‘He became a carer for me, and for our mum, when she needed it,’ he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken.
She only hesitated for a moment.
‘She was ill?’
If you could call being a drug addict ill. Some people called it an illness. Having lived through it, borne the brunt of it, he and Malachi had always been considerably less charitable. Not that Sol was about to say any of that aloud.
‘Something like that.’ He tried not to spit it out in distaste.
Clearly he didn’t do a very good job; the expression on her face said enough. Less shock, more a tired understanding. As though she hadn’t expected it from him, but, now that he’d said it, she wasn’t entirely surprised.
Or maybe he was just projecting. This woman made him rethink things of which he’d long since stopped taking notice. He blinked as he realised she was still talking to him.
‘Sol? I asked about your dad.’
‘Dead. That’s why she became...ill.’
‘So he cared for you before that?’ She was trying to put it together, like one of the jigsaws at the carers’ centre, only it was a jigsaw of his life and he hadn’t given her all the pieces.
With anyone else, he wouldn’t have wanted to.
‘Cared is a bit too generous a description,’ Sol ground out. ‘He was a former Russian soldier.’
‘Your parents were Russian?’
‘Not my mother,’ he clarified. ‘My father was medically discharged due to injury; he had street smarts but no education so he earned a living taking work on the docks when it was available, or as a pub fighter otherwise.’
‘Did he hit you and Malachi?’
‘No. He wasn’t exactly the best father but he didn’t hit us, except the odd clip around the ear as many kids got back them, not bad for a man who had been systematically used as a punching bag by his own father. Though he did teach us to fight, from toddlers really, but particularly Mal because he was older. It was his way of bonding with us, I guess.’
‘So that’s how Malachi became the skilled fighter he is now.’
‘I doubt he’d ever have believed it would make Mal a millionaire.’ Sol shook his head. ‘Love wasn’t something our father was good at. Even his relationship with our mother was more passionate and volatile than loving. She showed us some love as kids, and he put food on the table and a roof over our heads.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Bad fight.’ Sol laughed but it was a hollow, scraping sound. ‘Brain bleed. And yes, I know all the psychology arguments about that being the reason why I became a neurosurgeon. The point is that my mother fell apart. Started doing drugs to numb the pain. It wasn’t a far reach from the world in which we lived back then. The love went pretty fast, then.’
‘How old was Malachi?’
‘Eight.’ He shrugged as Anouk drew her lips into a thin line. ‘By the time he was ten, she was a full-on addict and Mal was full-time carer for us both, whilst he also earned money for us to eat and live.’
‘He was earning money at ten?’ Anouk blew out a breath. ‘Doing what? Surely no one would employ him.’
‘Local gangs.’
‘Gangs?’ She looked momentarily stunned. ‘So...what did he do?’
Sol crossed his arms over his chest. Even now, over two decades on, it still rattled him that he didn’t know exactly what his brother had been compelled to do just to keep the two—three—of them together.
Like holding their lives together with sticking plaster. No, not even something so expensive. His ten-year-old brother had been holding their lives together with a bit of discarded string he’d found blowing about in the filthy street outside their tiny terraced house.
He didn’t even understand why he was telling Anouk any of this, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop. She drew it out of him, with all the patience and compassion that he had used on the young carers in his centre.
It was odd, the tables being turned on him. And, strangely, not entirely unpleasant.
‘Errands like drugs?’ she pressed gently.