Davey Darling, page 11
‘Oh yes … we are too,’ said Mum dreamily.
As usual this was news to me. That left me only four days.
‘That’s pretty soon,’ I said.
‘No point in shagging around,’ said the Old Man, meaning he was running out on Davey as fast as he could. He lumbered back inside. No need for any further discussion. The decision had been made.
Mum was staring up at the sky. I walked out into the middle of the section to see what she was looking at, focused so tightly like she was poking a needle through it, examining a tiny hole somewhere in the ocean of blue.
I looked deep into the fading blue day and felt I knew what Mum saw. We couldn’t really be leaving? Could we? Not leaving our own patch of sky?
twelve
THE DAY OF the big move started brilliantly enough. Spaghetti and poached eggs on toast: one of Mum’s own favourite meals. It went completely to crap about half an hour later when I carried Mum’s suitcase out to the car and it exploded on the footpath with her collection of old knickers. Women’s pants are such weird things. All big and that funny browny colour that’s supposed to be like skin but comes off looking like stockings.
When she finally saw what had happened, ‘the state of it’ as the Old Man said, she flew out of the house like she was on fire, yelling at me, ‘Just leave them, David.’
She stopped and gathered her breath, ‘Thank you. I’ll pick them up,’ and bent down bundling up all her undies as quick as she could. She seemed to think that everyone in the street would be offended or something. Anyone could see that it was just an accident but she decided to let loose on the Old Man parked with his foot up on the bumper and a fag in his mouth pretending to pack the wagon. She nailed him for the shonky bloody suitcase, the fact she had no money to buy new underwear, and even having to leave – how it was his entire fault and he was two-bit useless.
The Old Man wasn’t having any of it. Not today. He shrugged off the torrent. ‘If you’re finished whingeing then maybe we could get out of here.’
Mum stared at him, shook her head and then stormed off mumbling angrily about how she had all the bloody cleaning to do. She was shaking her hands and walking trembling, so worked up I thought she was going to explode.
The Old Man stared after her, shaking his head. ‘Just leave it, woman. Jesus Christ, no one’s going to bloody care.’
‘You are a bastard, Tiny. First you reckon I’m whingeing, now you’re telling me I shouldn’t care. Well, I’ve always tried to care.’
‘And look at where it’s got you,’ said the Old Man, digging a hole big enough to fit twenty dead men.
Mum stood by the gate, hands on hips, seething.
‘We’d have been a damn sight worse off if you didn’t have me around to maintain some standards.’
‘Goodness me, woman, you and your standards. No one’s going to give a shit.’
Mum looked at him with her deep, frowning eyes.
‘I mean it’s not that bad.’
He walked over to her, trying to weasel his way out of the situation.
‘You’ve always kept the house spotless, so what’s the problem?’
‘God, Tiny, it’s when everything gets taken out you see all the bloody dirt. The state of the cupboards! Frankly, it’s disgusting. If I’d known I’d have done them last week.’
After that the Old Man shrugged and turned back to the car to pretend to sort out his tools. We knew we weren’t going anywhere fast. I sloped around the back to lie on the grass and smoke a ciggie I’d nicked in the kerfuffle of the morning. I lay on the grass and as I dragged down on the durrie, I watched a cop car swing around and park up over the drive.
It was those two again, McCracken and Cook. I pulled back so they wouldn’t see me. They walked towards the Old Man, out on the street. He shook his head with a brisk jerk and a lunge like he was trying to shake the image out of his head of two cops coming towards him.
‘Leaving town, eh, big man?’ said McCracken.
The Old Man arched up his body and sucked back on a ball of mucus in his throat.
‘We’re moving. New job.’
‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with a little boil-up then, would it?’ said the other guy, Constable Cook, leaning over the Morrie.
‘Boil-up? What do you mean?’ the Old Man half-shouted.
McCracken leaned on the back bumper facing him with the spit and polish of a Waffen SS officer. His heavy black shoes glowed in the sunlight. Every other cop I’d seen looked tragic in their blue suits. Not McCracken. He loved his.
‘Do we have to spell it out for you or would you like to see the pictures?’
‘Pictures?’ said the Old Man like he’d just discovered a new language. His eyes were wide open and afraid as McCracken undid the top button of his tunic and reached inside for these big black and whites he shoved under the Old Man’s nose.
The Old Man recoiled. Must have been stuff of Davey.
‘We’ve got you, Ardsley. Withholding information in a brutal case of gross disfigurement and endangerment. This boy is never going to be able to show his face in public again. How do you expect he’s going to be able to live with himself looking like this, eh?’
The Old Man wasn’t moving or saying anything. I came out from the side of the house pretending I had just been walking around. The curtains were parting at the Pagets’ and across the road. Nosy bastards. Hadn’t they got anyone else to pry on? The Old Man lifted his eyebrows and McCracken turned and saw me as well walking into bad news.
‘Well, eh!’ yelled McCracken.
‘I don’t know,’ yelled the Old Man back.
‘We understand too there could be a family connection.’
‘Look, what is this?’ said the Old Man, shaking his head.
‘This is just a few questions, Ardsley, and if you don’t mind you’d better get in the car. You’re coming with us and you, Mr Big Man, are going to fill us in.’
McCracken grabbed him by the arm.
‘Wait,’ said the Old Man. ‘Can I just tell the boy what’s going on?’
They moved him towards me, holding him like he was a big lumbering statue.
The Old Man leant down with his face full of his boozed optimism. He grabbed me on the knee.
‘Look after your mother, will ya Davey? This won’t take long and then we’ll get away, eh? All right?’
I looked down at my shoes, at how the stitching had worn around the outside. He prodded me. I did nothing.
The two cops leaned back. They’d seen this a million times. Some more sad arses for the scrap heap. Another one incarcerated, as they called it. He prodded me again, pulling my face up to look at him.
‘All right?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, OK … but what do I tell her?’
I felt like I was squealing. Little stuck pig.
The Old Man leaned over and put his mouth close to my ear, his breath thick with smoke. ‘They want me to dob in Bryce.’
He leant back up really slowly and before I knew it, while his words were sinking in and his smell thinning, they were pushing him in the back seat.
ALL THIS TIME I’d been expecting – well, not even expecting, more like hoping – that Mum would come out and help me understand. Especially about this family connection business. What family were they talking about? Whose? I went back into our empty house.
In the kitchen it hit me straight away how the whole room gleamed like it had been shone up for exhibition in a museum. I couldn’t possibly go in. Not in such a pristine state. Nothing had been overlooked. The ceiling, the walls, the doors, the windows, the bench and now the cupboards were all scrubbed clean and Mum was nowhere to be seen. Why did she clean the place up better for leaving than she did while we lived there? Why would she do that? It was spotless. The last box, with her cleaning gear, was sitting by the door.
Out of nowhere I felt an arm on my shoulder. Something had crept up on me. I fair jumped out of my skin.
‘Davey! It’s only me,’ she said.
I faked going ‘Phew’ and watched her put some clips in behind her hair. She’d changed. She had gone and gotten all flash to leave. The final parade.
‘Mum. Shit you gave me a fright,’ I said leaning back onto the door frame.
‘Well, I’ve been waiting on you and your father. What are you doing out there?’
‘Nothing much, because the Old Man isn’t here.’
‘You don’t call your father the Old Man,’ she erupted. Then she looked down at me, suspicious, lips puckered.
‘What do you mean, he isn’t here?’
‘Like I said. He’s gone. Those two cops just took him away.’
‘What? Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, laughing and swinging with her hands on her hips.
What planet had she been on? Hadn’t she seen it coming? I thought she had. The last visit, they were just casing us, seeing if the situation could be true.
‘I’m not being ridiculous.’
It was a very grown-up thing to say. A retort, by all accounts.
‘They took him to the police station.’
‘Who?’ she asked with her eyes forming big moons. ‘Tiny?’
Her face pulled up and the lines that grew out of her eyes lengthened. A tiny bit of spit hit my forehead.
I nodded, wiping the hoik away.
Mum moved around to the back step where she was drinking tea out of a Thermos.
‘Can I have a cup, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. She was quietly shaking as she dug me out a cup, the Old Man’s cup, the hardy big green teacup she scrubbed up clean after his trips away.
She filled it only three-quarters and we sat and talked about what we were going to do. It was obvious to Mum. She thought we should just go down to the station and collect him. He had nothing to do with it. Bryce did the act. The Old Man may have alerted him to the situation, but he didn’t physically have anything to do with it.
‘But mind you,’ I said, ‘he didn’t exactly stop it.’
Mum nodded her head and then started going on about how they might have him down there for hours and even if we went down there it might change nothing.
‘Davey,’ said Mum. ‘We officially don’t have anywhere to live.’
‘Surely Davey had told them about Bryce,’ I said.
‘Could have been across the road. You just don’t know with this lot,’ said Mum like she was somewhere else. ‘Could have been any one of them. They all heard or saw the ambulance coming.’
She stood up and muttered in this grudging whisper and went in to the toilet. I noticed the unattended packet of cigarettes. I glanced inside. She’d had quite a few out of it. She wouldn’t miss one. I deftly pulled a Topaz and heard the toilet flush.
She sat down, opened the pack and sparked up again without saying a word. She let out a big train of smoke, like she’d sucked the whole fag dry. My Mum guts-dragging her durries on the back step.
‘Davey,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do? I don’t know whether to wait here and see if your father rings or how long they’re going to have him. I just don’t know.’
I wanted to try and, you know, comfort her. I didn’t want Mum running off again.
‘He’ll ring up. Aren’t they allowed one phone call?’
‘Who’s they?’ said Mum, all quizzical.
‘They being people taken in for questioning.’
‘I think that only happens on television.’
‘But isn’t it true?’ I asked.
‘No, probably not,’ she spat. ‘They’ve got your father there for the night, the useless bugger. Don’t know why I bother.’
thirteen
SHE DIDN’T STOP crying for a good while after that. I’m not really sure how long it was and then she decided that I should grab everything out of the car and plonk it back inside.
‘We won’t be going anywhere tonight,’ she said in her matter-of-fact voice.
She was wrong. We were on the road at 3.30 to the Central Police Station on Worcester Street and everything that had been in the car was piled up in the hallway.
I showed Mum how the Old Man started the car with a small screwdriver from the glovebox and Mum prattled on about how she used to drive a lot a long time ago and how she hated leaving the house unlocked.
‘What does it matter, Mum?’ I said. ‘It’s not even our place any more.’
‘I s’pose so,’ she said holding the screwdriver, turning it tight in her hand as if grinding it against her knuckles. The Morrie growled into life and gushed with smoke pouring out the back end as she gave it what-for on the gas.
We lurched down Paget Street, jerking along beside parked cars. She turned carefully though into Murdoch Road and when we hit Blenheim Road, she was going fine – I was almost starting to relax.
As we went over the big culvert that was the boundary between town and us, something made me grip the door handle and the seat edge in fright. It was an unknown force, like I was going to be taken by something, swept away from the land. Like I could be sucked into the sky.
I held on. We got to the corner by Hagley Park and Mum let the Morrie sail around the corner in top gear in a great big arc and I knew that you didn’t do that, that she should’ve changed down, because the old wagon started chugging and choking, gasping at the gas being shoved down its neck.
Mum didn’t care. She drove on regardless, not caring a toss that the motor was making these weird low sputtering noises; she pushed her head inside her scarf and tried to keep the car going straight. That was hard enough.
Around the park we went, sputtering and chug-chug-chugging away until we slowly picked up a bit of speed. The leaves of the big oaks were like a smear of woody green in the sky. It made me think for a minute, maybe more, of something other than my Old Man being held by the police.
What were they doing to him? Were they trying to beat him? Had he actually told them anything? What did they know? Would he tell them anything? He wouldn’t tell them it was me, me that discovered Davey Cousins with his dick in Mrs Bryce Darling. I was the one that should pay. I was the one that got them discovered, or uncovered. They should thrash me on the floor till I was blue in the face, so my arms couldn’t move and I couldn’t lift my legs. That’s what I bloody deserved. Not a pathetic little crack on the back of the skull.
The Old Man would probably agree with me but wouldn’t on his life let it happen. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt us. Only he was capable of doing that, unfortunately. He’d die for us, the Old Man would, but the weird thing was he could kill us as well.
Mum finally reached the police station after we’d done another unnecessary circuit of Hagley Park, having missed the turn into Tuam Street twice. Bloody trip had taken us half an hour.
WE PUSHED IN through the glass double doors with ‘Police’ in big white letters and came into the tiny waiting area. Behind this big counter, stained with ink, stood a skinny little cop with a pockmarked face like he had really shit pimples when he was a boy. His face was a multitude of craters, hollows in his skin on each side of his face, which might’ve easily matched the moon. Jesus, poor bastard, I almost felt sorry for him.
Mum gripped my hand and we stood up at the counter like we were waiting for a meal in a prison.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the cop. His name was Redmond. It was on his badge.
‘I believe you might be able to, yes,’ said Mum in the posh-sounding accent she used when she had to do something she didn’t like.
Constable Redmond nodded.
‘Well, we’ll see, shall we?’
Mum sucked in all the breath she could muster.
‘I believe my husband is being detained by you on false pretences.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Redmond, with the old eyebrow arching up. ‘What is his name?’
‘Tiny … ah, Merrin,’ said Mum pausing, ‘Ardsley.’
I grabbed the counter feeling the blobs of chewing gum under the timber rim.
‘Ardsley,’ he said wincing. I’d never heard our name said that way before, like it was a swear word, a curse muttered through clenched teeth. It was as if he was going to reach out and whack me just for the hell of it. If I was just a bit bigger I’d punch the pimply git out. He flicked through this big ledger book.
‘Ah yes,’ he said looking up finally. ‘Your husband is helping us with some enquiries. At this stage we’re not really sure how long he’ll be.’
Mum stopped shaking her head.
‘Please take a seat.’
‘No, I won’t take a seat. What is going on?’
‘I just told you, Mrs Ardsley,’ said Redmond. ‘And that is all I can tell you. Now if you’d please take a seat.’
The wind blew under the door and swirled up lolly wrappings lying under the benches, up towards the windows covered with their recruitment posters that screamed Stop Thief! Christ, it was an ugly shit-hole. I didn’t want to be there. Not just then. It wasn’t fair and I didn’t want to whinge like a little schoolgirl so I just bit my lip and shut it.
Mum looked down at me and you could see she was right on the edge, on the edge of falling into a rage. Just for a second. Then she pulled back and there was more of a sort of womanly way about her.
‘How long will we have to wait?’
Redmond looked up.
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t. Furthermore, if I were you, and that is unlikely, I’d make sure I had my lawyer down here.’
‘Blow that,’ said Mum. ‘Bloody leeches, lawyers, take all our bloody money and then where will we be?’
She looked Redmond fair in the eye.
‘My husband may not be perfect but he hasn’t done anything wrong. We’ll wait.’
Mum was hard like that. Harder than nails, she could be. She bit her lip. Like the Old Man would insist. We slumped further into our seats. We sat there for what seemed like ages mumbling to each other about how much longer it would be and how long we’d waited already. When I asked her for the fourth time she was completely wound up and erupted: ‘Three bloody hours!’ and there was the Old Man standing at the door at the end of the counter, with the two that took him away looking like his henchmen, his little cronies.
