Wronged Sons, The (5 page)

After being dropped off a few miles south of Luton, I sat near an oil heater to help dry my damp clothes. I wedged a bunch of napkins under the table leg to stop it from rocking on the uneven floor tiles. A stocky man in a red cap and apron behind the counter frequently took pity on me, refilling my mug with hot tea for no charge.

I mulled over what I might say to my mother when I found her. I was thirteen years old when she suddenly began writing me letters from her new home in London. She’d reassure me I was never far from her thoughts - words I’d longed to hear in the five months since she’d last left. And I read each sentence again and again until I knew them off by heart.

I’d missed her too, and even though it wasn’t something I felt I could share with my father, I suspected he felt the same. So I kept our correspondence covert. I’d intercept the postman and squirrel away her letters between books about building designs on my bedroom shelf. I’d reply hastily, recalling my day-to-day activities, life at my senior school and my friends. I even told her about a wonderful girl I’d met.

Then out of the blue, Doreen asked me to visit her. She told me she was sharing a house with a friend that had a spare room. It was mine to use if I wanted it. She worked in a nearby restaurant and had saved some money, and offered to send me the train fare.

I wrestled with my conscience before I broached my father. He was surprised, and probably a little disgruntled to learn it wasn’t just his wife who kept secrets from him. He tried to make increasingly flimsy excuses as to why I shouldn’t go, warning me she would only hurt me again.

“I had a full head of hair when I met her; look at me now,” he said, clutching at straws and pointing to his shiny dome. “She’ll do the same to you, Simon.”

But we both knew his reluctance was because he was scared I’d prefer to stay with my mysterious, occasional mother to my pedestrian, full-time, bald father. I reassured him it wasn’t the case, but I admit, I had briefly considered it. Although Arthur had yet to fail me, Doreen Nicholson’s secret life held an overpowering allure.

I imagined her living in a beautifully furnished home where she spent her nights dressed up to the nines holding glamorous parties for London’s elite. And I needed to experience first hand just how that world took preference over mine. Eventually my father relented and let me go, but he insisted on paying for the ticket himself – making sure it was a return.

As a grown man, I recognised Doreen’s and my reasons for craving new lives were at odds, but our actions mimicked each other’s. I had begun to understand her like I’d never understood anyone else before.

London, 5.30pm

I was sandwiched between four snoozing Yorkshire Terriers in the back seat of a Morris Minor when I reached the outskirts of London. I’d approached an elderly couple by the service station petrol pumps and they’d agreed to deliver me to the capital. An eight-track played John Denver’s Greatest Hits on a loop while they trundled along the motorway at no more than forty-five miles an hour.

I absent-mindedly fumbled with the rotating bezel on my watch – the only gift Doreen had given me that I’d kept – and stared through the passenger window at a train bursting out from a tunnel in the distance.

I remembered my mother standing, waiting for my train twenty years earlier, taking nervous drags from an unfiltered cigarette as it pulled into the platform. Nicotine and lavender perfume clung to my coat as she pulled me to her chest; her falling tears glistening her cheeks and bouncing off my lapels.

“It’s so good to see my baby,” she cried, “You have no idea.” I did, because I felt exactly the same.

We perched on the top deck of a red Routemaster bus as we made our way to her home in East London’s Bromley-by-Bow. Doreen draped an arm around my shoulders and intermittently kissed the top of my head as the wind raced through my hair. I’d always had a fascination with buildings and was as hypnotised by the architecture we passed as the woman who held me. I sketched notable landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament in my jotter to show Steven when I returned home. They had dominated the city for generations; ever present fixtures that wouldn’t uproot themselves if a better location made itself known.

“We’re here,” she finally announced, with a nervous smile, as if to encourage mine in return. But I struggled to find the enthusiasm for the pokey little terraced house on the square before me. It was squeezed like a concertina between dozens more in an austere little backstreet square. I knew my disappointment secretly mirrored hers. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I tried to convince myself, ‘I’m with my mum.’

She unlocked the front door and as the sun struck her face, I saw the tears she’d wept had made her make-up drip like ink. Behind her heavily disguised eyes lay the ghost of a purple bruise.

And as she lifted up my suitcase and walked into the corridor, the sleeves of her floral dress rose to reveal yellow and blue circular blotches scattered randomly about her forearms. I didn’t mention them or the diagonal scars on her wrists.

Inside, Doreen’s house was neat but sparsely furnished and hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the last war. Strips of wallpaper had once made futile attempts to escape by peeling themselves from the walls, but sticky tape secured them back into place. Cigarette smoke stained the ceiling above a blanched armchair from which stuffing leaked. A large pair of scuffed men’s boots lay tossed to their sides in front of her white stilettos.

“Whose are those?” I asked.

“Oh, they belong to a friend,” she replied.

And before I could delve any further, a monster appeared.

***

Today, 8.25am

“Simon…”

She whispered his name almost silently, like it was a word trapped in her last breath and she could barely find the strength to shape her lips around its form.

“Yes, Kitty,” came his measured reply.

She gripped the door handle tightly as if it was a life belt. She was terrified that if she let go, her legs would buckle beneath her and she’d drown in emotions she’d cast adrift decades ago.

In the few moments she took to regain her composure, her mind raced ten to the dozen. At first, she considered she might be having a stroke, and that her brain was playing tricks on her. Then she wondered if the disease they’d told her she’d beaten had returned to play one final, callous joke. She focused on the olive green eyes before her; eyes that once gave her everything she’d ever wanted, then cruelly snatched it away.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She snapped out of her thoughts. No, he definitely wasn’t a figment of her imagination. He was very real. The man who’d fallen from the branches of their family tree twenty-five years ago; the man she had loved and mourned for all this time; the man who had been no more than a ghost for so long was standing on her doorstep.

She cleared her throat and her voice reappeared, albeit croakier. It was a word that had proceeded so many of her questions past and present.

“Why?” she asked.

“May I come in?” he replied, having faith her answer would be yes. Instead, she said nothing, and stood firm. He tried to read the expression on a face he no longer knew until eventually, she turned to her side and cleared a path through the porch door and into the lounge.

As he moved inside, her eyes looked beyond the garden fence to see if anyone else had witnessed his resurrection. But like the day he vanished, he was invisible. She inhaled all the fresh air her lungs would allow before she breathed in that belonging to the dead.

Then she quietly closed the door.

CHAPTER THREE

London, Twenty-Five Years Earlier

June 6, 4.20am

Street sweepers brushed discarded soft drinks cans and polystyrene fast food boxes from London’s pavements into black plastic bin bags. The previous day’s rainstorm had washed away the stale, humid air and brought with it an early morning chill. So I pulled my shirt cuffs up over my cold hands, perched on the wall outside the British Library and leaned back on the railings, hoping it would be warmer inside when it opened later.

I passed the time by staring at the blank faces of the early morning workers who sleepwalked past me. Any one of them over a certain age could have been Kenneth Jagger.

My first recollection of the monster that lived with my mother was of his iron girder legs pounding down Doreen’s stairs. The solid brick walls seemed to quake under each footstep. Then when he reached us, Kenneth briefly eyed me up and down and without saying a word, lumbered into another room. I looked at my mother quizzically. She retaliated with a forced smile.

My loathing of Kenneth was immediate, intense and plainly shared. I had never been in close proximity to such an intimidating presence. He wore a thick, black moustache and his receding hairline was poorly disguised with a limp Brylcreem quiff. Dark hairs crawled across his broad shoulders like spiders’ legs and poked out of the holes in his dirty white vest.

A chequered history was etched across his gnarly face - a portrait of his environment. A collection of clumsily self-inked gun and knife tattoos on his forearms and backs of his hands warned he preferred to be feared, not befriended. A crimson heart with a black dagger penetrating the name ‘Doreen’ sat off-centre on his left bicep. Its faded colouring indicated he had been a part of her life a lot longer than I.

Doreen pulled him aside into their tiny concrete back yard while I read a potted history of the man proudly displayed on the wall in framed newspaper cuttings.

Kenneth Jagger, or ‘Jagger the Dagger’ as the press had branded him, was a gangster of sorts. Not to the degree or notoriety of the Kray Twins – although rumoured long-time associates of his. But he was enough of a wrong’un to earn vibrant stories every time police questioned him in connection with armed robberies. Knives were his weapons of choice. His was a wasted life, blighted by sporadic stays at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but never a punishment so harsh as to have encouraged him to see the error of his ways.

By the mid 1960s, Kenneth had remained a small fish in a crowded pond. As a career criminal, he had seen meagre returns. All he had under his control were his aspirations, and Doreen. According to one report about his conviction for beating and robbing a postmaster, he’d been released from prison shortly after my mother had last walked away from us. I realised he must have been the one my parents argued about behind closed doors.

Kenneth returned to find me engrossed in his criminal CV. Doreen’s apprehensive expression told me she too sensed the atmosphere that hung thick in the air like her cigarette smoke.

“Right, let’s get the tea on,” she offered in an overly chirpy voice, like Barbara Windsor in a ‘Carry On’ film. She nervously tapped her bottom lip with her finger. “Do you want to give me a hand Simon?”

“How do you know him?” I whispered as she bustled me into the kitchenette.

“Kenny’s an old friend,” she continued without making eye contact, and focused on peeling potatoes and dropping them into a deep-fat fryer.

“But why is he here? With us?”

“He lives here, Simon.”

I glared at her, waiting for a better explanation, but there was none. I scowled at Doreen, unable to reconcile the carefree life she’d lead in my imagination with the squalid reality before me. The silence loomed heavy between us as we made our first, and last, meal together.

1.50pm

I’d sifted through mountains of electoral registers in the library dating back two decades, but drew a blank in trying to find any trace of Doreen. It was possible - and given her history, quite likely – she had moved on from East London. But the pain etched into her face the night my father and I turned her away from our door for the first time told me she’d resigned herself to her fate. And that lay with Kenneth.

So I relied on my hazy memory, a London street map I’d smuggled out under my shirt, and several buses to get me to Bromley-By-Bow.

I recalled Doreen’s futile attempts to gloss over the sour mood between Kenneth and I that day by talking incessantly. He had little to say, and stared menacingly at me to relay his feelings instead. I all but ignored him, frightened to even make eye contact. She had everything she could have possibly needed from us but discarded it for a pitiful existence with a worthless man. It made no sense.

“How long’s he here for?” Kenneth suddenly spat, then stuffed his face with another chip sandwich. Tomato ketchup trickled down his chin like lava.

“Don’t be like that, Kenny,” Doreen replied gently. Around my father she was the life and soul of the house, but around Kenneth, she was subservient. I didn’t like her.

Doreen asked me about school and I explained how I planned to go to university and study architecture. She smiled warmly. Kenneth just laughed.

“Poncey load of crap,” he roared. “University. Load of bollocks.”

“Why?” I asked; the first time I’d dared to speak to him.

“You should get a proper job. Get out there and work instead of learning rubbish.”

“I’m thirteen and I can’t train to be an architect if I don’t pass my exams.”

“Listen, kid, I was in the boxing ring and earning money working on the markets when I was your age, not wasting my time.”

“Well my dad doesn’t think it’s a waste of time,” I directed at Doreen. Her eyes remained fixed on the table.

“What does that wanker know? Someone needs to make a man of you.” I was aware cockiness probably wasn’t the best way forward with a man like Kenneth, but my brain wasn’t listening.

“Like you?”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” I looked down at my plate.

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” he continued, a volcano preparing to erupt. “Coming down here with your big bloody ideas. Well you’ll never be better than me - you’re fuck all.”

I looked to Doreen for support, but she said nothing. Then my ability to self-censor completely evaporated.