The Child Who

by Simon Lelic

  ‘What do you mean, Daniel?’

  Daniel switched his attention to his other thumb. ‘I wanted to talk to her. That’s all.’ He seemed to ponder this for a while, to the point Leo felt an urge to offer another prompt. But, ‘She was scared of me. Even before I’d said anything.’

  ‘Why do you think she was scared of you?’ Beyond talking, Leo kept as still as he could.

  ‘I… I dunno. Probably cos I’m, like… you know. Ugly. Or… I dunno.’ Still the boy stared at his hands. ‘I asked her to kiss me. Just cos I knew she wouldn’t.’ He glanced but failed to hold Leo’s eye. ‘I was only joking. I wasn’t going to make her. But she – ’ again Daniel looked puzzled ‘ – she made this face. Like… Just this face.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Daniel dropped his chin. ‘She walked away. She was laughing, like she wasn’t scared any more, and I… I dunno. I liked it better when she was.’

  Daniel’s hands stopped writhing. He clasped them together, aligning the knuckles of his thumbs.

  ‘She walked away,’ Leo said and the boy nodded.

  ‘I followed her. Not on purpose. I just started walking the same way she did and it ended up that I was following her, along the riverbank. It was cold and I… I just wanted to be moving.’

  ‘Did she… Was she aware…’

  ‘She saw me. She pretended she didn’t but she did. She started singing. To annoy me. Stupid songs like the Spice Girls and that.’

  ‘Why do you think she was trying to annoy you?’

  ‘I dunno. It was annoying though. She knew it was.’

  Leo nodded, once. ‘And what happened after that?’

  ‘I was getting closer, just cos she was walking so slow. She did that to annoy me too. I could tell. Walking like she didn’t care who was following.’

  ‘Did you speak to her? Did you say anything?’

  The boy, almost undetectably, shook his head. ‘I got to like… I dunno. Like a bus-length away. She was still singing, even louder than before. I…’ A drop fell from Daniel’s eye and burst on the back of his thumb. ‘I picked up a stone. I threw it. Not to hit her but… I dunno. It landed closer than I thought it would.’

  ‘What kind of stone? You mean like a rock?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It was just a stone. I didn’t hit her with it.’

  ‘No. Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘She heard it land. The stone, I mean. She turned. She looked, like, angry. Properly angry, like teachers get. She didn’t say anything, though. She stuck her tongue out. And then…’

  Leo waited. ‘And then?’

  ‘Then she ran.’

  Daniel was crying freely now. The tears drew no sound but they filled the boy’s eyes to the point that he was blinking, wiping, just to be able to see.

  ‘Would you like to take a break, Daniel? Can I fetch you some water or something?’

  The boy shook his head, more forcefully this time. ‘I chased her,’ he said. ‘Just cos she ran. I wasn’t even trying to catch her but she – ’ he sniffed ‘ – she tripped. Slipped on some ice maybe. She fell. It wasn’t my fault she fell but when she did I… She was just…’

  ‘You caught up with her.’

  Daniel nodded. He ground his knuckles into his eye sockets. ‘She was crying. Shouting, too. Kept going on about her coat. Her stupid coat.’

  Her coat. Felicity’s crimson overcoat. Leo thought of bulls, of beasts: of the instinct – irresistible; incomprehensible – to charge.

  ‘She said she’d tell. She said she knew who I was and that it was my fault her coat was ruined. Even though it wasn’t. Even though I didn’t do anything. Even though it was her fault for running, for tripping, for looking at me like… like…’

  Leo could imagine, all too readily, what had come next. An exchange of abuse, perhaps of blows. Felicity’s terror dictating her volume; Daniel, the louder Felicity grew, ever more desperate that she should keep quiet. Him seizing her. Her flailing at him. Daniel shoving and Felicity falling and then… and then…

  ‘I just went mad. Just, like, mad. Her coat – her stupid coat – I ripped at it just to annoy her, to piss her off, to make her as cold as I was. But her blouse, it ripped as well. And I… Her skin, she… It…’ Daniel swallowed and his narrow neck bulged. ‘I just went mad.’

  Mad indeed.

  But not mad enough.

  ‘The assault,’ Leo said. His voice did not falter. ‘Is that when it happened?’

  Daniel nodded.

  ‘And Felicity. Was she conscious? Was she awake, I mean?’

  Another nod, followed by a shake of the head. ‘I hit her. With a stone. She wouldn’t be quiet, not even for a minute. So I hit her.’ Daniel stared at his open palm. His fingers curled, as though testing the shape of some unseen object, and then balled themselves into a fist. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ He searched for Leo through glistening eyes. ‘I didn’t. But then, when I saw what I’d done to her, I… I looked around me and…’

  The fairy lights. The gravel. The river. And it was the river, despite what Daniel had believed at the time, that ended her life.

  Leo turned away.

  He brought squash. He brought biscuits. He set the tray on the floor between them and lowered himself back into the chair.

  ‘I thought you’d be hungry. I know you said you weren’t but you should try and eat something.’

  Daniel said nothing. He was back at the pillow end of the bed, the sheets covering every part of him now except his neck and his puffed, pale face. Beside him, on the built-in shelf that was the bedside table, was an array of figurines: soldiers, mainly, with rifles abutting their shoulders or grenades poised to be thrown. There was a phalanx facing the window, another angled towards the door. They were on guard, clearly. Against what, Leo could not tell.

  He opened the packet of Bourbons. He offered it to Daniel but the boy declined. Leo took out a biscuit for himself. He set it, after a moment, on the arm beside him.

  ‘The arraignment,’ he said. ‘We still have time – three weeks or so – but at some point we need to decide.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ Daniel said. ‘Tell them whatever you have to so I don’t have to stay here. So I can go…’

  ‘Home?’

  Daniel glanced. ‘Anywhere. Anywhere but here.’

  ‘Is there any reason you wouldn’t want to go home, Daniel?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I wouldn’t go home.’

  ‘No. I know. But Karen – you remember Karen? – she thinks that perhaps there might be some reason why you wouldn’t want to go back there. Why, perhaps, you shouldn’t.’

  Daniel’s jaw tensed. ‘What does she know?’

  Leo brushed at the sugar on the chair from his biscuit. ‘She’s concerned, that’s all. We both are.’

  Daniel moved his eyes without turning his head. He knew. From his expression, he clearly knew exactly what Leo was talking about.

  ‘Home would do,’ he said.

  ‘Daniel, I…’

  ‘I said it would do.’ The boy glared, then dropped his eyes. ‘It’s not like it used to be.’

  Leo nodded. There was a silence and he could not think how to fill it.

  ‘This place,’ said Daniel after a moment. ‘It’s not so bad. Is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, it’s bad, I hate it – but there are worser places. Aren’t there? They could send me somewhere worse.’

  Leo stared. Why he was surprised, he did not know. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They could.’

  Daniel’s face gave a peculiar twitch, as though there was something inside him he was trying to keep from slipping out. ‘Tell them what you have to,’ he said. He made to say something more but seemed not to trust himself.

  ‘If there’s a trial,’ said Leo, ‘if we plead not guilty… It won’t be easy. For you. For your mother.’ For Ellie, he did not say. For Megan.

  Daniel nodded.

  ‘It will be painful. It wi
ll be drawn out. You’ll have to stay here, at least until the trial is over. And after that… After that, there are no guarantees.’

  No movement this time. No sound.

  ‘Your barrister: he thinks you should plead guilty, Daniel. He thinks it’s your best chance of a shorter sentence.’

  Daniel’s voice came in a burst. ‘What about you?’

  Leo took a breath. ‘I think…’ I think it shouldn’t be my place. I think someone, somewhere in the system, is forcing me to decide so they won’t have to. ‘I think what you did was wicked,’ Leo said. He expected Daniel to look away but the boy did not. ‘But you need help, above all. I think you’ve been wronged and that someone along the line should have set it right. I think, if you plead guilty, you’d be taking on more than you deserve to.’ He paused, then added, ‘I think you’d be letting the rest of us off the hook.’

  Daniel did not answer right away. ‘Do I have a chance? If I do what you say?’

  And that, really, was the question.

  18

  NOT EXACTLY BEACH WEATHER IS IT LEO?

  NO LIES NO EXCUSES

  LAST CHANCE. DROP THE CASE

  There were no shards of glass this time. That, by itself, should have been a relief. But the implication that he – whoever he was – had been following, watching, just as he had threatened and despite Leo’s vigilance, was somehow more unsettling than if the envelope had arrived barbed with razor blades. And if the intention was to alarm him – to panic him – then whoever wrote the notes could hardly have chosen a more economical turn of phrase. It was, thinking about it, almost as if… as if…

  No. The thought was ridiculous. He was dealing with a lunatic. Someone deranged. There was simply no way that anyone Leo knew… That someone from work like… like… Terry, for instance. Even Terry. He was jealous, certainly, but even Terry would not stoop to this.

  Closer to home, then. Who was more eager for him to drop the case than his wife? She had asked, repeatedly, and Leo had refused. They could barely have a conversation, it seemed, without Daniel becoming the theme. Maybe if Megan was even more desperate than she so often seemed? Take the man at the window, for example. Did Leo not half suspect, deep down, that the story had been a fabrication? Or, if not quite that, an exaggeration; a deliberate misrepresentation. And the phrasing. Not exactly beach weather. Hadn’t Leo, speaking to Megan, used virtually the same expression himself?

  Or Ellie. What about Ellie? She had been at the beach too. And Ellie, in her quieter, more solicitous way, seemed more upset even than her mother. Leo had put it down to the incident with the ink, her troubles at school, but perhaps the last note had also been a clue. A confession. How would your daughter like it? Was that Ellie’s way of saying –

  Your daughter. Your wife. For Christ’s sake, Leo!

  He wrapped the note in his palm. It crumpled easily, along the scars it had suffered after Leo had tossed it, the first time he had read it, into his office bin. He felt an urge to hurl it again but instead slid open his bedside drawer and shoved it beneath his socks and his emergency cash, atop the other two notes tucked away in their envelopes. He stood and the mattress sprung and he turned towards the door.

  ‘Was that it?’

  Ellie was at the threshold. She was sockless and damp-haired and wrapped in a dressing gown that sagged from her shoulders. She bore a towel, damp like her hair, and a book and a hairbrush. Her cheeks were flushed: from the heat of the bath water, Leo assumed, though if he had encountered her in any other guise he might have wondered whether his daughter had in fact been crying.

  ‘Ellie. I didn’t hear you.’ Leo stepped away from the bedside drawer and towards the doorway, resisting the urge to glance back.

  ‘Was that it?’ Ellie said again. ‘That thing you were reading?’

  ‘Sorry? Was what what?’

  ‘The article. I heard Mum,’ Ellie added when Leo frowned. ‘Is she going somewhere? Why was she talking about leaving?’

  ‘Leaving? What do you mean? Who’s leaving?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mum was talking to Grandma. She said something about…’ Ellie ended the sentence by shaking her head, as though she were not sure, actually, what her mother had said.

  ‘Ellie? Please. Start at the beginning.’

  ‘I heard Mum,’ his daughter said. ‘On the phone, through the floorboards. She was talking to Bernice. Something about an article.’

  The article. The piece in the Gazette. Leo had seen a copy just that morning but he had thought, if he ignored it, maybe Megan would never have to know. He had reckoned, clearly, without Terry’s wife: briefed by her husband, no doubt, on Leo’s hesitancy in agreeing to the interview in the first place, and with nothing else to keep her awake at night but getting to the bottom of why. ‘But… What’s this about someone leaving?’

  ‘Mum called Grandma. Afterwards. She said… She definitely said something about going to stay. Or… I don’t know. Something, anyway. It was quieter so I couldn’t hear but… Are you breaking up?’ Her tone teetered as she voiced the question.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and Mum. I mean, why else would she be—’

  ‘No! No one’s breaking up. Honestly, Ellie, I promise. You misheard, that’s all. I’m sure you must have misheard. She was talking about visiting, I expect.’

  ‘She sounded angry. Talking to Grandma. She said… What was in the article, Dad? What did it say?’

  ‘The article? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t know why you think your mother would be angry.’ Except, in truth, he did. He could just hear Megan’s voice. One minute you’re chasing the press away, the next you’re preening for the cameras. Never mind that Leo had done his best to back out of the interview. Never mind that the article, anyway, made no mention of the Forbes case. Leo, inevitably, would be at fault. But calling her mother. Leaving. There was no question: Ellie, surely, had misunderstood.

  ‘You should dry your hair,’ Leo said. ‘You’ll catch a chill.’ He made to herd his daughter towards her bedroom but Ellie held her ground.

  ‘Ellie? Please, I really need to… ’ Leo looked behind him at his bedside drawer. He looked through the doorway towards the stairs.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Ellie said.

  Leo’s attention settled on his daughter. The colour on her cheeks had intensified and there was an unmistakable sheen now across her eyes. ‘What’s not fair?’

  Ellie swiped at a tear. ‘Just… Everything. School; Sophie; you and Mum. Everything.’

  ‘Sophie?’ Leo said, consciously sidestepping the you-and-Mum part. ‘What’s happened with Sophie?’ More than his daughter’s closest friend, Sophie seemed Ellie’s only friend. Since they had moved to the estate – since Ellie had switched schools – even her childhood friendships seemed to have withered and she had struggled, in the bigger school, to fill the void. ‘Did you argue? Look, darling. It’s natural, at your age, to have disagreements.’

  ‘It wasn’t just a disagreement! And stop treating me like a little kid! I’m not a fucking five-year-old!’

  Leo recoiled. ‘Ellie! Mind your manners! I won’t have you using language like—’

  Ellie did not wait for the rest of the rebuke. She rolled her eyes and turned away.

  ‘Ellie. Wait. Ellie!’

  She stopped. She angled her shoulders towards her father but not her face. She dragged a baggy sleeve across each eye.

  ‘Look at me. Ellie. Please. I’m sorry. Okay? You’re not a kid. You’re grown up enough to decide for yourself what language is appropriate. Okay?’

  But when she looked at him, finally, she did not seem grown up. She seemed the child he always imagined her: confused, anxious, unsure of herself and the world.

  Until she took a breath and seemed to inflate. ‘You’re the one behaving like a child,’ she said. ‘Hiding things from Mum. Hiding things from me.’

  ‘Hiding things?’ Leo thought of the notes. ‘I don’t know what you’re…’ But: the article; the Gazette. �
��I wasn’t hiding things. I was just… I forgot to mention it, that’s all. It didn’t seem important.’

  His daughter looked doubtful.

  ‘You were telling me about Sophie,’ Leo said.

  Ellie dropped her chin. ‘There’s nothing to tell. She hates me, just like everyone else.’

  ‘Ellie. Really. Why would she hate you? You’re best friends. Aren’t you? I thought you two were inseparable.’

  ‘Not any more. Just this week, it’s… Something’s changed. It’s like she doesn’t want to talk to me, not if anyone else is around.’

  ‘Maybe she’s… I don’t know. Maybe there’s some simple reason…’

  ‘It’s not just her, Dad. It’s everyone. Even the teachers treat me like an outcast.’

  ‘The teachers? Come on now, Ellie, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not being ridiculous!’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’

  ‘You don’t know! How could you know? You’re not there! You’re always at work. With him.’

  Leo felt his jaw tighten. ‘You’ve been talking to your mother,’ he said. ‘If you have questions about my work, Ellie, you should really come and speak to me.’

  ‘Why?’ she countered. ‘What would you say? What could I say that would make things any different? Ever since Grandad died you never seem to notice what any of the rest of us are feeling. You don’t seem to care!’

  She had. She had been talking to Megan. It was the only explanation as to why they kept accusing him of the same failings.

  ‘I’ll go to your school again. I’ll talk to the head. If you feel like you’re being victimised then it’s important that someone—’

  ‘No! Don’t! Please, Dad, don’t!’

  Leo sensed his exasperation showing. ‘Look, Ellie. If you feel like the teachers are being unfair somehow, I don’t see what other option—’

  ‘Dad! Don’t! I mean it! Please!’

  ‘What then?’ Leo spread his arms. ‘What else do you want me to do? I can’t just… It’s not like I don’t have other things to…’ He shook his head and gripped his forehead.