Bitter

 

“I’ll give you three weeks to pack up and clear out, then that’s it, the bulldozers will be on their way! Goodbye family home, hello luxury flats and lots and lots of luvverly money!”

So saying, my brother Stan enthusiastically rubbed his hands together and gave that horrid rasping laugh that I had grown to hate over the years.

Stan had given my wife Molly and me the ultimatum that very morning, and now he was repeating it to me, to ram the point home.  As I gazed at his handsome, unlined face and his fine handmade suit I reflected on what a despicable shit he had always been, and that even in the midst of this family tragedy, he would never change.

We were sitting in the stuffy scruffy living room of Mum’s house on the day after her funeral.  I still couldn’t get used to the fact that I’d never hear dear old Mum’s voice, or see her face again.

You see, Mum had been diagnosed with a horrible illness a year ago, and since she was living alone in the family home in London, I had immediately given up my job and council house in Sheffield and Molly and I had moved down south to look after her.  She had needed full-time care, and I was only too glad to help her, even though Molly and I had had no choice but to put our lives on hold.  It’s not so easy to up-sticks and start your life again when you’re in your sixties, but we had done it. After all, in my book, family comes first.

Stanley, meanwhile, who already lived in London, hadn’t even bothered to visit her once, until it was clear that she only had weeks to live.  As a multimillionaire property developer, he claimed to be far too busy to help us.

However, a month ago he had visited  her.  Not only that but he’d also persuaded her to make a new will, in which she left him her house and most of her savings, and Molly and me were allocated just a measly few hundred quid.

“Come on, Stan, be reasonable,” I had appealed to him.  “You know that Mum had early onset dementia as well as her other problems at the end, otherwise she’d never have signed the new will.  She’s always promised Molly and me would have the house – we’ve got nowhere else to live now – you know we gave up our flat in Sheffield. Whereas you’ve already got a fortune.”

“You can always contest the will.” Stanley treated me to the usual smarmy smirk, and I wondered how come his teeth were still so white, when mine were yellow.  “It’ll take about eight years, cost a fortune, and you’ll never prove she had dementia, or that I used ‘undue influence’.  My solicitor advised me to get a doctor to be a signatory – that means the will is bloody fireproof! Aren’t I a clever lad?”

And then Stanley did what he’d always done as a boy.  Took the packet of small choccy sweets out of his pocket and poured them out all over the coffee table in front of his sofa and then proceeded to shovel them greedily into his mouth.  When he’d been seven and I’d been nine, he’d always loved to do it, taking a pride in making sure I never got one single sweet, and grinning and smacking his lips at the end, knowing that I longed to have just the one, always laughing when my tears started.

“I would like to give you and Molly a bit more time to sort yourselves out,” Stan went on. “But a mate on the council says the planning permission to knock this place down and put up flats will be a breeze, so I want to get cracking as soon as I can.”  He finished chewing the sweets and stood up.  “That’s the difference between you and me, Lennie.  We’re both in our sixties, but I’ve got a huge house in Stanmore, a property empire, millions in the bank and you haven’t even got a pot to piss in.  I’m a doer, you’re a loser!”

A couple of days later, Molly and I still hadn’t got a clue what to do or where to go.  We could probably have got jobs in London stacking shelves in the supermarket, but no way would the wages have covered the massive rental costs for a flat, even if we could find one. Whereas if we went back to Sheffield, where rents were lower, even low-skilled jobs were rarer than hen’s teeth.

Molly and I were going through Mum’s stuff, realising we’d probably have to throw away most of it.  I had just found a big box in the basement, labelled ‘Uncle Albert’.  I brought it upstairs and took it to the kitchen table to go through it. Inside I found all our uncle’s bits and pieces, taken from his flat when he’d died a few years ago, that no one had ever looked through.

I tipped it all out on the table. 

Uncle Albert had been in the paratroopers elite forces during World War Two, and it was thrilling to see his medals, cap badge, plus all his favourite books and bits and pieces. 

“Did I ever tell you about what Uncle Albert told us about the D-Day landings?”  I asked Molly when she came in to do the washing up.

“No.”

“He said that the saddest thing was that there were all these German soldiers on the beach when the British and American forces landed, all hell broke loose in the fighting, and some of these Jerries were shouting Bitter!  Bitter! as they ran forward towards them.  Afterwards Albert found out that Bitte in German meant Please, meaning that the soldiers were pleading for mercy and no one realised it.  He was really upset about that. Always said that it broke his heart.”

“But you told me he was a really tough guy,”  Molly answered.  “That he could kill men with his bare hands.”

“Sure, he was,” I agreed.  “And he did kill a lot of men. But he was also the nicest, kindest man you ever have imagined. He never hurt a fly, he was my favourite uncle, he was wonderful with us kids, loved bringing us sweets and toys and playing games with us.  I always remember he had this great sense of humour.  Apparently he was sometimes dropped behind enemy lines, and because there was a danger he might have been captured, they gave him this ‘suicide pill’ – cyanide or something, so that if he was captured, to avoid being tortured to give away secrets he had the option of a quick end.  He called his pill ‘Harold’ and always carried it with him afterwards as a sort of good-luck charm.  That was old Albert, always looked on the bright side, everything was a big joke. We loved him.”

“Blimey look at this!”  Molly said, as she came over to the table and riffled through the books and things.  Underneath a copy of Oliver Twist, she had found an old revolver. 

“Bloody hell, I never realised this was here!” I told her.  “If the cops caught us with this thing, they’d lock us up and throw away the key!”

“It’s rusty.  I bet it wouldn’t even fire.  Mind you, looks like there are bullets in the chamber.”

Later, I was on my own at the kitchen table, re-reading Mum’s dreadful will.  There was one section I didn’t understand. 

Just then, Stan arrived and sat down opposite me.  Molly took one look at him and stalked away – they had taken an instant mutual dislike to each other.

“What about this part in the will?”  I asked him.  “It says here that if you die within thirty days, then I get your entire inheritance, as the default beneficiary.”

“Oh yeah,” he muttered.  “The solicitor insisted I put that bit in. Apparently  when beneficiaries of a will are old or middle-aged, like us, having that clause makes it more fireproof legally.  Basically it’s a tax thing.  See, Lennie, when I get all Mum’s money and the house I’ll have to pay inheritance tax.  If I then die shortly afterwards, my family, who inherit my estate, they would then have to pay inheritance tax all over again, so to avoid that, the idea is that if the older person who gets the money dies in a short time, the default beneficiary, which normally has to be the closest living relative, in this case you, gets the inheritance instead.”

“Really?”

“Of course it’s all academic, isn’t it?” he boasted, leaning back in the chair, puffing out his chest.  “I’m two years younger than you, go to the gym every day, never smoke or drink and I’m in tip-top health.  Whereas you, dear Old Lennie, you smoke like chimney, you’ve got high blood pressure and heart trouble, are morbidly obese and take so many tablets that you rattle!  So if either of us is going to die within thirty days, it’s hardly going to be me, is it?”

He laughed for a long time. 

“Tell you what, Lennie.”  He leaned forward and picked up the pistol on the table by the barrel, cocked the hammer and handed it across to me.  There was a twinkle in his eye. “Why don’t you shoot me?”

“What?”  I was holding the gun and staring at him.

“Go on!  I despise you. And you’ve always hated me.  You could shoot me now and tell the police we were messing about with the gun and it went off by accident. You’d probably get off with a fine, or even a short sentence. And you and Molly would have all that money!  Go on, mate, I dare you!”

He sat there staring, and I aimed the gun at him and my finger tensed on the trigger.

But of course I couldn’t do it.  Dropped the gun onto the table, didn’t I?

And he laughed, as he always laughed, that nasty grating rasp I had heard and hated all my life.

“And that’s the difference between us, Lennie.  If I’d been you I’d have fired and fuck the consequences because I’ve got the courage to get on and do things. That’s why I’ve got somewhere in life and you’ll always be a failure. Just like that old tosser, Uncle Albert, who you loved so much.  I ask you, what a wasted life he had. I mean, think of it! The man was a trained killer – he could have worked for the East-End gangsters as a contract killer and lived the life or Reilly, but after the war, what did he do?  He settled down, bought a newsagents shop in a back street of nowhere and worked like fuck until the day he died, and the contents of that little box is all that his life amounted to.  Albert was nothing but a fucking loser, just like you!”

And then he did it. 

The chocolate trick. 

He brought out the packet of choccy sweets from his pocket and poured them out all other the table, then gathered them up in his palm and stuffed them all into his mouth, gobbling greedily.

Until there was just one left, sitting there all alone in the middle of the table.

“Go on, Lennie, have the last one, why don’t you?”

And then, just as he’d done when we were boys, he swooped in and grabbed it just before my hand made it, and shoved it into his mouth.

But as he chewed, he frowned slightly.  “Fuck me, that tasted funny, right odd.  Kind of bitter.  Yeah, really bitter. . .”

That’s when I remembered another of Uncle Albert’s war stories.  The one about Harold, his suicide pill. About how he had a mate in the cookhouse, who, for a joke, had covered Harold with chocolate, because Albert reckoned that if he was going to die, the last thing he wanted to taste was some lovely chocolate.

“Bitter. Blimey, that tasted really bitter!” Stan said.

Then his head fell forwards.

They were the last words he ever spoke.   

(image courtesy Mo Farrelly from Pixabay)