Thicker Than Water (17 page)

‘Stevie Rawlings saw,’ he mumbled. ‘He was over by Sandford, on three, and he said . . . what this bloke said. Bic climbed up on the ledge, and he just stood there. Stevie shouted to him, but Bic didn’t answer or anything. Then he leaned forward, like he was gonna jump off, and this bloke caught him in the air, kind of thing. Pulled him back, before he could go over. That’s what Bic said, too, before he fainted.’

The mood in the room changed, as I went from potential enemy to something less easily definable.

‘I’m calling 999,’ Tom Daniels muttered, crossing to the phone.

Jean stroked her son’s cheek again, and then stood up on legs that seemed understandably shaken. She wiped her bleary eyes with the heel of her hand.

‘You were here before,’ she said, giving me a wary, searching look. ‘Yesterday.’

‘To see Kenny Seddon,’ I confirmed.

‘He’s in the hospital. He was mugged.’

I let that word slide, although it seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the frenzied industry of Kenny’s attacker; the threshing of his flesh with a straight razor until the floor of his car filled up like a well with his blood. ‘I know,’ I admitted.

‘And you’re . . . nothing to do with the church, are you?’

‘No. I’m an exorcist.’

She nodded as though that answer confirmed something she’d already guessed. She started to say something, but that was when her husband got through to the emergency services, and his clipped answers to the standard questions cut her off short. ‘This place is sick,’ was all she said, and then she returned her attention to her unconscious son.

There wasn’t much she could do for him, but such as it was, she did it. She got John to go and get a cold flannel to drape over Bic’s forehead, although the heat of the day had faded by this time and the room actually felt a little chilly. Hedging her bets, she brought a blanket in from one of the bedrooms and covered him with it. She fetched some pillows, too, but then seemed to have second thoughts about whether or not his head should be raised, so she made John take them back again and bring a glass of water so she could wet Bic’s lips.

By this time Tom Daniels was finished on the phone. ‘They said there’ll be an ambulance along inside of half an hour,’ he said to his wife.

‘He could be bloody well dead by then,’ she said bitterly. ‘God forbid.’

‘He’s breathing steadily,’ I pointed out. ‘And you can see his eyes moving under the lids. I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.’

Jean picked up on the apparent contradiction, staring up at me hard from where she knelt at Bic’s head.

‘Then what did you mean before?’ she said. ‘When you said he was.’

I hesitated. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry these people and add to the problems they already had on their plate – particularly given how little I really knew about what was going on here. On the other, I didn’t want to fob them off with some bullshit when their kid was lying comatose on the sofa – and had been an inch away from killing himself a moment before for reasons that seemed more geographical than psychological.

‘You said this place is sick,’ I said. ‘I think I know what you mean. And I think that Bic – Billy – has caught the same sickness. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was in a trance state of some kind.’ I looked from her to Tom, and then to the older boy, John, who was back loitering in the doorway again. I could have added that John had seemed pretty out of it too [ ou ol, in a different but equally scary way, but I suspected that it would derail the discussion into a pointless argument. I appealed to him as a witness instead. ‘Bic told us that, didn’t he? That he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, or how he got there.’

John nodded but didn’t speak.

‘Well, we’ll take care of it now,’ Tom said, turning his gaze from his older son to me and keeping it there until he was sure I’d got the message. I nodded, accepting the brush-off without argument. He was right. I had no business being here.

But as I headed for the door, Jean spoke a single word. ‘No.’

I stopped and turned. Jean released her hold on her son and stood again. Husband and wife exchanged an asymmetrical stare: surprised and affronted on his side, cold and calm on hers.

‘You heard him,’ Jean said. ‘He’s an exorcist.’

Tom huffed out breath in an exasperated grunt. ‘Oh not that bloody rubbish again! Didn’t we have enough of this with that frigging nutcase in the white coat?’ I pricked my ears up at that. Gwillam? Gwillam had been here? Why? But Tom Daniels was still talking and there was no opening to slip the question into. ‘It’s just his mind, woman. It’s bloody sick ideas he’s got in his head from the other little psycho, isn’t it? Poems and bloody pornography! I’ve sat by and watched and I’ve said nothing, but enough is enough. That filth poisoned his mind, and any other man would have smacked it out of him long before now. He doesn’t need an exorcist, he needs to – he needs a—!’

Words failing him, Tom brandished his clenched fist to illustrate what Bic needed. Jean stared at it as if it was a slug she’d found in a lettuce. After a moment he lowered it again, some of his belligerence fading as he realised how little impression it had made.

‘The day you touch him,’ Jean said, her quiet voice sounding very distinct after Tom’s little tirade, ‘will be the last day on this earth that you have a family. I’ll go out that door and they’ll go with me.’

Tom blinked. I saw a guy once get hit in the eye with a piece of a car tyre, when the tyre exploded after he overfilled it. That was how Tom Daniels looked, more or less: as though some mechanism whose workings he was sure he knew had just blown up in his face and left him bloody.

‘John,’ Jean Daniels said after a strained pause. ‘Go and wait on the street for that ambulance. Tell them where to come. They could waste ten minutes traipsing around this place.’

John protested half-heartedly, but gave it up on the second repetition and did as he was told. Jean crossed the room to close the door behind him. Tom stared at her with troubled eyes, clearly aware that there’d just been a
coup d’état
and – it seemed to me – not wanting to put a foot wrong before he’d had the new constitution explained to him.

‘There’s things that have been going on,’ Jean told me, with a catch in her voice.

‘You never saw very much of her,’ Mrs Daniels said. ‘Mrs Seddon. Did you, Tom?’

We were talking in the kitchen so as not to disturb Bic – or perhaps because we were talking about things that Jean didn’t want her son to hear. It was a cramped, functional little galley: there was room for the three of us in there, but not a lot left over. The kitchen knife that Jean had been wielding when I first saw her lay in the sink, protruding from a plastic bowl full of unwashed dishes. My eyes kept straying to it as I listened.

‘Hardly ever saw her at all,’ Tom agreed. ‘Only she did the shopping, some days. You’d see her coming up the stairs with her bags. Never had a word to say to anyone.’ He was pathetically eager to please: a willing collaborator with the new regime of Jean the First.

‘And once . . .’ his wife prompted.

‘Once she had a black eye, and a sort of a cut on her lip. It looked like someone had given her a bit of a hiding. If it had been anyone else, I’d have asked them if they were all right, but I didn’t feel like I could. Not to someone I’d never even spoken to. It would have felt like nosing.’

I thought of Jean’s monologue at the door the other day.
Nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does.
‘Did you tell anyone else?’ I asked. ‘The police?’

Tom rolled his eyes and Jean scowled bleakly. ‘I called
them
a few times,’ she said, with a contemptuous emphasis on the pronoun. ‘Not just then, but later on when they had the fights. Smashing things and screaming at each other at two in the morning. I knew he was hitting her. I didn’t need to see it. I could hear it.’

‘Hear what, Jean?’ I asked, wanting to be sure I was getting the right end of the stick.

‘Hear him hitting, and her – making the noises you make when you’re hit.’

‘Crying out?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Not exactly. Grunting. Gasping. She didn’t ever scream or cry: she was as tough as nails, that one. I don’t think she wanted to give him the satisfaction.’

‘You’re talking about her in the past tense,’ I said. ‘Did something happen to her?’

‘She left him,’ Tom Daniels said, with flat and absolute conviction. ‘For a younger bloke. A real flash Harry, he was. Used to work for some builder’s merchant’s down Blue Anchor Lane, but he looked like an Italian waiter with his long black hair and his motorbike. And he had this palaver all over his face.’ He gestured vaguely towards his own forehead. ‘Earrings on his eyes, sort of thing. I don’t know why anyone would do that to themselves, and on a man . . .’ He tutted, leaving the obvious verdict unspoken. ‘He used to come and see her on a Saturday afternoon when Seddon was on his allotment down Surrey Square. Ten in the morning till one in the afternoon, every Saturday. As long as the weather held, he never missed it. And from what I heard, neither did she.’

Jean winced at this crude single entendre, but she confirmed Tom’s version of events with a curt nod, only qualifying it with a ‘Well, there’s always talk.’ As a defence of Mrs Seddon’s virtue, it was less than spirited. ‘He went mental when he found out she’d gone,’ she went on. ‘Seddon did, I mean. Running up and down the stairways shouting after her, asking everyone if they’d seen her. He had the police in and everything, only they said it was a missing-persons and they don’t investigate a missing-persons unless there’s . . . you know. Unless they think there was funny business.’

‘How long ago was this?’ I asked. ‘That she left Kenny, I mean?’

‘Nineteen months, now,’ said Tom promptly. ‘Just before Christmas, it was. Has to have been, because he pulled down all their decorations after she went. I reckon Christmas was like bloody Lent for that poor lad that year.’

‘For her son?’ I clarified, and Jean nodded.

‘That was what I was coming to, really,’ she said. ‘The young lad. Mark. After she left, he used to hang around here like a lost soul. He’d left school by then, but he was too young to be on supplementary, so he didn’t have any money to spend. He didn’t run with any of the gangs.’

‘Didn’t seem to have any mates at all, to be honest,’ Tom chipped in.

‘He just sat, out there on the walkway, the livelong day. Bouncing a ball off a wall, or reading a comic sometimes. And sometimes some of the younger kids would sit with him, on a weekend or after school, because he had the comics – the American ones, you know, with Spiderman and whatnot – and he’d let the little ones take them away when he’d finished reading them.’

‘So that was how Billy got to know him.’ Jean’s tone became more sombre and her eyes defocused. This part she was remembering more vividly. ‘He’d sit with Mark for an hour or more, just talking about superheroes and superpowers. And he’d come in with an armload of Superman and Spiderman and X-Man and Daredevil-Man, and sit on that sofa -‘ she nodded towards the living room, one skin of brickwork away on the other side of the wall that faced her ‘- for hours. In his own little world.

‘Then I found the poem.’

Tom’s face darkened at the word. ‘Show him,’ he suggested. ‘Show it to him.’

‘I don’t know if I kept it,’ Jean said. And then, abandoning the subterfuge immediately, ‘All right.’

She got up and turned her chair round. Using it as an ad hoc stepladder, she climbed up onto the seat and reached into the space on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. A moment later she got down again and handed me a sheet of paper: lined, folded into four, ragged along the left-hand edge where it had been torn from a pad or an exercise book.

I opened it up and read in silence. Twelve lines in small, neat handwriting with only one crossing-out.

It’s the easy choice._

But I can’t, so my knife has to be my voice.

I sing. Do you hear me sing? But what you don’t know

Is what that sounds like inside me, in the depths below.

I’m full of pain. Like a bottle full of coke.

I take the blade and it just needs one stroke.

It comes out, but it changes as it flows.

Water becomes wine. My wound becomes a rose.

The pressure is balanced, outside and in.

The torment is over, the future can begin.

In that moment I know where I belong.

So you see why I need the blade to make my song.

The crossing out was in the fifth line.
I’m full of pain
had originally been
I’m full of darkness
.

‘Mark wrote this?’ I asked.

Jean nodded. ‘Or copied it from somewhere. And he gave it to Billy as a present. Because he thought Billy would get what he was going on about, Billy being such a bright little lad. So after that—’

‘I put my foot down,’ Tom said. ‘I told him to have nothing to do with Mark. Not even to talk to him. I said if he did, I’d stop his pocket money and pull him out of the school football team.’

Jean took the sheet of paper out of my hands and folded it up again, as though its dangerous doggerel had to be silenced. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured me. ‘So that was that, we thought. And then in the summer – I suppose that would be a year ago, wouldn’t it, so you’re right, Tom, it must be longer since she went – in the summer Mark jumped off the walkway out there and killed himself. And it came out at the inquest that he’d been cutting himself. For years. Which was what he was telling us, if we’d only cared enough to listen.’ She waved the sheet of paper like a tiny white flag of surrender. ‘What can you say, Mister Castor?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘What kind of love did he get at home, if his mother ups and leaves him for a brickie with a fancy hairdo, and his father is an animal who just hits out all the time at everyone around him? It was for me to say something, and I only thought about Billy. About my own.’

She relapsed into dismal silence. Tom seemed thrown by the sudden detour into moral philosophy, but he struggled on manfully.