The first piece looked like this.
Coming home late one evening from the bookshop where she worked to her flat in Muswell Hill to find this skinny little kid sitting out on the stairs – the flight that led up from her landing to his – dressed in a vest and underpants. Feet bare in the November cold, on stone steps that were chill even in summer. His blond hair was darker underneath, as though he bleached it. And his face looked too small to sustain that crazy, free-form mop.
“You okay?” Jess asked.
The boy nodded but didn’t speak.
From above him came shouts in two different voices, bass and soprano. The door of the upstairs flat was closed, but the phrase “always been your fucking problem” came through clearly in a falsetto yell. That was the mother. Then “Don’t start! Don’t you bloody start!” from the father.
Jess hesitated. You couldn’t invite someone else’s kid into your flat, could you? Certainly not without letting their parents know. However innocent your motives were, it wouldn’t fly. She almost talked herself into it but chickened out. She made cocoa instead and brought it out to him. Chocolate flakes and marshmallows. All the trimmings.
The next time she looked out, he’d gone. The mug was where he’d been sitting, on the seventh stair from the bottom. It was empty.
That first encounter set the tone for all the others. They were allies of a sort, but they only ever met in no-man’s-land. On the stairs. And they only ever talked about banalities.
“How was your day?”
“It was okay.”
“You want some cocoa?”
“Yes please.”
Apart from that, she followed Alex’s adventures at a distance. Heard his mum and dad cursing him out – seemingly whenever they took a break from cursing each other. She knew his name was Beech because their mail lay out on the table in the hall some days, waiting to be picked up. And she got the Alex from a thousand shouted commands and reprimands.
“You’ve got a pet,” John said the first time he saw the boy. “Did he follow you home?”
“That’s not funny, John.”
“I’m not laughing. Honest, Jess! I think it’s cute. What does he eat?”
She had to admit that she didn’t know. But the next time Alex camped out on the stairs, she brought him a sandwich as well as the cocoa. “It’s cheese,” she said. “I don’t know what you think about cheese. But it’s there if you want it.”
He seemed to think that cheese was acceptable, by and large. He ate the sandwich, apart from the crusts. And their relationship entered a new phase. Jess thought of it as comfort and supply.
Still no talking, though. Just “How are you?”; “I’m fine.” She thought about sitting down next to him, striking up a proper conversation. So is school going well? Do you have a favourite sport? A best friend? Do your parents only shout at you or do they hit you too?
“You want to keep your distance from that,” John warned her. “I mean it, Jess – it’s trouble you don’t need. If he tells you he’s being abused, what are you going to do? Call the police? They’ll start looking into us too, and find out we’re using. We’ll go to jail.”
John still called Alex her little pet, but he didn’t laugh any more and there was a nasty edge to his voice when he said it. He seemed to feel that the whole thing had gone beyond a joke.
Jess went ahead and had the talk with Alex anyway. John Street wasn’t her conscience. He was the anti-Jiminy Cricket, always egging her on to darker and crazier things. This time she decided to pretend she had a better angel.
“Only once,” Alex said when she asked him if his dad ever got physical with his reprimands. Jess had no idea what to do with that. She suspected that one smack or punch always led on to n, where n was a large number. But it wasn’t exactly a smoking pistol. Not enough to justify an anonymous tip-off to child services, or an ugly altercation on the upstairs landing. And her batteries were low in every way that mattered. If there was a confrontation, she would almost certainly lose.
She gave Alex her number – made him put it into his phone. “If you ever need someone,” she told him, “you can call me. Or just come down and knock on the door. I’m usually home.”
It didn’t ever happen. And after a while she forgot about the promise – forgot she’d ever even made it. The addiction was lying like an iron bar across her brain right about then, and it was getting worse with each day that went by. Alex was one of the last things to go, but he faded out in the end along with the rest of the world. She went sailing away to a sunny, squally island where the population was three: herself, John Street and heroin.
At first, that was as far as Jess’s memories would take her. But she kept on dipping her bucket into that deep black well and hauling up more and more details. When the psychiatrists appointed by the court to test her mental faculties asked her what she could remember, she tried her best to tell the truth, but the truth changed from one session to the next. She could see in their eyes that they thought she was faking her amnesia.
Then her lawyer (also court-appointed, set in motion by the magic of legal aid) arrived like a fox in a henhouse and sent the psychiatrists packing. His name was Brian Pritchard. He was exactly Jess’s height, which made him quite short for a man, and grey-haired, even though he couldn’t have been more than forty-five or so. The hair read almost like a statement – of gravitas and moral rectitude. “My client isn’t ready to talk about these traumatic events,” he told the shrinks in cold, clipped tones. “And by God you’d better not try to use those assessments in court if you haven’t got a consent form to go with them!”
But they did have a consent form. Jess was signing everything that was put in front of her, collaborating with every legal process, being as helpful as she could. That was what innocent people did, and she was sure in her heart she was innocent.
Pritchard did not approve. “You’ve been arrested and charged,” he told her waspishly. “In an ideal world the police would still be vigorously pursuing their inquiries, but we don’t live in an ideal world, Ms Moulson. If you hand yourself to them on a plate, they will take you and pick you apart and wipe their fingers clean with the laws of evidence. And in the meantime they will not be exploring any other possibilities, because exploring other possibilities takes effort. So please, as a favour to me, treat everyone who isn’t me as your sworn enemy until your trial is over.”
Jess glanced at the man who had accompanied Pritchard on to the ward. A skittish little junior solicitor or clerk whose role was to hand his boss pieces of paper when they were needed and who scarcely ever spoke. When Jess met his eyes, he blushed and looked away.
“Oh, I don’t mean Mr Levine,” Pritchard said. “You can treat him as landscape.”
On that first visit, Pritchard took Jess’s statement about the night of the fire without comment or question. On the second, the next day, he brought her some newspaper articles and printouts from internet blogs in order, so he said, to give her a better idea of what she was up against.
Inferno Jess: “I know nothing!”
The woman at the heart of tragic ten-year-old Alex Beech’s death is being treated at London’s Whittington Hospital both for her physical injuries and for memory loss. Yet doctors have found no evidence of brain damage or psychological trauma.
Pritchard seemed to be trying to provoke her into some kind of response, but all Jess could give him was exhaustion and despair, occasionally peaking into dull amazement.