Wronged Sons, The

by Marrs, John

Dougie’s parents treated me like a part-time son. My place was set at the dining room table regardless of my presence. My sleeping bag remained on a camp bed in Dougie’s bedroom and they’d even bought me my own toothbrush and flannel. All the Reynolds children were encouraged to invite their friends over and their house resembled a youth club with the number of children passing through its doors. But Elaine took a shine to me the most.

  As an only child, I was fascinated by the unfamiliar world of sibling relationships – how they played, learned and fought with each other. They taught me the definition of family. But watching them bred resentment in me towards my father. The head of Dougie’s house was not the ghost of a man overtly consumed with his louche wife to notice his own neglected son.

  I questioned what was missing in my father’s make-up that rendered him unable to keep hold of Doreen. Why hadn’t she loved him like Elaine loved her husband? What did he lack that drove my mother into the arms of other men? He lacked nothing, of course. My negativity merely masked what I felt were my own failings as her son. I knew the man who had offered me as much as he could also had his limitations. So what I couldn’t get from him, I stole from the Reynolds.

  But the most important lesson I learned from spending time with them came years later. And it was that if you scratch the surface of something perfect, you’ll always find something rotten hidden beneath.

  August 26, 3.15pm

  While neither Bradley nor I trespassed too far into each other’s pasts, my gut instinct was that he was a reliable sort. My history was as irrelevant to me as it was to anyone else, so I would never have voluntarily revealed my true colours to him.

  Such aloofness was a self-defence mechanism born out of bad experiences. Because the more you trust in someone, the more opportunities you give them to shatter your illusions. But as much as I cared to think of myself as a solitary unit - and against my better judgment - I still needed a Dougie Reynolds in my life. Bradley came close to filling that vacancy.

  It was during a lock-in at the village pub a decade earlier, and with several pints of Guinness loosening our lips, that Dougie revealed the disease running through his family. Out of the blue, he confessed his father was a violent wife-beater who regularly knocked the living daylights out of Elaine.

  Sometimes he’d hone his skills in front of his family. But for the most part, he kept his hobby behind the bedroom door. Dougie explained it was why they encouraged their friends to spend time at their house. Because if left alone, some minor incident would likely occur and inspire Dougie Senior into hurting her again. Our friendship offered them a temporary stay of execution. He’d used me.

  I masked my ever-increasing dismay while he tearfully recalled his family’s swift departure from Scotland. Elaine had been attacked so badly that she’d been hospitalised for a fortnight – her husband’s lightening bolt blows broke her jaw and five ribs. Instead of offering their support to Elaine, Dougie Senior’s colleagues encouraged her not to press charges against one of their own and offered them a fresh start elsewhere.

  But my disappointment wasn’t directed at the culprit, as it should have been. It was towards his son. Dougie had urged me to buy into his idyllic home, knowing full well what it had meant to me. Any sympathy or understanding he should have expected was greeted by stone-faced, silent, selfishness instead. The snow globe in which I’d placed the Reynolds had been shaken so vigorously, the contents would never settle again. He’d cheated me out of the only stability I had known. Ignorance was bliss, and I’d liked bliss.

  I was also disappointed with Elaine’s failure to remove herself from the side of a sadist. At least my mother had the strength to leave us for a reason, no matter how weak it was. Elaine had plenty of them but she’d stayed and she’d lied, like all women do.

  Eventually Dougie must have read my expressionless face and realised my lack of compassion meant he’d confided in the wrong friend. So the conversation petered out, was brushed under the carpet and never discussed again.

  Years later, I learned Dougie wasn’t all he seemed either. If I’d allowed myself the opportunity to know Bradley better, he would have probably disappointed me too, so I kept him at arm’s length. It was better to remain on my island than drown in somebody else’s sea.

  September 7, 8.10pm

  “He’s dead, man. Shit.”

  Bradley gently rolled Darren’s rigid body from his side and onto his back. He lay there with his eyes clammed shut. His forehead was as pale as a winter’s dawn.

  “He certainly is,” I sighed, then pulled a patchwork blanket up over his bare chest and covered a face devoid of expression.

  “Better call the Doc then,” said Bradley, picking himself up and walking towards the reception’s payphone.

  With my eyes fixed on my friend’s movements, my hands darted under the dead man’s bed to find his backpack. I relied on touch to open the metal fasteners and fumbled around until I found my prize. I crammed it into my pocket as Bradley hung up the receiver and turned around.

  “Doc’s on his way,” he shouted.

  *

  Darren Glasper appeared on our doorstep a month or so before his demise. Our hostel was cheerful, and most importantly for the traveller on a budget, inexpensive. And like myself, the intoxicating lure of the town’s unfettered, relaxed anonymity was all it took to persuade Darren to remain there longer than first planned.

  He’d told me over supper one night that as the youngest of a family of eight, his motivation was to discover his own identity away from those who’d shaped it. At first, he’d succumbed to family convention by leaving school and becoming immersed in an unrewarding career in Sheffield’s steel mills and foundries. But Darren craved more than a lifetime of manual labour in a job he despised. So to his loved ones’ surprise, he announced he was leaving to travel the world and educate himself before returning home to educate others as a trainee teacher.

  Despite the inevitable attempts to persuade him he was being foolish, he upped and left. Nevertheless, he beamed with pride when he spoke of his family and the wall behind his bunk bed was plastered in family photographs. He’d arranged them like a protective halo around his head.

  Summer was a fertile period for the hostel and filled to bursting point with guests. However, the closing days of autumn were quieter and allowed the building to loosen its belt and exhale. It gave me space to sink my teeth into my renovation work and Darren and others were more than willing to act as my labourers.

  He’d been afforded a four-bedroom dormitory to himself but when neither Bradley nor I had seen him that day, his lack of presence concerned us.

  At some point during the night, Darren had checked out of the world he was so keen to be a part of.

  *

  The town’s doctor arrived within the hour to officially pronounce him dead. I’d joined Darren’s smiling family in keeping his body company while we awaited the police and an ambulance.

  I wondered how his family’s lives would be affected by his death. I pitied them when I realised they’d probably never come to terms with being robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye to a son and a brother.

  For a moment, I contemplated how you had coped when I had done the same. But my thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two officers, so I left the room and wandered into the courtyard for a cigarette.

  Alone, I put my hand into my pocket and removed Darren’s passport. His spirited wanderlust would live on through me. I enjoyed my time at the hostel, using it as a place of redemption and healing. But I knew I’d develop itchy feet when I eventually finished my project. And possessing no passport or international identification meant that when it came time to leave for fresh pastures, it would be problematic. But not now.

  Darren and I shared the same almond-shaped eyes, hairstyles and facial bone structure. A cursory glance at his passport’s black and white photograph confirmed that. Others had often assumed we were related. As long as I avoided a razor for a fortnight, I’d match hi
s light beard and I’d gain the potential to explore wherever I liked.

  The moral complexities of assuming the identity of a man who’d yet to be laid out on a mortician’s slab were questionable. Added to that quandary was that I alone knew Darren had lost his wallet in Algeria. So without his passport, there would be no speedy way of tracking down his relatives.

  But with my ability to justify my actions if my best interests were served, I told police his Christian name and his nationality and left them to fill in the blanks. It would buy me time. I stubbed out my cigarette and returned to the building to watch in respectful silence, as his body was stretchered away.

  Darren and I were both freer from those who’d held us back than we’d ever been before.

  ***

  Today, 9.50am

  “When did I ever hold you back?” she roared. “How dare you! I did nothing but support you and encourage you. I believed in you!”

  As each new revelation fell from his lips, her mood darkened, shade by shade, until all she saw was black. She questioned whether the man sitting before her was indeed the same one who’d promised to love her until death do they part so long ago. It looked like him; it sounded like him. Even his mannerisms remained, like the way he absent-mindedly scratched the print of his thumb with his middle finger. Or when he tapped his bottom lip to mask his anxiety.

  But his recollections of life beyond her resembled nothing of the Simon of old. Was it really in him all along to live without a conscience? How could she have failed to recognise such deplorable traits in him as deceit and opportunism? Her love really had been blind.

  “And you stole a dead man’s passport?” she continued, perplexed. “That’s disgusting.”

  He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, like the devil was poking him with a pitchfork. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but I did what I had to do. I had no choice,” he replied.

  She drew deeply from a reservoir of anger. “Oh here we ago again with those bloody words. You had no choice. Please, spare me. It was the children and I who had no choice, no choice but to carry on trying to live without you. No choice but to do all we could to try and find you.”

  “In all honesty, I didn’t expect you to be so persistent. I hoped you’d give up after a few weeks.”

  “But that’s what love is, Simon. It’s never giving up on the person you’ve given your heart to; it’s having faith that no matter how tough things get, that person will always be looking for you.”

  She shook her head at her own stupidity in dedicating so much time trying to find a man who’d long left the country. They stared at each other until she stopped waiting for him to defend himself. Her victory felt hollow.

  He wasn’t ready to explain in full why he, her husband, the stranger, had suddenly elbowed his way back into her life. It wasn’t a revelation he could suddenly blurt out or casually slip into the conversation. He had to make clear to her first why he had made his choices before explaining the role she’d played in pushing him away.

  Only then, when she realised her culpability, could he drop the bombshell. Otherwise all she would hear when it detonated was the deafening sound of the truth ricocheting around the room. She would not pause to reflect and their reconciliation would be over as quickly as it began.

  But his refusal to answer even her most basic of questions frustrated her. She deserved to know the truth – all of the truth. But against her better judgment, she also had a growing curiosity as to just how he’d filled his ocean of time.

  She hoped he’d lived a miserable, depressing existence filled with regret, longing and woe. But none of that was evident in the brown, healthy looking man who’d invaded her home. And all she’d heard so far were his thinly disguised boasts of a much better life abroad and without her.

  He rose to his feet and made his way over to the patio doors to look over the garden he’d once toiled to shape. The corners of his mouth rose when he spotted the patio where they’d spent many long evenings planning their futures. He hadn’t thought about those nights in years and acknowledged there had been good times after all.

  She’d since had a brick barbecue built and a wooden pagoda erected where bright green grape vines hung. He knew on instinct they’d never make a decent wine. A child’s yellow plastic bike was propped up against a crab apple tree he’d planted in the corner by the firs. He wondered where and who its owner was.

  “I am glad you kept our house,” he said softly.

  “My house,” she corrected quickly. “It’s my house. And I nearly lost it because of you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Northampton, Twenty-Five Years Earlier

  September 9, 11pm

  “You bloody idiot,” I muttered.

  My heart sank when I read the letter. Eight weeks was all we had left in our home before the bank repossessed it. I’d ignored the stack of brown envelopes addressed to you and crammed them into the kitchen drawer, out of sight and out of mind. And I hadn’t given any thought to checking the balance in our account.

  Money wasn’t something I’d ever needed to take responsibility for. I was more than happy to let you deal with our finances. I presumed you’d make sure we were okay and as long as we kept a roof over our heads that was all that mattered. Silly old me.

  I only knew there was a problem when the first cheque bounced. It rebounded off the doormat and back into my hand a few days after I’d given it to a petrol pump cashier. Two more soon tumbled through the letterbox from British Telecom and an off-licence in town.

  But it wasn’t until my debit card was declined at Sainsbury’s that I knew I had to pull my red face out of the sand to see just how much trouble I was in. Our fridge was almost bare and the only food we had was waiting to be paid for in an abandoned trolley by a checkout.

  I plucked up the courage to look at our bank statement and, through squinted eyes, regretted it straight away. I was up to my neck in our overdraft. Your wages had always covered the utilities but there was never much left to siphon off into a rainy day account.

  You and Steven had agreed that until the business reached a certain profit, you’d only pay yourselves a basic sum. But with half the work being done, Steven had barely enough to cover his own expenses let alone mine. There was little in the way of rainy day money and certainly not enough to survive a drought. And after three months of natural erosion, the reservoir was dry.

  That awful day in January had almost cost me my sanity. It had also wiped out our savings, but neither of us would have had it any other way. Despite the turmoil it had seen, our house was as much a part of the family as the people who lived under its roof. But unless my fairy godmother waved her magic wand, we were going to lose it.

  I wasn’t stupid. I loved a little gossip as much as the next person. So I knew many people in the village were gossiping about me. I’d see them looking away when they spotted me in the supermarket, unsure of what to say. I heard whispers at the school gates from the other mums. I had my suspicions they thought you’d walked out on me only because I’d have probably thought the same thing if I was them.

  So I played on my rumoured ‘abandoned wife’ status to my advantage and pleaded ignorance to our bank manager. I even felt a twinge of guilt when I turned on the waterworks with surprising ease to prove how hard I was finding it to cope. But it worked.

  He offered me a two-month stay of execution to climb out of arrears before his hands became tied and we’d lose our home. I could have kissed him, but instead I skulked back home, ashamed of how I’d let things slide.

  I decamped into the dining room and faced the reality of my money woes on a table littered with old statements and red letters. A bottle of wine gave me support when I watched figures on reams of pages twirl around like whirling dervishes, daring me to take a closer look at the mischief they’d created while I was distracted. Eventually, I calculated my outgoings were triple my incomings, but no matter where I thought I could make some savings, the debts were still going to mount
up.

  The fact you had, as far as the authorities was aware, not actually died but gone AWOL made it much harder to claim welfare state support. I’d slipped into a grey area that wasn’t recognised by black and white regulations. I wouldn’t receive a widow’s allowance as there was no proof you were dead and I’d not been ‘actively seeking work’ so I couldn’t claim unemployment benefits. I was allowed family support but that fortnightly payment didn’t stretch far. I was caught between a rock and a hard place.

  Frustrated, I poured myself another drink while my eyes filled up faster than the glass. I was both angry with you for leaving me like this and at myself for being in denial. Something had to change. It was time to remove myself from my pity party and start being the breadwinner.

  I began by selling your car then reluctantly pawning my jewellery, including my gorgeous wedding and engagement rings. Never in all our years together had I taken either of them off. Not when we spent all our waking hours glossing doors and staining floorboards or lifting concrete slabs. If I scuffed them, it didn’t matter – they’d be reminders of what we’d built together.

  Even when four pregnancies made my fingers swell to the size of tiny watermelons, they remained where I could see them at all times. Your disappearance had made them the saddest objects I owned, but the only thing stopping another round of tears was the knowledge that when we found you, I’d be able to buy them back.

  A house clearance firm I found in the Yellow Pages made up the rest of the mortgage shortfall. I’d begged them to come late in the evening, as I was too embarrassed for the neighbours to see strange men taking our worldly goods away in the back of a lorry.

  I sold the Welsh dresser from the kitchen; a sofa and television we barely used from the snug; your writing bureau; two book shelves; three wardrobes; a chest of drawers; dressing table; sideboard; dishwasher; lamps and crockery we’d been given as wedding presents. And while it killed me to do it, I even sold the children’s bikes. By the time the removal men left an hour later, I still had a home but barely anything left to fill it with.