by Ruth Dugdall
It comes back in a tumble just hearing him say my name. Adam had sat with his head bowed while Stuart said that all of our family problems were my fault. Adam had always looked out for me before, and he was there on the bridge. He knew the truth, yet he let Stuart make me out to be a runt, the half-brother from a foreign and inscrutable source. He even went as far as to say I was wrong in the head, and the psychiatrists went some way to agreeing, though not far enough to keep me out of prison.
I was just ten, sat in my stained T-shirt with no-one to speak for me, watching as the court artist sketched what she thought a murderer looked like. After just two hours of deliberating the jury agreed.
But Adam, he wasn’t a killer. No, he was guilty of compliance, guilty of covering, but not guilty of what really mattered. To the count of murder how do you find Humber Boy A? Not Guilty. He got just four years in prison and he got to keep his name.
“How did you find me?”
He stands, just a yard in front of me. And still I don’t stand aside to let him in.
“Google Earth.”
It’s my fault, I put my address on my card to Mum, the one I’d been told never to send, the one she hadn’t replied to anyway.
Adam shifts position, looks bored. He was always good at that.
“Come on then and let us in, our kid.”
He looks uncertain for a moment, as if it suddenly occurs to him that I might not want him there, and I don’t recognise him in that moment, but then he firms up his jaw and his shoulders and that’s the Adam I knew, no-one would mess with him, the brother I was so proud of. He looks just like Stuart.
Adam follows me into the lounge and, as I’ve noticed everyone always does, he walks straight to the window.
“You jammy bastard. That’s some view.”
“It is.”
“How d’you feel looking out on all that water? And that there bridge.”
His accent is so obviously Hull that it makes me feel weak inside, the way he says water like ‘what-ha’, you with a deep ‘oo’, it takes me back to our boyhood, and I think how I no longer sound like that. My voice has been neutralised by years of moving around, and my own will, straightened out so I no longer says ‘a’ as in apple, not when I’m saying ‘bath’ or ‘laugh’ anyway. My ‘a’s’ are like ‘ahs’ and I no longer have a problem with ‘u’. But I haven’t said enough for him to know that yet. I can’t answer his last question.
He starts checking out the room, picking up my book from the floor. He reads the spine. It was a leaving gift from Roy, it’s Dante’s Inferno, half the page in Italian, half in English. He tosses it back onto the floor, giving me a narrow glance that looks like envy but it can’t be that. Nobody would want my life.
“You gonna get me a drink or summat? It’s a long drive, you know, from Hull.”
He doesn’t say he arrived yesterday, though I know now it was him I saw in the library. I don’t ask him where he spent the night. “You’ve got a car?”
He walks towards me and gently taps my chest with the back of his hand. “How else you think I got here, flew? Now, when are you gonna get us a bloody drink? I’m parched.”
He follows me to the galley kitchen and watches as I open the litre bottle of Spar Cola.
“Got any brewskies?”
I shake my head. It never occurred to me to buy any beer, and anyway it would be expensive.
Ignoring the glass, Adam reaches for the bottle, twists the top and drinks it down even as the foam fizzes around his lips. I watch him drink my coke until the bottle constricts, thinking pathetically that I have nothing else in the flat except the water in the tap and I don’t feel up to another trip to the Spar just yet. Even though Shirl is friendly I still have to steel myself each time I walk into a shop. Adam sucks down air with the last of the bubbles. When the bottle is done he pulls it free and burps then grins at me.
“Any grub?”
All I have is some sliced white bread and marmite, but even that feels precious to me, so I hesitate. He’s my brother, and this isn’t about bread, it’s about the trial. I don’t want to give him anything of mine, I feel he’s taken too much already. In the silence I can feel him weighing me up and finally I look at him directly.
I haven’t seen him in eight years, but he’s so familiar and I realise it’s because he’s looking at me in the same way Stuart used to. Then I see that his expression is Stuart’s but his face is all Mum. And mine. We all have it, the oval face, the sky-blue eyes, the look that may be a result of living on the east coast where the Vikings once landed. “We’re descended from them,” Mum would say. “We’re tough, us. Whatever life throws at us we keep buggering on.” She liked the idea of us being Vikings, and she certainly liked a fight so there may be some truth in it. I’m shorter than Adam, though, and that’s not like a Viking, and I have white-blond hair like my dad whereas Adam’s hair is dark. You’d think my smallness would have helped me in court, that the jury might think the older and bigger boy was more responsible.
Adam wanders back into the lounge, looking again out onto the Orwell River, and then turns to face me. “You’ve hardly got owt. Where’s the stuff the prison give, to help you out and that?”
“Did they help you?” I countered.
Adam reddened then looked down at the carpet.
“I got nowt, not a posh flat like this. I had ta go live with our mam.”
This stings, sharp. He was allowed back to Hull and Mum took him in. Everything was different for him, the trial, the sentence, the way Mum responded. Then another thought arrives, as deep as a belly blow.
“Are you still living with her?” Is that why she wouldn’t even consider moving to Suffolk with me?
He shrugs as if it’s of no consequence. “Sometimes. When I’m not with our lass.”
I remember his letter then. “Is that your girlfriend WHO KNOWS? What right did you have to tell her when there’s a Facebook campaign to find me?” It’s only when I hear my voice, the sharpness in it, that I realise how angry I am. He’s in Hull, with Mum. He has a girlfriend.
He seems surprised by my anger. “I didn’t tell her nowt, our kid. She was there. I couldn’t say in the letter, didn’t think that would be smart, but I’m with Cheryl. From the bridge.”
The information drips slowly through.
“Roger Palmer’s daughter?
It doesn’t make sense to me that he could be with her. Not when she was so involved with what happened. He’s watching my face and seems to understand my confusion.
“You remember how we saw her, in court? After she’d been in the witness box she was allowed to sit with us and we all had a drink and summat to eat. Remember?”
I think back, to sitting in the waiting area, shielded from the press. Cheryl was there, a prosecution witness because she saw us that day, first outside the shop and then at the river. But she’d already testified so she was allowed to wait in the room with us, we were all given snacks and my social worker went to the vending machine and bought us all some sweets. We may all be involved in a murder trial but we were kids too, and we argued over who got the mints and who got the chocolate.
Two defendants and a prosecution witness in the same room, sharing a packet of Polos and Maltesers but no-one seemed to think it an issue. Cheryl broke ranks, she screwed a letter into a ball and when she passed, seemingly to go to the toilet, she threw it into my lap.
She’d used our names, because she knew them, even though no-one was allowed to say them in court. I still know the letter by heart:
You’re going to prison, my dad says there’s no getting away with it. I want you to write to me, wherever you go. I’m putting my address at the end of the letter because I need to know what happened after I left the bridge. Noah was alright, I liked him even though he was a bit posh. And I’m sorry he’s dead. Are you? Why haven’t they asked you that?
I screwed her letter up, put it in the bin.
“How did she know where you were?”
; There are several secure units in the north, he wouldn’t have been easy to find. Then the penny drops, Adam must have taken the letter from the bin, smoothed out the crumples.
“You wrote to her?”
“Well, you know how it was.” He shifts from one foot to the other. “I mean, I was lonely and no-one came to visit much – you know our mam’s not brilliant at letters. And Cheryl knew what had happened, her being there and that. I wasn’t allowed to write to you but no-one told us not to write to her, so it just kept pouring out. And then, she visited us. By the time I got released, we were in love.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I can’t help it, the words come out without permission. I don’t know why him being in love with Cheryl bothers me so much, but it does. That letter was for me, not for him. Something else he stole from me.
He shrugs again, a gesture I’ve already deduced has become his response when he doesn’t know what to say.
“One thing led to another.”
“One thing led to a fucking other! How is that even possible? She knows who we are. She was there, she was part of it.”
He held both hands up as if in submission. “We were children. It were ages ago.”
As if that makes any difference. I look to the floor, the weight of it all suddenly pulling me down.
“Look, our kid, you need to know it was Cheryl who told me to come down and find you. She wants to see you too.”
“So you’re the welcome party?” The idea is unsettling. Who else will come knocking on my door? Adam looks like he doesn’t get what I mean. “I said I’d call her when I got here. Tell her it’s safe.”
41
The Day Of
Noah walked quickly out of the side door of the Palladium, his eyes sparkling like hot coals. “Let’s go do it.” As if fear hadn’t frozen him but woken him up.
“Do what, idiot?” Adam said, following Noah down the passage but sounding wary. His face was still pale, and his heart hadn’t quite found its rhythm yet. The film had been scary, not that he’d admit that. “Buy us a house in the woods and conjure up some Devil shite?”
“Not that, the Ouija board. We could use the dining table and I’ve got a tape recorder to catch anything that speaks. My mum won’t be back for hours.” Noah was speaking fast, words strung together by nervous excitement, tripping over his shoelace which had come undone yet again. He knelt and re-tied it, a double knot like his mum had taught him.
To get back to the estate the boys would have to walk in front of the Palladium, where Ashley was taking a five-minute cigarette break. Seeing him, Adam grabbed Ben by the collar of his T-shirt, yanking him away from the cinema entrance. “Let’s frame, that’s the lad who checks tickets. Scarper!”
Outside his home, Noah picked up a stone, or what looked like one, and turned it over, sliding his fingers along the back so it opened, revealing a key.
“That’s fucking cool,” said Adam, taking the plastic stone from Noah and tapping it, sliding the key safe to examine it. “No burglar would suss it wasn’t real.”
Noah pushed out his chest and said proudly, “My mum got it from the Internet. She thinks of everything.”
Only then did he pause, the key in his fingers but not yet ready to open the door.
“No mess, though. She’d go crazy if she caught us.”
“It’s okay, Noah,” Ben reassured his friend. “We’ll be careful.”
“But we’re conjuring the Devil,” said Adam, waggling his fingers. “Owt might happen.”
Inside the house were other signs of just how clever Noah’s mum was. There was a wipe-clean board that had the days of the week on it, and beside them menus for each day. Ben read the meals in wonder, vegetable lasagne, chops, fish. His mouth watered at the thought, even though some of the meals he didn’t know. What was gumbo? What was fajitas?
Noah saw him reading the weekly menu. “And she works, full-time,” he said, enjoying showing off and though Ben didn’t like him for it he was fascinated too, by this insight into what normal families did.
“What about your dad?”
“Oh, he’s at the garage. He’ll be home later, probably.”
Adam started to root around in the fridge, and though Noah tried to stop him, no way was Adam going to resist the slices of ham, the fresh juice. In the end, Noah gave in and all three boys started to graze, grabbing juicy strawberries, Greek yoghurt and breaking brie with their fingers. Ben wasn’t sure he liked the brie but he ate it anyway, just because it was different and new. There was bread too, so they had a makeshift picnic, munching as they stood, handing round the carton of juice until it was empty.
With full stomachs and feeling sleepy, the boys pulled the curtains closed in the lounge and sat cross-legged with knees touching, a triangle around the Fisher Price tape recorder that they placed on the carpet in front of them.
“It’s all I have,” said Noah. “I mean, I have a CD player but it doesn’t record. And this has a mike, look.” He picks up the white plastic microphone, and the other boys laugh at it, even when the sky darkens and the room becomes quieter.
“What if summat happens?” asks Ben, thinking about the film, about the blood and pain that followed the conjuring.
“Scared, our kid?” taunted Adam. “Come on, I’ll go first. Give us a pen, so I can work out what to say. Backwards, like they did in the film.”
And he wrote on the jotter: come to devil the ask we.
The boys began to chant, saying the line again and again until they felt dizzy and hoarse and the sound of the letterbox made them all scream. But it wasn’t the Devil, only a flyer for the new Morrisons.
On his way to the loo, Ben saw something he couldn’t walk past without exploring: Noah’s bedroom. The door was ajar as if to invite him in. Although he’d called at Noah’s house several times over the past few weeks they had stayed in the garden or played in the sitting room, where Noah’s mum kept a giant box of Lego, so Ben hadn’t seen the bedroom. Now he stood in the doorway, unable to fathom why Noah would ever play outside when he owned such amazing things, the spoils of a childhood Ben had never had. Lego pieces, assembled and displayed on shelves, a Scalextric set on the floor, cars scattered around as if they weren’t precious. The bed even had a Hull Rovers duvet cover and pillow. Tacked above the bed, given the proudest space, was a red and white Hull Rovers scarf.
Ben stepped forward, his hands itching to touch all of Noah’s possessions, clenching into fists as he thought of his own room, the stained duvet without a cover, the broken toys that Adam had passed down, the football that had a puncture. Noah had all this and he was still a whinger. Poor little rich kid. And that was when he decided, if Noah wanted to see the Devil then he bloody well could.
Downstairs, Adam and Noah were bent over the table but it was only when Ben joined them that the glass started to move. Spelling out H-E-L-L-O. Then another word. D-I-E.
“Who’s going to die?” Adam asked the glass, stifling a giggle, but looking strange all the same. Ben bit his lip, hiding how much he was enjoying seeing the others so scared and knowing he was causing it. It was a fun game.
O-N-E.
“One of us?” said Adam. There was no giggle to suppress now, he gave Ben a thump on the chest. “Are you pushing the glass, our kid?”
“No.” And as he said this Ben realised it was true. The glass was moving against the pressure from his fingers.
Noah looked like he was going to shit his pants, and it was all Ben could do to keep his finger on the small shot glass, it moved so swiftly around the letters to make the final word.
M-U-R-D-E-R.
The boys all pulled back from the glass as though it was hot, and it fell on its side, rolling over the letters and stopping, completely still, over one letter.
The letter N.
42
Now
FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B
Silent Friend: I’ve had word of where he is. Tomorrow I’ll know for sure.
Noah’s mum
: I don’t know who you are, but you sound like you’re on our side. Thank you. I just want a chance to speak to him, I have just one question to ask him. Do you think that would be possible?
Silent Friend: He’s had the chance to explain himself. It may be too late for that.
Noah’s mum: It’s what I want. To look him in the eye and hear what he has to say. I don’t want any more violence.
Silent Friend: I’ll see what I can do, Jessica.
43
Cate
Cate and Amelia tumbled indoors tramping sand into the carpet, Amelia sticky and smiley, Cate sporting pink skin on both shoulders where she’d neglected sunscreen, assuming no-one would burn in September, not even a redhead. She never learned.
Amelia saw the flashing light on the answerphone and pressed it:
“It’s me. Mum will have told you I called. I’d rather have spoken with you but I didn’t have your number. I’ve called a few times, but you’re always out.
“Look, I’m coming to Ipswich in a week. Can we meet? I’m staying at the Great White Horse. I hope it’s not the dive it was when we were teenagers. Anyway, come see me Cate. We have a lot to talk about.”
Amelia cocked her head to one side and spoke as if to the machine, “Who’s that?”
“It’s Liz. My sister.”
After pressing re-dial, Cate discovered that the number Liz had called from was ex-directory, so Cate had no way of returning the call even if she’d wanted to. Amelia trailed after her as she walked into the kitchen to unpack the remnants of their day.
“Why don’t we ever see her? Does she have any children? They’d be my cousins.”
Of course the questions would start, Cate didn’t blame Amelia for this. She just wished she had some answers for her.
“I don’t know, love. Liz left home when she was seventeen. She just packed a bag and went, and I haven’t seen her since.”