The car has stopped at an entry gate, uniformed guards stepping out from their sentry hut and taking details from the driver before they will open up the gates.
Davy turns away from Fly’s damp face to look up through the top third of his passenger window once again. He wishes the fencing wasn’t quite so high, its uppermost panels bent inwards to prevent scrambling children scaling over the top. He wishes the sense of incarceration wasn’t so apparent to the terrified boy beside him. The car starts to move again along a wide river of tarmac towards a series of low-slung new builds. Square Lego-like buildings, somewhere between a uni campus and a medical centre. Not unlike Cambridgeshire HQ in fact.
Arlidge House. Home to sixty boys charged with everything from murder and rape to burglary and assault. You could spend most of your life pretending a place like this doesn’t exist, ignoring the children inside it who’ve had rubbish lives from the off.
Can he really be responsible for putting Fly in here? Will the state take care of this child, once Davy hands him over?
He shuffles over towards Fly’s end of the back seat, so they can exit the car together. Reception – reached after a copious unlocking of doors and disabling of alarms – is bright at least. The word ‘Welcome’ is writ large across the wall in lots of different languages and in different-sized fonts, which seems a case of over-thinking, seeing as most of the kids in here won’t have shown up to school, let alone be saying ‘willkommen’ in German. Flat foam sofa bases, which remind him of the youth centre where he volunteers, are the only place for himself and Fly to perch while they await the processing of reams of paperwork. They must decide how to sit, the cuffs giving them little leeway, so they sit forward, elbows leaning on their knees. And through it all, Davy can feel the trembling of Fly’s apprehension.
‘See?’ Davy says, his cheery sing-song voice an irritant even to himself. ‘Not so bad, is it? Feels a bit like a youth centre.’
It doesn’t feel like a youth centre.
They are approached by a big man – shiny-headed, wearing waist-hugging combat trousers (macho pockets, yet camply tight around the buttock area) with a tucked-in T-shirt and carrying a clipboard. Around his belt are clusters of keys on various chains and crackling black radio handsets.
‘Right, Fly is it?’ he says in thick Yorkshire, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Neil, your care worker. We don’t have guards here, right? This isn’t a prison. We call it a college.’
Davy thinks of the term for custodial sentence where kids are concerned: DTO (detention training order). He wonders how much ‘training’ there will be.
‘Let’s show you to your room, shall we?’ says Neil.
They walk down grey carpeted corridors which have the feel of a sixth-form college but they are stalled by the relentless locking and unlocking of doors: ten between reception and Fly’s room.
‘Why is there a toilet?’ Fly asks, standing at the centre of a stark bedroom. ‘In the middle of the room, I mean?’
‘Your own private facilities,’ says Neil. ‘I’m sorry it’s lidless and there are no walls. It’s for your own safety, you see.’
‘I don’t understand,’ says Fly.
‘Kids can pull lids off, use them as weapons. Attack the staff.’
‘Still,’ says Davy, that jaunty upswing irrepressible, ‘it’s a nice room.’ He drags Fly over to the window to look at the view, which is of a small empty yard with some sort of chequerboard tarmacking surrounded by high fences. The sky, low with dense white cloud, is sharply bright. A pigeon sits on top of the bent-in fencing.
‘Now,’ says Neil, ‘here at Arlidge House you’re a resident, not a prisoner. This is your room, your home, not a cell.’
‘Except you lock me in it,’ says Fly, looking at Neil’s keys. ‘Are there any books?’
‘Books?’ says Neil. ‘First time anyone’s ever asked me that! What kind of thing?’
‘Maybe if you could bring me what you’ve got I can choose. Or is there a library?’
‘Not as such. I think there might be a trolley somewhere that I can wheel your way. I’ll need to check if you’ve got to earn your good behaviour points to qualify for a book.’
Christ, thinks Davy.
‘The system will be explained to you,’ says Neil. ‘Everything you do here will be assessed with a point system, one to five, and good behaviour is rewarded with treats – takeaway on Friday night, movie on the telly, that kind of thing. Rudeness to staff will not be tolerated. Nor will violence of any kind.’
Fly’s trembling has increased, Davy can feel it up his arm. Delicate and fragile. He wonders if Fly is going to cry again.
Walking away, Davy rubs his unencumbered wrist and tells himself this is procedure. Fly has potentially committed a serious offence and it is their job as police officers to see that justice is done. He gets into the waiting panda car, winds down his window and gasps for air.
‘Let’s go,’ he says to the driver.
Manon
‘You need to eat properly, you know – you can’t neglect your body, not at this stage,’ Bryony says, coming into the room with a stack of files and looking for somewhere to deposit them.
She finds the only inch of bare surface on the kitchen dresser. Bri’s house takes clutter to new teetering heights – Lego on every window ledge, pens with lids off, half-made paper planes and scraps, of the sort with scribbled lists on, propped behind vases. On the dresser are bowls of various sizes containing family detritus – rubber bands, bits of toy, erasers shaped as snowmen or burgers, a battery or two (spent or new, nobody knows), paper clips and Nerf gun foam bullets. Yesterday, Manon had to finger through several of these bowls looking for Bri’s iPod headphones. She came up with four sets; none of them worked.
‘Jesus,’ Manon had muttered. ‘Is my house going to become like this?’
‘Like what?’ Bryony asked.
‘I’ll make you some toast,’ Bri is saying now.
‘No, I’m not hungry.’
‘Any news on the house?’
‘We can go back in this afternoon. Get out of your hair.’
‘You’re not in my hair. Jam or Nutella?’
‘Marmite if you’ve got it.’
Bryony makes a disgusted face as she opens the jar. The toasted bread leaves beads of buttery moisture on the black granite worktop, which Bryony ignores.
‘Is it kicking?’ she asks, looking at Manon’s bump. Manon looks down to see a bulge protruding from the top of her belly – an elbow or a foot, flexing against its enclosure.
‘So weird, isn’t it?’ Manon says.
‘Like harbouring an alien,’ says Bri. ‘I remember after mine were born, I missed the feeling of having them inside.’
‘I won’t,’ says Manon, putting down the toast, nausea sweeping through her – the first of her pregnancy coinciding with Fly’s arrest.
‘Yes you will,’ says Bryony. ‘You can get through this.’
Tears roll heavy and slow down Manon’s face. ‘It’s even worse for me to feel like this – I mean, I’m the one who longed for this baby. I’m the one who went to such lengths—’
‘You think because you wanted the baby so much, there won’t be times when you hate having it?’