‘Hi,’ a new voice said at last. ‘Hear you’re trying to find out about this place when it was the Southfield Unit. When Rebecca Fisher was here.’
While it wasn’t exactly a young voice, it was obscurely redolent of youth—quick and sharp with the placeless patois affected by hard-eyed teenagers, a faint echo of EastEnders that you heard just as often in Dorset.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting to get someone who worked there in those days, not straight away. You didn’t, did you?’
‘Well, I was here. But not working. On the other side of the fence, you could say.’ His laugh matched his voice, good-humoured but brief, alert. ‘I was thirteen when Rebecca turned up—I’d been in a lot of trouble for shoplifting, vandalism, you name it. In case you’re wondering, I’m a counsellor here these days. You probably wouldn’t think so, but it helps when you’ve been there yourself. They can see you know what you’re talking about.’
‘I can imagine.’ I paused for a second, not quite sure how to say what I wanted to, then ploughed on and said it anyway. ‘You must have seen a lot of changes since it was the Southfield Unit.’
‘Christ, yeah. The whole culture’s changed. It’s a different world, these days.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, just the whole way things get done. These days it’s all set procedures, rules and regulations coming down from Home Office level. Every young offenders’ home in the country has to do things the same way, pass the same inspections and reviews, that sort of thing. Back in the old days, it was nothing like that.’
His voice was slightly, perhaps unconsciously regretful, and I spoke with some curiosity. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s hard to explain…it was more personal, back then. The Head of Unit used to set the tone for the whole place, but now they’re just figureheads, pretty much, teach a robot the rules and it could do the job. Back then, though, it was all up to them—how the home was run, what the staff were like, what the kids could and couldn’t do during the day. I can guess it created a few little Hitlers, that way of working. But our Head of Unit…this probably sounds corny, but he was one in a million.’
My silence clearly demanded clarification and he went on, sounding slightly embarrassed, as if trying to cover over clear traces of decades-old hero-worship. ‘Tom Hartley, his name was—is, he’s still alive today. It says a lot about him that he called himself Tom, rather than Thomas, I mean. He hated the kind of divisions you could get in these places, them-and-us, all that kind of shit—said it just led to distrust and bad feelings, the staff all strutting round like the gods of creation and the kids all acting like prisoners-of-war. Equality was one of his pet words. He didn’t just pay lip service to it, either. The staff all ate the same food we did, joined in with all the activities, and he always acted like he was just another one of the staff. We were all in it together, the way he saw it, and we all had to do the best we could.’
‘He sounds fantastic.’ I spoke cautiously, trying to conceal my own misgivings. ‘But didn’t any of the kids take advantage of that? In a young offenders’ home—’
‘Oh, Christ, I must be giving you completely the wrong idea of him. I can just see you thinking he sounds like a pussy, he wouldn’t have been able to keep order in a monastery.’ Martin laughed, a healthy, gutsy laugh that said the idea was ridiculous. ‘He was a great guy, but he knew what he was doing, all right. He always believed in looking for the best in us kids, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see the worst. There were clear-cut rules, and clear-cut punishments if you broke them…no cruelty or abuse, just rules. Bullying was just about the worst crime you could commit in there, stealing and lying pretty close to that. He cracked down on them so hard that they hardly ever happened. I don’t want to make it sound like Sunnybrook Farm, but I think we were all quite happy there.’
‘Was Rebecca quite happy there? As far as you could tell?’
‘She seemed it. We were only there together for a year. I turned up the year before they shipped her off to the nick: I was twelve, she must have been about fifteen. Still, it was a small unit, about twenty-five kids, so we all knew each other. And she couldn’t help standing out a bit, being the only girl. Not to mention a household name.
‘It’s weird that that’s all changed these days. There’s about one girl here for every two boys, I suppose it’s a positive step towards equal opps. Back then, I heard they didn’t even have a separate shower room for girls before Rebecca turned up; they’d never needed one before. Girls just didn’t seem to commit so many crimes. And I’m just talking about the kind of shit most of us were in for, vandalism, persistent shoplifting, that kind of thing. I’m not talking about murder.’
‘She must have been a bit of an oddity,’ I said.
‘You’re not wrong there. I remember when I saw her for the first time—I was having my first supper in the canteen, and she came in on her own. I just couldn’t stop staring. She was so notorious, like Jack the Ripper or something—Christ knows what I’d been expecting, horns, a tail, a triple-six tattoo. But she could have been one of my sisters’ friends, from home. She could have been anyone.’
‘I suppose you recognised her from that old photo,’ I said. ‘The one where she’s wearing school uniform.’
‘I don’t know—maybe. I think it was mostly just deduction. I’d heard Rebecca Fisher was the only girl in the place, and she was far too young to be one of the staff. Just call me Sherlock Holmes.’ I could sense his grin all the way down the line. ‘It wasn’t that she’d changed, exactly—when you looked closely you could see it was the same person—but the photograph looked so creepy, and she just didn’t. If anything, she looked too prim-and-proper for comfort. Good-looking, very, but not the kind of girl we all wanted to go out with in those days. Like a very pretty Head Girl who’d never dream of kissing a boy till she was legally married. I couldn’t imagine her wearing lipstick, never mind stabbing a little kid to death.’
‘How did the others react to her? The other children in the unit?’
‘Well, she was never one hundred percent part of things—she couldn’t be, really, not when she was the only girl. But she got a lot of wary respect, being a killer. Some of the kids were scared of that and tried to hide it. A few others were impressed, and tried even harder to hide it—Tom would have hated that, if he’d known. She didn’t seem to care much either way. She was quiet, polite, kept herself to herself. Not standoffish, exactly—if you talked to her she’d talk to you, perfectly friendly in a guarded sort of way—but it was next to impossible to know what she really thought about anything. It felt a bit like having an older sister around the place, in a weird sort of way. We always toned it down in the common room when she came in—the jokes, the language, you know the kind of thing. She seemed the sort of girl who’d hate stuff like that.
‘I only saw a different side to her once, come to think of it. I must have been there about two months, at the time. There were five or six of us in the common room, me and Rebecca among them, and we were talking about things we’d done before we’d come here, what our families were like, that sort of thing. One of the kids—he could only have been twelve or so, same as me—started saying about all the foster homes he’d been sent to, how much he’d hated most of them, what a bunch of bastards his old foster parents had been. He was a hard little sod, said it all quite matter-of-factly, but it was pretty sad. Rebecca said something sympathetic, like a social worker might have done, I can’t remember what it was exactly. And he said, “Well, you must know what that’s like and all. You’re adopted yourself, I heard it on the news.”
‘It was frightening, the way she reacted. She went from calm to furious in about two seconds, flew at him like a wildcat. Scratching, punching. The poor kid didn’t know what had hit him, and the rest of us just sat there, gobsmacked. “Don’t you dare say that again,” she shouted, “you don’t know anything about my family, they are my family, all that on the news was just l
ies,” and she was hitting him all the time and he was coming out of shock, trying to defend himself. Then one of the staff came rushing in to see what was going on and separated them. Took them both off to Tom’s office. They both got punished equally, so they couldn’t have told the truth about what happened. I suppose the kid was too scared to grass her up, after that, and said they’d just been fighting.’
I remembered something from A Mind to Murder: she never even mentioned that she was adopted, I’d read, she always referred to them as Mummy and Daddy. ‘Did she talk about her family a lot?’ I asked.
‘As much as she ever talked about anything. She saw a hell of a lot of her father—her adoptive father—he seemed to visit whenever he could. I saw him a couple of times. Miserable-looking sod, always looked like a pissed-off wage slave on his way to the nine-to-five grind. It was hard to believe he was as rich as everyone said, he certainly didn’t look like a millionaire. But he had money, all right. You only had to see the things he sent Rebecca.’
‘She got a lot of presents from him?’
‘Christ, yeah—seemed like there was a big parcel for her every week. You had to open your mail in public there, so we all got to see the things he sent her. Funny, they weren’t the sort of things I’d have thought she’d like: expensive makeup kits, big bottles of Chanel Number Five, things you’d have expected a vain, tarty sort of girl to ask for. Rebecca wasn’t that type at all. She seemed delighted to get his presents, but I can’t remember her ever using them.’
A moment’s pause before he spoke again, slightly more briskly. ‘That’s pretty much all I know about her, anyway. Hope it’s been some use.’
‘You’ve been terrifically helpful. Thanks a lot,’ I said. Then, unable to stop myself, ‘you said Tom was still alive, earlier on. I don’t suppose you know how I could get in touch with him?’
‘Well, I’m still in touch myself. A lot of the kids kept up with him after they left, and he’s been like a dad to some of us. I have to say, though, I’m not sure if he’ll want to talk to you about Rebecca. He was seventy-two last birthday, and he’s not in the best of health. Still, if you give me your number, I’ll pass it on to him…can’t hurt to ask.’
‘That’d be great.’ I read our number out, could hear the tiny scratching sounds as he wrote it down. ‘Anyway, thanks again. Talking to you’s been a real eye-opener.’
‘Hope it’s helped you. Take it easy.’
He hung up. In my mind’s eye, I could clearly see him leaving a small office, hurrying back to a noisy recreation room—a game underway at the pool table, a wall-mounted TV going constantly. I went into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and lost myself deep in thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE REST OF THE MORNING went by slowly. Bringing down my bulging folder of photocopies and printouts from the spare room, I sat down at the kitchen table and went through them all; tried to clear my mind, to see the separate pieces as if for the first time. I hoped to discover some crucial unifying factor, some common thread that would tie them all together and show me the real Rebecca. But there was nothing. In fact, the sight of them all spread out in front of me made them more contradictory and bewildering than ever, an impenetrable forest of guesswork, opinions and facts. A corner of the St Anthony’s school photograph stared out with a dozen black-and-white faces, behind the psychologist’s report on Rebecca Jane Sanderson, and the pad of A4 paper where I’d jotted random thoughts down. In the bright sunlight, the picture was somewhere between collage and still life; Confusion, it might be called in an art gallery, or Frustration, or, perhaps, Obsession.
At about five to three, I was startled by a knock at the back door. Bundling the various documents unceremoniously back into their folder, I shoved it into a convenient cupboard before answering. I’d known it would be Liz, and it was.
‘Hello, Anna,’ she said amiably. ‘just thought I’d pop round and see how you were…you’re not busy, are you?’
‘Not at all, come on in!’ I was delighted to see her, amazed to think I’d once perceived her as self-righteous or judgemental. ‘Want some tea?’
‘That’d be lovely. White with two sugars, please.’
I put the kettle on, as comfortable with the short silence as I would have been in Petra’s company, or Carl’s—when I spoke, it was from simple interest rather than fear of seeming awkward. ‘So how’s it going? Just got in from work?’
‘About half an hour ago. I’ve had a very nice day so far, actually—I got a letter from my elder daughter this morning.’ She smiled. ‘That’s Katie—I’m sure I’ve told you about her. She’s the teacher in Germany.’
I had an image of what Liz must be like as a mother, never preoccupied, never guilty, always there—I felt wistful envy surfacing inside me, ready to reveal itself in a flicker of my eyes, a subtle inflection of my voice. I focused on making the tea, tried to speak with matter-of-fact good humour. ‘It must have been good to hear from her,’ I said. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh, very well. She’s met a nice new man, apparently, another teacher—I do hope he’ll turn out to be the one. I’m probably old-fashioned, but she’s leaving it quite late to get married.’
‘Does she want to?’
Liz looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not really sure. You know how it is, I expect, they don’t talk to you quite as much when they’re all grown up. Maybe she doesn’t, come to think of it. Alice was always the more domestic one… of course, she’s a mother of three now, over in America. Almost two years old now, her youngest. A little boy called Todd.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘It must have been lovely for you to see him.’
‘Oh, I haven’t, dear—not in the flesh, at least. Of course, I’ve got plenty of photos. But I haven’t been to visit them in nearly five years…it’s a shame, I know, but it’s so hard to find the time to go abroad.’
I was going to ask why they didn’t come to Abbots Newton, but a fugitive look in her eyes forced the words back—of course Liz wasn’t that busy, she was a part-time librarian rather than a managing director. They simply hadn’t invited her.
‘They’re very good about staying in touch, though, considering,’ Liz went on quickly. ‘They’ve both been very good daughters to me.’
Something slightly defensive in her voice told me that her own children might see her as nothing more than a tiresome occasional duty. The silence between us grew gradually awkward. When she spoke again, I could sense her trying her best to sound cheerful. ‘What about your family, Anna, dear? Do you stay in close touch with your parents?’
‘Not really,’ I said quietly. ‘We’re still in touch—we send each other Christmas cards and birthday cards and that sort of thing, but that’s about all. I haven’t seen any of them for a good six years, come to think of it.’
‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Liz’s face was a picture of concern. ‘Why ever not?’
‘It’s pretty complicated.’ Go on, her expression said, if you don’t mind talking about it. ‘My mother had me when she was very young, a teenager—she wasn’t married or anything, and I never knew my real father. She married my stepfather when I was two, and they had three more kids. It was always…well, a bit difficult. We all tried to pretend I was as much a part of the family as they were, but we knew perfectly well it wasn’t true.’
‘Didn’t you get along with them?’
‘My half-brother and sisters?’ She nodded. I took a deep breath, trying to translate incoherent emotion into words. ‘Oh, we didn’t argue, not even as much as most kids do; I got on perfectly well with them, on the surface. But it was just the surface. They were all so alike, and I…I just wasn’t. They all had brown hair and blue eyes, like my mother and stepfather did, but it wasn’t just looks, it was everything about them. Really confident, but not in an obnoxious way. Just outgoing. Contented. They were all very nice; everyone liked them. I liked them myself. I couldn’t help it.’
I lit a cigarette, hardly aware that I was doing it. ‘It made it worse, in
a way, that they were so nice. I couldn’t really get angry or jealous, just guilty. I made everything so complicated at home just by being there. I spent most of the time trying to stay out of the way, really. I think that’s how I started writing, looking back. There’s not a lot else you can do, when you’re up in your bedroom on your own. Maybe that’s why I’m a bit funny about it these days. When you associate something with something else that much, you can’t help thinking other people do, as well. I know how paranoid it sounds, but I always think they’re going to know too much about me if I talk about my writing. That bedroom. Not wanting to go downstairs. The whole atmosphere, back then…’
Taking a drag on my cigarette, I found myself speaking slowly, as if putting it into words for the very first time. ‘It would be different, I think, if I was successful—people would be too impressed to think all that; they’d just see a big famous name with books in Smiths. But as it is…well, I’ve told you before. It goes too far back. It feels wrong.’
‘I can understand that.’ Liz’s voice was quiet, gentle. ‘I honestly can. Does your family know you’ve had a book published?’
‘Oh, yes—it’s not as if we’re estranged exactly; they know where I’m living now, that I’m married now, what my husband’s called and what he does for a living. But they’ll never come here, and they’ll probably never meet him. We’ve never talked about it properly—we never do talk about things properly—but we all know it’s for the best. We just make things awkward for each other. All they want to know is that I’m all right, that I’m happy. That they don’t have to feel guilty about me any more. And vice versa.
‘Anyway, they’re all fine these days, just like I am. It’s not like some tragic separation or anything, it’s so much easier this way. I always thought it would be. I remember, after my A levels, I deliberately chose the university that was furthest away from them, out of the ones that offered me a place. I thought things might all be different if I was miles away. I thought I’d be free of all that baggage…’
In the Spider's House Page 23