Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (19 page)

“Where’s Ruby?” Mr Radunski said as I left him to go upstairs.

I hesitated. They must have heard the argument between us. Arguments. It got pretty loud. I hung my head slightly. I couldn’t see Mrs Radunski, but I bet she was craning her neck even more, painfully so. “We had a bit of a disagreement,” I said with the thinnest veneer of nonchalance I could muster. It was no good lying about it. They must have heard everything. I could see from the way they regarded me that morning that they saw a different me to the one they thought they knew, and it must have come as something of a shock judging from their faces. I must have sounded like an animal, bellowing at Ruby like I did.               

“She’s…” I began.

“She’ll be away long?” he asked gently, sympathetically. He rubbed at the blood smears on his apron.

I scratched my head, as if I’d been given a puzzle that had an answer I couldn’t fathom. “I don’t know. I hope not. I wouldn’t blame her.”

He waved it away. “All dis just flash in pan. We do it ‘undred times. She go to mudder an’ I left ‘ere alone. All de time.” He lowered his brows. “But I never hit ‘er,” he said. “Never strike my wife.”

I shrank back at the thought. “And I never will either, Mr Radunski!” I said, truly horrified that he believed I might.

“You need a house, Philip,” Mrs Radunski joined, her voice curiously distant. “You need a house of your own not a place above a butcher’s shop.”

I left them and made my way to our room, shedding my coat and kicking off my shoes. I sat down in the armchair, the place an empty shell without Ruby, like a skull that’s had its insides scooped out. The clock ticked loudly on the old 1950s sideboard we’d been given. I watched the fingers ease themselves around the face, but couldn’t be bothered to get up and fix myself something to eat or drink. Instead I replayed the loud voices of the night before, the accusations which hung in the air like a stale fug, looking to the vacant space where she stood in the corner defending herself against my mindless barrage of hostility fuelled by my own personal inadequacies and disappointments. She hated this room, she hated me, she hated being here in this stinking little town. And I hated her; I hated her puffed-up job and puffed-up friends. She hated being married. I hated being married. We were both firecrackers full of hate going off in each other’s faces, and I couldn’t pin down what exactly had started it all. I had the feeling that it was me. I think I started it.

That’s not true. I
knew
it had been me that kicked it off.  Jealousy gets stoked up in you like a furnace, till its white-hot and spews out in a storm of fiery abuse. Till you get angry with someone for just being that someone. Just for being Ruby, for being popular, for having a decent job, for being attractive. Just because you feel useless and used up. Young and used up. Why me? Why me? I was screaming this over and over in my head, and all the time saying, I hate you, Ruby! I hate the sight of you!

Which wasn’t true, because I loved her more than anyone on this godforsaken planet. And when she finally threw some things into a carrier bag and hobbled downstairs, tearful and fuming, I was screaming in my head,
Come back, Ruby! I love you, I need you!
But as she opened the door I’m telling her to bugger off to her stuck-up friends and precious little job of hers. I’m telling her to take that smug face of hers and shove it under a bus.
Those beautiful lips! Those gorgeous eyes!
And I hope it splatters you all over the bloody road, I said. Till the front door slams and I slam our room door in heated response, and I sit in the armchair and tell myself I hate me.
I hate me! I hate me! I hate me!

Ruby!

*  *  *  *

A room. Think about that. Think about what a room actually is.

It’s really four brick walls (on average). A box.

Any meaning, sentiment, feelings for it, they disappear when you think about it like that. It’s a box inside which we lay out personal things and then ascribe a name to it to try to give it meaning.

But it’s still a damn box all the same.

I never thought about such things until coming here to this island. I never thought about that when Ruby and I stepped into our room above the butcher’s shop.

When we walked through the door for the first time we might have seen only the awful pink flowered wallpaper and the limp nets hanging at the window; but we had been swift to imagine ourselves occupying the space the walls created, filling it with our few sticks of furniture, with our desires and hopes. As we stood in the doorway with Mrs Radunski breathing loudly behind us because the stairs had taken her breath, as we clutched each other hip to hip, it became ours. It became an extension of us. In our heads this box was a home before it became a home.

But when had it ceased to be? When had the room died and reverted to being simply a box laid out with personal things?

It was as if the room had been dead until we arrived and our combined energy breathed life into it, gave it a soul, the four brick walls no longer a stale vacuum. But it had grown sick and died. Its soul, its meaning, had drifted away from it, leaving behind the empty shell we first stumbled upon. When had that happened? Had it been gradual?

The longer Ruby stayed away the more morbid I became. The wallpaper that had been awful, but quaint-awful, was awful again, and the room was filled with that familiar cloying smell of dry, aged carpet that I thought had vanished for good. I had the sense of something old and decayed, of a body long-dead. The same smell as that which hung about Uncle Geoffrey’s belongings when my father, in a rare moment of affection and emotion, brought them down from the attic to show me. His old, heavily foxed books on fishing, a number of tatty black and white photographs, a trilby, an old thin tie from the 1950s. There were precious few things in the box that once held twenty-four tubs of sunflower margarine and now held the shoddy remnants of a life. He’d been a boxer in his youth, a meaty bloke who’d trained by lifting concrete blocks, so you’d expect the carton to be bigger. I stared hard at the scattered bits and bobs on the coffee table, trying desperately to visualise him, but failed. The things were alien to me. They didn’t smell like Uncle Geoffrey. He reeked of aftershave and Brylcreem and soap.

Our room had started to smell like Uncle Geoffrey’s margarine box.

I became bored of gazing at the bars on the electric fire in front of me, wondering why there was plenty of heat coming from them but no warmth. I became sick of listening to the television humming away downstairs, and the Radunski’s combined chortles at Terry Wogan and
‘Blankety Blank’
. I thought of myself, hunched there on the old sofa, shrivelled and lifeless, ossified like Max’s dead rat inside its shoebox coffin, the world outside ticking steadily away, unaware of me sitting noiselessly and breathing in my own noxious vapours.

For someone to turn to I took a stroll down to my parents’ house. My mother was there, as always. She’d never worked, not in the sense that she went out to a job. She never had one, not since leaving the factory when dad married her at twenty-one. It was a time she recalled as being an intensely blissful one, the getting up at daybreak, the sandwiches of bread and jam, the laughs with the other young girls, flirting with the factory lads. Work, to my mother, was coloured by her brief and jaunty encounter with it, and she found it impossible see what all the complaining and striking was about. She now spent her days tidying up and rearranging that which she’d arranged the day before. With no-one to care for but the two of them she had plenty of time on her hands, and the house had become a showpiece. When I arrived I had the impression that she looked faintly disappointed, because she was armed with a plastic bucket and cloth, apparently on the verge of cleaning the kitchen, and now she’d have to put it off till another time, thus disrupting her tight schedule. Something in my demeanour must have speared her motherly conscience, for she packed away her cloths in an instant and put the kettle on to boil, which meant I had at least twenty minutes of her valuable time.

She knew things between Ruby and I weren’t too good, but as always she put it down to just another young lovers’ tiff, which, though they’d been happening with alarming regularity, she chose to ignore, except by comparison with a few she and dad had had over the years. Their arguments had been far worse, of course; worse than anything Ruby and I had encountered, and they’d survived unscathed. One thing was clear, though, any difference between us had only one origin, and that had to be Ruby.

“She spends far too much time reading books. All that learning, just think what that does to a brain. The problem is she doesn’t know anything about real life. Too immature. She wants to start getting out into the world, not being cooped up in some silly textbook all the time,” she said, making sure the pleats on the curtains were a regulation two inches across. Ruby’s acceptance onto an MBA had provoked many a discussion, I gathered.

“She’ll be back,” she added, with the same tone she once assured me the Sun would still shine in the morning, that the night always went away and that there was nothing at all under my bed that shouldn’t be there.

Which was all very fine. But I wanted to tell her that
I
was the problem, not Ruby.
I
was the bastard.
Her
son. Her precious one and only.
I
was not a nice person. How do you tell someone that they’ve raised a defect, when their world is all about perfection and toilet blocks? You can’t. They don’t listen. Whatever you say is mere air landing on their ears but not exactly entering, because it might be taken as blame, and blame leads to guilt. And how crushing to find out that after so many years that the one thing you’re proud of achieving you suddenly have to start feeling guilty about.

So she doesn’t listen. She hovers around the fireplace touching a photograph frame, moving it a fraction of an inch, moving it back, steers me to talking about Auntie Daphne’s new Eldiss caravan, and how their daughter takes her for granted, because it’s far easier and far more comfortable for my mother to spot and live with someone else’s imperfections. She’s like a catalogue, not a person. She turns over the pages one by one, and it’s all about what’s been bought, what’s for sale, what she’d like, what others have got. I get this picture in my brain of my entire family posing before their lawnmowers or their Kenwood food mixers, models in a massive celestial mail-order catalogue standing on grass too green under skies too blue with smiles too white and stretched skin too perfectly flawless.

I drank tea, and found I could not speak of what I wanted, reduced instead to emitting a string of superficial words that seemed to have meaning, but carried with them no meaning whatsoever. I wondered what would be put in mother’s margarine box. Those plastic and silk roses? A can of spray polish with real beeswax? Her list of favourite dress shops? It had been a mistake seeing her.
Really
seeing her.

We broached the subject of Bernard and Connie. This kind of conversation came easier for her. She sat down, visibly stiffened in her chair, her hands clasped regally on her lap as she assumed the haughty pose of a judge, her grey tight locks completing the portrait. Drunkenness was a sign of failure, and failure was not to be tolerated in any form. She had this idea that you could tidy up your mind like a living room; if it got into disarray all it required was a good dust and vacuum. She equated anyone incapable of doing this cleaning of the mind with those that did not dust or vacuum as regularly as they should, like Auntie Bernadette in Coventry who left the grill pan messy for weeks on end.

And thus Bernard was branded so. Connie was pretty, and prettiness meant clean. Bernard was Bernard. Responsibility lay solely with the individual, and if he couldn’t get his act together that was just because he was that kind of person. Not like you or me. It had to be the genes. Weakness was inborn. We didn’t have to worry about Bernard, because Bernard was his own biological time bomb waiting to go off. If he went pop it was his family’s fault. Which greatly appealed to mother.

I was on the verge of leaving, and could see she was eager for me to go, when a knock came at the front door. I heard mother in the hallway greeting someone heartily, heard a cuddle (can you actually
hear
a cuddle?), the slapping of backs. I heard Max’s unmistakable voice. He breezed into the living room larger than I remembered him, his voice deeper, richer. I recognised his disappointment at him finding me there, but it faded instantly and he offered me a nod and a smile that was unusually warm. It spoke of times past. Times long past, I thought.

“Look, it’s Max!” mother blurted unnecessarily. “Do come in! Do come in!” she said, though he was already in, and she pushed him towards a chair with markedly more enthusiasm than she’d greeted me. “You smell nice,” she said. “What is it?”

He shrugged, sitting down opposite me. “Dunno, something.”

“Well it’s lovely, whatever it is, isn’t it, Philip?” she asked. Her eyes were far too bright, I noticed.

“It’s OK,” I said.

“Can I get you something? Tea, coffee?” she resumed, at the same time rolling her bulk into the kitchen and filling up the kettle again. “How are you getting on, Max? You look very well.”

“I’m doing fine,” he said.

“When did you get home?” The sound of a kettle lid being slammed into place and a socket being turned on.

“Just this minute.”

“You haven’t been home yet?” she said, coming to stand in the doorway, the fact that he’d stopped off here to see her first she found thrilling.

“It’s on the way. I thought I’d pay you a visit.”

“That’s very kind of you. That’s very kind of him, isn’t it, Philip?”

“Very kind,” I echoed.

“So what are you doing now? He’s working now, aren’t you, Max?”

He offered a little shoulder jerk. “I’ve got a part-time job. Radio station.”

“A radio station! How unusual!”

I could see her mind working through the milky glaze in her eyes, how she’d drop it into future conversations as if Max had become part of her own family, as if she were somehow responsible for what Max was becoming, a reflection on her.

“Nothing grand. But I’ve got an interview with the BBC after my holidays.” he said, and, giving him credit, not building it up to sound pretentious. “And you, Philip,” he said, “what are you doing these days?”

“He’s just an old married man now, you know!” mother said quickly. “All slippers and nights in front of the telly.” Which was her sanitised version of the truth, and nowhere near the truth at all.

“I’m getting by,” I said.

“How’s Ruby?”

“She’s fine,” I said, possessed of the feeling that he was rifling through my thoughts as if they were trash in a litterbin. I tried to shut him out, but it was something I could never do. I rose from my chair and even though I towered above Max, I couldn’t help but feel small by comparison to this confident, accomplished figure before me. “I have to go,” I said, rather too hastily.

“Already?” mother said. She didn’t fool me. I knew she longed to be alone with Max. She didn’t have to worry about the negative aspects of life with Max. He exuded positive. I resented him for that. I resented them both. This is why I said what I said.

“Your mother didn’t look too good, Max,” I said. “When she came into the shop. Least, that’s what Mr Radunski told me.”

“What do you mean?” he said, concerned.

I smiled inside when I realised I’d dented his composure. Genuine alarm spoilt his perfect face. A face that wouldn’t be out of place in mother’s catalogue of life, I thought. He wouldn’t need to stand by a lawnmower or a caravan, because he was all the perfection he’d need. He’d just have to stand there and smile and wow everyone with himself. Mother would love that. And then I hated myself for what I’d said. A knowing look passed between mother and me, which I tried to fend off by taking my coat from the back of the sofa and slipping my arms into it, but it was a look that clawed at me, like an invisible cat I couldn’t shake off.

“Is everything all right?” Max said. “She’s not unwell, is she?”

“No! Course not!” mother said, but she was never very good at disguising things.

He stood up. “Maybe I should go.” His eyes hardened, that familiar Max hardness.

“What Philip means is that your mother’s been hit around the face,” she said, “with a door.”

“Hit around the face with a door?” Max said incredulously. It was obvious by our furtiveness that we were hiding something. Mother was dancing around as if she’d had hot oil poured into her knickers.

“Bernard’s a nice man,” my mother insisted, which only made matters worse.

“Bernard!” Max said, looking at me with mounting severity.

“It’s not as bad as it appears,” I said.

He grunted and pushed by me, not even bothering to wave as he clambered into a new Ford Fiesta parked outside mother’s front door. He gunned the engine and drove away. Mother’s eyebrows rose. She pursed her lips. “Isn’t that a lovely car?” she said to me, rubbing her chapped hands together. “Very economical, though. Very sensible.”