Jack-Knifed

by Wonny Lea

  If his father Bob was not to blame for hurting his sister then Mark thought he must be responsible, and that was why the policeman was taking him away.

  Mark couldn’t understand why this had to happen when Amy was staying. He had not been aware that his distraught mother had told police and social workers that she couldn’t cope with her son and begged them to take him away. It seemed that she was now holding Mark responsible for the anger and hatred he had instilled in his father.

  He had screamed and held on to the handle of his mother’s bedroom door but she had not got up to help him and Amy, the youngest of his two sisters, just sat on the edge of the bed sucking her thumb. Bizarrely, Mark thought she was lucky that their father had been taken away as he would have shouted at her for sucking her thumb as he had always done, calling her an eight-year-old baby bunting and threatening to tell her friends she still wore nappies.

  One of the social workers gently removed Mark’s hand from the door handle and held it very firmly, leading him down the stairs and out into a dark and drizzly February night. The rain and the lateness of the hour had not prevented the sightseers and Mark had never seen so many of their neighbours in the same place at the same time, and again he heard that strange sound of silence everywhere.

  Paula thought back to Mark’s accounts of the next few years of his life. He had told her bit by bit over a long period of time, and usually after a couple of bottles of wine, how he had been passed from one foster home to another. Until he was fifteen Mark had never stayed in one place longer than eight months, although foster parents and social workers were always keen to point out that this was because of exceptional circumstances and not because of any problems with Mark himself.

  The best possible luck had come Mark’s way in August 1983, just ten days before his fifteenth birthday, when yet again he had packed up his belongings and got into the car of his most recent social worker to be taken to a couple living in Cardiff.

  By then Mark was a tall, good-looking boy, but far too thin and not surprisingly lacking in social graces. His churlish attitude served mainly to disguise an underlying shy nature and a decided uncertainty about his place between being a child and a grown-up, and his preference between men and women. The couple he was taken to were Norman and Sandy Harding, and all he knew about them at the time was that they were older than the norm for fostering. They had been a pain in the side of the local authority for some time in their efforts to be considered suitable as long-term foster parents.

  Already in their forties, the couple were seen by the authorities as a definite ‘no’ for caring for young children, but an unusually enlightened official had eventually agreed that they had a lot to offer some of the children who were nearing the end of their childhood placements and were needing support to take them out of foster care and into independent lives.

  Regrettably, their first opportunity had been with Sophie, a fourteen-year-old girl who after just three weeks at the Hardings’ had invited half the teenage drug scene of Cardiff into her new home, an event culminating in the theft of some of Sandy’s jewellery and Norman taking a beating before handing over just £22.50, which was all the cash in his pocket at the time.

  Maybe most couples would have turned their back on thoughts of any more fostering, but Norman knew what a difference a good experience could make to a child, as he himself had been fostered in Cardiff at the age of thirteen by a fantastic couple with three children and two dogs of their own, and a home that had had rules and discipline, but only in the context of love and lots of fun.

  He had lived with the family even after his eligibility for foster care had ended, and when the Parry family had decided to move to Australia in 1962, Norman had gone with them and become a partner in the very successful company set up by Jim Parry with his two sons and his daughter, Sandy.

  The company, SurfitA, was involved in every aspect of surfing that Southern Australia had to offer, with its base close to Boomerang Beach, Pacific Palms, in New South Wales. Local staff were taken on by the company to make surfboards to suit the local conditions, and after a few years the name SurfitA was on all the gear of any serious surfer, not just in Australia but around the world.

  What a place to be a man in his late twenties – and little wonder that Norman fell hopelessly in love with Sandy Parry, and proposed to her one evening as they were watching the dolphins surfing around Boomerang’s northern headland. Their life together followed the fairly typical pattern of many married couples’, with the ups of weddings and births, and the downs of family illnesses and deaths, but their biggest regret was having no children of their own.

  It was Sandy who always wanted to return to the real Wales, as she called it, and was on the eve of her forty-second birthday, as they sat reflecting their lives a little distance away from the frenzied celebrations of their relatives and neighbours, that Norman finally agreed and their preparations to return to Cardiff began. They spent hours considering the parts of the capital that they remembered from growing up there, but were amazed by the changes, sometimes forgetting that it was more than twenty years since they were last there and then laughing as they remembered how much they had changed in that time.

  The house they chose was just outside the main city, in the village of Whitchurch, chosen because the area seemed relatively unchanged but was not far from the city centre, and the house itself was old and could do with complete modernisation. All of the negotiations for the purchase of the house were done over the phone and the sale went through without them having set foot in their new home. They employed an architect and builders through a brilliant project manager, Elly, so that by the time they set foot in Cardiff the house was just as they wanted it, with even the fridge and freezer well-stocked.

  Elly met them at the Cardiff Wales Airport and drove them to the house that turned out to be everything they had hoped for and more. It was as they prepared their first meal in their new house that they decided to share their good fortune and came to the conclusion, as they were unlikely to be considered as viable adoptive parents, already being past the usual child-bearing age, that fostering could be an option. From that moment on, all their efforts went into transforming their new house into a home for whichever children they were fortunate enough to be entrusted with.

  It hadn’t occurred to either of them that it would take such a long time for the authorities to process their application and indeed for it to be rejected in the first instance as they were definitely considered to be too old to foster younger children. So eventually, after almost three years of being subjected to every form of scrutiny and putting aside their first bad experience, Norman and Sandy welcomed Mark into their home and, as it turned out, into their lives.

  From day one, Mark and Norman hit it off, and Sandy was fascinated to see how easily her husband related to the needs of this strangely sensitive young man, whose background could easily have made him aggressive and bitter but instead had taught him to appreciate every bit of good fortune, no matter how trivial. Small wonder that Mark thought all his birthdays had come at once when he was shown his room equipped with a sound system and even a computer, things he had previously only dreamed of or shared with others, but only at their convenience.

  The next three years were exceptional by anyone’s standard, but to Mark they were beyond his wildest dreams. He finished his education at Whitchurch High, where diversity seemed to be the norm, and where the more out of the ordinary you were the more likely it was that you’d be accepted. For the first time in his life he met other boys of his age who were openly gay and, although he didn’t meet anyone he wanted to be with, he felt the shadow of being different lifted from his shoulders, and was at ease with the girls in his class, who knowing where his true feelings lay were happy to accept him as a friend.

  He met Paula and Suzanne, and although both were a couple of years younger than him the three formed an instant friendship, and the girls become regular visitors to Mark’s home in Whitchurch. Sandy w
as only too pleased to cook for them and generally make them welcome. She felt so happy that Mark was able to treat their house as the home he had not had since he was a very young child.

  At eighteen, Mark went to art college, and it was there he met Anne, who was a couple of years older than him and had joined the class a couple of weeks after the start of the first term. She seemed to make a beeline for Mark, and although her spiked blond hair and body piercings were not to his taste, they soon became partners in all their college activities. On finishing college, both she and Mark got jobs at the same graphic design company on Newport Road in the east of the city. Anne was invited to Mark’s home and was accepted as the fourth member of the group. They all shared their secrets of growing up, from relationships to ambitions and from thoughts to downright silly ideas, seemingly safe in the friendship they all thought was solid and unquestioning.

  It was now well over twenty years since they had all first met, but the friendship had stood the test of time, and so it was that all three girls were on their way to Mark’s house for one of their eat, drink, and gossip sessions. Sandy and Norman, now in their mid-seventies, had made numerous friends and contributed greatly to the life of their chosen community, but their proudest day had been on Friday 16th June 2000, when after years of consideration they had finally adopted Mark. Paula knew that they were planning a surprise visit to Australia to celebrate the tenth anniversary of that special occasion. Although still regular visitors to Sandy and Norman in Whitchurch, the girls were now going to Mark’s house that was near the top of Penylan Hill in the Roath Park area of Cardiff.

  Five years earlier it had been Norman’s idea that Mark should get a house of his own and be more independent. His adoptive parents helped him both psychologically and financially to make the break. It was at the time that SurfitA was sold, and Norman and Sandy became not just comfortably off but extremely wealthy. In spite of his protests that he should not be taking their money, Mark was finally persuaded that Norman and Sandy had no one else who needed it and there was no one they would rather give it to than their chosen son.

  Mark had gone for a three-bedroom detached property, one of the older style Edwardian houses, in excellent structural condition but with a somewhat dated décor. The garden was well-established, with mature shrubs and trees, and had obviously been created by someone with a love of nature, as throughout the year different flowers emerged and then retreated, to make way for new colours and scents as the seasons changed.

  The interior gave Mark a blank canvas on which to stamp his own creativity, and with the help of Norman, Sandy, and the girls, he created a contemporary but warm and inviting home – especially, thought Paula, when the real coal fire was lit. His one big indulgence was his “doona”, a Christmas present he bought for himself in 2009 when the new John Lewis store had opened in Cardiff.

  Paula recalled Mark telling her about the pretty young girl in her smart new uniform who had explained that the sofa was called a doona after the Australian word for a duvet, and that’s just what it felt like! Mark wasn’t sure if it was the Australian link or the understated ultra-contemporary style and sink-into-it sumptuousness that made him part with £3500 for a pale coffee-coloured sofa, but it had become the centrepiece from which the design for the rest of the room had developed.

  Over the years, and usually after more than your average amount of Cabernet Sauvignon, Mark had spoken about his biological family and of the efforts made by a number of social workers in the early days to get them reunited. He had learned that his father was convicted of manslaughter and spent several years in prison, and that the experience had made him a bitter and violent man, but one who was able to say the right things in terms of remorse and contrition to the authorities, and so after seven years he got early release.

  It had been arranged for him to stay at a hostel in Pontypridd on his discharge but at the first opportunity Bob Wilson had made his way by bus and taxi to what he still believed to be his family home in Penrhys. Bob knew that Joan still lived there, and that following the divorce which she had secured against his wishes, she had moved in an old drinking mate of his called Barry Evans.

  Joan had gone to pieces following the death of her daughter and the scandal of Bob’s trial and imprisonment. As time went by she had grown to hate the little boy she had once loved so dearly, and was encouraged by Amy, who had always been jealous of her brother, to have nothing to do with him. She took to drinking as a means of blotting out his memory and sought the company of other men to compensate for the absence of her husband.

  Things had not worked out well with Barry, though, and he was proving to be more than handy with his fists. He also had an increasing desire not for Joan, but for the then-aged-fifteen daughter Amy. Bob knew about this because during the last year of his sentence Amy had been visiting him in prison. She had been only too willing to fill her father in on all the sordid details of her life, with her mother’s casual flings and Barry’s drunken and lecherous outbursts.

  Amy, with her mousy-coloured curly hair and hangdog expression, was not an attractive teenager, and her life experiences had, not surprisingly, made her morose and difficult, so that she had few friends and lacked any loving relationships in her life.

  Bob arrived on the Penrhys Estate that everyone now agreed had been badly designed and built and dogged by problems from the beginning, and was now regarded as a dumping ground for people who had nowhere else to go. For Bob there was nowhere else he wanted to go, because when brooding in his prison cell for the past seven years this return visit had been the sole focus of his very existence.

  Although Mark was not sure of the exact details, it seemed that his father had arrived at their old family home to find Amy fending off the unwelcome sexual attentions of Barry, while her mother was slumped at that memorable kitchen table drinking herself into oblivion. Years of prison self-preservation and wilfully built-up hatred and anger had overcome Bob and he beat Barry to a pulp, before turning his attentions on Joan, who would have ended up just as dead as Barry if Amy hadn’t intervened – as if with some small variations history was repeating itself.

  Bob fled the scene, and with no exit plan in place was picked up within hours by the police and returned to prison. Joan suffered an even worse fate, as during the violence she had received a serious spinal injury that was potentially life-threatening. Consequentially, after several months in different hospitals, and numerous protracted and difficult surgical interventions Joan was transferred to a specialist spinal injuries unit at Rookwood Hospital, where she died just two weeks following her admission.

  Social workers and a psychologist specialising in the behaviour of displaced teenagers from dysfunctional families had spoken to Mark at the time of his mother’s death and they had decided there was nothing to be gained by him attending the funeral. It was recorded that this was Mark’s decision, but in reality he had by the age of thirteen learned that acquiescing with people in authority meant that they soon went away, he presumed to deal with less compliant people than himself, and that suited him well.

  Mark was told that his sister Amy had been taken into care at the time her mother had been attacked, but he had no idea of her whereabouts, and his social workers had always told him she had become psychologically unstable as a result of everything that had happened to her and that meeting up ‘would not be a good idea’. On reflection, meetings with his mother and his sister had not been a good idea for as long as he could remember, and he had only seen his sister once since his father had killed Sarah. Meetings had been set up, but Joan would at the last minute ring social services feigning sickness for either her or Amy, and one social worker had told Mark that Amy was a disturbed young lady who seemed to think her little brother Mark was to blame for all the family problems.

  When things had improved for Mark, and with the help of Sandy and Norman, he made some attempts to contact his sister, but to no avail, and so finally they agreed that as she had gone to such lengths to co
nceal herself, she clearly did not want to be found.

  In the distance, Paula could see Suzanne walking down the hill towards her, and she waved to her friend and walked a little faster towards Suzanne’s familiar smiling face.

  ‘You look like a cross between Joseph and Doctor Who,’ laughed Suzanne, eyeing Paula’s coat before giving her friend a bear hug that left Paula almost breathless. ‘Haven’t you heard we’re in the middle of a heatwave, and that these sub-tropical conditions could be the beginning and end of our summer for this year?’

  ‘Not like you to walk further than you have to,’ retorted Paula, ignoring her friend’s comment about her coat. ‘Why didn’t you go straight to Mark’s house instead of walking past the door and down the hill, only to have to turn around and walk back?’

  ‘I did call in but couldn’t get an answer. There are the most delicious smells of cooking coming through the letterbox and a pink glow from the little tealights in the hall, but I rang the bell and hammered on the door and no-one came.’

  ‘Mark has probably got his headphones on, you know what he’s like about needing constant music when there’s no one there to talk to,’ said Paula, but what she actually thought was that it was strange not to have Mark standing on the doorstep waiting for them.

  Both girls walked a bit faster towards Mark’s house, and although neither of them could understand it, they both felt a strange nervousness as they approached the gate leading to the front garden, which exploded with the scent of early summer flowers and a late-blooming variety of bluebells.

  Chapter Two

  Gruesome discovery

  The dark blue wrought-iron gate was slightly open, and Suzanne said it had been like that when she got there and she had probably left it open after failing to get any response from Mark and deciding to go in search of either Paula or Anne. Almost draped over the gate was a small lilac tree, hanging with fragrant white double blooms, and beneath the tree and under the hedges around the whole of the front garden were masses of long-stemmed bluebells. In the warm and still evening air the combination of scents was provocative and as they walked towards the front door two tubs bursting with lily of the valley continued with a heavier sweet perfume.