Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘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.

If I could talk, I’d talk. 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.

‘We didn’t discuss it with Billy,’ he said. ‘John knew all about it, of course, because they were talking about it up and down the estate, but Billy mostly stays at home and does his own thing, like. He’s got his Playstation and his books. Or he goes off wandering, sometimes, with his mates. There’s half a dozen of them — no harm in any of them, not like the bloody teenagers we’ve got round here.

‘But as Jeanie says, Billy’s not stupid. He knew Mark had gone, and I imagine there was talk at school about what had happened. Must have been, mustn’t there? Anyway, he started brooding about it. Next thing we knew, he’s cutting stuff out of the newspapers and taping bits off the TV news. I suppose it hit him hard, this lad living right next door to him and being sort of his friend and everything.’

‘His best friend,’ Jean said softly.

Tom looked at her and shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There was five years between them.’

‘He gave Billy the poem,’ Jean said, talking to me more than to her husband. ‘That had to have meant something. I told you he had no friends his own age, Mister Castor. I think he thought Billy understood him. I think it must have hit him very hard when Billy stopped talking to him.’

She trailed off into silence.

There was an elephant in the living room with us, and I felt that it was time to try wrangling it a little. ‘When did Billy’s hands start to bleed?’ I asked.

Tom blanched at this blunt wording, but Jean took it squarely on the chin. ‘That was later,’ she said, her voice almost level. ‘The dreams came first.’

‘He dreamed about Mark?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really. At least, he didn’t see Mark in his dreams. He dreamed about a place. It was really dark there — so dark you couldn’t see anything, not even yourself. And he’d stumble around for a while, trying to find a way out. But he never could, so in the end he’d just sit down on the ground and wait.