Lashton Sounds: Chapter Four

Oidhche muses on life, crime, and family between laps in the pool.

Gellert Osgodby is beginning to settle into his position as Lucien Pike’s secretary, but nothing in Lashton ever stays the same for long.

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Oidhche reached the other end of the pool, his fingertips touching against the tile before he loosely curled his fingers about the edge and pushed himself up. He didn’t draw himself fully out of the water to sit up on it, but rested his forearms on the pool’s edge with his head rested on his hands, the water still lapping about his ribs.

When they’d moved into this house, he and Lara, the pool had been one of the first projects, and when all the kids were still young, it had been more colourful and a lot more fucking messy; pool noodles and lilos and toys all around the fucking place, rubber mats pinned down to help the kids not slip, a load of towels always ready on the warming rails in different colours.

By the time Siân and Dag were fifteen or so, all that had trailed off, and the pool had become nearly wholly Oidhche’s domain. The kids still came, of course, still used it – Cassian swam and he boxed in the attached gym; Bridie was a swimmer, and she and Ariana came here and raced against one another often enough – but they were no longer having regular pool parties or gathering here of an evening, chattering and playing games whilst some of them swam, and others sat around the tables or on the benches.

He was not looking forward to losing this calm oasis, purely meditative on all sides, the water around and under his body, him cutting through it at his leisure. He was getting old on land, but in the water, he felt as young as he ever fucking had been, still moved gracefully, still moved a lot fucking faster than any of the kids, more dexterously.

It was a return to the womb, in a way, all that fucking potential – and like a womb, the water only protected him, bolstered him, while he was in it. Once he was out again, he was just an increasingly frail old man.

But—

Well.

It was worth losing his private oasis to have grandkids on the way. Carlotta and Marina had revealed they were pregnant at the same fucking dinner – the girls had been delighted, of course, and so had Trevyn, although Oidhche had seen the competitive streak stiffen up Huw’s body, tighten his jaw, before Carlotta had muttered, “Huw,” and touched his arm, and he’d uncoiled a little, though not completely.

That fucking boy.

Oidhche knew what it was, really – he was jealous, always so fucking jealous, always so competitive, always needing to keep his position as top fucking dog. He considered it his by birthright, what with being the eldest boy, in line for Oidhche’s throne. He’d always tried to impress a real sense of fucking meritocracy on the kids, but Bethan didn’t see it that way, and he knew she was fucking whispering stupidity in Huw’s ears even now, as if he needed it, as if any man nearly forty years old needed to be fucking encouraged to act like a child by his own mother.

Oidhche liked his children.

He liked being a father – loved being a father.

From the out, he’d been careful, from the beginning, to make sure he was spending time with all his kids, feeling out their strengths and their weaknesses, making sure that he understood what made them tick, what motivated them, what they wanted out of life and why and how.

Huw had been jealous even as a little boy – even as a baby, he would wail and scream because Cassian was being held and he wasn’t; when Trevyn was born, Huw had been downright fucking dangerous.

Bethan had always favoured him too much, Oidhche thought. If Oidhche hadn’t been so fucking aware of it, so paranoid about such things, Huw might have really hurt his little brother, he thought, done more than try to pinch him or slap him in his cradle, or once, make a play to leave him outside in the snow like he’d heard the Vikings did.

How he’d fucking cry, whenever he was caught at it – how he’d wail and wail, and say he didn’t do it, and then say he didn’t mean to, and then say it was Trevyn’s fault, that he was too small, that he cried too much, that he took too much. How he’d fucking run and hide behind Bethan and say Daddy was being mean again, even as Oidhche held Trevyn or Cassian to his breast and coaxed them into calm again.

The divorce had brought the boys a bit closer together, or at least, stopped Huw from thinking of Trevyn so much as a tumour on all the attention that was rightfully his. Suddenly he had a rival family to consider – a stepmother to hate and blame and bite at, and half-breed siblings that had no right to leech Oidhche’s attention away from him, the firstborn, and even his real brothers.

So many sisters to battle with, too many of them, and with what he thought of as stupid Scottish names – Oidhche always laughed when he thought of the little prick saying that – and then had been the bus crash, and all Huw’s fucking dreams had come true, and at the same time, he’d changed his fucking tune a bit. Gotten more subtle about it, at least.

It hadn’t been easy, making sure he was fairly dividing his time between thirteen children, making sure he was carving out time for each and every one of them, one-on-one time, whilst running a fucking business, but how could it not be worth it? How was that work not worth doing?

What vocation could fucking compare to being a father?

Sports practices and music lessons and swimming and dance, reading with them, helping with homework, taking them out with him in the car or on a boat or just out for the day, getting haircuts together, taking the kids to the tailor with him, and when he started having girls, out for mani-pedis.

When Bridie had asked to get her legs waxed when she was sixteen, and had asked if he would go with her, he’d even done that – he’d gotten his chest waxed, even, before her, and that was the first time she’d fucking seen him cry in front of her, he thought.  

Nine kids was easier to juggle than thirteen, sure, in some ways. Perhaps if it was just Lara he’d lost, he could have coped with it better. Would have been devastated still, of course, Hell, would have been more devastated about losing her, he thought now, if it had just been her he’d lost, and not the kids.

He thought of her, cold and statue-like with that secretive smile pulling at her lips, her nails always dark-painted. He thought of her jokes and her quiet remembrances, the way she would sometimes murmur poetry in his ear, reciting in English or Gaelic, the hundred lullabies she always chose from. He thought of her hand on his shoulder, always having to reach up because he was so tall, and her head leaning on his side, thought of her cajoling him when he had one too many cigars, or shoving past him so that she could get into the water first, laughing the whole while.

“Do you miss your mother?” Oidhche asked.

His voice echoed a little under the high glass ceilings and the tiled walls.

It used to be that Dai couldn’t stand to be in the pool hall. He would occasionally manage it if it was busy enough with people and he could camouflage himself and go undetected amongst them, or feel undetected, anyway.

Now, he was sitting on one of the stone benches at this end of the pool, directly in front of Oidhche, and it was just the two of them. He was leaning back with his arms spread over the back of the bench, and had been looking into the middle distance, but now his eyes slid lazily back to his father.

His eyes dropped from Oidhche’s face down to his arms and breast before flitting to the water, eyeing it warily, before looking Oidhche in the eyes again.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I was thinking about her today. She used to hold me on her knee and we’d watch bouts together on TV. She wanted me to be a knight.”

Oidhche remembered, with a stab of cold ache through his heart, Lara on her last pregnancy, stroking her belly and talking to Dai before he was even fucking born, saying that she knew what he would be, that he would take up a sword, that she would teach him like she’d been taught, that if he wanted, he would joust and fight and be knighted.

“Yes,” Oidhche agreed. “Well. She didn’t think it, sweetheart. She said she knew you would be – or knew you’d be a warrior, anyway.” He looked to Dai’s jacket hung on the corner of the bench, rightfully taken as a trophy from Dunnock Wesson’s body, and the glint of blades inside it. For so long, he thought the kid would be fucking nothing. “She was right about that, honey.”

Dai smiled.

“You miss her more,” he said in that dreamy, medicated way he had these days. He spoke more slowly, less frantically than he ever had before, didn’t stumble over expressing himself in the same way. Even the twins had commented on it, that it felt like they were suddenly getting to know him again, that he was putting some of himself out there, into the world. “You remember her better.”

His eyes dropped to Oidhche’s chest again.

What the fuck would Lara say about that, huh?

Hey, Lara. Sorry you’re dead, honey, miss you lots, got a question for ya.

After twenty fucking years, your boy has things he seems to want, seems to fucking strive for, is interested in the business and wants to do more than just stew in his fucking room or run laps at the gym, but maybe ‘cause of all the drugs he’s taking, maybe ‘cause he’s finally grown up, maybe ‘cause of something else inside him, something darker, something fucked up, one of the things he seems to want is too much closeness with his fucking daddy.

What would you do, if it was you, and I was the one in the ground?

Let it slide when he looks at your body in the pool? Let him kill one of your bodyguards out of jealousy, and let him bark and bare his teeth at the other ones – to the point that Friday, very sensibly, is stationed outside rather than in here where he usually would be?

How far would you let it go, Lar?

Let him sit in your lap like he did when he was little? Let him suck on your tits? Let him fuck you?

How much did Oidhche love his little boy, the one who was so distant for so fucking long, so hard to reach, so hard to connect with? Was that the price he had to pay for so much fucking distance, that now his baby boy was getting close to him like the other kids, he was getting too close, and wanted it too much?

“Bridie said you took the cash run today.”

“Mm, yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary. Had tea with Mr Wotan when I picked up his protection – he’s planning for his funeral, picking caterers.”

Oidhche raised his eyebrows. Old Wotan was a good old boy, and an old boy he may be, but Oidhche hadn’t thought of him as particularly close to death’s door – despite the name, he was more fae than human, and Oidhche would have thought he had another half century in him at least. “The old man dying?”

“No,” Dai said placidly – always so certain nowadays, no longer shivering and twitching like a chihuahua in the pound. Oidhche couldn’t get over it, couldn’t get used to it. He wondered if there would come a point where it ceased to feel like such a fuckign surprise. “Or, not actively, anyway. Apparently this is something he does every thirty years or so – ‘cause caterers change over time, you know? Likes to be prepared.”

Oidhche laughed, running his hand through his hair and idly kicking his legs in the water. “The old bastard was always kooky.”

“Valorous King lives there, on Saltpeter Street,” Dai said. “Above the shops.”

Oidhche blinked at that, tilting his head slowly to the side. Dai had mentioned it, in passing – he liked to go to some of Oidhche’s old haunts. Oidhche had always liked the gay spaces in town, enjoyed the relative equality of being both hunter and hunted, more so than he ever appreciated the meat market the straight stripper places were.

He was a bisexual, after a fashion – he loved women, but he was particular about his relationships with them, liked to settle with one and work out a melody together, and he’d been really very hurt when he and Bethan started dancing to different songs.

When Lara died, though?

He knew that love was over for him, that all his love would be going to his kids now instead of shared with a wife. He couldn’t open himself up like that, not again.

Men were easier. He liked to fuck men, or in general, liked for men to fuck him – he didn’t love them. They weren’t for that, and never had been, not for him.

Dai was…

Oidhche didn’t know what he was. He doubted Dai knew either.

But he’d mentioned this little thing he had with Valorous King, the two of them flirting together, drinking together when King was out on the prowl. At least King was no longer a fucking cop, the kid was rescuing kittens or something.

“You gonna meet up?”

“Yeah,” Dai said. “Talk, anyway. He lives over the fish shop.”

“… What’s that, honey?”

“The fish shop. Aquariums. They sell goldfish.”

Oidhche took that in, non-sequitur as it fucking seemed – Dai was talking a lot more than he used to, not stammering or clamping shut the way he did for so long with Oidhche, but his trains of thought had become fractured, confused, harder to follow.

Bridie thought he was seeing things – Oidhche knew he was seeing things, and was currently watching his youngest son follow the path of some invisible floating object back and forth under the pool ceiling.

“Oh yeah?” he prompted. “You, uh… You want a goldfish, sweetheart? We could set up a tank.”

It didn’t seem that this idea had occurred to Dafydd, because his brow furrowed very deeply, and he actually tipped his head back, rubbing at his chin as he thought about the question. For a minute or two they sat in silence together, Oidhche waiting patiently as cogs turned in Dai’s confused little head.

“Maybe,” he said finally. “I don’t know how to look after a fish.”

“It’s not so hard. Gotta keep the tank clean, feed ‘em, have a filter in there to keep the water oxygenated. Some of them, you need more complicated setups, you know, water heaters or live food or whatever, but I imagine the fish guy’d be able to give us a book.”

“I used to like swimming,” Dai said after another minute of silence.

He was looking past Oidhche and at the water again, his face chemically blank, and Oidhche raised his chin.

“Oh,” he said, more quietly. “You, uh— You wanna give it another try? It used to make you anxious, used to hurt.”

“Everything hurts,” Dai said dismissively.

He was still looking at the water. His face didn’t show it, but Oidhche knew there was want there, under all the drugs, under the pain.

Oidhche turned away to swim a few more laps.

He needed a minute before he could continue their conversation, if the boy was gonna break his heart like that. The water soothed him, pressing pleasantly cool on all sides as he cut through the water, hit the other side, flipped, retraced his length.

This time when he returned to his place he loosely gripped the ladder and pulled himself out of the water. Dai passed him a towel, and then wandered off in a dreamy manner, disappearing through the open door and into the little kitchenette. Through the glass windows, he watched him slowly circle the table, seeming to have forgotten why he’d gone inside, before he looked at the fridge and then paused a minute…

Then finally opened it, and came out a few minutes after with a tray.

Wrapping a robe from the warmed rail and belting it around his waist, Oidhche moved forward and settled at the table beside him as Dai portioned out salad and salmon for each of them. He’d made it this morning, and Oidhche knew it would be good even before he speared a piece of pink meat and felt it all but fucking melt on his tongue, even before his teeth cut through it.

“What are you thinking about, honey?” he asked after a few minutes, and Dai’s eyes slowly turned to him instead of gazing into space.

“Noble King,” he said. “You two are friends. Is it so surprising, that I would be friends with Valorous?”

“Noble and I are in different positions than you and Valorous,” Oidhche murmured, but he did take the question in and digested it slowly. He chewed on a few soybeans, flattened them against the roof of his mouth and tasted the sweetness of them, swallowed. “She was only a little girl when I came down to Lashton, you know – all that business with fucking… How much do you know about it? Dauntless’ leadership?”

“They’d had female leaders before,” Dai said. “But I know that her dad didn’t like her for leader. She was the eldest, and she had a bunch of sisters. He didn’t want any of them, and he didn’t want Vital for leader because he had a cleft palate, right? ‘Cause he was deformed. Wanted Laborious King for leader.”

“He did, yeah,” Oidhche agreed. “He was always a nice boy, Laborious. The family business was here in town, but my mother had us living half of the time up in the magical quarter of Edinburgh, so we were half up, half down. He was bookish, but he wasn’t shy – he was whip fucking smart. I thought he would have been a good leader, actually. But…”

“He got a policewoman pregnant,” Dai said.

“He was twelve or thirteen, when she started grooming him as an informant – he was, I don’t know, fifteen or sixteen at the fucking eldest when she got pregnant. It all came out – Dauntless was fucking furious on his behalf. She was ready to kill half the fucking Lashton police force for letting this woman rape her little fucking brother, and they swore off responsibility, obviously, said she was acting on her own.”

Dai’s expression had changed somewhat, his nose wrinkling, and he had stopped taking morsels from his bowl, was sitting there still with his fork held in the air, his body preternaturally still.

“Fuck,” he pronounced finally.

“Yeah,” Oidhche said. “He tried to kill himself, I think – swore off the whole family business, went down London way. He’s still in the life, but not for any of the Lashton families. But anyway, that was what Noble was coming up in, you know. Was born pretty much just as Laborious was leaving and Dauntless was taking control. She liked the idea of her eldest boys for leader, but Heinous was never cut out for it, I could have told them that, and Vainglorious, Valorous’ father, he was…” Oidhche sucked his teeth and thought about him a moment, Vainglorious King in his leather jacket with his flash car. He’d used to think that car was so fucking cool, when he was a lad – he had been ten years older than him, or thereabouts, and surprised at how fucking impressed he was by this nineteen-year-old and his weapons proficiency and his cool, slick air. “He was something.”

“Do I want to hear this?” Dai deadpanned, and Oidhche laughed.

“Oh, Vainglorious King, he was straight as an arrow,” Oidhche murmured. “I would have had a better shot at Noble – might have given it a go, even, if I didn’t want my mother eating me alive.”

“Isn’t she trans?”

“No,” Oidhche said.

He watched the confusion on Dai’s face, and he laughed, putting his hand on his chin. “Is that what you kids think these days? That the two of them are, uh…?”

“She got him pregnant. A dozen fucking times.”

“They went to a fleshturner. Tricky operations, those ones, too – pretty easy to, uh, change out the equipment, so to speak, less easy to make sure it’s going to lead to safe births and healthy children. They went to Ireland, I think, or maybe even France – it was very expensive, too, but Dauntless paid the whole bill. Thought it was fucking inspired, her daughter having her husband do the messy parts. He always looked like a string with a bead through the middle of it, whenever he was pregnant.”

“Huh,” Dai said. “How… modern.”

“Yeah. She always was willing to make certain choices other people wouldn’t, was Noble. But the two of us understand each other well, and Hell, she may be younger than me by a good few years, but we still have so much in common. You and that boy, that’s another story. I hope you don’t think I disapprove, kiddo. If you want him, take him. I just hear he’s crazy, that’s all.”

“Not crazier than me,” Dai pointed out, in such strikingly reasonable tones that Oidhche couldn’t help but laugh, tapping his fork against the side of his bowl.

“Maybe,” Oidhche allowed. “He isn’t too old for you?”

“I don’t know that you want to open that door, Daddy,” Dai said dryly, and Oidhche’s answering chuckle was a dryer thing, but not at all offended. The boy was right, and Oidhche wasn’t about to argue his fucking case.

“How are you feeling about, uh… about the job, these days, doing more for the family? Bridie and Ariana trust you so quick, these days. They hand you jobs to do, let you take up work, hm?”

“Some,” Dai said. “Bridie seems to think I’m like a lit stick of dynamite.”

“And is she wrong, sweetheart?”

It was Dai’s turn to wryly smile and show himself caught out, because he loosely shrugged his shoulders, and Oidhche sighed as he looked across at him, at this boy that looked so much like him these days, had taken on so many of Oidhche’s mannerisms, his physicality, now he was feeling… looser, more relaxed in the body he’d inherited. He was still bound tight inside, maybe, still half-crazed, but now that his body wasn’t wound up and twisted in on itself at any fucking moment, the similarities between the two of them were so much more obvious.

It was what was driving Huw around the twist, Oidhche thought – Bethan had been saying that Dafydd should be put in a fucking crazy hospital for years, and now Dai was not just walking freely and conducting business with them, but was spending so much extra time with Oidhche, impressing him, and looked like him, too.

People were taking notice.

“You worried about Huw?” Oidhche asked.

Dai sighed. “I don’t want what he has. Shouldn’t we be worrying about bigger fucking things than that, anyway? This stuff with the Renns and the Sorrels – or Gellert Osgodby.”

“Gellert Osgodby,” Oidhche agreed. “Huw doesn’t see the danger in him. He really should know better, but he can be so fucking hard-headed sometimes. I hate to say it, but I think he’ll learn that lesson before the year is out. Funny, though, how he’s settled into the hierarchy the way that he has.

“Pike has always been a half-rabid fucking animal, and his kids have been like fucking street cats, at best. There’s a lot of new discipline these days, though – so much more fucking structure to the current line-up. Osgodby has picked out younger ones to crew his main council, but now they’ve moved their production so fucking close, I think a lot of those older Pikes will be coming home.”

Dai shrugged. “Maybe some of them, but not others,” he said. “Verdance and I have talked a little about it. Colleen Pike is gone for good, he says, and Richard Hodden is going to stay in London, same as a lot of his people. They’re going to continue the lines of trade there, more like a franchise. Pike would never have allowed for it before, but Osgodby is more strategic about this stuff.”

“He is strategic,” Oidhche murmured. “But he doesn’t realise what Pike is, just yet, I don’t think. He doesn’t realise how feral the man is. He can give that bastard a computer and clean the filth out from under his fingernails, bring him to a party like he’s halfway civilised, but Pike will always give way to his instincts once he goes off script. Bridie thinks you’re a lit stick of dynamite? You’ve got nothing on Lucien Pike, baby.

“Impregnating every girl he claps eyes on, either thinking with his cock or the bloodthirst at the back of his throat. Punching out his own boy’s neck. He nearly fucking killed him, you know, when he did that. It wouldn’t have been the first of his own kids he’s killed.”

Dai’s brows furrowed a little together, and he looked at Oidhche very seriously. His eyes had a glazed quality to them pretty much always these days, the pupils overlarge and slow to respond to changes in light, but sometimes Oidhche did fancy that he could see the cogs turning behind them, inside them, deep in the back of that twisted little brain of his.

“You really don’t think the Renn-Sorrel marriage is the real threat to us? You think it’s the Pikes?”

“Two things can be true at once,” Oidhche murmured, gesturing vaguely with his hand. “But there’s a reason that I wanted us to reach out to Osgodby and have him try to corral Pike’s insanity in a specific direction, and to present us as, uh, potential allies in that direction. So that when the blood settles, maybe he won’t keep going and aim himself at us. Your mother used to like him. Maybe like is the wrong word – she’d never be in a room where he was, and certainly, she didn’t exactly fucking respect him. But she was a poet, you know. She always liked a force of nature.”

Dai set his fork down and wiped his mouth.

“The twins,” he said. “Cosmo and Damien. Is it true about them, that they were… that they were really feral? Bridie says she remembers seeing them when they were out, when they’d started going to school at Blue Bridge. Both really quiet and twitchy and weird.”

“The mother died,” Oidhche said, remembering with a sickened taste in the back of his mouth. “She wasn’t a local, she’d immigrated here from somewhere in the Balkans. She was… A Serb? Maybe Croat. Her name was Maria something. Me and your mother were following it in the paper as it unfolded, what happened to those fucking boys – she was a bit of a shut-in, she was very shy, and she did a lot of translation work from a home office.

“Barely talked to anybody local, so people didn’t even know she was fucking sick, and she was really paranoid about hospitals and doctors, had tried to have a home birth that went badly, so the neighbours heard her screaming and they had to fucking drag her, wrestling and yelling, into the hospital before she bled out.

“They’d been out of school for a while, had only gone until they were six, maybe seven, and then, uh… Well, she died. I can’t remember of what, exactly, but it was some kind of cancer, I think, maybe a brain tumour. And the boys had been told they couldn’t go out anywhere without her, ‘cause she was so fucking paranoid, and as she’d been getting sicker and sicker, she’d arranged a lot of food deliveries and stuff in advance. Those boys were locked up in that house for three months before anybody fucking noticed, and six before anybody fucking did anything about it. Social services in this fucking town…”

Oidhche wiped his mouth and slowly shook his head, then sipped a little of his water, wishing he had ice, but they only had a fridge in here, no freezer.

“Poor sons of bitches,” he said. “To go from that house of horrors, the mother wrapped up in the bed with towels under the door to try to keep the smell from the rest of the house, and to be given off to Lucien Pike as their fucking daddy. They were thirteen. He had some of his women at the time look after them, but, uh… Yeah. Took ‘em a while to get closer to normal.”

“Everyone in this town is so fucked up,” Dai murmured. He was on his feet and clearing up their plates, setting them beside the sink for the cleaner to wash this evening.

“Not me,” Oidhche said, making Dai scoff. “Me, I’m peachy keen.”

He reached into his robe pocket for his cigar case, but before he could light one, Dai looked at him sternly and said, “Daddy. Not in here.”

For just a second, it was like Dai didn’t look like Oidhche at all – for just a second, all Oidhche saw was Lara, and he felt himself soften, felt himself smile.

“Fine, fine,” he said, putting the case on the table. “Tell Friday to come in on your way out, will you?”

Dai didn’t answer that, only made a derisive noise, and leaned to kiss his father on the cheek before he took his leave.