‘Thanks,’ the boy said and smiled at her and then looked at Sam. ‘I’ll explain it all, really I will. I want to get rid of it all anyway. I’ve got better things to do now than deal with the sort of stuff I’ve had to. Get rid of it all — that’d be good. A drink then? The pub on the next corner’s all right. Now he isn’t around.’ And he produced a smile of such happiness that in spite of himself Sam smiled back.
‘Oh, well, then,’ he said. ‘I suppose so. If it’s all right with you, Hattie? You’re awfully tired.’ He put up one hand and touched her face fleetingly.
‘I’ve got my second wind,’ she said, and indeed she felt quite different now; tired, yes, aching in bones and muscles, but not exhausted as she had been. She was rather high, if anything, feeling almost as though she’d taken a stimulant. A little more stimulant in the form of alcohol could be very agreeable, she thought, and got to her feet. ‘I’ll do for a while yet. If we don’t hang around. Shall we go then?’
‘It’s one of the few pubs left in the area that hasn’t been tarted up into a juke-boxed game-machined glitter hole,’ Vivian said, looking round at the shabby old bar and its dull lights with a judicious air. ‘I quite like it. Now.’
‘Are you such a connoisseur?’ Sam said, unable to keep the irony out of his voice.
‘Most people my age are,’ the boy said and shot a glance at him. ‘It’s been a year or two since people of my age didn’t use pubs. Now we’re the ones who use them most.’
‘Not this one,’ Hattie said, looking round. There were only a few people there, most of them dispirited-looking men in their forties and older, sitting hunched over pints at grubby tables and muttering at each other, and Vivian nodded.
‘That’s why I like it,’ he said. ‘I told you that. All the other pubs where the noise and games are, they’re like fourth-form rooms. And a bit younger.’
‘Enough chit chat,’ Sam said. ‘Mrs Clements is tired and I’ve better things to do than sit here and admire the faded wallpaper and the dirt ground into the floors. What were you doing hanging around the staff common room tonight?’
The boy put down his glass and sighed. ‘Yes, well, it’s a long story.’
‘However long, tell it. But you don’t have to string it out for the fun of it. I’m not buying after this round and never you think it.’
‘I didn’t bring you here to drink,’ the boy said with great dignity. ‘I promised to explain and I will. It — it starts a long time ago.’
‘So, it starts a long time ago. Spit it out.’
The boy was silent for a moment and Sam opened his mouth to speak, but Hattie put a hand on his and he subsided. The boy noticed and looked at her and smiled briefly.
‘OK. I was in the third form when it began. Not much good to anyone. Miserable really. So I thought he was being nice to me when it started.’
‘Who?’
‘Him. Collop.’ It was like a swear word in his mouth and Hattie drew back, a little alarmed at the venom in him.
‘What did he do?’ Sam was very still and not irritable at all now.
‘Oh, nothing at first! Not a thing. He was kind. He said he liked my essays, said I could write, said I had a great future. Got me to try my hand at short stories for him. Said they were marvellous. Oh, you never heard such stuff. And I believed every sodding word of it.’
‘It could have been true,’ Hattie said and he looked at her, his face alight with scorn.
‘For Christ’s sake, at thirteen? I’d have had to be bloody Tolstoy to merit the sort of things he used to say. But because I was only thirteen and thought myself no end of a magical type, I chose to believe him. It was what I’d always expected, you see.’ He looked at Sam then, as though he expected him to understand better. ‘When I was very small I’d thought about how it would be later, when I was grown. Somehow I’d get away on my own, and make enough money to have a place of my own to live in, and the only way I could think of doing that was writing books. So I had it all imagined, all ready, and he sort of — he walked in on my imaginings as though he knew what they were, and he took them over. Took them away from me.’ He was paler now, and his hands, clenched on the table, showed white patches over the knuckles. ‘I believed him because it was what I wanted to hear.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘It got more. He wanted me to come and see him at his house. Said it’d be easier to talk to me there like a person rather than a child.’ He looked a little startled then. ‘It was the same as you said but I — it came out different. I only just realized, you know that? It was the same as you said. Only I suppose you said it because you meant it. He didn’t.’
‘What did he mean?’
There was another silence and Sam said again gently, ‘What did he mean?’
‘Parties,’ the boy said at length. ‘Parties. It was — well — incredible …’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, marvellous. I try to remember how they made me feel, but I can’t. I can’t make the feelings come back. I can remember what I felt at the time, though. So grown-up — you can’t imagine how grown-up! These parties were so — lots of food and drink, of course, and then sometimes other things. Smoked a bit of pot and so on, not that I liked that much.’ He laughed then, sounding for the first time like a boy. ‘It made me so sleepy, I missed all that was going on. I used to go out like a light and wake up and find the best bits were over. The music and then — Anyway, I stopped doing that. No one minded. That was great too, I thought. No one minded what you did.’ He sighed again, softly. ‘No one said you had to eat or jeered at you if you didn’t, and no one laughed when you went and got a different sort of drink and even if you were sick no one seemed to care. It was all — I wish I could feel all that again.’
He turned his head to look at Hattie. ‘That’s the awful thing about it. It was all dreadful, I know that now. I was just being — well, softened up, I suppose. But I thought it was wonderful. There’ll never be another summer like it.’
‘All summer? You were going to parties at Collop’s house all summer?’
‘Oh, not just that. There were evenings out as well. How very devilish that felt, being in a pub, just turned fourteen! How he got away with it, and so near the school too, I’ll never know. But he did. And there were theatres and concerts and — it was like falling asleep and waking up where it was perfect. There was school all day of course, and I had to go back home and see her sometimes, you know how it is, but there was always the next party to think of. It was magic, just magic.’
‘Who else was at the parties?’ Hattie asked, and some of the animation that had filled him went and he lifted his brows and shook his head.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Different people all the time. Young blokes, people about nineteen or twenty or whatever; actors some of them, and I think there were people from the army. There were a lot of jokes about guardsmen. I remember those. Some of them were a bit — well, creepy. I didn’t like them. They were the sort that vanish into the middle of the evening and then everyone would laugh at them when they came back, and me, poor sap, had no notion of what it was all about.’
‘What was it all about?’ Sam said. ‘When did you find out?’
‘Look, let’s be clear in this,’ Viv said, sitting up very straight. ‘I wasn’t stupid, I sort of knew what it was. I mean, we saw dirty films and I liked that, and there was a lot of mucking about. The older ones and us, we’d — well —’ He went brick-red. ‘There was kissing and that. But I didn’t really know, you see. I didn’t understand about all of it.’
‘I see,’ Sam said in a colourless tone, and Hattie sat and stared at the boy, trying to comprehend what it had been like for him, even smaller then than he was now, sitting with older men, watching pornographic films, kissing and that …
‘But it wasn’t wrong, do you know what I mean? There was no harm in any of that. If people did things, went away and did things, it was because they wanted to. No one was ever pushed or anything. I
f I liked being hugged by someone and kissed a bit and if he liked it if I — if I touched him, well it was me doing it. No one else told me to. It was sort of normal really. Do you know what I mean? Can you understand what I mean?’
‘I’m trying to,’ Hattie said after a moment. ‘It isn’t easy.’
‘I know. People like you always think it’s — You may say you don’t care what people do as long as it’s in private and you get all upset if anyone says you’re prejudiced against gay people, but you’d rather not think about what they really do. You’d rather not know of anything except the romantic parts, the falling-in-love thing. That makes them seem the same as straights. But they’re not. Not always.’
‘Straight people, as you call them, don’t usually involve thirteen-year-olds in their sex lives,’ Sam said. ‘Do they?’
‘Oh, don’t they?’ Viv said, and laughed, a jeering little sound. ‘Going by what I read in the papers more straight people do things to kids than gay ones do.’
‘Fair enough,’ Sam said. ‘But whoever does it, straight or gay, it’s regarded as anything but normal.’
‘Well, for all that, the parties I went to then were normal. There was nothing really wrong in any of it. It was nice naughty, not wrong naughty; even if there were a few people younger than me — fourteen, I was by then — and a few more a bit older — sixteen or so — there was no harm in it. I thought it was a bit odd there weren’t more from school. But I found out later on he was too careful for that. Never had more than one person at a time from the Foundation, except once or twice —’
He faltered, stopped and then started again, a little louder this time. ‘But it really was all right there, because it was all normal.’
‘I won’t argue with you,’ Sam said and the boy shook his head and cried, ‘But it was!’ and someone looked around from the bar to the table in the corner where they were sitting and Sam said quickly, ‘Hush!’ and he subsided.
‘If there’d been anything half wrong about it I’d have felt bad,’ Vivian said eventually. ‘That’s what I’m trying to explain. To start with it was all great. And he kept on saying how I was a good writer —’ He took a deep breath. ‘And then it all changed.’
Neither of them said anything, just sitting and waiting for him and he swallowed half the contents of his glass in a gulp and then set both hands tidily on the table in front of him and started again.
‘He told me there was someone he knew, a friend who could help me with my writing. Said he had connections in publishing and that. So I said that was great and he said would I like to meet him and I said I would so he said he’d fix it. He said he’d pick me up and take me to his friend’s flat …’ His voice dwindled away, and he sat staring blankly at the facing wall and then started again, louder now. ‘It was halfway through the autumn term,’ he said. ‘The first night I thought I needed a coat to go out because it was cold. It’s funny how you remember things like that.’
Again they were all silent, both knowing without consulting each other that the time had come to leave him to speak as and when he chose, and he seemed aware of their patience and was grateful for it. Because he looked at them both and then smiled at Hattie, a little shakily.
‘The thing is, I didn’t know, but he — he was a sort of — well, fixer for this other bloke. Collop just got people to his parties and he’d come and keep out of sight and look us over and he’d choose the ones he wanted and after a while Collop’d fix it up. And that was it. And the reason I was at the school the night of the rehearsal — well, he hadn’t stopped. I stopped going to the parties after that first night I went to Limehouse. I was never asked again. He had done what he was supposed to do, Collop, getting me there, and that was the end for him. After that he started laughing at me, said I couldn’t write for toffee, said I was stupid, told the others my name ought to be pronounced Bottom instead of Botham, the way I say it, the way the cricketer says it, said they ought to call me Arse to help them remember it …’
‘You’re jumping about a bit,’ Sam ventured. ‘Why were you at school on the night of the Shrew rehearsal, did you say?’
‘Because he was still doing it!’ Vivian said impatiently. ‘Can’t you understand? He was still getting these young ones and having parties to find people for the other bloke. And there was this boy in the fourth; well, I found out it was happening to him. He liked it, of course, just the way I used to, so there was no use talking to him, trying to get him not to go. He’d think I was jealous or something, or just a misery. No, I had to tell him —Collop — that I knew what he was doing and say it had to stop. I wouldn’t let him go on with it. I’d tell someone. That was what I was going to do. Dilly, you see’ — he looked at Hattie, and his eyes were very bright — ‘Dilly’s changed things for me. She likes me. Just me. The way I am. She likes me.’
‘She might even love you,’ Hattie said, smiling at him, and he ducked his head, shy suddenly.
‘Well, anyway, that was why I was there. And then the acid happened and I thought, Maybe the kid’s done it. The little one, I mean. Maybe he put the acid in Collop’s bottle because he’s already been — because he’s hurt him already, and he’s not the sort of wimp I was who just let it go on and on. Maybe, I thought, he’s done something like what I did with the pepper, and that was why I wanted to hear what happened at the meeting. In case you’d all found out it was him, the little one — and don’t ask me who it is because I shan’t tell you — I thought maybe if he had and you all knew, I could warn him, cover up for him …’ He shrugged. ‘It all sounds so stupid now, doesn’t it? But I meant well. I was just so — I wanted it to be better for Jamie — for the other kid. I wanted to do what I wished someone had done for me, right at the beginning.’
‘The panic attack in the lavatory,’ Hattie said slowly. ‘The day of the autumn fair when you were ill in the loo and I found you.’
He looked at her and then nodded. ‘That was when I found out about this — the other boy. I saw and I heard — it made me feel so dreadful I — I was still sort of involved then, you see. And I — this is hard to explain this bit, because I’m not sure I understand properly myself — but I didn’t want the other kid to get hurt and at the same time I knew what it was like for him. How there were good bits as well as the awful part.’
‘Let’s get this clear,’ Sam said, and he leaned forward. ‘Forgive me if I step on your toes at any point, Viv, but believe me it won’t be deliberate. You’re saying that Martin Collop procured you for someone else? Someone who abused you?’
‘Yes,’ Viv said, and didn’t look at him.
‘And that abuse went on for a long time. In the man’s home.’
‘He’s got a flat. A fancy flat, down by Limehouse.’ The boy’s face cracked in a painful grin. ‘I thought it was marvellous, the first time I saw it. Very fancy. It’s filthy really, but I thought it was marvellous, all black and purple and silver …’
‘And then you discovered another boy was being put in your place. And you were upset for him. And upset for yourself, because although you hated it, and although you knew you didn’t want it to go on there were parts of it you liked …’
Viv’s face seemed to crumple. ‘I didn’t like it exactly. It was just that’ — his voice dropped to a whisper — ‘he was so bloody clever. He knew how to make — to make things happen to me that felt exciting. I felt sick after, but when it was going on it was marvellous. That was the worst thing about it.’
Sam nodded, seeming to understand. ‘And then there was Dilly. And with her to help you, you decided to stop it all for good.’
‘I knew I could, now there’s Dilly. She makes me feel — Oh, it’s just knowing she’s around, you know? She’s Dilly.’
Sam leaned back in his chair and his face fell into shadow. ‘Yes,’ he said in a flat tone. ‘I know what you mean. It’s called being in love, you’ll find.’
‘I know,’ the boy said, and looked at Hattie. ‘I did try to help the little kid, you know? I
did want to. I thought that’d make it a bit better.’
‘What would make it really better,’ Hattie said very deliberately, ‘is telling us who this other man is. The one with the flat in Limehouse.’
He seemed to pull back in his chair, and shook his head hard. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘He can’t hurt you,’ Sam said. ‘Not if you tell us what he did. You were under age when he seduced you. Dammit, you still are. He did seduce you, didn’t he? No one will blame you.’
He shook his head, stubborn now. ‘I can’t say. I don’t — I can’t.’
‘He can’t hurt you if he’s caught and taken to prison,’ Hattie said. ‘He’s the criminal, not you.’
Again the boy shook his head, angrily this time. ‘Shut up! I won’t say,’ and there was a note of hysteria in his voice, and Hattie put out one hand and held on to him.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. No more now. Look, Viv, you’d better get home. We’ll — Mr Chanter and I’ll think about what you’ve said and decide where we go from here.’
‘I’ll deny it all,’ Viv said, and looked at them with his head up. ‘If you go to the police with all this, I’ll deny it. I’m only telling you, I’ll never tell anyone else.’
‘All right,’ Sam said unexpectedly, getting to his feet. ‘All right. We’ll leave it at that. You’ve kept your side of the deal, told us why you were at school. That you didn’t put the acid in the bottle but were afraid someone else had. We’ll believe you. There’s just one thing I have to ask you, Viv. Was Matterson one of the people Collop procured for his friend?’
Vivian sat very still and stared at him and his face whitened as though an icy wind had blown across it, and he opened his mouth to speak, and then shook his head and got up and, clutching his face with one hand, ran for the lavatory.
‘These kids,’ the barman said, looking across indulgently as the door flapped behind him. ‘Can’t ’old their booze, can they? And ’e’s only ’ad a pint!’
Dangerous Things Page 33
