Betrayal

by Martina Cole

  ‘We are going to sing “Grease” together in a minute, Jade! Me and my mum. I wish I could come home with you.’

  Jade laughed again. ‘She means well, Aggs, even though she doesn’t realise how crass she can be.’

  Agnes sighed and nodded in agreement. ‘I love the bones of her, but I know that I disappoint her.’

  Jade embraced her affectionately. ‘Look, she doesn’t get you, Aggs. You and her are like chalk and fucking cheese.’

  Agnes nodded once more. ‘I know, Jade.’

  Reeva came back to the table with a tray of drinks. ‘I got us all doubles, girls, and a round of shots.’

  Agnes looked at Jade and rolled her eyes.

  Reeva necked her vodka shot and, pretending to shiver, she shouted loudly, ‘Let’s get this fucking party started!’

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Aiden was stripping off in the bedroom, and Jade was lying in their bed watching him. She loved his body; she felt that it was perfect in every way, because it was perfect for her. They suited one another, and when they came together it was amazing, every time. She still felt that they were meant to be together.

  ‘Only your mum would think that it’s perfectly normal to get her thirteen-year-old daughter drunk. For fuck’s sake, Aiden, you need to talk to her. She seems to think that poor Aggs needs to not just get drunk but, I am assuming, fucking laid! It’s a disgrace.’

  As Aiden looked at Jade she realised that he had been drinking and that he was not being too responsive to what she was saying.

  ‘Come on, Aiden, you know I’m right. Agnes does not want, or indeed feel the need, to drink alcohol. It’s a good job that one of them has a sense of what’s right and wrong.’

  Aiden took a deep breath and then, smiling nastily, he said, ‘Look, Jade, I know you and my mum will never ever be bosom fucking buddies, but I’m warning you now. Stop slagging her off to me. Every chance you get you fucking slaughter her. Well, do you know what? She looks after my boy just as she looked after all of us, lady. You should thank her on your knees because we both know you are not exactly fucking maternal, are you? She might not be Mother of the fucking Year, but you knew that and you still let her look after Aiden Junior. So, darling, you fucking tell me if she’s good enough for you!’

  Jade looked at the man she adored, and whose life she had tried to make easy, who she had educated in every way she knew how and for whom she had stepped back to give the chance to make something of himself, even though she knew that he wasn’t ready, didn’t have the nous yet that was needed to live and survive long-term in their world. She saw the anger in his face, the complete disregard for her and her feelings. She saw then that he believed that he had overtaken her, that he was her superior, that everything she had done for him, taught him, was forgotten. He was to all intents and purposes his own man.

  Well, she wished him all the best with that fucking stupidness and foolishness. She had no choice but to fight her corner, because she was not a woman who would allow herself to be treated so badly.

  She turned on him and said ferociously, ‘You do not dare speak to me like that, Aiden. Do I look like I have “cunt” written on my fucking forehead?’

  Aiden heard the hurt and the anger in her voice, and he saw that he had gone too far. He had known all along that he was being unfair, but he was on edge over the Gerry Murphy dealing, spoiling for a fight and feeling guilty for leaving Jade in the dark. He had wanted to prove to her and to himself that he could do whatever was needed on his own. Plus he knew that she would have warned him off this venture, so he had not asked her opinion. She would have run a fucking mile. And she would have been right. He had been royally mugged off.

  Gerry had decided to have him over, and that was something he could not swallow. Now Gerry was a fucking dead man walking. But Aiden was in too deep to walk away without a serious comeback. Suddenly the enormity of what he was embroiled in had hit him like a sack of shit. He wanted Jade on his side, wanted her input, needed her sensible head. He relied on her more than he wanted to admit.

  ‘Well, fucking answer me, Aiden, because none of us will sleep tonight otherwise, I can guarantee you that much.’

  He shrugged in dismissal, well aware that it would send her off her head. She was a lot of things but stupid had never been one of them.

  Jade came out of the bed, all teeth and nails. She had been quiet for too long. And now she needed to remind him that the man who could put her down had not been born yet.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Aiden felt like he had gone ten rounds with Joe Bugner. Jade could have a fight, and fight like a fucking man at that. Last night she had come at him with everything she had and − he held his hands up − she was within her rights. He had still not been able to tell her the truth of the situation though, and that was what was really bothering him.

  He opened his eyes and wondered what the day would bring. For the first time in years he woke without knowing what to expect. He didn’t like the feeling one bit. He ached all over, and he deserved it. He had treated Jade like a fucking nobody, had spoken to her like she meant nothing to him, and now he was awake, sober and remembering the drama of the night before, he knew that he had a lot of making up to do. And on top of that, he had to explain to Eric that his latest scheme had fallen apart.

  He had invested a lot of money in Gerry Murphy’s fucking bullshit. He had trusted him enough to lay out a fucking small fortune. Serious bunce, as the saying went, and it had been for nothing. Gerry had taken it all. And the fact that he had also talked Eric into investing in it as well . . . That was what he would not, indeed could not, forgive. No one made a fool out of him, and Gerry Murphy was going to find that out to his detriment. There were some things that could never be forgiven and this was one.

  He could hear Jade talking to Aiden Junior, and he wished more than anything that he could take back his stupidity of the night before. Jade came into the bedroom with his son, and he glanced at her with trepidation. She looked good, but Jade was a woman who made a point of always looking the business. Make-up perfect, hair immaculate and her clothes were the envy of most of the women around her. She was a beautiful woman, and he could never deny that. She held an attraction for him that was beyond age, beyond everything. He loved her still and he always would, no matter what.

  ‘Bye, Daddy. Uncle Patsy is taking me to Nanny’s.’

  Aiden kissed his son and felt the force of the child’s love for him. He couldn’t look at Jade, though, and he watched as his son bounced out of the room, unaware that there was anything wrong. But both Jade and Aiden knew that there was a divide between them, and it was because of him and his need to always make himself the main man, even though they both knew their strength came from working together. It was part of what drew them to one another, the way they could think along the same lines, could understand what each other expected, wanted or indeed needed. Now, because he had deliberately chosen to ignore that, he had been bitten on the arse.

  Jade stood in the doorway and, looking directly at him, she said quietly, ‘Get your arse out of that bed, and let’s try and salvage something from this mess, shall we?’

  He didn’t have the guts to look her in the eyes, and they were both aware of that fact.

  Jade laughed sarcastically. ‘Fucking gun-running? You couldn’t run a ladder in my tights, you fucking imbecile. And you think I didn’t know about it? Really? Have you no respect for me at all, Aiden? Did you honestly think I didn’t know what was going on after I introduced you in the first place?’

  She shook her head in abject disappointment and he realised that he should have known better, that he should have understood that, unlike him, Jade Dixon would always be aware of everything that was going on in her orbit. She was far too shrewd for anything else.

  ‘Then you wonder why I won’t fucking marry you. If you don’t fucking start using your brain, boy, I will be burying you. Now, thanks to you and your lack of fucking brainpower we are all going
to have to deal with the IRA and, I might add, Eric fucking Palmer who, I know from old, will not be impressed with this latest debacle. Think about it, Aiden. They were my contacts. Eric has made a point of never dealing with the Irish. Now you have involved him in the worst possible way in a deal gone south.’

  The slamming of the front door reverberated through the whole house and, against his will, Aiden found himself flinching at the sound.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Agnes was tired out after last night’s shenanigans and she wondered at her mum who thought that the answer to her daughter’s teenage angst was make-up and boys. She hoped that her mum would not start giving out yards as usual. Her mum believed that girls were only put on this planet to make men happy, that they were far below men in the grand scheme of things. It really galled her, even though she could never argue that with her mother. Reeva saw everything in her life as pertaining to the male sex; she believed that without a man, she had failed. Agnes would never point out that, if that was the case, her mum had failed over and over again because every man Reeva had snared had left her with a belly full of arms and legs. None of them knew anything about their fathers except their names.

  Agnes wanted a bit more than a drunken tale of a stranger who Reeva had taken up with, and who had eventually been the reason for her kid’s existence. All her mum ever said was that her dad was really handsome, kind and gentle. It wasn’t enough. And anyway, Reeva had said exactly the same thing to Eugene when he’d once asked about his father. Agnes wanted to know where she came from. She guessed she was either Turkish or Arabic; her face told her that much. But, unlike her brothers, it bothered her that she had no knowledge of her heritage. As her brother Patsy had so succinctly put it, ‘Who gives a fuck, Aggs? Mum has always been there for us. She is more sinned against than sinning. Remember that. She kept us and she loved us.’ Then he had smiled as he said, ‘Especially when she had you. She had really wanted a daughter after us lot, and you were her last one. You are her baby.’

  Agnes had accepted then that she could never make her feelings known − like her brothers, she had to let it go. She couldn’t ask her mum about her background − anyway, knowing Reeva, she had probably never asked. Agnes appreciated the fact that her mum had kept the children her bad decisions had created. For all her mum’s lunacy, Agnes respected her because she had not once thought of aborting any of her children. Reeva had kept them all without fear or favour, even though she had been looked down on and dragged through the mud where public opinion was concerned. She had loved them with a ferocity that people outside their family could never understand.

  Nevertheless Reeva’s lifestyle had impacted on her children’s lives. They had each been aware of that from a very young age. As well as being different colours, they were all different personalities. Whether that was because of their parentage Agnes didn’t know. But what she did know was that a family of both black and white siblings – and everything in between – marked them out as ‘different’ to the average person in their orbit. Coupled with the fact that Reeva had spent her whole life fighting that prejudice, this had probably made them the people they were. It had made her mum the woman she was, because she had never had it easy. How could she? Reeva had stepped outside of everything that was deemed acceptable. Worst of all was that Agnes perceived that her mum’s pretence at not caring about other people’s opinions had been an act from start to finish − it had been how she coped with the consensus of public opinion. Reeva had fronted it out but there had to have been times when that was more than a young woman could bear.

  Agnes could not imagine having a baby at fourteen like her mum, and then producing more and more at regular intervals by so many different men. But she understood now that after Aiden, her firstborn at fourteen years of age, her mum’s life had been well and truly over. Until Tony, the only men who would go near her mother were not exactly reliable, were not looking at Reeva as a prospective wife. They were men who saw her as a good time, who had never seen her as viable marriage material, who, as soon as she fell pregnant again, couldn’t wait to run out on her, even though they had left her with their flesh and blood. Her nan had told her that her mum’s trouble was she believed what she wanted to believe in the moment, and that she had never understood the difference between sex and love. What she really wanted was love and that she got from her children when men let her down over and over again.

  Agnes had no doubt that each of those different men, who had never even stayed around long enough to see their child born, had what they saw as ‘real children’ with the women they had married. That really galled her, because they had used her mum, her house and her mum’s body without even wondering about the kids they had produced, and left without a backward glance. Agnes hated the men for that, hated that they were able to get away with leaving their children, and no one vilified them. But her mum, who had been used and who had never once thought of destroying her children, had been left to face the music alone. That Reeva had kept them together as a family was something that Agnes would always respect her for, even though her mum did her head in on a daily basis − even though the family circumstances made them second-class citizens in most people’s eyes.

  A girl at school had called her mum a whore and Agnes had found herself beating her up in the toilets at break time. She had held in her anger and hatred until she could put her in her place in private. And she had done just that, battering the fuck out of her, and making sure that the girl in question was well aware of her feelings. She had explained in graphic detail what would happen to her should they ever have a similar disagreement in the future.

  The news had soon done the rounds at school and she had the satisfaction of seeing that no one would ever say anything detrimental about her mum again. She had not even known she had so much rage inside her until then, but it had proved to her that she could defend herself if she needed to and, thanks to Reeva, she would spend her life defending her mother’s choices, living down her mother’s lifestyle. It had been a big learning curve for her. The realisation that, no matter what she achieved or how well she might get on in her life, Reeva O’Hara was the yardstick she would be measured by depressed her because she was the antithesis of her mum in every way. She was, by her very nature, a good girl, and she was determined to prove people wrong. She was going to get an education, and she was going to make something of her life. That was what she strived for every day.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Gerry Murphy woke up with a blinding headache and a thirst of biblical proportions. He sat up warily, knowing that with the amount he had drunk he could expect the worst. It wasn’t the first time: he drank on a daily basis – it was an occupational hazard. He was a free spirit and he loved nothing more than an Out. Especially an ‘Out Out’, a wonderful cockney term for ‘I will get home at some point in the future’. Gerry loved the whole concept of that. His weakness was always going to be the Out: once he had a few drinks, everything else went to the wall. Well, he didn’t give a flying fuck. And why should he?

  Gerry was a handsome man with a fine head of black hair. The drink didn’t seem to affect him too much and he put that down to his ancestors − all good IRA men with what the Irish called a good stomach. They could all take a drink, and then take another drink – and another. They were men to be reckoned with, men who banged their own fucking drums.

  God knew, he felt like shit today though. He’d had a great fucking night but now, as he looked around him, he wondered how the hell he had ended up here. It was a shithole – dark, dank, and the bed he was lying on didn’t even have a fucking pair of sheets. It was like a fucking cheap man’s kip! Gerry laughed to himself, wondering what high jinks he had got up to. He must have been drunk as a skunk to have come back somewhere like this. He could only hope that the woman he had pulled was built like a fucking porn queen because nothing less would explain this dive. He had shagged some dogs in his time, but they were good-looking dogs. In fairness, no matter how d
runk he got, he had never woken up with a fucking serious fright. He prided himself on having a built-in shit detector, and it had never failed him yet. But this place was fucking rancid.

  He stood up, stretched and, yawning loudly, he walked towards the door. He needed a piss, a cigarette and a coffee in that order. As he approached the door it opened and, smiling widely, he said happily, ‘All right, darling? I’m pleased to finally meet you.’

  But instead of his usual squeeze coming through the door, he saw Aiden O’Hara.

  ‘Well, Gerry, this is a real fucking treat.’

  The glint in Aiden’s eye told Gerry Murphy that he was in deep shit. He was a man known to be well able to look after himself but he wasn’t going to talk his way easily out of this situation. He had dropped the bollock of a lifetime because he should have taken the money and run. Instead, he had called in to see an old mate in Kilburn and one thing had led to another. As the details of the night before came back to him he wondered at how he could have been such a fool as to think this fucker wouldn’t have tracked him down.

  ‘Come on now, Aiden. I will hold me hands up. I made a big mistake. But there’s still plenty of room to manoeuvre.’

  Aiden grinned snidely. He had him bang to rights and they both knew it.