An Act of Silence

by Colette McBeth

  Jonathan bobs his head in agreement. But he knows Charlie hasn’t gone abroad. He’s just seen her passport in her bedside drawer.

  ‘Which one is it?’

  ‘It’s . . . well, that’s strange, isn’t it. It was here a few days ago, I swear.’ Marjorie’s face fills with confusion. ‘I know I’m old but I’m not crackers.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ Jonathan says. ‘I don’t suppose you know what kind of car it was?’

  ‘I can do better than that. I have the registration number upstairs.’

  When Jonathan has thanked Marjorie and said goodbye, he returns to his car and makes a phone call. It goes straight to voicemail. He tries again, and again. Five times until he gives it a rest. She won’t want to speak to him, or any reporters for that matter, not while she’s investigating the biggest case of her career. But she owes him a favour, and as far as Jonathan is concerned, there’s never been a better time to call it in.

  He makes one final call to Detective Inspector Victoria Rutter. ‘Call me urgently,’ he says. ‘I might have something for you.’

  June 2001

  Gabriel, aged 16

  Acute Liver Failure, or ALF as abbreviated by the doctors. I saw that written on my notes and ever since that’s what I’ve called him. I needed a transplant, which means there’s part of someone else in my body. It seemed a bit rude not to give him a name.

  Alf saved my life and that should be a good thing, right? Wrong. My mum and dad argued about him a lot until it got so bad my dad fucked off. He lives three streets away now and we all pretend nothing has changed. Don’t even get me started on that.

  My mum doesn’t like me so much now. That’s not me overreacting or being sensitive. It is a fact. Simple as. When I came out of hospital, nothing was the same. I mean, I was the same person. I was like, hello, it’s me, Gabriel! But she acted like I was different. I used to moan that she watched me too much, now she can hardly bear to look at me. THE IRONY. It’s as if I’ve done something wrong but no one will tell me what it is. And guess what? I miss her. I spend a lot of time in my room because it’s less lonely than being around her. Fucked up, right?

  My mum and dad told me they were splitting up over an ice cream after school one day. It was April. Sunny like June. They were both waiting for me at the gate. I should have known something was wrong.

  I ordered a raspberry split with extra sprinkles and they had a coffee. I stopped trying to understand adults long ago.

  ‘Gabriel,’ my mum said. ‘You know we both love you very much.’ Could have fooled me.

  ‘That is never going to change,’ my dad said, but his body language was in no way convincing. To distract myself I focused on the raspberry veins that had spread around my vanilla ice cream, little inlets and streams of blood.

  ‘The thing is, Mummy and Daddy think it’s best that we don’t live together any more.’

  I hadn’t called them Mummy and Daddy for years. I hoped this meant they were reading the script to the wrong audience.

  ‘Do you understand what we are saying, Gabriel?’ My mum stretched out her words like I was totally thick.

  ‘They’ve put too much raspberry in my ice cream, I only asked for a dribble.’

  Dad pulled the ice cream away from me. Impatient. ‘It won’t change things, not really. You can come and stay with me half of the time. You can choose your own bed and we’ll still go to the game together.’

  ‘I’ve gone off football, I told you.’ We went to Highbury once last season and there were so many people Alf went crazy, screamed at me until I asked Dad to take me home.

  ‘OK, not a football game. You get to decide. We can do whatever you want.’

  ‘In that case, I’d like you both to stay together at home.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘So you lied?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said I could have anything I wanted and now you’re saying I can’t.’

  ‘Please, Gabriel, don’t make this any harder than it is.’ My mum reached out for my hand.

  Holding hands is not going to make this better.

  ‘Is there anything you want to ask us?’

  I gave this a moment’s thought.

  ‘Have you got another woman?’

  ‘Gabriel!’ Mum shouted, before compensating for her outburst with a whisper: ‘There is no one else.’

  Not true.

  There is Alf. It is his fault.

  I heard them last week, shouting at each other: ‘There’s part of him inside my son, how do you think that makes me feel?’

  I didn’t know how it made them feel, but I do now.

  ‘I could get rid of him if it would help.’

  ‘Get rid of who?’ my dad asked.

  ‘My liver. Alf.’

  ‘Oh God, Gabriel, please . . .’ My mum clasped her hand to her mouth. ‘Please, never say that. It’s not your fault.’

  Dad always liked wine but before there was more of a point to it than just getting pissed. He talked about grapes and vineyards and vintages and bored all our guests senseless with his decanting and sniffing. Now it’s about getting it down his neck as quick as possible. One bottle and he’s my dad only a bit weirder and swearier. Two bottles and he’s crying. He had two bottles tonight.

  It’s always about Mum. He talks about how he loves her and wants her back. I want to tell him that no one, certainly not my mum, is going to find him attractive in this state. He has rampant nose hair and his breath stinks. When he opens the third bottle, I know we’re in deep shit. He starts talking about sex. Sweet Jesus! Could there be anything worse than my dad telling me about having sex with my mum. I get this image of the two of them sellotaped together naked, my dad on top, humping. I want to scrape it out of my brain and stamp on it until it smashes, but it is indestructible. My mum. My dad. My mum my dad my mum my dad.

  ‘Every man wanted her and I was the only—’

  ‘Dad, for fuck’s sake, shut up!’

  He stops and looks up at me. He’s forgotten I’m here. He’s talking to the bottle of wine. If I could turn myself into a bottle of claret, he’d love me more. This is the problem. I am surplus to requirements, at home, at my dad’s house. My mum works late, our communication has been reduced to Post-it notes: Lasagne, love you x. She has time for me when I’m in trouble. Like the fire in Mr Wallerman’s shed a few weeks ago. The old git called the police. Serves him right for putting broken glass in his flower beds to keep Pudding away. She’s old now, and the sight of her in the vets having her feet stitched was horrendous. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.

  Not that I explained this rationale to my mum. She wouldn’t get it. You’ve got to make the right choices, Gabriel, is her constant refrain. Anyway, the upshot of the ‘shed incident’ was that she shouted at me for an hour, how stupid, what were you thinking? and then dialled it down to give me a quiet bedside heart to heart. The attention warmer than the flames of any fire.

  My dad is still staring through me as if I’m transparent and I get that sense, one I’ve had loads lately, that I might not exist, that I’m being sucked away through a black hole where no one can see me. To give my dad his due, he tries to stop me being sucked away by grabbing my arm and pulling me towards him. I smile and think he’s going to say something nice like, Are you OK? But what he actually says is, ‘Iwasn’ttheonlyonewasI? Youaretheproof.’

  I know what this means but I can’t know. I know. I don’t. I pull free of his grip and dive back through the black hole where I don’t have to face up to what he’s just told me.

  I can’t remember making it to the door. I’m in his house and then I’m not. I run across the road to the Common. Alf is awake. He likes a bit of drama. ‘Hide,’ he says, ‘they’re coming for you.’ Alf doesn’t explain who ‘they’ are,
but I do what he tells me to do. It’s no good, crossing Alf. You don’t want him as an enemy. I skirt the dark edges of the bushes where the streetlights can’t reach. Alf is with me, shouting his directions: ‘Three steps to the left. Go forward for ten paces. Watch out, bogey to the right. Duck down. Run.’

  That’s when I run straight into them.

  A group of girls and boys. Older than me, bunched together. If I had been looking up I would have seen them, but my eyes were trained on the ground, counting steps, following instructions. I trip over a girl who turns out to be two people moulded together.

  ‘Awww!’

  ‘What do you think you are doing, man?’

  He’s up on his feet, coming towards me. I leg it. My path is blocked by another guy. I’ve run straight into the bogeys.

  Alf’s fault. ‘Fuck you,’ I say to Alf.

  ‘What did you say?’ A large guy has risen to his feet, chest puffed out at me.

  Alf is still yelling, shrieking. My head is going to explode. ‘SHUT UP. SHUT UP. SHUT THE FUCK UP.’

  The big guy is killing himself laughing. ‘Man, you need to be taught a lesson.’

  He’s right next to me, fingering my jacket. It’s new. The one I saved up for with my birthday money. Nike. Swoosh on the lapel.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And the jeans too. Diesel, man. Take them off.’

  It’s not really a question because he starts to remove my top, but not before he relieves me of my rucksack and empties it out on to the grass.

  ‘Little teddy, sweet.’ He throws it to his mate and they throw it around. Mr Piddles is launched in the air. I go dizzy keeping track of where he’s landing.

  ‘Take your pants off. Now. Or else I’m gonna flatten you.’

  ‘Off, off, off.’ They’re all chanting. ‘Off, off, off.’ Crowding too close, I’m surrounded, wind from their breath on me. They’re going to eat me.

  ‘OFF.’

  I take my trousers off and then my pants.

  ‘HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.’

  ‘Now he’s flashing, man. Your pants, not your boxers. Didn’t want to see that.’

  ‘Not much chance of seeing it,’ a girl shouts, wiggles her pinkie in the air.

  Wet trickles down my legs. A gap has opened up in the circle and I leap through it. Run run run run, Alf shouts. I sprint out the Common on to a side street. There’s a woman coming up the road; I hide behind a car so she doesn’t see me naked. A few more steps and she’ll be gone. Wait. No! She’s unlocking this fucking car, the one I’m hiding behind. She gets in. The headlights go on. I have to jump out otherwise she’s going to run me over. I hope I’ll be so fast she won’t see me.

  ‘FUCK. Oh my God!’ she screams.

  Lights flash. Locks fasten down.

  I wave my arms in the air so she knows I am just on my way home and mean no harm but that’s a lot of information to ask my hands to convey and judging by her face I don’t think she’s understood. I don’t hang around to find out.

  I’m cold and alone and I know there are bogeys everywhere but I can’t run any more. The pavement has chafed my feet and the night air hurts my skin.

  Turns out I don’t have to walk much further because at the top of the road there’s a car with flashing lights and two men jump out and push me inside.

  I want my mum. My mum doesn’t come. Evidently her first thought on learning I have been taken to the police station is not, there must be a terrible mistake but, how is this going to look? This is why she sends her emissary Camilla in her place. Camilla was my mum’s SPAD when she was Home Secretary (yeah, I know, it stands for special advisor but still, there are some titles that really can’t be excused). Camilla deals with it because her speciality is spinning a crisis into a triumph. Needless to say, she falls short on this occasion because she’s good but not that good. The crisis is merely downgraded to an ‘incident’ and I am swept out of the back entrance into a waiting car dressed in clothes that aren’t mine.

  My mum is waiting for me when I get home, face a mask of displeasure. I need her arms to be open so I can fall into them but they’re folded hard into her chest.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I say, and she looks suspiciously at what I’m wearing as if to say, Did your own clothes just take a walk by themselves then?

  ‘They’ve got it wrong.’

  I want to explain about Dad being pissed and the black hole and the gang in the park and Alf shouting at me and the fact that I was hiding behind that woman’s car not trying to expose myself but it all gets mushed up together.

  ‘Sit down,’ my mum says.

  Camilla brings us tea and I expect her to go until I notice there are three mugs and she’s sitting down with us with a notepad and pen. We need to thrash it out, apparently, carve out a more suitable story in case the press gets wind of it. This personal nadir is no longer my own, it’s a political embarrassment to be managed.

  Most of the ensuing exchange flies over my head but two things stick out.

  1.My mum says, ‘Christ, Camilla, how is this going to look?’ before she asks how I am. Before she asks if I need anything or hugs me or even looks me straight in the eye. (FYI, Camilla replies, ‘It’s OK, I’ll kill the story,’ like I’m vermin to be exterminated.)

  2.She presumes I did it. And, yes, I know I don’t give a very good account of myself, mainly because the sequence of the evening is all out of sync, but the main point is she had already accepted I was capable of such an act. My own mother.

  Which begs the question, who the hell does she think I am?

  It’s a few weeks after the ‘incident’ when my mum corners me in my bedroom. The police gave me a caution. The woman I ‘flashed at’ is threatening to go to the press; though my mum hasn’t told me, I overheard her talking to Camilla. I suspect the theme of this conversation will be, You can’t put a foot out of line from now on, Gabriel.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she says.

  Too right we do.

  She sighs like I’m making her weary. ‘You still haven’t explained why you were walking around naked.’

  ‘They took my clothes!’

  ‘Who took your clothes?’

  ‘The people in the park.’

  I’m aware that my description of the people in the park isn’t exactly Crimewatch standard but I wasn’t in a position to commit all their distinguishing features to memory. They were young, maybe a bit older than me, there were a lot of them. They were taking the piss out of me. (Language, Gabriel!)

  ‘Gabriel,’ she says in a gentle tone that suggests she’s ready to believe me. ‘You can tell me the truth. Lying isn’t going to do you any good.’

  I hear a little hiss of air. It’s coming from me. Her doubt is needle sharp, it punctures my skin.

  I don’t know why the look she wears produces the revelation. I’ve seen it before. But tonight my sensory receptors are wide awake, catch its meaning and send it high speed to my brain. It’s not me. It’s her. I’ve got the full technicolour picture for the first time. Deep down there’s something that has stopped her loving, believing, trusting me. She searches for the worst because she can’t shake the feeling that it is there somewhere, lurking beneath my skin, hidden in my core. A darkness. Didn’t she always watched me like a hawk when I was little, ready to pounce when I did something wrong?

  But here’s the thing she doesn’t get. If you look for something hard enough, chances are you’ll find it.

  School becomes a problem. The noise is too much for Alf and I can’t concentrate in lessons with him screeching in my head. Mum doesn’t understand. She makes me get out of bed, tells me to get dressed. She wears this face when she comes in my room that’s like, ‘Have you had a shower in the last week?’ The answer is no. I don’t want to shower beca
use I don’t want to take my clothes off. I’m a little perv, scared of what I might do.

  When she leaves for work I go back to bed. Or maybe I go to the kitchen and make a sandwich with ketchup, but I don’t hang around. I can’t leave my room for too long because Alf doesn’t like it. He starts this weird cry, like the foxes shagging at night, half baby, half animal. If it’s two minutes he’s OK. But any longer, say 2.01, that’s when he starts. When he cries I have to talk to him for hours and hours to calm him down. Alf likes me to play him songs and sing, and that is OK with me because I love singing. I don’t necessarily share his choice of songs, mind you. He’s a fan of Freddie Mercury. I spend a lot of my time singing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ which is enough to finish anyone off, but sometimes when he’s quiet I’ll sneak in a few of my own.

  One day I’m having a quiet moment, ALF is asleep, when the doorbell rings. It’s a girl. A young woman. Shy.

  ‘Is anyone home?’

  ‘I am.’ Not as smart as she looks then.

  ‘Are you Gabriel?’

  ‘I am.’ This conversation is getting pretty repetitive. ‘Are you from my mum’s office?’

  ‘Mind if I come in?’

  I’m about to say I do but she’s already in the hallway.

  ‘Not at school?’

  ‘Was sent home sick.’ I don’t want her telling my mum I’ve been skiving. ‘Can I get you anything?’ I’m relieved when she says no.

  ‘Are you doing your GCSEs this year?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t want to miss too much school then.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs, to do some work.’ I add for cover, ‘My mum won’t be home for a while.’