Keep your cool, Blaze, I tell him, once he’s back from the line. There’s no hurry.
He nods, glowering. I clap a hand on his shoulder, give him a quick shuggle. I want to tell him it will be all right, but I can’t, because it isn’t going to be. The best thing I can do is get him involved with the shooting, something to focus his mind on, other than the thing that’s eating him.
We watch Zambo step up. He’s almost casual – this is his thing. Lewis pulls again, Zambo sweeps the gun to his shoulder, and a single barrel load smashes the clay right in the centre. Pieces fly everywhere, a spectacular disintegration. The effortlessness has to be seen to be believed. Zambo grew up close to the border with Zimbabwe, Rhodesia as it was then, during the latter years of the independence war. You learned to shoot well.
I can’t fucking believe it, Blaze says.
I know, I tell him.
How the fuck could she do such a thing?
I know, I know, I say.
Just a fortnight after his first meeting with us at the Half Moon, a knock at his door in the early evening. He answered, thinking it would be a charity collector or a Jehovah’s Witness or something. Instead, a couple of coppers standing there. He even knew them from shout-outs, dealing with the aftermath of house fires together. Dave and Neil. They looked pained, embarrassed. Roger Appleby? Neil asked him. Don’t be stupid guys, he told them, his pulse picking up tempo, wondering what the hell was going on. Roger Appleby, Neil said again, we’ve received an allegation. I’m arresting you on suspicion of historical rape. You don’t have to say anything but anything you do say blah blah blah.
I imagine the hot shame he’d have felt, being led to the waiting Astra in front of the neighbours. The hand on the top of his head as they ducked him inside. At least they’d had the decency not to use cuffs, Dave and Neil. Inside his mind Blaze would have been screaming It’s not what it seems! I’m fucking innocent! But he would have felt the cloying judgements already forming in the heads of the scandalised onlookers. No smoke, after all, is generated without fire.
DNA mouth swabs. Hours of questioning. Then home on bail with the condition not to go within a quarter of a mile of his former matrimonial home.
Crack. Shatter. I watch Zambo dispatch another clay pigeon with equal ease.
Blaze is finding it hard to make eye contact. I know what’s going on: he thinks I must have my doubts about him, too. We’re so conditioned, aren’t we? We see a grey-black column pluming skywards and can’t help but conclude that, at its root, some family home must be in flames. It’s what they all depend upon, those who deploy smoke bombs. How to explain to Blaze that I know it’s fake news? That we’ve seen the same patterns again and again with other war-torn parents down the years – we all of us have, Prof, Rev, Zambo and me.
Blaze is restless, shifting his shotgun from hand to hand. When he breaks it, he can’t get the spent cases to come out; he has to fumble and shake to get them loose. It’s as though every last thing is against him. His tension is infecting me; I feel jittery, edgy. I consciously breathe more slowly, trying to counter-infect him with calm.
And the fucking kids, he says.
I know, I say.
I knew what was coming, as soon as he told me about the rape allegation thing. So fucking predictable. How the next day a case worker from child protection was on the phone, wondering if she could interview him about allegations that had been made regarding his daughter and son.
I’d been wrong about Blaze heading for a contact centre order next. He and his kids have been plunged into all-out war.
Merc is next up. I didn’t see how he was going to manage it, but he’s turned up to the shoot with his prosthesis. It’s fascinating, watching him in action – there’s some kind of harness and cable set-up that means the claw-hand opens when he extends his arm, and closes tight when he moves it back again. I guess it’s how he holds letters for sorting. Zambo spends a minute getting him to practise grasping the shotgun barrels in the pincer. Not exactly stable, but. Then he stays close by, explaining things to Merc, his arm sweeping left to right as he describes what the clay will do. Lewis pulls. The pigeon flies. Crack. The recoil causes Merc’s gun to buck, rattling the metal of his claw. The clay flies on. Zambo shouts to Lewis. Another pull. This time, a few bits of shot from the edge of Merc’s pattern wing the target. A chunk breaks off and falls to earth.
I turn back to Blaze. Listen, I say, resting my hand on his shoulder again, you’ve got to prepare yourself. It’s going to be shit.
He’s due in court in a few days’ time, an emergency application by his ex’s lawyer. The key is rapidity. They’ve got to get it before a judge PDQ. That way, the only thing the court will have had time to do is a basic agency check. And that will turn up an arrest for suspected historical rape, and a child protection enquiry. It won’t look good. It won’t look good at all. Smoke and fire, soot and flame. What’s a poor judge to do? So that’ll be Blaze out of his kids’ lives for five, six months minimum, banned from any contact, direct or indirect, while the wheels of formal investigation grind on. Six months of undiluted influence on the children from his ex. Six months for her to complete her work of poisoning. By the time he sorts out the mess, his kids will be completely turned.
He doesn’t like my explanation. I knew he wouldn’t. But I’m just the messenger. He shrugs violently, displacing my hand from his shoulder.
Can’t they see what’s fucking going on? he shouts.
I know, I tell him. I know.
Fucking hell!
The thing is, they all do – they all do know what’s going on. The unscrupulous lawyers, playing the game. The police, the social, the judges. The coppers who arrested me – alleged domestic violence; supposed emotional and psychological abuse – even told me: they explained they’d had exactly the same scenario countless times. Always in the context of a divorce or separation. When allegations of offences that were supposed to be years old were suddenly and urgently made. The discomfiture of the judge in my case – a bearded bloke, in his forties, quite inexperienced, so my lawyer said. He was acutely aware he was being manipulated. He was angry about it, had a go at both of us, Mummy and me, as though I’d had anything to do with putting him in that position. But that’s the sick beauty of it. Make an allegation, no matter how transparently cooked-up or pathetic or bizarre, and everyone has to take it at face value. Everyone has to play the game. No one wants to be found to have failed to take something seriously, if later it does turn out to have been the stuff that actually happened.
I felt almost sorry for him, that judge, prohibiting me from any contact with your sister and you till a date months away, to allow time for enquiries to be done. Actually, feeling sorry for him came much later, after the utter shock had subsided, shock like I’d never before known – like a car bomb had detonated just yards from me, rendering me deaf with tinnitus and disorientated and sickeningly confused, debris smacking on my head and clattering on the ground all around. And after the anger had subsided, too – anger that he should so spinelessly roll over and fail me, your sister, and you. But once time had passed and the aftershocks had finally burned out, that’s when I could see his side. That petulant tantrum, berating me along with Mummy, when it was her trumping up the crap – well, he didn’t know how to handle it, other than to go along with what he was being forced to do. And that’ll have felt shite. So he did the only thing he could do with his own anger, and lashed out with his tongue. If he’d had a bowl up there on his mahogany bench, I guess he’d have washed his hands, Pilate-like. What’s a poor judge to do?
Feeling sorry for the fuckwit judge. It’s an empath thing.
You, of course, would’ve been oblivious – kept in the dark like an overwintering bulb. Not one word about the emergency proceedings, and who said what about whom. The ruling, though. I imagine you were told about that, weren’t you?
Blaze has stalked o
ff, gone to stand alone for a while. I turn back towards the firing line. I don’t know why the girls hang back – they do the same on every shoot. Rev is taking up position. She’s got a padded parka on, she looks like she might be going down town on a shopping expedition. But I’ve seen her in action before. She might be full of the love of God for her fellow man, but she has it in for clay pigeons. Crack, smash. Crack, shatter. She’s almost as good as Zambo.
Angel is hopeless. She’s so startled when the gun goes off that she drops it on the ground. Zambo rushes forward, making sure it’s safe, then wipes the mud off the stock.
I walk over to where Blaze is standing. His shoulders have dropped. I halt a pace or so behind him. I know it’s hard, I say, but the thing is, Blaze, you’ve got to keep your cool.
He turns and looks at me as though I’m speaking Mandarin or something.
It’s the classic sting. You get fitted up for the worst kind of crimes a person can commit, then when the professionals come flooding in, making their enquiries, turning over stones, what do they find? One charming parent, tearful in places when describing the horrific ordeals they and their children have endured, their kids flocking adoringly around them. Then the other one – the one who’s supposed to be the violent rapist, the oppressive abuser; the one the kids are supposed to be too scared of to ever see again – that one is foaming and fulminating, writhing under the injustice of it all. And they come across to the professionals as exactly what they’re being made out to be: uncontrollably angry, spewing counter-allegations of perjury and lies. Honestly. Which one would you believe?
I try to get this across to Blaze.
What’s the fucking point? he asks. I’m fucked either way.
He’s bright, is Blaze. He can see it in a way that took me a lot longer to get. Or maybe it’s because he’s had a head start on me. It was ages till I first turned to Google, which in turn sent me to Facebook, where after a few posts on a public group I got a DM from someone called Laurence, offering to add me to a secret forum he knew. Getting put in touch with others of my clan who live nearby. Prof, Rev, and Zambo. I dealt with everything Blaze is going through on my own. Blaze has already watched Caitlin at that rally, and had Prof to start to give him the measure of what’s going on. How in several months’ time, once his name has eventually been cleared, it’ll all be over bar the shouting. How the social workers will present their report to the judge, detailing the children’s ‘wishes and feelings’. How just like before, old judgey will find he has no choice. Who would send kids back to a parent they say they fear and hate, a parent they profess to have absolutely no desire ever to see again?
The miracle, really, was how your sister managed to resist it. How she held on to the reality of her daddy through all she was being subjected to. I think it was Jacqueline Wilson. She loved her stuff, your sister did, read every single one of her books between the ages of about eight and twelve. Do you remember them? Hetty Feather, Tracy Beaker, The Suitcase Kid? You were never into them; you preferred dragon tales and fantasies. Through reading, your sister had already encountered just about every conceivable permutation of family breakdown. Through imagination and empathy, she’d had a chance to test out in her mind how each might make her feel. I remember her – just ten, she was – standing in the kitchen at that rented place on Drake Avenue, not long after I’d moved in, once she could see that I had a place not far from the old house, and that she was going to get to spend half her time there. She confided in me then: her greatest fear had been that she would lose one or other of her parents. Now she could see that everything was going to be all right.
I guess she held on tight to that, all through the months when I was banned from seeing her. I guess she used it as a shield to fend off the disturbing things that were going on. I guess Jacqueline Wilson saw her through.
You, though. It wasn’t because you were into dragon fantasies. It was you. Two-and-a-half-year-old you, your supplicating arms falling despondently by your side. Ten-year-old you scribing away in your little notebook, trying to work out why it was that Mummy always seemed to favour your sister. It was you Mummy seemed to have power over. It was you it seemed she was able to use. Does that sound like I’m blaming you? I am sorry, if so. Believe me, I’m not. Anything but, as I hope to show.
I don’t tell any of this to Blaze. He doesn’t need to hear it. Maybe one of his kids will prove resilient like your sister; perhaps both of them will. Stranger things have happened. But, in reality, he’s right. He’s fucked whichever way. So few children withstand this shit, not when it reaches all-out war. Prof, Rev, Zambo can testify to that. Two completely conflicting beliefs about one parent – one formed of experience, the other propounded again and again in all sorts of different ways by one of the two people in the world they most love and most implicitly trust. They don’t have the critical thinking to sort it out. Cognitive dissonance. Intolerable internal conflict. The contradictory beliefs simply cannot coexist, cannot be held simultaneously in the one young mind. One belief has to prevail, the other has to be suppressed, boxed away, abused. Splitting. A fracture occurs. A child is forced to choose.
I look at Blaze, his solid jaw, his slightly frizzy hair with just that hint of red in it. The courage in those fire-fighting eyes of pale blue. Maybe it would be a comfort to him – to know it’s the fragile one, the inconstant one, the parent that looks like falling apart, that’s the parent they choose. The one they perceive as strong, reliable, unshakable – that’s the one they figure, in their desperate unconscious quandary, that they will simply have to lose. That’s the one who won’t disintegrate, that’s the one they secretly hope will still be there for them, when the raging storm finally passes – as they think, in their innocence, it must surely someday do.
I shake my head. I’m getting ahead of myself. There’ll be time enough to explain all that to Blaze further down the track. For now, for all his anger and gloom and bitter sense of fate, somewhere inside him lingers the hope that this mess might just come good. The time to get him to see it’s because he’s the only true parent – the time for that is once he’s lost them for good.
Prof’s just finished her turn. Both barrels discharged without troubling a clay. I watch her coming away from the firing line, more English than the English in her green Barbour. She’s her own worst enemy, Prof is. She overthinks the process every time. Shooting is a matter of instinct – there’s no room for calculating, for trying to work it out with maths and algebra and triangulation. A few simple rules, then let your gut take over. Blam blam. But her cool rationality, her grasp of psychological theory, that’s been the saviour of us all – Rev, Zambo and me, and loads of other members over the past few years who have since moved on. Prof, I love – all the more so for her utter incompetence with a gun.
Come on, Blaze, I tell him. Our turn again. We start forward, side by side, a newbie and his mentor, back to the front line. I slide a couple of fresh cartridges home as we go, loving the snug precision with which they fit into the lightly oiled breech. Lewis tells us never to load till we’re in position, but what does he know? I cast a glance at the rest of the group. Zambo’s ribbing Prof about her blank score sheet. Rev looks lost in a moment of silent prayer, as she is wont to do. Angel and Merc are standing a little apart from the others, talking quietly together. Angel still looks shell-shocked, as though perplexed by all that’s happening to her like it isn’t quite real. As if disbelieving that she is here, in some Mendip gun club, trying to fire a shotgun to hit a spinning disc of clay, and wondering how comes she has gone from being the loving mother of two delightful boys to this outcast, surrounded by so many others of the living child-lost. But there is something else there, a new light in her eye. She’s looking at Merc with it – a certain sort of attention that suddenly hits me. He’s looking at her the same way, too.
You go first this time, Blaze, I say, as we get to the firing line. And remember, I tell him. Take it nice and
slow.
❦
We debrief at the Half Moon, the newbies heading for home.
How’s Blaze doing? Prof asks, once we’ve got our drinks and our regular table.
I shrug and say, Oh, you know.
Zambo has heard about the lawyer Blaze is up against. Some woman called Violet something-or-other. Her name conjures up prim properness, but Zambo tells us she’s known as Violent on the circuit. He figures she’s yet another trauma victim, projecting her own stuff on to the cases in which she’s involved. Hell-bent on destroying the other halves, avenging her own childhood wounds. I think: is there no end to it, this juggernaut of pain and destruction? But I don’t voice it out loud. I know what the others will say – if there’s any hope, it lies with us and those of our clan.
How about Angel? Prof asks Rev.
Rev raises her eyebrows. Surprisingly, keeping her chin up, she says. Not great, of course, but on the whole I’m quite amazed.
Ah, but she’s found a chink of hope, hasn’t she? I say. The other three look at me, quizzical puppies.
Merc, I tell them. Haven’t you seen the way they look at each other?
Rev laughs, and tucks her hair behind her ear, bangles clinking. You’re kidding!
Prof’s brow creases. I do hope not, she says. It’s way too early. They’ve got to sort themselves out first, before they can take someone else on.
Zambo shakes his head. Lighten up, Prof, he says. Good luck to them, if they can find a little happiness.
Prof huffs.
Merc could do with something good right now, Zambo says. He’s about at rock bottom.
He tells us about the previous weekend, when Merc’s son Mark was playing footie for the first time for his school. Merc went to watch the game, as dads are wont to do. Soon as he got there he saw his ex and her mother, so he kept to the edge of the parental crowd. Mark’s team won, three nil, and he scored the first. Come the final whistle, Merc went to congratulate him. Before Mark even made it off the pitch, his mum and gran shot from the touch line and escorted him straight past Merc like they were prison guards. He still called out something: well done, Mark, you played really well – great goal! And the boy completely blanked him. As though he didn’t exist.
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