Thicker Than Water

by Mike Carey

  By contrast, my fellow patients were mostly ignoring him: but then, we were all of us fire-damaged, chipped at the edges or generally shopworn. This was a recovery ward, but the term was being applied fairly loosely. There was a guy with hair so lank and plastered to his head that he looked like he’d been given the first part of a tarring and feathering, who twitched and chewed his knuckles a lot and seemed to be in some kind of withdrawal; another, much older man who drifted in and out of sleep with a look of faint surprise perpetually dissolving back into torpor; a kid probably still in his teens, his pyjamas drenched with sweat, who wore cordless headphones and rocked gently to his own inner beat. And there was me. Mostly we respected each other’s space - or in some cases were maybe unaware of each other’s existence.

  That suited me fine. I was looking at this brief stay in the way that old lags look on short stretches of imprisonment: you do your time, interacting with your environment as little as you can, and then you walk. I’ve already told you why I hate hospitals: the teeming multitudes of ghosts are as distracting as mosquitoes, as spirit-sapping as a constant hangover. That aside, though, this was a new-ish ward with reasonable decor. Reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Picasso’s Man With the Blue Guitar and one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans looked down on us from the walls, and the fluorescent strips were the kind that are meant to simulate outdoor light. Despite my bitching, it could have been a lot worse.

  ‘Okay, you’re kind of spoiled for choice,’ Nicky said, dropping a thick wodge of computer printouts on the table in front of me. Actually, ‘thick’ doesn’t cover it: it looked like a Central London phone book. Propped up in bed in tee-shirt and pyjama trousers with every muscle in my body aching, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry, I could only stare.

  ‘This is—?’

  Nicky gave the massive accumulation of data an affectionate pat. ‘Incidents on the Salisbury estate involving a police report or a newsfeed write-up. I went back two years - and I widened the net to include an area of a few blocks on all sides of the Salisbury itself. I didn’t know how tight your brief was.’

  ‘So tight I’m having trouble breathing,’ I said, fingering the bandage across my chest. ‘Jesus, Nicky, how many incidents are we talking about?’

  ‘I didn’t tally up. And bear in mind, there’s a lot of redundancy in there - some things popped up in a lot of different places, and I didn’t bother to filter out because, hey, you don’t pay me enough for the deluxe service. Also, I set the bar real low. If someone’s bike got stolen, it’s in there. Or say little Timmy went missing for an hour or two and turned out to be round at his gran’s . . . So long as someone called the cops and the call was logged, I threw it all in the pot. I didn’t discriminate.’

  He paused. I could tell it was a pause rather than a dead halt because there was something in his voice - the eagerness to spill that Nicky feels when he’s unearthed something good.

  ‘But?’ I prompted.

  ‘But there’s a lot of good stuff, too. I mean, if you were looking for evidence that the Salisbury is a snake-pit, then you’ve got it. Standouts from this year included a guy cutting up his teenaged daughter with a carving knife because she stayed out too late, and a bunch of kids who caught a cat, dismembered it and posted the pieces through all the letter boxes in Boateng Block. Last year someone celebrated Christmas by hanging a tramp with a noose of barbed wire in the doorway of an empty flat where he was squatting. A while before that, a kid took a swan-dive off the eighth-floor walkway head first onto the concrete.’

  I pondered this. ‘Is all of this inside the bell-shaped curve, or out of it?’ I asked him.

  Nicky’s face lit up as he answered, with the fervour of the data-rat. He’s never happier than when he’s slinging some choice statistics.

  ‘How many people live in that towering shithole, would you say? With full occupancy, I’d say it would be pushing three thousand. But some flats are in between tenants and some have been certified unfit for human habitation. Call it two thousand, for the sake of argument.

  ‘Average percentage for public-disorder offences involving violence is 2.2 per thousand head of population. That’s across the whole of the UK mainland. For London it’s 2.9, and on the worst sink estates you can expect to be up past five. The magic number for the Salisbury holds steady at six all the way from 2000 up until late last year. Then it jumps to more than three times that. Okay, across small populations you can expect crazy year-on-year variations, but I’d say this is something special - especially given how wild and wacky some of these incidents are. It reminds me of that time last year, you know? When your friend Asmodeus got loose inside a church and made the whole congregation turn rabid.’

  Nicky dropped his voice for this last part, because the guy with the greasy hair had turned to look in our direction a moment ago, when Nicky’s tone became more animated. I nodded. I’d made the same connection myself.

  ‘I tried to get Juliet on the case, too,’ I murmured. ‘She went down there to take a look at it for me. But she’s being real cagey about what she found.’

  ‘Cagey?’

  ‘She won’t discuss it at all. She more or less said she knows what it is but she’s out of it. On the sidelines.’

  Nicky thought this through, obviously fascinated. ‘Did she seem scared?’ he asked. ‘Was it, like, this is too big for her? She doesn’t want to get in deeper than she can deal with?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, not that. Or at least, it didn’t feel like that. I just don’t know, Nicky. She’s never bailed on me before. Well,’ I amended, ‘for a while on the Myriam Kale case, when she was seeing it as a sisterhood thing, but even there she came around. I don’t get this at all, but I’ve seen Juliet face off against everything from were-kin to God Almighty. I don’t think there’s anything out there that she’s afraid of.’

  Nicky acknowledged the point with a nod. ‘Well, anything else she tells you, I want to know about it,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at me as if that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. ‘Because knowing things is my shtick,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Okay, Nicky.’ I made my tone emollient because I was too tired and sore right then to want an argument. ‘What about Kenny Seddon? You turn anything up there?’

  He shrugged with his eyebrows.

  ‘A little. I mean, I got what was there to be got, but there wasn’t much. And none of it is what you’d call illuminating.’

  ‘Go on.’

  He pointed at the thick stack of pages. ‘It’s in your reading material,’ he said.

  ‘Give me the highlights.’

  ‘What highlights? He’s born, he lives, he maybe dies. Bit of a cliffhanger ending there, but that’s as good as it gets.’

  I held his gaze, and after a few moments he took an in-breath so he could sigh theatrically. ‘Okay, whatever. Full name, Kenneth Christopher Seddon. Born, Walton, Liverpool, late 1960s. The exact date is in there somewhere. He gets to age fourteen without incident, then has his first run-in with the police - possession of stolen goods. Court appearance, rap on the knuckles, off he goes. That’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship - he turns up on the magistrates’ court dockets six more times before he hits eighteen. Couple of affrays, couple of B-and-Es, drunk driving, and one moderately juicy wounding with intent.

  ‘Then he cleans up his act. Puts away childish things and doesn’t put a foot wrong for about five years or so. Or so we assume. Certainly doesn’t leave any footprint on the world. I’ve got a few possible pings on the name from Glasgow and Oldham - credit checks of one sort or another, mostly - so maybe he was on his travels.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I allowed. I’d already left Liverpool myself by that time, and truth to tell I hadn’t gone back much since. I’d never seen Kenny on any of my brief trips home, but then, I hadn’t been looking for him. I had no idea whether he’d stuck around. A lot of my generation were shaken loose when the slums around the
hospital were knocked down and new estates were built there. A lot more had already gone, deserting the sinking ship that Liverpool had looked like back in the Thatcher/Hatton era.

  ‘But then we get a solid sighting in January 2001,’ Nicky went on. ‘In the exuberant spirit of the new millennium, your man Kenny head-butted a cop after being pulled over on the M25, which places him in London and tells us something about the deficiencies in his survival instincts.’

  He made a gesture towards the sheaf of paper. ‘I decided to narrow the search then, and hit a rich seam. There’s a K. Seddon working casual shifts at a haulage firm in Newport Pagnell in August 2001. He doesn’t stick around long, but then he pops up again at a Lada garage in Welham Green, where he works for a year on and off. Pays his taxes, keeps his nose clean.

  ‘He’s down on the council register in Brent in 2002, on the waiting list but not yet in residence. He gets sick of that, presumably, and heads south. Bribes, blags or begs his way onto the list in Southwark and in due course gets his offer. Not the Salisbury, at first. Somewhere a bit classier than that. He lands in a two-bedroom conversion in Curtin’s Grove - the only council estate in South London where most of your neighbours live in fucking Grade Two listed buildings. And two bedrooms makes you think, doesn’t it? There’s no mention of dependants on the application form, but obviously there had to be some. Presumably it came up at the screening interview, and the records were filed with the housing department’s formal assessment. Which was erased, as per the stipulations of the Data Protection Act, when he left that address.’

  I was momentarily distracted by the memory of that stark, unlived-in second bedroom at Kenny’s flat. The son was hers, not his, Gary had said. And he’s dead. Details to follow.

  ‘So then he moved to Weston Block?’ I asked.

  Nicky nodded. ‘July 2003 to present day,’ he said. ‘But you’re missing out the best part, which is the reason why he moves. Those mysterious dependants? He keeps beating on them. Three domestic call-outs in five months, one of which involves an actual court appearance and a charge of assault, for which he does a month because he’s got some previous. That means we get a name at last. Kenny’s live-in is a Ms Blainey. Tania, Tina, something like that. You’ve got all the details there, but it’s a name that leads nowhere. I know, because I chased it.

  ‘Anyway, all of this bullshit is too rich for the neighbours’ blood. Complaints and formal warnings follow, and the housing department, as soon they’ve made their nod to the house rules, pick Kenny up by the scruff of the neck and drop him into the oubliette. I mean the Salisbury. There are no employment records from around then, by the way, but we’ve got him signing on at the social and showing up in the DSS database. He’s got a dodgy back and he’s on some kind of invalidity benefit. But he’s still got the two bedrooms, so I guess we can assume that his lady friend sticks around despite the abuse. Maybe the bad back makes him less free and easy with the backhanders. She goes AWOL soon after, though. Kenny reports her missing on 16 December 2005. Police file the report, then do nothing, which is fairly typical copping for a missing-persons notice. File hasn’t been added to since and, like I said, the name goes nowhere.’

  He started in on a fairly arid list of other official agencies whose records proved Kenny’s continued existence. ‘What about the kid?’ I said, cutting him off before he could get a head of steam going: I needed to see the wood right now. Individual trees could be examined later.

  Nicky looked aggrieved. ‘I was coming to the kid.’

  ‘I know, Nicky. But visiting hours are almost over. Let’s not piss off matron any more than we can help, eh? This is Mark, right? The boy who died?’

  ‘Right. Birth certificate has Mark Blainey. Local school records had him down as Mark Seddon.’

  ‘But he’s not Kenny’s son?’

  ‘No reason to think so, since he’s living with his mother at seven different addresses that don’t have Kenny in them before they all wind up together in Walworth. But she tends to give him the surname of whoever she’s shacking up with at the time. Maybe she’s an old-fashioned girl at heart - or maybe she thinks it helps the family to bond. But it’s kind of a moot point now, since, as you already pointed out, the kid is dead.’

  I felt a twinge of formless regret, thinking of that bare bedroom like an inadequate mausoleum: a memorial to a life, but from which all the visible signs of that life had been scrupulously erased. Didn’t grieving parents keep their kids’ rooms the way they were when the kids died? Wasn’t that how it was meant to work?

  In my mind’s eye I’d given this lost boy the face of Bic, the prescient kid with the bandaged hands. And I suddenly realised that the hands were the link I’d unconsciously followed. Bic’s hands were wrapped up in grubby dressings: Kenny’s were criss-crossed with the scars of old wounds. Even the ponytailed woman who was hanging out with Gwillam had her hands wrapped up. And my hands, when I’d visited the Salisbury for the second time, had itched so badly that I’d wanted to tear the skin off them.

  You need hands to hold a little baby, Max Bygraves crooned lugubriously in some imperfectly locked room in my memory. When I was about eight, there was a certain level of drunkenness that would cause my mum to break out her LPs late at night and play them loud enough so that the sound came up through the floorboards to the bedroom I shared with Matt. SingalongaMax was one that we came to dread.

  ‘Tell me about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, how he died.’

  ‘He was the jumper. I told you there was a jumper, right? Maybe eighteen months ago. Jumped off the walkway between Weston and Beckett Block. Lot of alcohol in the blood, and a lot of speed, too, which is never a good combination. Couple of people saw him climb up on the concrete parapet, yell something and then jump. Verdict was accidental death, mainly because of the bloodwork. He probably wasn’t sober enough to make up his mind to kill himself and then stick to it.’

  ‘How old?’ I asked. Jean Daniels had already told me, but there’s never any harm in checking against the records.

  ‘Eighteen. Just.’

  Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me. This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the double bed he now slept in alone, and carving out his indignation on his wrists and forearms . . . that was no stretch at all. But Kenny mourning a dead child? That wasn’t such an easy fit. And the bare room belied it, too, unless he cleared out all the kid’s stuff because it aroused memories that were too painful to bear.

  I suddenly saw another anomaly, though, and the vivid picture faded.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘If Kenny’s girlfriend had left, why was the son still living with him? Didn’t he move on with the mother every other time she switched boyfriends?’

  Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That seems to have been the pattern. But not this time. This time she hit the road and he hit the concrete. Everyone leaves the nest sooner or later.’

  I found I wasn’t in the mood, somehow, for Nicky’s flippant little homilies, but as I opened my mouth to launch a put-down a nurse stuck her head in through the door and called out ‘Five minutes!’ in a ringing tone to the room at large.

  ‘Man, you should ask for a cavity search,’ Nicky scoffed. ‘That’s all you’re missing for the full institutional experience.’

  ‘That and some decent food,’ I reminded him. ‘Nicky, did you get anywhere with that drawing? The teardrop thing?’

  ‘The shiny vagina? Not so far,’ Nicky confessed grudgingly. ‘Still working on it.’

  ‘Okay. I want you to do me another favour.’


  ‘Well, Jesus, what a surprise.’

  ‘Gwillam. Find out where he lives.’

  Nicky’s eyes lit up, but he couldn’t resist the cheap shot when it was sitting there right in front of him. ‘I thought that was Humpty-Dumpty territory,’ he reminded me.

  ‘It is. But hey, they cracked me once and I didn’t break. Not all the way. So now it’s my turn.’

  ‘Then I’ve got some good news for you.’ Nicky reached inside his pocket, fished out a folded sheet of paper and waved it in front of my face before dropping it onto the sheets. ‘I took the liberty. He hides himself pretty fucking well, and it took a while. But it was a labour of love.’

  I unfolded the sheet. It was an address in St Albans: The Rosewell Ecumenical Trust, Church Street.

  ‘That one you get for free, by the way,’ Nicky added.

  ‘Truly, this is the ending of days.’

  ‘Get well. And get bent.’

  He walked away with a laconic wave, and I immediately turned my attention to the papers he’d left me. Not Gwillam’s address - that would keep - but the incident reports and statistics.

  They would have made dry and difficult reading even if I’d been in better shape than I was. Nicky’s hacks get him into all kinds of interesting places, but he usually loses a certain amount of formatting along the way, so I was facing vast blocks of prose with pretty much no punctuation apart from line breaks.

  And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tide. People hurt and killed each other, or themselves: broke against pavements, were impaled on railings, swallowed razor blades, carved gnomic messages on their own flesh or the flesh of their loved ones. There was blood, and there was pain. It drew me in, until I couldn’t see the land any more.

  Was self-harm just another current within that sea, or was it something else? Mark, the dead boy, had cut himself and written poems about it: the wounds were clearly part of his inner life; the most intense and precious part. And Kenny had got the habit, too: as though it was something you could catch. As though . . .