by Graham Joyce
He and nine others of Bridget Cleary’s relatives and neighbors were tried for her death.
SUMMARY OF COURT TRANSCRIPTS
I’ll give you a story if it’s a story you want. I almost wrote a song about it, but it didn’t come out right. It was supposed to be a love song and it ended up sounding like a protest song. Though most love songs are protest songs, when you think about it.
There was me and Peter and Tara and a couple of other boys in the band and all was well with the world, and then one day everything changed. I wasn’t yet eighteen and it was like someone slammed the door shut on my life the way it was then. Everything was right and the world was full of prospect and possibility; and then it was all wrong.
It was always going to be Tara. Always was. She was just Peter’s kid sister and I was only fifteen years old and I was at her house on her thirteenth birthday. One day she was a skinny kid and the next day there was this glow about her. And I would catch her looking at me. When me and Peter were talking she would be listening and I could sense her listening like someone stroking you and I could feel her eyes on me. She looked up to me in those days.
And I knew she was a cut above. From that day on I couldn’t stop thinking about her, though I couldn’t tell Peter. For one thing it wasn’t cool to go chasing after girls who were younger than we were. The object of lust and fancy was older girls and women, even if they were unobtainable. Girls our own age and younger were treated with disdain.
Except my feelings about Tara were different. One day I was waiting for Peter to get ready and I saw this school photo of her, with the waves of her brown hair all combed and her eyes full of sparkle. I stole the photo there and then. I kept it in the bottom of my sock drawer and took it out from time to time. It wasn’t the only photo of her I lifted from their house. They must have known where all those photos were going. Must have known.
Like I say, I kept it all secret. But I looked forward to going to school every day because I knew I would see her. School, which before all this was a pile of dung, had become a place of golden light. I was too clever to let on. Of course. I wasn’t about to have Peter or anyone having a laugh at my expense.
There were plenty of opportunities to be near her. I watched her blossom every day. No one knew. I don’t think she knew. I never let her see me watching.
One day in the schoolyard she asked me to look after her shoulder bag while she went off and did something. When she’d gone I nipped behind the bike-sheds and had a rummage through the bag. I found a comb with a couple of strands of her hair in it. I kept it. A pencil. Kept it. One or two objects like that. I wrote things with that pencil. I wrote I love you, just to see how the words would flow out of her pencil. I kept it, that pencil, in a box with a lock on it, like it was the finger bone of a medieval saint.
I was learning the guitar back then. I wrote some shit songs about Tara. Really shit songs. You wouldn’t want them to see the light of day. No.
I noticed that Tara didn’t seem to have close friends. Not like most girls of that age. It wasn’t that she was unpopular—just the opposite. She held people off. Didn’t seem to need them.
But she did want to come with us, wherever we were going. Peter resisted at first, but I talked him round. Peter was always easy to run. I told him that if Tara came along, we’d have more chance with the girls.
“ ’Owz that work?” he’d say.
I told him that if girls see you with another girl they feel less threatened. At the time we had a project to try and get into any girl’s pants who came along. But I knew we were coming on too desperate.
“ ’Owd’ya mean?” he’d ask.
It was like he hadn’t thought through any of these things. I told him it made us look less like we were on the prowl and they would drop their guard. Plus she might talk to them and that way we would have an in. “Christ you’re slow, Pete,” I told him. “So bloody slow.”
Anyway, he bought it. Tara started to tag along. I was still playing it cool, and the cooler I was with her, the more she got interested in me. But I couldn’t stand it. I was dying in love. Dying. I had dreams about marrying her and the two of us flying over the motorway at night. Bright-colored dreams. It was making me ill. After over a year of this I told Peter.
Well, he hit the roof.
“I want to go out wi’ your sister.”
“Eh? ’Owd’ya mean?”
“Tara. I want to ask her out.”
“ ’Owz that work?”
“Your sister. I want to ask her. Out. On a date.”
“Hahaha!”
“I’m serious, Peter. I want to go out with Tara. I think about her all the time.”
His face reddened. “Fuck off.”
“I’m serious, mate.”
“Fuck off! You ain’t going out with my fucking sister, no way!”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cos I know what you want to do with her, that’s why fucking not!”
He wouldn’t speak to me for three days. Then I went round there and reasoned with him. “If your best mate, who you trust, can’t go out with Tara, then who can? And someone will, I said, ’cos she’s gorgeous, and it’s only a matter of time before some skanky, sleazy townie with jelly oil on his hair and a sporty set of wheels comes waving his top gear dick and—”
“Shaddup,” he said quietly. “Shut up.”
Anyway, he came round.
I asked her out. I made out like it was all nothing. A trip to the flicks. Can’t remember what was showing. Did she want to go?
“With you and Pete?”
My heart was slapping inside my rib cage. My tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. “Nachuschoonme.”
“What?”
“Just you and me.”
She looked startled. Big brown eyes wide, all over me. Raked me. Her eyelashes fluttered once. She smiled and looked to the side, away from me. “Yeh.”
So that was it. We were courting, as the old folk call it. There is a difference. Difference between courting a girl and just trying to get your leg over. I think there is, anyway.
We went to the flicks and I never saw anything of what was on the screen, even though I had my eyes wide open. All I could sense was Tara in the next seat. The smell of her hair. She wasn’t my first girlfriend. I knew the ropes. But I was paralyzed. Then we held hands and I thought I would float clean out of my seat.
Outside the cinema I kissed her. At that moment if she’d asked me to walk over the edge of a cliff, I swear to you I would have done it. And from that day on it was like she’d put a hex on me. I couldn’t look at another girl and I didn’t much like other boys looking at her, either. More than a couple of times Pete had to hose me down if I thought some other lad was looking at her a bit strong.
One time I decked a lad who touched her ass. It was at a disco we’d sneaked into. That’s how it is when you’re that age, isn’t it? You have to stand up for your girl. Another time a bloke was getting a bit friendly with her and I stomped him. Pete had to get between us and I caught Pete one on his jaw. The bloke was taken off to hospital by paramedics and his parents wanted to press charges, but nothing came of it. Only Tara said if I didn’t stop she’d leave me and I knew she meant it, so I had to sit on my jealousy, which was probably no bad thing.
We started getting gigs and she used to watch me when I was up on stage. She’d stand at the front with her arms folded, looking up at me. She was telling the other girls I was hers. I loved that.
Anyway, she fell pregnant, and that was what the problem was all about. Whether to keep it.
Oh, I knew what I wanted. There was no doubt in my mind, none at all. I wanted for us to keep it, to get married, to have half a dozen sprogs all looking just like her. Six little girls if I had my way. The future was all settled in my mind. House, wife, kids, garden, dogs. What else?
That wasn’t how Tara saw it. Pete was on the verge of buggering off to university. He was going to complete his studies, and he’d been offer
ed a place at the University of Warwick. That wasn’t for me; I’d staked a future on my guitar, but Tara had an idea she might follow him down the college road. She was smart, and she found studies easy. She said she wanted to do what Pete was planning.
“And what then?” I asked her. “There’s two years to go before that, and three years there is five. What then after that?”
“Who knows?” she said. “I don’t like to plan that far ahead.”
“But how you gonna do all that? You’ve a kid growing inside you. How you going to do that when we’ve got a kid?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “That’s just it.”
She never came right out and said so but she wanted to get rid of it. She didn’t want to be tied down at the age of sixteen. I called her a killer and a butcher and all sorts. Stupid, ignorant, ugly things I wish I’d never said to her. But I was stupid and ignorant and ugly. Remember, I was only a kid myself. I wasn’t thinking with my head, even though it seemed like I was at the time.
She cried. We had fierce rows about it.
Then I drove her up to the Outwoods one day in my old banger. We often went up there to be alone together. The bluebells were flowering and I thought if we strolled through the woods holding hands it would all work itself out. But it all flared up again and I must have bellowed bad things at her, and she cried and ran off into the woods.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find her. I thought she’d come out again: I mean, how was she going to get home? I scoured the place until dusk and then I started to get worried, so I drove to a phone box and called her home. Her mum answered and said she’d been home a couple of hours and that she’d gone out again. I guessed she was sitting there right next to the phone.
I called the next day. I called lots of times but Tara was never in. I went round there myself but her dad said she was out and he’d tell her to call me. I knew she was just refusing to see me, because Peter told me so.
The next thing I knew was that she’d returned to the Outwoods, and she’d disappeared.
SO THE POLICE COME and ask me what I know. And I tell them what I know, and they go away. Then I go round to Peter’s house. His mum and dad have always been like second parents to me—they’re worried sick, as am I. They want to know what the arguments have been about. I can’t tell them the truth about the pregnancy—Tara hasn’t told them that. What’s more, she’s not yet sixteen and Dell would probably want to skin me alive, anyway, when he finds out. So I say it was about another boy she’s been seeing.
Peter looks at me. He don’t believe that for a second.
So I say okay not someone she’s been seeing but someone who has been making eyes at her, and Peter buys that, knowing how jealous I get.
Then after a couple of days a search party is organized by the police, and we go up there to be part of it. Dell is shocking pale and Mary is shaking visibly and Peter is tight-lipped and we all go up there. And the police are out like blackberries in September and they’ve drafted in dozens more from neighboring forces: dog handlers, the lot; and there are friends and neighbors up there, too, with sticks to beat the ground and rake the bushes, and I feel this huge weight of a boulder in my guts. And I can tell everyone is looking at me and talking behind their hands, you know, he’s the boyfriend, he’s her chap. Christ, everyone is there, complete strangers come to help now that her picture has been in the local paper and on the local evening television news. Hundreds of people and we all move forward in a steady line, spread out across the Outwoods, marching between the trees and tramping the dying bluebells.
They find her bike.
I hear a copper telling another copper that it looks like someone has tried to hide her bicycle in the scrub, in some undergrowth, and he looks up and he glances over at me and he wipes his finger under his nose and walks away. And I know; I know at that minute exactly where they’re going to take this.
We walk in slow formation through the Outwoods. Every inch, every bush, every depression in the earth, behind every rock. We keep going until the twilight comes and then the police stand us down. They say they’ll carry on searching with torches, but they want us to go home. Dell drives. He gives me a lift home. Mary in the front seat, me and Peter in the back. In silence all the way.
I don’t sleep a wink that night. I keep snapping awake. My dad is snoring in the next room. There’s no one else to talk to. My mother died when I was nine. I sit up all night trying to work out where she might have gone, but it’s the same question Dell and Mary keep hitting me with: where might she have gone?
I don’t have a single answer.
Next morning I’m sleeping on the sofa when there’s a hammering on the door. Dad has gone to work and there’s only me to answer. I go to the door in my boxers. Police again. Would I come down to the station?
I get dressed and they drive me to the station. I’m under eighteen so they can’t ask me anything, they say, until I have a lawyer with me. Lawyer, I say, I don’t need no lawyer. Do I mind getting the fingerprinting out of the way? No, I don’t mind, here, do it now. I’ve got nothing to hide.
It’s an hour before this lawyer arrives. Woman. I don’t like her much. She’s got this long jaw and her teeth are like too big for her mouth. Face like a fucking racehorse. Shergar. All she does is nod at me, no kiss your ass or nothing. Just sets out a notepad and pen on the table. She sees from the ink on my fingertips that they’ve already started. There’s this copper sitting beside me, bloke with a big wart just beside his nose. He’s been all right, told me not to worry, brought me cups of tea.
She looks at the copper. “You shouldn’t have begun this before I arrived,” she says sourly.
Copper smiles at me and scratches an eyebrow, as if it’s all a joke between him and me.
“He’s a minor,” says the lawyer.
“Give me a break,” says the copper. “We just got a few things out of the way.”
“Has he said anything?”
“No.”
“Excuse me,” I puts in fiercely. “I’m here.”
She turns to me and through the narrow gap between her two rows of teeth she says, “Have you told the police anything?”
“Only what they asked me,” I says. “I haven’t got nothing to hide.”
She looks at the copper again and he just folds his arms.
Two new coppers come into the room, plainclothes. They don’t even look at me. They introduce themselves to my lawyer as West Midlands CID. I’m trying to think where I’ve heard stuff about West Midlands CID. Something to do with corruption charges.
“I’m Julia Langley,” my lawyer says through her overcrowded mouth. I think it’s funny how some people’s names ring against their own teeth.
The two newcomers settle into the plastic chairs around the table. One of the CID men is so big he can only just squeeze into the chair. He sits back from the table, the seams of his trousers almost bursting round his fat thighs. He rocks back in the chair with his legs apart and the fat fingers of this huge paw digging in under his collar, as if it’s too tight for him. He still hasn’t looked me in the eye.
The other one is most definitely looking me in the eye. He’s way overfocused on me. And he looks sad. I mean sad, like he might at any moment burst into tears. Is he faking it? I don’t know. He’s kind of scruffy. An old raincoat with a shabby cardigan underneath. He’s wearing a tie but the knot is tiny, pulled way too tight, and the collar of his shirt even I can see is dirty. His face is wreathed in lines. I’ve never seen a bloke with so many lines on his face: brow corrugated, wrinkles all round his eyes, lines circling his mouth like ripples from a pond, a big cleft in his chin. His face is a ruin. He takes his eyes off me very briefly to nod at the uniformed copper who’s been with me for the past hour. The uniformed copper leans forward and switches on a tape machine and says my name aloud and what time it is.
“Hello, Richie,” says the man with the lined face. His voice is very gentle. It’s so gentle it scares the
fucking liver right out of me. A gentle copper. Really, I want to shit. “I’m Dave Williams. Are you all right?”
I look at my lawyer. She just clamps her teeth together like a horse and stares back at me. “Yeh,” I say. “Yeh.”
“They treating you okay?”
“Yeh.”
“That’s good, because I don’t want anyone to give you a hard time. We just want to get to the bottom of things.”
“Right.”
“Richie,” he says, and the lines corrugate deeper on his brow, “we’re pretty much sure we know how it happened.”
“How what happened?”
“Look. I’m going to be dead straight. It really is better if it comes from you.”
“If what comes from me?”
The big fat fucker suddenly coughs and leans forward, fingering his collar again like he might want to rip it off his neck. He says nothing.
“Richie, I want to help you.”
“Who are you?” I say.
“I told you, Richie. I’m Dave and I’m from CID. You know what CID is, don’t you?”
“You think I’ve done something to her, don’t you?”
“We have her bike, Richie. It has your fingerprints all over it.”
I look at my lawyer like, Is this a joke? She just makes a little nod, encouraging me to answer. I go cold and then I feel a wave of heat roll over me. “Well, that would be because I ride it with her all the time.”
“You have a car,” says the fat copper, looking at me for the first time. He has an incredible, high reedy voice for such a fat bloke. He sounds like he’s nine years old, except there’s menace in his voice. “Why would you need a bike?”
“For cycling,” I says. “And by the way, I gave her the bike. It was my bike and I fixed it up for her and gave it to her. The chain was always coming off. It would have my fingerprints on it, wouldn’t it?”
The other one, Dave, the sad one, leans in. “We know she was pregnant.”
“What?” I say. “What? How could you know that?”
“Was it your child she was having, Richie?”
