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Smug cunt. He tells you with that little placid smile, always with that same neutered-cat expression, the same one you used to wake up to every morning, the one he used to shoot at you when he corrected your grammar. As if you ever gave a fuck what a double negative was.
He's on the other side of the glass and you want so badly to reach out to him, to grab him. If only to wrench his earlobe back like you would when you were kids to wake him up the nasty way. You want to ask: What the fuck do I care about a book deal, Bambi? Look at where I am. Where we are. You even think of hitting him with a bored did ye, aye? That was the only thing that’d get to him more than a sharp pinch when you were young. When you’d ignore him. Act like he was beneath your notice.
Sometimes it's hard not to blame him for this round in the clink, too. Two fifths of all prisoners reoffend, after all. Would’ve been nice not to get banged up in the first place. But you're not Niall. You don't make a habit of putting all your problems on other people. So, you grit your teeth and say: That's brilliant, son. About fucking time. You whistle when he admits how much he got for the advance, all shy. Thank him for coming, ask for updates on your mother's condition, ask after Lori. You stumble back to your cell and fall into your cot with a huff. You wasted another visit being mad. Now there was no more Niall ‘til next month.
You know you should be happy for your brother. Up until now he couldn't help but fuck up, could he? You’re both similar in that regard. Unlike him, though, you usually manage to build things up a little before they completely collapse.
You think of the kid's centre, the happy little spastics waiting for you to come in every morning. Their hands all soft and squidgy in your palm, their faces blank as you told the poor fucks you probably wouldn’t be back to work with them for a while. You were soft and squidgy back then too, not that Niall knew it. Fuck, not that you knew it either. Two years in Polmont had you thinking you knew the whole wide world and everything in it. You didn’t know shit.
You think of the big, beautiful house you and Mona bought and furnished together. How she'd wait for you to come back from Aberdeen in the late hours of the morning, how she’d be laid out on that huge, plush couch with dinner in the microwave. You remember all the afternoons you and her spent drinking and necking in the garden, the evening you spent with her knelt in the grass setting up a huge football goal from Argos, the kind you'd have killed for as a kid. She'd cupped your cheek and said: You've done good, Ruben.
You clench your jaw. The house has been repossessed. The goal's probably in a scrapyard by now.
You think, for the first time in a long while, about the University of West Glasgow. About Niall beaming like an idiot when you walked through the doors of that grim student block. He was like a fucking Cabbage Patch Kid back then: 60% big rosy cheeks, 40% eyebrow. To say nothing of that dire bloody fringe. And he wonders why he was bullied. The absolute muppet.
Even when things are going good for Niall, he doesn’t smile like that anymore. Not like he used to. He’s always knackered these days. You'd think he was seventy sometimes, not thirty-nine, the way he acts. You grin, envisioning him spending a day on the oil rig.
The thing with Niall is, he's been sat in his own muck for years, refusing to stand up and brush himself down. It used to drive you mad, sometimes, imagining him sulking in that hovel of a bedsit. A bedsit you fucking paid for after Lori told you her scrounger of a son wouldn't deign to live with her. You almost broke no contact when she told you that, almost texted him ever heard of beggars can't be choosers you snivelling cunt? How Niall could have had such a charmed life compared to you and still act like a fucking layabout was a mystery.
Then he’d stumbled on that sweet deal living in Ava's house. Beautiful bird, complete meal ticket, let him toss himself off by his laptop all day over his books and all he had to do was hoover, do the dishes, maybe shove his oversized cock in her. And she’d given him a beautiful boy. Somehow, he managed to fuck that up too.
It really had been dire for Niall. So, it is good news. It's good he's back on his feet professionally, isn’t subsisting off hand-outs and two pence royalties.
You smile again, picturing the little wankstain holding a big cartoonish cheque reading ££££BOOK DEAL££££. Niall had said some newspapers got in touch with him for interviews. You imagine the kind of shite he'll say to them.
It was rough on the estate. We didn't have a lot, you know? I had to wear my brother's massive hand-me-downs. (Laughs) My brother, he taught me how to box when we were teenagers, to protect myself when he wasn't around. That's what it was like where we grew up, if you can imagine.
You picture it in serif font, tucked in one of the back pages of the kind of boring broadsheets Maura never bought. You used to take the piss by telling Niall your mums only ever bought tabloids ‘cause they loved the Page 3 girls. Niall would go bright red, call you fucking manky, but he wouldn't be able to stop the giggles bubbling out. He always giggled. Like a fucking girl.
Maybe it's a waste of phone credits, but you'll give him a ring tonight, make up for being narky during his visit. You'll make sure Niall brings you up in the interview. You'll say: Now you better tell those journos all about your convict brother. Only interesting thing about you, eh?
Can't have him getting too smug.
Smug. Layabout. Scrounger. Was that really fair? You frown, rapping your knuckles against the steel bedframe. Niall had been sick, last time you were put away. And you were never sick, not like that, no matter what the headshrinker at Barlinnie tried to say. Mad bitch would have had the lot of you on pills if they'd let her, whole prison on a cocktail of sedatives and cock-wilting depression meds. But you'd never hallucinated or nothing. Can't even imagine what that would do, to lose control of your mind like that.
You're proud. You're proud of your brother. He's done well. He's finally up out of the muck.
It was ridiculous, given you were the one getting shoved into a three by two box, but you were right worried for Niall when you got your sentence. Without Ava, you thought he might go round the bend again. He never told you how he fucked things up with her, but Benji must've been a part of it, you're sure. Ava never liked you, and then Niall wound up implicated in your GBH court case while Ava was having an old-lady pregnancy. It was a bad look, you have to admit. Still, it had to be more than that, you reckon. It had to. Seemed like it was going down the drain even before you were arrested.
You stare at the damp veins of your cell's ceiling, grout and water damage wrapping around each other like vines. Close as you get to nature these days, other than the anorexic trees out the back of the courtyard.
You think of Niall's thin legs pinned beneath your own, squirming against you, trapped against the stairs of his patio. His leg hair was blonde, almost see-through, but much thicker than you remembered from when you'd wrestle as kids. Ava had peered down at the both of you from the doorway, unable to comprehend what she was seeing, lips parted in almost-disgust. Her expression reminded you of your mother's, that one time. The last time it ever happened.
Enough.
You think of Niall's beautiful boy. Your nephew.
He's never brought him in for a visit. Says Ava absolutely won't allow it, no arguments. You tell Niall the kids gonna have to learn he's from scum one day, so he may as well start early. Niall doesn't laugh at that, doesn’t even crack a smile. Christ alive. The boy's got Ava's lovely dark hair and Niall's nervous disposition — as in, he looks shit fucking scared even for a baby. It makes you laugh every time Niall shows you a photo of him. Niall doesn't seem to see the kid a lot, which makes sense given the messy break-up. Makes sense for Niall in general. He's always been a self-absorbed prick. Dilkennie had been a painted backdrop for his miserable childhood, you and Lori and Maura and that English boy and the entire population of fucking Glasgow characters in the great elaborate tragedy of his life. What was a baby son other than another member of the ensemble?
Lori told you two years back that she had once had to take Niall to the hospital for a meth overdose. When he was...25? 26? Lori couldn't even properly recall, like it was an appendicitis scare, not your brother fucking OD'ing. You'd called her some choice words, asked how on Earth she had never mentioned this to you.
It was hard, she said, dry as ever. What with your mother leaving me and you threatening to kill Niall and all. I wasn’t sure you’d be sending flowers, Ruben.
You try to imagine what scenario Cabbage-Patch-Kid Niall could possibly be puffing meth in and come up short. So instead, you imagine finding him in A&E and knocking his baby teeth down his throat. For being such a wastrel and a junkie, and worse still, for being a fucking clipe. You imagine the hurt of it, the gush of blood, the numerous intensive dental surgeries. After all of that Niall is forced to sort his life out, to get up off his arse, to stop the drugs. He doesn't get as sick as he did because you've already tracked him down and done your worst before he could drive himself properly mad, made him choke and splutter on his own blood in the emergency room like he'd imagined a million times over. And he comes out better for it. Brilliant, even. All that shit purged a decade early.
In fact, he sends you a beautiful, handwritten thank you letter for the fractured jaw, same as he used to send his aunties after Christmas. His face heals twice as rosy, twice as dimpled as before, and he goes back to Oxford to finish his degree, and he actually invites you to his graduation this time because he's done being an arrogant, ungrateful little gobshite.
You shift, attempting to find a comfortable position on your tiny grave slab of a bed. You wonder if he's still taking that shit.
No, no wonder Ava didn't let Niall see the kid much. Niall doesn't even have it in him to take care of himself, let alone a child. Not like you. You might've been a good dad, under the right circumstances.
You want circumstances to be different. To be right. Mona visited a few weeks ago with Baird. It had been the best day you ever spent in this hellhole. Fuck it, it was the best day of your life, watching the way Baird's tiny hands fit perfectly around Mona's thumb, your forefinger. You want to fix things. With Mona, sure, but mostly with Baird. He barely understands the world yet. He doesn’t have to know how poorly things went for his father, how you didn’t see his first steps. He never has to know that.
You get why Niall didn't laugh. At the scum thing. You don't want Baird to ever think he's like you, or even like Niall. Certainly not like Lori or Maura. The rest goes without saying.
It's early days, so you haven't mentioned anything about Mona's visit to Niall, in case you manage to fuck it all up. Still, you want to tell him about it so badly — about the best day of your life. Niall has his fancy little book, you have a wife and son. You have your pride. You’re going to make it work behind bars when Niall couldn’t make it work in a townhouse in Kelvinside. Useless scrote.
That’s the worst of it, though, your lower impulses. You want to share the good too. You shared a lot of your best days with Niall. Seems unfortunate to cut him out of this one. Mostly, you want to tell him what you realised while you were holding Baird. You know Niall would laugh, cynical prick, probably say you’re hallucinating. Remind you you're not actually related, you were more like impoverished roommates with two lesbian landlords. It doesn’t matter. ‘Cause it really was the strangest thing. You took one look at Baird, so much bigger than the last time you saw him, and you couldn’t shake the thought he looked just like his Uncle Niall. The scrunched-up nose, the chubby cheeks. Big brown eyes, like Bambi. It just made you love him more.