First and foremost, my thanks go to Bonnie Hurd for poking, prodding and prying at this story to help me make it intelligible, so many, many thanks, Princess, and to OldKing Clancy for sanity checking at the 11th hour and introducing some logical and much needed changes!
This story follows on almost immediately after the events in Ch. 4, and draws together some of the loose ends from the original series.
A word of caution; it's a long one, for which I apologise, there isn't really any point in the narrative where I could draw a line and cut it into two halves to make two chapters, there is a lot of scene-setting and new character introduction going on, so please bear with me, the next part won't be anything like as long as this, I promise!
As before, please note this is my world, a reasonable copy of the real world, not a real-life situation in the real world, it's just a story, in a make-believe world, where these things get to happen.
There's no salutary lesson to be learned here, no priggish moralising (at least, I hope not!), no message, just hopefully an enjoyable read, so go ahead, dip a toe into my world and have a swim in the dark reaches and echoing spaces of my mind!
I do appreciate all comment, even the nasty, scary ones, and I'm saving the truly barking mad ones for publication one day, otherwise, if you have a comment or a point to make, please do be my guest, I'll try and accommodate, where possible, all suggestions, except the anatomically impossible ones...
Please do vote if you like it, or let me know if you don't!
beachbum1958
PS. This is a special mention for Leann, who always asked for "MAAWH", so read and enjoy, darlin'!
________________________________
My name is Robert Davies, and this is the story of how I learned to stop being an obnoxious prick and actually made someone happy at last.
*
I have one older brother, Nicky, but more about him later, and a younger brother, Richard, Rick, who's a year younger than me. We live in Carlisle, on the Scottish borders, in a great big, gloomy barn of a house my father had inherited from some relative or the other. When I was 17, Nicky did a bunk, I don't know where he went, for all I knew he dropped off the face of the earth, but that was just about when all our troubles began, the catalyst, as it were.
The day after he fucked off, his mother, Barbara went and hanged herself in the old Butler's Pantry, cue police, coroners, and all kinds of disruption while the rest of us tried to live our lives around it. At the time I thought it was the most inconsiderate thing I had ever heard of; why couldn't she go and do it in the public lavatory in town, or the ladies Restroom in McDonalds? Then at least we wouldn't have the Old Bill wandering through the house like they owned the place, something that particularly pissed-off my old man.
Yes, I know, I sounded like a heartless, self-involved prick just then. Well, back then, before so much changed for me, that's about all I was.
So Nicky was gone, and all was quiet for a few weeks, and then it all started to go pear-shaped; the Americans were trying to yank dad over there on what he said were trumped-up charges that he had violated one of their embargoes; this nonsense went on, and on, and on; dad spent a fortune on legal brains to clear this mess up, and when the last Extradition request was thrown out, as it should have been, we all breathed a sigh of relief; then the bloody Appeal Court got in on the act, allowed the appeal, and suddenly my dad is on a plane to stand trial in America, for doing business in Europe, with countries that had no connection to America; how did that happen?
Anyway, to cut a long story short, he was convicted of crimes against America, and sentenced to 40 years in jail with no hope of parole; basically, he was going to die in jail, they just extended the death sentence by 40 years. So now the witch-hunt started here, too.
All my dad's businesses, all his bank accounts, all his property, everything he owned, everything we owned was seized by the Serious Organised Crime Agency, leaving just this house; they even took the furniture, the TV's, and most of the crockery and silverware, because they claimed they were bought with the proceeds of crime; they'd be auctioned-off at some time in the future, but I didn't know where or when, and I didn't have the money to buy them back anyway.
I was 19, Richard was 18, and suddenly all we had was a mostly empty house, no money, and no furniture except a few battered pieces we found in the attics and basements. For various reasons we weren't entitled to any benefits; we had no income, but we owned an asset, a very valuable asset, apparently, so the only answer I got from the Benefits Agency when I asked for assistance was pretty straightforward; if you need money, sell your house; two teenage boys don't need to live in a six-bedroom mansion...
There was no way I was going to allow the house to be sold; it was my dad's and it was all we had, so I found a job with the City Council, mostly driving the mowing machines that cut the grass verges and public green spaces. It was long hours, at minimum wage, but I jumped at it; I wasn't actually trained to do anything, I'd always believed in my dad's money, and this was where it had brought us...
I should have followed Nick's example; he'd always wanted to be a mechanic, even though dad was dead against him being any kind of manual worker, but Nick persevered, and actually qualified, in spite of dad and his objections. Richard and I however, had no marketable skills, we'd always thought dad was going to hand his businesses to us one day, so here I was, driving the mowing machine, spending all day cutting grass verges, getting sprayed with grass clippings, dogshit, and all the other nasty debris inconsiderate slobs drop on the verges.
When the grass stopped growing as the year turned, they moved me to pushing a street sweeping machine, which was even worse; I had to buy my own masks, as the ones supplied were worse than useless, and again, the days were long, cold, smelly, and poorly paid.
Richard couldn't find a job for love nor money, so he used to spend his days either watching the small second-hand TV I'd bought or going through dad's papers, the stuff that had been returned as being 'of no evidential value', and seemed to have found something of interest in there; he tried to tell me about it, but I was usually too buggered after a long day being back-sprayed with filth from the street-sweeper to pay any real attention, or even care, so I guess after a while he gave up trying.
And then one day, just after his 19th birthday, he was gone. I had a tin under my bed with an emergency fund, almost £200, and that was gone as well. There was nothing I could do about it; he had no mobile phone, we couldn't afford them, and so I just had to accept that he was gone, and my bill-paying fund was gone with him.
So there I was; haunting an empty house, earning just enough to keep me off the breadline, but not enough to actually make a difference or make life any easier, with no friends, no-one to turn to, as dad, in his wisdom, had kept us apart from other kids when we were small, even down to having us home-schooled; at least Nick got to go to secondary school, and then college, his mother made sure of that, but she never lifted a finger for Rick and me; I guess her own son came first, no surprises there, from what dad had told us about her.
Funny thing is, I never really questioned how, if Nicky was older than us, and if Barbara was his mother, how did we come along? When did our mother come on the scene, and where did she go? Somehow, dad managed to always deflect that question when it arose, and Rick and I never really thought about it; if we had, then maybe things might have been so different...
My job sucked, but I stuck with it; millions of people had no job; at least I had daily employment and a payslip at the end of the week, and with Rick gone, there was enough money for the occasional treat. I remember the first time I bought a real pizza, from the Domino's in town, I was actually drooling by the time I got home, it had been so long since I'd had one; my occasional treat was the 'Saver' version from the local supermarket own-brand range, and the taste of the real thing was out of this world; I had to discipline myself to just eat a couple of slices and save some to last for the next few days; that week was bills week, so no treats until the following month. After putting aside enough to pay the gas bill, the electric bill, and the Council Tax, there was precious little for food, so I quickly had to learn how to eke out what food I could afford as best I could.
And so it went on; work, no real prospects, no friends or confidantes, loneliness and anger; at dad, for letting them railroad him and stripping us of everything, at Nick and his mother for abandoning us, at Rick for leaving me alone, and at myself for landing myself square in the poverty trap. I wanted out of here, I wanted my life back, I wanted my dad back, and I wanted to see that smug scumbag Nicky strapped to the railway lines for what I was sure he'd done; I'd come to believe that Nick had somehow set in motion everything that had happened since he left, and I wanted my hands around his neck so I could choke the life out of him for being what he was; the sly, spoiled little bastard who destroyed my life.
Rick had been gone for almost two years, and I'd become so used to being alone that I hardly ever even thought about him anymore, when that all changed. I came home from work on a cold and windy November evening, badly in need of a shower, as usual, to find the front door open; I was immediately on my guard; there was nothing here worth stealing, the Crime Agency had already stripped us of everything of any value, but there were always junkies who'd steal anything they could sell for a fix, and vagrants looking for a warm squat to doss in, so I quietly eased the door open and slipped inside.
I immediately smelled something cooking, something spicy, warm, inviting, and my stomach rumbled; it was late in the week, and my budget was stretched to breaking point, so I had baked beans on toast planned for dinner; this smelled a lot better. I heard voices, and realised it was Rick. Rick! After two years, what was he doing here, and what gave him the right to just waltz back in after taking all the money I had and doing a disappearing act?
I pushed the door open, and there he was, looking the same, reading something and talking over his shoulder to someone in the kitchen, someone female, by the sound of it, a voice with a distinct London accent; so, he'd waltzed back in here and brought his girlfriend too, had he? I'd soon put him straight about that! You leave, you're gone, it's as simple as that; sneaking-off like that had taken away any right he had to be here, as far as I was concerned.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I demanded, watching in satisfaction as he jumped, spinning round, to smile at me, a big, wide, cheesy, 'Hi, howya doing!' kind of smile, but I wasn't having any of it; he'd stolen my money, what little I had, disappeared, and never so much a note in almost two years to say where he was, to say sorry, nothing.
