Thicker Than Water

Not to mention the fact that Pen had probably weaselled a lot of the story out of ce s wh Coldwood already. Brandy is a potent lever in her hands, and with the home-team advantage she’s pretty hard to beat.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

Over lethally potent coffee from her stove-top Moka pot, Pen listened to the whole story in inscrutable silence.

‘What did he mean?’ she asked, when I got to the confession part. ‘You don’t go for all that stuff, do you, Fix?’

I gave a scoffing laugh. ‘Too many sins,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine the queue that would build up behind me?’

‘Then why did Matt say that to you?’

I didn’t answer for a moment.

Pen waited, knowing me too well to push: and after a while, speaking softly because this too felt like a confession, I told her the story.

The party was Dad’s idea: to celebrate Matt’s achievement and to rub everyone’s nose in the fact that he had a priest for a son.

I wasn’t exactly in the party spirit: I prowled around the edges of the good time that was being had, feeling the same old resentments coming to a boil in my mind. Matt had walked out on us back when ‘us’ was still the barely viable huddle of him, me and Dad: now Matt had come back the hero. I didn’t see anything much to celebrate here.

So I swiped a bottle of whisky - a potent liquor I’d only just discovered - and a glass, found a tiny room at the back of the club where they stacked empty beer barrels, and commenced an experiment that Albert Hofmann would have approved of.

Matt appeared in the doorway maybe an hour later. He’d noticed my absence from the party and had come looking for me.

‘You okay, Felix?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ I answered, raising the whisky bottle to support the contention. ‘Doing good here, Matt.

‘Then do you want to come and join the rest of us? Auntie Lily wants to talk to you about the ghost in her outside loo.’

‘Auntie Lily can whistle for it.’"

"Matt came forward into the room. He was wearing the scrimshaw cross that Mum had just given him: carved with bas-relief thorns to the point where it looked like a bramble thicket, and with the legend INRI inscribed on a scroll at its centre, it was an object both beautiful and grotesque.