16 | Tam
‘Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.’
— Seneca
Wednesday
Tam was packing. He’d been sleeping at a hotel near the office because he needed to put this fucked-up house of murder and failed relationships behind him, and get on with his life. The hotel was out by ExCel, which was about as far as he could get from the flat and still be in London, and he’d been taking his stuff over on the train one bag at a time ever since the police let him back in. He’d been shifting stuff gradually just in case the Holiday Inn decided he was moving in, which he pretty much was until he found a storage unit and then a new place to live. Every time he walked out of his old front door he could smell the deep atavistic odour which still hung around even in the hall, in the air above the table that once held a neat pile of post, but was now covered in fingerprint powder and takeaway leaflets spilling on to the carpet beneath. Tam sifted through Karen’s post and extracted his letters. One more visit and he’d be done. A shiver ran down his back, and he stepped over the faded bunches of flowers on the doorstep, put his head down and walked up the path.
Most of his life for the last few weeks seemed to have revolved around bin bags one way or another and this morning on the train he looked a pretty sight, carrying yet another black bag stuffed with clothes, while young professionals made their way to work wearing suits purchased on gap years in Hong Kong with ridiculous red linings, or pink embroidery marking out handmade buttonholes from the run of the mill. This was why the British class divide would run and run; he hadn’t grown up with anyone whose dad would have told him to buy a suit in the Far East. Tam nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all.
Opposite him, a tall, well-spoken guy was talking into a mobile phone. He was absentmindedly patting a bundle that was attached to the front of him and joggling a pushchair with his knee. An arm kept reaching out of the buggy to grab his trouser leg and a voice which was, from Tam’s angle at least, faceless, repeated the mantra ‘daddydaddydaddydaddy’. The bundle he was patting turned out to be a baby, staring glassily out in front of him, and it seemed to have no thoughts of trying to get attention. As the train pulled in, Tam saw him following a herd of other commuters all attached to babies and toddlers of various ages. What was it, bring your child to work day? Tam craned his neck to look at the sign they were all headed towards.
WE TAKE BABIES FROM SIX WEEKS, 7 A.M. TO 7 P.M. LATE TAKE-HOME AND LET-IN SERVICE AVAILABLE.
It seemed to Tam that the Russians had tried something like this and they hadn’t had a universally positive outcome. How had this happened, that it was fine for kids to be farmed out to someone probably on minimum wage rather than being at home tucked up in their cots? Tam felt old and out of step again. He wasn’t a parent, thank God, but what he’d seen over the last couple of weeks made him think something in society was going wrong, and he was glad to be out of it. Thoughts of children took him back to Sarah, and a pang of sorrow, mixed with anger, flooded through him.
The events of the other night flashed into Tam’s mind. Rushing back to the flat and the screaming he’d heard coming from Nick’s flat. Sarah’s frantic cries for her father as Tam had burst in were still ringing in his ears. He needed to close that door for the last time, and sit by himself with some IPA and ten takeaways in a row. He leant back against the cool of the glass behind him and tried to still the images and the rising panic which kept taking him by surprise. Nick’s face, the sheet covering the bed, it just kept playing like some demonic Faustian play. So many bleeding hearts and no one to fix them.
It had been chaos. First through the door, he had been in the flat within thirty seconds of hearing a scream. Nick had been standing between him and Sarah, and the flat was gloomy with that sweet smell of rot that still seemed to be living in his mouth and nose.
It had taken him about twenty seconds to push down the rising bile in his throat, adjust to the gloom and decide what to say. Police training – old-fashioned police training.
‘Sshhh, Sarah, calm down, I’m here, stop screaming, let’s try and talk to Nick and explain that we aren’t here to hurt him, then we can sort everything else out.’
While he talked, Tam had been looking round the flat. There was only one door in and out, obviously, and it was behind him. Nick was on the floor, sitting, back against the wall, below the window which looked out over the garden of the house and Staverton Road. His eyes were closed and he was wailing like a banshee, his hands moving in a frantic pattern and his whole body twisted like a ball of wire. Sarah was behind Tam in the doorway of the bedroom, by the smashed window that looked over the path and bins, standing in a pile of broken glass, her eyes fixed on the bed and her hands clamped over her mouth and nose.
‘Nick, come on, we know each other, mate, don’t do anything silly. Sarah’s your neighbour, you don’t want to hurt her. Just let her go past you and find her dad and then we can talk and sort all this out.’
‘It can’t be sorted out now. I want to go somewhere peaceful and have a routine. I don’t want to go to my mother’s house; I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to go in the bedroom. I don’t want to be here.’
‘I can see that, Nick. Come on, let Sarah go past you and we can sort this out.’
‘She said she would help. It’s a lie. I don’t like it here and she said she would help. I don’t feel good here.’
‘Nick, I can see you’ve had a rough time; what I find is that something goes wrong, then one thing after another makes it worse. Let’s sit down and try and work out what happened and make a plan.’
Tam remembered the next few seconds clearly, Nick starting to calm and the rocking and twisted arms seeming to relax for a moment and him standing up, as if he was ready to go with Tam. Then suddenly he caught sight of a movement outside and Nick looked down at his mother and grandfather on the pavement. Tam had never heard keening, that strangest of human noises, but Nick started it then. A high-pitched wail of agony, and then another layer, an echo of Nick’s pain in Sarah’s sobs and cries mixed with the wailing, until amidst the frantic repetition Tam could suddenly make out words.
‘Don’t make me, don’t tell.’
‘Nick, no one is trying to make you do anything, it’s OK.’
‘Sit down, sit here.’ Nick beckoned to the floor, and soon Tam and Sarah and Nick were huddled together while outside the sounds of cars arriving, and teams with loudspeakers, made Nick rock ever more frantically back and forth while Sarah looked more and more terrified.
Tam dug deep and tried to remember what he’d been told on the ridiculous hostage seminars he’d been forced to go on. He knew that eye contact was recommended, but that wasn’t an option here. He tried putting a reassuring hand on Nick’s shoulder, which was also less than helpful as it was met with a jerk and a shout. He looked at Sarah, and then spoke to them both.
‘Listen, we’re all in this together. We need to get this sorted and get out of here so that we can all get back to our lives and our routines.’
He remembered that: repeat words back that the perpetrator finds comforting. He had learned that on a course.
‘Nick, just let me go to the window and let them all know we’re OK, and that we need some peace and quiet to talk. Is that alright with you?’
Nick scrunched up his face; his hands were over his eyes. Sarah put a hand gently on his arm, as she had earlier, and his eyes sprang open. Tam noted that he didn’t jerk away when Sarah touched him.
‘You lied to me, you said you would help me.’
Sarah was frozen, unable to talk, and Tam took over.
‘I will, I’ll do that, I’ll help you sort this out and get somewhere quiet; let’s just get the noise to go away and we can see what the problem is. Look, we’re all here, and we’re all safe. Now we can deal with the rest of the problems.’
‘I am the problem. I am the problem. My mother doesn’t want me and I don’t have anyone else. Just because someone di
es, it doesn’t mean it’s your fault. I had a brother and my mother doesn’t love me and I am the problem. Grandpa told me that.’
Tam had got gently to his feet and headed for the bay window at the front of the house. He waved down and gave a thumbs-up and then put his finger to his mouth in a shush sign. He remembered making eye contact with Sarah’s father, he recognised him from Karen’s flat, and he tried to convey that everything was alright but that they needed everyone to back off for a bit.
Things quietened down. Tam sat back down on the floor and Nick slowly became less frantic. Sarah had pulled herself together and now she started talking gently to Nick, in an almost singsong voice. It was gentle, and even made Tam feel better.
‘Do you remember I told you that my brother and you were so similar, Nick? He’s my best friend and I would never let anyone hurt him. If someone’s hurt you, or you’ve hurt someone, we can make it better, I’m sure. Just talk to me.’
The silence seemed endless and Tam waited to see what Nick would do. His arms slowly stilled, he stopped moving and eventually he locked eyes with Sarah and just started talking. It was a different voice and a different Nick, as if he was digging deep, shocked out of his carefully created world by the chaos around him.
‘It’s always been the same. I’m different. I know I am. I can remember the first time I knew. I came into a room and I tried to join in, and the expressions on the faces made no sense. I didn’t have any of that information. I just knew that nothing made sense to me that made sense to everyone else. Everyone was playing, but I didn’t know the game, so I sat down and put all the toys into lines, green, blue, big, small. I tried to see the patterns and the more I tried to make it neat, the more I was different. Then someone came along and kicked them all over the floor, and it was my fault for scaring everyone and shouting and I wanted to go home.
‘My mother would look at me, and try and pick me up, and I hated that feeling and then she stopped. After a while she didn’t take me to see other people and soon it was just me and her and then we were a unit. We are a unit, Nick, she told me that. I woke up, and put on my clothes and made a neat parting, and washed my face, everything. Then I concentrated on being good; I could do it really well.’
Tam remembered the desperation rising in the room, the sounds of movement on the staircase. Nick was dragging the recollections from some part of himself which he had long ago discarded. Tam needed to move things along, God only knew what would happen if they scared Nick now.
‘Nick, everyone is different. What happened to make you so unhappy?’
‘I didn’t hurt anyone. I just got more and more scared, and the more scared I got, the more I could only see the straight lines, and that’s why my grandpa had to come and take me away from my mother and teach me how to be a man. I didn’t have a dad, and I didn’t need one, but Grandpa wanted to set an example. He said I needed to learn to listen, and that no one could get through to me. No one can get through to you, Nick, you little freak. You’re so fucking sensitive, crybaby. I didn’t like the lessons, but I wanted to be good so badly that soon I stopped fighting and I was quiet. Keep your mouth shut, Nick, open your mouth, Nick, you little retard. I took the bits of me that could feel and I stuffed them down below my ribs, where no one could hurt me any more. Now I can’t get them back. The last time I tried was when I put my hand on my little brother to see if he was alright, but he died. Grandpa thinks he died because of me. You’re pathetic, Nick, who’d feel sorry for you? You’re a fuck-up and we’re all sick of making allowances for you. You don’t like it here? Your brother’s gone, your mother’s a wreck, and you whine every time I come near you even when it’s for your own good. Move out, then, see how that goes. Wash your face twenty times a day, get a routine, you love those. Just don’t come snivelling back here, and don’t fuck up, because you have one chance, Nick, one chance. Then it’s back to learning about real life.’
Tam felt as if all the air in his body had been knocked out at once. Sarah’s hand had been resting on Nick’s arm as he talked. She had a way with him; for a young kid it was extraordinary. Nick seemed to have used up all the energy in his body, mental and physical, and he curled in on himself and wound into a tight foetal position on the floor. His eyes closed and Tam watched as he silently withdrew back to wherever he felt safe, alone within himself.
Tam tried to pick Sarah up from the floor but she wanted to stay next to Nick. He was quiet now, and, getting carefully to his feet with Sarah’s help, Tam went to the window to beckon Sarah’s dad into the house. The evening was sticky, one of those Indian summers that often arrived in London in September, and the smell in the flat wasn’t getting any better. The front door crashed open, and, instead of Sarah’s dad appearing, the room had filled with armed police. The terrified wailing from Nick as he was pulled to his feet, bent forward and handcuffed, would haunt Tam for many years to come whenever he drifted in that strange land somewhere between reality and dreams. It was the sound of injustice, and pain, and a life never lived.
The ‘raid’, which was completely unnecessary and that even ten years earlier would have been achieved with two coppers and a truncheon, now involved a massive amount of shouting and strange arm signalling. Anonymous faces shouted GET DOWN FLAT ON THE FLOOR at Tam and Sarah followed by PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEADS while the room was made safe and ‘cleared’ in an echo of a television terrorist cell discovery. When each kitchen cabinet had been thrown open, and the fridge and freezer doors left hanging open, Nick was half pulled, half pushed towards the door as he tried to get away and restore order to his flat.
The Met scene-of-crime officers arrived and Nick’s hysteria mounted to a crescendo. Tam had looked up at one of his colleagues and said, ‘Just get him out of here – he’s a neat freak; he’ll totally lose it in a minute. You need to get on to the Vulnerable Persons Unit. He needs help.’
Sarah meanwhile was softly talking to Nick, constant and gentle-toned. She must have been aware that he couldn’t hear her any more in the anguish of his carefully constructed life being destroyed in front of his eyes, and she was silently crying. She didn’t stop, though, and perhaps she knew that her voice was enough to offer some comfort. Tam couldn’t help wondering where she’d learned that.
Then Nick was gone, but as he was pulled past them his eyes met Sarah’s and he shouted, ‘You said you would help me. Everyone lies to me.’
Tam lay still, patting Sarah occasionally, and wondered to himself how the level of fucked-up had got this extreme in a couple of weeks. Total fucking bedlam in his own house – you couldn’t make it up. At this point the level of hysteria had lowered slightly even with a dead body in the bedroom and a group of armoured police that looked like Star Wars battletroopers patting them down on the floor without any word of comfort for the girl, even though she was now shaking like a leaf and obviously in shock.
‘What happened here, Tam?’
He recognised the voice, and tried to see through the mask. ‘Can we do this downstairs or at the station? She needs to be with her dad; he’s outside. She’s a kid.’
‘Yeah, of course, sorry – procedure.’
He gestured to his partner and they pulled off their masks: human faces, Tam wondered what the point of the macho display was. Maybe they were channelling the SAS.
Tam gently helped Sarah to her feet, slowly, and when he put his arm round her shoulders she leant almost all her child’s tiny weight into him for support. Together they walked down the stairs, where a female officer was holding out foil insulation blankets for the pair of them. Tam put one round her and walked past his – load of bollocks, but it made the police look as though they were doing something useful to help.
He led Sarah to her dad and looked around for Karen. Nothing – just Jack, the middle son. Totally fucked-up family, he thought to himself. He could certainly pick them. Sarah squeezed his hand as he turned away, and said thank you. It was the first time since he had lost his job that Tam thought he might cry.
It had been natural then to walk over to his colleagues. After twenty-five years on the force there were a few faces he knew but more he didn’t. Young, enthusiastic kids from the new intake that thrived on paperwork, targets and initiatives. Two of them were patting Nick down while he struggled and resisted, and a few feet back, behind a cordon of yellow police tape, a young woman – well, young to him, mid-thirties, Tam guessed – was sobbing, standing awkwardly and separately next to a much older man who must have been her father. That had to be the grandfather who’d been such a bastard to Nick; Tam was determined not to let him out of his sight. He might not be the most PC guy around, but he knew a wrong ’un when he saw one.
Nick was trying to turn in the direction of the weeping woman, and was now as taut and as agitated as Tam had ever seen him. His hands were twisting, he was on his toes, and from his contorted mouth came a stream of appeals. ‘Stop, don’t touch me, no, stop, no!’
Tam walked towards them, and Nick met his eyes.
‘Let me help here. He’s my neighbour, I was in there with him. We have a relationship of sorts.’
They hesitated; it was obvious that everyone had a good idea who he was, and his reputation had gone before him. The officer in charge spoke.
‘The gaffer said that if we saw you in or anywhere near the house we were to arrest you.’
Tam shrugged. The scene spoke for itself: they needed him. They hesitated, not sure what the consequences would be of taking help from a non-conformist ex-copper, but by this point even the guys with the least EQ had worked out that, whether or not he was a killer, Nick had some serious issues, and they were beginning to panic about the level of visible distress, and were on their radios to the Vulnerable Persons Unit. The officer in charge, who was trying to shield Nick from the mobile phone cameras of passers-by, called Tam over. ‘What a fucking mess. Are you off the force or on leave?’
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 21