Richard Hathway lives in Bristol with his partner and their son.
THOSE WHO BROKE THE BOY
RICHARD HATHWAY
Richard Hathway
Those who broke the boy. The Sons of Charlemagne book one.
©2017 Richard Hathway
Self-Published
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, stored in a database and / or published in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
For Cat & Oliver
You inspire me to be better
Doctor Morris
I’m sorry I cannot come to our session today. I am in the hospital wing, having contracted food poisoning yesterday. I hope this will keep you entertained in my absence.
You asked me a long time ago to think about why I felt broken and who had broken me. I chose not to answer you in pieces, communication is difficult without a tongue, but have taken my time to explain it all here. Perhaps reading this will relieve some of the frustration you feel at my silence over the years.
CHAPTER ONE
We know exactly when we felt at peace. The moment when the contradictions of nature and nurture reconciled. The itching in our brain falling near perfectly in rhythm with the constant nervous rebellion of muscle and bone crawling under our skin. We moved with purpose and grace. Our breath became ours, not some unwelcome necessary intrusion into the heavy, ugly shell we inhabited but did not own. And we saw. We really saw. Our eyes moved to our command. No longer staring into middle distance and dulled by the grimy drapes of depression. The windows to our soul let in the light of the world. What dazzling, wonderful, disgusting light! It shone so brightly on what he had done. It looked like Christmas, though Santa would have no cause to visit there that year. Dark Crimson across the forest green walls and pooling on the French Oak floor. We looked at the broken vase in the hearth, an anomaly in the story he had constructed. Our tongue lay cut from our mouth and as we bled out from the wound to our stomach we grew dizzy and weak. We slumped on the Italian breakfast stool, slid the knife back shakily into its rightful place in the chrome block, another anomaly, felt the coolness of the marble worktop on our palms and sighed.
We know exactly when we felt at peace.
Our story began in the seconds after my birth. I lay helpless and naked, the dirty and bitter umbilical cord wrapped tight around my neck. As I slipped from the painful light into the coolness of the dark relief, as I twitched and convulsed, fighting for my first breath, he was born. His decayed and beautiful form wrapped around my starving brain and kissed my mind. Thick air filled my tiny lungs and in an instant, we were torn from sweet silence into the thunderous noise of the world. He shrivelled and disappeared and I screamed for two days.
July 20th, 1985. That’s when it began for me. Six days before my twelfth birthday. One week after Live Aid. I’d been playing in the woods with my mates, as we did most Saturdays. We were lucky where we grew up. Coombe Dingle is an idyllic looking rural suburb on the north-west edge of Bristol. Nestling against the sprawling expanse of woodland that was the old Blaise castle estate is a patchwork of different housing styles that has developed over the last three hundred years.
I always found the coolness and silence of the woods so calming. Whatever was on my mind, whatever conflict I was having, it would all disappear as soon as I was amongst the timeless beauty of that green and pleasant land. All the sorrow of my existence in a grubby and aggressive man-made world floated away on the breeze and babbling brooks.
Grove Road runs all the way from the open fields at the upper corner of woods down to the Dingle car park at the lower corner. Much of Coombe Dingle is quite standard 1930’s roads and houses but Grove Road has the air of a country village lane about it. The sporadic short stretches of pavement here and there suggest it doesn’t know if it belongs to the old master’s lands to the east or the newer housing it finds itself co-habiting with on its west. The houses are older and bigger there.
Halfway down there’s a lane that runs to Roman field, and that leads into the woods. I would meet my mates on the corner of Grove Avenue opposite the lane. The five of us. Riley, Garret, Sam, Harry and me. We were just a normal bunch of boys, the kind of gang you’d see anywhere. A miss-match of personalities and social standings but, thrown together by geography and circumstance, we made it work. We fell out sometimes, what group of boys doesn’t? But we made it work. I miss them terribly when I think back to those days.
I was walking home up Grove Road to Arbutus Drive. As part of the 1930’s sprawl Arbutus Drive was pleasant enough. A wide road of large concrete pieces, rather than laid to Tarmac, it had an awkward unfinished feel. Or perhaps it was trying to stride the gap between rustic country chic and clean urban progress. Either way it didn’t sit quite right. All in all, the perfect place for my family.
The sun was warm that day and I felt the usual mixture of joy and foreboding. I had, as always, had a great time mucking about in the woods with my mates but it was time for me to be home for tea. I had half an hour until I had to be home and it only took five minutes to get from the field to my house but I knew full well it was a bad idea to be late. I learnt early on in life that waiting due to being early is infinitely preferable to punishment for being late. Besides which, having plenty of time gave me a chance to prepare my mind for the culture switch from the carefree abandon of playing in nature with good friends to the clouded, dystopia of home. So, there I was walking home up Grove Road, meandering from side to side, kicking dandelion heads from their stalks as I went. I was purposefully dawdling along, just soaking up the sun and enjoying the quiet of a summers afternoon. Looking back, I guess I was employing a clunky, juvenile kind of mindfulness though I didn’t know it and certainly couldn’t have articulated it as such. The walk home was always freedom and despair. A border crossing from one circumstance to another. The residue of what has gone before blending with the rising tide of what is to come. That road. That simple road of beautiful, eclectic architecture and grass verges. The cover of trees, the rising of the road as it climbs the hill towards fields and woodland. That road was like the event horizon. My nervous system closing down as I passed along it towards home like Louisiana farmers screwing storm shutters to the windows when the hurricanes are due.
I was nearly at my road. More so than usual I was day dreaming. I barely noticed the silver Datsun of the ‘Yes Dear’ lady pass me and turn into Arbutus Drive. I was absolved of the human condition, still floating warm and free on the tide of nature’s perfection.
The first bang jolted me back to earth. Curiosity more than anything had me glancing around to find the source of the sound. I had no idea what had caused it or how much that simple sound would change things. BANG! There it was again! I zeroed in on it this time. I spun and looked towards the big house on the right and in the downstairs window I saw her. Fear always looks the same regardless of the face it clings to. She was more fear than anything else. Her eyes were wide in terror but sunken and somehow hollow. Even from the roadside I could see the welts and scars on her dark skin. That look of desperate hunger I had seen on the faces of children in Ethiopia a week before on Live Aid was right here in front of me. I was blinking trying to process what was happening. There were no black people in Coombe Dingle. Were there? Certainly not any that looked like they’d come straight out of a BBC news report. She couldn’t be here. The welcome tide of social mobility hadn’t yet washed across Coombe Dingle. It was impossible that she w
as here. I’d never even seen a black person in real life. I mean maybe a bus driver or a delivery man but living in a big house on Grove Road? No, no that was impossible. She was impossible. She was still banging on the window. I looked away briefly as if to re boot my senses. I looked back, she was still there, this was happening. I started towards the house. Instinct took over I guess as I took the first step towards her. She let out a shriek of surprise and horror. I saw the hand come around her neck and drag her back. As suddenly as I had seen her she was gone. I froze. I could hear the highest notes of her screams through the muffling of murderous hands. My heart was beating so hard it was hurting. I was panting fast and deep like a hundred-metre sprinter but I was nailed to the spot. Another bang on the window. A bloody smear on the glass and suddenly, briefly she reappeared. “The Sons of Charlemagne!” she shouted, her accent thick with African tones and bubbling with blood. “The Sons of Charlemagne!” she shouted again. I was still frozen to the spot when her head was smashed into the window. The dull thud of skull on thick glass awoke my muscles and I turned and hid behind the hedge at the roadside. I looked through the foliage to see what was happening. Everything was still and silent. I could see the blood smears on the window, the only indication that I had not imagined the whole thing. I could feel my breath and my blood in my ears. I was shaking as I crouched behind the hedge, my mouth was dry and sweat was starting to run from my forehead into my eyes. What the hell was happening? Who was that girl? Had I just witnessed a murder? A hundred thoughts were running through my head. I was turning one way then the next on my heels. Should I stay here or run? Who lives there? Do I know them? Did they see me? Then I heard the click. The unmistakable click of the latch on a heavy wooden country door. I turned again and looked through the hedge. The door was open. A man, possibly in his forties, it was impossible for a terrified eleven-year-old to nail it down, was stood just past the threshold scanning the landscape. He looked so normal. Brown corduroy trousers tucked into green wellingtons, a shabby olive tank top over a checked blue shirt. Greying, neatly trimmed, side parted hair sat above a non-descript face. He looked so normal. Apart from the secateurs dripping blood that he still held in his left hand and the blood smeared across the tank top. The same blood that was still on the window. He stood for a long time just looking, waiting for any witness to betray their cover by moving. I had spent many happy hours hiding from friends in the woods and was very good at keeping still. Such a happy skill I now employed in such a desperate situation. As I slowed my breathing and stilled myself I kept my eyes fixed on him. He was metronomic in the way he remained just outside the door, moving his head to direct his forensic glare like a lighthouse beam. In the periphery of my vision I noted some movement in the house but daren’t take my eyes from the man in the driveway with the secateurs. When at last he seemed satisfied that no-one was watching he turned and disappeared back inside. He closed the door quietly behind him and I saw that someone had cleaned the blood from the window. I stayed behind the hedge for a while after that just to be sure.
My legs ached as I finally stood after crawling away and only standing once I was past the hedge. I made my way down Arbutus Drive on auto pilot. I was forty minutes late home. I didn’t care about the gentle jibes mingled with questions of where I had been from my siblings as I got through the door. It didn’t matter. The punishment was as harsh as ever. I was shouted at and beaten with a belt before I was sent to bed without tea. Other times I would be sobbing and filled with hatred as I painfully went upstairs to my room but that day it didn’t matter. I didn’t care about the banana sandwiches or the Saturday evening television. I didn’t care about the beating or the words of derision. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing except the question repeating in my foggy brain. Who were the Sons of Charlemagne? Who were the Sons of Charlemagne? Who were the Sons of Charlemagne?
I was numb. Everything was different now, though of course it was still the same. A common vista viewed not through rose tinted spectacles but broken eyes stained with the blood of that impossible black girl.
I painfully got undressed and checked my wounds. As I stood facing the mirror, not really seeing the blood trickling from my shoulder, chest and abdomen, a strange but familiar voice whispered to me. I couldn’t hear what it was saying, it was too distant, but I took comfort in it somehow.
CHAPTER TWO
I was in bed at 6pm, the lazy evening summer sun not really trying to push through the blinds. I could hear my brother and sister enjoying the last of the day in the back garden below my window. I was curled on the bed facing the wall.
My eyes were open but saw nothing of the real world. Instead my mind worked like a movie projector, replaying scenes through my eyes. I saw the man in the driveway, the girl, blood dripping from secateurs, the girl. The soundtrack to this movie was disjointed and jarring. A crunch of gravel under green wellingtons, the shriek of a girl, and always the backing track of a skull thumping against a heavy window. And the girl. Always the girl. The deep longing for survival and rescue pleading in her eyes. Her dark and wonderful eyes. Emotional connections made in adversity are always doomed not to last because they never survive the monotony of real life. But I was eleven and I had never been in love. I had no idea what love was, how it begins and grows. I had no reference from which to view the intense and visceral feelings rushing through me. I loved her. I loved her and I didn’t know it. In that way that every boy experiences the first flourishing of hormones my love for her was immediate and brutal. I felt the burning of needing to be with her in my bones. Even now I feel her face so detailed and complete in my mind. Like all deeply ingrained memories from long ago it is more sensory than a mere recollection of facts, like an aroma on the wind. I couldn’t describe her to you but I know her so completely. That night I lay completely still, loving the girl and hating the man. “The Sons of Charlemagne”
“The Sons of Charlemagne”
“The Sons of Charlemagne”
I stayed that way until seven the next morning, the world turning far beneath me. The light of day faded into the cool darkness of night. Shadows and sounds changed with the passage of time but always present was the whisper within me. The words were always just out of reach, the fragrance of their meaning meeting my senses just as it disappeared. I didn’t sleep and wouldn’t have moved had it not been for my father doing his habitual weekend job of denying any of his children a lie in.
Sundays held the weekly chore of church and Sunday lunch. Perpetually seeking the face of God, my mother made sure all her children went to church. My father would sit in the car outside and wait for it to be over. Then it was home for the roast that my mother resented cooking but never considered was anything other than what was expected.
When my father came into my room without knocking I barely registered his intrusion. He prodded me and told me, as he did every Sunday, I needed to get up for church. I had given up challenging the absurdity of forcing people to attend an anointed place to conduct the same rituals in an attempt to placate whatever invisible bully was culturally relevant to the geography. My mother was of course Church of England. What else could she have been in late twentieth century England? She conveniently ignored the fact that the lumbering beast she was dedicating herself to was only born when a man wanted to knob someone other than his wife. My mother was very good at picking only the truths and morals that suited her.
I somehow got dressed and was downstairs in time to begin the pilgrimage. Some element of self-preservation must have been telling me that being late again would be a very bad idea. Despite the continuing whispers urging me to rebellion and revolution I silently stood by the radiator in the hallway with my brother and sister. I was still as a beefeater while my siblings moved around me, extolling the exaggerated virtues of breakfast since I hadn’t had any. When my mother was ready we made our way out to the car. Father drove, I sat behind my mother as she had her seat pulled further forward. I was the middle child but the tallest so got the most legroom
in the back of the beige Ford Escort. My brother, being the youngest, sat in the middle with my sister to the side of him. Church wasn’t more than a mile away but somehow that journey on a Sunday morning seemed so long and foreboding. I imagine a man on death row feels the same. A short walk from his cell to the killing room that seems to take an eternity. The world seems to drag itself around you, Leonard Cohen played at half speed. I wondered if the man on the driveway went to church. He seemed like the type.
The rituals and costumes of a morning at church usually washed past me harmlessly. I would hope to see that my friends had been similarly made to attend the social standing pageant. We would sit at the back like all middle-class boys who think they’re rebelling. In truth, of course, the rebellion of a middle-class boy is a desperately uninspired thing. Sitting at the back of church, the bus, the class. Wearing the wrong socks to school or wearing your tie in an unconventional manner. I once got on the bus wearing my blazer inside out thinking I was Mr billy big bollocks. When we were in a group we did go further. We egged each other on and certainly we broke a few laws but really our two fingers to the man wasn’t much more than that. Our parents, mine certainly, had carefully cultivated us to think we were being bad. Minor indiscretions were punished more harshly that perhaps was warranted. It suited them for us to think that being late for tea was a major crime. It meant we could be left alone knowing we wouldn’t dare push the boundaries.
I took my usual place in the back row. The huge wooden cross used for Easter parades leant against the corner wall. On the upright, there was a small knob of wood sticking out, a remnant of a branch that had once lived there. One winter Sunday Riley had hung his coat on it in an act of defiance. The heavy jacket had unbalanced the cross and, as the congregation fell silent for the beginning of the absolution of their many sins, it began to topple towards him. In the silence, and quite by instinct, Riley was heard to shout “Jesus Christ!” and when everyone looked around he was pinned to his chair by the cross, his jacket, his alibi for the crime, lying hidden on the floor.
Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One Page 1