I stared open-mouthed in shock; I was disinclined to believe him, then all those evasions and refusals by dad to give any real answers about where Nicky was, or why he’d left so suddenly re-surfaced; all dad had ever said was that he was a namby-pamby little mummy’s boy, and good riddance; now perhaps I was about to get some answers.
“Nicky tried to stop dad beating Barbara up, and dad hurt him; he hurt him really badly. He boasted that Nicky was going to carry those scars ’til the day he died, that every day, when he saw those scars, he was going to remember who put them there; according to him, that was a father’s true, lasting legacy; the last time dad saw him, Nicky was just a blood-soaked wreck, and he was proud of what he’d done to him; Nicky didn’t run; dad almost killed him, and left him nowhere to go; Barbara helped him escape before dad killed him, and he would have, God, he would have…”
He swallowed, then continued.
“You remember how dad always used to lay into Barbara, we’d listen, and just shut the door and ignore it? How we always said it was nothing to do with us? We should have tried, Bobby, maybe if we’d tried, maybe she’d still be here, maybe Nicky wouldn’t have gotten so badly hurt! Just once would have been enough, Bobby, just once could have saved her, now it’s too late, it’s all too late… ”
My head was spinning with this, and something he’d said came back into focus.
“Who did he boast this to; who was he telling all this to?”
Now Shereen spoke.
“He was telling this to mummy. We were there, he was drinking and pawing at mummy, and telling her all this stuff, boasting about it, like it was something to be proud of! We were there, but that didn’t stop him groping and mauling her. He told her so much more; Rick?”
Rick took up the story once more.
“Bobby, I don’t know how to tell you this; I wish to fuck I’d never found out, now I’m going out of my mind, and I don’t know who can help me, or you!” He paused for so long I thought he’d said all he was going to say, but then I saw the tears start.
“Nicky wasn’t Barbara’s son, Bobby; dad snatched him from his first wife in America when he was a toddler and brought him here. He’s not Barbara’s son; I am, and so are you; she was our mother, Bobby, Barbara was our mum, and he never told us, and he wouldn’t let her tell us either. That son of a bitch stole us from our mother, and lied about her to us all our lives, he made us hate her, he made us into things that sat there and grinned while he beat her and hurt her, and I still don’t know why, and now I know why she died; Shereen’s mother told me the truth; he killed her, Bobby, he killed her just because she went through his papers, he thought she was trying to find something to give to the police, something to get him put away, so he strung her up and watched her die, and now he’s never going to pay. What are we going to do, Bobby? I can’t…”
He stopped, tears running down his face, and I couldn’t do a thing about it; I was literally frozen in place as the whole, terrible, evil story unfolded. Yasmin was holding Rick as he cried like a small child, but all I could feel was cold rage that my whole life was being turned into a sham, a web of lies spun by a man I’d idolised. All I could do was shake my head in denial; this was a lie, it had to be, it was some weird nightmare, and any moment now I was going to wake up and it would be time to go back to my shit job for shit money and live out the shitty remains of my shitty life.
“Bobby…!”
I looked up to see Shereen standing next to me. She knelt down and leaned on the arm of the chair.
“Bobby, it’s all true. Our father was a vile man, who did vile things because he could; he thought his money made him invulnerable; he hurt mummy so many times, and he’d just laugh and say that’s what chilli-cracker whores were for. My mother was a brilliant businesswoman, a London Metropolitan University graduate in business and finance. She owned properties all over London, Robert Davies wanted those businesses and properties, so he sabotaged her arranged marriage to shake her loose from her family, and suddenly he’s in her bed, and all her properties, all her businesses, all now belonged to him.”
She was looking away into the distance now, seeing something I couldn’t, her expression set and her voice flat.
“He’d turn up out of the blue, drink Scotch until he was in the mood, then drag her off to bed, and in the morning she’d be covered in bruises, cuts and scratches, and usually a black eye or two. Sometimes he’d beat her up in front of us; we were small and he was our father but that never stopped him hurting her in front of us.”
She stopped speaking to wipe her eyes with the heels of her hands,
“He used to tell us that when we were old enough, he had some friends who wanted to play with us, he used to call us little chilli-cracker sluts, half-breed whores, vile names from a vile man, our own father; he was a racist, but he saw nothing wrong in forcing an Indian woman into his bed, and promising the children he fathered on her to his friends, for a price. Our own father was going to whore us out to his friends, Bobby, he thought it was funny! can you even imagine what it feels like for your own father to tell you his friends were waiting to do to you what he did all the time to mummy? That’s what he made us live with, that’s the kind of man he is, Bobby, that’s why I hate him!”
Tears were running down her cheeks again, but she made no move to wipe them away this time.
“He used us to control her, he’d tell her what he’d do to us if she ever went to the police, and she knew he wasn’t bluffing; he took everything she’d built Bobby, and left her with nothing except her house, and only because it was in a trust and he couldn’t touch it, the clothes on her back, and us; he’s hurt so many people, ruined so many lives, told so many lies, but I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Our father nearly destroyed all of us, but at least where he is now he can’t hurt anyone ever again; he did everything he was jailed for, believe me, and more, so maybe now he’s being made to pay for what he did, maybe now he’s learning what it’s like to be powerless and at the mercy of people who don’t give a fuck about you. Ricky told me you thought he’d been railroaded, but the system here never caught up to him; at least the Americans saw him for what he was, and stuffed him in a cage and threw away the key; now maybe he’s getting some justice handed to him!”
I listened in horror; what Rick had told me was bad enough, and now this; my father was a psychopath, he had to be, to inflict such suffering with no flicker of remorse; we were his children, and he’d lied to, hurt us and stolen from us all our lives. And now I was remembering how Nicky had hinted time and again to us about Barbara; he must have known all along that she was our mother, and he’d tried to let us know, and we’d just snubbed and ignored him, and tattled on him to dad, and sniggered like half-wits as dad beat the pulp out of him…
Maybe Barbara (and even now, after everything I’d been told, I still couldn’t call her ‘mum’!) was so beaten down, cowed and frightened she made him promise not to tell us; it made sense; the way Nicky was attached to her, he’d have done anything for her. I felt a deep stabbing pang of remorse and guilt for all the things I’d said or thought about both of them, and suddenly I missed my big brother like i never thought I would. I wanted to see him again, and to beg his forgiveness for all those bitter, thoughtless words, all the unfounded hate and anger. He’d been alone, only his Barbara was there for him, and he’d been pulverised by my father, and she’d been killed; they weren’t even allowed to have each other when they needed each other most of all. Suddenly I needed to know if he was alright, if he’d even survived that beating, if he’d managed to find his way back to his mother, wherever she was, if he had a family who took better care of him than we had, and if his life had somehow worked out. I wanted it, but the sick truth was, Nicky was probably dead too, beaten and killed by my father for no other reason than he could, just the way he’d killed my mother.
There was one other thing I had to know, a glaring omission in Shereen’s story.
“Shereen, where’s your mother? Why didn’t she come with you?”
Shereen looked at me levelly, fresh tears welling up in her beautiful eyes and spilling down her ivory cheek.
“She died, Bobby, three months ago. She had a massive brain haemorrhage, she just… went, like that; she didn’t suffer, she didn’t feel a thing; the coroner thought it was possibly connected to all the violence she’d been subjected to, but she’d taken so much punishment there was no one thing to blame her death on. Ricky helped us get past it; mummy loved and trusted him, she told him most of what you just heard, and made him promise to look after us if anything happened to her; it was almost like she knew what was coming…”
Rick was still crying softly and Yasmin was cradling him, but she had tears in her eyes too. I looked at my brother, my sisters, and all I could feel was a kind of hopeless, empty dread. Even now, with him in prison so far away, my father was still here, in this room, lying coiled up inside me; he’d made me what I was, and all I’d learned came from him; one day he was going to come out of me, and I couldn’t allow that, not now, not after what I’d learned about him, and us. What use was I ever going to be, with that monstrous scab caked on my soul?
And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do to fix it; our father had put so many sharp bends in me, instilled so many hatreds, so many wrong ideas, it was all I knew, all that I was, so how could I ever hope to be normal?
The answer, of course, was staring me in the face; I couldn’t; I was badly damaged goods. Maybe our mother had wanted him to catch her and do that to her, maybe she knew that there was no way to fix what Robert Davies had done, to her, to us, to all his children, and she’d used him to put her out of her misery. Was that how it was? Had she sacrificed herself for us, even though we felt nothing for her, had she sacrificed herself in the hope her death would set in motion the destruction of her husband and free his children?