On Loving Josiah (12 page)

Kerry came in at eight o’clock to say goodnight to him. She found a boy lying in his bed as stiffly as a knight in his bronze coffin, staring up at the ceiling.

‘I’m so sorry, Josiah,’ she said, sitting down on his bed. ‘I’m so sorry about tonight. You know it’s not usually as bad as this.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Josiah.

‘Jason had a few stitches and he’s fine. Dave’s cleared it all up downstairs and everyone’s going to bed.’

‘Who’s Dave?’ asked Josiah.

‘Ah Dave! I’ve not introduced you yet! You’ll like him, we have good fun with him. Sometimes he brings his guitar along. Do you know any good songs, Josiah?’

‘No,’ said Josiah.

‘Then you’ll just have to learn them. Here, let me tuck you in.’ Kerry knelt down beside him and tucked him up tight. ‘There,’ she said, ‘did your mother used to…?’

‘No, she didn’t tuck me in,’ interrupted Josiah.

‘Dear Josiah,’ gushed Kerry, feeling overwhelmingly moved, and suddenly kissing him on his forehead. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know.’

‘Oh yes I should,’ said Josiah, confidently.

Kerry sighed and took hold of Josiah’s hand.

‘No, don’t,’ said Josiah.

And Kerry, with all the sadness of the day heaped upon her, said goodnight and left him.

Of course, Josiah was bullied right from the start, but he didn’t really notice much. He felt all the comfort of the true outsider: he was untouchable. But it would be inaccurate to describe him as ‘lonely’, because ‘lonely’ suggests the still-warm memory of a time when you have known something else, and
The Hollies
managed to free such a memory entirely, relegating his past to mere text-book history. Maggie continued to mother him from time to time, telling him he’d catch a chill if he stayed outside so much, insisting that he let her know if any of the boys were giving him a hard time. But the trouble was that Josiah knew that she meant it, and thought it best to keep quiet.

He listened quite happily to the attentions of Kerry, Dave and a new field-worker called Lizzie, all of whom took it in turns to endear themselves to him. He was always polite, and when they asked him whether he was happy at
The Hollies
he always said, ‘yes’. ‘It’s
incredible
how self-sufficient he is,’ was what they said about him behind his back, and each, in their own way, rather loved him.

But after a few months, Dave realised that he wasn’t going to be able to initiate Josiah into the mysteries of Motown music, Lizzie was getting a heavier caseload and Josiah was an ‘easy’ kid who didn’t make demands upon her time, and Kerry got herself a boyfriend. By the time Josiah was nine, they were leaving him much to his own devices.

There were two mature trees in the small garden at
The Hollies
: a large majestic beech and a small, fairly stumpy yew. But within Josiah’s first month there, the beech had become Heaven, and the yew, Earth, and Josiah had appointed them as his Confessors. It was good, he decided, to have one tree for his heavenly anxieties, and another for his earthly ones. His next task was to attempt to discover their answers to him, and to learn their particular language. There had never been any doubt in him that trees had a language: his father had told him as soon has he was capable of understanding that trees 
were living, and he had witnessed for himself their acute sensitivity to the seasons and the weather. What he required of them now was that they should apply that same sensitivity to other matters, and he thought that if only he could manage to communicate to them some of what he was feeling, then there could be no wiser nor more constant arbiters than they.

So he set about trying to de-code the trees’ peculiar language, and to look for signs (Heaven and Earth must have so much to talk about, he thought), and he decided that it was no mere
coincidence
that the words ‘three’ and ‘tree’ were like each other. The trunk, the branches and the leaves were each responsible for
different
kinds of messages, and though he had never been particularly religious before, (despite his mother telling him on several occasions that ‘Josiah’ was both a famous and a good King in the Bible, and his father taking him to Church at Christmas and Easter), he now considered that either the Father himself, or his Son, or the Holy Ghost, might well wish to communicate with him. God himself was the trunk, and the trunk only swayed when a communication of the highest order had to be delivered; Jesus was the branches, wavering and nodding and always ready to reply; and the Holy Ghost had found his home among the leaves. ‘The Holy Ghost is like a wind,’ he thought, ‘and leaves love wind.’

Josiah preferred the beech tenfold to the yew, and when it lost its leaves that first autumn he gathered up the more beautiful ones and took them to his bedroom. He considered it his solemn duty to keep them safe until the spring, and he kept them in his drawers under his clothes, and when it was too dark to go out into the garden after school, these shrivelling leaves became his soul mates.

Josiah often wondered where the Holy Spirit got to when He left the Heavenly beech for half the year, and until he was fourteen (when his life was to change irrevocably and he had other things to think about), he tried out several theories, none of which could
wholly satisfy him. There was a while, even, when he wondered whether his own banal conversation caused the leaves to lose their vivid colour, and then by extension that he was causing the leaves to fall in the first place. But if that was the case then he was also the reason why buds burst forth in April! Josiah’s was indeed a year of grief and hope, of wretchedness and joy, but all these emotions were so painful to him that to dare to lie under his Heavenly beech was something he only occasionally had the strength for.

He chose the yew to be his everyday advisor, to whom he
complained
about tummy aches and homework and the like. For the yew kept its dark green spines all year long, and Josiah knew they could be utterly relied upon. So year in and year out Josiah took the yew into his confidence, lying in an indentation in the moss beneath it. When Kerry left
The Hollies
to go and live in Wales with her boyfriend, the yew was the first to know. When Tracy Fortune, the social worker who had first taken him from his parents, fell upon him one afternoon and in floods of tears apologized for her part in his demise, Josiah told the yew. He also talked about the children in his class at school or at
The Hollies.
He was always careful that no one should ever catch him going outside, and once there he could trust that he’d be left alone. No one else ever bothered to come into the garden. Why would they? It was far too small for football. And anyway, once everyone was home from school, there was a general lunge towards the kitchen for bread and jam, and he could always manage to sneak out.

What was curious, however, was that Josiah rarely bothered the yew with what he considered minor irritations: he didn’t bother to mention quite how many times Steve, Jason and John continued to prod him in the back with a corkscrew or a new penknife, or how that boy Darren drew pictures of penises in toothpaste on the mirror above his basin. He was more concerned about the anxieties of
newcomers
, who were unaccustomed to the chaos of the place, the lack
of predictability, the interminable noise, the arguments that seemed to break out constantly about which TV programme to watch or who had taken the last portion of trifle. For each time a new child came to live at
The Hollies,
he saw it all again through that child’s eyes, and continued to be anxious on his behalf until bewilderment was replaced by the more reassuring gang mentality.

When Josiah was ten he told the yew that his thirteen-year old protector, Maggie, was pregnant, and was going to leave soon. He felt privileged to have received a private confession from her. One evening at seven o’clock she had knocked at his door, and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you, love.’ She had sat down on the bed right up close to him and taken his hand in hers and said, ‘I’m going to have a baby. Would you like to see my tummy?’ Then Maggie had taken up her jumper and let him feel her taut, smooth stomach. ‘They wanted me to have an abortion,’ she’d told him, ‘but I said, “I’ll never kill a little baby, never.” When she’s born I’ll bring her to visit you. I’m going to call her Cherry.’

Two months later Maggie was gone, and she never said goodbye. Josiah told the yew all about it. He said he’d like to see her baby very much.

It was a mood rather than a confession which drove Josiah to seek the solace of the Heaven-beech. Here, he never even tried to put
anything
into words, but rather listened very hard to the creaking,
whispering
tree, and instinctively knew that its message was this:
there is somewhere else which will one day be yours.
That was all the solace he needed. Well, usually it was. Just occasionally, Josiah’s head was too full to listen properly, and there was a bottleneck between his head and his heart. There was a week at the beginning of June 1995, when the eleven-year old Josiah rarely left the beech’s protection.

What happened was this. In May, a new residential social worker arrived at
The Hollies.
There was nothing strange in that – during the year after Kerry’s departure there had been no fewer than five
new young men and women who’d run the gauntlet and promptly resigned. But this one was hip and called Josie, and she had long, fine blonde hair that ended in a perfect line three-quarters of the way down her back. Josie would swing her fair hair back when she laughed, and because she was good-natured and slightly nervous, this happened rather often. Within a few hours of her arrival, all the older boys had to acknowledge that they fancied her rotten. At this time Darren was fifteen and trying to grow a moustache; the older boys had of course left, but there were younger ones whom Darren was happily grooming to be quite the callous shit he was: Dan and Ricky, Kev and Jed.

But Josie only had eyes for Josiah. While the others continually bombarded her with demands for attention, Josiah would eat his meals quietly and take his empty plate to the kitchen without a murmur. While the others would talk until midnight and gather in each other’s rooms to smoke cigarettes, Josiah took himself off to bed at eight o’clock as though he barely existed. When Josie learnt from
The Hollies Birthday Book
that there was soon to be a birthday and it was Josiah’s, she set to work and made him a huge chocolate cake.

Josiah, of course, wasn’t expecting it at all. That tea-time, the first of June, when the last vestiges of ketchup, chips and sausages had been cleared away (Josie had even insisted that the tables be wiped down), a large cake was suddenly produced with the words
Happy Birthday Josiah
written across it in broken flake bars (which alone had taken Josie an hour). Five lustful adolescent boys began nudging each other and gazing furiously at their new object of hate. Josie didn’t notice because she was busy closing the curtains.

‘I always think,’ she was saying, ‘a room needs to be dark before we light candles.’

‘Oh fuck me,’ declaimed Darren, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

Josie’s hair was by now swinging at quite a rate, first over her left shoulder, then over her right; but by the time she came to be
lighting the candles one by one, her face was suddenly still and glowed angelically.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘Where are you, Josiah? You come here, birthday boy.’

Josiah did as he was told, though sheepishly. He’d had three more years experience of
The Hollies
than Josie, and already he knew he’d have to pay for this. Then Josie put an arm about his shoulder, and he made himself small and retreated into his body.

‘OK, so are we going to sing?’

‘Sing?’ sniggered these streetwise lads in disbelief.

‘Come on,’ she said, trying to jolly them along. ‘Happy
Birthday
to you…’ went Josie’s tuneful solo. No one joined in, and she stopped singing.

‘You’re a useless lot,’ she said. And then, as she looked down at the glum Josiah, feeling desperately that she didn’t want Josiah to be hurt or feel that his birthday was ruined, she took both of his hands in his and planted a kiss on his forehead.

‘Ooooooo,’ piped up a couple of the younger boys.

‘Fucking disgusting,’ reckoned one of the older ones, and stormed out. Four others followed him.

‘I don’t know what’s got into them!’ said Josie, anxiously. ‘Just ignore them, Josiah. Come on, blow out your candles then!’

Josiah did, to please her, and it seemed very hard work. He then had to be the first to eat the damn cake, but he managed that, too. But the younger children all guzzled it down, and in fact Josie was quite relieved that all that ‘bad karma,’ as she called it, had left the room.

When Josiah went to his room at seven o’clock that evening he saw that a bit of paper had been glued to his bedhead. At first the message written in thick green felt pen was difficult to decipher, not least for its strange spelling, but after a few minutes he managed to make out the following: