After I got back from seeing Elaine I read my mother’s article and my first thought was to set it on fire, but in the end I just threw it away. My mother, Michelle Hayes, forty-eight, now lives in Bermondsey with Darren Hatton, forty-one, and their nine-year-old daughter Kimberley. She has ‘been saved’. She regrets my upbringing, but I was a very difficult child. She thinks Verity looks like a nasty piece of work. I’m not a murderer, not her son, no. I must have been persuaded to do it somehow, there’s no way she’ll ever believe otherwise.
A photograph accompanied the article but I didn’t see any point in keeping it either because I don’t know anybody in it. I stared at it for a long time before I threw it away, but I can’t even be sure if the woman in the picture was really my mother. She was sitting on a beige leather sofa in a room with large purple flowers on the wall, in front of a window looking into a garden. The wall was bedecked with photographs in frames which spelt the word ‘LOVE’ or ‘FAMILY’. The floor was carpeted and you could see the corner of a television and a painting on the wall. She had her arm around a podgy little girl with long brown hair, wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt. Darren was sitting on the other side of the girl with his arm against my mother’s shoulders. Darren might have always been on the large side, but my mother had definitely put on weight. You could see a roll of flab which had been exposed by her jeans, highlighted by the pink of her T-shirt. Her hair was now dyed a soft blond and her make-up looked professional, probably done for the paper. I looked at her hands cupped round Kimberley and I saw her nails were neatly filed and painted a pink which matched her T-shirt. She had a few rings on her fingers and a bracelet round her wrist. I wondered if they were all naturally mournful people or if the photographer had told them to look sad; the latter I suspect.
Even though she is now in the bin I find myself hoping that in reality she smiles more. That she has found the happiness she proclaims. Wouldn’t it be good for us both to have finally found love, to have finally found what we were unable to give to each other.
Christmas is a dismal affair in prison. There is something about seeing a line of men wearing coloured paper hats, queuing with their plastic trays for a meal you know will taste of sawdust, that makes you want to jump out of a window. And I know I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. The day had a febrile atmosphere to it, as if the tension existed in electronic waves which zoomed through the air. Men threw punches and shouted, the guards drew their weapons, a small man jumped on the metal netting between the floors and rolled around, someone got a snooker pole wrapped round his head and the blood wasn’t cleaned up properly. Terry spent the day with his hand down his trousers watching telly and I lay on my bunk and thought of V.
‘You never meet birds like that, do you,’ Terry said towards the end of the night when our cell was fogged with twisted desire.
I leant over my bunk and looked at the woman he was pointing at on the telly. She was shouting at someone, her Barbie body encased in a shimmering, sparkling suit which loved her like a second skin. Impossible, Kaitlyn-like heels were on her feet and her breasts were as round and large as two watermelons. Her hair was platinum blond and her face looked painted on, like a modern-day geisha, her ballooning lips a bright, shocking red, her eyes ringed in thick, smoky black. Her skin was the colour of yoghurt and I wasn’t sure she was human.
‘Bet she’s fucking filthy an’ all,’ Terry said, slapping his hands together and rubbing them with ever-increasing motion. ‘God, I tell you, if I got my hands on her she wouldn’t know what’d hit her. I’d give her a right good seeing-to, I would, and she’d fucking love it. Be begging for more.’ He laughed and it lapsed into his deep smoker’s cough.
‘Bet you had birds like that flocking round you with your fucking loadsa money,’ he said, but I had rolled on to my back. ‘Go on, give us a Chrissie present and tell us about them.’ I lay still. If it came to it I’d be happy to beat Terry to a sorry version of himself, but I didn’t want to. ‘Fucking killjoy,’ he said beneath me.
I read somewhere that the reason humans are so tragic is because we are only one half of a whole and most of us spend all our lives desperately searching for that missing person to make us complete. But because the universe finds it amusing to watch us suffer, most of us never meet our elusive other half because they have been born on the other side of the world. But you keep searching, not even knowing what you’re looking for, or even that you’re searching, because that is your biological imperative. And then you start to panic, because you feel this massive gaping hole inside and you know you either have to fill it or die. Some turn to drink or drugs or gambling or TV, anything really to make them forget they are hurtling through life on a lonely, never-ending path to death. Others take a more conventional route and convince themselves that the person they always dismissed as being too boring/fat/ugly/inadequate/bad in bed/smelly/violent/psychotic is actually ‘the one’. The one person in this world who will stop them slitting their wrists next New Year’s Eve. But of course they’re not, so they’re left with a life of recriminations and regrets which ends up in the same place as if they’d missed out the middle section and gone straight to the drugs, drink or TV. There is no one perfect out there, you hear people say, because for the large majority that is the truth. Your perfection is living on the edge of a mountain in Outer Mongolia and your paths are never going to cross.
Except that isn’t true of V and me. We found each other. And not just that, it wasn’t even hard. We met in the way all those other not-quite-right people meet, except we didn’t have to ignore the nagging doubt in the dusty basement of our minds. We just were, are, right. We fit together in every way and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. You could send us to America and fry us in the electric chair and still this would be our truth. Still nothing could change this fact.
Today was the first day of the trial. I was taken by police van to the back of the Old Bailey, where I was escorted inside with my hands locked in front of me and a blanket over my head. I felt the crowd around us and saw the flashbulbs bounce off the rain-slicked pavement. A woman shouted, ‘Repent or die,’ and I presume it was meant for me. Once inside, the blanket and handcuffs were removed and I was led through what felt like miles of labyrinthine corridors which seemed to be underground. We stopped at the bottom of a flight of stairs, at the top of which was a shut door. The guard went in front of me and I followed. It took me a minute to realise we had made it into the courtroom as we walked up and through the door. The light was bright and there was a cacophony of noise from the many people who were there. But I soon saw that I was in the dock, as Xander had told me I would be, a long box which ran across the back of the courtroom. He had also told me time and time again that because V and I were being tried together she would sit in the dock with me, which meant we would be sharing not just the emotion of the room but the physicality of it. It was a delicious thought which had kept me awake at night, as if the whole of the British legal system had been designed for this moment alone.
The guard indicated for me to sit, so I did and he sat down next to me. Xander turned from his table at the front and nodded at me, his absurd wig bobbing into his eyes. I knew that V was somewhere in the building, probably not even that far away. I was about to see her and at that moment I would have given my freedom for just one glimpse.
She arrived a few minutes later via a door which meant she had to walk through the body of the court to reach our box. I felt a surge from the people in the room, as if everyone was as drawn to her as I was. A female guard ushered her into our space, but at the other end of the dock, sitting next to her as my guard had done, as if they knew it would be impossible for us to be alone and not touch in such a confined space. V was carrying a cardboard cup which brought with it the scent of coffee. I knew it would contain a skinny latte; we’d drunk enough of those together over the years and, for some reason, this memory almost seemed worse than all the others. It seemed so carefree and innocent compared to where we w
ere now and I couldn’t understand why it was proving so difficult to return to. I looked over at V, desperate for her to glance over even for a second, but she refused to return my stare, her pursed lips sipping from the white plastic lid.
She was dressed in a black skirt and jacket, with a white shirt underneath. Her hair was tied into a low ponytail and she didn’t look like she was wearing make-up. But the eagle was round her neck, which made me relax slightly. She kept her eyes in front of her and her expression neutral, but I could see the twitch at the corner of her mouth and the drag in her cheeks. I was worried by how pale she was, almost Kaitlyn-colour, and she had lost a substantial amount of weight so she was verging on being too thin.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ had been Xander’s last words to me. ‘You have to seem like the sane, stable one. You can be upset, you can fight your corner, but do not do anything to arouse interest. It is imperative we direct the attention towards Verity.’
I looked at the jury as they filed in, but they were no different from a group of people you might see in a train carriage or walking down the street. They varied in age, gender, ethnicity, weight, height. They all glanced at me and then round me to get a glimpse of V, before looking away again quickly. For all I knew one of them could have enjoyed drowning kittens in their spare time, or going to church, or swimming. None of them looked as intelligent as V and me and it seemed absurd that they should be deciding our futures. Although I had to check that thought. We were deciding our futures. We had engineered this. We were playing the game and they were just coming along for the ride.
There would be people I knew sitting in the rows in front of us but they felt like a bogeyman, as if by not looking at them I could somehow make them go away. When I lived with my mother there were monsters in the corner of my room only I could see, hidden by the cobwebs and filth which clung to our walls. I came to an agreement with those monsters. If I agreed never to look straight at them they agreed not to eat me. It lessened the terror a bit.
I looked anyway. Elaine and Barry were there and they both smiled in a low, depressing way. Colin and Suzi were in front of V, both shrunken and thinned, like pruned trees. Suzi was leaning across Colin to talk to a man who looked so like Angus he could only be his brother and, next to him, were Angus’s parents, whom I remembered from the wedding.
It struck me then that this was in fact like a wedding, bride’s family on one side, groom’s on the other. And that made me feel better. I looked again at V but she was still staring straight ahead. I wished I could tell her that this was our conjoining, our true beginning, the end of our ultimate Crave, but the start of something more wonderful. A normal, bog-standard wedding was never going to be right for us. This was a much better way of cementing our union.
‘All rise for Justice Smithson,’ said a loud voice and the room moved as an elderly man in a flowing red robe with a greying, powdered wig on his head climbed the steps to the altar. Xander had been very pleased by Justice Smithson; ‘old school’, he’d called him, which was apparently a good thing. When Justice Smithson sat we all copied him and he looked down on us like he enjoyed his job. His eyes rested on me and then I followed them to V.
There is so much empty time in court, so many hours pass in which nothing is really said or established. I find myself looking at the dust which collects between the glass and the wood of the enclosure they have put V and me into. I try not to look over at her too much and she never looks towards me. But there are moments when something is said and I feel the pull between us like a wire, feel us reaching and straining for each other.
People stand, people sit, the judge nods and the barristers speak to the jury. The jury frequently looks over to V and me; I can feel their eyes on us and I know they have no idea what to think because they are such ordinary people, puffed out by life. The charges seem so large: murder for me and accessory to murder for V. And I know the jury is so far from being able to make these sorts of decisions about us. They seem like nothing more than children being told bedtime stories when Xander and Petra speak to them and I am not sure they even listen to the details. I see them yawn and rub their eyes sometimes; one of the young men looked hungover a few days ago.
And sometimes I hardly blame them because so many stories have been told in here it is hard to grab hold of what they mean. Sometimes even the witnesses change their minds halfway through as the questions switch between Xander and Petra. Angus’s brother, Frederick, told us that they had all liked Verity and had never seen Angus so happy. But he also said that sometimes it had seemed too much, that maybe you could say he was almost under her spell, that it was a lot of money to leave to someone you had known for such a short time.
I hate the thought of V having Angus’s money. I think we should burn it. I think we should fill his stupid show-off house with notes and set fire to it, watch it dissolve into the air like the nothing it is.
We had to listen to the man all the papers have been quoting; he was called Gordon Sage and he was paraded in front of us to speak about the things he and V had done together when they were eighteen.
‘I must confess I found her scarily sexual,’ he said, his piggy eyes staring out of his fat, rugged face as though they could still see her naked body. ‘She had this thing for doing it outside.’ He licked his lips and I felt something rise through me so I was worried I was going to be sick on my shoes and fill the court with the acrid stench of bile.
I looked over at V but she had shut her eyes and was leaning her forehead against her hand. I turned my attention back to Gordon Sage and saw his fat fingers curving round the wood of the witness box. I imagined them inside V. ‘But then one day she got a friend to ring and say it was over, no explanation or anything. In fact we never spoke again.’
I imagined V screaming underneath his corpulent body and I knew then why she needed me to always save her from men like that. All the Gordon Sages I had peeled off her in nightclubs, all the times I had stopped them pawing her body and breathing on her neck, little droplets of spittle landing on her skin, so she would be tainted by their DNA. I would prise his fat fingers off one by one, bending them so far back each one would break and he would end up snivelling on the floor, snot dribbling from his nose.
Xander liked Gordon, or at least what he brought, as he put it. ‘They tried to call some American woman you worked with over there,’ he said when we met beneath the court after that day. ‘I’m presuming it was that girl you slept with. But she’s refused to come and the judge said he didn’t think it was relevant anyway. He actually said that he wasn’t interested in your sexual adventures.’ He laughed. ‘I thought Petra was going to burst when he said that. Good old Smithson, never disappoints.’ I couldn’t really understand what he meant, but I didn’t care, because the thought of V having to sit in the same room as Carly made my skin itch.
On other days my brain has felt overused, as if words are turning in my head and banging against the side of my brain, chipping my skull so that fragments of bone are imbedding themselves in places they shouldn’t be. I wonder now if the woman who called herself Mrs Lascelles really was my old headmistress, because nothing about her felt familiar. She could have gleaned a lot of what she told the court from any newspaper: like how my clothes were often dirty and I was small and thin for my age. But she also spoke about things I find hard to place, like my ‘violent temper’, as she put it. She said I was always starting fights and that lots of the parents complained about me. She said the other children were frightened of me, even some of the staff. Sometimes I had to be restrained, one teacher carrying my legs and one my arms, to remove me from classrooms.
Her words scratch at my head and at times I have thought I am going to remember something, but it always remains tantalisingly just beyond my reach. She didn’t blame me, she said, trying to catch my eye as she spoke. They knew there was trouble at home, but however many times they questioned me I never admitted to anything, always saying everything was fine, even when it so obvi
ously wasn’t. They were in contact with social services, but they hadn’t known how bad it was. Naughty children are never anything more than bad parents, she said, her understanding radiating off her like a bloody halo.
But then there are others, like Sarah Cross, who felt like being reunited with an old friend. She smiled at me when she stepped into the stand and I remembered how warm she had always been, how she’d give you a hug even when she wasn’t meant to or sneak you an extra biscuit. She was rounder than she’d been when I’d known her and she had heavy bags under her eyes and a nasty cough which attacked her sometimes as she spoke.
‘You would be hard pushed to find a worse case of neglect,’ she said, ‘although undoubtedly worse things do happen to lots of children. He wasn’t sexually abused, which is always a blessing, but he hadn’t been provided with basic care, which certainly left physical and mental damage.’ On the day I let them into the flat I was ten years old and weighed five stone. I was wearing clothes for a six-year-old. Lots of my teeth were decayed and I was infested with lice.
I could feel V reaching out to me as Sarah spoke, as if she wanted to lean over and take my hand. But I kept my head down because I don’t want V to think of me like that. I have told her everything, but I don’t want her to hear it from someone else, I don’t want the knowledge to be out in the open. It taints me somehow, taints me with the infection of that time.
The court was shown photos of the flat, which I could only bear to look at peripherally. Everyone in the room was able to see the piled plates and overflowing ashtrays, the black mould on the walls, the encrusted toilet, the black sink and the bath so filled with rubbish it was unusable. The pictures weren’t lying, but what they didn’t show was how the whole flat smelt of rot and decay, how it caught the back of your throat and made your eyes water. I coughed because it was as if the pictures had released the stench, as if it had found its way back to me so that sitting in court I could taste the yeasty, sour smell of my childhood home which, towards the end, made me think about new life forms. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I opened the door to the social services that day was not because I wanted to save myself, but because I thought something was actually going to materialise out of the atmosphere, something worse than was already there.
Our Kind of Cruelty Page 19