Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  She lay on top of her bed, closed her eyes and pictured him.

  Some people thought that all children with Down’s syndrome looked alike. She supposed she might have thought that too, once upon a time, if, that was, she’d ever thought about it at all.

  Sam Moon did not look like anyone else on earth.

  His photographs lay in a box in her locked wardrobe. One was brought out most nights before she went to sleep and put away again when she woke because that was one of the rules. In case Josie – her mother’s cleaner – was to wonder who the boy in the picture might be.

  Heaven forbid.

  Laurie had long since given up pointing out that no one ever needed to come into her bedroom to clean, that she preferred doing it herself.

  ‘Even if you do,’ Shelly said, ‘it doesn’t mean they might not come in.’

  ‘I could lock my door,’ Laurie said.

  ‘That would look strange,’ her mother said.

  Rules of the Moon house.

  Sam was not photogenic. In photographs, he looked happy, but quite ordinary. In real life, however, he was spectacular, and Laurie didn’t really need photos to conjure him up, could just shut her eyes anytime and whisk him up at will.

  She smiled now at the prospect of seeing him in the morning, then returned her thoughts again to that brief, foolish fantasy about Dave, wondering what exactly that had been about, before pushing it away again.

  She plumped up her two pillows and lay back.

  Closed her eyes firmly.

  ‘See you soon, Sam Moon,’ she said.

  The Game

  Jack’s contribution had taken the game back to the level of physical roughness that had been absent since their assault on Rose Miller. His chosen Beast was a woman he had seen at Kennet Shopping Centre abusing her frail, elderly mother, swearing at her and dragging her along, almost pulling her off her feet.

  ‘This one really deserves a taste of her own,’ Jack had insisted to Ralph. ‘And I’ll tell you straight, if you don’t let us handle this the way I want, I’ll take care of her on my own, and it’ll be a bloody sight worse.’

  They had all talked it over for a while, Simon wondering if this might have been a one-off event, if this woman really was a Beast.

  ‘We need to be certain,’ she had said.

  ‘I know an abusing bitch when I see one.’ Jack had been blunt. ‘But if you don’t want to take my word for it . . .’

  ‘I know what Sy means,’ Pig had said. ‘June Norton thought I was a rotten son for not kissing my mother goodbye.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceiving,’ Ralph agreed.

  ‘Jack knows what he saw,’ Roger said.

  All together for once at a restaurant opposite Swindon Station because it was Ralph’s birthday and she’d been missing them so badly and wished for no present more than a real reunion.

  So she’d been there to observe the hardness in Jack’s eyes when he talked about ‘taking care of her’ himself, had caught a responding flicker of excitement in Roger’s, and had realized that they were both out of her control.

  Had recognized, too, that this was yet another opportunity to detach herself.

  An opportunity she had not, of course, taken.

  They had talked through the plan carefully, then left it to Ralph to work out the details and dovetail them with the Beast’s movements.

  The daughter, she learned, travelled each weekday by train to work in Reading, which meant there was nothing more complex to take care of than choosing the right place, rehearsing split-second timing and – with witnesses and CCTV on site – paying careful attention to their own disguises.

  They decided to play the game on a Thursday afternoon, just after the daughter had alighted from her train at Newbury Station. Three of them moving into position as she and her fellow passengers crossed over the stepped footbridge and started down to the opposite side and station exit. As the Beast began her descent of the final twelve steps, Jack slipped into place beside the young man just in front of her, gave him a furtive but hard shove, then stepped neatly away as the man fell with a cry to the stone platform below.

  ‘She pushed him!’ Pig had shouted, pointing to the Beast. ‘Stop her!’

  ‘I didn’t touch him!’ the young woman protested in shock.

  ‘Call the police,’ Roger yelled, knowing that Simon – just outside the station – was already doing exactly that; then, as Pig melted into the throng on the platform, made a grab for the woman’s arm. ‘Someone help me hold her!’

  An elderly man, cheeks rosy with outrage, and a young female backpacker hurried forward to lend a hand, while a cluster of passengers gathered around the fallen man.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ the Beast told the official. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Roger saw a uniformed official moving quickly towards the steps.

  Releasing the Beast, she stepped back, passed unhindered through the small crowd, and went quietly on her way.

  ‘Was the young man all right?’ Ralph had asked later.

  None of the four knew for sure, had been too focused, they said, on the Beast.

  Ralph had scoured the Reading Evening Post every day for the next week and the Newbury Weekly News after that, certain that if he had been badly injured it would have merited mention. It pained her to think of an innocent man’s suffering, brought back her own grim times after her accident, pricked at her conscience.

  It relieved her just a little to find that she still had a conscience.

  She wondered sometimes if the others ever thought about the novel that had sparked off their games, if any of them were aware that there were certain points of comparison between the evolving nastiness of their own adult games and that old tale of children becoming savages. She supposed they did not dwell on it any more and was, she thought, glad of that.

  Bad enough that she noted similarities and was chilled by them.

  And exhilarated too, of course.

  She had, by then, come to accept that sickness in herself.

  * * *

  The great and irrevocable change had come with the Mitcham game.

  More complicated and, ultimately, much more violent than any of them, even Jack, had intended it to be.

  Alan Mitcham had been Simon’s beast. A teacher at the primary school where she worked as a teaching assistant.

  ‘He has no business being a teacher,’ she’d said, fiery tears in her eyes as she proposed him to Ralph. ‘Or working with children at all.’

  Mitcham, a single man, appeared, Simon said, to dislike children and to have scant respect for their parents. The incident that had helped turn him into a candidate had begun when Simon had witnessed him being unkind to a six-year-old with learning difficulties. The child’s mother had come to school next morning to complain to the head, but had encountered the teacher first, and Mitcham had retaliated by humiliating both mother and child.

  ‘Right there, in front of everyone,’ Simon had said. ‘Made her feel completely inadequate. Poor woman turned tail.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report him to the head?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘I might have,’ Simon had answered, ‘if that had been the only thing.’

  It had, in fact, been the least of it, because a few days earlier Simon had caught sight of something in Mitcham’s locker just before he’d slammed the door.

  A photograph of a naked child, unmistakably pornographic.

  ‘I only caught a glimpse,’ she said. ‘But I know what I saw.’

  She had felt shocked, sickened.

  True Beast.

  Two days later, Jack had confirmed Simon’s suspicions, breaking into Mitcham’s flat in Barton and finding photographs so revolting to him that his first impulse had been to lie in wait and give the scumbag a beating he’d never forget.

  The group met the following week in a private room over a Didcot pub.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Jack said, ‘that it’s time to rev up
the game.’ He was having trouble blotting out the images of the children in Mitcham’s collection. ‘We have to make this filth really do a crime,’ he said. ‘Like a robbery, something heavy.’

  ‘That sounds complicated,’ Ralph said, on speaker phone.

  ‘Not really,’ Jack disagreed, ‘because we’d be making sure he didn’t pull off the job, wouldn’t we?’ He paused. ‘But it’s gotta be something big enough so we’d know he’d get seriously banged up.’

  ‘Maybe we should just shop him, after all?’ Simon was growing doubtful. ‘I mean, we’re not vigilantes, are we?’

  ‘No, we’re fucking not,’ said Jack.

  ‘We’re a lot smarter than that,’ Roger said.

  ‘And shopping him wouldn’t be the game, would it?’ Jack pointed out.

  ‘But how can we possibly make anyone do a robbery?’ Pig had asked.

  ‘Blackmail,’ Roger said flatly. ‘Make him realize he either does what we tell him, or he ends up doing ten years as a nonce.’

  ‘Maybe that’d be the right punishment,’ Simon said.

  ‘Maybe it would,’ said Ralph, from the speaker.

  ‘And what if he found himself a good brief who got him off?’ asked Roger.

  ‘At least he’d be finished as a teacher,’ Simon said.

  ‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Roger argued. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t be nearly enough.’

  ‘He’s your Beast,’ Jack reminded Simon. ‘The biggest dirtbag we’ve had.’

  ‘Jack’s right,’ Pig agreed.

  ‘Biggest dirtbag,’ said Roger, ‘biggest game.’

  ‘It’d have to be armed robbery,’ Jack said. ‘I can get a gun, no sweat.’

  ‘No guns,’ Ralph’s voice said promptly.

  ‘But nothing less would really do it, would it?’ Roger backed Jack up. ‘Not if we want to make sure Mitcham gets a long stretch.’

  ‘Couldn’t we use a replica gun?’ Simon asked.

  Ralph wondered why she hadn’t thought of that, was glad Simon had.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Jack said. ‘If it makes you feel better.’

  ‘It would,’ Ralph had said.

  Doubt had gnawed at her that Jack might say one thing and do another, which meant the only way to be certain would be to insist on inspecting the gun when the time came. Except she wouldn’t be there, and anyway, it would be insulting to Jack and unsettling for the group.

  The group was everything to her. With every passing year, every phone call, every reunion, every game, that became more clear to her.

  She wrote once in her journal:

  If only we could be content just to assemble now and again, simply keep in touch without the game as the main objective, I believe my happiness might feel less tainted.

  But just hours later, she wrote:

  I lie even to myself these days. Tell myself, over and over, that I do these things for them, because if I didn’t take control they might play the game less well and come to harm.

  But for me, the prospect of future games fills me with hope, makes me feel like a kid seeing a gorgeous red balloon floating in a blue sky, its string just long enough for me to catch hold of.

  If I deny this, even to myself, I am a fraud.

  They chose a newsagent’s because Jack said there was likely to be a decent amount of money in the till, and because the shop they chose in Summertown, a mile or so from the school, had a particularly smutty top shelf.

  They went in on a Sunday night, because the teacher was home alone in his Barton flat over a café that closed at weekends, and because they knew by then that Mitcham’s only neighbour went away every Friday until late on Monday.

  ‘You’ll have to get to the shop first thing,’ Ralph had said during planning. ‘The newsagent does his banking after the paper rush.’ She’d paused. ‘I know you’ll have all that under control, Jack.’

  ‘Did I say a word, Chief?’

  ‘You’re very patient,’ Ralph told him. ‘I’m just keen for us to cover all bases.’

  ‘We know,’ Roger said.

  Ralph heard the gentle irony, felt affection behind it and was warmed.

  * * *

  ‘If anything’s out of place,’ she told them all during their last conversation before the game, ‘you have to promise me you’ll pull out.’

  Jack told her not to worry.

  Simon said she hadn’t slept for a week.

  Pig said he’d felt sick for a fortnight.

  Roger said she had never been so scared and excited in her life.

  ‘Best part I’ve ever played,’ she said.

  ‘Real life,’ Ralph reminded her. ‘Real consequences.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Roger said candidly, ‘I’ve ever understood the difference.’

  They would wear black stockings over their heads, it had been agreed, except for Simon – in case Alan Mitcham recognized her voice – who would remain outside in wig and glasses, their emergency getaway driver again.

  So three against one.

  ‘He’s not especially strong, so far as I know.’ Simon’s main role had been to provide information about her colleague. ‘I’ve watched him when he’s had to take PE a couple of times, and he’s pathetic.’

  ‘Wanking the only exercise he gets, then,’ Jack had said.

  Afterwards Ralph wrote:

  It worked perfectly. Being locked up for hours and terrorized by three masked strangers made Mitcham feel that going into a shop with a fake gun and maybe getting away with some money – that he believed he would hand over to them – had to be better than being put inside for child pornography.

  It might have gone horribly wrong at any time, but it did not. Mitcham was taken in a van to the shop on Monday morning, given his weapon, told exactly what to do, told that his every move would be watched, every word listened to, and he took no chances, did as he was ordered.

  The newsagent pressed his alarm.

  The police came.

  * * *

  Guilty as charged, and locked up in HM Prison Oakwood.

  Innocent Beast, though only of that crime. Guilty as all sin in their eyes.

  What had followed though, a month later, had not been in the original plan. And yet it had become necessary, Ralph had been forced to accept, because after Roger had called in a favour from a contact at Oakwood, she found out that Mitcham was claiming to have remembered new and ‘significant’ details about the gang.

  ‘It might be bluff,’ Roger told Ralph on the phone, ‘but what’s scaring me is that most of what we had on him came from Simon.’

  ‘And you think he’s linked it to her?’ Ralph felt ill at the thought.

  ‘With all that time to think, I suppose the penny could have dropped,’ Roger said. ‘And Sy was the one sitting outside, so someone might have noticed her.’

  Ralph was silent.

  ‘He needs shutting up, Chief,’ Roger said. ‘Fast.’

  ‘How much have you told your contact?’ Ralph was alarmed.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Roger had assured her. ‘It’s on the grapevine.’

  ‘We need a meeting,’ Ralph said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s time.’

  ‘We have to at least tell the others,’ Ralph insisted.

  ‘Of course.’ Roger paused. ‘I gather it can be arranged. For the right sum.’

  ‘It being shutting him up?’

  ‘Permanently.’

  Ralph felt a shudder go through her. ‘Dear God.’

  ‘I know,’ Roger said. ‘Not simple or safe any more, is it, Chief?’

  ‘Couldn’t we just arrange a reminder of how it would go for him in there if they knew about the photographs?’ Ralph felt suddenly on the end of a hook, struggling for her immortal soul. ‘It worked in the first place.’

  ‘Trust me, Chief, it’s because of the photos that this can be arranged, no questions asked,’ Roger told her. ‘That’s how much his sort are hated.’

  ‘But mightn’t a beating be enough to keep him
quiet?’ Ralph was still hanging on.

  ‘How long for?’ Roger said. ‘Do you really think we can take that chance?’

  Ralph took another moment, thought about Simon, who’d wanted to change her mind and shop the teacher rather than play the game; who was, of all of them, still the most innocent.

  ‘How much?’ she asked.

  And knew, right away, that she was lost.

  She spoke to the others one at a time.

  It was, they all knew, a massive step into the abyss, and yet they all agreed to take it, making Ralph feel, with a sense of quiet, clamping bleakness, that it was as if they had always known this would happen.

  Jack had been shocked at first, but had swiftly seen the point, and Pig had been more afraid for Simon than about what it meant to him, had therefore not argued as much as he might have.

  ‘I don’t want this,’ Simon had said. ‘This is wrong.’

  ‘None of us wants it,’ Ralph had told her.

  ‘But you’ve more or less said it’s for my sake.’

  Ralph heard her desperation. ‘It’s for all of us,’ she told her. ‘Like always.’

  ‘But surely,’ Simon went on, ‘if something happens to him, they’re even more likely to go back and look at what happened before.’

  ‘But he won’t be around to give evidence,’ Ralph said.

  Simon had been silent for a moment.

  ‘We’re really going to do this, aren’t we, Chief?’ she said at last.

  ‘I don’t see,’ Ralph told her, ‘that we have any real choice.’

  All of them trying to block out the truth: that they were about to be party to the greatest of sins, and no part of it a game. Their abiding awareness of Mitcham’s wickedness had helped, of course, and their desire to protect Simon had enabled them to believe they had no alternative. They were, Ralph thought, all afraid of breaking ranks, of smashing the group, ruining the friendships which had become everything to them. So they had stood together and agreed to it.