So I'm writing this partly because I promised I would, and partly because as much as I knew we'd never get a scene like this, I really felt we should have.
"I'll call the coppers myself if I so much as see that man's smug face again" Peter fumed, breaking the silence that had lasted almost the entire car ride back from the lock up.
Carla threw her bag down onto the Underworld office desk, flopping into the chair, causing it to spin two thirds round with the force of her weight. "Peter will you just stop with the police?!" Head in her hands, she spoke through almost gritted teeth. "He's my brother, it was me he stole from and me who'll decide what happens, alright?"
He paused, leaning the final roll of silk against a cupboard on the opposite side of the room. Seeing how shattered his girlfriend was, he softened slightly. "Ok, sorry".
As he walked over in a bid to console her, he was taken aback as he leaned away from his touch. She was clearly in no mood to be affectionate. "He's got to you, hasn't he? All that stuff he was spouting about you walking out on him?"
"Yeah, well, he were right weren't he" It was a statement, not a question. She looked up, scanning the room. "And your sister was, yesterday".
"What did Tracey say?" Getting the message, he pulled Michelle's chair over to the side of the desk, close enough to show is attentiveness but distant enough to not be overbearing. He leaned closer, hands rested on his knees, not hers.
"Oh, she was just going on about how this place fell into my lap. How I'd only got here by luck, blah blah. She had a point, though. I mean, how am I any different to what Rob's doing now?"
Peter sighed in disbelief. "Um, because you didn't rip off your own family, didn't just expect everyone to just rally round and give you everything out of some misguided sense of entitlement?!"
"Maybe not, but if I hadn't married the right man, hadn't 'sucked up' to the right people as he put it, I'd be no better off than he is now".
"Do you really believe that?"
Carla merely gave him a look, before replying in a tone full of self-depreciating laughter. "I inherited half of this place from Paul, the other from Frank. We'd have gone under if Michelle hadn't salvaged things when she got back off the cruise...-"
"After you were raped, you mean?" He'd meant his words to sound compassionate, to illustrate how she'd hardly had an easy run of it, but the second they left his mouth he knew that wasn't how it had sounded. Silence momentarily fell over the office, and Peter counted 6 seemingly deafeningly loud ticks of the clock before she finally spoke.
Carla stood up, pacing the room aimlessly, her fingers gliding across folders neatly arranged on shelves. "Yeah but that's the point isn't it? When things got bad, I had people there to support me, to... To save me. Who's Rob ever had?"
"That's not your fault"
"Isn't it? Peter, he's my brother, I'm supposed to look out for him"
"Like he has you, you mean? Works both ways, Carla."
She sighed, sitting back down. "Peter look, you weren't there, it's not that simple"
He could see they were headed for territory he'd rather not visit. Every throwaway mention of his lover's childhood, her unstable, alcoholic mother and whatever else had come with it made him feel uncomfortable, as selfish as he knew that no doubt made him. He wished he could probe her, encourage her to open up about demons he knew still haunted her even now, but he couldn't shake the part of him that was glad when she didn't. It was easier, safer. At least this way he wasn't forced to imagine Simon, twenty years in the future telling an all too familiar story; didn't have to lie awake at night wondering just how unhealthy their relationship really was, and how much of her mother Carla saw in him. Because of course, it all made sense then, why she was drawn to the darkness the rest of the world ran from, why she'd stuck by him, supported him. Maybe none of this was really about him at all, but some Freudian, unconscious way of acting out the past. Maybe in helping him, she could somehow console the part of herself that wishes she could have saved her mother. Or maybe she merely admired him, because when she'd told him repeatedly that he wasn't the awful father he believed himself to be, she'd known first hand just how much worse things could be.
Either way, it was no basis for a relationship and he secretly feared that one day she'd see that for herself. So instead of asking the questions he knew he needed to ask, he'd let things go. And as much as that other part of him pricked up whenever her family were mentioned, he tried to sedate it with the tiny amounts she did give away willingly. It was far easier to focus on his hatred and desire for revenge on Rob than to think any more deeply about it. But back there, at the lock up, and again now, that was becoming increasingly difficult.
It's not my fault you were that smelly girl with one pair of shoes...
Rob's words echoed through his mind, and he hoped his internal shudder at the thought of her life before didn't show on his face. His own selfishness aside, it broke his heart to think what she must have gone through, and the part of him that wasn't full of self-preservation wished with everything he had that he could somehow make that better. He couldn't undo the past, but he could make sure it was never repeated, that she never felt that alone or was that neglected again. Of course, she was a grown woman now, more than capable of looking after herself, and yet he still somehow wanted to cradle her, to buy her a thousand pairs of shoes just to show that someone could.
Carla's words broke his thought. "I won the golden ticket when I met Paul, and you know what, Rob's spot on. Did I ever look back, ever give a second thought to what I was leaving behind? No, I was far too busy getting as far away from that place as possible".
"No one would blame you for that, love".
"Rob does though, and so did she, my mam."
"I'm sure that's not true"
"No, no it is. Even that last time I saw her, y'know, when I actually bothered to drop by for half an hour between conferences a few tube stops away, she still blamed me."
"That was up to her, you did your best".
Carla scoffed, spinning a pen on the table between two fingers. "Oh yeah, so much so that I didn't even know she was dead until the day before her funeral".
The room fell silent again, as Peter tried in vain to think of a single thing that could rid her of so many years of guilt.
"So, yeah, I do owe him, Peter. He's already done eight years because of me and I won't sit by and watch him do any more, no matter what he's done".
Their eyes met for the first time for probably the whole day, both sets filled with tears that neither would allow to fall. Peter stood slowly, pulling his girlfriend's jacket from the back of her chair and handing it to her. "Come on," He told her, "I'm starving. Let's go eat".