The front door going jerked her out of her reverie and she hurried down the stairs, heart thudding as though she’d been caught out in some minor crime.
‘Sheila?’ Why, if she wasn’t in the kitchen and immediately visible, did Alan have to sound so alarmed? It annoyed her.
‘What?’ she called, bad-temperedly.
‘Oh, you’re there.’
‘Of course I’m here, where’d you expect me to be, Timbuktu?’
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing’s up. For heaven’s sake.’ She bustled into the kitchen, put on her apron, though there was no need, boiled the kettle again, fussed about. There were still two cups on the table.
‘Company?’ Alan asked, staring at the cups.
Dear God, their lives, her life was so predictable that the presence of a second cup was worthy of attention.
‘Carole,’ she said briskly.
‘Oh? On a Wednesday? What was she wanting?’
‘She just dropped in.’
‘Carole?’ said Alan, incredulous. ‘Just dropped in?’
‘Oh my God,’ she shouted. ‘Are you an echo or something? Can’t my own sister have a cup of tea without the heavens falling in?’
Alan stared at her, concerned. ‘What’s she been saying to upset you, eh?’ he asked quietly.
‘She hasn’t upset me. She hasn’t said anything. She was just passing.’
‘A likely story. She was snooping, I’ll bet, seeing what was what. She won’t leave well alone. Take no notice of her.’
‘I won’t,’ said Sheila, almost laughing now at the way Alan could get everything wrong and think himself so clever. He’d had words with Carole who, like her father, had been blunt over Sheila visiting Leo. Carole thought she shouldn’t. She said Sheila was making herself ill over those visits. Even though Alan agreed, he’d been irritated at his sister-in-law thinking it was her job to point it out.
‘Any road,’ Alan said, ‘we got all his bedding plants and I’ve left him happy as Larry putting them in.’
‘That’s good.’
And then it was over, the brief period of alarm, though she didn’t know why she’d been alarmed, she wasn’t afraid of Alan. Never, ever, had she felt afraid of Alan. Not like her father. They’d all been afraid of him until well into adolescence and even now he had the power to make them all, if not afraid, then apprehensive. He was old, he was frail, he had no power and yet he dominated them still. The only person he’d failed to terrify at some stage was Leo. Leo had been brought up not knowing what fear was. Never beaten, never smacked, never shouted at. But then he’d never needed to be. Docile, Leo was always docile . . .
She’d lied now. Told a straightforward, unmistakable lie to Alan. She might even get found out. Next time Carole and Alan met, he’d mention it. He wouldn’t be able to resist it. But she didn’t care – let him find out. A woman of her age was entitled to a secret and if guarding it meant lying, then so be it. Anyway, it was already in the past, a one-off thing, hers.
*
All the way home Harriet went over and over every word that had been said and was horrified by their emptiness – nothing, in effect, had been said, which was why she couldn’t understand the comfort the interchange had brought. Sheila Armstrong was a nice woman. No evil could possibly have been nurtured by her. She’d been friendly and yet kept her distance. She hadn’t seemed to mind that Harriet didn’t know what to say, that she couldn’t articulate why she had wanted to meet. It was as though the older woman had been waiting and was glad the waiting was over. They hadn’t talked at all about what had happened, the very thing that gave them any reason to be together. Nor had they talked about their boys.
That, thought Harriet, was what I was afraid to ask, about him. That was what frightened her, knowing that she wanted to know so badly. At first she hadn’t even thought of the attackers, but now she thought of them all the time. All these months and now they rose in her mind, shadowy figures, huge and menacing. She’d only seen Leo Jackson, not his more dangerous accomplice, but she felt she hadn’t seen him at all, she didn’t equate him with the brute in her imagination. He, the two ‘he’s’, were elsewhere. She sickened herself wanting to know every last detail about them, to explain it all away once she knew, once it was not all without a history. Yet she’d asked nothing, nothing at all. She hadn’t seen his room, for example. She blushed, alone in her car, driving along, to think she had wanted to see his room. What kind of a room did a brutish boy have? What would be on his walls? What clues would there be?
She stopped the car half a mile from her home in a lay-by from which the neck of the lake could be seen. She had to calm down, this was no good. Revulsion for her own curiosity made her tremble. If Sheila, Mrs Armstrong, had been a different woman . . . she would never have been able to ask to see his room. It could only have happened if she had been urged to, as proof that Leo Jackson was a good boy until one half-hour of madness . . . ‘Look at his room,’ another woman might have said. ‘Look at those posters of elephants and whales, all he ever thought about, my Leo, was animals and what he could do to protect them, look at his books, look at the National Geographic Magazine, it was all he ever read, we got him the subscription for his birthday, look at those models, he carved them himself, and that trumpet, he played it so well, look at . . .’ She could hear a shrill voice in her head, a voice quite different from Sheila Armstrong’s, she could hear it going on and on and see herself, actually see herself, wandering round this mythical, ridiculous room she’d designed for Leo Jackson, full of things mentioned in court . . .
Horrible. It was horrible, her need. She dreaded Joe, or even Sam, finding out. The last thing Joe wanted was to have Leo Jackson made into a human being. When he’d first spoken coherently he had gone on and on as to why this had happened – ‘I wasn’t doing anything. I hadn’t done anything to them. I was just walking down the street, it wasn’t even dark or late. Why did they pick on me?’ – and she had tried to console him by saying there was no reason it had happened to him but that there would be reasons why those who had attacked him had come to be so vicious and cruel, and he’d shouted at her that he didn’t want to hear one word of justification, not one word, he didn’t want to hear his attackers were from broken homes and had been made to suffer all their lives and were just doing as they had been done by, he didn’t want to hear that shit. He’d sobbed. She’d been scared of how violently he’d reacted. Then, when it turned out that Leo Jackson at least was not from some terrible deprived background, his anger had again startled her. It hurt him more, not less, that there were no obvious reasons for this other boy to have taken part in such a crime. Listening in court to all the praise for Leo Jackson – his excellent school record, his trumpet playing, his love of animals – had almost driven Joe mad. Then there was the heavy play made of his mother’s and father’s deaths, the attempt to arouse pity for him. It drove Joe frantic, as did the sight of the boy. Tall, yes, and well built, powerful, yes, but a heavy, intelligent, calm face, not handsome but not brutish, definitely not brutish. And Joe badly needed him to be a brute.
Staring at the lake in the distance, Harriet wondered how abnormal was her reluctance to let Leo Jackson go. It wasn’t something she could discuss with anyone. She had fantasies in which, she visited the boy. She sat in front of him – she’d seen the films, the television programmes, she knew the set-up – and asked him questions. Not about what he’d done but about why. All those questions others had asked him to which he had not replied a single word. But he’d tell her. In her fantasy, he told her everything. She was so near to him. She could see the pores in his skin, so near she could feel the slightest breath he took. She was excited, her heart pounded as she waited for his answers and he gave them, his voice low and indistinct, he told her how he’d been just hanging about, lonely, bored, he’d only gone into the club out of desperation and at first he’d hated it, he’d been going to leave straight away, but then the comfort of it, the darkness and nois
e and crowds and himself anonymous had begun to appeal and he’d stayed, and then he’d been seen by someone in his class, not a friend, just someone, ‘and he’d had a drink with him and then another, and after that he’d begun to feel happy, light-headed, after only two halves of beer, and he’d got in a gang and was swept along by them and glad to be with them, and then he’d somehow been in a car and driving very fast and arriving he didn’t know where, some pub, and suddenly he was outside, in the fresh air and with someone he didn’t know who gave him something to take, and he took it thinking he wasn’t himself anyway and he might as well and next minute he had a knife in his hand . . .
No! What nonsense. It could not have been like that. If only, if only she could know how it had been. She wondered if he had told his grandmother. Was Sheila Armstrong the only person who knew? Would she be the only person Joe would tell? Well, she had been. She was the only person, his mother, to whom he had confided that last, appalling detail. He said he would never, ever tell anyone again in his whole life. Sometimes she thought that was the whole basis of what was now wrong between them, that she alone was to know this final thing which haunted Joe most . . . Michael had seen him, covered in blood and excrement. She and Sam had not. By the time they had reached the hospital Joe was in the operating theatre. Michael and the policemen and the ambulance crew and the nurses and doctors – they had all seen poor Joe, all recoiled at the sight of him, his thin naked body, filthy, his hair matted with the shit rubbed into it . . . He was clean when she saw him. White sheet below him, white sheet drawn up to his waist, white bandages, everything white. She hadn’t had to see the filth. They told her, but she didn’t have to see it. Only picture it, imagine it . . . had they defecated actually on to him? Had they, or one of them, done it in a corner and then picked their own dirt up and smeared it over Joe’s hair? Had they made him do it? She didn’t know, she couldn’t ask. Detective Sergeant Graham could and did. He told her. He said he had to know. And Joe had told him. But he hadn’t told Graham that he’d eaten it. He hadn’t told them that. He’d told her, screaming and sobbing one night, blurting it out, watching her, seeming to hate her as he said it, said one of them had urinated into his mouth and he’d swallowed half of it and choked and then the shit . . . his underpants, used as a gag, pulled out and then the shit packed into his mouth, his lips forced closed over it, gasping and choking and swallowing . . . then vomiting, on and on, and hearing laughter . . .
The lake was blue but misty, the hills shrouded in mist. All that was beautiful and peaceful and serene was before her. Nature did heal, but only those parts it could reach. It healed her eyes and her ears but not her heart. She could feel her eyes less sore, less strained, washed by gentleness of the landscape, and her ears were rested, the silly voices of her fantasies stilled by the silence. But deep inside was the same hunger to resolve this conundrum which plagued her so and no amount of looking at lakes or hills could help. Her instinct was so strong, she knew that if only she could get to Leo Jackson and his partner then she would be satisfied. She loathed the mystery, the vagueness, the lack of reality when what had happened had been so very real. She couldn’t let Sheila Armstrong go. She’d thrown away this opportunity and must not allow another to be wasted. Next time, she’d be direct. She knew the woman now, knew the sort of person she was dealing with. She could trust her. She could confess, and ask for her help. As simple as that.
Joe was there when she got in. He was sitting watching tennis on television. She called out to him but he didn’t reply and she was glad for once to be ignored. She didn’t want to lie to him. It mattered less about Sam, for whom she’d already invented the scenario she’d decided on. Sam could take a lie or two, it wouldn’t really bother him if he found out, not the fact of the lie anyway. But Joe despised lies, even small ones. All his childhood he’d been implacable. ‘You said’ were words forever on his lips – ‘You said it was ice-cream for pudding,’ and when she’d had to confess she’d just discovered that there was none, ‘You lied!’ Silly, really, then. They’d made fun of him, called him little Georgie Washington. He had such standards, Joe. She’d been proud of him. But it was exhausting all the same, his rigid attitude to so many things.
He came through after a while, the television left on in the background, and just stood watching her. She felt she ought to say something but everything she thought of was no good, none of the normal pleasantries now sufficed, they were not any longer part of the currency of chat. She waited, trying to edge herself towards some harmless observation, but he made it so difficult. That was what Sam resented most, how difficult Joe made things. His brooding, unhappy mood affected them all and they couldn’t tell him to snap out of it. He never asked them anything about themselves, their lives, their jobs. Everything was in-turned. But today he was visibly hovering, hanging about, wanting something if only she could decide what. If she said the wrong thing she’d never find out but if she waited too long he’d give up and disappear. She risked sarcasm, a little normality.
‘You wouldn’t be wanting something, would you, squire?’ she asked him. He actually smiled.
‘I think I’d better go on the skiing trip. The money has to be in, the deposit part, tomorrow.’
Careful, she told herself, not too much enthusiasm now. ‘Well, that’s fine, good, I’ll write the cheque. How much is it, the deposit?’
‘Fifty pounds.’
‘Right. Get my bag, it’s on the table, I’ll do it now.’
‘I’ll pay you back. I’ll start at the boat yard, if he’ll have me.’
‘Of course he’ll have you . . .’
‘Why? Because he’s sorry for poor little Joe?’
‘No, not at all, because he said you were the best part-time worker he ever had.’
‘That’s boost-Joe’s-ego time, isn’t it?’
‘Why do you have to turn everything? Of course I’m not trying to boost your ego, or . . .’
‘That’s lucky, it would be rather hard, I haven’t got one, lost it, dunno where, must look for it, have you seen my ego?’
She eyed him warily. Was he making a joke? Was he being skitty? Was it safe to laugh?
‘Why are you looking so worried?’
‘I wasn’t. I was just wondering if I remembered to buy some more cheese.’
‘Liar.’
‘No, I really was, the thing is I went . . .’
‘Stop it, Mum. Spare me.’
‘Then you spare me.’ What had she said? ‘What I mean is, you’re so, so . . .’
‘So?’
‘I can’t think what I mean. You know what I mean anyway. You jump on me. I can’t say anything without your taking it the wrong way.’
‘What’s the right way?’
‘Oh Joe, don’t start that, all that, playing with words, you know what I mean.’
‘So you keep telling me. It’s boring.’
‘Well, here’s the cheque.’
‘No questions asked.’
‘Why should I ask questions?’
‘Because you want to. You want to know why I want to go skiing all of a sudden, why the change of heart, does it mean I’m getting better. That’s what you want to ask. You’ll tell Dad, and he’ll say, Oh good, he must be getting better, about time he got over it, and you’ll tell him not to be so sure and it isn’t a case of my getting better, oh, you’ll tick him off, and then you’ll say that all the same it does look hopeful and it will do him good to get right away, you always thought a holiday would help . . .’
‘Joe, please, I wish you wouldn’t.’
‘And I wish you wouldn’t. Look, you want to ask so ask, can’t you?’
‘All right. What persuaded you?’
‘Boredom. I don’t expect to enjoy it, but it will use up time. I have to fill time up with something. If I’m not going to have the whole thing over I have to start filling up time. Holidays, working at the boat yard again, that’ll fill up the time.’
She was silent. Any pleasure she’d
felt in him wanting to go skiing was spoiled. He soured everything. She knew he was watching her, a funny little half-smile on his face.
‘You don’t like that, do you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You don’t like the truth, ever.’
‘Who would, if that’s the truth?’
‘There’s no “if” about it, Mum. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.’ He went upstairs, she thought, with an air of triumph.
It was clear enough, she supposed, what ‘the whole thing over’ meant. Suicide. Well, it was absurd, she knew he didn’t mean that, he was just being melodramatic. He would never, ever kill himself, not because he’d been attacked and degraded. She wasn’t even frightened, not at all. If he’d been deranged enough to do that he’d have done it long ago, not now. That kind of talk was merely a sign of the usual adolescent depression, the sort she’d suffered from herself, that awful feeling that there was no point to life, so why bother? One had to be patient with that kind of feeling and it would gradually go, it always did. Activity dispelled it, which was precisely why this skiing jaunt was a good thing. It was only a pity it was so far off, the trip – if only something nearer in time would turn up. But if he was going to start working at weekends and in the holidays again, to earn the money, then that would be activity too, that might achieve something and at least get him out of his room . . .
The telephone broke into her ramblings but she didn’t mind, she was feeling cheerful as she answered, expecting Sam or Ginny. ‘Mrs Kennedy?’ he said, and she knew the voice at once, even after all this time. ‘Detective Sergeant Graham here. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s been a development. We’ve got a suspect for the other attacker. Can I come round now, or when would it be convenient?’
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