‘She wouldn’t get much,’ he said calmly, ‘I’ve got nowt.’
‘I know Danny,’ I said, ‘I know.’
I decided Our-young-’un was sober enough to bundle into a cab. I’d always called him Our-young-’un even though he was years older than me. I couldn’t remember why. I got him back to his flat; a rented shit hole in a high rise, which he wouldn’t let me buy him out of. He hadn’t got an income except his giro and the few bob he got each month from some sort of invalidity payment from the army. I helped him out when I could, slipped him a few quid every time I saw him and I really didn’t mind because he’d had ya bad time of it. He wouldn’t let me do more than that though, and I reckoned he spent virtually every penny of it on booze and the horses he backed that won nowt for themselves, except a short trip to the glue factory.
His crack-head neighbours left him alone because I made sure they knew whose brother he was but if I tried to do more, he just laughed and said, ‘you’re my younger brother, you’re not supposed to look after me. It’s s’posed to be the other way round!’
I helped him in through the doorway and got him to lie down on the couch then I made more coffee but not before giving the two mugs on his draining board a proper wash. He was out of milk again, so I made the coffee black.
‘You should get yourself a bird,’ I told him, ‘you need a woman to clean up this shit tip. She can put some milk in the fridge while she’s at it.’
He laughed again, ‘Nae bugger’d have us,’ and I’m afraid he had a point there, ‘I don’t have a fancy job working for Bobby Mahoney, yer knaa.’
I brought the coffees into the tiny lounge and set them down on his rickety, little coffee table. He had an old TV in there with a battered PlayStation rigged up to it. He was always playing those war games where you have to shoot robots that look a bit like the Terminator, which I found strange, considering that the war he’d been in had clearly messed with his mind. Last time I was round, I gave him a few cartons of fags, some games for his play station and an iPod.
‘How are you getting on with that iPod?’ I asked him.
‘It’s great man,’ he told me, ‘thanks.’
‘So have you actually downloaded some tracks then?’
‘Downloaded?’ he asked me doubtfully. He clearly didn’t realise you had to do that.
I laughed, ‘You’ve not taken it out of the box have you?’
He looked hurt. ‘Aye, I have and like I said it looks great. I just haven’t had the chance to do the downloading thing yet. Jimmy will help us like. He knaas everything there is to knaa about computers.’
‘Jimmy? I’m sure he does. He probably has a Dragon 32.’ He didn’t have a clue what I meant and I knew he’d never get round to using that iPod.
He didn’t have much of anything if the truth be told, except a couple of photos from his days in the Paras; one with him in uniform, with a blacked up face from the camouflage paint, holding an SLR, standing next to three other mates he had lost touch with over the years. He was smiling like he might have been fairly happy back then but I doubted it because I knew when it was taken, some years after he got the Campaign medal that he kept in his drawer. It was the South Atlantic medal and it proved my brother did a minimum of thirty days of continuous or accumulated service, between seven degrees and sixty degrees south latitude, between the 2nd April and the 14th June 1982. In other words he fought in the Falklands War. I refuse to call it the Falklands Conflict, people got killed, his friends got killed, so it was a war.
I’d seen my brother’s medal many times, held it reverently in my hand when I was a tiny wee lad. Even today, I can still recall the chest-bursting pride I felt, knowing my brother was an elite member of the 2nd battalion of The Parachute Regiment that took Goose Green. It was undoubtedly his finest hour. Trouble is, the rest of his life has been an absolutely unrelenting torrent of shit. He’s had every bit of trouble going; a shite marriage and a worse divorce, runins with the police, fights, drinking, drugs for a while but, thank Christ, we got him out of that world before it took a hold. When he left the Paras he worked a bit, casual stuff, labouring mostly but even that seemed to just tail away after a while. He went from being one of the most reliable men in the whole British army to a fellah you couldn’t trust to turn up at a building site two days running. He doesn’t talk about his war but something bloody awful must have happened to him there because he has never been the same since. I don’t ask him about it. I just try and keep him out of trouble.
I was a bit pissed-off with Danny because he had gone wandering into one of Bobby’s places and groped a lass when he should have known a lot better than that, even when he was completely off his face. And his timing was impeccable. I needed that kind of hassle on top of my troubles with Bobby, Geordie Cartwright and the Drop like I needed a frontal lobotomy. But he’s my brother and he is, and always will be, a fucking hero. Nothing can change that.
It had been a long night. I contemplated phoning Laura but to be honest, right then, I didn’t need the grief I’d get from her. She’d have fallen asleep in front of the television by now, blissfully unaware of the fact that her boyfriend was already a dead man walking.
FIVE
When he woke up in the morning, Danny wandered in and found me still lying on his couch and said, ‘eeh young’un,’ like it was all suddenly coming back to him, ‘I’m sorry. I was off me tits.’ Then he scratched his crotch, offered me a cup of tea, which I declined because he still hadn’t got any milk, or teabags for that matter, and then he thought for a while and said, ‘do you think I should send that lass some flowers? To say sorry like?’
‘No Danny,’ I told him firmly, ‘I don’t.’
Laura went a bit nuts when I finally called her in the morning and I got a lengthy version of the time-honoured where-the-fuck-have-you-been speech that lasses have been delivering to their men folk since Moses first went out on the lash.
I felt a bit bad, particularly after I’d called her a stupid bitch for forgetting to put my name on the booking. She had clearly not grasped the seriousness of the situation she’d put me in but then how could she?
‘Look I’m sorry, I am, but it got so late there didn’t seem any point in phoning or texting you. I’d have woken you up.’
‘Woken me up? Do you think I sleep when you’re not here? I was worried sick David.’
I had to bite my tongue so as not to say ‘well, why the fuck didn’t you call me then?’, because I realised this would just escalate things. Laura was spoiling for a fight and it was a bit sad how we had got right back into our old, bickering habits again just 24 hours after such a wonderful holiday. It was, however, the least of my worries right now.
‘Look it’s complicated alright? It’s not as if I was out having a few drinks with the boys. I’ve got a problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’ this is the type of stupid question I wouldn’t have expected from Laura and I didn’t say anything, just exhaled wearily down the phone at her. ‘Alright, okay, I know you can’t tell me,’ she moaned.
‘You don’t want me to tell you, believe me. It’s not about shutting you out, not letting you in, not trusting you or any of that utter bollocks, it’s just that I cannot tell you.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she said making the two words sound like the absolute opposite of their meaning, ‘it’s fine,’ another lie. The word ‘fine’ never means fine to a woman. ‘I’ll see you back at the flat,’ and she hung up on me before I could say anything else.
‘Bitch,’ I hissed into the phone even though, or perhaps because, I knew she couldn’t hear me. Christ, where was the girl’s imagination? She knew the circles I moved in. The very fact that I even bothered to tell her there was a problem should have alerted those highly-educated brain cells of hers that I was in deep, deep shit. Women come home every night and go through their entire day, telling their men every trivial bloody problem they’ve encountered, so they can get some weird kind of catharsis from reliving the whole damned thing. Men aren’t like that. We like to switch off and forget our troubles, so me saying ‘Laura, I’ve got a problem’ is like watching a drowning man frantically waving with both hands. It’s a sign I thought she might have picked up on.