Jessie Keane - Lawless

Rob got back to polishing the car.

No. Best to steer well clear of the complications. Find a nice single girl down the pub, no kids, no hassle, no crazy lunatic exes or unwanted connections, and let off steam with her instead.

It was all Daisy could do to stay awake, but she forced herself to get up out of the cosy armchair in the twins’ room and make her way downstairs to join her mother. The previous evening she’d been so exhausted she’d gone to bed as soon as she finished bathing the twins with Jody and tucked them in for the night. She didn’t want to make a habit of being in bed by seven thirty.

She sat down on the sofa beside Ruby, kicked off her shoes and gingerly rubbed at her ankle. It was still sore, but she wasn’t limping any more. No permanent damage. Not enough to cry off work tomorrow, which was a pity. Fucking store work.

‘You OK?’ asked Ruby.

Daisy looked up at her mother, wondering whether to come clean, but the strain on Ruby’s face stopped her in her tracks. ‘I’m fine, but what about you? You look as if you’re worried sick.’

Ruby sighed. ‘I can’t stop thinking about what happened at the funeral yesterday…’ She told Daisy about Kit showing up, and Bella’s words to her.

‘God, that sounds serious,’ said Daisy. It certainly put all her petty concerns into perspective.

‘It’s that all right. But if Bella can rein in Vittore and Fabio, Kit might yet get away with it.’

‘Do you think she can?’

‘Let’s hope.’

Kit woke up alone and in pain. No luscious blonde Alison today, kicking off because he called her by someone else’s name. Now, he couldn’t remember whose name he’d called her by. Same meat, different gravy. It didn’t matter, anyway.

The pain was a familiar morning companion. His head felt like someone had taken it off his shoulders and kicked it all around a football field, then booted it right out of the ground for an encore.

The drink.

He knew he had to stop that. He’d come home from his mother’s late yesterday afternoon after the funeral – was that wise, taunting the Danieris as they buried Tito? – and then he’d got drunk again. Roaring, shit-faced drunk. He must have fallen across the bed fully dressed, and now he was awake, and he felt like death warmed over and served up as freshly minted.

He opened his eyes and it was light, it was morning, and oh God he didn’t want another day, another fucking day without Michael, without Gilda. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and his brain started banging away inside his skull.

‘Shit,’ he groaned. There was a three-quarter-empty bottle of Bell’s on the bedside table. He reached for it.

Hair of the dog, right? Make it all better. Maybe a prairie oyster later, settle my stomach, feels like it’s doing backflips in there, what the hell…?

Her face rose up in front of him, sea-green eyes laughing into his, the faint fairy jangle of gold that had followed her everywhere like her perfume, which was sweet strawberries and hay meadows. Not that he’d ever smelled a hay meadow, but if he had he just knew it would smell the same as her skin.

Gilda.

He’d truly loved her, and now she was gone.

He screwed up his eyes, wrenched out the cork, put the bottle to his lips and drank. Then he set it aside, tossed the cork fuck knew where, and lay back, eyes closed, feeling the whisky burn a hot tingling track all the way down to his toes.

Now he could see another face. Granite-jawed, set with a strong mouth and dark grey eyes that matched the thick thatch of hair. Those eyes were looking at him with disapproval.

Michael? Boss…

Kit felt his eyes fill with tears that spilled over. It was the drink. He was turning into a pitiful, booze-soaked alkie, maudlin and seeing faces of dead loved ones and blubbing like a fucking baby. Michael was looking disgusted with him. Well, he was disgusted with himself. He knew it was getting to be a major problem, the way he felt the pain and then automatically reached for the bottle to take it away.

He was scared of the pain. Physical pain he could handle. He was a gladiator, right? That was how he saw himself: tough as you like, nothing touched him. Rip his arm off, he’d come at you with the other one. But this - this soul-eating sense of loss, of something precious that was never, ever going to be replaced – this was too much.

So maybe he was, in fact, a fucking coward.

And what use was he, falling-down, rat-arsed drunk? He had…

Oh shit he had something important to do. What the hell was it?

Yeah, he had to… find out who murdered Michael, who really did it, because Tito and his brothers didn’t. Was that true, though? Could it be?

Oh, and incidentally, just a minor detail, Kit, but didn’t you kill Tito because you believed he did Michael?

‘Fuck,’ he muttered.

He hauled himself back into a sitting position. Looked again at the bottle and felt an uncomfortable stab of self-loathing. He was like a sodding baby with that bottle, a baby on its mother’s teat. Gimme comfort, take the pain away, don’t let me think, don’t let me feel, it hurts.

He had no regrets about taking out Tito: Tito had been a bastard through and through, and he was now frying in hell, Kit was convinced of that. But what Ruby told him tormented him. That there could be someone still out there, laughing in secret because they’d done it, got away with it, they’d taken Michael Ward’s life and never been made to pay the price.

Kit swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Everything in the room spun. Bile surged into his throat.

Somehow, he kept it down. Managed to stand up, too.

Up and at ’em, soldier! he told himself, and then he looked at the whisky bottle again, and he could taste it, it was good and it was as cosily enfolding as a warm blanket on a cold night, the booze, the blessed booze.

He picked up the bottle. No cork – where was the cork? Ah, no matter.

Raised it to his lips. Smelled it, rich alcohol, so soothing, taking the pain away.

But… he paused.

Maybe he had to feel that pain to be able to do this, find whoever had robbed Michael of his life. Maybe. He took a couple of steps over to the bathroom door, opened it, with the whisky bottle still in his hand. Then he went over to the sink, fully intending to pour all the remaining golden happy-juice down the plughole.

Instead, he left the bottle in the sink – careful now, don’t be a cunt and spill it! - and looked at himself in the mirror. Café au lait skin looking a little grey, a little bleached , black hair, a handsome, well-sculpted face and blue, blue eyes with big dark shadows underneath them. His face. The face of Kit Miller. Only not. The stranger in the mirror was a nameless, unwanted boy, and ‘Kit Miller’ was actually a construct of some long-ago care worker in a children’s home. His mother was Ruby Darke. His father was Cornelius Bray, who had also fathered Daisy – and neither of his parents had ever wanted him. He’d been cast aside, left to rot.

‘So who the hell are you, pal?’ he asked his reflection.

And his reflection answered: ‘Michael’s right hand. His number one man.’

Except, he wasn’t that any more. Because Michael was gone. Now, everything that had been Michael’s was Kit’s – the restaurants, the boozers, the clubs, the wedge from the streets, the fortune Michael made on the Albert Docks development. Kit hadn’t totted it all up, but he guessed he was now a sodding millionaire, and that was funny, because once upon a time money was the one thing he’d wanted. He’d been destitute as a child, not a pot to piss in, reliant on charity in children’s homes. Now, he had it all. And he didn’t want it.