We had to listen to the man all the papers have been quoting; he was called Gordon Sage and he was paraded in front of us to speak about the things he and V had done together when they were eighteen.
‘I must confess I found her scarily sexual,’ he said, his piggy eyes staring out of his fat, rugged face as though they could still see her naked body. ‘She had this thing for doing it outside.’ He licked his lips and I felt something rise through me so I was worried I was going to be sick on my shoes and fill the court with the acrid stench of bile.
I looked over at V but she had shut her eyes and was leaning her forehead against her hand. I turned my attention back to Gordon Sage and saw his fat fingers curving round the wood of the witness box. I imagined them inside V. ‘But then one day she got a friend to ring and say it was over, no explanation or anything. In fact we never spoke again.’
I imagined V screaming underneath his corpulent body and I knew then why she needed me to always save her from men like that. All the Gordon Sages I had peeled off her in nightclubs, all the times I had stopped them pawing her body and breathing on her neck, little droplets of spittle landing on her skin, so she would be tainted by their DNA. I would prise his fat fingers off one by one, bending them so far back each one would break and he would end up snivelling on the floor, snot dribbling from his nose.
Xander liked Gordon, or at least what he brought, as he put it. ‘They tried to call some American woman you worked with over there,’ he said when we met beneath the court after that day. ‘I’m presuming it was that girl you slept with. But she’s refused to come and the judge said he didn’t think it was relevant anyway. He actually said that he wasn’t interested in your sexual adventures.’ He laughed. ‘I thought Petra was going to burst when he said that. Good old Smithson, never disappoints.’ I couldn’t really understand what he meant, but I didn’t care, because the thought of V having to sit in the same room as Carly made my skin itch.
On other days my brain has felt overused, as if words are turning in my head and banging against the side of my brain, chipping my skull so that fragments of bone are imbedding themselves in places they shouldn’t be. I wonder now if the woman who called herself Mrs Lascelles really was my old headmistress, because nothing about her felt familiar. She could have gleaned a lot of what she told the court from any newspaper: like how my clothes were often dirty and I was small and thin for my age. But she also spoke about things I find hard to place, like my ‘violent temper’, as she put it. She said I was always starting fights and that lots of the parents complained about me. She said the other children were frightened of me, even some of the staff. Sometimes I had to be restrained, one teacher carrying my legs and one my arms, to remove me from classrooms.
Her words scratch at my head and at times I have thought I am going to remember something, but it always remains tantalisingly just beyond my reach. She didn’t blame me, she said, trying to catch my eye as she spoke. They knew there was trouble at home, but however many times they questioned me I never admitted to anything, always saying everything was fine, even when it so obviously wasn’t. They were in contact with social services, but they hadn’t known how bad it was. Naughty children are never anything more than bad parents, she said, her understanding radiating off her like a bloody halo.
But then there are others, like Sarah Cross, who felt like being reunited with an old friend. She smiled at me when she stepped into the stand and I remembered how warm she had always been, how she’d give you a hug even when she wasn’t meant to or sneak you an extra biscuit. She was rounder than she’d been when I’d known her and she had heavy bags under her eyes and a nasty cough which attacked her sometimes as she spoke.
‘You would be hard pushed to find a worse case of neglect,’ she said, ‘although undoubtedly worse things do happen to lots of children. He wasn’t sexually abused, which is always a blessing, but he hadn’t been provided with basic care, which certainly left physical and mental damage.’ On the day I let them into the flat I was ten years old and weighed five stone. I was wearing clothes for a six-year-old. Lots of my teeth were decayed and I was infested with lice.
I could feel V reaching out to me as Sarah spoke, as if she wanted to lean over and take my hand. But I kept my head down because I don’t want V to think of me like that. I have told her everything, but I don’t want her to hear it from someone else, I don’t want the knowledge to be out in the open. It taints me somehow, taints me with the infection of that time.
The court was shown photos of the flat, which I could only bear to look at peripherally. Everyone in the room was able to see the piled plates and overflowing ashtrays, the black mould on the walls, the encrusted toilet, the black sink and the bath so filled with rubbish it was unusable. The pictures weren’t lying, but what they didn’t show was how the whole flat smelt of rot and decay, how it caught the back of your throat and made your eyes water. I coughed because it was as if the pictures had released the stench, as if it had found its way back to me so that sitting in court I could taste the yeasty, sour smell of my childhood home which, towards the end, made me think about new life forms. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I opened the door to the social services that day was not because I wanted to save myself, but because I thought something was actually going to materialise out of the atmosphere, something worse than was already there.
As I looked I had to tuck my hands under my armpits, a trick I learnt when I lived with my mother, as if they had once again become raw and chapped from the freezing water I used to try to wash a plate so I could eat off it, using a blackened sponge and no washing up liquid. I felt again the rush of sweat break on to my forehead as I heaved over the rotten toilet, never learning the lesson not to eat food that had grown white fur. My mouth dried at the memory of days-old pizza stuck to the top of the box, or at least the remnants of toppings.
I noticed an older woman in the jury dabbing at her eyes when they were shown my bedroom, which made me want to stand up and roar and cover V’s eyes with my hands. I wanted to spare her the sight of the curtainless window, like a large bruised eye, the mattress as thin as paper and the filthy duvet. A shiver started deep in my body, an involuntary memory of all those nights when a freezing wind passed over my head and the cold seeped into my marrowbone so it felt like I would never be warm again.
But those photos missed something else, something rare but nevertheless true: the times it was just Mum and me on the sofa, snuggled under a blanket with the telly on. When she’d used her money for food rather than vodka so my belly had stopped hurting. Before the fourth can, when she was still the right side of lucid.
‘It’s going to be OK, Mikey,’ she’d say, drawing me into her. ‘I just need to get through this and then we’ll start again.’ I would nestle into her sweaty, threadbare bathrobe and wish she was telling the truth. Wish that I hadn’t reached an age when I knew that people could lie to themselves as much as others.