To Mend a Broken Wing, page 2
Naturally, I justified my downwards spiral of bad behaviour. To myself and to anyone who cared to listen. Shiny new husband, shiny stepkids, shiny new life; finally, my mother had everything she wanted, and the brown-skinned misfit with the hot temper hanging around from her old life made the place look untidy. She’d done her best with me in the early days, but a quick shag on a moonlit beach at seventeen, followed by an unwanted pregnancy wasn’t the healthiest start to familial relations. My mum had been a resentful skint kid bringing up another resentful skint kid, and one with a different coloured skin to all the other kids in our backwater town. And with no man in the house to keep him in line. Not exactly a winning recipe for a mutually fulfilling relationship.
From that miserable hand-to-mouth existence to finding out that my biological father was an ex-professional footballer? Like tearing the wrapper from a cheap chocolate bar and discovering the fucking elusive golden ticket. Even if he was French.
Yep, yours truly was the result of a quick shag on a moonlit beach. Times were different back then, I told myself. So, what if this Frenchman about to receive a surprise visit had enjoyed an ungentlemanly one-night stand twenty-two years ago with a girl barely legal? Instantly forgiven and totally understandable. Everyone knew hot young women practically threw themselves at professional footballers, didn’t they? He’d have had to maintain the self-control of a Trappist monk not to succumb from time to time.
My son-he’d-never-known-he-had homecoming would be magnificent. I’d pictured our reunion scene: My dad’s house would be a dazzling white villa, somewhere very hot, overlooking miles of sandy beach. An azure sea. A sleek yacht moored nearby. The villa would have a kidney-shaped swimming pool, perhaps two of them, one indoors and one outside, and they’d be those fancy designs that created the illusion of merging with the ocean and the brilliant blue sky. My dad—in my head, he was Idris Elba’s double and twice as cool—would be patiently sipping an ice beer in the shade of the pool as if he’d been waiting for me his whole life, a missing piece of his perfect jigsaw. We’d exchange a manly embrace, his eyes brimming with tears of joy; his fit ex-model wife would be crying with happiness, too, because after years and years of praying they’d be blessed with a child, their dreams had finally come true. And so on and so on and bloody so on.
That fucking idiotic fantasy had lasted all of thirty seconds.
Because page two of Google painted an entirely different story. A Pandora’s box I’d prised open and now would give anything to slam shut again. As the truth screamed at me from my phone screen, in black and white, the red mist descended. Hatred and contempt for my mother grew even stronger.
Noah Bennett was the bastard spawn of a murderer.
*
THE TRAIN SPAT me out at La Rochelle station, hungry, grubbily weary, and with a growing realisation that I was bewilderingly out of my depth and running on fumes. Righteous indignation had carried me only so far. As if the journey across miles of his godforsaken country hadn’t cost me an arm and a leg already, my murdering French sperm donor had chosen to live on the same bloody island where he’d been incarcerated for fifteen years. Which meant negotiating another bloody bus journey. On no money and insufficient sleep, working out which bus to catch felt like an insurmountable obstacle, so most of my remaining euros were swallowed up by an extortionately priced taxi.
Page two of Google was more than merely a place to hide murderous activity; it had also yielded the ex-convict’s current employment—bar manager at Le Coin, an establishment providing moderately priced booze and betting, lying a couple of streets back from the port where he lived. I’d imagined staking him out at the bar (he’d be the one dressed in the orange prison jumpsuit) and then accosting him on his way home. I’d confront him, he’d cower, plead with me not to expose his criminal past, and then I’d probably punch him. Or something like that. To be honest, the details became a little hazy, except for the utter certainty that afterwards, I’d feel better about myself.
But it turned out my task was even easier than I’d imagined, and I’d be confronting him on his own doorstep. The guy brazenly hid in plain sight! Pages Jaunes, the French online phone directory, listed numbers for two G. Guilbauds with island addresses. The first number I tried was answered by the whispery, petrified voice of elderly Gisele Guilbaud, who sounded ready to choose her coffin handles. She answered my dreadfully accented “Guillaume, s’il vous plait” with a longwinded torrent of French, the word non in amongst the mix. So I struck her off my list, which only left the other one. The banality of dialling the second number, then disconnecting sharply as a man’s deep voice answered hit me as a terribly anticlimactic ending to such a profound moment of personal discovery.
The taxi driver dropped me off at the pedestrianised entrance to the port. I’d pored over images of this place on Google Maps; reality was smaller, quainter. At eleven at night and outside of holiday season, the cobbled streets were empty and unwelcoming, the cafés and bars shuttered. A cool breeze swirled, setting off a clanking chorus of ropes bashing against masts from rows of fishing boats moored a few feet from where I stood.
I walked past the austere grey house at the far end of the port three times before plucking up the courage to climb wide stone steps leading up to the imposing front door. I don’t know what kind of home I expected a murderer to deserve. Probably, I imagined him eking out an existence in a pitiful hovel somewhere, not growing blooms of winter pansies in pretty stone pots either side of a smart entrance.
I blew on my hands, wet with perspiration. The journey had rendered me hot and sweaty, which annoyed me. That I even cared about first impressions in front of this man annoyed me even more. Confronting him in travel-creased clothes, with a coffee stain on my sweatshirt from an unwarranted jolt of the train, set me on the back foot. When I coolly hammered on the door, squared up to him, and looked the bastard in the eye, I wanted to see shock, recognition, and above all, shame. Shame that his son knew his past. Shame that he’d passed on his fucked-up genes, already well on the way to creating another monster. And then I’d say… I had no fucking idea what I’d say after that.
The heavy iron knocker set in the middle of the green-painted wooden door resembled a fist. A metaphor for the violent nature hidden behind it. I lifted it twice, the solid rap as it dropped reverberating like gunshot, shattering the quiet of the night. I stepped back a pace onto the step below, putting some distance between me and when the killer answered the door, and then stepped up again when I realised it left me at a significant height disadvantage.
Muffled noises reached me from within the walls of the house. I sucked in a deep breath and rolled back my shoulders. To my right, a chink of light appeared around the edges of the closed window shutters. The outside lamp above my head flickered into life, causing me to flinch. Two dull clunks sounded as bolts were drawn; I clenched my fists as the chunky door was dragged open, my whole body coiled tight.
I’d prepared a whole speech in shit schoolboy French for precisely this moment. Five lines of painstaking words designed to cut right into the blackened soul of the evil bastard I had the misfortune to call my father. After printing it out from Google Translate, I’d memorised it, practiced aloud in front of my mate’s bathroom mirror, carried it around with me as I taunted my mother, and hatched plans for my trip. I’d recited it under my breath on the train, over and over, hating the way my tongue stumbled around each unfamiliar vowel and softened consonant, but determined to deliver every drop of venom directly to him when the time came. The moment this man opened his green door to face the son he never knew he had and, after tonight, the son he’d never see again.
As the door pulled wide, my carefully honed script flew off into the night breeze, taking every other measly scrap of French vocabulary stored in my head along with it. My grand rendezvous was not going to plan. A scrawny white man, a little shorter than average, dressed in stripy pyjamas and swamped in a grey towelling robe regarded me. I waited for his polite expression to change to fear.
If he hadn’t spoken first, I might still be waiting now.
I towered over him, chest out, chin up, and scowling. A pose adopted by young male thugs the world over. Still no fear. Me, a big brown youth in a scruffy black hoodie and jeans, the kind of guy old ladies crossed the road to avoid, a guy security guards trailed in department stores. If this dude had lived on our housing estate, he would have slammed the door shut and phoned the police quicker than I could accuse him of being a fucking prejudiced bastard.
He spoke in a jumble of quick French; I caught a bonsoir; the rest was a haze of white noise as my mind reeled and my vision blurred. The strain of the journey, of the months prior to the journey caught up with me. I swayed on the step and held out an arm to steady myself against the cold stone wall. Humiliating hot tears of frustration pricked at my eyes. This was all wrong; where was the bastard who screwed young women on dark beaches and saddled them with a kid like me for the rest of their lives? Where was the violent criminal, the killer, my ugly, evil fucker of a sperm donor?
“You’re my father,” I blurted crazily, stupidly, and (annoyingly) fucking tearfully.
Even as I sobbed the words, I knew them not to be true. I knew how genes worked; white plus white did not equal brown. But my bastard father lived here! He had to live here! I’d spent six months hunting him down; I’d hung up the phone on him when he’d answered my call; I’d spent every fucking penny I had to travel all the way to this fucking doorstep to finally meet the worthless piece of shit who’d given me this worthless life. And now I was having a nervous breakdown, miles from home, on this bewildered, harmless, little Frenchman’s doorstep instead.
“My dear.”
I looked up. He had a trace of an accent, although he’d said ‘my dear’ in perfect English. I was no one’s dear, never had been, never would be. But just to confound me, he said it again, his voice soft and breathy as if he’d run up a flight of stairs. His tone was kind too. A caring voice that sounded as if it belonged to the sort of man I’d like to have called my father. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, something else replaced his polite curiosity. Still not fear, probably because even thuggish-looking brown-skinned men like me weren’t very scary with tears running down our cheeks. Shock, maybe?
“My dear,” he repeated, a slight tremor to his words. “I’m… I think you’ve made a mistake. I’m…aah… Let me reassure you in no uncertain terms that I’m not your father. With one hundred per cent clarity and without going into my…um…gender preferences, naturally, but no. Not possible, I’m afraid, even if you and I did bear some passing similarities, which we don’t, of course. Far from it, in fact. But do come in.”
He paused and hitched his glasses up his nose before giving me a hint of a cautious smile.
He was inviting me in? I was being set up, surely. The guy was insane. No one travelled four hundred miles and turned up on a stranger’s doorstep at eleven o’clock at night to be welcomed into the fucking house. He should be slamming the door in my face and phoning the police.
“I think…I think the man you might be looking for is…yes, oh my goodness. Yes, I see it now. Yes. You had better come in. I believe the man you are looking for is my husband. Guillaume.”
Chapter Three
Toby
“DADDY?”
“Yes, poppet?”
Eliza twisted in her seat at the kitchen table, treating Jay to the full baby blues. It wasn’t only the china doll looks that made her a chip off the old block, she could turn on Lucien’s pervasive charm, too, especially with her lovely, generous daddy. More of a clone than a chip. Lucien’s diva-ish behaviour, she tended to save especially for me.
“Why don’t fish have eyelashes?”
Sometimes it was hard to believe stuff like that didn’t come out of kids’ mouths with the specific intention of making adults look stupid. Pausing in chopping Orlando’s food into tiny pieces, Jay frowned, trying to both simultaneously come up with a sensible answer and not fall about laughing.
Having worked out a satisfactory reply, he cleared his throat. “Because, my sweet, they are aquatic creatures. Eyelashes are an evolutionary phenomenon designed to prevent harmful particles such as dust and moisture from flowing into the eye. Fish live in water; ergo, eyelashes would be superfluous.”
He sat back, clearly pleased he’d come up with an appropriate and plausible response.
Early on in this job, I’d realised Lucien and Jay’s parenting style included not talking down to their children. Eliza narrowed her eyes as she absorbed his answer, then quietly resumed her colouring. Jay went back to chopping up pieces of sausage into Orlando-sized mouthfuls.
“Papa says it’s because they don’t have arms, so they can’t apply mascara properly.”
I snorted, attempting to disguise it as a cough. Eliza eyed me suspiciously.
“Thanks for your support, Toby,” Jay murmured, trying to keep a straight face.
“Fish wouldn’t wear mascara anyway,” Arthur butted in, coming to Jay’s rescue. “Even if they did have eyelashes. It would come off in the water, silly.”
Jay threw his dependable wingman a look that said he’d earned himself a second helping of ice cream after supper. Lucien’s mini-me threw Arthur a look that said he’d earned himself no pudding at all.
“Duh, Arthur. There is such a thing as waterproof mascara!” She tutted disapprovingly. “Gosh, don’t boys know anything? Papa let me try his blue one on my eyelashes. And he told me that inner beauty is great, but waterproof mascara is even better.”
“It’s a shame no one ever passed that little gem of knowledge onto the fish,” Jay responded placidly, refusing to meet my eye.
Fortunately, Orlando filled the lull in conversation, which would have otherwise been replete with another snort from me, with a noisy belch, followed by a giggle of appreciation at his own joke. His curly dark head bobbed with delight. My goodness, that toddler was adorable. The image of his darkly handsome father and with a temperament to match.
Papa himself, the fount of all mascara wisdom, blew into the kitchen. “Toby, darling?” He swept up Orlando and his plate of food on his way past and then settled the boy onto his lap.
“You are forgiven for interrupting my, ahem, nail painting earlier.” He turned to Jay with a look that could only be described as lascivious. “You and I, however, shall most definitely pick up where we left off. We have some outstanding buffing.”
He nuzzled the back of Orlando’s curly head, inhaling deeply, while Orlando busily smeared ketchup over his sleeve.
“Marcel and Guillaume had a rather interesting visitor last night.”
“Was it the tooth fairy?” asked Arthur, desperately waiting for his first tooth to drop out.
“No, my sweet. Marcel doesn’t have any teeth because he ate far too many sugary treats as a child—he paints white squares on his gums every morning. It’s a very sad situation, and we don’t talk about it.”
Arthur’s little mouth fell open in horror. Somebody was going to scrub their teeth exceedingly thoroughly that evening. Lucien tenderly patted Orlando’s face with his bib before continuing.
“It would appear that sometime in the dim and distant past, when he gadded around as a young man about town, dashing Guillaume had a—” He raised his eyebrows in the direction of two very interested five-year-olds. “—an exceedingly brief alfresco frolic with an equally youthful tourist of the double X-chromosome variety, the product of which, more than twenty years later, has presented himself at Marcel’s residence.”
“They’re doing that thing, Arthur,” observed Eliza disgustedly in the silence that followed as Jay and I translated and then digested that juicy nugget of information. A disadvantage of never talking down to the children was that holding conversations above their heads was increasingly challenging. “Where they use long words so we don’t understand. Come on, let’s go to the playroom and make up our own secret language.”
They scampered off.
I made a move towards the door. “I’ll leave you to discuss it.”
“Gosh, no, darling. Stay. We don’t keep secrets here. All opinions gratefully received.”
Jay sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Did Guillaume even know he’d fathered a child?”
“No,” answered Lucien. “He and Marcel were utterly gobsmacked. This young man literally turned up out of the blue from nowhere—well, from some godforsaken small town up north, and…”
“What? England north?” I interrupted. “He’s English?”
“Yes!” Lucien smoothed down Orlando’s wayward curls. “It’s extraordinary. This boy claims his mother was on holiday with a gaggle of girls in Ibiza when she was still a teen herself. They met some hunky young French footballers in a bar, and she had a whirlwind romance with one of them. By whirlwind, I mean lasting approximately less than four minutes, and by romance, I mean one episode of unprotected drunken sexual intercourse on a dark beach. Anyhow, they did the deed, both went on their merry way, and six weeks later, she found out she was with child. According to the boy, she hid her pregnancy from everybody for as long as she could. By the time her own mother found out, even if she had wanted to end it, it was too late.”
Jay frowned. “How is this man so sure Guillaume is his father? How old is he? And why has he chosen to track him down now?”
“I asked Marcel exactly the same questions. He’s twenty-two, apparently. This chap—Noah—had a rocky relationship with his mother and essentially prised the information about his father out of her. One can only assume that at some point early on during his life, she found out Guillaume was in prison and thought it in Noah’s best interests not to know.”
“That must have been quite the shock for him.” Jay nodded thoughtfully.
“I should say so. And for Marcel and Guillaume too. Marcel was in a bit of a state.”
