Thicker Than Water Read online

  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.

  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.

  ‘The ground . . .’ She hesitated, as if she really didn’t know how to say this. ‘He said it was warm. Like skin. But not soft like skin: it was all ridged and rough and shiny. He said it was like lava after a volcano. When it’s cooled, he said, you get miles and miles of this stuff like the surface of the moon.’ She smiled faintly. ‘He’d just done volcanoes at school.

  ‘And then he’d start to hear this voice, in the darkness. And he was sure it was Mark’s voice, even though he said it didn’t sound anything like. But there it was, this voice droning on and on. Not really talking to Billy, so he said. Just talking.’

  ‘About what?’

  She gave me a slightly haunted look. ‘What do you think? About hurting yourself. Cutting yourself open. About the way it feels when you cut into yourself and let the pain out. About how wounds are roses and blood is wine.’

  One of those leaden silences fell between us: the kind where everyone is expecting someone else to be the next to speak, and it gets more awkward the longer you leave it.

  ‘Did the news articles mention that Mark was a self-harmer? ’ I asked.

  ‘Some of them,’ said Tom. ‘But he could have got most of it from the poem, couldn’t he? It’s all there. We just tried talking him out of it at first, because he’s bright and he’s a good lad, like Jeanie said. We thought it would be a nine days’ wonder, like most things are when you’re that age. We took the tapes and all the bits of paper away and locked them in a cupboard. And we kicked him out when he got back after school to play in the adventure playground or over in the park. We thought he just needed his mind taking off it.’

  ‘And that,’ said Jean, with heavy finality, ‘was when the bleeding started. Just a drop, at first, but how can you have blood, Mister Castor, if you haven’t cut yourself? And the more we wiped it away, the more it came. We took him in to see the GP, and then a dermatologist, but they don’t have a clue. They were talking about our Billy being a haemophiliac, as though that explains it. But his blood clots normally if you test it, so it isn’t that.’

  ‘And that bloody priest . . .’ Tom interposed, but then he seemed to think better of that line of discussion and left the words hanging.

  ‘The priest?’ I echoed. ‘Is that the man you mentioned before? The man in the white raincoat?’ Tom didn’t answer, but the look he threw at Jean was of the he-already-knows variety. ‘Was his name Gwillam?’ I asked.

  After a strained pause, Jean nodded. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘What did he want? Was it something to do with Billy?’

  Another look passed between them.

  ‘It was my fault,’ Tom muttered, ‘for mentioning it to Father Merrick at Bethesda’s. I should have kept my mouth—’

  ‘I don’t think it’s something I feel comfortable talking about, Mister Castor,’ Jean broke in, her tone as tense and taut as if Gwillam had put an indecent proposal to her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  That left me somewhat high and dry. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s not my place to ask. And I’m grateful for what you’ve told me already.’ I stood up. ‘See what the hospital says about Billy,’ I said. ‘Hopefully he’ll just wake up tomorrow not remembering any of this. But I’d get him out of this place, if you’ve got anywhere else to send him. He needs to be in a different atmosphere for a while.’

  ‘There’s my sister’s,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘In Croydon.’

  The thought of sending anyone to Croydon for their health was as surreal as anything else in this conversation. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That sort of thing. Just for a couple of weeks. You’ve got the school holid
ays coming up. Pack him off out of this.’

  But Jean was shaking her head. ‘He stays here,’ she said, ‘with me. Or we all go together. If my boy is going through something bad, then I’m the one who looks after him. Thank you for your time, Mister Castor.’

  There was no misinterpreting her tone. The consultation was over.

  ‘I think it’s this place more than anything else that’s making him sick,’ I said, persisting with my diagnosis in the teeth of her new-found determination. ‘It’s your choice, obviously. And I know it’s complicated. It always is. But look, if anything should come up that you want to talk to me about . . .’ I gave them my card, with the solemnity of someone who hasn’t been doing that kind of thing for very long. The card is a recent innovation, obtained from a printer who offered to do me a job lot of a hundred for free by way of an introductory offer. If he’d known the size of my client base he would have cut that back to ten.

  Jean turned the card in her hand, and Tom looked over her shoulder at it, his expression changing to a slightly pained frown.

  ‘Spiritual services,’ Jean read aloud. ‘That’s what you get from an exorcist, is it? What does it mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means a lot of different things,’ I said. ‘I set up wards against the dead, advise people how to make their houses safe, that sort of thing. I persuade ghosts to go away if they’re making a nuisance of themselves, or else I find out what it is they want. I can tell you if someone you haven’t seen for a while is alive or dead, and if they’re dead I can invite them over to talk to you. I do kids’ parties too, sometimes. Don’t ask for references on that, though, because I haven’t had any satisfied customers yet. The number on the back is my landlady’s: if I don’t pick up on the office number, you can leave a message for me there.’

  Jean gave the card to Tom to look after, and he slipped it into a back pocket. I stood up, feeling like I’d overstayed my welcome.