by John Niven
His scream.
This had all gone far enough, too far, much, much too far. But there was further to go, distance yet to run, as Tommy jumped on his head now, laughing, stumbling, falling over. Then Banny was leaping off the low wall above Docherty. Banny was caught against the sun – his black silhouette framed, arms extended, feet coming down, like at the pool (‘No Dive-Bombing’), like an awful bird of prey, falling, falling, his feet the talons, coming straight down at Docherty’s skull, Docherty sobbing, trying to crawl, the glittering rod quivering in time with his sobs. Banny’s face, lit with terrible glee. The impact . . .
Banny getting up and walking away, straightening his Harrington, brushing chalky dust off, flicking his hair out of his face.
Back into real time and the silence, broken by a gull, crying as it streaked low over the river, white on grey, moving fast in the corner of my eye. Tommy was the first to speak.
‘Docherty? Get up, ya cunt.’
They’d told us something, in Physics, about the velocity of falling objects, something to do with mass times gravity or something, about unstoppable forces and immovable objects, but the only person here who would have been listening, who could have told you what the equation was, wasn’t listening any more. He wouldn’t be listening to anything ever again.
A single rivulet from his ear – black and thick as treacle. His mouth and eyes – both open, the mouth caught as though it was forming the end of the word ‘no’, the eyes just staring up, staring dumbstruck at the bland, vacant sky.
It was Banny who took charge.
Nobody saw anything.
It was our word against any cunt’s.
He told us to get stones and boulders and put them in Docherty’s pockets.
We rolled him to the edge of the weir and pushed him into the water. I tried not to look at him. He floated away, face down, just below the surface, the green parka ballooning up out of the water slightly.
The rest of the weekend was fear and keeping quiet and staying out of the way. I remember feeling sick all that weekend, avoiding my parents, spending most of it in my room, my mum having to call me out for meals. The nauseating fear as we ate, as always, on our laps with the telly on, me pushing the mince and tatties and beans around my plate, unable to look as my dad mashed his into a pink/grey pulp. He changed channels for Game for a Laugh after the football results and we watched a couple of minutes of the news, me wondering if this would be it. But no – just a news item about the Pope’s visit, about proposed redundancies at a steelworks near Motherwell. The weather. The crack and hiss as my dad opened another can of lager. My mum asking if I was feeling OK? ‘Bit sick.’ I told her I’d drunk too much ginger.
First thing Monday it was on the news, on the telly, about the missing boy, Craig Docherty aged thirteen from Ardgirvan, Ayrshire. Last seen fishing Saturday morning on the River Irvine near the railway bridge. Docherty’s mum and dad, appealing for anyone with information. It was the talk of the school. Rumours about paedos and stuff.
It was in the papers on Tuesday, his face on the cover of the Daily Record, his school photo: Docherty smiling in white shirt, school tie and blazer.
The next day the old dog-walker guy came forward with a description of ‘three youths’ seen at the weir that Saturday morning. They were ‘loud and abusive’.
They found the body on Thursday morning. The current had carried it nearly a mile, to within sight of the estuary where the river emptied into the Irish Sea. It had drifted into a bank and become wedged beneath the roots of a tree. A golfer at Bankside, looking for his ball down behind the sixth green had spotted what he thought was just ‘a green coat’ floating in the water. Given what police described as the ‘horrific’ nature of his injuries it was now a murder hunt. Police appealed for the three boys seen near the weir to come forward. That night, we later found out, Tommy asked his big sister, ‘See if ye didnae mean to kill somebody but they died could ye still go to the jail?’ She told her mum and dad. Tommy didn’t come into school on Friday morning.
They came for me and Banny during second period. Chemistry. I remember we were all gathered round a Bunsen burner, wearing the daft glasses, the knock at the door, Mr Staples looking up from whatever he was demonstrating as Mr McMahon, the headmaster entered, looking shocked. The black, looming figures of the two policemen behind him and everything seeming to go into slow motion as they came towards us. Banny acting indignant, saying ‘Whit?’ and ‘No me’. and Mr McMahon taking me gently by the elbow and leading me towards the police. The stunned silence in the class.
I can’t really remember the hours and days after that very clearly, but I know it didn’t take long to break us down. They interviewed Banny and me separately and we were contradicting each other within minutes, the whole thing coming apart, falling down around us. The cell. How hard and cold the tiled bench was. The toilet in the corner. The disbelief on my parents’ faces. Detectives and psychologists from Glasgow. Edinburgh even. Being asked about my home life, about sex, about fighting. About the incident in Miss Gilchrist’s English class weeks ago. (They’d interviewed everyone in the class.) The woman who just sat in the corner and watched me and wrote things down. Glimpsing Tommy, crying, through the open door of another interview room. The policemen mainly polite to us, except one older, harder man, with a thick black moustache, who I later learned had seen the body, whispering, hissing, to me as he took me back to the cell after more questioning. ‘Yese are cruel, vicious wee bastards. Ah hope they throw away the fucking key.’
By the following week I was ‘Boy C’.
27
THE TRIAL IN Glasgow, where I last saw her, during the winter of 1982.
It took months for the case to come to court, for profiles to be prepared by psychologists and social workers, for the Procurator Fiscal’s office to prepare the prosecution. We were all held in different young offenders institutes: Banny near Edinburgh, Tommy further north, outside Aberdeen, and me closest to home, in Glasgow.
And all the while the Scottish press bayed for our blood. ‘Hang them.’ ‘Pure evil.’ The papers dwelt at length on Craig Docherty’s stable, loving home. His exceptional academic promise. Our lives were described as ‘chaotic’ and ‘broken’. My parents came to visit two or three times that summer. My mother would sit crying and saying ‘Why? Why?’ My father – silent, eyeing me coldly until, the last time he came, he stood up after five minutes and said, ‘You’re no son of mine.’ They had to be rehoused twice. The windows kept getting put in, things painted on the walls. (‘MURDERER’. ‘BASTERDS’.) People spat at them in the street, until, finally, my mum wrote that letter. They didn’t come to the trial and I never heard from them again.
I came off best in the reports. I was a ‘timid, easily led boy’, who had ‘the capacity for remorse’ and who showed ‘some academic promise’ and ‘potential for rehabilitation’.
Tommy had a ‘limited capacity’ to understand the consequences of his actions and there was ‘very little to suggest’ this would ever be improved upon. His IQ was determined at 72, ‘borderline feeble minded’.
They went to town on Banny. ‘A vicious, malevolent personality’ with ‘an enormous capacity for cruelty’. They found evidence of sexual abuse. He had great difficulty expressing any ‘empathy or remorse’ over what had happened. Banny tried longer than any of us to deny killing Craig. He blamed me. Tommy, who my lawyer said was ‘intimidated’ by Banny, blamed me too. When Banny finally confessed to ‘some part’ in the murder it was in what the prosecutor characterised as ‘a blatant attempt to mitigate sentencing’. In court Tommy and I looked at our feet. Banny stared straight ahead, sullen and defiant. The judge characterised his attitude as ‘irritation. As though it were inconvenient that a minor misdeed should keep troubling him.’
I remembered her from the trial. Blonde, full lips. She seemed very old to me then of course, although she couldn’t have been more than thirty-four or thirty-five. She watched everything intently, taking
notes on an A4 pad, looking from us to the judge, to whichever lawyer was talking. She didn’t cry, but her hand would sometimes cover her face when certain details were read out. (‘Rectal tearing, dozens of gashes, massive cranial trauma, decomposition of the body after five days in the water.’)
We were over twelve, the age of criminal responsibility in Scotland at that time, so we were effectively tried as adults. Banny was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, defined as being a minimum of fifteen years. Tommy and I were found guilty of second-degree murder and given seven years each, prompting an outcry in the press about soft sentencing. At the Home Secretary’s insistence we were mandated to serve the full terms of our sentences with no possibility of parole, meaning we would remain in young offenders institutions until we were eighteen before being transferred to adult prisons to serve the remainder of our time. Then we were to be released into probationary care with new identities.
We were all moved around a lot in our first few years, for our own safety. I stayed in three different institutions across central Scotland in the first two years. Every time I was transferred there would be screaming mobs outside the van, Mr Cardew, holding my hand sometimes, a blanket over my head, the flashbulbs of the press going off.
Tommy never made it. He was stabbed and killed in a borstal fight when he was seventeen.
Banny’s sentence was extended by three years due to repeated incidents of violence. He was finally released on parole in 2000, when he was thirty-two. He almost immediately reoffended, raping a fourteen-year-old girl. He is still in prison today.
I was luckier: Mr Cardew, Of Mice and Men, The Long and the Short and the Tall (the way the dying boy said ‘mother’, always strangely affecting to me). Ted Hughes. ‘The Jaguar’. (‘Over the cage floor, the horizons come.’ Mr Cardew explaining its resonance to my situation.) Then Shakespeare and me crying and shaking in his arms, smelling the nicotine on his jacket. We had to stop. Orwell and Larkin. I learned to play chess, Mr Cardew gradually becoming Paul over hours at the board while I became Donald Miller. By the time I was eighteen the thirteen-year-old William Anderson already felt remote and half remembered, like a distant relative, a second cousin who shared a vague trace element in the blood, an echo in the bone structure, but who I didn’t really know, whose history I did not share and was not responsible for. (Perhaps true to a degree for all teenagers.) I was given a backstory: my parents died when I was very young and I was brought up by an elderly uncle who died when I was eighteen, the uncle finally fusing in my mind with Mr Cardew.
I took what we had done, what I had done, sealed it up in a box, and dropped into the depths of my being.
I was released in 1989 and matriculated at Lampeter University in Wales that October as Donald Angus Miller. A mature student at one of the smallest, most remote universities in the UK.
Biology helped me. A twenty-year-old is almost unrecognisable from his thirteen-year-old self, the age at which all available photographs of me were last taken. As an undergraduate I sported a thick, unfashionable growth of beard. The government paid me a living allowance and kept watch at a distance. The gentrification of the soul that had begun in prison with books was intensified at university with life. I met English people for the first time, people we would have called ‘posh’ or ‘up themselves’, and I marvelled at their ease in the world, at the way they laughed as they casually held up a hand to bring a waiter to the table. I didn’t drink wine, didn’t see a bottle of wine, until I was twenty years old, at an arts faculty ‘cheese and wine’ at Lampeter. Some kind of thick, rusty Bulgarian red, served in plastic cups. The token plates of Jarlsberg and Brie curling untouched on the side, under the strip lighting of the lecture theatre.
There were some upper-middle-class children at Lampeter, the sons and daughters of wealthy London or Home Counties families whom even the best public schools had failed to springboard into Oxbridge, Bristol or St Andrews. I went to my first dinner party later the same year, hosted by two girls (Hilary and Ally?) in their flat off-campus, the dining table set up in the hallway, candles flickering and classical music playing, the jokey, ironic attempt at ‘adult’ sophistication. I remember one of them sighing and saying ‘Voilà! The ubiquitous ratatouille . . .’ as she placed the heavy orange casserole pot on the table. I had never had ratatouille before. Digging among the tomato and peppers I fished something out and tried to eat it. Moments later, my cheeks burning as I picked strands of string and fibre from my teeth, Ally, or Hilly, explained what a bouquet garni was.
Later that night, on the chintzy sofa, I told Hilly – or Ally – that they were the first rich people I’d ever known. She laughed and took great pains to explain the difference between ‘rich’ and ‘wealthy’, telling me that her parents were doctors and that they were ‘comfortable’ but they had to earn a living. Being truly ‘rich’ meant having ‘capital’, not having to work. Where I came from it was difficult to imagine anyone further up the social scale than a doctor.
There were trips to the cinema to see strange new films with subtitles, strange new vegetables in the supermarket (I peeled my first clove of garlic aged twenty) and strange new concepts in the lecture theatre: Providence, the Augustins, Structuralism, Ironic Distance.
The Unreliable Narrator.
Earnest discussions in the refectory, arguments in the pub or union bar, as, for three years, the university went quietly about its sophistry, its business of transformation. One of these girls – a Hilly, an Ally, a Becky – once took my hand in the corner of a party and held my gaze with her clean green eyes – eyes that had seen nothing bad or ugly, that had seen only pleasant things and expected to see a good deal more of them – and told me that I was ‘different’ from the others. I wasn’t ‘full of shit’. I was ‘interested’ in other people. I ‘listened’. I didn’t just ‘blah on about myself’ all the time.
Later, in bed, she also told me that my past seemed to be a ‘closed book’. I shrugged and smiled sadly and murmured the set backstory: the absentee father, the alcoholic mother, the abandonment as a toddler, the kindness of my elderly uncle. (No, my backstory hadn’t required too much tweaking at all.) And she did something for me I hadn’t been able to do myself. There in the warm single bed with the Welsh rain brushing at the window behind us, she wept.
My accent softened as, in and out of the lecture hall, my tongue found its way around strange new words, words that had had no place in my childhood: lunch, fresco, supper, Giotto. Croissant.
I was once William Anderson.
I graduated in 1992 with a BA in English Literature and Language. After a minor identity scare the following year (tabloid revelation, the wrong guy) I moved to Canada. It was far enough away with an English-speaking population and a large Scottish ex-pat population. I wouldn’t attract much attention. I studied for my Masters at the University of Toronto. I moved to Regina for the postgraduate Journalism course. I met Sammy. Walt was born.
I am Donald Miller.
28
I STOPPED TALKING. I don’t know how long it had taken to get it all out. Walt was looking at me. I could feel it, but I couldn’t look at him. She was still perched on the edge of the wooden table, her arms folded across her chest. It was quiet for a moment.
‘Thank you,’ Gill Docherty said. ‘You know, I really couldn’t believe it was you at first. After all this time?’ She was moving now, walking around the table, the knife in her hand. ‘And how you’d landed on your feet! Marrying the rich girl? Your huge house and your fun little househusband life. Having said that, I always thought you’d be the one I might get. Derek Bannerman? Sadly he’ll never see the outside of a prison cell again. Your friend Tommy? Well, you know what happened to him and good riddance to bad rubbish. But you, with your “model rehabilitation” . . .
‘And then, having to be so patient this last year? Getting your trust. Waiting for the perfect time. After I had my first winter here last year I knew, I knew the weather might give us the privac
y we’d need. You see, I thought about just abducting Walt here. But your father-in-law’s money . . . it could have made things difficult. Besides, I wanted you to watch.’
‘Please. Just kill me. Let Walt go.’
‘Kill you?’ She laughed here. She actually laughed. ‘I’m not going to kill you.’ She crossed behind Walt’s chair and started pushing him in towards the table. Walt started screaming behind his gag, struggling against the ropes.
‘Oh please, oh God . . .’
She banged his chair up against the table and untied his right arm, flattening his hand down on the rough wooden surface, her hand over his tiny one. Walt strained and pushed and twisted against his bonds. She picked up the hunting knife. I couldn’t hear what Walt was screaming behind the gag but I knew what it was – ‘Daddy! Daddy!’
‘NO!’ I was screaming. ‘DON’T!’
She put the tip of the blade against the wood in front of Walt’s hand and brought the heel of the knife up above his pinkie. ‘Walt?’ she said to my son. ‘Remember, everything that is going to happen to you tonight is because of your dad. He did this to you. OK?’ Walt was struggling, trying to say something. Through my own tears and screams I flashed on when Walt was born, the howling blob of gore wrapped in a hospital blanket, the desire to protect and nurture – unfathomable, depthless.
Then she was bringing the heel of the blade down and, blissfully, I was fainting, the basement dissolving away into murk, but I could hear her talking, standing over me, holding my hair, telling me something.
29
YOU KNEW YOU should never have sent him to that school. You’d argued about it. But, in the end, Stephen had prevailed. With his new job, the pay cut, the mortgage to pay, the fees at Hutchinson were out of the question. So off to Ravenscroft he went, your perfect, special wee boy. It used to break your heart to sit in the car, the old blue Triumph Dolomite, and watch him walk through those gates, through the scowling throng of boys who towered over him, the boys who were forever spitting on the ground. The kind of boys for whom school was prison, a sentence to be endured before real life could begin, real life for most of them being, at best, a job on the production line somewhere. Factory fodder.
