McAuley’s Old Ale House. Maccers for short.
My dad’s pub.
Home.
Home right now is a ten-by-eight in the eaves of the Dawson family residence in Vauxhall, where I’ve got my own sink and toilet, two shelves for my food, and the gnawing guilt of knowing a child was evicted from her bedroom in favour of £500 a month because Claire Dawson lost her job and they needed a lodger.
Home, from the age of eight, was a five-bedroomed detached new-build in Radlett. A ‘cul-de-sac’, Mum had proudly announced, as if a dead end was something to aspire to. I’d had to look up what it meant.
But to me, my real home, the place where I was formed and where I was at my most happy, will always be McAuley’s Old Ale House.
As I was just a child when we left the pub, my sister Jacqui insists that the only life I’ve ever known has been one of en-suite shower rooms and Sky TV, but she couldn’t be more wrong. I remember every madcap minute we lived above McAuley’s. The peeling paint and the knock-off furniture. Dad cashing up while Mum was mopping down. I was so bloody content there. A proper little pub kid, rushing down the stairs on Saturday morning, gathering up the coins that people had dropped the night before, nicking crisps, skimming pints. Learning the word ‘cunt’ and how to play snooker.
It’s changed, though. Duck-egg blue, no longer brick-and-pollution-coloured. ‘Aspirational’, I bet Jacqui calls it, meaning hipsters drinking whisky sours out of jam jars. Less ‘boozer’, more ‘gastro-pub’. When we lived here in the Nineties, you either microwaved it or you battered it; if you were being particularly cosmopolitan, you might have put a sprig of parsley with it, but now there’s a chalked sign outside offering ‘Potted Prawns, with apple and radish’ and ‘Slow Cooked Porchetta’. Not a deep-fat fryer in sight.
There’s a few lights on but it’s too early to be open so I walk around the back and up the fire escape to what we used to illogically call the front door.
What am I doing? Why have I come? It’s not even ten a.m., Dad probably won’t be here.
The sound of my steps on the fire escape reverberate in the way they always used to and the door opens before I get a chance to look for the bell. But it isn’t Dad standing there, it’s the cut-price version. The man whose bitter failure to be Dad left him skulking off to Spain to pull pints in a strip-club. Or at least so I thought.
My brother Noel stands in the doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with thick, scabby fingers. We’ve got the same cupid’s bow and the same allergy to shellfish but apart from that we could be strangers. We certainly try to be. He’s chunkier than the last time I saw him, with ridiculous pumped up arms that haven’t quite got the right ratio of muscle to fat. He leans his bulk against the doorframe and the squashed fat of his biceps turns from pink to puce as we stare each other out.
I break the silence first. ‘Well, if it isn’t the prodigal son returned. What are you doing here?’ The question’s entirely rhetorical as I know it’ll be about money. ‘Is Dad here?’
‘’Fraid not,’ he says, heavy on the ‘t’. He doesn’t so much invite me in as walk away from the door and the sight of him retreating tempts me to do the same.
Curiosity wins out though and I step inside.
The hall smells of frying. Pork on the cusp of charcoal. I follow Noel into the kitchen and wait while he prods sausages around a pan, swearing at a space-age hob that has more functions than a cockpit. I look around but there’s nothing to recognise. Not one single memory evoked. There’s no hand-sketched growth-chart on the back wall by the bin. No sandwich toaster shaped like a cow. No stain from where I split my chin and dripped blood on the welcome mat. Nothing to say I ever lived here at all. It’s all clean lines and brushed steel.
It reminds me of the morgue.
I talk to Noel’s sun-damaged back. ‘So when did you arrive?’
There’s a black hold-all on the floor with its contents spilling out. There isn’t enough to suggest a long stay but with Noel you’d never know. You travel light when you’re doing a midnight flit.
‘A while ago.’ Ever cagey.
‘You’re obviously not big news, Noel, I hadn’t heard.’
He smirks and spears a sausage, brandishing it across the floor like a weapon. The fat drips onto the tiles, pooling like petrol.
‘Still doing that veggie bollocks? Or was that Jacqui?’
Jacqui. For about four months in 2001. And it was only veal.
I push the fork away. ‘So why’d you come here then, not Radlett? Hertfordshire not gangster enough for you?’
‘Radlett?’ He looks confused, which confuses me. ‘God, you really aren’t a regular visitor, are you? I mean, Dad said it’d been six months since he’d last seen you but I thought he was exaggerating, getting his months mixed up. I should be calling you the prodigal daughter, really. At least I’ve got the excuse I’m in a different country. Where are you living these days?’
‘Why do you want to know? Planning to burgle me again while you’re back?’ I pull a mock-contrite face. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t you, was it? It was pure coincidence that a mate of yours found out my address and knew exactly where to find Mum’s jewellery without disturbing anything else.’
He barely flinches. Doesn’t deny or defend himself. Just rummages in a cupboard, tutting at the lack of brown sauce.
Eventually he sits down at the table. ‘Dad seemed pretty upset, you know – about not seeing you in ages. Bit slack of you, really . . .’
Shit-stirring is Noel’s favourite pastime. His undisputed key skill.
‘Yeah well, I was pretty upset about him bringing that bimbo to Finn’s sixth birthday party. How long had he known her? A fortnight?’
He nods. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot, Dad’s supposed to live like a monk. From what I heard, Jacqui wasn’t the least bit bothered so what it had to do with you . . .’
‘’Course Jacqui wasn’t bothered, Dad was paying for the party. A private room at the Rainforest Café. Very nice.’
‘I know. I saw the photos.’ He trickles ketchup over his blackened breakfast in thin, jagged lines. Slashes across a throat – shallow but nasty. ‘Didn’t see many of you, mind. Sulking in the toilets, were you?’
I really don’t know why I’m getting into this with him.
‘A body’s been found on Leamington Square,’ I say, cranking a major gearshift. ‘A woman. A young-ish woman.’
Clearly I don’t know she’s young-ish, except on some wispy, intuitive level.
Noel shrugs, he couldn’t be less interested.
I shake my head, ask again, ‘So what are you doing here then? Are you broke? In the shit with someone bigger than you?’
He doesn’t look up, just keeps working away at his breakfast. ‘You know, given you haven’t seen Dad in six months, it rather precipitates the more pertinent question of what you’re doing here, little sister, not what I’m doing here.’
Precipitates. Pertinent. A barbed reminder of an intelligence gone to waste. Noel’s convinced that if he’d had the same private education as me, he’d have found a cure for cancer by now, or at least bought a Porsche, and the very fact he hasn’t is always somehow laid at my door. For coming along seven years later. For my schooling falling in line with Dad’s money.
Money that was never really explained, or questioned.
‘I told you why I’m here, were you even listening? A woman’s body’s been found up the road from here.’
He pauses, a piece of white toast hangs in mid-air. ‘And that’s what you came to tell Dad?’
My mouth’s dry. I need a glass of water. I spot tumblers through a frosted glass cabinet but there’s no way I’m helping myself. This is a stranger’s home.
I should go.
‘Look, do you know whether he’ll be here soon or not?’
‘Haven’t a fucking clue. I’m not his keeper.’ Noel pushes his plate away – two thousand calories in two minutes flat. ‘I think he’s shagging that sweet-ass with the lip-stud though, the one who comes in here, so as soon as he’s bored doing that he’ll surface, no doubt. Can’t give you an exact time though, sorry.’
My insides scream. Lip-stud suggests young, and young suggests nothing ever fucking changes with my father.
I head towards the door. ‘Just tell him I called, OK?’
‘Sure.’ Noel opens the dishwasher, tosses the pan in. ‘Any message I can pass on?’
I almost laugh at this. Truth is, I’ve no idea what I came to say.
Yeah, tell him I know he lied about Maryanne Doyle.
Tell him it’s OK though, I was too scared to ever squeal.
But tell him I’ve been punishing him for it for the past eighteen years.
Instead, I say, ‘Yeah, tell him not to put non-stick pans in the dishwasher. It strips away the coating.’
Noel laughs and trails me down the hallway. The morning’s changed in the short time I’ve been inside and a low wintry sun dazzles my face as I walk back down the fire escape.
‘Don’t be a stranger, sis,’ he calls after me. ‘We’ll have a drink sometime, yeah? Bring a colleague. Preferably one in uniform.’
I stick my middle finger up then instantly wish I hadn’t. It seems too flippant a gesture to be aimed at Noel, too matey; the kind of thing I reserve for Parnell when he’s whingeing about my driving or the weakness of my tea.
The door slams shut and I take out my phone. Ten fifteen a.m. Hardly worth going home now. However, in the interests of not getting bollocked, I wander down to Exmouth Market to buy toothpaste, a hair bobble, a lemony-stripe top from one of the many cutesy-kitsch boutiques and some cod liver oil, and then I head straight to the public loos to transform myself into someone who looks like they’ve had a quick power-nap and a change of clothes. Afterwards, to kill more time, I amble slowly towards Spa Fields, drawn to the sounds of shrieking children hurling themselves around the adventure playground – part of the regeneration of Exmouth Market, or the gentrification, if you’re being snide. When I was a child, Spa Fields had been known for much darker adventures and I’d never been allowed to play here. Noel used to frequent it though.
Drink, smoke, fight, repeat.
Once when I was six years old, the police brought Noel home from Spa Fields. Something about a girl and a smashed bottle. I sat on the stairs listening to Dad raising hell about Noel bringing coppers to his door. Screaming that ‘Uncle’ Frank would do his nut, and had he even thought about the effect on takings if ‘certain people’ got wind that the Old Bill had been seen sniffing around McAuley’s. Mum had just wanted to get to the bottom of it. To understand if there was another side to the story, or if she really had given birth to such a nasty piece of vermin.
I don’t know if she ever got her answer. It was certainly never mentioned again. Like so many things within our family, it was glossed over or blocked out. Dad managed to smooth things with ‘Uncle’ Frank, who incidentally isn’t our real uncle – he’s Dad’s ‘blood brother’. His ‘brother from another mother’ he insists when he’s drunk too much Bushmills.
Dad has two brothers. Real ones, those of the shared DNA kind. Uncle Jim and Uncle Kenny. I haven’t seen them in a long time and I don’t know too much about them, but what I do know is that, unlike ‘Uncle’ Frank, neither of them ever beat Dad up with a pool cue for talking out of turn to a rival outfit. Neither of them ever remarked that Jacqui had ‘a bankable body’ or offered her a job in their nightclub the night before she sat her A-levels.
Sitting on a bench beside the winter remnants of a foxglove tree, I wrap my coat tight around me and watch the children for a while, giddy with excitement that it’s only a week until Santa comes. Then I fiddle with my phone for a bit, fire off a few emails. Obsess about who this ‘sweet-ass with the lip-stud’ could be.
*
There was a Latvian girl who worked in our pub one Christmas. A student. She’d had a lip-stud too. Her name was Alina and she was supposed to be making her English better but she ended up making my Latvian better.
‘Mans vārds ir Cat un es esmu septiņas.’ (My name is Cat and I am seven.)
‘Man ir brālis sauc Noel un viņš smaržo maziņš.’ (My brother Noel smells of wee.)
I liked Alina. She used to make me laugh by saying that her other job was dancing to pop music in her pants in ‘Uncle’ Frank’s nightclub. I don’t know what happened to her though. She was there one day and gone the next.
A bit like the Snowman in that sappy cartoon me and Dad used to watch.
Dad had liked Alina too.