by Maggie James
He waves the letter at her. ‘Can’t tell you how bad it was, getting this. Never let myself get close to anyone afterwards, Nat. Didn’t seem any point. Not as if I have much to offer a woman. I can’t be honest about my past, that’s for sure.’
‘Did you think about a future? With me?’ She hardly dares ask.
‘Yes. Wanted to get closer, Nat, I really did, but it seemed impossible. Catch 22, you see. I can’t trust a woman enough to reveal I’m on the Register if I don’t get close to her, and I can’t do that whilst lying about my past. Or without discussing it with Tony Jackson.’
Natalie is silent. Part of her understands how difficult it’s been for him; what he said about his father dying when he was still so young tugs at her emotions. Did his death play some role in shaping the nine-year-old Joshua into a killer two years later? Especially when coupled with a mother who seems the archetypal cold, hard bitch. She’s no armchair psychologist but both those factors have to have exerted some influence. Something she recalls her mother saying about the Morgan murder comes back to her. I blame the parenting, Callie Richards pronounces decisively, and Natalie’s inclined to do the same.
There hasn’t been another woman. He wants to get close to her. Can she overlook what happened to Abby Morgan, though?
Mark’s always seemed the non-aggressive type. Natalie finds it difficult to reconcile the man before her with the stereotype of a brutal child killer. She wants to accept he’s telling the truth about the girl’s death. The problem of her messy history with relationships concerns her, though. Can she trust her instincts around men?
Without warning, a male voice sounds in her head. ‘Frigging fat bitch.’
Natalie thrusts the memory away. No thoughts about him, not here, not now. She forces her mind instead onto Darren, her first boyfriend, who ends up stealing money from her. After him comes Rob, who screws half the female population of Bristol behind her back, echoing her father. After those two, Natalie vows she’ll do better in future when it comes to men. And Mark’s not a thief or a womaniser. He’s been convicted of murder, though, a far bigger and uglier can of worms. One she can’t bring herself to open.
She accepts then it’s not just Abby Morgan Mark’s killed. He’s murdered another child too; the one they’ll never have together, not now. The desperate need for a partner who doesn’t steal, cheat or kill children but one who’s simply normal overwhelms her, crushing her hopes for a future with this man. She shoves Mark’s hand from her arm, squashing down the lingering desire to understand, instead forcing the anger of before back into her mind.
She stands up. ‘I’m leaving.’ The need to inflict hurt on him, the way she’s hurting, burns through her. ‘We’re finished. I never want to see you again.’ Her jacket goes on with a few furious shrugs. ‘I’m not surprised your mother rejected you. Nobody will ever want you. Not after what you did.’
‘Natalie, I repeat, I didn’t hurt Abby Morgan. The whole thing was Adam Campbell’s doing.’
Her fingers yank up the jacket’s zip. She can’t allow herself to listen. Denial’s the safe option, ensuring she won’t get hurt any further. Of course, it also guarantees loneliness, but Natalie doesn’t allow herself to dwell on that. Instead, she wonders how much weight she’ll pile on through the inevitable comfort eating. Darren ended up adding two extra kilos to her body, Rob four, none of which she’s subsequently shifted. She reckons Mark might add as many as ten.
‘I’d rather it had been another woman.’ Natalie yanks open the door, striding into the hallway to walk out of Mark - no, Joshua’s - life.
4
REJECTION
Eight o’clock, later on the same evening. The time Mark should have been arriving at Natalie’s for Chinese and some God-awful rom-com. Instead, he’s pounding around the running track at Bristol’s Eastville Park. A light drizzle is in the air, the temperature consistent with a cool March dusk. One, two, one, two; Mark’s feet thud over the ground, but he’s not paying attention to his hammering heart or the ache in his calves.
Twice now he’s been rejected by a woman for the events of fourteen years ago. Nobody will ever want you again, not after what you did, he recalls Natalie flinging at him as she walks out. Her words sting, but maybe he’s always been unlovable. Perhaps since birth.
Mark Slater, now a nine-year-old Joshua Barker in his head, remembers the moment he realises his mother doesn’t love him. Never has.
A damp Saturday morning, three months after the shock of his father’s fatal car crash. Joshua and his mother have just finished breakfast. Joanna Barker’s mood seems benign, which isn’t the norm, not at all. He decides to risk the question he’s never dared ask before.
‘Why did you and Daddy wait so long before having me?’
The answer comes as a shock even though he tells himself subsequently: you should have realised.
A frown of irritation clouds his mother’s face.
‘We never decided to have you. You were an accident.’
An accident. Like spilt milk, not worth crying over. Or like his father, bloody and mangled behind the wheel of his wrecked car. He’s cried over that all right. His grief’s reserved for when he’s in bed at night, a haven where his mother can’t witness his sorrow for the father who isn’t coming back.
An accident. Unplanned, unwanted. At nine, he’s picked up enough from playground gossip to know what she means. Some failure has occurred; perhaps her little round pills haven’t worked, a condom’s been defective, she’s miscalculated her dates. He doesn’t know which one it is and it doesn’t matter. The result has been the same; sperm has met egg when the two should have been kept firmly apart, their cells destined never to splice and turn into him, Joshua Barker.
Only they do, and he, an accident, is the result.
His mother is speaking again.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out. I’d been so careful…’ Her voice holds disbelief. ‘Your father was pleased, though, and he went on and on about having a son. Didn’t think about me, forced to carry a baby for nine months, getting more like a whale every day. So selfish, only considering what he wanted.’
At least his father never thought of him as an accident, Joshua consoles himself. One of his parents has wanted him, even if it’s not his mother. What quirk has led him to long for the love of a woman who seems incapable of the emotion, rather than the father who, until his death, is always there for him? Does her affection, so out of reach, seem more desirable because getting it represents such a challenge, whereas his father gave his unconditionally?
Andrew Barker, Mark thinks as he pounds along the running track, was what’s now known as an enabler. A good man, a loving father, but essentially weak when it came to standing up to his wife. When still alive, he colludes with Joanna Barker’s whims and moods. ‘Anything for a quiet life,’ he tells Joshua with a wink, although his son notices that the smile accompanying his words is often strained. He understands why his father acts this way, though. Joanna Barker, like Adam Campbell, isn’t someone who tolerates opposition in any form. It’s her way or the highway. With hindsight, Mark sees that his father’s docility is probably the very reason his mother married him. She’s an alpha female and as such, she needs a subservient husband. One who poses no competition.
His mother’s irritation at having produced Joshua is nothing, of course, compared to what she later experiences in being the parent of a child killer. It’s not until he’s been tried, convicted and receives his grandmother’s letter that he has time and space to process her reaction. Why, he asks himself during his detention at Vinney Green, do Adam Campbell’s parents stand by him when his own mother doesn’t? Even now, at the age of twenty-five, her rejection of him seems incomprehensible.
In his head, now aged eleven, he’s back at his childhood home. Joanna Barker responds to a knock on her front door to find police officers with questions that need answers. The murder of Abby Morgan has been broken in the media a couple of days before, t
he coverage intense. Joshua hasn’t been able to watch; since he witnessed her life draining away in that abandoned farm building, he’s been unable to hold food down, repeatedly vomiting up the vile memory. Joanna Barker is annoyed at being forced into the role of nurse and at having to clean up after him, the sickness being worse when Joshua overhears the news on the television downstairs. In his mind, he’s as guilty as Adam Campbell is, by virtue of weakness of character if nothing else. Why the hell didn’t he stop Adam when he had the chance? He should have realised what would happen, find a way to circumvent Abby Morgan’s death somehow, but he failed. Weak, weak, he tells himself, an echo of the way his mother has always described her dead husband. Like father, like son, he later decides whilst in the detention unit. Andrew Barker never stood up to his wife and his feebleness is mirrored in his son’s failure to confront Adam Campbell.
By the time the police arrive, Joshua’s not been sick for a few hours and he’s relieved he’s been caught. Later, he finds out how a witness reported seeing two boys leading a blonde-haired toddler dressed in pink towards the murder scene. The child was seen clutching a soft toy, a green hippopotamus. Vicky Campbell later finds such an item, stained with blood and unfamiliar to her, in her son’s bedroom. Adam, by the age of eleven, already has a record of what’s euphemistically called challenging behaviour, but to believe he’s capable of something so awful is a stretch for his parents. They question him; he screams and lashes out with his fists, and his father takes the bloodied hippo to the police, although Vicky begs him not to. The result is the two officers now standing in Joanna Barker’s living room.
Joshua sees in his mother’s eyes that he’s already been judged guilty.
Still experiencing the after-effects of the sickness, terrified at the seemingly endless questions fired at him by unsympathetic police officers, dread clutching tight at his gut, telling the truth seems impossible. Adam has threatened to kill him if he ever reveals what really happened. He pictures the two of them being sentenced to the same custodial unit, where Adam will have any number of opportunities to carry out his threat. Joshua ends up lying, saying he swapped turns with Adam to use the rake and the knife. He’s remanded in a temporary detention centre in Exeter before sentencing. At the trial, he sees the other boy’s parents, emphasising the absence of his own. The injustice of it slams into him as he becomes aware Mr and Mrs Campbell intend to stick by their son, whereas Joanna Barker has deserted him. She refuses to attend the trial, apart from when compelled to do so by the court, and doesn’t respond to her son’s letters. Joshua’s confused, hurt, bewildered, until the day he receives the letter from his grandmother.
He remembers the day it arrives. Such a moment is a pivotal one in his life, after all. He’s already been at Vinney Green for a couple of months. Once a week he writes to Joanna Barker, not daring to make it more often, but so far all he’s received in return has been silence. His grandmother’s handwriting, instantly recognisable, disappoints Joshua at first, simply because it’s not that of his mother. He opens it, expecting nothing different from Linda Curtis’s usual chatty, grandmotherly letters.
His brain can’t assimilate the words at first and he reads the letter three times before he really starts to get it. The contents burn him, much as they do Natalie fourteen years later, some parts doubly caustic. Very difficult since your detention…she is adamant on this point. One sentence in particular stings: it is her intention to begin a new life, a life without you. Joshua begins to doubt he’s ever had a mother in the true sense; maternity, after all, involves more than a woman opening her legs for the conception and birth.
Shock at the finality the letter brings, and the cruelty of it, slam through him, even though he’s not seen his mother for weeks and on one level he already understands she wants nothing more to do with him. After the shock, bitterness arrives. He pictures Adam’s parents at the trial, attending every day without fail. The other boys at the unit also anger him. Take Danny Carpenter, for example. A serial arsonist who kills his uncle in a blaze of burning petrol at his home. His parents visit him once a week, never missing a Friday, despite the fact their son is responsible for the death of his father’s brother. Or there’s Matt Wainwright, aged thirteen, who stabs his grandmother to death when she refuses to buy him new trainers. No lack of family visits there either. It’s unfair, thinks Joshua, self-pity overwhelming him. Reverting to the maturity level of a five-year-old, he tells himself: I didn’t do nothing wrong.
He’s angry, pissed off he allowed Adam Campbell’s threats to stop him telling how it really happened with Abby Morgan, because they’ve ended up being detained in separate juvenile units, rendering Adam’s intimidation hollow. It’s too late now, of course, to backtrack and tell the truth, so he has no option but to resign himself to detention as a child killer.
The unfairness of his situation, the whole fucking misery of it all, infuriates Joshua so much he destroys his bedroom at Vinney Green. He overturns furniture, throwing everything he can get his hands on to the floor, kicking, smashing, trampling, all the while screaming his rage and frustration, until the door opens and he’s restrained. His fury doesn’t end there; in the coming weeks, he lashes out at other boys in the unit, reserving the brunt of his anger for Danny Carpenter and Matt Wainwright. He’s particularly proud of the cracking punch he lands on the arsonist’s nose, breaking it, and after that he gets a reputation for being a hard nut.
The fights get worse after he tries writing to his mother again. The tone of his letter is pleading; how he’s not guilty, how she has to believe him. How Adam forced him into going along with what happened, how he’s sorry he’s caused her so much trouble. Even as he writes, he can hear her voice, condemning him as weak. She’s already branded him a loser like his father. No wonder she wants nothing more to do with him. He decides to send the letter anyway, folding it neatly in three before sealing it up. Pen poised, he starts to write her name and address on the envelope before remembering. He doesn’t know either any longer.
Your mother has decided to move away from Exeter and change her name…
Joshua considers his options. Someone on the staff must have her new details, surely. He’ll give them the letter and ask them to post it to her. Then his grandmother’s words flood over him, how his mother is starting a new life without him, brought about by the embarrassment he’s caused her, and he abandons the idea of sending the letter. It contains nothing she’ll want to hear. He tears it into shreds, then slams his fist into the wall, repeatedly, until again the door opens and he’s prevented from doing himself further harm.
Joshua subsequently develops two personalities. The aggressive one, which makes the arsonist and the granny stabber think twice about having anything to do with him, contrasting with his withdrawn side. When he’s not taking out his anger on the other boys, Joshua turns in on himself, closing down his emotions, shuttering them away. If he doesn’t feel, he can’t get hurt, he reasons, leading years later to Mark Slater’s inability to let his guard down with Natalie Richards. He’s a complicated, emotional mess, although that’s hardly unusual for the residents at Vinney Green. Sessions are booked for him with the unit’s child psychiatrist; tortured blocks of time when he refuses to co-operate in any way. Impossible to do so. This woman has a university degree. A home, a life outside the unit. He doubts she’s ever done anything besides follow society’s rules; how can she get even a tiny grasp on what it’s like to be Joshua Barker? She’s been briefed, of course, about him not getting maternal visits, about the death of his father, and she tries, she really does, to be empathetic and delve under his skin, failing abjectly. Joshua reads, upside down from across the table, phrases in her notes about abandonment, unresolved grief, and he recognises she’s doing her best but he still has nothing to say to her.
The neatness obsession creeps up on him gradually, an antidote to the aggression fuelling the fights. Joshua has to channel his churned-up emotions somehow and so the fixation with regularity, symmet
ry and order kicks in. It works, too. Tidiness imposes a sense of consistency on his world and the sessions with the psychiatrist get shorter and fewer until they stop. By the time he’s transferred to adult prison, aged eighteen, Joshua is a model detainee, the fist fights long gone, replaced by the rigidity of his obsessions.
Oh, yes. Obsessions in the plural, not singular. Whilst at Vinney Green, another compulsion besides tidiness tugs at his brain, refusing to let go. Abruzzo. A surname, one he remembers because it’s Italian and therefore unusual in his limited experience. ‘Abruzzo,’ he often says aloud, letting his tongue rasp against the cheese-grater quality of the -zo. He first encounters the name during a lazy afternoon spent messing around in Adam Campbell’s bedroom. It’s written in a diary, along with the owner’s address. Copthorne Close; its alliterative sound pleases him and like Abruzzo, it’s filed away in the eleven-year-old Joshua’s brain. Later, when he’s in bed after another day at the detention centre, unable to sleep, the name and address worry away at him. He can’t get the thought, dark and hideous as it is, out of his mind; that Adam Campbell has hurt another child besides Abby Morgan.
Back in the present moment, his seven laps of the running track completed, Mark thrusts Joshua Barker out of his head. He jogs back through the drizzle to his flat. Once home, he throws his damp, sweaty clothes into the washing machine, changing into fresh ones. A faint hint of Natalie’s perfume lingers in the air and he breathes in the musky scent, the pain of her rejection stabbing him again. Really, though, he’s not surprised she’s dumped him. It’s as she said; Abby Morgan’s death has branded him unlovable. Some crimes simply aren’t forgivable.
