Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead

by George Lincoln

  ‘She was always so happy to be alive, so full of life,’ Susan replied with the love and certainty only a mother could.

  David was not a monster. He vaguely recalled what a loving mother might think, what they might choose to believe and what they would want to cling on to for years afterwards as some sort of coping mechanism. They say the truth hurts and so often it really does. Susan was just trying to get through each day.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Officer?’ Susan enquired as David stood and walked towards the door.

  ‘Thank you for allowing me into what must be such a sacred space for you,’ he deflected.

  He couldn’t discuss details of the case at this stage, and she knew that. He had noticed the Christian adornments on the walls downstairs and thought she might appreciate the use of the word ‘sacred’. Total victim care to the end.

  As he drove back to the station, a feeling of dissatisfaction seemed to linger. Sally had been given every opportunity to succeed in life. She had an adoptive mother who loved her very much, despite the crack-addicted womb from where she had first emerged into the world. She showed promise at school and had a lovely home life with white walls and white bed linen. She was loved so much even the fucking air in her bedroom had sentimental value. How dare she throw all of this away. Suicide was for losers, weaklings who gave up. Although a small part of him admired the intensely grotesque way she chose to end it. That took balls.

  He returned her book to the evidence room. He’d crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s. There were no witnesses to any of the stories Sally wrote. Her grotesque suicide set a precedent at Kings College Hospital for any other woman in the future who decided she needed a new place to store her CD collection. He’d visited the scene. A far cry from the loving home Susan had provided her with. The cold, hard feel of an institutional bedroom. Grilled windows. Polished steel mirrors. CCTV may have shown a lackadaisical approach to patient care but no suggestion any third party was involved in her death, or indeed any other story she wrote.

  But that death was something.

  David read the medical report over and over again. The severity of stabbing depends on the point of entry, which organ has been injured, shape and sharpness of the penetrating object and finally is the penetrating object still in the wound or has it been taken out? In most cases, if the stabbing object penetrates through the chest wall, hurting intercostal blood vessels, you can expect to see pneumothorax or hemopneumothorax.

  David no longer felt like an interloper, prying into people’s deeply disturbing and tragic moments.

  These were now his moments.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lloyd seemed like he had done this before as he led the way through some undergrowth, towards a large brown building with no windows. Nobody would see them behind here. The boy remembered wondering why only he had been asked along that day when all his other friends were off school for the summer as well. They all wanted a go on that bike as much as he did. Lloyd was one of the older boys on the estate. The boy knew nobody would mess with him when he was with Lloyd because he was bigger than everybody else and didn’t even have to worry about getting kicked out of school any more since he had left for good that summer.

  The boy felt safe around Lloyd.

  All the local kids knew this as the ‘waterworks’, an old water treatment centre at the end of the street the boy lived in. Years later they put great big steel railings all around it because of the constant graffiti and property damage. Boys will be boys.

  They reached a small verge and Lloyd stopped walking, turning to the boy and gesturing for him to stop. The boy looked around for something, anything. Just grass and plenty of high bushes between them and anything else.

  ‘Do you know what big boys do?’

  The boy didn’t really understand the question Lloyd had just asked him. All he cared about was having a go on Lloyd’s silver Mongoose BMX. It was brand new, and Lloyd had said he could have a go on it if he did something for him first. All the other kids would be so jealous. His mum had promised him a new bike for his birthday which was coming up soon but that seemed like ages away. And he knew they couldn’t afford a Mongoose so it would probably be something rubbish anyway.

  ‘I’m going to show you something. If you run away or shout, I’ll kick your little fucking head in.’

  The boy nodded his acceptance of these terms. He remembered whenever they played football here at the waterworks, his mum always used to tell him off for wandering over towards the buildings. He never really understood why. Lloyd began to undo his belt and unzipped his flies. He pulled out what seemed like the biggest cock the boy had ever seen.

  ‘I want you to hold this for me,’ said Lloyd, his tone a little gentler this time.

  The boy really didn’t understand how this had anything to do with the bike. Lloyd began stroking this giant fucking cock gently up and down with his hand, staring at the boy intensely as he did so. The boy felt awkward. Lloyd was his friend. He always used to come hang around with the younger kids when they were playing on the swings or playing football. He always seemed quite calm and friendly but this felt different. The boy wasn’t sure what was happening.

  ‘Are you going to hold it or not?’

  ‘Not if you’re going to piss on me, no,’ was the boy’s main concern.

  There was this boy at school who pissed all over himself a few days ago. There was no way the boy was going to let that happen to him. His mum would’ve killed him.

  ‘I promise I won’t piss on you,’ the older boy laughed, still stroking his giant cock gently up and down. The boy had seen cocks like this in some magazines they found behind the shops a few weeks ago. All these naked women lying there with their tits and fannies out, some guy with a massive cock dangling in their face. His mum was really angry with him when they got caught going through the newsagent’s bins; he’d been grounded for a few days.

  By now Lloyd had sat down on the grass verge, lying on his back. He was still stroking that massive cock and looking straight at the boy.

  ‘All you have to do is hold it for a bit, that’s all.’

  The boy felt a bit more at ease now that Lloyd was sitting on the floor. If he did decide to kick his head in, at least the boy had time to run while he fastened his trousers back up.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Promise. Then you can have a go on my Mongoose.’

  The boy sensed something wasn’t quite right but didn’t see how this could do him any harm. His mum was always telling him not to wander off with strange men but Lloyd wasn’t a stranger; he was his mate. Slowly he reached over and put his hand around Lloyd’s cock. It felt really hard. Bigger than anything he had felt in his hand before. Lloyd told him to hold it tighter, so he did. Lloyd seemed to like this a lot and lay back on the grass. He told the boy to start moving his hand up and down, slowly.

  The boy’s house was really close to here. He usually played out most of the daytime during the school holidays because it was boring just sitting at home. There was this other boy who lived a few doors down from their house called Shaun. Shaun’s dad was really loud and would just stand at the front door shouting as loud as he could until Shaun eventually came running home. Sometimes this would go on for half an hour or so. His mum said he was a nice man but didn’t realise how loud he was. The boy didn’t really like going in their house because it always felt really cramped. They all shared a bedroom with each other, brothers and sisters together. It was a bit weird. Years later Shaun got arrested for having sex with his younger sister.

  ‘Faster, do it faster,’ Lloyd said.

  Eventually it stopped. The boy couldn’t really remember how or why. Just like he said he would, Lloyd let the boy ride around on his Mongoose for a bit. He rode it up to the park where Shaun and his other friends were and gave them all two fingers as he rode past. He brought it back and handed it to Lloyd, who was sitting waiting outside the boy’s house.

  ‘If you ever tell anyb
ody about this, I’ll kill you.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Total victim care. This was the Met’s commitment to giving each and every victim of crime the proper care they deserved. Regular updates. Professional handling of their case. The legal process explained to them in plain English. Support when needed in attending court. Video evidence played to a jury to prevent the victim having to face his or her attacker in court. Financial support to cover travelling expenses and any loss of earnings when victims were needed in court. Rehearsals, familiarisation visits, requests for wigs and gowns to be removed. Compensation for any injuries sustained, physical or otherwise. Total victim care.

  David soon realised his role was far more consuming than anything he had previously been involved in. Sure, 7/7 was a bad day for London. He’d spent twenty-four hours on duty that terrible day, helping to recover what remained of the Aldgate tube bomb victims. The smell of cooked human flesh is not something you ever forget. Unidentifiable pieces of a person’s dreams and ambitions scattered all over the twisted iron tracks.

  This type of experience tends to focus the mind on the job in hand.

  But then you carry on. It’s what you get paid for. Abuse victims were something altogether different to David. Everything is hidden. The grooming, planning and preparation involved all goes on in secret. The degrading acts always take place behind closed doors. The years of silence. The threats, the fear, the stigma. Everything so wrapped up in mystery, sometimes forever. What doesn’t kill you leaves a big fucking scar across your psyche. You can spend years in therapy and still go home and cry yourself to sleep every day. But only if you choose to be a victim.

  David hated the victim culture. Nobody accepts any responsibility any more. Everybody lining up to pour their heart and soul out so they can spend the rest of their lives believing that nothing is their fault. Jimmy fucking Saville. Thousands of people all of a sudden feel compelled to become a victim the second that fucker dropped dead.

  Really? The man in the shell suit with a cigar and silver comb-over wasn’t quite entirely honourable?

  That must have come as a huge shock to so many. But not while he was alive. That would involve courage. That would require facing head-on the person who supposedly ruined your life. Best to wait until they’re all dead and then play the victim card with impunity. David wasn’t a victim of anything. He despised the weakness and indignity of it all. We all fuck up. Accept this and pick yourself up. Make different choices. Don’t pass that choice onto someone else, some ‘other’ that you can then blame for the rest of your pathetic existence.

  Choose not to be a victim like Clare. A fat fuck if David ever saw one. He tried to work out the point at which the red blood vessels in her face would’ve last been beneath the surface of her dry, broken skin. A face so ravaged by internal suffering and anxiety it had forgotten which parts were supposed to smile and which parts were supposed to cry. Clare was begging for a terminal illness to end her misery. And if she wasn’t, she fucking well should be.

  Clare had grown up in Ulster, near the Falls Road which is a predominantly Catholic area. Clare had been encouraged by her uncle to meet him in an alleyway numerous times between the ages of eight and thirteen, whereby he had violated her orally, anally and vaginally many times. The abuse only stopped when she moved away with her family to England. Clare never reported it to anybody and instead just slowly disintegrated into what now sat before David in the victim interview suite forty years later.

  Clare was a fucking shipwreck, lost at sea with no hope of survival. Alcoholism had ravaged her skin and mental capacity; poor diet had taken her teeth and what may have once been a waistline. Years of chronic depression had taken whatever else had once existed of Clare’s personality. Clare could barely speak a sentence without breaking down into floods of tears, which made taking her statement a rather arduous process, not helped by her thick Ulster accent which David hadn’t had time to fully acclimatize to yet. How the fuck can ‘hand’, ‘hair’ and ‘wear’ sound the same?

  ‘So why did you never report this matter before, Clare?’

  ‘I’m a Catholic,’ came the pitiful response.

  David forgot he was relatively lucky. As a white male he’d always enjoyed the privilege of police support growing up in England. Things weren’t so simple over the water for Catholics at the height of the Troubles. Nobody ever thinks about the consequences that has for an entire generation of victims whose cries went unheard because they came from the wrong side of the divide. They could definitely teach the English a thing or two about internalising things, thought David.

  The uncle was now dead. Clare only came forward after she heard he’d died recently through a family member. Clare thought that with all the publicity surrounding the Jimmy Saville enquiry, now would be a good time to report what happened to her.

  ‘We will make some enquiries and be in touch.’

  David thought a lot about this case, especially about the debris that had sat before him in the form of Clare for the past few hours. You see, the problem for most rapists and abusers – hefty prison sentences aside – is they never actually get to see the long-term effects of the fruits of their labour. A child who is sexually abused probably keeps their mouth shut about it, at least for a while. Then the discontent grows inside them and manifests itself in various ways later in life – drug abuse, alcoholism, emotional disengagement, social awkwardness, unhealthy sexual relationships and so on. The abuser rarely sees this, unless your name happens to be Josef Fritzl. The more David thought about this he began to develop a very obvious theory. At least he thought it was obvious. An abuser rarely sees the fruits of their labour. A trusted professional gets to see the entire mess played out on DVD with a freeze frame function. The sorrow. The emptiness. The confusion. The feelings of self-worthlessness.

  Total victim care.

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘I need to tell you something, Mum.’

  The boy didn’t really know what he wanted to say, but since the other day with Lloyd he felt like something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t normal. He knew his dad hated gays and would probably be really angry with him as usual, so he figured he’d tell Mum about it first and then go out with his friends. There was a roller disco on at school tonight.

  ‘Not now. You and your brother need to sit down. Your dad and I have got something to tell you.’

  It never seemed like a good time lately. All they ever did was scream and shout at each other, and then his mum would always be crying when the boy went to bed at night. Sometimes they would carry on screaming and shouting at each other, and then the next day his mum would wear her big sunglasses. Those really big silly ones like Mickey Mouse ears, the boy always used to say to her.

  But she didn’t laugh.

  He hoped they were going to split up. Loads of people at school had parents who were divorced; it wasn’t a big deal. They got to see their dads at weekends, and their dads always seemed really pleased to see them. He wondered if they would have to move house. He didn’t really mind if they did; he didn’t really like playing out at the waterworks any more.

  He didn’t know where his dad was. His mum and dad never seemed to be in the same room any more, unless they were arguing. It was always worse if Wednesday had lost. His dad was a massive SWFC fan, and how well they played each weekend seemed to dictate his mood for the following week. Sometimes his dad would take him to watch Wednesday play, but he didn’t really like it much. Everybody there always seemed really angry.

  Somebody knocked at the door. It was the boy’s friends from school, Scott and Richard. He forgot they were coming around. The boy thought it was funny how boys his age were always so polite when they knock on the door – he’d never heard Scott speak so politely in his life! They wanted to know if the boy was coming to the roller disco with them.

  Everybody was going to be there.

  The boy looked hopefully towards his mum, who just closed the door on the two boys waiting outside withou
t even saying anything. She used to do that a lot whenever his friends came around to call for him. It was so embarrassing. She always seemed too preoccupied to be nice to people. A lot of his friends refused to come around for him any more; they said their mums had told them not to. The boy always had to go around to their houses instead.

  ‘Just wait at the end of the street. I’ll meet you in ten minutes,’ the boy managed to say out of the window as his friends walked away.

  They nodded their agreement.

  Eventually his dad appeared from somewhere, and both he and his mum were sitting on the sofa. They never sat on the sofa together. His dad usually sat in his armchair next to where all the cassettes were and got really annoyed if anyone else sat there. His dad said that the boy could sit in his armchair if he wanted. It must be important, the boy thought to himself.

  His younger brother was there too. All three of them sat in a row on the sofa which the boy thought was really weird and seemed unnatural. They had just got new cream leather sofas and the smell of cheap leather still filled the living room. The dog wasn’t allowed up on the new sofas, his mum said. The boy just stayed by the window, watching his friends walking away. The boy noticed his dad had his arm around his brother and looked like he had been crying. His dad never cried, except when Wednesday got relegated. He cried loads that day, the boy remembered.

  Everybody seemed really tense. Then the boy started worrying that somebody else had told his parents about Lloyd and he was going to be in loads of trouble, and maybe his dad was crying because he hated gays so much and didn’t want people to think he had a gay son. The boy wondered if it was that snitch Shaun who lived down the street with the really loud dad. He was always creeping around in bushes and snitching on people. They were a bit strange in that house.