Rag Doll Ch. 05

I stared open-mouthed in shock; I was disinclined to believe him, then all those evasions and refusals by dad to give any real answers about where Nicky was, or why he'd left so suddenly re-surfaced; all dad had ever said was that he was a namby-pamby little mummy's boy, and good riddance; now perhaps I was about to get some answers.

"Nicky tried to stop dad beating Barbara up, and dad hurt him; he hurt him really badly. He boasted that Nicky was going to carry those scars 'til the day he died, that every day, when he saw those scars, he was going to remember who put them there; according to him, that was a father's true, lasting legacy; the last time dad saw him, Nicky was just a blood-soaked wreck, and he was proud of what he'd done to him; Nicky didn't run; dad almost killed him, and left him nowhere to go; Barbara helped him escape before dad killed him, and he would have, God, he would have..."

He swallowed, then continued.

"You remember how dad always used to lay into Barbara, we'd listen, and just shut the door and ignore it? How we always said it was nothing to do with us? We should have tried, Bobby, maybe if we'd tried, maybe she'd still be here, maybe Nicky wouldn't have gotten so badly hurt! Just once would have been enough, Bobby, just once could have saved her, now it's too late, it's all too late... "

My head was spinning with this, and something he'd said came back into focus.

"Who did he boast this to; who was he telling all this to?"

Now Shereen spoke.

"He was telling this to mummy. We were there, he was drinking and pawing at mummy, and telling her all this stuff, boasting about it, like it was something to be proud of! We were there, but that didn't stop him groping and mauling her. He told her so much more; Rick?"

Rick took up the story once more.

"Bobby, I don't know how to tell you this; I wish to fuck I'd never found out, now I'm going out of my mind, and I don't know who can help me, or you!" He paused for so long I thought he'd said all he was going to say, but then I saw the tears start.

"Nicky wasn't Barbara's son, Bobby; dad snatched him from his first wife in America when he was a toddler and brought him here. He's not Barbara's son; I am, and so are you; she was our mother, Bobby, Barbara was our mum, and he never told us, and he wouldn't let her tell us either. That son of a bitch stole us from our mother, and lied about her to us all our lives, he made us hate her, he made us into things that sat there and grinned while he beat her and hurt her, and I still don't know why, and now I know why she died; Shereen's mother told me the truth; he killed her, Bobby, he killed her just because she went through his papers, he thought she was trying to find something to give to the police, something to get him put away, so he strung her up and watched her die, and now he's never going to pay. What are we going to do, Bobby? I can't..."

He stopped, tears running down his face, and I couldn't do a thing about it; I was literally frozen in place as the whole, terrible, evil story unfolded. Yasmin was holding Rick as he cried like a small child, but all I could feel was cold rage that my whole life was being turned into a sham, a web of lies spun by a man I'd idolised. All I could do was shake my head in denial; this was a lie, it had to be, it was some weird nightmare, and any moment now I was going to wake up and it would be time to go back to my shit job for shit money and live out the shitty remains of my shitty life.

"Bobby...!"

I looked up to see Shereen standing next to me. She knelt down and leaned on the arm of the chair.

"Bobby, it's all true. Our father was a vile man, who did vile things because he could; he thought his money made him invulnerable; he hurt mummy so many times, and he'd just laugh and say that's what chilli-cracker whores were for. My mother was a brilliant businesswoman, a London Metropolitan University graduate in business and finance. She owned properties all over London, Robert Davies wanted those businesses and properties, so he sabotaged her arranged marriage to shake her loose from her family, and suddenly he's in her bed, and all her properties, all her businesses, all now belonged to him."

She was looking away into the distance now, seeing something I couldn't, her expression set and her voice flat.

"He'd turn up out of the blue, drink Scotch until he was in the mood, then drag her off to bed, and in the morning she'd be covered in bruises, cuts and scratches, and usually a black eye or two. Sometimes he'd beat her up in front of us; we were small and he was our father but that never stopped him hurting her in front of us."

She stopped speaking to wipe her eyes with the heels of her hands,

"He used to tell us that when we were old enough, he had some friends who wanted to play with us, he used to call us little chilli-cracker sluts, half-breed whores, vile names from a vile man, our own father; he was a racist, but he saw nothing wrong in forcing an Indian woman into his bed, and promising the children he fathered on her to his friends, for a price. Our own father was going to whore us out to his friends, Bobby, he thought it was funny! can you even imagine what it feels like for your own father to tell you his friends were waiting to do to you what he did all the time to mummy? That's what he made us live with, that's the kind of man he is, Bobby, that's why I hate him!"

Tears were running down her cheeks again, but she made no move to wipe them away this time.

"He used us to control her, he'd tell her what he'd do to us if she ever went to the police, and she knew he wasn't bluffing; he took everything she'd built Bobby, and left her with nothing except her house, and only because it was in a trust and he couldn't touch it, the clothes on her back, and us; he's hurt so many people, ruined so many lives, told so many lies, but I wouldn't lie to you."

"Our father nearly destroyed all of us, but at least where he is now he can't hurt anyone ever again; he did everything he was jailed for, believe me, and more, so maybe now he's being made to pay for what he did, maybe now he's learning what it's like to be powerless and at the mercy of people who don't give a fuck about you. Ricky told me you thought he'd been railroaded, but the system here never caught up to him; at least the Americans saw him for what he was, and stuffed him in a cage and threw away the key; now maybe he's getting some justice handed to him!"

I listened in horror; what Rick had told me was bad enough, and now this; my father was a psychopath, he had to be, to inflict such suffering with no flicker of remorse; we were his children, and he'd lied to, hurt us and stolen from us all our lives. And now I was remembering how Nicky had hinted time and again to us about Barbara; he must have known all along that she was our mother, and he'd tried to let us know, and we'd just snubbed and ignored him, and tattled on him to dad, and sniggered like half-wits as dad beat the pulp out of him...

Maybe Barbara (and even now, after everything I'd been told, I still couldn't call her 'mum'!) was so beaten down, cowed and frightened she made him promise not to tell us; it made sense; the way Nicky was attached to her, he'd have done anything for her. I felt a deep stabbing pang of remorse and guilt for all the things I'd said or thought about both of them, and suddenly I missed my big brother like i never thought I would. I wanted to see him again, and to beg his forgiveness for all those bitter, thoughtless words, all the unfounded hate and anger. He'd been alone, only his Barbara was there for him, and he'd been pulverised by my father, and she'd been killed; they weren't even allowed to have each other when they needed each other most of all. Suddenly I needed to know if he was alright, if he'd even survived that beating, if he'd managed to find his way back to his mother, wherever she was, if he had a family who took better care of him than we had, and if his life had somehow worked out. I wanted it, but the sick truth was, Nicky was probably dead too, beaten and killed by my father for no other reason than he could, just the way he'd killed my mother.

There was one other thing I had to know, a glaring omission in Shereen's story.

"Shereen, where's your mother? Why didn't she come with you?"

Shereen looked at me levelly, fresh tears welling up in her beautiful eyes and spilling down her ivory cheek.

"She died, Bobby, three months ago. She had a massive brain haemorrhage, she just...went, like that; she didn't suffer, she didn't feel a thing; the coroner thought it was possibly connected to all the violence she'd been subjected to, but she'd taken so much punishment there was no one thing to blame her death on. Ricky helped us get past it; mummy loved and trusted him, she told him most of what you just heard, and made him promise to look after us if anything happened to her; it was almost like she knew what was coming..."

Rick was still crying softly and Yasmin was cradling him, but she had tears in her eyes too. I looked at my brother, my sisters, and all I could feel was a kind of hopeless, empty dread. Even now, with him in prison so far away, my father was still here, in this room, lying coiled up inside me; he'd made me what I was, and all I'd learned came from him; one day he was going to come out of me, and I couldn't allow that, not now, not after what I'd learned about him, and us. What use was I ever going to be, with that monstrous scab caked on my soul?

And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do to fix it; our father had put so many sharp bends in me, instilled so many hatreds, so many wrong ideas, it was all I knew, all that I was, so how could I ever hope to be normal?

The answer, of course, was staring me in the face; I couldn't; I was badly damaged goods. Maybe our mother had wanted him to catch her and do that to her, maybe she knew that there was no way to fix what Robert Davies had done, to her, to us, to all his children, and she'd used him to put her out of her misery. Was that how it was? Had she sacrificed herself for us, even though we felt nothing for her, had she sacrificed herself in the hope her death would set in motion the destruction of her husband and free his children?

That one question hammered at me, but it was too dreadful to contemplate, that someone could be so desperate that they could be driven to that, and now the full horror of what I was, what he'd made me into, hit hard; all I could ever do would be to follow in his footsteps, plough my way through other people like they were chaff in a field, because that was what he'd made me, and the only thing he'd ever taught me, the only thing I knew.

I couldn't change, I knew that; I was condemned to follow in his wake, and destroy everyone in my path; he'd seen to that.

Suddenly, it came to me with shocking clarity just how simple it really was; there was a way out for me, one that solved everything for everyone and shut this nightmare off for me forever.

Rick was still adaptable enough to change, the evidence was right there in front of me, the same for the girls; my father had somehow been unable to worm his way inside them, but me, I knew how damaged I was, how immersed I was in the ways and values of Robert Davies.

I'd felt at times that the only real cure for what ailed me, the only way out of this fucked-up travesty I called a life, was a bullet in the brain; perhaps that really was my best and most realistic way out of this hopeless nightmare. This whole series of revelations had shown me just how deeply Robert Davies had reached down into me, and what it had shown me with shocking clarity was that there was nothing inside me worth the having, nothing to save and no soul to speak of, just a whole lot of me, and it was fouled and slimed with him and his values, an irretrievably lost cause; all I'd ever accomplish would be to infect, damage, and destroy those around me.

Everyone at some time in their life has stood on a high place and felt those conflicting twin compulsions, the urge to jump and simultaneously the fear of what that brought; now I knew, for me the time to make that jump had suddenly arrived, the fear of what came next was gone, in the first full moment of clarity I'd ever experienced. Authors and philosophers talk about a life worth living, how about a life so fouled and polluted that it should be discarded, for the good of those around you?

I had to go somewhere quiet, I had to think about what I'd just discovered about me, who and what I was, and where I belonged in this 'family' that had suddenly descended on me. I got up out of the chair and made for the door, Shereen watching me closely. As I reached for the door handle, she called out my name.

I turned to see her looking at me oddly.

"Bobby, where are you going?" she asked me.

"I have something I have to do," I answered truthfully, "Goodnight Shereen, I think Rick needs you; keep an eye on him please."

I closed the door firmly and walked up the stairs. Once in the bathroom, after locking the door, I picked up dad's old straight razor and sat down on the edge of the bathtub, idly watching the light play on the blade of the old razor, suddenly fascinated by the tiny points of light along the edge, the sign of a well-sharpened blade.

As I watched the light ripple on the old steel, I thought about what Ricky and Shereen had told me; my father was a murderer, he'd killed my mother, maybe he'd killed Nicky too, and I was just like him, I was a chip off the old block in almost every way. If I stayed with those people downstairs, and somehow I still couldn't bring myself to think of them as 'family', because they weren't, somehow, in some way, I would be responsible for bringing them down, because that was my nature; that was how I was bred.

I realised my first impulse was the right one; the blade was my way of protecting them from me, the one thing I could do for them that would keep whatever was still coiled-up inside me, the sickness and depraved inhumanity of Robert Davies, away from them forever; this blade was their guarantee of a life free of my father and his influence.

Shereen must have seen something of my inner turmoil in my eyes, because just as I had decided to make that final, sweeping cut across my throat with that slender, lethal piece of steel and end this whole miserable existence for me, the door burst open and suddenly Rick was holding my hand away from me in a grip I just couldn't break free of.

"Bobby, what the fuck are you doing, just give...me...that...!" I let the razor go as my hand opened involuntarily, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Shereen kick it out of reach under the bathtub.

"Bobby, what in the name of God are you doing, why would you want to...to...?" she asked, her eyes wide and frightened.

I was having trouble speaking, as Rick currently had his forearm in my throat as he held me flat against the wall.

"Why, Bobby?" she whispered, and I answered her as best I could while struggling to escape from Rick's hold on me.

"Don't you know what I am? I'm him, or I will be! I can't be one of you! I'll break it all up, I know I will, and you all deserve better than that! Please, please, if you really think anything of me, just turn around, close the door, let me finish this my way!" I pleaded with her, my heart sinking as she slowly shook her head, then glanced at Rick and nodded slightly.

"Sorry Bobby, no can do!" said Rick, "Sorry about this...!"

His fist slammed against my jaw, I saw stars, and then blackness and silence.

*

I awoke in darkness, wondering for a second where I was, then stiffened as the sound of someone stirring came clearly to me. I tensed, ready to jump out of bed at whoever was in the room with me.

"Shhh, Bobby, calm down, it's only me!" came a soft voice, and I relaxed; Shereen; it was all real then, not some weird dream.

I fumbled for the lamp, and she switched it on. She was sitting in the carver chair I had found in the basement, which constituted the sole piece of furniture in my bedroom other than the narrow single bed with the bricks at one end in place of legs, and the battered night-stand next to the bed.

"How are you feeling, Bobby?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

My jaw ached where Rick had cracked me, and Shereen saw me wince as I opened my mouth to speak.

"No, it's okay, don't speak if it hurts. Sorry about that Bobby, Rick was scared of what you might do, he didn't want you hurting yourself; please don't be mad at him."

I had to grin at her defending him; but then, she probably knew more about him than I did; the Rick I'd seen earlier was nothing like the Richard I'd grown up with; he was almost like a different person, a much friendlier, more together person than I'd ever known. Before Rick left, he'd been morose, sullen, bitter, hostile and angry; just like me in fact. Now it was like he'd had a personality transplant; his smile had been open, friendly, and approachable, as had his whole demeanour, not cynical and devious; something radical had happened to change him, and I was intrigued, in spite of everything else that was crowding inside me just then; had it been these two girls? How?

"Would you like a hot drink?" she asked, and I smiled ruefully.

"I haven't got anything, only water; don't worry, I'll get a glass myself." I said, and she cocked her head as she smiled at me.

"You didn't, but Ricky and Yaz did some shopping earlier, and we have coffee, tea and juice, and a couple of beers if you want something a little more interesting than tap water..."

It was my turn to look curiously at her.

"I know I asked you this before, but why are you doing this for me? It seems to me you could have a much better life in London, far away from all this. Why are you so intent on making me a part of your life? I mean, I'm no-one to you; don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, especially after that meal, it just seems...strange, is all I'm saying..."

Her hand came up to gently touch the side of my jaw, right where it hurt the most, and I winced.

"Sorry, I just wanted to check for myself nothing was broken." she murmured, "It all seems okay, you'll live, sweetie. In answer to your question, I'm a few months older than you, so that makes me your big sister. Big sisters are supposed to look out for their little brothers, and that includes not turning their backs while their little brothers make huge, stupid mistakes."

She shifted her weight, sliding closer to me.

"Bobby, I saw how you've had to live, I know how hard you work and how little you get for it, Ricky told us everything, and I can see for myself how little proper food you get; baked beans and tomato soup; you can't live like that, it may be hot and filling, but it's not nourishing; you need protein, a proper balanced diet, not just empty calories; look at you, you're all skin and bones. You poor baby; you look famished! I'm your big sister and I won't let you live like that again; Yaz, Rick, and me, we're your family, and family sticks together, so come and be part of your family. Please? For me?"

She smoothed the hair back out of my eyes.

"Rick came to us just when we needed him the most, and now we're here because you're family, and you need us, and we need you; Yaz is your little sister too, she needs both her brothers, especially with what she's had to live with for so long, so let's make a deal; you look after your sisters, and your sisters promise to look after you; deal?"

Despite my own damnably suspicious nature, I saw and heard nothing here to put me on my guard; on the contrary, what was radiating from her in waves was just honest sincerity. I smiled at her, probably the first real smile since before Dad had been taken away to appear in court all that long while ago now.