Falling For You (49 page)

‘Apparently you did. Arjuna saw you do it. The day when you were on your way out of the camp with him. Apparently you stopped and emptied out your wallet. Gave the lot to the guy who puts up the photos…’

All the rupees I had left. I remember now. I gave them to that guy
for himself
, because Arjuna told me how the man had fifteen relatives left he somehow had to feed. How he only made fifty rupees for himself for every missing person he posted up there. I knew I wouldn’t be needing the rupees anymore. I gave them to him. I didn’t mean him to put up any fliers for Sunny…

‘And his sister saw the picture?’

‘She came looking for her relatives and she saw it. She’s taking him to her home in Colombo where he’ll be well-looked after. He’s going to make it, Lawrence. He’s going to make it after all. And you… you’re back with your family, and … I take it you’re working things out?’  What can I say to him? He wants it all to have come out good for me.

‘We’re working things out,’ I get out at last.

‘I was like you once,’ I hear Dougie say in a low voice. ‘As a young man, I fell out with my folks. But the day we resolved our differences was the day that changed my life.’

‘Dougie ...’ I start.

‘You’re a good lad, Lawrence,’ he says over me. ‘Damn it, you’re one of the best workers I’ve yet had the pleasure of supervising out here.’
‘Thank you.’ I wipe my eyes with the edge of my sleeve and I know that this is all wrong, this phone call coming in now. It makes me vulnerable. It reminds me of the kindness I have known in my life and that makes me weak. I can’t face my father when I’m feeling like this.

‘If you can keep your nose clean,’ he can’t resist adding, ‘You’ll go on to do great things some day, I have no doubt of that.’

‘I’ll be in touch, Doug.’

Ah, God. I appreciate what he’s tried to do for me but it’s not going to work out the way he was hoping. It’s not; it can’t. And yet… I have come home. I am here. I have met Rose and I have been to Clare Farm and spoken to my victim. I’ll admit - seeing Jack Clare sitting in his chair unable to reach even that window, that did something to me inside. My overriding feeling wasn’t the remorse I’d expected to feel. It wasn’t the guilt. Seeing my unintended victim sitting there I felt -
I felt
- where it was my actions five years ago had really put me; it’s put me in exactly the same place where Jack is. I’ve run and I’ve run but in the last five years I’ve never once been a free man. I never will be till I face my father.

My nemesis.

So; maybe it’s all been worth risking? I am going to wait. I go and sit down in the soft leather swivel chair. The one that still has the imprint of him on it, like me; like anything he’s ever touched. Except - Rob Macrae won’t touch me ever again. I lick my lips and my mouth is parched. My left ear has started up buzzing and throbbing with an old pain. I inch the colt further down into my waistband. To steady my trembling hands I take out my playing cards from my pocket and lay them out on the desk. Then I build them up, three pairs abutted against each other, lay the roof-cards along the top, taking my time, willing my heart to stop hammering, willing my fingers to be steady.  In my mind, I’m humming that tune that Rose sang to me when I called out in my sleep in the chapel. I don’t know where that tune came from all of a sudden, but it’s here, it helps to calm me.

By the time he comes in, I am ready.

‘I said you’d be back.’  He’s here. Five years older, a little paler, a little greyer, flabbier around the jowls than he was but the hardness around his jaw and his eyes, it’s the same. I blink, feeling the old churning in my belly.

‘I
knew,
’ he leans his arm against the door jamb and his rock-hard biceps form a square block of muscle that I can’t take my eyes off; ‘... that sooner or later you’d come crawling back with your tail between your legs.’ I see a small self-satisfied smile cross his face. ‘And here you are.’

Here I am.

‘I’m here to put things right,’ I say and my eyelid twitches in the corner of my eye. The impulse which I always get in my father’s presence - fight or flight - is kicking in now, hard. I stand up coming away from his desk, involuntarily take a few steps back towards the window.

If he went for me, could I take him? Not here; not like this. The time I tried to tackle him before, I had the advantage of the cover of darkness; I
had the element of surprise. I had the unstoppable fuel of my hatred and my grief. Now I only have my feelings of regret, of wrong-doings that need putting right. I have no desire to add to them.

I look up at my father slowly, my eyes drawing level with his as he speaks again.

 ‘Get tired of running, did you?’

I lick my lips, a dry white foam has formed in the corner of my mouth.

 ‘I’m tired of running now.’ To my surprise, as soon as the words a
re
out of my mouth, I know them to be true. He gives me a strange, slightly disgusted, look.

‘You’ll be wondering why I never came after you?’ He’s come inside the room with me, now. If there’s anyone else outside, I have no idea. Right now, in here, it’s just him and me. He never did come looking for me, did he? I used to wonder why. His promise stayed with me long enough though;
I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth... even if it means finishing the lot of you...
When I left here, for a few weeks I slept in the open, under park benches, in doorways. But when I took to sleeping in houses at last, places that had an address he could potentially discover, I remember I slept sitting up in the wardrobe for months. I used to sleep under the bed with a knife in my hand.

It took me a long time before I let myself know that he wasn’t out there somewhere, lurking in the shadows, waiting for his chance. I look at him warily now, watch him lower himself into the soft leather chair I’ve just vacated.

‘Why didn’t you?’ I feel the twitch go in my eye again and I rub at my face, willing it to stop.

‘Didn’t need to, son.’ He jabs at the air with his index finger, and then at his own heart. ‘I’m already in there, aren’t I? Inside of you.’ His certainty makes me wince. ‘You take me wherever you go, just like I always took my old man. I know that.’

A wave of cold goes over me but he’s right. For months after I left here, just the memory of him was enough to keep me awake into the small hours. When I slept, it was enough to invade my rest, drag me out of deepest sleep in a fitful sweat, crying out. Just like the time Rose heard me, comforted me. He’s hunted me to hell and back, haunted my dreams just as he promised me, without ever leaving his doorstep. And I in turn... I’ve haunted Jack’s. I bite my lip.

‘Once a Macrae ...’
H
e opens his hands, leaves the sentence unfinished, and I know that he’s goading me. ‘You’re mine, Lawrence. Blood of my blood. That’s why you had to come back.’

I’d blocked out the memory of his voice, I realise now. His voice has the power to set off little jangling nerves of worry deep in my brain. Like the broken shards of a beer bottle being shattered in a dark alleyway, it sets the blood surging through my limbs, heightens my senses until every extremity is tingling with an electric rush of fear.

I am not like you. I never wanted to be yours.
I take in a deep shuddering breath.
I used to dream that my mother would tell me she’d cheated on you before I was born just so I could hope it was some other man who fathered me, anyone but you...
She’s never going to tell me that now, though, is she?

‘Where’s Mum?’ I look at him suddenly. Not here, I know that much. But where is she?

‘I sent her away a couple of days ago,’ he says slowly. ‘Didn’t want your sudden appearance here unsettling everyone again, upsetting the applecart.’
My sudden appearance...

 ‘Marco told you I was back, then?’ Of course. It makes sense. How else would the police have known to look for me if someone who knew hadn’t alerted them? Bastard.

My father shrugs.

‘He still works for me, Lawrence. And, no.’ he answers my unspoken question. ‘Your mother didn’t know you were coming back. I told her to take this Christmas off,  spend it with her sister like she’s always wanted to. She was happy enough to go. She never will know you were here unless I decide she should.
If
 I decide it.’     

‘If?’ I’ve been leaning with my back against the window, watching him. I’d like to stand up now, to walk over to his desk and lean forward over it and just tell him what I’ve come here to say, get it over with, but my legs won’t support the idea of standing.

‘Depends on you, son. What you’ve come back for?’ He looks at me and somewhere deep within that hard, blank face, I fancy I can see a small something opening up; his hope?

‘I came back because ... I needed some help.’ There’s something very painful about admitting that to him, even though it was never him I wanted the help from. Needing help means you are vulnerable. Needing anything – or anyone - means you are vulnerable. And damn it, I have fallen in love with Rose; I have never been more vulnerable in my life than I am right now, and I know it.

‘
Help! He needs help
!’ he mocks, in a little falsetto voice. Then;

‘What kind of help?’ He’s suddenly serious again, back into business mode -
let’s see what we can sort out here ...

‘
Money? Protection?’

‘Can you protect me from the cops?’ I throw unwillingly at him now. I don’t even know why I say it. The words come out of their own accord, maybe because what I said to him just now is true. I am tired of running. I am tired of always hiding or being hunted. It would be good to stop.

‘Word’s clearly out that I am back. As soon as the highways are cleared this place will be crawling...’

Why am I telling him this? I’m going to get thrown into jail, I know this now. Jail is the very least that’s going to happen to me. Unless... a tiny, unformed hope that hasn’t a chance in hell, rears its head now, a hope as remote as the chance that I was ever going to be able to save Sunny from his fate; only this time the hope isn’t for Sunny, it’s for me.

‘Can you save me from a prison sentence?’ This brutal man who I once tried to hurt; he isn’t going to be interested in saving me now, is he?

‘Of course,’ he says unexpectedly, a faint pleasure creeping into his voice, and something else, something I did not think to hear;
a pride
. 

‘Of course. I can protect you from anyone. Anything.’ A strange frisson of something goes through me at that; an echo of something, a memory of what it might feel like to be truly protected; safe from harm.

‘You’re a Macrae,’ he reminds me. ‘We look after our own.’ And I am one of yours. I swallow. He opens his hands in a gesture of curiosity.

‘What are they after you for this time?’

‘What
for
?’ I stumble. He knows what for. He must do. ‘I hurt Jack Clare. You know that,’ I begin but he’s shaking his head brusquely.

‘That was five years ago, son,’ he dismisses that in an instant. ‘I meant; what have you done now? What’s really brought you back?’

I open my mouth to tell him and then I shut it again. Sunny’s story will be totally irrelevant to him. There’s a glitter of anticipation in his eyes and I know he’s waiting to hear I’m guilty of something even worse than what I did to Jack. But I am not.  The Sri Lankan guy will recover, and I do not need any help in that regard.

‘There’s nothing else. I never meant to hurt that man the way I did.’  I look at my father painfully. ‘I never should have done it. I never meant ...’

‘He shouldn’a fuckin come up here, Lozza
.
’
M
y father shrugs my remorse off as easily as he’d swat an annoying fly off his back.

‘He shouldn’a come begging and bothering me. Stupid fucker. Don’t cry about it.’ He stands up suddenly, pulling his jacket down and the huge rings he always wore, knuckle-dusters shine menacingly on his fingers. ‘If it makes you any happier, you did me a big favour, know that? Got him out of my hair.’

‘I didn’t ...’ I choke. ‘I didn’t do it for that reason. I did it because I ...’ I stop. His eyebrows go up. Just a fine arc of red hair on his shiny white forehead.

‘Because ...?’

I don’t go on. My face is burning.
I wanted to stop you,
I think.
Because of what you did to our family. Because of what you did to my dog.

‘You wanted to get your own back on me, right?’ His voice is so soft. It’s like the whisper of a dark wind, bending back the branches of the trees in the night, bending them back so hard that in the morning when you look all the branches have snapped...

‘I wanted to put the fear of God into you.’ I breathe. I don’t know why I say it. If he doesn’t already realise it was him I was after that night I went for Jack Clare, then he should learn it now.

‘I know,’ he says, with the faintest of smiles in his voice. ‘You failed, though.’
Just as you will always fail in any transaction you engage in with me,
his look says.
I win, Lawrence. After all this time, you’ve come crawling back wanting something, needing something. Just tell me what it is. Tell me, sell me your soul and let’s do the deal because once I let you have it, you stay here just as I always intended for you to do and you’re mine.

‘I can protect you,’ he says.  I look at him, my eyes glittering with dislike;

‘I went for you and...’ I choke a little as the words stick in my throat. ‘You’re still prepared to offer me some sort of protection against the law?’

‘Total protection,’ he says confidently.

‘You don’t care? What I did?
I hit that guy with a metal shovel
...’           

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he shrugs, ‘that was the one time in your life you ever proved to me you had any balls, son.’