How the Trouble Started (5 page)

I haven’t seen anyone since we left Clifton. No therapists, psychotherapists, or counsellors. There was no legal requirement and Mum thought it better not to dwell on any of it. ‘They’ve done tests Donald. On soldiers back from war who saw and did terrible things. Those that went to see head doctors and talked about it and relived it over and over recovered more slowly than those that kept shut and got on with things.’ So that was that. As far as she was concerned the second we closed the door of the new house in Raithswaite it was finished with. Outside of the house was a town where nobody knew about it, inside the house it wouldn’t be mentioned. We only ever spoke about that day once, and not even properly then. It was after the last police interview. She sat me down at the kitchen table and looked at me and said,

‘Donald. Was there anything you could have done to stop it? The accident?’

I stalled for time. ‘I shouldn’t have gone past number sixty-five,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t mean that. Was there anything you could have done to stop it from happening when you were down there?’

I shook my head.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Go through it one more time for me. And it’s just you and me now, you won’t get into trouble.’

So I told it again. The same as I’d told it at the police station. How I was riding my bike and I didn’t see him until it was too late, when he was suddenly there in front of me. She interrupted.

‘What do you mean “suddenly”? There was
nothing
you could do?’ she asked. She was staring at me as if she might never blink again. I stuck with what I’d said at the police station. ‘I didn’t know what had happened until I got up and saw him,’ I told her. She took a deep breath and rocked her head from left to right as if she was shaking any doubts away for good.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Bad things happen all the time to people all over the world. There have been thousands before you and there will be thousands after. The best thing you can do is to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and get on with things.’

She looked at me again. ‘As for that little lad and his mother . . .’

I waited for what she was going to say about the little boy and his mum, I’d been waiting for weeks, but the words never came. After a long silence she shook her head and hugged her cup. That was her final comment on the matter. Sometimes she looked worried that I was even
thinking
about it. She would squint at me when I’d been quiet for a while, as if to say,
You better not be thinking those kind of thoughts in this house Donald
.

For a while being in a new town helped. The fact that I was trying to settle kept me busy. And there was Mum and her moods to duck and hide from. But it never went away. I don’t see how it ever could. I tried to control my thinking. If something came on TV that brought back memories I turned the TV off. If I saw something that reminded me when I was out and about I looked away or walked off in the other direction. When any discussion in a lesson brought back a memory I stopped listening, regardless of whether it would get me into trouble. But it didn’t work. You can’t stop thinking about something just because you want to.

Close your eyes.

Empty your head of all of its thoughts.

Don’t picture a clown.

So I’ve been thinking about it for years. My brain is drawn to that morning and its consequences over and over and I can’t leave it alone, like wasps and jam. My fingers work at the itch until the skin gives way and then I keep scratching deeper. The panic has grown along with my comprehension. When I was eight I understood it to be a bad thing like I understood lying, hitting and kicking, and war to be bad things. Kindness, sharing and caring were good things. That was my moral compass. Back then I didn’t realise what it
meant
to have killed someone. That every second I was alive he wasn’t. That every time I looked at the sky, stroked a dog, ate a cake, ran a race, drank a drink, read a book, went to sleep, cleaned my teeth, combed my hair, woke up, sat down, stood up, he couldn’t. And all the things he couldn’t do, his mum and dad were there to see him not doing them. I didn’t understand back then that every moment I was alive he was dead. I didn’t understand that he could never do anything ever again.

It took a while after it happened before I started thinking thoughts like that. There was no terror at first, not like there is now. I was upset back then, but the real truth of it has crept up over the years. On a good day I can convince myself that I was involved in a terrible accident where someone ended up dead and there was nothing I could have done about it. I can breathe on those days. On a bad day the only thought in my head is:
I killed a little boy
. On a bad day breathing is shallow, there’s not enough oxygen in the air and there’s not enough air in a whole sky for my lungs. I see risk everywhere. Every time someone gets in a car, every time someone crosses a road. Every time someone mentions they have a headache. I see and hear those things and expect they are going to end in disaster. I’m surprised when I leave the house and return safely in the evening. I’m surprised to see that Mum has made it through the day too. Frankly, it’s a hundred tiny shocks to me that anyone makes it through a whole day. During a bad period every part of my body and brain is only made of guilt. Hands, arms, feet, legs, blood, bones – all cast-iron guilt. Heavy, black and dragging. They had a book on display in the library a few months ago:
Guilt and How It Gets in the Way
. I took it down from the shelf and went for a read in a quiet corner. There was a chapter on what guilt is, a chapter on self-esteem, a chapter on enforcing boundaries, a chapter on reclaiming your life. As I flicked through it, it dawned on me that it was a book for people who had no reason to feel guilt at all. It was a book for stupid people. There were no chapters on what you should do if you’d killed someone and guilt was pulling you to the ground. I was angry. For the few seconds I carried the book from the display to my chair I felt the sharp ache of hope. I thought there might be something in those pages that could help. Something that would absolve me. I dropped the book to the floor and kicked it under a shelf and went home and cried. On a bad day it’s like I’m filling with water from the inside and there’s nothing anyone can do, not even Mr Bowering, to stop me from drowning.

And then there was hell to consider. I looked into hell. I had to. There can’t be too many things you would end up in hell for, but killing a two-year-old must be on the list. I researched it at the library. I’d been feeling sick about it for weeks so I thought it might be better to get a look at where I was heading. I told the lady who was helping me find the books that it was for a school project. ‘It’s a bit gruesome,’ she said, ‘I think you drew the short straw. Next time try and get heaven.’

She gathered a few books together and I took them to the reference room and started to read. I didn’t understand some of the passages at all, but there were lots of pictures of flames and burning men and the devil. I read in one book that hell was eternal damnation, that it was always burning away and always hot. Another book said that some people believed hell to be cold and gloomy, and one said that Earth itself and here and now was hell. That one made some sense to me. But if scholars couldn’t decide what hell even
was
, how was I to know what to expect? I saw the librarian who’d helped me putting books back onto shelves. I pushed my books to one side and went over to her.

‘Do you believe in hell?’ I asked.

She stopped what she was doing, put a big book down on a table. She straightened herself and held her hands together and stared off into space. After a few seconds she glanced around to see if anyone was near, and leant in close to me and said, ‘No. No I don’t. I think it’s all mumbo-jumbo.’

She smelt nice. She smelt of hope.

‘Thanks,’ I told her.

‘But don’t put that in your project,’ she said.

I left the library with that thought in my head. Mumbo-jumbo. Hell was mumbo-jumbo. And that from a woman who must have read a lot of books. It was something to cling on to.

But the terror of it never goes away. You can go for days thinking that you’re doing well, but all you’re doing is holding the panic at bay for a while, and that feeling of terror and horror is something that is only ever one thought away. The only thing I can compare it to is a feeling I had back when I was about six years old, back before I’d done anything wrong. It was a summer night and still light and warm outside but I’d been put to bed. My window was open and I could hear older children playing a game of football out in the street, neighbours were in their gardens, chatting to each other. Even my mum was down there. I wasn’t tired at all and wanted to be with everyone having fun. I tossed and turned and grumbled to myself. I was thirsty. I went down to ask if I could have a drink and maybe a snack too. The front door was shut, which was unusual; when Mum was out at the front she normally left it open. I opened the door onto a silver-grey and silent world. I walked out into the street and looked up and down, but there was nobody there. All the houses were sat back in the shadows, no lights on anywhere. The world had ended and I was six years old and terrified. I started running up and banging on neighbours’ doors, shouting and yelling. Where was everyone? I was halfway up the street when I heard Mum shouting for me. I turned and saw her running towards me in her nightie. I ran as fast as I could, back towards her. She grabbed hold of me. ‘Good God Donald, what on earth are you doing? Why are you waking the street up?’

‘I heard you all talking and I wanted a drink so I came downstairs.’

‘It’s one o’clock in the morning.’

‘I heard everyone out in the street.’

‘That was five hours ago! You’ve been asleep for five hours.’

I was confused. I couldn’t have been asleep. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I remembered that I didn’t feel tired at all.

A few of the neighbours’ bedroom lights were on now and they were looking down onto us as Mum dragged me back to our house, waving sorry to everyone, and pointing a finger at me, shrugging her shoulders. I was still frightened and confused but no longer terrified. But that moment when I walked out into the deserted street, when I thought the world had ended and I was left alone at six years old in the dark, the terror I felt then is the same feeling that has always been there since the day of the trouble. It’s not always right in front of me, jumping up and down. Sometimes it is, but even when it’s not, it’s lurking, it’s on my back. What makes it worse is that there isn’t anything anyone can do to make it better. Mum running down the street to me in the middle of the night can’t make this terror disappear.

We didn’t move just because I was caught in the garden and because Mum was scared of bumping into the boy’s parents. There were problems with older lads too. The first time it happened was just a few days after the trouble. There was a knock at the door early one evening and when Mum answered it I heard a voice I didn’t recognise. Nothing seemed too unusual until our door was quickly slammed shut and Mum came into the back room and told me to get upstairs. Her voice sounded like stone being shredded and I quickly did as I was told. It was a summer night and my bedroom window was open and I could hear people out on the street. After a couple of minutes lying on my bed listening to the voices and wondering what was happening I walked over to the window and looked out. I could see a group of what seemed to me men, although they were probably only lads the age that I am now, and they were on the pavement in front of our house. They looked like they were having fun – a group chatting in the evening heat, a couple of them on bikes, some holding cans at their side. They didn’t seem like trouble to me and I wondered what had been said to Mum to make her slam the door and turn her voice so strange. Then one of them looked up at the window and clocked me. He pointed without saying a word, and they all turned and looked. It was a strange reaction they had. There was a cheer, some pretend gasps and the odd word shouted. One of them threw an empty can, but it didn’t get close and ended up in next door’s hedge. Mum must have been as fast to the phone as I was upstairs because a police car drove down the road then and the lads scattered, discarding more cans as they went. After the police had gone and I was allowed back downstairs I asked Mum what had been said when she opened the door, but she wouldn’t tell me. She shook her head and said it was just a lot of silly boys and tried to raise a smile. But then they came back the next night. Mum knew not to answer the door this time, she sent me upstairs again and made sure I went to her bedroom at the back. I could still hear them, faintly, out at the front, shouting to each other, maybe shouting to me, I couldn’t tell. They came back regularly, but because they didn’t throw anything again or do anything illegal the police stopped answering Mum’s calls. Mum grew quieter and thinner with the stress of it. Her cheeks hollowed out, the patches under her eyes darkened, and her breath started to smell. One Friday night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard hissing below me down in the front garden. In my sleepiness I imagined a massive snake sliding around down there, but then I heard giggling and I knew the naughty lads were back. I thought about going to tell Mum, but if they were just pretending to be snakes in our front garden, well, that was better than knocking on the front door and making her cry, so I left them to it. The next morning we got ready to go into town. When Mum turned to lock the door she froze with the key in mid-air. I was stood behind her and had to step to the side to see what was causing the delay. Someone had sprayed ‘Psycho Killer!’ in red paint across the front door. The key never made it into the lock. Mum grabbed me by the shoulder, pushed me back inside and slammed the front door shut behind us. She went straight up to her room. I did the same and we lay in silence in our bedrooms. Or maybe she was crying quietly, she had been doing that quite often. Lying there, it took me a minute before I realised that I was the psycho killer the paint was referring to.

It was when Mr Mole turned up that I realised we wouldn’t be staying in Clifton much longer. Even before the trouble Mum wasn’t the friendliest of people and we didn’t have neighbours calling round all the time, but we both liked Mr Mole and he seemed to like us back, despite Mum’s reserve. He came to see us a few days after the accident and then he arrived a couple of days after the graffiti was sprayed. Mr Mole was one of the neighbours Mum would leave me with and I’d spent lots of days at his house, reading and playing, as he sat with his newspaper, or did the washing up, or mowed his lawn. I liked Mr Mole, he was my favourite of the neighbours to be left with, and we always went to him first. But occasionally he would be away, or he wouldn’t be well, and I would have to go elsewhere. Those were always long and awkward days. Mrs Armer would insist I helped her with her baking and cleaning and would try to teach me how to knit. Mr and Mrs Seedall had never had children and watched me like I was an animal in a zoo, like I might suddenly turn wild and decide to break everything I could get my hands on. At the Seedalls’ you weren’t allowed to watch TV and at three o’clock every afternoon Mrs Seedall went upstairs for her afternoon nap and everything had to be even more silent than it had been all morning. Mr Seedall had no idea what to do with me for that hour, but he must have been given instructions not to let me out of his sight, so we sat in the front room, both pretending to read, and time did long division on itself until one hour felt like ten. In some ways the stillness at their house prepared me for life with Mum after the trouble.

But Mr Mole was easy to stay with. He didn’t care what I did or didn’t do. I could go anywhere in his house and he didn’t follow. I could turn the TV on and off whenever I wanted and watch anything I liked. If he was working in the garden, or decorating a room, I could help or sit on the couch and read my books and let him get on with it. I did have to take his dog, Scruffy, for a walk with him every afternoon, but he always let me hold the lead and I enjoyed that anyway. When Mum wasn’t well once, and had to go and stay with Aunty Sandra to be looked after, I stayed with Mr Mole for a couple of weeks because it was term time and I couldn’t miss that much school. It was a brilliant two weeks. We had fish and chips from the chippy, he let me have shandy when he had his drinks in the evening, and he let me stay up later than Mum did. I watched programmes with him Mum would never let me watch. And I don’t think it was just me who was sad when it was over. ‘We’ve had a good time together, haven’t we Donald?’ he said, when Mum turned up and I had to go and pack my stuff. ‘He’s been good company.’

When he turned up after the graffiti was sprayed he brought with him a box of vegetables from his garden. He spoke more loudly and cheerfully than he usually did. I followed him and Mum into the kitchen and answered Mr Mole’s questions and wondered when Mum was going to start speaking. But she didn’t speak at all. She looked at the box on the kitchen table as if it contained dead puppies, not potatoes and cabbage, and I thought she might burst into tears. When it became clear that Mum wasn’t going to speak Mr Mole rubbed his head a lot and kept saying, ‘Well then, well then.’ He didn’t stay long and I knew then that we wouldn’t be in Clifton much longer. The dead little boy, my midnight garden visit and the bunch of bad lads had all combined to make Clifton impossible in Mum’s eyes. Mr Mole could be as kind as he liked but nothing was going to keep us there.