The Lubetkin Legacy (19 page)

‘Bertie? Bertie! You haven't changed a bit!' A stench of alcohol and urine hit my nostrils. I couldn't immediately identify the scrawny, raddled old geezer with a boozer's nose, silver curls straggling on to his dandruffy collar, and a peaked cap pulled down over one eye who was standing on my doorstep with an empty bottle in his hand.

‘Howard! Your brother!' He reached in, hooked an arm around my neck and pulled me towards him to smack a wet whisky-flavoured kiss on my lips.

‘Oh. Hi, Howard.' I backed away from the blast-furnace of his breath. It was hard to recognise in this shrivelled sozzled figure the handsome, louche shoe salesman and air guitarist who had once been both my idol and my scourge. He must have been not much more than sixty, but time had not been good to him. ‘It's great to see you. It's been a while. What brings you back home?'

‘I tried to come to Lily's funeral, honest I did, but I couldn't find the damn place. Green something. Ended up at the burial of a lady called Mrs O'Reilly. Great wake. Beef sandwiches and whisky …' He paused. ‘Was it a good send-off, Lily's?'

‘Yes. Yes indeed,' I lied. ‘Apart from the rain, of course. Someone turned up at the wrong funeral. And those twins were there – Ted Madeley's daughters. I hadn't seen them for some forty years. They seemed to think their dad had left the flat to them.'

‘Heh heh heh! What a pair of chancers! They were just trying their luck. Lily once told me that Ted Madeley and their
mother were never officially married. Apparently, they were planning to marry when she got pregnant again, but she lost the baby.'

‘Oh, they told me …' What had they told me? The story had become confused in a fog of morphine and double vision, but I seemed to remember that a dead baby had also been involved. Either they were lying, or Lily was. Probably I would never know.

Howard cleared his throat. ‘We need to talk, Bertie. Did Lily leave me something in her will?'

‘She didn't leave a will.'

‘She must have done. She promised.' His grey-red eyes watered, and he brushed them with his sleeve, then he fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a small orange cigarette lighter. More fumbling yielded a battered ten-pack of cigarettes, emblazoned with their deadly warning. ‘D'you mind if I smoke?'

I shrugged and went to find an ashtray. Suddenly his legs buckled and he fell into an armchair, his eyes scanning the cabinet where Mum used to keep her booze. ‘Have you got any …?'

I felt both pity and revulsion. ‘No. We drank it all at the wake,' I lied. The only wake had been around my hospital bedside.

‘Be a good kid – nip round to Baz's Bazaar for a bottle of Old Grouse. Here's the money.' He fumbled in his jacket pockets again and held out a tenner in a shaking hand.

I laughed. ‘I'm not a kid, Howard. I'm fifty-three. And Baz's Bazaar closed down twenty years ago.'

‘Heh heh. It was probably our fault, me and Nige, the amount of stuff we nicked from there. And you, Bertie. You were the villain of the piece. Remember how we lowered you into the coal hole on a rope? You were a skinny little kid. And
you climbed up the inside stairs and opened the window for us?'

A formless horror welled up out of my nightmares: I dangle like a newborn spider in a black void. The rope around my waist much too tight. Something massive and formless pressing on my chest. Eyes and nose covered with black-gloved hands. Mouth full of coal dust. Try to scream. No sound comes out – only a suffocating velvety cough, cough, cough. ‘Shut up! Keep quiet!' Howard's voice hissing through the grating.

‘I remember trying to explain to Dad how I got coal dust on my pyjamas. And the belt.'

‘The belt. Yeah. Dad and his belt. I got it too. But you know what, Bertie, I was always jealous of the way Mum used to stick up for you? Like you were her special little lamb. She used to rock you in her arms when you were crying.
Meh-eh-eh! Hush, hush, my lamb. He doesn't mean it
.' He squeaked in a mock-Lily voice.

‘But she loved you too, Howard. She talked about you for years after you'd gone.'

‘Nah. I was just this stray kid she'd took pity on. She lost interest in me after you came along. She didn't even leave me anything in her will, though she must have got a fair bit from Dad. Did Mum ever tell you, after they split up, he made over a million on Buy to Let? He found the tax breaks were more reliable than crime.' He chuckled glumly. ‘Heh heh heh. She never told you that, eh?'

I felt exhausted and a bit sick. I wished he would go away, but at the same time I wanted him to keep on talking, throwing his bitter light into the secret places of the past.

‘Do you remember when we drove up to Ossett to visit your real mother's grave?'

In the summer of 1983 Howard and I had travelled up to Ossett together, his hometown and the birthplace of my father,
Sidney Sidebottom, aka Wicked Sid, swindler, child abuser, Buy to Let millionaire. Howard had inherited our dad's good looks and his mother's musical talent, and at that time he was having some local success with a band called the Blue Maggots, loosely modelled on UB40. I was a star-struck nineteen year old with time on my hands, and although I had no great fondness for my dad, I did have a certain familial curiosity.

The Sidebottom clan, I discovered, despite the Cheshire origins of the name, had been living for generations in this dismal little industrial town halfway between Dewsbury and Wakefield. Ossett had once been a spa, but by the time we Sidebottoms came along it was known mainly for the big Ward's ‘shoddy and mungo' mill where both my grandparents worked recycling rags, like Gobby Gladys, who had once recycled rags in Whitechapel. So you could say rags were in my blood on both sides of the family, and in moments of introspection I have sometimes wondered whether that might account for my somewhat shredded outlook on life. But Sid felt he was destined for greater things. Charming and good-looking, with golden curls and a silver tongue, he found a day job in a newsagent's shop and studied bookkeeping at night school.

Once qualified, he started doing the books for the newsagent and other local businesses. His popularity grew as word got around that he was rather good at minimising payments to the Inland Revenue, all perfectly legally. No one, apart from Sid himself, could say exactly when some of the money that passed through the books started sticking to his fingers. By the time he was twenty-five he had stashed away enough money to put down a deposit on a terraced house in Ossett and to marry Howard's mother, Yvonne Lupset, the beautiful and musically gifted (said Howard) only daughter of
prosperous local farmers. She was six months pregnant when he took her to the altar.

Sid had an inventive mind, and over the next few years he borrowed from his in-laws and floated a number of get-rich-quick schemes: land in Madagascar, gold in Peru, chickens in Bulgaria, ostrich farming in Kenya. All colourful and fascinating ways of quickly losing other people's money.

The Lupsets let their son-in-law know in many not-so-subtle ways that they thought their daughter had married beneath her. This stirred Sid to fury. She started to come home with unexplained bruises. They had a quiet word with the newsagent, his former employer, who happened to belong to the same Masonic lodge. Irregularities in the books were discovered. Yvonne's parents persuaded the newsagent not to prosecute, but they threatened Sid with exposure should he ever lay a hand on their daughter again. Sid, who had always been quick-tempered, was now eaten up with uncontrollable rage which he could not vent on Yvonne. Besides, she had taken to drinking gin and tonic at the wrong times of day and was doing enough damage to herself already. She was thirty-three when she died. Fortunately Howard, aged eight, was big enough and tough enough to withstand a belting.

As his tale unfolded on that long-ago road trip, Howard's sombre profile flickered in the headlights of the oncoming cars; like Sid, he was quite a performer. That was all well and good, I said, and I could understand why Sid was drawn south by the great magnet of London, seeking opportunity and anonymity in the age-old tradition of fortune-seekers and ne'er-do-wells. But I couldn't understand why lovely widowed Lily Madeley had fallen for this scoundrel when he showed up in the Widow's Son looking for digs.

Howard turned towards me, and the car drifted into the
fast lane. I clutched the sides of my seat and prepared to die, but there was nothing behind us, or if there was, its brakes were good.

‘She wanted a child, Bert. Ted was dead, and she was getting on a bit. It wasn't him she fell for, it was me.'

I'd been smitten by the image of the beautiful Yorkshireman with brooding eyes and the silent waif-like child at his side, and I could understand how they had pierced Lily's tender heart. I had been conceived soon after …

‘Heh heh heh!' Fast forward thirty-plus years. Howard took a deep drag on his cigarette and swung one leg over the arm of his chair, chuckling, ‘Then I decided I'd had enough belting, and it was your turn. I'm sorry, little Bertie.' He didn't look sorry at all.

‘And there was something else I've been trying to remember. The rope. A canal. A bridge …'

‘Ah yes …!'

At that moment, the sound of a key in the lock made us both turn. The door opened and Inna appeared in the hall, looking flushed and windswept. There was something different about her appearance, she looked somehow younger and livelier, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

‘Hello, Bertie. Hello …' She looked from me to Howard.

He looked from her to me.

‘Howard, let me introduce Inna, a friend of Mother's. She's living here now.'

A knowing smile spread over his face. ‘Onshontay, madame.'

He kissed her hand and winked at me. I could tell what he was thinking. Her cheeks were pink from the wind and her eyes were bright, but for godssake, she must be in her seventies.

‘Inna, this is Howard, my –'

‘Aha! I know. I understand. No problem wit me.' She winked
theatrically at me and did a little bow to him. ‘You like it slatki, Mister Howvord?'

‘No,' I interrupted. ‘No, thanks, Inna. We're fine.'

I still didn't trust her.

‘You want I go out?' she asked.

‘No …'

‘What are slapki?' asked Howard, nursing a lewd smile.

‘Aha! I think you will very like it, Mister Howvord!' She pursed her mouth kissily. ‘Very sweety sweet.'

‘Oh yeah?' Despite her age, he looked genuinely interested, the old rake.

‘No, thanks, Inna. Really.'

‘Nuh, you no like you no ittit, Mister Bertie.'

With a huff, she disappeared into the kitchen. Howard did gross finger-pointing gestures behind her back. I shook my head. He wiggled his fingers lustfully. I could see where this was going and I reckoned alcohol was needed.

‘Look, I think I'll go and get that whisky after all. It goes well with slatki. Have you still got that tenner, Howard?'

All was quiet as I crossed the twilit grove, and the lights were on in Luigi's. There was something I needed more than whisky: calm, coffee and common sense. The temptation was too great. Luigi greeted me like a long-lost friend, although it was barely a week since I'd been in. I leaned my elbows on the counter and inhaled. Soon the heavenly aroma of coffee banished the sour smell of whisky breath and the dangerous scent of slapski, as the present banishes the past.

‘The usual? Latte with?' He wielded the tamper. ‘Where you been, boss? I been missing you.'

‘My mother died. I had my bike nicked. I sustained an injury at the funeral.' I hadn't intended to get emotional, but once I'd started, it just poured out of me. ‘And, to be frank, the coffee's
gone downhill in here. You're taking this austerity thing too literally, Lu.'

‘Okay. Sorry about your mum, boss. I got some of that old blend left, I make it special for you.' He reached under the counter.

‘Thanks, Lu.' I felt better after I'd got it off my chest. ‘And I don't like this new newspaper you've signed up for either. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I preferred the
Guardian
.'

‘I know, boss, but is cheaper, and other customers like it.'

An unwelcome thought butted into my mind. Could my lovely neighbour be a covert
Daily Mail
reader? Surely she was too sweet and guileless for that poisonous brew? I picked it up just out of curiosity and positioned myself with my coffee by the window where I could see the comings and goings in the street. The coffee was barely acceptable, but the newspaper was utterly engrossing, full of tax avoidance scams and celebrities' boob jobs gone wrong. And Kardashians, whatever they are. You don't get that in the
Guardian
.

I'd almost finished the coffee when a swift black shadow in the street outside the window caught my eye. It was her. She was running in the direction of the flats, like a darling deer fleeing the hunter's arrows. I thought of springing up to follow, but I didn't act on my impulse because she would already be halfway through the grove – and besides, I was halfway through a fascinating article in the
Daily Mail
speculating that George Clooney had had cosmetic treatment on his wedding tackle – testicle smoothing, apparently – which filled me with an agreeable Schadenfreude.