Humber Boy B (17 page)

Noah walked quickly out of the side door of the Palladium, his eyes sparkling like hot coals. “Let’s go do it.” As if fear hadn’t frozen him but woken him up.

“Do what, idiot?” Adam said, following Noah down the passage but sounding wary. His face was still pale, and his heart hadn’t quite found its rhythm yet. The film had been scary, not that he’d admit that. “Buy us a house in the woods and conjure up some Devil shite?”

“Not that, the Ouija board. We could use the dining table and I’ve got a tape recorder to catch anything that speaks. My mum won’t be back for hours.” Noah was speaking fast, words strung together by nervous excitement, tripping over his shoelace which had come undone yet again. He knelt and re-tied it, a double knot like his mum had taught him.

To get back to the estate the boys would have to walk in front of the Palladium, where Ashley was taking a five-minute cigarette break. Seeing him, Adam grabbed Ben by the collar of his T-shirt, yanking him away from the cinema entrance. “Let’s frame, that’s the lad who checks tickets. Scarper!”

Outside his home, Noah picked up a stone, or what looked like one, and turned it over, sliding his fingers along the back so it opened, revealing a key.

“That’s fucking cool,” said Adam, taking the plastic stone from Noah and tapping it, sliding the key safe to examine it. “No burglar would suss it wasn’t real.”

Noah pushed out his chest and said proudly, “My mum got it from the Internet. She thinks of everything.”

Only then did he pause, the key in his fingers but not yet ready to open the door.

“No mess, though. She’d go crazy if she caught us.”

“It’s okay, Noah,” Ben reassured his friend. “We’ll be careful.”

“But we’re conjuring the Devil,” said Adam, waggling his fingers. “Owt might happen.”

Inside the house were other signs of just how clever Noah’s mum was. There was a wipe-clean board that had the days of the week on it, and beside them menus for each day. Ben read the meals in wonder, vegetable lasagne, chops, fish. His mouth watered at the thought, even though some of the meals he didn’t know. What was gumbo? What was fajitas?

Noah saw him reading the weekly menu. “And she works, full-time,” he said, enjoying showing off and though Ben didn’t like him for it he was fascinated too, by this insight into what normal families did.

“What about your dad?”

“Oh, he’s at the garage. He’ll be home later, probably.”

Adam started to root around in the fridge, and though Noah tried to stop him, no way was Adam going to resist the slices of ham, the fresh juice. In the end, Noah gave in and all three boys started to graze, grabbing juicy strawberries, Greek yoghurt and breaking brie with their fingers. Ben wasn’t sure he liked the brie but he ate it anyway, just because it was different and new. There was bread too, so they had a makeshift picnic, munching as they stood, handing round the carton of juice until it was empty.

With full stomachs and feeling sleepy, the boys pulled the curtains closed in the lounge and sat cross-legged with knees touching, a triangle around the Fisher Price tape recorder that they placed on the carpet in front of them.

“It’s all I have,” said Noah. “I mean, I have a CD player but it doesn’t record. And this has a mike, look.” He picks up the white plastic microphone, and the other boys laugh at it, even when the sky darkens and the room becomes quieter.

“What if summat happens?” asks Ben, thinking about the film, about the blood and pain that followed the conjuring.

“Scared, our kid?” taunted Adam. “Come on, I’ll go first. Give us a pen, so I can work out what to say. Backwards, like they did in the film.”

And he wrote on the jotter:
come to devil the ask we
.

The boys began to chant, saying the line again and again until they felt dizzy and hoarse and the sound of the letterbox made them all scream. But it wasn’t the Devil, only a flyer for the new Morrisons.

On his way to the loo, Ben saw something he couldn’t walk past without exploring: Noah’s bedroom. The door was ajar as if to invite him in. Although he’d called at Noah’s house several times over the past few weeks they had stayed in the garden or played in the sitting room, where Noah’s mum kept a giant box of Lego, so Ben hadn’t seen the bedroom. Now he stood in the doorway, unable to fathom why Noah would ever play outside when he owned such amazing things, the spoils of a childhood Ben had never had. Lego pieces, assembled and displayed on shelves, a Scalextric set on the floor, cars scattered around as if they weren’t precious. The bed even had a Hull Rovers duvet cover and pillow. Tacked above the bed, given the proudest space, was a red and white Hull Rovers scarf.

Ben stepped forward, his hands itching to touch all of Noah’s possessions, clenching into fists as he thought of his own room, the stained duvet without a cover, the broken toys that Adam had passed down, the football that had a puncture. Noah had all this and he was still a whinger. Poor little rich kid. And that was when he decided, if Noah wanted to see the Devil then he bloody well could.

Downstairs, Adam and Noah were bent over the table but it was only when Ben joined them that the glass started to move. Spelling out H-E-L-L-O. Then another word. D-I-E.

“Who’s going to die?” Adam asked the glass, stifling a giggle, but looking strange all the same. Ben bit his lip, hiding how much he was enjoying seeing the others so scared and knowing he was causing it. It was a fun game.

O-N-E.

“One of us?” said Adam. There was no giggle to suppress now, he gave Ben a thump on the chest. “Are you pushing the glass, our kid?”

“No.” And as he said this Ben realised it was true. The glass was moving against the pressure from his fingers.

Noah looked like he was going to shit his pants, and it was all Ben could do to keep his finger on the small shot glass, it moved so swiftly around the letters to make the final word.

M-U-R-D-E-R.

The boys all pulled back from the glass as though it was hot, and it fell on its side, rolling over the letters and stopping, completely still, over one letter.

The letter N.

42

Now

FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B

Silent Friend:
I’ve had word of where he is. Tomorrow I’ll know for sure.

Noah’s mum:
I don’t know who you are, but you sound like you’re on our side. Thank you. I just want a chance to speak to him, I have just one question to ask him. Do you think that would be possible?

Silent Friend:
He’s had the chance to explain himself. It may be too late for that.

Noah’s mum:
It’s what I want. To look him in the eye and hear what he has to say. I don’t want any more violence.

Silent Friend:
I’ll see what I can do, Jessica.

43

Cate

Cate and Amelia tumbled indoors tramping sand into the carpet, Amelia sticky and smiley, Cate sporting pink skin on both shoulders where she’d neglected sunscreen, assuming no-one would burn in September, not even a redhead. She never learned.

Amelia saw the flashing light on the answerphone and pressed it:

“It’s me. Mum will have told you I called. I’d rather have spoken with you but I didn’t have your number. I’ve called a few times, but you’re always out
.

“Look, I’m coming to Ipswich in a week. Can we meet? I’m staying at the Great White Horse. I hope it’s not the dive it was when we were teenagers. Anyway, come see me Cate. We have a lot to talk about.”

Amelia cocked her head to one side and spoke as if to the machine, “Who’s that?”

“It’s Liz. My sister.”

After pressing re-dial, Cate discovered that the number Liz had called from was ex-directory, so Cate had no way of returning the call even if she’d wanted to. Amelia trailed after her as she walked into the kitchen to unpack the remnants of their day.

“Why don’t we ever see her? Does she have any children? They’d be my cousins.”

Of course the questions would start, Cate didn’t blame Amelia for this. She just wished she had some answers for her.

“I don’t know, love. Liz left home when she was seventeen. She just packed a bag and went, and I haven’t seen her since.”

Amelia jumped up on the kitchen counter and for once Cate didn’t stop her. Amelia grabbed the half-empty bag of marshmallows that they toasted at the beach and sucked one thoughtfully. “If Chloe left, I’d try and find her. I’d be like Anna in
Frozen
, I’d search everywhere.”

Cate scrubbed at the cutlery and tipped the charred barbeque in the bin, going through the motions of clearing up while her head was full of Liz. Had she done enough to find her? Did she really not know why Liz had left? Nagging, niggling thoughts that she’d kept supressed for years now woken and moving around in her mind. The pain, too, of losing Liz began to throb under the scab that Cate thought was healed long ago.

“Tell me what happened in the second film, Amelia. Did the sisters live happily ever after?”

Amelia had a brain like a movie reel, scene by scene in chronological detail and she was unable to edit. As she started to tell the story of the two sisters, separated but then re-united, Cate listened closely, soothed as the sweet sound of her daughter’s voice tumbled over her.

She waited until she was sure Amelia was asleep before she called her mother, having administered a glass of Chardonnay and a strict warning to herself not to shout.

“Mum, it’s Cate. You gave Liz my number.”

She could hear the sigh down the phone and knew exactly how her mother would have pursed her lips, defending herself against any suggestion of wrongdoing.

“Well, you want to see her, don’t you, Catherine? She is your sister.”

Suddenly taken over, not by the alcohol or her own self-warning, she found she was simply too tired to argue. Too sad. “Did we let her down, Mum? Did we try hard enough to find her?”

There was silence on the other end, though Cate could hear the chink of glass. It seemed both women were armed with their tonic of choice.

Cate asked gently, “Are you drinking again, Mum?”

“No. It’s just water.”

Cate wished with all her heart that this were true. That Liz coming back into their lives was a good thing, that it might even heal their mother.

“I tried my best to be a good mother. I gave you all the love I could. Maybe it just wasn’t enough.”

Cate washed her glass and put it away. She brushed her teeth and went to Amelia’s room, pausing before she switched off the light to watch her daughter sleep, resisting the urge to kiss her because Amelia was the lightest of sleepers, unlike Cate who could sleep through an earthquake. She had slept through Liz packing her bags and leaving. She had slept through her parents’ rows.

The phone call felt like a watershed, it was a rare thing for her mother to use the word ‘love’. But also, Cate had heard a partial apology in her words, though she knew the blame had to be her dad’s too. Whatever had happened, it was the whole family that was rotten, not just one individual. Cate – or Catherine as she was back when she was a child – and her sister were reminders that her parents had once loved each other and earned the status of ‘family’, but her clearest memory was their simple lack of interest in her. She was discouraged from having friends over and remembered her mum saying things like, “Well, it’s a bit inconvenient at the moment, dear. Maybe another time?” Finally, Cate stopped asking. And as long as she was doing well at school, her mum didn’t see the point of going to parents’ evenings. Though they weren’t poor, Cate often went to school without lunch money, her shoes would be too tight before she got a new pair and her school uniform too small before it was replaced. Low-level neglect, a simple lack of interest.

Cate had actively sought her father’s love but he was always busy, more interested in work than family, always on the phone or at meetings, occupied with the shadowy world of business. Whenever teachers or other kids asked her what her dad did she struggled to answer.

“I’m a manager,” was all she ever got out of him, simply stated without even looking up from
The Telegraph
. It was an inadequate answer, but she didn’t want to push further in case she was told to give him some peace and go to her room. Just to sit silently by his side felt like a victory.

But Dad never ignored Liz. If she came into the room, he would put the paper down just to look at her. And he would read Liz a story before she went to bed, lying on the duvet next to her, in a way he never did with Cate.

No wonder then that, by the time she was a teenager, Cate slid from favour and sought the company of those who at least noticed her. Dad was no longer bothering to excuse his more frequent absences and her mother was drinking even more; Cate would arrive home late to find her mother collapsed on the sofa.

She longed to escape, longed to be loved. She was just eighteen and in the final year at sixth form she met Tim, during a weekend shift at the Great White Horse. At first she was afraid to trust him but the more she resisted, the more he persisted, and she started to think that she was safe. She convinced herself that finally here was someone who loved her. How wrong she was.

Amelia’s sleep was deep, her eyes were moving to whatever dream was playing in her brain, maybe happy thoughts from their day at the beach. Cate turned off the light and went back downstairs, wishing there was someone there to talk to.

44

Ben

I’m hiding and I know it, staying in bed to avoid leaving the bedroom and having to face my brother. I can hear Adam moving around, banging the cupboard door in the kitchen, clearing his throat noisily, and I can’t bear it, this proximity to him. My thoughts are jumbled with how they let him go back home. None of that is his fault, but was it really all mine?

I think back to the trial, how he looked so pathetic, so stupid and gullible. The jury bought it. Maybe that isn’t his fault either, he was just playing a cleverer game than me. I simply told the truth, thinking that was what mattered. Hearing him moving around, opening up the window, yawning, I realise that if I allow any of my feelings to surface I’ll end up lashing out and what I learned in prison is that it’s best to keep any strong feelings inside, where you can control them. If I see his face for too long I just might do something I’ll regret and lose everything. I have to get out of the flat.