Frances Fyfield - Trial by Fire

`There, there, no crying, love. Think about something else. There'll be nice things to do in the morning. Shh, now. Listen, I'll tell you a story.'

I'm frightened,' said William. 'Hug me. No one's ever going to hug me again.' It was said with utter and final conviction. She hesitated. Hugging William, even in this filthy pit, was a dangerous activity for a boy who could not distinguish between affection and desire.

She hugged him all the same. They might neither of them see morning.

`My mother never hugged me,' Bailey read. 'Never did anything like that, ever.

Dressed up and all that all the time, but never went in for hugging; it smudged her. Don't like her a lot and reckon she hates me. Jealous as sin. Hates me having friends. Always calls me darling child, like I haven't got a bloody name.' Bailey was examining one of a hundred fragments he had found in the desk in Evelyn's room, a mess of paper crammed into drawers, half-written letters and portions of school essays.

This page was mildly corrected in Antony Sumner's hand: Evelyn, no need to swear in essays. It diminishes your considerable talent for description. Please remember to write in full sentences, not a series of fragments. Try this paragraph. "A Description of My Family" again.'

She had tried again on the bottom of the same sheet: 'My mother is always staring into the distance and prefers I do not have a real name or identity. She has never loved me and always tries to prevent me having anything I want. The more I treasure something, the harder she will try to take it away.'

`Much better, but give examples,' Sumner annotated in a bored hand. 'An essay should illustrate the points it makes.'

`Well, she took away my camera, my new desk, my best clothes. She would never let me have friends or anything,' Evelyn had continued on an uncorrected sheet, apparently written for her own benefit, the standard of the English beginning to slip. 'Amazing she lets me have these English lessons. Because I asked Dad first, because it's pretty cheap and because she doesn't think it would be any fun. Didn't know, did she, how I love you. Thought she'd just be keeping me indoors while she's so bloody fat and I'm so thin. Ha ha.'

Beneath these fragments, of which Evelyn had kept dozens of pages corrected in Sumner's handwriting, Bailey found a pile of poignantly incomplete letters on primrose paper:

'My darling Antony, I love you so much it hurts. I want to kiss you all over, I'll do whatever you like. No one else listens to me except you and no one else notices me. Even if I had any friends, I couldn't bring them home, especially not Will. So I'm free to love you to pieces, and I do, I do. Hope you got my Valentine. Now that we have lessons with just us, I shall have you all to myself. She doesn't know. How can I write how much I love you?'

Scattered among the sheets of compulsive writing were random diary jottings, as if Sumner's tuition had brought about an obsessive habit with the pen and a constant urge to record, albeit incompletely. On scraps torn from exercise books lay the evidence of a saga of bitter disappointment. 'August 5: Mummy losing weight like an Ethiopian. Ha ha. Buying new things. I wonder if she wants him. Oh, God, she can't, she's old. Why? Because he's mine, that's why. I watch them going out for drinks. Dad pretends he doesn't notice.'

Next, a torn sheet, crumpled, straightened out again, kept against her better judgement: 'Watched them in the woods. Disgusting, yuck. He sucks her big tits, puts his thing in her, grunting like pigs. Why, why, why? I would have. I'm going to find William.

Must stop crying. Can't stop crying. How can you do this to me? I hate her, hate her. Only thing I ever really wanted.'

October 4: Dad buying things for her, only she never lets him buy anything for me.

Gold stuff, lots of it. Suppose she thinks she looks bloody wonderful. Dad trying to buy her back. Silly wanker. Antony talks to me, nice, to me, but pathetic, head somewhere else. That gold stuff is mine by right. What about me, Daddy? What about me, then? I am beginning..

`November 10: Where will they go in the cold? Not Bluebell Wood. In his car? Yuck.

A whole winter in a car? That won't do. Ha ha. I wonder about telling Dad, but what difference would it make? I got William to rap on the car window and scare them.'

`March 15: She's gone funny. He's gone off her; I knew he would. Now he'll come back to me. I want to, I want to, but he's making excuses not to come any more for my lessons. Why not? What have I done? How can he leave me? Surely he knows I don't mind about bitch face as long as he comes back.'

Then a flat statement on May 10: 'Followed him again. He was with someone else, kissing. Watched them a long time. He doesn't come here any more and doesn't even say hello to me.'

A gap of weeks and then more animation: 'Mummy phones him all the time, but he won't come back. She's done it, hasn't she? Driven him away. She doesn't know I can listen to her on the phone, doesn't even care if I do. Jangling gold and making phone calls. I can't say how much I hate her stinking face. She took him, she took him. Serves her right. Hate him, hate him, hate him.'

`June 5: She gets him to meet her! I'm going, too. With my k… '

Bailey paused in his reading, opened the next drawer. More paper, roughly torn sheets with crossings-out, sketched maps, a tube map of London, and a picture of a local craft shop, one of William's favourites, Bailey seemed to remember. There were lists, terse reminders on paper: 'Get washing liquid, v. useful. Hide bike, ask Dad for new one, don't tell.' Interspersed with the lists were strange descriptions, like brief catharses, literary attempts to distil an experience, full of slang in a deliberate and rebellious departure from the favoured style of the essays.

A passage dated the day of Sumner's committal: 'You'd like this, Mr Antony fucking Sumner. Ain't this kind of neat? You were in the wood again with the old sow who wants to shag you like a bitch in heat – she never let me have a dog, so I don't know how I know.

Says she'll run off with you, doesn't give a fuck for her daughter, husband, etc. Tell me news. Ha ha. Ants in her pants, ripping off clothes. You hit her with the stick and leave her there with her bum in the air and your stick on the ground. Gives me the idea. So I tiptoe up with my knife and then I tiptoe away again. Get my gold later, also clothes. I want to… Go on, then, rot. Daddy's the same today. In I come in the evening, go downstairs. "All this time studying, darling child?" he says. "Of course," I say.'

Bailey put down the page and found his hands were trembling. Sifted through the rest finding none of equal length or savagery, some of a similar degree of crudeness: 'At least I now know How to Fuck. William taught me. See what you missed, A.S.? Ha ha.' A few expressions of regret about something: 'Shouldn't ask Will to help, have to do something about Will.' Nothing else but reminders, dates, and scribbles, staccato scrawls like spittle on a page, a mind seized by itself, each day a new plan.

On the desk itself, a notice to the occupant: 'Holidays, Dad. See to W. Buy: (1)…'

The remainder of the white sheet a panic-stricken blank until the tiny scribble at the bottom:

'People watching me now.'

Oh, you are wrong, my dear. People have been entirely consistent in their failure to watch you. You might have known, thought Bailey, they would not change. We should all have watched you sooner, and where the hell are you now? He visualized her approach to the sobbing form of her mother, knife in hand, seeing in one wide-angled glance the evidence left to incriminate another, using the same neatness to litter the ground by one of the fires designed to discredit the hapless idiot who had assisted, perhaps, in the burial.