Chapter 19 #2
The weakest link in the chain – The Little One – was eventually put in charge of me full time and he sat on another upended plastic crate opposite me in the garage and played on his phone.
‘What do you want with me?’ I asked.
‘Huh?’ he said, his squinting eyes as wide as my rabbit’s when I was telling him off for nibbling Mum’s valance.
‘You’re not allowed to say yet, I get it.’
He glanced at the cucumber sandwich. ‘Eat.’
‘How do you propose I do that with no hands?’
‘Oh yeah.’ He came over to me, picked up one corner of the sandwich and placed it in front of my mouth. ‘Bite.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Drink something then,’ he said, picking up the OJ.
‘I’m not making it easier for you to rape me. I’ll fight each one of you the whole way.’
‘Oh no, no, not that,’ he said emphatically. ‘They wouldn’t do that. Or me, none of us.’
‘I don’t care if you kill me then. But just know this – I will haunt the shit out of the three of you. Wherever you go, whatever you do …’
‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘Here …’ He slid a Swiss Army knife, just like Mitch’s, out of his jeans pocket and cut the tie on my right hand. Then he handed me the glass. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
I sipped all the orange juice straight down. I did feel better and handed him the empty glass. ‘And it’s not about my rabbit?’
He frowned. ‘What rabbit?’
‘This is about your dad, isn’t it?’
He stared at me but didn’t confirm or deny it.
‘You’re Anthony, aren’t you? You’re the youngest.’
His Adam’s apple went up and down and he glanced towards the house.
‘I know what Rhiannon did to him. His name was Dean, right?’
He stared, briefly, then nodded. ‘How did you know?’
‘I read the Sweetpea books. And I’ve watched all the documentaries about Rhiannon. And I saw your mum being interviewed on daytime TV. The footage of you at your dad’s funeral, carrying a little football. I recognised your squint.’
‘Fuck,’ he gasped, rubbing his thighs with his palms.
‘I’m in Birmingham, aren’t I?’
‘Warwick,’ he corrected. ‘Just outside. Birmingham’s not far though. Shit, I shouldn’t have said that.’ He glanced towards the door again.
‘What are they going to do to me?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. They just wanna send a message to Rhiannon. They were talking about cutting off a bit of your hair or summing.’
‘To achieve what?’
Anthony pulled up his crate alongside me and sat down on top of it. ‘Some sort of ransom, I think. I think the idea is to keep hold of you for a few weeks and send bits of you to her as a warning.’
‘Is your mum involved in this? This is her garage I take it?’
‘We packed her off to Spain on holiday last week – my auntie’s got a timeshare.
Nine pound fifty flights. She hasn’t had a holiday since Dad was alive.
We thought it was the perfect time. Matt lost his job – he was a car salesman – and Lou’s got hideous student debts.
I can’t get a job and I failed all my exams. We’re all a bit of a disappointment to her and she was really stressed.
We just wanted to do something for her. Get some money for her. ’
‘But there’s nobody to pay the ransom for me,’ I said. ‘My adopted mum is dead. All my money is tied up in inheritances. I don’t get a thing for years.’
‘There must be someone you know who has money.’
‘No. Nobody gives a shit about me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anthony, head bowed. ‘I never liked this plan.’
‘I get why you’ve done it though.’
‘Them, not me,’ he said firmly – the biggest show of confidence I’d seen.
‘I never wanted to go along with it. I actually want a life outside of prison, unlike Louis. Matt’s on the fence but Louis is really out to do something; to get revenge on Rhiannon.
They both want her to get more than just a prison sentence.
Did you know she lives the life of Riley in there … ’
At that moment, the door flung open and Anthony bounced off the crate as though a hot poker had come through the top of it.
‘I fucking knew you’d try and befriend her, for Christ’s sake!’ Louis roared. ‘What do you think this is? Fucking come ’ere!’
Anthony followed Louis out of the garage, slamming the door behind him as he did.
I stayed on the chair, one hand tied, the other free with a cucumber sandwich dangling from it, the bang of the door echoing off the metal shutters.
I set down the sarnie and reached across for the empty OJ glass.
I tucked it in the crook of my arm out of sight.
And I breathed. In for four, hold for four, out for four, like Mum used to make me when I was having one of my tantrums. In for four, hold for four, out for four.
I ran through the same exercise multiple times until my chest wasn’t painful and my head was clear.
I was certain that River wasn’t coming to save me anytime soon.
If I hadn’t been so pig-headed I’d have asked him to track my phone but I wasn’t even sure where my bag was.
I tried to summon Dad in my mind. He appeared in front of me, standing on the garage floor.
What are you going to do?
‘What do you think?’
He shook his head, just as he’d done at the beach when I was about to try and drown myself. Not like this.
‘I didn’t start this,’ I snapped. ‘It’s his fault if he gets hurt.’
You hurt him, his brothers will hurt you. You’ll just make things worse.
‘How can they be worse?’ I said.
‘I’m tied up in a garage somewhere in Shakespeare country, no fucker knows where I am, and I’m being held by three fairly strong lads whose dad was butchered by my mother. The odds are not in my favour, Dad.’
Dad leant against the silver car. You know what you have to do. You were already doing it then. So finish it. Your way, not Rhiannon’s.
‘Is that what you’d do?’ I asked him, checking my cucumber sandwich was still there. It was. But when I looked back up at him again, he’d gone.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ I sighed as the back door clicked open behind me.
Louis was back, his hair damp at his fringe from sweat. He pulled the crate up in front of my chair and sat on top. ‘I hear you know who we are?’
I nodded.
‘And you know why we’ve done this?’
I nodded again.
‘So what are we gonna do about that, hmm?’
I opened my elbow slightly and the glass dropped to the concrete floor with a tinkling thud but didn’t smash. He leant over to see what had dropped.
‘Thinking of glassing me, was you?’ He smiled.
‘Briefly. But you don’t deserve it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Rhiannon took your dad just like she took mine.’
He sat back on the crate and glanced towards the door. Nobody else was there. His face was different.
‘You’ll never be able to forgive her for that,’ I continued. ‘I don’t forgive her for what she did to mine.’
He stared at me, waiting for me to say more. So I did.
‘Your dad was a good man who didn’t deserve it, not one bit. Neither did mine. They were both in the wrong place at the wrong time and she was in the wrong mood. My dad was nineteen.’
Louis got up and I thought he was going to disappear but he just closed the internal door and came back. ‘I still remember seeing my mum collapse at the front door when these two policemen came round to tell us.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seven, Matt was five, Ant was about eighteen months.’
‘Your mum spoke so well on that talk show. They were asking such stupid questions …’
‘I know what you’re doing. Trying to play some mind game to get me on your side, and it won’t fucking work.’
‘You’re holding all the cards, Louis,’ I said. ‘I can’t exactly go anywhere, can I?’ I nodded towards my tied-up hand. ‘But you’re not going to kill me, I know that.’
‘Oh, do you?’
‘Yeah. You’re not killers. Neither am I. We have to be better.’
‘Do you want me to get you a soapbox or summing, so you can gimme the proper lecture?’
‘No. I’m just saying. We’ve both had it tough.’
He got right up in my face. ‘She stabbed him sixteen fucking times and left him alone in a fucking car park, covered in litter and piss.’
‘I know she did,’ I said flatly. ‘My dad had boiling water thrown over him, then he was stabbed to death, and she … did stuff to his corpse, and finally he was chopped up in a bathtub. So I think if we’re having a pissing contest about this, I might just edge the fucking win, don’t you?’
Louis let out a laugh, despite himself, though it was more like relief in laughter’s clothing. ‘I guess you would, yeah.’
‘Anthony looks just like Dean,’ I noted.
Louis nodded, with a flash of pride on his face. ‘Yeah, he does. At least I have seven years of memories of him, I suppose. He doesn’t have any.’
‘It’s never long enough, however long we get with them.
I had sixteen years of my adoptive mum – Claudia – but I miss her every second.
I never realised how much she did for me until today.
She gave me a brilliant life. I’d have had a terrible time if I’d stayed with Rhiannon.
What you’re doing to me, it’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to bring Dean back.’
‘Of course it’s not,’ he snapped, standing up and pacing the floor. ‘We’re not doing it for that.’
‘No, you’re doing it to hurt Rhiannon, but it’s pointless. She doesn’t have feelings.’
‘She does when it comes to you.’ His eyes stayed fixed on mine.
‘She’ll kill someone in prison; someone who killed someone else, I expect,’ I said. ‘And so the cycle repeats. It’s all pointless, Louis. Utterly, utterly pointless.’
He glared at me, hard, right down the lens. But said nothing.
‘Your mum’s away for a couple of weeks, right? Timeshare holiday? But she’ll be back.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘You’ve done all this because she’s away. But if she came back right now, tonight, and saw me here, she’d be mad as shit with you, wouldn’t she?’
‘You don’t know fuck all about my mum, what she’s been through, how hard she’s had to work to see us grow up all right.’
‘You’re right, I don’t. But I can imagine.’
‘How the fuck can you imagine, you spoilt little rich bitch?’