I was my mother’s son. A hiding place within myself and a born liar, immune to new people and desensitized to our surroundings. But Annie was a human being. A musical child capable of thought and feeling. Around the houses, the various flats and homes, she was always humming or tapping out anxieties. Singing lovely, sad little songs of her own invention. I see now that it was her acknowledgement of our environment, its undeniable cause and effect, that so incensed our mother. I was older and she’d grown used to me, my numbness. My ability to dissolve in and out of rooms or situations.
Annie, on the other hand, couldn’t hide her thoughts and feelings. She burned them out in fevers, turned them over all night in her head, until they were as plain to see as the frown on her face, the bags under her eyes. So our mother started to leave the room whenever Annie sang nervously to herself. She started to leave the house, locking us inside. Sometimes she’d be gone for an hour, sometimes she’d come back the next day, dancing through the front door all glass-eyed, still wearing her going-out clothes from the night before. This became normal, with the periods lengthening each time, until finally she didn’t come back. We were locked inside, and we ran out of food on the second day. On the third, when Annie was too tired even to sing or tap, I dialled 999, dizzy with hunger, knowing on some level that it would make things worse. I don’t remember who came for us or how they got inside. I remember being sent to a home with hard, damaged children for one week, before being released back into our mother’s care.
She collected us wordlessly and never spoke of it again.
When we returned home I saw where the door had been kicked in to get us out. Deprived of her coping mechanism for the outward expression of her daughter’s despair, our mother simply found a new one. And so my sister became accident-prone. At first, these accidents were minor. A fall, resulting in a bruise, a cut or scrape. Soon she started to really hurt herself. Broken fingers and toes. I didn’t realize for some time that our mother was responsible. When I did I became inseparable from my sister, temporarily solving one problem and unknowingly sowing the seeds for something worse. One day we came home from school to the smell of cigarettes.
One day Bateman arrived.
We never knew him by any other name, and at first his presence, his antipathy towards children, brought more stability into our lives. He didn’t want us around the house so we attended school more regularly. On weekends, if he was there, we’d be sent outside until it started to go dark. It was impossible to avoid him at all times, though. He was an enormous man with dirty, invasive eyes that could always see the worst things you were thinking, and he projected his anger at whatever happened to be in front of him. Sometimes that was our mother. Sometimes that was me. To his credit, he came to my sister last.
As Bateman segued from verbal to physical abuse, so I began to segue from reality into the rising. A haze of sunspots would wash in front of my eyes. My mouth would start to water and I’d lift out of my body. I’d drift up to the ceiling and ignore the six-foot-two man slapping, pushing down and hitting an eight-year-old boy. I’d watch my little sister instead, crouched down facing the wall with her hands over her ears. At first this was agreeable to Bateman, an uncomplaining human punchbag, but where my detachment from events had suited our mother, it didn’t truly suit him.
Bateman had no internal life.
Outside of cruelty he ceased to exist, and he became agitated when he couldn’t see the effect he was having on things. The rising, my passivity, became my only form of defence against him. So when he made lewd comments to my mother, I wasn’t there. When he verbally threatened me, I wasn’t there. When he physically assaulted me, I wasn’t there.
But one day he noticed my head turn, sharply, when he took a step towards my sister, and from there began his experiment in making me react. She was smaller than me, small for her age, and I never saw him hit or sexually abuse her. He was more interested in fear, and in terrorizing Annie he got two for the price of one. My sudden, futile, pleading anger and my sister’s wide-eyed, thoughtful, comprehending terror. Sometimes he’d tell her how stupid or ugly she was. Sometimes he’d put cigarettes out on her arms and call her names. The constant smell of tobacco burning about his person just fed the perception that something smouldered inside him. A kind of fire, generated out of spite, kept alive by constant chain-smoking, and witnessed occasionally through his eyes.
With our fear secured we settled into a dysfunctional family unit, with Bateman at our head. He stayed with my mother because we represented new opportunities to a conman. He’d have me approach remote homes with sob stories. Telling them I was lost, training me to steal whatever I could see while I was inside. He had me crawl into people’s homes at night. Just to see if it was possible at first, graduating to theft and even home invasions, where I’d unlock the front door, let him in and sit down while I heard the elderly people he targeted plead with him not to hurt their partners. We sat outside chemists and department stores at 3 a.m. and then he’d feed my body through high windows or skylights. When it became useful for me to pick locks, he taught me that too.
The night he and my mother woke us, took us downstairs to a car we’d never seen before and drove us out to the middle of nowhere was the last time I saw him. Annie and I were taken into care and separated shortly afterwards. She was successfully placed with a new family, and after that I never saw her again, either.
Bateman had re-entered my life before, but until now only in the vivid nightmares that made me a lifelong insomniac. He was the archetype, the logical conclusion, of every bully and every abuser I’d ever met since. When I think of him now, I feel a limitless, cold hate. He’d been crippled by a gunshot and sent to prison for the rest of his life where, if my childhood wishes came true, he’d die shrivelled up like a cold scrotum. But, as Sutty always says, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other. Only one of them ever fills up.
8
‘He’s in the toilet,’ said Sian, nodding towards the back of the room.
‘Are you OK?’ I said it distractedly, because I knew I should.
I was nervous, looking over my shoulder.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘He kept asking for shots of Jack Daniel’s. Dropped some notes on the bar and said to just keep lining them up so he could watch me pour. In the end I took the notes, pulled the bottle off the wall and sat it next to him.’
‘Sounds better than the alternative.’
‘I don’t know …’ She nodded at the bottle on the bar. It was half-empty. ‘Who is this guy? What’s his problem with you?’ Before I could answer I saw her eyes move, smoothly, over my shoulder. Widening slightly. I felt Bateman’s entrance into the room as a change in air pressure. A psychic gasp going through the bar. I turned to see him crushing a cigarette out on the wall, dropping what was left and walking through the tables towards us.
The people either side of him glanced at the ruined face, the empty eye socket surrounded by darkened, concave scar tissue, then they looked quickly away. He held his chin out like a challenge, daring someone to say or do something. When he reached the bar he shoulder-barged past me and I felt the power of his body. The heat that seemed to pour out of him, the hate.
‘Jim Beam,’ he slurred, through the wet click of his speech impediment. Close up, his face was painful to look at. A gunshot will do that. Sian glanced at me for a split second but I didn’t react.
‘You’ve got half a bottle of Jack,’ she said.
‘Changed mind …’
When he spoke he sounded like a deaf person but I wasn’t sure how much of that was real and how much of it was for show. My impression was that he enjoyed unnerving people. Sian took a nervous step back from the bar, pushed a glass up to the optic and measured out a shot. Bateman made a show of watching her move. She looked back at him and he nodded to make it a double. ‘Slower,’ he said. She turned to give him the glass. ‘Make it a threesome …’ he said.