Behind Closed Blinds Ch. 06

'You don't even look 50 but she's definitely shaven the years off you. Looks awesome with the tattoo. I love it. Shaved hair on a woman is sexy, you look wild xx'

"Oh yeah, living the wild life right now drinking tea, doing laundry, and catching up on Breaking Bad lmao xx pop round later for a cuppa if you haven't been arrested xx PS -- I'm not 50, cheeky! xx"

'Lol will do,' I texted back. 'Promise I won't kill my ex's dad.'

"You better not, or she'll stalk you forever and ever! X"

'She will either way' I replied, famous last words.

XX

5

Watson Industrial Park beckoned. I'd fixated so hard on staring at the photo of my mum and Elaine at Emily's, and texting Elaine, that I hadn't seen the last few train stations pass by. Here I was, swaggering across the river to unload on my ex-fiancee's dad with both figurative barrels and my first move on foreign soil was to bolt for the closing doors, embarrassing myself in front of countless other commuters; people I'd never known and never would!

The panic was gone though. Instead of filling my head with useless what ifs and whys, a calm quiet came over my mind as I sauntered onto the lot of my former employer and passed security without a care in the world.

An unknown in a high-vis vest, bearded and bespectacled, popped his head out of his monitoring booth and summoned me with a brash "Oi!"

'What?' I asked, without stopping or turning to face him.

'Are you supposed to be here?' the guard asked.

'Ask Derek,' I called back as the distance grew.

'Who the fuck is Derek?' the guard yelled from his open window.

'Exactly,' I laughed and entered the building. It was quiet, quieter than I had ever known. To support my observation and disarm any implication that I was just becoming paranoid or nervous, I noticed that the receptionist was gone.

Not absent! The whole downstairs reception area was no longer!

I climbed the two flights of stairs up to the next level of the industrial apartment, half-expecting security to come bumbling up behind me. When I reached the main office, I was dumbstruck to witness how the silence persisted.

On the other hand I felt drawn now, magnetised, compelled by an invisible force. No longer was I pushing forward toward the outcome of a fateful meeting. I was being reeled in as I had suspected long before my decision to be here at all.

A phone rang from within my old department. A room that held all the admin support, and where I used to take care of the accounts. Still no sign of life made itself known. There could have been up to ten people sitting in there, quietly busying themselves with their workloads, but I didn't care to look for myself. When I had left this place I'd wanted to see the back of it, even the people I'd gone so far as to call friends.

Instead I charged forward, Derek's office door now in sight at the end of a deceptively long corridor, closed and yet hiding the only sign of life I'd noticed thus far. A phone call, I could hear his frustration through the closed door, things were not going his way to say the least.

I was starting to get ahead of myself, thinking that maybe this was about him, not about Carol. Derek had fucked one man too many and now he was sinking with the ship. Please God, let it be so, I thought to myself as my hand reached for the doorknob.

'Fine... fine... listen, I'm sorry you feel that way but...'

Dead silence followed. I had hoped to enter the room and seat myself in front of my ex-employer and would-be father in law while the inaudible diatribe was reaching its end, to gently place the final straw on the camel's back. Maybe I was relishing this too much, what was to come. I held myself in check, drew in a breath, and entered.

Derek's eyes landed on me immediately, wild, flustered -- a proverbial deer caught in the headlights.

'That's okay, stay seated,' I said, the sarcasm very much intended as he sat back in his expensive leather office recliner.

'I didn't know it was that late,' was Derek's attempt to outdo me. I sat down with a polite smile that may or may not have been pleasant, but by now you might have guessed that it wasn't my intention.

'Oh it's late,' I insisted pointedly. 'Why am I here?'

'Because I asked you to be,' Derek answered haughtily. He might have had me by surprise there hadn't he followed it up immediately with, 'you have grown a gob on you since you walked.'

'Since I learned who I can trust,' I corrected, resisting the urge to let completely loose. 'Why am I here? It isn't because you say so, Derek. What couldn't you say with a text message or a phone call?'

Carol's dad studied me with a look I'd seen on his face only one other time in my life. It was the evening I was first introduced to Derek and Margot. We'd had dinner and were discussing work and life-related things. Derek had pulled a question out of the blue, asking me about the future and what I expected of Carol.

I didn't know how to answer the question. In my shoes, in my own experience, there was no answer for what lay ahead that wasn't a careful one. I planned to work hard, earn a living, and look after my wife and family as a man does. As for what I wanted from her? I was more interested in what she wanted that I could give her.

That's how I remembered it at that point, not to mention the sly interrogative look he gave me before telling me that I had no ambition, and that people with no ambition lack direction or control of their lives.

Right or wrong, if he disapproved so much he didn't cancel our plans after that evening. He had merely put me in a position to be walked all over, which is what both he and his daughter had done to me in the end. But I never forgot that look, one of disdain and disapproval, and I wasn't about to start playing the role of an unwanted son desperate to gain favour with the father for whom nothing was ever enough.

It was too close to the bone, so naturally my intention was to cut back twice as deep.

'You think having a pair of balls makes you a man. It makes you maybe twice what you were the last time I saw you,' Derek hacksawed onward, trying to make me smaller than he was. 'You still lack this up here,' he said, pressing a finger up against his balding skull.

'Oh and that's why you're asking me for help, yet trying to make it sound like I owe you. The truth is beneath you, is that it?'

'Well I see you've done some thinking,' Derek came back hard.

'No, in hindsight you're just that transparent. Why am I here, Derek?' I pressed harder.

'I never wanted this,' he said, and immediately his tone had changed. Was it possibly just a really terribly expressed attempt at remorse I was hearing? Or was he circling me like a narcissist races around the honesty trap trying not to get caught in it?

'Well, you make your bed, you lie in it. Why am I here, Derek?' My patience waned.

'Did you hear me? I didn't want this,' he said, his voice lower.

'Neither did I. Goodbye, and don't message or call me again,' I said, getting up and turning around to walk.

'I'm sorry... Steven...'

Inside myself at that moment I felt filled suddenly with a kind of triumph I hadn't ever felt before in my life. I allowed myself to smile a smile that he couldn't see. Derek the Impossible, bullshitter of bullshitters, had said to a lesser human being that he was sorry.

A pathetic sorry, with no conviction or context, but an apology nonetheless. I reserved judgment and sat back down to face him, the smile replaced with a face too straight for poker. 'I don't get what you're sorry about. You never liked me, you treated me like an intern, you couldn't wait to see the back of me. The way you treated me when your daughter left me for a crackhead wasn't massively different to when things were going good.'

'You don't actually know, do you?' Derek asked after some consideration.

'I know that you keep avoiding the question as to why I'm here, like you don't know what you want. Maybe you expect me to just know. Maybe I already do, which is why I'm here to tell you to go fuck yourself, face to face, so that you'll never forget it.'

'When's the last time you saw Carol?' Derek had then asked. Having dismissed my last response, the words seemed to weigh too heavily on him.

'Finally getting to the point,' I replied, figuring it was only fair game that I derail the conversation this time, since he wouldn't talk straight with me.

'Steven, stop,' Derek interrupted. But I didn't.

'So this is about your daughter, who is now notably no longer of any concern to me. I told her that to her face maybe two weeks ago now? Haven't looked back since. Haven't wasted so much as a brain fart on her.'

'Steven...'

'You do know it was her decision to leave me, oh but you were all too happy to help.'

'That's enough!'

'As for you, you weren't even a bad taste in my mouth, Derek, hard as I tried by you,' I went on, effortlessly, letting it all pour out in one measured stream of blissful indifference to what effect these words were now having on him. And because I didn't think him capable of feeling anything, and I was proving myself correct.

'She came back asking me to give her another chance, and just like her flaky old privileged Napoleon complex of a father, she had it in her head that it was me who owed her. Imagine!'

'I blamed you. I was... wrong!' Derek interjected the moment he saw the opportunity. Silence loomed sudden and large.

What the fuck was he going to say next? More skirting around the facts? More avoiding responsibility for his cruel actions? 'Carol had a... a track record... a past...'

'Oh boy, here we go,' I groaned inwardly, and sank unnoticeably further into my seat.

'We'd forgotten about it. We all deserved to move on. Nobody wanted the past having a negative impact on her life moving forward.'

'Great story, do I win a prize if I guess Carol's secret past?'

'Her mother and I haven't seen her in maybe a month.'

'She's an adult with her own life. A month is not a long time.'

'She is... was... a recovering drug addict,' Derek then said, and I felt my guts turn painfully as though wrapped around a barbed 4X4 spinning on the end of a power drill. I suddenly couldn't speak. I felt my eyes begin to sting, a champion in tatters moments after assuming victory.

'You never knew this, did you?' Derek asked me.

'Why am I here, Derek?'

'You didn't, did you?' he asked again. I shook my head, my throat too tight to allow for words. I was somewhere now in between anger and remorse, though I didn't know why I felt the latter at all. Why hadn't she ever told me this?

'It was a long time ago, but...'

For fuck's sake, now even Derek was starting to crack. I wanted to get up and walk away for good, that more than anything, and my legs wouldn't move.

'Listen, I thought I was protecting her and I was wrong. I came down hard on you and I gave you no quarter because I blamed you for what I was seeing, because she wasn't telling us the truth. We knew she was abusing again. We asked, we tried to intervene. She even allowed us to for a time, but she was lying to us, twisting the truth...'

'I wonder who she could possibly have taken after,' I said, wanting nothing more than to hurt Derek for what he was putting me through, now that I had escaped and then allowed myself to be lured back into their dysfunctional bullshit.

And beneath that I also knew that I was being selfish, even childish. The one time the old man had bared himself to me, proven that he did feel something, I was using the opportunity to slip the knife in, as only the lowest would.

'For fuck's sake, Steven!' he lashed out, his face flaring an unhealthy looking red, his cold grey eyes burning hotter than had ever seemed possible. And then the hidden rage was gone as swiftly as it had revealed itself.

'Do you think I don't know that?' he pleaded, near demanded of me.

'There's no denying this changes the way I can look at what happened,' I offered, not wanting to say any more, but knowing that this was just the beginning, if Derek thought he was going to be back in control of me. I hadn't fallen for him despite realising that his emotions were at least consistent with what he was saying.

Right then Derek thanked me for my response. Frankly I wanted to throw it back into his face. Instead I waited, listened.

'Did she tell you where she was staying when you last spoke?' Derek asked.

'She didn't need to,' I responded measuredly, trying my best to keep my own hidden anger in check. 'Your family already knew who she was seeing. Literally tried to make me take her back to save her from making her own mistakes.'

Derek turned red once more. I even braced myself for the oncoming barrage of noise and rage that up until now I hadn't thought him capable of. Maybe he really was coming apart due to all of this, but amazingly he managed to swallow it all and keep his composure.

For a moment I felt that I even respected him for being able to handle this nasty side of me. I knew for a fact though that I didn't respect myself for kicking a man while he was down. I wanted to add, 'you didn't know this?' Again, I bit down on my tongue.

'We've both tried to speak to her. She won't answer calls anymore...'

'I want to know more about this past of hers nobody told me about,' I said. Something clicked inside. I knew for fact that I would never, ever -- no matter the story -- trust Carol and her family again. But something inside me wouldn't allow me to walk away with my head held high if I didn't at least show Derek, my once upon a time would-be father in law, that, yes, it took more than a pair of balls to make a man.

I wasn't going back home until I had shown him that I had a conscience, and that it was completely my own and nobody else's.

6

'Mum?'

Sara answered swiftly. 'Baby, are you coming home?'

Ironically I had set out to be home hours ago. It was now seven-thirty and I was stood on the waterfront, albeit finally back on our side of the river. Beneath the rippling murky waters of the pier head, masses of eels roiled and boiled, black-skinned and seemingly formless as they writhed in their masses.

'Err... I don't know exactly when but I'm slowly making my way back around,' I replied, still out of it, practically speechless all these hours later. I had finally left the office at half-three and was back in town less than an hour later. And for all this time I had gazed into the beyond as my past life came crashing back into this new reality.

Now I didn't know how to feel. I couldn't decide which reality was stranger -- the world that my mother and I now shared, or the one made apparent by the truth unveiled by the father of my ruined fiancee.

'Steven, just tell me you're alright,' mum pleaded.

'I am,' I finally said, unable to mask the sadness seeping out of me and into my voice. 'I heard things about her...'

'You mean...' Even she didn't dare utter Carol's name at this point.

'Yeah, I'll tell you later, when I get home, or tomorrow, depending how I feel.'

'How about I order your favourite pizza? I'll call in about an hour? Will that give you enough time?'

'That sounds great actually,' I near sobbed. 'I haven't eaten all day. Argued so much with Derek, I feel drier than a pack of crackers.'

'One pot of fresh coffee on standby,' mum responded dutifully, 'check!'

I don't recall what made me say what I did next. All I wanted to do was cry, but I felt too emotionally used up even for that. 'I promise I'm not doing anything to hurt myself, okay?'

Mum was quiet for but a few seconds before her talented tongue sprang once again into action. 'Of course you're not, love. You're too clever for that. You have an answer for everything. Even if not right away, you always know the right thing to do by the time it matters.'

'And I'd never hurt you,' I insisted.

'Well...' she considered aloud. 'A bit of spanking never went amiss!'

I laughed, eyes still fixated on the dancing eels performing their lurid display some ten feet below me, muddying the water's edge. 'I said I'd pop in on Elaine when I got back for a cuppa. I don't think that's going to be happening but I don't want to let her down.'

'I'll let her know for you, baby. Just come home, okay?'

'I will,' I assured her. 'I'll be there shortly,' I promised and hung up. And then I began the long walk back to the underground.