My Name is Legion

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘But don’t you see,’ said Mercy, ‘you just assumed.’

  Kevin shrugged, stretched out jeans and trainers at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  ‘Assuming isn’t what I’m about at all.’

  ‘But this was what was happening at home, right – this is just how this whole thing got started. Things went wrong, and we all started blaming Peter. Okay, so he’s not perfect, no one is. But we weren’t wanting to face up to all the other things – my husband’s illness, the tensions that’s causing, tensions between me and my other two sons … And Peter kept saying, “Mum you’re always picking on me … Trevor, he does nothing except pick on me …” And, like, I was getting angry with him all the time and trying to keep the peace between him and Trevor, him and the other boys … But he had a point, Peter. When things went wrong, we all blamed him. And that’s why it seemed a good thing for him to go and live with Lily, move to a new school … And it really, really is getting better, it must.’

  ‘But then,’ said Kevin, ‘the behaviour patterns have started up again.’

  There was no need for the three of them – Lily, Mercy, Kevin – to rehearse the list of offences. Peter d’Abo weighed on his mother’s heart. Within weeks at the new school, similar complaints were being made. Once again, as at Streatham, Peter had gathered around him a gang of admiring and much younger boys who followed him slavishly. In order to prove themselves tough enough to belong to the group, these little thugs performed minor acts of vandalism, the theft of motor-scooters being a favourite. Windows had been smashed on a regular basis. Then there was the craze for eggs and spray paint which had been aimed at the front doors and windows of all the houses down one side of the road adjoining the school.

  Much more disturbing had been the capacity of this Crickleden gang to victimize or persecute teachers, or other grown-ups, apparently selected at random, but often with deadly effect. A few weeks before – it had all been front-page news in The Daily Legion – an old-age pensioner in Crickleden had reached the point where he could bear the taunts and abuse no longer. Whenever he teetered out of his small flat to buy a newspaper or toddled towards the pub, a group of these young boys would be waiting for him. They kept up a vigil from early morning until late each night, sometimes just two or three of them, sometimes as many as ten. At first, the persecutions were of a trivial, even a comic, kind. They would walk behind him blowing rhythmic raspberry noises and holding their noses. Satisfyingly, this old man, Bill Hacklewit, would turn and shake his walking stick at them.

  Little by little, the boys increased their levels of offensiveness, sometimes threatening old Bill with words, sometimes mouthing dreadful insults about his wife, who had died about a year previous. No one knew how these boys had managed to learn his wife’s name. Since being widowed Bill Hacklewit had been in a state of periodic depression. During one such day of uncontrollable sadness he came home to find the words EDNA CUNT sprayed in paint on his little Fiesta. These words were then shouted through his letter-box for several hours.

  One day, when a group of the boys had been crouching on the landing outside his flat, one of them with a firecracker in his hand, ignited and ready to post through the letter-box, Bill had opened the door in a rage and run at them, brandishing an old service revolver. It was then that Peter d’Abo, who happened to have been present at this dramatic moment, immediately used his mobile phone to summon the police.

  It had never been proven that Peter was the ringleader of this troublesome group. His own story was that he was worried that these boys, some of them as young as eleven, were getting up to mischief, but not realizing that by so doing they were endangering their lives. He said that he lived with his grandmother on an adjoining estate in Crickleden and they were in fear of various unpleasant right-wing groups who had posted literature through their door. He claimed to have reason to believe that Bill Hacklewit had links with one of these extremist organizations, and had seen him posting British National Party leaflets through the doors of black people: hence his anxiety for the boys’ safety. No one ever corroborated this claim. He also asserted that he had often heard Mr Hacklewit utter violent or threatening abuse to the children, and that this abuse was always of a racist tinge.

  When the police apprehended Bill Hacklewit, he did not deny shouting at the children, ‘Get out of here, you little black bastards! God, if I had my way, I’d shoot little niggers like you!’

  The police had decided to press charges. The revolver, which contained no ammunition, was confiscated. Bill Hacklewit, who, as readers of The Daily Legion were reminded, had served in the Desert Rats and fought against the army of Rommel, was found hanging from the light-fitting in his one-bedroomed council flat on the morning that he was due to appear at Crickleden Magistrates’ Court to answer charges of illegally possessing a firearm, and behaviour likely to incite racial hatred and a breach of the peace. His neck was held tight by the new plastic flex. On his brown acrylic cardigan he had pinned his service medals.

  Mercy Topling did not merely suspect, she intuitively knew, that her son Peter had in some way orchestrated the persecution of old Mr Hacklewit. She knew, because she had watched her own cheerful, well-adjusted husband Trevor lose his job and his will to live, even lose his capacity to get up in the mornings, through Peter’s unique gifts of unkindness, and manipulativeness.

  Peter was no ordinary disruptive or disturbed adolescent boy. That was why they’d made the decision – for Mercy, a heartbroken one – for him to leave her house and go and live for a time with his grandmother. That was why these two stoical and level-headed women had consented, though with some scepticism, to the involvement of a psychiatric social worker. At the same time her deepest maternal instincts wanted only to protect the boy. She wanted to ask Kevin Currey now, as she had all but destroyed her marriage by asking Trevor and Lucius and Brad, Why pick on Peter – why not just let him be the way he is?

  If Kevin, with his slob’s clothes, was an accepter of human incurability, Mercy was eternally an optimist. Her birth, her youthful love affairs, her work, her marriage, her every working day had been the recitation of a joyous Yes to Life. She believed in Redemption. She thought that Peter, who had so many extraordinary qualities (not simply good looks, but charm and pleasant manners and a sense of humour), could be made better. Sometimes she thought that this might come about through prayer. (Lily had re-introduced him to churchgoing; he had even served mass – a fact which filled Mercy with a number of complicated feelings – for Father Vivyan.) Sometimes, however, Lily’s excessive piety made the daughter place her faith in more modern varieties of the occult. Hence, Kevin Currey, and the endless burrowing back into the past, in the belief that there might be some twist of the darkened corridor where they might stop, and locate the precise moment where the life of her son had begun to go wrong. At other times, her optimistic heart shunned both prayer and psychoanalysis in favour of a gentler hope that time alone could cure many things, especially the character deficiencies of the young.

  That was why, quite often, she could not concentrate as Kevin pressed embarrassed palms against his plastic files and tried not to meet her gaze.

  ‘I’m not at this stage using the word “schizophrenic” … frankly, it doesn’t matter what words we use …’

  ‘How d’you mean, it doesn’t matter?’ Only in her defensive mood Lily said, ‘doesn’t martyr’. ‘Course it martyr. Are you saying he’s not in his right mind, that he has evil demons?’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘We must face the poss— Look, let’s be frank … We haven’t, formally, as such, assessed Peter … but what I’d like … maybe explore with you the possibility of … a psychiatrist.’

  Trying to focus on the enormity of what was being said, Mercy tremblingly spoke. ‘It was a mistake – is that what you’re saying now – to talk to him about his father?’

  ‘You remember what I told you, Mister Kevin,’ said Lily aggressively.

  ‘Mum, don’t.’

&n
bsp; ‘Don’t come Mum don’ting me, Mercy. I tink it were a big mistake to go telling him. Dats what I say, Mister Kevin, when you say to Mercy that the boy was disturbed because he was trying to get in touch with his real father …’

  Often,’ Kevin’s toneless intonation, in such marked contrast to the bobbing lilt and sway of Lily’s Exuma Sound smack, was the repetition of a mantra; the delivery of a sacred doctrine more than the utterance of an opinion, ‘as a lad …’

  Mercy bridled – it was ‘lad’, the way he said ‘lad’: something was giving her the creeps about this man.

  ‘… as a lad moves through puberty and his body starts to show all these very visible signs of manhood, he starts fighting with his dad. And if the lad’s adopted or he doesn’t know who his dad is, he’s looking around for him – and the aggression, the testosterone’s building up inside him … And some of that aggression which should have been directed into rows with Dad gets repressed. It doesn’t know where to go – and that’s alarming for the lad.’

  ‘Mercy,’ said Lily, ‘she never told me who the father of that chile was. She told no one. And you wait until this boy, this chile’s going rarng …’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘No, listen. We’re all in this – me, I’m his grandmother, I live with him. Mercy – she’s his mother. You. Mister Kevin, you know nutten at ahl about this. You jus’ said out of some textbook: disruptive chile, so he wants to know his real father. Fifteen year, nearly sixteen year he live in this world without knowing. No one knew, ‘cept Mercy. The minute she came back from the doctor and knew she was with chile, she shut up like a clam, dis one. Dat’s a woman’s right. No one’s not saying she didn’t do everything right by dat boy. He’s always been different. From a little chile. You remember Joan of Arc. Saint Joan.’

  ‘Yes, Mum …’

  Mercy had hoped her mother would keep her Saint Joan memories to herself. At this rate not only Peter but the whole family was going to end up sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

  ‘Joan?’ Kevin’s expression conveyed total ignorance. He looked on the verge of asking whether she lived locally.

  Mercy explained.

  ‘I’ve always read a lot to my children,’ said Mercy. ‘Peter loved being read to, especially in the days when it was just him and me. And when he was a little kid, we had these books – you gave them to us, didn’t you, Mum?’

  ‘I read dem to Mercy when she was a little girl – A Chile’s Book of Saints – and den dere was A Chile’s Book of French, Italian, all de different contries and so on and so fort.’

  ‘Well’ – Mercy took up the tale – ‘the story Peter wanted over and over again was the story of Joan of Arc. If you didn’t read it to him there’d be a tantrum. ‘

  Lily laughed at the recollection.

  ‘One day I bought a Noddy story for him to read and oh with what strong arms dat little man hurled dat book across the room – I don’t want Noddy I want Saint Joan, Saint Joan – really screaming and yelling it, man.’

  ‘And then,’ said Mercy, ‘you know the story of Saint Joan?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were all Catholics …’

  ‘Who said nussin about Roman Catholics,’ said Lily, adding to the confusion. ‘Isn’t the High Chorch good enough for you then?’

  Kevin shrugged idly and murmured, ‘I don’t do saints.’

  ‘Joan of Arc,’ said Mercy, amazed at the ignorance. ‘She was a medieval peasant in France, she fought against the English – they burnt her as a witch – anyhow, when she was a little kid, she’d hear these voices, angels and saints talking to her.’

  ‘De angels talk to me, Mam, dat what he say,’ burst in Lily, thereby spoiling Mercy’s punchline.

  ‘The angels speak to me,’ Mercy corrected. ‘He’s always spoken well. I’ve never had to correct him, like I correct Brad and Lucius all the time. Peter’s always been in a world of his own. Like, he’d want to be lots of different people. I know all kids are like that, you take them to a film and they come out saying they’re the Lion King or whatever. But with Peter, it was always more than that. He really became another person. Like he was … I dunno … like he’d been taken over. By some other personality altogether.’

  ‘Another personality,’ said Kevin, who had begun to make copious notes.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t think sticking labels on people helps all that much,’ said Mercy. ‘I’ve met people who’ve been described as a schizophrenic and they’re nothing like Peter. Look, he’s a perfectly decent, clever, good-looking boy – much of the time. But other times, he’s someone else – and then he’s someone else again. He’s gifted. A lot of gifted people are like this.’

  ‘But I hadn’t finished,’ said Lily, ‘telling you, Mister Kevin, man, about this psychiatric approach to the problem, and I’m a nurse. I’ve got my head screwed on the right way round, man. And you keep on at my daughter she must tell him, she must tell him who his father is! And I’m telling you, man, it’s too much to saddle a boy with dat knowledge when he has dese other problems. Why now? He didn’t need to know now. If his father was someone from round here, no offence, someone like yourself, a teacher, a clerk, okay, so we’d all live with that. Believe me, man, no one ever screwed my head round the wrong way but it would have it spinning like a top to be told my daddy was a big, famous billionaire, owning De Daily Legion and all dat, while I was living wid my old granny in a council flat in Crickleden and grumbles about how to buy me a new pair of Reeboks. Do you see what I’m saying? Do you see what you did?’

  ‘Maybe we should’ve spent a little more time thinking through the implications,’ said Kevin.

  ‘But you told me,’ said Mercy, ‘tell him who his dad was – give him the chance to get in touch with his inner self.’

  ‘And what a dad – eh?’ – it was Kevin’s first smile of the interview; a particularly revolting smile in Mercy’s eyes, since it seemed unduly impressed by the notion of having on his book the case of a son, albeit illegitimate, of Lennox Mark.

  TWELVE

  The first thing Lennox Mark noticed, when he entered the kitchen at 16 Redgauntlet Road, was the smell. When, desperate with hunger, he had padded into the room at breakfast time, the pong had been dreadful: an overflowing rubbish bin, beside which an open black plastic bin bag told its own tale, with its used teabags, its Seven-Up tins by the score, its eggshells, sandwich wrappers, pizza boxes and foil containers to which the remains of curry were encrusted. The sink had been full of unwashed cups and mugs and the draining-board had been piled with unemptied ashtrays. Now, the odours of decomposition had been replaced by the stringent atmospheric effects of bleach and that faintly nauseating smell which in the fantasies of detergent-manufacturers bears kinship with a lemon. Metal, enamel, wood and laminated surfaces shone spotlessly. The chrome garbage-can glowed, as if simonized. Who had done this? Surely the old woman, who had never performed a menial task since living there, had not donned rubber gloves and set to? And it beggared belief that Martina herself was personally responsible. On the very rare occasions he had seen her wash up a single cup and saucer it had appeared to enrage her that she had been demeaned into such a chore, and violently obscene expletives spat themselves from her lips for as long as it took to wipe a saucer, and remove a few grains from a cup with a much-cherished, creamed and manicured finger.

  Certainly, both Martina and her mother defied their national stereotype. Though they wanted the house spotlessly clean – and this might be considered a Teutonic virtue – they both preferred to suffer smells and dirt than exert any effort themselves with Dyson, J-cloth or squidgy-squeezy.

  The only explanation, therefore, for the immaculate state of the house was that Martina had somehow worked her magic on the agency after all, and that a cleaner (at least) had been found.

  This thought, the knowledge that the five long days without domestic service were at an end, filled Lennox with such relief that it almost neutralized his fear and anxiety about the break-in – Marti
na’s calm but clearly troubled voice on the telephone; the agonizingly slow drive to Knightsbridge through evening snarl; the police cars and blue lights in Redgauntlet Road; the tapes to prevent him or anyone else walking on the pavement by the gate, and the bloodstains; the forensic experts scouring gates, gravel, steps, hall, stairs, every inch, it would seem, of house and garden. When he had negotiated entrance to his own house, by the servants’ flat in the basement area, the place seemed awash with police. He hoped and believed the cameramen were engaged in forensic not journalistic processes.

  ‘Olga?’ he asked his wife when he came into the kitchen. Having smelt the clean smell, his next consciousness was of his mother-in-law’s absence. This was something you could not rely upon. In some moods, Martina agreed that Frau Fax should keep to her own quarters on the second storey. Catch Martina on a bad day, however, and she would ask furiously why she should be compelled to treat her mother as a guilty secret. Then, however grand the dinner or party, there was only one thing for it, and Frau Fax, whose appearance was quite a shock to those who had never seen it before, would be brought down, and placed at table next to the distinguished ambassador or government minister. Martina had relished as much as Lennox had loathed her mother telling the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he was a ‘fucking fool’ for some fiscal measure over which he had no control.

  ‘Mummy is tired, she’s lying down,’ said Martina; but Lennox could tell from the shocked expressions of the young officers in the kitchen that they had set eyes on Frau Fax.

  There were three police, who introduced themselves to Lennox Mark. It had evidently been communicated to them by some higher authority who Lennox was. Equally clearly it was not a name which rang bells in any of their heads. Martina claimed afterwards to read into their attitude a spirit of truculent egalitarianism, a suggestion, particularly by the young female officer in mufti – a CID sergeant – that if you lived in such an opulent style you were asking to be murdered.