The Unravelling: Children can be very very cruel (A gripping domestic noir thriller)

by Thorne Moore

  We used to play every day. Sometimes at her house or mine. Mostly hers, because her mother didn’t mind. Or we’d disappear from adult eyes into the private kingdoms that only we could discern. Those demolished prefabs were a godsend for children like us. We could roam freely, hand in hand, where adults wouldn’t even notice us, let alone bother to prise us apart. Me and Janice Dexter.

  She’ d been murdered.

  I could remember the fact, now, but not the images that should accompany the fact. That must have been when I’d started blocking things out. What could be worse than having your best friend murdered? Now, at last, I could see her as clearly as I’d started to see Serena Whinn. Janice – Janice smiling, gaps in her teeth, flaking skin, thin fair hair straggly and knotted, always a scab of dried snot under her nose. Janice in that thin, limp, yellow gingham dress that had been handed down through four older sisters and was splitting at the seams because it was too small for her. Janice, tongue between her teeth, threading a daisy chain through my hair. Janice looking wide-eyed in delighted wonder when I brought the cardboard mouse house to our den. Janice, one shoe scuffing the other and shoulders hunched as she stood in the school corridor, in disgrace about something, eternally sad ‒ but then smiling as soon as she saw me.

  Janice looking up, face wet with tears, mouth open, blubbing, scared—

  The image hit me with a force that was almost physical, winding me, lifting me out of my body.

  Janice with blood on her face.

  I huddled, trying to hide from the image, but it wouldn’t go away.

  What had I seen? I didn’t know. I didn’t know!

  But there had been a murder. I had watched, from a police car, the gathering mobs in the street, the huddles of worried mothers – Mrs Dexter struggling to get through, bawling her eyes out, a whale in tears, and no one came near her, no one offered comfort or help.

  ’Well, what can you expect?’ people whispered.

  Her boys, Kenneth and his older brothers, one of them already a man with half a beard, gathered like an army ready to charge, swearing foul-mouthed vengeance.

  And somewhere in it all was my utter misery because Janice was dead. Murdered.

  There was a car. I remember. There was a car.

  I’d tried to picture Serena getting into it, and I couldn’t. This was why. It hadn’t been Serena, it had been Janice.

  ‘Tell them, Karen.’ Serena, holding my hand, pleading with me to speak. ‘Tell them what you saw.’

  What did I see? I felt a compulsion, that cattle prod, stinging me, urging me to picture Janice getting into a car. I couldn’t. I knew it had happened, but still my mind kept blanking it out. I could only see myself in a car. A big police car.

  Why was I in a police car?

  I fought to make sense of it all. Was this the source of my guilt? I’d watched my friend getting into a car, and I hadn’t stopped her. Even though we’d been told repeatedly, warned with that ominous voice adults used when they wanted to terrify us to death, that we should never, ever, get into cars with strangers.

  Because if we did…

  We didn’t know what would happen if we got into cars with strangers. It was a mystery so dark and terrible that parents wouldn’t spell it out. It was like Black Jack Coke.

  Another name I’d forgotten, till Barbara mentioned him. Black Jack Coke. He was evil and misshapen and black with coal dust, and he lurked in the slime and mud under bridges, so you had to run across them or his fingers would creep up over the edge or through the planks and grab your ankles. Boys would laugh and taunt us with shouts of ‘Black Jack Coke will get you,’ and we would huddle together, in case he was round the corner.

  Everyone knew about Black Jack and everyone knew he wasn’t real. Not really. Maybe one of the coalmen who delivered to our houses was called Jack and that had started it, but Black Jack Coke had grown into the monster who had to be out there somewhere. In another age, we’d have invented a troll, or a dragon. Our age invented Black Jack. None of us knew what he would do to you if he caught you, but rumour had it that he’d steal your knickers. That would probably be what strangers in cars did too.

  Then we found out what strangers in cars did. They killed people. They killed Janice Dexter. Molested, Barbara said. Obviously a sexual motive. There it was, then. My best friend, ten years old, had been raped and murdered. Oh God. I wanted to be sick again, but there was nothing left to bring up.

  What had I seen? I pressed my forehead hard against the unyielding glass of the train window, trying to force memories to coalesce.

  No good. I couldn’t see anything except Janice’s upturned face, snotty, howling, open mouth red. Blood red. Blood.

  What blood? How? I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t cope.

  I just wanted to block everything out.

  Unravel me now, please.

  ‘Karen, oh Karen, what are we going to do with you?’ Charlie had picked me up from the station. ‘Oh dear, look at you. I was going to offer to take you to lunch first, get something inside you, but you’re obviously in no state for that.’

  ‘No.’ It was kind of her, coming to meet me off the London train. That was where I’d finished up, the day before. I’d got on a train, any train, in Carlisle and disappeared into a black hole. I don’t remember the train arriving in London at all. I suppose I was in a state, embarrassing people, causing a palaver. Wouldn’t be the first time. Over the years, I’d made quite an art of it.

  I spent the night somewhere institutional. I think it might have been a police cell. It’s difficult to say. Doubtless they, whoever they were, found enough clues in my bag to figure out who I was, where I’d come from and who to contact. In the morning, dosed up with sedatives, they’d put me on the train back north, and Charlie was waiting for me.

  ‘So what happened? I thought you were doing so well, Karen. What’s sent you off the rails this time?’

  ‘I remembered my friend. From school.’ The sedatives were still at work and I was in a dreamlike state, hearing my answer as if it came from someone else’s mouth.

  ‘This Sally, Sylvia ‒ no, Selina person again?’

  ‘Serena. No. Not Serena. She’s important. She’s terribly important, I know that. But it was my other friend. She was killed. Janice Dexter.’

  Charlie did an emergency stop. A van, up her exhaust pipe, hooted, and manoeuvred round, deliberately close enough to joggle the wing mirror. She wound down the window. ‘Sod off!’

  A finger was raised, in the van.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Charlie drove on again, sedately, eyes looking diligently at every road sign and traffic light, which meant that her thoughts were elsewhere. ‘So. You’ve remembered Janice Dexter.’

  ‘Have I remembered her before?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘But you know her name.’

  ‘Yes. She’s in your notes.’

  ‘Oh.’ I watched shops flashing by. Beginning to take things in. Dogs. An old woman with a walking frame. I wished I was an old woman with a walking frame. No one would notice me then. I could fall down and die and no one would notice. Old women didn’t count. I wasn’t quite old enough, that was my trouble. ‘What do they say, my notes?’

  Charlie licked her lips. ‘That you were, you know, distressed. Traumatised by her death. You were having trouble talking about her. Or rather, to be honest, you refused to talk about her. It was like you couldn’t hear her name if someone said it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Miles says you – well, he can explain it. You’ll talk to him this time, about it, won’t you? He’s waiting to see you.’

  ‘I suppose.’ It wasn’t as if I’d ever had a choice. ‘Will you tell me what happened to her?’

  Charlie was very busy at a junction. By the time we were round and in the right lane, she’d decided that it was all right to reply. ‘She was murdered, I know that much. She was found in a drain in a wood, I believe.’

  ‘Was she raped?’

  �
�Maybe. Yes, something like that. Look, don’t discuss this now. I really don’t know enough about the case. Miles will talk to you.’

  ‘He won’t, though. Miles doesn’t talk. He gets me to talk, and that’s no good. I can only talk about the bits that are already there, in my head. I want to know about the missing bits. I want to know what I did. Or what I didn’t do. She was murdered, and I saw something and I should have told people, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Well.’ Charlie slowed, as a bus pulled out in front of us. She took a deep breath. ‘The little girl was abducted. Apparently, you saw her get into a car with – well, presumably with her murderer. You told someone but I suppose it was just shock setting in. When the police questioned you, you wouldn’t speak to them. Wouldn’t say a word. Switched off. I think there’s a term for it.’

  ‘There’s always a term for everything about me. Millions of terms. Like amnesia. Post-traumatic stress. Hyper-arousal. Bipolar. Dissociative identity disorder. Blah blah blah. They’re all pointless. It’s just doctors picking labels at random to stick on people, so they sound as if they know what they’re talking about. But they don’t really. I like nice proper terms, like “away with the fairies,” or “stark raving mad” or “out of my tree”. Much better.’

  Charlie glanced sidelong at me, with a smile. ‘You’re sounding more awake.’

  ‘Yes. I am. I am poised on that pivot between being drugged to the eyeballs and being a gibbering idiot, so please, while I’m still functioning, tell me the rest. I wouldn’t talk to the police…’

  ‘You wouldn’t talk to anyone, not after you’d first mentioned it. But once they’d found poor little Janice and what had been done to her, they knew the story must be true. She’d been abducted and you must have witnessed it and they were desperate for you to describe the car or the man or anything. And you wou— couldn’t. That’s all. I think some people got a bit upset about it.’

  *

  ‘What did you see?’ An angry face in mine, shouting, spittle spraying my face. There’s a door behind him. I want to run through it but I can’t. I have to sit in this chair while he bends over me, shouting and spitting.

  ‘Tell us, girl! Enough of this dumb insolence! Tell us what you saw!’

  *

  ‘Yes. They were upset. I wet myself.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised. You were only a child.’

  ‘Sorry. I think I’ve done it again.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Charlie, bravely, handing me tissues. ‘Let’s get you in to see Miles.’

  ‘So Janice was murdered and she was your best friend. How did that make you feel, Karen?’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Why were you guilty?’

  ‘I should have said something.’

  ‘Did you feel responsible for her death?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And do you still feel responsible now?’

  Did I still feel…? The trouble with talking it through with Miles was that he was totally missing the point. He was missing it in a way that should have been flattering. Yes, we’d gone through the story over and over again, piecing together my fragments of memory until they made sense, and I could figure out what had happened.

  I’d walked home from school with Janice, I’d seen her get into a car with a stranger, and no one had ever seen her alive again. Three days later she was found in a drainage ditch. I’d told my story to a friend, but after that, I’d clammed up and the police couldn’t get a word of confirmation or denial out of me. I’d locked myself up in a private torture chamber, from which I’d never emerged, even when our family moved, to start afresh, away from it all. I’d fallen and perhaps it was a suicide bid, born of the guilt I carried. But I really wasn’t to blame, and if I could just talk it out, I would see that and be on the road to recovery.

  It was all about me. Miles didn’t give a toss about what had happened to Janice. ‘Why don’t you draw Janice for me?’ he kept suggesting, but why should I? He wasn’t interested in what Janice looked like, how she sounded, what she must have felt. She wasn’t his patient. I was his only concern. I was to vomit up the truth in order to feel better about it all. Janice Dexter was merely a thing in the story. She was of no importance to anyone.

  He wanted me to understand that I was not to blame. I wasn’t responsible for Janice’s death. My silence had been unavoidable and understandable, the reaction of a traumatised child. I couldn’t have saved her, or brought her back to life, so I must learn to cast away the guilt.

  Yes, Miles, I wasn’t guilty of her death. But what about the guilt of betrayal?

  I’d been friends with Janice ever since we’d started school at five. Two little forlorn waifs, terrified in a roaring crowd of strangers. If we ever fought, it was only in the way kittens fought, all forgotten the next day.

  But my friendship with Janice didn’t stop me gazing with awe and longing on the divine Serena and her select coterie. I watched and admired from afar, never dreaming of joining them. That was far above my unworthy ambition – until that last year. Until Teresa Scott left Marsh Green Junior, because her family was moving to a different town and then, out of the blue, they were all over me. Barbara, Ruth, Denise and Angela. As if they’d had a committee meeting and, after reviewing all the candidates, had selected me. I don’t think any of them had even spoken to me before, but now they chatted, they walked with me, they called me to join their games, to sit with them in the playing field, knotting elastic bands for skipping, or folding paper games that would reveal immortal truths – like favourite colours.

  Serena didn’t change towards me. She had always spoken, sweetly and gently, when chance had brought us together. She’d often smiled at me, she’d invited me to join her team when I was left, unwanted, on the side. But now her seraphim, who had studiously ignored my existence, suddenly took me up as one of theirs and I became a golden girl.

  I was almost paralysed by the honour. I wasn’t overwhelmed by Ruth’s obedient declarations of friendship, or by Barbara and the others, but the thought of being allowed to trot in Serena’s golden wake every day made my heart swell and my heels lighten.

  My mother was delighted when Ruth came home with me, instead of Janice. She never called Ruth ‘That Girl’. We had tea, with proper china. She was even more delighted when I, with Ruth and the others, was invited to the house of Serena Whinn. It could have been my coming-out ball. I was being presented at court.

  And there was Janice, on the sidelines, watching. Not angry, not resentful. Just a bit wistful, as if she knew she didn’t have a hope. I didn’t give her up. I tried to involve her, bring her into our games, but without much success. Serena smiled on her, but the others froze her out. Still, we walked home together. Ruth was a bit annoyed, one day, because I hadn’t chosen to walk with her, which was silly, since she lived on the opposite side of the estate. She cried about it, and Serena put her arms around her to comfort her. I felt like a monster.

  But still I walked with Janice, down Aspen Drive, among the weedy, whistling remains of the derelict prefabs. We walked together on the last day of Janice’s life. Somewhere, along that road, where no one lived any more, and only stray cats scuttled in and out of the shadows, a car pulled up, and I watched Janice speak to the driver and get in. I didn’t stop her. I didn’t shout a warning, even though I knew it was something we should never do. Black Jack Coke was in that car, and he took Janice away and killed her. She went missing – and then she was found, dead, battered and drowned, stuffed into a culvert among the leeches and the rats, her knickers ripped off.

  And I said nothing. Except to Serena. I was as sure as I could be that it was Serena I must have told, and she had explained it all to the police. Yes, of course she would, because Serena’s father was the policeman in charge of the case. Inspector Whinn. That was why my sister could remember the name Whinn. It was his angry, impatient, desperate face I could see, spluttering at me, commanding me to identify the killer.

  But I wouldn’t.
>
  I expect Miles was right. I was simply traumatised from the moment Janice got into the car, my brain cells already conspiring to deny it. Once I’d offloaded the terrible secret on to Serena, I couldn’t bear having it in my head any more, so I’d thrown it out. Completely.

  Which was why, even now, going over it again and again with Dr Pearce, I could only state it as a known fact, not as a genuine memory. I could no longer see the car, or its occupant.

  ‘That’s all right, Karen. You’re doing fine. Now tell me again, about Janice.’

  I told everything I knew about her. Not really to him, just to any ghosts on the wind that might be willing to take note. I told them about the scab on her knee that never healed. About her giggle and the way she could go cross-eyed to make me laugh. About the dead mole I’d taken into school so proudly, and Miss had said, ‘Very nice, Karen, but maybe we should bury it,’ and how I’d been mortified and Janice had crept out after class and dug it up again for me. About the bedroom she shared with four siblings and how we had to pick our way through bedding to get her other jumper – her best one, the one with fewer holes. About her youngest brother, Clive, who wore callipers ‒ I think he had rickets. About her doll, her one toy, stolen for her by brother Kenneth and when she cried because it had an eye missing, he filled the hole with chewing gum. About our finding three caterpillars, on the playing field at school, and deducing, as proto-scientists, that they were mummy, daddy and baby caterpillars, because one was much smaller than the others.