by Ruth Dugdall
It was over. So he said.
He’d said it was her drinking, he said it was the way she couldn’t get her act together, then he’d said it was Ben. And that was the part that really stuck with her, the reason she thought most likely. He couldn’t live with ‘that kid’ and when she asked what he meant he’d said something about a ‘constant reminder’.
Yvette occasionally looked into Ben’s face and remembered that time when Stuart had been gone too long and she was lonely, grateful for a little bit of kindness from a man who was indebted to her, but mostly she just saw Ben. Her kid, her son, no-one else’s. For ten years, Stuart had never let it go, not that it was the only time she’d had another man but here was the evidence, walking around their home. It was why Stuart hated Ben, not that the kid could help where he came from.
A moment of defiance, maybe it was high time that Stuart pissed off. Good riddance! Why should Ben have to put up with a step-dad like that? They were better off on their own, the three of them. Then the anger was gone and she simply felt defeated.
How would she cope without him? When he came home, there was brass and there was food.
If only she could get some damned sleep, get rid of the headache, the world would feel a whole lot better when she woke, but Adam was in the bedroom next door, roaring about T-shirts and getting ready for a day-trip that wasn’t going to happen. He’d find out soon enough. She groaned and slid deeper under the covers, putting off the moment, but then the bedroom door was flung open and she knew the moment had found her anyway.
Adam looked around the room.
“Where’s me dad?”
She could hear in his voice that it had taken just a second for him to know Stuart was gone again. Doing what he always did when the going got tough.
“Gone. On the Icelandic boat.”
Adam’s face was drained of colour, his lower lip trembled, and she knew as well as if she felt it herself that the disappointment was crushing. And she couldn’t find the words to comfort him, she couldn’t say anything, her son looked so broken hearted. Instead she just opened her arms, her fingers beckoning him, desperate to hold him and make it better. Tell him that his dad may be a shit but she loved him and that was what mattered.
But Adam glared at her accusingly, like it was she who had ruined the plan. He saw the vodka bottle on the floor and he turned back to his own room. To Ben, the only person he seemed to trust with his pain, and Yvette returned to her own.
18
Now
FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B
Noah’s mum: Today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary. I met Dave when I was seventeen and he gave me our precious son, Noah, may he rest in peace. Did you know that half of all parents who lose a child, divorce within a year? Not us, though. Happy anniversary, Dave. Thank you for everything, and I’m only sorry that I can’t always be there for you. But everything I do is for our boy, you know that, don’t you?
Dave: Happy anniversary, Jess. I love you and admire you, my powerhouse of a wife.
Silent Friend: Congratulations. It can’t have been easy for you to make it through.
19
Cate
“Mum! Stop staring at me.”
“Sorry, love.”
Amelia was right though, Cate had been staring as Amelia painted her nails, inexpertly, dripping blue polish on the white Ikea table, but that wasn’t what Cate was thinking about. She was marvelling at how grown up her daughter looked. Ten years old and so fully formed, with whispery blonde hair and large green eyes, Cate was glimpsing the woman her child would one day become.
“I’ll take my nail polish set when I stay at Dad’s tomorrow night. Maybe Sally will let me paint Chloe’s nails.”
“You better pack pink then. I don’t think you’ll be allowed to paint your half-sister’s nails blue. And take the remover, once you’ve finished wiping the mess from the table.”
Amelia enjoyed having a half-sister, so much so that she got annoyed when Cate used that phrase. “She’s my sister, Mum. There’s no half about it.”
No half about any of it, not with Amelia.
Amelia lazily put some remover on a cotton pad and began to half-heartedly wipe up the mess, noticing that Cate had a stack of papers in front of her. “What’s all that?”
“Just work.”
Cate had been reading Yvette’s statement, and it had made her feel sick for the woman’s lost opportunity to save her son. The woman came across as depressed, she’d given up on life so much she hadn’t even noticed that her two boys needed her. If the woman had only got up that day, taken them somewhere, things would have been so different. Cate knew this was harsh judgement, borne from hindsight. How was Yvette to know the tragedy that was coming her way?
Harsh too because Cate knew first-hand you can’t just ‘snap out of it’. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to feel wholly sorry for Ben’s mother, not when there were other people who deserved her pity so much more. Like Jessica and Dave Watts. Noah’s parents were the true victims, no matter how much Yvette’s life had been fucked up by the murder. At least her son was alive.
“Criminals?” Amelia asked, leaning her chin on Cate’s shoulder to see what she was reading.
“Yup.” She pushed the notes aside, out of Amelia’s eyeline, and turned to her daughter. “Just for a change.”
She covered Amelia’s hand with her own, pulling away to see a dab of blue on her own skin and as she moved, a photocopy of the trial proceedings slid from the file. It was the artist’s sketch of Ben as he sat in the dock. Amelia noticed it too.
“Did he do something bad?”
“He did.” Just recently Amelia had begun asking questions, as if she was beginning to understand the world beyond her own life. Cate wanted to tell her anything she needed to know, didn’t believe in innocence as a means of protection, but questions about Ben were sure to be difficult to answer.
“But he’s just a boy.”
“He was ten. Your age.”
Amelia’s eyes didn’t widen, she didn’t even looked surprised. Was it only adults who failed to grasp that children had the same range of emotions, the same capacity for good and evil?
“But now he’s a young man. And it’s my job to make sure he doesn’t do anything bad again.”
Amelia blew on her nails, then went to collect her bag, calling over her shoulder. “You’re always working, Mum. Why don’t you have some fun?”
There was an email on her laptop. She hadn’t replied to it yet, because she wasn’t sure how to.
It was from Olivier:
Cate,
As part of my secondment it would be most beneficial if I could discover more about the probation service.
As part of my weekend, it would be most enjoyable if I could discover more about Cate Austin.
So maybe we could meet to this end.
Yours,
Olivier (mob 0776245673)
Her daughter had suggested she had fun, and who was Cate to argue? Ten-year-olds were always right, as Amelia often reminded her.
She clicked Reply and typed: I’m free tomorrow evening if that offer still stands.
But before she pressed Send she looked again at Ben’s dossier on her dining table. Two possibilities presented themselves, and though seeing Olivier may be fun it also terrified her. She hadn’t been out with a man in four years. Reading a casefile was a much safer option, and besides she didn’t have anything nice to wear for a date.
She deleted the message to Olivier, and so resolved to spend another Friday night working instead. A much safer option.
20
Ben
I have an hour, just sixty minutes until my next meeting with Cate and I don’t know where to go. I’m slowly walking through town as I count each second down, wondering how time can drag more than it did when I was in prison. I thought when I was free I would never feel its weight again, but I don’t know what to do with myself. I haven’t enough money left to go to McDonald’s and anyway
it’s busy. I’d like to go to the aquarium but just one hour wouldn’t be long enough, and Leon might think it’s odd if I turn up when I’m not supposed to be there.
Then I see someone, he looks about my age or a bit older, but he’s walking with such ease that I know he’s never been where I have and I start to follow him. It’s only then that I realise why. He reminds me of my brother. He has Adam’s dark hair, I can’t see his face, but he has Adam’s walk too; shoulders back and head up just like Stuart told him. Like me, he’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he looks like he didn’t give it any thought, they fit so easily. I tag behind him, through town, trying to copy how he moves, swinging one arm, using the other to support the orange rucksack casually carried on his shoulder. If I can only learn to walk like that, to look around me that casually, then no-one would realise I’m a freak. He turns and I think he’s noticed me following so I duck into a doorway. My heart thumps and I tell it to calm down. I’m not doing anything wrong. When I step back onto the path I’m just in time to see the orange backpack disappear up a side street. I follow, jogging to catch up, then stop when I see the building he’s entered, not sure I can go any further because it may be restricted, a special place where I’m not allowed.
Then I see it’s a library.
Ipswich library is a glass building with shelves stacked so close to the windows they look vulnerable, layers and layers of books. We had a library in prison, but that was just a room with a handful of books and an old teacher, Roy, who’d try and persuade us not to pick the slasher books, but to go for classics. The other lads took the piss, but I liked Roy and I grew to like the classics too. Especially American stuff, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird and On The Road. Boys like me in different worlds, making other choices. It excited me more than any of the talk about rehabilitation, this idea of another life. I wanted my new identity to be American and brave, fighting injustice, having sex. I wanted to be Dean Moriarty on a road trip, not just me trying to enter a library on a Friday afternoon without looking odd.
I steel my nerves, though I’m so tense my shoulders are almost touching my ears, and tell myself this library is for everyone. And if I can find the boy with the orange rucksack, I can watch him some more. I can learn how to be normal.
Inside the library is a warren of bookshelves, much, much bigger than any library I’ve seen in any prison, which was usually just a converted classroom. But at least books always feel friendly, I learned that much, and I study the racks with longing. I catch my reflection in the window and wonder if I could look like a student. My hair’s short, prison-issue – better not to give them anything to grab onto – but my clothes might pass, they aren’t so different, except for my hoodie which is wrong in this heat but I’m too scared to lift it off, as if exposing my pale skinny arms is what will give me away and not my face. As if the hoodie isn’t fleece but steel, a protective armour rather than a cheap sweatshirt that right now I’m sweating in.
I look for the boy, for his orange bag.
The library is fiercely air-conditioned inside, cold pricks at my skin until my arms are bumpy, and then I start to shiver. It’s like being trapped in a glass box, I feel that everyone walking by is watching me, and I don’t know how to act. Inside are older people mainly, all looking like they belong whether it’s checking out books or reading leaflets or – like the student – finding an empty desk and opening up a laptop. I need to choose a direction, and quickly, or someone might speak to me.
Next to the entrance is a cluster of comfy-looking armchairs where people sit reading magazines. Other magazines are waiting to be read, on glossy display in gleaming glass racks with headers of different hobbies, different worlds: TOP GEAR, FILM REVIEW, CROCHET CLUB. I’d like to sit and read one, any of them, just to lose myself in the possibilities life offers a free person, but the single vacant chair is next to an old woman reading KNITTING FOR BEGINNERS, and she looks distracted, flipping the pages like she can’t find what she’s searching for. If I take that empty seat she might start talking to me and then I’d be trapped so I keep walking around in a circle, searching for stairs, but all I see is a lift. I can’t do lifts.
I study the floor guide:
Floor 1: Fiction
Floor 2: Children’s Books
The lift is open, just one step and I’d be whisked to another level.
Come on Ben, keep moving, you can do this. I can’t stop walking or turn around, that would attract too much attention. I must look like I know what I’m doing. I force myself to step inside.
The lift is also glass so when the doors close I’m in a prison where I can see all the people and books, but can’t be touched. My heart thuds and my hands feel clammy. As the lift moves I’m scared it will go on forever but of course it doesn’t. It knows where it’s going even if I don’t, and opens up to show me even more racks of books in a darker, larger room. Corridors of books, I’ve never seen so many, it’s like a labyrinth where exits are blocked by people reading back covers or walking long rows with their fingers trailing along spines.
I have to walk past people, still searching for the boy who reminds me of Adam, and I’m aware of their closeness and the silence. I sense some glance up as I pass but I keep my eyes ahead and walk as if I’m not lost. I’d like to stop and look at the books, find one I’ve read before, something familiar, but I’m scared. Then I come to some stairs and realise that there was an alternative to the lift and I was stupid to think there wouldn’t be. Wide wooden stairs with open spaces between, curving up next to the window. The wall outside is a silver mosaic pattern, squares and circles, and I know from all I learned during hours of education that this is modern art. Or design. Something to be valued, anyway, though I can see the rust and think how it’s being wrecked, by the rain or wind or whatever the elements are. If it was inside, locked away, it would have been protected from that. The rust makes me think of my silver scooter that got left in the rain. The rust meant the wheels didn’t spin freely, and because of that I met Noah.
I’d seen him around, we lived on the same estate, but we’d never spoken before I got the scooter. He was different; his family had a bit of money, he had a dad who left for work every day in a car and came back each night. We had nothing in common until that scooter. He watched me as I tried to kick the wheels back into action, shyly at first and then with the conviction of someone who knew.
“WD40.”
He took the handle, positioning the scooter so he could see the rusted wheels.
“My dad’ll do it for you. He’s a mechanic, so he knows.”
I snatched it back. “Liar! You just want to steal it.”
His eyes widened in surprise. “Why would I? I’ve got a scooter that works.”
I watched him wheel it away, telling myself it was broken anyway, that it didn’t matter if he nicked it.
But the next morning when I left for school the scooter was propped on my porch, not only greased and working but also rust-free. Either Noah or his dad had cleaned it up, and it looked better than when Stuart brought it home from a car boot sale, on a good day when he was making up for beating me, back when he still bothered.
I can’t find him, the boy with the orange rucksack has disappeared. I look on Level 2, Children’s Books, but it’s deserted.
Of course, it’s two in the afternoon, but there are no preschoolers even. This doesn’t calm me, because I know I shouldn’t be here – I’m not a child – and I stand out more being the only one. Eighteen. Too young to be a father and too old to be reading teen books. Aren’t I? I walk swiftly, trying to contain my panic as I pass through sci-fi, skirting through romance, and arrive into another room, one that is smaller and brighter. On the floor is a large fluffy rug with a teddy bear’s head, and there are different coloured beanbags all around it. There’s a long lime-green crocodile, its back is big enough to sit on. I love this room, I don’t want to leave and can’t stop looking at the colourful books, yellow and orange and
blue, so big I’d have to use two hands to read one. I daren’t actually hold one. This room feels perfect and it makes me want to weep.
I sink deep into a giant red beanbag. I can hear activity in the other room, where the teen romances are, the wheels of a book trolley. Roy, the prison librarian at my last place, had one of those, I’d help him push it down the landings when he got out of breath. I hear it rattling closer, then I see the trolley and a portly woman pushing it. The librarian, short and busty and severe in half-moon glasses. I hold my breath, waiting to be told to leave or recognised or accused but she doesn’t even look at me, as if her book business is far more important than noticing people.
When she leaves I relax but only slightly because I know this room isn’t meant for me. There’s a doll dressed like a witch holding a magic book and a fluffy Dalmatian and crayoned pictures of pirates taped to the window. I long for it, all of these stories and playthings, to have been brought somewhere like this, to have been read to. This never happened to me. Mum didn’t like books but Stuart would sometimes bring one back from his trips, thick paperbacks about spies and criminals and drug barons because there wasn’t much to do on a boat in a storm, and the crew would swap books between themselves as the skipper tried to get the boat to even water. When he left, I’d find them and try to read, a finger under the line and mouthing the words, but they were too difficult.
I don’t remember anyone reading to me but I know without a doubt, though I never asked him, that this happened to Noah. His mum would have read him something every night, a book to help him sleep. And for a sharp moment I forget he’s dead and I hate him all over again.
21
The Day Of
Noah knew the day wasn’t going right, that his mum would be mad. She’d arranged for him to be looked after by Ben’s mum, who she knew from school and also lived nearby. She’d left the house early, so when he woke there was an empty bowl set out with his chocolate cereal and a note that told him to do exactly what Yvette asked and to be a good boy and that she loved him. But Noah hadn’t even seen Yvette when he knocked at the door, he’d not even got beyond the doorstep before the brothers had pushed him back out and told him to frame.