Immaculate Conception, her rosary beads already in her hand. She looked deep in prayer.

  Mary was strangely cheered when she saw her daughter avert her eyes, knew that even Imelda didn’t have the guts to look the poor woman in the face. But then again, neither did she.

  That people were already noticing her presence was not lost on Mary, and she knew that how she reacted to Louise Parks being at the funeral was very important; it would be talked about for years and she knew she had to think seriously about the best course of action. This woman had lost her only child, her son, and her son’s father, and she was a nice person. It hit Mary for the first time just how terrible it must be for her, to lose your child like that and then be told that he was a rapist into the bargain.

  Until now, she had not even thought about how this woman might be feeling, she had not given her a passing thought. The humiliation of Louise Parks’s situation washed over her then, the enormity of what had actually happened seemed to hit her like an invisible sledgehammer. She felt her heart constricting, felt the shortness of breath that always accompanied deep shame, and she knew that if her daughter had really been raped she would have chased this woman from the church the second she had clapped eyes on her. But she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t add to this poor woman’s burden.