Luca Veste - The Dying Place

AVON

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Luca Veste 2014

Cover image © Alamy 2014

Cover design © ClarkevanMeurs Design

Luca Veste asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007525584

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007525560

Version: 2015-07-27

For Angelina ‘Angie’ Veste

11/04/1936 – 07/05/2014

My nana. My nonna.

She loved her family and her family loved her.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Now

Before

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The Farm: Six Months Ago

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Farm: Five Months Ago

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The Farm: Three Months Ago

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

The Youth Club

Chapter 14

The Farm: Three Days Ago

Part Two

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

The Farm: Two Days Ago

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

The Farm: Two Days Ago

Chapter 19

The Farm: Yesterday

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Home

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

The Youth Club

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Part Three

Home: Six Months Ago

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Toxteth: Liverpool 8

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Bootle

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Peter

Chapter 36

Epilogue

In Conversation with Luca Veste

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

No one believes you. Nothing you say is the truth. They know it every time you open your mouth and start speaking, hoping to be believed. Everything is just a lie in disguise, dressed up nice, trying to be something it’s not.

Mutton dressed as lamb.

That’s just how it is. You go down the social – or the jobcentre as they call it now, although that’ll probably change to something else soon enough – and try to explain why you’re still worth sixty quid a week of taxpayers’ hard-earned money . Trying to justify yourself even though you haven’t worked in years. Get that look which seeps into you after a little while.

I’ve heard it all before, love.

There’s no let-up. Being judged at every turn. Lucky enough to have more than one kid? Unlucky enough to lose your part-time job working the till at some shitty shop? For your fella to piss off with some slag from around the corner? Doesn’t matter, shouldn’t have had more kids than you can afford. Doesn’t matter that you’re a single parent – I’m paying your benefits.

You live on a council estate, on benefits, and that’s it. You’re scum. Do not pass go, here’s a few hundred quid to pay some dickhead landlord who thinks five ton isn’t too much for a terraced house that’s overrun with damp. Mould growing on the walls if you dare put any furniture too close to it.

Your kids then become scum as well. Shit schools, shit kids. Bored with life, constantly pissed off because you can’t afford the latest frigging gadget that Sony or Apple put out. Every six months without fail, something new that every other kid in the school has, that they can’t be without.

You try. You really do. But it’s never enough. Sixteen hours working in a supermarket, a few hours doing cleaning. Bits of crap here and there. Never enough.

No one believes you.

Your kids get older. Get in trouble. Bizzies knocking on your door at two in the morning, hand on the back of your fifteen-year-old son.

He’s had too much to drink. Could have got himself into a lot more trouble. Should keep an eye on him more, love.

That judgement again. Always there, surrounding you.

You try and explain. Tell them he’d said he was staying at his mate’s, or staying at his uncle’s house. With his cousins.

Get that look back.

I’ve heard it all before, love.

You want to scream. You want to pull the little bastard into the house by his stupid frigging head and beat the shit out of him. Like your dad would do to your brothers if they ever got caught doing stupid shit.

You try your best. Every day. It’s never enough. The crap wages you get for working two, three, different jobs barely matches what you were getting on benefits. So you think, what’s the point? You’re tired. You want to be lazy. Exhausted by the sheer weight of being alive. Everyone else around you seems to be doing sod all. You want to do that for a while.

The kids get worse. All boys, so the house is either deathly quiet whilst they’re all out, getting up to God knows what. Or, it’s a cacophony of noise. The moaning, the groaning. The smells of teenagers on the cusp of manhood, burning into your nostrils, hanging in the air.

No one believes you.

When one of them doesn’t come home for days, you shout and scream as much as you possibly can, but no one cares.

They think he’s just done a bunk. Gone to see a girl. Gone to get pissed, stoned, off his face somewhere. He’ll turn up eventually. They always do.

Your kind always does.

You try and tell them it’s different. That your lads have always been good at letting you know where they are, or if they’re going to be away for any time at all. That they wouldn’t just leave without saying anything.

They give you that look.

I’ve heard it all before, love.

You try and get people interested, but no one cares. The papers aren’t interested. Thousands of people go missing every year. No one cares about your eighteen-year-old son, missing for weeks … months.

You believe he’s okay. You make yourself believe it.

You know though. As a parent, you know.

Something has happened to him.

It’s not until you’re watching his coffin go behind the curtain – fire destroying everything that made him your son and turning it into ash – that they start to believe you.

It’s too late now, of course.

Sorry, love.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

The plan hadn’t been for him to be in this position. Not yet, anyway. He was supposed to be there to see it through. It was his idea, his design. None of them would have thought of doing it without him. He was the catalyst, the spark that brought them all together.