Even Money

2

But you can’t be my father” I said, nonplussed.

“I can,” he said with certainty, “and I am.”

“My father’s dead,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked. “Did you see him die?”

“No,” I said. “I just… know. My parents died in a car crash.”

“Is that what your grandfather told you?”

My legs felt detached from my body. I was thirty-seven years old, and I had believed for as long as I could remember that I was fatherless. And motherless too. An orphan. I had been raised by my grandparents, who had told me that both my parents had died when I was a baby. Why would they lie?

“But I’ve seen a photo,” I said.

“Of what?” he asked.

“Of my parents,” I said.

“So you recognize me, then?”

“No,” I said. But the photo was very small and at least thirty-seven years old, so would I actually recognize him now?

“Look,” he said. “Is there anywhere we could go and sit down?”

In the end I did have that beer.

We sat at a table near the bar overlooking the pre-parade ring while the man in the cream linen suit told me who I was.

I wasn’t sure what to believe. I couldn’t understand why my grandparents would have lied to me, but, equally, why would this stranger suddenly appear and lie to me now? It made no sense.

“Your mother and I were in a road accident,” he told me. He looked down. “And then she died.” He paused for a long time as if wondering whether to carry on.

I sat there in silence, looking at him. I didn’t feel any real emotion, just confusion.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?” he said.

“Why have you come here today to tell me this?” I began to feel angry that he had chosen to disrupt my life in this way. “Why didn’t you stay away?” I raised my voice at him. “Why didn’t you stay away as you have done for the past thirty-seven years?”

“Because I wanted to see you,” he said. “You are my son.”

“No, I’m not,” I shouted at him.

There were a few others enjoying a quick drink before making their way home, and they were looking in our direction.

“You are,” he said quietly, “whether you like it or not.”

“But how can you be so sure?” I was clutching at imaginary straws.

“Edward, don’t be stupid,” he said, picking at his fingers.

It was the first time he had used my name, and it sounded odd. I had been christened Edward, but I’d been known as Ned all my life. Not even my grandfather had called me Edward, except, that is, when he was cross with me or I had done something naughty as a child.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Peter,” he said. “Peter James Talbot.”

My father’s name was indeed Peter James Talbot. It said so in green ink on both my birth certificate and his. I knew by heart every element of those documents. Over the years the handwritten details on them had somehow been the only tangible link to my parents, that and the small creased-and-fading photograph that I still carried with me everywhere.

I removed my wallet from my pocket and passed the photo over to him.

“Blackpool,” he said with confidence, studying the image. “This was taken in Blackpool. We were there for the illuminations in November. Tricia, your mother, was about three months pregnant. With you.”

I took the photo back and looked again closely at the young man standing next to a dark green Ford Cortina, as I had done hundreds of times before. I glanced up at the man in front of me and then back down at the picture. I couldn’t say for sure that they were the same person, but, equally, I couldn’t say they weren’t.

“It is me, I assure you,” he said. “That was my first car. I was nineteen when that picture was taken.”

“How old was my mother?” I asked.

“Seventeen, I think,” he said. “Yes, she must have been just seventeen. I tried to teach her to drive on that trip.”

“You started young.”

“Yes… well.” He seemed embarrassed. “You weren’t actually planned, as such. More of a surprise.”

“Oh thanks,” I replied somewhat sarcastically. “Were you married?” I asked.

“Not when that picture was taken, no.”

“How about when I was born?” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.

“Oh yes,” he said with certainty. “We were by then.”

Strangely, I was relieved that I was legitimate and not a bastard. But did it really matter? Yes, I decided, it did. It meant that there had been commitment between my parents, maybe even love. They cared, or, at least, they had then.

“Why did you leave?” I asked him. It was the big question.

He didn’t answer immediately but sat quiet, still looking at me.

“Shame, I suppose,” he said eventually. “After your mother died, I couldn’t cope with having a baby and no wife. So I ran away.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“Australia,” he said. “Eventually. First I signed onto a Liberian-registered cargo ship in the Liverpool docks. I went all over the world for a while. I got off one day in Melbourne and just stayed there.”

“So why come back now?”

“It seemed like a good idea,” he said.

It wasn’t.

“What did you expect?” I asked. “Did you think I would just welcome you with open arms after all this time? I thought you were dead.” I looked at him. “I think it might be better for me if you were.”

He looked back at me with doleful eyes. Perhaps I had been a bit hard.

“Well,” I said, “it would definitely have been better if you hadn’t come back.”

“But I wanted to see you,” he said.

“Why?” I demanded loudly. “You haven’t wanted to for the last thirty-seven years.”

“Thirty-six,” he said.

I threw my hands up in frustration. “That’s even worse,” I said. “It means you deserted me when I was a year old. How could a father do that?” I was getting angry again. So far my own life had not been blessed with children, but it was not from a lack of longing.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I wasn’t sure it was enough.

“So what made you want to see me now?” I said. “You can’t just have decided suddenly after all this time.” He sat there in front of me in silence. “You didn’t even know that your own father was dead. And what about your mother? You haven’t asked me about her.”

“It was only you I wanted to see,” he said.

“But why now?” I asked him again.

“I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said.

“Don’t try and tell me you had a fit of conscience after all these years,” I scoffed at him with an ironic laugh.

“Edward,” he said somewhat sternly, “it doesn’t befit you to be so caustic.”

The laughter died in my throat. “You have no right to tell me how to behave,” I replied with equal sternness. “You forfeited that right when you walked away.” He looked down like a scalded cat. “So what do you want?” I asked him. “I’ve got no money.”

His head came up again quickly. “I don’t want your money,” he said.

“What, then?” I asked. “Don’t expect me to give you any love.”

“Are you happy?” he asked suddenly.

“Deliriously,” I lied. “I leap out of bed each morning with joy in my heart, delighting at the miracle of a new day.”

“Are you married?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, giving no more details. “Are you?”

“No,” he replied. “Not anymore. But I have been. Twice-three times, if you count your mother.”

I thought I probably would count my mother.

“Widowed twice and divorced once,” he said with a wry smile. “In that order.”

“Children?” I asked. “Other than me.”

“Two,” he said. “Both girls.”

I had sisters. Half sisters anyway

“How old are they?”

“Both in their twenties now, late twenties, I suppose. I haven’t seen them for, oh, fifteen years.”

“You seem to have made a habit of deserting your children.”

“Yes,” he said wistfully. “It appears I have.”

“Why didn’t you leave me alone and go and find them?”

“But I know where they are,” he said. “They won’t see me, not the other way round. They blame me for their mother’s death.”

“Did she die in a car crash too?” I said with a touch of cruelty in my voice.

“No,” he said slowly. “Maureen killed herself.” He paused, and I sat still watching him. “I was made bankrupt, and she swallowed enough tablets to kill a horse. I came home from the court to find bailiffs sitting in the driveway and my wife lying dead in the house.”

His life was like a soap opera, I thought. Disaster and sorrow had been a constant companion.

“Why were you made bankrupt?” I asked.

“Gambling debts,” he said.

“Gambling debts!” I was astounded. “And you the son of a bookmaker.”

“It was being a bookie that got me into trouble,” he said. “Obviously, I hadn’t learned enough standing at my father’s side. I was a bad bookie.”

“I thought gambling debts couldn’t be enforced in a court.”

“Maybe not technically, but I had borrowed against everything and I couldn’t afford the repayments. Lost the lot. Every single thing, including the girls, who went off to live with their aunt. I never saw them again.”

“Are you still bankrupt?” I asked.

“Oh no,” he said. “That was years ago. I’ve been doing fine recently.”

“As what?” I said.

“Business,” he said unhelpfully. “My business.”

One of the bar staff in a white shirt and black trousers came over to us.

“Sorry, we’re closing,” he said. “Can you drink up, please?”

I looked at my watch. It was well past six o’clock already. I stood up and drank down the last of my beer.

“Can we go somewhere to continue talking?” my father asked.

I thought about Sophie. I had promised I would go and see her straight after the races.

“I have to go to my wife,” I said.

“Can’t she wait?” he implored. “Call her. Or I could come with you.”

“No,” I said rather too quickly.

“Why not?” he persisted. “She’s my daughter-in-law.”

“No,” I said decisively. “I need time to get used to this first.”

“OK,” he said. “But call her and say you’ve been held up and will be home later.”

I thought again about Sophie, my wife. She wasn’t at home. She would be sitting in front of the television in her room watching the news as she always did at six o’clock. I knew she would be there because she wasn’t allowed not to be.

Sophie’s room was locked, from the outside.

Sophie Talbot had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983 and detained for the past five months in secure accommodation. It wasn’t actually a prison; it was a hospital, a low-risk mental hospital, but it was a prison to her. And this wasn’t the first time. In all, my wife had spent more than half the previous ten years in one mental institution or another. And, in spite of their care and treatment, her condition had progressively deteriorated. What the future held was anyone’s guess.

“How about a pub somewhere?” my father said, interrupting my thoughts.

I needed to be at the hospital by nine at the latest. I looked at my watch.

“I have about an hour maximum,” I said. “Then I’ll have to go.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Do you have a car?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “Came on the train from Waterloo.”

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“Some seedy little hotel in Sussex Gardens,” he said.“Guesthouse, really. Near Paddington Station.”

“Right,” I said deciding. “I’ll drive you somewhere for a drink, then I’ll drop you at the railway station in Maidenhead and you can get the train back to London.”

“Great,” he said, smiling.

“Come on, then.”

Together, we pulled the trolley out through the racetrack’s main gate and across the busy road.

“What sort of business are you in now?” I asked him as we hauled our load through the deep gravel at the entrance to the parking lot.

“This and that,” he said.

“Bookmaking?” I persisted.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But mostly not.”

He seemed determined to be vague and evasive.

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he repeated.

“But mostly not?” I asked, echoing his previous answer.

He just smiled at me and pulled harder on the trolley.

“Are you going to go back to Australia?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Expect so,” he said. “But I’m just lying low for a while.”

“Why?” I asked.

He just smiled again. Perhaps it’s better, I thought, if I don’t know why.

I had parked my car, my trusty, twelve-year-old Volvo 940 station wagon, at the back of parking lot number two, behind the owners-and-trainers’ area. As always, I’d had to pay for my parking. The racetracks gave bookmakers nothing.

Bookmakers’ pitches had once been held on the basis of seniority, as they still were in Ireland. However, in Britain, pitch positions had been offered for sale and, once bought, remained the property of the bookie, to keep or sell as he wished. Whoever owned number one had the first choice of where to stand in the betting ring, number two had second choice, and so on. My number was eight, bought by my grandfather about twenty years ago for a king’s ransom. I stood not quite at the best position, but good enough.

A bookmaker’s badge fee, paid by me to the racetrack to allow me to stand on any day at the races, was set at five times the public-entry cost. So if a racegoer paid forty pounds each day to get into the betting ring, as they did at Royal Ascot, then the badge fee was set at two hundred. Plus, of course, the regular entrance cost for Betsy and Luca to get in. On any day at the Royal Meeting, I was many hundreds out of pocket before I even took my first bet.

There were controversial plans for the old system to be thrown out in 2012 and for pitches to be auctioned by each racetrack to the highest bidder. The bookmakers objected to what they saw as the stealing of their property, and they believed that the racetracks were greedy, while everyone else thought the reverse was true.

The downtrodden bookie, the man that all and sundry love to hate. “You never see a poor bookie,” people always say with a degree of loathing. That’s because poor bookies rapidly go out of business. You never see a poor lawyer either. But, there again, all and sundry love to hate them too.

“How long are you staying?” I asked my father.

“A while,” he replied unhelpfully.

If he was going to be like this, I thought, then there was no purpose in going to a pub to talk. And I could use the time to go spend longer with Sophie.

“Look,” I said. “Perhaps it’s better if you go straight back to London now. There’s little point in going for a drink if you are going to ignore all my questions.”

“I want to talk about the past, not the future,” he said.

“Well, I don’t.”

We were still pulling the trolley towards my car, passing through a gap in the hedge to the back of parking lot two, when I heard running footfalls behind us. I turned my head and caught a glimpse of someone coming straight at me. In one continuous move he ran straight up onto the tarpaulin-covered trolley and kicked me square in the face.

Shit, I thought as I fell to the ground, I’m being robbed. Didn’t this idiot know that it had been a dreadful day for the bookies? There was precious little left to steal. He would have done better to rob me on my way into the course this morning when I’d had a few grand of readies in my pockets.

I was down on all fours with my head hanging between my shoulders. I could feel on my face the warmth of fresh blood, and I could see it running in a bright red rivulet from my chin to the earth below, where it was soaking into the grass.

I was half expecting another blow to my head or even a boot in my guts. My arms didn’t seem to be working too well, but I managed to maneuver my right hand into the deep trouser pocket where I had put the envelope containing the small wad of remaining banknotes. Experience had taught me that it was better to give up the money early rather than to lie there, taking a beating, only to have the cash taken later anyway.

I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and threw it on the grass.

“That’s all I have.” I could taste the saltiness of the blood in my mouth as I spoke.

I rolled over onto my side. I didn’t really want to see my attacker’s face. Experience had also taught me that a positive identification usually leads to a further kicking. However, I needn’t have worried. The young man, and I was sure from his strength and agility that he was a young man, was wearing a scarf around his face, and the hood of his dark gray sweatshirt was pulled up over his head. Identification would have been impossible even if he had been facing towards me. Instead, he was facing half away, standing in front of my father.

“Here,” I shouted at him. “Take it, and leave us be.”

He turned his head slightly towards me, then turned back to face my father.

“Where’s the money?” he hissed at him.

“There,” I said, pointing at the envelope.

The man ignored me.

“Go to hell,” my father said to him, lashing out with his foot and catching the man in the groin.

“You bastard,” hissed the man with anger.

The man appeared to punch my father twice rapidly in the stomach.

“Where’s the bloody money?” hissed our attacker once again.

This time, my father said nothing. He merely sat down heavily on the ground with his back up against the hedge.

“Leave him be,” I shouted at the hooded figure. “It’s there,” once again pointing at the white envelope on the grass. The man simply ignored me again and turned back to my father, so I screamed at the top of my voice, “Help! Help! Help!”

Parking lot two was mostly deserted, but there were still some after-racing parties taking place in the owners-and-trainers’ area. Heads turned our way, and three or four brave souls took a few steps in our direction. No doubt, I thought ironically, they would probably come and help with the beating if they knew the victim was a bookmaker.

The man took one look over his shoulder at the approaching group and was off, running between the few remaining cars, before disappearing over the wooden fence on the far side of the parking lot. I sat on the grass and watched him go. He never once looked back.

The envelope of money still sat on the grass next to me. Not much of a thief, I mused. I leaned over, picked up the envelope and thrust it back into the deep recesses of my pocket. I struggled to my feet, cursing at the green grass stains that had appeared on the knees of my trousers.

Three of the vested revelers, still clutching their champagne glasses, had arrived.

“Are you all right?” asked one. “That’s quite a cut on your face.”

I could still feel the blood, now running down my neck.

“I think I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks to you. We were mugged, but he didn’t get away with anything.” I took a couple of steps over to my father. “Are you OK… Dad?” I asked him. The sound of the word, Dad, was strange to my ears.

He looked up at me with frightened eyes.

“What is it?” I asked urgently, taking another couple of steps towards him.

He was clutching his abdomen, and now he moved his hand away. The cream linen jacket was rapidly turning bright red. My father hadn’t been punched in the stomach by the young man, he’d been stabbed.

The ambulance took an age to arrive. I tried to dial 999 on my mobile phone, but, in my panic, my fingers, feeling more like sausages, kept pressing the wrong keys. Eventually, one of the champagne revelers took the phone from my hand and made the call while I knelt down on the grass next to my father.

The blood had spread alarmingly right across his abdomen, and his face had turned ashen gray.

“Lay him down,” someone said. “Put his head lower than his heart.”

Quite a crowd had drifted over from the various parking lot parties. Somehow it seemed absurd for people to be standing around sipping champagne whilst my father was fighting for breath at their feet.

“It’s OK,” I said to my father. “Help is on the way.”

He nodded very slightly and then tried to say something.

“Keep still,” I instructed. “Save your energy.” But he continued to try to speak.

“Be very careful.” He said it softly but quite distinctly.

“Of what?” I replied.

“Of everyone,” he said in a whisper.

He coughed, and blood appeared on his lips.

“Where is that damn ambulance?” I shouted at no one in particular.

But it was the police who arrived first. Two officers appeared on foot. They were probably more used to dealing with race-day traffic than a violent stabbing in broad daylight, and one of them was immediately on his personal radio calling for reinforcements. The other one knelt down next to me and tended to my father by placing his large, traffic-stopping right hand on the wound and pushing down.

My father groaned.

“Sorry, mate,” said the policeman. “Pressure is the best thing.”

Eventually, the ambulance arrived, with the driver apologizing for the time taken. “Going against the race traffic,” he explained. “Jams everywhere, and half the roads made one-way-the wrong way.”

My father was rapidly assessed and given oxygen through a face mask and intravenous fluids via a needle in his forearm. He was lifted carefully onto a stretcher and loaded into the vehicle, the pressure on his stomach being maintained throughout.

I tried to climb in with him, but was stopped by one of the policemen.

“You wait here with us, sir,” he said.

“But that’s my father,” I said.

“We will get you to the hospital shortly,” he said. “It looks like you need a stitch or two in that head anyway.”

The paramedics closed the ambulance doors and bore my father away just as the police backup arrived in two blue-flashing cars.

I spent much of the evening in a hospital, but not the one where I had planned to be.

I knew my father had been alive when they had placed him in the ambulance at the racetrack-I’d heard him coughing-and, according to one of the nurses, he’d still been alive when he’d arrived at the hospital. But he didn’t make it to the operating room. The combination of massive shock and drowning in his own blood had killed him in the accident-and-emergency department reception area. So sorry, they said, there was nothing they could have done.

I sat on a gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chair in a curtained-off cubicle next to the body of my dead parent, a parent I hadn’t known existed until three hours previously, and wondered how the world could be so cruel.

I was numb. I had grieved for my father when I was about eight, when I was just old enough to begin to realize what I was missing. I could still remember it clearly. I had seen my school friends with their young mums and dads and, for the first time, realized that my aged grandparents were different. I could remember the tears I had shed longing for my parents to be alive and with me.

I had wanted so much for my father to be there and to be like the other dads, shouting encouragement from the touchline during my school soccer matches, carrying me high on his shoulders when we won, consoling and wiping away the tears when we lost.

I had amused my teammates with made-up stories about how my father had died bravely saving me from drowning, or from enemies, or from monsters. Now I discovered that even the story I had been told, and had believed unquestionably, had itself been a lie.

I looked at the figure lying silently on his back in front of me, covered by a crisp white sheet. I folded the sheet down to his chest so I could see his face. He looked as if he was just asleep, peaceful, with his eyes closed, as if he could be wakened by my touch. I placed my hand on his shoulder. His flesh was already cooling, and there would be no awakening here ever again. I stroked his suntanned forehead for the first and last time in my life and considered what might have been.

I should be angry with him, I thought. Angry for going away and leaving me all those years ago. Angry that he had then taken so long to come back. Angry that I’d had sisters for nearly thirty years whom I’d never met. And angry that he’d come back at all and added complications to my already complex existence.

But I have always believed that anger is an emotion that needs to be expressed, to be vocalized with passion, towards someone who can respond or be hurt. Somehow, directing anger towards my dead father’s corpse seemed pointless and wasteful of my energy.

I would save my anger, I decided, for the young man who had so abruptly taken away any chance I might have had to make up for time lost in the past. I grieved not so much for the death of my father but for the loss of the opportunity that had come so close.

I stood up and pulled the sheet back over his face.

A man in a light brown suit came into the secluded cubicle behind me.

“Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, turning around.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Murray,” he said, showing me his warrant card. “Thames Valley Police.” He paused, looking down at the inert form beneath the sheet.“I’m very sorry about your father,” he said, “but we really need to ask you some questions.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Shall we go and find somewhere more suitable?”

He seemed relieved. “Yes, good idea.”

One of the nurses showed the two of us into a small room provided for families-grieving families, no doubt-and a second plainclothes policeman came in to join us. We sat down on more of the gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chairs.

“This is DC Walton,” said Detective Sergeant Murray, introducing his colleague. “Now, what can you tell us about the incident in the parking lot at Ascot?”

“I’d call it more than just an incident,” I said. “I was attacked and my father was fatally stabbed.”

“We will have to wait for the post-mortem to determine the actual cause of death, sir,” said the detective sergeant rather formally.

“But I saw my father being stabbed,” I said.

“So you did see your attacker?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know that I’d recognize him again. His face was covered. All I could see were his eyes, and that was only for a split second.”

“But you are sure it was a man?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” I said. “He had a man’s shape.”

“And what shape was that?”

“Thin, lithe and agile,” I said. “He ran at me and came straight up onto my equipment trolley and kicked me in the face.” I instinctively put my hand up to the now-stitched cut in my left eyebrow.

“Was he white or black?” he asked.

“White, I think,” I said slowly, going over again in my mind the whole episode. “Yes, he was white,” I said with some certainty. “He had white hands.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t wearing light-colored gloves?” the detective sergeant asked.

I hadn’t thought about gloves. “No,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I still think he was white. His eyes were those of a white man.” I remembered that I’d thought at the time that they were shifty-looking eyes, rather too close together for the shape of his face.

“Can you describe what he was wearing?” he asked.

“Blue denim jeans and a charcoal-gray hoodie, with a black scarf over the lower part of his face,” I said. “And black boots, like army boots with deep-cut soles. I saw one of those rather too close up.” The detective constable wrote it all down in his notebook.

“Tall or short?” the detective sergeant asked.

“Neither, really,” I said. “About the same as my father.”

“Tell us about your father,” he said, changing direction. “Can you think why anyone would want him dead?”

“Want my father dead?” I repeated. “But surely this was just a robbery that went wrong?”

“Why do you think that?” he asked.

“I just assumed it was,” I said. “It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a bookmaker has been robbed in a racetrack parking lot. Not even the first time for me.”

Both policemen raised their eyebrows a notch in unison. “About five years ago,” I said. “At Newbury. I was walking back to my car in the dark after racing in late November. There was a gang of them on that occasion, not just one like today.”

I could still recall the pain of the ribs they had broken with their boots when I refused to hand over my heavy load of cash after a particularly bad day for the punters. I could also remember the indifference of the Newbury police to the robbing of a bookmaker. One of them had even gone as far as to say that it was my own fault for carrying so much money in my pocket. As far as I could tell, no serious attempt had been made by them to catch the perpetrators.

“Bookies get robbed all the time,” I said. “Some people will try anything to get their money back.”

“But you say you weren’t robbed on this occasion,” said the detective sergeant.

“No,” I admitted, feeling for the envelope of cash that was still safely in my trouser pocket. “But I simply imagined the thief was disturbed to find he had an audience, so he took off.”

“Now, about your father,” he said. “What was his full name?”

“Peter James Talbot,” I said. The detective constable wrote it down.

“And his address?” he asked.

“I’m not sure of his full address,” I said, “but I believe he lived in Melbourne, Australia.”

“Then can you tell us, Mr. Talbot,” the detective sergeant said, “why the man, who you claim was your father, had a credit card and a driver’s license in his jacket both in the name of Alan Charles Grady?”