A Traitor to Memory

He'd never much liked children after that. And the thought of producing one himself … The older he became, the more he'd realised he didn't need that drama twice in one life.

He went to the sink and turned on the water, thinking that a drink or a bathing of his face would drive the memory out of his head. As he reached for a glass, he heard the flat door open. He heard a man's voice say, “You made a right cock-up of that one, di'n't you? How many times I got to tell you to shut your gob when it comes to jollying the customers?”

Another man said, “I di'n't mean no harm. Birds always like a bit of oiling, don't they?”

To which the first said, “Bollocks. We lost them, you yob.” And then, “'Lo, Mum. How's going wha's going?”

“We got a visitor,” Jen Pytches said.

Pitchley drank down his water and heard the footsteps cross the sitting room and come into the kitchen. He placed his glass into the grimy sink and turned to face his two younger brothers. They filled the room, big men like their father with watermelon heads and hands the size of dustbin lids. Pitchley felt in their presence as he'd always felt—intimidated as the dickens. And he did what he'd always done at the first sight of those hulking creatures: He cursed the fate that had inspired his mother to couple with a veritable midget when she got him and to choose an all-in wrestler—or so it seemed—to father his brothers.

“Robbie,” he said as a hello to the elder one. And “Brent,” to the younger. They were dressed identically in boots and blue jeans topped with windcheaters on which the words Rolling Suds were printed front and back. They'd been working, Pitchley concluded, attempting to keep alive the mobile car-wash business that he himself had initiated when he was thirteen years old.

Robbie took the lead, as always. “Well, well, well. Lookit wha' we got here, Brent, our big bro. And don't he look a real pitcher in them fancy trousers?”

Brent snickered and chewed on his thumbnail and waited, as always, for direction from Rob.

Pitchley said, “You win, Rob. I'm shoving off.”

“Shoving off like how?” Robbie went to the fridge and pulled out a can of beer, which he tossed to Brent, calling out, “Ma! You want somethin' in there? Eat? Drink?”

She said, “Cheers, Rob. Woul'n't say no to a bite o' that pork pie from yesterday. You see't there, luv? On the top shelf? Go' to eat it 'fore it goes off.”

“Yeah. Go' it,” Rob called back. He plopped the crumbling remains of the pie onto a plate and shoved it at Brent, who disappeared for a moment as he delivered it to their mother. Rob ripped the ringpull from his beer can and flicked it into the kitchen sink, pumping the beer directly into his mouth. He finished it in one long go and began on Brent's, which the younger man had foolishly left behind.

“So,” Rob said. “Shoving off, are you? And where 'bouts you shoving off to, Jay?”

“I'm emigrating, Rob. I don't know where. It doesn't matter.”

“Matters to me.”

Of course, Pitchley thought. For where else would the money come from when he placed a bad bet, when he crashed another car, when he fancied a holiday by the sea? Without Pitchley there to write out the cheques when Robbie had a financial itch that wanted scratching, life as he'd known it was going to be different. He'd actually have to make a proper go of Rolling Suds, and if the business failed—as it had been threatening to do for years under Rob's quixotic management—then there would be no fallback position. Well, that was life, Rob, Pitchley thought. The milk cow's dried up, the golden egg's broken, the rainbow's vanishing permanently. You might've tracked me from East London to Hammersmith to Kensington to Hampstead and all points in between when you fancied, but you are going to be hard pressed to track me across the sea.

He said again, “I don't know where I'll end up. Not yet.”

“So wha's the point in all this, then?” Robbie indicated Pitchley and his presence in their shabby childhood flat by raising the empty can to him. “Can't be ol' times now, can it, Jay? Ol' times's the least of what you'd want to come round to have a chat about, I 'xpect. You'd like to forget them, you would, Jay. But here's the ringer. Some of us can't. We don't got the wherewithal. So everything we been through stays right up 'ere, circling round and round.” He used the can again, but this time to indicate the alleged movement in his head. Then he shoved both cans into the plastic grocery bag that hung from the pull of one of the kitchen drawers and had long done service as the family dustbin.

“I know,” Pitchley said.

“You know, you know,” his brother mocked. “You don't know nowt, Jay, and don't you forget it.”

Pitchley said for the thousandth time to his brother, “I didn't ask you to take them on. What you did—”

“Oh no. You di'n't ask. You just said, ‘You saw what they wrote 'bout me, Rob!’ Tha's what you said. ‘They're gonna end up pulling me limb to limb,’ you said. ‘I'm gonna be nothing when this is over.’”