Chapter Twelve: Goldie

Having waited patiently for almost two hours and starting to lose all hope from sheer frustration, Goldie's head suddenly appears through the open back door of the ambulance to confirm he has sorted everything and we were okay to proceed once more; he has an enormous smug grin on his face as he yammers away, exuding a sense of bravado that only a hero who has saved the universe should have not a smarmy git like him!

He explains that after all the suspicion, it really was genuinely an overturned truck that was blocking the road and the local people and some officers with his help of course, managed to somehow build a makeshift pulley to drag the behemoth out of the way to allow the flow of traffic to start running again until the morning when something a tad more sophisticated could remove the truck all together.

"No surprise there then that your father was being a little too cautious there, eh Neema?" I overhear my sister tease as Neema jokingly huffs and puffs away.

Auntie Poppy thanks Goldie profusely for all his hard work but it all feels seriously over the top to me - it was not as though he had slayed some dragon!

You'd think after all he has done a simple thank you from his big sister would be enough but that was Auntie Poppy's way I guess, far too loving and forgiving...maybe she wasn't as similar to mum as I thought cause mum would have told Goldie to put a sock in it and get the show on the road.

Whilst all the ass-kissing goes on Neema rolls her eyes repeatedly feeling the same sense of despair at Auntie Poppy's behaviour as I, as my sister and I look at each other with a brief but very obvious grimace which luckily Goldie does not notice but of course Tanny does, as I see him from the corner of my eye staring up at me with both curiosity and confusion written all over his face.

As Goldie pulls his head back out and shuts the door behind him, Auntie Poppy takes a deep breath and smiles slightly now knowing we were all sorted to continue forward before looking around at us all pulling our awkward faces.

There is an uncomfortable pause as she thinks about what to say to put us more at ease for having to had rely on the hero that is Goldie to rescue the day, but luckily no explanations are needed as we are interrupted by the rumble of the engine as it is started up by the driver.

A synchronised murmur of relief from all of us works its way around our enclosure as we start to move and finally accept that the wait is over and we are on our way again...plus do not have to air our thoughts about him!

As the ladies begin chatting away or more precisely, Neema and my sister start chatting away clearly gossiping about Goldie whilst Auntie Poppy decides to keep to herself by reciting some prayers and blessings for mum, Tanny leans over to me and whispers in my ear, "Don't think I didn't see that...what's with you and all of ya against Uncle Goldie? Not like you man!"

I look at Tanny and though I want to tell him, I find myself scrunching up my nose, tightening my lips and shaking my head from side to side clearly indicating to him that this was not something I wanted to talk about.

Tanny looks a little surprised that for the first time, I was refusing to share something with him but knowing me as well as he does, he drops the issue and patting me on one shoulder, puts his headphones back in and tries to go back to sleep in his corner of the ambulance...which he seems to manage to achieve in seconds!

I snicker a little at first as I hear Tanny snoring away already but then feel a sense of disappointment that I didn't want to share what was bothering all of us so much about Goldie.

I trust Tanny implicitly but the tales surrounding Goldie were far too disturbing and frankly, somewhat embarrassing to us as a family to share...although perhaps if the truth were known about the kind of man Goldie really is maybe less people would rely on him as much as they did and see him for the complete bastard he is!

Despite his demeanour and looks making him appear dodgy to say the least, it is still quite hard to imagine the things Goldie has done to others in the family; truth be told, he was like one of my best friends when I lived in Bangladesh growing up despite him being my uncle, but guess I was younger and much more naive then to fully appreciate how twisted his mind was.

Amongst all the stupid scams or tricks he's pulled over the years, all of which our father told us about when we became old enough to understand them (which in his mind was both of us being 30 plus!!!), the worst ones were his illicit affair and the robbery; mum was so ashamed of these incidents that even after she knew we knew, we continued pretending everything was fine and never discussed it with her in any way, shape or form.

With the first, the affair, I find myself imagining what it would be like to be from a family of 4 brothers and sisters but then losing mum whilst I am only 4 similar to how old Auntie Poppy was at the time mum's birth mother passed away.

I continue thinking what the siblings must have gone through and how badly they must have coped despite having their father alive and well as in those days, he would have been the type of father who didn't have the first clue of raising a family so was required to remarry quite speedily not out of love but necessity.

How weird it must then have been to have another 4 siblings to arrive, the youngest being a lovely little boy, before tragically losing their new mother who never distinguished her own children from that of her step-children - loving them all equally, and learning how to deal with the loss all over again.

I then imagine being that baby boy needing love and guidance severely lacking from his father. Being taken under the wing of one of my brothers - the only one who has decided not to leave dad's side and the local village where we were all born and work the land we all own - who takes sole responsibility for me despite the other siblings wanting to contribute, bringing me up like his own. A brother who works all hours under the sun tirelessly, to pay for everything I ever desired and needed to get the head start in life he never got.

I imagine then that my brother has an arranged marriage to a girl from a neighbouring village and she moves into the house we are all sharing and she along with my brother looks after me - never once complaining about the burden I am on them financially or other wise.

But then somewhere along the line, be it through some sordid grooming from the wife's side due to lack of affection from the husband who is always working or a case of advances from a highly sexed teenager which can no longer be denied, the wife and I begin to have a sexual relationship.

I feel my body shudder at the kind of betrayal Goldie had committed...it was not even a rumour - it was fact. Worst bit of it all was that as divorce is not considered the done thing in Bangladesh, even after my uncle found out about Goldie fucking his wife, he did nothing.

He didn't divorce her, didn't try to tear Goldie apart - nothing! The argument being they had a little daughter together, a lovely little girl they nicknamed Princess, and that would devastate her life.

Not only would it ruin her psychologically but in the future, the family would find it almost impossible to marry her off to a family if she came from a broken home; for some reason guys can get away with anything in Bangladesh - from sleeping around to having several wives but girls? Apparently they need to be pure as white and unspoilt in every way.

Add to that the sheer humiliation for the family name as a whole and well, uncle's hands were tied I guess. I realise it is a gross generalisation but the attitude people in Bangladesh have to divorce is shocking..."God forbid there be divorcees in the family; it's much better to have people shagging each other's wives behind closed doors than anyone contemplating filing for divorce!" I muse sarcastically.

But the worst bit of the whole situation? Everyone suspects Princess is Goldie's anyway but no one dares say it or do a DNA test to try prove it! No, that's just not done - although sleeping with someone who is meant to be like your mother whilst she is still married to your brother is apparently.

Have to be honest, having seen pictures of my cousin who I love immensely despite the disgust I feel towards Goldie and Princess's mother, it is pretty obvious she is Goldie's daughter and not my uncle's. The 4 siblings borne from my step-grandmother have such distinguishing features that unless there is some unexpected way the gene carrying Goldie's face has managed to jump from that side of the gene pool into my grandfather's side, there is no way the little lady has been fathered by a brother borne of my original grandmother; the family resemblance to the step brother and sisters is undeniable.

Heck, when my auntie was in chronic pain delivering the baby coming into this whirlwind world of incest and betrayal, I was told by my dad that she called out not for my uncle (her husband and supposed father of her child) but Goldie. Normally I would have said this was purely gossip but unfortunately, my dad in his capacity as a doctor, was present during the delivery as mum and him were visiting at the time and my uncle was extremely poorly so he was privy to the incident as it unfolded.

Although dad wanted to tell mum about this the moment he came out of the delivery room, everyone was so excited about the little one's arrival that dad never managed to do so and later, discarded his thoughts as merely conjecture and unfair to discuss with mum spreading further aspersions over what everyone already knew.

However, when all this was coming out and dad was sharing the gory details of the affair with my sister and I and hence why we should not trust Goldie as far as we can throw him, he could not help but tell us of his suspicions surrounding the birth.

The situation is horrendous and despite the family trying to keep all this under wraps, let's be honest - many outsiders know!

Even then, in spite of this and Goldie hardly being a great catch having never finished formal education beyond his O'Levels and flitting from job to job never being able to stick to one due to complete disinterest or being sacked from it for being useless, people have still flocked around our family with proposals of marriage based on the sheer weight of our family's name alone. Incredibly people are more than happy to forgive Goldie's misdemeanours in favour of having their daughter become part of Dada's family!

However, no proposal is ever good enough for Goldie, due to his unhealthy obsession with auntie.

Okay, forgetting the whole creepy suspicion of grooming, let's say they really are in love and the daughter, be it Goldie's or not, would be happy enough to accept Goldie as her father and desert uncle. Despite all the stigma, surely that would be better than the arrangement they have now - everyone playing happy family whilst all this is brewing underneath, right?

From what I understand, the situation they have now is that Goldie tends to live in Dhaka living with Auntie Poppy and her family doing odd bits of work here and there whilst auntie continues her life playing wife and dedicated mother in the village sharing a bed with uncle as a married couple do. Fine so far.

However, when Goldie does come home, whilst he stays and sleeps in a separate room, it is rumoured between certain hours of the night, uncle can be seen in his night clothes sitting near the pond at the back of their house as Goldie makes love to his wife.

"What the fuck???!!!" I think to myself as I can feel every muscle in my body wanting to smack the living daylights out of Goldie.

To add insult to injury, supposedly uncle has now stopped working all together due to ill health but without health insurance or pensions in this country, how does he continue running the household? Well, it is suspected that Goldie pays for everything be it through a sense of responsibility, repayment of a debt or feeling of guilt - but I personally see it as a trade-off: "I'll continue shagging your wife until you die but pay for everything you and they need until then. Don't worry though, I shan't humiliate you by pushing you to divorce your wife or eloping with her..." is what I can only assume the conversation went as when uncle and Goldie perhaps discussed the arrangements.

"Practically pimping off his own wife" I go on to think with utter disdain but then my anger subsides a little as I feel an overwhelming sense of upset for my uncle, "God only knows how true all of this is, but seriously fucked up!...but then again, what would I do I wonder if culturally, physically and financially I had no other choices available?"

As for the robbery? What a fucking palaver. As I think of it, it dawns on me that cliches are cliches because they are true - fact really can be stranger than fiction.

As mentioned, the loser tends to flit between jobs usually for no other reason bar him feeling as though he can being the brother of a high-flyer such as Dada, but like all human beings, Goldie is always on the look out of making big bucks fast.

So one day whilst chatting away to one of his sister's husbands, he finds out the husband has quite a large amount of cash stashed away in the house for the further education and wedding dowry of his two daughters; the idea of dowry itself angers me but my concerns surrounding that can stay hidden until another time I am sure.

Goldie then goes away only to come back some weeks later to say he has an amazing deal that he can offer the husband if he wanted to invest all of his savings and get a threefold return on his investment within the year and the husband, coming from a very humble background quickly agrees despite all of the above regarding the affair which he knows about, as he trusts Goldie implicitly.

"[Goldie] is after all, my wife's younger brother" he must have rationalised as he handed over his briefcase full of cash into Goldie's sweaty paws, never discussing any of this with his wife as he is the master of the manor so to speak and most Bangladeshi households still exist on a parallel dimension where they are stuck in the 1930s!

Goldie swans off on the back of a motorbike with a mate of his and that is the end of that...for the time being.

A few hours later, the husband is informed that Goldie and his mate were ambushed by some thugs who somehow knew they were carrying all this cash in their briefcase and having been beaten up badly, this was stolen from them.

The husband is clearly devastated but at no point suspects this has anything to do with Goldie and forgives him, being thankful that he is alive and well.

The husband is then told by the ever efficient local police investigators that they will try and investigate matters but as this kind of crime was quite common, it would be unlikely they would be able to find who did this and the husband finally breaks down in tears and confesses all to his wife.

Thankfully, her woes are then relayed up the food chain and makes its way to the ears of none other then Dada himself and pulling some pretty major strings, the FBI version of the Bangladeshi police force get involved.

The rest of the story gets a bit hazy from here on in, probably because I understand the techniques used on the suspects to the robbery were not the fluffy type that you would expect in England but rather forms of mild beatings to quite major torture...Slumdog Millionaire people? Yep - the torture scenes in that are a very accurate depiction of what went on I understand.

The police officers who were on the take and the friend who drove the motor bike that day eventually confessed that the mastermind behind the whole scam was GOLDIE!!!!

Absolutely unbelievable.

When the family then tried to track the bastard down to find out the truth directly from him, turned out he had already fled the country and was sitting pretty in Singapore trying to find work as a caterer...so what happens next?

Not extradition from the family, no that would make too much sense.

No, instead, except for my auntie who suffered the scam and thus has never forgiven him even after 4 years now and rightly so, everyone else asks him to come back and that all shall be forgotten and they understand why he did all of this as everyone wants to make a quick buck...and he crawls back out from under his rock.

Claiming to have spent all the money he stole, he arrives back in Bangladesh with his tail between his legs and coincidentally, shiny new gold tooth, hides behind Dada who gets all the charges dropped as it would be too embarrassing for his career for his younger brother to be chucked into prison for these shenanigans, and gets on with his life as if nothing had ever happened.

Even now, he has not paid back a single penny to my auntie and her husband despite knowing that the husband has repeatedly threatened to controversially, divorce my poor auntie if the money is not repaid in the hope that the threat will make Goldie pay up...a plan that would work if the fucker had a conscience. He doesn't even seem to show any remorse as to how his fucking irresponsible and vindictive behaviour will impact on their daughters who are merely 14 and 18 respectively...

"...Yet, the daughters seem to love him to bits although they know everything he has done to their family and everyone seems to count on him whenever a job needs doing as if no one else is capable of doing it. Incredible!"

I then jokingly begin to chant to myself using the famous Ghostbusters' theme tune, "There's something weird in your neighbourhood...who you gonna call? If it ain't Goldie, call that fucker..." as I imagine the idiot walking around with his chest all puffed up, sunglasses on and gold tooth sparkling with his smug grin running from ear to ear and then cringe.

"Such a horrible - horrible person" I think to myself as I clench my fists and feel my blood boiling once more, "...and still because the Bangladeshi attitude is blood is thicker than water, he is always given shelter and sanctuary by the family instead of being fucking turfed out and telling him to burn in hell. Even I try never to be too bloody disrespectful to him as he's my uncle because it is so instilled in me not to be disrespectful to your elders but sometimes...just sometimes, I want to bash his head in with..."

Suddenly the ambulance screeches to a halt and Tanny snorts his way to the land of the living, "Waah? Hoo dere...?"

My sister, Neema and Auntie Poppy laugh at Tanny's reaction to the jerky stop as I ask the driver what the problem was.

"The drivers are all jumping out of the car to check the wheels and adjust air in the tyres for the last bit of the journey," he says but as I look totally lost at his comment he continues with a wry smile, "If you thought the journey had been bad by the time we got to the road block Sir, wait until you experience the rest!" and with that he disappears outside.

"Great! Thanks for that!" I say quietly as I frown and sit back down, "if he knew what I had been thinking for the last few miles I'm sure he would realise that nothing could be worse...nothing..."

I hesitate as I look over at mum lying in front of me and realise how wrong I am, "...or maybe not...".

And with that I lay my hands on mum's coffin and remind myself once again the real reason I was there; there were indeed worse things that could happen and for now, Goldie was not one of them.