(2012) Say You're Sorry

by Michael Robotham

  “Fifteen and seven.”

  He nods. “We were only blessed the once. You read those stories about women popping out babies like they’re Pez dispensers even though they can’t afford to feed them. I’m not just talking about in Africa and poor countries. Look at the single mums in this place—never working, living off welfare, having three kids with as many different men. It’s fucking criminal, you know.”

  I don’t answer.

  Theo scratches his cheek with three fingers.

  “Cal doesn’t normally play in this league. He’s part of the Olympic squad.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “It’s going to be a big year for him.”

  His eyes mist over. “He used to play football. When he was twelve he was taken down to Arsenal to look around the Emirates Stadium and meet some of the players. There was talk of a contract.”

  “What happened?”

  “Becky didn’t want him leaving home. Only child. You understand?”

  “I do.”

  “We had a few arguments but she was right. She let him go at sixteen. He was in their youth training squad. You should have seen him. So much speed and poise. He could ghost into positions like he was invisible, you know, and then pounce.” Theo takes a deep breath and then stares at his shoes. “He was going to fly so high, that boy. But then some whackjob, rattling with pills, drives a car into him and takes off his legs. I can remember the day. I can tell you the time and place. You don’t forget details like that. You don’t forget how someone puts your boy in a wheelchair. Destroys his dreams.”

  “I talked to Aiden Foster earlier.”

  Theo nods and glances at the game.

  “He’s due out next year.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s done his time,” says Theo. “They’ll let him go and he’ll have two good legs for the rest of his life. Won’t matter. He’s always going to be a deadbeat scumbag, a poster-child for losers.”

  “Did you blame Natasha too?”

  “She wasn’t behind the wheel.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  He looks at me, holding a pocket of air in his cheeks. “She provided the drugs. She started the fight. What do you think? If that bitch hadn’t… if she… my boy would…” He can’t finish. “Ah fuck it, I don’t want to talk about this.”

  For a long while he remains silent, watching the game, not concentrating.

  “Aiden Foster never called. He didn’t write a letter. He didn’t say he was sorry. Wait, no, that’s not true. His legal team came to us and wanted to organize a meeting between Cal and Aiden, a reconciliation, they said. They turned up with a TV crew. They wanted to film the whole thing, so they could show the judge and get Aiden a lesser sentence. Maybe if Aiden had showed up without the cameras. Maybe then I’d have believed him.”

  The referee has blown time. Handshakes. High-fives. Callum rolls away from the circle, crossing the polished boards. A good-looking boy with shoulders like a butterfly swimmer, he has a flop of blond hair that he flicks back, showering the sprung floorboards with beads of sweat. He looks like he should be advertising Gatorade or appearing on a BBC sports quiz show or dating a hot-looking girl. Theo tosses him a towel. Callum chugs the contents of a water bottle, wiping his mouth, tossing the empty bottle into his kitbag. He misses.

  “First one I’ve missed today,” he says, grinning.

  “This is Joe O’Loughlin,” says Theo. “He’s working with the police. He wants to ask you about ‘you know who.’ ”

  “You can say her name, Dad.”

  Callum shakes my hand. Apologizes for the sweat.

  “I told him you don’t know squat,” says Theo.

  “Why would anyone think I did?” asks Callum.

  “That’s what I told him. I said you didn’t. I said you’ve got more important stuff to think about. That girl was nothing but trouble.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that, Dad. She’s dead. What happened is in the past.”

  Callum spins the chair to face me. “What happened to her? I mean… where has she been all this time?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “They must have some idea.”

  “Do you have one?”

  The pause extends a beat past comfortable. Callum shakes his head.

  Theo tells him to put on a sweatshirt so he doesn’t get cold.

  “The Olympics—that’s a big deal,” I say, noticing the British team logo on his kitbag.

  “Yeah, it is.” He rocks backwards, balancing the chair on two wheels. “It was my dad who suggested wheelchair basketball. He took me to see a game. I told him if I can’t play on my feet, I don’t want to play.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  He shrugs. “Before this happened to me, playing sport came naturally. Football. Training. I didn’t have to think. After my injury I became more self-conscious about my body and staying healthy. I started this to keep fit. Now it makes me happy. Earns me respect.”

  “You must have regrets.”

  “About what?”

  “Being disabled.”

  “I lost my legs. Now I have these.” He opens his kitbag and shows me two prosthetic limbs, skin-colored and sculpted to look real. Trainers are laced to the feet.

  “Who do you blame?” I ask.

  “Do I have to blame someone?”

  “Most people do.”

  “Why?”

  “It helps them come to terms with things.”

  “You mean it gives them an excuse?”

  “Maybe.”

  He shakes his head. “When I woke up in hospital and looked down at where my legs used to be, I went through that whole hard-nosed, why-me response. I denied it, grieved over it, screamed at the unfairness and wanted to crawl into a dark hole. I did for a while. I hated Aiden Foster. I hated Natasha McBain. I hated everybody who was able-bodied and walking around on two legs.”

  “What changed?”

  He shrugs. “Time passed. I stopped making excuses. Winners don’t make excuses. When I’m on a basketball court, or staring at a flight of stairs—I don’t make excuses. I find a way.”

  Strapping on his legs, he tugs down his tracksuit pants then rubs a towel over his hair, drying the sweat. Theo has gone to get the car.

  “If you see Mr. and Mrs. McBain—tell them I’m sorry for their loss. Tell them I didn’t blame Natasha.”

  “What about your father?”

  He glances at the double doors and smiles sadly. “Don’t judge him too harshly. He shattered his knees in a skydiving accident and the army pensioned him off. The pain doesn’t go away.”

  “And your mum?”

  “She left us years ago.”

  “Did she leave him or you?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  A car horn sounds from outside. Theo is waiting.

  Balancing on his wheels, Callum spins his chair and rolls away, his shoulders flexing like a boxer throwing punches at a bag. He has to turn to move backwards through the swinging doors.

  The woman at the front desk yells goodbye and a chorus of other voices wish him good luck. Callum grins and waves back, sitting up straight in his wheelchair—a man with useless legs trying to stand as tall as his dreams.

  Once Tash got an idea in her head

  she didn’t let it go. Running away was her new project. Her eyes would light up from the inside when she made plans, talking about how we’d live in London and hang out with celebs.

  Getting more and more excited, she’d spin sentences together each beginning with “and then.”

  “And then we’ll find somewhere to live, not a squat, but somewhere nice in Fulham maybe, or Notting Hill. And then we’ll get jobs. I could be an actress or a model. I don’t mind getting my kit off. Just the top half like Katie Price, you know. Glamour shots. Lots of girls do that. They make loads.”

  “I think you’ve got to be eighteen to be a glamour model,” I said.

  “I look like I’m eighteen. I
’ve got my fake ID.”

  “Some of those photographers can be real sleazebags.”

  “You’ll come with me. We’ll look after each other.”

  “Won’t they come looking for us if they see you on page three of the Sun?”

  “They’ll have stopped looking for us by then. You can divorce your parents, you know. It’s, like, legal and everything. You just get a lawyer and he goes to court and asks a judge.

  “We’ll get invited to all the cool clubs, no queuing, straight to the front of the line. And then we’ll buy our own place. I’m gonna have a circular bed and automatic blinds that go up and down and I’m going to be friends with David Beckham and David Tennant and that guy from the Arctic Monkeys whose name I can’t remember.”

  Tash had only been to London a few times, but she always sounded like an expert. She knew exactly where she wanted to live and how much it would cost and where all the celebrities lived. She was an expert on Katie Price, having read all her books and the magazine articles.

  Our English teacher Miss McCrudden said that if Tash had studied her schoolbooks the way she read magazines she could be a genius. She was getting straight As anyway, so she couldn’t really complain. I was the one who was dumber than a box of hair.

  The only reason Lady Adolf was so nice to me is because Daddy organized for the school to get a cheap loan from his bank so they could build a new assembly hall. We had names for everyone at the school. The physics teacher Mr. Fielding we called Mr. Bean because he had this weird overbite and he drove a Mini. Miss Kane, the PE mistress, was called Miss Trunchbull because she used to be a javelin thrower. (If you haven’t read Matilda, you won’t know what that means.)

  Everybody at school knew that Miss Trunchbull was having a fling with Mr. Bean. We used to see them flirting with each other in the playground and Tash saw them kissing in the alcove near the assembly hall. That’s when she came up with a cunning plan. She put a digital recorder on the windowsill of the PE staffroom. It was mid-July and the window was open.

  Listening to the recording afterwards, you could easily hear what they were doing. Mr. Bean, who has this lisp, was going, “Oh, oh, yeth, yeth, yeth,” while Miss Trunchbull was so loud we couldn’t tell if she was getting shagged or tortured.

  That should have been the end of it—a good laugh and no harm done—but then Miss Trunchbull made fun of Tash in PE class because she wouldn’t do a cartwheel, saying she was a prima donna. Tash’s period had started unexpectedly and her knickers were stained, which is why she wouldn’t do the cartwheel.

  After that Tash uploaded the audio onto a YouTube post which included photographs of Mr. Bean and Miss Trunchbull taken from the school website.

  I warned her. She wouldn’t listen.

  The school hired these computer geeks to track down the person who uploaded the files. Even though Tash took it down straight away, they still kept looking. It took them three days to find her and she was hauled into the headmistress’s office where she took the blame.

  Mr. Bean was there, his face bunched in fury. “Look at her eyes,” he said. “She’s high as a kite.”

  Lady Adolf tut-tutted. “Have you been taking drugs, Tash?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  Denying a lie made it no less a lie, according to Lady Adolf. I remember wondering if admitting a truth would make it more of a truth.

  She had made up her mind. Tash wasn’t welcome at the school any more, she said.

  Welcome? When was she ever welcome!

  29

  For the past three hours I’ve been reading Piper’s stories and poems. Her handwriting is full of loops and swirls, punctuated by drawings, doodles and emoticons. At times I feel like I’m eavesdropping on my own daughter’s life, yet I don’t feel guilty. Maybe I’ll learn something. Understand more.

  Most of the entries are undated, but I can see how they grew messier and more secretive in the months before she disappeared. There are code words that I don’t understand and nicknames for people. One of her teachers is “Mr. Bean” and another “Miss Trunchbull.”

  She writes letters to herself and to her parents, a lot of them full of angst and anger.

  Dear beautiful Daddy and the ice maiden,

  By the time you find this letter I will be gone. Maybe I’ll have killed myself. Maybe I’m too hopeless to do that properly. I mess everything else up. Either way, I’ll no longer be your problem. You should be happy now, Mum. You’ll have a perfect daughter in Phoebe and a beautiful little boy and the ugly one will no longer mess up the family photographs or get in the way.

  I used to think I was adopted. I still do. Then you had a proper baby and realized that I didn’t fit in with your perfect family. Maybe you should have given me back to the agency when you had the chance.

  I think it’s best you forget me. Please look after Phoebe and Ben. Tell them I love them.

  I am sorry but goodbye.

  As always,

  Piper.

  Another journal entry begins on Piper’s fourteenth birthday, after what she describes as “the worst year of my life.”

  Sometimes I feel that there is no point my living if I’m not going to be anyone. I’d hate so much to be just an ordinary nobody. I can’t imagine having a quiet life and then fading away, not to be remembered. The other day I read this: “You’re not a child any more when you have discovered that childhood is the best time of your life.”

  If that’s true then pass me the razor blades.

  Reading more of the pages, I discover Piper’s likes and dislikes. Favorite films. Worst fashion crimes (gypsy skirts and black mesh vests). Coolest bands. Possible careers. “Reasons to hate my mother.” “Why little sisters should be boiled in oil.” Occasionally I laugh out loud at some of her observations—a bad haircut makes her look like “a startled hamster,” while some boy she met at junior athletics has “an IQ two points lower than a rock.”

  Wedged in the pages of one journal I find a strip of passport-sized photographs. Piper and Tash are sitting on each other’s laps in a photo booth, pulling faces at the camera, laughing behind smears of crimson lipstick.

  It’s the only photograph that I’ve seen of Piper in which she doesn’t look self-conscious. Instead, she’s relaxed and reveling in the moment, completely happy.

  Glancing at the pile of journals, I’m still no closer to uncovering her secret life. Condoms were found in Tash’s room, along with two cannabis cigarettes. She had older boyfriends and was sexually active. She went to parties and dabbled in drugs. Piper knew these things, but didn’t write about them.

  Villages like Bingham are often deceptive. Viewed as rural idylls and perfect places to raise families. People get nostalgic about them, harking back to bygone days, imagining a world of picket fences, corner pubs and village bobbies.

  The reality is sometimes very different. Bigger towns expand, swallowing up villages, turning them into satellite suburbs or commuter belts. Areas become run down. Pockets of poverty emerge. Unemployment. Domestic violence. Boredom.

  Teenagers feel it most. Too young to drink or to drive, without cinemas, shops or youth centers, they find other amusements, crashing parties and experimenting with sex, soft drugs and alcohol. Young girls like Natasha are drawn to older men. Boys their own age are slower, shyer, less worldly, whereas older men have cars and money to splash around on restaurants and nice clothes. The girls are excited by the fact that a grown man might be interested in them, but are too young to understand the danger of stoking a man’s desire.

  At some point I fall asleep fully clothed, a journal open on my chest. A phone enters my dreams. My mobile. Buzzing. A name on the screen: Victoria Naparstek.

  She speaks before I can utter a word, yelling down the line.

  “Please, please help me! They’re outside!”

  I can hear shouting in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “At Augie’
s house… there are people outside… they want to kill him. They’re saying they’re going to burn him out.”

  “Where are the police?”

  “I called them.”

  “What about Augie?”

  “He’s here… with his mother. They’re scared. I’m scared.”

  “Are the doors and windows locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, stay away from them. I’m coming.”

  Ruiz isn’t answering his phone. I leave a voicemail and juggle my shoes and socks as I run for the lift, taking it downstairs. The streets are deserted. Christmas lights twinkle and blink from shop windows and behind net curtains.

  Jumping red lights at empty intersections and swerving around trucks gritting the roads, I reach the house in less than fifteen minutes. There must be fifty people outside, spilling across the footpath and grass verge onto the normally quiet street. More cars are arriving.

  A dozen police officers are lined up in front of the two-story house. Outnumbered. Nervous. They’re yelling at people to go home but the protest has already gained too much momentum. Hayden McBain is at the center of the crowd. His uncle is at his shoulder.

  “He’s a child-killer,” yells Vic McBain. “And we don’t want him here! There are kiddies in this street. We don’t want that evil pervert touching them. This is our town. These are our kids.”

  The crowd punctuate each statement with a cheer and then begin to chant.

  “Scum! Scum! Scum! SCUM!”

  Fighting my way to the front, I recognize one of the constables. Yelling above the noise.

  “Where are the rest of the police?”

  “They’re coming.”

  “Can I go inside?”

  He nods and opens the gate. Victoria answers the door and closes it quickly. Relief in her hug. Fear. I glance along the hallway and see Augie, peering from the kitchen, half hidden behind the door frame. His mother is next to him, wearing her dressing gown, her hair unbrushed and skin looking almost jaundiced.