Humber Boy B (25 page)

“You saved my life,” the lad said, coughing up sea water, looking pale and weak. His white hair was stiff with ice.

Stuart did save the man’s life, and so he felt responsible. They were on their way back to Hull and the Icelandic crabber had three more weeks at sea, so the young man came home with him. He stayed on the sofa, rested. Yvette looked after him. His name was Hugo.

When Ben was born, Stuart embraced his baby son. Even when his hair grew, silvery white, he didn’t suspect anything.

But then, that Christmas a few months later, Hugo came to visit with presents for them all, supposedly as a thank you. “I will never forget your kindness,” he said to Stuart and Yvette. And then he held Ben, kissed his tiny cheek, and Stuart saw that he had been betrayed.

Yvette denied it, of course she did. For months she said that Stuart was paranoid, an idiot. She said it made her depressed, his jealousy, his anger. That she had done nothing wrong. Then, during a drunken row, she admitted the truth and the hurt crashed in on him like any wave he’d ever witnessed. Sometimes he could forget and could love her again, but other times he had to get away.

The sea made him forget.

The sea didn’t lie.

66

Now

FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B

Noah’s mum:
I’ve had a lot of messages and tweets since
The Sun
article and I want to say thank you, to everyone who is supporting me and for all those kind words. But I need to say this publicly: I do not and never will condone violence. I am a Christian and I believe that only God can punish, and I trust Him to see that Humber Boy B is rightly judged.

I’m posting this because the police came to see me today. Someone has assaulted Humber Boy B. This has nothing to do with me, or my wishes. I simply wanted some answers, not violence.

Silent Friend:
Sometimes violence is the only way. A boy like him will never understand anything else, and if he’d had a few slaps when he was younger he might never have killed your son.

67

Cate

Arriving back at the Great White Horse, almost two hours later than arranged, Cate saw that the place hadn’t changed much. It was she who had changed. The last time she’d stepped through the doors she’d been wearing Doc Martens with red and black striped tights. She was a sixth form student with back-combed hair who worked the bar two nights a week for some extra cash, and to get out of the house for a while.

Twenty years later, Cate wore a cream linen blouse with black jeans, she’d painted her nails a matt taupe and her hair was straightened and glossy. As if for a date. This meeting with Liz and the attack on Ben had made her nervy, and she’d overcompensated with eyeliner. That at least was the same as when she was eighteen and had just perfected the cat flick. At the bar, where she had previously only ordered snakebite and black, she asked for Grey Goose with Fever Tree tonic and drank it quickly, the ice rattling in the glass as she offered it back to the bartender and asked for a second. This, she didn’t touch. She would take this with her up to Liz’s room. She hoped that the receptionist had passed on her earlier message.

Cate was just fifty paces away from hearing why her sister had left. Liz had been seventeen when she walked out, leaving Cate the unenviable task of keeping things normal at home, as normal as possible. Prior to Liz leaving their mother drank secretly, but afterwards she did it openly. Her usually controlled anger was given full vent. She seemed to blame Cate – as if she could have stopped Liz from leaving. Her mother’s depression was something they had all learned to weather, and although she had previously had very little time for either daughter, once Liz left the family unit seemed to implode and the depression never lifted. Arguments raged between her parents. Within six weeks Dad too had gone, also suddenly, also without a forwarding address.

Cate was in her final year of sixth form and, although she tried to concentrate, her grades suffered. The time she spent alone with her mother was the most difficult. She tried to keep the house clean and make her mother eat the food she cooked, but it was all to no avail. Unable to throw good food away she would eat both their meals. She took the job at the Great White Horse, serving fellow students their snakebites, taking on as many extra shifts as she was able to. Walking slowly back home, she grew to be afraid of what she would find. If her mother was asleep in a drunken haze on the sofa it was bad enough. She would have to haul her into bed and make sure she was comfortable, lying awake through the early hours worried that her mother would choke on her own vomit. But if her mother was drunk and awake that was worse. Then she would have to suffer recriminations, the transfer of blame from Liz to herself. Her mother said things that no daughter should ever hear about herself or, worse, about her father. Next morning her mother would remember nothing, or pretended to, and Cate colluded with the act.

Liz had destroyed the family unit, and never looked back. But now she was here, in Room 3 of the Great White Horse.

The thick carpet sucked at Cate’s pumps so she felt she should stand still, even the flooring was telling her she shouldn’t walk another step. The light cast creepy shapes up the embossed wallpaper. Cate sipped her drink, the ice cubes knocked her nose.
Fuck’s sake, it’s your sister. Knock on the bloody door
.

“Hello?” It was Liz’s voice, no mistake. She sounded just the same.

“It’s me.”

The door opened to show Liz. Just Liz, so much Liz, and the same dark hair and blue eyes, but older, slimmer. Cate couldn’t help it, she grabbed her sister, hugging her so hard the vodka glass was pressed between their shoulders.

When Liz pulled away, looking emotional, she took the glass from Cate and downed it in one. “Share and share alike,” she said, handing the glass back with only ice remaining.

“I’ll go back down, get us more.”

“That’s okay, there’s a mini-bar.” Liz opened the small black fridge and took out two little bottles of vodka, two of gin, and the Schweppes tonics. She placed the clinking booty on the table and went to get a second glass from the bathroom. Cate was already re-filling hers as she wandered around the hotel bedroom. The room was large, overlooking Ipswich’s high street, the jewellery shop opposite was a local trademark and the place where Tim had bought her engagement ring all those years before.

Cate looked around. Whatever Liz did for a living she could afford a superior room. The bed was a four-poster, with dark chunky wood and rich red and russet bedding. There was a pink sofa and two armchairs. Despite all of these comforts, the room was stuffy and Cate couldn’t bring herself to say it was nice. She preferred the modern austerity of Olivier’s room at Novotel.

“So,” Cate sat on the sofa, next to her sister. They both examined the other, fascinated by what time had changed and what remained the same.

“You’re not ginger anymore,” Liz said, as if this was the most important thing to say after such a long separation. “More auburn now.”

“Hmmm,” Cate acknowledged. “Red hair gets darker with age.”

“Does that mean your temper has mellowed too?”

“Not according to recent evidence.”

Liz laughed and it broke the tension, but also made Cate feel sad for all of the anger and resentment she felt towards her, all the years she had not known where she was or why she went. All the laughter they might have shared.

“Why are you back in Ipswich, Liz?”

“I’ll get to that.” Liz had clearly thought about how to handle the meeting, she was very much in control. “First, I want to know about you. Mum told me you have a daughter.”

“Amelia. She’s ten, eleven next month,” Cate replied, deadpan. Liz hadn’t just walked away from being a sister and daughter, she had rejected her role as auntie too. “She’s with her dad this evening.”

“Your husband?”

Cate winced, and thought of that engagement ring gathering dust in a velvet box at the bottom of her sock drawer.

“Mum didn’t tell you I’m divorced?”

“I’m sorry, she probably did. There’s just been so much on my mind, so many new facts to take on board that I forgot. God, I can’t imagine you as a mother.”

“Not just. I work as well.”

“Artist?”

Liz’s departure had changed Cate’s plans. When September came, Cate’s longed-for escape to art school did not happen. Her mother could not bear the thought of being alone and Cate feared for her safety if she left. With Liz and Dad both gone, what choice did she have? She rejected the place at Glasgow that she had so coveted, and applied through clearing to the local college in Colchester. The courses on offer were limited, not offering the fine art degree she would have chosen, but the one that appealed most was social work. She started the course in September, returned each night to her mother, and worked weekends at the Great White Horse.

“Not even close. I’m a probation officer.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed that one,” Liz said, looking surprised.

“It felt like a good fit at the time but it’s lost its shine since. What about you?”

“I’m a nurse. I specialise in cancer.”

“Oh. Well that’s great. Children?”

“Nope.”

They both sat in silence, the mini bottles now all empty, the sun outside casting an orange glow in the red room.

“Have we finished with the small talk, Liz? Are you going to tell me the reason you left?”

Liz looked at Cate like she’d slapped her, her face folded with pain and disbelief. “Please don’t pretend you don’t know. I couldn’t bear that.”

Cate was mystified. “But I don’t know. Why did you walk out of our lives and never look back? What did I do?”

“What did
you
do?” Liz repeated, clearly shocked that Cate showed no understanding. “You
knew
, Cate. You, Mum, Dad. You all knew, you all colluded. No-one tried to help me and in the end I had no choice. I had to leave, for my own sanity. My own survival.”

Cate slammed her drink on the table and placed her palms on her knees. “Okay, enough. What the hell are you talking about, Liz?”

The sisters stared at each other, the gap of understanding a wide abyss between them.

“Okay, Cate, if you want to play this game I’ll go along with it. If it makes it easier for you.”

Liz walked to her suitcase on the luggage rack under the window. She clicked it open and lifted out a wooden jewellery box, ethnic in style, carved with exotic flowers and long-beaked birds. It had brass corners and a small key to keep the contents locked safe.

“I remember that,” Cate said, as Liz turned the key. “You used to keep it in your wardrobe, and you’d go mental if you thought I’d so much as touched it.”

Cate’s curiosity was piqued when Liz opened the box and placed it on her lap. Inside was a pile of envelopes, and Cate saw her father’s unmistakable handwriting, bold lettering in heavy black ink.

“You kept in contact with Dad?” Cate asked. She had not heard from him often over the years, cards at Christmas was about the sum of it, and she felt a stab of old jealousy that Liz was still his favourite.

“These are old letters. From back then.”

When Cate’s father left home, just after Liz’s disappearance, she’d assumed he would return, that it was a bad patch between her parents. It never occurred to her that he too was gone for good. She could see how impossible her mother was to live with, had some sympathy with him, but surely he would not abandon them? She knew that she was not his favourite daughter – it was obvious that he loved Liz more, and always had done – but he wouldn’t stay away forever.

As the weeks dragged on she approached the first milestone without him, her eighteenth birthday. Even her mother had made an effort by staying sober at least most of the day and she returned from a morning outing, unusual for her, producing a gaudy pink birthday cake with a fondant unicorn on top. The cake was intended for a child and Cate wondered if this was how her mother saw her, or merely how she wished she were still. Or maybe it had been the only cake left on the shelf.

After watching Cate feign pleasure and force some of the cloying sugar into her mouth, her mother, satisfied that she was performing her maternal duties, handed her the cards that had arrived by the morning’s post. Cate opened them without joy. They were from various aunts and uncles who she only saw at weddings or funerals. Wishes and greetings from across the galaxy, it seemed to her then. But her mother had a secret.

When the cards had been displayed on the mantelpiece she produced something else that had arrived in the post, looking nervous and unhappy as she handed it over. Cate’s heart burned with righteous certainty when she saw the envelope, the line of postage stamps revealing that it had been posted abroad. She had hoped it would be from her dad. In fact, it was from Liz.

“I wrote to you, from Greece. A birthday card,” she now said. “I begged you to get in touch.”

“I was angry.” But how had she forgotten? Liz had made contact and Cate had not replied. She had not even read the entire card, but thrown it in the bin along with the remains of the unicorn sponge cake.

The two sisters considered each other, and Cate saw in Liz the girl she was at seventeen, the sister she had loved so much. Inside something stirred, feelings long since denied. She had grieved for Liz, lost her twenty years ago, and this was a resurrection of sorts. Why then were they not hugging, full of joy? Liz shut the lid of the jewellery box, closing in the pile of letters as if they were soiled and she did not wish to see them.

“Cate I want you to read these, not now, but when you get home. The police have taken all the copies they need.”

“Police?”

Liz nodded. “There’s no going back for me. I want to know if I can count on your support.”

The bulk of the jewellery box was unpleasantly balanced on her legs and she thought again of her father’s handwriting. She tried to hand the box back to Liz.

“I don’t think I want to know.”

But Liz refused to relieve her of the box’s weight.