The History of Us

by Jonathan Harvey

  All I could keep thinking was, I’d found out my mother was a slut. A dutty, dutty lady.

  That was no lady. That was my mum!

  No wonder I went off the rails.

  I used to imagine her in my head. Imagine meeting her. It was the same every time. I travelled down to London on my own on the coach, sometimes the train – I knew I could do this, as I say, I was so self-sufficient, I could do more than most twelve-year-olds – and I somehow had her address, and I would go and visit her. She’d not been expecting me, so she would be caught unawares, and that’s when I’d discover she was nothing like the naughty pictures or the record made her appear to be. She was lovely. She was always dressed in white. A big white smock thing, and she was in her garden picking blackberries from the bushes. She’d put them into a flat basket she’d have slung over her spare arm, and she’d turn and look at me. At first she’d be scared, because she didn’t know me.

  I remember I liked that. I liked seeing her scared.

  Sometimes I imagined she wet herself, she was that scared. A little puddle. Middle of her smock. Poor little lamb, all embarrassed. Gosh, how humiliating for her. Glorious.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ I’d say, ‘for I am William.’

  I know. How very Old Testament.

  ‘William?’

  ‘But they call me Billy now. It’s me, Mum. Your son.’

  And she’d let the basket tumble to the floor, then hurry inside, upset. I’d follow. She’d sit at her kitchen table, crying.

  I liked seeing her cry.

  ‘Please. Please forgive me, Billy. I’ve been such a poor role model. I’ve done things I’m so ashamed of, just to make ends meet. I’m a good girl, I am.’

  I know. How very My Fair Lady.

  ‘I was kidnapped. By these men. They kept me captive and made me do these . . . things! I’m so sorry, for those things must have caused you deep distress. I’m sorry. But I didn’t choose to do them. They were forced upon me. I hated every second of every photo shoot. I hated pretending to be copulating when I was singing that awful song. I’m sorry if you were bullied off the back of it. Please. Please say you’ll forgive me.’

  And every time, I’d step forward.

  And her eyes would light up as if she knew I was going to offer my forgiveness.

  And instead, I’d go up to her and slap her round the face, leaving an angry red welt across her cheek and one of her eyes.

  I liked that.

  But that was only in my head.

  I could never be that brave.

  In the real world, the first thing I did that was out of character for me was that I asked a girl out to the school disco. Her name was Briony Adlington, and she was the most beautiful girl in school. At first she said yes, but then she must have got a better offer, because a week or so before the disco I heard a rumour that she had agreed to go with the vice-captain of the Year 8 football team. I went up to her between lessons and asked if it was true, and with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders she confirmed that it was, and offered a meek apology.

  I was not best pleased.

  I was not pleased at all.

  But what to do?

  I’m not keen on the word ‘revenge’.

  I much prefer words like ‘karma’. Or ‘just deserts’.

  In the cobbled alleyway behind our house, there was a lot of dog shit. I took some and wrapped it in clingfilm and slipped it into one of Ruby’s Jiffy bags, and took a bus into town and posted it to Briony at the main post office in the city centre. I did this once a week until my anger subsided. That took about three months. It gave me so much pleasure. It was balm to my soul. The idea of her receiving these parcels. And the smell. Oh, it was glorious. I used a different post office each time, just in case her family had made some sort of complaint. Meanwhile, every time I saw her in school I gave her the broadest smile, as if her actions hadn’t hurt me, hoping that would put her off the scent, the scent of dried-up old dog shit, and it seemed to do the trick.

  A few weeks into the ‘shitstorm’, I saw that Briony’s photograph had appeared in the school magazine. She’d won a poetry prize.

  I wondered how the poem went.

  I wondered if it was . . .

  I’m Such A Twat

  By Briony Adlington, Year 8

  I’m such a twat,

  There’s no doubt about that

  I should’ve taken Billy to the disco

  He is far superior to that idiot I ended up going with

  But hey

  That’s what happens

  When you’re a twat.

  OK, so my structure might’ve needed work.

  Gosh, she looked so full of herself, standing there beaming into the camera looking all holier-than-thou. When actually, the rumour was that after the school disco she’d had sex with the so-called footballer round the back of the gym block. What a hypocrite. And she wasn’t yet thirteen!

  Brazen.

  Not unlike my mother. And we all know what happened to her.

  This similarity to Jocelyn made my blood fizz even more. But what to do with all this pent-up energy?

  Oh yes!

  I carefully cut out Briony’s picture from the magazine, and set to work. I wasn’t particularly artistic, in so much as I was pretty useless at drawing, but when I put my mind to it I was capable of creating a masterpiece. As I did now. Each night for a week, when I was supposed to be doing my homework, I painstakingly put together a flyer using Ruby’s newly purchased computer. Fancy lettering. And then, using Ruby’s photocopier, I copied it. Thank heavens Ruby liked to run a business or two and had all the latest gadgetry. It took a bit of readjusting with the size of the lettering and getting the angle of her photograph just so, but eventually the flyer was ready. And I put it in twenty different phone boxes around Liverpool. What I had created was a mock-up of a prostitute’s calling card, with Briony’s home phone number on. ‘Busty Teen Babe Briony For Hire’. The idea of her holier-than-thou act being shattered in the privacy of her own home gave me great pleasure.

  Really, when I think about it now, this is the sort of thing that these days would win the Turner Prize. It could be called Just Deserts. And to think, I was only twelve. If it’s not too bigheaded of me to say so, this sort of karma was bordering on genius for one so young. I was like Mozart with a photocopier and Pritt Stick.

  And so the time had come for me to plan the third prong of my three-pronged attack. I was going to give her a scare somehow. I had watched enough horror movies to know it was easy to do, especially around Halloween. I was toying with hanging out in the alleyway behind her house, climbing into her back yard, and then somehow getting to her bedroom window and giving her the shock of her life; I just had to work out how best to achieve that. I was not a natural climber. I would need a stepladder, but how on earth was I going to get that over a brick wall and into her back yard?

  And then something magical happened: I discovered what Briony’s father did for a living. He was a window cleaner.

  Window cleaners had ladders to ply their trade. Window cleaners probably left their ladders . . . indoors? No. In their back yards? More than likely.

  Now you have to remember, this was quite some time ago. These days the back alleys of Liverpool are cordoned off with wrought-iron fences and gates, and the yards are safe havens where bikes are never stolen, nor hanging baskets, nor knickers from the line. They are well-lit – with low-energy bulbs, no doubt – places where only bins skulk, in every colour of the rainbow. But back then you could wend your way across the city and hardly have to cross a road. So it was very easy to walk up behind Briony’s house and stand in the entry and look up.

  After a few visits, I had worked out which was her bedroom. The back bedroom overlooking the yard. Result!

  The more difficult thing to do was this. No matter what sort of disguise I was wearing, it was going to be hard to climb up a ladder and knock on her window without her opening her curtains, screaming, and drawing the atte
ntion of everyone else in the house. So how did I then climb down the ladder and run off before someone else in her family made it downstairs and out into the yard to apprehend me? Or beat the living daylights out of me? It was going to need some more thought.

  There was a chink of light at the end of this particular tunnel, as I also discovered that both of Briony’s parents were deaf. If she called to them to chase me, they wouldn’t hear. But I didn’t know if she had some secret panic buttons in her room that lit up round the house saying GIVE CHASE.

  Maybe my mind was working overtime.

  American horror movies were so misleading. On that side of the pond there seemed to be no notion of terraced housing and alleyways and the like. They all seemed to live in sweeping cul-de-sacs in sprawling Seventies bungalows and mansions with nothing between them but trees and litterless drives and wide streets. Kids went trick-or-treating. Bikes were ridden, there was little traffic. It was perfect for giving the girl who’d betrayed you the shock of her life. Although admittedly, no-one did to Jamie Lee Curtis what I had in store.

  And then, as if by magic, another stroke of luck.

  Ruby bought a new fine-fangled gadget known as a mobile phone. It felt like magic. It felt like it might sort everything out. Nobody else in our neighbourhood had one, but Ruby felt it was imperative for her as a go-getting businesswoman. It was going to sort everything out for me.

  And hopefully sort her out, too. That bitch, Briony.

  It was Halloween. I’ve always been drawn to the dramatic. And I had used my paper-round money to buy a Ku Klux Klan fancy dress outfit from The Wizard’s Sleeve joke shop and fancy-dress place in town. I had no need for Briony’s dad’s ladders now, as I had a new plan.

  And it was pretty fucking good, actually.

  Once I heard Ruby shutting her bedroom door and going to bed, I quietly got out of mine and got dressed. It was half past eleven. This was perfect timing. I took my specially prepared bag and crept as quietly as I could down the stairs. I went to the pantry, lifted out our two-tier stepladder and let myself quietly out of the back door.

  I hurried down our back entry, and across to the street that was two parallel to ours. Ashfield. And then down that back entry, till I was behind Briony’s house. I then unzipped my bag and pulled out the KKK outfit, and slid it over my head so it dropped down over my shoulders. I took out the torch from the bag, and the mobile phone. I extended out the stepladder and checked it was steady. I then climbed to the top of it and – bingo – my head poked above the wall of Briony’s back yard.

  I placed the torch under my KKK outfit, and switched it on. I had checked this look in the bathroom mirror at home without the lights on, and it was pretty scary. Light beamed from the eyehole slits, and the whole thing went luminous. Excellent. I then pressed the number I had previously entered into the phone.

  I heard it ring in the house before I heard it through my phone.

  It seemed to ring for ages.

  Eventually, the light went on in Briony’s bedroom. Her curtains lit up, an oblong of light against the rest of the dark house. Finally she answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  I took a deep breath. I was suddenly nervous.

  ‘Hello?’

  Shit, I’d better say something before she hung up.

  ‘Go to your bedroom window.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look outside.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Go to your bedroom window, Briony. Look outside.’

  She said nothing. I could hear movement. Was she walking to the window? The heat from the torch was now making my face hot. I wished she’d hurry up.

  Then I saw her silhouette through the curtains.

  ‘Good girl, Briony.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  Excellent. She sounded like she was about to cry. Superb. Her voice was tiny, high-pitched, quivering.

  ‘Open the curtain!’ I said, teasing, like this was all a big joke.

  She opened the curtains and I saw her frown, eyes adjusting to the change in light. And then as I saw her register seeing me, peering over her yard wall, I crowed into the phone in the croakiest voice I could muster for my half-broken, twelve-year-old voice.

  ‘I’m going to rape you, Briony. Till your fucking kidneys poke out of your eye sockets, you prick-teasing cunt.’

  I then switched off the torch, jumped off the ladder, grabbed it and the bag, and ran.

  I snuck quietly into the house, returned the ladders to the pantry, deleted Briony’s number from Ruby’s list of dialled calls and took off my disguise. When I went to bed, I slept like the dead.

  I had planned that manoeuvre with military precision. I had planned that sentence so it flowed beautifully and scarily.

  I’m going to rape you, Briony. Till your fucking kidneys poke out of your eye sockets, you prick-teasing cunt.

  It was like poetry.

  I was very proud of myself.

  Except . . .

  A word to the wise. I was very young. I was naive. And I was pretty stupid to think I could outwit Briony. Nowadays, I’d know. I’d know all phone calls can be traced. But I honestly thought mobile phones were different back then. As it turned out, all it took for Briony to trace the call was to dial 1471 after I’d called.

  Two policemen arrived the next day, wanting to speak to Ruby. And when it became obvious that Ruby had not made that threatening phone call, the finger of suspicion pointed towards me.

  The shit had hit the fan.

  I don’t wish to go into too much detail about what happened after that. I certainly never showed my face again at school, whether they believed my claim that I’d done it as a joke or not, and soon Ruby decided that I’d gone off the rails too much. I was overwhelming her. It was decided that it would be best all round if I left Liverpool and went to live with her cousin in London. A fresh start. A clean page. A new life.

  But then something happened that sent my life in a different direction.

  Aunty Gina, who I was now living with in Brixton, had to go away for four days, and as I was only twelve I was returned home for a few days to stay with Ruby. As she would not let me out of her sight, she insisted I go with her to the funeral of an old lady who lived down the road. When I heard who it was I was keen to go, actually, as I knew the woman’s granddaughter had been a friend of Jocelyn’s. I wondered if she might hold some clue to her whereabouts. She didn’t. But she came up trumps another way.

  Her name was Kathleen. She got drunk, and she told me who my dad was.

  Or so I fucking thought.

  Sorry. I know I shouldn’t swear.

  Why am I apologizing to myself? I must be the only person in the world who does this. Must be my strict upbringing. Or is it in my genes? Hmm. Some genes.

  Oh, it took her a while. I could see she was fishing, in her stupor, to see what I knew about my heritage and what I had been told. So I just came out and said it.

  ‘I know Jocelyn’s my mum.’

  And the relief on her face was tangible. Like she’d been holding in the biggest fart, and finally she’d been allowed to let it out.

  ‘Do you know who my dad is?’

  She did indeed. My father was a man called Mark Reynolds. She reckoned he was making a bit of a name for himself in the world of politics.

  She was waylaid then by people passing on their condolences to her and her father, and when Ruby saw that the father was there, she said we had to get back to check on some teasmade orders. I went with her, forming a plan in my head as to how I might find out more about this man called Mark Reynolds.

  The next day was my final day in Liverpool before heading back to Aunty Gina. I told Ruby that I had promised to run some errands for Kathleen. She seemed surprised and raised some objections, but I laid it on with a trowel about how poor Kathleen had just lost her granny and how she needed a hand with sorting a few things out. Just for an hour.

  A slow nod of the head said it was sanctioned.


  I had already stolen a sweaty five-pound note from Ruby’s handbag. I went to the garage by the railway bridge on Picton Road and bought the cheapest display of tulips I could find, then dropped by to see Kathleen.

  She was still in her dressing gown, and looked like shit warmed up with sugar on top. She was delighted with the flowers, as I knew she would be. My strict upbringing came into its own as I continued to be charming with her, asking how she was and explaining that although she’d spoken at the service, I just wanted to check she was OK, as I knew what a friend she’d been to my mother in the past. I could see her practically preening like a peacock. She liked the sound of this. She was so typical of most of the grown-ups I knew. So susceptible to a compliment.

  Women, eh?

  Looking back, she was surprisingly flirtatious with me. Flicking her hair this way and that. Telling me how she was an international traveller thanks to her new job as an air stewardess, about how exciting it was to travel the world. She then turned to one side and asked me what I ‘thought of her profile’. I had no idea what she was talking about and when I hesitated, she threw her head back and laughed – at this point I wondered whether she had been on the sauce that morning already – and explained that she’d recently had some ‘minor reconstructive cosmetic surgery’ and it was ‘one of the benefits of international travel’.

  At this point, I thought Kathleen was actually a bit of show-off.

  I then said I mustn’t delay her any more, and stood to leave. I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Going so soon? She stood too to follow me out, and thanked me for the flowers and told me what a charming young man I’d grown into.

  I then did a double-take sort of head jerk, and said, ‘Oh. What we were discussing yesterday . . .’

  Like I’d forgotten. As if!

  ‘. . . Would you have any idea about how I could get in touch with Mark Reynolds?’

  Her eyes lit up, as if relishing the challenge. Well, how could she deny a boy who’d been so polite to her in her hour of need?

  ‘No, but I’m sure we could find out.’

  An hour later, we were sitting side by side in an internet cafe in town and Kathleen had brought up a new search-engine page called Google. I had no idea what this was, but she confidently typed the words MARK REYNOLDS into a box at the top of the screen and then hit return. She did a few more clicks before proudly announcing, ‘Well, Billy. It would appear that your father lectures in politics at the City Lit.’