By the same author
Luke and Jon
How the Trouble Started
Robert Williams
Once again, for Kate
Contents
By the same author
Title Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the author
1
The police were involved over the trouble. They had to be. But I didn’t think of them as the police at first. As an eight-year-old boy I expected uniforms, flashing lights and handcuffs. Speeding cars and the glimpse of a gun. Instead there was a tired-looking woman in a business suit who drove a grey car slowly and always smelt of coffee. She told me to call her Tracy, but I’d never called a grown-up by their first name before and couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried, but it felt as impossible as saying ‘fuck’ in front of my mum, or jumping off a wall that was too high. I teetered on the edge a few times but my brain wouldn’t make my mouth form the correct shape and I ended up calling her ‘Miss’ instead. ‘Tracy,’ she said, the first few times, but after a while she shook her head and gave up.
There wasn’t a knock at the door until the evening of the day it happened. I’d been expecting repercussions, I should be clear about that, but I didn’t expect those repercussions to be an interview at the police station. They asked a lot of questions but I didn’t say too much. It wasn’t that I was scared, they were nice enough, they didn’t shout or anything, but I didn’t want to get into more trouble and the more I spoke the more trouble I might get myself in, so I went quiet. ‘I was just playing,’ I told them, but that wasn’t enough. They kept going back to the beginning and tried to work out every second of everything that had happened that morning. I started to get dizzy with it. I don’t think I lied to them and whilst they didn’t quite lie to me, they didn’t tell me the whole truth for a while either. I suppose they were trying to work out if I was hiding anything, testing how much I knew, but even at eight years old I knew not to say too much, I knew words could get you into trouble, words could trip you up. But I wasn’t up to being devious at eight, I didn’t have it in me then. Mum thinks I’ve grown into deviousness since, and maybe she has a point, but back then I wasn’t devious, I was just careful.
When it became clear that I was missing something important, that things weren’t quite as I understood them to be, I had one question to ask. But when I asked it everyone in the room ignored me so completely that I wondered if I’d spoken the words out loud. I waited until there was another chance and asked again. It drew the same non-reaction from everyone. It was either later that night or the next day when they did their big reveal. I can’t remember all of the details from those early days, but I do remember what I was wearing when they told me. It was summer and I had blue shorts on and my school shoes. I felt daft in shorts and shoes, but they’d taken my trainers away with all the other clothes I’d been wearing when it happened. I was taken to a bare room with green plastic chairs and a grey table in the middle. They sat me down and told me the answer to the question I’d asked twice previously. Tracy spoke slowly and clearly and everyone in the room was watching me closely like I was a magician about to do a trick. I listened to what she had to say and tried to understand it fully. It was a hot day and when she lifted her hands from the table she left a flurry of damp patches in front of her. I watched them disappear, Tracy finished talking, and they all looked at me, waiting for me to say something, so I said the only words I could think of to say – I asked when I would get my trainers back. It was like I’d dropped my pants and waved myself about. Everyone looked away and Mum started to cry and somebody said, ‘Bloody hell, he’s a cold fish isn’t he?’
Mum sat me down that night and told me I wasn’t making a good impression of myself. ‘You need to show some compassion Donald.’ I promised I would try harder. The next day I was back in the room with the green chairs. We all settled down and Tracy asked more questions. She wanted to know what I understood by ‘intent’. I listened carefully whilst she explained. ‘It’s important for us to know what you meant to do Donald, what you were thinking in the seconds before it happened and why you did what you did afterwards.’ She used the word ‘intent’ a couple more times but in my eight-year-old head I was only reminded of the night me and Matthew Thornton camped in his garden, his mum and dad taking turns to check on us from their bedroom window. I think they knew we wouldn’t last the night, and they were right, and we abandoned the tent an hour after it went dark and slept in bunk beds in his bedroom, happy to be safe indoors. That was all ‘intent’ meant to me back then. I tried to explain that I didn’t mean to do anything at all – that I was just playing outside and it went wrong. But Tracy wasn’t sure. She seemed to think there was something I wasn’t telling her, that I was keeping from her information she needed to know. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that there is something about me people don’t trust, and even as an eight-year-old I wasn’t convincing. Eventually they decided there were no more questions and we didn’t have to go back to the police station again. The next day I was back at school.
That was that, except I was taken out of class once a week and driven across town to a place called The Happy to Be Here Centre, where I went into a room with a woman called Karen and played for an hour. At the time I didn’t think it was strange, I didn’t think about it much at all; I was just happy to get out of lessons and play. There were some rules – you went in empty-handed and left empty-handed. If you wrote or painted anything, that had to stay in the room in a box with your name on it. And your mum wasn’t allowed in, so it was just me and Karen. It drove Mum mad that she had to wait outside. She didn’t trust me and she didn’t trust them. ‘What do you do in there?’ she asked.
‘Just play,’ I told her.
‘Well, play carefully,’ she said. And I tried to play carefully, but I’m still not sure to this day how you’re supposed to do that.
There were puppets, toy animals, toy cars, a doll’s house, model soldiers, teddy bears, and paints and paper. Sometimes I played with the toys, sometimes I painted. Karen would join in and do a picture too. She would tell me what she was planning to paint and then ask what I was painting. When I was playing with the toys she left me to it and watched. She sometimes asked what was going on in the game I was acting out and I would happily tell her.
‘The tiger has eaten the soldier’s friend so the soldier is hunting him through the doll’s house to kill him for revenge. He will wear a tiger’s tooth around his neck in honour of his friend.’
Probably something daft like that. I had no idea at the time that they were observing me. Seeing how I ticked. Seeing if I strangled the dolls and stabbed the teddy bears. It was understandable I suppose, but it seems a bit sneaky, spying on an eight-year-old when he thinks he’s just playing.
*
The kids at school didn’t say anything on the morning of my return, but they must have been
told not to, because there was a buzz of not saying anything everywhere. I’d only been off for a few days but the place was crackling with excitement. Mrs Walsh made everyone say, ‘Welcome back Donald,’ and I was aware of my fellow pupils’ eyes on me, checking to see if I looked different somehow. Their eagerness to question me was straining their jaws, I could tell, but it was hard for them to get a chance. Even in the yard it wasn’t going to happen – there were twice as many teachers on duty as usual, and whilst they normally stayed close to the doors with their hands wrapped around coffee cups, on my first day back they circulated and crisscrossed the yard like Scalextric cars around a track. It wasn’t until lunch break that anyone got close. The Hudson triplets must have clocked me on my way to the toilet because two seconds after the door swung closed, it banged open and before I even got my hands to my zip they were in front of me, a mini-army, jostling, asking, ‘What happened? Did you go to jail? What did your mum say? Was there loads of blood?’ I didn’t get chance to say a word before Mr Barker burst through the door and chucked us out and made us walk off in different directions, ignoring my plea that I really did need the toilet. The school’s vigilance persisted, and looking back I think it was a shame how they went about it. Of course the kids were interested, but we were all made very aware that it wasn’t something that should be discussed before, during, or after school. The school was trying to look after me I think, at least partly they were, but it didn’t really help. Everyone knew what had happened and everyone was wary of me. And then, when I did finally get back to being friendly with Matthew, my only real friend before all the trouble, he was pulled aside and they checked that he wasn’t asking anything he wasn’t supposed to. Pretty soon I became the boy you got into trouble for talking to.
*
For a while I wasn’t sure that anything too terrible had even happened that day. I had the suspicion that I was being tricked. As far as I was concerned when I jumped on my bike and raced home I wasn’t leaving the scene of anything momentous or dreadful. I knew something bad had happened, I knew someone was hurt and I might get into trouble, but I had no idea that the police would be involved. And when Tracy told me what the outcome had been, that seemed impossible and didn’t sit with my understanding of any of it. I didn’t believe them and I was at that shadowy age where I’d realised not everything grown-ups say is true. I’d had years of tales about Father Christmas, Tooth Fairies and carrots helping you see in the dark, and all of it turned out to be nonsense. And what I’d been told in the police station in Clifton seemed as far-fetched as a fat man in a red suit coming down chimneys with presents for all the children everywhere.
*
It was important for me to go back to where it happened. To see if there were any clues confirming what I was being told, or anything there to bolster my belief that I was being misled. Something as terrible as they were claiming couldn’t happen without evidence left behind, I was sure of that. But it was going to be tricky; I hadn’t been allowed out of the house alone since it happened. I did go out with Mum, but I was steered out of the front gate and turned ninety degrees to the right, walked up the hill, away from where it happened, no matter that we needed to go down the hill to get anywhere we needed to go. We would walk up Hawthorne Road for about a quarter of a mile, cut through an eventual side track, and then walk back down Kemple Street, avoiding the house where the trouble happened. It added a good twenty minutes onto all our trips, but I knew not to risk saying anything. Even when I was tired and we approached the fork in the road where one option would have us home in five minutes and the other would send us on a trek out of our way, I kept shut. Since the day the police had arrived at the door Mum had been prone to crying and anger in equal measures, and I was learning anything I said could provoke her. I was learning it was best to keep quiet. Words can trip you up.
I arrived at a plan. I would wait until Mum got herself to bed and then let myself out of the house an hour or so later. I would run down to where it happened, have a good look around, and see if I could find any evidence to support what they were saying. But on my first attempt I found myself being woken up for school in the morning; I’d slept through the whole night. The same thing happened the next morning, so when Mum was in the bathroom I had a rummage around in the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen and found an old plastic cooking timer, shaped like a chicken. When I heard Mum go to bed that night I set it for an hour and stuffed it under my pillow. Sure enough I fell asleep, but I woke when the muffled ringing vibrated underneath my head. I turned the timer off and crept out to Mum’s door. I listened carefully for any noise and when I heard a gentle snore I knew I had my chance. I didn’t bother changing; I wouldn’t be too long. I snuck out of the house in my pyjamas and school shoes, a torch in my hand.
It would only have been about midnight but it was a dark night, darker than I’d ever seen, and the street where I’d grown up looked as unfamiliar as when it was covered in a thick layer of snow. The stillness of the scene shocked me and brought me up short at the front gate, I wondered if I would be able to disturb it, but within moments of pulling the gate closed behind me I was a dark shadow, quickly working my way down the black and silent road. Five minutes later I was at the bottom of the hill, outside number five. I shone my torch on the pavement. I was looking for blood. I moved the beam left and right, in the road, along the kerb. I tried further up and further down, in case I’d misjudged the spot. But there were no dark patches of dried blood anywhere. I flashed my torch over the gate and shone the beam up the path to the front door. Nothing there either. I couldn’t understand it. There must have been blood left behind if what they were saying was true. I turned my attention to eye level, to see if there were any clues there I could find. I did a full, slow turn. Straight ahead was the junction at the bottom of the hill that took you either into Clifton or out of Clifton. Across the road stood a row of tall, grand houses with steep steps to take you up to their wide front doors. Back the way I came was the long climb which led to my house. And then, the final turn, and in front of me, the house where the little boy lived. No clues anywhere that I could see. It didn’t appear to me to be the scene of a tragedy of any kind. I started to get excited then, to believe my hunch that the adults were trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I was about to head home and climb into bed and think it over some more when I noticed the cards in the window for the first time. One of the cards had fallen against the window pane and was twisted round. I would be able to read what message had been written. I’d had no intention of going up to the house before, but I knew it was important to see the words in that card. I opened the gate as quietly as I could and snuck up the path to the window without setting off any alarms. I shone my torch at the black glass, leant in and read:
Dear Becky and Ian,
With Deepest Sympathy
There will never be the words.
He sleeps with the angels now.
With all our love,
Emma, Chris and Imogen
It became real in that moment. I still didn’t understand how it had happened, but I believed that I’d been told the truth. I turned to head down the path, to walk back the way I’d come. I took one step and a light popped on above me and illuminated the front garden like a stage. If I’d run and kept running I would have been away in seconds, but in my panic I ran to the middle of the garden and stopped. I turned and considered running back to the house to hide against the wall. In that moment of indecision, when I was frozen to the spot, as obvious as a tower on a hill, the curtains pulled back in the upstairs window and the little boy’s dad was there. In the middle of his garden, staring back at him, stood the boy who’d killed his two-year-old son two weeks before. He looked astounded. Then I ran.
2
I changed after the trouble. Mum says that I went into myself. I see it as the opposite – that I escaped myself. I called it ‘vanishing’ and quickly became good at it. The first time I tried it was just a few days after the police had talked t
o me for the final time. I can see now, looking back, that for a first vanishing it was quite ambitious. But back then I had no real idea what I was up to; I hadn’t the understanding of a vanishing that I have these days. At the time I just wanted to escape Mum’s upset and the darkness that had descended on us since the day the police knocked at the door. The idea came from an author’s visit to the school. He talked to our class about his writing and his books and I didn’t like him or his stories much, but one thing he said stuck with me. He told us that he spent his days in other worlds. He said that when he started writing and inventing the everyday world disappeared, and when it was going well he ended up somewhere that felt more real to him than the world he woke up in. I wanted some of that for myself, I wanted that magical escape, and whilst I couldn’t get the words down onto the page like he could so easily, I was good at disappearing to other worlds in my head.
The first time I tried it, my bed was a spaceship and I went to Neptune. I was space-crazy in those days – the books I’d been borrowing from the library were all about space, the pictures I’d been drawing in the play room at The Happy to Be Here Centre had been planets, stars and spaceships, and any film or programme that was set in space was likely to get me excited for days. I remember there was a school trip booked to a famous telescope, the Pilchard Telescope, where they said you could see other solar systems if the conditions were right. I was counting down the days, but in the end we moved just before the trip and Mum wrote me a note to take in on my last day, asking for the money back. I’d never known disappointment like it, and it seemed to me probably illegal to build a child’s hopes up so high before dashing them like they were nothing. I was sure that someone in authority would step in at the last minute and make it right. When they didn’t, and I finally realised that I really wasn’t going to see the giant telescope and far-off solar systems I let my displeasure show.
How the Trouble Started Page 1