Chapter 197: D. Flynn II

His mother’s hands had gone white at the knuckles on the Formica.

"I told him to leave you out of it. I said I’d pay it. I’d started on the bikes that summer, I’d got a bit coming in. He said 100 a week, Friday nights, cash, in his hand. And I said, not at this door, not where my mum lives. And he laughed at me and said, Then you’d best not live here, son. This address is where I collect.

"I went for him. I was 17 and stupid and I went for him in the street, and he put me on the pavement with one hand and split my lip with his ring, and got in his car."

"You said you’d fell on the stairs," his mother said. Her voice had gone very quiet. "I come in at 20 past 3 and you were at the sink with a tea towel on your mouth, and you said you’d fell on the stairs coming up with the shopping."

"I said it so you’d stop looking at my mouth."

"There was no shopping."

"No. I’d made it up before you got your key in the door."

"So I knew," she said. "I knew it was a lie the second it was out of your mouth, and I knew it was something to do with your dad. You’d had the same face on you the morning I told you he’d gone. And I didn’t ask you, Danny. I was so tired of that year I let it go."

"Then on the Tuesday night I said I was going. On the Wednesday I went to Mare Street and got a flat off a man who didn’t ask for a guarantor, and on the Friday I rang Vic Harrigan from a phone box and gave him the new address, Pembury House, top flat, end. That’s where he collected. Every Friday night, and never here again."

His mother put one hand over her mouth.

"How long?"

"10 years. Nearly 11. 100 a week, then 120 when he said the time had gone up. In his hand, at the bottom of my stairs at Pembury. Some weeks I didn’t eat on the Thursday so I’d have it for the Friday. He kept telling me it was nearly done. Then he’d say the time, son, and laugh."

"That’s 50, 60,000 pounds." She’d done it in her head the way she did a rota. "For a 5,000 pound debt that was never yours. That was his."

She sat back. He watched it go through her, year by year.

"That’s why you never had a coat that fitted," she said. "All them winters. I’d see you the odd Sunday in that same anorak with the sleeves halfway up your arms and I’d think, he’s spending it on drink, or a girl, or that bike. And I never said. I thought, he’s a man now, it’s his money. It was never your money, was it? Not one penny of it. It was his."

She took her hand off her mouth and looked at him, and her eyes had gone wet and hard at the same time.

"And there’s more," she said. "You’ve still got that face on. The thing you said on Sunday was ours. There’s more of your dad in it than a split lip."

"There’s the night the phone first went gold, Mum. I’ve told nobody that one. Jodie’s been waiting for it since I showed her the phone, and I told her you’d get it first. It’s Vic as well."

He told her.

The last 2 years Vic had got too ill to come across London on a Friday, so Danny had gone to him instead, with the money in an envelope: a ground-floor flat on the Kirkland estate in Stockwell with the curtains always shut. On the night of the 10th of October he’d knocked, and nobody answered, and the door was on the latch.

"He was in his chair in the front room in the dark, with the telly on with no sound, and he was dying. Anybody could see it. He’d gone yellow, with a click in his breathing like Robin’s the morning I sat with him, and nobody was with him. The flat smelled like a bin.

"I could have put the envelope on the table and gone. I don’t know why I didn’t. I got him water and held the bowl for him when he was sick, and I sat with him in the other chair from 10 till gone 3 in the morning."

His mother made a small sound.

"He knew who I was. About 1 o’clock he started talking. He said he was sorry about the lip. He said I’d paid him near enough 11 times what Dad borrowed, and he’d counted it every week and kept taking it.

"And then he told me how he’d found me."

Danny put his hands round his cold cup.

"Dad gave me to him, Mum. In the pub in Clapham, the spring before he went, when he borrowed the money. Vic said he’d asked what he’d get if Dad did a runner, and Dad wrote it down for him. The boy. If I’m not about, the boy. On the back of Vic’s own card, in his own hand, as if I was the telly.

"Vic said he came to you first, the November after Dad went, and you told him where to go and said you’d have the police on him. So he waited till I was 17 and he’d seen me on a bike on Lavender Hill with a courier bag on my back. Then he came on a Monday when you were on an early."

His mother sat quite still.

"He died at about 10 past 3, holding my sleeve. I put his hands in his lap and rang 999 from his landline and went out on the walkway to wait for them. It was the 11th by then. And stood there in the cold, waiting for the blue lights, I looked at my phone, and it had gone gold. The first time it ever did. It said Good evening, host. At 25 past 3 in the morning, on a walkway in Stockwell, with him dead behind me.

"The money came a few days after. I couldn’t tell you which day. The doors came after that. And the first thing I did with any of it was pay off your 40, Mum. In one go."

The fridge hummed. Through the wall Denise’s telly was going, a quiz, a man laughing at something.

"That’s why I’ve not told you," Danny said. "Not because of Vic. You could have had Vic. It’s because of Dad. Because he’s on a jetty in Noosa sending a postcard that says look after your mother, son. And because he sent me that card the Christmas I’d left, with a 20 in it. Thought of you. 2 months after Vic split my lip on what he’d written."

His mother didn’t answer straight away.

"Mine come the same week," she said. "That Christmas. Same beach, same 20. I put mine in the gas meter on Boxing Day, and I felt clever doing it." She looked at the window. "He’d wrote you down for a man in a pub and then he sent us both a 20. He knew. He knew what he’d done, sat on that jetty, and he sent a 20 so he could tell himself he’d sent something."

Then she got up.

She took the biscuit tin off the side, the old one with the lid gone soft at the edges, and sat down with it on her knee, and took the lid off. She went through it with her fingers, past the robin card and the rubber band, turned away from him, the way she’d done in the front room 6 weeks after the money started.

She took out the flat pale thing she’d folded into her cardigan pocket that day and never shown him.

It was a piece of white card cut down to the size of a postcard, off a shirt box by the look of it, soft at the corners from 12 years in a tin. On the front, in blue biro, in big careless handwriting:

V. HARRIGAN. RING WHEN YOU’VE GOT IT. And a mobile number.

"He pushed that through the door," his mother said. "The November. After I’d told him I’d ring the police. He pushed it through face down, so I’d see the back first."

She didn’t give it to him yet. She held it flat against her chest with both hands.

"I read it standing in that hall in my coat, Danny. The day he left it. I read it and I put it in this tin, and I never said one word to you. I thought if I kept it, he couldn’t use it. I thought I’d seen him off. I was proud of myself. I told Denise I’d seen him off."

She put the card on the Formica with Vic’s name showing, and pushed it across to him with one finger.

She’s known since I was 16. She’s had it 6 feet from my bed.

He turned it over.

Black biro, a different pen from the front, in slanted capitals, the same capitals that were on the back of his school photos, DANNY AGE 8.

IF I’M NOT ABOUT, THE BOY. D. FLYNN. SAME ADDRESS.

Every D was bigger than it needed to be.