Humber Boy B (16 page)

Silent Friend:
Let’s not make excuses for human evil. It’s time for action.

39

Cate

Cate awoke on Sunday morning, having dreamt that she and Liz were playing by a large bridge, and that Liz had fallen in. Cate had jumped in to save her, but gave up quickly, before she’d even got her hair wet. She swam to the shore and let her sister drown.

She hadn’t thought about Liz in years, but the news that she’d been in touch with their mother had awoken thoughts, shreds of memories. Plus, you didn’t need to be Freud to know that the dream was triggered by her dealings with Ben, reading Roger Palmer’s terrible description of Noah falling from the bridge, but also the statements of other people who saw the boys that day, like the joggers who ran past, the drivers who were too rushed to stop. There were so many moments when things may have taken a different turn, single moments that added up to a boy in the water. If the guy who was working at the Palladium had been more conscientious and chucked them out, if Mrs Patel had called the police about their shoplifting. If the teachers’ strike hadn’t happened.

Cate groaned, rolled onto her side and turned to the window, blinking at the sun that was streaming through the gaps in the curtains. It was a beautiful day and she promised herself she wasn’t going to think about work.

She got out of bed and opened the curtains to let in the sunshine. Amelia was still asleep, so she went downstairs to make a coffee. What she was itching to do was to go to the office, and continue to read through the pile of witness statements, to obsess and delve and think about the case. But it was Sunday, a day off, and these last days of September were turning into a mini-heatwave. She would take Amelia to Felixstowe, enjoy the beach before the weather broke.

“Up you get, Amelia! Let’s not waste the day in bed. Chop chop,” she called from the bottom of the stairs.

Before she’d become a mother, Cate had always disliked Sundays. When she was growing up she hated the boredom. Sunday never had the promise of Saturday, and she and Liz would quickly run out of things to do, especially if it was raining so they couldn’t skate or bike in the street. They’d soon squabble over what to watch on TV until Mum emerged from her bedroom, yelling at them to be quiet. If Dad spent a weekend at home things were different, they would have to participate in rituals like going to church (if it was Easter or Christmas), the family walk in the park, roast beef for dinner, and the Sunday serial. She was only seven when she knew what her mother refused to acknowledge – that family was a show they put on. And the audience was her father.

Cate sighed, thinking about her mother. She felt sorry for her, really. Even when she was just seven years old she seemed to understand more than her mother, who was always trying to pretend they were a happy family. If she confronted the truth the whole charade of their marriage would be exposed, and she’d have been afraid that if Dad actually left she wouldn’t cope. Coping was something she didn’t do well, and alcohol was her way of not confronting things, blunting the edges of reality.

But it had happened anyway, the family had split and her mother was one of the victims. Cate could only acknowledge this when they were apart though. When they were in the same room it only led to arguments.

Amelia came down the stairs like a princess who had just woken from a hundred-year sleep, dressed in her
Frozen
nightdress and stretching both arms above her head. On impulse, Cate grabbed her and gave her a huge hug, smacking her on the cheek with a fat kiss.

“Whoa, Mum. You’re in a good mood.”

“Good morning, gorgeous girl. Go and eat breakfast while I pack a picnic. We’re going to the beach.”

The September sun was pleasant as they found a spot near the water. Amelia had brought her loom bands kit and she began twisting the coloured plastic into an intricate shape as Cate settled into reading a book. The world felt warm and peaceful. Like the calm before a storm.

40

Ben

“Hello… ”

He stands in front of me and calls me by the name that died with Noah. On his back is an orange rucksack.

I don’t move, only just manage to call him by his, the only name he’s ever had.

“Adam.”

Adam, my brother. Humber Boy A. He was four years older but not necessarily more culpable. Humber Boy A, who said with a stutter I didn’t know he had that his younger brother made him, suggested, lifted, pushed. Humber Boy A whose father, Stuart, bought him a smart shirt.

It comes back in a tumble just hearing him say my name. Adam had sat with his head bowed while Stuart said that all of our family problems were my fault. Adam had always looked out for me before, and he was there on the bridge. He knew the truth, yet he let Stuart make me out to be a runt, the half-brother from a foreign and inscrutable source. He even went as far as to say I was wrong in the head, and the psychiatrists went some way to agreeing, though not far enough to keep me out of prison.

I was just ten, sat in my stained T-shirt with no-one to speak for me, watching as the court artist sketched what she thought a murderer looked like. After just two hours of deliberating the jury agreed.

But Adam, he wasn’t a killer. No, he was guilty of compliance, guilty of covering, but not guilty of what really mattered. To the count of murder how do you find Humber Boy A? Not Guilty. He got just four years in prison and he got to keep his name.

“How did you find me?”

He stands, just a yard in front of me. And still I don’t stand aside to let him in.

“Google Earth.”

It’s my fault, I put my address on my card to Mum, the one I’d been told never to send, the one she hadn’t replied to anyway.

Adam shifts position, looks bored. He was always good at that.

“Come on then and let us in, our kid.”

He looks uncertain for a moment, as if it suddenly occurs to him that I might not want him there, and I don’t recognise him in that moment, but then he firms up his jaw and his shoulders and that’s the Adam I knew, no-one would mess with him, the brother I was so proud of. He looks just like Stuart.

Adam follows me into the lounge and, as I’ve noticed everyone always does, he walks straight to the window.

“You jammy bastard. That’s some view.”

“It is.”

“How d’you feel looking out on all that water? And that there bridge.”

His accent is so obviously Hull that it makes me feel weak inside, the way he says water like ‘what-ha’, you with a deep ‘oo’, it takes me back to our boyhood, and I think how I no longer sound like that. My voice has been neutralised by years of moving around, and my own will, straightened out so I no longer says ‘a’ as in apple, not when I’m saying ‘bath’ or ‘laugh’ anyway. My ‘a’s’ are like ‘ahs’ and I no longer have a problem with ‘u’. But I haven’t said enough for him to know that yet. I can’t answer his last question.

He starts checking out the room, picking up my book from the floor. He reads the spine. It was a leaving gift from Roy, it’s Dante’s
Inferno
, half the page in Italian, half in English. He tosses it back onto the floor, giving me a narrow glance that looks like envy but it can’t be that. Nobody would want my life.

“You gonna get me a drink or summat? It’s a long drive, you know, from Hull.”

He doesn’t say he arrived yesterday, though I know now it was him I saw in the library. I don’t ask him where he spent the night. “You’ve got a car?”

He walks towards me and gently taps my chest with the back of his hand. “How else you think I got here, flew? Now, when are you gonna get us a bloody drink? I’m parched.”

He follows me to the galley kitchen and watches as I open the litre bottle of Spar Cola.

“Got any brewskies?”

I shake my head. It never occurred to me to buy any beer, and anyway it would be expensive.

Ignoring the glass, Adam reaches for the bottle, twists the top and drinks it down even as the foam fizzes around his lips. I watch him drink my coke until the bottle constricts, thinking pathetically that I have nothing else in the flat except the water in the tap and I don’t feel up to another trip to the Spar just yet. Even though Shirl is friendly I still have to steel myself each time I walk into a shop. Adam sucks down air with the last of the bubbles. When the bottle is done he pulls it free and burps then grins at me.

“Any grub?”

All I have is some sliced white bread and marmite, but even that feels precious to me, so I hesitate. He’s my brother, and this isn’t about bread, it’s about the trial. I don’t want to give him anything of mine, I feel he’s taken too much already. In the silence I can feel him weighing me up and finally I look at him directly.

I haven’t seen him in eight years, but he’s so familiar and I realise it’s because he’s looking at me in the same way Stuart used to. Then I see that his expression is Stuart’s but his face is all Mum. And mine. We all have it, the oval face, the sky-blue eyes, the look that may be a result of living on the east coast where the Vikings once landed. “We’re descended from them,” Mum would say. “We’re tough, us. Whatever life throws at us we keep buggering on.” She liked the idea of us being Vikings, and she certainly liked a fight so there may be some truth in it. I’m shorter than Adam, though, and that’s not like a Viking, and I have white-blond hair like my dad whereas Adam’s hair is dark. You’d think my smallness would have helped me in court, that the jury might think the older and bigger boy was more responsible.

Adam wanders back into the lounge, looking again out onto the Orwell River, and then turns to face me. “You’ve hardly got owt. Where’s the stuff the prison give, to help you out and that?”

“Did they help you?” I countered.

Adam reddened then looked down at the carpet.

“I got nowt, not a posh flat like this. I had ta go live with our mam.”

This stings, sharp. He was allowed back to Hull and Mum took him in. Everything was different for him, the trial, the sentence, the way Mum responded. Then another thought arrives, as deep as a belly blow.

“Are you still living with her?” Is that why she wouldn’t even consider moving to Suffolk with me?

He shrugs as if it’s of no consequence. “Sometimes. When I’m not with our lass.”

I remember his letter then. “Is that your girlfriend WHO KNOWS? What right did you have to tell her when there’s a Facebook campaign to find me?” It’s only when I hear my voice, the sharpness in it, that I realise how angry I am. He’s in Hull, with Mum. He has a girlfriend.

He seems surprised by my anger. “I didn’t tell her nowt, our kid. She was there. I couldn’t say in the letter, didn’t think that would be smart, but I’m with Cheryl. From the bridge.”

The information drips slowly through.

“Roger Palmer’s daughter?

It doesn’t make sense to me that he could be with her. Not when she was so involved with what happened. He’s watching my face and seems to understand my confusion.

“You remember how we saw her, in court? After she’d been in the witness box she was allowed to sit with us and we all had a drink and summat to eat. Remember?”

I think back, to sitting in the waiting area, shielded from the press. Cheryl was there, a prosecution witness because she saw us that day, first outside the shop and then at the river. But she’d already testified so she was allowed to wait in the room with us, we were all given snacks and my social worker went to the vending machine and bought us all some sweets. We may all be involved in a murder trial but we were kids too, and we argued over who got the mints and who got the chocolate.

Two defendants and a prosecution witness in the same room, sharing a packet of Polos and Maltesers but no-one seemed to think it an issue. Cheryl broke ranks, she screwed a letter into a ball and when she passed, seemingly to go to the toilet, she threw it into my lap.

She’d used our names, because she knew them, even though no-one was allowed to say them in court. I still know the letter by heart:

You’re going to prison, my dad says there’s no getting away with it. I want you to write to me, wherever you go. I’m putting my address at the end of the letter because I need to know what happened after I left the bridge. Noah was alright, I liked him even though he was a bit posh. And I’m sorry he’s dead. Are you? Why haven’t they asked you that?

I screwed her letter up, put it in the bin.

“How did she know where you were?”

There are several secure units in the north, he wouldn’t have been easy to find. Then the penny drops, Adam must have taken the letter from the bin, smoothed out the crumples.

“You wrote to her?”

“Well, you know how it was.” He shifts from one foot to the other. “I mean, I was lonely and no-one came to visit much – you know our mam’s not brilliant at letters. And Cheryl knew what had happened, her being there and that. I wasn’t allowed to write to you but no-one told us not to write to her, so it just kept pouring out. And then, she visited us. By the time I got released, we were in love.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I can’t help it, the words come out without permission. I don’t know why him being in love with Cheryl bothers me so much, but it does. That letter was for me, not for him. Something else he stole from me.

He shrugs again, a gesture I’ve already deduced has become his response when he doesn’t know what to say.

“One thing led to another.”

“One thing led to a fucking other! How is that even possible? She knows who we are. She was there, she was part of it.”

He held both hands up as if in submission. “We were children. It were ages ago.”

As if that makes any difference. I look to the floor, the weight of it all suddenly pulling me down.

“Look, our kid, you need to know it was Cheryl who told me to come down and find you. She wants to see you too.”

“So you’re the welcome party?” The idea is unsettling. Who else will come knocking on my door? Adam looks like he doesn’t get what I mean. “I said I’d call her when I got here. Tell her it’s safe.”

41

The Day Of