Nobody Came (9 page)

O
n our second Saturday, as soon as we had eaten our breakfast, once again Sister Freda appeared to escort us to Neville’s lair.

‘Neville told me how hard you both worked last Saturday,’ she told us grudgingly, ‘and said he wanted you to help him again.’

My heart sank. I had hoped and hoped all week that we wouldn’t have to return to his outhouse, but he had forestalled us.

When we arrived, we saw that Neville had done something different with the chickens. Instead of bringing them from the deep litter barns in boxes and releasing them in the killing shed, he had caught the birds three at a time, tied their legs together, carried them across the few yards from the barn and thrown them onto the flagstone floor. There they lay in pitiful feathered heaps, feebly trying to break free and escape. He smirked at the birds’ plight but it was clear that his fun was far from over.

He picked them up, held them out at arm’s length and laughed out loud as they beat their wings and contorted their bodies, trying to reach their tormentor’s hands and peck them.

‘Naughty, naughty!’ he said as he hung them up by their bound feet onto the pegs in squirming, clucking bunches. ‘Mustn’t be nasty to Neville.’ He whispered to us: ‘Now I’ve got a new job for you, Robbie. See this bowl?’

I nodded suspiciously.

‘That’s to catch the blood when I cut their throats. The nuns want it for the gardens. Say it’s good for the flowers. So catch every drop and no blood on the floor. OK?’

He thrust the bowl into my unwilling hands, went up to the feathery mass, caught one chicken’s head in his hand and with the other hand sliced its throat so that the head hung by a thread and blood spurted out in fat, dark-red globs. Neville quickly pulled me in front of him, holding me tightly against his body. He lifted my arms and positioned the bowl under the bird.

The blood dripped in. I smelled its ripe, metallic odour and, combined with the stale musky stench of Neville’s body, it nauseated me. I was only five and I just couldn’t comprehend that there was something about the combination of the smell of blood and the fear and panic of the helpless creatures that thrilled Neville, but I was aware that they did. I could feel a peculiar sense of pleasure and enjoyment in his quickened breath that raised the hairs on the back of my neck; the rising heat of him so close to me seemed to penetrate right through my jumper. When I wriggled free and turned round I saw the tip of his tongue licking the edges of his fleshy mouth in a way that was quite repulsive. He always seemed to do this when he was excited, I noticed.

One after another he systematically slit the throats of those poor chickens. He chuckled with delight as they twisted and turned in their slow, bloody death throes. Once the first batch of chickens was still, he severed their heads with a quick flick of his hunting knife and allowed them to drop to the floor.

‘Davie, you’re to pick up the heads. I know it was Robbie did it last week so it’s your turn this time.’

Davie shook his head defiantly.

As he slowly comprehended that a three-year-old boy was challenging his orders, a sudden look of delight spread across Neville’s ugly features. Out of his pocket he took a length of thick twine. He caught both Davie’s hands in one of his and, using his other hand and his teeth, he quickly tied them together. I stood rooted to the spot with fear.

‘I warned you what happens to little boys who say the word “no” to me.’ He picked Davie up by his knotted wrists and hung him from a free peg set between the dead chickens on one side and the last untouched bunch of flapping, living ones on the other. Neville sliced one of their throats and pulled it so it dripped blood close to Davie’s face.

‘Your turn next!’ he said. Davie’s face turned chalky white, except for two spots that flamed bright red on his cheeks. His eyes fluttered shut, and his body hung limply. I guessed he must have fainted. What could I do to help him? There’s no way I could fight Neville – I knew that.

‘Now, Robbie, your little brother is going to have to stay there unless you do something for me. Do you know what I want you to do?’

I shook my head. I wanted to beg him to let Davie down. I was so scared for him. He wasn’t making a sound. But I already knew that begging Neville would just make it worse. ‘Don’t cry, Davie,’ I silently pleaded. ‘Don’t scream, or yell. If you stay still he’ll get fed up.’ I looked at the knife in Neville’s hand and shivered. Would Davie suffer the same terrible fate as the chickens? With mounting horror I watched as Neville snaked his hand out towards Davie. It slid up his little legs and disappeared under his pants.

‘Come here, Robbie,’ Neville said in a voice I had not heard before. ‘Do you want me to let your brother down or do you want to go up alongside him?’

I tried desperately not to show the fear that gnawed inside of me. ‘Let him down, please,’ I whispered, my voice catching in my throat.

‘And you’ll do anything I ask?’ Cos if you don’t, it will be worse for him.’

Pee was running down Davie’s legs. I felt his terror and I knew that’s what had paralysed him. He hadn’t fainted; he was just scared to death.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

Neville lifted Davie down but left his wrists tied and roughly propped him against the wall. Davie slumped forward.

Neville lowered his huge frame onto a chair. He pulled me towards him until I was standing between his legs, then he unfastened the buttons of his trousers and lowered them slightly. He lifted his penis out of his grubby underpants. I had never seen a man’s one before, not even Stanley’s. It didn’t look as big as I had thought it would. John had told me that when you were a man they grew very big, like a banana. Neville’s was just poking out from under rolls of fat and lay limply on the top of his white thigh.

He grasped my small hand and wrapped my fingers around his penis.

‘Move your hand up and down,’ he instructed.

I did.

I couldn’t look at him or at Davie so I looked somewhere just over his shoulder. I didn’t want to look into his face, didn’t want to see those fleshy lips, which I somehow knew were being wetly caressed by his tongue. Neither did I want to listen to his heavy breathing, but I could feel each hot, fetid breath blowing on my cheek. Nor did I want to feel that warm, slimy, sticky substance that trickled into my hand and dripped through my fingers.

‘Better wash them before you pluck those chickens,’ was all he said when he pushed me away.

He untied my brother’s hands. They were red where the rope had cut into his flesh.

As if nothing had happened, Neville filled the tin bath with boiling water and started to throw the chicken carcasses into it.

Without a look or a word passing between us, Davie and I began to pluck the chickens. Davie never disobeyed Neville again.

From being my favourite day, the one I looked forward to all week, the day all three of us went to the beach or the park, the day John was with us, a day full of laughter and fun, Saturday now became the day I dreaded the most. For everything that was loathsome and everything that was corrupt was conjured up in one word: Neville. And every Saturday Davie and I were sent to work with him.

I wondered whether he spent all week preparing himself for our visit. Did he lick those fleshy lips in anticipation of our tears? Did he plan the first time he fondled us, when he rubbed his large, flabby body against our small firm ones and yanked his penis up and down in front of us? Was that the highlight of his week?

Maybe it was. Subconsciously, over time, we began to fight back. Not straight away, because it took some months for us to gain enough inner strength, but eventually we did. Eventually Davie stopped crying and I stopped shaking. Instead we stared back at him and wiped all evidence of emotion and feeling from our faces. That way, we felt, he hadn’t won. That way we could spoil at least some of his disgusting fun.

W
hen I look back at that time some memories are so sharp and clear that I can still feel the sadness that was the essence of my five-year-old self. Others are like an old photograph left partially forgotten at the back of a wallet or the bottom of a drawer. Time has faded it, creases mar its surface and at first glance the people from yesterday, depicted in it, are almost unrecognisable. But we know that should we allow our defences to weaken, the image will become sharper and the features familiar until we are once again face to face with the horrors of our past.

Those pictures in my head of those first months at Sacre Coeur are like those old black-and-white photographs, for I can only remember dark, dull days. It’s as though my little-boy misery has sucked all the colour from my early memories of Sacre Coeur. I’m sure that the sun must have shone on our Channel Island; it was spring when we went there, but I don’t remember one single ray of its warmth. I remember other things though. The austerity, the daily rituals and the smell of burning porridge that greeted us each morning. Queuing outside the dining room before every mealtime for our hands and necks to be inspected; knowing we would go hungry should any dirt be found.

Having to stand and recite grace before and after meals. The morning mass; the evening mass, when we were so tired that all we could think about was sleep. The smell of incense, the click of rosaries, the huge statues of a man whose heart was exposed, eyes rolled up in agony and thorns covering his head, appearing to beckon us with his bloodstained hands. And the blessed Mother Mary who was said to love little children – but not the ones at Sacre Coeur, we were convinced.

Over time we learnt if not to like, then at least to tolerate the institutionalised food. At breakfast we had lumpy, thin, tasteless porridge made with water. At first I yearned for something sweet to flavour it – syrup and rich, creamy Jersey milk – but knowing neither was forthcoming, gradually I learnt to eat it with salt. The remainder of our breakfast was two slices of coarse, wheaten bread and dripping. Once a month and on holy days, boiled eggs were put in front of us, but all the other eggs produced by the laying hens in the deep litter barns were either served at the nuns’ table or sold to local shopkeepers.

The most common main meal of the day was a greasy stew that consisted of whatever vegetables were in season and chicken complete with skin and bones. Those plucked, pallid birds were carried from Neville’s outhouse and piled up on the wooden kitchen table. Each one was hastily chopped into six portions, thrown into a large pot along with some vegetables and potatoes and there it bubbled, filling the air with unappetising aromas.

At first, when I saw how the grease floated out of the skin to stain the surface with pale yellow streaks, I looked at it with disgust. When the old nun ladled it out onto my plate at dinner-time I tried not to think of the terrified creatures that Neville had killed, or how I had had to pluck them, or what Neville made me do to him in the chicken killing room. Instead I chewed, swallowed, spat out bones, licked my lips and wiped my plate clean. Hunger has a knack of making the most terrible food palatable, and with no between-meal snacks hunger was something I got used to.

My sixth birthday came and went without comment except that I was given another chore to do: instead of just sweeping the huge entrance hall Nicolas and I had to wash and polish it every morning as well.

A few weeks later the summer holidays started. That year, unlike the previous one, there was no excitement; no big brother coming home saying ‘That’s it for six weeks.’ No beach that we could go to and swim and play ‘Castaways’. No swings in the park and no freedom. Instead we faced six weeks of being under the rigorous discipline of the nuns who, with their belief that the Devil finds work for idle hands, made doubly sure that mine were very, very busy.

After I had helped Nicolas clean the hall we had breakfast and then attended mass from Monday through to Friday. After mass, I was sent to work in the laundry, a huge noisy room with a damp, steamy smell, along with Marc, a ginger-haired boy about two years older than me.

The walls were lined with deep, white rectangular sinks. Heavy ridged washboards used for scrubbing lay on the wooden draining boards and mangles with basins placed underneath them stood in a corner. In the centre of the room were the gas burners where huge pans of water bubbled away. In them we threw grubby white bedding and towels to which we added soap powder and a small amount of bleach. About an hour later a pair of older boys used giant wooden tongs to remove the boiling-hot washing and dump it into baskets. Our task was to drag these away and rinse the washing before hanging it out to dry. Over our heads were wooden drying racks that hung from the ceiling and a heavy pulley enabling them to be raised and lowered.

The first task I was given was to separate dirty socks from underpants, jumpers from shirts, pyjamas from day clothes. Once they were piled in separate stacks I, and several other boys of a similar age, filled the sinks with soapy water, cold for the wool and warm for everything else. We propped up the metal and wooden ridged boards beside them and rubbed and rubbed until even the most stubborn stains had been removed.

They were then rinsed in another sink filled with cold water: no point wasting hot water on clean clothes, the nuns told us, thus making the task of rinsing take twice as long. Once one sink-load of washing had been completed we would try our best to wring it out, but our hands were too small to be of much use. We pulled out bundles of wet clothes and sheets, placed them in the wicker baskets and trailed them across the floor to be put through the mangles. We fed those dripping wet clothes, sheets and towels through the heavy roller, then grasped the handle with both hands and turned it over and over until, after a number of times through the mangle, the washing was merely damp.

Back in our wicker baskets it went, to be dragged over to the racks. Bigger boys pulled them down for us to hang everything up to dry.

We repeated that exercise again and again until our backs and arms ached unbearably by the end of the day. My hands were red and sore. It was hard, heavy work. Our days were ruled by the ringing of the bell announcing either a mealtime or mass.

Marc and I used to whisper to each other when we weren’t being watched – rude comments about the nuns, and the kind of chatter that little boys enjoy. Making a new friend was the only bonus to working there.

I spent the entire summer indoors in that laundry. The job was so relentless I almost looked forward to going back to school. That, I thought, would be an easier option. But I was wrong.