Dead Flowers

ALES-2

‘My uncle used to call this place t**t Church,’ Sian said, gesturing around at the drinkers in what used to be the Unitarian Church before it was bought and renovated by an upmarket pub chain.

Kris laughed loudly and brought a hand to his mouth to stop himself spitting beer. ‘You shouldn’t swear like that, young lady. In the house of God!’

‘Yeah, well, God moved out a while ago, and all the t***s moved in.’ The old building was packed with drunk, noisy groups; more than one of them looked like stag parties. A few tables away, someone shouted ‘who are ya’ and his friends joined in so loudly it swallowed all the air.

Sian tipped her head back as she took a swallow from her beer, taking in the high ceiling and the stone arches along the side that had been turned into balconies. There were several large stained-glass windows and even the framed mirrors on the walls were arched to fit with this style. It was very in keeping with where the building had come from.

‘Better to turn churches into pubs than to turn pubs into luxury flats,’ Kris said.

Sian gave him a level stare. ‘The Loggerheads hasn’t made any money for about a million years.’

‘Yeah, but maybe your uncle wasn’t a businessman. With you at the helm, it could be a different story.’ He slid a hand around her waist.

‘Oh, my uncle was very definitely a businessman.’

‘Oh, really?’ There was a sudden light in his eyes. ‘A “businessman”?’ He made air quotes with one hand.

Sian nodded. This had been code on their squad for someone who did a certain type of business, not much of it legal. She let out a small nostalgic laugh. ‘He joked when I joined the force that he wouldn’t be able to talk to me anymore.’ She looked up at Kris. ‘Cos, y’know, you don’t talk to police.’ She imitated a strong Nottingham accent.

‘Your family gets more interesting by the second.’

‘Believe me, they really don’t,’ Sian said, looking over his shoulder at one of those arched mirrors behind them, sensing trouble somewhere. She saw the reflection of two men the other end of the bar doing the drunken wankers’ dance, edging themselves closer, then further away from one another, on the brink of a fight. Sian felt her chest tighten. She checked where the exits were. She looked at the men, assessing their weights and heights and anything around that might help immobilise them if necessary.

‘So, c’mon, Love, what’s the problem with the Loggerheads?’ Kris stepped back so that he could look into her eyes. ‘It’s a bit creepy, I’ll give you that.’

Sian took Kris’s hand, manoeuvring him away from the potential fight and towards an empty table. ‘You’re sounding like my mum, now,’ she said. ‘Don’t move into that pub, it’s a dark, bad place.’ She was putting on a fortune teller voice, each word heavy with meaning. Her eyes were still on the two men, though, and she was relieved to see a bouncer intervene and tell them to leave.

‘Whoo-oo-ooo!’ Kris said, making a token effort of waving a hand and wiggling his fingers. ‘But you’re better than that. You don’t believe in that shit.’ It was left unsaid between them, the crime scenes they’d witnessed together. Sian had always been struck by the absence around a dead body; that was what unnerved you, not the sense of any kind of spirit or presence in the room.

With a deep breath, as if she were about to dive underwater, Sian took another swallow of her beer then came back up for air. ‘I dunno. I’ve always had a weird time at that pub. I ran away to Uncle Rob when I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘I’d just found out that David wasn’t my real dad and I was furious. Uncle Rob took me in but he told my mother I was there and she turned up screaming like a banshee.’ She stared down at the table, remembering it so clearly, the twist to her mum’s face. She’d thought it was rage at the time, pure, blind anger, but now, as she tried to picture it again, she saw fear there instead. ‘She threatened to drag me out the place by my hair.’ She was shaking her head and felt the prickle of tears in her eyes. She pulled against the feeling, her throat tightening. ‘I think I was more upset with Rob, in the end. He was supposed to be my cool uncle who played the drums and owned a pub. But he went straight off tittle-tattling to my mum.’

Kris looked thoughtful and was quiet for a moment. ‘Quite a big deal, something like that. What it does to a family,’ he said.

A sip of drink, marking time whilst she gave herself space to think.

‘How’d you find out? Birth certificate?’ he asked her.

Sian let out a bitter little laugh. ‘No, nothing as simple as that. It’s David’s name on my birth certificate. But he has the wrong colour eyes.’

‘You what?’

Sian waved her beer about as if to illustrate what she was saying. ‘You can blame good old-fashioned O-level biology,’ she said. ‘Two blue-eyed parents can’t have a brown-eyed child, etcetera. I read that, and kept staring in the mirror to see if my eyes were really some kind of odd shade of green that gave the impression of brown, or had some blue in there somewhere, right in the middle near my iris. I tried to persuade myself that what I’d read had to be wrong. But it nagged at me until I blurted something out in the middle of a row like a total cliché. You know the drill, the “you’re not my dad!” obligatory teenage strop.’

‘Did they deny it?’ Kris’s eyes were shining.

‘Well, I was b****y expecting them to, but no. Mum just crumbled. She sat down, fell back, actually, as if I’d punched her. And she said, no, he’s not. And then started giving me the third degree about who’d told me. When I explained about the eye colour she seemed relieved.’ Sian shook her head. ‘I couldn’t believe they’d lied to me all those years. Lied to the b****y registrar too, the pair of them. Mind you, poor old dad. I mean, David dad. He probably didn’t know that long before I did. I dunno. He just seemed gobsmacked by the whole thing.’

Kris had gone very quiet and was staring at her. She hadn’t meant to say as much as this.

‘What about Tom?’’ he asked, finally, and Sian realised he’d been trying to work out how to phrase the question about her younger brother.

She laughed; a sharp, bitter sound. ‘Lovely Tom? No, David’s his dad, because he’s lovely Tom and life is always lovely for him. That’s the rule.’

‘You make it sound like you don’t think he’s very lovely at all!’

‘Sorry.’ Sian sat up straighter. ‘It’s not his fault. Him and his lovely blue eyes.’

‘Okaaaay,’ Kris said.

‘Anyway,’ she said, running a hand through her blonde, cropped hair. ‘It was all wrong, my premise. I know that now. There are a bunch of ways that blue-eyed parents can have brown-eyed kids. My genetic father might very well have blue eyes for all I know. It’s all much more complicated than that biology class.’ She paused and looked at Kris. ‘I just happened to have been right at the same time as being wrong,’ she said.

‘That’s f*****g mental.’

‘Yup.’

‘And you said your family wasn’t that interesting,’ he said.

‘f****d-up is not the same as interesting.’

They both sipped beer at the same time and their eyes caught. Kris put his glass down and reached across the table for Sian’s hand. ‘And you’re not even as f****d-up as you should be,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, that was supposed to be funny but came out wrong.’

There it was; that tight, pinching squeeze of anxiety again. She leaned back in her chair and looked around the crowded bar. She considered getting another drink but staying out didn’t appeal. ‘Listen, I’m knackered. I’m going to go home. Get an early night.’

‘On your own,’ Kris said. It was a statement not a question. Sian pulled at the corners of the label on her beer bottle and didn’t say anything. She knew that she needed to be better than this with Kris, that the way she pushed him away had broken them up before. But she couldn’t help it.

Kris downed the last of his beer then shook his head. ‘What’s wrong, Sian? We getting a bit too close?’ She noticed the use of her first name and knew that she’d upset him.

‘I’m just tired.’

Kris stood up and put on his jacket. ‘Fine,’ he said. He waited for a moment, like he was expecting her to change her mind. Then he zipped up his coat and walked away.

Sian watched him go through another mirror. She felt like everyone in the bar was watching him leave, watching the two of them. But, actually, he was walking slowly, with his usual lazy swagger and she wouldn’t even have realised he was pissed off if she hadn’t known him so well. She wished she could stop upsetting him and just be normal. One day, he’d decide he’d had enough of her nonsense, the way her ex had promised her when he first heard they were together. He’ll realise you’re a psycho b***h soon enough. She could hear the words, her ex-boyfriend’s voice, so loud and clear that she almost expected him to appear in the arched glass of the mirror as she stared into it.

She turned on instinct, the ghost of an itch in the middle of her shoulders like there really was someone behind her. But there was nobody there.