Someone Else's Son (48 page)

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, with the utmost respect for her grief, Miss Dayna Ray.’

Again, there was a ripple of restrained clapping followed by absolutely nothing. Carrie swallowed and waited by the wings to greet Dayna. She didn’t care how nervous or tentative she was about stepping in front of the cameras, she just wanted her on air. Dayna didn’t appear. Carrie pressed her earpiece. Nothing.

Finally, after another few seconds but what seemed like an hour, Dayna eased herself from the wings of the set. Behind her, Carrie caught a glance of Jess Britton. The detective nodded reassuringly, her hands on Dayna’s back, gently easing her out into the brilliant lights.

‘Dayna, my love, thank you so much for doing this.’ It was a private moment, with Carrie holding away her microphone. She hugged the girl – a prolonged gesture which she hoped not only the viewers would recognise as a special yet unfortunate bond between the pair, but also as a genuine conveyance of her sympathy. Losing a close friend – she’d tried to imagine losing Leah – was not so far removed from losing a son.

Dayna blinked. She squinted ahead, obviously trying to make sense of what she saw. Carrie knew that she’d been brought on set earlier and shown around to get used to the lights, the crew, the cameras, and the hundreds of studio seats that would soon be filled with eager faces. For Carrie, it was all so easy to ignore. Dayna, she realised, would be shell-shocked from it. Even at the best of times, appearing on television was gruelling.

‘Come and sit down here and we can talk.’ Carrie involved the audience again, as if inviting them into their intimate chat. There was a low table in front of the chairs with two glasses and a jug of water. Carrie poured while Dayna settled herself. The girl seemed half her usual size, minimised by grief and fear. Her legs were pencil-thin in the tight grey jeans and the rest of her was swamped in the jacket she wore. She tried to make her face disappear beneath the collar with her shoulders hunched, her chin bent low. The girl stared at her feet as they shuffled within mucky plimsolls.

‘We all really appreciate you coming, Dayna. There’s no easy way to say what I need to ask you today. I hope you can take some comfort, as I am, in that by doing this we are making the most of this awful situation. Neither you nor I, nor the team of tireless detectives who are working round the clock on this case, want to be doing this, but we have to. For Max. For all the other kids out there who aren’t dead yet but might be next week, next year . . . we have to try to stop it.’

Carrie took a moment to compose herself. She sipped some water, adjusted the way she sat and looked Dayna Ray straight in the eye.

‘I want you to tell me, Dayna, in your own words, what happened at school on the morning of April the twenty-fourth.’

 

Dayna knew she looked nervous – all the squinting and fidgeting and fiddling with her hair – but she didn’t care. She bit her nails, desperate for a fag, and could have done with a beer too, to get her through. On other shows, she’d seen some guests scream and kick and fight and end up storming off stage. That, or they were dragged off. Carrie used her charms to calm them down, bring them back, get down to business again. Could she do that? she wondered. Run away? She’d thought of it the last few days although it suddenly seemed much more of an option while sitting here with Carrie Kent, about to be taken to pieces because she didn’t really know anything. She
didn’t
.

‘I want you to tell me, Dayna, in your own words, what happened at school on the morning of April the twenty-fourth.’

Carrie put down her glass. Dayna picked up hers. It would prevent her having to speak for a few more seconds. Why had she come?

‘In your own time,’ Carrie continued, which obviously meant hurry up.

‘It was just a normal day,’ Dayna began. It felt weird being the only one speaking and all those people watching. Her voice didn’t sound like hers. She could pick out faces in the audience; see them shaking their heads, shifting in their seats. ‘I never thought anything like that would happen.’ Her voice sounded vapid, as if she was simply talking about the bad canteen food or the way the PE teacher let them skive cross-country.

But it was true; she didn’t think anything like that
would
happen. Even with everything that had gone before between her and Max, it still all seemed like a horror movie that she couldn’t get out of her head.

‘I got up early. I helped my kid sister get sorted and took her to school. Then I went on to Milton Park. It was all just normal.’

Dayna was aware of Carrie nodding. It was so hot in the studio. She wished she hadn’t worn this stupid jacket.

‘Did you talk to anyone when you got to school?’

‘Nah. No one talks to me. Well, Max did but...’ Dayna trailed off. Her heart thumped. She was already tip-toeing through broken glass in bare feet. ‘I went to maths and, like, got really bored. I did geography next but decided to bunk off after that.’

The lights shone brightly in Dayna’s eyes, dazzling her thoughts. She stared up at the metal racks with hundreds of spots aiming at her as if they were going to fire at her. Shots of light to make me spill the truth, she thought. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. This was Max’s
mother
.

‘Was Max in either of those lessons?’

It was like the police interviews all over again, Dayna thought dismally. She’d wriggled through those somehow but not easily. Had she come on the show to convince everyone, including herself, that she still didn’t know anything? Or had she come to confess that she knew too much? She was on the verge of bolting and they’d only just started. God, all she wanted was for Max to be alive again. Surely that made them on the same team.

‘He was in maths,’ Dayna heard herself saying. She recalled his back curled over the desk, his fingers tapping at the calculator. He found maths hard, he’d told her once, as if, for some reason, he should be innately tuned in to the subject. Only bother with what you’re good at, she’d said. Like the competitions, she’d continued, grinning. ‘But I didn’t see him in geography. We were doing stuff about fair trade. Max once told me that nothing was fair.’

She felt the burn of Carrie’s stare, way hotter than the lights. The woman’s silence made her continue talking. ‘I went to the chippy. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was hungry. I wasn’t the only kid from school there. There were some girls bunking off from my year.’

Give us yer cash
, Dayna remembered them saying. She saw the hatred in their eyes when she emptied her pocket. ‘And the other one,’ they said until she had no money left. They went in and ordered their chips. When they’d gone, Dayna hitched up her shirt and opened the money belt she wore. With a pound or two in her pockets to appease whoever chose to help themselves to her cash, she’d hidden the tenner she’d nicked from Kev’s wallet in the pouch. She ordered chips and wandered slowly back to school.

‘I was hoping to bump into Max. We’d got stuff to talk about,’ Dayna continued. She felt a sweat break out on her top lip. Would all that stupid make-up smudge if she wiped her face?

‘Such as?’ Carrie said.

The two of them stared at each other. A frozen moment.

‘Things hadn’t been going too well between us.’

‘Oh?’ This was clearly news to Carrie. Dayna didn’t speak to her mother about such things, and clearly Max hadn’t confided in his either.

‘It was just something . . . something I told him that he took the wrong way. I wanted him to know the truth. And kids had been mean to him at school because he was going out with me. They were spreading rumours and stuff.’

Carrie shook her head, looking concerned, lost. Dayna didn’t expect her to hold it together after that revelation. She waited for the yell or the shake of her shoulders, demanding answers. But oddly she remained calm and professional. Dayna thought that was worse.

‘So I went and sat on the wall and ate my chips. I reckoned Max would walk past. I wanted to talk to him. You know, clear things up.’

The lights flared in her eyes. Cameras rolled around her on big trolleys. There were so many people . . . so many people watching.

‘Fucking hell,’ he’d said when she’d called out his name as he’d walked past the wall. The first thing he’d said to her in ages. And she just held out her chips to him as if that would make it all better.

‘He was . . . dancing around,’ she told Carrie quietly. ‘Dancing around and I didn’t know why. His arms were everywhere and at one point I thought he was going to hit me. He was, like, really mad.’

Dayna heard a collective gasp. She noticed the ripple in Carrie’s throat as she swallowed.

‘I calmed him down and got him to sit with me on the wall.’

Dayna felt the cold grit of the cement beneath her school trousers. She was kicking her heels against the bricks, trying to make out that she was in control when really Max was. She ate the chips. The vinegar stung a cut she had from biting the skin on her lip.

‘Had the gang arrived at this point? Was anyone threatening Max?’

Dayna heard Carrie’s words in her head but she was back on the wall, burning her tongue, smelling Max’s aftershave, feeling the sense of utter desolation inside from what she’d done.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘The gang wasn’t there yet.’ She knew Carrie just wanted her to get to the point, identify the one who did it, get the phone lines buzzing. Blue eyes or black hair or a scar on their cheek? Adidas trainers or ripped jeans, a visible tattoo or description of a chain round their neck? Anything to help.

Could she make it all up? Would she be able to sit here, live on television, and lie? It was what she’d planned, wasn’t it?

Dayna felt as if she was floating again. Everything had built up inside her the last week. She’d hardly slept or eaten and all she’d drunk was beer or Coke or whatever made her griping stomach feel full and the truth go away.

Was she standing, sitting? In the school grounds or at the television studio?

She took a step forward but the ground wasn’t there. Maybe she was on the wall still.Yes, the wall. There was Max, jumped down now, looking all agitated and hopping about.

‘I told him what I’d done,’ Dayna said. Who was she talking to? Carrie? Max? She wanted to sob but couldn’t. ‘I was so angry that I screamed it at him. I told him I’d done what he wanted.’

‘What had Max wanted?’ That Carrie woman again, sticking her nose in. ‘Tell me what you mean, Dayna.’

A long silence, broken only by a car going along the street outside school, the rhythmic thud of her boot on the wall, a cough from someone in the audience.

‘About the baby,’ she whispered. The shuffling chorus around her again. Shock and disbelief. Then the wide eyes of that woman beside her, as if she, too, was walking in this strange, detached place.

‘The baby? What baby, Dayna? For God’s sake, you have to tell me.’

She felt a hand on her arm. Was it Max’s or his mother’s? Dayna remembered Max grabbing her. He was rough and angry.

‘You killed our baby,’ he said in such a way that Dayna didn’t know if it was a yell or a whisper.

Then she was walking somewhere, anywhere, into the light. Someone was following her. She turned suddenly, her eyes wide and searching like a trapped animal. ‘All this pain inside me,’ she said. ‘I just want to make it go away.’

‘Tell me about the baby, Dayna.’ A woman’s voice – slight tremble, tightening fingers on her arm. Dayna stared into Carrie Kent’s eyes, illuminated by the brilliance around them. Max’s
mother
. Dayna smiled at that. Max was everywhere, wasn’t he?

‘We were lovers,’ she said. A rumble from the audience but cut short. ‘I loved him, but you know what?’ Dayna heard someone laughing. It took her a moment to realise it was her. ‘I never once told him.’

‘You were having unprotected sex?’

Dayna was nodding, just as she had done to Max when he lay down on her. ‘It’s what you tell everyone to do, isn’t it?’ Dayna was vague, unreal.

‘What?’ Carrie asked indignantly.

‘To use contraception.’ Dayna shrugged herself from Carrie’s grasp. She was sick of being pushed around. ‘Well, we didn’t, did we? And I got pregnant. I got pregnant with Max’s baby.’

Oh my God
. . . was all Dayna heard layered over the studio audience gasps of shock. She liked it that she had stunned everyone. A primer, she thought, for what was to come.

‘You’re, like, always going on about teen pregnancies and irresponsible sex. Well, guess what? Your own son was doing it right under your nose.’ Something was building inside Dayna. It was a similar feeling to when she’d stolen fags off that little kid. It was empowering, enabling her to stride across the studio just as she’d seen Carrie Kent do to intimidate her other guests. She spun round, the cameras tracking her, and glared at Carrie.

‘How does that make you feel?’ she spat out.

‘I . . . I . . .’ Carrie stopped. She touched her earpiece. ‘When is it due?’ she said so quietly that Dayna had to virtually lip-read. ‘Max’s baby . . .’ she whispered.

‘Thing is,’ Dayna continued, staring down the camera lens that was aimed at her, ‘it’s not that simple.’

She remembered his face, the way it crumpled as he spoke, the utter loss and desolation. ‘I didn’t mean it, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t want you to get an abortion but you said those things about me. They said you’d slept with them all, that you were nothing but a slag. They told me you hated me. I hated you back.’

Dayna remembered shrugging. It was easier than hearing it. She’d wanted to tell him that they hurt her too, that someone had spotted them emerging from the boiler room. They’d forced lies out of her, that even if she hadn’t said them they’d have made them up anyway. It’s just what they were like, what they did. Her life and theirs. Combined misery.

‘I’ve never had sex with anyone else,’ was all Dayna managed to get out. Max didn’t believe her. He made a face. One she’d never seen on him before. It was anger mixed with distrust wrapped up in such intensity it scared her. For the first time ever, she was afraid of him.