by Ruth Dugdall
Which means that whatever progress I’m making, they still don’t fully trust me.
I shuffle down the line for breakfast, my feet heavy as lead and my bones like rusted steel, despite the fact that I weigh less now than I did when I was ten. Sian’s at the serving hatch this morning, so no hope of getting a little less to eat. Bet when her parents gave her that classy name they weren’t thinking she’d be working here. She carefully spoons a measure of porridge (made with full cream) into my 5 oz. plastic bowl, like she’s auditioning for a role in Oliver!
‘Thanks, Sian. That looks yummy,’ I lie.
She gives me a tight pinch of a smile as I trudge my red tray down its silver road to the cutlery station. ‘Just one napkin, Sam. You should know the rules by now. And if you don’t eat all the porridge, we’ll use the tube.’
I return the second napkin, which would have come in handy for covering the cereal I won’t eat, and I’m turning away when she says, ‘It must be going well with Clive for him to say you’re ready to self-nourish.’
I can hear in her voice that she thinks he’s wrong, that it’s too soon after the tube was inserted for this. I bet it was her that suggested the tube should remain in place.
I stop, and wipe the rim of my bowl with my solitary napkin.
‘I’m doing very well with controversial and intensive, thank you for asking. We use photos.’
I wait to see if she makes a quip about it being a waste of taxpayers’ money, but instead she says, ‘I used to study photography. Did an A level in it.’
Her eyes look dreamy, clouded into another place. She blinks and looks down at her shabby housecoat, the aluminium ladle like a crude extension of her own hand. She plunges it back into the porridge as Stacey holds out her bowl. ‘Fat lot of use that was.’
Sadness seeps into my heart, a physical ache for what we have all lost.
I turn my back, carry my tray to the brown table and sit nearest to the window, alongside Mina and Pearl.
Manda sits overseeing the brown table. We eat in a line, chewing as slowly as cows in a field, while kindly Manda murmurs encouragement from the wings. Over on the blue table, the girls aren’t officially supervised, but they watch each other with professional scrutiny; Stacey and Joelle are competing over smaller and smaller spoonfuls of porridge as we slow-race until twenty-five minutes, the time allowed for breakfast, are up. Fiona seems to have forgotten she’s anorexic; she’s eating without even watching the food, chatting about the pony she has at home, whose name is Topic. Typical anorexic: even her horse is named after a chocolate bar.
I can’t digest the porridge; the grains weren’t properly soaked, and I can feel the grit on my teeth, clogging the back of my throat. But I have to leave an empty bowl. If I do, I’ll get a star on my chart, and I only need two more to be allowed to watch a film. That’s my reward; we all have different rewards on our personal charts. Fiona gets to go ride on Topic, Stacey gets a manicure and Joelle gets to use the internet, though she has to be watched or she’ll visit the pro-Ana sites, full of ‘thinspiration’ pictures of wasted girls, and blogs on how to starve. Those sites are porn for anorexics, and lethal. She used to run one; I’ve seen the archives.
Mina likes trips to bowling or playgrounds, kiddie treats that were ruined for her when she actually was a kid.
Top of my list, though, is vintage horror, even if it does mean swallowing gruel. If there was a chance to purge I would, but there’s no loo, not even a sink, in my room, and a trip to the shared bathroom, with Sian on duty, would be impossible.
When the time is up Stacey sidles towards me, her face flushed with guilt. ‘What you doing after breakfast?’ she asks. So this is how we’ll play it: no acknowledgement of what a bitch she was yesterday, but she’ll try to make it up to me. I decide to let her.
‘Catching a flight to Paris,’ I say. ‘Thought I’d start with the Louvre, but I’m skipping the Eiffel Tower. Too touristy.’
She grins, glad I’m playing along and that I’m not going to punish her. She raises one over-plucked eyebrow, a look she must have practised in the mirror. ‘What about going back to my room and I’ll give you a makeover? I’ve nicked some scissors from the kitchen, so I could trim your hair for you, give you a total new look. Vampire goth is so last decade.’
‘You’re not touching my hair, Stacey.’ She’s managed to hide scissors in her room, somewhere clever enough to survive the search. But then we’re all experts in deception.
She sighs at me, shaking her head. ‘You could be a model if you just made an effort. Why d’you always cover yourself up? It’s like you don’t want anyone to notice how beautiful you are.’
I don’t tell Stacey, but I have a previous engagement. I lie on my bed and wait for Clive, thinking about my fifteen-minute confessional. I have no doubts that he’ll turn up, which must mean that I trust him. A novelty for me.
When he arrives I’m ready.
It was Thursday 9 June, three days since our visit to the police station, and I woke abruptly, chest tight with panic, replaying Jena’s fit. I’d not told Mum, who was down in our backyard, pacing the concrete in her fluorescent lollipop-lady uniform. After Jena came out of her coma, Mum returned to work. We needed the money, especially with Dad on unpaid compassionate leave. Someone had to put food on the table.
She was having a final smoke before leaving for the morning school run, trampling the grass that had started to stick through the cracks because no one could be bothered to try to make it nice. Jena was the gardener of the family, her artistic flair revealed in nurturing shrubs and flowers, so now everything was running wild.
I opened the window to let some air into my stuffy room, and Mum looked up at the movement. She called, ‘Breakfast is on the table, love.’
She didn’t need to ready my breakfast. I had all the time in the world to eat. School was closed for classes; I just had to go in for my GCSE exams.
Chloe, our pensioner neighbour, harmless but a bit of a gas-bag, was putting washing out on the line, a peg in her mouth as she worked.
‘All right, Kath. Gorgeous day, isn’t it?’
‘A bit hot for me, Clo.’
Mum tried to make a swift exit into the house, but Chloe stalled her with questions, because she knew we’d been to the police station on Monday. Since the attack, there was only one thing our neighbours asked: Any news?
No news on Jena, who hadn’t improved much since arriving at Minsmere; no news on the case: nobody had been officially charged yet, and the main suspect might be released soon due to lack of evidence. Chloe mourned the lack of bobbies on the beat, how things had been better when she was a girl, how much less crime there had been. Then they stopped talking because Mrs Read, who lived next to Chloe, was hovering under the apple tree in her garden, listening.
Mum and Mrs Read hated each other; they always had, even though they’d been neighbours-but-one for thirty years. Mrs Read was crazy, and Mum said she was dangerous too, always peeking over the fence to see what was going on, or spying through her dirty windows. I’d been warned to stay away from her. Mrs Read gave me the creeps, and local kids would dare each other to knock on her door and run away before she could catch them. She was our local bogeywoman. But, credit where it’s due, she had come round with a gift after she’d heard about the attack: some wildflowers from her overgrown garden for Jena and a book of some kind; not that she had a chance to explain what it was.
Mum slammed the door in her face.
In my bedroom, I booted up the computer, a cranky thing I’d bought in Cash Converters. It weighed a ton, but Dad didn’t like the idea of me getting a laptop, even though he had one in his shed; he said if I had one I’d drop it when I was on my bike and break it. I knew that wasn’t the real reason. He didn’t like the idea of me searching the internet without him knowing, worried I’d stumble across some inappropriate site, or get talking to some pervert. If I was using a computer under his roof he felt it was safe, which was stupid. I might be in
my bedroom, but I could be up to anything.
I was a good student. I’d done really well in my GCSE coursework and things had looked rosy before the attack, when I’d missed two exams because I was in the hospital, waiting for Jena to come out of her coma. The school had indicated that if my final grades were too low for me to be accepted on the A-level courses, they would appeal, but they said I should try and revise extra hard for the remaining exams to make up lost ground.
I’d always been quick at finding facts and researching data, good at losing myself in books and essays. My new plan was to find out more about the police’s prime suspect.
I started in the most obvious place: Facebook. I went to Jena’s page and looked through her ‘friends’, but there was no Douglas Campbell there. He said she’d sent him a message, but I could only access them with her password. I tried logging in as Jena, trying ‘Andy’ as a password, then ‘Pleasurepark’, but both were incorrect. My only hope was to request a change of password, and have it sent to her mobile. Where was her phone? I hadn’t seen it since the attack.
My second idea was to use my friend Google.
Douglas Campbell.
Not much to go on; just a name. I googled it and 5,150,000 results came up. I did it again, but added ‘Ipswich’. 103,000 – still too many. Okay, think. He’d been remanded to prison, so he must have been sent there by a judge. What about adding ‘court’ to the list? There were still lots of pages, but I skimmed down. I clicked some open – one Douglas Campbell was an interior decorator; he’d painted Blue Hall Court. Free quotes. Close the window, scroll down again. Another Douglas Campbell was standing for the Liberal Democrats, discussing a new court bill. Nope, keep going.
Then I found something – an archived newspaper article from sixteen years before:
ORWELL RAPE LATEST: LOCAL MAN RECEIVES PRISON SENTENCE
A Suffolk man has been jailed, after being found guilty of rape at Ipswich Crown Court today. Douglas Campbell was sentenced to eight years’ custody, and the judge condemned him for putting the victim through an emotional trial. Judge Turner said, ‘You believed this would not come to court, because you had groomed your vulnerable victim over a period of months, and you were certain she would not speak against you. Today you have been proved wrong.’
Campbell runs a fish and chip shop on Orwell Estate alongside his girlfriend, with whom he also has a child. He befriended the victim, just thirteen at the time, when she became a regular customer, and took her to his house on The Terrace, where the offence took place. The rape was reported after the victim confided in a teacher at her school, who had become concerned for her welfare.
Suffolk Police praised the victim’s courage in coming forward, and spoke of its plan to reduce sexual crime in the town by focusing on work within schools to educate pupils about paedophile activity and the dangers of being groomed.
So Douglas Campbell was a rapist. The scene clarified: down the alleyway in the storm he had been trying to rape her, she had fought back, and in the struggle . . . Her head hitting the concrete. Oh God, her split skull.
I blinked the image away, looking back at the article as if it might hold answers. The photo showed him arriving at court with a coat over his head, but his girlfriend’s face was visible. I recognised her, a face from the estate. Searching my memory for the name: Sonia, that was it.
Sonia was a local woman, and I’d seen her, hanging around at Pleasurepark, back when I was much younger and we went there often, and Jena and she would always exchange filthy looks. And she was at Pleasurepark because her brother worked there. Her brother, Andy, was Jena’s boss and secret fiancé. But Sonia and Jena had never got on.
Another time, I must have been eleven or twelve maybe, and it was Halloween. I was too nervous to answer the door to the trick-or-treaters so Jena was doing it for me, passing out sweets, and this teenager arrived, a boy I recognised from school. His hair was as orange as the pumpkin Jena had carved, his face as white as the candle she put inside. Jena had filled a bucket with water and we took turns trying to pick out an apple with our teeth. The boy had been shy at first, standing apart from the other kids who’d gathered at our door, until Jena encouraged him to try. I have an image of his head bent over the bucket, his face rising from it wet and jubilant with an apple in his mouth.
Then I remember Sonia arriving, marching down our front path and shouting at Jena, grabbing the boy by the wrist and dragging him away.
Sonia, taking her son home because she didn’t want him playing at our house. I remember it upset Jena, so much that she stopped the apple bobbing. Our little Halloween party was over.
The article said that Douglas and his girlfriend ran the chip shop together, and also that they had a child. This child must be the boy from the impromptu Halloween party, with red hair.
We’d attended the same school, though he was a few years older than me. I’d see him sometimes in the playground, or pass him in the corridors, but we never spoke. I bet I could find him on Facebook dead easy, if I could just remember his first name. But at least, thanks to the newspaper article, I knew where they had lived, sixteen years ago. I could only hope they still did live there; if so, it would take me one step closer to getting something on Douglas Campbell, something concrete. I pressed ‘Print’ and the machine began to spit out the article, line by noisy line.
‘Why aren’t you dressed, Sam?’
Mum. Stood in the doorway of my bedroom, glowing in her yellow coat with white flashings, her fluorescent baseball hat already on her head. Downstairs, her lollipop would be waiting, propped by the front door, round end to the floor like she always positioned it when it was at rest. You’d be surprised how much one of those things weighs.
She’d got a cig in one hand, even though she wasn’t supposed to smoke around me on account of my asthma; she wafted the air with the other, as if that made it okay. The printer stopped churning, and I made a grab for the printed pages, moving back to the bed, the papers behind my back. Mum was distracted, tutting at the books on the floor and the unmade bed, and started folding the clothes I’d strewn on the carpet.
‘Oh Sam! How can I vacuum in here with all this stuff in the way?’
I didn’t answer her, and when she looked up she noticed the computer screen, went closer and read a few lines.
‘Is this revision for your exams?’ Her eyes squinted at the words on the screen, fixing on the photo of Sonia. Then her chest heaved a single time.
‘What’s going on, Samantha?’
I was trapped on the bed. Mum loomed over me, her face losing all its blood.
‘It’s about him, Mum.’
She bent down, her smoky breath in my mouth. ‘Who?’
‘Who do you think? The man the police believe attacked Jena.’
She swooped back to the screen and read the article again, the fag getting squashed in her fingers, eyes narrowing like she’d just lost a pile at bingo. When she spoke, her voice was reedy-thin and careful.
‘He’s been to prison in the past,’ I said. ‘For eight years.’
‘Who’s in prison?’
‘He’s not anymore. He must have been out for a while. But in his statement, he said he was meeting Jena, on 25 April. That’s why he was hanging about outside her flat.’
She looked like I’d slapped her, mouth gaping. ‘You looked in Jena’s case file?’
I felt my skin burn with shame, but jutted my chin defiantly. ‘While you were out of the room.’
Distressed, Mum gripped on to the edge of the desk. I was worried I’d bring on one of her panic attacks, but couldn’t stop the words tumbling out of my mouth like loose change dropped on the ground.
‘His name is Douglas Campbell. Do you know him?’ I gabbled.
She turned slightly towards the window, and seemed to be looking at something outside. ‘Why would I?’
‘Because he’s local and he raped a thirteen-year-old girl. It was in the papers; you must know about it?’
She
turned to face me, with her back to the window, the peak of her cap casting a shadow over her eyes. Mum panted. She went to the window, swung it wide and tossed the fag out.
‘Douglas Campbell told the police that the night Jena was attacked he found a coat, down the passageway, trampled on the ground. And it was covered in blood. Whoever owned that coat attacked Jena.’
‘So why isn’t it over?’ she said, her voice wavering. ‘If they’ve found the coat, they know . . .’
‘They haven’t found it! When Douglas went back, once he realised the significance, it was gone. Or so he says. I think he must have taken it, realising he’d left it behind. Covering his tracks.’
‘God, it’s so hot. I can’t bear it.’ She fanned herself with her hand, but the air in the room was still and heavy. She was leaning out of the open window and gasping. Her panic attacks came quickly, especially these last six weeks. They made it hard for her to breathe, and then she’d vomit. I huddled into my duvet: red poppies in a green field, all faded.
‘Stop this, Sam. Let the police do their job.’
‘But Penny said they only had circumstantial evidence; Douglas Campbell could be released. We have to do something!’
Mum might have believed that there was nothing we could do, but I couldn’t accept that, not anymore. I pulled the printed article from behind me, and held it up so she could see. ‘See the woman in the photo? That’s Douglas’s girlfriend, Sonia. Do you recognise her?’
Mum took the page and stared at Sonia’s ravaged face. Then she folded it, running her fingers down the crease till it was sharp as a blade.
‘She came here once, to collect her son. One Halloween. Remember?’
Mum closed her eyes for a beat. Her mouth was nipped tight. Her shoulders started to heave. She was leaning so far out of the window it scared me. Her anxiety tablets were downstairs in the kitchen drawer.
‘Get dressed . . .’ she gasped, then carried on, ‘I keep telling you this – concentrate on your exams.’
