by Jane Renshaw
‘She did it to Beckie,’ Flora said. ‘She hurt Beckie.’
‘She’s denying ever having done it before or since,’ said the man. ‘But there is a possibility – we feel it’s unlikely to have been an isolated incident. The police investigation will include Beckie’s case, I’m afraid. There are photographs of the cuts and bruises that were found on her. They’ll be compared with the injuries found on the boy…’
‘She’s going to be taken away from us,’ said Flora. ‘She’s going to have to go back and live with the Johnsons.’
I skedaddle through the door from the lounge to the kitchen. When the polis come round the house for Jed or one of the boys, it’s best if I’m no there, so they’re no looking at me thinking, Lorraine willnae let them touch us so she willnae.
I leave the door open and stand with my eye to the crack at the hinges.
Ryan’s all: ‘Take a seat, gentlemen, take a seat,’ waving at the settee.
One of them looks about twelve year old.
Ryan goes, ‘Can I get yous a tea or a coffee?’
‘You’re all right,’ says the adult one. He’s got his notebook out. ‘Now, Mr Johnson… We’ve had a complaint regarding a breach of a court order. We have witness statements to the effect that three white males, matching the descriptions of yourself, your father and Travis here, confronted the adoptive mother of your niece Bekki, and the child herself, yesterday afternoon in Edinburgh.’
‘Aye,’ goes Ryan. He sits down in my chair and leans forward towards the polismen. ‘Hands up, that was us right enough. I’m no gonnae lie to you. But it was a pure accident so it was. My brother, he’s starting a market garden business and we’d gone for a deek at the Botanic Gardens for a wee bit inspiration. Took the old guy along because he doesnae get out much these days.’ He nods at Jed. ‘But he was “tired and emotional”, if you get me, and we have to leave him in the motor while we’re in the Gardens. Then when we get back, he’s only gone and clocked Bekki, and he’s out the motor giving it: “Wee Bekki-hen!” and aye, maybe he’s out of order. But he’s no all there. He’s a vulnerable adult so he is. And God, you can maybe understand the shock of it, aye? Here’s this old jakie wakes out an alcoholic stupor and there’s his wee granddaughter that was taken off of him six year ago standing right there on the pavement? He’s looking for the pink elephants and giant fucking bunnies, but naw, it’s Bekki and she’s fucking real. No one with her, mind. Eight-year-old lassie on her own in the street? That’s no right.’
Ryan sits back in the chair.
The adult polisman goes, ‘So, Mr Johnson. You’re admitting the breach of the court order?’
‘Aye. But it was unintentional, like. We’re no out to make trouble for Bekki or her new family. We dinnae want no hassle. Even Maw and Da have accepted it now, so they have, that she’s better off with they folk. We’re no going to go hassling them again. Aye? Could you tell them sorry like, it was just the shock, eh, after all these years? Da maybe was out of order, but as I say, he’s a vulnerable adult.’
The two polismen eyeball Jed.
‘Right. Yes. I see.’
‘Aye,’ goes Ryan. ‘Forty year on the bevvy will do that to you. Take a good look, gents. There’s a walking public health warning right there, eh?’
‘And is Mr Johnson able to understand why we’re here and what we’re saying?’
‘Course I’m fucking able to –’ goes Jed.
‘Okay Da, okay.’ Ryan smiles. ‘Kids call him Father Jack. Wee rascals.’
‘Ah… Hmmph. Well. I think, in the circumstances, we’ll be able to offer you the option of a caution rather than involving the courts. Now, you don’t have to accept the caution, which will be entered into the record, including the Police National Computer. You can go to court if you so wish. And you don’t have to decide right now. You may wish to take legal advice.’
‘Naw naw,’ goes Ryan. ‘You’re fine. Caution’s fine.’
‘Mr Johnson?’ He looks at Jed.
‘Aye,’ goes Jed.
‘That’s barry,’ goes Travis. ‘We have to sign it, eh? God, I could recite what’s on that form so I could –’
‘Aye, I think we’re all fine with cautions, thank you,’ goes Ryan. ‘And please pass on our apologies to the family and wee Bekki. We’re hoping when she’s eighteen maybe she’ll get in touch, but we understand that’s her decision.’
‘And you understand that the court order prohibits any contact in the meantime?’
Ryan’s nodding. ‘It wasnae that we were intending making contact. It just happened, eh? We hold our hands up but. Da shouldnae have spoke to Bekki. God, I wish he hadnae, causing trouble and that. Poor wee lassie. We only want what’s best for Bekki, you know?’
Belter.
And as the polismen are getting out their forms and that, and Travis is going, ‘Naw, I dinnae need to read it, I’ve seen it afore,’ Ryan turns and gives me a wee wink.
That boy’s something else so he is.
When it’s his turn to sign, he squeezes onto the settee next the twelve-year-old and goes, ‘Cosy,’ and signs the form and then he goes, ‘You’re Raymond Bain’s laddie, eh? I was at the school with your cousin Isla. Went with her a while. What’s Isla up to these days?’
The laddie’s got a beamer on him so he has, and the other polisman is getting up and giving him evils, and the laddie jumps up off the settee and goes, ‘She’s fine, aye.’
‘God I was mad for Isla. Right clever wee bint. She went the university?’
‘Aye.’
‘Computer sciences, aye?’
‘Naw, geography. She was gonnae do comp–’
‘Thank you, Mr Johnson,’ goes the other polisman. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’
I give it a wee minute and then I’m out the kitchen and high-fiving Travis and going to Ryan, ‘Vulnerable adult, oh God, vulnerable adult,’ and me and Ryan and Travis are pissing ourselves and Jed’s like that: ‘I’ll give you fucking vulnerable, ye wee bass, I’ll give you fucking vulnerable.’
And aye, you can see it in his bangstie wee eyes, he’s going radge, but he’s no fit for the boys and hasnae been for years, and Ryan’s in his face giving it ‘Oh aye, Da, go on then, you fucking old vulnerable bastard,’ and Jed’s raging so he is, kicks the door on his way out the room, and Travis is giving him the finger.
What goes around comes around, eh?
14
Saskia’s house looked different in the daylight. It was a 1960s semi in a nice area in the north of Glasgow, on a housing estate circling a wooded hill. There were lots of grassy areas and a small park across the road from the house, complete with a children’s assault course. A view of the distant hills of the Highlands from the front door. You’d be able to hop in the car and be climbing a Munro in less than an hour.
But the white paint on the wood cladding was peeling, there were weeds all up the path, and the doorbell didn’t seem to work.
Neil tried it again, then pounded on the frosted-glass door.
‘Try to stay calm,’ said Flora.
But it was so hard, having to rethink everything they’d believed. The way Beckie had been when she came to them, that traumatised, withdrawn little girl – had she been nothing more than a child wrenched from the people she loved, a child who didn’t understand why they didn’t come for her, why she had been abandoned to yet more strangers?
A figure appeared behind the glass. The door was opened by a tall thin man in bare feet, with an incongruous little beer gut nudging at his T-shirt. He had the pasty, spotty complexion of someone who never saw daylight.
She barely recognised him as Saskia’s husband.
‘Hello. Is Saskia in, please? It’s…’ Flora realised that they’d had different names last time they’d met. ‘It’s Alec and Ruth Morrison.’
His shoulders slumped. ‘Beckie’s parents.’
‘Yes. Look.’ Neil grimaced. ‘We’re not here to make a scene. We just need to talk to her. Please.’
/> ‘She’s not here. We’re not together any more.’ He reached behind him. ‘She’s renting a flat in Haghill. This is the address.’
A dank, deeply shadowed close led from the street between a warehouse and the high wall of a tenement. The concrete underfoot was slimy with algae and slippery, and littered with wrappers and Lucozade bottles and cigarette ends. Flora’s foot crunched on a piece of broken glass. On the wall was a grubby sign with an arrow on it and ‘Nos 34a−h, 35a−h’.
The close ended in a tiny courtyard surrounded by high tenements which must never get the sun. There were two doors faced with hardboard and painted blue. The one on the right, Number 34, was tattered along the bottom as if a large animal had been gnawing it.
What an awful place to have to live. But Flora couldn’t summon any pity for Saskia.
She pressed the buzzer for 34g.
After a long moment: ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Saskia? It’s Flora and Neil. Parry. We need to talk to you – is that okay? Can we come up?’
As the door buzzed open, Neil said, ‘I guess we could go back to Alec and Ruth Morrison, couldn’t we? Now they’ve found us, now they obviously know who we are –’
Flora shook her head. ‘Let’s just leave it for now. Beckie doesn’t need any more upheaval. She’s just got used to being Beckie Parry.’
The stairwell was lit by a flickering fluorescent light. The windows on each half-landing were so grimy it was impossible to see through them. But the stairs themselves were clean enough, and on the first landing someone had put a sad little loop of fabric bunting above a door painted a tasteful powder blue.
Flora looked up the stairwell. It spiralled up and up, several more stories. A lot of these high old tenements had been demolished in the Glasgow slum clearances, but many remained. When this tenement had been built in the Nineteenth Century, each household would probably have had just one room – ‘single ends’, they’d been called, with a range and a sink and a bed recess, with communal toilets out the back or, later, at the bottom of the stair, to be shared among them all.
Now the single ends had been put together to make flats, just two households on each landing rather than six or eight.
Saskia’s flat was on the top floor. She stood in the doorway watching them ascend to the landing, and any thoughts Flora had had about Saskia choosing to live here because of an interest in social history vanished. She looked terrible – hair greasy and in need of a cut, fleece and leggings wrinkling on a frame that had shrunk several sizes since Flora had last seen her. Her feet looked huge in matted brown faux-fur slippers.
‘Hi,’ she said flatly. ‘If you’ve come for an apology – I’m sorry. Really I am.’
‘No,’ said Flora. ‘That’s not why we’re here. I understand why you did it. We both do.’
Not true. Neil was completely baffled and outraged by what Saskia had done.
‘Can we come in and talk?’
‘Place is a mess.’ But she held the door open for them.
The smell hit Flora as soon as she entered the living room – an open-plan kitchen and sitting area with a large flat-screen TV opposite a sofa on which Saskia had evidently been sleeping. There was a yellow-stained pillow on it and a duvet cascading onto the floor. In front of this was a coffee table with an ashtray full of joints. The sickly smell of cannabis and sweat and mouldering food was so overpowering that Flora wasn’t sure she was going to be able to stand it. Dirty dishes were piled up all over the worktops.
Flora turned to Saskia. ‘Are you – are you all right?’
Saskia gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Fine and dandy.’
What about her children? Did they come here, or did she meet her husband at a café or a park or the zoo to spend time with them? An image came into Flora’s head of a tousle-haired little boy in Saskia’s arms.
I just wanted to see you.
She couldn’t ask her about her children. She couldn’t afford to have Saskia break down and be unable to tell them what they needed to know.
‘We’ll not stay long,’ she said, perching on one of the chairs positioned on either side of the sofa.
Neil didn’t sit and Saskia also remained standing, near the door, as if she was expecting to need an escape route.
‘Please come and sit down, Saskia,’ said Flora. ‘Neil.’
Neil perched on the other chair, while Saskia went to the sofa and folded up the duvet, shoved it to one side and sat. She still hadn’t met Flora’s eye.
‘Did you hurt Beckie?’ Neil said. She could hear the strain in his voice, the effort it was taking for him to remain calm.
Saskia didn’t respond.
‘We’re not going to repeat what you tell us to anyone,’ Flora said. ‘We just need to know. We need to know the truth about what you did, and what you made up, and what the Johnsons really did and didn’t do. Because they’ve found us again.’
Saskia looked up. ‘Oh God… I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah,’ said Neil. ‘Right. You’re sorry.’
‘Neil.’ Flora wanted to just get up and leave, to run out of this stinking flat and down the stairs and forget Saskia Mair existed. But they needed to hear the truth from her. ‘Please, Saskia. I mean it, we won’t go to the police or anything with what you tell us.’
Saskia shook her head and, finally, met Flora’s gaze. ‘I did it for the kids. And you know what? I’m not sorry. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. A few seconds of discomfort weighed against a lifetime of abuse and fear and misery and deprivation?’
‘That wasn’t your call to make,’ said Neil.
‘Oh, but you see, it was. I knew those kids. I knew those families. You’re really saying Beckie’s not better off today than she would have been if she’d been left to grow up in that family?’
‘If they weren’t actually doing her any harm, if she wasn’t really in any danger from them – you had no right to take her away. No wonder they’re angry. No wonder they moved heaven and earth to find her. My God, in their position I don’t know what I’d do.’
‘Of course they were doing her harm,’ Saskia almost spat. ‘Most of it was true, what I put in my report.’
‘What bits, exactly?’ said Flora. ‘We need to know what you made up and what was true.’
Saskia shut her eyes.
‘Saskia!’ Flora bunched her fists.
Saskia breathed out, opened her eyes, and stared off. ‘The house was filthy. There were holes in the walls and doors missing. The place was full of cigarette smoke. The dog was out of control. There was a used condom lying on the carpet. Dirty nappies were spilling from the bin and the dog had hold of one. Beckie really was outside in the rain. Okay, she didn’t have a dirty nappy. She wasn’t dirty. She was in clean clothes. And there were no signs she had recently been physically hurt, although there were old bruises. But she was obviously not happy. She was obviously frightened of something. And Ryan and Travis and Jed really did threaten me. They didn’t actually assault me, but only because Lorraine stopped them. Jed Johnson really is dangerous – he’s a psychopath. A truly evil man who gets off on torturing people. Ryan’s more subtle, more sophisticated maybe, but he’s a killer too. As is Shannon-Rose. Travis is just a violent thug. That isn’t a family any child should have to grow up in.’
A long silence.
Neil was looking out of the window, his face expressionless. If you didn’t know him, you’d think he’d lost interest in the conversation, but Flora knew it was taking all he had not to lose it.
‘And that’s the truth?’
Saskia nodded. ‘The courts won’t take Beckie away from you. Not now. No court in the world would deem that to be in her best interests, after all this time with you. You’re her parents as far as she’s concerned. You’re her family.’
This was what Yvonne Richards had told them. That there was no need to worry on that score.
‘So they never actually harmed Beckie,’ said Neil quietly. ‘They were looking after her well.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’m sure they did harm her! I just didn’t have the evidence.’ Saskia’s voice caught. ‘Surely you must know that yourselves, surely you’ve seen the effect living with them had on Beckie? You’re not going to tell me she’s not been affected by it?’
‘No, I would certainly never claim she hadn’t been,’ said Flora. ‘She’s –’
Neil cut through her: ‘But that could have been down solely to Shannon-Rose! Who was a schizophrenic and not responsible for her actions – and the rest of the family certainly can’t be held responsible for what she did. Whatever Beckie suffered before she came to us might have nothing to do with them.’
‘Oh, believe that if you want to!’ Saskia reached for a roll-up. ‘Go ahead and get the adoption changed from closed to open if you want and see what happens. The courts would probably look favourably on such an application, in the circumstances. If you’re so confident they’re no threat to Beckie, go ahead and let the Johnsons back in her life.’
‘We’ve no intention of doing that,’ said Flora.
But Neil didn’t look at her.
15
‘What the fuck’s up wi’ you, doll?’ goes Mandy.
‘Aye,’ I goes, ‘excuse me if I’m no maybe wanting to bankrupt my arse on a wean that’s no even out the fucking womb.’
We’re in the TK Maxx on Argyle Street, me and Carly and Mandy, and I’m pushing the trolley because Carly thinks being pregnant means she cannae do nothing. Doesnae stop her shopping for Scotland, mind.
I goes, ‘Next time you go for a check-up, hen, you should maybe ask if there are no any procedures, like maybe they can get a pair of Swarovski earrings onto one of they keyhole whoogies and shove them up your fanny into the bairn?’
Mandy cackles.
Carly’s chuckling an’ all. ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Bairn.’ The wean’s da’s that wee fucker Ryan calls Gypsy Bob, but he’s no really a traveller, he just keeps getting evicted by the Council. ‘Aw is that no gorgeous?’ goes Carly, and she breenges past another bint – She’s pregnant, aye? So get out her fucking road – and shakes a baby-gro in my face. It’s pale yellow with wee bunnies and bees and that. Soft as anything.