On Loving Josiah
Page 10
Maggie tottered over to Josiah and said, ‘Hi.’
Josiah looked serious and said ‘Hi’ back, and when she offered him her hand to shake he took it.
‘You come and sit next to me,’ she said.
The dining room was large and light with stained carpet tiles and brown floral curtains. Plastic cups and cheap cutlery were piled up on one end of a long, battered table. The children, twelve boys and three girls, were making their way from the kitchen with plates piled high with beef burgers and chips. Each found himself a chair at the table and sank down into a slouch; some of their chins were a mere six inches from the table. Hair unkempt, spots unpicked, sweatshirts sweated in, inhabited by egos simultaneously vast and fragile. Maggie set Josiah down amongst them, whispered him reassuring words about her imminent return, and went into the kitchen to fetch them both supper.
Josiah knew he had to stay very still and look straight ahead till his protector returned.
‘So titch, who are you?’ asked his neighbour, a lad of eleven called Darren who’d been called ‘titch’ most of his life. There was faint interest from the others, whose chomping jaws paused briefly to hear titch’s reply.
‘My name is Josiah,’ said Josiah, avoiding their eyes.
Immediate laughter: “My name is Josiah,” imitated Darren, enunciating every vowel.
‘I’m so sorry,’ continued Steve in the same voice, ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong place.’ He was tall with bad acne, and had been living at The Hollies ever since he’d stolen his mother’s car at twelve and she’d signed any paper she could to get rid of him.
‘Yes,’ said a third boy, Jason, who if he’d been asked to say boo to a goose would have said ‘boo’ but was asked instead to throw a brick through a jeweller’s window. ‘You’ll find the Queen doesn’t visit often.’
A fourth said, ‘No, she simply doesn’t find the time.’ That was John, thirteen, who’d come to The Hollies at much the same age as Josiah. He was the youngest of eight, whose father had left home on the day of his birth, and he’d always been one too many.
But then Maggie returned with tea, and shooed them all off him as if they’d been pesky fleas. She put Josiah’s burger and chips in front of him and wriggled into her chair. ‘They’re fucking idiots here,’ she said.
Josiah began to gently suck on a chip, as though that might be nourishment enough for a day, while Darren leant over to grab a handful of them.
‘Ignore him,’ said Maggie, and went on saying it until Josiah’s plate was empty.
‘Here, help yourself to mine,’ she said.
‘Oooooo, love!’ said the three lads opposite, in unison.
Steve reached over the table with his fork and stabbed it into one of Maggie’s chips. Maggie grabbed the ketchup bottle and squirted the stuff over Steve’s face.
‘Lay off, Steve,’ she said.
‘Wrong move,’ said Steve, coldly, getting up from the table and nodding almost imperceptibly to John and Jason. For the three were gangsters, joined at the hip, and the only friends each had ever known. They were moving round the benches like a single, menacing organism to find their prey. Maggie thought that was her and took a stiletto off her foot to be ready for them. The other children were watching expectantly; Kerry was clearing the kitchen; Josiah was sitting very, very still and only Maggie noticed he was shaking.
It was Josiah they wanted. Moving as a threesome, each prodded a fork into his neck. Now, if Maggie had been a target she would have put up a good fight; twice she’d been expelled from school for putting up rather too good a fight. But her sense of outrage that Josiah was their chosen victim was such that Al Capone himself would have marvelled. Down came the blows on Jason’s head with her stiletto, down they came on the smallest of those three villains, and even the first gushes of blood did not satisfy her, but on she went till all the children in the room were screaming and Steve had his hands around her throat.
Kerry, poor thing, herself still a teenager, was just not up to the scene which confronted her. She burst into tears like a baby and was feebly shouting, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ At first, she didn’t even notice Jason who was unconscious now, blood pouring from his head, but happily surrounded by curious children who were wondering if he was dead. All she saw was Steve, his two thumbs pressing down on Maggie’s windpipe, and all she heard was Steve’s assertion that ‘You will die.’ Kerry ran up to him and began pulling at his hands.
‘Get off her! Get off her!’ she cried. ‘Are you mad? Are you going to kill someone? Are you going to prison for the rest of your fucking life?’
Darren said, ‘She’s the murderer round here!’
And suddenly they were all quiet.
It’s so strange the way children move, like birds, like rabbits, like sheep, like animals. Kerry sat slumped on the bench with Maggie, who was fighting for her breath; Jason lay corpse-like on the floor, while the others, even Steve, even Josiah, congregated against the walls of the room.
‘You’re all fucking useless,’ said Kerry. ‘You, Steve, call a fucking ambulance.’
It was Maggie who suggested getting towels to wrap round Jason’s head, and Kerry took her cue from her, happy in the momentary refuge of her kitchen as she fetched clean tea-towels from the drawer, happy in the dense quiet of the dining room as she took authority once more and knelt beside Jason’s body and took his hand in hers to check his pulse, and happy, above all, that his hand was warm and the day would pass like any other day.
How good the children were that night! How they took themselves off to bed without demur! How quiet the house was! The ambulance came and went, and by the time Kerry’s co-worker Dave had come at six with the promised electric guitar no one was interested. Kerry said, ‘Not tonight, Dave,’ and they had a cup of tea instead.
When Josiah brushed his teeth with his new Mickey Mouse toothbrush, courtesy of the Social Services, and took his carefully folded pyjamas out of his top drawer, and folded back his bedcovers before slipping inside, he felt better than he had for a long time. Foster homes made him feel claustrophobic: whether he was being watched, criticized or fawned upon, he was always the object of attention. He loathed the feeling of indebtedness, when it was not coupled with the love which turns such a feeling into gratitude. Josiah also instinctively felt that in his case a certain amount of hardship was appropriate. If his parents were suffering on his account – he felt quite certain their disappearance had something to do with him – then he should be suffering on theirs, and he was looking forward to a cleansing of conscience that no amount of molly-coddling or ‘understanding’ could ever satisfy.
Kerry came in at eight o’clock to say goodnight to him. She found a boy lying in his bed as stiffly as a knight in his bronze coffin, staring up at the ceiling.
‘I’m so sorry, Josiah,’ she said, sitting down on his bed. ‘I’m so sorry about tonight. You know it’s not usually as bad as this.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Josiah.
‘Jason had a few stitches and he’s fine. Dave’s cleared it all up downstairs and everyone’s going to bed.’
‘Who’s Dave?’ asked Josiah.
‘Ah Dave! I’ve not introduced you yet! You’ll like him, we have good fun with him. Sometimes he brings his guitar along. Do you know any good songs, Josiah?’
‘No,’ said Josiah.
‘Then you’ll just have to learn them. Here, let me tuck you in.’ Kerry knelt down beside him and tucked him up tight. ‘There,’ she said, ‘did your mother used to…?’
‘No, she didn’t tuck me in,’ interrupted Josiah.
‘Dear Josiah,’ gushed Kerry, feeling overwhelmingly moved, and suddenly kissing him on his forehead. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know.’
‘Oh yes I should,’ said Josiah, confidently.
Kerry sighed and took hold of Josiah’s hand.
‘No, don’t,’ said Josiah.
And Kerry, with all the sadness of the day heaped upon her, said goodnight and left him.
He listened quite happily to the attentions of Kerry, Dave and a new field-worker called Lizzie, all of whom took it in turns to endear themselves to him. He was always polite, and when they asked him whether he was happy at The Hollies he always said, ‘yes’. ‘It’s incredible how self-sufficient he is,’ was what they said about him behind his back, and each, in their own way, rather loved him.
But after a few months, Dave realised that he wasn’t going to be able to initiate Josiah into the mysteries of Motown music, Lizzie was getting a heavier caseload and Josiah was an ‘easy’ kid who didn’t make demands upon her time, and Kerry got herself a boyfriend. By the time Josiah was nine, they were leaving him much to his own devices.
There were two mature trees in the small garden at The Hollies: a large majestic beech and a small, fairly stumpy yew. But within Josiah’s first month there, the beech had become Heaven, and the yew, Earth, and Josiah had appointed them as his Confessors. It was good, he decided, to have one tree for his heavenly anxieties, and another for his earthly ones. His next task was to attempt to discover their answers to him, and to learn their particular language. There had never been any doubt in him that trees had a language: his father had told him as soon has he was capable of understanding that trees were living, and he had witnessed for himself their acute sensitivity to the seasons and the weather. What he required of them now was that they should apply that same sensitivity to other matters, and he thought that if only he could manage to communicate to them some of what he was feeling, then there could be no wiser nor more constant arbiters than they.
So he set about trying to de-code the trees’ peculiar language, and to look for signs (Heaven and Earth must have so much to talk about, he thought), and he decided that it was no mere coincidence that the words ‘three’ and ‘tree’ were like each other. The trunk, the branches and the leaves were each responsible for different kinds of messages, and though he had never been particularly religious before, (despite his mother telling him on several occasions that ‘Josiah’ was both a famous and a good King in the Bible, and his father taking him to Church at Christmas and Easter), he now considered that either the Father himself, or his Son, or the Holy Ghost, might well wish to communicate with him. God himself was the trunk, and the trunk only swayed when a communication of the highest order had to be delivered; Jesus was the branches, wavering and nodding and always ready to reply; and the Holy Ghost had found his home among the leaves. ‘The Holy Ghost is like a wind,’ he thought, ‘and leaves love wind.’
Josiah preferred the beech tenfold to the yew, and when it lost its leaves that first autumn he gathered up the more beautiful ones and took them to his bedroom. He considered it his solemn duty to keep them safe until the spring, and he kept them in his drawers under his clothes, and when it was too dark to go out into the garden after school, these shrivelling leaves became his soul mates.
Josiah often wondered where the Holy Spirit got to when He left the Heavenly beech for half the year, and until he was fourteen (when his life was to change irrevocably and he had other things to think about), he tried out several theories, none of which could wholly satisfy him. There was a while, even, when he wondered whether his own banal conversation caused the leaves to lose their vivid colour, and then by extension that he was causing the leaves to fall in the first place. But if that was the case then he was also the reason why buds burst forth in April! Josiah’s was indeed a year of grief and hope, of wretchedness and joy, but all these emotions were so painful to him that to dare to lie under his Heavenly beech was something he only occasionally had the strength for.
He chose the yew to be his everyday advisor, to whom he complained about tummy aches and homework and the like. For the yew kept its dark green spines all year long, and Josiah knew they could be utterly relied upon. So year in and year out Josiah took the yew into his confidence, lying in an indentation in the moss beneath it. When Kerry left The Hollies to go and live in Wales with her boyfriend, the yew was the first to know. When Tracy Fortune, the social worker who had first taken him from his parents, fell upon him one afternoon and in floods of tears apologized for her part in his demise, Josiah told the yew. He also talked about the children in his class at school or at The Hollies. He was always careful that no one should ever catch him going outside, and once there he could trust that he’d be left alone. No one else ever bothered to come into the garden. Why would they? It was far too small for football. And anyway, once everyone was home from school, there was a general lunge towards the kitchen for bread and jam, and he could always manage to sneak out.
What was curious, however, was that Josiah rarely bothered the yew with what he considered minor irritations: he didn’t bother to mention quite how many times Steve, Jason and John continued to prod him in the back with a corkscrew or a new penknife, or how that boy Darren drew pictures of penises in toothpaste on the mirror above his basin. He was more concerned about the anxieties of newcomers, who were unaccustomed to the chaos of the place, the lack of predictability, the interminable noise, the arguments that seemed to break out constantly about which TV programme to watch or who had taken the last portion of trifle. For each time a new child came to live at The Hollies, he saw it all again through that child’s eyes, and continued to be anxious on his behalf until bewilderment was replaced by the more reassuring gang mentality.
When Josiah was ten he told the yew that his thirteen-year old protector, Maggie, was pregnant, and was going to leave soon. He felt privileged to have received a private confession from her. One evening at seven o’clock she had knocked at his door, and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you, love.’ She had sat down on the bed right up close to him and taken his hand in hers and said, ‘I’m going to have a baby. Would you like to see my tummy?’ Then Maggie had taken up her jumper and let him feel her taut, smooth stomach. ‘They wanted me to have an abortion,’ she’d told him, ‘but I said, “I’ll never kill a little baby, never.” When she’s born I’ll bring her to visit you. I’m going to call her Cherry.’
Two months later Maggie was gone, and she never said goodbye. Josiah told the yew all about it. He said he’d like to see her baby very much.
It was a mood rather than a confession which drove Josiah to seek the solace of the Heaven-beech. Here, he never even tried to put anything into words, but rather listened very hard to the creaking, whispering tree, and instinctively knew that its message was this: there is somewhere else which will one day be yours. That was all the solace he needed. Well, usually it was. Just occasionally, Josiah’s head was too full to listen properly, and there was a bottleneck between his head and his heart. There was a week at the beginning of June 1995, when the eleven-year old Josiah rarely left the beech’s protection.
What happened was this. In May, a new residential social worker arrived at The Hollies. There was nothing strange in that – during the year after Kerry’s departure there had been no fewer than five new young men and women who’d run the gauntlet and promptly resigned. But this one was hip and called Josie, and she had long, fine blonde hair that ended in a perfect line three-quarters of the way down her back. Josie would swing her fair hair back when she laughed, and because she was good-natured and slightly nervous, this happened rather often. Within a few hours of her arrival, all the older boys had to acknowledge that they fancied her rotten. At
this time Darren was fifteen and trying to grow a moustache; the older boys had of course left, but there were younger ones whom Darren was happily grooming to be quite the callous shit he was: Dan and Ricky, Kev and Jed.
But Josie only had eyes for Josiah. While the others continually bombarded her with demands for attention, Josiah would eat his meals quietly and take his empty plate to the kitchen without a murmur. While the others would talk until midnight and gather in each other’s rooms to smoke cigarettes, Josiah took himself off to bed at eight o’clock as though he barely existed. When Josie learnt from The Hollies Birthday Book that there was soon to be a birthday and it was Josiah’s, she set to work and made him a huge chocolate cake.
Josiah, of course, wasn’t expecting it at all. That tea-time, the first of June, when the last vestiges of ketchup, chips and sausages had been cleared away (Josie had even insisted that the tables be wiped down), a large cake was suddenly produced with the words Happy Birthday Josiah written across it in broken flake bars (which alone had taken Josie an hour). Five lustful adolescent boys began nudging each other and gazing furiously at their new object of hate. Josie didn’t notice because she was busy closing the curtains.
‘I always think,’ she was saying, ‘a room needs to be dark before we light candles.’
‘Oh fuck me,’ declaimed Darren, raising his eyes to the ceiling.
Josie’s hair was by now swinging at quite a rate, first over her left shoulder, then over her right; but by the time she came to be lighting the candles one by one, her face was suddenly still and glowed angelically.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘Where are you, Josiah? You come here, birthday boy.’
Josiah did as he was told, though sheepishly. He’d had three more years experience of The Hollies than Josie, and already he knew he’d have to pay for this. Then Josie put an arm about his shoulder, and he made himself small and retreated into his body.