by Matthew Crow
‘Each to their own,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about China next. Maybe do the Great Wall.’
‘Why not just watch a documentary?’ I dipped a chip into the froth of my milkshake as Jacob grimaced in horror. ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,’ I said.
‘Do you honestly think that?’ he asked. ‘That everything you need is on TV?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t get what you gain from… doing stuff,’ I said. ‘It just all seems like so much effort. Can’t you just read a book or something?’
‘Because I want experiences,’ he said with an arched eyebrow. ‘First hand.’
‘What if you just want to stay in one place, or just be still for a while?’
Jacob became more animated, the way boys like him always are if you didn’t share their wayfaring ambition. My theory is that they know you’re on to something, but can’t admit it to themselves.
‘But the world is huge. It’s endless. Who wouldn’t want to see as much of it as possible?’ he asked, taking a chip from my plate as I glared at him for his forwardness.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘What’s your endgame?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You just said it, it’s endless. You can never see everything. Why bother even starting. You’ll only come up short.’
‘That’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Sarah told something once. She said that her dream in life was to have the luxury of doing the same thing, every single day, without having to pay it a second thought. That way, she said, she’d be free to just be herself. I loved that,’ I said, thinking back to her admission on the beach, her guard lowered with the fourth sip of stolen vodka and her speech slurred with the fifth. ‘That was something she and I had in common, I think. We both found it so hard just to be ourselves that it was like a luxury. I mean,’ I said, correcting myself through a mouthful of potato, ‘I mean being ourselves was just so fucking complicated at times, like there were so many spinning plates, that simply to stand still was like the best holiday of all.’
‘I get that,’ Jacob said.
Sarah and I were united in our bemusement at the world at large. So many people, with so much to love about their lives, still made themselves so needlessly mysterious, adding layers of pretence. We, on the other hand, longed to have lives we didn’t feel we had to hide from view.
I spend half my time kicking against the current trying to get back to myself.
Trying to reconnect with the parts I know.
Trying to cling on to whatever it is that makes me me, even as the riptide pulls me down and out.
I’d give anything to be nothing more than myself.
When I told Jacob this he just smiled.
‘You were real with me, I think,’ he said, before correcting himself. ‘I hope,’ he tried again, and I nodded in agreement. My instinct was to run from the conversation, and yet the truth was I had been grateful to have met Jacob that summer.
‘I think I needed you more than I thought I did,’ I said and he nodded. ‘You were just… when I needed someone who’d just let me be, you were there.’ I was uneasy with my own honesty but keen to say it once and for all. ‘You listen. You see me without any of the bullshit I usually give. It’s not often you get to just be yourself with somebody. I think I was with you. I think I really needed to be. So thanks. I mean it.’
Jacob nodded and smiled for a moment.
‘Claudette, whoever you were with me – and I think it was the “real you”, as you put it – I liked it. I like you.’ He said. ‘And I think… well, no, I don’t think. I’m sure Sarah felt the same way.’
I felt itchy, in the way I always did when someone said something nice about me, and I attempted to downplay his words with a deep eyeball roll.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said, sternly. ‘Don’t dismiss how important these things are. Sarah was fucked, in every conceivable way. Whatever you did or didn’t do I think she had something with you that maybe she didn’t have anywhere else. At that point at least. Don’t make out like it didn’t matter. Because it did. You did a good thing, Claudette. Even if it was just being in the right place at the right time. For a moment you mattered to someone. And that counts.’
I walked home alone that evening. I ducked past shops where posters requesting information on Sarah’s whereabouts were smudged and torn with exposure. Scraps of police tape clung in filthy ribbons to the grates of the drains.
Throughout the town, the feeling was that Sarah’s moment had either passed or was passing. The cameras grew noticeably less and less. The columns and features in the papers grew smaller. Even in the café Jacob and I heard a couple discussing her in a voice usually reserved for overindulged children.
‘Well, I mean, if she only drowned then why are they still going on about it?’ said the woman as she flicked through the newspaper. ‘Happens all the time. Especially places like this. All those police… should be out catching real criminals. Not like anybody had her… just another silly girl didn’t realise how strong the current was,’ she said, as her husband sat in silent agreement.
It seemed like the less morbid her final moments, the more the entire ordeal was just another case of a girl pleading for attention; stamping her foot until all eyes were on her.
The less they cared the more the fire inside of me grew; the one that had to understand why Sarah had died; the one that demanded context for a life that had ended so cold and so alone.
I heard Sarah calling, too. Demanding attention. There was still a place for her, even now.
Her voice played in my head as I walked alone. I imagined how she felt as her body was swallowed by the sea; as she was dragged out, away from wherever she had been, far, far out to where nothing could hurt her again.
I had to try hard to catch my breath, suddenly panicked, when I realised that a stranger’s shadow had been tracing my footsteps through the town in the amber haze of the street lamps.
I didn’t turn around. Nobody ever does when they’re being followed. Nine times out of ten this would put your mind at ease; your heart would slow, your temperature would rise again.
You’d be safe. It’s that one per cent that keeps us ploughing on in a desperate hope of escape. The one per cent that stops us from facing our fears.
I rounded two corners. The shadow followed behind me.
They trod lightly but quickly and the footsteps grew louder until I could feel them right behind me.
A huge pain shot through my right leg and I winced but didn’t scream. Somebody had kicked me. Not as hard as I’d ever been kicked before, but certainly enough to stop me in my tracks and force me to slow my pace. Then I turned, thinking that if I was forced to fight I’d rather do so with my fists than my elbows.
It was the little girl from the photographs, the one I’d seen at the re-enactment, just hours earlier.
‘You little bitch,’ I said angrily, glaring down at her. She was staring at me with the fury of a thunderstorm. ‘What did you do that for? I should kick your stupid head in!’ I bent down and rubbed my calf, as the girl continued to stare at me in her hand-me-down tracksuit, her unkempt hair matted to the side of her head.
‘You’re a thief,’ she said.
‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘And no. I’m not.’
‘That’s not yours!’ she said angrily, grabbing my wrist and holding it up as high as her arm would allow, highlighting Sarah’s bracelet. ‘It’s not yours!’ She kicked me again in the shin before bursting into tears.
PART FOUR
Another Place
18
A Most Peculiar Man
‘Roseanna?’ Mr Fitzpatrick asked, with a knowing smile, as I sat on his carpet, rolling up my jeans to show the purple welt where she’d kicked my shin.
‘Pretty name for the Antichrist,’ I muttered as Mr Fitzpatrick chuckled gently to himself. ‘It’s not funny. That was her second effort too. There was one on my calf as well but that’s
not as dark. Mostly internal wounds I shouldn’t imagine.’
‘Well, she’s no angel but she’s not quite the devil incarnate, either. Somewhere in-between. Like most of us, no doubt. Would you like another biscuit?’ he asked, handing me the small saucer on which Mint Viscounts had been artfully arranged.
The answer to this question, for me and any other vaguely sane person, is always ‘yes’. Mr Fitzpatrick knew this. For a man who acted so sour in public he shared my insatiable sweet tooth. I still beat him on appetite though; he was often astounded at my inability to reach capacity where food was concerned.
I reached out and took two biscuits and he gave me a quick wink that suddenly made me sad. It was a wink that he never showed anybody. The wink he’d no doubt been saving one day for his own grandchildren. There’s my girl, it said.
I winked back subtly and he looked as if he’d been given the most elaborate gift of his life.
When the girl – whom I now knew to be Roseanna – started crying, I panicked. Once you’ve been through an illness that manifests itself through your emotions – extinguishing and augmenting them to unmanageable levels – the idea that a person, even a child, can cry an appropriate amount in an appropriate instance seems entirely alien. A bout of sadness is enough to render me and plenty of people I’ve met incapacitated for days, weeks, months. That a human can reasonably respond emotionally to their thoughts is a bigger leap for me than most fantasy novels.
So I did what I did best when I didn’t know what else to do. I swore and told her to shut up.
‘It’s me that’s just been attacked,’ I hissed quietly, as if by lowering my volume I’d lower hers too. ‘Come on, stop being such a little tit. Stop crying.’
She heaved for breath in the alleyway, holding her dirty face in her hands as her body throbbed and jerked to her tears, like she was being shot through with electricity.
I got down on my knees (painful, having recently been hoofed repeatedly below the waist) and leant in to her. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. You won’t get in trouble.’
I reached out and placed my arms around her. Hugging does not come easily to me. Nor do children. At first I was rigid; the embrace was not the warm, comforting fabric I’d imagined – rather like a towel left out to dry overnight. I was stiff and uneasy, and rough to the touch.
The girl didn’t seem to mind, though, the way some children don’t. She saw the gesture for what it was, and allowed herself to soften into my body, forcing me to fully embrace the hug with the gratitude of someone who has never known true affection in her life.
‘God, you stink,’ I whispered as she began to calm down, her breathing becoming something that she controlled once more, rather than a violent onslaught of air that caused her bony body to tremor.
‘They can’t make me bath,’ she said as she wiped her nose with the cuff of her sleeve, varnishing the right side of her face in the process. ‘She told me not to let them. They try, sometimes, but I won’t let them. I’ll run away,’ she said defiantly.
‘Who told you?’ I asked.
Roseanna stared at me, evaluating whether I was to be trusted.
‘Sarah,’ she said eventually, as she began to cry again, this time eschewing my attempt at a consolatory hug before skittering back through the alleyway as quickly as she had arrived; disappearing into the maze of streets before I’d had a chance to follow her.
I looked up at Mr Fitzpatrick.
‘So. Are you going to tell me how you knew her then?’ I asked.
Mr Fitzpatrick sighed and straightened, as if preparing to make a statement in court.
‘I knew them from a while ago,’ he said. ‘Roseanna and Sarah. They live together in the home. Lived,’ he corrected himself flatly.
‘Why were you there?’
‘I helped out. Two days a week. No money in it but they give you bus fare, even though it’s only down the road,’ he said. ‘I was a teacher, once. Art. Worked in schools rougher than you’d know… I hadn’t worked since Robin had gone but I wanted to do something useful with whatever skills I had while I still could. I’d bring art supplies and the children would make things – pictures, collages, jewellery…’
My eyes lit up as I held up my wrist.
‘The bracelet?’ I asked.
‘Ah yes,’ he said and smiled, reaching forward. I gave him my arm and he held it gently in his dry hands, inspecting the handiwork of red rope and shells. ‘A Mother’s Day present from Roseanna to Sarah. That girl was closest thing she ever had to a parent.’
‘Sarah didn’t seem like the motherly type,’ I said.
‘You’d be wrong. She cared, in her own way. She had a good heart – terrible struggle showing it a lot of the time, but a good heart nonetheless. I was there the day they met. Some of the younger boys were trying to make action figures out of salt dough. Poor things looked like snowmen on a summer’s day but they seemed to be enjoying themselves all the same,’ he said. ‘Roseanna was brought in by a couple, a man and a woman, who had a small bag for her and a clipboard. She went straight into the kitchen and sat down on a seat at the head of the table. She was a seasoned pro, even by her age. She knew that you had to mark your territory from day one. Feisty when it came down to it, but fragile all the same.
‘Sarah had been there that day, too. She’d been missing for two nights in a row, but this was the house she’d lived in for longer than she’d ever lived anywhere, she always came back. Only this time, there was a new face at the table.’
He told me that before long they became inseparable and, with Sarah to shield her, Roseanna avoided the plight of being the new kid. The taunting and teasing, the tricks and initiation rituals doled out by the long-termers, never reached a peak. Any instances of unpleasantness were sharply dealt with by Sarah. Usually a threat would suffice, but on occasion brute force would be issued, until Roseanna became untouchable.
‘She’d found something she could keep safe,’ he said. ‘A project. Art was never Sarah’s thing. She was never going to channel her mood through a painting or a vase. But in Roseanna… in Roseanna there was somewhere for her love to go. There was a person she could protect the way nobody had ever protected her. And I don’t just mean from the other children.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Roseanna slept in Sarah’s bed with her, when she was there, which was becoming less and less the older she got.’
He paused, noticing my expression, which was both rapt and incredulous.
‘When you hugged her,’ he said. ‘Did she…?’
‘Smell?’ I offered. ‘Yes, like a bin. It was disgusting.’
He smiled. ‘Sarah made her promise. Whenever she was gone she wasn’t to wash. I only found this out later. Not her teeth nor her face nor her body. Told her to spend her days playing out, running about the beach and the dene. “Get good and muddy. Be the biggest little scruff in the world when I’m gone,” she’d told her.’
‘But why?’ I asked, though I feared that I already knew the answer.
‘It’s not a good place, Claudette,’ Mr Fitzpatrick said solemnly.
‘When Sarah wasn’t there, nobody could protect Roseanna,’ he said. ‘And if she didn’t wash then nobody would want her. Nobody would touch her.’
‘Oh God,’ I said and felt my insides churn. ‘Why didn’t anybody do anything?’
‘The staff, not all of them, but some of them… the children were taken advantage of. Not all of them, but many…’ he tried. ‘None of the children ever said anything. They didn’t have to. You could see it in their eyes. Those blank stares. People talk about Sarah, about the things she did. About how she lived her life, what she was allowed of it. But she learnt the hard way. She said she was going to take Roseanna away. Said she had big plans. “I’ll die before I let anything happen to her” she’d told me the last time we spoke. And then she did… It’s my fault. It is my fault.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you tried to stop it.’
‘I told the police. Told the ser
vices. Told anybody whose number I could find. But they didn’t believe me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m an angry old fool, remember,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.’
‘I was just another timewaster,’ he said. ‘And I had no proof. Nothing but knowing, deep down, deep inside of my soul, that those children weren’t safe.’
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘once she went missing, they would have taken you more seriously.’
Mr Fitzpatrick shook his head
‘To rectify a mistake is to acknowledge that they made one in the first place. Girls like Sarah are too easily buried,’ he said.
‘I tried,’ he said, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘But ‘I didn’t try hard enough.’
‘We can try again,’ I said quietly, staring at my bag on the floor. ‘I think together we can make a difference.’
‘No,’ he said, releasing himself from our embrace. ‘No, it’s no good. They’re not interested. She drowned. Slipped in the water and went under. They don’t care about her life.’
‘I don’t mean just Sarah. I mean the home.’ I opened my bag and let the contents spill out on the floor. ‘I’ve got this theory,’ I said. ‘I think people only care when it’s an emergency. When something is so loud that it can’t be ignored.’ I waded through empty, curled pill packets and tampons before I found what I was looking for. ‘I mean, I had to go through a school window before anyone would admit I wasn’t just a moody attention-seeker. And Sarah, well… nobody cared about Sarah until she was past tense. Here.’ I offered him the journalist’s business card, the one who had stopped me my first day back. Nancy, with the name of her newspaper printed at the bottom. ‘Let’s make it an emergency. Let’s make it so loud they can’t ignore it.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, uneasily
‘For Sarah,’ I said, and he softened. ‘And for Roseanna. Before it’s too late.’
‘Will you be here?’ he said eventually, placing the card on the table where his cup of cooling tea sat beside a stack of photo albums. ‘When she comes?’