by the same author from The Gay Men’s Press:
Conduct Unbecoming
Out of Bounds
Full Circle
with other publishers:
Quick Singles
Coppers: An Inside View of the British Police
Fine Glances
One Over Par
Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies
Turf Accounts
Nice Tries
Richard Rodney Bennett: His Life and Music
America’s Conscience: The Life and Politics of Noam Chomsky
Mike Seabrook
Unnatural Relations
Published 1989 and 1996 by GMP Publishers Ltd,
P O Box 247, Swaffham PE37 8PA, England
World Copyright ® 1989 Mike Seabrook
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Seabrook, Mike
Unnatural Relations.
I.Title
823'.914
ISBN 0 85449 116 3
Distributed in Europe by Central Books,
99 Wallis Rd. London E9 5LN
Distributed in North America by InBook/LPC Group,
1436 West Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60607
Distributed in Australia by Bulldog Books,
P O Box 300, Beaconsfield, NSW 2014
Printed and bound in the EU by The Cromwell Press,
Melksham, Wilts, England
Table of Contents
Author’s Note (June 1989)
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
Postscript (June 1996)
Author’s Note (June 1989)
All the descriptions of police and legal procedure in this story have been checked for authenticity, although I have taken occasional liberties, for which I plead the usual defence of dramatic licence. Readers would be forgiven for presuming that my portrait of the judge, in particular his conduct at the end of the court scene, must be one such liberty, and an extreme one at that. Much though I regret the fact, they would be wrong. This character is modelled closely on a judge who was sitting until a few years ago; and his conduct of the court case in this tale is based on a case that I watched that judge conduct less than ten years ago. At least he is not sitting now. I doubt if we shall ever look upon his like again.
I am grateful to Chris Chapman, Solicitor of Sheringham, for legal advice; to the Sheringham police for valuable advice when I needed it; to my friend Steve Speck for helpful comments; and most of all, as usual, to my wife Perviz, whose contribution to this book was so great that she ought to be on the front cover as co-author.
ONE
The lake was a sheet of beaten silver. The wind drove the clouds hard across the reluctant dawn sky and made a ceaseless dry hiss in the reeds and the alders, there were a few spots of cold rain in the air. Jamie Potten scrambled over the fence off the towpath and dropped on his belly. The hawthorn brakes were too dense for even a boy to force his way through; but if you were small it was possible to crawl between the ancient black boles, beneath most of the thorns. Dragging his rod and his old canvas tackle bag beside him, he came to a sheer twelve-foot bank, and began to clamber down, finding handholds in the roots of the hazels that grew out from it. He dropped the last few feet, rolled, got up and squeezed his way through a thick belt of alders and sallows, and he was there.
He had discovered the place two years ago, and it had been his private citadel ever since. He didn't think anyone else knew of it. He hoped not. It was quite invisible from the path, and even if you did know it was there, it was wholly inaccessible to anyone much bigger than Jamie, who was small for his fifteen years. The angling club that owned the fishing rights on the lake was not wealthy, and its members were not energetic. They hadn't restocked the lake after an outbreak of some devastating disease several years before, and most of the keen fishermen in the district fished elsewhere. They were equally indolent about cutting back the bushes and undergrowth surrounding the lake. Jamie hoped it would continue.
Certainly in his two years of fishing there he had never been disturbed by anyone. The alders and sallows gave way to a tiny sward of turf, almost smooth enough to be a lawn, which sloped gently down to the edge of the water of a small bay. The water here was deep: you could see the bottom for no more than a couple of feet, then it plunged, suddenly into blackness. The horns of the bay curved round, shaggy with bushes and small trees, in such a way that you could make a goodish long cast, and yet were hidden from view from any other point on the lake shore. For Jamie, who had discovered by the age of ten that privacy was the chief mercy the world had to offer, it was a personal paradise, big enough for him. He knew that big carp, tench and chub fed in his bay, and sometimes he had glimpsed the form of a great pike cruising, just below the surface.
He coveted the great fish more than anything else in his world. It was, he thought, just about the most beautiful object he had ever imagined: sleek, majestic, sublimely confident. Jamie, who, like most lonely, self-sufficient, unhappy boys, had written secret poems, had written dozens about the pike. Then he had read Ted Hughes's ideas and decided that since the last word had been written he would do better to concentrate on just catching the creature. Perhaps today would be the day. That would be something to show them, when he brought home that miraculous creature - in which, to be truthful, he only half believed. He had no clear idea how he would go about playing and landing such a fish, and none at all about how he would kill it, let alone get it home. But he was a good fisherman, and a confident boy in some things, among them his own resource. He hoped more than almost anything else that today, which had started badly even by his standards, he would take the ultimate symbol of himself home. There was only one thing he hoped even more: that Christopher would come.
***
They had started early that morning, before he was properly awake. It happened occasionally - less often than at the Great Crisis of last summer, when it had been going every morning when he awoke and continuing every evening, a continuous rumble downstairs, mostly muted, occasionally rising in a shout or even, now and again, a scream. Those rare crescendi were invariably followed by a lull, in which, oddly, he could hear the individual words more clearly. The words were always some exhortation on the lines of "Shhhhh! He'll hear you." The "you" whether it was in the rumbling growl of his father or the elocutioned mezzo of his mother, was always underlined. It had puzzled him why he could always hear the words in these interludes and not at any other time, but he quickly worked out to his own satisfaction that it was because they were the only moments when they weren't both talking at once. The conclusion had pleased him in an abstract sort of way, with the pure, impersonal pleasure of the mathematician who cracks some difficult problem. He had grinned to himself and gone to sleep. As usual he had been woken by the deafening silence as they called a cease-fire for the night. And then, as usual, he had cried himself back to sleep again. But there had still been some of the warm pleasure of triumph left, and the process hadn't taken as long as usual. That had been the moment of what he privately termed his divorce.
Over the past few months there had been much less of that, and correspondingly more silence - which, he thought, working it out on his own private scale, was rather worse. His father had taken to going off to the club early in the evening and returning late, after his mother was in bed. Then there was often nothing, sometimes a subdued murmur from their bedroom. That, he thought, was the worst of all. Another problem: why did the softest murmur from their room wake him with such unfailing efficacy, when sometimes he could drop off in the middle of tumult downstairs? He could find no answer to that one that satisfied his logical mind, and had to be content with t
he theory that there was somehow, in some subtle way, infinitely more menace in low voices than in raised ones, and that he himself must have some special sensors for picking up menace and distinguishing it from the mere pushing and hauling that was his conception of normality. That morning they had been speaking quietly.
He had experienced the familiar sequence. It was almost, some strange corner of his mind told him, as if he ticked the stages off on his fingers. The sudden transition from sleep to wakefulness, with no warm, cocooning few minutes coming to the surface. The instant cringing, crawling of the flesh and the draining of the blood. He had never quite been able to track that exact feeling to its lair, never been able to work out quite where the blood drained to. It was just a rush of the fluid that he felt conscious of inside his body, all of it, suddenly rushing, from some place to some other place. It was always over before he could get hold of it and start his analysis.
Then there was the sequence of thoughts, always the same, and their aftermath. And that, he was quite sure, was the worst item of all. God, I wish he was dead. No, I wish she was dead. It's her fault as much as his. No. I wish they were both bloody dead. That's the truth of it, isn't it, James Potten? Come on, now, you know you don't wish them dead. Where would that leave you? You? Is that all you can think about -where it would leave you? You selfish bastard, James Kieran Potten. Whose side are you on?
And the aftermath. Guilt. Get up, Jamie Potten. Get up, go on, get up, now. And perhaps if you're extra nice to both of them they'll never suspect what you've just been thinking about them. Get away with you! They know. That's why they do it. If they thought you cared about them they wouldn't be like this, would they?
At any rate, his systems invariably told him, get up, now, and go down and be nice to them. Bright smile. As if nothing's happened. At least, as if you haven't heard it happening. Then, maybe, just maybe, they'll forgive you.
That's how it used to be, Jamie thought to himself somewhere beneath the surface as he set up his rod-rest and screwed his rod together and prayed that the big pike would come today. Or that Christopher would come. Or both. Perhaps Christopher would help him catch the pike, help him land it. He'd know how to kill it, perhaps. That would need some doing. And some thought beforehand. He knew that it was Christopher that he wanted. But the pike would do. Yes, that's how it had used to be, but that was ages ago, when he had been a boy. At least, his mind added (for he was quite exceptionally honest, as all boys like him become) a young boy - when he was thirteen, say.
He was now grown up, or pretty close to it - the nagging bit of him insisted on adding - and now he knew the truth. It was simply nothing to do with him. They didn't forgive him, because there was nothing they had to forgive him for -unless for having been born to them. No, the truth was they were simply both bastards. It hadn't made a scrap of difference when he had got out of bed and gone down and been extra nice to them both, because they didn't give a damn whether he was nice to them or not. They hadn't even noticed. They were too fully occupied with their own problems, and he... he didn't even come into the equation; a phrase he had been very proud of when it had come into his mind one morning.
"They're just a pair of fucking bastards," he muttered to himself, and the words, drifting like steam in the cold morning air, made him feel good. They were somehow cleansing. He scanned the swim quickly, made a perfect fifty-foot cast, and smiled to himself as he sat down on the canvas bag to fish. He would have been astonished if anyone had told him, but when he smiled he was beautiful.
Over an hour later the wind had slackened and there were a few more spots of rain. Jamie was disgustedly taking a very small gudgeon off the hook and throwing it back. There was a rustle in the alders and sallows behind him, and Christopher arrived. Jamie threw the gudgeon back with a curse on its parentage, looked over his shoulder, smiled a dazzling smile which almost curdled Christopher's blood, and laid his rod in its rest.
***
At about the time that Jamie Potten was laying down his rod and walking slowly towards Christopher with his arms outstretched, David and Annabel Potten were standing in two separate towering rages in the study of the headmaster of their son's school, both trying to make themselves heard above the other, and neither of them hearing or desiring to hear the headmaster's soothing suggestion that they be seated in the two Victorian chairs placed for their benefit before his enormous desk.
The headmaster allowed the commotion to go unchecked for a few moments, in which it told him a great deal. He had not met the Potten boy's parents before except for odd moments at school functions, and when he had politely but firmly required them to visit him he had not known what to expect. The opening few moments of any such meeting, especially a potentially difficult one such as this, were always most instructive, and this was even more so than the norm. The headmaster, who was a kind, intelligent and extremely worldly man, made a series of mental notes even as he stood with his arm still extended to indicate the chairs. Then, even as the voices began to rise and take on querulous tones, he spoke again, in a tone that he used rarely to the boys in his charge and almost never to anyone else. It was not loud, but it had the effect of a whipcrack.
"Mr and Mrs Potten, you will please sit down in those chairs which have been placed for you, and do me the kindness of listening, first of all, to what I have to say."
They were so astonished at being addressed in that tone, which he had selected especially, that they both stopped speaking at the same moment, and meekly sat down. The headmaster, mentally offering up a prayer of relief at the silence, stalked slowly round the desk and eased himself into his own throne-like chair. He had been a schoolmaster at very good schools for a very long time, and was well-versed in the many small ways of making himself impressive and holding people in awe; he exerted his powers to the full. He had already made his preliminary assessments of the Pottens, and concluded that every artifice of thirty years' experience would be called into the battle-line today. Accordingly he steepled his fingers, pursed his lips and looked coldly at the two parents over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses, much in the manner of a judge about to pass sentence. The silence grew in darkness and consistency. After fully half a minute he observed David Potten's face darkening. He waited. After a few more seconds the man's mouth opened. The headmaster spoke, ruthlessly drowning the first word before it was born.
"Mr and Mrs Potten, we are worried about your son, James. In fact we are very worried. I take it that this is not altogether a surprise to you."
"Worried? What do you mean, worried? He seems all right," said the father, sharply. The headmaster saw that he was darkening again, a deep red flush crawling up his cheeks and across his forehead. The wife, he saw with approval, had begun immediately to look worried and even furtive. Good, he thought, somebody's feeling guilty. He waited once more, watching the flush on Mr Potten's face darken. Eventually he said, "So it does surprise you, then?"
"I assume that if he's been up to no good you'll have dealt with it yourself. It's what we pay you for, isn't it? And if he isn't up to no good, what else is it that's worrying you? His work's all right, isn't it? Judging by his reports, anyway."
He fell silent under the headmaster's level gaze. "MrsPotten. Does it come as a surprise to you that we are worried?"
The woman, he thought, was superficially the harder case. The husband was aggressive, probably ruthless in business -that was his reputation, at any rate. Built like a bullock, wearing heavy farmer's tweeds and otherwise dressed in the kind of casual that doesn't reek of money but gently radiates it. Mrs Potten was sophisticated, dressed from Paris by the look of it, smelt very slightly of something very discreet and even more expensive, and spoke with a warm, beautifully modulated voice that could, he suspected, send shivers up the spines of many men, especially the wrong kinds. He waited, observing her carefully construct her reply.
"Ah... well, Doctor Lane, I don't assume automatically as my husband does that James has been up to no good, as he so elegant
ly puts it... but I, too, have seen no cause for complaint about his work, and he seems to be keen enough at games... is it his discipline, perhaps? No, I can't think so," she went on, giving the headmaster no chance to speak. "No, he's always been a very well-behaved little boy, right from when he was tiny. In fact, I've sometimes wondered if he had enough spirit, as boys go... I mean, we've always been at pains to bring him up to remember his manners and so forth, but I really can't think of anything he might have done..." She let the sentence fall to earth by itself, offering him a very faint smile.
David Potten drew a leather cigar case from his jacket, extracted a large cigar from it, rolled it, put the case away and prepared to light it. As a transparent afterthought (at least it wasn't a deliberate snub, reflected the headmaster) he said, "You mind if I smoke?" The headmaster caught the woman's eye. She raised her eyes slightly towards the ceiling, then slightly increased the voltage of the faint smile. He studiously kept his face neutral. "Not at all," he murmured. "I was about to offer you one of these..." He opened a cigarette box on the desk top and proffered it to Mrs Potten, who refused with an almost invisible shake of her head. Dr Lane lit one for himself and drew on it deeply.
"You will remember," he said eventually, "that I said we are worried about Jamie. He is, to begin with, a very self-possessed boy, would you agree?"
"I should hope so," said the father, snappishly. "Isn't that what we're paying you six thousand a year for, to makehim able to stand on his own two feet? A boy should be able to look after himself, shouldn't he?"
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