Nicky looked pityingly at him, trying to hide his grin.
“You. Put. Your. Foot. Down. With Judy, and yet you’re still here, still alive, with all your bits still attached… you’re either the bravest man alive or the biggest fool in Christendom…”
Leon backpedalled hastily.
“OK, what I meant was, I thought about putting my foot down, in fact, I very nearly did, but…”
Nicky grinned.
“Yeah, I thought so. Look, there are going to be times when you’re wrong, and Jude’s right; what you should have worked out by now is that’s approximately one hundred percent of the time. Always remember one thing, and keep it top-of-mind; this is JUDY we’re talking about here, your hyper-intelligent, adorable, smart-mouthed, darling wife, who is also my not too scrupulous little sister, a girl not exactly overburdened with old-fashioned ideas about right and wrong and how rewards and punishment work, and our family’s very own vengeful Practitioner of The Dark Arts, with a brain like Einstein’s evil twin and absolutely no compunction about using pain as an educational tool. Leave us not forget, YOU asked her to marry you, she spends her life surrounded by kids, it’s what she wants; once she’s finished her clinical internship, and she’s nearly there, she can make life-choices about either pursuing a residency or starting family, with you, and only you, you idiot, why is that a problem? Money’s not an issue, so what’s really the problem? Don’t you love her?”
Leon opened his mouth to protest that of course he loved his wife, but just then Ashley poked her head around the door, her eye rolling and quick head gestures reminding Nicky that she wanted him to get Rick alone and talk to him. Leon watched the by-play with an amused grin. Ashley disappeared again, and Leon made as if to leave too.
“I see Ashley’s been at you too about Rick,” he observed. “Judy gave me the scoop yesterday; it seems she and Ash have been doing a little plotting, so good luck with that…”
Nicky pointed at him, staying him in his seat.
“I know where they’re going with this; they both have some sort of need to fill-in some of the blanks, and they think Ricky needs to tell his story. I’m not convinced; if he’s shutting down about it, he’s probably got good reasons that have nothing to do with me and are none of my business. This is where you come in. I’m Ricky’s big brother, true, but you’re his oldest and closest friend, and Ashley and Judy obviously feel that counts for something; maybe he’ll tell you stuff he can’t or won’t share with me?”
Leon grimaced, shaking his head.
“You’re right, Nick; Ricky is my friend, he’s one of the best people I know, and that’s exactly why I’m having no part of this. There are some things families share, there are some things friends share, and there are some things that should never be shared; some things should remain private, and this is one of those things. if Ricky hasn’t shared this with any of us, it’s because he doesn’t want to, and I respect that. You’re his big brother so you do it. Just leave me out of it.”
Nicky grinned and bumped fists with him.
“Bingo, that’s exactly what I told Ashley you’d say; now, perhaps, those two will let this whole thing drop. Ricky doesn’t need us rummaging around inside his head, he’s had enough to deal with.”
Something made Leon look up, to see Ricky standing in the doorway, his eyebrow quirked in that exact same way Nicky did. As always, Leon was struck by how much Rick looked like Nicky; aside from the different hair and eye colours, they could almost do duty as doubles for each other, even though there was a more than four-year age gap; they had the same mannerisms, the same way of speaking, even the same taste in clothes and weird English foods. To cap it all, there was even a third, Bobby, who was like another dark-haired, grey-eyed carbon-copy of Nicky.
Nicky spun around, seeing Rick, and his expression.
“Rick, I’m sorry, it was just that…” he began, but Ricky waved him to silence.
“Guys, it’s OK, really; I overheard Jude talking with Ashley, and just now… so, what do you want to know? I mean, there’s nothing sinister in my past, if that’s what you’re worried about, no secret life as a contract-killer or Yakuza enforcer or anything like that, just me, so ask away; I know I never told you anything before, and it’s funny, Yaz and I were talking just the other day about what we were going to tell the kids when they get a little older, about who we are and how we met, that whole ‘Mummy, where did you meet Daddy?’ thing, so perhaps now is as good a time as any.”
He grinned, looking even more like Nicky.
“You better go get Ash and Judy, I know they’re bursting to hear this, might as well let them in from the beginning, it’s probably about time we all talked about this.”
*
Ricky’s Tale
My name is Richard (aka Ritchie or Ricky) Davies, the original teenage loudmouth loser. When I was seventeen, my whole world fell apart; for reasons I couldn’t really comprehend at the time, my father was arrested, put on trial, and after two years of legal back-and-forth, extradited, and chucked in an American prison for what amounted to the rest of his life. Not content with doing that, the ‘authorities’ then decided that everything we owned was bought with the ‘proceeds of criminal enterprise’, that was the phrase they used, and came and took it all away to be auctioned-off, and the money they obtained from selling all our stuff went to compensate dad’s ‘victims’, hah, and the Ministry of Justice for the time and expense involved in jailing my dad forever. The only reason we even kept the house was because dad had put it in a trust for us the day he’d inherited it from his father or grandfather or uncle or something, so it couldn’t be proved to be in that catch-all definition they’d used to take everything else.
If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I was; they’d decided my dad was guilty of preposterous ‘crimes against the United States’ so they got to take him and incarcerate him in a federal prison somewhere thousands of miles from us, so we’d never see him again, and left us, my older brother Robert and I, in a shell of a home, with no money, no benefits, no state-aid, and no prospects, no hope, and no-one to turn to.
I did have an older brother, Nicky; he was getting on for five years older than me, but he doesn’t really come into this; he sneaked away one night, where he went no-one knew or cared, and his pointless mother, Barbara, committed suicide in the house the next day; dad was furious, we had the cops traipsing in and out for days, muddying the carpets and asking stupid questions, like we cared. She’d killed herself, so what, why was it our problem? It wasn’t like she was MY mother, after all, so why should I give a shit what she did to herself?
That was how I thought back then, that’s the kind of person I was, and that’s why I think I would have won the ‘World’s Biggest Asshole’ accolade hands down; I really was that loathsome, repulsive, uncaring, and disconnected; I have a lot to be punished for, a punishment I really managed to earn in a solid, heartfelt way, by virtue of who I was, what I was like, and how I thought, behaved, and believed. Bobby wants to have that crown for himself, he really believes he earned it, but all I’ll concede on the point is that between us, as later events conspired to show both of us, if there had been an Oscar for ‘Most Repulsive Little Shit of the Year’, we’d have been fighting on stage over it.
I started with all this to tell you what I think of myself back then, because my life changed in one day, in the most amazing and soul-shattering way, and what came out of it is the life I have today, the people I have around me, and the family we all discovered, Bobby, Nicky, but most of all, me; Richard Brian Davies, former dickhead and spoiled, entitled, arrogant little brat, now and forever part of something so much bigger and better than anything I ever dreamed of.
So where to begin? I suppose Nicky would say “Begin at the beginning” but even now, all these years later, now that I have some perspective on things, I still don’t really know where that is, so I’ll just tell you how things went, and you make up your mind if I’ve got it all in.
*
After Nicky left, sneaking away in the middle of the night, as dad had claimed, and Barbara, Nicky’s mother, had gone and hanged herself in the old Butler’s Pantry, everything rapidly went downhill; a few weeks after Nicky did a runner, the sky fell in; people showed up with warrants and Court Orders and Repossession Orders and removed all kinds of things from the house, everything of value, even the furniture, rugs, and dinnerware; big serious men in serious suits backed-up by square-faced coppers with blank, impassive faces showed up and took dad away for questioning again and again, and all of dad’s businesses were confiscated or suspended while he tried to fight the preposterous charges being levelled at him.
Through all of this, he did nothing but blame it on Nicky; I suppose if I had been a little older, or a little more considerate, or even inclined to think at all, I might have wondered how it could possibly be his fault; after all, dad gave Nicky nothing, did nothing for him, pretty much ignored him when he wasn’t smacking him around, and treated him like the bastard at a family wedding ninety percent of the time; Nicky had nothing, and he certainly didn’t have the kind of power and resources dad had, so how could he have brought all this about?
But I never once thought that; instead, I joined in wholeheartedly with dad and Bobby in hating Nicky for destroying our family, taking away everything we had, and subjecting us to the kind of scrutiny only reserved for criminals. The worst part, and the guilt and sin I will always bear in my heart, was that we rejoiced in Barbara’s death. It actually made dad grin every time he told us how he’d found her hanging from the old pulley-hook in the butler’s pantry, and we’d grin along with him, my father’s two servile, fawning little sidekicks, prepared to believe unquestioningly anything bad about Nicky and his worthless mother, and rejoice in the fact they were out of our lives forever.