Page 38 of The Redemption of Alex Cade
“Kel turned up a couple of months before we got out and from the moment he walked through the door, you could see that he wasn’t going to take any shit. Cocky, sharp, and smart mouthed, he had the words ‘bad attitude' written all over him.It was probably why he got bumped from one place to another. That, and being intimidating. All it took was a narrowing of his eyes as he stared at you, and a tilt of his head. It was something you took note of, if you were wise. Travis wasn’t, and he learnt to his cost.”
I said nothing. I’d had a taste of that special Kelvin brand of intimidation, the type that had made me lock my door as soon as I walked into the house, and peek through the curtains if the bell rang, things I’d never done before.
“Travis reserved his attention for me. He never went near the two girls who were also in the house. Or as far as I knew.” Alex pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up, drawing hard and blowing out the smoke on a deep exhale, taking his time before he resumed.
“Me and Kel struck up a friendship right from the start. We had a connection that had nothing to do with being in care. He was bi and didn’t hide it, always said it gave him the pick of all the sweets in the shop.” Alex laughed quietly and shook his head as a fond smile lifted his lips; it fell away almost immediately. “I wasn’t like him. Although I knew who and what I was, I was riddled with fear and anxious all the time, but having Kel around made me feel safe. We were so much more than friends, but not in the way you’re thinking.” His brow knotted, as he searched for the words to explain. “It was as if we’d both found something in the other neither of us had known we were looking for.” He smiled suddenly, sweeping away the tension in his face.
Maybe I’d misjudged Kelvin, but I didn’t think so. I couldn’t forget the way he’d turned up with cold smiles and veiled threats I knew it was stupid not to take seriously. No, I hadn’t misjudged Kelvin but if he’d been the friend Alex had needed, then for that I’d always be grateful.
“Shortly after Kel arrived, Travis started getting up to hisold tricks again. But it only happened once. After that, we got out, but not before Kel gave him a beating. Travis was a mess, but Kel had been careful to go only so far, nothing that would put him in hospital for weeks on end. It was controlled and calculating. He carried a Stanley knife,” Alex said quietly. “I hadn’t known that, until he laid into Travis. Kel cut him. Small nicks, nothing too deep, but so many of them there were buckets of blood everywhere. Kel told him that if he said anything, he’d come back and finish the job. I believed him, too, but what was more important so did Travis. I’ll never forget the fear I saw in that man’s eyes.”
Cold, calculated violence. I could believe it all.
“Travis had an old biscuit tin he thought was well hidden, but wasn’t. It was stuffed with cash. We took it all, and were about to get the hell out of there before Kel said he wanted to have another little word with Travis. I don’t know what he said, and I didn’t ask. All I knew was that nobody came looking for us when we walked out of that house. No police with charges of assault. No social workers or council officials. It was like we’d disappeared off the radar.” Alex shrugged. “We were sixteen, so maybe it was too much trouble to start looking, or cost too much.”
“So what did you do? Where did you go?” Two teenagers, out on the streets. If I thought I knew what was coming next, I didn’t know the half of it.
“We lived in squats for a time, but Kel’s fastidious.” Alex laughed, laced with genuine humour. “God, he hated that. Me, I was just pleased to be away from Travis’ clammy hands, but Kel was always complaining about being grubby. Hated living with a bunch of crusties, as he put it. We got jobs, starvation wages but strictly cash in hand, in clubs and bars. It didn’t matter that we were underage, not in the dives we worked in. After a while we ended up at Euphoria. Cleaning,bar work, anything that was needed. Same arrangement as elsewhere, the big difference was that it came with accommodation.”
Alex snorted as he swirled the whisky around in his glass, his eyes growing distant as he looked back to those long ago days. I said nothing, waiting for him to pick up the story again in his own time.
“It was a damp attic room. We also had our own toilet, and a puny shower that worked most of the time. It got us out of the squat with the crusties, but the most important thing was that it got us into the business. Rob, the guy who owned the place, became a kind of mentor,” Alex added, seeing my confusion. “We went from being dogs bodies into management. We started running the place on a day to day basis. Kel, he shone from the beginning. He was smart and had a head for business. Things were going well, we had the place running like clockwork. Then Rob died.”
“Oh!” Alex and Kelvin’s spell of luck had come to an end. “What happened to him?”
Alex paused. “He was a drinker,” he said at last. “It was why we were running the place, because he was pissed most of the time. We found him in the cellar, where the booze was stored, at the bottom of the stairs. His neck broken from the fall. Most likely he was going down to get another bottle of vodka. I thought that was the end of our time at the club, that some relative would crawl out the woodwork, inherit the place and sell it to a developer or something. That was all I could think about at the time because the first place where I felt settled and safe in years was going to be taken away. But it turned out I was wrong.”
“How were you wrong?”
“Rob left Euphoria to me and Kel in his will.”
“He didwhat?”
“There was no relative to crawl out from the woodwork. It was straight down the line, we got fifty percent each. We were still in our teens and there we were, two foster home runaways with a by now thriving business handed to us on a plate.” Alex rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, the story draining him. “The rest is history,” he said quietly. “We worked harder than ever. We learnt. Sometimes we made mistakes, but mostly we didn’t. We thrived. We diversified.”
Diversified. That could mean anything, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask. What Alex had told me had been harrowing, but it’d also been a story of survival against the odds. Had he told me everything about how he and Kelvin had turned a run down dump of a club into a successful business? Probably not. Perhaps corners had been cut, and not always legally, but who was I to judge. Alex had shed some much needed light on his past, but I knew in my gut there were still shadows, some of which I might never get to peer into.
Alex’s watchfulness and cool analysis was back.
“It’s—it’s quite a story. One of triumph over adversity.” It was, of that there was no doubt. But there was more and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever know it all, or if I really wanted to.
“You could say that. Yes, I think you could.” His sudden smile was wide, bright, glittered like diamonds and as devoid of warmth. I shivered, at what might have been omitted from his carefully curated story.
Alex’s hand settled on the back of my neck, warm but heavy. As his thumb set up a rhythmic stroke, I forgot all my questions, all my doubts, and everything faded as he eased me towards him and pulled me into a long, deep, dark kiss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ALEX
Leaning against a railing overlooking the barges on the canal, I dragged on my cigarette. It was the third, maybe the fourth, in the past hour. A vicious, icy wind whipped around me, tugging at my coat.
We closed the clubs on Sunday. Kelvin always said the day was his one moment of calm amidst the chaos. He’d once let slip that he often called into Euphoria on a Sunday. He liked to wander across the empty dance floor, liked to listen to the silence. It was, he’d said, the nearest thing he ever got to going into a church. But not today, because I’d sent him a message to find out where he was. I chucked the butt of my cigarette into the dark, oily looking water, no longer able to put off what I’d made the journey from Hampstead to do.
I punched in the security code and the fancy iron gate to Kelvin’s ostentatious Victorian villa slowly swung open. Crunching across the gravel drive, the front door was already open; he’d have seen me on his security camera.
Closing the door, I turned as Kelvin appeared in the doorway of the living room where he leant against the door jamb. In loose jeans and a looser hoodie, his dark hair messy, he was far from the sharp suited and immaculate man I saw just about every day. He looked younger, and for a moment it took me back to a time which had long since passed. He tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes, blasting back into the past that younger version of himself.
“What’s so important you have to disturb a man’s day of rest?”
