Beast

by Matt Wesolowski

  —They come and they go. I’ve seen the same surly lads a hundred times over – they’ve had a bad start, you see: chaotic home life; a lack of boundaries. More often than not, there was exposure to trauma at an early age – emotional abuse, violence, lack of role models, nearly always no father figure in their life. In every single child – because that’s what we’re talking about here, children – inside every child I’ve seen pass through the system, is the same lack of self-esteem. That doesn’t change when they get older, either, they’re still fighting against everything. And what has school taught them? That they’re useless. They’ve left with nowt, and there’s nothing for them anymore but the streets.

  It’s funny isn’t it? You don’t think of hard lads and lasses from rough estates like that do you? They’re thought of as egotistic, arrogant. But it’s all a front. All behaviour is communication. Why are stray dogs vicious? Because they’re scared, so they’ll bite you before you bite them.

  It’s the same with the people I work with. There are very few exceptions.

  Solomon Meer was one of those exceptions.

  What you heard at the top of the episode is a piece of creative writing penned by Solomon Meer while he was attending Leighburn Educational Unit, and being taught by Jo.

  It is raining hard in Ergarth, where Jo has kindly offered to meet me. We conduct our interview in Jo’s car, parked up outside the old Leighburn unit. It’s now an unremarkable community facility with a nursery and office space, meeting rooms and various support services.

  Around the unit a few crumbling terraced streets lead off into the distance; pebble-dashed walls, grimy windows with thick net curtains. A few young mothers share a chat on the corners, babies asleep in prams. Traffic-calming measures in faded paint fill the roads around here, most of the bollards broken off and the signs tagged or cracked. I hate to paint such a bleak picture, but there are signs of a community just clinging on, constantly trying to heave itself back from the brink. Just along the road is Ergarth Food Bank, alongside a new community cafe. Jo tells me it’s a project tackling food waste; everything made in the kitchen is ‘surplus food from supermarkets that would have been otherwise thrown away. ‘Pay what you feel’ is written on a large chalkboard outside, and a huge man with a face full of tattoos carries his twin daughters on his shoulders through the doorway. All three are shrieking with laughter.

  —I’m glad we’re here.

  —Outside the old unit? Does it bring back memories?

  —It does but you also can’t see Tankerville Tower from here. We’re facing the wrong way. I hate that place, I always did. Gave me the creeps. It’s even worse now, after what happened. Wherever you are in Ergarth, you can see it; just this nasty black shape that you can’t look away from – like a crack on the screen of your phone. It’s also so bloody cold on that side of town. It gets right into your bones. Takes ages to get warm again. No, we’re much better here.

  —I suppose there’s added poignancy to the tower now, right?

  —It’s just a sad place really, like a dead tooth in someone’s mouth. That tower sums Ergarth up, really. Half forgotten, crumbling. No money to maintain it, no money to get rid of it. I see it in my dreams sometimes, still. Just that tower; falling snow. And … things flying in and out. I can never get to sleep after one of those dreams. It’s weird.

  Jo shivers slightly and turns the heat up slightly in her car. She presses both hands against the vent, her fingers red with cold.

  —You taught English to Solomon Meer a few years ago, that’s right isn’t it? I’m struggling to find anyone who had any first-hand interactions with him.

  —I knew from our first session together that there was something deeply troubled about Sol – and believe me, I know about trouble, I know about damage. I’ve worked alongside damage my entire career.

  —Can you tell me about the Solomon Meer you knew?

  —Sol was the first of the three to end up here; the other two, I already knew. When his name appeared on my mentee list I had that bit of anticipation you always get with a new client: what are they going to be like? Are they going to tell you to fuck off? Are they going to be that exception – the one that you won’t ever be able to reach? There’s been a few of those in my career, but I honestly never thought that about Sol – or the other two, if I’m honest. Not until I found out what they did to Elizabeth Barton – the details of it … the … her head. I honestly never thought any of those three capable of that. I wonder if that’s why Ergarth’s been on my mind recently, why that tower keeps popping up in dreams.

  —So you met Solomon Meer when he first came to Leighburn, you were his mentor?

  —Yes. The system was quite good here – management really got it. There’s a really delicate dynamic in classes like these; you can’t just chuck a load of angry young people together and hope it works out. In alternative provision, your classes are no more than six, but in reality you’ll only be ever teaching around two or three at once. Most classes are relatively calm. They know that if they mess on here, they’re out, and then it’s prison. They can be surly. They want to come in, get their head down and get out again. The introduction of the wrong type of person can fuck up that dynamic. So here we were careful. Every mentor had a few mentees. Outside lesson time you’d chat to them, give advice about careers, be an ear to listen if they wanted you to.

  I’d actually read Sol’s behaviour log from when he was at school, and I wasn’t expecting a scared young man to be sitting there. You know what his first question was to me? ‘Has anyone ever been really badly beaten up here, miss?’ Miss? He was twenty-four! My first instinct was to hug him…

  —What had you expected him to be like?

  —I read about the incident with him squaring up to the headmaster when he was at school, and I won’t lie, I was a little nervous. Is ‘nervous’ the right word? No. Apprehensive is better. I don’t know what I expected really: in Ergarth, you didn’t get a great deal of variety. Maybe a thug – a Martin Flynn?

  The reasons for Solomon Meer being referred to Leighburn are not particularly noteworthy. Meer was excluded from Ergarth High when he was in year eleven. He stopped education completely, and began working in Ergarth Books full time. However, when Solomon began getting in persistent trouble with the Ergarth police for petty offences – drugs, vandalism, drunk and disorderly – he was sent to Leighburn to try and get some qualifications and make something of his life.

  —What was it about Solomon Meer that was so different from the others?

  —With the new ones, they’ll often say hello, shake your hand, no bother. Then there’s ones where it’s hoods up, arms folded, defensive. Then there are the ones who won’t look at you, who won’t even acknowledge you – that’s quite rare and you know that’s where you’re going to get trouble. Sol was none of those. He was sat at the desk, staring up at me with these big, wide eyes. I could tell he was on the verge of tears. That look was desperation – a desperation to please.

  —What was his work like?

  —One of the first pieces of work I do with the new intake is about heroes, just to have a look at their English skills, a free-writing piece about someone they admire. The usual is sports stars, actors or musicians. Very rarely it’s members of their family. Most of the people who come to Leighburn had a terrible time at school, and lots of them had lost hope. There’s a lot of problems with drugs and drink here. Most were from broken homes, they’d grown up amid chaos, often with no role model, no one to look up to. Now they were adults with their own chaos; cos that’s all they were used to. Chaos.

  Sol’s piece – I don’t have it anymore, in fact I submitted it as part of some evidence to try and get him some help – it was strange.

  —Who did he write about?

  —It was a what not a who. Sol wrote about a demon.

  We’re off to an interesting start. According to all reports and accounts about the young man, Solomon Meer was obsessed with vampires and the occult. Honest
ly, I was not expecting something so … obvious.

  —It had a funny name: Pazuzu. The demon from The Exorcist, the one that possesses that little girl. Sol knew a lot about this demon, called him the ‘God of the Winds’ – that phrase stuck with me, I don’t know why.

  The famous Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu was the son of Hanbi, the demon king of the underworld, a representation of the south-west wind, personified as a human with the head of a lion, talon-like claws and a scorpion’s tail. Pazuzu was thought to be the bringer of famine, raging storms and locusts.

  —Sol’s piece was very well informed. He wrote about how this demon was good as well as bad; how he was destructive but also protected people from other demons. It was an odd piece, rather long and rambling with no real point. I don’t recall exactly what it was that Sol liked so much about the demon. I mean, at the time, I thought he was just trying to be edgy. Like a teenager.

  I have been compiling and reviewing what I know to be facts about Solomon Meer, free of speculation or hyperbole. It’s not a lot. He was from Nottingham in the East Midlands. There was little to report from his previous school in terms of poor behaviour, but when his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Ergarth.

  Jo speaks with a distinct fondness when talking about Solomon Meer, and I decide to challenge her on this right away. She bristles.

  —I can see why everyone now thinks he’s the personification of evil. A devil-worshipper who killed a young woman. This demon stuff probably doesn’t help. I can only say what I saw in front of me – and what I saw was not evil at all. The demon knowledge – well, anyone can know about that sort of thing by listening to a podcast; it doesn’t make them evil. It doesn’t make them a killer. What I saw in Sol was a very disturbed young man who needed help.

  Solomon Meer worried Jo from day one, she says. He was quiet and withdrawn, unwilling or unable to mix with any of the other young people in the unit.

  —That whole devil-worshipper thing, he’d constructed as armour; it protected him from the world. Underneath that façade was a sad, scared young man with a lot of issues.

  Solomon Meer is a figure shrouded in myth. A rather overexuberant series in the states named Teenrage: When Kids Go Psycho portrayed Meer using a six-foot-tall actor with raven-black hair down to his shoulders, wearing full goth regalia – leather trousers and white make-up, sat snarling and carving pentagrams on his desk. But the photographs of Meer in the media show a pretty normal-looking young man in his early twenties – average height, skinny with mousy curls that hung over his eyes. In court he wore a suit, his head had been shaved roughly, giving him a rather odd appearance. Despite this, Solomon Meer’s obsession with the occult has followed him wherever he goes. Even Rob Karl in episode one accuses Meer of being a devil-worshipper. But burning flowers in Ergarth Dene seems to be the only actual evidence anyone has that could remotely back up this claim.

  I’m starting to understand, though, that Meer used this perception of him to perhaps ‘curate’ his own life – but unlike Elizabeth, he did it in a negative way. Perhaps he did this to protect himself in a small town where he didn’t fit in. Jo tells me she thinks it came from somewhere deeper.

  —You describe Solomon Meer as ‘disturbed’.

  —Yes. He had a lot of issues: depression; crippling anxiety. He told me so many times that his brain was ‘rushing’ – that was the word he used: ‘rushing’. He was always so apologetic about it, always so sorry. Some days he would come in late, looking like he hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. He would say he was having a bad day, couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t think straight.

  —Was he getting help? Counselling? Medication?

  —That’s honestly hilarious. Mental-health provision for young people in somewhere like Ergarth is more or less nonexistent. Sol was on a two-year waiting list for therapy. It’s ridiculous. No one goes for help until they’re at the end of their tether, in crisis; and then they have to wait two years? And he was scared of being medicated. He’d read about the potential side effects of antidepressants – he was frightened he would commit suicide. My heart went out to him, it really did. I could see him getting worse, and there was nothing I could do about it. In a town like Ergarth, a place that’s been stripped to its bare bones by government cuts, then forgotten about, there was no hope for him. None at all.

  —So how did he fit in at the unit? As I understand, it’s not a place that specialises in mental health or special educational needs.

  —Right. We weren’t qualified to deal with people who had a diagnosis past mild learning difficulties. Our speciality was social and behavioural issues. We simply didn’t have the facilities or the staff to deal with someone like Sol.

  —So how did it work for Solomon at Leighburn?

  —I think, when Sol first came here, he just wanted to do his time and get it over with. He didn’t want to stick out, and I didn’t blame him. There was no uniform there, obviously, but Sol always wore very plain clothes, just basic, no logo hoodies and jeans, not the sportswear that most of the lads and lasses wore. Sol just wore anonymous stuff.

  —Why was that, do you think?

  —Because he was terrified of the others. He was a petty criminal: graffiti, broken bottles, drinking, stealing chocolate bars from the newsagents. He thought he’d be eaten alive in Leighburn, he thought it was going to be like school.

  —It’s going to be hard for people listening to understand this. Especially after he did what he did.

  —Yeah, OK. I see what you’re saying. But even to this day, when I think about Sol, I don’t think of him as a cold-blooded killer. I’m not trying to deny or excuse what he did. It’s just … It’s that cliché isn’t it? It’s always the quiet ones.

  —I want to talk about George and Martin briefly, but right now, let’s stick with Solomon Meer. It seems like people knew a lot more about the other two than him.

  —It sounds a bit unkind to say it, but I will. You see, most lads who come to Leighburn, despite their social issues — there’s not a lot going on between the ears. I’m not being funny but it’s true. Ninety-nine percent of them come from a background that lacks order. They come from damage since they were little. Kids need order as they grow up. They need routine. Just stay with me for a moment; back when these lads were in school, lads like George and Martin, they don’t often understand the work and didn’t want to be called ‘thick’, so it’s much easier to kick off, mess about, get sent out the room. Then it escalates and they get kicked out of school. So they’ve never had to face the work they didn’t understand. Then they often spend their lives repeating the same cycle – they’re now grown adults with no real skills, getting in bother rather than getting a job. It all comes from a place of fear.

  Sol wasn’t one of those lads though. There’s plenty of smart kids came to Leighburn for other reasons: school didn’t suit them, other problems at home. A lot of them have grown up a bit, realised they want more from life, they want to turn things around. Sol was one of them. Like I said, rare for Ergarth; he had a brain in his head, he just didn’t like having to use it for such trifles as school. He was likeable, funny, he read a lot, had a vast imagination, loved writing stories. But there was always this darkness behind it all, his mental health was like a black cloud that sometimes overshadowed his entire life, sometimes just peeping over the horizon.

  —When Solomon was at school, he tried to assault his headmaster, Mr Threlfall. I’ve spoken to an Ergarth volunteer fire-fighter who says Solomon Meer caused a lot of petty trouble in town. It might not have been mugging old ladies, but he was no angel.

  —Well, yes, I suppose that’s true. For the record, I don’t think Mr Threlfall’s story was exactly accurate, though.

  —Can you elaborate?

  —I have a few friends who worked at Ergarth High at the time. I’m not going to stitch anyone up here, but the word in the staffrooms in this area was that Mr Threlfall was throwing his weight around, trying to be the big man, and Sol just s
napped. In my eyes Sol was more the victim in that situation.

  —So once Solomon had got over his initial fear and settled down at Leighburn, did you get to know him better? Did he open up?

  —He did rather quickly, actually. We used a lot of techniques that come from alternative provision. So, for example, we used to have ‘mentor time’ on Friday afternoons where we’d have an hour one to one, to discuss the week, play board games, chat. It sounds a bit babyish for lads and lasses who are in their twenties, but I’m telling you, if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t do it. A lot of the Leighburn lads have never had an adult to share their feelings with, they’ve not really had someone who’ll just spend that time. It’s good for their social skills. They all pretend they hate it, but they never miss a mentor session. You’d be surprised how many of them who’re in a bad situation want to open up. I had a lot of board games in my cupboard here, and sometimes we would sit and play, just chatting about nothing really. Those were the moments when you’d get them disclosing to you. It was hard sometimes, it really was. They’d tell you about what they get up to – I often had to tell them to keep the drug talk to a minimum. But I’ve had a few occasions where we’ve been in the middle of a game of Boggle and a young lass has offhandedly mentioned some horrific sexual assault when she was a teenager. I’ve had lads quite matter-of-factly tell me about the things they’ve seen at home when they were little – stabbings, drug deals, domestic violence, the lot.