Nicholas Dane

by Melvin Burgess

  There were no charges to press, though, and he was only two months off sixteen anyway by that time, so rather than send him off to another Home, they released him the next day. He carried on with his life of crime pretty well where it had left off.

  Not much change there, either.

  As for Nick, he was caught up in the attic, wiping Jones’s blood off his face and weeping hysterically. He was taken to the police station where he gave Jenny’s name and address. They drove him back there in the morning, where she wisely kept her mouth shut about next of kin and other difficult matters, but, of course, the social services were informed by the police. Mrs Batts was duly outraged when she discovered where Nick was living, unreported by Jenny. The rules were there for a purpose, as she pointed out to Jenny over the phone. There was a disagreement, and Mrs Batts hinted that she might be prepared to turn a blind eye so long as they could have a chat about it in a few days. But she must have changed her mind at some point,because the police picked him up on his way to the shops a couple of days later and drove him straight round to Meadow Hill and into the patient hands of Tony Creal.

  No change there, either, you might think - but in fact there was. That sentimental old gentleman had decided somehow in his twisted heart that the letter sent to him warning him of Jones's murderous plot was something to do with Nick. After the usual welcome from Mr James, Nick came to an interview in Mr Creal’s office, where the grateful paedophile, to Nick’s astonishment, tearfully thanked him for saving his life and asked if there was anything he could do in return. Nick jumped at the chance, and suggested that they send him back to Jenny’s. That wasn’t possible with Mrs Batts so much on his case, but Mr Creal was able to offer him a place at another Home.

  ‘Anywhere that isn’t here,’ said Nick.

  ‘Agreed!’ Mr Creal banged his hands down on his desk and beamed. He got up from the table and for a second, Nick thought he was actually going to come round to embrace him. But if that was his plan, the look on Nick’s face put him off at once and he sat back down in his chair.

  ‘I’ll get on to that right away. Good move, I expect,’ said Mr Creal, although he never explained why. The fact was, he’d had more than enough problems from Nick Dane to want to put himself in the way of any more. ‘I’ll put you in with the Turners for tonight, and you’ll be out of here tomorrow with a little luck. Bit softer than that bastard Toms, eh, Nick? Right, let’s get on with it, then!’

  He called in the prefect who was taking Nick around, a new boy Nick hadn’t seen before, to take him off. The door closed behind him, and Mr Creal vanished out of his life.

  On the way down to America House, which the Turners ran, Nick asked the prefect something he hadn’t dared ask Creal - about Oliver.

  ‘Oliver who?’

  ‘Oliver Brown? Small kid, blond hair. Used to be one of Creal’s favourites.’

  But the prefect knew nothing more than Davey had already found out. ‘Never heard of him,’ he said. Later, mixing with the other boys, Nick asked around some more. Oliver, it seemed, had simply not been seen since Nick and Davey had run off. He’d been taken to the Secure Unit by the old prefects, Andrews and Julian, that much was known. After that, nothing. As Davey had reported, the story was he’d done a runner, but at what point, no one had the slightest idea.

  And that was all Nick ever got to hear about Oliver. Escaped, re-captured, transferred - there were various rumours doing the rounds. Then, even the rumours dried up and Oliver was forgotten - one of many boys who came and went in and out of the Homes without leaving any mark behind them.

  Nick, as promised, was transferred to another Home, a few miles away in Cheshire, where they ran a very different kind of regime, a genuinely kind one. He was well fed and given a room of his own for the first couple of weeks while he got used to things. Even after that he only had to share with two other boys. There were no beatings, and no fences, either. He was told that if he did run, he was to remember that he was always welcome to come back - which made Nick laugh. As if!

  Since it was so easy to run, he did so within a week, as much out of habit as anything. He hung around with Jenny for a few days, then, of his own free will, got bored, and, to his own surprise, went back to the Home. Well - it wasn’t so bad there. It fact, it was safe. He started day release college, and when he left some months later, went on to an apprenticeship as an electrician.

  All might have been well at that point, if it wasn’t, once again, for Mrs Batts. She discovered that the firm he was apprenticed to didn’t know he was a Children’s Home boy. Once again she resolutely did her duty, and told them. Nick wasn’t sacked, but neither was he ever trusted at the firm again, never left on his own in the offices, never sent out on any jobs into clients’ homes, and taught next to nothing. As a result, he quickly got sick of the whole thing, and left.

  He signed on and a few months later got a job in a hotel where he discovered sneaking - that is, stealing things from guests’ rooms. He was caught a few weeks later and given a suspended sentence; did the same thing within a month and got another suspended sentence; took up shoplifting with Davey and next time, he was sent to jail.

  And that wasn’t the last time, either.

  By the time he was twenty-seven, Nick had spent four of the previous ten years inside. He had been helped on and off by Jenny and by his uncle, Michael Moberley, who had found money for various plans Nick came to him with, to buy vans, put deposits down on flats, buy tools, help with training, whatever - all of which ended up getting spent on drink, drugs, clothes and cheap holidays. It could have gone on forever, but at that point, after a stretch of a full year inside for breaking and entering, Nick decided that enough was enough. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being poor, drunk, stoned and in and out of jail.

  He signed on for college. He took his GCSEs, and to his surprise, found that they were easy. Then it was A-levels - he got straight As. Where at school he’d found it almost impossible to concentrate, now, years later, he took to it like a duck to water. He went back to his uncle and begged for yet more money to help him go to university.

  The old man was pretty reluctant by this time, but Nick had his results to show off and a job serving at a burger bar that he’d actually held down for over six months. It was the first time he’d come with some positive thing he’d actually already done and Michael responded to that, rather than his nephew’s past. He provided an allowance of a hundred pounds a month -enough to keep body and soul together, along with Nick’s wages at the fast food restaurant, while he was at university.

  To his own amazement, three years later Nick emerged with a first. And he never even knew he had a brain. It was as if all the tangles of his life seemed to be somehow working themselves out inside him, because not only did he suddenly find it in him to work, he also found someone to love. There had been women before, many of them, but no one who had stayed around for longer than a couple of years. Now he wanted to build his walls and make a solid thing out of his life. Her name was Maggie; she was a mature student like him, one year older. They set up house together while Nick completed his training as a youth worker; he wanted to help boys who had been disadvantaged as he had. A year later, Maggie became pregnant and by the time Nick was in his first full-time career job, he was already a father.

  And so it was, three years after he had begun this work, at the age of thirty-five, crossing the road in a small town south of Manchester one cold December day, that he saw an old man leading a boy across the road towards him.

  Something in the scene caught his eye - the way the old man walked perhaps, or the way the lad had his head down. Without even thinking, Nick stepped back into a shop behind him and peered sideways round at the two of them making their progress across the road. A shudder of recognition went through him - not at first because he recognised the old man, although he did. It was something about himself.

  Jones would have been perhaps a little younger than Nick was now when he spotted Tony
Creal at the pub that day, and had hidden behind a wall to watch his abuser from years before. Dear Tony had retired by now, but still liked to help out at the Homes with boys who needed a little bit of extra care. Nick, like Jones, was a product of what Creal had done. In this respect, they were almost like brothers. Now, faced with the same situation, he felt closer to him than ever. All the terrors of his past came welling up inside him, and for a moment, hiding there in the shop doorway, he was unsure of his ability to avoid the same tragic path Jones had taken.

  It was with a sense of utter horror that Nick understood that the old man before him had been carrying on with the same tricks ever since. Twenty years? Can it really have been so long? And how many years before that? And how many boys? How many Nick Danes and Olivers ... how many Joneses had this wicked old man damaged to destruction?

  Nick was still unsure that he had truly esaped himself. He felt sick to his stomach as he watched the old man and his current victim walk away down the road. As soon as they were out of sight, he went to the nearest pub and got rapidly and soundly drunk.

  The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, Nick put off what he had to do. Finally, he plucked up courage and went to talk to Maggie, and, for the first time in his life, found the words to tell the story of Meadow Hill and Tony Creal, and Oliver and Jones and the whole thing. Upstairs his two sons slept the sleep of the innocent while below their father wept and cursed and stormed. Was it possible that even now, in this day and age, they too could fall to the likes of Tony Creal? Of course it was. It could happen to anyone at any time.

  Maggie was amazed. She’d had no idea he had such a history or so many hidden tears.

  ‘You have to go to the police,’ she told him.

  That, Nick refused to do - he was too aware that at least one of the men who had raped him in the Secure Unit had been a policeman. But the next day, with Maggie by his side, he went to see a solicitor and gave a statement. He cried like a baby when it was done, and kept bursting into tears for days afterwards; but the ball was in motion by then, and nothing was going to stop it.

  Only a few years before, nothing would have happened. People were so disturbed by abuse of that kind that they didn’t want their institutions or even the courts polluted with it. But times had changed. There had by this time been several other cases up and down the country and it was becoming understood that sexual abuse in institutions designed to care for children was far more widespread than anyone had once believed. In Manchester, as in other places around the country, a process was begun of getting in touch with the men who had been boys not just at Meadow Hill, but at other Homes, to see if their experiences there had anything in common with Nick’s. The records were examined, old cases were turned over and re-opened. Three years later, the first prosecutions were begun.

  It would be nice to report that Tony Creal got what he deserved, but by this time he was seventy-five. Not yet frail, but his solicitor advised him well, and when he appeared in the dock, he had aged dreadfully almost overnight. The shock of the accusations, the wearisome questions, the hatred of him this affair had brought about in his own community had all taken their toll, as his solicitor movingly explained. The judge deemed him unfit to stand trial.

  Amid screams of rage, the case against Tony Creal was dropped, although a number of his colleagues, including Toms, were eventually sent to jail.

  Creal lived another five years. He moved south to finish his retirement in Nottingham, after a few too many bricks had come in through his window, a few too much dog shit and the odd burning rag had been pushed through his letterbox. He was an active member of an organisation founded to defend innocent and dedicated workers at Children’s Homes who had been unfairly accused by ex-inmates, jail birds to a man, who had obviously only made such allegations to get compensation. In this enterprise he was well supported by the likes of Mrs Batts and others, who refused to believe a word against him.

  He died as he lived - unloved. And with him died any number of secrets, and fates. Perhaps, even, including Oliver’s. Nick spoke to the police about him when the files were opened and tried to find out what had happend to him, but there was no record of him at all. Records at Meadow Hill were badly kept, boys came and went with very little in the way of a paper trail behind them. Oliver disappeared without a mention.

  Nicholas Dane was not one of those who pursued his revenge outside the courts. In his view, nothing could happen to Tony Creal that would change what had gone before. The only important thing was that he had helped to put a stop to something that had filled the prisons of this country with violent men for decades.

  Love comes to us all, if only we can recognise it and hold on to it. Jones had it and destroyed it. Nick had it too. He recognised it in Maggie, but during Creal's trial he went through such a turmoil that he lost sight of everything he had gained. Dreadful years followed, but in her, Nick had found at last found something every bit as precious as love itself - a full answer to that old Nick Dane loyalty. When he emerged at the other end, there she still was, waiting for her Nick to come back to her. And back he came, and there he still is. He lives in a Pennine town north of Manchester. As much as anyone could have, he has laid his ghosts to rest.

  MELVIN BURGESS is justly regarded as the Godfather of Young Adult fiction in the UK. Since winning the Carnegie Medal for Junk, the seminal teen drugs and love novel, he has produced a body of work both challenging and thrilling. His books have been adapted for stage, television and cinema and are widely translated. Recent titles Lady: My Life as a Bitch and Doing It have reinforced his reputation for writing unflinching but funny, controversial realism.

  Praise for Lady: ‘It’s original, and challenging and incredibly rude.’

  INDEPENDENT

  and Doing It ‘Funny, honest and touching ... This boldly comic book has a serious core and a great deal of heart...’

  OBSERVER

  His most recent title, Sara's Face: ‘For those who want their cautionary tales with a bit of grit this is worth reading.’

  THE TIMES