Blow Down

by JL Merrow

  That was rich, coming from him. The only reason people didn’t think him and Darren were joined at the hip was that Darren’s hips only came up to Gary’s knees. “You don’t reckon it’s necessary, then? I mean, you know, there’s all that bollocks about ‘the couple that plays together stays together.’”

  “And once again, I’d have to say I thought we weren’t talking about—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Right. No common hobbies apart from X-rated ones. Got it. Oh, cheers, love.” The barmaid had come over with our meals.

  “Sauce?” she asked, with a raised eyebrow.

  Gary beamed at her. “Oh no, thank you, darling. I’m saucy enough already, aren’t I, Tommy?”

  Me and the barmaid exchanged What can you do? looks. “Bit of mayo for me, please,” I asked, and started unwrapping my cutlery from the neat little napkin bundle it’d arrived in.

  Gary took a thoughtful sip of his martini before doing the same. “What’s brought this on? Has your young man been trying to drag you along on his mammoth-hunting expeditions?”

  “Nah, it was just something he said about, well . . .” I stopped, not sure if I should say anything. No, better not. I took a bite of crusty bread and cheese.

  “The ex?”

  Bugger. I struggled to finish my mouthful and had to wash it down with a gulp of Coke. “Yeah, all right, but if you tell anyone . . . And that includes Darren, by the way.”

  Gary pouted. “I’ll do my best, but you know how it is when you’re in bed with the man of your dreams. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, something just slips out.”

  “Yeah, well, use less lube next time. I’m serious. If Phil heard I’d been telling everyone about him and that git he used to be with—”

  “I’m hurt, Tommy. I am not everyone. But do tell. Is that how his previous entanglement withered and died—due to a lack of common interests?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.” I was not going to mention the cheating.

  I gave Gary a sharp look in case he’d somehow managed to guess this bit of gossip as well, but he was busy stroking his chin and staring into the middle distance.

  The old bloke came back from the gents’—I didn’t envy his proctologist—and sent Gary a worried look.

  “It’s just so hard to think what you and Phil might have in common,” Gary said at last.

  “Cheers, mate.”

  “Apart, of course, from an outdated attachment to the aggressively masculine, which, while I have nothing against it per se, is not really entirely my area . . . Oh, I have it!” Gary sat up straight, a proud smile on his face. “Shooting.”

  “Shooting?” I echoed, my eyebrows chasing my hairline as a phantom pain shot—heh—through my arm. “Seriously?”

  “Of course. Macho and violent enough for him, yet involving enough skill and precision to interest you. And, of course, with Phil preferring to cultivate an image as the strong, silent type, the headphones will be a definite bonus.”

  “I dunno. Doesn’t he see enough violence in the day job?”

  Gary gave me a stern look. “I was suggesting you shoot at targets, not actual people. I’ve heard gun clubs tend to take a dim view of that sort of thing.”

  “Ah . . . I dunno. I’ll think about it.”

  “And in his line of work, knowing how to use a gun could save his life one day.”

  Okay, so that was a stronger argument. But . . . “Maybe he knows already? From the police?” Phil had been in the force six years, because apparently it was cheaper than going to private-eye school.

  If, you know, there was such a thing as private-eye school.

  “Was he in the police in America?”

  Lacking a clean knife to cut the sarcasm with, I stuck up a finger. “No, but they have firearms units over here too, yeah? Some of ’em get training with guns, I know that much.”

  “So? Even if he did, maybe he misses it. I’ve heard a man can get quite attached to having something with that much power in his hands. Ooh, you know what? I’ve just had a really radical idea. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Screw the knife. You’d need a JCB to get through sarcasm that thick. I laughed. “All right, all right. I’ll suggest it. Sometime.”

  Gary pouted, but let it go. “Any other family news to tell me?” His tone made it clear just which member of my family he was asking about.

  “You mean Mike Novak?” I sighed. “Sod it. I’m gonna need another drink for this. Same again?”

  “Ooh, yes please. But tell her it’s an olive this time, not a cherry.”

  I got the drinks in—no olive for Gary, but they managed to dig up a slice of lemon for variety—and added a pack of ready salted to fortify myself.

  “Well,” I said, sitting down. “I’ve seen him a couple of times, but I dunno. It’s just . . .” I waved my hands a bit, as if the words I wanted were flying around in the air between us and I just needed to catch them.

  Then I told him.

  It’d been . . . Christ, I dunno. I mean, what the bloody hell do you expect, meeting your real dad for the first time? Just . . .

  I s’pose I’d thought there’d be some, I dunno, instant connection. That we’d get talking and somehow everything would make sense.

  Like, say, my psychic so-called gifts.

  I mean, I hadn’t thought it’d be like I’d mention it, and he’d say, Oh, yeah, that one: see, your great-great-great-squared-grandad married a gypsy girl and ever since then every firstborn son in our family is shit-hot at finding stuff and makes a killing as a plumber. And then launch into a funny story about him as a nipper finding all the presents three days before Christmas.

  Okay, maybe I’d thought that a bit.

  But what’d happened was, I’d mumbled out a question about supernatural family gifts, which he’d interpreted as me thinking he’d come from Transylvania because all those Eastern European countries are basically the same to us ignorant Brits, which led to a geography lesson I really hadn’t needed (okay, maybe I’d needed it a bit). By the time we actually got round to my gift, we’d been talking at cross-purposes so bloody long, it all came out sounding even more unconvincing than it usually does. Which, by the way, is another reason why I don’t tell people about it, not if I can help it.

  Mike—he’d told me to call him Mike, which was weird but also a relief, seeing as how I wasn’t sure I could call him Dad without feeling guilty about, well, Dad—had given Phil this look. I was fairly sure it meant something along the lines of Oi, you might have mentioned my long-lost son is in urgent need of care in the community. Phil gazed back stonily, which probably translated as No dissing the mental health of my intended, mate.

  Me? I’d changed the subject, pronto. Well, at least when you first meet the bloke who provided half your DNA, the one thing you’re not short of is topics to ask about. (And topics to avoid at all costs, come to that.) I’d found out he’d gone back to Poland and got married to a lass from his hometown after having his fling with my mum. Was that normal? For Europeans, I mean? I knew one or two blokes who’d spent a summer visiting family in India or Pakistan and come back hitched, but I’d always thought that was like a religious or cultural thing.

  I didn’t like to ask if she’d been his girlfriend all along. Patiently waiting for him to make his fortune in England and come back to marry her, while he played away with my mum.

  They’d moved to Bristol, him and the missus, and had a son. Just the one, which surprised me somehow, but I didn’t like to ask. “Daniel, he is twenty-five now. He works in construction. Doing very well.” Mike had showed me a picture of a fair-haired bloke who must take after his mum, looks-wise. Either that, or what was sauce for the gander . . . Nope. Not going there.

  Mike snapped a picture of me on his phone. I wondered if he was planning to show it to Daniel, and what he’d think about me looking more like his dad than he did. I mean, he was my dad too, obviously . . . but it still seemed weird.

  And the whole being Polish bit . . . See, as you probabl
y already know, Novak isn’t the way you spell, well, Novak in Polish. I mean, you say it the same, but it’s usually spelled with a w. Nowak. I s’pose, if I thought at all about it, I just assumed he’d changed it to make life easier for himself, like changing Patschke to Paretski back around World War I when having a German name was a bit of a no-no. I mean, these days everyone and his dog knows Polish w’s are v’s, but way back in the mists of time around when I was conceived, it was probably either spend your life explaining spelling and/or pronunciation to ignorant Brits, or change the name.

  Uh, no. Apparently that great-great-great-squared-grandad I’d been thinking about earlier had, according to family legend, actually moved to Poland from Austria-Hungary sometime around the Prussian War. (Or maybe a Prussian war. All this education was seriously doing my head in.) Mike even made a joke about it, said he’d had to come to this country to get his name spelled right. Then he pointed out that Novak was a name traditionally given to a bloke who’d moved into the area from somewhere else, so basically, no one had a bloody clue where my forebears had originally come from.

  I could be anything. From anywhere. Christ. I’d thought I’d come away from meeting Mike Novak with more answers as to who I was, where I’d come from, and maybe even why I had this weird psychic so-called gift.

  If anything, I had less of the bastards than before.

  I’d made the mistake of trying to talk it over with Phil, after.

  He’d given me a look. Seeing as we were in bed at the time, that involved turning over and pushing himself up on his elbow, which made me feel even more on the spot than I had done already.

  “What?”

  “You’re just like my sister, you are.”

  “You what?” I was fairly sure the number of things me and Leanne had in common, apart from a moderate fondness for one Phil Morrison (which, if he didn’t watch out, was liable to be getting more moderate by the minute), could be counted on the fingers of one fish.

  “Leanne. Don’t you remember her, back when we were at school?” He got that pinched look on his face he always did when talking of our mutual school days.

  Course, I couldn’t see a mirror from here. Chances were I’d got the same expression plastered all over my mug. “Not a lot, to be honest. She was a couple of years below us, wasn’t she?” And yeah, some of the younger girls had had older boyfriends, but by the time she’d have been looking for one, it was pretty much common knowledge it wasn’t girls I was after. Mostly, it had to be said, thanks to her big brother Phil spreading that juicy bit of gossip far and wide.

  Yeah, I definitely had a pinched look on my face. I could feel the tightness of it.

  Luckily Phil was back to staring at the ceiling now. “Used to be fat, didn’t she? Got a lot of shit for it at school.”

  Oh. Now I remembered her. A vague picture of a mousey-haired girl bursting out of her school uniform who spent a lot of her time crying. I hadn’t connected her with Phil, probably because I couldn’t remember ever seeing them together. Still, how many teenage boys want to hang around with their not-so-little sister where their mates can see them? Yeah, kids can be bastards.

  Case in point: you might have thought me and her would have a bit of fellow-feeling, seeing as we were the butt of most of the nasty jokes going around. Far as I could remember, we’d avoided each other like the plague, thinking (probably correctly) that if there’s anything more fun to rip the shit out of than a podge or a poof, it’s a podge and a poof who’ve chummed up together.

  Phil carried on before I could sort out how to say yeah, I remembered her when he put it like that. “She used to reckon, Leanne did, if only she could lose weight, her whole bloody life’d be sorted. She’d get a boyfriend, all the girls would want to be her friend, and no one would laugh at her anymore. ’Cept then she did it, and you know what? She’s still the same person with the same life. Just wearing smaller clothes. And yeah, a lot more boys fancied her. Trouble was, they were still the ones she could remember being pricks to her when she was fat.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not in school now, is she?” I said, putting an arm around him and snuggling in closer. “I mean, she must meet all sorts now. People who never knew her back then.”

  He didn’t respond. Not physically, I mean. “Yeah, and now if they don’t fancy her, she’s got nothing to blame it on, has she? And even if they do, she’s gotta be asking herself, would they have been seen dead with her in the old days?”

  There was an elephant in the room all right, and it wasn’t bloody well Leanne. I pulled Phil and his guilt trip for the shit he’d put me through in high school a bit closer and gave them both a cuddle. “Oi. Water under the bridge, remember? Anyway, I thought we were talking about my dad. How’d we even get onto this?”

  “Because what you were hoping for from meeting your real dad is exactly what Leanne was hoping for from losing weight.”

  “What, for more blokes to fancy me?”

  Phil huffed a laugh. “No, and you know it. For doing one thing to somehow give you the answer to life, the universe, and sodding everything, all right?”

  “Nah, that’s forty-two. Everyone knows that.” At least, they did if, like me and Phil, they’d recently watched Gary’s DVDs of the eighties TV series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (According to Gary, it was an absolute classic and not to be missed, so when I gave the DVDs back, I didn’t mention we’d stopped paying much attention fairly early on after a discussion about what you could do with two heads and three arms veered into X-rated territory with impressive speed.)

  “Jesus, I was a fucking stupid prick when I was a teenager. C’mere.” Finally Phil rolled over and hugged me back, one hand on my arse and the other stroking my hair.

  “You want me any more here, we’re gonna need another condom, just saying.” I managed to get about a millionth of an inch closer, even so.

  Gary listened while I went through my little spiel. About Mike Novak, I mean, not about what me and Phil got up to in bed or, for that matter, on the sofa in front of the telly. Not that Gary wouldn’t be interested, mind. But I like to keep some things private.

  Then he put his martini down thoughtfully. “Tommy, darling, you know I love you, but don’t you think you’re getting just a teensy bit obsessed with the whole who-am-I thing? Isn’t it enough that you’ve met your real father? Do we have to go the whole ancestral-DNA route?” Gary pursed his lips. “Although that kind of thing can be fascinating. Did you know you share fifty percent of your DNA with a cabbage?”

  “Speak for yourself.” Then I frowned. “Savoy or red?”

  “I’ve always thought of you as more of a brussels sprout, actually. But does it really matter if you get your work ethic and your little psychic thingy from your Slavic forebears, or if they’re all your own work?”

  I took a long swig of my Diet Coke, wishing it wasn’t the middle of the day and I could’ve had a pint instead. “Ah, I dunno. Maybe Phil’s right.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Gary reached over and patted my knee. Maybe he was missing Julian. “Never mind. We are what we are. So when do I get to meet the donor of your sperm?”

  “Never, if you put it like that. I’ll let you know, all right? And I’d better be off. The work ethic’s starting to give me gyp.”

  “You should get that seen to. I had mine removed years ago, and I’ve never looked back.”

  Me and Phil went round to see Uncle Arlo at six o’clock that evening, just as the skies were beginning to darken. Winter always seems so much closer when it starts to get dark before you’ve had your tea. I get mixed feelings at this time of year. Yeah, we’re losing the long days of summer, and my hip definitely isn’t a fan of colder weather, but there’s something, I dunno, magical, if that doesn’t sound too daft, about the nights drawing in. Maybe it’s the kid in me looking forward to Christmas.

  Or maybe it’s just the thought of more time in bed with a certain six-foot private investigator. Yeah, that’s probably i
t.

  Fenchurch’s Fine Fancies—and what kind of a name was that? It sounded like they ought to be selling overpriced, overdecorated cupcakes—was set up in, of all places, an old barn. It was down a winding, single-track country lane, the sort where you wonder if you should toot your horn when coming up to a corner, but always feel too self-conscious or, you know, too British to actually do it. In fact, the place was more like a series of connected barns, all tarted up, modernised, and set around three sides of a central courtyard with posh shrubs and big stone Buddha heads. The large plate glass windows, which I was guessing weren’t original, were brightly lit and full of stuff for sale.

  A pretty little necklace that looked like a daisy chain caught my eye—I reckoned Cherry might like it, and it’s never too early to shop for Christmas, at least not for people whose allergies mean you can’t fob ’em off with a gift basket of bath stuff.

  Okay, so there’s other reasons that would be a spectacularly bad gift for my sis. Still, no reason to rake over the past.

  Then I saw the price tag and nearly fell into the shrubbery in shock. It wasn’t the only piece with an unfeasibly large number of zeros to its name either. Even the silver stuff wasn’t cheap, and claimed to be actually made of white gold, which I’ve never seen the point of. That and platinum. I mean, if you’re going to pay top whack for a bit of bling, you want everyone to know it, don’t you?

  There was a Sorry We’re Closed sign hanging in the door, which turned out to be locked when Phil tried it. He rapped sharply on the glass, and we waited.

  I stretched, long and slow. “If no one answers, I vote we chuck a brick through the window and make off with the goods. Compensation for a wasted journey.”

  Phil huffed a laugh. “And this is the bloke who won’t even take cash for a job under the table.”

  “That’s different. That’s professional ethics, that is.”