Nobody Came (17 page)

D
uring my first few days at Haut de la Garenne, I could sense that there was something about my brother that Pete and Martin were not telling me. ‘Was he popular?’ I asked, trying to draw them out.

‘Oh yes,’ Martin said. ‘Everyone liked John. Didn’t they, Pete?’

Pete nodded in agreement but still I sensed that my brother and his experiences here were not a topic they wanted to discuss.

‘What is it then? There’s something you’re not telling me.’

Pete looked at Martin, who shrugged and said, ‘Oh, go ahead, we might as well tell him. He’ll find out anyhow.’

Martin began: ‘Pete knew him better than me, he was already here when your brother first arrived, but I know John was given a hard time.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ continued Pete. ‘The bastard wardens seemed to have it in for him as soon as he walked through those doors. Don’t know how he’s still OK. But I’ll tell you something he said to me once. I’ve never forgotten it, Robbie.’ He looked at me intently. ‘He said he had to be strong ’cos one day he, you and that other brother of yours were going to be together again and ’cos he’s the eldest it was up to him to take responsibility for making it happen. And I reckon that despite all they did to him, that’s what kept him right in the head.’

I felt a lump in my throat and my eyes prickled with emotion. I could just hear John saying that, even back at the age of eight. After all, it had been up to him to look after us almost from the day we were born.

I waited for him to continue and, seeing that I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I knew everything, he sighed and reluctantly started telling me about the years John had spent in Haut de la Garenne.

John might have been my big brother, my hero when I was only five and he was eight, but now that I was twelve I realised that he was really only a little boy when we had been separated. I had at least had Davie, but he had no one. John had been such a beautiful little boy – one who walked like a bigger boy, because that was what life had demanded of him.

But at night he wet the bed, which was a punishable offence in Haut de la Garenne.

‘Parker had just started here then. Remember I told you he’s a real evil bugger, that one?’ Pete said. ‘John was scared all right. Poor little sod tried to make the bed without anyone knowing. He put something under the sheet, you know, to stop it staining the mattress. He got away with it for a couple of days but it whiffed a bit and someone told Parker. He came into the dormitory early the next morning and pulled John out of bed. Sure enough, he had done it again. Parker told all the boys in the dorm to stay and watch what happens to dirty little sods like John. I was in the bed opposite him, so I could hear and see everything.’

I felt an icy coldness in the pit of my stomach at the thought of John’s shame that morning when he had been pulled out of bed and shown up in front of the thirty boys who slept in that dormitory. I remembered when I had helped him hide the sheets from Gloria and imagined how upset and frightened he must have been without me to help.

‘What happened then?’ I asked. I was finding it hard to hear these things, but I needed to know.

Pete furrowed his brow in concentration and I knew he was picturing my brother as he had been that morning.

‘Parker shouted at him, called him a dirty little bleeder. John just looked up at him with those big grey eyes of his. Didn’t cry, just stood there. Then Parker made him take off his pyjamas. Told him they needed washing, and when he was standing there naked Parker made him strip the bed. John was bright red by then and still that bastard hadn’t finished with him. He put the sheet over John’s shoulders and head and pulled the wet bit around his face. “Now smell your own piss,” he shouted at him, playing to the audience of us boys as well. And still your brother didn’t cry, and that’s what made Parker really mad. He grabbed John and pushed him towards the door and yelled at all of us to get down to the playing fields. He even told one of the boys to go to the other dormitories and tell them he wanted everyone outside as well.’

I closed my eyes and squeezed back the hot tears that threatened to run down my cheek at the image Pete had conjured up. I could hardly bear to think of that proud little boy being so humiliated by strangers. Pete’s story continued and I wanted to put my hands over my ears to block out the words, but I didn’t.

‘Parker made him run round the grounds naked with his wet sheet on his head and made the rest of us watch him. He told them all what John had done and called him the little pisser. Some of the boys laughed and jeered but others were frightened. Parker was so scary then, even more than he is now. I wasn’t even six when it happened, but it’s something I remember very vividly. I used to wet the bed when I was little and it scared me that this could also happen to me. But John still didn’t cry, you know. Not then.’

‘What did Parker do after that?’ I knew that no amount of humiliating punishment could make a person stop bed-wetting.

‘Oh, Parker often made him do it. We all got used to seeing John running with that sheet over his head. Didn’t matter what the weather was like, Parker made him run. And then your brother got his own back; he got the better of Parker. Of course that meant that Parker really hated him then, but I think John thought it was worth it.’

I heard the note of admiration in his voice. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How did he do that?’

‘It was only a few weeks after he had come here,’ Pete continued. ‘I think John had worked Parker out. Anyhow, he got up before Parker came in the morning, washed the piss out of the sheet and then stood by his bed waiting. When Parker came into the dorm John said he was ready for his run. And do you know what he did when he got onto the grass?’ I shook my head and Pete answered himself. ‘He took that sheet, waved it above his head and ran so fast that the boys started cheering him on. John laughed, raised his other hand and waved. He looked just like an Olympic runner crossing the winner’s line! Parker was purple with anger and he really had it in for John after that. But that was your brother all right, he really was the dog’s bollocks. Even the older boys admired him.’

I pictured John as he would have been then, with his white-blond hair, pale-golden skin and compact little body, pumping his legs furiously as he ran faster and faster with the sheet billowing above his head like a giant victory flag. I saw his grin, that wide ‘I don’t care’ grin of his, and I felt a surge of pride for the plucky eight-year-old he had been.

Pete told me that after that Parker became determined to break John’s spirit, and any misdeed, no matter how tiny, was picked on and punished. ‘If he was walking too fast he was accused of running, too slow then he was dawdling, and when he tried to defend himself, arguing with authority and being cheeky. I remember the first time he was caned. They did it in front of us in the dormitory. Parker pulled his trousers down, made him lean over the bed and told him to spread his legs. He used the woopy cane on him,’ he said, using the nickname for a cane that made a fierce swishing sound when brought down swiftly onto bare flesh. Its ends were split and sharp enough to draw blood. I’d heard about these from some boys at Sacre Coeur, even though the nuns never used anything like this, and I cringed inwardly at the thought of that type of cane being used on eight-year-old John’s delicate skin.

‘He belted John with that cane good and proper. His arse was fire-engine red and cut so bad he was bleeding all over the place. John cried; he tried hard not to but he couldn’t help it. He was black and blue for the whole week after. That was the only time I saw him cry, though; he was no coward, he always kept his head up.’

Pete went silent and clenched his fists with the effort of finding the words to tell me more.

‘It was those men, those filthy scum bags,’ he spat the words out with a sudden, fierce anger. ‘You know those bastards that always want to feel us up? They really hurt him bad.’ Pete’s hand went up to his mouth, almost as though he wanted to push back the words. ‘He fought them, but he was only about nine then. He cussed them out anyhow he knew and kicked and spat at them. He just wasn’t having any of it.’

Pete looked miserable remembering. ‘It’s wicked,’ he said. ‘They’re wicked. He got whopped a lot. It must have been when he’d been in here for about two years that it got even worse. He bit one of the wardens’ hands, didn’t like where the bastard had been trying to put it! They took him down to the cellars and beat him. Anyhow, Robbie, I don’t know for a fact what went on there ’cos I wasn’t down there with him, but there was blood on his underpants, I saw that all right the next day. And he walked really funny, you know as if he was really hurt. We asked, but he didn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t, no matter how hard we tried. He only got angry if anyone asked. I was about eight then and I sort of knew what had happened. I’d been touched – you know, had my willy pulled – and had been made to hold one of those men’s, but that was all. So I didn’t really know but I knew it was bad, knew they had hurt him.’

I felt sick. I wanted to beg Pete to stop. To tell him that I didn’t want to hear any more, that I couldn’t cope with it. But I didn’t. Maybe in a way I felt I owed it to John to listen to the rest.

Pete’s eyes darted round almost fearfully, checking that there was no one in earshot. ‘You see that warden, Blake? He likes young boys, that one. Things got even worse when he came because he wanted your brother for himself. John was forever being taken down to the cellars. Anyhow, when he got a bit bigger he hit Blake. Didn’t see it, wished I had, but there were other boys down there. It was at one of their “parties”. John drew back his fist and hit Blake right in the mouth. Called him a bleeding poofter and all.’

I wondered what they meant by ‘parties’ but didn’t like to ask.

Martin spoke then. ‘Yeah, that was when I was here. Those bastards beat him up so badly he was kept down in those rooms in the cellar for two days. They had him in the room with the bath. It was Blake himself, the sick fucking bastard. When he was good and sloshed, he bragged about what they did to him. He was laughing his stupid head off too; he wanted us to know what happens to anyone who dares to lift a hand to one of them.

‘Anyway, they put a sort of hood over his head, put him in the bath and held his head under. There’s no one who wouldn’t panic when that hood’s over your face and your head is under water. It’s like drowning. Your brother would have thrashed and thrashed, heard their laughter and thought he was dying. Maybe hoped he was.’ His voice dropped so low that the next words were almost whispered. ‘They did it to me once too.’

He had averted his eyes while relating this bit, but on finishing he lifted his head to see if I was coping with everything he’d told me. I looked back at him through a film of tears. All of a sudden Martin looked like a defeated, hunched-up old man who had reached the end of his life, not a thirteen-year-old boy who should have had everything to look forward to.

‘You’d do anything for them not to do that to you again.’

The chill in my stomach turned to ice. I thought of the times John had managed to sneak out and see me and hadn’t said a word about what they did to him in this place.

‘Anyhow,’ Pete continued a bit more cheerfully, ‘by the time he was coming up to leave here things got better for him. I don’t know, but I think Blake started getting scared of him. Your brother might have been only fourteen but he was pretty big and muscular, what with the gym training and all. You know he did push-ups and lifted some sort of weights? Every spare moment he had, we would see him running round and round the grounds. Don’t know where he got the weights from but he used them every morning before the wardens came in. I could barely lift those weights and he did it like they were plastic. He told us he was training, but he never said what he was training for.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, I think Blake was pleased when he finally left, all right.’

I remembered admiring John’s athletic physique when he had visited me at Sacre Coeur. He’d had broad shoulders, a slim waist and clearly defined muscles in his arms and legs.

Now I knew why he had made himself so muscular: he’d done it in order to survive.

A
ll my life I had envied John his good looks. While he had thick, white-blond hair, mine was an unprepossessing mouse colour and so fine it flopped limply across my forehead. Long, almost black eyelashes framed John’s light-grey eyes set under darker blond brows, while my washed-out murky-blue eyes peered at the world through pale-pink plastic frames. John’s skin always appeared slightly tanned and was clear of the teenage spots that plagued his contemporaries and that I was expecting to erupt on my face any day now.

In contrast to his muscular build, my shoulders were narrow and my arms and legs were skin and bone. I was still trying to do press-ups every day but there didn’t appear to be any sudden spurt in muscle growth and I despaired that, try as I may, I would never look like John when I was fully grown.

But by the time I had been in Haut de la Garenne for a few days, I was grateful that I didn’t have my brother’s good looks. It didn’t take me long to learn the advantages of not having the label ‘pretty boy’ attached to me, for I often heard sobs and muffled pleas in the dorm at night and I realised that they mostly came from one of them.

When I was woken by soft, stealthy footsteps creeping across the dormitory floor, I held my breath to try and silence my breathing. We all did, every one of us in that room. We didn’t want to do the slightest thing that would draw attention to us. We lay there, our bodies curled up tightly in our beds and our fear palpable, waiting for the footsteps to stop by the bed of one small, hunched-up figure. We prayed that it was not going to be our bed that those large men, into whose care we had been entrusted, stopped at. ‘Anyone else, please God,’ I prayed, ‘anyone else who isn’t me.’

We squeezed our eyes tightly shut one moment and then, desperate to know if they had already passed us by, we peered out between our lashes the next. We saw through half-closed eyes which beds they went to. There were three boys in our dormitory who were taken on a regular basis. But any pity I felt for those chosen boys was by far outweighed by my relief that it wasn’t me. At least, not this time.

I knew without seeing them that those boys’ knuckles would be white with their futile efforts at resistance. Small hands clutching the edge of the mattress as hard as they could were no defence against brawny men determined to wrench them from their bed. Those nights, while I lay in my bed pretending to be asleep, I heard when an adult’s hand covered a small boy’s mouth. I heard the gasp abruptly cut off, the sound of bare feet scrabbling on the floor and knew that the boy had been pulled from his bed and was being dragged from the room. I thought of the fear he must be feeling, of the tears that would be running down his face. I knew the words that would be spinning around and around in that petrified boy’s mind. ‘Stop them, somebody please stop them. Help me!’ But nobody ever did.

With their departure I could hear the faint sound of released breath and the tiny movements of bunched-up muscles relaxing. Every time it happened I was sure I could smell the faint whiff of a little boy’s pee that had dampened the sheets of an empty bed.

Yes, we all knew what was happening. But we were only children who were far too controlled by fear to find the guts to leap to one another’s defence.

We all knew that their journey would take them to the cellars where someone would be waiting. Sometimes another warden or maybe a man from outside.

There was one man who visited us regularly, walked down the long corridors freely, laughed and joked with the wardens and at Christmas time, while ‘Jingle Bells’ played on the radio in the common room, he gave small children brightly wrapped presents, sweets and jovial smiles as he sat them on his knee.

To the boys who were brought to him in the cellars at night, where he crouched in the shadows waiting for them to be delivered, he gave something else – something special, he told them. He gave them pain and shame.

When the hand was removed from a boy’s mouth I would hear faint cries and pleas disappearing down the corridor and, unable to bear those sounds, I put my hands over my ears. In the dining room the following morning I averted my eyes from the pale faces of the chosen boys and if there was an empty place I didn’t ask where the missing boy was.

The small group we called ‘the pretty boys’ all clung together. Both their shame at being taken night after night and ours at not helping them kept them separate from us.

Sometimes I would see them in the corridors walking ahead of me. They would flinch when a warden or a group of older boys approached them, for it was not just the wardens who bullied them. There was a gang who lay in wait for the pretty boys, and my group knew to stay well clear of them.

These were boys who had got into trouble on the outside, fighting, stealing and playing truant. Rejected by their natural parents and handed back by foster parents when small and cute became large, sullen and aggressive as their teenage hormones kicked in, they were the ones who entered the home with acne on their faces and large chips on their shoulders.

They took pride in their poor school marks, showed little interest in team games, cleaned their fingernails with penknives, avoided washing, smoked in corners and Bryl-creemed their greasy hair. They found each other in the home and created their own little gangs who used their fists and feet and made catapults which fired stinging missiles. They laughed when their victims jumped, winced and cringed.

No doubt once upon a time they had been bullied, called little bastards, tripped up and jeered at themselves. Over the years they had made the transition from being helpless little boys to being young thugs without a great deal of effort. They saw violence and cruelty as the norm.

The worst of them was a slack-mouthed boy who had been given the nickname Spud. His intelligence was so low he couldn’t work out why his round pasty face, short thick neck, bristly sandy-coloured hair and small mean eyes had earned him that name. By the time I met him, nobody dared tell him.

He formed his own group of like-minded dullards with two other boys who were brothers. They stalked the younger children and became the wardens’ accomplices, for even they did not want to mess with this trio of feral boys.

One of Spud’s favourite daytime games was to stake out the lavatories and wash areas. He would lie in wait until an unsuspecting boy bent over the sink to brush his teeth or wash his face. With a leer, Spud would creep towards him, place his large meaty hands on either side of his victim and rest them against the sink, holding the boy firmly in place. His eyes would close to slits and his mouth drool as he jerked himself back and forth against the boy’s buttocks.

Lonely corridors were unsafe places so I always hurried along them as quickly as I could. However, one day a few weeks after I arrived I saw Blake’s tall, thickset body coming towards me with that self-confident swagger that defied anyone to challenge him. A wide, mocking smile was plastered across his face.

‘Go past me,’ I begged him silently, as I tried to look anywhere but at him. But he didn’t.

‘Hey, Robbie,’ he said as though we were friends, ‘there’s a party tonight and you’re invited.’

I looked up at the man, who in a few short weeks I had already learnt to distrust, and I’m sure my face registered my suspicion. Pete and Martin had mentioned ‘parties’ and although they hadn’t explained exactly what they were I knew I didn’t like the sound of them.

He ignored my expression and carried on: ‘Just an intimate little get-together so we can all become better acquainted. You know, learn about each other a bit more.’

‘Who else is coming then?’ I managed to ask, seeing no alternative but to play along with his game.

‘A few of you lads, a couple of my friends and Anderson,’ he replied. At the sound of Anderson’s name, I felt a wave of fear. He was another warden and one of the men who came to the dormitories in the night.

I thought of Neville then, those fat fingers prodding at my small body, the heat of him through my jumper, the way my small hands had been forced to stroke him, and afterwards that smell – that smell when his slime stuck to my fingers.

I remembered how when I had first known Dennis I had seen him as someone to look up to and admire. I had been so happy, so flattered and so excited when he picked me for the gymnastics team that I had found it difficult to sleep the night after he had told me. But I had quickly learnt that an apparently kind smile could disguise a very different kind of man. A picture flashed into my mind of him naked, sitting with his legs spread wide, playing with his penis as though it was a pet rat, and I shuddered.

But bad as those two had been, I knew this would probably be worse. I remembered the unease I had felt when Blake watched me taking my first-ever shower on the day I arrived at Haut de le Garenne.

I opened my mouth to say no. No, I didn’t want to go to the party, especially if they were going to be there.

He forestalled me. I was not going to get a chance to refuse. His hand gripped my wrist in a powerful hold.

‘After supper you go to your dormitory and wait for us. All right?’

I felt the chill of fear in my stomach. I just looked at him. What could I say?

‘Don’t worry if you’re shy, Garner,’ he said in a tone that was meant to be reassuring but that frightened me even more. ‘You’ll soon know us well. So you will be ready, won’t you?’

I knew that this wasn’t something I had a choice about and that to ignore his command would bring down unimaginable repercussions on my shoulders. I swallowed hard. I felt sick. I’d hoped that maybe I had escaped his notice but I realised that he had just been playing for time. I wanted to escape, to run from him, but there was nowhere or nobody to run to.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He smiled again, patted me just a little too heavily on the bottom, and strode off. His mouth was pursed in a tuneless whistle, his arms swinging; he was a man looking forward to the evening ahead.

There were six of us waiting by our beds that night, six of us who did not want to meet each other’s eyes, six of us who already felt ashamed of something that had not yet taken place.