by Anna Maxted
Charlie had been fostered briefly by a pair of white middle-class nobs who worked at some rag. Charlie knew how to ask for the right books and papers without looking wrong. The Mail was useful. Tatler. The Standard. The Standard told you when were the big events, who’d be there. The Mail said how rich, and where they lived.
Charlie would ask to take a piss, ring the Standard from a payphone – at 4 p.m., when the editors were rushed; whoever answered the phone would be the least important member of staff. Nothing fazed Charlie. ‘Hello, love, I’m calling for Mr Bailey. His assistant here, Freddie Marks. Listen, features have commissioned a shoot with Lady Bracken early tomorrow at her West London gaff. The governor’s scrawled the address on the back of a fag packet. I can’t make it out – he’ll string me up if it ain’t sorted.’
They’d get the address, then Nathan would ask the librarian for the local history of the area. If it was an important house, the floor plan might be included. Tatler might even have done an article showing the inside of the house, and its tastiest valuables. It wasn’t only the house you were researching, it was the people themselves. What they were like; who they knew. Rich people were stupid about protecting their stuff; they thought they were too important for anything bad to happen to them. Then Charlie and Nathan would go back to the home and merge into the general greyness of care existence.
The evening of the job, they’d go to their rooms and sit – same as the night before, and the night before that. No one would check on the third night – no time to waste on the kids who weren’t causing grief. Nathan had been back in the care home for four months now, and it was his third job. The first had been a soft target to see if he was up to it – some mad rich old cow, lived alone; the hardest part was the bus route there. Every room in the monster house was crammed to the corniced ceiling with piles of newspapers, documents, books. It was as if she was slowly burying herself alive. They’d taken an old jewellery box, containing a man’s wedding ring.
The second job had been trickier. The two-million-pound townhouse of an earl and countess, attending an all-night charity gala for underprivileged children in Africa – tables cost ten thousand pounds, Elton John was playing, and the flowers exploded into fireworks. It wasn’t an evening you’d miss once you’d coughed up. They’d waited till two a.m.: whoever was there would be pissed or asleep. Charlie had stuck a bamboo pole with a hook on it through the letterbox, fished the spare keys off the fancy side table, opened the door and walked right in. It had been dark. Eerily quiet. Muted laughter from a back room: the kitchen. They’d calmly walked to the second floor, stuffed their pockets full of jewel-encrusted necklaces and rings from the woman’s bedside table – she was helping underprivileged children in Britain more than she knew – and were trotting coolly back down the stairs when the bloody teenage son emerged from a bedroom, a big fat fucker, stark-bollock naked, with a sandwich in his mouth. He’d charged at them, bellowing like an animal; they’d dropped their haul and run. Nathan had retained a diamond ring, but he hadn’t seen the need to mention this to Charlie.
Nathan frowned as his heart beat faster. In his head, he felt no fear. How dare his heart betray him? He swelled his chest inside his white shirt, defiant. You only saw the frayed collar up close. He looked like a poof. They both did. A fucking plait in his hair tied with a red ribbon. Charlie had it off one of the girls. The white stripe across his nose was wall paint: it itched and he’d have to scratch it off. They walked fast. Charlie was wearing lip gloss, and his expression said Shut it.
This house was surrounded by high red walls covered in ivy. There wasn’t even barbed wire. Nathan carried a rope they’d nicked from a shed. For a tree house, if anyone asked. Charlie had a football under his arm.
It felt weird to Nathan that he could, to a random stranger, be a child for whom survival was a given, who had nothing more urgent to do than build a tree house.
The cars were queuing at the entrance to the drive, each car as sleek and curvy as a beautiful woman. Nathan allowed his gaze to skim over them and the gauzy silhouettes of their passengers; he noted the way they carried their heads, that upward tilt of the chin. He and Charlie didn’t talk. The guards would be focused on the front gates. They found their position: a quarter of a mile along, where the one-way system kicked in. The lights would remain red for fifty-five seconds.
Go. Charlie gave Nathan a leg-up, slowly. He hauled himself to the top of the wall and looked over. Green stretched for miles; all this space, for four people, a proper lump of the planet. Then he jumped on to the lawn below. Charlie threw over the rope. Nathan hung on to it, his weight allowing Charlie to climb the wall from the other side. Charlie jumped down. Clear.
‘What’s the order of events?’ said Charlie. He knew the order of events. It was the same as Batman saying to Robin, ‘Where’s my cape?’
‘There’s a champagne conception in the Great Hall from eight thirty. Which is on the’ – never, eat, shredded, wheat – ‘west side of the property. The security is’ – he paused again – ‘a few of his hotel doormen working overtime.’ He didn’t sound like Nathan. He sounded like the man who had written about the party in the paper. The man had also written that, ‘according to sources in the City’, it would be Jack Kent’s last party for a while. Nathan knew that the man was suggesting, in a sly sort of way, that something bad was going to happen to Jack Kent. Yeah. He was going to get robbed! But it interested Nathan the way the man said all that stuff. If you remembered how another person said their words, you could almost become that person. He liked that he could crawl into another human’s skin: like a cannibal wearing the scalp of his victim.
Charlie snorted. ‘Twat.’ He dropped the ball, passed it to Nathan. ‘And who are we?’
Nathan casually passed it back. ‘We’re Claudia’s mates. Friends, I mean. She’s ten. And there’s another sister, Emily. She’s three.’
‘Fucking names of these people! We need to get away from this wall. Move. Look like you’re having fun. What’s she look like, this Claudia bird? Lush?’
Lush? All girls were disgusting! They made him feel sick. ‘There weren’t a photo.’
Charlie didn’t stop walking and smiling and passing the ball, but his voice was cold. ‘We’re her mates, and we don’t know her to spit on. You—’ Charlie stopped. ‘You should know.’
Nathan felt a swell of rage and satisfaction, intermingled. Charlie had been about to go off on one, but he’d checked himself. Even Charlie was a bit scared of him.
‘We’ll find out,’ Charlie added. ‘No sweat. This place is nuts.’
Beauty made no odds to Nathan. Everything was ugly underneath. The house was like a palace. White and long, with big low windows, and pillars. The garden was weird: full of hedges cut into the shape of birds. It was dark, but the flowerbeds were lit up. One flowerbed had been arranged so that red flowers spelt some words, and the white flowers were like the page: Innocence is Divine.
What? It was the tidiest garden; how did you get everything to grow so neat?
They were nearing the guests. He could see a few kids, round about Charlie’s age. Good sign. There were a lot of poofy red jackets with the gold tassels, a lot of tight black drainpipe trousers. Adults in fancy dress. Weird.
Charlie bounced the ball, caught it, wandered up to an old lady in a tight gold dress. He tugged shyly at her skirt, not meeting her eye. ‘Hi. Do you know where Claudia is, please?’
The woman beamed, her skin stretched tight. ‘Well of course I do, I am her gr—her father’s mother, after all! You are late, you bad boys, you have missed the swimming, I am afraid – the children are all changing for dinner. Go inside the house: ask someone to direct you, it is too big, too big to find yourself! You need the trail of breadcrumbs to find your way! Do tell Claudia how pretty she looks, even with her hair cut so short. Poor darling!’ The lady frowned for a second.
‘Thank you so much,’ said Charlie, a real grin lighting his face.
They walked up the s
mooth stone steps, Charlie bouncing the ball. There was a man standing there in a police-type uniform. He had short hair and dark glasses. He watched the boys, though he pretended not to. Nathan ignored him – you would, if you were a rich kid living it up at a party like this. His eyes felt hot and sore with the bright fierce perfection of this place. His life was a million shades of grey. This house was like another country; it was insane with colour. There was so much light, so many things, and so big. It was like Wonderland, when Alice got shrunk.
Charlie’s arm shot out as a big lady in a bikini and high heels waggled past carrying a tray of steak and chips. The steaks were small, with little sticks stuck in them, so you could take one. The smell was unbelievable: it made Nathan want to cry. All the food in the care home smelled like old oil. She bent low. Her body was painted silver. It looked weird. Charlie winked at her; he took three steaks and a load of chips. The security guy was looking over. All that work and Charlie would blow it for a bit of fried potato. She offered the tray to Nathan. His stomach growled. Nathan felt the guard’s gaze hard on his back. He wanted to taste that food, so bad. He shook his head. ‘No thank you,’ he said.
He waited for Charlie to stop shoving food in his mouth. ‘The guard is looking,’ he whispered. ‘We can’t go upstairs.’
‘The pool’s got to be this way,’ said Charlie. ‘We’ll get a look at the girl – she don’t need to see us – then we’ll head upstairs. There’s got to be a back way. If anyone stops us, we’re lost, right? This place must be crawling with servants.’
They jumped down some wide stone steps. The walls were white and there were seven big silver mirror balls hanging from the ceiling. Nathan imagined smashing them up with a hammer, the shards of glass like a thousand tiny daggers, and the mess of noise. At the bottom was another giant room, with doors off of it like you’d get in a castle, and the whole floor was covered in a fluffy purple carpet. These people were nuts.
‘I think’, said Nathan slowly, ‘we should get what we came for and go. That guard was looking at us. We don’t need to see the girl.’
Charlie went quiet. Then he shrugged.
Nathan said nothing. He sniffed. If he lived in this house, what would he want? A pole from his bedroom that he could slide down, like a fireman … into the pool? Not really. He didn’t see the point of spending time in cold water, full of other people’s piss. But these people, these pampered people with nothing to do but fuck around, they would want the pool to be right there, they wouldn’t want to walk far … so, their bedrooms would be close by. He’d let Charlie check out the parents’ room. He wanted to see the girl’s room. The ‘poor darling’. People interested him. He was interested in them the same way he was interested in flies: in the way they squirmed about after you’d pulled their wings off.
He was right. There was a curly dark wood back staircase, with white furry carpet your feet sank into like mud. They crept up it, and found themselves in an endless arched hallway of white and gold. There was a huge stained glass window at the end, as you’d get in a church. Light streamed through it, even though it was night. There was a picture in the glass of a woman, or an angel. Could angels have black hair? It kind of looked as if people should worship her – she had a halo, and white wings. But in her hand she held … was that a smoke?
Charlie nudged him. A pink sign: ‘Claudia’s Room’. ‘You check out the girl, see if she’s got any stuff worth nicking. I’ll do the main bedroom. See you back here in fifteen?’
Perfect. Charlie was a bit of a moron, it turned out. Nathan worked better alone. He knocked quietly, walked in. It was grey-dark, and you could hear the faint clash of music from downstairs. The room was a horrible colour, peach loo roll, and it wasn’t as big as he’d expected. Like a medium-sized princess might have, but not the main princess. It smelled of flowers. There was a square jewellery box on a shelf with a ballerina on it. He padded towards it, opened it, and shit – it started tinkling out a tune, really loud, so he pressed it shut. But fucking hell, it was stuffed with diamonds and shit and just left there for anyone to make off with. Finders keepers. He’d take the whole box. He was walking towards the door, when … he froze.
A little gasp. Jesus Christ, there was someone in the bed.
He breathed slow and deep. His hand went to his pocket; his fingers curled smoothly around the knife. He padded towards the noise. It was an irritating sound. He wanted to make it go away with the knife. The girl was huddled under the cover, curled up like a cat. The top of the pillow was poking out: she was crying into it. Sitting on a cabinet next to the bed was a little glazed china castle with lots of tiny holes in its roof. Inside the castle sat a tiny figure in a crown, and a spinning wheel. Nathan couldn’t stop himself. He had the knife anyway. He switched on the light. Little bursts of light streamed from the holes in the castle roof, turning the room into a magic kingdom. He stared at the castle.
The girl was still sobbing quietly into her pillow (shut up), she had no clue he was standing right there, poor darling. He felt a rip of anger. What did she have to cry about? He should stick the knife through the bedclothes. But he’d want to look her in the eye as the knife went in. Where was the fun, otherwise? He glanced at the Sleeping Beauty night light. There was a glint of something inside. He reached his hand in, pulled out a small red velvet bag. With greedy fingers he forced it open. Inside was a fat little gold heart on a chain. He liked it. He’d have that. He dropped it into his shoe, then paused. He dragged the knife very gently over the form of the girl, then, reluctantly, slid it back into his pocket. He didn’t need the aggro.
He padded towards the door, holding the jewellery box, and crept into the corridor.
He felt the floor shake a split second before he saw the men. From nowhere, they appeared, a pair of angry gorillas: one burst into Claudia’s room; the other grabbed him by the neck, hauling him two feet up the velvet wall. He flailed, struggling for air. The box flew out of his grasp, spilling jewels across the carpet.
‘You made me look bad, you little prick, and I don’t like that.’
There was a loud scream. The second gorilla emerged in a rush from the bedroom and punched Nathan in the face. It hurt like fuck. He’d had worse. The first guy dropped him, and he fell to the floor, choking on his own blood. It tasted metallic. ‘He’s fucking bleeding on the carpet. The bitch will flip. Get him out of my sight. Stick him with the other one, till the Bill show up.’
He felt sick. How had he been caught – why? It was Charlie’s fault.
He was dragged downstairs by his hair, his nose swelling to twice its size, and flung on the floor in a kitchen, next to Charlie, who had a sour face, smeared lip gloss and the beginnings of a black eye.
Nathan sighed as a few thoughts occurred. One: he was going straight back to the secure unit, or worse. Two: fucking newspapers were careless with details, because, while they were perfect little Adam Ants, all the invited guests had come as Michael Jackson. Three: a tealeaf had been yanked out of Miss Claudia’s bedroom and Mummy and Daddy were still partying. Grown-ups were cunts. A smirk lit his bloody face. He had her tiny heart in his shoe.
Poor darling.
ESSEX, 1989
Nathan
We’ve created a monster, thought Mark Stevens as he flicked through the case file. He chewed his lip (stop chewing), wishing that his hair wasn’t thinning; it was a chink in his shrink armour. These bastards sized you up on sight; they had a cruel instinct for your weak points. He was dreading the meeting. The kid’s life was a litany of disasters. Adopted. Unadopted. Abusive foster parents. In and out of care homes, secure units. And now, finally, at the grand age of eleven, here, at the juvenile detention centre.
They were too lenient. This small child had been described by his probation officer as ‘the most dangerous person I’ve ever met’. He had probably burned his foster parents to death. He had, according to a witness, stabbed a boy in the eye. His violence was casual and extreme. Aged eight, he’d been briefly fostered by
a wealthy couple. After one year, the couple had fostered a second child. Three days later, that child and the mother had been found dead in their swimming pool. The evidence was never 100 per cent conclusive. Bullshit.
Mark shook his head. A hair fell on to the page and he brushed it crossly away. Instead of being prosecuted, Nathan was moved to another home: oh, genius. His crimes weren’t his fault: they were the fault of every adult who’d ever mistreated him. He’d got away with everything. Built up a sense of omnipotence and guiltlessness. It was an abuse not to discipline him. Yeah, OK, he was too young to be banged up, but why couldn’t these people impose sanctions? They had the warmest, kindest hearts, but they were completely wrong.
It was a system of indulgence; it had spawned a psychopath.
Mark sipped his coffee: cheap, instant, from a polystyrene cup. He was the hired help, as far as this government was concerned. He got less respect than the inmates. The inmates with their drama classes, and their fabulous gyms, and their three nutritional meals a day, and their endless counselling. Mark was having his loft done and even the Geordie roofers turned their noses up at Nescafé. He’d been shamed into making them cappuccinos. God only knew what kind of a lousy job they’d have done otherwise.
There was sweat on his upper lip. Damn. He wiped it off with his sleeve. He could do this. He shut the folder, tucked it under his arm, nodded at the staffer. ‘I’ll see him, in his cell, but I’d like the door left open, please.’
Mark never made this walk without feeling like a very fat model on a catwalk. It was a highly inappropriate piece of projection; he needed urgent work on his core image. Nathan was sprawled on his bed, one leg bent. He looked straight at Mark, a long, lingering look. Mark forced himself not to swallow. He was a singularly good-looking kid – heart of the devil. ‘Hello, Nathan. I’m Mark. I’m here to have a chat with you today.’