Boy A

by Jonathan Trigell

  ‘Dave wants to see you two,’ the yard manager grunts at them, when they enter the building.

  Chris tucks his shirt in as they walk to the office. Dave Vernon is the owner/MD of DV Deliveries. It’s amazing that anyone who lacks the vision to even make up a proper name for their company can keep it going. He’s a mole-like number-cruncher. Most of the lads slate him non-stop behind his back. Jack kind of likes him. Maybe Jack’s more grateful for his job than the others, respects the trust he’s been shown. Even though his background’s invented, the legend lists plenty of prison time.

  Dave’s office door is open; it usually is. ‘Hi, it’s the heroes of the hour,’ Dave says, ushering them in. He’s a bit too eager to ingratiate himself, slightly slimy. Jack’s noticed it before, but it’s in spades today. There’s another man in the office. He’s sat down, with a coffee from the exclusive pot that permanently percolates in here. Everyone but Dave has to drink instant, or go to Café Costa on their break. Shell says the smell drives them all mad.

  ‘This is Felix,’ Dave says, gesturing to the man in a way that is slightly effeminate, and seeming to realize this, correcting it to a more manly posture. ‘He’s from the Evening News. They’re going to run a short piece on your quick thinking and bravery. And DV Deliveries.’ He turns to look at Felix, as if to check that this last point is correct. ‘Felix is going to take some shots of you.’

  Jack sees that there’s a camera on the desk, by Felix’s elbow. It’s a fierce-looking, futuristic piece. Long-barrelled and deadly. It looks like it could blow holes in people, spaces you could fit your fist in.

  ‘Look,’ Jack says, ‘why don’t you just take Chris? He’s the real hero, he’s the one that thought of the pry bar and phoned the ambulance.’

  ‘Nonsense, Jack,’ says Dave. ‘You both did it. You’re both shining examples of our team. Now where d’you want them?’ he asks Felix. ‘I thought beside one of the vans, maybe.’

  Jack tries to protest. ‘I really would prefer not to. I’m not really one for publicity.’

  ‘But I am, you see, Jack, I am,’ Dave says quite firmly. ‘Now what do you think, Felix?’

  ‘Is it not going to be too wet to get them by the van? I think we’re going to be doing indoor stuff. Why not just a shot against the wall there?’

  ‘It would be nice if we could get the logo in, though.’ Dave shoots Felix a smile, so sickly it would make Jack want to retch, if he didn’t want to retch anyway.

  Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Chris tries: ‘Maybe we could get Steve the mechanic to stand in, if Jack really doesn’t want to do it. Who’d know? Steve’s a good-looking bloke!’

  Jack nods vigorously; there’s a chance here.

  ‘Look,’ Dave turns on them, with a face like breeze-block. ‘We are not getting some bloody grease-monkey to pretend to be Jack, when Jack is standing right bloody here. Now, Felix and I are trying to organize something. Chris, would you go and find out if there’s space to fit one of the vans under cover at the moment. Jack, would you wait outside, please.’

  Felix gives them a sympathetic shrug from behind Dave’s back.

  Jack trudges to the allotted place with the compliance of the condemned. He and Chris are lined up in front of the van. Chris looks at Jack, and winks.

  ‘Hey, Dave,’ he says, ‘maybe we should wear our caps for the shot?’

  Dave’s eyes light up. ‘Good idea, Chris. Have you got them with you?’ Chris and Jack shake their heads. ‘Hold on a minute would you please, Felix. I’ll just go and get you a new one each.’

  He returns from the locked uniform store with two brand-new baseball caps. They still have the cardboard shape-savers inside them. Normally none of the lads wear their caps. Dave, proud of his initials branding, had DV put in large letters on the front. It’s a bit too close to ‘divvy’ to warrant much wearing in public. Jack’s pleased of the cap now though, he pulls it right down on his head, so that his eyes barely see beneath the brim. Chris wears his at a jauntier angle.

  They don’t really speak until they’re on the road again.

  ‘What is it, Jack?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Come on, you really didn’t want your photo taken. That was more than just being camera shy. You didn’t want to be in the newspaper. Do you owe people money? Surely your mates are all down South? No one’s going to see it up here.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. I just don’t want my old crew catching up with me. I don’t want to get dragged into all that again.’

  ‘You’re being paranoid, Jack. It happens. Shit, I thought for a minute I was being followed the other night. But this is a different world. You’ve got new friends. You don’t have to worry.’

  And maybe he is being paranoid. He hardly came across anyone from Manchester inside. Probably that’s why they chose it. What are the chances of someone seeing that shot who could recognize him? And even if they did, putting two and two together to figure who he really is? But he’s tired of all this. It’s making him weary. The pretence. All the lies. Like Shell, on Sunday.

  ‘I just want to get close to you,’ she said. ‘It feels like you didn’t even exist before you came to work here. I mean it’s nice to be with a lad who doesn’t just want to talk about himself, but I have to do all the talking. Tell me something about you, Jack. Tell me a story.’

  So he told her one. He’s getting good at them. But that’s the thing. That’s all she’s ever going to get. Just stories.

  O is for Once Upon a Time.

  She wondered if she would recognize him, if she didn’t know. He had changed a lot, of course, he was nearly eighteen. His face seemed to have changed for the better; maybe suffering does ennoble. There was no mistaking those teeth, though. She could remember the headline ‘Monster’ underneath his picture, suggesting what the editor didn’t quite dare state: ‘He must have done it, look at how ugly he is.’ Would it have been different if the girl, Angela, wasn’t quite so lovely? Would he have been quite the same embodiment of evil; if it wasn’t so Beauty and the Beast?

  She made a note on the paper she had before her, to disguise the fact she hadn’t given her full attention to his last sentence.

  ‘You know of course that I can’t help you while you remain in denial?’ she said. ‘I’ve replaced Dr Bittlefield because he felt he wasn’t getting anywhere with you.’

  ‘I wasn’t there. I can’t tell people any more times. Yes, we took her and we walked with her down to the bridge. And I knew he was going to do stuff, but not that stuff, not kill her. But then I left them, I was further down the Byrne. Do you want me to admit to it, now? After all this? Admit to something I didn’t do?’

  ‘I want you to come to terms with what you did.’

  ‘They get it wrong, you know? Judges and juries, they get it wrong sometimes.’

  She had worked in a prison, when she first qualified, where everyone was wrongly convicted, or so they said. It doesn’t matter: innocence is not considered sufficient grounds for an appeal. This young man was not innocent, she was sure of that. The court case took thirty-three days, the jury was unanimous. Dr Bittlefield believed the boy had repeated the story so many times that it had become true. He had come to believe in this version of events. A story he had clung to like jetsam after a shipwreck, and could not now be persuaded was waterlogged, would drag him down. Which was one of the reasons she’d been asked to take over: they hoped it would be easier for him to tell the truth to someone he had not told the same lie to for so many years. No, he could not be innocent, or this would be one of the gravest miscarriages of justice ever. That didn’t even bear thinking about.

  Not innocent then, but not psychopathic, as her new colleague Dr Webster believed the other boy might be. She allowed herself a little smile as she thought of Dr Webster; he had been utterly charming on the phone, so easy to talk to.

  The initial results of Elizabeth’s evaluation did not produce fresh insight. As with the tests Dr Bittlefield had conducted, th
ere didn’t seem to be anything extraordinary in the young man’s responses. If unusual at all, the results showed a slightly younger level of thinking than one would have expected from a seventeen-year-old. But even this was perhaps not remarkable, for one who had not seen any degree of freedom throughout his formative years. Since adults made all of his choices, he had probably been kept in a more childlike role.

  She had plenty of time to think about it on the drive home. It was a long way from the secure unit to where she lived; a couple of hours by car. But it was only once a week after all. Besides, this was a prestige patient. She had thought there might be a book in it, some scientific articles at least; but Dr Bittlefield had warned her that secrecy was such it was doubtful this would be allowed for many years. Still, she knew it could be alluded to if the need arose. It was definitely not going to impede her career.

  The Range Rover’s tyres chomped into the gravel, as at last she pulled into their driveway. She liked to look out at her lovely garden as she drove up to the house. Actually it was nice peering out of the Range Rover anywhere. You felt so secure, so safe, so aloof; three feet above the other motorists. All right, so she probably didn’t need a four-wheel drive, but she did at least live in the country. She wasn’t one of those urban housewives who just used it for the school run. Thomas wasn’t quite old enough for school yet anyway.

  Saturday was glorious. She lounged in the garden under a sky as blue as any they had enjoyed in Medina the previous month. She could see her husband upstairs in his study, catching up on missed work. Consulting one volume after another of accountancy law, and typing away into his computer.

  She couldn’t help feeling jealous of his success. She was always the clever one, the one destined for greatness. When they had got together at Cambridge, she could tell that people thought he was beneath her. Yet somehow his hard work had eclipsed her brilliance. She took a break to have Thomas, and when she returned to work, she found that his basic salary was more than triple what she could earn. It wasn’t even about the money. It was the way his colleagues and new friends treated her: as though her psychology was a hobby. A means to keep busy, like their own wives did charity work or coached badminton. Sometimes Elizabeth felt that he was complicit, that he too had begun to see her career as secondary to childcare.

  Thomas was playing by the wheelbarrow the gardener had left out. It was tin, and had showed it could hold water after the storm on Thursday. Elizabeth had topped it up with the hose, so that her son could float his boat in it. She should probably get him a paddling pool if it stayed this hot. She watched his head bob about as he collected ants to crew his ship. His hair was blond, but darker underneath where she had the barber shave it, like a basin cut. He looked beautiful. He was the most beautiful child she knew; not just because he was hers. She was sure, even impartially, he simply was the most beautiful. He looked like a page-boy with his hair like that. She could hardly bear the thought that one day he would want it shaved off, or quiffed, or long like a hippy, or whatever else was in style which would look awful.

  She also knew if that was the worst that happened she would be a very happy woman.

  She could remember at the time of the trial, everyone she knew was horrified, imagining what it would be like if their child had been murdered in such a way. In such a brutal, senseless, godless way. No one had stopped to think about what it would be like if their child was the murderer. That was why the boys had to be evil, they had to be alien: other, demons. They could not be something that normal children could have become given the same set of circumstances.

  Thomas had started to shake the boat around in his makeshift sea. He made roaring noises like the thunder from Thursday’s storm. Again, she wished he could stay this way. The larger an animal’s brain, the longer its childhood has to last. Maybe if he was a genius he’d wait a little longer to grow up. He didn’t seem unusually bright, though, whatever she told her friends. Who could say how quickly he’d develop? She noticed that he seemed to be squashing the ants now, crushing any that were washed by his cruel waves on to the edge of the barrow. She went and stood by his side. He didn’t look up at her, continued to torture the marooned insects. He rolled them on his perfect thumbs, so that their bodies crumpled in on themselves, became a ball of abdomen and head and legs.

  After a few minutes she stroked the back of his neck and said to him: ‘You know that hurting the ants isn’t very nice, don’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why are you doing it then?’ She wasn’t cross, just curious.

  ‘You didn’t stop me, Mummy. I thought you’d stop me.’

  On the first meeting with Dr Webster they just discussed the cases, compared notes.

  ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,’ Dr Webster, Michael, had said. And she had laughed, even though his joke was both inappropriate and childish.

  They found the meeting very useful, however, and thought that it was something they should do regularly. Since they were based so far apart they agreed that the Travelodge, where they had first rendezvoused, was the most sensible place to get together. A neutral place to meet, to discuss people who would never meet again.

  After a couple such summits they took to booking rooms at the Travelodge, so that they could continue their talk over dinner. Soon it became clear that two rooms was an unnecessary extravagance.

  Elizabeth did not actually enjoy sex with Michael as much as she did with her husband. Michael rarely made her come. But she enjoyed his desire, she enjoyed his attention and she enjoyed his stories. She didn’t have to pretend that she hadn’t heard every anecdote, as she did with her husband at the numerous dinners they attended.

  She found that she was surprisingly good at stories herself. She stayed near the truth at all times when she discussed Michael with him, leaving out only the details that would matter. She discovered that by distressing the edges of the facts, most of the gaps could be very neatly covered. Not sturdy enough to step upon, but pleasing from a distance.

  Her husband’s initial admiration, that she had been selected to work on such an important matter, seemed to have faded rather quickly. Now he only ever asked about her work in terms of whether or not she had made the breakthrough. As if dealing with a damaged child was as straightforward, as cut and dried, as winning a corporate court case.

  Elizabeth began to dream of being carried around on a sedan-chair, by her husband and Dr Bittlefield. Sometimes with laurels on her head. She did not, as a psychologist, set much stead by dreams. But hers was hardly difficult to decode. Michael said the other boy suffered intense nightmares. To which, in her opinion, he was devoting far too much attention. Elizabeth believed the primacy of dream in the Freudian school to be ascribable to the Viennese middle-class habit of eating large quantities of cheese after dinner. She cut out dairy products altogether. Nonetheless her sleep continued to be disturbed.

  The sessions in the secure unit were not proving fruitful. While he remained in denial about his culpability in the crime, little other development could be made. She was beginning to see why Dr Bittlefield had handed the case to her. There did not seem to be any realistic chance of a career-enhancing study without even an admission of guilt. She reminded him that in a little over a year he would not be able to remain in the secure unit any more. He would be forced, by law, into a young offenders’ institute, a prison, and she told him quite bluntly that he would never be paroled from prison whilst in denial.

  ‘Will any of the staff be able to come and see me when I’m in the young offenders’?’ he had asked her.

  ‘That is not normal procedure,’ she said. ‘I believe it is within my remit to advise that contact could be maintained if a relationship was particularly beneficial to stability, and as you have no family in the country. However, since you do not appear to be making any significant progress, I can only think that no such relationship exists.’

  ‘It does with Terry, I’ve told you. You know it does with Terry.’

 
; ‘I believe that your reliance on Terry, and his unconditional support, may actually be detrimental to your eventual mental health, since it is impeding your ability to confront your guilt.’

  ‘And if I said that I did it? Would you say that he should see me then? If I said what you want?’

  ‘It’s not what I want. It’s for your own well-being.’

  ‘If I said it?’

  Elizabeth smiled; this could be the watershed moment. ‘I would certainly recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that Terry be allowed continued contact if he was contributing to such a substantial leap in progress.’

  The boy let out a sigh, almost a shudder, and his shoulders slouched. He looked up after a minute or two, and she could see the pain in his eyes.

  ‘OK then,’ he said. ‘I did it. I killed her too.’

  Elizabeth turned to a fresh page in her notes. So that she might have this new story uncluttered by what had come before.

  P is for Pictures.

  Past and Present.

  Marble the cat is vibrating with its own purrs on Jack’s lap. He and Kelly are watching The Forsyte Saga on TV. Jack is not keen on these sorts of shows. Hacendado used to say that ‘period drama’ was called that because it was woman dribble. It’s nice to sit here with Kelly, though, stroking a cat with one hand, a beer in the other. He only allows himself one or two beers on week nights, conscious that he can’t allow alcohol to become a crutch. Kelly met Shell yesterday. They seemed to really hit it off. Everything’s well with the world until the news comes on.

  The chimes always strike deep in Jack. They’re too loud, too impersonal, too powerful. It was from the news that he had first learned his appeal to the European court had failed. Somehow the BBC had managed to get the information to the studio before his lawyer could phone the secure unit. Europe means nothing to Jack, a place even more distant and abstract than the picture of parliament behind the presenter. A newscaster who is himself supposedly a part of national heritage, a grey statesman, an honest broker, telling Britain about how ‘sleaze takes a new turn tonight’. Jack hasn’t trusted the news since John Craven.