She wished her father had kept something of her mum’s for her. Anything. Just a blouse, or a favourite cardigan or something that she could have sniffed.
‘D’you want me to help you?’ she asked him.
‘Would you?’ He seemed pleased that she’d offered. ‘Once our Monica’s up and gone. I gave your mam a couple of those pills the doctor prescribed for her. She’ll be out for a good while.’
‘I hope so,’ Kathleen said ruefully, managing the first smile to him in days. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if she finds us in there. She’d bloody murder us!’
Which wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to have said, but it at least raised a smile from him too.
They finished off the early morning chores together, John dealing with the back of the bar, while Kathleen, having taken Monica her tea and checked she was up for work, finished off the big room and went and dealt with the toilets.
Monica was back down in what seemed like no time, hair and make-up immaculate and only the grim set of her mouth giving any indication of how she was feeling. It was still very early, and Kathleen had the impression that getting out of the pub was her first priority every morning – only once she set off up the road could she breathe out and start her day. Oh, how she wished she could do just the same.
‘Mum’s spark out,’ she told her stepfather, not even glancing in Kathleen’s direction.
Kathleen’s dad nodded. ‘And will be for a good while, I’ll bet,’ he said, their nods of acknowledgement confirming that was much the best thing for everyone.
‘Anyway, I’m off,’ she said and now she did seem to acknowledge Kathleen’s presence. ‘Some of us have proper jobs to get to.’
It was her way, Kathleen decided, of excusing her disappearance. Point-making, to deflect any negative comments about how little she was currently around. So let her, she thought. I really don’t care.
Not so her dad. ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘Kathleen works every bit as hard as you do. Just get gone,’ he added mildly, ‘and less of the gob.’
It was the first cheering thing Kathleen had heard from him in days.
Less cheering was the business of entering Darren’s bedroom, which was dark – Irene had obviously decided to keep the curtains closed now – and smelt musty and stale.
The bed was all awry from where Irene had been climbing in and out of it, but apart from that, it looked as bare and neat and characterless as it always did. Darren had been as tidy in his personal habits as he’d been with his clothing. It was just such a tragedy that his personality had led him so inexorably to the chaotic world of the out-of-control gambler.
Now she was in here she really didn’t know what she could help with. Riffling through Darren’s personal papers was the last thing she felt like doing.
Her father, however, seemed to have no such concerns. Perhaps conscious of the clock ticking, he immediately went to the wonky old wardrobe, getting down on his knees to see what he could find in the bottom – the place where Darren apparently shoved his paperwork. Out of sight, out of mind? She studied her father’s back. He’d said little of his personal feelings, but he must have them. Darren had been his stepson for a long time, after all. And he’d liked him. They’d rubbed along fine.
She went to join him, aghast at just how much stuff was jumbled together at the bottom of the wardrobe – who knew so much was hidden behind the thin wooden doors? There were piles of boxes and files and she accepted a shoebox he’d handed her, and was soon lost in a thick sheaf of sundry documents. Many payslips, a bunch of bank statements, a bundle of handwritten letters that she recognised as being from a girl he’d been going with for a while a couple of years back, and betting slips – all of them old ones, for small, seemingly insignificant amounts, but which had still amounted to the seeds of his destruction.
It was difficult to know what to look for, she realised, and, again, her thoughts strayed back to the business of having to be here – like a pair of snoops, in a room they had no business being in, with the weight of its absent owner pressing down.
She could have sat there on the edge of Darren’s bed for hours, no doubt, she realised, but for a sound, through the wall. Was Irene stirring?
Her dad obviously heard it too, because his head jerked up, listening. She wasn’t sure what he’d been going through – he now seemed like an island in a sea of bits of paper – but he quickly closed the lid on the box he had in front of him, and gestured to her that she should do the same, and hand it back to him.
She did so, glad to leave, unsure what purpose could be served here, and was just heading out again, her dad close behind her, when she heard a rustle.
She turned. He seemed to be stuffing something into his dressing-gown pocket. ‘What’ve you found?’ she whispered.
‘What?’ he said, before putting a finger to his lips. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
She continued out of the room, her dad following, switching off the light with careful fingers. It was only when they were back on the landing that she saw his face was white.
‘What have you found, Dad?’ she said again.
He shook his head. ‘I told you,’ he mouthed. ‘Nothing.’
And she knew he wasn’t telling her the truth.
Kathleen stood back against the wall behind the bar and tried to listen. It was late afternoon, just a few days before Bonfire Night, and whoever was at the other end of her dad’s whispered telephone conversation must have things to say that he didn’t want anyone else getting wind of – presumably Irene – because he’d stretched the phone cord all the way out from the end of the bar and taken the receiver out to the bottom of the stairs.
But he wasn’t doing much of a job of keeping the conversation private. He was obviously getting angry. He was certainly raising his voice.
‘Well you can’t get blood out of a bleeding stone, can you?’ he snapped, his voice close to a shout now. ‘So there’s no point coming here, pal. No point whatsoever! I owe you nothing,’ he hissed, obviously checking the volume of his voice. ‘And there’s more than me here if you’re thinking of coming mob-handed.’
There was a long pause then, whoever he was speaking to obviously giving as good as he’d got. Then, ‘Step one foot in my boozer and see what happens then, eh? I’m about sick of this – folk chasing us for money we don’t owe! It’s the police next if it doesn’t stop. I mean it!’
Kathleen jumped away just as her dad burst back through the door into the bar. He looked angry and stressed and she wished she could help him. This wasn’t the first of that sort of call he’d had to deal with – far from it. And it was almost as if Darren’s creditors were working together. Nothing for ages – not a peep out of anyone – and they were suddenly all coming out of the woodwork. As if they’d waited for what they thought was a respectable amount of time before calling up en masse to try to get what they were owed out of her dad. Was one of them the reason Darren had got himself that gun?
‘Creditors again, Dad?’ she asked after he’d slammed the phone back on the bar, and tried to impose some order on the now-twizzled cord. She hadn’t forgotten that