Why didn’t they help her? Why hadn’t anybody ever helped her? She was empty. She needed to be full. She had needed their seed. Why hadn’t they ever seen that, any of them? She’d been drunk and fucked so often that the misuses were a blur. Rare moments of laughter stood out – especially the last one, after hours, on the bonnet of a car at the back of the tavern. The barman had been swaying as he joked about her being slack. She’d ridiculed him for being limp; sniggering as she flicked his ‘little boy’s willy’ away from her, comparing him with others she’d had before losing control, hysterical as he tried to force it back in. She laughed until he hit her. He hit her more than once. No longer limp, he flipped her over and tore her anus, beer slopping from his bottle onto her lower back.
Deborah cried herself to sleep behind the tavern; her pants stuck to her, her face turning purple, her arm as a pillow.
As the sun rose, she felt her hair being brushed off her face, gently, but still enough to wake her. Struggling to focus, she was briefly hypnotised by the light refracting through the dewdrops suspended on the wool of her jumper. Gradually, within the birdsong of the dawn chorus, she recognised the slow exhalations of someone close by, watching. Blinking, she moved her head to see. Above her stood a child in a white dress, radiant with sunlight and long blonde hair.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Sabbath,’ said Deborah.
‘It’s good you know my name.’
‘I guess so.’
‘No need to waste time on introductions.’
Sabbath held her hand out. She kept her slender fingers straight and still as Deborah took hold. Slight as the child was, Deborah took strength from her as she pulled herself into a half-sitting position.
‘We need to go,’ said Sabbath.
She gave a gentle tug, but Deborah resisted. She was tender and it hurt to move and she remembered what had happened the night before. She wiped young tears away before they had time to fall.
‘Be strong for Sabbath.’
‘I can’t, I’m sore.’
‘You need to be strong.’
Sabbath tugged again, coaxing. After a few seconds, Deborah allowed the child to pull her up. She winced, feeling raw and ripped.
‘He used the wrong hole.’
‘I know,’ said Sabbath.
‘Why?’
‘He doesn’t care about you.’
Deborah looked down at Sabbath.
‘Do you?’
‘Of course.’ Sabbath took Deborah’s hands in her own. ‘Why else would I be here?’
‘I’m glad,’ said Deborah. ‘It’s nice. I feel better with you here.’
‘Shall we?’
Sabbath led the way with faltering steps. Slow progress saw them emerge from behind the tavern on to the footpath. No traffic passed them as they walked home together, Deborah holding on to the child.
Sabbath still had hold when Deborah was clean and she fell asleep.
The girl was right. The barman didn’t care. He had a story and he was happy to tell those who would listen. It started another wave of derision and condemnation. It also teased some of them back to her, bottle in hand by way of payment. Past beaux who had wearied of her guiding hands, fat men with no hope, young men with no experience. Yet not a man in the village who wanted to use her wrongly could meet her gaze. It was over. She rejected them all. Some of them had stood in the circle around the dead boy. One of them passed her the spade.
Deborah tore the skin off her blister, nails digging into the subcutaneous flesh to feel the pain, refusing to indulge in pity. It helped clear her mind to the now, to this act of cleansing herself of everything Dog Evans. She sat the jerrycan on the top step of the Evans’ house. She pushed down and turned the sprung cap until it popped off. She positioned the mouth to pour into the house and tilted it.
She watched as the diesel glugged, rippling with indigo moonlight as it spread. The boats became animated, lifted from the floor by the incoming tide to set sail and float away from her on the swell. She envied them. She emptied the can.
The disposable plastic lighter was warm from her jeans pocket. The liquid visible through its clear walls was precious, the answer to her prayers. She sensed an end and was surprised to hear herself snigger as she held the flame to the spilled fuel. It went out. Her thumb re-spun the wheel against the flint. It sparked and caught. She held the lighter to the floor, concentrating to keep it in the thin layer of fume as the heat of the flame transferred to the metal collar and into the pad of her thumb. She held it in place until the diesel caught, sucking air into the house as the multicoloured ignition coiled away across the room to the window. She let go. The lighter dropped through the spreading sheet of flame. She watched as each boat ignited individually in the aurora of burning fumes: brief fireworks on a shallow sea. It was only in the moment of their burning that she realised they were banknotes.
Pushing away from the door, Deborah slumped against the wooden upright that supported the porch and faced back into the house. She was exhausted. She watched as the smoke thickened. Feathers of flame flew up table, chairs and armchairs. Fire spread to the walls and soon the fabric of the house was alight. Her thumb pulsed with the pain of another developing blister. She tried to wipe the burn into her Levis, rubbing it against the frayed leg seam. They’d been good to her for over a decade, been well used. At times, this faded pair of jeans was all she could rely on. A smile creased her cheeks as she gazed, fascinated, into the warp and weft of the denim that flickered with the killing of the house.
10
It was a large room, occupying the whole ground floor. When the newly married John Cutter had finished his work and allowed people in to see, their neighbours had marvelled at the open-plan design. It was audacious, bright and airy, space for the soul and ventilation for the eyes. It made people smile and yelled freedom. The freedom had been playful. At first John and Debbie had played alone. Then came Jenny. Jenny Cutter had crawled, toddled, cycled and roller-skated around the central column of the stairwell that appeared to hold the rest of the home up like Atlas held the heavens. The floor retained the arcs of roller-wheel marks.
John Cutter mourned the room’s lack of use. It had been years since the solid wood counter he had spanned the right-hand wall with was busy with family activity. Food had been prepared as Play-Doh had been rolled and squeezed or crayons pushed across the back of old wallpaper. Meals had been cooked. Plans had been made. A future had been expected. The dining table was not set. What was visible of his workbench below the far window was dusty and unused. Beside the open fireplace, a solid single bed dominated the left-hand side of the room. It was a blunt frame of spars and beams, jointed and pegged, made for sleep and nothing else. After finishing his bed, he had retired his carpenter’s tools. Save for a single gouge, they dressed one side of the stairwell’s outer wall. Civilian clothes hung from the other. The narrow back wall held his police uniform.
He crossed from the fireplace to the concealed stairway and pulled the heavy velvet drape aside. The smell that fell into the room came from a distant past. It was the smell of more than one: of talcum powder, flowers and clean clothes. From the bottom of the stairwell Cutter looked up into the gloom. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d climbed the stairs. His left hand encircling the ceramic ball that weighted the pull string, he applied steady pressure, as if to a trigger. The mechanism clicked and the light bulb popped. In the brief flash he saw that Jenny’s bedroom door was open, that wallpaper was peeling away at the top of the stairs, a rainwater stain ran through the ceiling rose and a nest of cobwebs gave the impression they held the light in place. The darkness that followed the snapshot was solid and disappointing.
He sighed.
Rooting through the cupboard beneath the stairs, John Cutter found a bulb. He took the small black Maglite off its hook. He slid his overcoat off and hung it up. He noticed the wet
stains down the back and in the armpits. Unhooking it, he draped it over the radiator and turned the valve to allow hot water to flow through.
On the landing, he changed the bulb, the torch held in his teeth. The bulb flared as soon as he screwed it in. Looking down, he blinked until he was used to the light. He saw his footprints on the stairs. If dust consisted mostly of human skin, how could the layer on the stairs could be so thick?
Their bedroom door was still closed. Two steel brackets with security screws ensured that it would remain so. Behind it was an almighty and family-ending mess of anger. Clothes covered the floor. The bed was slashed hard and eviscerated. The wardrobe door hung from the single surviving bent screw of one hinge. A fist-size hole at head height took the blame for the lightning-streak scar beneath Cutter’s watch strap.
Jenny’s room was spotless. She hated things out of place. The clear desk beneath the window had two sharpened pencils at the ready in a plastic cup.
Looking out, Cutter saw a reddening of the sky. It was too early for dawn. From the direction, it could only be the Evans’ house. He was heartened that somebody had seen fit to cleanse the town completely.
Through the slim vertical gap between the door and its jamb, he caught sight of his daughter’s boots: red leather, white soles, white laces and a white fur trim. Her Santa boots, Debbie had called them. They had driven to the city for those boots, the last day of the half-term holiday, the weekend before she was taken. They were meant to complement the red check of the plaid skirts worn during winter term. They had argued about them. Couching it in terms he felt reasonable, he had tried to steer them towards a more sober pair of a conservative price and black leather that would take the wax and polish they already possessed, not the red ones the assistant already had in her hand.
Jenny had worn them once, on the Monday. A boy had made fun of them at school and she wouldn’t wear them on the Tuesday. Her mother had tried to tell her that it was a boy’s way of being friends; picking on you meant they liked you. She had blushed but hadn’t budged. She returned to school in black boots. Surprised as he was, John was saddened. Once the buying was done, the red ones became her boots; they suited her and he was secretly proud of her determination. He should have told her. For the first time, he had entertained thoughts of her growing up, meeting somebody, not needing him. Maybe the boy apologised.
Jenny’s cat was still waiting at the foot of her bed. It had stopped eating the evening she hadn’t come home. For seven days, in which time her body was recovered, identified and buried, it circled her room, getting thinner. He had taken changes of food, milk and water, talked to the cat; a cat he had never been particularly fond of. He tried to stroke it once, to feel what his little girl had felt. It hissed at him and swiped extended claws across the back of his hand, as though he was the reason for her absence. Cutter rubbed his hand, still offended. He’d stopped taking the food that the cat had not been eating, and removed its water. Three days later it had lain down at the foot of her bed and died.
He was shocked at the condition of the remains. The skin looked as delicate as ancient parchment; the short glossy fur was gone. The spine arced between disconnected limbs. The ribs of a broken cage were piled like the jack straws of his daughter’s game of pick-up. The skull was bare, the eye sockets hollow. The mouth lay slightly open, enough to let the last breath out, or possibly, at the end, realising that it needed to eat.
Vehement and irrational, Cutter had refused to move it after it had died. Nor would he allow her mother to move it. This became the reason she left. It allowed her to leave. She refused to see the cat’s devotion as a good thing.
He hadn’t cried when Deborah had left. No want remained in their relationship. Their daughter hadn’t been the glue that held them together, but her absence was their undoing. He had made their bedroom uninhabitable and withdrawn to the ground floor.
Looking into his little girl’s room, he saw the reflection of her bed in the dressing table mirror. Her doll slept.
‘I got him, darling.’ His dad voice was rusty and broken-edged. ‘I told you I would. It’s been a while, I know.’ He swallowed into his parched throat. ‘Time passes.’
He leant against the wall. Tonight was right, though. The boy knew it, as well as anybody, stripped naked like he was. It was a sacrifice. He was guilty of more than surviving. It was all over his face.
‘You think it got too much, the being alive?’
John Cutter looked at the glow in the sky.
‘Now that he’s gone, who knows, this might even become a good place to live once more. Anyway, I knew you’d like to know.’
He stood on the threshold. He stared at her desk.
‘Baby – seems like it’s at an end.’ He took hold of the handle. Just before the door was fully closed, he stopped. ‘Your mother’s gone. Don’t know if I told you that. If not, I’m sorry.’
The hand-made door clicked into place. The fit to frame was perfect.
Downstairs, he kept the drapes drawn across the stairwell. He drank whisky and lay down to sleep. He couldn’t. His thoughts ran like the cracks in the ceiling, tearing through sense and reason as he relived the events of the night; feeling the weight of the club, the impact of contact and hearing the boy’s final breath as it squeaked out of him, compressed through the kink in his neck. He wondered where the leak would come from. The fucking priest was favourite. If not the priest, who else wouldn’t be able to contain their guilt, would need to confess it, or worse, share it? Not everybody had his mental fortitude. Somebody would need to take the night’s events out of the village. Of that he was certain.
John Cutter stood and dropped his trousers. He took the gouge missing from the tool rack from beneath his pillow. Sitting on his bed, he wiped his right thigh. It was partially shaven. From the groin to the knee in a parody of fish scales were dozens of crescent-shaped scars. Healed, fine and livid at the top, the lowermost were scabbed and still itchy. He positioned the gouger blade before pushing it into his thigh until the skin broke and blood seeped. He held it steady as a thin red line trickled around his leg. A single drop of blood hit the floor before he took the gouge from the wound. He used his handkerchief to wipe the blade before stemming the flow. He lay back and dozed off.
He awoke to the smell of burning. He focused on the stains and broken plaster above his head. His ears picked up revelry, jubilation, footfalls, and then quiet; quiet for a good while – until there was a knock on his door. He fastened his trousers and answered.
Deborah stood outside the house in denial of what he had recently told their baby. The priest held her up. The last time he’d seen her before tonight was the last time he’d arrested her, months ago.
This wasn’t the girl he had wanted; the girl whose tummy had fluttered as his fingers traced the line of her knicker elastic before sliding into the dip between her hip bone and what there was of her belly, her moaning, urging his fingers down with her hand, inviting him to explore.
She was dirtier than usual, and drunk again. She swayed and would have fallen had the priest not steadied her, his arm around her waist. She didn’t look up. He wasn’t sure she even knew where she was. John Cutter had never seen anyone more in need of help. He told the priest to take her away, turning and closing the door without watching them go.
He couldn’t lie down again. Topping strong coffee up with whisky, he sat and listened to the rain as it swept across the village.
When he left the house, Cutter was in uniform, the priest was gone, the rain was easing and morning was on the way.
Seven years earlier
Fraser Blades blew hard as he cleared the snow from the yard entrance. His dad, builder ‘Sandy Blades – man of trades’, was renowned for being late with quotes and low on estimates when compared to the final bill, but he was local. Schoolmates had told Fraser his dad was a thief.
Fraser earned a modest yet steady wag
e during the school holidays, cleaning tools, learning the correct proportions for mixing concrete or grout and chipping cement off old bricks and stone to be reused. Though he accepted that clearing the yard this morning was part of his remit, he hated that his fingers were blue and smarting with the cold. Through the kitchen window he saw his dad pour a healthy dram into his coffee flask and tighten the lid against the escaping steam, then take a swig from the bottle. He caught Fraser watching and pulled a mock-guilty face before making a play of offering him the whisky. Fraser frowned and shook his head in pretend chastisement, then returned to the final few yards of clearing, wishing he was in the warmth of the kitchen.
In his bedroom, Fraser kept his wages in his bank: a whisky tin with a slot punched out of the lid by a screwdriver. He had asked his dad to solder the lid on to stop him spending any of his savings. Lifting the tin to gauge the weight, he shook it close to his ear, as if wealth had a particular sound. He was an avaricious collector of money, believing it would protect him against the cold and the isolation. He didn’t want to be like his dad. At the back of his unformed mind he sensed a future that would depend upon lying to his peers with a smile on his face at the service to the clink of coin in his pocket. He wanted friends, wanted to belong. His dad worked long hours alone and spent each night the same, short drinks his only companion.
Fraser thought he knew a way out. After rinsing his face, he combed his hair, wanting to look his best today for Lucy Livingstone, his future partner.
Fraser had decided to make a good show of pretending to like Lucy Livingstone. He made this decision after an opportunity presented itself on the third Saturday of September, at the harvest festival. Beneath the helium balloons and jostled by the elbows of adults, he was pretending to weigh up how many multicoloured marbles there were likely to be in the sealed glass jar. Positioning himself so that he could see beyond the jar, he observed the enthusiasm and competition of the crowd gathered around the cake stall in the corner of the class. Dismissing the short-term gain of marbles, he mingled with the adults. As he listened to the praise accorded to Lucy Livingstone’s baking, Fraser watched her cakes disappear from the trestle table. He calculated how much she had raised for the school. Substituting himself for the school, he concluded she would be a good business partner, and a cake shop would be warm and happy.
The Wrong Child Page 7