by Camilla Way
I pulled the door to behind me and stood listening to the house. It was completely silent. I strained my ears but couldn’t hear a sound, not a tick or a drip or a murmur or a creak. I wondered if they had all gone out, and panicked slightly at the thought of the three of them returning suddenly and finding me there – an enterer if not a breaker, but practically a burglar, standing on the wrong side of their front door. Then I remembered Kyle’s useless mother and her inability to leave the house, and I guessed they must all be upstairs, tucking her in and reading her a story or whatever the hell it was they did with her. I almost left.
Almost.
I didn’t want to call out; I wouldn’t have liked to have heard my voice echoing up those silent stairs, and anyway, I was too afraid of Kyle finding me stood there in his house like that, uninvited and unwelcome. I shuddered at the thought of it. I made up my mind to leave, to continue my watch from the other side of the road, to wait until Kyle returned from wherever he had gone. But I didn’t. I didn’t because at the end of the hall, past the lounge door, was a room I’d never been into. And it was just way too tempting. Have you ever been in somebody’s home when they don’t know you’re there? You should try it; it’s fun. I decided I’d just nip down the hall to take a quick look. Just a quick one, then I’d leave. Definitely. No harm done. Like I’ve said, that house was fascinating to me.
The room turned out to be their kitchen, and it was almost as big as the lounge. It had battered red tiles on the floor, a big white trough of a sink filled with dirty pots and plates, an old dresser piled high with random crap you don’t usually find in a kitchen: a fur hat, a stack of books, a roller skate. The table was covered in dirty plates and half-empty cans of food. Someone had dropped their toast on the floor. A fucking mess, in other words; it made my house look good.
Disappointed I turned to leave, but then, out of the corner of my ear, I heard a noise. It was barely there. It was like a sound heard in your sleep, a sound you’re not quite sure you really heard, more of a shift in the air than an actual noise. And then I heard it again. For the first time I noticed a door at the far end of the kitchen. I noticed that its opaque glass panels had little flowers cut into them and they twinkled and winked their invitation. I had a quick look over my shoulder before going over to peer in.
And there they were: Kyle and Patrick, in a tiny, lowceilinged room that I guess must have been some sort of outhouse. There they were, caught within the confines of my petal-shaped spy-hole. I saw them in that little room that like the kitchen was full of crap, saw them bathed in a golden light that seeped and creeped into the dusty air through dirty windows. I saw them. Like an old-fashioned sepia photograph; a silent yellow-tinged moment, suspended forever, indelible, undeniable. I saw them.
The top of the window in that little room had a stained-glass panel and the sunlight threw red, blue and green squares on Kyle’s naked back as he stood, his face hidden in his grandfather’s embrace. And nothing moved, nothing moved at all; not me, outside looking in through the petals, not Patrick, his eyes closed, as he sat on a rickety old table, his trousers and underpants bunched around his feet, his wrinkly hand its veins like roots caught in green light across his grandson’s bare buttocks.
Nothing moved at all in those seconds while I stood somewhere I shouldn’t have been, in someone else’s kitchen, staring through a glass daisy on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, the summer I was thirteen. Nothing moved, everything was still, except for my friend’s hand which shifted back and forth, back and forth, not quickly not slowly but carefully, deliberately, in his grandfather’s naked lap.
I felt my guts shrivel then splinter.
The world fractured, it let go of me.
A million flecks of light filled my vision, adrenalin shot through me like I’d missed a step on the stairs and I was falling. I kept on falling. Looking back, I guess from that moment on I never really did reach firm ground again.
I backed out of the kitchen, my feet like they had people tethered to them and somehow made my way into the hall, almost made it to the front door.
Almost.
Because there she was, Elizabeth. Halfway down the stairs she stood, one hand on the banister, one hand to her mouth. Frightened, guilty eyes darting from my face then over her shoulder to the kitchen door. Frightened guilty eyes telling me that she knew, telling me that she’d always known.
fourteen
A red car’s bumper grazing the backs of my knees, some old doris behind the wheel, her face blank, almost serene with shock. The noise of her horn competing with the screaming in my head. A bloke in a green tracksuit, him and his dog both frozen in slack-mouthed amazement. The door of No. 33 wide open still. The sun shining on my face. I wondered for a moment if they were in on it too, if the whole fucking world had known apart from stupid, stupid me, and then I realised that I’d almost been run over, that I was standing in the middle of the road. That was all.
The man with the dog was saying something, his words floating between us like smoke. He started walking towards me and the old bird was getting out of her car. So I just turned and legged it until I got to the park at the top of our road. I sat on a bench with my head almost in my lap, vomit in my throat, wishing I could burrow through the grass and the earth and the worms and the roots and curl up there where nobody could find me, and I understood then why Kyle wanted to, knew then what he meant. But instead I just sat there on the bench and listened to the knives sharpening in my head, the taste of metal in my mouth.
It was dark when I got home. Everyone was in, even my sisters. The sudden noise and brightness from our front room like a face-full of acid after the quiet of the park. I tried to slip past the lounge door and up the stairs but then there they all were: Esha and Bela and Push and Janice and Dad, crowding out into the hall, ten excited eyes on me like teeth. I thought I might faint so I leant against the wall to stop myself from falling. I tried to focus on the bit of white paper Janice was waving in my face.
‘Bem Bom Brothers,’ she was saying. ‘Margate!’ she said. Her pink-frosted gob open in a wide excited grin, a crowd of tiny yellow teeth like tic-tacs. ‘Fun fair.’
I looked at Push who was feigning boredom. ‘She won it,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to Dreamland.’ And then he smiled like he was six again.
They all started talking at once. Something about a raffle, something about Janice’s sister who worked at the local spastics home and she’d fiddled it so Janice had won, and they were all going and did I want to come to Margate to ride the Scenic Railway and maybe the Mary Rose? Train fare there included, all the rides too. Did I want to? Make a family outing of it?
Yeh, I said. OK, I said. If it meant that I could go upstairs. If it meant that I could sleep.
Lewisham station, platform two.
Everything unclear, like looked at through water. Random stuff thrown suddenly into focus. Graffiti on the wall, ‘Michelle loves Jon’ and ‘Darren bumfucks packys’. A puddle of Tizer by my feet from a long-gone stranger’s spilt can, which I stared at and stared at like it was one of those religious miracles, like when thousands of people travel across the world to see God in a damp patch or Jesus on a piece of toast. Like if I stared long enough I’d see something in it that made some sort of sense.
Seeing only Kyle’s arm moving between his granddad’s naked thighs.
The six of us waiting for the train to come. We’d all got up specially early and the heat by nine a.m. was extraordinary, the hottest it had ever been, as if the sun was giving one last blast, one last gasp before imploding.
‘Did you know,’ Kyle had said once, ‘that the sun is shining itself smaller? That the more it burns, the smaller it gets? Every day the sun shines, it weighs a little less. One day there’ll be no sun at all.’
I thought of Katie Kite. I thought of Kyle’s mum’s face when she saw me in the hall. My head a pinball game, the thoughts ricocheting off the sides. I started to hear a noise like someone running a stick along railings. Real
ised it was inside my head.
Me standing in Kyle’s front room with Patrick.
‘What did happen, Patrick? What did happen to Katie?’
‘I don’t know, my dear. I really don’t know.’
The train came and we all got on. A single compartment. Do they still exist? Our own private carriage, stinking of hot dust and stale fags, the seats covered in green and red bristly stuff. The floor the colour of Kyle’s eyes. The white shiny walls smeared in something brown, something yellow. A swastika and an NF sign next to a giant penis with three little drips shooting out of the top in blue biro. ‘I love you’ underneath in black. Me and Bela and Esha on one side, Janice and Dad and Push facing us. No light bulb, so we sat in darkness when the tunnels came.
Janice wore a dress, pink and shiny as a Wham bar. Her boobs like bald men’s heads. The sun followed us through the open window and I kept slipping in and out of hot sleep. I listened to Esha and Bela’s conversation, heard how their Yorkshire accents had morphed without me noticing into a south-London West Indian twang.
‘So he goes, you’re a slapper, and I says, nah fuck you man.’
‘Naaaaaah?’
‘Yeah mate.’
‘Uh-aah! Bwoy. Cheek of him!’
‘Innit?’
I thought about the night I walked to the castle with Kyle.
‘What happened to your sister, Kyle? You know, don’t you?’
Kyle’s face, yellow in the lamp light. My hand on his shoulder.
I sat up straight, shook my head, tried not to think of anything at all. My eyes felt sore and everything seemed unnaturally bright, like it had been scribbled over in yellow highlighter pen. I stared hard at Push just for something to do. He was gazing out the window listening to a Walkman he’d come home with one day, saying his mate had given it to him (though it was brand new and still in its box) and I noticed for the first time a Nike swoosh he’d had shaved into the side of his head, saw too that he had hair sprouting from his top lip. Noticed how his fingernails were bitten down to the quick, and most of the skin on his fingertips gnawed away too. Ten raw and scabby stumps, one of them wearing a big gold ring. The sight of them for some reason making my chest tighten. Then we went into another tunnel, and came out the other side.
I felt the walls of my mind begin to close in on themselves.
Dad and Janice each cracking open a can of Co-op lager. My dad in his cardi, touching cans with Janice, saying ‘Cheers.’
Kyle’s arm in Patrick’s naked lap.
Suddenly Janice was squeezing herself in between me and Esha, lager slopping onto her knee, a look of concern on her fat caked-on face. I realised from somewhere far away that she had been talking to me for some time.
‘You all right, lovey?’
Patrick’s trousers around his ankles.
I stared back, trying to focus.
‘Yeh, I’m fine.’
She held a sweaty, pudgy hand to my forehead. Eyed me with distaste. ‘Don’t like the look of you, sweetheart.’
She turned to my dad, who was watching us with a shy smile. I put my head in my hands and tried not to cry. Pulled myself together just in time.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just hot.’ But Janice had turned away and was talking to Push about something else.
We had to change trains twice before we reached the Kent coast. We walked from Margate station through the town towards the beach, carrying the plastic bags which held our sandwiches. The sun hung heavy in the sky and the world shrunk and burned under it like a hot, sick dream. We trudged past shops, the ones that weren’t boarded up selling ice cream and giant candy dummies and beach balls and buckets and spades and hats and fake tie-on boobs and hoola hoops and plastic tennis racquets and the streets were crazy with people and when we got to the beach everything was bright, so bright it hurt my eyes.
And I thought I’d never seen a sky so big. We walked onto the beach like we’d just landed on the moon, the sand burning through our flip-flops. I trudged behind my family, not thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing, just stopping when they stopped, walking when they walked. Heat and people and sea gulls and noise and wide blue sky and then there was the sea and I stopped and stared because I’d never seen the sea before, and I wondered which bits of it had once been in the Thames. Its vastness, its endlessness, making me feel suddenly panicky, like a trapped bird was flapping its wings inside my chest. We stood, the six of us, all in a row along the sea shore, looking without speaking, just staring at the waves.
Then a screech from Janice. ‘Look!’ and we all stopped and followed her finger to where she was pointing and there, at the end of her finger, at the end of the beach, a roller-coaster loomed high against the vast blue sky and then we noticed the entrance gate which said ‘Bem Bom Brothers’ Dreamland’ in flickering lights on top. I looked at my family’s faces all squinty and pleased, staring at the gates to the fairground, like all the answers to all their dreams did indeed lie behind them.
Dreamland funfair: like being smacked around the head from all directions with an enormous neon-flashing cartoon hammer. And then being kicked repeatedly in the guts with comedy-clown shoes too. A giant Woody Woodpecker on some kind of mechanical spring, flailing and honking and stuttering maniacally towards us, a siren wailing from somewhere like it was the blitz. ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood blaring from the dodgems, Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ pumping from the Hearts and Diamonds. Some bloke on a loudspeaker begging, ‘Scream ladies, scream!’ And everything drenched in that queasy white light.
Dad and Janice ambled off in the direction of the arcades. Esha and Bela made a bee-line for the dodgems, and Push was left to pair off with me. He marched me through the park, half dragging me by the arm to all the rides. I felt my responses become slower, everything I looked at drifted and shuddered for no reason at all and I felt like my arms and legs had bricks tied to them.
People with their kids laughing and arguing and stuffing candyfloss into their faces. Queues for the roller-coaster and a giant boat thing that rotated in the air. The stench of burgers and everything around me a blurred streak of noise and colour, fast then slow but random stuff illuminated, odd things suddenly clear and sharp. I spotted Dad and Janice by the Tea-cups ride, holding hands, saw a look of such tenderness pass between them I nearly fell over. I hadn’t noticed, had been looking the other way to realise before, that they loved each other. A child crying because it had dropped its ice cream, its face one red and sweaty ball of anguish. A lad I’d seen working the dodgems was kissing Esha behind the hot-dog stall, his hand on her left tit. Bela smoked a fag next to them, looking bored.
Then Push was pulling me again by the wrist across hot, black, melting tarmac, my flip-flops sinking with each step. Queuing for what seemed like hours for the roller-coaster and then there we were. Hurtling up into that big blue sky, towards the blinding sun that every day Kyle said weighed a little less.
And suddenly I knew what had happened to Katie.
As we dipped and rose and swooped and spiralled high above the crowds of daytrippers, I knew. I knew with total certainty what had happened at No. 33 that night last summer.
The ride gradually slowed and ground to a halt and when the bar rose from my lap I followed Push along the shifting metal platform which seemed to have turned to water beneath my feet, and suddenly I was stepping off into nothing. Blackness rising over my eyeballs. My cheek against tarmac, my body sinking into nothingness and God knows how long I was on the ground for but gradually a pin-prick of light appeared and got steadily larger until black-rimmed sunshine filled my eyes again. My body was still stuck to the tarmac and I couldn’t seem to find the strength to get up.
I became aware that I was surrounded by people’s legs and, trying not to vomit, I looked up to see a ring of faces peering down on me with interest, like I was one of the more entertaining sideshows on the way to the big, rotating, boat thing. I could hear Push whining from miles away, ‘She just fell! One minute she
was standing up, next thing she was on the floor. Think she fainted. Weren’t my fault.’
I rested my head on the tarmac again and stared instead at all the legs. Nobody really said or did anything and I grew strangely anxious that people might be finding me quite disappointing. I started to think about getting up, but couldn’t actually picture how I’d manage it.
Finally the legs shuffled apart to make room for a pair of trousers I recognised. They were my dad’s, the ones with the shiny knees and the falling-down hems, the ones he used to wear for the only job he’d ever had, when he worked the buses in Leeds. I looked up and there he was: my dad, pushing through the people, elbowing them all out the way, leaving Janice and Push trailing behind him. My dad. And as everyone stood and stared he knelt down and he picked me up and he carried me through the fair, out through the big gates, down along the beach, back through the town, all the way to the train station he carried me, my dad. The whole way there he held me in his arms in the heat and through the crowds and I rested my head against his chest and listened to the beating of my father’s heart beneath his nylon cardigan.
A new single carriage, new writing on the walls. Me lying on one side, my family on the bench opposite. Watching me, their eyes agog, their mouths gaping, like I was something thrilling on the telly. So I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and I listened to Janice and Dad whispering about the flu or how maybe it was ‘women’s things’ and I thought about Kyle and what I knew, and suddenly I saw what needed to be done.
fifteen
New Cross Hospital. 4 September 1986. Transcription of interview between Dr C Barton and Anita Naidu. Police copy.