• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1048 0

him, and you feel sorry for him when he gets smacked by Mum or by the man of the house (a rotating title, apparently) or by Bowlex (Dowlex? I think I’m reading that right)—but Paul grew up fast and started throwing his weight around too: he started to hit Eulalie back, before he ran away for the last time. And Paul was good at school, surprising thing, even when he was a little fellow. Tommy don’t like that, though: Paul was the only one who’d had a chance at school, a real chance, since Eulalie could still work a bit back then, could make a little money, and so Paul got to go to school “regular, not just now and again,” while the others were in and out, helping their mum with work, quitting the books as soon as the state said they were through. Worse though, Eulalie always told Tommy and the other kids that Paul was special because Paul’s dad was something special, and she’d throw that at Tommy’s dad too: “You aren’t Barnabas Davies.” Tommy told me with a quiet, angry amazement, “But Paul wasn’t even grateful for that,” he used to call Eulalie a whore and a disgrace, would say she wasn’t his mother, wasn’t a proper woman at all, and he’d be off out the door to visit his other friends, “and he never took me,” says Tommy, “never once took me, never showed me his books and pictures, looked at me like I was dirt because my dad wasn’t your Mr. Davies, but was just poor old Tom from down the pub. But I got him once”—Tommy laughs, showing his few teeth—“I got him good. I once snatched one of his library books, a real nasty one, took it and showed it to Rowler (Bowlex?). Paul had the devil whipped out of him that day. That was something to see.”

Well, Mr. Macy, you can imagine that this was quite a tiresome spectacle—vengeful lies, self-pitying misunderstood memories—but it was something I could understand and put up with as long as I got my job done. Had to listen to a heap of this before I could get young Tom calm enough to answer me: where was Paul Davies now? My mistake triggered another storm: “He isn’t Paul Davies, he’s Paul Caldwell, you hear? The Caldwell name is good enough for him, he’s lucky to have it.” “Fine, Paul Caldwell then, Tom—where is he?” Turns out Paul’s been gone since Tommy was thirteen or fourteen. Not one word when he left. “That broke Eulalie,” says Tommy. “She needed him. He was going to be the man of this house, and now I still have to bloody well hear how I’m not Barnabas Davies’s son.”

“And since then, since, let’s say, 1907?”

“Yeah, that Bolshie, what’s her name, the crazy library lady, she came by one day, in ’18 or ’19, prim and proper and disgusted by us, and shows us the letter from the Army saying Paul was missing, a corporal he was, and ‘no further information’ known. We didn’t even know he went off to the War. Him missing and Mick dead on that Turkish beach, God damn, Eulalie cried for a bleeding month. Now what in Christ’s name do you want with us?”

My notes say, “Two and a half hours with those animals. Bill London for ten hours.” No crime that, Macy, since London turns around and bills the solicitors for twenty and they bill Davies for forty, and that’s about right for this bastard, leaving women in distress like he did. Can you imagine, Macy? All over the world, detectives like me were prying around in the open sores of unhappy families and abandoned women. There must have been a whole city’s worth of pathetic, screaming scenes like this one going on all over the world right then, at that very moment, because old Mr. Davies had been a wolf as a young man and wanted to be loved for it as an old man.

My notes also say, “Engaged by Tommy Caldwell to bring back any word of Paul Caldwell’s address or grave, payable on contingency.” I had my second client on what was now the Paul Davies/Paul Caldwell case, though I highly doubted his intention to pay.

Mr. Macy, I slept like a baby last night, not the old nightmare, nor a toss or a turn. For this alone I thank you. Just knowing that you and I are working together on this memoir, opening up the old case, explaining its logic and structure,