Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Hey, Steve,’ I said.

‘Hey, yourself,’ he growled back at me, if you can growl while you’re keeping your voice half a hair above a whisper. He gave me a look of the up-and-then-back-down-again variety, his lip curling. ‘Christ, it really is you, isn’t it? Felix bloody Castor! Well, take the bloody hint, okay? I don’t want to talk to you, and you shouldn’t want to talk to me. You’re probably prejudicing that fucker’s case just being here.’

‘Fucker?’ I queried.

‘Don’t play thick. Your frigging loser of a brother.’

‘Wow,’ I reflected. ‘Free legal advice! Do the partners know you give it out for nothing, Stevie? Or are you planning to hit me with a bill on my way out?’

‘I’ll hit you with the toe of my frigging boot,’ Steve hissed, with another panicky glance towards the receptionist, who was still watching us with undisguised interest. ‘Piss off, Castor. I mean it. Do you want me to tell the prosecutors you came here to offer me a bribe?’

‘I don’t want you to do anything that would niggle at your conscience, Steve,’ I said. ‘Children and lawyers should get a completely free ride, in my opinion. Karmically, I mean. But then you’re not actually a lawyer yet, are you? You’re still slogging your way up the ziggurat, and it’s got slippery sides. All the more so when you barely scrape a pass in your tests and your kid brother is up Beddie Road doing time for drugs. So I’m hoping we can have a civilised conversation here and not make a scene. Because a scene would be ugly and demeaning and it might mean you miss out on your promotion for the second year running. In fact,’ I added, poking him lightly in the stomach, ‘if we make it just ugly and demeaning enough, you could be out of a job altogether. What do you think?’

Steve stared at me, nonplussed. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last, shaking his head in wonder at my impudence.

‘Fuck me,’ I agreed. ‘But quietly and discreetly, yeah? So as not to wake the neighbours. Sit down and let’s talk. Or I will, I promise you, blot your copybook here beyond any chance of unblotting.’

Steve laughed indignantly. ‘I’ll just have you thrown out.’

‘Then I’ll go out screaming that you raped my teenaged sister after I refused to sell you any more drugs.’ I shot him an affable smile. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘Last time of asking.’

A heroic psychomachia played itself out in his face. To my chagrin, it looked as though he’d decided on the ‘publish and be damned’ option, but the receptionist, who had left her desk and crossed the room to join us, intervened at the tipping point by pure chance.

‘Is everything all right, Mister Seddon?’ she asked, with heavy emphasis.

‘It’s fine, Karen,’ Steve said, instinctively shrinking back from the edge of the abyss. ‘I might have double-booked an appointment time, but I’m sorting it out. Thanks.’

He stared at her, a stiff smile on his face, until she retreated again, with a begrudging nod. She knew something wasn’t kosher, but she couldn’t push it any further in the face of Steve’s stonewalling. And Steve, as soon as she was out of earshot again, gave up the unequal struggle. He sat down opposite me, giving me a venomous look.

‘How long ago did you talk to Kenny?’ I asked him, feeling in no mood for small talk.

‘You mean before your brother killed him?’ Steve shot back, his voice sinking to the lower limit of audibility.

‘I just mean how long ago, Steve. Give me straight answers and you’ll get me out of your life a lot faster.’

‘Months ago. A year, almost. We don’t talk.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Why do you think?’ Steve’s tone was sharp.

‘Because you’re trying to become a lawyer, and everyone else in your family is a petty crook with a rap sheet as long as a nun’s nightie?’

‘There you go.’

‘But you knew who Kenny was shacking up with, right? Up until a couple of years back? The big love of his life, until she left him for a builder’s merchant with a moped?’

‘Anita Yeats.’ Steve spat out the name as though it was something poisonous that he’d almost swallowed.

‘Exactly. How did that happen, Steve? How did the star-crossed lovers meet up again so far from home?’

‘How the fuck should I know, Castor? And why the fuck should I care? Kenny always had a thing about her. I wouldn’t have put it past him to go looking for her. Or pay someone else to. He couldn’t be made to see sense on that subject. Anita Yeats was a frigging bike, and he talked about her like she was the Blessed Virgin.’

‘Couldn’t be made to see sense?’ I echoed. ‘Did you try? Was that something you talked about a lot?’

Steve rolled his eyes, shrugged in exasperation. ‘We didn’t talk about anything a lot!’ he said. ‘He was two hundred miles away, Castor, and we didn’t have a blind bastard thing in common to start with. If we talked once a year, it was all we did.’

‘But you had strong opinions about Anita, obviously,’ I observed. ‘You didn’t think your brother should be taking up with her.’

Steve shook his head. ‘Not just Kenny,’ he said. ‘Anyone. Fucking psycho-bitch from Hell! You know what she did to him with that bit of steel. And anyway she wasn’t worth picking up off the street. She was a scissor-reflex slut, like all the women in her family. Getting herself knocked up before she was twenty, then carting the kid around with her from pillar to post while she was looking for another shag!’

Steve’s face twisted with distaste. I raised my voice as I answered, loud enough for the earwigging receptionist to hear me very clearly from across the room. ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Steve. Sexual morality’s a funny thing, when you think about it. One man’s meat, kind of thing.’

Steve cringed, hunching his shoulders. ‘Keep your frigging voice down,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘Then keep it respectful,’ I counter-suggested, ‘In case you’ve forgotten, the psycho-bitch from Hell episode was when Anita saved my life from your much more scarily psycho brother. So remove the beam from your own eye first, eh, Steve?’ Another thought struck me, so I pushed on, dropping my voice again. The receptionist wasn’t even trying to pretend not to eavesdrop now, so I threw her a friendly wave over Steve’s head. He started and turned, the hunted expression coming back onto his face. ‘Who was Blainey?’ I asked. ‘The guy she named her kid after, I mean. Did you ever meet him?’

Steve opened his mouth to speak, and judging from his expression it was going to be another mouthful of bile. But our eyes met and he hesitated, then changed gear. ‘I saw him a couple of times,’ he said. ‘He was . . . nobody. Really, nobody. A gobshite from Childwall Valley who was stupid enough to let her bring another man’s kid into his house.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Then why do you remember him after sixteen years?’

Steve was silent for a moment. In case he was trying to come up with a lie, I pressed him again. ‘Why do you remember him?’

Steve exhaled: a world-weary sigh of resignation.

‘Kenny sent me and Ronnie over there to have a look at him,’ he said.

‘What? Why did he do that?’

‘I have no fucking idea. Because he never saw sense where Anita was concerned.’

I turned this fact over in my mind. ‘Just to look, or–’

‘No. We warned him off. Told him that if he didn’t drop Anita, someone with a flick knife and no sense of humour was going to drop him.’

‘And did that work?’

‘Yeah. She was on her travels again in short order. We did it a couple of times after that, too. In the end she packed her bags and fucked off south. Which was always what she was going to do, but you couldn’t tell Kenny that. He thought that if he terrorised enough of her boyfriends, in the end she’d come running back to him because he’d be the only viable option. Dozy fuck.’