One Night (16 page)

“I wasn’t always in the children’s home,” he said. “I was fostered for six months. When I was nine. They took me in the spring and sent me back in the autumn. I’ve never told anyone about this, not then and not now.”

It happened sometimes but not often. One of the kids would get to go, to escape. There were a few foster families in the area and when they had room they would take another child in. There was a lot of talk of matching the right child to the right family but what this basically meant was that the adults got to pick which boy the wanted. They did it by discussing the boys with the manager of the home and, sometimes, by interviewing the boys.

The staff in the home used it as a carrot to make them behave.
You might get to leave,
they’d say.
If you’re good. You might get a family. If you’re good.
Or
No family would want a child who didn’t finish his dinner.
One of them liked to say things like
If I was choosing a boy I wouldn’t want one who did that.
That was whatever the child in question had just done. Picked their nose, farted, spoken out of turn.

Occasionally the boys who escaped didn’t come back to the home but mostly they did. Days or weeks or months later they’d appear again. Sometimes they’d tell the others why they’d be sent back. Mostly the reasons came down to fairness and the lack of it. The foster families not understanding. There was something about being in the home that changed them, meant they couldn’t be normal again even if they were given the opportunity to. The home was a terrible place but at least the rules of living there were clear, they were drummed into them every day. The outside was far trickier.

Joel didn’t expect it but one day he got pulled aside by one of the staff and taken into a room he’d never seen before. There were two people in there, a man and a woman, sitting on the other side of a table. He sat down and they talked to him for a while. They asked him what he liked to do, what he had learned at school, what he wanted to be when he grew up. After a while he was taken away again, when he was walking out of the room he heard one of the staff speaking to the couple. “He’s okay really, quiet but no trouble. You won’t know he’s there.”

Two days later they told him he was leaving, that the family wanted him. He didn’t believe it at first, thought they were playing a trick on him like they sometimes did with the kids. They weren’t though. The next day he had all his clothes and his toys and his two books in a little cardboard suitcase and he was being ushered out of the front door. The family were waiting there in their car. The man and the woman and a boy. He stood there holding his case, not
really sure what he was supposed to be doing. And then there was a flurry of motion and the two front door of the car opened and the man and the woman jumped out. They ran to him and the woman threw her arms around him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. The man put a heavy, reassuring hand on his shoulder and smiled down at him. “You’re coming to live with us now, Joel,” he said.

“You’re part of our family,” said the woman. “You’re a Johnson.”

The boy didn’t look so sure, he sat in the back of the car and stared out at Joel while his parents fluttered around him. In the end he turned away and went back to his GameBoy.

Right from the start the man (Bob) and the woman (Jackie) were brilliant. She would tuck him into bed each night and give him a kiss on the forehead. He would let Joel help him in the garage and around the house, repairing things, working with his hands.

The boy, Mark, was cold for the first few days but after a while he seemed to warm to him a bit. He was eleven and Joel acted around him like he had around the bigger kids at the school, respectful. If Mark wanted something Joel was playing with then he got it, if he wanted to watch something different on the TV it got turned over. They co-existed like that for a while. Joel had his own room so he could keep out of Mark’s way if he had to. 

As the weeks went by Mark played with him more and more, he sometimes let Joel chose the TV channel,
he even spoke to him at school.

For three or four months he felt like his life had changed. He had a family, a mum, a dad, a brother. He was normal. He didn’t live in the home he lived in a home.

And then bullying started. It wasn’t Joel who got bullied though, it was Mark.

The first thing he noticed was that Mark started acting differently. He didn’t want to play anymore. He’d come home from school and do his homework and then just watch TV until bedtime.

One day a group of boys cornered them on the walk home. Joel knew they were in the same year as Mark but they were bigger than him, starting to grow into their bodies already.

They surrounded them but ignored Joel, focussing instead on Mark. One of the boys shoved him and he staggered across the circle they had formed to the other side. The boy there shoved him back. All the time they chanted “Oh boy, oh boy”.

Mark got shoved again and Joel decided he’d had enough. Living in the home had taught him how to pick out the leader of any group and he’d identified the head of his one. He ran at him, punched him, drove his small fist into the boy’s sneering face. The boy fell back clutching his nose, a wet stain spread across the groin of his school trousers and he turned and ran. The other boys scattered after him.

Mark didn’t speak to him at all on the way home. Just before they reached the house Joel asked him why the boys had been chanting “oh boy”.

“It’s O” said Mark. “It means orphan. It’s because of you.”

Joel though that would be the end of the bullying but the next day it happened again. This time two of the boys held Joel while the others pushed Mark around.

It carried on for a week. Mark didn’t talk to him at all, not at breakfast, not at dinner, not at school. Joel knew that Bob and Jackie were trying to make him tell them what was wrong but he didn’t think Mark was talking to them either. He kept quiet too, the home had taught him that telling adults other kid’s secrets was usually a bad idea.

The weekend was a relief because they didn’t have to go to school, didn’t even have to leave the house.

But then Monday came.

All through the day Joel worried about the walk home but he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He could have walked a different way, left Mark to deal with the bullies on his own, but Mark was his brother. Maybe not by blood, maybe not for real, but in every way that actually mattered. So he walked with him.

It was the same as Friday. Two boys held him, held him tight so he couldn’t move an inch, while the others pushed Mark around, laughing and shoving and gloating.

And then the leader caught Mark when he was pushed at him. He let Mark go so the two of them were standing facing each other. He pulled out a pen knife.

Joel recognised the look on his face. The look of someone in love with the idea that they’re stronger than others, that they can turn people to their will. He’d seen it on the faces of some of the boys at the home. And the staff.

“You can stop us,” the boy said to Mark. “We’ll leave you alone. All you have to do is cut the orphan. He doesn’t mean anything to you anyway, that’s what you said, right?”

The other boys got excited. “Do it,” they shouted. “Cut him.” The two that were holding Joel forced him down onto the concrete. The leader guided Mark to him, kicked him in the back of his knees so his legs bent and he sat on top of Joel.

“Cut him,” the boys said again.
And Mark did. Joel lay there with his arms pinned by Mark’s legs as the boy he’d called his brother moved the blade closer and closer to his face. He could see that Mark was crying. Little beads of moisture forming in the corners of his eyes and being blinked quickly away. He felt the cold steel slice into his cheek and he knew it was all over. The pain of the knife cutting into him was intense but what was worse was the knowledge that there was no going back from this moment. He didn’t have a family anymore.

Bob took him to the hospital, he told them Joel had been cut by some glass from a window that he’d broken playing football. Joel didn’t say anything, he just let the nurse stitch up his cheek.

The next day he was back at the children’s home. His little cardboard suitcase in his hand packed with the same items he’d left with. Only two things were different. The scar on his face and the surety in his heart that he would never trust anyone ever again. 

Eve didn’t say anything when he had finished telling her the story. She just kissed him on the lips and held him. Their heads were side by side as they hugged, she was looking at the wall, he was facing the cafe and the windows out onto the park. That’s why it was Joel who saw the silhouettes of the men outside.

Joel didn't want the moment to end, not for any reason let alone the one that was staring him in the face outside the cafe. The men standing there.

He'd given Eve his body and now he'd given her his soul. He had opened himself to her in a way he never had with any woman and it felt good. Was this what love felt like? This emotion that seemed to fill every part of him. That had subtly changed every one of his senses so that the world seemed better, richer,
sweeter.

They needed to run but before they did he needed to tell her.

"Eve," he said, his voice low. "I think I'm falling in love with you."

She was about to speak but he placed a finger on her lips.

"Later, there are men outside."

She looked at the window and saw the silhouettes there too. Her face changed, the glow of relaxation gone replaced by tension. She nodded and crawled away from him to her clothes. The sight of her naked round arse swaying as she went made him smile.

He moved to his own clothes and pulled them on quickly, keeping an eye on the window the whole time. The figures were still outside, three of them, wandering around. One of them had a torch and was shining it over the various rides and buildings. Had it been the light of the Carousel that had brought them down here? Maybe.

Joel realised he didn't regret it. The time he’d spent with Eve tonight had changed him, he could feel it. It was as if she’d healed something broken inside him. Fixed him. The time on the Carousel was a part of that, the most important part. It was there that his heart had softened enough to let her in.

He watched the men and tried to decide what to do. He knew he hadn't left any sign on any of the locks he'd picked. Jesus, he'd left the door to the cafe unlocked though, too swept up in the passion of the moment to care. All the men had to do was try the door and they'd know where the two of them were hiding. Besides, wasn't the cafe the most blindingly obvious place to take shelter in the whole fucking park?

He glanced over at Eve who was dressed now and motioned to her to keep down. Hand level, palm down. She recognised the gesture, learned from a hundred movies.

Joel crawled to the door and crouched at it, glad that the lower panel was solid rather than glass. He slowly raised his head and peered out. The men were still there, maybe twenty feet away, close enough that they might seem him if they looked in his direction despite the darkness and the film of sea spray coating the glass. They looked aimless, as if they were there because someone had told them they should be rather than because they thought there was any purpose to what they were doing. They seemed to be a different group to the one that had attacked them in the town, he didn't recognise any of them at least. They didn't have any masks on, probably figuring that even if they did find who they were looking for there wouldn't be anyone else around to see. One of them had a baseball bat held casually by his side, which ruled out the possibility that they were just extremely diligent maintenance men.

Joel ducked his head down again and pulled his lock picks out. He quickly locked the door and then crept back to Eve.

"They don't look like too much of a threat at the moment but I don't want to take the chance."

They crawled across the floor together, rounding the serving counter that faced the windows and heading into the kitchen beyond it. There was a door at the back, Joel could see bins through it. He unlocked it quickly and efficiently and then opened it an inch. Putting his ear to the gap he listened to the night. He could hear traffic in the distance but not the men.

“Let’s go,” he said and they stepped out together, Eve speaking quietly as they did.

"The trust thing, it's human, Joel. We have to trust so we don't feel that we're all alone in the world. When we lose the ability to trust we lose a little of what makes us human. That’s what I think anyway."

Joel thought about it, about the years before he met Danny. How he'd drifted through life, moving from one girl to the next, always leaving them as soon as he started to think he might be feeling something. The string of girls hadn't stopped when Danny had found him and taken him under his wing but maybe he'd stayed with each one a little longer, let them in a little more. As hard as it was to admit it with what had happened, his life had been better when Danny was in it.

The bins were in a small fenced area with a gate that led out into the park, Joel cracked it open and looked. He couldn’t hear or see the men.

He opened the gate fully and they stepped through it together and started running through the park, back to the hole in the fence they’d entered it by. Joel thought briefly about going for the bag but it was well hidden and the men were between him and it. There was too much risk in trying to retrieve it, especially as if he did manage to get to it safely he’d just be struggling under its burden again. He’d leave it where it was for now.

So they ran, together, as they had before.
Ran through the night, leaving the three men behind. The fence was in sight, glinting in the darkness with the promise of escape when Eve’s phone rang.

She stopped short, struggling to get her bag open and find it. The ring was loud, some pop song Joel didn’t recognise. It carried through the quiet night, a beacon that would draw the men right to them. He heard the shouts just as she pulled the phone out, saw her start at the aggressive yelling, the phone slipping from her hand and falling to the path. He saw the glowing screen as it lay there, saw the name of the caller. Harry, it said.

She stooped and picked it up, rejected the call. Joel could hear the men’s footfalls now. Heavy, fast, running towards them.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her with him as she started running again. Behind them one of the men shouted, his deep loud voice carrying through the night.

“Eve!”

Joel kept running.
Her was hand still in his, but something was starting to feel wrong inside him.

“Eve!” the man shouted again. “It’s okay we’re here now.”

That feeling inside Joel was getting stronger. An ache where his heart should be.

“Harry says thank you,” said the man, Joel thought he could hear the hint of a laugh in his voice. “Thank you for leading us to him.”

Joel looked at Eve and tried to read her face. She looked shocked, confused. She started to shake her head at him.

He heard a shout from ahead of them. Another man stood there. Joel wasn’t sure if he was the one he’d seen from the cafe earlier or not. It didn’t matter, what mattered was
the baseball bat in his hands.

The man raised his bat as Joel and Eve ran towards him. Her grip
on his hand was loosening, or maybe it was the other way around. The man swung his bat and Joel jumped to the side to dodge the blow. Eve’s hand slipped from his and he heard her gasp, he looked back and saw that she had fallen to the floor. She lifted her head and looked right at him.

“Run!” she shouted.

Joel ran, not knowing if he was escaping the men or her.