by B P Walter
He just nods. I look out of the window again at the smashing rain. And then, in the reflection, I see someone standing in the archway that leads through into the lounge. A face, watching us. The brother. I jump slightly.
‘Evan, what the fuck?’ Michael says. ‘You eavesdropping?’
The boy doesn’t reply. Just stands there. Face white. Michael seems to notice something’s wrong.
‘What is it? Is it Mum?’ I can’t work out if his voice is one of panic or irritation. I wonder how many disasters involving their mother these boys have had to endure.
But the boy is looking at me. He’s watching me, closely, as if terrified of my very presence. Then he runs away – literally runs out of sight. The sound of him rushing up the stairs follows immediately after.
‘Jesus, what’s his problem?’ Michael says.
‘Maybe he’s upset about your mum,’ I venture, but Michael shakes his head.
‘We’re used to it. It’s not the worst she’s done. And anyway, Evan’s a grade-A nutcase.’
‘Oh really?’ I say, unsure if I should sound interested or concerned.
‘Yes. He’s… he’s had trouble figuring stuff out. Since our dad went when we were younger… stuff… he finds stuff trickier than I do.’
I don’t say anything, but nod as if I understand.
‘I think it’s because… things have always been a bit weird here. I think it’s all because of… well, our dad was a cunt and… I just think…’
Something in his tone makes me look at him quickly. His eyes have gone all shiny and a tear is threatening to spill. I have a really horrible sense of dread, as if someone somewhere is turning out all the lights, and is getting nearer and nearer. And then I know what he’s telling me. And it shocks me. Really shocks me. And I’m someone who’s been through one of the worst things a human can ever experience.
‘Michael,’ I say softly, ‘are you saying your dad was… that he behaved improperly towards you and your brother?’
He’s crying fully now, and seems cross with himself about it, as he frowns and rubs away the tears. ‘Fuck,’ he says under his breath, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry. You don’t need to be sorry,’ I say, and put a hand out onto his, but he flinches and pulls away.
‘He used to take us places. To terrible places. And…’
I get up, walk round to his side of the table and embrace him. And he cries in my arms. I don’t care about the pressure of his strong frame on my shoulder. The pain, in any other circumstance, would have been too much to bear, but for this poor, broken boy, I can bear it. I need to. And he needs me. All I can do is stroke his hair, like I used to do to Jessica’s when she was upset, and tell him everything’s going to be OK. Even though it’s not.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Boy
It’s Jessica’s mum. My brain won’t let me properly believe it, but it is. She’s here. In the lounge. And she’s telling Michael about what happened. And I’m going to be sick. I run as fast as I can to the bathroom and throw up in the sink. I haven’t eaten much today, but there’s enough for it to be pretty instant and horrible.
Jessica’s mum. Jessica’s mum.
How did she get here? Why is she here? So when she found me in the bathroom cutting – she was Jessica’s mum then. And I didn’t know. And she didn’t know I was cutting my skin raw because of her daughter. Because of what I did to her. That it was me that killed her. Me that couldn’t toughen up and go and meet her and, because of it, she ended up gunned down by some masked terrorist. And her mum didn’t know any of it.
Or did she? It can’t be a coincidence that she came to this house. Of all the thousands of houses in the world – even just Southend by itself – why the fuck did she end up here? It can’t be an accident. It just can’t be. She’s here because of me.
Once I’ve worked all this out, I get into bed. I need to sleep. My body feels like it’s dragging me down. It’s not even night-time but it’s no good, I can’t stay awake. Staying awake means facing this. Thinking about this.
I sleep for hours. Not fully. That horrible half-sleep. The kind I had when I first saw that horrific headline on the BBC News website. The Stratford attacks. The rising body count. Mobile phone footage of people running, screaming. The front of Stratford shopping centre blown open. Things on the floor. Things that were once people. The sound of gunshots in the distance. And Jessica. Somewhere within them. Or maybe she’d died earlier. Maybe she was one of the first. I didn’t know. But as I slept, I kept imagining her blood pouring out onto the floor, soaking everything, then lapping against the sides of my bed until it reached me, it found me, it covered me, it started choking me…
The banging wakes me. Someone is stomping around the house. And by the sounds of it, it’s coming from Mum’s room. I get out of bed and walk out onto the landing. It’s definitely from Mum’s room. I tread quietly, almost on tiptoe, to her door, so I can see the reflection in the mirrored doors of her wardrobe. A guy is on top of her, pulling her round to face him.
‘Where is it?’ he hisses in her ear. Then he slaps her. She doesn’t move. So he hits her again. Then he turns round to the chest of drawers and starts flinging out clothes and old magazines and bits of paper over the already cluttered floor.
I think about going in there. Hitting him. Punching him. Killing him. Smashing his head again and again into the wall until it cracks into a thousand pieces of skull and brain. I’m drawing my breath in, trying to get the courage to enter the room, when a noise downstairs stops me. Someone is walking through the lounge and about to come up the stairs. I rush back to my bedroom and close the door quickly. I hurriedly pull on some pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, then crouch back by my door, listening, listening as I hear someone – Michael, I think – running up the stairs and then going into Mum’s room. Doing what I should have done. Doing what I wasn’t brave enough to do.
‘What the fuck, mate?’ I hear a man’s voice shout – not Michael’s, it must be the stranger. Then a woman’s voice, ‘Michael, get off him!’
There are more shouts. Some I can’t make out, something that sounds like ‘She took it out my fucking coat!’, but then it all becomes a garbled mass of shouting. Then a crash and a thud and a shriek. Then a lot of sounds, like a tumbling and crunching. And then silence. I come out of my room now and look out onto the landing. Michael and her, the woman, Jessica’s mum – they’re standing there, looking down. Down the stairs. As if there’s something shocking at the bottom of it. They don’t say anything to me as I walk past them. Still nothing as I stand at the edge of the top stair and look down. Then, when I see what they see, I hear the woman let out a sob. A man’s body is lying at the bottom of the stairs. Twisted. On its side. Not moving.
Chapter Forty
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
I end up staying the night. I’m not sure how it happens, it just does. Michael and I go into the lounge and sit together on the sofa, against the drab, stained cushions and old magazines, watching a rerun of Blue Planet II. ‘TV’s not up to the standard of yours,’ he jokes as he puts it on.
I don’t notice when it becomes night. The darkness outside has been so all-pervading for so long, I don’t feel it creep up on us. A day, stolen from me in confusion, tears, and never-ending gloom. I am both starving and tired. When it gets to 9pm, Michael messages a friend of his who works at a local takeaway and he pops round with a feast of stuff. I offer to pay for it but Michael just says, ‘Nah, Jimmy owes me.’
The food is fried, greasy, and smells delicious. Chicken wings, kebabs, pizza, and three huge portions of chips, spilling out of their polystyrene boxes. I gorge on the food, and so does Michael, neither of us talking as we munch and watch some weird sea creature illuminate its fins at the bottom at the sea. After an hour of David Attenborough, Michael suggests I sleep in his room. I’m feeling slightly nauseous. ‘No,’ I shake my head, wincing as my muscles tighten, ‘I’l
l just get a taxi back to my hotel.’
‘No, please… stay here,’ he says. ‘I can make you up a bed. Hold on.’
He runs out of the room and up the stairs. Seconds later, he is back down with a duvet and a pillow. ‘Here. If you don’t want to sleep in my bed… with me… you can sleep down here. I’ll make up a little bed for you.’
I try to protest again, telling him it isn’t appropriate and that I should be getting back, but he is adamant. His eyes bore into mine. Pleading. Desperate.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘OK, I’ll sleep down here.’
It is all too much. The conversation about Jessica. The suggestion from Michael that his dad has inflicted some form of abuse on him and his brother. And the fact that I somehow knew to come to this place to tell this boy something important, something that keeps drifting from me, just out of reach – all of it is weighing on my mind in the heaviest way. I just need to let sleep take the pain away, both physical and mental.
I fall asleep almost instantly after Michael leaves the room, but wake with a start when I hear the front door close. Someone has entered the house. The pain in my shoulder has spread to my neck. I shouldn’t be here. I need to be back in my safe, calm hotel with my pain meds and enormous television, recovering in private. I feel like I am close to panic, so try to breathe slowly, and gently swing my legs off the sofa. They collide with something soft.
‘Ahh, what…?’
It’s a boy’s voice. In the darkness, I realise it’s Michael. He’s lying on the floor nestled amongst a collection of coats and cushions.. Has he been here all night?
‘Sorry. I thought you’d gone to bed,’ I say.
He rubs his eyes. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down here to be with you.’
I sigh. ‘Oh God, Michael. This is all a bit of a mess.’
‘What is? The lounge?’
‘No, not the lounge,’ I whisper, even though it is a tip. ‘I mean this. Me. God, what am I doing here?’ I rub my eyes with my hand, trying not to cry.
His eyes are stilled closed. ‘I need to sleep. Can we talk about this in the morning?’
I am about to reply when I hear a thump upstairs, as if someone has dropped something on the floor. Then another clunk. And then a man’s voice.
‘What’s that?’ I say.
Michael doesn’t reply. He just sits up, clearly listening.
‘I heard the front door go a minute ago. It woke me up,’ I say. ‘I think someone went upstairs.’
Michael gets to his feet in a rush, staggering slightly. ‘Fuck!’ he shouts.
‘What? Wait! Hold on.’ I try to get up quickly but my shoulder sends a shooting pain down my entire right side. ‘Christ!’ I yell, and Michael turns then.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, I think so. What’s going on?’
‘I think one of the cunts is here,’ he says, viciously. He’s angry. Pure fury. Looks as if he’s going to hit something. Someone.
‘What… what do you mean?’
‘A man. It’s what they do. She borrows money or buys drugs and when she can’t pay… Fuck’s sake!’ He kicks the rickety coffee table in anger, sending takeaway boxes flying, and lets out a shout when his bare foot collides with the wood.
‘Calm down,’ I say, even though I feel anything but calm.
‘He needs to leave. She’s not in any kind of state to chuck him out on her own…’
He makes a move for the door and I follow him, trying to keep up with his pace up the stairs. On the landing he marches down towards the room we left his mother in hours before. It’s clear, as soon as we approach it, that a commotion is occurring inside. We hear a man grunting, raging, shouting, ‘You fucking junkie!’ Through the slightly open doorway, I can see him pulling out drawers and going through the detritus of clothes and tissues and carrier bags on the floor. Michael bangs open the door fully and I get a proper view of him. He’s a young man – probably in his late twenties, early thirties, clean shaven, tattoos dotting his neck and upper forearms. His body is extremely toned – you can see it through the thin grey hoodie he’s wearing. He clearly spends hours pumping all kinds of machines in the gym. If he tries to defend himself, I’m not sure what use either Michael or I would be. When he sees the door open, I brace myself for him to charge at us, but he just yells, ‘What the fuck?’, then carries on searching through the stuff on the floor, as if he’s dropped something. In the seconds before Michael rushes into the room and launches himself at the man, I see something that makes me feel very, very sick. The boy’s mum has blood on her face. Her nose is bleeding and there’s a clear red mark on her cheek that looks like it’s been dealt by a strong, merciless hand.
‘Get the fuck out, you cunt!’ Michael is yelling at the man, pushing him. He doesn’t retaliate immediately, instead puts up his hands to defend himself. Then Michael directs a well-aimed kick to his groin. The shriek the man lets out is blood-curdling. He clasps his hands over the zone of pain, hopping from one leg to the other. Michael seizes this moment of vulnerability, dragging the man by the wrist to the door and out onto the landing. ‘Come on, fuck off!’
Although apparently still in pain, the man clearly objects to both being dragged and being called a cunt, and he takes a swipe at Michael’s face with his hand, slashing the boy’s cheeks with his nails, so a small drop of blood falls onto his bare chest. ‘She took my gear. I know she took it. And if she doesn’t pay, she has to learn the hard way.’ He then slaps Michael across the face. ‘Run off back to Mummy, you little rat,’ he says, sneering.
‘Michael!’ I shout, running to his side. He’s been knocked back by the force of the slap, but I’m just grateful it wasn’t a punch. I don’t fancy picking up teeth from the carpet. ‘We need to call the police.’ My mobile is gone from my pocket – probably on the sofa where I was sleeping, no doubt out of battery. I look around helplessly but I don’t know what to do. Then I see Michael take his hands away from his bleeding face and throw himself at the man in front of him. He topples. Shakes. Grabs about him wildly. Then falls down the stairs, clattering all the way down.
In complete silence, Michael and I look at each other, then edge towards the top of the stairs, and look down.
The man is lying twisted on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Weirdly, the thing that most catches my attention is a piece of junk mail, one of several littering the space between the door and the stairs. It’s touching his nose, poking into his nostrils. Normally, one would bat such a thing away from such a sensitive area. But he doesn’t move.
Stairs can be dangerous things.
It’s my mother’s voice. It creeps into my head like a snake. I don’t want to think about that now. I can’t think about that now. That’s not what’s happened here. It can’t be. It just can’t be.
I pull myself out of my daze and dully become aware of a third party on the landing. Evan has come out of his room and is standing beside me, looking down the stairs too. Then he turns to his brother: ‘What happened?’
Michael appears to be incapable of speech, so I make an attempt: ‘He… he fell…’ I stammer, unsure what else to say. Then common sense takes over. Again, I remind myself I’m the adult here. I should know what to do in a situation like this. ‘We need to call an ambulance.’
Neither of the two boys says anything. Eventually, I slowly and gingerly descend the stairs towards the strange mass of limbs lying by the front door. His top has ridden up and I can see the perfectly carved lines of his smooth chest. His body reminds me of what Alec’s used to be like when we first met. Toned and athletic. He hasn’t become overweight in his journey to middle-age – his body has just shrunk into something slim and unremarkable.
I crouch down on the floor so that I’m nearly next to the man and feel for a pulse. Ludicrously, part of me expects to find the body already ice cold. It isn’t. It’s warm and, to my immense relief, the pulse is evident almost immediately.
‘He’s alive,’ I call back up to the boys on the stairs. Slo
wly, like I did, they traipse down, Michael first.
‘What now?’ he says. ‘Should we really call an ambulance? Did you see what he did to my mum?’
I struggle to stand up, using the banister as support. ‘I know. But if we don’t, we could be in major trouble.’
‘Really?’ Michael seems unconvinced.
‘Yes, really. As in prison.’
He nods, as if prison is a far-off country he’s vaguely heard of.
I’m about to step over the body of the young man when a hand shoots out and grabs my ankle. I scream. And Michael leaps into action, kicking the mass on the floor. ‘Stop it!’ I shout, shaking my foot out of the man’s grip. He’s standing up now and swaying dangerously. ‘What the fuck is this? You fucking attacked me.’ He tries to hit Michael, but the boy dodges and the man slams against the wall. I notice one of his trainers has come off, and since he has sock-free feet, I can see a red-ish purple bruise on the skin.
‘For Christ’s sake, will you all please be still!’ I yell. To my surprise, they all obey. Michael has his hands raised against himself in a defensive motion, in case the bigger, stronger man aims another punch at him, and the latter continues to sway, but ceases to throw his fists around. Evan, meanwhile, sits down on the fourth stair up and watches the strange tableau with a blank expression.
I turn to look at the man – the stranger, the drug dealer – and, with more courage than I thought myself capable of, speak to him: ‘Why are you here?’
